Poets Translate Poets: A Hudson Review Anthology (4 page)

Th

e Wilbur tradition recalls Robert Frost’s preference for “the old-fashioned

way to be new.” If you think of the way so much of Wordsworth, Keats, and

Coleridge is translated into the American vernacular of Robert Frost, you

can also understand why Frost believed poetry is what is lost in translation—

from one language to another. But as Galway Kinnell implies, when poetry is

found in translation, frequently it is a new form of the old-fashioned way—for example, Greek hexameters coming back as iambic hexameters, French alexandrines as blank verse or heroic couplets.

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One of the remarkable achievements of the Wilbur tradition of trans-

lation in this anthology is Charles Martin’s version of nineteenth-century

Roman poet G. G. Belli, whose poems in Romanesco dialect—earthy, vulgar,

obscene when necessary, sweet when called for, irreverent almost always—

made him one of Italy’s most beloved poets and a Roman icon. Martin’s trans-

lations into an equally colloquial and irreverent English, without being arch, mannered, or tinny—that is to say, without creating a translatorese—are an

impressive transformation. At the same time, Martin’s versions hew in form

and expression closely to the originals. All sonnets, in fact Italian sonnets, Martin’s poems bear comparison with an earlier attempt to capture Belli in

English by Anthony Burgess in his wonderful, little-known novel about the

death of Keats,
ABBA ABBA
. Keats and Belli were contemporaries, aft er all, though Belli enjoyed a much longer life. Belli himself more resembles Robert

Burns, in his Scottish dialect poems, than he does Keats, but even Burns who

could write a wonderfully ribald, profane, and obscene lyric is not beloved for these very qualities as is Belli.

Charles Martin is one of our fi nest translators, known most widely as

a translator of Catullus, Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, and the Bhagavad Gita. In this anthology, he also contributes with Johanna Keller translations from the

Medieval French of Christine de Pisan. With just the right touch of inver-

sion, formality, and the almost archaic word, Martin and Keller capture the

world of de Pisan and her attempts to challenge the antifeminine tropes of the period as she frankly praises the sexual gratifi cation of her lover who loves her “well,” enjoys her solitude when her lover is away, and debunks the male

protestations and whining of the Petrarchan tradition. But again, though the

translation reminds us of the courtly tradition in Europe from more than six

hundred years ago, alien as that tradition may seem, the English diction of

Martin and Keller’s translation makes it seem less alien and more familiar.

Another gem of the Wilbur tradition of translation is Emily Grosholz’s

of Yves Bonnefoy (a poet she translates superbly) and his homage to the great

English contralto Kathleen Ferrier. In the French, his poem “To the Voice of

Kathleen Ferrier” consists of four quatrains, with rhymes occurring only in

the third and fourth quatrains, and possibly the fi rst. Bonnefoy, usually not constricted by the alexandrine, departs from that meter only in a couple of

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lines. His sense of Ferrier’s voice is hauntingly accurate, calling it a voice at one point that is “blended with gray” and also combining qualities of crystal and mist. Grosholz has preserved his quatrains but provides an audible

pentameter line (the French metric is based only on syllables, the English on accents and syllables). Some of her translation refl ects Bonnefoy’s Gallic exactitude, “I celebrate the voice blended with gray,” while at the same time

preserving the English mood of reserve appropriate to Ferrier—for example,

when Grosholz translates the French “brume” or “mist” into the less poetic

“low clouds.” For Bonnefoy’s exclamatory “Ô lumière,” “Ô cygne,” and “Ô

source,” we have in Grosholz’s version “O light,” “True swan,” and “Source.”

One of the most beautiful renderings she gives us is of Bonnefoy’s description of Ferrier’s voice, “Qui hésite aux lointain du chant qui s’est perdu” as the

voice “Th

at falters in the distances of singing.” I do not know which I prefer,

that in Bonnefoy’s poem the hesitating voice is ultimately lost in the distance, thus elegizing the singer’s early death, or that in Grosholz’s version it simply

“falters” there. One of the beauties of translation at this level is that we are given not only a version of the original in our language, but also a poem in its own right. Emily Grosholz in translating Bonnefoy’s homage has given us an

English elegy for an English singer.

Th

ere are many examples in the anthology of poets whose natural incli-

nations of style fi nd their kinship in the poems they are translating. Charles Tomlinson hints at this sympathy between translator and translated in his

version of Ungaretti’s “Little Monologue”:

Poets, poets, we have put on

All the masks; yet one

Is merely one’s own self.

Surely, this is true of translation, yet the self in its “mereness” does become more greatly developed, exposed, ramifi ed, and hatched like a seed or an egg.

Rhina Espaillat’s kinship with the poets she translates from Spanish, as a

native speaker of the language she translates into English, fi nds a particular resonance with the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. Mistral’s traditional formalism corresponds with Espaillat’s own, so that we can hear in Espaillat’s

translation of Mistral’s “Th

e Death Sonnets” a music of meter and rhyme in

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English, which echoes the Spanish. Still, there are subtleties to the Spanish

that cannot be brought over into the English, like the connection between

dusting and dust in Spanish,
espolvoreando
,
polvo
, and
polverado
, which in Espaillat’s poem become
sprinkle
,
dust
, and
mist
. Th

e Spanish insists audibly

on the return of the body to the earth, but the English, while not so insistent on the aural connections, maintains an imagistic one. Th

e English also intro-

duces an earthier, even grittier edge with its monosyllabic and Anglo-Saxon

rhymes (
sleep / deep
,
alone / bone
). Poetry may have been lost in translation, but poetry has also been found.

Choices about how to translate Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, a poet

of complex forms, have oft en dispensed with all eff ects except imagery

and expression. Th

us, in Judith Hemschemeyer’s and Anne Wilkinson’s

Akhmatova we have the great poet of the senses as they are ignited in charged

but enclosed spaces, so that even a street or time of day can seem packed

with explosive potential. Th

is mode is the way Akhmatova is oft en success-

fully translated. So to have Jennifer Reeser’s translations that come as closely as possible to the prosody of the Russian originals while also capturing that

invigorating embrace of the senses is valuable.

Modern Greek poet C. P. Cavafy translates well into English, as W. H.

Auden claimed, due to the distinctiveness of his voice. But like Akhmatova’s,

many translations into English have turned Cavafy’s poems, oft en complexly

and subtly formal, into free verse. Th

ere is no doubt that a poem by Cavafy

could not be anyone else’s, but it appears to be because of his two distin-

guishing subjects—the ordinary lives and homoerotic aff airs of young men

in early-twentieth-century Alexandria and the large and small doings of the

classical world, from the Caesars through the Byzantine emperors. Still, one

of his best recent translators, Daniel Mendelsohn, has hinted at the nuanced

rhyming of Cavafy’s poems, especially in two short lyrics here, “Desires” and

“Prayers.” And Cavafy’s own sense of the meters appropriate for song or story

also emerges in Mendelsohn’s translations. In this way, he captures that dis-

tinctive voice Auden speaks of, along with the subjects that lovers of Cavafy

regard as uniquely his.

Like Constantine Cavafy, modern Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges

has a distinct set of subjects, including historical and contemporary Buenos

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Aires, the romance of gaucho life on the pampas, and the nooks and cran-

nies of world history and literature. Who else but Borges could ask if a recent dream of a white deer had come from his reading of English or Persian literature? Like Cavafy, his voice is distinct, though I think more so in his

prose than in his poems. Oft en Borges is summoning the voices of histori-

cal fi gures, rather than exposing their secrets via gossip and anecdote like

Cavafy. Borges, however, does not seem to have a colloquial style to mix

with a more formal approach, as Cavafy does. He is always literary, even as

his literariness can be another mask, as it so oft en is in his stories. He has the benefi t of two excellent translators in the work of Emily Grosholz and

Robert Mezey. Grosholz gives us both one of his fervent lyrics, recalling the

passionate garden of St. John of the Cross, and also a cold-eyed blank-verse

sonnet summing up his career, beautifully and pitilessly, in Buenos Aires.

Th

e translations by Mezey also give us a sense of the entire scope of Borg-

es’s poetry and include a prose poem and the almost unbearably poignant

“Th

e White Hind,” which shares a motif central to Borges’s fi ction: that the

dreamer is himself being dreamed.

Zbigniew Herbert, a member of the Polish Resistance during World War

II and aft erward a despiser of Communist rule in Poland, is at his best as

he plays the role of subversive in his poems, whether it is to ironize classi-

cal history or to suggest, oft en in his prose poetry, the deadening rule of the totalitarian state, especially via censorship and the corruption of language.

His work, like the poetry of most Eastern European poets during the Iron

Curtain years, is in free verse, and his experiments with the prose poem have

been widely infl uential in the West. From this perspective of history, because he avoided the status of émigré, though he traveled as much as he could outside of Poland, he looks like the greatest political poet of Europe since Yeats.

Peter Dale Scott, himself a political poet during the Vietnam War era, seems

ideally suited to translate Herbert. Irony like Herbert’s always translates well, since it occurs on a symbolic level in which the terms are recognizable as they make the transit from one language to another. It would be hard to miss the

allegorical and political import of the two prose poems here, “Th

e Wringer”

and “Episode in a Library,” in which a laundry and a literary analysis take on the overtones of the repressive and ideological state apparatus. Yet Herbert

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is never overbearing or obvious. And this point too is clear from the transla-

tions. He works playfully with apparently literal images so that you can imag-

ine an obtuse state censor missing the point entirely.

Th

ese major fi gures of the twentieth century, early, middle, and late, are

all well represented and rightly so. But one of the pleasures of any anthol-

ogy is the isolated poem that, usually not part of a larger selection of a poet’s work, becomes one to return to, for its uniqueness and quality. Th

is anthol-

ogy is no diff erent from others in that respect. Denise Levertov’s translation of “Th

e Cricket” by Bulgarian poet Krassin Himmirsky celebrates the sur-

vival of the natural world and the durability of poetry. William Arrowsmith’s

translations of three poems by Medieval Japanese poet Hitomaro include the

lovely free-verse imagism of “Grief at the Mountain-Crossing of the Prince,”

which reminds us of the value placed on the humanity of all throughout

world poetry, including those individuals separated from the rest of us by

noble birth. Th

e stringent political subtext of nineteenth-century German

Christian Morgenstern’s “Maids on Saturday,” translated by Lore Segal and

W. D. Snodgrass, foreshadows the later songs of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt

Weill, especially one like “Pirate Jenny,” from
Th

e Th

reepenny Opera
. Jerome

Dennis Rothenberg’s translation of twentieth-century German Erich Käst-

ner’s “Autobiography” gives us Europe between the world wars with a gleam

of black humor in straight-faced rhyming quatrains. Infl uential Hungarian

poet Attila József’s inimitable take on the pleasures and pains of daily life

is refl ected in Michael Paul Novak and Bela Kiralyfalvi’s translation of “To

Sit, to Stand, to Kill, to Die.” Horace’s “Prayer to Venus,” translated by Craig Watson, expresses that desire for revenge on an estranged lover that is as fresh today as in the heart of any ancient poet. And fi nally there is tragic Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s tour de force, “Poem of the End,” translated by