The Best American Poetry

"By the Waters of Babylon" [by San Juan de la Cruz; trans. Marian Baranda and Paul Hoover]

    By the rushing waters
I discovered in Babylon,
there I sat down weeping,
there I watered the earth.

    Remembering you,
oh, Zion, whom I loved;
sweet was your memory,
in memory, I cried all the more.

    I abandoned the garments of feasting,
and put on the garments of work,
and in the green willows I placed
the lyre that I carried, 

     saving it there in awaiting
what I hoped for in you.                                
There love wounded me,
and took away my heart.

    I told love that you killed me,                               
how happy I was to be wounded.
I stepped into love’s fire,
knowing it would enfold me,

    forgiving the little bird
that came to its end beside me;
I was dying inside me,
for only in you did I breathe.

    Within me, for you, I died,
and for you I revived,
that the memory of you
took away my life and returned it.

    The strangers took delight
in me as their captive.
They asked me for the songs
that I used to sing in Zion.

    “Sing a hymn of Zion,
let’s see how it sounded.”
I replied: “In a foreign land,
where I weep for Zion,

     how I can sing of the joy
that remains for me in Zion?
If what is foreign delights me,
I will cast it into forgetting,

     Let the tongue with which I speak
cleave to the roof of my mouth,
if I should ever forget you
in the land where I abide.

    Zion, by the green boughs
that Babylon gave me,
let my right hand be forgotten,
which you most loved in me.

    If I didn’t remember you,
in whom I most delighted,
and if I had a feast,
and without you I enjoyed it.  

    Oh, daughter of Babylon,
miserable and wretched!
Blessed was the one
in whom I trusted.

    He who gave you the whip
by means of your own hand;
he who will gather me up
with his little ones, because for you he wept
at the rock that was Christ,
for whom I abandoned you.

--Translated by Paul Hoover and María Baranda 
from The Complete Poems of San Juan de la Cruz (Milkweed Editions, 2021))

<<< In 1578, during months of imprisonment for his reformist beliefs, San Juan de la Cruz composed a series of narrative poems inspired by the Biblical Song of Songs—and, the story goes, a popular love song overheard from his cramped cell—that take God as the beloved. Erotically charged, initially scandalous, his mystical poetry engages with the journey of the soul through the darkest trenches of suffering and despair toward an enlightened spiritual connection with God. For hundreds of years, these poems have resonated deeply with those who search for meaning in the dark, and have influenced generations of poets, artists, and philosophers.

This bilingual edition of the Complete Poems—including “Dark Night” and both the Sanlúcar and Jaén manuscripts of “Spiritual Canticle”—presents an intimate and exceptionally collaborative new translation from María Baranda and Paul Hoover. Baranda, one of the most distinguished Mexican poets of her generation, lends her deft hand with expansive, meditative poetry. Hoover—the accomplished American poet, editor, and translator—offers his dexterity with form and the possibilities of language. The product is uniquely faithful to image and idea, and loyal to the ecstatic lyricism of this canonical text. >>

Paul Hoover writes:
<< The translation project was Maria's idea, a daring one since so many translations of San Juan's poetry were already in print.  Our approach was different, however.  We immediately saw the futility of trying to match the sumptuous beauty of the poet's rhyme, based on popular street songs called villancicos.  Doing so would twist the meaning unmercifully.  Juan's poetry was mystical, therefore complex and paradoxical. This is especially true in the Romances, which are concerned with the Trinity.  We produced the first draft at Maria's house in Mexico City.  I then worked to shape the English version at my home in Mill Valley, California.  I also prepared three introductions, "The Life," "The Poetry," and "The Translation."  I am grateful to Aurelia Cortes Peyron, for her reading of my Spanish translations.  That includes my contributions to Maria's recently published book, The New World Written:  New and Selected Poems (Yale University Press, 2021), which I also edited.  >>

"How Rich" (For Richard Howard) [by David Lehman]

How Rich

The root of influence is astrological and is related to influenza. . . .

Forty-five years ago I met Richard Howard in the same place where we have met many times since: his fifth-floor apartment in a building called the Waverly Mews near Washington Square Park in New York. It was wall-to-wall books, except for the bathroom where every inch of wall and ceiling space was covered with photographs of writers and artists. Richard wasn’t drinking but offered his guest a glass of white wine, then displayed some newly acquired books and drawings, asked lots of questions and smiled encouragingly, told an anecdote about how he had learned French in five days from an aunt on an automobile trip from Ohio to Florida when he was a little kid, and finally read aloud a just-finished poem, doing the voices in his flamboyantly theatrical manner. 

Eliot said Henry James had a mind too fine for an idea to violate it, clearly not a problem Eliot suffered from . . .

I was a cocky young assistant professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, where I had a brutal teaching schedule but got to run the readings and lectures series. By the time I left Richard that afternoon, he had agreed to come to Hamilton to give a poetry reading and two lectures – “The Art of Digression” and “The Art of Boredom” – in October. He also gave me three of his books, each one signed with a flourish and a witty inscription, and made me promise to send him some of my poems.

Innocence versus experience is Blake’s way of presenting Oedipus and the Sphinx. . .

Richard is one of poetry’s great pinch-hitters. Twice I have seen him step in for a fallen colleague and give a poetry reading on short notice. Once he agreed to teach a literature seminar at the New School – this is flash-forwarding some twenty-five years – when the regular faculty member had to cancel, and this on the eve of opening day. Three at bats, three home runs.

Henry James does to language what art does to life. . .

The authenticity of Richard’s love of poetry, of poetry and ideas, is inspiring. One way it expresses itself is in his commitment to young poets, the mentoring of whom he takes as a civic responsibility. I know no one who has done more personally to mentor younger poets -- making editing suggestions, publishing their best work. In my own case, Richard was my first reader at a time when I urgently needed his candor and high intellectual standards. Unlike others, Richard does not compete with his students, begrudge them their recognitions, or expect them to turn into disciples and epigones.

Grammar is an etymological variant of glamour. . .

At one time or another Richard has served as poetry editor of New American Writing, Shenandoah, Western Humanities Review, The New Republic, and The Paris Review. Mark Strand cracked that Richard needs to be poetry editor of at least two magazines concurrently. When I launched The Best American Poetry in 1988, I knew I could count on Richard to discover fresh talent and help it make its way. Inevitably, I asked him to be the guest editor of the 1995 volume, an experience as enjoyable in the doing as it was pleasurable in the product.

Prose is to bread as verse is to cake. . .

In the early 1990s, Richard spent each fall on the faculty at the University of Houston. Twice I rented his apartment and lived in it. I took it as an auspicious sign that the dry cleaner downstairs was called Erudite, the one around the corner Faust, and the third one in the area Aphrodite. It gave Richard a kick to phone me and say, “My dear, would you get volume four of Byron’s correspondence from the top shelf in the kitchen and mail it to me?”

In this course we will consider the discrepancy between the name and the adjective derived from it: Socratic, Platonic, Christian,  Machiavellian, Elizabethan, Byronic, Marxist, Victorian, Freudian, Kafkaesque. . .

Richard's syllabi for the literature courses and seminars he gave at Columbia are inventive, reflecting his erudition and wide-ranging curtiosity, and I have tried, vainly so far, to gather them and publish them, in a literary journal of note. 

How rich
how hard
do I
draw war

How rich
how rad
oh dice
or cad

I row
a chair
raid a
raw hoard
arch war
had id

          Thank you, Richard, for the best four-word definition of the difference between prose and verse: “Prose proceeds, verse reverses.”

And what if

          Proust in French
          Consisted of short
          Sentences in the
          Hemingway manner and
          The elaborate style
          Were his translator’s
          Invention? If grammar
          Be but a
          Variant of glamour
          I see the
          Great domed head
          Of Henry James
          On your shoulders,
          My dear Richard.

Perils of the Poetry Reading [by Katha Pollitt]

Am I the only person who finds it hard to follow an unfamiliar poem when I hear it read out loud and don’t have the text in front of me? Even when reading to myself at my own pace, I might have to go over a poem several times to really get it,  but  at a reading,  the poems whizz by  unstoppably-- no chance of a second hearing, and all the helpful visual cues of print , like punctuation, italics, quotation marks, and even line breaks,  are absent.  A stray thought enters my head --  I wonder why they painted this room turquoise? -- and in seconds I’ve lost the thread.  (I’m speaking of what you might call “literary poetry” here,  poetry written primarily to be read silently, not spoken word, which is intended for the ear from the outset.)

  I often find that the poems I’ve enjoyed most at a reading  seem oddly flat on the page when I hunt them down in a book.   What made the poem seem striking and fresh was  the poet’s performance: the energy and especially the humor was in the voice and manner and gestures, not the words themselves.  Or it was the story the poem told: the poetry reading as a series of anecdotes, with the poet placing and embellishing each one in his introductions: My uncle ran a chicken farm in Iowa,  and when he ran off with the Methodist minister’s wife my aunt killed all the chickens and  gave them to the nuns, and out of that comes this next poem, “Saint Rooster and the Holy Choir of Hens.”  it’s been suggested, in fact, that the proliferation of poetry readings, and their importance to a poet’s career, has actually changed the way poets --  “literary poets” -- write, encouraging verbal simplicity, talkiness, easy emotions, simple narratives, and punchlines. It’s the poet as stand-up comedian/tragedian. 

    Still, you can see why poets would try to shape their art to please their audience -- and notice how we now commonly speak of  poetry’s audience rather than poetry’s readers, which tells you something right there.   It can be painful and embarrassing to stand up before a small group of  miscellaneous strangers who expect you to entertain them and instead offer poems they might find bewildering, or remote.  I've given readings  at which I just want to say, oh well, never mind, let’s just go have a beer and talk about health care reform. 

      Wislawa Szymborska’s “Poetry Reading” (translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)   may be the definitive account of a reading at its awful,  humiliating worst.  To paraphrase the old Jewish joke about the Catskills hotel (“The food is terrible!” “Yes, and the portions are so small!”), the audience is not only tiny, it’s not even listening.  And yet, Symborska disperses her pity, her warmth and her satirical humor so evenly among poets and audience members and even the muse, poor thing,  that what in lesser hands would be just another complaint about the world’s indifference to art becomes a gesture of understanding, forgiveness, love.

POETRY READING

To be a boxer, or not to be there
at all. O Muse, where are our teeming crowds? 
Twelve people in the room, eight seats to spare --
it's time to start this cultural affair.
Half came inside because it started raining, 
the rest are relatives. O Muse.

The women here would love to rant and rave, 
but that's for boxing. Here they must behave. 
Dante's Infemo is ringside nowadays.
Likewise his Paradise. O Muse.

Oh, not to be a boxer but a poet, 
one sentenced to hard shelleying for life, 
for lack of muscles forced to show the world 
the sonnet that may make the high-school reading lists 
with luck. O Muse,
O bobtailed angel, Pegasus.

In the first row, a sweet old man's soft snore: 
he dreams his wife's alive again. What's more, 
she's making him that tart she used to bake. 
Aflame, but carefully--don't burn his cake!
we start to read. O Muse.

-- by Wislawa Szymborska 
                (from View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems Harvest Books, 1996)

from the archive; first posted August 19, 2009

    Still, you can see why poets would try to shape their art to please their audience -- and notice how we now commonly speak of  poetry’s audience rather than poetry’s readers, which tells you something right there.   It can be painful and embarrassing to stand up before a small group of  miscellaneous strangers who expect you to entertain them and instead offer poems they might find bewildering, or remote.  I've given readings  at which I just want to say, oh well, never mind, let’s just go have a beer and talk about health care reform. 

      Wislawa Szymborska’s “Poetry Reading” (translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)   may be the definitive account of a reading at its awful,  humiliating worst.  To paraphrase the old Jewish joke about the Catskills hotel (“The food is terrible!” “Yes, and the portions are so small!”), the audience is not only tiny, it’s not even listening.  And yet, Symborska disperses her pity, her warmth and her satirical humor so evenly among poets and audience members and even the muse, poor thing,  that what in lesser hands would be just another complaint about the world’s indifference to art becomes a gesture of understanding, forgiveness, love.

POETRY READING

To be a boxer, or not to be there
at all. O Muse, where are our teeming crowds? 
Twelve people in the room, eight seats to spare --
it's time to start this cultural affair.
Half came inside because it started raining, 
the rest are relatives. O Muse.

The women here would love to rant and rave, 
but that's for boxing. Here they must behave. 
Dante's Infemo is ringside nowadays.
Likewise his Paradise. O Muse.

Oh, not to be a boxer but a poet, 
one sentenced to hard shelleying for life, 
for lack of muscles forced to show the world 
the sonnet that may make the high-school reading lists 
with luck. O Muse,
O bobtailed angel, Pegasus.

In the first row, a sweet old man's soft snore: 
he dreams his wife's alive again. What's more, 
she's making him that tart she used to bake. 
Aflame, but carefully--don't burn his cake!
we start to read. O Muse.

-- by Wislawa Szymborska 
                (from View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems Harvest Books, 1996)

from the archive; first posted August 19, 2009

An Interview with Rachel Hadas [by Aspen Matis]

Rachel Hadas is the author of more than twenty books of verse and prose, including the acclaimed poetry collections Poems for Camilla, Questions in the Vestibule and, most recently, Love and Dread. Her poems appear in many magazines, journals, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, and she is a frequent reviewer and columnist for the LondonTimes Literary Supplement. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant in poetry, and an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and she has taught courses in literature and writing at Columbia and Princeton and is Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, where she has taught for many years. She lives in New York City.

I corresponded with Ms. Hadas via email about poetry’s power to offer “the life raft of language by fusing the private and the universal. We also discussed imagination’s ability to press back against the pressure of reality and the gritty nature of the poetry that feels most alive — that these poems are “often made of mundanity and suffering,” not merely sterile sentiments and “truths.”

And through the poet’s transcendent work, we glimpse the complex weave of love and dread called life. 

Photo credit: Shalom Gorewitz

What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

Poetry has always meant for me the place where inner life and outer world meet. It helps and challenges me to express, observe, clarify, get a second chance. At different stages of my life, poetry has enabled me to remember; to replay; to find courage; to tell the truth. Although I haven’t always been aware of this salient role poetry has played, I’ve been writing steadily for well over half a century, and poetry has always offered what James Merrill, a friend and guiding light, called “the life raft of language.” So even if I didn’t always know why, I turned to poetry from an early age and never stopped.

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course? 

I’m wary of making grandiose claims for poetry. (Would that it were, that anything were, a unifying force!) Poets have always loved to talk about how powerful and important poetry is, and I’m no exception. Poetry’s power to fuse the private and the universal always amazes me, as does its ability to offer a reprieve (as you aptly phrase it) from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence. But poetry’s role is more complicated than that. Poetry is often made of mundanity and suffering; if it excludes or flees them, it risks being empty, generic, sentimental. Each poet has to manage their own balancing act, whether in formal or thematic terms, or both, between the mundane and the visionary, the public and the private — one could add so many pairs. A complicating factor is that poets come with their own talents and temperaments, their own obsessions and models, their own reading and experience.

Your most recent book of poems, Love and Dread, was published by Measure Press in July of this year to widespread praise. Poet Jessica Greenbaum describes the collection as “contemplative and joyous,” writing that — in this collection — you have “set up shop at the borders of inside and out, past and future, life and death, the conscious and the subconscious,” and your “wares from these liminal thresholds are those rarest of treasured souvenirs that absolutely cannot be found anywhere else.” Poet and translator A.E. Stallings describes the collection as prophetic, its tone and content evoking the pandemic months before it ravaged the globe, writing that the work “seems to speak already to that world of closeness and anxiety,” and poet Andrés Cerpa writes that the book finds “the quiet truths that exist in the everyday ceremony of love,” calling the book “poised and ecstatic.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection? 

Finding titles for my books used to pose a challenge — not anymore.  Since I fell in love with Shalom Gorewitz early in 2013, and later that same year was quite sick, and then when Trump started to loom on the horizon, and since, the twin themes or poles of love and dread have seemed incredibly clear. They’re even clearer now, in our time of unremitting disasters: lots of daily dread, yet not only dread.

To step back a bit, my poems have addressed mortality, have tended toward the elegiac, since my father’s death when I was seventeen. In the decades since then, the largeness, the universality both of our sense of attachment and of the fear of losing what we’re attached to — this has felt increasingly like my master idea.  Often this doubleness has played out in a single poem — not only the title poem of “Love and Dread” but in, say, “A Poultice” or “Midair,” and other poems in the collection, most of which was written between 2015 and 2017.  Originally I thought of dividing the manuscript into a Love section and a Dread section, but it seemed truer to life and art to weave the dark and the light together — as they are woven together every day.

Your stunning poem “In the Cloud,” published in The New Yorker in May of this year, beautifully evokes two dual abstractions: language and digital technology, such as Zoom and the cloud, where contact and content exist — but virtually. You write: “Words deeply pondered start to freeze — / as when before our tired eyes / Zoom stalls and stops (and no surprise), / leaving a dark screen, a blank hour / to fill with after and before.” What moment or interaction — or ongoing experience and feeling — sparked the light of this powerful poem?

“In the Cloud” had the original and very flat title “The List,” and it really was inspired by a list, which I really did lose, of words my poetry students (in a Gen. Ed. Poetry course I was teaching remotely for Rutgers-Newark in the fall of 2020) didn’t know. Once I began to jot down those words from memory, the rhyme and meter carried me swiftly along.

A lot of the poems I’ve written in the past few years are rhymed tetrameter couplets. A.E. Stallings, in her Foreword to Love and Dread, writes that “the indicative mood of this volume is the couplet, the wedding of opposites, as if translated from a language where “love” and “dread” do indeed rhyme.” I’d only add that for better or worse, I rarely overthink (or even think consciously at all about) formal matters; the decision tends to make itself, and off I go.

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

In the seventeenth century I especially love George Herbert (I’m hardly alone in that), and in the eighteenth, perhaps following in Merrill’s footsteps, Alexander Pope.  Compression, elegance, wit.

Your new book of essays, Piece by Piece, was published by Paul Dry Books in June of this year. Scholar David Mikics calls the work “haunting and intensely memorable,” and the publisher describes the collection as a book “about paying attention.” In the introduction, you write that you are “interested in…the obliterations and transformations of memory,” and, in this exploration, you pose the questions, “What and how do I recall what I’ve read, sometimes many years before? How, at different times in my life, did books help me?” What is the role of literature in your life? And how do reading and living well and fully relate to one another, in your eyes?

Piece by Piece is in many ways a memoir of reading: what I read, what I remember, how it helped. What Wallace Stevens said about the imagination, that it helps us to press back against the pressure of reality, comes to mind; reading does that, it can offer or seem to offer us a safe place, an escape. But just as I said earlier that mundanity and suffering are crucial elements of poetry, in the same way the very reality against which reading might seem to exert a saving counter-pressure is also found in books. 

Sharing a book, reading to a child, teaching a text to students — I don’t know a better way of caring, of human helping, person by person, page by page — whether with a toddler on one’s lap or staring at a screen full of faces. I’m the child of bookish parents, the mother of a bookish son, sister of a bookish sister, and the fortunate teacher of hundreds of students.

Piece by Piece, I hope, is about all these things.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets? 

I’m not the only older person to opine that young poets should read.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you, today?

I’ve recently finished a collection of poems entitled Pandemic Almanac. Also, my translation of one of forty-eight sections of the Dionysiaca, a zany and baroque Greek poem from late antiquity, should appear next spring. Working on this translation kept me happily occupied during the first stages of the pandemic.

“Translating,” says my husband Shalom, “is your Sudoku.”

UKRAINIAN POETRY AND SCREEN SAVOR: Greetings from Amherst [by John Hennessy]

(From A New Orthography, by Serhiy Zhadan)

We’ve Been Talking About War for Three Years (part one)

+

A friend of mine volunteered.

He came back six months later.

Who knows where he was.

He won’t say what he’s afraid of.

But he’s afraid of something.

Sometimes it seems

he’s afraid of everything.

 

He left a normal person.

But he talked too much.

About everything in this world.

About everything he came across.

 

And he came back

completely changed, as if

someone took his old tongue

and didn’t leave him a new one.

 

So he sits in his bed every day

and listens to the demons in his head.

 

The first demon is ferocious,

he pours out white heat, demands

punishment for all the living.

The second demon is submissive,

talks about forgiveness,

speaks quietly,

touches his heart with hands

covered in black soil.

 

But the worst is the third demon.

He agrees with the other two.

He agrees, doesn’t object.

 

As soon as he speaks

the headaches begin.  

                                    --translated from the Ukrainian by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin

 

It’s been nine years since I last blogged for BAP, opening with my salutations from Sifnos, Greece, my former home away from home, at the height of that country’s economic crisis. I presented a trio of documents addressing Greece’s dilemma at that time: whether or not to accept EU-imposed austerity measures or to leave the union—or at least to drop the euro in favor of a return to the drachma. None of those radical changes happened, precisely as one of my savviest informants predicted, despite the national referendum three years later (July, 2015, when the people voted in favor of rejecting the austerity measures). But as we all knew would happen, Greece survived. If all goes well, this summer they will also continue to be among the first countries in the EU to welcome back international guests with few restrictions. 

In addition to a couple of personal meditations, that week I wrote extensively about serving as poetry editor for The Common. We had just completed our first year of publication then, and all was new, ranging from provisional to speculative, fingers always crossed; we celebrated our 10^th anniversary with a beautiful new issue  and a big Zoom party this past year. Yes, I’m being a bit dry and craggy, like that Greek island, about the party. But really, in all seriousness, we have had Zoom events with contributors reading their work from their homes throughout the US, Europe, and the Middle East. We got everyone together with a smaller carbon footprint. And—at least I waited a paragraph to say it—we did the best we could to gather our broad community face-beside-face in real time during the pandemic.

This week my focus with these posts will be a little narrower, sticking to a goal of offering some of the best contemporary American poetry, growing primarily from the work I do at The Common, but also from my recent experience as a judge for the National Book Award in poetry. It amuses me to think that I used to take what I called “screen-free Saturdays,” my sabbath. During the pandemic (and with family overseas, not yet vaccinated, I know it’s not over and I don’t write in the past tense) I gave that practice up. The NBA deliberations were screen-centered, both through Zoom meetings and through reading the 250 books on a Kindle. Yes, that’s right, we read virtually all 250 of the entered titles on a Kindle smaller than my hand. But I was lucky to have been with a fine group of judges through this period, people who led with kindness, curiosity, and generosity from start to finish. The National Book Foundation’s directors and staff met the unprecedented obstacles presented by the early months of the pandemic with grace, humor, and ingenuity. There was a great spirit of camaraderie, and working with them all made it much easier to get through 2020.

While I did quietly attend to my own book of poems in progress throughout the last “year and,” most of my energy has gone into reading vast screens of new American poetry—and a fair bit of Ukrainian poetry. With Ostap Kin I co-translated A New Orthography by Serhiy Zhadan, the most significant voice in post-Soviet Ukrainian literature, and one of Eastern Europe’s most critically acclaimed authors. The book we translated doesn’t exist in Ukrainian, and now that I have more translation experience I realize that’s important to note.

Let me explain: we set out to do a volume of Selected Poems spanning Zhadan’s career, but quickly changed our minds. For one thing, Ostap was in close contact with Zhadan, and the poet gave him access to brand new poems, poems that hadn’t even been published in Ukrainian yet, including all of the work in Catalogue of Ships, Zhadan’s 2020 volume. We decided early on to observe what Zhadan has said many times, that his career can be divided into a before and an after around the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine. A New Orthography, then, is a selection of poems written since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War (2014 to present), and with the lives of civilians, soldiers, and veterans during wartime as their focus. Zhadan even wrote an introduction to this book, in addition to the translators’ introduction, about his own trips to the US and his engagement with American poets and poetry; the introductions and the poems are presented in a bilingual edition.

A New Orthography came out in the first month of the pandemic, before we all had figured out how to do launch parties and book tours online—it was sad to see this book go out into the world at such a time. What one wants is a reader, a few readers, as many good readers as possible, and towards that end we had published the individual Zhadan poems in journals throughout the US and even the New Statesman in the UK from the earliest days of our translation process. The press (Lost Horse Press, Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series, distributed by University of Washington Press) and we did our best, and there were a few small reviews, but at least one big anticipated review never happened, and we were really at a loss about what to do other than follow through with the couple of articles and self-interviews we were invited to contribute to journals.

Everyone was still figuring out what the pandemic meant and how it was to be survived. Everything was uncertain, especially for the sick and those on the front lines, health care workers and hospital staff, and even the multinational big pharma companies and their vaccine efforts. What it meant for poets and writers, for books and magazines, what it meant for publishers and librarians and booksellers, who have done what they can remotely, or even in person, masked and “distanced,” well, we have a better idea now, but the smoke hasn’t cleared and the changes to the economy and our practices haven’t been calculated.

(They buried their son last winter), by Serhiy Zhadan

+ + +

They buried their son last winter.

Strange weather for winter—rain, thunder.

They buried him quietly—everybody’s busy.

Who did he fight for? I asked. We don’t know, they say.

He fought for someone, they say, but who—who knows?

Will it change anything, they say, what’s the point now?

I would have asked him myself, but now—there’s no need.

And he wouldn’t reply—he was buried without his head.

 

It’s the third year of war; they’re repairing the bridges.

I know so many things about you, but who’d listen?

I know, for example, the song you used to sing.

I know your sister. I always had a thing for her.

I know what you were afraid of, and why, even. 

Who you met that winter, what you told him.    

The sky gleams, full of ashes, every night now.  

You always played for a neighboring school.

But who did you fight for?

 

To come here every year, to weed dry grass.

To dig the earth every year—heavy, lifeless.

To see the calm after tragedy every year.

To insist you didn’t shoot at us, at your people.

The birds disappear behind waves of rain.

To ask forgiveness for your sins. 

But what do I know about your sins?

To beg the rain to finally stop.

It’s easier for birds, who know nothing of salvation, the soul.

            --translated from the Ukrainian by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin

 

Shortly after A New Orthography came out, Ostap invited me to work with him on another project, an anthology of Ukrainian poems about Babyn Yar, the Holocaust massacre that claimed the lives of between 100,000 and 150,000 people in Kyiv (1941-1943), that he was editing. To be clearer than the Soviet censors—who insisted that the people killed were “Soviet citizens” and persecuted poets who wrote about Babyn Yar as a massacre of Jewish people—the vast majority of the people killed were Jewish. In fact, in two days, early in the occupation of Kyiv, between September 29 and 30, 1941, Nazi soldiers shot and killed 33,771 Jews at the site of the ravine. (Babyn Yar means “grandma’s ravine.”) The massacres continued over the next two years, and poets have been writing about Babyn Yar since the fall of 1941 to the present.

Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond also is a book that doesn’t already exist. In other words, we didn’t translate a Ukrainian collection; instead, Ostap put the book together himself. He is an archivist, and he flexes his skills with this project, having chosen poems spanning the last eight decades, many of them found in newspapers and other periodicals. He annotates and offers a publishing history for each poem and has written an extensive introduction, a bibliography, biographies of the poets, and a geographical note. We started this project last June and have just finished. It’s under contract but I don’t know if I’m at liberty to say anything further.

While we were working on this anthology, we received exciting news: A New Orthography was longlisted for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. We celebrated over FaceTime and kept working. Sometimes I do bless the screen. The Zhadan book began to receive notice on social media platforms, and the poems are available, both online and in print. Ultimately the book was a finalist for the PEN Award, and it’s presently shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize. As my experience as a judge has shown me, just being in the conversation is great, and I’m grateful, as is Ostap. I’m also grateful for the opportunity to present a few of Zhadan’s poems in translation here.

We’ve Been Talking About War for Three Years (part four), by Serhiy Zhadan

+ + + +

He’s been away for two years,

she hesitated.

Change the lock?

Or not?

Will he come back?

Or not?

 

In the end, she didn’t change the lock.

Probably, she unconsciously expected

him to come back.

He would return and she would tell him everything.

About her take on him,

about her take on all of this—

she would definitely tell him.

And about her terminated pregnancy. 

Which he knew nothing about these past two years.

And when he came back

(without keys, actually, he lost them somewhere),

she wouldn’t say anything.

And neither would he.

In general, they decided to talk less.

Especially about politics.

Talking about politics in our situation

is the same as talking about death in a TB ward—

someone there definitely won’t like it.

 

And here no matter what you say—everything is politics.

Bread on the table—politics. 

The school around the corner—politics.

The early spring that fills the sky with sweet smoke—

also politics.

Politics in gestures, politics in breathing,

politics in vocal cords

that need rest.       

                   

They got into a fight on the third day,

a fight over the shower.   

       

In the morning, he collects his stuff again.

She watches the sky like milk

that is about to simmer.

It’s too late for us to learn joy and consolation.

It’s too late to fix the floodgates when so much water has passed through.

 

Life is like a house where a person is found hanging. 

 

It’s too late to choose the right words.

It’s too late to install a new lock.

 

            --translated from the Ukrainian by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin

"June 11" by David Lehman -- in English & Portuguese (trans. Francisco Carvalho)

11 de Junho

Faço anos tenho a barriga vazia Posts
desejo preguiçar na rede
ir talvez nadar num dia quente
com o trombone de "I've Got You
Under My Skin" do Sinatra
metido na cabeça depois parar
para o almoço uma sanduíche
de carne de vaca enlatada e uma Pepsi
com muitos cubos de gelo ao contrário de França
onde põem um mísero cubo de gelo
na nossa Coca cara e quando
pedimos mais discutem connosco
desta maneira dizem pelo preço
fica com mais Coca mostrando não
perceberem nada da essência dos
refrigerantes Americanos que são uma
desculpa para os cubos de gelo contudo
não me importaria de uns dias por
lá ocorre-me a atitude do Philip Larkin
em relação à China quando lhe perguntaram
se gostaria de lá ir respondeu sim
se pudesse voltar no mesmo dia

-- trans. Francisco Carvalho; 6 / 26 / 19 

June 11

It's my birthday I've got an empty
stomach and the desire to be
lazy in the hammock and maybe
go for a cool swim on a hot day
with the trombone in Sinatra's
"I've Got You Under My Skin"
in my head and then to break for
lunch a corned-beef sandwich and Pepsi
with plenty of ice cubes unlike France
where they put one measly ice cube
in your expensive Coke and when
you ask for more they argue with
you they say this way you get more
Coke for the money showing they 
completely misunderstand the nature of
American soft drinks which are an
excuse for ice cubes still I wouldn't
mind being there for a couple of
days Philip Larkin's attitude
toward China comes to mind when
asked if he'd like to go there he said
yes if he could return the same day

—David Lehman (from The Daily Mirror)

"Dutch Interior" -- in Dutch [trans. Marcel Vanslembrouck]

from Ambrozijn 39ste jaargang nummer 1 2021-2022.

"On the Day of Atonement" [poem by Yehuda Amichai]

On Yom Kippur in 1967, the Year of Forgetting, I put on
my dark holiday clothes and walked to the Old City of
    Jerusalem.
For a long time I stood in front of an Arab’s hole-in-the-wall shop,
not far from the Damascus Gate, a shop with
buttons and zippers and spools of thread
in every color and snaps and buckles.
A rare light and many colors, like an open Ark.

I told him in my heart that my father too
had a shop like this, with thread and buttons.
I explained to him in my heart about all the decades
and the causes and the events, why I am now here
and my father’s shop was burned there and he is buried here.

When I finished, it was time for the Closing of the Gates.
He too lowered the shutters and locked the gate
and I returned, with all the worshippers, home.

                translation by Stephen Mitchell

-- sdl

 

Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus": A Multiple Translation Project [by Alicia Ostriker and friends]

A POEM THAT MADE SOMETHING HAPPEN--NOW IN MULTIPLE TRANSLATIONS

 

If you want to refute W.H. Auden's assertion that "poetry makes nothing happen," all you really need is one poem:  Emma Lazarus' sonnet "The New Colossus," written in 1883 to help raise money for the base of the statue we now call the Statue of Liberty.  The statue, a gift to us from France, was supposed to celebrate the friendship between France and the United States, and was originally inspired by American emancipation. By the time it was completed and erected, it was called "Liberty Enlightening the World." It had nothing to do with immigration. But the poem came at a  moment when immigrants -- many of them East European Jews escaping waves of pogroms -- were pouring into the country, and it radically changed the meaning of the statue, of the Port of New York, and of the USA.  We were "a nation of immigrants."

 

Then as now, America was divided. Immigration  was fiercely resisted by many Americans, just as it is today.  But Lazarus' symbol of "the Mother of Exiles" welcoming a tide of people "yearning to breathe free" took hold.  The Mother of Exiles has greeted arrivals here for well over a century, and the poem speaking in her voice is widely understood as representing the core American value of hope. See, for example, its presence in The Oxford Book of American Poetry edited by David Lehman (2006), and other anthologies.  Wishing to expand its global reach in this time of turning to a more generous America, with its renewed hope for us as a nation of immigrants,  we have collected translations from poets and writers speaking over 40 languages.  Here they are online, hosted by the American Jewish Historical Society, with comments by the translators, voice recordings by over a dozen of them, and brief essays by Alicia Ostriker and Mihaela Moscaliuc.

 

https://ajhs.org/emma-lazarus-translations

 

Alicia Ostriker

Mihaela Moscaliuc

Tess O'Dwyer

 

PS: If you are interested in translating "The New Colossus" to a language that is not yet present on the site, please write to Rebeca Miller rmiller@ajhs.org

and Mihaela Moscaliuc mmoscali@monmouth.edu.

 

PPS: For those of you who are teachers (or parents, or children), check out the children's 2021 Statue of Liberty Poetry Contest:

https://www.ajhs.org/emma-lazarus-project-poetry-contest

"Days of 1896" [by C. P. Cavafy]

He became completely degraded. His erotic tendency,
condemned and strictly forbidden
(but innate for all that), was the cause of it:
society was totally prudish.
He gradually lost what little money he had,
then his social standing, then his reputation. --
Nearly thirty, he had never worked a full year --
at least not at a legitimate job.
Sometimes he earned enough to get by
acting the go-between in deals considered shameful.
He ended up the type likely to compromise you thoroughly
if you were seen around with him often.

But this isn’t the whole story – that would not be fair.
The memory of his beauty deserves better.
There is another angle; seen from that
he appears attractive, appears
a simple, genuine child of love,
without hesitation putting,
above his honor and reputation,
the pure sensuality of his pure flesh.

Above his reputation? But society,
prudish and stupid, had it wrong.

[Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard]

from the archive; first posted Sept. 16, 2008

"Days of 1896" [by C. P. Cavafy]

Days of 1896

He became completely degraded. His erotic tendency,
condemned and strictly forbidden
(but innate for all that), was the cause of it:
society was totally prudish.
He gradually lost what little money he had,
then his social standing, then his reputation. --
Nearly thirty, he had never worked a full year --
at least not at a legitimate job.
Sometimes he earned enough to get by
acting the go-between in deals considered shameful.
He ended up the type likely to compromise you thoroughly
if you were seen around with him often.

But this isn’t the whole story – that would not be fair.
The memory of his beauty deserves better.
There is another angle; seen from that
he appears attractive, appears
a simple, genuine child of love,
without hesitation putting,
above his honor and reputation,
the pure sensuality of his pure flesh.

Above his reputation? But society,
prudish and stupid, had it wrong.

[Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard]

Charles Baudelaire's "Le Vin Des Amants" [translated by Sandra Simonds]

I Love Wine!

 

Today, omg, I’m just so spaced out and splendid,

           as I walk this earth without death, without an apron,

without being a wife and so my heart becomes the nostrils of a winter

        workhorse whose exhalation breaks through the iced, tulip sky.

 

Why does everyone want to torture me?

          All people care about are calendars, clocks, wallets

to time the flesh; Well, I can’t take it!  

 

So here ich bin, all balanced and delirious,

                tapping into some long forgotten intelligence—

 

Oh sister, let’s go to the Oregon coast

           and relax inside the boxed wine paradise of our dreams. 

 

—© 2014 Sandra Simonds

From the archive; We first posted this highly imaginative translation of Baudelaire's "Le Vin Des Amants" (*literally 'the wine of lovers') on January 17, 2014. Pictured above: Charles Baudelaire.

"Fallen Angel" [by Madeleine Freitag]

1.

The angelic guest wields his gun, the crowd applauds,
and no one knows where he came from or what he has done
to merit the praise of the world and the souls of men.
Nor is he wiser than the mapmaker, nor less obstinate
than a disobedient minor god who loves the fallen angels
and gathers their love in return. And still night descends
and lust arrives with it – lust and good humor, drink
and sleep, and the dreams of glory that charge the sleep
of heroes and heroines in days before the death of faith.
Nevertheless there is always tomorrow night, Saturday night,
when in cities from London to Moscow the proles get drunk,
smash glass, and forget their troubles for the few charged hours
when guns replace words, and the lovers withdraw
into the sacred intoxication of the ancient night sky.

2.

So the world is a map that yields to the eyes of skillful men,
even those without heavenly sponsors. Day comes promptly,
roosters crow, and an obstinate god has his way
with a stiff-necked tyrant. The love of a sister for her brother
is as tender as the kiss goodbye, the shutting of the eyes with kisses.
Nor is lust to be denied; night lets the couple sleep
after seeing the human form divine. The old gods grin.
The new gods are not yet ready to take their place.

Translator's note:
Madeleine Freitag was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1969. She spent a year at Oxford learning English and a year at Heidelberg studying the German romantic poet, Friedrich Hölderlin. Married to an accomplished archer who competed in the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, she has lived in Kyoto since 1990. 

Little known as a poet, Freitag has won plaudits for her translation into Japanese of a selection of Thomas Mann’s short stories and essays. She has written fiction under a pseudonym. I met her at the Rotterdam literary festival in June 1999 and we have since corresponded by old-fashioned air mail as Madeleine refuses to use a computer or communicate by e-mail. She abhors social media and says she feels “as alienated from the digital world as from the terrifying continent of my birth.” One reason she writes poems, she says half-kiddingly (I think), is to keep up her German.

Freitag tells me she feels lucky to produce one good poem in a year. “Fallen Angel” ("Der Gefallener Engel") is among the first of her poems to be translated into English. In line eleven, Freitag uses a word more conventionally rendered as peasant; but I feel that Orwell’s “proles” comes closer to her meaning.

The painting above is Luca Giordano's "Fall of the Rebel Angels" c. 1666. -- David Lehman

from The Antioch Review, 2020

On Translating Baudelaire's Prose Poems for "The Paris Review"

In Baudelaire’s “La fausse monnaie,” which I have rendered as “Fake Money,” the poet is outraged when his companion gives a counterfeit coin to a beggar. Translating the poem, I aimed for a coherent and well-written narrative rather than a literal version.

The phrase la criminelle jouissance in the last paragraph is difficult to translate because we have no English equivalent of jouissance. The standard definition, enjoyment, leaves out the secondary sense of the word, sexual climax. Critical theorists have made much of jouissance and connected the term itself with a transgressive impulse.

My initial solution: “joyous criminality.” Thus, for the French Je lui aurais presque pardonné le désir de la criminelle jouissance dont je le supposais tout à l’heure capable, I had: “I might almost have acquitted him for desiring the experience of joyous criminality that I once supposed him capable of.” This is exact, if clumsy, and on further thought, I concluded the clause with the word criminality and dropped the rest: “I might almost have acquitted him for desiring the experience of joyous criminality.”

All along, I was undecided between this formulation and one that put a greater value on narrative speed. In the end, I decided on the latter: “I might almost have acquitted him of the criminality I have charged him with.” In tonality and succinctness, this is superior, though the gain in clarity sacrifices the concept of “joyous criminality” or perhaps “transgressive joy” that Baudelaire champions in a number of his prose poems (gathered under the title Spleen de Paris). Were I to publish a group of my translations, it would be with notes and an introduction addressing just such an issue as this.

I keep making changes in my translations, even after they have been published, as it is the bane of the translator’s life to keep discovering ways he or she can improve upon what he or she has done. The work is endless. But if we can communicate something of the flavor of a great writer, even at the cost of a significant nuance, the gain is great. —David Lehman, translator of Charles Baudelaire’s “Fake Money” and “Get Drunk”

Ed. Note: For notes by translators of other poets -- Pessoa's Alberto Caeiro, Miraji, Osorio, Guerra, Kahal, Farrokhzad -- click here  for The Paris Review forum entitled "The Untranslatable." For "Fake Money," click here.

"Separate Them" [by Thomas Moody]

Separate Them

                            after Baudelaire's "Semper Eadem"

The deviant disses you, sells strange tickets
Online, immersed in nouveau Black Metal.
Not to interfere with the dance of vengeance
We avoid the mall. There is a secret canoe,

A dealer with good looks who holds no mystery,
And in the voice jar, a plant or two.
Shush the donkey, ring the bell of curiosity!
Being the vote getter, doubt will taser you!

Ignorance will taser you! Aim is a certain ravine!
Push the rear to the front, add to the core cleverly.
The savant sees no more tenets through the subtle lens.

They say the concurring senator didn't get the message
Taking down the whole affair, a dance of strange beauty—
The longtime sommelier befriends the decimal

Raymond Roussel's "Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique": 3 Extracts translated by Mark Ford

(Ed. note:  In 2011 Mark Ford wrote for us about the experience of translating Raymond Roussel's Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique. You can read yesterday's post here. Find Ford's new translation here. )

The first two extracts are footnotes from Canto IV. There are 98 lines of the main text in this canto, and 134 in footnotes! The first footnote is on the general theme of ambition, and the second on pride, and the fact that animals and birds (apart from the peacock) don’t have it, despite their various accomplishments. The third extract is from the enormous list in Canto II in which Roussel presents 207 examples of things that are visually similar but of different sizes.

1

There is no one who does not cherish an ambitious dream; 
The worker believes he will see himself dictating, at the time of a strike
(These days people use their reason, and each, with their eye on the goal
((We all have one: as long as the nape of his neck,
Laid bare for the blade of the guillotine,
Remains for a quarter of an hour longer connected to his spine,
Thinking: “Letting one's prey slip occurs — often — even
To someone who holds it most securely” (((and indeed, the imbecile
Escapes from his padded cell, the prisoner in solitary confinement from his jail,
The cheese from the beak of the duped crow;
— On some occasions keeping silent is the best option;))),
The murderer has only one aim: escape;)),
Whatever his or her ideal is: to earn a large salary,
To give birth to children, to see the threshing floor overflowing with his grain
Or to make his pulse rate slow and settle down,
Feel that, to succeed, it is better to think and act
Than to make — jobbing worker, infertile wife,
Harvester or invalid — a wish in the moment
That a shooting star leaves its shining trail;),
Tired of giving his sweat to the bourgeoisie to drink
(It is often for Peter that Paul suffers and works;
Vespucci exploited Columbus’s discovery;
And it is to furnish a pearl for some finger or waistcoat
That an oyster spends its life labouring;), laws to his boss;
The slut in her attic dreams of living in style;
And to see his hands adorned with amethysts and holding a crozier
Is a fantasy dear to each fledgeling priest.

2

If human excellence drives out modesty
As much as Monday does the ardour of workers
(One gets used to leisure; the soul and the heart elsewhere,
The lycée pupil is sombre when he returns in October;),
And insanity, in the case of a criminal, the shame of his crime,
And an unsnowy winter high prices for road salt,
Yet pride is not a universal vice;
Leaving aside the peacock, it steers clear of beasts:
The swallow, despite its ability to predict tempests;
The ram, although it is the emblem of the order of the Grand Cross
(Everyone is familiar with the Golden Fleece); the cat,
Although it can work out its bearings at midnight without a candle,
Although it knows how to predict — just like the swallow,
But not so accurately or publicly —
By the static its fur gives off
The anger lurking in a sky that feigns calm,
Although it allows spinsters to enjoy a sweet old age
And can walk in silence even when not on a carpet;
The wolf, although a she-wolf had famous dugs;
The he-goat, although his skin furnishes humans with water-bottles;
Despite the high price currently demanded for his skin, the otter;
Although his name designates a fabric, the alpaca.

3

              the candle end of a miser,
For a flat-headed drawing pin on its own
With its point in the air; — in Switzerland, at the bazaar, for an eyelash,
Curved escapee from a soft eye, the black horn
Of a chamois; — a warming pan after it’s been hung on its nail,
For a motionless pendulum, called back to life;
— In a rickshaw just as it's being readied,
The puller’s degrading harness, for a pair of braces;
— At a lewd woman's house, a pleasant lace-fringed pillow,
For an unused pincushion with a merry flounce;
— A mask put aside by a tired fencer,
For an eye protector to be placed over the glasses
Of a stonebreaker; — the clearly wrinkled temple
Of an old man, for the upper part of the underside of a fist;
— For the hair-touselling black cloth of a photographer,
That with which, generating a breeze, four people cover
A coffin; — an album of portraits, if, to open it,
You have to overcome one or two fasteners, for a parish register;
— For a lowly button hook, the hook, almost a part of his body,
Whose noble fate is to stand in for the five fingers of an armless man;
— An arm sling, for the scarf in which a much enlarged
Cheek is hidden on a day when it's inflamed;
— When he's making iron hot enough to be bent,
For a pair of hearth bellows, the bellows used in a forge;
— For that which someone with a cough shows to a throat-doctor,
An arched cavern, reddened by the setting sun,
With a solitary stalactite; — a lake of blood that appears
In a dangerous district, for the treacherous spittle
Of a consumptive; — at a saddler’s, the tether
From which an empty stirrup gleams, for the broken fastener
Of a yellow umbrella; — for the perfidious, sworn-at bit of shot
That an eater of game spits aside, cursing it to the devil,
A cannonball cleaving the air…

 

from the archive; first posted April 22, 2011

Mark Ford on Raymond Roussel: "Such Also Wonder"

Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique is largely made up of lists. Most of Canto II, for instance, is taken up by a list of 207 examples of things of things that might be mistaken for smaller things with which they have a visual similarity. The first of these is a lightning conductor, which is (much) bigger than, but looks like, a grey thread being passed through the eye of a needle; the last is a spider in a fisherman’s net, which looks like, but is (a bit) bigger than a louse in a hairnet. Some of Roussel’s examples in this list amply demonstrate why his writing was so popular with the Surrealists – though the compliment wasn’t returned; he said he found their work ‘un pur obscur’.            

                   — for a single fried egg, on its own,
         With a vigorously salted yolk, the skull, bent in prayer,
         Of an old priest with jaundice;

         — For that which someone with a cough shows to a throat doctor, [ie. an
inflamed uvula]
         An arched cavern, reddened by the setting sun,
         With a solitary stalactite;

All of these lists are introduced by a sort of ‘hook’. The ‘hook’ introducing this particular one is an eavesdropper overhearing a conversation about himself; our vanity is such, Roussel goes on to note, that even when we hear our large faults enumerated, it’s as if we fall under a spell that that makes us likely to mistake big things for little things: a porthole for a monocle; a guillotine for a cigar-cutter; an alligator by a sun-umbrella for a lizard by a mushroom. And so on. And so on.

There is no real reason why any of these lists should ever end. In Canto I the dominant list is introduced by someone having his photo taken, who wonders if, even if he keeps as still as he can, he will end up coming out blurred. At this Roussel breaks in:  ‘((((Tels se demandent: - / ((((Such also wonder: -’, and we get 54 instances of people – and things – in comparable states of wondering; a lamppost if the three-headed dog Cerberus would sniff it with all three of its noses before urinating on it; a wall being battered by a loose shutter during a storm, what it is being punished for; an animal-tamer being eaten by a wild beast if his mourning widow will still be strictly in black (sans gris ni mauve) a year on; hot milk that has been left in the pot, if it will be poured with or without its skin.

It occurred to me that that Roussel’s lists, though undoubtedly the product of a very singular imagination, could actually also be the basis for quite useful and interesting writing school exercises. Just as Joe Brainard’s ‘I Remember’ format is widely employed to stimulate autobiographical prose pieces, wouldn’t the ‘Such Also Wonder’, say, work as an inspiring format? Such also wonder:

         the bic pen-cap, how often it will be used
         to clean the writer’s ear; the child’s tooth
         under the pillow, if fairies really exist…

Like ‘le très special procédé  (the very special method) that he used to write his novels and plays and posthumously explained in the essay ‘Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres’ (see the note on p. 233 of this edition of Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique), the special methods Roussel developed in this, his final poem, might also, or so it seems to me, prove useful for later writers.

from the archive; first posted April 19, 2011

from "Vertical Poetry" by Roberto Juarroz [trans. by W. S. Merwin]

Every word is a doubt,

every silence another doubt.

However,

the intertwining of both

lets us breathe.

 

All sleeping is a sinking down,

all waking another sinking.

However,

the intertwining of both

lets us rise up again.

 

All life is a form of vanishing,

all death another form.

However,

the intertwining of both

lets us be a sign in the void. 

                           

— Roberto Juarroz [trans. W.S Merwin]. With thanks to Howard Altmann.

"Machaut's Complaint" [by Guillame de Machaut, trans. Robert Launay]

Like wicked men whose evil exploits taint
The pages of the story of their lives,
Damned by God, cursed by all the saints,
Banished, of any glimpse of light deprived,
The month of March should share their fate as well
And perish in the raging flames of Hell.
Each day I would condemn him, without doubt,
Who cruelly afflicts my foot with gout.

From his eyes, may the bright sun be ever hid,
Nor may the moon’s rays ever grace his night.
His realm is darkness, which all light forbids.
Nature is his nemesis, whom he would fight
With coward’s weapons. May the deceit
Of such a thief and looter earn defeat.
Perish that King of Ice, that miserable lout,
Who cruelly afflicts my foot with gout.

May other months expel him from their fold
And Nature consign him to oblivion.
Let April instead be honored and extolled,
The gentlest, noblest, and the kindest one,
Who strews the world with flowers ever fair,
In pastures, meadows, forests everywhere,
Who cures me when the month of March he routs
Who cruelly afflicts my foot with gout.

-- Guillame de Machaut (1300-1377) translated by Robert Launay.

Ed note: The French title for Machault's poem is "Ballade Contre la Goutte." The double meaning of complaint" makes "Machaut's Complaint" superior to "Against Gout, a Ballad" as a title for this masterly poem. Machaut was celebrated as "a master of French versification and regarded as one of the leading French composers of the Ars Nova (q.v.) musical style of the 14th century" (Brittanica). 

The return of the mountebanks to Paris: the imperative pleasure of live performance [by Tracy Danison]

A mountebank tries her hand for the Compagnie Gwénaël Morin’s “Uneo uplusi eurstragé dies” performance, which opened the post-lockdown season in Paris. Photo©Emile Zeizig/mascarille.com

Yeah baby, I like it like that/ You gotta believe me when I tell you/ I said I like it like that/ You gotta believe me when I tell you/ I said I like it like that …  - I Like It by Cardi B, Bad Bunny & J Balvin, 2018                                                      

The brakes on Karine’s electric bike squeak abominably as I twist nervously through Vincennes and Montreuil, pedaling back from the Atelier de Paris, behind the Parc Floral in the Bois de de Vincennes. The morning is still grey. It’s about 8. Poor thing. The bike, I mean. I’ve taken it because it’s an advantage when I’m up early, feeling old and living in a city humpy and made narrowly but with broad ideas, like Paris.

Compagnie Gwénaël Morin open Atelier’s season with a dawn performance of his Uneo uplusi eurstragé dies (my guesses : “One bizarre moment more” or, maybe, “In one brain, many moments bizarre”). The performance knits together Ajax, Antigone and Heracles. Distraught, determined, destined, each was responsible for their own death.

Dawn is just the right note to open on in the Covid-era; there’s a new day between sun up and sundown –  anything is possible. I think “rosy-fingered dawn”, Odyssey, Odysseos. I laugh, remembering swotting Greek. I remember that every single day begins all on its own… Live Dance does that, too – I think of Morin’s piece as “Dance”, for instance, because I’ve concluded all “performance” grows from the fundamental art of Dance. Dance begins and proceeds and beginsunique, like the days of our lives, like remembering, like the reincarnating soul is said to do.

This apprehension of its one-time-only quality is why live Dance is as universally sacred as it is profane. The Catholic Mass is a Dance of Remembrance, Passion and Resurrection; the Passion is the mother of plays and all true mountebanks. Playing Uneo uplusi eurstragé dies as the sun rises is a natural homage to the Dance in ourselves.

We onlookers are masked-up, raggedly distanced, flopped or tailor-legged or leant against the bigger trees in a trampled little meadow just outside the doors of Cartoucherie’s Aquarium theater. Local families often gather here for soccer and impromptu picnics. The rain this morning hesitates often enough that, playing or looking on, the performance stays outside throughout, damp but not soaked.

Fat grey clouds roll above as we look on. Lit by one giant globe lamp, the stage is carved from onlookers by a circle of reddish DayGlo spray paint, dimensioned by a big board on which somebody has written “AJAX ANTIGONE HERAKLES”. Twenty-something mountebanks in jeans, one cream molding-sack dress, sneakers, some in ponchos, one bare-chested, chorus, fall on their own sword, just say ‘no’ to wrongness and finesse their own pyre, all with pomp and style that wouldn’t surprise Sophocles or Molière.

The house offers coffee and croissants after.

Back on the e-bike, I am wondering, Is Gwénaël Morin’s piece suggesting we are responsible for our deaths as well as our dreams, bêtises and attendant guilts?

Wishing to get around a delivery truck in a narrow street, I take the curb too much lengthwise, take unwingèd flight, bang and abrade brow ridge, knee and nose. My good old left hand doesn’t stop the pavement from recreating me an old, has-been Palooka, but she does save me. She’s throbbing like a bastard but fully mobile. Likely just a strain. I’m not ambidextrous, but I lead left, often. Karine responds to Palooka’s post-beating selfie: “Bist du zuuuu schnell gefahren?”, a variant of an offhand “Bist du sicher?”. Then she asks after her e-bike.

The incident is worth every bruise, however. I’m hysterically glad to get back in among the mountebanks in spaces that were uncomfortable before fear of getting this viral salopérie gave us all these experiments in national lockdown, masks and social distancing.

With little exceptions, like a particular music-dance video or two (for instance, Philip Chbeeb & René Kester) and a drowsy appreciation of TV butt, cleavage, bump and grind as I stretch along Karine as she watches her Saturday-night ballroom dance TV contest, Uneo uplusi eurstragé dies is the first live performance I’ve set eyes on since 15 March 2020.

And, if the pandemic has proved one thing to my satisfaction, it’s that, even snuggled up to my honey-squeeze and drowsily appreciative of the family-rated content, un-live and un-in-person, audio-visual reproduction of Dance-performance can’t work for me. It’s physical and also intellectual – “moral”, in the French sense of the word.

Not by accident or even disdain, I haven’t had a TV since I left home for good in 1972. The flicker rate of TV and films make me feel weird – in the old days an “alienist” would have said “alienated”, like one feels in the first few moments of an acid trip. I have to steel myself to see a film. This may seem to you “odd”. It probably seems “unusual” but not “odd” that I also taste all sweeteners but sugar as bitter, hear very high-pitched sounds like dog whistles, am 65 years old and do not need glasses, though I can’t spontaneously tell my left from my right.

For me, the long and short of the effects of audio-visual technology on people is that people are naturally very variable and sensitive to the movements and evolutions of the world around. It stands to reason that the variability and sensitivity would extend to the technological environment. For the rest, a brother of mine was in a rocket attack that blew out his ear drums, burned his skin and drove a bone splinter from a comrade deep into his body. The experience left him permanently “nervous”. When it came to compensation, there was much ink exchanged over whether his was mental or physical disability. I’ve concluded that when we say “unusual”, we mean we don’t want to say not much is known about humans or the rest of the natural world and “odd” when a we don’t want to know about it.

I like the content of the recorded and reproduced performance as much as I do live performance content. Sometimes, even more. But, intellectually, reasoning from experience and values, not only do I suspect that audio-visual reproduction technology is the source of a number of psychic ills subtler than my own marginal schizophrenia, I also feel certain that the technology does not reproduce, but rather produces a thing quite different from the once-and-only that is the soul of Dance performance.

Physically – psychically, intellectually – morally, live Dance-performance is just not the same as recorded or reproduced performance. In the future, we need to better value that difference.

On Robert Fitzgerald’s Odyssey [by Carolyn Clark]

The Odyssey has often been considered the lighter of the two Homeric epics, easier to read, more various and more entertaining than its counterpart, The Iliad.  The splendor of the narrative is indisputable, and great writers from Dante and Shakespeare to Tennyson, Joyce, and Kafka have mined The Odyssey for their own ends. 

Odysseus, who plays an important supporting role in The Iliad, is the main attraction of The Odyssey. Following the end of the Trojan War, he embarks for his home, Ithaca, but has to overcome perilous obstacles and to resist seductive blandishments before getting there.  It takes him ten years.

But this epic tale is not just about Odysseus, MIA war hero, voyager, strategist, adventurer. It’s also a coming of age story about his son, Telemachus, who is trying to set things right. And Penelope, Odysseus’s long-suffering wife, is a scene-stealer. As wily as her husband, she has gamely and creatively fended off the advances of the many importunate suitors, vainglorious freeloaders all, who have violated the Greek values of hospitality and decorum. It is thanks to the unstinting help of the goddess Athena that Odysseus reaches Ithaka, vanquishes the suitors, and reunites with Penelope and their son, Telemachus.

For readers of English, embarking on this journey, which translation? There's the crucial question.

I'll start with my old favorite, Robert Fitzgerald's translation (Anchor Books, 1961, 1963), which I read enthusiastically in high school and college, and even gave a pale blue copy to my mother, also a poet, inscribed “with love to Florence - of journeys.” Written in very readable, American “plain style” language -- even more so than the prose-like verse translation produced a few years later by Richmond Lattimore (1965) -- Fitzgerald’s Odyssey was my bridge to the world of true epic, replete with richly physical depictions and closely linked to the language of Homeric Greek.  Himself a poet, Fitzgerald offered a refreshing alternative to the roundabout, prose-style translations by Rouse (1937) or Rieu (1945) that spoiled the fun for high-school students obliged to encounter Homer through their eyes.

Let me dwell on a passage that occurs well before Odysseus enters the story. In Book II “A Hero's Son Awakens” (l. 230 ff), Telemachus' guide, Mentor, a wise old warrior and friend of Odysseus, scolds the assembly both for short memories and for their long standing indifference toward the pack of ravaging suitors. For seven years they have usurped Odysseus’ home and kingdom, slaughtering his local herds and flocks and partying pretty much non-stop. Telemachus, who has just turned eighteen, finally calls the townspeople together for the first time since Odysseus’ absence to seek their help in banishing the suitors.

After Telemachus has his say, the aged Mentor stands up and gives the Ithacans a tongue-lashing. His opening words, fraught with irony and sarcasm, intend to waken their sense of social responsibility.  Mentor’s words also resonate with a well-known axiom from ancient history: when it comes to leaders, people remember kindness over cruelty.  In the historic concept of body politic, leadership that demonstrates fairness and caring for the balanced wellbeing of the entire community, large or small, is always cherished.

Odysseus, for all his survival tricks, had long been celebrated for the parenting skills he employed as king. Mentor knows this and suggests its inverse:

 "Let no man holding scepter as a king / be thoughtful, mild, kindly or virtuous, / let him be cruel, and practice evil ways,/ it is so clear that no one here remembers / how like a gentle father Odysseus ruled you."

They are important positives, these Greek adjectives – thoughtful (prophron), mild (aganos); most notably, used twice in this passage, in the phrase ‘as a gentle father’ – kindly or virtuous, well-disposed (epios). These same words recur in later passages in the poem.  

Homer also knew that posterity will remember, honor and cherish a good leader but will relegate a bad leader to oblivion. Mentor’s sarcasm builds on this general knowledge. Next, using an approach that is more direct, he tries to stir the Ithacans from their silent indifference.

"What sickens me is to see the whole community/ sitting still, and never a hand raised/ against them [the suitors] - a mere handful compared with you."

Reminding the townsmen that they are many (polloi) and the suitors are few (paurous), Mentor tries to draw the community away from its apathy, its silence; the Greek word used to describe them as ‘still’ is actually  ‘silent’ (aneo).

After reading and focusing on these passages, I discovered an amazing additional text, The Odyssey: A Graphic Novel (Candlewick Press, 2010).  The artist, Gareth Hinds, chose to illustrate the same passages from the speeches to the assembly of Ithacans. In his notes at the end of the 248-page graphic novel, Hinds acknowledges that his favorite translators of The Odyssey are Fitzgerald (1963) and Fagles (1996) – my favorites as well. I can also recommend Emily Wilson’s recently published version (WW Norton, 2018).

The theme of ‘nostos’ – homecoming and the longing for home that compels Odysseus forward – is crucial. Near the beginning of Book 13, when Odysseus learns from the generous Alkinoos, king of the Phaiakians,  that he will be receiving a crew the next day to continue his journey home, Fitzgerald uses a beautiful Homeric simile to convey Odysseus’s emotion:

Just as the farmer’s hunger grows, behind
the bolted plow and share, all day afield,
drawn by his team of winedark oxen: sundown
is benison for him, sending him homeward
stiff in the knees from weariness, to dine,
just so, the light on the sea rim gladdened Odysseus…

Born in Ithaca, New York, Carolyn Clark studied Classics at Cornell, Brown and Johns Hopkins (diss. Tibullus Illustrated: Lares, Genius and Sacred Landscapes, 1998). Her recent poetry publications include Poet Duet:  A Mother and Daughter (Aldrich Press, 2019), New Found Land (Cayuga Lake Books, 2017), a pair of Finishing Line Press chapbooks – Choose Lethe: Remember to Forget (2017) and Mnemosyne: the Long Traverse (2013) – and winter poems in The Avocet (2017, 2018, 2019), all published after Carolyn moved back to the Finger Lakes.