The Best American Poetry

Francois Villon, Rascal Poet [by David Lehman]

The original bad-boy poet roamed the countryside of fifteenth-century France. Francois Villon narrowly escaped the gallows; a vagabond and a thief, he cast his major poems in the form of satiric versions of a last will and testament.

In "Le Petit Testament" (also known as "Le Lais") -- a title that appealed greatly to the Australian inventors of the great twentieth-century hoax poet Ern Malley -- Villon bequeaths his possessions, whether tangible, spiritual, or imaginary -- to the people and institutions that deserve them. The mood is one of irony, sometimes bitter, sometimes of the type known as gallows humor, but there is warmth of feeling and also compassion.

To the Holy Trinity, Villon leaves his soul; to the earth, his body; to a Parisian named Denis, some stolen wine; to a madman, his glasses; to a lover, all the women he wants. At least two of Villon's shorter poems -- "Ballad of Hanged Men" and "I Am Francois, They Have Caught Me" -- were composed in 1462 while the poet was under sentence of death.

Here is a brief excerpt of "The Legacy" ("Le Lais") rendered by John Payne in 1878:

                                Item, this trust I do declare
                                                For three poor children named below:
                                Three little orphans lone and bare,
                                                That hungry and unshodden go
                                                And naked to all winds that blow;
                                That they may be provided for
                                                And sheltered from the rain and snow,
                                At least until this winter's o'er.

This stanza, sweet and sad, yields a completely different set of emotions when you consider that the three "orphans. . .named below" were three of the richest men then living in Paris.

At Bennington College one winter, Anne Winters and I suggested that a group of young poets write a poem ending with Villon's grand line, "And I die of thirst at the rim of the fountain."

Here's my stab at a famous Villon verse:

“In my own country I live in a foreign place
With strength of mind and purpose, yet powerless,
A winner at any game I try, yet awash in loss.
At dawn I say goodbye to the night,
And in bed, I fear I'll fall from a great height."

Among translators the late Louis Simpson had a go at Villon's testamentary masterpieces in 2000. Earlier, Galway Kinnell edited a Signet book of bilingual selections. Robert Louis Stevenson's story "A Lodging for the Night" perpetuated some of the legends surrounding Villon, which have formed the basis of more than one Hollywood swashbuckler.

Simon Loekle has an excellent blog post on Villon, which begins with these paragraphs.

<<<
   Francois Villon disappeared from written record circa 1463 (aged 30), when he was banished from the city of Paris, after a dramatic reprieve from the gallows.

Though Gutenberg's contraption was thumping clanking and squeaking in Germany, the first printing press did not set up operations in Paris until 1470; the earliest edition of Villon was published in 1489. That Villon's reputation survived for nearly 30 years after his disappearance, that it proved strong enough to support a half dozen published collections of his work over the XVI century is his true legacy. It was the literate and literary readership that preserved his words and brought them to the print shop, but he had a reputation among his contemporaries not only for his criminal activities: he was known for his poems. The First Respondents were listeners, in taverns and jail cells and fine chateaux.

The Legacy was written (I think quickly) in 1456 just before the poet fled Paris, and it is in part a farewell to his native city. The specific places and people underscore its satiric motive; if the topical humour falls flat after 500 years, the energetic bite of the verse still makes its mark. Over the next four years on the road, "The Legacy," it may reasonably be supposed, served as a kind of ticket or calling card, as it displays his skill in a long poem (a traditional ambition of poets). The satiric parody of the Last Will (popular since the days of the plague) spared Villon the demands of narrative (which, somehow, Villon does not seem temperamentally suited for). The format is obviously flexible, and if Villon presented it along the way, it is easy to imagine his touching up the text with local references. 

That "The Legacy" is a work of hard-boiled irony is palpable, though how the irony works through the poem is more difficult to grasp. Over the centuries, virtually all of the "heirs" have been identified, but we have lost the immediacy of the reference, and must bear in mind that Villon is engaged in presenting "the thing that is not." It is also clear that The Testament is unquestionably the masterpiece: the interludes of ballades and rondeaux enrich the poem, providing human details and warmth, and better exposing Villon's humours. The two poems cover much the same territory (behind or to the East of Notre Dame); some of the "heirs" in the first are "re-gifted" in the later. I cannot but think that the later work was a conscious revision of the first.
>>> 

From the archive; originally posted October 5, 2013.  See also "Francois Villon Begins His Journey," a poem I wrote in 2017 following the impulse that gave rise to this piece on the "Rascal Poet."  The Hollywood swashbuckler pictures is Ronald Colman playing Villon. -- DL https://www.thecommononline.org/francois-villon-begins-his-journey/

On Mayakovsky's Birthday [from "The Cloud in Trousers" / English version by David Lehman]

On a January night in 2019 at the Russian Samovar in New York City, these lines from Mayakovsky's "Cloud in Trousers" were read aloud. If Vlad had been there, this is how he would have looked. -- DL

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.

*

Hello!
Who’s there?
Mama?
Mama!
Your son is sick, magnificently so.
Mama!
His heart’s on fire.
Tell his sweet sisters
in all of Russia there’s nowhere
he can take refuge.

The words he spits out,
the jokes he cracks,
flee from his scorching mouth
like naked women
jumping out the windows
of a burning brothel.

The stink of burnt flesh is in the air.

The fire brigade drives up
in a shiny new red truck,
the men with their helmets on.
But no hobnailed jackboots here.
Tell those guys to tread softly
when a heart’s on fire.
Look, I’ll show you what to do.
I’ll pump buckets of tears from my eyes.
I’ll save the one last survivor,
the thirteenth apostle,
who lives in my heart
and wants to leap to his freedom.

In vain.

You can’t leap out of your heart.

From the crack of the lips
on my smoldering face
the cinder of a kiss tries to escape.

Mama!
I can’t sing!
In the chapel of my heart the choir’s on fire!

Figurines the shape of letters and numbers
rush out of my skull
like kids bursting out of a schoolhouse in flames.

And as the blaze spreads
I command you to moan
into the centuries, if you will,
my final intimate yell: I’m on fire!

-- as rendered by David Lehman

"My Bohemia" [by Arthur Rimbaud; trans. Bill Zavatsky]

I took off, fists in my torn pockets;
Even my coat was becoming an idea;
I went beneath the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal;
Oo-la-la did I dream some love affairs!

My only pair of pants had a big hole.
—Tom Thumb the dreamer, I picked rhymes
On my way. My inn was at the Big Dipper.
—My stars in the sky made a gentle swoosh.

And I listened to them, seated by roads,
Those good September evenings where I felt drops
Of dew on my brow, like a strong wine;

Where, rhyming surrounded by fantastic shadows,
Like lyres I strummed the elastic laces
Of my wounded shoes, one foot near my heart!

Bill Zavatsky is a poet, translator, and editor based in New York City. This poem was published in Rimbaud—10 Poems (Omertà, 2014), now out of print. Bill has also translated (with Zack Rogow) Earthlight: Poems by André Breton (Black Widow Press) and (with Ron Padgett) The Poems of A. O. Barnabooth (Black Widow Press).

"Evening Prayer" [by Arthur Rimbaud; trans. Bill Zavatsky]

 

I live sitting down, like an angel held by a barber,
Clutching a deeply fluted mug,
Stomach and neck arched, a Briar
In my teeth, under air swollen by sails no one can touch.

Like the steamy droppings of an old columbarium,
A thousand Dreams light sweet fires inside me:
Then sometimes my sad heart’s an alburnum
Whose own ooze bloodies its deep new gold.

Then, when I’ve carefully gulped down all my Dreams,
I turn around, after thirty or forty mugs,
And collect myself to dispense with my burning need:

Sweet as the Lord of the cedar and the hyssops,
I piss up at the brown skies, very high, very far,
Permission granted by giant sunflowers.

“Oraison du soir” ● Translated from the French by Bill Zavatsky

What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger [by Michael Fontaine]

That's Diogenes up above, the Greek philosopher who famously lived in a wine barrel.

This post is #4 in the series on How to Drink. Click here for parts one, two, and three. Fair warning: this one's longer, so pour a glass of wine, fire up the music, and get a little stronger. 

 

Nietzsche said it first, but Kelly Clarkson said it better:

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

She's right, and if you don't believe it, then lifting heavy or running a couple dozen sprints will remind you. (I’ll come back to that topic tomorrow.)

In the meantime, Clarkson goes a long way toward answering an ancient question, namely, where do good ideas come from?

As you'll see below, Vincent Obsopoeus is the first person in world history to write a How-to manual for drinking alcohol.

Strange as it now seems, nobody had ever thought to do that before. How did he come up with the idea?

Start with Hollywood. In 2006 a dark comedy came out called Smokin' Aces. It’s a terrible movie but it features a brilliant performance by Jeremy Piven.

Piven plays a Las Vegas card illusionist who gets tangled up with the mob, and in every scene -- no matter what’s happening, even when he's getting beaten up  -- he keeps fiddling with his playing cards and pulling tricks. Those cards are an obsession, a part of him. “They're kind of like worry beads for the character that I kind of incorporated,” said Piven at the time.

That's exactly the kind of guy Obsopoeus was, only with wine instead of cards. 

When an influential man once offered to help Obsopoeus get a prestigious job, he replied that the advertised salary was so low, “it won’t even quench my thirst.”

And when Obsopoeus asked Joachim Camerarius to blurb The Art of Drinking, Camerarius replied,

If you publish this book, you won’t easily convince everyone of your sobriety (as you claim). ... People assume speech tracks one’s true feelings.

In other words, thought Camerarius, everyone would assume Obsopoeus was an alcoholic because he wrote a poem in praise of drinking wine. It's inevitable. 

Events proved Camerarius right. A couple years later, Obsopoeus wrote another book and in it, he tucked away a tiny comment about drinking games:

I wrote a lot about that topic in The Art of Drinking, and I hear a lot of people are trashing me behind my back for publishing it. They say I went too far. Whatever. Obsopoeus doesn’t care. They can go on hating and criticizing me until they explode.

That sounds deeply bitter, and it is, but it's also totally hilarious. Why?

The tell is the phrase I translated here as "Whatever. Obsopoeus doesn't care."

In Latin it's Haec non sunt curae Obsopoeo et Hippoclidi, literally, "Obsopoeus and Hippoclides don't care."

In ancient Greece, Hippocleides was a young man who ruined his chance to marry a princess by getting drunk and acting stupid at a party. In his drunken state, he quipped, "Hippocleides doesn't care."

In time that response became the classic ancient Greek expression for "f#ck it."

And it shows that even at the very moment he was accused of drinking too much, Obsopoeus couldn't resist making a joke about drinking too much.

That brings me to the letter I’d like to share with you.

Because of space restrictions, I didn’t have room to include Obsopoeus' original preface in How to Drink. It’s a gem, though, and I’m pleased to publish it here online among fellow lovers of literature, instead of burying it in some specialist journal.

Even better, it’s now generously seeded with hyperlinks for the curious and indulgent to follow. It’s the first translation into any language, and it’s a fascinating insight into how and why Obsopoeus came to write his poem on The Art of Drinking – the very first, as he points out, that anyone had ever thought of.

Specifically, the preface reveals how great literature can spring from a combination of disappointment, resentment, a lot of wine, and a determination to prove all the bastards wrong.

In it we learn that Obsopoeus – a gifted translator – had recently lost out on some commissions to translate classical literature, apparently on the grounds that he wasn’t a serious enough person to handle great “works of art.” And that's why, he says, he turned his attention to the one “art” that everyone thought he was worthy of: the art of drinking.

It all goes to show that Kelly Clarkson was right. What didn’t kill Obsopoeus, made him stronger.

 

The Preface to The Art of Drinking

(For the original 1536 Latin text, click here. My translation is from the slightly slimmed down version he included in the 1537 reprint, here.)

 

To John Hartung,

the illustrious and humane gentleman, and

Judge of Heilsbronn Abbey,

Vincent Obsopoeus sends his warmest greetings

 

The people of Corinth were shocked at first and paralyzed with fear when the news dropped that a hostile army, led by King Philip of Macedon, was about to invade their city.

Then, though, they all kicked into high gear, competing to make all necessary preparations to defend their homeland. One started furbishing weapons, another was gathering stones, a third was patching the city walls and fixing portions that had collapsed or that were weak with age; yet another was erecting towers and battlements. In short, everyone everywhere was working their tails off to do whatever the situation demanded.

Diogenes the Cynic saw all this energy in action. And, since he didn’t have anything to do (nobody was asking him for help!), he hitched up his tunic and started frantically rolling his dolium—the wine “barrel” he lived in — up and down the streets of his neighborhood.

When a friend asked him why, he answered,

“I’m rolling my barrel so I won’t look like the only one here who’s a slacker!”

*          *          *

What’s the point of this story, my good Hartung?

It’s this: that given the tidal wave of authors writing and publishing books—well, the same thing’s happening to me that happened to Diogenes back then.

You see, there’s no shortage of people writing and publishing endless books (good ones, too!) every single day and on every topic under the sun, and certain people are so gripped with the irresistible urge to write something that ¡they’re shamelessly “decanting” the Greek and Latin classics into modern languages! And by doing that, they’re whoring out all their humanistic education and even the Muses themselves, whoring them no different than a disgraceful pimp exploits naïve young women. ¡As if—thanks to the behavior of certain loudmouths—the Classics weren’t already in crisis, and suffering plenty as it is!

(By contrast, when philosophers in the ancient world transmitted their dunderheaded philosophy to their students, they wrapped it up in certain secret signs and symbols so that none of it would accidentally get shared with the uninitiated!)

And that’s why—given this huge throng of writers and mass of popularizing translations — I thought it was a good idea for me to roll my barrel with Diogenes for a while. I don’t want to be the only one sitting around doing nothing!

(here comes the sarcasm...)

Because I know I’m "not up to writing up a systematic treatise" on those truly great works of literary art, and because nobody really needs my help to translate them, I’ve settled on just one “art”—yes, it does sound funny at first glance, but it’s probably the richest and most popular—namely, the Art of Drinking: because who doesn’t see how widespread drinking is?

Still, for an art that virtually everyone on planet Earth is eager for, it’s regrettable that until now, there haven’t been any guidelines or recommendations for people to follow, and hence learn to drink with greater knowledge, moderation, and sophistication.

I guarantee you that people ignorant of grammar don’t make as many mistakes in language on any given day as the number of gross mistakes you see made every single day by drinkers who get tripped up because they aren’t educated in the art of drinking.

It’s also pretty well established that as institutions, the Greeks had designated roles for those who dictate how much wine to drink and those who have to drink it, and the Romans had their own “symposiarchs” and “dictators” and the custom of appointing “kings” for their parties.

If an Art of Drinking was ever taught by anyone at any point, though, I haven’t found it. You see, in the various Convivial Questions and Symposiums written by Plutarch, Athenaeus, and even Plato and Xenophon — and by Macrobius on the Latin side — people tend to be long-winded and talkative, not alcoholics.

Only a crackpot, however, could have the temerity to deny that specific guidelines for the art of drinking can be found the same way they can for other arts. Because I realized this, and because I pitied the human race for being left helpless in this one exclusive domain, I quietly made notes of certain observations I’d stumbled upon through frequent experimentation.

I organized them into the three books that follow, and published them in order to equip people that are smarter and better educated than me with a more expansive reason and opportunity for reflecting and writing on the subject.

I’m content myself to have blazed some trails to the Art of Drinking; if others can come refine and enlarge it as their abilities allow, I won’t resent it.

And so, as I said, given the whirlpool not only of people writing, but also of people binging and emptying out wine barrels night and day, it’s been a pleasure to roll this Diogenes-barrel of mine: unlike everyone else, it’s not my fate (</sarc>) to serve a Corinthian crisis or greater literature—no, not with the “cold blood in my breast limiting my inspiration.”

I’m also glad to realize what I can and can’t do, having taken a good hard look at the financial straits my family is in. That’s why I have willingly followed Horace’s recommendation and undertaken to write about a subject matter that isn’t completely beyond my strengths.

(here comes the venom)

My other reason for “rolling this barrel” is the false opinion some people have of me, and the smears that certain trash talkers have put out there.

When they go accusing me to one and all of being a “world-champion wine drinker” (which isn’t true, and nothing I’ve ever done to them ever provoked them to say that, other than their being unable to live without blackening someone else’s good name); — those stupid idiots don’t understand that they’re actually “insulting” me in the most honorably way possible.

You see, the famous Plato, prince of philosophers, doesn’t think it’s absurd for the most beautiful reward for virtue to be being drunk for all eternity, even though I’m not aiming at that reward for my virtues (they’re far too small, you see, to be graced with so incredible a prize </sarc>).

You see, I do like wine more than water, but I’ve always controlled my enjoyment of it with such moderation that I’ve made sure that no one’s ever gotten misled or hurt by my drinking.

Meanwhile, those sobriety-worshippers who are slandering me—who go around signaling their virtue in public while binging in private—they’ll surely spell the doom of no few people with their destructive teaching, contaminated as they are by far more disgraceful sins and behavior.

Besides, I’d rather get called a slightly immoderate wine drinker than be accused — and rightly so — of being a riot-starter or teacher of evil or blasphemer or ghostwriter or perverter of scripture or disturber of the gospel’s peace and harmony or the author or abettor of a pernicious heresy or a church robber and nefarious Sacramentarian or an Anabaptist fanatic or, I might add, a disgraceful man-whore or imposter or plagiarist.

But enough—I’ll respond to my slanderers in a separate essay, and I’ll make sure they haven’t caught “a cicada by the wing.”

Still, if they do want to see how with what “fairness” and virulence they’ve been traducing my name, then allow them to direct their malicious eyes at me. Keep maligning me, and I’ll make sure they hear plenty about the malfeasance of their actions!

*          *          *

I dedicate this dabbling of mine to you, my dear Hartung — the majority of which I dashed off riotously and off the cuff, over drinks. Although your excellence deserves a greater gift, I had to limit myself not to what you deserve, but to what I could provide. And if I can’t honor you with a golden statue as you deserve, then please be content in the circumstances with this marble one—or rather, mud or clay—I’ve set up for you. If it’s modest and beneath your dignity, please consider that “God, too, looks fondly on our best efforts.”

Please don’t assume, though, that I dedicated these books on How to Drink to you because I think you’re getting debauched night and day in whorehouses overflowing with wine (nobody is more temperate than you are, and there’s no need to haul you back to a more productive life), or because even when the circumstances don’t require it, you’re a pro at playing the part of a friendly dinner companion, wherein, on account of your affability and poise, you deserve to be called a “man for all seasons.”

No, the only reason I’ve dedicated How to Drink to you is so that this poor, little homeless book of mine will have you for their patron. Under your patronage, it’ll fly free among the hands of women and men, protected from all the backbiting, smirks, and sneers of sycophants. I know it.

Please commend me to the Reverend Father, Abbot John. Pass my greetings on to Mr. Sebastian Hamaxurgus, the grain supervisor. In the past, we often—well, we didn’t roll Diogenes’ barrel together, but we did empty a few barrels of Bacchus…

Ansbach, January 1536

 

Notes in the Margin

Plagiarism goes a long way back. In 1577 a man name Franciscus Iunctinus of Florence ripped off Obsopoeus’ preface entirely – verbatim! Little did he know he'd get exposed by Google Books in 2020. There's a lesson there...

Poets and Painters in the Garden of Drunkenness [by Michael Fontaine]

This is post #3 in the series. Click here for part one and here for part two. Pro tip: click on any picture in this series to find out more about it.

 

Fun cocktail party fact: the word for drunkenness in ancient Greek is methe (pronounced méth-ee).

Actually, you already knew that. How?

Because it – or rather "she," since the noun is grammatically feminine – shows up in English in the words crystal meth and amethyst. (An amethyst is the gemstone you wear to keep the lady at bay.)

Methe was never really an official goddess in ancient Greece, but since people do “worship” her, Greek artists thought she made a great allegory. What's more, that allegory works in two ways, since (like “drunkenness” in English) methe can mean either intoxication (getting drunk) or addiction (alcoholism).

In The Art of Drinking, Obsopoeus exploits that ambiguity at several points, especially in the teaser he ends book one with:

The next book depicts the haunting portraits and problems of Drunkenness, composed by me in classical verse. You, binge drinker, who are constantly getting hammered, look at them as if you were looking in a mirror, and see how truly disgraceful the sight is! Once you’ve seen Drunkenness, you should turn and run from her for all your life, if you love the glory of true sobriety.

As he repeatedly says, Obsopoeus thinks getting buzzed or tipsy is okay, but getting drunk--hammered, blitzed--is wrong. It's a distinction worth bearing in mind.

Moreover, in speaking of "portraits" here, Obsopoeus means what he says literally, but in a totally surprising way.

He starts book two by referring to Apelles, one of the greatest of the "old master" painters of ancient Greece 2,500 years ago. Think Raphael, Michelangelo, Artemisia Gentilischi, and you're on the right track:

Among the paintings of Apelles—those monuments of old—that learnèd Greece celebrates in its writings, his ingenious hand left behind a masterpiece. It surpasses both the Venuses he created—the one of her emerging naked from the waves of the sea, and the other for the people of Kos that he only managed to get a start on. I’ll describe that picture, though its excellence outdoes my song and its precious art defeats my verses.

The picture at right is a Renaissance recreation by Titian of the first one of Apelles' lost paintings of Venus mentioned here, the "the Venus Anadyomene." He painted it around the year 1520, sixteen years before Obsopoeus wrote The Art of Drinking.

Apelles' other lost painting of Venus, the "Aphrodite of Kos," was also recreated in the Renaissance by Botticelli in the 1480s. I'm sure you've seen it:

Like Botticelli and Titian, Obsopoeus also wants to recreate a painting by Apelles. The difference is that instead of using pigments, he's going to use poetry.

In formal terms, Obsopoeus is going to give us an ekphrasis. That's the fancy term for a poet's attempt to outdo the beauty of a painting by describing that painting in beautiful language. It's an ancient and classical technique, and as a rule rather than exception, the poet's description ends up far more artificially alive and animated than any painting could ever be. 

That's true here, too. Obsopoeus spends the next few hundred lines describing a painting you could call “The Garden of Drunkenness.” It's a sweeping allegory for people who cannot stop partying when the party is over.

The crazy thing is, though, no such painting by Apelles ever existed. Obsopoeus made the whole thing up, inspired (it seems) primarily by Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych "The Garden of Earthly Delights" (1490–1510). That's the painting featured at the top of this post. Here's a wonderful short video introduction to the painting:

Like Bosch, Obsopoeus' "painting" shows us a green field filled with flowers and people. Unlike Bosch, his people are leisurely drinking wine at a festive gathering, and when the party's over, most of them get up and go home.

Others can't or won't, though. Instead, those people head for a walled garden in the center of the field. The garden is full of bad figures, like Hangover, Dementia, Self-Indulgence, Memory Loss, Depression, and a few others. And then--

Presiding in the center of the garden is a woman in royal raiment, drunk and surrounded by an entourage of women. A grassy garland’s encircling her styled hair, and she’s holding a phiale in her hands as if she’s about to drink from it. … As I studied these details, at first I thought the queen standing in their midst was Circe, but it wasn’t her. It was Drunkenness, labeled in Greek letters: Methe, Queen of all Wine-Drinkers.

This is a glass "phiale," or shallow wine bowl, from the time of Apelles (now in the Corning Museum of Glass in central New York).

By telling us that Methe is "holding a phiale in her hands as if she’s about to drink from it," Obsopoeus is doing something quite extraordinary.

To wit: at this central moment in his imaginary ancient Greek painting of Drunkenness drinking from a phiale, he’s alluding to a real ancient Greek painting of Drunkenness drinking from a phiale that once hung inside a shrine in Epidaurus, Greece -- and a famous one, to boot.

That painting was not by Apelles but by Pausias (4^th c. BC), another old master of ancient Greece. And what made it so famous is that it depicted Methe drinking wine from a crystal phiale, with her face visible through the glass. Not an easy feat!

(Pausias’ painting is lost, but his idea was imitated in the late Renaissance by Annibale Caracci, long after Obsopoeus' death. That's it at left.)

I'll come back to this point in a minute.

Meanwhile, what happens in the Garden of Drunkenness? As you might guess, things go badly.

The people inside continue drinking until they pass out. They transform into animals -- sheep, pigs, donkeys, monkeys -- and when they wake up, they start vomiting or attacking each other in a wild frenzy.

Some try to escape the Garden, but they're met by an entourage of old women as they do. The women lash the people trying to leave; they handcuff the compliant ones and bludgeon the resisters, and ultimately enslave them all. Obsopoeus then tells us their names: Fever, Edema, Psoriasis, Poverty, Old Age, and, yes, Death. Yikes!

Obsopoeus' allegorical painting is haunting and glorious. It’s the climax of the whole poem, and clearly designed to be. Rather than go into more detail, though, I'd like to share related material with you that I didn't have room for in How to Drink.

In my last post, I quoted a “liminary” poem in Greek by the Renaissance scholar Joachim Camerarius. In fact, Camerarius wrote two Greek poems for Obsopoeus’ book, and I’m pleased to present the other one here. It’s a miniature masterpiece, and it's a fantastic specimen of how learned and playful Renaissance poetry can be.

It alludes to the Garden of Drunkenness by way of Pausias' painting, and you could call it Poetry is a Painted Crystal Bowl. 

Like Obsopoeus, Camerarius is struck by the inherent competition between representing reality in the written word vs. the painter’s art. He heightens the similarity between those two arts by punning on the similarity of words used to describe each.

In his view, Obsopoeus’ written (engraphon) poetry is as beautifully, skillfully, and clearly executed as Pausias’ painted (graphike) crystal bowl because, through each one, you can discern the orderly rethe (features) of disorderly Methe (Drunkenness).

Here's the poem:

They say there was this one work of the painter’s art

    by Pausias that was really worth seeing:

Drunkenness drinking from a glass phiale that she was tipping up

    while facing forward, so that her whole face showed through,

and though the bowl covered her lips and eyes,

    all her features were still quite clear.

Unquestionably, then, this—a painting like that—was a work of art.

    But a greater work of art is the written one in your hands,

by our friend Vincent.

    It has the gorgeous adornment of the Muses’ verses,

it teaches you how to drink a lot with understanding and without harm,

    and it has found a system in an unsystematic business.

In it, not only will you be able to view Drunkenness,

    you can consort with her, and with pleasure and understanding.

Here’s the Greek for those of you who can read it. I’ve highlighted and color coded the many words that correspond or pun on each other in each part of the simile:

Παυσΐεω τέχνης ἔργον τόδε φασὶ γενέσθαι                  

      ἄξιον ἓν γραφικῆς, ὅ ττι μάλιστα θέας·

ἐξ ὑάλου πίνουσα Μέθη φιάλην ἐπέχουσα

      ἀντία, φαίνεσθαι ὥστε πρόσωπον ἅπαν,

τῆς φιάλης τ’ ἐπιπροσθούσης χείλεσσι καὶ ὄσσοις,

      εὔδηλ’ εἶναι ὅμως ὡς τάδε πάντα ῥέθη.

τεχνικὸν ὧδε γραφὲν—τίς δ᾿ οὔ φησ᾿;—ἦν ἄρα τοὖργον.

      μᾶλλον δ᾿ ἐν χερσὶν τεχνικόν ἐστι τόδε

ἡμετέροιο φίλου Νικήτα’ ἔγγραφον ἔργον,

      κόσμον ἔχον μέτρων πάγκαλον Ἀονίων·  

πολλὰ πιεῖν ἀβλαβῶς μετ᾿ ἐπιστήμης τε διδάσκον,

      καὶ λόγον εἰν ἀλόγῳ πράγματ᾿ ἐφευράμενον·

ἔνθαπερ εἰσιδέειν γε Μέθην δῆθ’ οὐ μονον ἔσται,

      ἀλλὰ συνεῖν’ ἀυτῇ εὖ καὶ ἐπιστάμενως.

 

Notes in the Margin

Since this is a blog for poetry lovers, I thought I'd end with a liminary poem of my own I wrote for How to Drink -- one of a couple I wrote in Latin. (Yes, to say that's old fashioned and nerdy beyond belief is an understatement.) I composed them in the Baroque tradition, a tradition that's distinguished by all kinds of wordplay.

Here's a one-liner I'm especially proud of because it manages a pun on methe, method, and methodicus. Depending on how you analyze it, that last word can mean (1) "methodical" or (2) "who talks about methe." The meter is dactylic hexameter.

 

The Dos and Don’ts of Social Drinking [by Michael Fontaine]

Social drinking can be a lot of fun. It can also be a major source of stress and anxiety, and a gateway to problem drinking. Not good. 

As I mentioned in my first post, the end of book one in The Art of Drinking discusses responsible drinking at social functions, while the entirety of book two is devoted to excess drinking. (I’ll discuss that in tomorrow’s post.)

That structure suggests Obsopoeus was especially alert to the gateway aspect of social drinking, and that may explain why he devotes so much attention to the topic. He knew that work parties, holidays and weddings could be make-it-or-break-it events.

Amazingly, Obsopoeus' advice for those occasions seems as wise and useful today as it was 500 years ago. Let me share some examples.

He starts by stressing the importance of etiquette, beginning the moment you walk through the door. First and foremost, he says, keep it light – even if you're upset about something:

If some hidden worry does happen to be gnawing at you, then lay your cross down the moment you step through the door or dispel it ASAP with a drink of wine—there’s no surer remedy for worries than alcohol.

You'd be hard pressed to find a textbook offering advice like that today, but Obsopoeus is sure it's sensible. In his experience, a single glass of wine – if necessary – won't inevitably send you down an irreversible path.  

He then offers a long series of dos and don’ts, elaborating on each point. For example,

• Do Follow the Conversation. No other interest, no pet hobby or topic that you bring up on your own, should force people to follow your inappropriate digression if they aren’t into it. No, you follow them. Surrender your ego to your group of friends. That’s how you avoid antagonizing people and the fallout that comes with it.

• Do Say Nothing Rather than Something Stupid. Nothing exposes the inferiority of a subpar intellect faster than a tongue droning on unthinkingly. Many win a reputation for wisdom through their silence and then lose it through their stupidity.

Ever met someone like that at a party?

Some of this may come instinctively to you. Unfortunately, it doesn't come instinctively to everyone. If you find yourself scratching your head at any of these next points, I encourage you to read his elaboration of each one:

• Don’t Try to Win Arguments
• Don’t Try to Impress People with Your Intelligence
• Do Be Careful with Your Jokes
• Don’t Use Foul Language
• Don’t Make Jokes at Other People’s Expense
• Do Keep Your Bodily Functions under Control

One of the best pieces of advice he offers is how to give a proper toast – and how to politely deflect peer pressure to join in if you're not into drinking. Here’s what you should say, he says:

 

“My fine friend, don’t you know how the Homeric warlords drank wine? They’d drink as much as each one’s heart desired. Everyone should down drinks as they please! I don’t know of any of those heroes ever acting like you were and telling someone, ‘Match that drinking!’ I grant I’m no epic hero, but what’s stopping us from following the heroic code?”

The heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey are shown drinking wine on many occasions, but never in any kind of competitive way. So, if those tough-as-nails guys — guys like Achilles and Agamemnon and Ajax — if those guys didn’t feel compelled to pound drinks, then you shouldn’t either. Brilliant! (And all the better if your host doesn't know who Homer was, because the last thing he or she will do is ask.)

Obsopoeus also offers some actionable advice about how best to refuse a drink when you're not into it:

Still, to avoid offending someone by refusing their offer of wine, do have a single drink if they’re pressuring you.

This is not the advice contemporary programs would offer today, but Obsopoeus has a point:

And that’s why—to avoid hurt feelings—I’m frequently drinking: it’s not because I’m thirsty, but so I won’t be a sober killjoy.

That said, he immediately admonishes us to never pressure other people to drink:

Forcing someone against their will is as serious a crime as chasing them away from flowing water when they’re thirsty. The sweetest glass is a drink that’s downed by choice, whereas forcing hurts the drinker and the wine alike. Wine makes friends and breaks friends; being forced to drink wine isn’t universally liked.

Obsopoeus finally sums up his advice with a golden rule borrowed from Ovid's treatise on sex education:

• Moderation must forever be your guiding principle.
• Everything needs to be kept within finite limits; and
• Consent to memorize the same thing Ovid taught his young man in love:

“I’m going to give you a specific drinking limit: Your mind and feet should both be doing their job.”

Again and again Obsopoeus comes back to that point, that moderation is the key to lasting sobriety, and if you're having trouble talking or walking, then you're past your limit. Time to head home.

I’ll talk about what happens when you don't in tomorrow’s post. In the meantime, I’d like to end this post with a liminary poem I didn’t have space to include in How to Drink.

When you wrote a book back in the Renaissance, it was customary to hit your friends up to write short poems—called “liminary” poems—to celebrate the publication. They were blurbs, basically, and the best of them enlighten and enhance the book that follows.

In How to Drink, I reprinted a liminary poem in Latin by Joachim Camerarius, a famous scholar of the German Renaissance. I didn’t have room for a second one Camerarius wrote in ancient Greek, and I’m pleased to share it here.

The conceit is that wine can be a bucking bronco, and art — and specifically, Obsopoeus’ "Art" of Drinking — will give you the confidence you need to "ride" it. (The conceit goes back to ancient Greek comedy and gets picked up elsewhere in the Renaissance; see footnote nine here):

Get set, all you wine enthusiasts out there!

     If your heart is willing but

your puny body lacks the strength,

     then smile and say hello to wine’s intoxication!

Vincent has devised the therapies in this Art for you

     so that you can drink wine without fear.

You little fellas don’t have to fear a big, tough guy anymore,

      because look, with art, even a kid can ride a mighty horse.

Here’s the Greek for those who can read it. (The phrase I translate “wine enthusiasts” literally means “suffering from the gentleman’s disease,” and it’s a recherché allusion to Aristophanes’ comedy Wasps, line 80.)

Θαρσεῖθ’ ὅσσ’ ἀγαθῶν ἀνδρῶν νούσῳ κατέχεσθε,         

      οἰνώδη θ’ ἱλαραῖς φρεσσὶ φιλεῖτε μέθην,

εἰ μὲν θυμὸς ἔνι στήθει πρόφρων, δύναμις δέ

      λείπετ’ ἐν ἀβληχρῷ σώματι δαμναμὲνη·

τοίης Νικήτης τέχνης τάδε φάρμακα πᾶσιν                  

      θῆκεν ὑμῖν ἀδεῶς οἰνοποταζέμεναι.                            

μή τινα νῦν δείσητε μέγαν μικροὶ ἄνδρα θρασύν τε.

      τέχνῃ παῖς ἵππον πόσσον ὁποῖος ἑλᾷ;       

We Have Sex Education. Should We Teach Drinking Education, Too? [By Michael Fontaine]

It sounds heretical to even ask, doesn't it?

In this world of ours, though, we’ve grudgingly come to admit that a few things that seem instinctive, really should be taught. Sex is one. Driving a car is another.

In all my life, though, I’ve never heard of anyone offering a course in the art of drinking alcohol.

I don't mean a twelve-step program to quit alcohol, mind you. I mean a course in how to enjoy alcohol responsibly, sustainably, and with discrimination.

Controversial? Sure. Risky, dangerous, potentially disastrous? That too.

But maybe it's not as nutty as it sounds – especially with so many of us stuck at home and drinking more than usual.

What might drink education look like? In fact, it might look very much like the book I recently rediscovered and translated as How to Drink: A classical guide to the art of imbibing. And even though it's five centuries old, the ideas it contains are as insightful, timely and actionable as ever. You simply won't believe it.

In much of the world, booze is an all-or-nothing thing. Thirty percent of us in the U.S. never touch the stuff. The other 70% of us do, with varying degrees of success. And for better or worse, virtually all of us learn about alcohol in the same hit-or-miss way that people once used to learn about driving cars or sex.

Five hundred years ago in Germany, a man named Vincent Obsopoeus saw a better way. Obsopoeus (pronounced Job? So pay us!!) was a very experienced drinker, and he decided to do the world some good by systematizing his experiences as rules and committing them to paper.

Incredibly, he wrote his treatise as a poem – a poem in classical Latin, the language spoken in ancient Rome 1,500 years before his time.

Obsopoeus' poem became an instant classic. It was read and reprinted – until the book was suddenly banned. It disappeared for centuries and was eventually forgotten.

No, Obsopoeus wasn't a rock star. He was the principal of an elite high school in Bavaria, and in his time he witnessed the birth of a poisonous new culture among young men of bingeing, hazing, peer pressure, and competitive drinking.

German universities had fraternities way back then – and frat parties, too. Drinking competitions started popping up, where the goal was to make the other guy pass out. Sounding like a critic far ahead of his times, Obsopoeus regarded this flush of hardcore masculinity he was seeing as “toxic.” (He says so explicitly.)

Worse, boozing was taking over professional life, too. The pressure to join in was overwhelming.

Obsopoeus saw all this and sought to halt it. He lifted his pen and composed a three-part poem called De Arte Bibendi, The Art of Drinking. He was inspired by a famous three-part poem from ancient Rome called The Art of Love, the world's first- or second-oldest course in sex education. (The competitor for that honor is India's Kama Sutra.) 

The difference between Ovid and Obsopoeus is that Ovid wasn't really serious about most of the advice he offers. Obsopoeus was, and he speaks with the candor of someone who's been around the block a few times.

The surprising thing is that unlike Alcoholics Anonymous, Obsopoeus doesn't just advocate teetotalism—that is, abstaining from alcohol completely.

Better, he thought, to take stock of the main occasions for drinking, see what works for most people best, and then systematize and institute some rules to guide our behavior.

In that respect, we can see a clear analogy with sex education in schools today. Sex ed typically recommends keeping sex within the bonds of a committed relationship. It doesn't recommend lifelong celibacy, which – if you look around – clearly isn't a sustainable way of life for most people.

Obsopoeus thought of booze the same way, and he uses that central insight to develop a number of practical strategies for managing our relationship to alcohol.

He begins by pointing out that there are three occasions on which we drink:

1. At home by ourselves,
2. Going out to meet friends, and
3. At social functions, like work parties and weddings.

Interestingly enough, Obsopoeus says home is far and away the best place to drink. Why? Because drinking at home gives us a chance to spend time with our significant other.

Obsopoeus spends the rest of his first book discussing how much to drink and how to behave on each of those occasions. He helps us identify the best drinking buddies, advises what to say and not say, and even how to give a toast.

In the second book, he turns to a far darker topic, excessive drinking, and repeatedly admonishes us not to go down that path.

In book three he does a complete about-face, and offers to teach us his secret way to win competitive drinking games--and it's not what you think.

In a series of blog posts this week, I’ll share some of Obsopoeus' insights and practical advice. I’ll also reveal some fascinating background material that I couldn’t squeeze into my book, material that reveals the creative impulse that led him to write it in the first place.

To listen to a podcast expanding on some of these thoughts, click here.

I’d like to end this first post, though, by reflecting on a problem I kept coming up against in translating the poem: namely, the choice between “drunk” and “alcoholic.”

Obsopoeus wrote his Art of Drinking in the 16^th century, long before it occurred to anyone to consider excess drinking a disease. Of course he recognized that drinking to excess can be self-destructive, that it ruins your family, finances, health, and even life; he says so himself. The idea of “alcoholism,” though, literally didn’t exist back then.

When I went to translate his poem, then, I faced a dilemma—and a morally loaded one.

Latin has many words, like vinosus, for someone who drinks too much. So, should I translate them “drunk” or “alcoholic”? The first is faithful to Obsopoeus and his world, the second to our own. But the second is anachronistic, and hence faithless to the author.

“In the animal kingdom,” remarked Dr. Thomas Szasz (1920-2012), the late professor of psychiatry, “the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.” Nothing proves his point like having to choose between drunk and alcoholic. One of those words brings naught but condemnation and stigma; the other brings compassion, help, even health insurance payments.

“No one can serve two masters,” quipped Jesus. Meanwhile “the translator is a traitor,” runs a famous Italian proverb (traduttore, traditore). Faced with the impossibility of serving both, I chose to betray both. I wound up charting a middle course, letting the context dictate whether to say “drunk” or “alcoholic.”

I hope readers will tell me what they think.

 

Notes in the Margin

In a nice review yesterday, Philip Martin wonders about one of my translations. 

Obsopoeus wrote, wine "has no steering wheel."

Wait, he was writing in the 16th century. Did they even have steering wheels then?

They did – on boats! (The Greek proverb literally says “Wine lacks rudders.”)

Poetry in Times of Oppression/Virtual Poetry fest in honor of Ernesto Cardenal [by Mihaela Moscaliuc]

Poetry in Times of Oppression/Virtual Poetry fest in honor of Ernesto Cardenal

As I mentioned in yesterday’s posting, for the second year in a row, the International Poetry Festival of Granada, Nicaragua, now in its 16^th edition, will take place only in virtual format. As they announced the cancellation of the ‘physical’ event, the organizers explained that the current political situation in Nicaragua creates “no favorable environment for any festive activity.” According to the Human Rights Watch 2018 World Report, “Ortega’s government has aggressively dismantled all institutional checks on presidential power,” which has allowed his government “to commit egregious abuses against critics and opponents with complete impunity.” (https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/nicaragua). The same document reports that “a crackdown by national police and armed pro-government groups in 2018 left 300 dead, over 2,000 injured, and hundreds arbitrarily arrested and prosecuted.” The numbers quoted by other sources are even higher.

In the January 22/24 issue of Confidencial, writer and Festival board member Gioconda Belli declared that at this time the people of Nicaragua are in mourning for the deaths, dissapearances, and imprisonment of those voicing dissent. In this “jailhouse atmosphere” of repression and harassment, “the only poetry that fits,” Belli wrote, “is that of protest.” (https://confidencial.com.ni/the-daniel-ortegas-regime-ties-to-hijack-poetry-festival-in-nicaragua/). She also suggested that a celebration like that of previous years would be an affront to Nicaraguan people’s suffering. In past festivals, poetry events were interspersed with local music and dance, and integrated also into a day-long, spectacular carnival/traditional masquerade that celebrated life and death, and which always included a ritualized “burying” of a particular evil such “intolerance,” “hatred,” or “violence.” (Photos from the 9^th edition of festival & carnival: https://designyoutrust.com/2013/02/the-ix-international-festival-of-poetry-in-granada-city/

 

This year’s virtual festival will be honoring Ernesto Cardenal, one of Latin America’s most revered literary and revolutionary figures. Poets from around the world will be read a poem in his honor and the event will be streamed through Facebook from Feb 20-Feb 25. You may watch it at https://www.facebook.com/FIPGNicaragua

 

Cardenal was born in Granada in 1925. On January 20, he turned 95. Active in the Sandinista revolution that ousted Anastasio Somoza in July 1979, Cardenal served afterwards as the Minister of Culture, but gradually broke away from the Sandinista government, becoming an increasingly outspoken critic of the current Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his authoritarian rule. A prolific writer who has authored over forty poetry collections and whose work has been translated into dozens of languages, Cardenal has occupied, over the years, ideological positions that have at times stirred controversy. He has been hailed or criticized for being an iconoclast, a visionary, a mystic, a Marxist, and a leader of the liberation theology movement. In his writings, whether addressing injustice, corruption, greed, the world’s transient beauty, or love, he documents and witnesses with eloquence and urgency, often by bringing religion, politics, and science in conversation with one another.

 

Priest, writer, translator, sculptor, diplomat/politician, social activist, Cardenal founded both a spiritual/religious commune (Solintiname, on Lake Nicaragua) and a cultural foundation (Casa de los Tres Mundos, in Granada, where I met him briefly in 2017). He was declared person non grata by Samoza for seeking justice, ‘suspended’ by Pope John Paul II for being political, and reviled by politicians for prizing integrity.

 

I don’t see Cardenal as a poet of contradictions (as I may seem to suggest above), but of human plenitude. I admire his reverence for, and commitment to, the earth and the cosmos—a commitment reflected also in what he has called his work’s “exteriorismo” (which translates, in simplified terms, into a preference for direct observation instead of metaphorical articulation). Robin Bower argues, in an appraisal of Cardenal’s work (“Remembering things past: Reading history, writing memory, and the poetics of agency in Ernesto Cardenal”), that critics have often rushed to assign his work to reductive categories, and suggests that we look instead at how in Cardenal’s body of work “the denunciatory, the religious, and the epic are all part of a self-reflexive poetics grounded in a conviction of the transformative power of poetry itself in its capacity to refashion memory, subject, and society.”

 

Poetry as diplomacy, communion, individual and communal transformation--

 

Cardenal writes about pre-Columbian history or the U.S. imperialist interventions in Central American history (see, for instance, “La Hora 0” / “Zero Hour,” with its “trucks and trucks loaded with crates of arms/all marked U.S.A., MADE in U.S.A.,/arms to catch more prisoners, to hunt down books,/to steal five pesos from Juan Potosme”—tr. Donald D. Walsh) with the same frankness with which he celebrates bodies and stars or, as in “Zoológico de Iquitos” / “The Zoological Garden of Iquitos,” a Peruvian zoo’s “Amazonian animals”—"the great leopard in repose/ (…) / the papagayo birds draped in flags of color/the sloth with terrifying yet weak claws / (…) / the ecstatic tortoises, each on its own rock/the elastic otter.”

 

This poem takes its time honoring each imprisoned creature, then shifts the tenderness toward the “nine-year-old Indian guide” who

 

picked up from the ground an immense

                                    red petal

that had fallen from a tree

            and said to me:

‘Touch it; it’s as smooth as the leopard’s coat,’

and, indeed, it was as smooth as

            the silky fur with quadrilateral spots

                        that we did not touch.       (tr. David Draper Clark and Cesar Ferreira)

 

Protest poetry or politically-engaged poetry can feel like the only poetry ‘fit’ for certain times, absolutely. The months before and for many months after the U.S. 2016 presidential election, I did not write at all because I felt I needed to --and wanted to, and couldn’t--write only about what was happening. (Since then, a number of poets have confessed to similar experiences.) However, re-reading Cardenal’s work I was reminded that poems do not have to engage with politics or current events in order to do significant work and to benefit us during historical and political crises. I thought also of Neruda’s view of poetry as “an act of peace,” and how the metaphor itself posited writing as an engagement with conflict, and how it also conferred poetry-making the status of a political act. While not writing, I translated. In 2016 I was translating from the Romanian a collection of poems by our contemporary Liliana Ursu—Clay and Star, published this past fall by Etruscan Press (https://etruscanpress.org/shop/clay-and-star/). These were not poems of protest. They were not, by most measurements, even slightly political. Further, Ursu, like Cardenal, is a religious person, which I am not, and her poetry is deeply spiritual, while my own is anything but. One thing that had attracted me to her poems, I realized then, was precisely that they provided me, in disconsolate times, with possibilities for accessing hope where I saw none, and beauty when my own work could no longer contain it. This was not escapist poetry, but poetry that insisted that I learn to renew hope in our common humanity, and that helped me recharge emotionally and spiritually. I had also grown up in a political system (Ceausescu’s dictatorial regime) in which religious practices were akin to acts of dissent, so Ursu’s monasteries, nuns, and monks stood, if not close to God, at least far away from daily corruption and repression.

 

Though ostensibly radically different, Ursu’s and Cardenal’s works converge to engage each other. To honor “El Padre” Ernesto Cardenal, I will end with a poem Ursu dedicated to Thomas Merton--the scholar, poet, and monk under whose tutelage Cardenal lived in the Trappist monastery at Gethsemani (Kentucky) between 1957-1965.

 

 

Liliana Ursu (tr. Mihaela Moscaliuc)

 

The one who leaves few footprints in the snow

                                                                         To Thomas Merton

 

He splits wood,

leaves few footprints in the snow—

their life shorter than that of the small

pine tree fire

above which he warms his hands

before dovetailing

the icon frames—

before taking back to his hut an ice cube,

water he’ll use at twilight

to make coffee,

its black eye—sole indulgence,

its fragrant eye—sole gratification.

 

He leaves few footprints in the snow

and they’re quickly erased by birds

for whom he sows wheat and crumbs

under the window where he reads the Psalms.

 

Kentucky, Abbey of Gethsemani, January 21, 2000

           

“The New Colossus” Translation Project [by Mihaela Moscaliuc]

“The New Colossus” Translation Project (spearheaded by Alicia Ostriker, Mihaela Moscaliuc, and Tess O’Dwyer and to be hosted by AJHS)

This past summer, faculty and students in the M.F.A Program at Drew University honored the formidable Alicia Ostriker for her work as poet, mentor, scholar, feminist, activist, Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and New York State Poet Laureate. As part of the celebration, we had translated and read some of her poems in our native, heritage, or acquired tongues. Something magical happened within the walls of the room as it gradually filled with Spanish, Arabic, Yiddish, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Sicilian, French, German, Russian, Romanian. Afterwards, Alicia and I decided that we needed to replicate and extend that experience. It didn’t take much to realize how that polyphony was about more than sound and multilingualism. As we left the celebration, we stepped back into a world steeped in inflammatory nationalist rhetoric, a world that had incorporated monolingualism into its mechanisms of oppression.

I proposed we choose a poem and reach out to poets willing to give it life in other languages. Brilliantly, Alicia suggested “The New Colossus,” which had been resonating, for more than a century, with millions of people. Written by Emma Lazarus in 1883, as part of an effort to raise funds for the Pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, it was etched on a plaque and attached to the pedestal in 1903, seven years after the statue was erected. Alicia’s personal involvement with "The New Colossus" was lifelong. She knew the poem as a child, because her mother would quote it to her, along with poems by Tennyson and Browning. Like so many immigrants, her mother believed in America as "the melting pot," and the Statue of Liberty poem and its symbolism fit into that understanding. Alicia’s mother, and in fact all her grandparents, arrived in the New World at the turn of the 20th century.

I arrived from Romania in 1996, just a few years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, and although my point of entry was not Ellis Island, but the Newark International Airport (NJ), I thought I had caught a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty before landing. I wanted to believe so anyway, as I had spent the last leg of the trip peering out of the small window, searching.

A month after Alicia and I first spoke of the “The New Colossus,” in an interview with NPR, Principal Deputy Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli argued that the Lazarus poem should be amended to convey that immigrants are welcomed only if “they can stand on their own two feet, be self-sufficient, [and] pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” This, he argued, was in line with the “American tradition.” Such rhetoric rendered our project particularly timely. “The New Colossus” was written in a time of acute nativist and anti-immigrant sentiment. We are reliving that time. The targeted immigrant groups differ, but the fervor of the rhetoric is strikingly similar. Our project became inevitable. An idea that emerged on the playground of translation took root in socio-political terrain. We sent a call out to poet-translators and the overwhelmingly positive response was encouraging. At this time Tess O’Dwyer, whose mother is Korean and her father Irish-American, and who is a superb translator and editor whose non-profit management firm works with various cultural organizations, joined our project. We received translations of “The New Colossus” into Yiddish, Hebrew, Spanish, Spanglish, Persian, Sicilian, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Romanian, Ukrainian, French, Albanian, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Basque, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Slovak, German, Swedish, Irish, Arabic, Bulgarian, Turkish, Czech, Haitian Creole, Argentinian Spanish, Filipino, Korean, Tamil, Bengali, Urdu, Esperanto, Greek, Shona, Kumanji, Turkmen, and Isthmus Zapotec. The poems are accompanied by the translators’ brief comments on their or their ancestors’ immigration experiences.

Tess O’Dwyer was instrumental in helping us to secure a host. Here are her words on the process: As soon as I heard about The New Colossus Translation Project, I contacted the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS), which hosts the Emma Lazarus Project. Amidst their Lazarusian archival exhibitions, curricula, and poetry contests, I saw a heart-snatching video of talented children writing poems to The Statue of Liberty today—and that cinched it. 

The New Colossus Translation Project has joined The Emma Lazarus Project at AJHS (https://ajhs.org/emma-lazarus-project) and will launch later this spring. It will be an integral part of public programming for the exhibition “From the Sitting Room to the Soap Box: Emma Lazarus, Union Square, and American Identity,” and part of their permanent archives.

The forty plus trove of translations (including an intersemiotic one into a musical composition) gifts the Mother of Exiles with the ability to welcome migrants, immigrants, and refugees in their own native or heritage tongues. Such a gesture of unconditional hospitality might remain, especially in the current political climate, utopian. The radical multilingualism of Mother of Exile is a metaphor. Metaphors, however, are not without agency.

As Alicia Ostriker points out, in a world of escalating tensions, of fear of (im)migrants, and of xenophobia, this poem remains radical. What’s significant too is that the poem doesn't attack the haters; instead, it offers an alternative ideal. Also, think of the thousands of heroic statues of Men on Horseback. "Mother of Exiles" may be a stereotype, but she's a new, exciting one: a female hero.

Years ago, when invited by the Library of Congress to record something for its “Poetry of America” project, Alicia chose this sonnet and talked about it as key to defining who we were. Then in 2018 she quoted it as part of a lecture on “Poetry and the City,” mentioning that it was a perfect refutation of Auden's famous pronouncement that "Poetry makes nothing happen": Auden is wrong! When France gave us the statue, its official name was "Liberty Enlightening the Nations," and it was all about how America and France were allies; we were both republics that had overthrown monarchies. It had nothing whatsoever to do with immigration.  But the poem changed all that. It transformed the meaning of the statue, the meaning of the Port of New York, and ultimately the meaning of America. It directly opposed the pervasive sentiment that saw immigrants as dirty and diseased criminals.  It insisted on re-defining us as a nation of immigrants.

We hope the project grows (through further ‘installments’) and that, in time, the Mother of Exiles acquires enough languages to speak to all minority groups in the U.S. and beyond. Tess, who is herself a consummate translator (see her translations of Alberto Blest Gana’s Martin Rivas and Giannina Braschi’s Empire of Dreams and Yo-Yo Boing!) remarks upon the already impressive range of our collection: As an indication of linguistic range, the project features Emma Lazarus’ biographer Esther Schor translating “The New Colossus” into Esperanto, Israeli-based poet Karen Alkalay-Gut rendering it into Hebrew, Rose Waldman into Yiddish, Ming Di into Chinese, Dunya Mikhail into Arabic, and Emma Asonye into Igbo. The range of artistry is inspiring. With Spanish, for example, we have Argentine poet Lorraine Healy translating crisp to the literal edge of each line, while Puerto Rican poet Giannina Braschi riffs metaphorically on “The New Colossus” as though it were an arrangement of a song to American immigration in the Obama and Trump era, rather than a sonnet addressing immigration in the Cleveland and Roosevelt era. 

We have been asked, at various points, to comment on the translations themselves. That is beyond the purpose of our project, although we hope for opportunities (perhaps through the AJHS platform and/or other online venues or discussion panels) to engage our contributors in discussions about the process. Each poet-translator approached the highly formal qualities of the poem (a Petrarchan sonnet whose diction may feel highly elevated and antiquated) on their own terms. I assume choices were informed by multiple factors, including the nature of the synergy between the host and guest language, the translatability of form and music, personal aesthetics, and/or politics. Some initial contributors withdrew when they realized how impossible a task preserving the sonnet’s formal qualities might be, while others declared themselves surprised by how amenable their mother tongues had turned out to be to those same qualities. Others sensed right away that they needed to do away with the sonnet form and compensate in other ways. We imposed no restrictions and provided no particular guidelines, choosing to trust instead the craftmanship of the contributors from whom we solicited work.

Alicia mentioned in a conversation that for her this project was not about “making artistic judgements,” but “about getting at a significant human experience.” I agree, and also embrace Tess’s view of the project as having the potential to provide a deeper understanding of translation as an art form. Tess writes: Literary translation is a living artform.  I have always shied away from the concept of definitive translation. Translations are originals in the same way that arrangements of songs or symphonies are originals. You can recognize the origins of a composition, thought, concept, while simultaneously recognizing what is original in the tempo, tone, feeling, imaging, etc. That space between history and creation is where translation thrives. Let there be many more translations of this poem into other Asian, African, Scandinavian, and indigenous languages. Let readers appreciate that the new does not void out the prior. Let there be a wider understanding that literary translations contribute not only to the evolution of poetry, but to language itself.

Stay tuned for news about the launch of The New Colossus Translation Project on the AJHS site and for a call for further contributions.

Two articles of interest accessible online:

• David Lehman’s “Colossal Ode,” Smithsonian Magazine, April 2004

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/colossal-ode-103151288/

• Walt Hunter’s “The Story Behind the Poem on the Statue of Liberty,” January 16, 2018 https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/01/the-story-behind-the-poem-on-the-statue-of-liberty/550553/ 

A Hurricane of Persecuted Stars: Clemente Soto Vélez [translated and introduced by Martín Espada]

One hundred and fifteen years ago this month, Clemente Soto Vélez (1905-1993) was born in Lares, Puerto Rico, the site of an 1868 revolt against Spain. The orphan son of landless peasants, Soto Vélez was a visionary poet, a surrealist, a socialist, an organizer and agitator for the independence of his island.

He was also a political prisoner. In 1936, the colonial government of General Blanton Winship incarcerated the leaders of the militant Nationalist Party and charged them with seditious conspiracy. Soto Vélez was the editor of the party newspaper. The statement on the masthead read: “Puerto Rican, the independence of Puerto Rico depends on the number of bullets in your belt.” This metaphor, in particular, was enough to earn him a six-year sentence, served in the federal penitentiaries at Atlanta and Lewisburg.

In the following poem, Soto Vélez confronts a political and emotional paradox: the fact that he lost his freedom for the love of freedom, cut off from his island for the sake of his island. The poet speaks of himself in the third person, and visualizes himself as a letter of the alphabet, sitting in isolation. This is poem #3 from Caballo de palo, or The Wooden Horse:

I met him
living like an h incarcerated in the honey of his bees,
but the bars of honey were bittersweet,
and because
he lost himself
in love with liberation,
and because he did not abandon
his love nor she her lover,
the earth for him is a hurricane of persecuted stars,
since liberation cannot
love anyone
except whoever loves
the earth, with its sun and sky.

--  Martín Espada

"Hotel" [by Guillaume Apollinaire; trans. David Lehman]

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," a prose poem by Charles Baudelaire [trans. David Lehman]

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. 

https://yalereview.yale.edu/sites/default/files/baudelairecharles.poems_.yr107.3july_2019.final_.web_.pdf

Catullus #154 [trans Molly Arden]

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

Molly Arden Bounces Back!

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" [by Charles Baudelaire, trans. D. Lehman]

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]

"Get Drunk" [Baudelaire, "Enivrez-vous," trans. D. Lehman]

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

Half-Life (after Friedrich Hölderlin) [by David Lehman]

After Hölderlin

Yellow pears
wild roses
the lake
your swans
and kisses
your head
in water.

But where,
when winter,
is sunshine
and shadow?
The walls,
silent and
cold, clatter.

[from The Atlantic, October 2018]

"Bread and Wine" by Friedrich Hölderlin [trans. David Lehman]

"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

Mayakovsky's "Cloud in Trousers" (excerpts) [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