My room’s the shape of a cage
The sun crooks his arm through the bars
But I, who smoke to make a mirage,
Let the flame of day light my cigar
I don’t want to work I want to smoke
far left: Apollinaire; left: portrait of Apollinaire by Giorgio de Chirico (1917)
The Clock
– for a lady
How do the Chinese tell time? By looking at the eyes of their
cats. Here’s how.
A lost missionary, afoot in a sleepy suburb of Nankin, had
forgotten his watch and asked a little boy what time it was.
After a moment’s hesitation, this street urchin of the celestial
Empire said: ‘‘Wait, I will tell you.’’ A few seconds later, he
reappeared with a very fat cat in his arms, looked into the whites of her eyes, and said, ‘‘It is almost but not quite noon.’’ Which was the case.
As for me, if I favor my beautiful Feline, so felicitously named –
the honor of her sex, the pride of my heart, and the perfume of my spirit, day and night, rain or shine – in the depths of her adorable eyes I can always tell what time it is, and it is always the same time, an hour vast, solemn, limitless as space undivided into minutes and seconds – a lingering hour no clock observes, soft as a sigh, swift as a glance.
And if an intruder came to disturb my study of this enchanting dial, if some malevolent genie, some demon of ill fortune, were to address me as a vain and idle mortal and say: ‘‘What are you staring at? What are you looking for in the eyes of that creature? Is time told there, and can you tell it?’’ I would reply without hesitation. ‘‘I know what time it is; it is Eternity.’’
Madame, is not this a most meritorious bagatelle, and as full of vain self-regard as your high and mighty self? Frankly, my dear, it has given me so much pleasure embroidering this pretentious piece of puffery that I ask nothing of you in return.
-- "L'Horloge" by Charles Baudelaire [trans. David Lehman]
from the Summer 2019 issue of The Yale Review, in which four other prose poems by Charles Baudelaire appear.
Ode to His Love
Where are you my Lady I am waiting for you
I used to think that you would come but you
Proved to me that male and female are true
Distinctions "different but equal" do you rue
The three years you spent at law school
When I think of them I feel like such a fool
The man who bones his woman is a useful tool
Each time we fuck is greater than the golden rule
I wrote these lines in an effort to be cool
But it didn't work I felt like a ghost or a ghoul
You sat on me as if I were a stool
With you I'd swim in the deep end of the pool
O where are you my dove my sweet
Love is loveliest in the throes of heat
trans. Molly Arden
From time to time we will be posting commentary from Molly Arden, a onetime BAP-blog regular, who has translated Catullus and written a memorable essay, "Horace and Catullus," which won the coveted Richard Hertz Award from "Contemporary Literature in Translation."
To welcome her back, we thought we'd reprint an earlier post as well as a photographic image selected by the camera-shy Ms. Arden.
Catullus #25
translated by Molly Arden
Thallus, you letch: softer than rabbit fur
is your phallus and sack of nuts
that dangle from your old man crotch,
festooned with cobwebs, and still
you’re as greedy as a gonif
[line missing here]
Give back the things you stole from her --
her cape, handkerchief from Spain,
etchings from Carthage, bracelet of Salome --
things you claim you inherited from your folks.
Spare me your obnoxious jokes.
Get your sticky hands off her stuff, and send it
to her, or I swear I’ll kick your ass
and make you twist like a toy battleship
in the bathtub when a hurricane hits the sea.
Loss of Halo (Perte d’Aureole) by Charles Baudelaire
“What! You here, too, old pal? You, in this den of iniquity! You, quaffer of quintessences! You, who sup on ambrosia! This is a real surprise.”
“My dear chap, you know my fear of horses and carriages. Just now, as I raced across the street, stomping in the mud to get through that chaos in motion where death gallops at you from all sides at once, my halo slipped off my head and onto the filthy ground. I’m afraid I didn’t have the sang-froid to pick it up –let’s just say I deemed it less disagreeable to lose my insignia than to have my bones broken. And then I said to myself, look for the silver lining. I can now walk around incognito, doing whatever nasty things I like, indulging my vices just as lesser mortals do. And here I am, just like you, as you see!”
“You should at least report the loss of your halo or post a reward for its recovery.”
“Not on your life. I am quite happy here. You alone have recognized me. Besides, dignity bores me. And it pleases me to think that some bad poet will pick it up and put it on his impudent head. How sweet to make someone happy! Especially someone I can laugh at! Think of X or Z. You have to admit that’s funny.”
-- translated by David Lehman
[from The American Scholar, Spring 2014]
You must get drunk. That’s it: your sole imperative. To immunize yourself from the backbreaking, body-bending burdens of time, you must get drunk and stay that way.
But on what? On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, your choice. But get drunk.
And if sometimes, while on the steps of a palace, on the green grass beside a marsh, in the morning solitude of your room, you snap out of it, your drunkenness has worn off , has worn off entirely, then ask the wind, ask an ocean wave, a star, a bird, a clock, every evanescent thing, everything that flies, that groans, that rolls, that sings, that speaks, ask them what time it is; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, will tell you: “It’s time to get drunk! To avoid being the martyred slaves of time, get drunk, get drunk and stay that way. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, your choice.”
-- trans. David Lehman
"Enivrez-vous" is one of the fifty prose poems that constitute "Petits Poemes en prose," also known as "Spleen de Paris," the book by Baudelaire [pictured above] that launched the prose poem as a genre (or a form.) This translation appeared in Alan Ziegler's excellent volume "Shorts" (Persea Books). I am working on a complete translation of "Paris Spleen," which is how I'd render the title. The poems have not been sdatisfactorily translated since Arthur Symons did it in the first decade of the twentieth century in Edwardian England. -- DL
"I don't believe you have any notion of the pleasure that the arrival of the fourth volume of Hölderlin's collected works provided me. I had been waiting for it so long and so eagerly (you see, I had ordered the collected works in August(!) at a bookstore). Because of my excitement, I was almost incapable of doing anything else the entire day. I am now eagerly awaiting the sixth volume. After reading the Reich fragments, I must presume the sixth volume is also inordinately valuable. Another factor is that, at the moment, I need the broadest base imaginable for coming to terms with Hölderlin."
---Walter Benjamin, Letter to Gershom Scholem, December 23, 1917.
See Scott Thompson's chronology of Hölderlin's life. The picture of Hölderlin above is from 1792.
Here is part 7 of Holderlin's major poem "Bread and Wine":
But my friend, we have come too late. True, the gods are still alive
But somewhere high above us, in another world.
There they repeat themselves eternally, and don’t give a damn
If we live or die, so little do they care about us.
For a weak vessel cannot contain them. Only from time to time
Can humans bear the fullness of the gods. And therefore,
The life we know is a dream about them. But confusion
And sleep assist us, sorrow and night make us strong,
And soon heroes enough will emerge from the warlord’s cradle,
With hearts rivaling a god’s in courage.
In the meantime, I believe it is better to sleep than to live
Without friends, waiting without hope, not knowing the right
Thing to say or do -- and what, after all, is the use
And purpose of poets in an age of darkness?
Yet you say they are like the priests of the wine god,
Moving from place to place in the sacred night.
–- translated by David Lehman
Posted by LIT, excerpts from Mayakovsky's "Cloud in Trousers": as translated by David Lehman. From part one, for example:
Hey!
Gentlemen!
You who,
next to me,
are rank amateurs
in the realms
of sacrilege,
mischief,
and mayhem —
have you laid eyes on
the most terrifying thing
in the world –
my face
when I am totally calm,
cool and collected?
I fear
my ego
isn’t big enough
for the rest of me
which
is struggling
to emerge
as a full-born youth
from a Madonna’s womb.
For more click here.
On Mayakovsky's birthday, July 19, watch this space for more Mayakovsky.
About ten or eleven years ago, the San Diego Reader reprinted a poem of mine that had appeared in The Kenyon Review. The poem was entitled "Poem in the Manner of Vladimir Mayakovsky." Next to the poem, there was a photo of me that Bill Hayward had taken back in 1996. Beneath the photo: the name Vladimir Mayakovsky. -- DL
Elizabeth Powell is the author of The Republic of Self, a New Issue First Book Prize winner, selected by C.K. Williams. Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances was a 2016 New Yorker Books We Love, a Small Press Best Seller, and won the 2015 Anhinga Robert Dana Prize, selected by Maureen Seaton. Her novel Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, will be released in Spring 2019. Her work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2013, Ecotone, The Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Sugarhouse Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Johnson State College. She also serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.
A Process Note
All poetry is physics, is a theology of being and thingyness, is transformative narrative. I am attracted to hybrid form as a way to push the imagination into new ways of thinking and seeing. The imagination is what helps to express what is difficult or unseen and begin to understand how its creative stance can revolt against status quo of American consumerism. There is a strong link between social justice and experimental prose and the hybrid lyric essay/poem because the power of the imaginative/spiritual/dream propulsion of writing is beginning to move us away from the old ways of seeing that no longer serve. The creative force is that which has the power to free. My lyric hybrid novel, “Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues” explores how that redemptive idea interfaces with and investigates the consumerism and desire so rampant in American culture. I employ a pastiche of forms from disparate places such as a JCrew catalogue to the Book of Common Prayer. The book looks, in part, at the intersections of conservative evangelical misogyny, the new cult of domesticity (that is fashioned, in part, out of the idea of retro), and the social drive of the American advertisement and consumer system of belief. My book thinks about creative force as prophecy, as the muse of history, as spiritual guide, as metaphor, as structural device, and, ultimately, as resistance.
__________________________________________________
A Folio of New Writing by Elizabeth Powell
AUTOCORRECTING THE LYRIC I
I keep autocorrecting myself. I don’t want to autocorrect myself. I autocorrect when I don’t want to autocorrect. It disturbs the fusion of my interior monologue. I cannot keep up with how fast things are changing. If I use autocorrect I am more suitable for you to see. I am dressed. I am not as naked as my fast typing might insist.
Autocorrection is a kind of conspiracy theory of reality based on the probability of words and un-nimble fingers. Thought is more easily rendered when you autocorrect, so it is said. But I know I am made from a God that makes homemade bread in the desert, even if He doesn’t have yeast. I am not made of touchscreen typing, though it is didactic consideration. My fusion is a kind of Cupertino, inserted into the narrative even though it was never meant to be there. Yet, autocorrection is supposed reduce the probability I am wrong to you in the way Cary Grant never seems wrong to anyone.
When I autocorrect myself, it is better than back when I merely erased myself. There are many ways of erasure: deletion, drunk and disorderly, disintegration. Acting is a favored mode, and that’s why I like theater, drama, monologue. I’ve had practice passing as a Jew and passing as a WASP because my math teacher explained that I am what used to be called in New York, a Mic-Moc, though I am not Irish. I have become kind of good at doing this passing, though the one identity is always trying to autocorrect the other. Can you guess which parent of mine is a Jew? A Gentile?
Let’s say I’m fusion of cold borscht and finger sandwiches on white. I’m matzo ball Jew Bagel and thrifty Campbell’s soup with dried parsley don’t worry about me luncheon. I’m noodle kugel and I’m turkey divan casserole. I’m Bubbeleh and I’m Dearie. I’m Ma and I’m Mummy. I’m the Episcojew, and I am strong and not strong! I have a family tartan and a silence in the Vilnius ghetto. I cannot be buried in the holy land, but I cannot be cremated. I am passing and have passed, heard the murmurs of lovely & also…Dirty Jews, Fucking Gentiles. I have paid close attention to speech and learned how to autocorrect instantly. As quickly as fire, which used to follow me around like a strange cat. Fire on the Amtrak from DC to NYC, fire in the living room burning the shag rug, Fire on the Mountain at the Dead Shows.
Now, I just keep turning my words into something else beside fire like someone with a personality disorder trying to make everything look good! It is humbling and uncool, but I keep trying to fill in the blank of myself with words that keep changing. It is better, the Boston Brahmins say, to have a history not a past, so when I speak in the “I’ it must be my Jewish side, when I say that I am a vaudeville act in a quiet New England house. I’m the Daughter of the American Revolution in third class steerage.
I’m the debutante in the Pogrom. I’m a morpher like autocorrection. I have tried to make myself acceptable to both sides. Literally.
I am an Elizabeth…I autocorrect into an electric elsewhere
I am also Ann And Another
Powell to Power to Pose
In Hebrew my name would be Bathsheba Bat Label
Bathsheba becomes Banshee, Battery
Also, I am delighted: Cary Grant was Jewish & Cary Grant was Church of England. He was perhaps the
Continue reading "Poet Spotlight: Elizabeth Powell [by Kristina Marie Darling]" »
For my final Guest Author post (already!) I am going to do a survey of things I see around my desk that are inspiring me as I look out the windows at water dripping off pendulous icicles and streaks of shadows and dying sun on the softening snow.
First off, there is Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002), in which Carson makes a representation of the classical text in its original language. She makes the fragmentary textual condition palpable. Many ancient poems come to us from papyruses that have been irreparably torn, resulting in the loss of words, lines, stanzas. Other fragments come to us in citations from later authors. Unlike most previous translators, who chose to translate only poems of Sappho’s that approach or can be made to emulate a complete state, Carson translated all the fragments we have. In her introduction, Carson writes:
In translating I tried to put down all that can be read of each poem in the plainest language I could find, using where possible the same order of words and thoughts as Sappho did. I like to think that, the more I stand out of the way, the more Sappho shows through. This is an amiable fantasy (transparency of self) within which most translators labor.
Carson is funny when discussing the uses to which poetry may be put by grammarians and pedants. We possess one of Sappho’s lines because someone named Apollonios Dyskolos in the second century CE cited it in his treatise On Conjunctions. The line is, “Do I still long for my virginity?” What a fantastic line! And how tantalizing not to have the rest of the poem.
She even goes on to that most remote category all classicists are familiar with, alternately delighting and despairing: when a song of Sappho’s is referred to but not quoted. In this category is a famous line from Solon recounted by Stobaios:
Solon of Athens heard his nephew sing a song of Sappho’s over the wine and since he liked the song so much he asked the boy to teach it to him. When someone asked why, he said, So that I may learn it and then die.
Carson writes, “As acts of deterrence these stories carry their own kind of thrill—at the inside edge where her words go missing, a sort of antipoem that condenses everything you ever wanted her to write…”
The Solon story reminds us that Sappho, as most ancient Greek and Roman poets, was a musician as well as a lyricist. In addition to her poems, she is credited with inventing the plectrum and the Mixolydian mode.
Carson’s translation of fragment 118 reads in its entirety:
yes! radiant lyre speak to me
become a voice
Jane Harrison’s Prolegomena to the study of Greek Religion, first published in 1903, helped to introduce a much more various method of understanding the ancient Greek world. She was one of the first to examine pre-Olympian cults and rituals, extending the study of mythology farther into the past and comparing it to similar patterns in diverse cultures.
Harrison’s words and her demonstrations of a shift from female- to male-centered religion resonate today:
To the primitive matriarchal Greek Pandora was then a real goddess, in form and name, of the Earth, and men did sacrifice to her. By the time of Aristophanes she had become a misty figure, her ritual archaic… Pandora is in ritual and matriarchal theology the earth as Kore, but in the patriarchal mythology of Hesiod her great figure is strangely changed and minished. She is no longer Earth-born, but the creature, the handiwork of Olympian Zeus… Hesiod loves the story of the Making of Pandora: he has shaped it to his own bourgeois, pessimistic ends… To Zeus, the archpatriarchal bourgeois, the birth of the first woman is but a huge Olympian jest… Such myths are a necessary outcome of the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy…
Denys Page’s 1959 book, History and the Homeric Iliad, like similar books in this University of California Press series by E.R. Dodds and Hugh Lloyd-Jones, derives from the Sather Lectures he gave at UC Berkeley in 1957. Attempting to analyze the historical basis of the epics, he writes the following about the so-called dark ages in Greece after the end of the Mycenean era:
Towards the end of this period of eclipse a single voice was uplifted loud and passionate enough to ring through the ages. On the summit of a stony, rugged hill near Mount Helicon, among the untrodden ways, stood the joyless hamlet of Ascra—a bad place in winter, and disagreeable in summer, according to old farmer Hesiod. The earliest Greek personality known to us since the Mycenaean era, he tells us what he and others thought of the times in which they lived—not only the immediate present, but all the years since the age of heroes ended. And the emphasis falls not so much on the material as on the spiritual degeneration of Greece.
In order to best comprehend poems from Classical antiquity, it is necessary to consult the comprehensive commentaries that are periodically published to accompany specific authors. In the case of Hesiod, two massive publications by Martin Litchfield West (1937-2015) are essential reading. They are Theogony Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary (1966) and Works & Days Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary (1978). West brings a seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of manuscripts, Greek and Latin literature of all periods, usages in all of Homer and all other Greek poets. In addition, he was one of the first Western scholars to study systematically parallels and predecessors in Babylonian, Hittite, Jewish, and Egyptian traditions, not to mention relevant later parallels.
We’ll leave this week’s final words to him. Here is West on Theogony:
When I say that Hesiod’s narrative is more condensed than Homer’s, I do not mean that he never says a word more than he need. His brevity is a brevity of thought, not of language… The most important and not the least remarkable fact about the dialect of Hesiod’s poems is that it is essentially the same as that of Homer…
Written language was a recent importation to Greek culture when Homer’s and Hesiod’s poems achieved the forms in which we have them now. In his intro to his Works and Days commentary, West writes this on Hesiod’s compositional process:
It is not to be supposed that having written a poem down Hesiod ceased to recite it, or that he abstained from reciting it in the middle of writing it down. With the work growing by stages, each activity may at times have run ahead of the other. After composing a passage in his mind he might either recite it to people before he wrote it or write it before he recited it. There is no reason why it should make a visible difference to our text. What he recited, however, would probably be closer to the written version when he had already written it than before, because the act of writing or slowly dictating a particular version must inevitably have tended to impress it on his memory. In the end, then, he was probably reciting a multipartite poem much like what he left in writing.
Except no! Keeping to our theme of song as poetry, we’ll end with Eric von Schmidt (1931-2007), a singer-songwriter who inspired Dylan in the early days (and whose album The Folk Blues of Eric von Schmidt appears on the cover of Dylan’s seminal Bringing It All Back Home, among other culturally significant detritus). Von Schmidt has a heart-breaking intensity to some of his vocal performances. It is so on his haunting version of “Fair and Tender Ladies,” written by Maybelle Carter of the Carter sisters. But in true folk tradition, von Schmidt invents lyrics to add to Carter’s. And in that, he is right in the tradition of the rhapsodes of Homer and Hesiod’s time. See you at the intersection of Song and Word!
I am thinking about satire. The literary genre, not the political kind, though that can be useful as well. In these times, comedy can be the thing that really helps us survive. And most of the best comedians these days that deal with political topics are having a field day with satire. But that’s not poetry.
The OED informs us that satire’s etymology is uncertain. One idea was to connect, via the root that gives us “saturate,” to the Latin expression lanx satura, or “full dish,” i.e. a miscellany of prose and verse. Another theory is that the word is of Etruscan origin, with obscure significance. Satire was also at one time associated with satyrs, and thus with the genre of satyr plays.
Satire as a literary genre began in Rome, and the first practitioner of it whose work has survived was Horace, in his poems known in Latin as Sermones, which could perhaps be translated nowadays as Riffs. Roman satire is appealing to me because of its form.
There is something about the form that seems quite modern to me. Like Propertius in his use of elegiac couplets, Horace, in his first book of Satires, published in 35 BCE, when he was 30, takes advantage of a conversational tone to give the poems an expansive, improvisational quality. Satire 1.9 is almost a Frank O’Harian “I do this I do that” poem. As the poem tells it, Horace is walking along the street in Rome when he is accosted by a drag of a person, who pesters Horace to introduce him to his patron, Maecenas. Horace is only saved at the last minute by a plaintiff in a court case against this person who drags him off to court.
Between Horace and Juvenal, there was another Roman satirist, Persius. Kenneth J. Reckford’s 2009 book, Recognizing Persius (Princeton) is an excellent introduction to this poet, who died at 27 and left six satires that we still have today. Reckford writes:
Persius gives us traces of an Aristophanic contest, or agon, between the Old Literature and the New: between the rugged old Classical authors like Pacuvius and Accius, nostalgically misremembered and praised by grumbling elders, and the smooth, effeminate, precious, hyper-Alexandrian verse beloved by modern youth, all about orgiastic Maenads and self-castrating Attises. It is all special effects nowadays, all style and no substance. Modern poetry has no balls. And not just poetry: for rhetorical pleading in the lawcourts, once the vital center of Roman political life, has also become theatricalized; defendants give artificial performances for show, just as their prosecutors do, and both sides hope mainly for applause. Underlying the parody is a dangerous thought. As Tacitus was later to demonstrate in his Dialogus, oratory atrophied under the empire because the lawcourts’ decision-making power had been taken over the emperor; what was left was flattery and self-display.
Horatian satire is generally considered to be lighter than that practiced by Juvenal some hundred years later. That has something to do with the times each poet lived in. Horace was writing at the height of the Augustan age, and what’s more, he was part of that emperor’s inner circle. Juvenal wrote during the period from Nero to Hadrian. Although he started publishing later in life, the fact that he survived the reigns of 10 emperors is in itself a testament to his shrewdness.
Rolfe Humphries’ translations of Juvenal, published in 1958, still have valor and bite to them. In his introduction, Humphries writes:
To Quintilian, and to Roman scholars and critics less well-known, the word satirehad a meaning, and connotations, less narrow than it has for us. Into these, and into the history of the art form, we need not go, for satire, as Juvenal writes it, cries with the saeva indignatio, the slashing sense of outrage, that we associate with the term. He is Swift’s cousin; we can feel at home. Not comfortably so, of course not, for this man is too good a hater.
What he hated were the ways of the world that Ovid, roughly a century before, had loved so dearly. Beau monde, haut ton—these did not amuse Juvenal. As for meretricious Rome, he shared the sentiments of (this too would have revolted him) an African king, Jugurtha the briber, dead before Ovid was born, who had called the city “venal and doomed if it only could find a purchaser.” It had found, Juvenal thought, more purchasers than one, and more than one debaucher. He did not like it at all, and he said so.
And finally, not a satirist, but a poet with a brilliantly satirical mind, as, in essence, many Roman poets were. The epigrammist Martial lived from 40 to 104 CE, meaning that he overlapped extensively with Juvenal. In poet Art Beck’s new translation, Martial: Mea Roma (Shearsman Books), we are given a sense of what makes this poet so eternally enticing. He’s famous for his lustful blasts, but he can be subtly philosophical as well. Here’s one in the latter vein that in a few syllables gets behind a famous myth in a way I would never have thought possible:
The Lyre
It returned Eurydice to the great poet: but then he lost her.
Because he loved with neither trust nor patience.
I am on a train on my way up to Yaddo, where I'll be for the next three weeks. Last time I was up there, it was also February. I like it in winter, when the isolation is increased. A certain kind of person is attracted to that extreme. That other time, I wrote a poem for the people I met there, who impressed me with their dedication to their art. It’s called “The February People.” I’m curious who will be there this time.
While I look at the snow on the tracks and the ice in the river, I am listening to The Beatles’ Anthology 1collection. I’ve also been reading about why Pete Best was fired. Apparently, it was a combination of his playing ability, his lack of a sense of humor, and his refusal to comb his hair forward. It is interesting to think about the Beatles' Hamburg period. They did three stints there over a two-year period, and it was there, over many hours of club playing, that they honed their arrangements and their commitment to the lifestyle.
There has always been a connection between poetry and music. To paraphrase Mr. Pound, if you can’t dance to it, it can’t be very good.
I’ll be working on a few things up at Yaddo. One is a translation of Hesiod’s poem Works and Days. I’ve now finished his Theogonyand hope to get close to finishing Works and Days during these weeks away. Works and Days is 828 lines long. I’ve got about 600 to go.
When I finished my translations of Sextus Propertius, I decided I wanted to go back to Greek poetry, as it forms such an undeniable basis for the Roman poets. Almost all they wrote — in terms of the genres, the ideas, the mythology — comes from Greek poetry. Of course, the great Roman poets altered and innovated, and in at least one case — satire — they invented. But to understand Roman poetry, you have to know Greek poetry, and poetry only truly lives in its original language. The translation of a poem into poetry in another language is the creation of a new poem based on the original.
So, I pondered for a long time. Archilochos, Kallimachos, Sappho, Alkaios — they all hold enticements — but I finally decided on Hesiod. I was most fascinated by the Theogony, as I wanted to delve more deeply into Greek mythology. I’ve always had a hard time keeping it straight — who has had sex with whom, which gods or demigods are the offspring of which parents, and in which versions, as Greek and Roman writers famously invented or sought out variants to suit their purposes.
There was another reason for choosing Hesiod. He is so highly regarded among ancient poets, and yet the existing translations into English make him sound terribly dull. I was certain Propertius, among many others, wouldn’t have had time for a dull poet, not matter how edifying. I had a hunch there was more to Hesiod than met the eye. Certainly, it wasn’t only for genealogies and information on early Greek agricultural practices that he was praised so highly.
And so it proved to be. I found, translating the Theogony, a spicy wit and a collage-like element. The latter may be partially because Hesiod is so early (he is considered a contemporary of Homer’s by contemporary scholars), and there may have been interpolations by early readers and editors. But I think some of the shifts of subject and narrative are native to the poet. His poems are in the epic form; they are in dactylic hexameter and rely on the Ionic dialect associated with epic. But they can be considered non-heroic in aspect. Hesiod is the first Western poet to mention himself by name and to discuss his family background and current situation, giving him a good claim to being the first personal poet.
On coming to the end of my translation of the Theogony, I decided to take the plunge and translate the same poet’s Works and Days, as I would thereby have in my hand a translation of Hesiod’s entire extant work. I embarked with less enthusiasm than I had on the previous poem, but something strange happened. My hunch came into play again. I am finding this poem thoroughly enjoyable as a work of writing.
The poet’s attitude towards women is of course a problem, but we shouldn’t fail to investigate an artist because of their personal failings, no matter how egregious or disturbing. Within his own limitations, as well as those of his time and place, he is a remarkable artist, and I am grateful for this opportunity to examine his poetics in detail — his word choices, his use of adverbial phrases, his development of the longer poem. It is inspiring me to write something longer, and that is that best thing that can result from translating, or from reading — the desire to go to the keyboard or notebook and embark on a new attempt at writing poetry.
Here is an excerpt from Ron Padgett's essay, "A Few Things about Apollinaire and Me." The occasion for this essay was the publication, by New York Review Books, of Ron's long-awaited translation of Guillaume Apollinaire's Selected Poems. It is a coincidence only in the sense Gertrude Stein gave that word, that I, too, was influenced deeply by Apollinaire in my time in Paris, a few years after Padgett's year there. Unlike Ron's, my attempts to translate Apollinaire are limited to two of his poems, "Zone" and "Hotel," and that makes me appreciate all the more the accuracy and the intelligence that Ron brings to the translator's task. He has done a noble service to literature. -- DL
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I wish I could recall the first time I learned of [Apollinaire, pictured left]. I do remember hearing, in the very early 1960s, Kenneth Koch talking enthusiastically and often about his poetry. I also recall being attracted to the sound of his name, which of course was not his real one. Would I have felt as much allure in a poet named Wilhelm de Kostrowitzsky (his real name)? Probably not: less euphony and no suggestion of Apollo.
The first two poems of his that I tried translating, “The Pont Mirabeau” and “The White Snow,” have moments of complex word play, but, being enthusiastic and naïve, I didn’t let that deter me. Over the years I got deeper into his work by translating more of his poems, as well as his novella The Poet Assassinated, which I tackled as a student in Paris in 1965. Well, I wasn’t really a student, I was a Fulbright fellow who attended no classes; instead I kept on being the poet that I had become, but now one who was falling deeper and deeper into what I imagined to have been Paris before World War One, a Paris whose writers and artists I had been drawn to since my teen years. Living below the poverty level—my wife and I subsisted on a Fulbright stipend allocated for one person—gave me the impression that I had even more in common with the threadbare poets I was captivated by, such as Reverdy, Cendrars, and Jacob, and among them Gui stood at the center of things, representing the exciting and innovative cultural world of pre-war Paris. My just being there, walking his neighborhoods—there were back streets whose buildings still had turn-of-the-century signs painted on them, cafes and restaurants that had hardly changed in 70 years—visiting his grave and sensing him there in the ground, standing mesmerized in front of the Bateau Lavoir, feeling the late-night danger and poverty of the Montmartre of 1907, and, perhaps above all, holding in my hands, just as he had, his manuscripts, corrected proofs, and letters—I was hooked for life. More than that, I assumed that as a young (avant-garde!) poet I had every right to be hooked, for we had something in common. However, fueled by youthful energy and adoration, I never stopped to ask myself exactly what it might be.
Although the poems I wrote that year in Paris reflect my being there, only a few of them show an obvious influence of Apollinaire, despite the fact that the book I cherished most was the Pléiade edition of his Oeuvres poétiques (the same copy I use today). I was already well acquainted with the two major collections he published in his lifetime, Alcools and Calligrammes, but the Pléiade edition included many poems I had never seen, and among them I found some gems, some of which didn’t sound like “Apollinaire.” All the better! For I was bent on not sounding like myself all the time, either, and I didn’t mind sounding like him sometimes. Take a look at his little poem, “Hotel”:
My room looks like a cage
The sun sticks its arm through the window
But I who want to smoke and make mirages
I light my cigarette with daylight
I don’t want to work I want to smoke
“I light my cigarette with daylight” is fanciful (and delightful), but it’s the final line that determines the feeling of the whole poem. The poet is feeling dreamy and lazy. Plunk. That’s it. The epigraph of a poem of mine I wrote in Paris that year, “Tone Arm,” runs in a similar vein:
The clouds go rolling over
The rooftops of the 17th-
18th- or 19th-century buildings—
They are really rolling
You people of the future
How I hate you
You are alive and I’m not
I don’t care whether you read my poetry or not
Fifty years apart, two poets sit in their hotel rooms in Paris and thumb their noses at the conventional bourgeois world, he charmingly, I arrogantly.
Apollinaire’s influence on me consisted of more than a superficial and temporary adoption of a self-indulgent attitude. What affected me more deeply was the elasticity of his work, which ranged from traditional, euphonious forms to avant-garde calligrammatic verbal collages. He certainly wasn’t the only experimenter of his day, but I can’t name another poet of his time who showed such aesthetic range, aside from Mallarmé, and even then the latter’s Coup de dés is an aberration for him. As for myself, coming from a country whose emblematic monument was the Statue of Liberty, and from a state (Oklahoma) with a freewheeling history, and from a father who liberated himself from social conventions (and laws) when it suited him, I was primed to become an adept of a poet of freedom and adventure such as Apollinaire, who, in one of his last poems, says, “We want to give you vast and strange territories / Where flowering mystery offers itself to anyone who wishes to gather it.” While cherishing the formal music and sweet diction of the Elizabethan and Metaphysical poets, the way Apollinaire revered Villon and Racine, I saw myself as a fellow explorer of those vast and strange territories, though I would never have articulated such a thought. It was yet another unspoken assumption that carried me forward.
>>>
Thallus, you letch: softer than rabbit fur
is your phallus and sack of nuts
that dangle from your old man crotch,
festooned with cobwebs, and still
you’re as greedy as a gonif
[line missing here]
Give back the things you stole from her --
her cape, handkerchief from Spain,
etchings from Carthage, bracelet of Salome --
things you claim you inherited from your folks.
Spare me your obnoxious jokes.
Get your sticky hands off her stuff, and send it
to her, or I swear I’ll kick your ass
and make you twist like a toy battleship
in the bathtub when a hurricane hits the sea.
Listening to the learned Calvus
castigate, with many an oratorical flourish,
the demagogue Vatinius,
a man in the crowd lifted his hands
in astonishment, and said,
"God, that little prick can talk!"
-- translated by Molly Arden
Thallus, you letch: softer than rabbit fur, goose down, ear flap
is your phallus and sack of nuts
that dangle from your old man crotch, festooned
with cobwebs, and still you’re as greedy as a gonif
[line missing here]
give back the things you stole from me --
my cape, handkerchief from Spain,
etchings from Carthage, bracelet of Salome --
things you claim you inherited from your folks.
Spare my your obnoxious jokes.
Get your sticky hands off my stuff,
and send them to me, or I swear I’ll kick your ass
and make you twist like a toy battleship
in the bathtub when a hurricane hits the sea.
-- translated by Molly Arden (2009)
Pictured above are Molly Arden and friend Charlotte Goren in 2009.
Sexism [by David Lehman]
The happiest moment in a woman’s life
Is when she hears the turn of her lover’s key
In the lock, and pretends to be asleep
When he enters the room, trying to be
Quiet but clumsy, bumping into things,
And she can smell the liquor on his breath
But forgives him because she has him back
And doesn't have to sleep alone.
The happiest moment in a man’s life
Is when he climbs out of bed
With a woman, after an hour’s sleep,
After making love, and pulls on
His trousers, and walks outside,
And pees in the bushes, and sees
The high August sky full of stars
And gets in his car and drives home.
Seksizmas [translated into Lithuanian by Saulius Vasiliauskas]
Laimingiausia akimirka moters gyvenime,
Kai ji išgirsta, kaip durų spynoje trakšteli
Mylimojo raktas, ir apsimeta mieganti,
Kai jis įslenka į kambarį, bando būti
Tylus, bet žengia kaip dramblys, kliudydamas daiktus,
Ir ji užuodžia nuo jo tvoskiant alkoholiu,
Bet atleidžia, nes susigrąžino vyrą,
Ir nebeteks miegoti vienai.
Laimingiausia akimirka vyro gyvenime,
Kai jis išsiropščia iš lovos,
Palieka joje moterį – po valandos miego,
Po sekso, ir užsimauna
Kelnes, ir išeina į lauką,
Ir myža ant krūmų, ir regi
Giedrą rugpjūčio dangų, pilną žvaigždžių,
Ir įlipęs į savo mašiną patraukia namo.
Sexism [as translated back into English by unknown person or entity]
The happiest moment in woman's life
When she listens, she's gonna break the door lock
The beloved key, and pretends to be sleeping
When he enters into the room, he tries to be
Quiet, but goes like an elephant, blocking things,
And she shines with alcohol in her spirits
But forgive, because he has restored the husband,
And you will not sleep anymore.
The happiest moment in a man's life,
When he scissors out of bed,
Leaving a woman there - after an hour of sleep;
After sex, and hang on
Trousers and goes out into the field
And the moss is on the shrubs, and see
Girless August sky full of stars
And getting on your car pulls home.
Link here for the original page of Siaures Atenai, the cultural weekly (Kultūros savaitraštis) in which appear the translations into Lithuanian of "Sexism" and two other poems by David Lehman. Saulius Vasilauskas (pictured left), who translated the poems, is a graduate of Vilnius University who plays basketball for Egzistenciniai klausimai, an amateur team whose name you could, with poetic license, render as the Existential Clauses or possibly the Existential Queries. Although it would be difficult to do better than "The moss is on the shrubs" three lines from the end of "Sexism," what happens when you re-translate "When a Woman Loves a Man" back into English, using rudimentary computer tools, is an equally high form of surrealism: When a woman loves a man, there is ten minutes after the first,/ she is sleeping, he watches baseball and cremation of the guinea pigs. The poem concludes on a sublime note: Stars fluctuate like vintage earrings. -- DL
http://www.satenai.lt/2018/02/02/poezijos-vertimai-50
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
THE RULE OF THUMB
by T.P.Winch
Ringfinger was nervous
Pinky terrified
when they learned
that Hand might succumb
to the rule of Thumb.
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