Poets Translate Poets: A Hudson Review Anthology (2 page)

Marina Tsvetaeva
317

Poem of the End

Sergei Essenin
343

“I am the last poet of the villages”

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C o n t e n t s

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“Wind whistles through the steep fence”

“It’s done. I’ve left the home fi elds.”

Olga Sedakova
346

Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Man

Th

e Angel of Rheims

Music

Dimitri V. Psurtsev
350

Th

ird Rome Man

Two Monasteries

Spanish
353

Lope de Vega
355

“Dawns hung with fl owers”

“In Santiago the Green”

Harvest Song

Rubén Darío
357

Urna Votiva

Antonio Machado
358

Waters

From “Galerías”

Guadalquivír

Gabriela Mistral
360

Th

e Death Sonnets

Close to Me

Jorge Guillén
363

Th

e Nymphs

Time unto Time, or Th

e Garden

Vicente Huidobro
365

Ars Poetica

Jorge Luis Borges
366

Rose

C on t e n t s
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Buenos Aires

Poem of the Gift s

My Books

Simón Carbajal

Th

e Temptation

Th

e White Hind

Elegy for the Impossible Memory

Relics

Elegy

To One No Longer Young

Eugenio Florit
376

Conversation with My Father

Pablo Neruda
382

Ode to My Socks

Miguel Hernández
385

So Bitter Was Th

at Lemon When You Th

rew It

Héctor Inchaústegui Cabral
386

Gentle Song for the Donkeys of My Town

Octavio Paz
388

Tomb of the Poet

Ustica

Touch

Friendship

Dawn

Here

Oracle

Certainty

Juan Matos
394

Th

e Illusion of Memory

Th

e Night Was a Pretense of Night

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Swedish
397

Gunnar Ekelöf
399

“Th

ere exists something that fi ts nowhere”

“Th

e knight has rested for a long time”

“When one has come as far as I in pointlessness”

“So strange to me”

Lars Gustafsson
402

San Francisco Sailing Further Underground

Free Fall

Darkness

Fragment

A Poem on Revisionism

Vietnamese
407

Nguyen Binh Khiem
409

Ironic Apology

Phùng Khac Khoan
410

On War

To Huu
411

Road Sabotage

Tru Vu
413

Th

e Statue of the Century

Tu Ke Tuong
414

Th

at Painter in the City

Acknowledgments
419

Notes on Poets
421

Notes on Translators
437

Index
447

C on t e n t s
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pr eface

Paula Deitz

W
hile the name the
Hudson Review
denotes its local origins in a make-shift offi

ce in lower Manhattan a block from the Hudson River, like

the city in which it was founded in 1948, its outlook from the beginning has

been international. Frederick Morgan, one of its founding editors who had

majored in romance languages and literatures at Princeton University, remi-

nisced in a 1997 interview about a conversation he had early on with Ezra

Pound in which “he opened my eyes . . . to the possibilities of publishing

translations from foreign literatures.” Th

ough Pound, he continues, “was very

strongly focused on the Mediterranean tradition . . . that particular strength of his happened to mean a lot to me at that moment.”1

Along with letters from London and Paris and literary criticism about

writers abroad from the classical to modernist periods highlighted in those

early issues, the fi rst translation of poetry appeared in the volume 1, win-

ter 1949, issue: three French poems translated by W. S. Merwin, at that

time a graduate student at Princeton University. Since then, translation has

remained for the
Review
a cherished literary and cultural tradition, provid-ing our global readership with an engaging worldview. Since 2000 alone, the

journal has published an entire issue featuring works translated from eight

1. Michael Peich, “Th

e
Hudson Review
’s Early Years: An Interview with Frederick Mor-

gan,”
Hudson Review
51, no. 2 (1998).

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diff erent languages as well as special issues devoted to French- and Spanish-

language literature.

Like many editorial decisions, this anthology originated in a simple per-

ception one day that while the poets translated in the
Review
—from Homer to Russia’s Dimitri V. Psurtsev—constitute a history of world literature, the

translators themselves are among our most distinguished American and

British poets and that these poems belong as much to them as to the origi-

nal authors. In keeping with this spirit, the poems were initially organized

by translator, so that the section, say, of W. S. Merwin’s translations would

read almost like a small collection of his own poems. In the end, however,

for greater clarity of our purpose, the poems are arranged by language, but

we urge readers to make use of the index to read one translator’s work, oft en from several languages, straight through to experience a diff erent and cumu-lative eff ect.

Th

is selection from a much larger group comprises seventy-eight poets,

who wrote in twenty-fi ve original languages, and sixty-one translators. All of these translations made their fi rst appearance in print in the
Hudson Review
prior to book publication, as is our policy. A reader may wish to keep this

in mind when reading, for example, Richmond Lattimore’s excerpt from

Homer’s
Odyssey
or, more recently, scenes from Corneille’s
Le Cid
in Richard Wilbur’s translation. Added to the experience of reading the poems as literature is the knowledge of the cultures that produced the original authors, from the imperial court of China to the political upheavals of twentieth-century

Europe—knowledge that can be gleaned from the biographical notes.

Grateful appreciation is due my colleagues for their invaluable assistance

in selecting and preparing this anthology: Mark Jarman, an advisory edi-

tor since 2003, also for his masterful introduction; managing editor Ronald

Koury; associate editor Zachary Wood; assistant editors Madeleine Fentress

and Zoë Slutzky; and student editorial interns Christian N. Desrosiers, Ricky

D’Ambrose, Rebecca T. Hawkins, Becky Tseytkin, and Scott Bartley. We are

particularly indebted to the National Endowment for the Arts and the New

York State Council on the Arts for supporting issues of the
Hudson Review
in which many of these translations originally appeared, to the Florence Gould

Foundation for its loyal sponsorship over the years of French translations

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Pr e fac e

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in the
Review
, and to Michael A. Boyd, whose generous gift has made this anthology possible. Our special thanks to the authors, translators, and copy-right holders of these poems for their gracious cooperation. Finally, to our

publisher, Syracuse University Press, and its editors for bringing this book to life for all to read and enjoy, we express our gratitude for understanding our vision since our initial contact.

Pr e fac e
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in t roduc tion

Mark Jarman

S
ince 1948, when it was founded, the
Hudson Review
has published nearly fi ve hundred poems in translation from more than thirty languages. Two

of the magazine’s founders, Frederick Morgan and William Arrowsmith, have

themselves made signifi cant contributions as translators from ancient and

modern languages. Poetry in translation has been such an important feature

of the
Hudson Review
in part because of the infl uence, direct and indirect, of the great modernist poet Ezra Pound. In the journal’s early days, Pound

off ered the
Hudson Review
a steady stream of editorial advice from his residence in St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC. Th

e magazine published

major translations by Pound from Sophocles and from Confucius. Pound’s

approach to translation was to turn the poets he translated into new creations and to break new ground for poetry in English. His translations recalled the

languages and cultures of their origins, but as they were understood by Pound.

His transformative practice of “making it new” is one of the two major tradi-

tions of translation found in the
Hudson Review
and in this anthology. Th e

other, no less valuable but more self-eff acing, seeks an appropriate form that preserves as much of the original as possible, including its literal meaning,

while still making a good poem in English. Th

e master of this tradition, Rich-

ard Wilbur, also published important translations in the
Hudson Review
, and many of the translations in the anthology refl ect his approach.

Th

ese two traditions derive from one that begins in the Renaissance and

combines both Pound’s emphasis on transformation and Wilbur’s attention

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to the original form. When English poet Th

omas Wyatt translated Italian

poet Francesco Petrarch in the sixteenth century, he introduced the Ital-

ian sonnet to English literature while making poems we think of as purely

Wyatt’s. In subsequent centuries, we can see how John Dryden turned Virgil

into a writer of iambic-pentameter couplets and how Alexander Pope did the

same with Homer, in both cases making the translated sound very much like

the translator. Samuel Johnson transformed Juvenal into yet another maker

of witty iambic-pentameter rhyming pairs. Because translation from classical

languages was an elemental part of English education throughout the Renais-

sance, it is possible to imagine William Shakespeare in his grammar school

in Stratford doing early miracles with Ovid and Catullus. We know for sure

that Ben Jonson did so in London, because he disparaged Shakespeare’s grasp

of classical languages and boasted of his own. Part of a poet’s training in craft was by turning a hand to translation. Th

e more gift ed the poet, the more valu-

able the translation and the more likely that the translation would be a new

addition to the poetic art.

In Pound’s version of this tradition, translation is meant to transform one

literature into another. A good poem translated should become another good

poem—one belonging as much to the translator as to the original author. A

good poet is probably the best catalyst for this metamorphosis. Pound inno-

vated in translation in ways that exacting scholars of the languages he trans-

lated have found troubling, not to say exasperating. One of Pound’s most

ambitious experiments with translation is included in this anthology. It is his translation of Sophocles’s, or, as he has it, Sophokles’s, drama
Women of Trachis
. When the translation was fi rst off ered to the
Hudson Review
, the stron-gest editorial response to this extended work of Poundian chutzpah was from

William Arrowsmith, who protested to Frederick Morgan, “I’m afraid this

kind of thing challenges every good wish I have for the classics.” Arrowsmith

also speculated that Pound was either mad or ignorant. But eminent transla-

tor and poet Robert Fitzgerald (represented here by translations from Sopho-

cles’s
Oedipus Rex
, Catullus, and Horace) responded more tolerantly, though not without a certain ironic humor by saying that it was “pure Pound, but

Pound deep in the Greek and out the other side.” It is possible that the same

could be said for any of Pound’s translations, deep in the Provençal, Chinese,
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I n t r o d u c t i o n