The Best American Poetry

Poet Spotlight: Elizabeth Powell [by Kristina Marie Darling]

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.
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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

"Memories of the Past at Red Cliff" ["Nian Nu Jiao" by Su Shi]

East flows the mighty river,
Sweeping away the heroes of time past;
This ancient rampart on its western shore
Is Zhou Yu's Red Cliff of three Kingdoms' fame;
Here jagged boulders pound the clouds,
Huge waves tear banks apart,
And foam piles up a thousand drifts of snow;
A scene fair as a painting,
Countless the brave men here in time gone by!
I dream of Marshal Zhou Yu in his day
With his new bride, the Lord Qiao's younger daughter,
Dashing and debonair,
Silk-capped, with feather fan,
He laughed and jested
While the dread enemy fleet was burned to ashes!
In fancy through those scenes of old I range.
My heart overflowing, surely a figure of fun.
A man gray before his time.
Ah, this life is a dream,
Let me drink to the moon on the river!

-- Nian Nu Jiao           

Translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Taylor

With thanks to Chang Yao, who informs us that this is her favorite of the various translations of the poem she has read. "Yang Xianyi was a Chinese translator who translated many ancient and a few modern Chinese classics into English, including Dream of the Red Chamber (my favorite novel of all time), and he was also the first one to translate The Odyssey into Chinese from the ancient Greek original. Glady Taylor was a British translator, and wife of Yang Xianyi (the couple met at Oxford, where they studied together)."

There is No Final Word [by Vincent Katz]

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!

Satire in the Offing? [by Vincent Katz]

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.

What's So Interesting About Works and Days? [by Vincent Katz]

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.

Ron Padgett on Apollinaire (an excerpt)

 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.

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Catullus #25 (trans. 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.

Catullus # 53 translated by Molly Arden

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

Catullus # 25 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" in Two Languages [by David Lehman, trans. Saulius Vasiliauskas]

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

Isaac Babel's essential fictions––and poetry? [By Val Vinokur]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Babel on a stud farm.

The event that occasions my guest bloggery for BAP is the recent publication of my annotated translation of seventy-two stories by Isaac Babel, The Essential Fictions. Anyone who knows a little about Babel will note the pun in the title of the collection. For Babel, fiction was essential to real life, which, in his words, "wants nothing more than to resemble a well-made story," and real life––or at least Babel's deployment of "autobiography"––was also essentially fiction.

About ten years ago, in my book The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas (Northwestern, 2008), I wondered about why Babel never wrote poetry. Now seems a somewhat propitious time to revisit and reassess what I wrote then. To paraphrase: You could argue that Babel, who composed his stories on tiny strips of paper, was really a poet. It's even been suggested that he wrote prose as a somewhat mercenary adjustment, to fulfill the young Soviet establishment’s desire for a “Red Tolstoy,” and that Red Cavalry was Babel’s version of Tolstoy's debut, The Cossacks (1863). Perhaps the assumption here is that only a repressed poet could compress a 150-page draft of “My First Goose” into a few sheets. But I would offer another view: Babel was a committed writer of prose, one who admired Tolstoy’s obsession with fiction as a mode of seeking the truth, of following the aesthetic and ethical imperative to love experience—an obligation that compels narrative. Tolstoy and Babel shared a specific kind of curiosity, if utterly different temperaments. As Babel once put it: "When you read Tolstoy, you feel the world is writing, the world in all its variety, . . . [but] although I am a devotee of Tolstoy, in order to achieve something I have to work in a way opposite to his. . . . Tolstoy was able to describe what happened to him minute by minute, . . . whereas I, evidently, have it in me to describe the most interesting five minutes I’ve experienced in twenty-four hours."

No, Babel’s world does not “write itself”; and in a certain sense, Babel’s condensed art may be more humble and honest than Tolstoy’s "loose, baggy monsters." I also wonder if Babel’s “most interesting five minutes”—released from the formal parameters of the realist novel—are a response to Dostoevsky’s novels, which are strung together from scores of intense five-minute encounters. But if it's true, as George Clay once helpfully put it, that "Tolstoy is what happens the most and Dostoevsky the most that can happen," then maybe Babel’s Dostoevskian “five minutes” are taken from Tolstoy’s “twenty-four hours.” In other words, where Dostoevsky, according to Babel and others, offers us a revealing (but often unkind) intensification of the human condition, and where Tolstoy is the apotheosis of a transparent (and often overbearing) objective descriptiveness, Babel arrives at a poetic and narrative distillation of the world as it is––"the essence of things," in his words. Babel’s best fiction reduces the world to its irreducible ambivalence—but it is a passionate ambivalence that will forever call out for some kind of ethical and aesthetic commitment. To remain in some kind of decadent poetic indifference would be to misread Babel’s lyrical reduction entirely. Poetic precision in fiction, besides having aesthetic force, often cuts with more ethical depth and subtlety, just as a faint light shining through a pin-prick can have a more interesting intensity than a fluorescent lamp. Why didn't Babel write poems? Perhaps he needed to move past the stasis of the purely lyrical, past its prophetic eruption and otherworldly challenge. Maybe only prose can move beyond the daughter’s implacable demand at the end of “The Crossing of the Zbruch,” the first story of Babel's Red Cavalry: “I wish to know where in the whole world you could find another father like my father . . .” There might be a simple reason why Babel did not write poems: prose takes you places. 

Well, that's what I thought ten years ago. My broad-brush description of "poetry" seemed strange to me even then. Richard Pevear has described the translation of prose fiction as more like writing poetry than anything else: "A good prose writer has to make a house, put furniture in it, open doors, bring people in, give them hair and eyes and clothes. They have to make a world and populate it. For a translator, that’s all been done.” That's exactly what translating Babel felt like. I spent days rubbing, teasing, tweaking every phrase as if it were a beloved rosary––knowing full well that my work would be compared with a half-dozen other translations. Was I fixing Babel's prose––his "army of words," nimble as the tachanka machine-gun carts of the Red Army––into some kind of lyrical stasis?

This is a tachanka! Note the pointed hat, known as a budennovka (in honor of Semyon Budenny, who organized the 1st Cavalry Army), similar to one I liked to wear as a young boy in the Soviet Union. Babel describes the tachanka: "Hay carts are prepared for battle and seize towns. A wedding procession approaches the local district council, opens concentrated fire, and a puny little priest unfurls a black flag of anarchy, orders the authorities to serve up the bourgeois, the proletariat, the music, and wine."

 

 

 

Val Vinokur is the author of The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas (Northwestern University Press, 2009), a finalist for the 2009 AATSEEL Award for Best Book in Literary/Cultural Studies. His poetry, prose, and interviews have appeared in The Boston Review, McSweeney's, Zeek, Common Knowledge, The Literary Review, New American Writing, The Massachusetts Review, The Miami Herald, Public Seminar, and LitHub. His co-translations, with Rose Réjouis, from French and Creole have been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Lewis Galantière Award. Since 2001, he has taught literature at The New School, where he is chair of Liberal Arts in the BA Program for Adults and directs the minor in Literary Translation. His annotated translation of seventy-two stories by Isaac Babel, The Essential Fictions (Northwestern UP), was published last fall. Vinokur is also the founding editor of POETS & TRAITORS PRESS, which publishes hybrid books of original and translated poetry.

Andrey Gritsman and David Lehman to Read at the Cornelia Street Cafe

Join us at the Cornelia Street Cafe on Wednesday, December 13th for an evening with Andrey Gritsman and David Lehman, who will read their translations of Vladimir Mayakovsky, among other poems.

Vladimir Mayakovsky

 

at the Cornelia Street Cafe

Wednesday, December 13, 6 PM

29 Cornelia Street

NYC

212 898 9319

 

On Cornelia Street, where W. H. Auden once lived and was quoted, saying that "the art of living in New York City lies in crossing the street against the light."

 

The event is sponsored by Intercultural Poetry. Lehman will read his versions of "Brooklyn Bridge" and parts of "The Cloud in Trousers." Gritsman will read "Brooklyn Bridge" in Russian as well as translations of such poets as Mandelstam, Akhmatova, and contemporaries Vladimir Gandelsman and Vladimir Druk. 

 

For an enticing taste of these two poets, check out the following links to their work!

"Amnesia" by David Lehman

"5 АДАР II 5771" by Andrey Gritsman

Poetry in outer space with Billy Collins and Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli [by David Lehman]

Billy Collins went to outer space, at least his voice did, and launched Emily Dickinson in orbit.

Come fly with me, let;'s fly, let's fly away
If you can use
Some exotic booze
There's a bar in far Bombay

Come fly away, I'll take you to the stars
To Juipter 
I'll sup on soup with her
and drink champagne on Mars
with all its cool cool bars

Come fly with me let's fly up to the stars

[the first stanza by Sammy Cahn, the second by DL]

. Grazie a Billy Collins, il più grande poeta contemporaneo vivente, grazie all'astronauta Paolo Nespoli nel ruolo di lettore dei versi di Emily Dickinson. 

Or the full treatment:

Abbiamo visto un poeta ed un astronauta parlare di poesia. Il poeta era un americano, e interveniva dalla sede dell'Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei a Trastevere. L'astronauta era un ingegnere aeropaziale italiano, e interveniva da bordo della stazione internazionale in orbita attorno alla Terra. Chi avrebbe detto che un giorno i ruoli assegnati dalla storia contemporanea - l'arte agli italiani, la tecnologia agli americani - avrebbero potuto così paradossalmente scambiarsi? Oggi, forse, comprendiamo meglio il significato primario del termine "rivoluzione": che nel linguaggio della scienza, l'unico che è sempre sinonimo di progresso dell'umanità, significa compiere un giro per ritornare, gli astri ad esempio, nella stessa posizione tra le stelle. Il 12 ottobre, anniversario della scoperta dell'America, abbiamo visto annullarsi la piega del tempo e rivisto un italiano, esploratore degli spazi fisici dell'universo, incontrare un americano, esploratore degli spazi metafisici del linguaggio. Grazie a Billy Collins, il più grande poeta contemporaneo vivente, grazie all'astronauta Paolo Nespoli nel ruolo di lettore dei versi di Emily Dickinson. Grazie alla John Cabot University che li ha invitati in occasione dell'apertura dell'ottava edizione di "Italy Reads Program" http://www.johncabot.edu/italy-reads/default.aspx , grazie all' Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, all' ESA - European Space Agency e alla NASA Earth.

Or, in an official translation amended by DL, with some parts left in the original translationese (the troles "could have so paradoxically exchanged")

<< 
We [heard] a poet and an astronaut talk about poetry. The poet was an American, and [did whatever he did] from the headquarters of the accademia nazionale dei lincei in trastevere. The Astronaut was an Italian Engineer, and [took part] from the international station in orbit around the earth. Who would have [predicted] that one day the roles of contemporary history - the art of Italians, technology to the Americans - could have so paradoxically exchanged [could be flipped to their mutual profit, DL guesses]? Today, perhaps, we understand better the primary meaning of the term "revolution": which in the language of science, the only [language] that is [indispensable is  the] progress of humanity, is [DL gives up] to take a turn to return, the stars, for example, in the same position among the Stars. On October 12th, the anniversary of the discovery of America, we saw cancel the fold of time [DL would like to do that] and revised an Italian, explorer of the physical space of the universe, to meet an American, explorer of the spaces of the language [DL likes the idea of revising an explorer as if he were a poem,]. Thanks to Billy Collins, the greatest living contemporary poet, thanks to the astronaut Paolo Nespoli in the role of of Emily Dickinson [DL !]. Thanks to the John Cabot University that invited them to the opening of the eighth edition of "Italy reads program" http://www.johncabot.edu/italy-reads/default.aspx, thanks to Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, ESA-European Space Agency and NASA Earth

I toast thee, Billy Collins. -- DL

Three Poems by Baudelaire, translated by Richard Kutner

Portrait of Charles Baudelaire in Profile by Édouard Manet

This is my last post as Author of the Week. It’s been an exciting experience. Since this is the Best American Poetry website, I’ve decided to end the week with three poems I translated by Charles Baudelaire, my favorite French poet. This is my first attempt to translate poetry, and I hope that you’ll enjoy them. Please listen as you read.

Sincere thanks to all of you have read and responded to these posts.

Connections

Nature is a temple, where living pillars
Sometimes utter indistinct words.
We wander through it amidst forests of symbols
That observe us with familiar looks.

Like long echoes blending from afar,
In a deep, dark unity
As vast as darkness or light,
Smells, colors, and sounds speak to one another.

There are smells as fresh as children’s flesh,
As sweet as oboes, green as prairies
--And others, corrupt, rich, and triumphant,

That spread without end:
Amber, musk, benzoin, and incense,
Which sing of the rapture of the mind and the senses.

Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, 1857  

Translation by Richard Kutner © 2017

 

Autumn Song
I.
Soon we will be plunged into icy darkness.
Farewell, bright glow of our too-short summers!
I can already hear the echo in the courtyards
As logs fall to the pavement with a funereal thump.

All of winter will penetrate my soul: anger,
Hate; chills; horror; drudgery,
And, like the sun in its polar hell,
My heart will be only a frozen block of red.

Trembling, I listen to the crash of every log;
There is nothing to mute the sound of the mounting gallows.
My mind is like a tower, collapsing
Beneath the blows of a relentless battering ram.

Rocked by this monotonous pounding, I seem to hear
A coffin being hastily nailed shut.
For whom?—Only yesterday it was summer; now autumn is here!
This mysterious sound rings like a departure.

II.
I love the greenish light of your long eyes,
My lovely, yet today all is bitter to me.
Nothing--not your love, not your bed, nor the hearth--
Can compare with the sun glistening on the sea.

And yet, love me, tender heart! Be a mother,
Even for one so ungrateful--for one so bad;
Mistress or sister, be the fleeting sweetness
Of a glorious autumn or a setting sun.

So quick a task! The tomb awaits, its appetite so huge!
Ah! While my head rests on your knees
As I mourn the white, torrid summer, let me taste
The sweet, yellow rays of this late fall.

Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, 1861 edition  

Translation by Richard Kutner © 2017

 

Spleen LXVIII
When the sky, heavy and low, weighs down like a lid
On the moaning soul, prey to long bouts of ennui,
And, embracing the arc of the horizon,
Spills upon us a black light sadder than the night,

When all the earth is transformed into a damp dungeon
Where Hope, like a bat,
Beats its timid wings against the walls,
Knocking its head on the rotten ceiling,

When the rain, falling in thick, dark strands
Mirrors the bars of a vast prison,
And a host of vile, silent spiders
Spin their webs at the back of our minds,

Bells suddenly cry out with fury,
Launching a terrible scream into the sky,
Like homeless, wandering spirits
Moaning incessantly.

--And long hearses, without drums or music,
Pass slowly through my soul; Hope,
Vanquished, sobs, as Anguish, atrocious and despotic,
Plants its black Flag on my bowed skull.

Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, 1857 edition      

Translation by Richard Kutner © 2017

Working at the Morgan [by Richard Kutner]

Last December, while searching for some volunteer translation work, I found this description from the Morgan Library and Museum, in New York, on idealist.org: 

This is a wonderful opportunity for an individual with a serious
interest in 19th-century art and literature and a high proficiency
in French translation to assist the Cataloguer of the Morgan’s
Gordon Ray Collection.  Duties include deciphering and translating
handwritten letters of luminaries from the worlds of art and
literature, conducting research where necessary or appropriate,
and preparing concise summaries of the letters for inclusion in
CORSAIR, the Morgan’s online collections catalog.

I thought, “This is for me,” applied, underwent a six-part background check, and was accepted.

Since January, I have been translating and summarizing mostly nineteenth-century French letters by noted authors, artists, scientists, politicians, and other public figures—Balzac, Baudelaire, Dumas (father and son), Condorcet (eighteenth century), George Sand, Renoir, counts, kings, and queens: the list goes on and on. Some of the letters are fairly mundane: “Thank you for your gracious dinner invitation. I will see you at 6:00 on Thursday.” Others involve intrigue about entry into the Académie Française, letters on various subjects from authors to their publishers, requests by generals for troops, lawsuits (many), and complex political, philosophical, or artistic discussions. I have learned a great deal about people I knew about and others I had never heard of.

It’s difficult to describe the constant thrill of reviewing documents in the handwriting of someone I’ve read or studied and realizing that I may be only the sixth person ever to have set eyes on them: the author, the recipient, the dealer, the collector, the cataloguer, and me.

Writing a summary is sometimes complicated, especially when the handwriting is difficult to read (either illegible or very small), when I’m dealing with a fragment or unsigned document, or there is little or no information about either the author or the recipient. I end up doing a lot of detective work. Is the person who wrote the letter really who the file label says it is? Sometimes it’s a relative, often with the same first and last name. Occasionally, the document turns out to be about the subject, not written by him or her. And at times the author is known by various names.

Often I need to research dates and addresses, check to see if the author’s correspondence has already been published (which makes it much easier to read), and look for postmarks. When I suspected that a letter was from Balzac, writing about the woman he would later marry, I went online to see if he had indeed been in Karlsrühe at the time the letter was written. (I was right.) Sometimes there is little or no punctuation, even when it’s a letter from a famous author, and often words are run together. There are people, like George Sand, whose handwriting changed dramatically during their lifetime. And once in a while, French is not the writer’s mother tongue, and there are many errors (for example, a letter from Caroline of Ansbach, the German wife of King George II of Great Britain).

If the letter is long or the handwriting is difficult to read, I transcribe it into readable French first. Then I do the translation in my head. I can summarize short, easy-to-read documents directly from the original. Often, the letters are witty or droll, and they’re always full of French charm, especially when written to someone of the opposite sex. Occasionally, what I’m working with isn’t a letter at all, but rather an excerpt from a play or novel.

In any case, I get to use my love for language and sharpen my skills, using materials from the period of French culture about which I’m most passionate. And my supervisor, whose intelligence and problem-solving skills are dazzling (and whose patience is remarkable) is always a great help.

I’m in France soaking up everything French I can right now, but I’m looking forward to seeing what Victor Hugo has to say when I get back to New York. And I can’t wait to start in on Flaubert.

Translating After the Roundup [by Richard Kutner]

What was it like to translate the memoir of a boy who escaped from a French-Nazi internment camp in 1942? One of my biggest challenges was recreating the exuberant, authentic voice of a scrappy eleven-year-old Paris street kid. I kept asking myself, particularly when translating dialogue, “Does this sound like a child?” I think that being an elementary school teacher for so many years helped me to understand how children think and talk. But kids today do not talk they way they did 75 years ago. I had to learn the street slang of 1940s Paris and put it into English that was appropriate for that period. Paris street slang is particularly spicy, and I needed to make sure that I kept its zing.

Sometimes it took many tries to capture the vitality of the language. How, for example, was I going to say, “Je dévale l’escalier à tout berzingue”? I worked on it for a long time and finally came up with “I zoom down the stairs full speed ahead,” which I think captures the energy of the French and keeps the important buzzing “z” sound.

Joseph Weismann, the author of After the Roundup, is unusually clearheaded, and his style is extraordinarily lively and direct. It is this very clearheadedness (and his out-of-the-box thinking) that saved his life. It was therefore of the greatest importance to me to use clear, direct language. Like him, I used vivid verbs and sentences that were short and uncomplicated (yet never choppy) to create a strong sense of immediacy. I avoided any language that sounded stuffy or slowed down the pace and force of his words.

The greatest challenge perhaps was dealing with overwhelming waves of emotion that I knew I’d have to face once again with every rereading. I have never experienced anything like what Joseph went through beginning in July 1942, when he was rounded up, put in an internment camp, brutally separated from his parents--and then decided to make a daring and difficult escape. In order to cope with this intense emotion, rather than shutting it out, I decided to try to imagine myself in Joseph’s situation, to feel his emotions as much as I possibly could, like an actor preparing a role, so that I could convey them in their full depth.

Despite its dark moments, After the Roundup is an uplifting and hopeful book. Joseph wrote it when he was 80, having kept his experiences locked away for 69 years, yet he was able to recall every detail of his ordeal. While some might not consider his style highly intellectual or literary, it clearly reflects his positive outlook and amazing life force. His book makes for compelling reading because of his intelligence, frankness, and energy, not to mention his one-of-a-kind, sometimes hair-raising experiences. It is a lesson for the world of today about what can happen when people are viewed as “others.”

After the Roundup is the true memoir of eleven-year-old Joseph Weismann, who was rounded up in Paris by the French police with 13,000 other Jews on July 16-17, 1942. He and 8,159 others—half of them children—were held in appalling conditions in the Vélodrome d’Hiver. From there, they were transported by cattle car to the transit camp of Beaune-la-Rolande. After being brutally separated from his parents and sisters, who were sent to Auschwitz, Joseph made a daring escape, inching his way under the barbed wire for five hours. Then what? How would he survive the war and reconstruct a life for himself? His problems had only just begun.

This week marks the 75th anniversary of the Vélodrome d'Hiver Roundup.

Joseph is the only living survivor (of two) of the camp of Beaune-la-Rolande.

After the Roundup, by Joseph Weismann
Translated by Richard Kutner
© Indiana University Press, 2017

Translating Fear of Paradise [by Richard Kutner]

Translating  Fear of Paradise

Like any translation, Fear of Paradise was an artistic endeavor and an act of creation. As always, I needed to maintain the author's tone and voice and make the book sound as though it were written in English rather than translated. But Fear of Paradise involved some extra challenges.

Most of the novel is set in Puglia, the heel of Italy, a rugged, sunbaked, glorious region of olive trees and fishermen, of deep blue sky and golden cliffs overhanging the green Adriatic. It was important to keep the setting in mind at all times, because in this book it plays a key role in defining the characters’ personalities and directing their thoughts and actions. Furthermore, Belgian novelist Vincent Engel is a master at describing setting. I therefore had to be very careful in choosing words that evoked the landscape just the way he wanted. Vincent’s style is both realistic and poetic, and I worked hard to bring out both these aspects of it, fundamental to understanding the book.

European authors tend to write in long sentences and paragraphs (sometimes very long). We avoid doing this in English, so I had to find where I could divide things while still maintaining the beautiful flow of the text. French authors also tend to repeat words, even in close proximity, something we discourage in English. That meant finding just the right synonym with the appropriate nuance to express Vincent’s meaning. In many cases I changed the verb tenses, since they are not used the same way nor have the same implications in English and French. Sometimes I changed words altogether, because what sounded right in French sounded wrong in English.

Most of Vincent Engel’s books take place in Tuscany, where the characters are worldly and well educated. In Fear of Paradise, however, they are poor, uneducated, superstitious, and uncommunicative. They hardly speak at all, so whatever dialogue there is must sound realistic and fit each character and situation with no wrong notes. I needed to penetrate the characters’ thinking so that I could use the correct language to express their thoughts and feelings even though they couldn’t. This was a particular challenge. Luigi does not talk like Valentina, and Basilio doesn’t think like Forza, so each person’s way of speaking had to capture his or her character perfectly even if they’re all taciturn. Moreover, the action begins during the rise of Mussolini in the 1920s, continues to the 1940s, and jumps to the 1960s. I had to make sure that the dialogue was always in sync with the times and that it reflected the changes in the characters’ ages and ways of thinking.

Fear of Paradise is a haunting book. It stays with you for a long time after you finish reading it. That was one of the reasons I wanted to translate it. Because of the nature of his characters and setting, Vincent used language to create a special music for this book. It was very important to me to keep this musical quality—the flow, the sound of the words, the rhythm. I think that my training as a musician was helpful in this regard. I thought about the cadence of the sentences, about the number of syllables in them, and a great deal about how they ended. A sentence that ends in a vowel sound floats off into the air, while one that ends in a hard consonant has a sense of finality or even brutality. One that ends with a word of two or more syllables makes a soft landing, while one that ends with a one-syllable word crashes down. Faced with a choice of words, I chose the one that conveyed my sense of the author’s idea most successfully.

Translating Fear of Paradise was a privilege and a pleasure. My wife and I read it and reread it so many times to make revisions and corrections that we both felt we had to go to Puglia to see the landscape we had inhabited for six months. We weren’t disappointed. I hope that when you read this wonderful book, you will think about my concerns in translating it and take the time to reflect on the choices both Vincent and I made. 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Fear of Paradise is a story of longing and missed opportunities, of separation, the passage of time, and the unforeseen consequences of innocent decisions. Set against the rise of Fascism in 1920s Italy, Vincent Engel’s novel takes us on a journey through a wild and romantic landscape where two lonely adolescents forge a strange and wonderful relationship. Between the sea and the forest, in the heart of Puglia, lies the remote fishing village of San Nidro, frozen in time. Here, Basilio and Lucia swear their love and loyalty until an irreparable act sets them on a collision course with the tragic realities of history.

Fear of Paradise, by Vincent Engel
Translated by Richard Kutner
© Owl Canyon Press, 2015

What Does a Translator Do? by Richard Kutner

It is a great honor to have been invited by The Best American Poetry to be their author of the week. Translators do not get much respect. In Italian, they even say, “Traduttore, traditore,” which means “The translator is a traitor.” Hmm. I am going to spend the week trying to disprove this dictum. Of course, the work we do is transformational, but we are artists and poets, too, and, while we try our  hardest to be faithful to the author’s style and intent, we have our own concerns.

I hope that you’ll enjoy this week’s posts and that you’ll gain insight into what a literary translator does and the challenges he or she faces.

What does a translator do? What we don’t do is just change one language to another, word by word, like a machine. We have to get into the author’s mind, internalize his emotions and language patterns, and set down his ideas in flowing language that sounds as though it was originally written in English. At the same time we need to make sure every word has the correct nuance, deal with untranslatable expressions, capture the music and spirit of the author’s words, and, most of all, be faithful to his style and tone. Yet the language cannot be self-conscious, calling attention to itself. The translator’s words are there to be the invisible vehicle for conveying the author’s ideas and concerns. However, in the end, the translation is still something different from the original.

But that’s just the beginning. Every author has his or her own music—a personal rhythm, cadence, and sound—and the translator must capture it even when the language he or she is translating into may have a different structure and sound profile. The music conveys the ideas in varying ways. Short sentences with hard consonants and long vowels are useful for portraying quick action or strong, even violent emotion. Longer sentences with soft consonants and short vowel sounds are more successful at portraying lyrical scenes or tender moments.

How many syllables should a word have? Words of one syllable have a different effect from multisyllabic words. What kind of ending do you want the sentence to have—one that ends with a thud or one that floats off into the air? And what about words that seem to mean the same thing in two languages but have the slightest shade of difference? Every word a translator uses involves a choice, and it is essential to read a translation aloud to make sure that it sounds right.

It is important as well to keep the time period in which the work one is translating takes place. People in the 1920s or the 1940s did not talk the way people do now. Just watch an old film and listen closely. And there are more subtle gradations between the formality and informality of other languages and English, in terms of vocabulary, usage, and structure. For example, in 1850s Italy, people did not say, “Yo, dude, what’s up?” Pieces of furniture or architectural features that existed 50 or 100 years ago many no longer exist, yet the translator has to find a way to name or describe them so that the reader can understand.

Literary translation is hard work and just as much an art as writing, and I’m glad to see that translators are beginning to get the recognition they deserve. It is difficult to understand, though, why just 3% of the total annual book production in the US is works in translation (of which only one-third is fiction), when there is so much to learn and enjoy from the varying perspectives of authors from other countries. I especially encourage educators to use books in translation to give their students access to how people think and express themselves in other parts of the world.

Richard Kutner, Guest Author July 17-21

This week we're thrilled to welcome Richard Kutner as our guest author. Richard graduated from Yale University with a major in French Literature. His translations from French to English include After the Roundup: Escape and Survival in Hitler's France by Joseph Weismann (Indiana University Press, 2017). Now 85, Weissman is a survivor of the 1942 Vél' d'Hiv Roundup in Paris. His story inspired the French film, La Rafle. Richard has also translated the novel Fear of Paradise by Vincent Engel (Owl Canyon Press, 2015), three Greek myths, and three graphic novels. He was awarded a Hemingway Grant from the Book Department of the French Embassy for his translation of Cast Away on the Letter A by Fred (TOON Graphics  2013). 

Richard also works in the other direction and has translated 31 songs for Disneyland Paris, an entertainment website, and four Ghanaian folktales from English to French. 

Richard taught at the United Nations International School in New York City for 33 years. He and his wife, Lynn, live in Manhattan, a short subway ride from both their sons. This year he began to translate and summarize nineteenth-century French letters at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York.

Welcome, Richard.

-- sdl

Francois Villon Begins His Journey [trans. David Lehman]

for Paul Violi

In my thirtieth year,
Drunk and no stranger to disgrace,
I grin wisely from ear to ear
Despite the fear I’ve had to face,
Clown that I am, condemned
By Thibaud d'Assole’s command
Threatened and even damned
By the faker with the crozier in his hand.