Poets Translate Poets: A Hudson Review Anthology (45 page)

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Sophocles
. An innovator of drama in classical Athenian culture, he was also a politician, priest, and military leader, and his musical accomplishments led to his recognition as a master of song. His most famous surviving works include

the Th

eban plays—
Oedipus Rex
,
Oedipus at Colonus
, and
Antigone
—as well as
Th

e Women of Trachis
,
Ajax
,
Philoctetes
, and
Electra
. He wrote more than 120 plays, of which only these 7 survive.

To Huu
. Hailed as North Vietnam’s poet laureate, he was born in Vietnam, French Indochina. An early member of the Communist Party, he joined the

Vietminh in 1942 aft er imprisonment for his political views. Already known

as a gift ed poet, when the country split in 1954, he was appointed deputy cultural minister in North Vietnam, inspiring party members with his propagan-

distic verse, meanwhile keeping other poets in line. He became deputy prime

minister, but blamed for ill-fated economic reforms, he resigned in 1985.

Nuno Fernandes Torneol
. He was a Galician-Portuguese troubadour in the

thirteenth century.

Tru Vu (Tran Dai Binh)
. A poet of South Vietnam, he has taken the name of a famous eighteenth-century poet as his pen name. A precocious poet since

his teens, he turned to painting and calligraphy aft er the Communist take-

over of South Vietnam (1975).

Marina Tsvetaeva
. A Russian poet, she was considered one of the most original silver-age poets of the twentieth century, bridging two contradictory

strands of Russian poetry—symbolism and acmeism (see Osip Mandelstam).

Th

e Tsar Maiden
(1922) is one of her best-known poems. Suff ering from poverty during the revolution, she moved with her family to Berlin. Upon return-

ing in 1939, her poetry was rejected by the Bolshevik regime, and translation

was the only work aff orded her. In 1941 her husband was shot for espionage

and her daughter sent to a labor camp.

Tu Fu
. A Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty, his early poetry celebrated the beauty of the natural world and bemoaned the passage of time. As a young

traveler, he met the renowned Li Bai and fl irted with Daoism; upon returning

to Ch’ang-an, the capital, he resumed his conventional Confucianism. Later,

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as a government offi

cial, he was captured during the 755 An Lushan Rebel-

lion. Th

ereaft er, he wrote of humanity in the grips of war, mastering all poetic

genres, especially the
lüshi
, or “regulated verse.” He died on a riverboat.

Tu Ke Tuong (Vo Tan Tuoc)
. A South Vietnamese poet, he wrote for many

journals beginning in the 1960s. Following the Communist takeover of the

country, he became a journalist writing for public-security organs. Th

e
Tuoi

Ngoc Magazine
is under his editorship.

Fyodor Tyutchev
. Th

e favorite poet of Leo Tolstoy, he wrote many lyrics about

nature. During most of his twenty-two years abroad in the Foreign Service, he

was posted at the Russian Embassy in Munich, where he immersed himself

in Western culture and German romantic literature and philosophy, becom-

ing personally acquainted with such fi gures as Heinrich Heine and Friedrich

Schelling. Th

rough the latter’s philosophy, he saw the universe as an organic

whole, animated by a single undivided life force. A collection of his poems

was published in English as
Poems of Night and Day
(1974).

Giuseppe Ungaretti
. A pioneer and leader of the modernist movement in

twentieth-century Italian poetry, he was born in Alexandria, Egypt, of Tus-

can parentage. He was a founder of the hermetic movement in the 1920s and

1930s that, infl uenced by French symbolism, believed in the mystical power of words. Following military service in World War I, he distilled the experience

in two of his essential volumes:
Il porto sepolto
(Th

e Buried Harbour) (1916)

and
Allegria dei naufragi
(Joy of Shipwrecks) (1919). He accepted the chair of Italian literature at São Paolo University, Brazil (1936–42). In 1970 he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

Paul Valéry
. He is considered a major French symbolist poet as well as an essayist and critic. His greatest poem is considered
La jeune parque
(Th e

Young Fate) (1917). Perhaps his most striking achievement is his monumen-

tal intellectual diary (more than twenty thousand pages), called the
Cahiers
(
Notebooks
). In 1925 he was elected to the Académie Française. He spent the remaining twenty years of his life writing numerous essays on poetry, painting, and dance. Th

e candlelit procession of his funeral was a national event

following the liberation in 1945.

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François Villon
. Although he lived life on the seamy side, he is perhaps the best-known French poet of the Middle Ages. During his exile from Paris,

commuted from a death sentence for killing a man, he fell in with a band of

thieves, giving rise to his poems in thieves’ jargon. Although he employed medieval forms of versifi cation, his personal message placed him among the

moderns. His works include the
Lais
(1456) and the
Testament
(1461).

Walther von der Vogelweide
. He was a renowned German lyric poet of the

Middle Ages, whose poetry emphasizes the virtues of a balanced life, in the

social as in the personal sphere, and refl ects his disapproval of those indi-

viduals, actions, and beliefs that disturb this harmony. Th

e title
hêr
, which he

was given by other poets, indicates that he was of knightly birth. More than

half of the two hundred or so of Walther’s poems that are extant are political, moral, or religious; the rest are love poems.

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not es on t r a nsl ator s

William Arrowsmith
(Orange, New Jersey, 1924–92). A founder of the
Hudson Review
and a classics professor, he was an eminent translator of Greek dramas. In 1980 he received the National Book Award in Translation for
Hard
Labor
, by Cesare Pavese.

Paul Blackburn
(St. Albans, Vermont, 1926–71). A prominent Black Moun-

tain poet, he studied Provençal at the University of Toulouse as a Fulbright

scholar and became a leading translator of Provençal troubadour verse.
Pro-ensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry
, selected and translated by him, was published in 1978.

Lorna Knowles Blake
(Havana, Cuba, b. 1953). She teaches creative writing at the 92nd Street Y in New York and poetry craft at Sarah Lawrence College.

Her fi rst collection of poems,
Permanent Address
(2008), won the Richard Snyder Publication Prize from the Ashland Poetry Press.

Robert Bly
(Madison, Minnesota, b. 1926). Following studies as a Fulbright scholar in Norway, he became a translator of Norwegian poetry. In 1967 he

won the National Book Award for
Th

e Light around the Body
. His latest col-

lection of poems is
Talking into the Ear of a Donkey
(2011).

Louise Bogan
(Livermore Falls, Maine, 1897–1970). She served as the
New
Yorker
’s poetry critic for thirty-eight years; her books of criticism include
Achievement in American Poetry, 1900–1950
(1951). In 1955 she shared the Bollingen Prize in Poetry with Leonie Adams for her
Collected Poems,

1923–1953
.

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Clarence Brown
(Anderson, South Carolina, b. 1929). A professor emeritus of comparative literature at Princeton University, he learned Russian while

serving with the Army Security Agency. He translated much of Osip Man-

delstam’s poetry and prose, and his biography
Mandelstam
(1973) won the Christian Gauss Award in Literary Criticism.

Olga Carlisle
(Paris, France, b. 1931). Granddaughter of the Russian writer Leonid Andreyev, she gained notoriety for smuggling out from Russia and

publishing seminal works by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Her 1993 memoir,

Under a New Sky: A Reunion with Russia
, records later adventures there.

Dick Davis
(Portsmouth, UK, b. 1945). He is professor of Persian and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University, from which he received the Distinguished Scholar Award in 2002. His

most recent book of poems is
A Trick of Sunlight
(2006).

Rhina P. Espaillat
(Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, b. 1932). Having moved to the United States as a child, she writes poems, short stories, and

essays in English and in her native Spanish and translates in both directions.

Her latest poetry collection is
Her Place in Th

ese Designs
(2008). Th

e Domini-

can Republic’s Ministry of Culture honored her for service to culture.

Ruth Fainlight
(New York, New York, b. 1931). Living in London, England, since age fi ft een, her
New and Collected Poems
(2010) draws on thirteen collections spanning forty years, including translations from Portuguese, Span-

ish, and classical Greek.

Dudley Fitts
(Boston, Massachusetts, 1903–68). Although he also translated works by Latin, Spanish, and Latin American authors, he is known for his

translations from classical Greek, oft en in collaboration with Robert Fitzgerald, his former student at the Choate School.

Robert Fitzgerald
(Springfi eld, Illinois, 1910–85). He served as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard University and was a prolifi c translator

of Greek classics. Awarded the Bollingen Prize in Translation for his verse

translation of Homer’s
Odyssey
(1961), he also translated
Th

e Iliad
(1974) and

Th

e Aeneid
(1983).

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Kimon Friar
(Imrali, Turkey, 1911–93). Although he moved to the United

States as a child with his Greek parents, he remained in the Hellenic linguistic milieu, eventually becoming a translator and critic of modern Greek literature. In 1978 he received the Greek World Award.

Robin Fulton
(Arran, Scotland, b. 1937). He has lived in Norway since 1973

where he taught at Stavanger University until 2006. His distinguished transla-

tions of Scandinavian poetry earned awards from, among others, the Swedish

Academy. His own poetry books include
Coming Down to Earth and Spring

Is Soon
(1990).

Emily Grosholz
(Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, b. 1950). She teaches philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. Her latest poetry collection is a bilin-

gual edition titled
Feuilles/Leaves
(2007), and her translation
Beginning and
End of the Snow/Début et fi n de la neige
, by Yves Bonnefoy, was published in 2012.

R. S. Gwynn
(Eden, North Carolina, b. 1948). A poet known for his wit and complex verse forms, he is also a critic, editor, and occasional translator who teaches at Lamar University. His translations include individual poems by

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Heinrich Heine, Victor Hugo, Stéphane Mallarmé,

and François Villon.

Michael Hamburger
(Berlin, Germany, 1924–2007). In addition to translating German poets, he published the anthology
East German Poetry
(1973) and was awarded Germany’s Goethe Medal. He wrote a critical work,
Th

e Truth of

Poetry
(1969), and his
Collected Poems
appeared in 1984.

Anthony Hecht
(New York, New York, 1923–2004). A longtime professor of

poetry at the University of Rochester, his book
Th

e Hard Hours
, relating the

horrors he encountered in World War II, won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize. A con-

sultant in poetry to the Library of Congress from 1982 to 1984, he was also

awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry (1983).

Judith Hemschemeyer
(Sheboygan, Wisconsin, b. 1935). She is the translator of
Th

e Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova
, fi rst published in a bilingual edition in 1990. Th

e latest of her fi ve books of poetry is
Lovely How Lives
(2010).

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