Poets Translate Poets: A Hudson Review Anthology (3 page)

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French, Italian, Latin, Greek, yet always pure Pound. If you consider the stages of Pound’s career, through his fascination with romance languages, ancient

Greek and Latin, and ultimately with Chinese, his translations charted the

development of his poetry.

In a sense, the Pound tradition of translation is a way of making new

the Western tradition of translation. Dryden and Pope turned the Greek

hexameters of Homer, the verse records of heroes, into heroic couplets. Th

is

form with its potential for the epigrammatic worked especially well for Pope,

so well that it is a defi ning poetic style of his age. Still, Pope and Dryden employed a mode they believed was the most accurate way of representing the

Greek verse. Chapman in translating Homer had tried heptameter couplets,

the foundation of common measure, two hundred years before but hardly

with the same success. Pound, especially in his Chinese translations, created

a verse as valuable as the heroic couplet—the cadenced free-verse line, which

we can hear in Carolyn Kizer’s translations from the Chinese in this anthol-

ogy. Yet it has to be admitted that the literal meaning of the original language, important to Dryden and Pope, who could actually read Latin and Greek, was

not of crucial importance to Pound. Pound saw the image but was aft er an

altogether new measure for English verse.

Pound is both an infl uence and an example of doing otherwise to the

two members of his generation, two of the great modernists, who are also

included here, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. Th

ough Wil-

liams turned to translation at the suggestion of Pound, whom he met when

both were students at the University of Pennsylvania, for Williams the act

was in some ways a retrieval of fi rst languages. He grew up in a multilingual household, in which the language he spoke at the table was his mother’s

native Spanish, though she herself preferred French. Williams translated

poems from Spanish throughout his career, and two of his marvelous trans-

lations, from Eugenio Florit and Pablo Neruda (Neruda’s famous “Ode to My

Socks”), are here. Th

e only other translator in this anthology working in what

might be called a native or home language is Rhina P. Espaillat, who brings a

similar sensitivity to her translations of poetry from Spanish.

And there is Marianne Moore translating the fables of La Fontaine. Th

e

three herein were published in the
Hudson Review
in 1954, the year Moore I n t roduc t ion
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published her collection of La Fontaine’s fables. According to her biographer

Charles Molesworth, Moore had worked on these fables, translating only

the best of them, as Pound advised her, for at least a decade. And just as La

Fontaine himself turned Aesop into the seventeenth-century French master

La Fontaine, so Marianne Moore turned La Fontaine into a poet who reads

as much like Marianne Moore as La Fontaine, although according to her biographer scrupulous accuracy was always her aim, which should not surprise us. One more thing, surely an infl uence of Pound, that characterizes

her translations and indeed all of the translations here is that the tradition of modern translation has been to speak in a natural tone, formal when

necessary and colloquial when possible, without any attempt to re-create

former rhetorical modes that would sound artifi cial and antiquated. Pound

is especially insistent on this in his translation of Sophocles, perhaps to a

fault. But that attempt to give us an English of our time, even when translat-

ing from twenty-fi ve hundred years ago, is what makes these translations

readable today.

Ezra Pound’s importance as an exemplary translator is clear in the trans-

lators of the same generation as Frederick Morgan and William Arrowsmith,

notably Galway Kinnell, Carolyn Kizer, W. S. Merwin, and Louis Simpson.

Th

e tradition of Ezra Pound is one in which the translator employs trans-

lation to make further discoveries of style, so that one way of understanding the stage of his or her development is to see how poetry emerged out of

their translations at diff erent times. W. S. Merwin’s next step as a poet can always be inferred from his work as a translator. Th

e translations Merwin

did of medieval European poets, particularly from the Provençal, refl ect the

young Merwin’s interest in the traditional lyric forms he was working in in

the 1950s. So we have him translating Richard I, de Peitau, de Vaquieras, and

a Renaissance French poet like du Bellay in the elegant lyric forms we fi nd

in Merwin’s fi rst two books,
A Mask for Janus
and
Th

e Dancing Bears
, and

then turning to modern French poet Jean Follain and his gnomic free-verse

portraits, and two giants of modern Russia, Osip Mandelstam and his her-

metic symbolism and Sergei Esenin and his nostalgic narratives. Th

ese latter

modes would come to characterize Merwin’s collections from the 1960s and

1970s, like
Th

e Moving Target
,
Th

e Lice
,
Th

e Carrier of Ladders
,
Writings to

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an Unfi nished Accompaniment
, and
Th

e Compass Flower
. Ultimately, in his

Quechua translations, the last of his translations to appear in the
Hudson
Review
, we can hear the appeal of this minimal incantatory style from the Andes as it emerges in Merwin’s work of the past twenty years, rather like a

return to what he was trying to produce among his elegant formal lyrics of the 1950s. As a translator, a poet as prolifi c as Merwin generously allows us this panorama of the Pound tradition of translation.

Th

ere are others we can see entering into a dialectic of translation and

translated work and producing a synthesis oft en of great beauty, and in ret-

rospect giving us insight into a stage of the translator’s own development as

a poet. Like his Princeton classmate W. S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell not only

shows his sympathy for modern French poet Yves Bonnefoy’s early work but

also fi nds in “On the Motion and the Immobility of Douve” a way into the

sequential form, which would carry Kinnell out of the traditional metrics of

his fi rst two books and into the many remarkable poems of the later 1960s,

culminating for him in
Th

e Book of Nightmares
. Louis Simpson, one of the

major translators in this assemblage of masters, shows us how much poets

as diff erent as the Medieval French François Villon and the modern French

Valery Larbaud and Philippe Jaccottet have in common with the author of

Adventures of the Letter I
and
Caviar at the Funeral
. We see Simpson making his way from his early traditional formalism into the free-verse narra-

tive style of his mature work with the translations of Larbaud and Jaccottet,

though when translating a ballade by Villon he sticks with traditional English verse. Carolyn Kizer reveals the coming of her distinct style by her translations of the Medieval Chinese Tu Fu, closest of all to the work Pound himself

did with Li Po. Her translations seem to be of a piece with Pound’s Cathay

poems. Charles Tomlinson’s sinuous style and fl exible free-verse rhythms,

learned in part from William Carlos Williams, are given fresh life in his ver-

sions of poems by Italians Giuseppe Ungaretti and Lucio Piccolo. But Tom-

linson can turn from the legato arias of those Italians to something more

jagged, elliptical, and discontinuous in the verse of Mexican poet Octavio

Paz and the neater quatrains of the Spanish Antonio Machado. Finally, Fred-

erick Morgan, whose work always moved easily between traditional and free

verse, turns the ambiguous twelve-syllable alexandrine couplets in French

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symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Aft ernoon of a Faun” into a kind of vers

libre, employing end rhyme occasionally and unpredictably and keeping to a

loose iambic-tetrameter line.

When poets translate poets, both are transformed. Th

ough Robert Frost

claimed that poetry is what is lost in translation, and Galway Kinnell made

the counterclaim that poetry is what is found in translation, I would argue for a synthesis of these two theses. A poem in translation becomes a new poem.

Th

ough the original language and its poetic eff ects may indeed be lost, the

new language provides a new originality. A good translation is less an imita-

tion (though Robert Lowell used this word for his translations) than an hom-

age. Pope and Dryden and translators like them, whom we might say are as

much a part of the Richard Wilbur tradition as the Pound tradition, perceive

verse measure and rhyme and feel obliged to produce a facsimile.

Although it can be exciting and historically illuminating to watch these

masters turn others into themselves, just as remarkable are those transla-

tions—and aside from the ones by Merwin, they predominate—by poets of

remarkable formal gift s who have found a way to put their mastery of tradi-

tion at the service of another tongue. Th

e greatest of these poets is without a

doubt Richard Wilbur, represented here by his translation from Renaissance

French poet Pierre Corneille’s
Le Cid
. Th

e seventeenth-century French alex-

andrine becomes, in Wilbur’s voice, echoed perfectly in the English heroic

couplet. John Frederick Nims works a similar magic with Goethe’s “Tril-

ogy of Passion” but matches the German rhyme scheme and meter almost

exactly. R. S. Gwynn defers his typical mordant humor to translate romantic

French poet Victor Hugo’s tender and visionary “So Boaz Slept,” a retell-

ing of the book of Ruth from the point of view of Boaz, forefather of David

and Jesus, choosing iambic pentameter for the alexandrine, as Wilbur does,

and observing the envelope rhyme scheme of Hugo’s quatrains—no mean

feat. Th

e secret to these translations as to all of the others gathered here is to

sound as natural as possible in English no matter how closely the translator

has chosen to follow the original.

Th

e translators of passages from epic—the
Iliad
, the
Odyssey
, Lucretius’s
On the Nature of Th

ings
,
Beowulf
, and
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
—

have all worked in the Wilbur tradition, fi nding a measure to represent the

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original prosody. William Arrowsmith for his version of a section of book 3

of the
Iliad
, “Helen on the Walls,” and Richmond Lattimore for his version of the unforgettable opening of the
Odyssey
’s second book have both written a loosely iambic and anapestic hexameter for Homer’s Greek hexameters. A. E.

Stallings in her passages from three of Lucretius’s books from
On the Nature
of Th

ings
(“Against the Evils of Religion,” “Against Passion,” and “On the Development of Civilization”) has created sprightly heptameter couplets for

the Roman poet’s dactylic hexameter (itself an imitation of Homer’s meter).

Alan Sullivan and Timothy Murphy translating the Anglo-Saxon
Beowulf

give us the hero’s last speech before his fatal encounter with the dragon, or

“fi re-drake,” and do so in the alliterative form of the original, something that W. H. Auden demonstrated could be done in modern English in
Th

e Age of

Anxiety
, but they have also included the distich form created by the caesura that divides the line in Anglo-Saxon poetry. And John Ridland, in his translation of
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
and the crucial episode in the castle of Bertilak before Gawain faces the Green Knight’s ax, has preserved the alliterative line of the original as it alternates with the rhyming bob-and-wheel

stanza. Ridland has also given us modern English for the Pearl Poet’s own

fourteenth-century English dialect.

In fact, the most valuable translations here may be in the tradition of Rich-

ard Wilbur. Th

e Wilbur tradition, making an accurate translation of poetry

in a form that honors if not duplicates the original of the poem, while also

doing so in modern English with little or no attempt to replicate the rhetoric of the original poem and its period, is as much a part of the Western tradition as the Pound way of translating is, and in fact probably closer. “Make it new,”

Pound’s famous declaration, clearly equates artistic excellence with novelty.