Poets Translate Poets: A Hudson Review Anthology (43 page)

Joachim du Bellay
. A poet, critic, and member of the Pléiade group of poets, in 1553 he traveled to Rome as a secretary to his cousin Cardinal Jean du Bellay, where he wrote
Les antiquités de Rome
(Th

e Ruins of Rome) early in his

four-and-half-year residence. Th

e sonnets of
Les antiquités
provide a glimpse

of classical Rome from the point of view of the French Renaissance.

G. G. Belli
. Th

ough largely unknown in his lifetime, he authored 2,279 son-

nets written in Romanesco, the dialect of the people of Rome. Th

ey give spir-

ited, funny, frequently obscene accounts of life under the nineteenth-century

papacy. Today, he is considered a major poet of the period.

Yves Bonnefoy
. Trained as a philosopher, he is also an essayist, literary critic, and art historian as well as the most important contemporary translator

of Shakespeare and other English poets into French. Described as France’s

greatest postwar poet, he has authored ten books of poetry, most recently

L’heure présente
(2011). His many honors include the Prix Montaigne (1978) and the
Hudson Review
’s Bennett Award for Literary Achievement (1988).

Jorge Luis Borges
. An Argentine poet, short-story writer, essayist, and translator, he is recognized as one of the foremost literary fi gures of the twentieth century. He was director of the National Public Library and a professor at

the University of Buenos Aires. He shared the fi rst Prix International with Samuel Beckett in 1981.

Catullus
. According to Cicero, he was of the “neoteric” poets who rejected the epic and its public themes in favor of using colloquial language to describe

personal experiences. His poems survived in a single manuscript discovered

422
N o t e s o n P o e t s

Deitz 1st pages.indd 422

Deitz 1st pages.indd 422

6/26/2013 6:52:26 AM

6/26/2013 6:52:26 AM

in Verona around 1305 and then disappeared again but not before copies

were made, one of which, with 116 poems, resides in the Bodleian Library at

Oxford University.

C. P. Cavafy
. A Greek poet born in Alexandria, Egypt, he worked at the Ministry of Public Works in Alexandria (1892–1922). He published little during

his lifetime, preferring instead to circulate poems among friends. A short collection of his poetry was privately printed in the early 1900s and reprinted

with new verse a few years later.

Christine de Pisan
. Th

ough born in Venice, she lived most of her life in

Paris. As a young widow, she began writing in Middle French to support her

family, thus becoming Europe’s fi rst professional woman writer. She com-

posed poems on courtly love as well as polemical prose works. Eventually, she

retired to an abbey and composed a long poem celebrating Joan of Arc.

Pierre Corneille
. Widely acknowledged as the creator of French classical tragedy, he was one of the three great seventeenth-century French dramatists,

along with Molière and Racine. Best known for
Le Cid
, whose complexities regarding duty and honor typify the playwright’s emphasis on psychologi-cal reaction over exaggerated action. A prolifi c playwright, he expanded the

boundaries and raised the level of dramaturgy on the French stage.

Rubén Darío (Félix Rubén García Sarmiento)
. He was an infl uential Nica-raguan poet, journalist, and diplomat. As a leader of the Spanish American

literary movement known as
modernismo
, which fl ourished at the end of the nineteenth century, he revolutionized poetry in Spanish on both sides of the

Atlantic through his experiments with rhythm, meter, and imagery.

Giraut de Bornelh
. A twelft h-century French troubadour of humble origins from the Limousin region, he would study in winter and travel from court to

court in summer, giving his income to impoverished relatives and the church.

In 1168 he went to the court of King Alfonso II of Aragon.

Joan de Guilhade
. He was a low-ranking noble who made a living as a troubadour, apparently employing jongleurs to propagate his songs. Active in the

No t e s on P oe t s
423

Deitz 1st pages.indd 423

Deitz 1st pages.indd 423

6/26/2013 6:52:26 AM

6/26/2013 6:52:26 AM

mid-thirteenth century, the heyday of the Galician-Portuguese school, he was

one of its most prolifi c and inventive poets, with fi ft y-four surviving
cantigas
that employ a number of original images and instances of irony.

Guillem Comte de Peitau
. A powerful count considered the fi rst of the Provençal troubadour poets, he was equally conversant with Arabic Spain and

northern France. Th

is tradition was carried on by his immediate succes-

sors, especially the ones in the courtly love tradition in the royal courts of his granddaughter Eleanor of Aquitaine, who continued the kinship with the

Moorish kingdoms. Eleven of his troubadour verses are extant.

Gunnar Ekelöf
. A member of the Swedish Academy (1958), he was a poet,

critic, and essayist. In his fi rst collection,
Sent på jorden
(1932), his poems were imbued with surrealism, whereas later work also refl ected his interest in musical forms and Eastern mysticism. In his fi nal decade, his Akritas trilogy explored the simultaneous experience of presence and transitoriness.

Sergei Essenin
. A Russian lyric poet, he bemoaned the industrialization of rural Russia and the political unrest born of the Civil War and World War I,

calling himself the “last poet of the village.” He toured the United States with his wife, dancer Isadora Duncan.
Th

e Collected Poems of Yesenin in English

was published in 2000.

Eugenio Florit
. A poet, critic, and translator, he was born in Spain and emi-grated to Cuba as a teenager with his family. He taught Spanish and Latin

American literature at Barnard College from 1944 to 1969. In addition to his thirty-four volumes of poetry, his criticism included
Hispanic-American
Poetry since Modernism
(1968).

Jean Follain
. A French poet born in Normandy, he was a member of the

group called Sagesse. Th

e last of his nine volumes of poems was titled
Espaces

d’instants
(1971). In 1970 he was awarded the Grand Prix de Poésie from the Académie Française for his life’s work.

Bogomil Gjuzel
. A founder of the Association of Independent Writers of

Macedonia, since 1995 he has edited its bimonthly journal,
Naše Pismo
.

Born in Èaèak, Serbia, he is a poet, prose writer, playwright, essayist, and

424
N o t e s o n P o e t s

Deitz 1st pages.indd 424

Deitz 1st pages.indd 424

6/26/2013 6:52:26 AM

6/26/2013 6:52:26 AM

translator. From 1999 to 2003, he was acting director of the Struga Poetry

Evenings International Festival.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
. Two works brought him early fame:
Goetz
von Berlichingen
(1773), a play of Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress), and
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers
(Th

e Sorrows of Young Werther) (1774), his

saga of unhappy love. He lived thereaft er at the court of the Duke of Saxe-

Weimar-Eisenach and held offi

ce in the Weimar government. His greatest

work was
Faust
, a dramatic poem in two parts.

Fakhr addin Gorgani
. He was an eleventh-century Persian poet.

Jorge Guillén
. A Spanish lyric poet, translator, and professor who became a member of the Generation of 1927, the group of poets who commemorated

the tercentenary of Luis de Góngora and were infl uenced by such European

movements as symbolism, futurism, and surrealism. In exile voluntarily to

protest the Franco regime, he taught Spanish literature at Wellesley College

(1940–57). His major works are
Cantico
(1928), later expanded, and
Homenaje
(1967). He received the
Hudson Review
’s Bennett Award for Literary Achievement (1975) and the Cervantes Prize (1976).

Lars Gustafsson
. He edited the Swedish literary journal
Bonniers Litterära
Magasin
(1960–72), and, until 2006, he was a professor of philosophy and creative writing at the University of Texas, Austin. A prolifi c writer, he has produced, since the late 1950s, poems, novels, short stories, and critical essays.

Among other major awards, he received the Swedish Academy’s Bellman

Prize in 1990.

Zbigniew Herbert
. He fought with the Resistance in Poland as a teenager, and his poetry was formed by his experiences under both the Nazi and the Soviet

dictatorships. He was coeditor of the poetry journal
Poezja
from 1965 to 1968, but he resigned in protest against its anti-Semitic policies. His books include
Report from the Besieged City, and Other Poems
(1983) and
89 Poems
(1998).

Miguel Hernández
. A self-educated Spanish shepherd, he became a poet

and playwright encouraged by the Generation of 1927 (see Jorge Guillén).

He fought with the Republican forces against Franco and the Nationalists No t e s on P oe t s
425

Deitz 1st pages.indd 425

Deitz 1st pages.indd 425

6/26/2013 6:52:26 AM

6/26/2013 6:52:26 AM

and joined the First Calvary Company of the Peasants’ Battalion as a cultural

aff airs offi

cer, reading his poetry daily on the radio. He died of tuberculosis

in prison during the Franco regime. A bilingual edition entitled
Th

e Selected

Poems of Miguel Hernández
was published in 2001.

Krassin Himmirsky
. In 1977 he served as chargé d’aff aires of the Bulgarian Embassy in Washington, DC. His collection
Time Bomb: New and Selected

Poems
was published in 1999.

Kakinomoto no Hitomaro
. Probably from Nara, he may have been a court

poet, an offi

cial, or a wandering entertainer. Among his surviving works are

poems in two major period forms: sixty-one tanka and sixteen
chôka
. His poems can be found in the anthology
Man’yôshû
(Collection of Ten Th

ousand

Leaves).

Homer
. Although little is known of the great author credited with composing the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
, the poems themselves are a measure of the writer.

Th

e foundation of Greek education and culture through the classical age,

these epics became the basis for humanist education later during the Roman

Empire, especially in association with Virgil’s
Aeneid
, and continued under Byanztine culture and into the Italian Renaissance. With excellent contemporary translations, they remain the foundation of the classical canon.

Horace
. A Roman lyric poet, he studied in Rome and Athens. His poetry

ranged from epodes and satires to epistles and lyrics, and in his later verse

he sought to adapt Greek meters to Latin. He once served as a scribe for the

Treasury of Rome but lived most of his life on Sabine Farm near Tivoli, a gift of his patron, Maecenas.

Victor Hugo
. Recognized as one of France’s most celebrated poets, he is better known abroad in translation for his novels
Notre-Dame de Paris
(1831) and
Les Misérables
(1862). A leader of the romantic movement beginning in 1830, he also entered politics and was elected a deputy for Paris in the Constitu-ent Assembly and, later, the Legislative Assembly. Opposed to Napoleon III’s

coup d’état, he lived in exile in the Channel Islands for nineteen years, where he wrote some of his most famous works.

426
N o t e s o n P o e t s

Deitz 1st pages.indd 426

Deitz 1st pages.indd 426

6/26/2013 6:52:26 AM

6/26/2013 6:52:26 AM

Vicente Huidobro (Vicente García Huidobro Fernández)
. A Chilean poet,

playwright, novelist, and journalist, he spent his formative years in Paris. He proposed a movement called
creacionismo
, stressing a fusion between the avant-garde and the ideals of Neoplatonism with the works of Ralph Waldo

Emerson. With Apollinaire and Reverdy, he cofounded the Cubist magazine

Nord-Sud
. In 1925 he returned to Chile as a newspaper editor and presented himself unsuccessfully as a candidate for Chile’s presidency. In 1931 he published his defi nitive work,
Altazor
.

Héctor Inchaústegui Cabral
. Born in Baní, Dominican Republic, he was a

poet, essayist, journalist, and playwright. One of his most signifi cant works was a dramatic trilogy called
El miedo en un puñado de polvo
(Fear in a Hand-ful of Dust) (1964).

Philippe Jaccottet
. Born in Switzerland, he has long been a resident of France.

In addition to translating German, Italian, and Spanish writers and poets, he

has also written several books of literary criticism. In 2010 he was awarded

the Schiller Prize, Switzerland’s highest literary honor. In 2011 his collected writings were published as a volume in the distinguished Pléiade series.

Attila József
. An important modern Hungarian poet attracted to Marxist

ideology, his poems depicted proletarian life. Only seventeen when his fi rst

poems were published, he went on to produce six books, combining in his

work the symbolist tradition with a concern for social justice. In 1936 he