The Best American Poetry

"The Hard and the Soft": Catullus 60 [trans. by Susan Brind Morrow]

Catullus 60 has a sort of fairy tale beginning. Like Aslan in The Silver Chair, there is a lion on a mountaintop up in the clearest air,
and there is a monster that lives in the deep blue depths of the sea.

Catullus is setting up a vivid contrast of two living things in extreme environments. The monster is barking. It is Scylla, the giant squid, with multiple heads: the head-like swollen tips of tentacles on long stem-like arms. The giant squid on the surface of the sea makes a terrifying barking sound that can be heard miles away. This is a portrait of a living thing.

Within the deepest depths of the squid itself is the word in the next line procreavit; something has been created. 

A Grammatical Dictionary of Botanical Latin has the word Catullus uses to describe what is created, taetra, as having to do with smell: it is putrid, the softness brought on by decay and the smell of it. Although the thing is soft (setting up the expectation of comfort), it has  the repellent softness of the slime of rot. Something is rotting having to do with things in the sea, in the depths, and in psychology, because what is being described is the mind.

The word taetra at once calls to mind the softness of sea creatures rotting on the shore, and the softness of the brain itself, taken out of its shell, soft and wet and rotting. And that is what Catullus is after here.

Num te leaena montibus Libystinis
Aut Scylla latrans infima inguinum parte
Tam dura mente procreavit ac taetra
Ut supplicis vocem in novissimo casu
Contemptam haberas, ah nimis fero corde

A lion on the Libyan Mountains
or barking Scylla in its inmost part
created you-
with a mind so hard yet soft with rot
that you would have contempt
for the voice of a person in absolute crisis-
Oh you with an iron heart

This passage is eerily reminiscent of Alcman’s fragmentary passage about sleep (a passage Catullus may well have had in mind when he wrote this).

eudousin d’oreon koruphai te kai pharanges
prowones te kai xaradrai
phyla t’erpet’ osa trephei melaina gaia
theres t’oreskwoi kai genos melissan
kai knodal en benthessi porphureos halos
eudousi d’oiwnon phyla tanupterugon

The peaks and the valleys of the mountains
are asleep, the headlands and the bays
The tribes of every creeping thing
the black earth feeds:
the mountain-going beasts and race of bees
and monsters in the depths of the porphyry seas
and slender-winged birds are asleep

Iris Murdoch wrote about these mysterious lines in The Sea,The Sea, saying when is it that everything is asleep at the same time? It must mean everything is under a magic spell, at midday, frozen in the light as in Sleeping Beauty.

But that is doubtful. It is night. What both poems are really about is the presentation of vivid contrasts. Alcman begins with koruphai, roof, the mountaintop, the uppermost part, and pharanges, the Gorge, the deepest part, like pharanx, the gorge in the human body, the deep inner throat, infima inguinum parte.

(One remembers that the word for womb and stomach are the same in Greek: gaster).

The contrast is of high and low -- top and bottom -- and continues with what lives there --  theres d’oreskwoi, the mountain-going beasts, and then that wonderful line:

kai knodal en benthessi porphureos halos
the monsters in the depths of the porphyry seas.

There are wild beasts high in the mountains
And monsters deep down in the sea

It looks like Catullus is drawing on this beautiful poem with his lion on the mountaintop (like Pope’s in the fields of air) and monster implicitly in the deep, and in the depths of the monster is your mind, which has the quality of the lion, hardness, cruelty, the kind of cruelty that can tear a person apart, and the mind disinterred as the brain that has the softness of the decaying boneless sea life on the shore.

The word latrans, barking, is a word that brings up the mythic Scylla, a terrifying female monster who is dogs from the waist down but is not as terrifying as the real squid, which has been known to pull sailors off the decks of ships with its long creeping arms.

The first letters that begin each line form an acrostic: they spell something. What they spell is hard as bronze. The paradox of hard and soft is the subject of the poem: what should be soft (the heart) is hard, what should be hard (the durability of friendship) is soft.

And with this I think it is very clear that this poem is not addressed to a woman- especially with his use of the words supplicis vocem, which suggest a quality of formality having to do with help given in the public world. The poem is not about love. It is a sincerely felt expression of deep hurt written to a friend, someone Catullus trusted and thought was worthy of trust, and the trust is betrayed.

supplicis vocem the voice of someone who is begging for help at a critical moment

novissimo casu
in the ultimate crisis

The friend could be Caesar, a friend of his family, whom Catullus wrote about elsewhere. The founders of Rome were nursed by wolves, latrans, barking, the dangerous wild animal on the mountaintop, the mountain going beasts, the lion, the wolf.

Some have translated the word fero as feral- and it may have that double dimension- but I have always seen it as fero- iron. Iron, bronze, dura- hard- what could be harder than a heart that is physically soft and should have the quality of softness, of love and compassion-:

There is a trap that catches noblest spirits
That caught, they say, God when he walked
the earth

-- Translations of Catullus 60 and Alcman by Susan Brind Morrow

Three Poems from the Ukraine [by Slava Konoval]

The Ukrainian poet Vyacheslav ("Slava") Konoval sent us these three poems for publication. A member of the Geer Poetry Group (Wales) and a member of the Federation of Scottish Writers, Slava lives in Kyiv and is determined to weather the Russian military storm. He tells me he has devoted much energy to address "acute social problems, such as overcoming poverty, ecology issues, the relationship of people with the government." I mean to ask him whether he wrote these three poems in English or translated them. Do they not read like translations? On the theory that there is a certain charm in poetry as a second language, and in respect of the embattled nation for whom Konoval would speak, I present them here even before I find out more.

Now I have found out more:

<<< Yea, I am writing in English to promote my compatriots and show the thick skin of the Ukranian soul.

Translation of anything cannot guarantee the precisely, especially in art activity, so I do original form writing in non-my native language.

Yea, I live in Kyiv and haven't leave my city from time of the overwhelming Russian invasion till nowadays. >>>

Don’t be a freak

I can’t be a freak,
I can’t play it,
I have nothing to speak.
From thought about it
I want only to spit.

I’m not a freak,
I haven’t millions on account,
I’m not strong as beek,
which stands firmly on the ground or on the mount.

I was brought up with my mother’s milk,
it is precious like silk,
hey, artificial behavior is bilk.

Richard’s Castle

On the sprawling mountain of Usypalnytsia,
the neo-Gothic wind built
a castle for the Lion Heart,
below St. Andrew's Church.
The castle's a marvel of art!

An unknown architect
loved the pages of Walter Scott,
having built pointed Spires,
laid his heart.

Moody mountain, sharp descent,
she let the towers in
through philanthropic help, maybe cent,
neither royal funds, no sin.

The royal castle shines,
in yellow colors,
in the graceful contours and lines.

Night Singer

Where missile strikes hit,
where the borders with Belarus are close,
I am asking for Your consent, please, permit
to tell about the Ukrainian company,
I honor her, raise a glass, and toast.

In days of turmoil, in stormy days,
IKOC like a weapon took a thread and a needle,
IKOC has will, courage and actions,
not empty phrases.

Weavers, mechanics, accountants,
they are bees, buzzing in workshops,
IKOC flaunts its image and patents
sewn shoes and uniforms for the military,
sketches in laptops.

With style, taste, and quality
IKOC cares about defenders,
who grind the enemy in a meat grinder,
and like blenders.

May the company prosper
that IKOC had a pre-war profit,
an investor is waiting for him in line, a sponsor.

Ed: Re "Night Singer": Diligent Internet searches of IKOC turn up many a cul de sac. Other poems of his are posted here. Other of Slava's Engish-language poems, such as "Painful condition," can be found here.

Painful condition

Once on Thursday, I woke up weak,
having been covered with a warm quilt,
with a merciless temperature,
I am dying, and I am bleak.
Like a pendulum,
hearing the run of strikes in the clock’s click.
Laying in bed, I had exhausted from the undead,
I am similar to a sickly chick.
Contemplate on the white pills,
that had become the color of capitulation.
Please, God, stop all human ills,
overcome the pains, and be a healthy nation.

Or click here.

In the new "Southern Review": Poems by Terence Winch

Fallen World 

You never cry anymore. The trees don’t make
you weep. The baseball season has almost
gone missing, but you aren’t really concerned.
You can’t go anywhere. There is a world of free
love, grocery stores, off-track betting shops,
and farmers markets. But that world has
slipped into another dimension, like when
you hang a jacket you got as a kid in your
closet and it turns into an old man’s
three-piece suit a half century later.

I am an absentee voter. I am an absentee
drunk. I assault my senses on a daily basis,
but nothing can open up the sky
again for me and you, no one can tell
us we are free to go. We get carry-out.
We get lonely and scared. No one can
open up the past and let it flow right
into the present the way it’s always
done before. Instead, it’s stuck back there
in the good old days. I blow a kiss to
the priests and rabbis, I genuflect to
the babies and bathing beauties. We will
see you soon, I hope, when the trees
remember the names of every fallen leaf.

-- Terence Winch

Two other poems by Terence Winch appear in the journal's Autumn 2022 issue (edited by Jessica Faust). The issue also includes a translation of Friedrich Hölderlin's magnifcent "Bread and Wine,"  which begins with this stanza:

The city’s asleep; on streets lit by lamplight,
      Carriages glide stealthily, with torches ablaze.
Men return from work, reflect on the day’s doings --
      Who’s in, who’s out, who’s leading, who’s losing --
Happy to be home; gone are the grapes and flowers
      Of the midday market; the craftsmen’s work is done;
But from distant gardens comes the sound of strings;
      Perhaps lovers are at play, or a man alone dreams
Of friends in distant places, or his own boyhood. Fresh
      Water flows freely and bathes the fragrant flower beds.
In the dimming light of evening, bells ring
      And the dutiful watchman calls out the hours.
Now wafts a breeze that touches the crest of the grove --
      And look! The shadow of our earth, the moon,
Rises without fanfare; the phantoms of the night come,
          The sky full of stars indifferent to human kind,
The astounding glow of night, a stranger among us,
          High over mountain peaks, with sad glamour.  

Egyptian Poetry [translated by Susan Brind Morrow]

Editor's note:  Susan Brind Morrow published a translation of The Song of Baramhat by Salah Jahin in The Seneca Review, Vol XVI, 1; p.93in 1986.

Morrow included her translation of Salah Jahin’s The Song of Baramhat immediately followed by her translation of the Egyptian New Kingdom hieroglyphic poem The Invocation to a Scribe her book The Dawning Moon of the Mind, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2015, p.278-79)

1970s

Songs of Baramhat (

Salah Jahin

Baramhat is the first month of spring in the Coptic calendar, the calendar of ancient Egypt still in use today, along with the Islamic and the Gregorian. The most notorious months are Amshir (February/March) which is characterized by inescapable sandstorms, and Tuba (January) which is bitterly cold. The poem follows the progression of the year from midsummer (Abib, Melaoon) during which time it is often too hot to go around in the day time. Tut (toot) is September.

Sucked through the ribs 
Like milk from the breast
Unceasing, but not by a child-
Tears give way to blood
Give way to fire
Give way to words-
Red, resounding, terrible…
So the strength of the sun in summer burns out sweat.
And I-
My breast
Is a bronze fortress
That scorches the eyes
The heat increases
And melts its lock
And passes.

                  *

Malaun in all the books is silence,
Malaun in all the books is dumb.
The silence of branches webbed tight by spiders
Though horses trip through them.
Bright delicate birds sing,
They chirrup out their lives.
And I…
My heart is another bird
And if it doesn’t sing it dies.

                     *

Oh sweet wind, the month of Tut,
The lock of summer is melted and gone.
Fly away over the roofs, my heart,
To the house without ivy or jasmine,
To the mother of the eyes 
The eyes with hard words and sad smiles
And say to her,
“Oh friend to those who wander
Your friend who has loved you 
year after year has returned.
And by life- a night of longing,
By dawn and those who cannot sleep
By morning and those who hope
By noon and those who sweat
By evening and those who are tired
By Maghreb- and what is it
But a punishment for madmen?
Do not abandon a friend
Who was never false
And never- though love was lost
Cried out-
And never said, “But I…”
May the earth and sky be my witness.”

And around the shanties and the hovels,
Heart,when you go
Don’t go as a nightingale or as a bat-
Go as what you are,
A heart
With a thousand eyes 
and a thousand ears
And a thousand thousand tongues.
Crawl on your belly on the pavement in the dust
And if it is the cowardly month of Tuba, the brutal,
Listen and see what rises in the wind,
Oh heart, oh million,
Say to those in the house of tin,
“Wake up!
Your lost friend returns.
Your friend who wandered too far, forgive him.
Oh you who live in a house of tin,
Come out, rejoice!
I am not Christ,
But I’ll tell you something,
And I swear it to you,
I swear to you-
The world is lie upon lie
And you alone are true.”

                             *

Sucked through the ribs
The heat of noon unbuttons my breast,
My breast, still full of sighs,
Sighs and clanging iron and songs.
Oh come Baramhat- Spring, perfume,
Greenness, sparrows, silkworm.
Come here and see me without a mask.
For after Amshir, the father of wind,
And Tuba, the father of frost,
You come Baramhat, you gem,
You father of sun,
And my heart
Doesn’t know how to whisper.

The Falcon

Amal Donqal
Go round, winged falcon, go round
The year passes and the end will come
And when my death comes
It comes around, like the ravenous falcon.

The Pyramid Texts

2500 B.C.

The sword of Orion opens the doors of the sky.
Before the doors close the gate to the path 
through the fire
Beneath the holy ones as they grow dark,
As the falcon flies as the falcon flies
May Unis rise into the fire
Beneath the holy ones as they grow dark.
They make a path for Unis.
Unis takes the path.
Unis becomes the falcon.

 

1200 B.C. (?)

The Song of the Harper

Death is before me today
Like the smell of myrrh
Like sitting under sails in the wind
Death is before me today
Like the smell of lilies 
Like sitting on the shore of a drunken land
Death is before me today

Invocation to a Scribe

If you learn this profession 
You will become a writer
Think of the writers of the past
Their names have become immortal
Even though they are dead
And their descendants are gone.
They didn’t make themselves tombs out of copper
With tombstones of iron from heaven
They didn’t think about leaving heirs
In order to perpetuate their names.
They made heirs out of books
They had written themselves.
People they will never know are their children
For a writer is a teacher to all.
Their houses are buried, 
their servants are gone,
Their graves are forgotten, 
But their names live on 
In the books they made
While they were alive.
Be a writer. Take this to heart.
And your name will be like theirs.
Writing is better than something made of stone
Than a solid tomb
For it lives in the heart.
A man decays,
His corpse is dust
His family dies,
But his books live on.

The Eastern Forest [Susan Brind Morrow]

 

The horns of a deer are still soft in September
An owls face is mostly ear

 

Fire in the trees at the end of winter
When red tongues of color run under their skin

 

The season of death begins with strokes of red
Its cold breath pours over the hill that swallowed the sun

 

Beeswax and fruit
And honey that tastes like raspberries thick with crystal in the comb
The full to bursting days of leaves on East Lake Road
A map of color in the fall between the fields and lake,
Sharp prickling smell of winter-
Pale blues, crushed powder snow,
The early green of winter wheat
In upturned earth; and summer’s riches
Seaweed and fish slime and stones baked on the shore,
And wreathes of rainbowed gasoline that flow
Under the dock where the carp spawn at night
In the shallow water-
The good things about Geneva
Almost make me forget its gloom,
And how my heart was broken there-
Torn into a blossoming wound,
The rose grows out of the wound

                                *

Unsheathed deer gut by the stream
A black living rust licks it down to the soft stones
Soaked in green light.
A leopard frog froze in the water last night

 

Dozens of snails in rose translucent shells
And yellow
Plastered like closing flowers on the dead stems of reeds

Now in cinders
Cedar has leaves 
Like the skin of a salamander

 

Her hair was like the fur of a winter animal
And her hands were webbed like stars

 

Scraps of color in the forest
the head of the red-bellied woodpecker
satin against the dead wood

 

She made a pillow out of the dress
Dragonflies settled around it with a light papery scratch
Throbbing salamander bodies- and glossy prismed eyes
Funny how insects prefer certain colors

 

And beyond them the mirrory river
Full of forming stars

 

Soft as a newborn, milk fed fawn
Left in the woods by its horned mother and afraid

 

Black vultures shadowing each other around the white rock

 

Pale blue bone white days of winter
When the sun is warm and the wind is bitter

 

David found a luna moth- or had my mother found it for him
Pressed against the screen door of the kitchen, a left-over from the night.
It’s huge delicate wings were the most deliciously cool shade of green I had ever seen,
Such a fine unusual shade of green I could taste it in my mouth,
Feel it’s delicate tissue on the tips of my fingers.
How could I draw such a rare color into myself?
I could only do this, taste and feel the color, as I looked at the moth

 

Clouds closed the sky like a fist

 

The silver light has retreated onto the branch tips, silvering now only the shells of the trees.
It is November. The air is cold, and there is still a burning color to things
The red squirrels are whistling in the maples by the road.

 

On the dry stoney side of the creekbed in spring were efts the color of cinnabar flecked with gold, their eyed skin as soft as wet sand. The solitary stalk of a cardinal flower, its rare deep red the true scarlet of nature, would stand in the fresh green light of the wet wood like a hidden flag.

 

Would oh would I were a kingfisher
That flies among the halcyons
Along the breaking waves, 
With a fearless heart, that holy bird
The deep blue of the sea

Kingfisher detail, Nelson Shanks

-- Alcman; Susan Brind Morrow trans.

Dante, Near and Far [by Robert P. Baird]

There is much strange in La Vita Nuova, the libello or “little book” that Dante composed fifteen or so years before starting in on the Divine Comedy. Take, for starters, the form of the book, an alternation of prose and poetry that produces effects as dizzying as any in Williams's Spring and All. Or take the central narrative, which describes a love—young Dante’s, for the slightly younger Beatrice—so intense that it causes the poet to faint in public and forces him, poor lad, to write lying love poems to the donne dello schermo, the “screen ladies” he uses to hide the real object of his affection. Take even Beatrice herself, who begins the book as a girl in a girdled dress only to reveal herself not long after as a miracle made flesh.

All of this is strange for us to read, or should be, even if, grinning behind our commentaries, we spot in the donna dello schermo an unacknowledged ancestor of the celebrity beard. After all, when Dante says that Beatrice is a miracle, he isn’t indulging mere hyperbole, the way Roxette did in that song I remember too well from seventh grade. Nor does he mean it less merely in the manner of an established trope, as John Donne did at the end of “The Relic.” Uniquely for the time and all but blasphemously, Dante meant that his beloved’s appearance on earth was a miracle that repeated (and maybe even competed with) Christ’s Incarnation itself. In the young poet’s eyes, Beatrice was the agent of his religious salvation and the summit of all Creation, the radiant filament that binds together heaven and earth. 

Dante’s strangeness, his distance from us in time and cultural space, is the reason Eugenio Montale took T.S. Eliot gently to task for suggesting that the Commedia was “extremely easy to read…for a foreigner who does not know Italian very well.” It’s not that Montale felt any need to defend the reluctant intricacies of his native tongue. His point was to insist that “Dante is not a modern poet…and that the instruments of modern culture are not ideally suited to understanding him.”

And yet even if we accept Montale’s reminder as well warranted, and I do, I don’t think it’s careless or unfair to say that there are times when Dante can feel close to us, “strangely close,” as Montale admitted. Graduate school is far enough behind me that I won’t bother you with theories of transhistorical subjective affiliation. My effort here is only to point out, a little like a finger before the moon, a single small moment that I love in the Vita Nuova.

The moment I mean happens early in the libello. At the start of the third chapter, Dante is describing his second encounter with Beatrice. (The first occurred nine years earlier.) The meeting is brief and profound: eighteen-year-old Dante sees Beatrice in the street, she waves hello, and her greeting causes the young poet so much giddy distress that he decides he can only go home and put himself to bed. 

That night Dante has a dream, and—perhaps predictably, dreams being dreams—this is where things get weird. In his sleep the poet sees uno segnore di pauroso aspetto emerge from a fiery cloud. Despite his fearful aspect the lord is happy, very possibly because he is carrying in his arms a naked woman asleep beneath a crimson drape. After Dante realizes that the woman is Beatrice, the lord holds up a burning object and tells the dreaming poet, in Latin, Behold your heart. At that moment the lord wakes Beatrice and starts to force-feed her Dante’s flaming heart. With understandable reluctance, Beatrice eats the thing until the lord’s happiness mysteriously turns to grief and he carries her away, presumably to heaven. 

As I said: weird. 

It was weird for Dante, too. So weird, he tells us, that he woke immediately afterward and decided to write a sonnet about what he saw. Not only did he write a sonnet but he told his readers, in the poem's second and third lines, that “these words I have composed are sent for your elucidation in reply.” And not only did Dante include this request (which I like to think of as the thirteenth-century equivalent of a self-addressed stamped envelope) he also decided to send the sonnet to molti li quali erano famosi trovatori in quello tempo, “many of the famous poets of that time.”

And here, finally, we get to the moment I love, the slender moon my finger’s been wagging after all this time. Here we see Dante—newly a poet, desperately in love—appealing to the judgment of his literary betters. Ostensibly, of course, the point was to ask about the dream, but who could doubt that what Dante really wanted was a judgment on his poem? What writer, what person of any ambition whatsoever, can’t remember that feeling of wanting to know—wanting to test—the quality of her nascent talent? 

It’s in this way that Dante comes to occupy, in my mind, anyway, the head of a secret history of such events, the benedictions or baptisms that link one poetic generation to the next. This is the history in which a young Walter Whitman sends Ralph Waldo Emerson an unsigned and unattributed copy of Leaves of Grass. This is Emily Dickinson asking T. W. Higginson, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?” This is Paul Muldoon sending Seamus Heaney a sheaf of poems topped with the question “What's wrong with these?” (“Nothing,” the older poet responded, or so the story goes.) 

Among those who responded to Dante, the Vita Nuova acknowledges only Guido Cavalcanti, whose response “Vedeste, al mio parere, onne valore” marked the start of the poets’ friendship. On the reading of his future primo amico, Dante’s dream was a vision of “all value, every joy and goodness that one can feel.” Cavalcanti suggests that the lord “who rules the world of honor” wanted to bring Beatrice back from near-death with the flaming food of Dante’s love.

It’s no surprise that Dante would choose this response to quote in his Vita Nuova, even while he would insist, as well, that “the true meaning of the dream I described was not perceived by anyone then.” As scholars have argued, Cavalcanti’s interpretation of the dream, while not strictly coincident with Dante’s own, was nevertheless close enough to buttress the latter’s dramatic sense of his love’s significance. 

Not all of Dante’s respondents, however, were so encouraging. Of the three reply-sonnets that survive, one, by the Tuscan poet Dante da Maiano, is about as far from Cavalcanti in spirit and tone as we can imagine. In so many words da Maiano tells Dante that it’s simple love-sickness that’s got him bothered, and probably bad hygiene besides. If Dante really wants to heal himself he needs to get rid of the noxious vapors infecting his brain. And the only way to do that, da Maiano says, smirking down the centuries, is for the young poet to go and give his testicles a good washing.

Here, too, we get the chance to meet Dante at his most queasily familiar: not as a prodigy reveling in the warm validation of his peers, but as a callow poetaster hearing harsh words from a poet he respects. It’s probably too easy to admire da Maiano’s sonnet for its precocious snark, but I appreciate his poem even more for the rare gift it affords: the chance for once to meet Dante outside the glare of his own genius.

"Fairy Tale" [by Robert Desnos]

Fairy Tale

Once upon many a time
A man loved a woman
A woman loved a man
A man and a woman
Didn’t love
The ones who loved them
Once upon many a time.

Once and maybe only once
A man and a woman
Loved each other.

-– Robert Desnos (1900-1945)
(trans. from the French by David Lehman)

from the archive; first posted February 13, 2009

Nomads [poem by Charles Baudelaire tr. Sandra Simonds]

Portrait of a 23-year-old Baudelaire, painted in 1844 by Émile Deroy (1820–1846)

Nomads

A tribe of prophets
moves through the mist
carrying a bit of money
and little kids on their backs,
kids with enormous appetites.
The men are barefoot, Felix,
just like me and their weapons
are long, just like mine.
The mist pulls their wagons
as they pass me, singing,
breaking the desert stones
open with their notes.
They move beyond
the stones full of water.
Our futures, so familiar.

 

Sandra Simonds is the author of eight books books of poetry, most recently: Triptychs (forthcoming Wave Books, November 2022), Atopia (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), Orlando, (Wave Books, 2018), and Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize, 2009). Her poems and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Best American Poetry, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is an Associate professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia. Find out more about Sandra here. 

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was a French poet, essayist, art critic, and translator of Edgar Allan Poe.

The Enemy (L'Ennemi) by Charles Baudelaire [trans. Sandra Simonds]

The Enemy 

My youth was so full of rage
that only the most brilliant of suns
could puncture it. Thunder and rain
ravaged me until my garden filled
with venom. But now my mind
has come to the autumn of its ideas
and one must rearrange this earth
with a shovel and rake. Flowers
are holes as big as graves. What are
these new futures I dream of?
Futures that burst from a soil
of grief. What mystical alignment
gives them such vigor?
Oh, sweet things! Time is a strange
enemy that gnaws at my heart.
It is blood and blood
alone that fortifies it.

Sandra Simonds is the author of eight books books of poetry, most recently : Triptychs (forthcoming Wave Books, November 2022), Atopia (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), Orlando, (Wave Books, 2018), and Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize, 2009). Her poems and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Best American Poetry, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is an Associate professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia. Find out more about Sandra here. 

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was a French poet, essayist, art critic, and translator of Edgar Allan Poe.

Alexey Tsvetkov: In Memoriam [by Andrey Gritsman]

“I am here together with myself and alone”

The great Russian poet Alexey Tsvetkov just passed away (February 1947- May 12, 2022).

He is a world-class poet, a world poet who happened to write in Russian.

Tsvetkov created his own poetic language, unrepeatable, addictive. Once started, a poem or a book could not be put down. One read to the end possessed by its magic. His incredible play, not of words, but of thoughts and images, bewitched the reader, as did his humor.

Alexey told us: whenever I write, I always write about death. The poet puts what’s created along with what is unsayable into metaphorical form. That is the power of poetry by Tsvetkov: he always writes about what is most important, what is deepest and darkest, presented metaphorically with an amazing mastery of words and meanings. His style of recital  I would characterize as toreutic, precise, cadential, and, on the other hand, paradoxically close to a natural speech, personal verbal communication.

Born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, formerly the Austro-Hungarian empire, Tsvetkov was educated in Odessa and Moscow. In Moscow together with other famous poets (Soprovsky, Gandlevsky, Kenzheev) he founded legendary underground poetry group Moscow Time. He emigrated to USA in 1975 after his arrest in Moscow and forced move to the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhya. He was awarded PhD degree in Slavic Studies from University of Michigan. 

Tsvetkov spent many years in Europe working as a journalist for the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe (Munich and Prague, 1989-2004). He anchored the RFE/RL Russian Service programs The Seventh Continent and The Atlantic Diary.  He lived his last years in New York City among his poet friends. Supporting himself as a freelance journalist and essayist, he produced a large body of original, unique and very popular poetry. He read his poems at the Cornelia Street Café, Russian Samovar, Columbia University and other venues. In 2018 he moved to Israel, where he died.

Tsvetkov was an individual of very broad erudition, rough on the surface, very kind, with stunning sharp sense of humor. His poems in English are most unusual:  cadential, almost syllabo-tonic, very tight. But it looked very natural - the same poet, writing in a different language.

He was the author of ten books of poetry and translated Shakespeare’s Hamlet. His heritage will be studied and it will take a long time to look into layers of Tsvetkov’s art and thought.

Alexey Tsvetkov

the quiet ones

in a recurring dream i find myself
stuck in a tiny town a green and neat
affair the locals scarce and studiously silent
for the most part avoid me and stay indoors
although i dwell among them i assume
myself to be a thing apart the town
is strangely shorn of outskirts there's a river
flowing from north to south and the main street
cutting across with a bridge in the middle
yet both are terminated in oblivion

beset by this conundrum i've come up
with a hypothesis perhaps the locals
are candidates to be born on earth that never
made up their minds about the matter shaped
in human form already but afraid
to take the plunge hedging their bets and this
is what the actual limbo is like the river
forever runs on the road likewise but both
resolve themselves into the void the locals
would find it pointless to wake up their green
and tidy town remains the same no matter
whichever side of the retina it's on
the quiet ones within their silent walls
what do they want of us they share no subject
with us to serve them as a starting point
for striking up a palaver

it looks
like a half-way house perhaps a railway station
but with the waiting crowd resigned to the tracks
having been dismantled so that no train will ever
stop here they look alive but never having
been actually exiled to our vale of grief
there is no way for them to share our joy
the only thing they envy us in earnest
is death denied to the unborn it is
a mystery for them and a temptation
and i remaining stubbornly asleep
fall into a confusion like a rabbit
teasing a python on the eve of being
consumed by the above and peeking under
death's skirts then part of me awakens i
recall the other's name but hush it up

 

Andrey Gritsman

In Memory of Alexey Tsvetkov

What can be said about unsayable?
Poet departs with all his belongings.
To say nothing: it is unbearable.
On tree of life - invisible markings.

His airborne light verbs, evasive,
Escapable, straight and relentless.
Who knows what one is capable
Of, while alive and restless.

What is left now: only new language
Speaking in tongues, and no sound.
He rests in peace, his last message
Only by those can be found

Only by those, who departed
Crossing the line into darkness
Keeping belongings in heart and
Calling him: the answer is silence.

"Gift Means Poison in German" [by David Lehman]

And poisson means fish in French.
Therefore, on my first trip to Paris,
reading a menu I recalled
my cousin, now a fashionable designer,
then a survivor of Dachau, twelve years old,
a week after arrival in New York City
when Truman was President. I thought
of what she must have thought when,
for the first time, she rode on the Broadway bus
and passed one gift shop after another.

Poison itself is a funny word, a gift horse
given by deceitful Greeks: look in its mouth
and see: it sounds what it says, it seems.
For example, five years ago I walked
into the Jolly Corner grocery store
which no longer stands on 75th Street
and Columbus Avenue. A man and his wife,
ahead of me in line, were buying Camels
for him and Winstons for her when
a display case of brightly packaged junk food
next to the cash register caught his eye.
His wife said, in a tone it would take a gifted actress
years to perfect, “That stuff is poison!”
and then she stalked out of the store as though,
perhaps, the ongoing argument that defined their marriage
had taken a new, subtle turn. Tilting his head
toward the door, the man behind the counter
faced the abandoned husband and said,
“She’s poison.” He said it as if he knew
and by god I thought he did: very possibly both of them
were right, I decided: and wondered what the husband
was thinking, who had suffered in silence
this perfect stranger to insult his wife.

David Lehman

David Lehman is the author of numerous collections of poetry including New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2013), When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005), and The Daily Mirror (Scribner, 2000). His latest book is Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World (HarperCollins, 2015). He is the series editor of Best American Poetry and edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry. He received the Deems Taylor Award from ASCAP for A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Schocken, 2009). He teaches in the New School graduate writing program. 

from Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 1983. Posted by VQR,  December 12, 2003. Poem appears in Lehman's first book, An Alternative to Speech (1986).

"That grand old Irish / Italian tradition" [by Moira Egan]

One of the great things about being an American poet who happens to live in Rome is the proximity to the American Academy in Rome. In recent years, things have become even better for us poetry-loving Romans, thanks to AAR trustee William B. Hart, who endowed an eponymous Residency for a senior poet to join the community at the Academy. 

Karl Kirchwey, poet, professor, and, for these past three years, Heiskell Arts Director at the AAR, has provided some wonderful programming in conjunction with the poets' visits (a remembrance of Brodsky, readings and seminars on and in translation [Italian/English and Polish/English], and the fascinating facets and various reworkings of the Ovidian oeuvre, for example). 

Poets who have been lured to Rome by this fellowship include Jorie Graham, Derek Walcott, Robert Hass, and, most recently, Seamus Heaney. And you can well imagine the thrill that passed through the DNA of this Irish lass when it was announced that Mr. Heaney would be the Hart Poet in Residence for 2013! 

 

I was able to attend two of Heaney's readings, one down at the Casa delle Letturature in the centro, and one up at the Academy. I still get a wee thrill hearing poems I love and have taught when they are read in the poet's own voice, in person. (And yes, I'm thinking here in an Irish accent.) "Digging" was particularly lovely to hear, because it reminds me of the epiphanic gleam that occurs in some students' eyes when they first "get" the idea of metaphor through this poem. Other Greatest Heaney Hits included "Oysters," "The Haw Lantern," and his own take on Dante's Ugolino. To the delight of quite a few audience members, he read "The Skunk," billed on the interwebs as "a very sexy poem." 

He also read his sestina, "Two Lorries," which, not surprisingly, got my translating husband to thinking about translating it. So we did. (Mostly he did, this time; I was still grading.) 

Think about this when you think about translating a sestina. We are so spoiled by the flexibility that we have in English. One aspect of this is how many words remain the same, even when they're being used as different parts of speech: play, work, love. In Italian (and other languages too, of course) a noun is a noun and a verb is a verb -- which must also be conjugated. Yikes. 

Here you can listen to "Two Lorries" in English, read by Seamus Heaney. 

And here it is in Italian, version by Damiano Abeni. You will notice an interesting sestina cheat, which I think works well. Enjoy!

Seamus Heaney

DUE CAMION

Piove sul carbone nero e sulla calda, umida cenere.
Nel cortile tracce di gomme: il vecchio camion
ha le sponde abbassate e Agnew il carbonaio
col suo accento di Belfast fa la corte a mia madre.
Le andrebbe di vedere un film a Magherafelt?
Ma piove e lui ha ancora metà del carbone
da consegnare. Stavolta era nero-seta il filone
da cui hanno estratto il nostro carbone, così la cenere
sarà del bianco più sericeo. L’autobus per Magherafelt
(via Toomebridge) passa. Così mezzo vuoto, il camion
coi sacchi flosci, ripiegati, commuove mia madre:
amabili i modi, con quel suo grembiale di cuoio, del carbonaio!
Ma un film nientemeno! Presuntuoso d’un carbonaio …
Rientra e prende la carta smeriglio e lo spazzolone
con la grafite per lucidare la stufa questa madre
degli anni quaranta, e tenta di togliersi la cenere
col dorso della mano da una guancia, mentre il camion
richiuso fa manovra, riparte verso Magherafelt
per l’ultima consegna. Oh, Magherafelt!
Oh, sogno di velluti rossi e di un carbonaio
di città mentre il tempo scatta in avanti e un altro camion
romba feroce, lungo Broad Street, verso un’esplosione
che ridurrà la stazione degli autobus in polvere e cenere …
Dopo il disastro, mi comparve in visione mia madre,
morta-vivente sulla panchina dove la solevo incontrare
nella sala d’aspetto dal pavimento gelato a Magherafelt,
con le borse della spesa colme di palate di cenere.
La morte le passò accanto col volto di polvere come un carbonaio
che ripiega i sacchi dei cadaveri, impila con passione
vuoto su vuoto, in un tourbillon
di pulviscolo e rombi di motore, ma che camion
era adesso? Quello di Andrew o quello che, morta mia madre,
più pesante, più letale, doveva causare l’esplosione
in un tempo oltre il suo tempo a Magherafelt …
E allora conta i sacchi e fa’ la corte al buio, carbonaio,
ascolta la pioggia che schizza su nuova cenere
mentre sollevi il carico di polvere di carbone che fu Magherafelt,
poi ricompari da dietro il camion nei panni del carbonaio
da sogno di mia madre, sotto una pellicola bianco-sericea di cenere.

PS My first-ever birthday gift to Damiano was a copy of Heaney's New Selected Poems 1966-87. I was on a fellowship in Malta and English-language poetry books were few and far between. I felt lucky to have found it. Now it's an even nicer memory, signed by the author as well!

 

from the archive; first posted May 22,2013

One of the great things about being an American poet who happens to live in Rome is the proximity to the American Academy in Rome. In recent years, things have become even better for us poetry-loving Romans, thanks to AAR trustee William B. Hart, who endowed an eponymous Residency for a senior poet to join the community at the Academy. 

Karl Kirchwey, poet, professor, and, for these past three years, Heiskell Arts Director at the AAR, has provided some wonderful programming in conjunction with the poets' visits (a remembrance of Brodsky, readings and seminars on and in translation [Italian/English and Polish/English], and the fascinating facets and various reworkings of the Ovidian oeuvre, for example). 

Poets who have been lured to Rome by this fellowship include Jorie Graham, Derek Walcott, Robert Hass, and, most recently, Seamus Heaney. And you can well imagine the thrill that passed through the DNA of this Irish lass when it was announced that Mr. Heaney would be the Hart Poet in Residence for 2013! 

 

I was able to attend two of Heaney's readings, one down at the Casa delle Letturature in the centro, and one up at the Academy. I still get a wee thrill hearing poems I love and have taught when they are read in the poet's own voice, in person. (And yes, I'm thinking here in an Irish accent.) "Digging" was particularly lovely to hear, because it reminds me of the epiphanic gleam that occurs in some students' eyes when they first "get" the idea of metaphor through this poem. Other Greatest Heaney Hits included "Oysters," "The Haw Lantern," and his own take on Dante's Ugolino. To the delight of quite a few audience members, he read "The Skunk," billed on the interwebs as "a very sexy poem." 

He also read his sestina, "Two Lorries," which, not surprisingly, got my translating husband to thinking about translating it. So we did. (Mostly he did, this time; I was still grading.) 

Think about this when you think about translating a sestina. We are so spoiled by the flexibility that we have in English. One aspect of this is how many words remain the same, even when they're being used as different parts of speech: play, work, love. In Italian (and other languages too, of course) a noun is a noun and a verb is a verb -- which must also be conjugated. Yikes. 

Here you can listen to "Two Lorries" in English, read by Seamus Heaney. 

And here it is in Italian, version by Damiano Abeni. You will notice an interesting sestina cheat, which I think works well. Enjoy!

Seamus Heaney

DUE CAMION

Piove sul carbone nero e sulla calda, umida cenere.
Nel cortile tracce di gomme: il vecchio camion
ha le sponde abbassate e Agnew il carbonaio
col suo accento di Belfast fa la corte a mia madre.
Le andrebbe di vedere un film a Magherafelt?
Ma piove e lui ha ancora metà del carbone
da consegnare. Stavolta era nero-seta il filone
da cui hanno estratto il nostro carbone, così la cenere
sarà del bianco più sericeo. L’autobus per Magherafelt
(via Toomebridge) passa. Così mezzo vuoto, il camion
coi sacchi flosci, ripiegati, commuove mia madre:
amabili i modi, con quel suo grembiale di cuoio, del carbonaio!
Ma un film nientemeno! Presuntuoso d’un carbonaio …
Rientra e prende la carta smeriglio e lo spazzolone
con la grafite per lucidare la stufa questa madre
degli anni quaranta, e tenta di togliersi la cenere
col dorso della mano da una guancia, mentre il camion
richiuso fa manovra, riparte verso Magherafelt
per l’ultima consegna. Oh, Magherafelt!
Oh, sogno di velluti rossi e di un carbonaio
di città mentre il tempo scatta in avanti e un altro camion
romba feroce, lungo Broad Street, verso un’esplosione
che ridurrà la stazione degli autobus in polvere e cenere …
Dopo il disastro, mi comparve in visione mia madre,
morta-vivente sulla panchina dove la solevo incontrare
nella sala d’aspetto dal pavimento gelato a Magherafelt,
con le borse della spesa colme di palate di cenere.
La morte le passò accanto col volto di polvere come un carbonaio
che ripiega i sacchi dei cadaveri, impila con passione
vuoto su vuoto, in un tourbillon
di pulviscolo e rombi di motore, ma che camion
era adesso? Quello di Andrew o quello che, morta mia madre,
più pesante, più letale, doveva causare l’esplosione
in un tempo oltre il suo tempo a Magherafelt …
E allora conta i sacchi e fa’ la corte al buio, carbonaio,
ascolta la pioggia che schizza su nuova cenere
mentre sollevi il carico di polvere di carbone che fu Magherafelt,
poi ricompari da dietro il camion nei panni del carbonaio
da sogno di mia madre, sotto una pellicola bianco-sericea di cenere.

PS My first-ever birthday gift to Damiano was a copy of Heaney's New Selected Poems 1966-87. I was on a fellowship in Malta and English-language poetry books were few and far between. I felt lucky to have found it. Now it's an even nicer memory, signed by the author as well!

 

from the archive; first posted May 22,2013

"And I will know each trembling of a leaf": John Ashbery's Translations from the French [by David Lehman]

Just as the sheer quantity of John Ashbery's literary criticism surprised even the poet's fans (see his Selected Prose, 2007), so too the poet's translations from the French: they fill two volumes, one devoted to prose, the other to verse. Farrar Straus and Giroux will publish in April. Edited meticulously by Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie, the books are rich in the enthusiasms of a maverick sensibility who did more than anyone else to put certain important French ecrivains -- Raymond Roussel, for instance -- on the map.

Ashbery spent ten formative years in France, mostly in Paris, having won a Fulbright in 1955. The critics, always quick to categorize, relegated him to a category as flexible as it is ill-defined: surrealism. And if there were a literary house of lords, surely he would be dubbed Sir Realist and be seated in the front row of the opposition party. He did in fact translate important works by Paul Eluard and Andre Breton, including such of their collaborations  as  "Le Jugement original," one of the highlights of the brilliant "collaborations" issue of Locus Solus #2, which Kenneth Koch put together. "The Original Judgment" is like William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell," only more so: "Let the dreams you have forgotten equal the value of what you do not know." "Adjust your gait to that of the storms." "Never wait for yourself." "You have nothing to do before dying.'

But Ashbery was always less interested in surrealism proper, if that is not an oxymoron, than in "hybrid" poets who deviated from the dads of dogma. I love his translations of Max Jacob's prose poems and believe that Le Cornet a des (The Dice-Cup) would garner deserved accolades if presented as a separate volume as Ashbery's versions of Rimbaud's Illuminations were a couple of seasons back.

Ashbery has a special feeling for Pierre Reverdy [left], whose poems were in Frank O'Hara's pocket on the day he spent his lunch hour walking elegiacally in midtown with Jackson Pollock's recent death on his brain ("A Step Away from Them"). Reverdy's poems have since found their way into a lot of other pockets, perhaps because in his leaps and enigmas he seems so pure an example of the French poetic sensibility that recommended itself so strongly to midcentury Americans eager to stray as far from the Eliotic throne room as they could. Ashbery's versions of Reverdy's prose poems (such as "Heavier," "From Another Shore") and verse ("Surprise," "That Memory") make the ideal introduction to this unusually compelling poet. Reverdy's lines seem able to detach themselves from the whole. Or rather the whole of a Reverdy poem consists of lines that arrive from different points of origin and coalesce as mysteriously as a drop of water:

The stars came out of the water
A ship passed flying low
              A bird
The line at the horizon from which the current was coming
The waves laughed as they died
Everything continues
No one knows where time will stop
              Or night

I have barely touched upon the treasures in the poetry volume of Ashbery's Collected French Translations and I have not even mentioned the highlights of the accompanying book of prose.

The introductory essay by Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie, with invaluable information, biographical as well as bibliographical, appears in The Massachusetts Review (Winter 2013) with an admirable Ashbery collage ("Corona" from 2011) on the cover and with his translations of poems by Pascalle Monnier and Yves Bonnefoy.

from the archive; first posted February 24, 2014. Photo credit (Ashbery pic): Star Black

Interview with Tzimon Barto: Languages, Poetry and Education [by Lera Auerbach]

 I am always fascinated by people who are masters of more than one profession.  I interviewed Tzimon Barto for the Best American Poetry blog. His passions and knowledge run deep. Tzimon Barto speaks seven languages fluently, reads ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew; his love of poetry is contagious, his ideas about education are inspiring.

      

For a taste of Barto's music-making here he is performing Mozart's Rondo for Piano and Orchestra in A major with the SWR Symphonieorchester and Christoph Eschenbach.

 

Reading Milosz with Robert Hass [by Mindy Aloff]

“Reading Miłosz: The Short Course”

Six winter 2022 Thursdays to consider the poetry of Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004), Lithuanian-born poet, novelist, lawyer, diplomat, Berkeley professor of Slavic languages, and Nobelist.

Guide: Robert Hass, poet, teacher, Poet Laureate of the United States (1995-1997), and one of the translators of Miłosz’s poetry into English.

Host: Jesse Nathan, poet, Berkeley lecturer in English, and interlocutor for Robert Hass’s Paris Review interview (“The Art of Poetry” 108, Issue 233, Summer 2020).

 Class I: Thursday, 20 January

Nearly two hundred impressively well-read souls, from locations as far-flung as Taiwan, Oaxaca, and Australia, signed up to take this unusual online course: A survey of English translations for a single poet, the native Polish speaker Czesław Miłosz (one of the world’s most revered poets of the twentieth century) under the tutelage of Robert Hass, a Bay-Area neighbor and friend of Miłosz’s who eventually served his fellow poet as a translator. The Community of Writers developed the course and administers it

It was a coup to enlist  Bob Hass as the class's Virgil, because it was Bob, himself a brilliant poet, who may have done more than anyone else to make Milosz's poetry accessible to English-speaking readers. Working closely with Milosz, Hass translated the verse of the older poet despite his own lack of Polish beyond a battered copy of McLaughlin’s Polish-English dictionary, excursions into Google, and occasional Mayday calls to Polish-speaking colleagues. Periodically humbled by Miłosz’s ironclad preferences for a different approach, the American poet's ego had to muster its capacity for resilience.

Czesław Miłosz: New and Collected Poems 1931—2001 (Ecco) is the course's point of departure for extended reports of such disputes as over whether the narrating I is waiting “peacefully” or “quietly,” disputes that, in Bob’s accounts of them, sound as if they were never less than courteous yet also never less than everything. As Robert Pinsky, working on one of the translations with Bob, put it, the problem with the translation at hand was that, in English, “cabbage” and “grass” don’t rhyme.

Since most of the students would not be able to read the poems in the original Polish, the subjects of discussion are the poems of Czesław Miłosz as filtered through the voices of Hass, Pinsky, and other translators, as well as the English voice of Miłosz. Bob provides personal backstories and he and Jesse Nathan fill in aspects of Miłosz’s biography and of Polish history. Along the way, Bob drops hints as to the formal elements of the poems in Polish: Are the stanzas rhymed? Metered? Are the three-liners related to Dante’s terza rima? Apparently, Miłosz took a dim view of analyzing poetry for its inherited forms. As Bob puts it, “He says form in poetry is like refrigeration—meant to preserve bad meat.” I suppose the fact that a poet with this attitude toward form still managed to produce poetry that never sounds disorganized is part of the proof of his innate magic. And I suppose the fact that the odd Miłosz line can strike some as “Sexist!" just goes to show that even the steeds of Apollo can stumble sometimes. The line in question is the last of this stanza, from “Dedication,” a poem written in the winter of 1945.  The stanza is introduced by two of the most cherished lines in the Miłosz treasury, lines that elevated him on the Starlight Express directly to Olympus:

“What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.”

Before anyone gets hot under the collar about the sophomore girls, you might want to secure a hazmat suit to read the little cantata “The Song,” written in 1934, when Miłosz was barely twenty-three. “The Song” dramatizes humanity, represented by a figure called “Woman,” as remembering her lesbian “Nights of love” with the Earth, her “tranquil sister,” whose “burning touch” can still be felt, and from whose “greedy mouth” the Woman cries to God to “have mercy. . .deliver me, / cleanse me of her untrue songs.”

If you detect a religious note here (and I am among those who do), it might be helpful to know that, as Bob observed, both he and Miłosz were imbued from childhood with the catechism of the Catholic Church, in which they were reared. As a Jew, I probably miss a lot of nuance in their poetry; still, I associate the catechism with an adherent’s pursuit of spiritual perfection and, at times, a sense of great sadness, even, perhaps, guilt, when perfection cannot be found in one’s being. I feel the search—and the lament—quite strongly in the poems of Miłosz. Here, in “The Song,” it is an abstract quality: “Oh, if there were in me one seed without rust, / no more than one grain that could perdure / I could sleep in the cradle leaning by turns/ now into darkness, now into the break of day.”

In a poem from Warsaw, in 1943—when, as Bob related, Miłosz and his friends stood on a balcony, in a beautiful, sweet-scented night, when flowering plants made it feel good to be alive, yet when the air was rent and seared by the screams of thousands of Jews being slaughtered in the ghetto by the Nazis—the poet creates “a guardian mole [who] makes his way, / With a small red lamp fastened to his forehead.” He goes on to make an aristocratic inventory of the unnameable:

“He touches buried bodies, counts them, pushes on,
He distinguishes human ashes by their luminous vapor,
The ashes of each man by a different part of the spectrum. . . .”

The poem concludes with a lament worthy of Jeremiah:

“What will I tell him, I, a Jew of the New Testament,
Waiting two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus?
My broken body will deliver me to his sight
And he will count me among the helpers of death:
The uncircumcised.”

Miłosz liked to compare his upbringing among the landed gentry of a rural place to the characters in the novels of Thomas Hardy. I’m not familiar with any comparison he made between the melancholy, even desolation in those characters and the burden that history thrust into the poet’s being, eventuating in a tone of existential despair and a vision continually rippling with premonitions that frequently turned out to be accurate. Yet the search for a perfection, a holistic innocence, that can be found only in early childhood, seems to me to ghost these early poems and, in certain attitudes of reading, to render them sacred.  

*

The Community of Writers, a California institution that is based in a valley in the Sierras renowned for its skiing, brings like-minded individuals together to discuss the whys and wherefores of various genres of writing, among them the usual suspects (poetry, fiction, playwriting) and a few exotics (The Art of the Wild, Writing the Medical Experience). In a triumph of Nature worship at its most imaginative, the Community ordinarily puts on its annual omnium-gatherum of programs in this famous ice palace of the Wild during the summer.  In 2022, because of the pandemic, the wordsmiths were finally able to celebrate their somewhat delayed half century of bonding over baseball games, lakeside dips, and impassioned debate by going rogue, with a program that is, if you’ll excuse the expression in this context, literally virtual -- as well as virtuous.

–Mindy Aloff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"RENE CHAR : Isle-Sur-Sorgue" [by Geoffrey Young]

It was early July, 1970, and we were at Le Chateau d’Lignane, guests of the Boutié family in Aix-en-Provence. Laura had spent a month with them when she was sixteen. The house had an all but empty long room, not part of the house, really, with a curved ceiling. All it had in it were a few tables and chairs. We worked there during the ten days we stayed with them. I can still hear the sound of my flute echoing in that monastic chamber.

We knew that René Char [pictured left] lived in a town not far from Aix. One day we drove to Isle-Sur-Sorgue, found his house, entered the yard, and parked. I’d been translating his poetry for the past year and wanted to see the landscape around his place--the river, the stones, the low hills, the bridge--and to meet him if possible, even without a letter of introduction.

Quietly, we walked around the yard looking at things, trying to get up the courage to knock on his front door. We noticed a marble slab lying on a patch of grass, with a line from his poetry carved into it.  “L’aigle est au futur.” My god, we thought, it’s his headstone! Did he die? But then we saw other slabs, planted here and there, memorable lines culled from his poems.

Three steps lead up to the front door, the house a dull-white two-story stucco with red trim. When we finally knocked, hoping to meet him, his housekeeper answered. I told her that I’d been translating the poet’s work into English, and hoped to meet him. She said, with kind regret, “Il garde son privé.”

We wondered if he was inside, peeking out of an upstairs window at two young Americans, uninvited, poking around his property with shameless audacity.

Nothing to do but get back in the car and drive away, disappointed, but armed now with the inscription on that stone: “L'AIGLE EST AU FUTUR.” Was it a prophecy? A projection? Symbolic or natural?

If “the eagle is in the future,” what did it mean?

Geoffrey Young has lived in Great Barrington, Massachusetts since 1982. From 1992 til 2018 he presented hundreds of shows of contemporary art at the Geoffrey Young Gallery. His small press, The Figures (1975-2005), published more than 135 books of poetry, art writing, and fiction. Recent chapbooks of his poetry, prose and colored pencil drawings include Thirty-Three (above/ground press, 2017), DATES, ASIDES, and PIVOT. Young has written catalog essays for a baker’s dozen of artists.

 

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

How Rich

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grammar is an etymological variant of glamour. . .

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

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

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

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

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

How rich
how hard
do I
draw war

How rich
how rad
oh dice
or cad

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

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

And what if

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

Perils of the Poetry Reading [by Katha Pollitt]

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

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

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

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

POETRY READING

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

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

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

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

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

from the archive; first posted August 19, 2009

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

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

POETRY READING

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

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

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

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

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

from the archive; first posted August 19, 2009

An Interview with Rachel Hadas [by Aspen Matis]

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

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

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

Photo credit: Shalom Gorewitz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(From A New Orthography, by Serhiy Zhadan)

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

+

A friend of mine volunteered.

He came back six months later.

Who knows where he was.

He won’t say what he’s afraid of.

But he’s afraid of something.

Sometimes it seems

he’s afraid of everything.

 

He left a normal person.

But he talked too much.

About everything in this world.

About everything he came across.

 

And he came back

completely changed, as if

someone took his old tongue

and didn’t leave him a new one.

 

So he sits in his bed every day

and listens to the demons in his head.

 

The first demon is ferocious,

he pours out white heat, demands

punishment for all the living.

The second demon is submissive,

talks about forgiveness,

speaks quietly,

touches his heart with hands

covered in black soil.

 

But the worst is the third demon.

He agrees with the other two.

He agrees, doesn’t object.

 

As soon as he speaks

the headaches begin.  

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+ + +

They buried their son last winter.

Strange weather for winter—rain, thunder.

They buried him quietly—everybody’s busy.

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Who you met that winter, what you told him.    

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

You always played for a neighboring school.

But who did you fight for?

 

To come here every year, to weed dry grass.

To dig the earth every year—heavy, lifeless.

To see the calm after tragedy every year.

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

The birds disappear behind waves of rain.

To ask forgiveness for your sins. 

But what do I know about your sins?

To beg the rain to finally stop.

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

+ + + +

He’s been away for two years,

she hesitated.

Change the lock?

Or not?

Will he come back?

Or not?

 

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

Probably, she unconsciously expected

him to come back.

He would return and she would tell him everything.

About her take on him,

about her take on all of this—

she would definitely tell him.

And about her terminated pregnancy. 

Which he knew nothing about these past two years.

And when he came back

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

she wouldn’t say anything.

And neither would he.

In general, they decided to talk less.

Especially about politics.

Talking about politics in our situation

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

someone there definitely won’t like it.

 

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

Bread on the table—politics. 

The school around the corner—politics.

The early spring that fills the sky with sweet smoke—

also politics.

Politics in gestures, politics in breathing,

politics in vocal cords

that need rest.       

                   

They got into a fight on the third day,

a fight over the shower.   

       

In the morning, he collects his stuff again.

She watches the sky like milk

that is about to simmer.

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

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

 

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

 

It’s too late to choose the right words.

It’s too late to install a new lock.

 

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