“I was writing poetry and singing since she [his aunt Mimi, with whom he lived] had me. All the time I used to fight and say, 'Look, I'm an artist, don't bug me with all this maths. Don't try and make me into a chemist or a vet, I can't do it.' I used to say, 'Don't you destroy my papers.' I'd come home when I was fourteen and she'd rooted all my things and thrown all my poetry out. I was saying, 'One day I'll be famous and you're going to regret it. I'd seen these poems around, the sort you read to give you a hard-on. I'd wondered who wrote them and thought I'd try one myself. Mimi found it under my pillow. I said I'd been made to write it out for another lad who couldn't write very well. I'd written it myself, of course. When I did any serious poems, like emotional stuff later on, I did it in secret handwriting, all scribbles, so that Mimi couldn't read it.” — John Lennon, The Beatles Anthology
I am listening to Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott’s performance of Schubert’s “Ave Maria” on WQXR. It’s Schubert’s birthday, and also Philip Glass’s. And I am thinking that John Lennon’s song “Julia” is as good as Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” They both rely on an ostinato pattern, and they are about the same length. Schubert used a pre-existing text; Lennon wrote his own ode to his mother, who may have been bi-polar and with whom he had a complicated but very meaningful relationship.
I am trying to learn to play “Julia” on the guitar. So I am watching a YouTube tutorial (props to my son Isaac, who has learned to play largely via YouTube tutorials combined with his dedication and skill!). The instructor makes a good point. To the casual listener, “Julia” flows along easily as anything, giving the impression that Lennon is lightly strumming the guitar, and allowing the listener to focus on the highly evocative lyrics. But when you start to break down what he is actually playing, first of all it is an impressive technical performance, and second, as often with the Beatles, songs that sound simple reveal harmonic complexities in their chord choices and rhythms.
The point is, you might never have known this — though somewhere you feel it, listening to the song — had you not taken the time to learn in depth what this great artist has actually done to create the effect. And this is quite like the process of translation. Translating takes you deeper inside something, where, hopefully, there can be a moment in which you gain a greater respect for another artist’s work.
Coincidentally, while I am working on my translations of Hesiod’s poems, some poems of mine are making their ways into other languages. I wrote a poem for Nicolas Leong and Judy Chung’s project of combining Nicolas’s photographs of Italian sites with texts by contemporary writers. Here is the poem:
Better at finding pleasure
That and that one, they
Look down over city
See near windows lit up
A life in each, a Rome
The winter moon haloed
Distant desires, some fulfilled
Would there be time?
Bells roll in, assurance
A trunk cracked, cut in logs
A garden to repair to
That and a figment of light
Nicolas and Judy wanted a translation into Italian, as they will be presenting this project in Rome, so I reached out to Brunella Antomarini, an Italian critic and translator, who, with the help of painter Donna Moylan, turned around the translation in a couple of days. It was interesting to me, receiving their translation, as it caused me to think more deeply about my own poem. For the phrase “Bells roll in,” they used the phrase Partono le campane. I knew that partire is the Italian verb for “to leave, depart,” but I did not know that it can be used for the beginning of something, music for example. While I was learning that, I wrote to Brunella that the phrase “Bells roll in” is meant to evoke that moment when the church bells start to ring, from various churches. It should evoke those moments in the day or night (in this case) when that happens. But also, the phrase itself, “rolls in,” is used, for example, to describe mist or fog coming in to cover a previously clear situation. So, the idea here is that bells have a physical quality that starts to come in to the situation of the poem. It’s different from just saying, “Bells start to ring” or “I hear bells” or “I begin to hear bells.”
And now I am seeing everything as translation. Going back to the Beatles, in the beginning they were translating the sounds and poetry of Little Richard, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and others. There’s a terrific bio pic, Nowhere Boy (2009), directed by photographer and filmmaker Sam Taylor-Johnson, about John Lennon’s teenage years, the period when he discovered music, met Paul McCartney and George Harrison, formed The Quarrymen, and started performing and writing songs. It stars Aaron Johnson as Lennon, Kristin Scott Thomas as his aunt Mimi, and Anne-Marie Duff as his mother, Julia. The film too is act of translation, bringing a story, of which there are only tantalizing glimpses in photographs and interviews, to life.
Finally, another act of translation at the intersection of music and poetry for which I remain eternally grateful. For a number of years, while he was director of Young People’s and Family Concerts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, David Amram led a group called The Beatles Magical Orchestra. They faithfully recreated, with exactitude and loving enthusiasm, some of the Beatles’ later, more complex songs. You can find them all on YouTube. Here is my favorite, their recreation of “I Am The Walrus.”
They even include a different radio recording of the bit from the end of King Lear! It is beautifully filmed, allowing the viewer to focus on individual contributions.
Comments