LIFELINES: June 2012

WHEN THE POET HAPPENS TO BE A NURSE At social functions, when someone asks me what I do for a living, I answer that I’m a nurse, and that I also write poetry. As a rule, the conversation then turns down the path I’ve taken as poet. Few people ask about the nursing (unless of course they happen to be nurses too). Few are curious about the connection between nursing and poetry. Perhaps because of the order in which I name the two paths—nursing, followed by an “also”—people tend to draw the romantic conclusion that at some point in my nursing career I felt the call to be creative, and thus I write in my spare time for the sake of my poetic soul. Perhaps it is I who have led them to that conclusion, for I’m given to remarking wryly that no one really makes a living writing poems, but one can at least pay the bills by working as a nurse. No wonder then that I’m perceived as a nurse who happens to write poems. But in truth I’m a poet who happens to be a nurse. (I also write fiction, but then that’s another story, no pun intended.) I suppose it could be said that a nurse who writes serious poetry is not unlike anyone else who writes serious poetry while also holding down a job outside the halls of academia. (Academia being the only place where a regular, working poet might be able to make living as poet.) Dana Gioia devotes a chapter of Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture to a discussion of American poets who happen to have made a living in business, ultimately making the case that these poets did not “simplify themselves into the conventional image of poet.” Gioia points out that he chose this particular group—poets who have at one time or another in their lives worked as insurance salesmen or bankers or investment brokers—because it serves the purposes of his wider argument as “one of the more extreme and paradoxical examples of the alienated modern artist.” Is the poet who works in a hospital, tending to the sick, any different from the poet who works in an office building selling insurance? Maybe not, since both these poets work at “regular” jobs for a paycheck in order to work in the off hours towards the same goal—a well-crafted poem. But to me the more interesting question is this: All things being equal (that is, we’re talking about serious poetry that merits the consideration of both the literary critic and the lover of poetry) what is it about the body of work written by nurses—as a distinct group—that is worth our attention? Gioia poses the same question about businessman-poets (all the poets he discusses in that particular chapter are men)—“Is anything even gained by segregating them as a distinct group of writers and comparing them to other poets whose lives seem more typical?” Obviously, given the depth of his own thinking on the subject, Gioia has concluded that there is indeed something to be gained. I agree, if only for the pleasure of digging past the intriguing question and into the poetry itself. But then Gioia goes off on in other directions (money and wealth as ancient subjects, for example) that may not be as useful to this discussion. One of Gioia’s questions, however, went off in such a direction as to give me pause: “Why did these men write nothing about their working lives?” Clearly, one would never ask that question about the “distinct group of writers” who are nurses, for the obvious reason that when nurses write poems, they quite often are writing about their working lives, with all the poetic energy it takes to address what they know firsthand of illness, birth, dying and death, suffering and healing. One could argue that a great many poems in the English and American tradition address these very same subjects. Still, there is no denying that the majority of poems written by nurses—at least those specifically identified and anthologized as such—are uniquely set in the working life of the nurse, a working life that requires an intimacy with human suffering the likes of which no other profession requires. Poems written by nurses are more likely to be narrative, to appeal to the senses, to be attentive to the human body in ways that are knowing, and authoritative. It seems to me this is only natural, given the sort of experience a nurse naturally draws from. I dare say that most of the poets represented in what Cortney Davis calls a “small revolution in nurses’ writing” did not take offense when Davis and her co-editor Judy Schaefer (both of them nurses, both poets) gathered them together under one title—Nurses—and published their poems in an anthology. (There are now two such anthologies.) The members of that small revolution owe a dept of gratitude for the passionate efforts of these anthologists, and for the outreach of editors like Danielle Ofri of Bellevue Literary Review. Were it not for the distinct grouping—for the category of “literary nurse”—some of these poets might never have received the notice they are due. That said, I am still a poet who happens to be a nurse. The distinction is important to me because I resist the suggestion that any subject matter—in my case, the working life of a nurse—is of primary importance in recommending a body of work to a reader. Some poets are nurses, and others are insurance salesmen and, yes, a lot of them are academics, but regardless of how they make a living, the best of these strive to perfect their art. Confined by the topics relating to a particular profession, how can any poet grow as an artist? In her foreword to Between the Heartbeats: Poetry and Prose by Nurses, Joanne Trautmann Banks writes that she’d like to remove the hyphen from the term “nurse-writers.” She concludes with an imperative: “Call them simply writers who happen to have unusual access to us.” (xiv) I think Banks has it right. In reading the poems in this tribute issue, it is worth considering the import of that “unusual access.” By virtue of the profession, nurses have physical access to us: They are present at moments of human vulnerability. At the same time, the work that nurses do—often so close to our pain as to breathe the very air of it—demands a discipline that limits access to emotion. Good nurses keep a check on the feelings—fear, revulsion, anger, grief—that might compromise what they have to offer as professionals. Even at the joyful occasions, childbirth for example, nurses know they aren’t entirely free to indulge in emotion. On the one hand they must be empathetic and engaged, but on the other hand they must be removed and clear-headed. Thus, at the end of the workday, a nurse’s approach to writing a poem isn’t exactly like Wordsworth’s emotion recollected in tranquility. The nurse’s approach might be described as professional barriers to emotion dismantled out of poetic necessity. My phrasing isn’t as euphonious as Wordsworth’s, but it’s the best I can do, and I believe it’s true. This is not to say that nurses write poems to let off the steam of pent-up feeling. It is to say that their approach to poems (even those poems addressing subjects outside the nursing workday—sea turtles and street cellists and the Day of the Dead, for example) is by way of a privileged and precarious access to human experience. Rather than merely reporting from the bedside, rather than aiming for sensation or sentiment, good poets who happen to be nurses work hard at the craft. As a distinct group, it is true they have an unusual access to us. But it’s important to note that this access is not easy, and that each poet in the distinct group presented here has approached it deliberately. Each one has mustered up the discipline it takes to make something beautiful out of what a nurse knows. Works cited: Gioia, Dana. Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture (Graywolf, 1992). Davis, Cortney and Judy Schaefer. Between the Heartbeats: Poetry and Prose by Nurses (University of Iowa Press, 1995). Davis, Cortney and Judy Schaefer. Intensive Care: More Poetry and Prose by Nurses (University of Iowa Press, 2003). __________ Madeleine Mysko is a registered nurse and a graduate of The Writing Seminars of The Johns Hopkins University. Her poems and prose have appeared in such venues as The Hudson Review, Shenandoah, Bellevue Literary Review, The Baltimore Sun and American Journal of Nursing. Her first novel, Bringing Vincent Home (Plain View Press) is based on her experiences as an Army nurse on the burn ward during the Vietnam War. A poetry collection, Crucial Blue (Rager Media), is due for release in 2008. –from Rattle #28, Winter 2007 January 19th, 2012 Link • Essays, Tributes • 1 Comment Alice Major POETRY AND SCALE Flying changes the scale of things. From up here at 40,000 feet, the immense boreal forest of northern Canada looks like lichen on rock, as though the huge landscape below had been reduced to a boulder. An hour or two from now, when we begin the descent to my northern city, the quarter-sections of cultivated land will become a quilt of human textures, the grain of corduroy or twill. The cars sliding along the highway will become insects and then toys. Then the wheels will bump down, everything will become its “real” size once more, and I’ll be home. Whether child or adult, we are fascinated by changes in scale. Look how long people will spend making model ships—the exquisite tangle of thread that’s exactly the right thickness to represent rope—or the bridges for a model railroad. Look at our fascination with bonsai, a whole landscape on a ceramic dish. When I was a kid waiting for an Ontario spring to arrive, I used to loiter by melting piles of snow at the side of the road, fascinated by the way they created miniature systems of river and waterfall, channel and dam. Years afterwards, on my first trip to Jasper in the Rocky Mountains, I had the strangest sensation that my childhood landscape had been blown up to a gigantic scale. The wide valley where the Athabasca River makes its way through braided channels and white cascades tumble down mountainsides was the grown-up version of my old walk to school. “Scale invariance,” this tendency for certain patterns to look the same as you get closer up or further away, is a common feature of the natural world: branches on a tree, cloud shapes, coastlines, the hierarchies of bronchiole and alveoli in the lungs. It is also a feature of intriguing mathematical objects known as “fractals,” which have become increasingly relevant to studying the world’s varying phenomena since mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot began working with them in the 1970s. We are used to the idea of dimensions and the objects that go with them—one-dimensional lines, two-dimensional squares or triangles, three-dimensional cubes, pyramids, spheres. We learn to manipulate such objects mathematically: area equals length times width; radius and circumference can be used to establish the volume of a sphere. We use these formulae to think about our world and forget that very few objects are this simple. Because we are creatures who evolved in the natural world, scaling relationships give us intense pleasure. They allow us to recognize a deep interrelatedness in the world’s disparate phenomena, where its parts are related both to larger structures and smaller ones. We are amazingly good at extracting fractal relationships from the incoming stream of wavelengths—sound and light—that pour in on us. In fact, recognizing fractal relationships is quite possibly central to how our visual and hearing systems distinguish random noise from meaningful data. Aesthetically, we are particularly fond of fractals that fall in a certain range of self-similarity, more at the middle. Patterns that repeat too exactly are monotonous; others that don’t repeat at all are uninteresting for a different reason. A pure monotone is the auditory equivalent of a straight line—a uni-dimensional repetition of a single wavelength that could quickly drive us mad. “White” noise, its opposite, is made up of all possible wavelengths. It’s the hiss from speakers or an old television, a featureless blanket that we quickly tune out. Instead, we like the sound of water, where we hear self-similar clusters of wavelengths repeated for shorter and longer periods, or the rustle of leaves in the wind. We like the patterning of mountain peaks with smaller and larger versions of the same shapes laid over each other. Or clouds. “Glory be to God for dappled things,” wrote poet-philosopher Gerard Manley Hopkins. His line wouldn’t have had read nearly so well if he’d written, “Glory be to God for fractal objects,” but it comes to nearly the same thing. * * * And poetry? Any genre that ranges from haiku to epic can obviously exist on many scales. But fractal relationships are especially relevant in considering the fate of poets. I was flying home from a conference of the League of Canadian Poets in Toronto. It was early summer, 2005, and I had a snug secret in my pocket. I had taken a phone call the previous day from the Mayor of Edmonton, confirming that I had been selected as the city’s first poet laureate. My emotions were mixed. When the idea of establishing the post had first been mentioned casually, I felt cool to the idea. Of course it is important to pay attention to an art form that typically ekes out a lichen-like existence on inhospitable tundra. But the notion of banging one poet on the head with a civic club and saying “You’re it” went against the grain of what poetry is to me. It seemed to play into the whole cult of celebrity, making poetry a kind of reality-TV game show. Who will struggle through when everyone else is thrown off the island? But then, when the local political will to establish a poet laureate coalesced into reality, my ideals deserted me. I was urged by friends to put my name forward as a candidate, and when I did so, I found that I wanted that honour. I was to be interviewed by a jury for the post; they would quiz me on my ideas about the position. Please be prepared to read a poem aloud for the jurors, I was told. But because I was away for the conference on the necessary date, I had to phone in at a designated time. The interview experience fell into a fractal dimension somewhere between epic and comic verse. In an obsessively interconnected culture, making a long-distance call may not seem like a big deal. But poets do not meet in posh conference centres with videoconferencing technology. I was staying in a phone-less dorm room in Victoria College’s Burwash Hall. The League meeting was in the stony-pillared vaults of Hart House. I was sternly refused permission to make a long-distance call from any of its offices. I did not own a cell phone. I didn’t exactly want to make the call from a public phone booth, so I jumped in a cab, having borrowed the key to the League’s office—only to run into the snarl of Toronto’s downtown rush-hour. The cab lurched into a line of traffic and sat there clucking like a constipated hen. After ten sweating minutes, I flung a bill at the driver, leapt out and galloped back to Victoria College on foot. The offices with their forbidden phones were now all locked up for the business day. I pleaded for someone, anyone, to point me to a place where I could make a relatively private phone call. For god’s sake, I’m looking for a phone not a personal teleportation device. They directed me back to the basement of Burwash Hall, where a phone was mounted on the wall in a bare, booming corridor just outside the dorm’s laundry room. The long white walls made an appropriate setting for a Hitchcock film—god only knows what might be tumbling behind the glassy occularity of the dryer doors. It felt as though I should be dialing 911 and hoarsely mouthing “help, help” into the mouthpiece instead of conducting a long-distance poetry reading. My voice came out in an un-laureate-like croak when I finally connected and introduced myself to the receptionist, who sounded dubious about accepting reverse charges from a frog in an echo chamber. “Please hold,” she said. “The jury isn’t quite ready for you yet.” I waited the long minutes on the phone, reading over the lines of a poem to get used to the sound of my voice in this theatre of the absurd and praying that no one would come out of the laundry room with a basket of sheets or a revolver while I was declaiming. The things I do for art. But perhaps the weird acoustics stood me in good stead. For here I was, flying back home as the soon-to-be-official-civic-poet. The plane may have been at 30,000 feet, but I was probably 5,000 feet above that. Yet my emotions were still mixed. Yes, I’d wanted it. But part of me could also imagine the yuck-yuck reaction from the world’s bigger ponds: “Edmonton? Where the hell’s that? And they think they have poets there?” In vain, I tell myself that my city’s population is about three times the size of Shakespeare’s London and we’ve got as much right to poets as anywhere. But the insecurity lingers, and the problem is a fractal one of scale. * * * Years earlier, I’d come to this city that would become home from the other direction—from a much smaller city even further west, where I’d worked as a newspaper reporter for a couple of years. In Williams Lake, British Columbia, I had covered city council, sitting in on evening meetings that staggered on until after midnight. My very favourite story as a reporter concerned the beaver dam debacle. Williams Lake—the lake itself—was dammed at its exit by enterprising rodents. As spring began melting snow from the surrounding hills every year, the lake levels backed up and up, getting ominously close to the front doors of houses built along its shore. The province’s fish-and-wildlife protectors did not want to do anything to destroy the dam because eventually the cold meltwater would descend to the bottom of the lake and flush up the warmer, stagnant layers below. This stale water would then pour over the top of the dam as part of a natural cycle of renewal. The hell with flushing out lakewater, says Mayor Tom—that dam is going to flush out people’s basements. So he goes out himself in a canoe one night with a couple of sticks of dynamite to blow a hole in a dam. I felt that this kind of escapade must be typical of small-town politics. Surely the assemblies of larger communities must act with more sense of proportion, more sophisticated analysis of issues. I came to Edmonton thinking that a city of three-quarters of a million people would be governed by a city council somewhat more dignified in its proceedings. However, I found the human dimension doesn’t change much. There were huge uproars when a new mayor didn’t want to wear a large beaver hide that came with the official chain of office. For her, it was a statement about animal rights; for the rest of council it was a rejection of the city’s history as a great fur-trading post. For me, it was more of a fashion statement—wearing that beaver hide is like having a great round furry pond draped over your shoulders from which your head sticks up like a lonely lotus bud. Only a mayor built like a buffalo can carry it off. The whole silly debate occupied more column inches in the paper than the approval of millions of dollars in road repairs. You might think this sort of thing happens just because we’re out here on the lone prairie and the winters are long. But then you watch televised proceedings from the national capital in which the level of discussion is hardly higher. Human beings don’t change scale much, regardless of the size of the stage they walk on. The distribution of capacities and talents is much the same in any group of humans. Making the group larger doesn’t lead to a corresponding increase in the individual IQs clustered under the Bell curve. To this extent, human beings are not fractal. However, assemble us into progressively larger groups and fractal patterns do tend to emerge. The qualities that make a good poet are a complex of linguistic ability, creativity and the desire to invest the time and effort necessary to succeed; these qualities are more or less uniformly scattered through the population. The qualities that make a famous poet are not so different, but they are compounded with something that can only be described as luck. The process of poetic fame is governed by fractal patterns. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his essay “The Black Swan: Roots of Unfairness in Arts and Literature,” points out that literary or academic fame is analogous to stock-market booms. There’s a “winner-take-all” effect—one book in 800 will account for half of sales in any given year, while the other 799 eke out a meager share of the pickings. We jump hopefully into the publishing cab and go nowhere much. The phenomenon operates much like the Mississippi river system scooping up the water from smaller and larger tributaries in an immense drainage basin. It becomes impossible for a water droplet to cut its own channel to the sea. The pattern is not caused by malice or design or even by commercial greed. Taleb points out that the same pattern emerges with academic citation system, supposedly free from such commercial interests. If you are the lucky researcher whose paper first gets cited out of all the researchers who may be working on the same problem, you’ll go on getting cited by all the future researchers. And the bigger the drainage basin, (i.e., the larger the number of contributors like authors or researchers) the higher the concentration into one main channel will be. An idealized mathematical process can be subdivided forever. However, the real world is not scale-independent in that way. In our world, most things are not subject to one fractal pattern but to two or more simultaneously. Such multifractals tend to come to a natural limit. Patterns that work at small sizes don’t work at large ones; hierarchies emerge in response to physical constraints. The early days of an embryo’s existence can be nourished without a central circulatory system, but fairly soon that doesn’t work any longer and cells need to specialize. In poetry, the physical constraint we are up against is time—the public’s time. In any one life, there’s only so much time to read books. Few citizens can take on 300 poetry books—the number published annually in Canada alone. You need a process for deciding which ones are worth your while. In isolated tribal systems, there are only so many bards, so many works, and each of them can be absorbed and recognized. In large urban societies, we depend on some kind of filtering system. Fame is just what happens when you can’t know every book personally—when you have to fly at 40,000 feet to get across the country in a manageable amount of time. Its filtration system is essentially an information-exchange process made up of little magazines, poetry contests and prizes, and includes the luck of proximity to the whole tag team of mentors, publishers, reviewers. It’s less hierarchy than swamp bed or compost pile. Only those poems or poets who are very sturdy, accidentally lucky or both will survive. The great advantage of being a poet is that the filtration system is so damn slow. A novelist will usually have a one-time chance to cut a channel with her book. For the poet, reputation is more marsh than Mississippi—an ecology that lets a lot of us flourish locally, which is where we’re really needed anyway. Note: Excerpted from Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science, to be published by the University of Alberta Press in fall, 2011. –from Rattle #35, Summer 2011 Tribute to Canadian Poets __________ Alice Major has published nine collections of poetry and a novel for young adults, and served as the first poet laureate for the city of Edmonton from 2005–2007. She emigrated from Scotland with her family at the age of eight, and grew up in Toronto before working as a weekly newspaper reporter in central British Columbia. Major has lived in Edmonton, Alberta since 1981, and is past president of the Writers Guild of Alberta, and the League of Canadian Poets. November 21st, 2011 Link • Essays • Leave a Comment THE IMPERTINENT DUET:: TRANSLATING POETRY WITH ART BECK #2: ODI ET AMO – HATE AND LOVE AND THE POET’S SOUP I. For those who’d rather avoid reading a treatise on the Latin classics—relax. That’s not where this is going, at least not where I intend it to go. This is going to be an exploration of echoes, rather than antiquity. But that said, let’s start with Catullus. And with a two-line poem of Catullus that, as much as it’s poetry, could as well be graffiti on an ancient wall. His “carmen (song) 85” written in the 1st century BC. Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris? Nescio, sed fierei sentio et excrucior. This is a much translated poem, but also a “much adapted” piece, both in poetry and music, as it resonates down the years. It’s a love poem of sorts, but also a poem that sticks in the throat of Catullus’ love poems. The two lines combine complex emotions with a simplicity of expression—and that very simplicity, I think, makes it more difficult to directly translate its poetry out of the Latin. Because of this, odi et amo tends to migrate into as many adaptations and variations as translations. Before even approaching a translation of this poem, maybe it’s helpful to talk a little about Catullus. Saint Jerome, compiling his chronological tables some 400 years later, notes Catullus’ birth in 87 BC and later, notes that “Catullus died in Rome at the age of thirty” in 57 BC. (And why does it seem more than ironic that the name of the great ascetic scholar should be forever linked to Catullus this way?) Modern scholarship tends to use the dates 84 BC to 54 BC. Still making Catullus thirty at his death. He traveled in high Roman circles, was acquainted with Julius Caesar, and was a friend of Cicero. Readers of this piece are probably either going to already know an awful lot about him, or not enough. I don’t have the qualifications to say much that’s meaningful to the former, and there’s not enough space in this article to address the latter. So, for the sake of moving forward, let me just generalize that Catullus wrote some of the most bittersweet love poetry of his, or any other, epoch. According to legend—and I’m of the mind that research at this distance isn’t much more than legend—his inamorata was a married woman some ten years his senior, named Clodia. She was the sister of a notorious libertine, Clodius Pulcher. Sexually notorious in her own right, she was rumored to have poisoned her husband, Metellus, who died in 59 BC—either two or four years before Catullus’s death. But by that time, Catullus had been supplanted as her lover. Catullus may have been the romantic poet every sentimental woman wants. And Clodia, the goddess slut every romantic poet craves. But she had priorities beyond poetry. Clodia was accused of many things, but never sentimentality. No one knows how long Catullus’ affair with Clodia lasted, but it was intense. Evoking Saphho, he called her “Lesbia”; wrote famous poems to her sparrow. And other poems whose translated lines are common currency still. One of the most read is song #5: Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus, rumoresque senum severiorum omnes unius aestimenus assis. Let’s live, my Lesbia—and love: the stern opinions of the old aren’t worth a cent to us. Soles occidere et redire possunt: nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda… Suns set and rise again: For us, once our brief light sets, there’s only night and an endless sleep. From there the poem goes on to talk about a thousand kisses, then a hundred, and another thousand, alternating between hundreds and thousands into the unquantifiable. Catullus’ thousand desperate kisses continue to multiply. The poem has exploded into translations and imitations from the Renaissance to today. The first stanza was beautifully translated by Sir Walter Raleigh. And there’s Andrew Marvell’s “To a Coy Mistress.” A poem that seems hugely indebted to Catullus V. Except Marvell’s “the grave’s a fine and private place/ But none, I think, do there embrace” seems coldly cerebral next to Catullus’ nox est perpetua una dormienda. And embrace, a tepid substitute for a thousand kisses. A present day poet, Joseph Campana (in his Book of Faces, a volume whose poems revolve around Audrey Hepburn) also bends Catullus V to his purpose: Let us live, let us love—Audrey! The old men talk but they’re not a copper to your gold (this I know) you’re gold rising and falling you are daytime. You’re brevity and light and I am the sleeping darkness… And let’s not forget Raymond Chandler, who’s said to have adapted his title, The Big Sleep from Catullus V. ___ II. That’s the Sweet, but now for the Bitter A friend recently observed that when it comes down to it, sweet love poems really aren’t that interesting. “When I go to readings,” she said, “to open mics… It’s when they start shouting about their exes, that p…., or that c…. That’s when you hear the applause.” A good many of Catullus’ poems are nasty epigrams, some as prurient as Martial’s. In fact, Martial, that consumate bad boy of Roman poetry, writing a few generations later, cites Catullus as a mentor. Catullus could rant as well as—well actually, much better than—any open mic poet. But sometimes the rancor of his great love turning sour is a quiet scalpel that slices deeper than any rant. And that helpless wound comes down to us, almost clinically, in Odi et Amo. Here’s the Loeb Classical Library prose rendering. A simple statement: “I hate and love. Why I do so, perhaps you ask? I know not, but I feel it, and I am in torment.” But too simple? Too prosaic. Sounding out the original, even if you can’t read Latin, the words seem resonant, charged, vital. Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris? Nescio, sed fierei sentio et excrucior. The first sentence seems to offer only one translation choice—I hate and love. But hate may not be the most productive translation choice. Hate in English tends to have an active component of anger. Odi is often used more passively, the way you’d hate the taste of headcheese. Not especially the way you’d hate a mortal enemy. When Horace says: Persicos odi, puer, apparatus—“I hate Persian trappings, boy”—he’s not talking about going to war against Persia. Rather, a sense of aesthetic distaste. Softened to something more reactive than active, Catullus’ odi takes on more nuance, less self certainty. And in choosing just how to interpret odi, I think you also have to consider the word order—in which odi comes before amo. Latin is an inflected language and word order is often flexible. But in this case you have one verb preceding the other, one image preceding the other. If odi is intended to be an active, aggressive emotion you’d think it would, more often, be preceded by love troubles—rather than precede love. Trying to think of examples where aggression becomes love, you can come up with some dark, extreme images. A sated sadist fondling her prey. Maria Goretti’s assailant turned suddenly remorseful. Othello’s too late epiphany. On the other hand, if odi is interpreted as something more passive, an instinctive dislike or aversion—then the helplessness of amo in this poem seems underscored. One falls in love, the way we always fall in love, despite ourselves. Stumbling into an unwanted, yet deeply wanted wound. Or as another friend once observed: Lovers, meeting for the first time, often feel initially annoyed with each other. And that annoyance is just the heart’s immune system struggling to avoid the pain to come. But in any case, one of the reasons these two lines of poetic graffiti have endured is that they resonate in every direction like a stone dropped in a pool. There’s no one right way of reading the poem. It speaks to the dark extreme fringe as well as to the myriad varieties of commonplace heartbreak. Catullus’ odi and amo co-exist like yin and yang, constantly circling and constantly nourishing each other. Going forward into the line, the identity of the “you” in the second sentence also offers some possibilities if you imagine a real rather than rhetorical “you” who’s asking “why?”. Maybe the speaker’s lover? Maybe Catullus is really talking to Clodia, not the reader? Maybe he’s even being nagged to explain himself. Cast this way, the first line could validly be interpreted as: I’m repelled and I love. Why that’s so, maybe you do need to know. ___ III. The Rosy Crucifixion? The second line opens unequivocally enough. Nescio—“I don’t know”—sed fieri sentio—“but I feel it happening”—et excrucior. And with et excrucior we get into the question of “false friends” in translation. Words that strongly resemble words in another language, but in fact mean something else. Crucio in Latin, and crucifigo derive from the same root, but crucio means to torture, and crucifigo to crucify. A subtle distinction, but one doesn’t necessarily kill you—the other does. So the speaker in Odi et Amo is tortured not crucified. Probably the better equivalent would be “racked.” The Nobel winning Greek poet, and sometimes translator, George Seferis remarked in one his journals that it’s impossible for us to read Homer except through the experience and patina of intervening history. So that the great classic works take on shades of meaning that were only potentially there in the original. I couldn’t agree more. The best poems (especially in translation) acquire a life of their own beyond their original intent and mutate in their dialogue with succeeding generations of readers. They speak to us through a phone line interwoven with the fiber optics of our past and their future. For us, some 2,100 years after Catullus, crucifixion (false friend or not) can never escape the weight of the sacramental—an energy of life as well as death. This was hardly the case when Catullus wrote. But that historic/cultural patina seems to—not add to—but actually draw weight out of Catullus’ poem. It’s where the poem wants to go now. I don’t know exactly what inspired the title of Henry Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion. My guess is it had more to do with the Rosicrucians than Catullus. But Odi et Amo would make a perfect epigraph for the relationships in those novels. And, for me, it’s almost impossible to not read crucifixion into excrucior. And to not finally translate the poem as something like: I’m repelled and I love. Maybe you do have to know why. I don’t know, but I feel it happening and I’m crucified. ___ IV. Echoes As with song #5, Catullus #85 has echoed down the centuries. When I queried an American Literary Translators chat group for examples, one person responded: “I thought of Racine’s Andromaque, the sentence that used to be taught in all the lycees classiques in France: Ah! Ne puis-je savoir si j’aime ou si je hais? Alas, am I incapable to know whether I love, whether I hate?” The speaker, in this case, is a woman, Hermione, but the emotion is universal, certainly not just male. And Odi et Amo has always for some reason brought to mind some lines from Paul Schmidt’s very loose, very lyrical translation of Rimbaud’s Drunken Morning: It began with a certain disgust, and it ended— Since we could not immediately seize upon eternity— It ended in a scattering of perfumes. A not particularly torturous ending. But in my memory those lines are always mixed up with lines that occur a little later in the translated poem: It began in utter boorishness, and now it ends In angels of fire and ice. Not explicitly Catullus, but lines Catullus would certainly understand. And Henry Miller as well, since he adapted the poem’s last line—Voici le temps des Assassins—as the title for his study of Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins. In the early twentieth century, Louis Zukofsky did a homophonic “translation” of Odi et Amo that makes “sound” if not imagistic sense. Not everyone’s cup of tea. But still an echo: O th’hate I move love. Quarry it fact I am, for that’s so re queries. Nescience, say th’ fiery scent I owe whets crookeder. Jospeh Campana also uses an adaptation of Odi et Amo in his Audrey Hepburn-centric Book of Faces: I hate, I love (Audrey…. … I know nothing, I feel it happening: the torment (mine). But two of the most interesting and lyrical contemporary adaptations come from Frank Bidart. In both cases, he begins with a simple “I hate and love.” And he omits the second line of the original, managing to compress a compressed Latin poem even more. The last line in his first version, from his volume The Sacrifice reads: “Ignorant fish who even wants the fly while writhing.” The second variant of that last line appears in his later collection, Desire, with the Bidart poem now entitled “Catullus Excrucior”: “The sleepless body hammering a nail nails/ itself hanging crucified.” With Bidart, you get the sense that it’s not the lover, but love itself that’s odious. Love, itself that you can’t live with, or without. Then you realize the original Catullus can also be read this way. Realize just how protean the deceptively simple Latin is. ___ V. Catullus and Old Helmut Soik Catullus was a young poet, and he’s still a poet for the young. There’s a sense of trespass when the old read Catullus that Yeats famously caught in his poem “The Scholars”: Bald heads forgetful of their sins, Old learned, respectable bald heads Edit and annotate the lines That young men tossing on their beds Rhymed out in love’s despair To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear All shuffle there; all cough in ink; … Lord what would they say Did their Catullus walk their way? I’m no longer young and I’m going to sidetrack here to someone even older: Helmut Soik, a poet who for some reason has been on my mind lately. We’ll wander a bit, but soon be back to Catullus. In fact, re-reading Soik was one of the catalysts that started me re-reading Catullus and it seems appropriate to give Helmut the last word. Indulge me, if you will, as I backtrack to somewhere around 1978. That was when Soik, a German poet my father’s age came to visit. We were both enjoying a pretty good year. I’d just published a book length poem based on Casanova’s memoirs that had gotten some nice buzz. And Helmut’s first (bilingual) volume of poems in English translation was recently out. We shared the same small, but hot at the time, California publisher. Helmut came to San Francisco to read, and we spent a few great days together. We wandered the neighborhoods—North Beach, the Castro, the old and new Chinatowns, and pondered the tombstones at Mission Dolores. His conversational English was only a little better than my stumbling German, but his fluent half sister Tanya accompanied us and our dialogue moved along as easily as a movie with subtitles. And Helmut’s life could have made a movie. Born in 1914, he belonged to what, for Germans, was definitely not their “greatest generation.” In his youth he was a prodigy, publishing his first volume of poetry at 16. And his second, five years later, along with critical studies of Rimbaud and others. He was a pacifist, active in avant-garde circles and had little interest in anything but literature and the arts. The sort of life the young Catullus may have led. And he had a sweetheart, the young love of his life. But then, of course, he was drafted. And ended up at the Eastern Front. War stories are notoriously unreliable. But the way Helmut told it, he was exhumed unconscious from under a pile of corpses after the battle of Stalingrad by a band of Russians. He was a cherub, then, he said. Despite being nearly thirty. A lost kid, through and through, and some angel must have touched his captors. Rather than shoot him or send him off with the other POWs, they adopted him as sort of a mascot and just put him to camp work. He looked back with genuine nostalgia at that interval. I’m not sure how long it lasted, because somehow the dates seem as out of whack as the concept. Although it all seemed quite logical when he was telling it. Then, as the story goes, when the war was finally over the Russians just shook hands and sent Helmut walking home. This is what I don’t understand. Were they the Red Army or a band of irregulars? Or just a disillusioned unit improvising their own rules. Helmut was never really clear about anything except how fond he was of those Russians. In any event, he somehow made his way across shattered East Europe to what he thought was a German town. But war had redrawn the borders and he found himself in newly Soviet Poland, conscripted to hard labor in the salt mines. He was finally repatriated in 1950. And spent the rest of his aesthetic (and personal) life practicing a sort of discipline of alienation. His mature poems dissect both the Hitler years and the postwar “German miracle” with a deeply humane cynicism. He settled, miraculously back into life with his old sweetheart, but avoided any non-menial pursuit except poetry—content to be “useless” to society. You come away from reading Soik with the sense that Nazism isn’t just an era that ran from 1933 to 1945, but rather a nasty strain woven into humanity from which Helmut had taken permanent leave. The title of his American volume, Rimbaud under the Steel Helmet[1] is apt. But the poems are wide ranging, and Soik’s volume begins with poems in honor of other poets: Tu Fu, Lorca, Rimbaud, Belli, and, yes… Catullus. Von Catull las ich in der stunde der dämmerung daß er in seinem dreißigsten jahr starb in der todesstunde alleingelassen in einem dreckigen hinterhaus der großstadt Rom. Die sexbombe Claudia Pulcher mied sein bett von toten küssen und schweigen…. I read about Catullus in the twilight hour, the way he died in his thirtieth year, left alone at the hour of his death in a filthy back alley tenement in the metropolis of Rome. Sexpot Claudia Pulcher wanted nothing to do with his bed of dead kisses and silence… Later in the poem: …Was nützte es ihm daß der pontifex maximus seinetwegen staatstrauer trug daß die zehntausend luxusnutten in den heiligen straßen schluchzten die jeunesse doree absichtlich schmutzige anzüge trug… …What use was it to him that the Pontifex Maximus declared official mourning on his behalf, that ten thousand exquisite whores sobbed in the sacred streets, that the gilded young all changed into soiled robes… But at the end, Helmut’s question and his old man’s answer: Und trotzdem was blieb erspart ihm? Schon sein früher tod trug zur geniebildung bei. Die demonstrieung weiblichen verfalls an seiner angebeteten geliebten vielleicht fünfzehn jahre später blieb erspart ihm Und das heißt doch wirklich corriger la fortune! And for all that what, if anything, was he spared? His early death, for one thing, solidified his image as a genius. And it spared him as well from watching his heartthrob’s menopausal decay some fifteen years later. You could say dying was really the ace up his sleeve! Helmut died a few years back. The story may be embellished a bit, passed from his sister to our mutual editor. But as I heard it, he was hiking up a not too strenuous mountain trail in a popular resort. And happened to be trudging behind a woman who caught his practiced eye. “What a nice ass you have,” he said. She stopped, turned, looked him over, smiled and said: “Coming from an old goat like you, even a compliment is an insult.” A couple of days later, peacefully watching television in his cabin, he died. Helmut wasn’t spared much in his long life. But if the account of his last days is to be believed—even at eighty-something, that ache still glowed. ___ VI: The Poet’s Soup Catullus died famous and young—Soik, old and obscure. Googling Helmut Maria Soik, the only recent references I could find were to the bilingual collection I mentioned above and a German volume of poems published in 1980 whose title translates to Ramblings about the Possible Existence of Hell. His obscurity wouldn’t surprise Helmut who, in a long, somewhat Brechtian, poem titled “Night and Nothing” (Die Nacht und das Nichts[2]) said: A man went to bed with a bundle of poems, wrote on his knees despite the cold in the room. He knew: for industrial society for competitive society he was useless. Later in that poem he asks the big question: Teach me comrade! Teach me in my ignorance! Give me the answer! Who gives the poet his soup? Wer gibt dem dichter die süppe? Who nourishes a poet? In one sense, it’s our poetic ancestors. Soik was nourished by Catullus, as Catullus was nourished by Sappho. But this can only go so far, provide only part of the calories a poet needs. Süppe is the daily ration of the humble and misfortunate, of mendicants, internees, conscripts, and labor camps. From the threads running through Helmut’s work, I’ve always felt his poetry was nourished forever after by his captor-saviors in the Russian forest. Whatever the real story, I’ve come to imagine them as a band of survivors whose priorities had probably come down to avoiding the twin grinding jaws of Hitler and Stalin. And would Catullus’ insistent songs still be nourishing us if Catullus hadn’t been nourished by Clodia? Not Lesbia/Clodia—the eternal muse, the eternal ideal. But Clodia the woman who lived, aged, grew, faltered and plotted to survive. Who bemused and captured and spooned out the stony, prisoner’s soup of poetry to Catullus. Notes: [1] Rimbaud under the Steel Helmet is still in stock at SPD books. www.spdbooks.org [2] The excerpts from Soik’s Die Nacht und das nichts are as translated by Georg Gugelberger and Lydia Perera in the original 1976 Red Hill Press edition. The excerpts from his Catullus poem were retranslated for this article by Art Beck. __________ Art Beck is a San Francisco poet and translator who’s published two translation volumes: Simply to See: Poems of Lurorius (Poltroon Press, Berkeley, 1990) and a selection Rilke (Elysian Press, New York, 1983). His recent articles on Horace and Rilke in John Traintor’s magazine Jacket can be accessed online at: www.jacketmagazine.com October 10th, 2011 Link • E-Reviews, Essays • Leave a Comment Reviewed by Art BeckThe Drunken Boat THE DRUNKEN BOAT AND OTHER POEMS FROM THE FRENCH OF ARTHUR RIMBAUD AMERICAN VERSIONS, BILINGUAL ADDITION tr. by Eric Greinke. Presa Press PO Box 792 Rockford, MI 49341 ISBN# 0-9772524-7-7 108 pp., expanded 4th addition, 2007 www.presapress.com Arthur Rimbaud had, arguably, the most productive adolescence in modern literary history. Born in 1854 and raised by a difficult and single mother on the edges of poverty, he nonetheless began publishing accomplished poems in his early teens. The title poem of this selection–Le Bateau Ivre–was written at the age of 16, and marks the beginning of a brief career that impacted not just French poetics but world poetics generations later. It’s hard, for example, to imagine Howl without the touchstone of Rimbaud. And it’s become a commonplace observation that each new crop of poets finds itself searching for the “new Rimbaud.” In the American imagination, Rimbaud, has become the brilliant bad boy personified. James Dean on poetry steroids. A patron saint of the Beats and rock musicians. Somewhere in his very early twenties Rimbaud stopped writing. As suddenly as any suicide. Which only adds to the mystique. After a year or two of wandering, he went to work for a colonial merchant firm in North Africa. Part adventurer, part fortune hunter, he peddled arms as well as trading in coffee and tusks. He might have continued for years, living as far away as he could from the scenes of his turbulent youth. Denying–as he was said to have–that he’d ever written poetry when the subject of poems by a certain Rimbaud circulating in Paris came up. “Preposterous.” But a knee that slowly began to swell with a persistent tumor finally forced him back to France for medical attention. In 1891, his right leg was amputated in Marseille. In July of that year, he returned home to his family. Would he also have eventually returned to literature? Invalided, with nowhere else to turn? And, if so, to what kind of aesthetic in the fast arriving twentieth century? We’ll never know. Stifled and sick, he resolved to go back to the colonies. But made it only as far as the hospital in Marseille. The swelling in his knee had been diagnosed as a carcinoma, which had evidently spread. He died in November, 1891, barely 37 years old. As brief as it was, the roughly ten year period of his poetic production seems significantly longer when viewed in the context of his, also, brief life. Translations If you browse the internet, you can find a number of individual Rimbaud postings and a few small press volumes, but, surprisingly, for all his popularity, there seem to be only a handful of major press collections. I’m no doubt overlooking some, but primary translators include Louise Varese and Wallace Fowlie in the 1950s, Paul Schmidt and Oliver Bernard in the 1960s, and Wyatt Mason, whose complete Rimbaud appeared in 2002. In any case, this group provides a wide backdrop for Greinke’s versions. Also noteworthy are the twelve adaptations of Rimbaud pieces included in Robert Lowell’s 1958 volume Imitations. I’m attracted to Greinke’s approach for a several reasons. First, because he’s a poet who’s unapologetically trying to translate poetry into poetry. A tough proposition requiring shameless intuition and not only the courage–but the inner need to risk “poetic flight.” The need to work without a net. The paradox of scholarly, linguistic translation is that by the time you do your research and test your facts, the poem’s as often as not gotten tired of you and refuses to come out and play. There are notable exceptions, but I’m also of the opinion that the disciplines that make for an accomplished linguist may also work against what John Berryman characterized as “the freedom of the poet.” The problem, of course, with poetic “intuitive” translation is that when you shoot from the hip, you have to accept that from time to time, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot. Another reason I’m attracted to Greinke’s approach is that for him Rimbaud is a labor of love, not a “project.” In his introduction he talks about a feeling of déjà vu when first encountering Rimbaud. And describes what seems an almost compulsive sense of appropriated ownership. An annoyance at the existing translations. A need to do his own. To a non-translator, these feelings may sound a little over the top. But to any one who translates poetry they’re instantly recognizable. Greinke’s only saying what most poetry translators think, but usually think twice about saying. Greinke also recognizes that “a literal translation is never possible…” And that “in many ways, a translation is a new poem, modeled on the original.” I personally would take this concept even further. I’ve often felt that a translator needs to look beyond the words and beneath the text for the roots of the original poem. But maybe, the best metaphor for this was one given by Robert Pinsky at recent reading of his version of The Divine Comedy. When the question of accuracy came up, Pinsky opined that somewhere–in whatever place these things exist–is the Platonic ideal of The Divine Comedy. Dante tapped it first, and no one will ever do it better. But Dante’s American and Chinese, and German, and etc. translators need to find that place that Dante tapped and try to tap it themselves. “Common Ground” In the introduction to his 2002 Rimbaud volume, Wyatt Mason draws a distinction between what he considers Fowlie’s almost prosaically trot-like versions and Schmidt’s highly personalized, poetic–but spun–translations. In his versions, Mason wants “to find common, rather than middle, ground between the two poles.” It may be informative to see where Greinke fits here. One of his better pieces, I think is “Ma Boheme,” a light and early poem but full of the “adolescent exuberance” that Greinke finds lacking in existing translations. Rimbaud’s first stanza reads: Je m’en allays, les poings dans me poches crevees; Mon paletot aussi devenait ideal; J’allais sous le ciel, Muse! et j’etais ton feal; Oh! la la! que d’amours splendides j’ai revees! Schmidt’s version seems, on surface, straightforward, until after comparing it you realize how much of Schmidt has been added (But as Mason points out, this may come down to a matter of taste). I ran away, hands stuck in pockets that seemed All holes; my jacket was a holey ghost as well. I followed you, Muse! Beneath your spell, Oh la la, what glorious loves I dreamed. With Mason, we lose what seems an interjected “holey ghost,” but we also seem to lose some of the voice. And so off I went, fists thrust in the torn pockets Of a coat held together by no more than its name. O muse, how I served you beneath the blue; And oh what dreams of dazzling love I dreamed. Does Greinke find the “common ground” that Mason is looking for? So, I’m walking along, hands in torn-out pockets & my coat is looking really perfect Under the Romantic sky, & I’m a slave To my dreams of splendid love! On first reading, I miss the “Oh! la la!” of the original, but yes, maybe oh la la does Frenchify the poem too much. And “I’m a slave” really replaces it well. What really differentiates Greinke’s version though is that unlike the other two (both of which are undeniably good)–is that it reads like a poem written in English. And I think this was accomplished by tapping the roots as well as the words of the original. By “internalizing” the original and letting the new poem shape itself in the new language. Rather than forcing the French into English. It’s also interesting to look at another instance of a poet appropriating the original: Robert Lowell’s version from “Imitations”: I walked on the great road, my two fists lost in my slashed pockets, and my overcoat the ghost of a coat. Under the sky I walked, I was your student, Muses. What affairs we had together… Whether you prefer Greinke or Lowell in large part comes down to taste. But both versions seem exemplary of what happens when a poem is internalized by a translator and then re-created in the target language, as opposed to just translating the text. That being said, you also have to question whether–by migrating “muse” into “romantic sky”–Greinke loses what may be the one serious point of the passage? The young Rimbaud’s dedication to “the Muse,” i.e. Isn’t it poetry he’s a slave to, not love? But I think Greinke may compensate enough for this later in the poem: “…as if I was in some fairy tale, I shouted poems / as I went & I had a room at the Milky Way / & of course the stars were rustling like leaves.” Greinke’s best passages exhibit that kind of fluidity and unstrained melody. From “The Clever Maid”: In the brown dinette, perfumed with the aroma of varnish & of fruits, at my ease I scarfed a plate of various foreign Delicacies, & I sprawled in my big chair. or the maid “At The Green Inn”: That one–never one to avoid embraces!– Giggling, served me buttered bread With warm ham on a multicolored plate. Poop Greinke’s preface states that he wants to bring across the “musical and painterly qualities” of the original. Along with the “adolescent exuberance … and the feeling.” The inference is that much of this rests in the music and metrics. As he puts it: “Restoring the surface qualities has…been one of my goals. The meaning emerges when the tone and persona are restored.” But if Greinke’s strength is musicality, I think there are places the pursuit of sound may work against him. For me, “Le Couer Vole“–”The Stolen Heart”–seems an almost impossible poem to capture in translation because its outer surface of jaunty, slangy rhyme protects something shattered within. Enid Starkie devotes a chapter to it in her biography of Rimbaud. And Wallace Fowlie discusses the poem and its presumed basis at length in his 1946 treatise The Myth of Childhood. As the legend goes (and perhaps it’s been revised in more recent biographies?), Rimbaud, while visiting Paris during the Commune uprisings, was sodomized, either willingly or not, in a military barracks. He was sixteen and Starkie considers it his first real sexual experience. He transmuted the experience into a poem with emotions that Starkie characterizes as both violated and fascinated. First entitling it “Couer Supplice” (“Tortured or Martyred Heart”), later changing the title to “Couer de Pitrie” (“Buffoon’s Heart”) before settling on “Stolen Heart.” The French first stanza is: Mon triste couer bave a la poupe, Mon coeur couvert de caporal; Ils y lancent des jets de soupe Mon triste couer bave a la poupe: Sous les quolibets de la troupe Qui pousse un rire general, Mon triste coeur bave a la poupe, Mon Coeur couvert de caporal. Fowlie’s translation begins as follows: My sad heart slobbers at the poop my heart covered with tobacco-spit. They spew steams of soup at it. My sad heart drools at the poop. Or in the 1962 Oliver Bernard version (on the WEB) entitled “The Cheated Heart”: My poor heart dribbles at the stern Under the gibes of the whole crew Which burst out in a single laugh, My poor heart dribbles at the stern My heart covered with caporal. Looking at the French rhyme scheme, if you didn’t know the content and background of the poem, you’d be inclined to presume this was something a lot lighter, a clever vulgar sound poem along the lines, say, of Jandl’s “Otto’s Mopps.” But reading Starkie and Fowlie–and if the story is at all credible–you start to view the protective shell of rhyme and slang as a tough ostrich egg with a small fatal crack from which the yolk is beginning to leak. When Rimbaud sent the poem off to his young teacher and mentor Izambard, he stressed “This does not mean nothing.” And “I implore you not to score it too much with your pencil or with your mind…” Izambard, however didn’t realize what the poem was. He later said he thought it “a hoax in the worst of taste.” But wanting to appear broadminded, he answered Rimbaud with what he thought was a clever parody of the poem. Starkie dates the beginning of the end of their friendship from this letter. It would be hard to criticize anyone for being less than successful in capturing “Le Coeur Vole,” but I think Greinke’s beginning tries too hard. My sad heart gushes in poop, My heart drenched in tobacco spit; They vomit currents of soup My sad heart drowns in shit. The sounds work, but the image they bring across is that of a conscious sentimentalist making tough fun of himself. Not a 16 year old boy, losing his anal virginity and “dribbling at the stern.” Substituting “poop” (as in shit) for the French poupe–a nautical term for stern from which we derive “poop deck” is arguably okay, because I think in this case poupe signifies astern as in behind. But “gushing” and later “drowning in shit”–while musical and jaunty, as well as nautical–just seem to kill the essential image. While “dribbles,” or, the even more complex, “drools” retains the damaged heart of the poem. …de Fleuves Impassibles Another instance where image may be unduly sacrificed for sound is at the very beginning of the title poem, “The Drunken Boat.” The original begins: Comme je descendais des Fleuves impassibles Je ne me sentis plus guide par le haleurs: Des Peaux- Rouges criards les avaient pris pour cibles, Les ayant cloues nus aux poteaux de couleurs. The voice speaking, is that of the boat itself. Wyatt Mason’s translation is: While swept downstream on indifferent Rivers, I felt the boatmen’s tow-ropes slacken: Yawping Redskins took them as targets Nailing them naked to totem poles. My own French is atrocious, but piecing out the stanza from a dictionary and with some help from French speaking friends, my stab at a trot is something along the lines of: As I descended the impassive Rivers, I sensed myself no longer guided by the (hauling) bargemen. Howling redskins had taken them as prey (or targets) and nailed them naked to painted poles. Louise Varese translates the stanza as: As I came down the impassible Rivers, I felt no more the bargemen’s guiding hands, Targets for yelling red-skins they were nailed Naked to painted poles. Note that Varese changes “impassive Rivers” to “impassible Rivers.” Impassibles (impassive) seems a “false friend” that’s almost impossible to resist in the context of a river. And Schmidt, possibly wanting to have it both ways says “I drifted on a river I could not control.” Greinke moves this further along: As I flew down the raving river, Free at last of the boatman’s hands That nailed themselves to my mast, That forced me into Indian waters Certainly a melodious entry to a poem rich in sound. But what Greinke has done is to switch the images. He’s objectified the impassive river system into a “raving river.” And turned the raiding band of scalpers into an abstract–”Indian waters.” He’s also interjected a–for me–surreal image of a boatman nailing his own hands to the mast. Does a translator have the right–in creating a new poem in English–to bend the original this much? Yes, of course. I have no doubt that if Rimbaud were translating, he’d have no compunctions. But to me there are several questionable consequences. One of these is to remove an image that marks this as the poem of a, albeit brilliant, sixteen-year-old. And I don’t know what’s worse–losing the “impassive Rivers” which to me impart a sense of expulsion and alienation. Or losing the Redskins with all their adolescent energy. And the sense of ordinary workaday river commerce suddenly invaded by the wild. One thing that strikes me is that, not only is Fleuves plural in the original–it’s also capitalized–which seems to imply the name of a system of waterways flowing to the ocean in whatever imaginary country we’re in. Do we really want to give that animist presence up? Another unintended (or maybe intended?) consequence of leaving out the murderous Redskins is that of sanitizing the stanza the way stage productions of Huck Finn refer to Jim as “River Jim.” Are the Indians essential to the poem?–maybe not. But, I think the “expelling” impassive Rivers foreshadow the poem’s penultimate stanza, where the now exhausted boat yearns to return to a childhood scene. A childhood the sixteen-year-old Rimbaud already felt expelled from? In Greinke’s sensitive rendering: If ever I shall return, it will be to the pond, Where once, cold and black toward perfumed evening, A child on his knees set sail A leaf as frail as a May butterfly. “The Drunken Boat” is a long poem and a translation doesn’t sink or swim on one stanza. But if Rimbaud is the lifelong companion he seems to be for Greinke, I’d hope that in some future revision, he might revisit that first stanza. But then again, there’s Robert Lowell’s “imitation” which turns the impassible rivers into the “virgin Amazon.” I felt my guides no longer carried me– as we sailed down the virgin Amazon, the redskins nailed them to their painted stakes naked, as targets for their archery. Another example illustrating how different poetic translators will look for the “poem” in different aspects of the original. There’s no “correct,” definitely no final, version. What resonates for one translator, may be static to another’s ear. __________ Art Beck is a San Francisco poet and translator who’s published two translation volumes. Simply to See: Poems of Lurorius (Poltroon Press, Berkeley, 1990) and a selection Rilke (Elysian Press, New York, 1983). He’s currently trying to atone for some of his earlier Rilke versions by retranslating the Sonnets to Orpheus. September 19th, 2011 Link • Essays • Leave a Comment THE IMPERTINENT DUET:: TRANSLATING POETRY WITH ART BECK #1: SPANISH DANCING ABOARD THE QUEEN ELIZABETH (in collaboration with Silvia Kofler) I. A Small Question of He or It At this year’s American Literary Translators Association conference, Silvia Kofler, an old friend and colleague, showed me a translation of Rilke’s “Spanish Dancer” that she’d come across in an anthology. “Look how they translated this line! Why?” And so began a conversation. While I take full blame for the vagaries of the translation at the end of this piece, this essay is really a joint endeavor, a record of the dialogue between Silvia and myself. Silvia is a native Austrian who emigrated to the United States in her twenties. She’s a published poet in both English and German. Rilke is, of course, a poet she’s known since her school days, but it’s worth noting that Rilke is not, for contemporary German readers, the ubiquitously read icon he is in America. A German speaking poetry reader might delve into Rilke as often as contemporary Americans read, say, Wallace Stevens. And as for us with Stevens, the German reader often has to slow down and mull over just what it is that Rilke is saying. But in this case, Silvia seemed emphatic. Silvia’s issue was a line in Rilke’s “Spanish Dancer.” Und plötzlich ist er Flamme ganz und gar. The line comes immediately after the first stanza and is, in fact, a stanza unto itself. “Spanish Dancer,” an extended metaphor set in a Paris nightclub, is one of Rilke’s least opaque poems. Most, if not all, Englishspeaking translators have roughly followed Herter Norton’s 1938 translation. Norton’s reading of the first stanza and the stand-alone line that follows is: Wie in der Hand ein Schwefelzündholz, weiss, eh es zur Flamme kommt, nach allen Seiten zuckende Zugen streckt -: beginnt im Kreis naher Beschauer hastig, hell und heiss ihr runder Tanz sich zuckend auszubreiten. Und plötzlich ist er Flamme ganz und gar. … As in one’s hand a sulfur match, whitely, before it comes aflame, to every side darts twitching tongues – : within the circle of close watchers hasty, bright and hot her round dance begins twitching to spread itself. And suddenly it is altogether flame. Why, Silvia asked, did they translate er as it when it should be he? The answer that Rilke’s myriad translators would uniformly give her is that in German, unlike English, inanimate nouns are gender specific. Either masculine or feminine. Der Tanz is masculine. And so in German, the pronoun for dance is “he.” And er, in this case, refers to the dance. It’s logical. There’s no “he” mentioned anywhere else in the poem. And, as I said above, I’m not aware of any English or American translator who’s treated the line otherwise. But, no, no—Silvia said. Sure that’s “logical,” but it’s not the way a native speaker would read this poem—at least at first. This, after all, is a very erotic piece and it’s as much about a man watching as a woman dancing. Which got me thinking. Grammar has rules that seem logical, but poetry has it’s own linguistic logic. And Rilke, especially, has his own poetics. His imagery can be as musical as his metrics—often fugue-like and ambiguous with interchangeable melody and harmonic lines as it were. In this context, it may well be that another native speaker might read this line differently than Silvia has always read it. But why does she read (and want to read) er as a he rather than a gendered dance? What happens when you interject a specific man into the poem? First, to me, the effect is reminiscent of a film director zooming in on a face in the crowd. It crystallizes and personalizes the eroticism of the dance. And second, it stops you (at least in German) because you have to ask yourself—did Rilke really mean “he”? And so that image might (for another German reader) flash and disappear if you finally settle on “it.” But the image is there, at least subliminally. And one shouldn’t overlook the poem’s line structure. Rilke has set one stand-alone line between two five line stanzas. He’s making us stop; the standalone line doesn’t flow smoothly from the Tanz in the previous stanza. Read by itself, without referring to the previous stanza, er is just as readily he as it. It’s hard for an English speaker to connect with this, because we have so few gender specific inanimate nouns. What’s happening in the German, seems to me, to be similar to what happens if you come across something like: The queen boarded the Queen Elizabeth then she promptly set out to sea. Is the “she” that sets out to sea the queen or the ship? You stop to think, and may say, what’s the difference because both, in fact, set out to sea. But you stop to think. And the image of the queen and the Queen both come to mind. __________ II. But How in the World Can You Translate Something Like That? I’m not sure, but I think it’s a good example of why poems as resonant as Rilke’s benefit from regular re-translation. It’s a commonplace observation that Rilke has become overdone in English. There are commercial reasons for this—he’s in the public domain, and most of the selections sell. Sadly, most of the selections read like workshopped versions of each other. So the only reason to do another version is to try to bring something across that hasn’t been attempted. And I think that’s a good enough reason here. __________ III. So Here’s the Attempt Some tricks just can’t be duplicated. I can’t think of a masculine English noun remotely equivalent to “dance.” My first thought was to just choose “he”—as Silvia seems to have done. Say something like and suddenly he’s utterly on fire. That’s consistent, it adds a close-up of a face in the crowd that instantly focuses the poem, makes the dance as much a dialogue as a performance. I can understand why Silvia was so incensed at losing this aspect in the translation she read. But then, is that too onedimensional? Does it lose the resonance implicit in choosing between images? You could also dodge the issue entirely and say: and suddenly, completely, helplessly: -fire. Leaving out both “he” or “it.” If you took that approach, you could stretch Beschauer—spectators, watchers—into something more gender specific and overtly erotic, like voyeurs. But then you lose that wonderful effect of a close-up, zoom in. And—as Silvia pointed out to me as our dialogue progressed—there’s another subtlety in the way Beschauer is used. This is another masculine noun, but also one that in German normally takes its singular or plural form from whether it’s prefaced by the masculine der (singular) or the feminine article die. In this case, it’s not prefaced by a definite article, because the plural is inferred from Kreis—the circle of spectators. Even so, Silvia observed—the lack of the usual definite article might subtly nudge the German reader into the ambiguity of er in the standalone line. Most of this isn’t possible in English. So finally, the best approach may be to try to find the tangled resonance of “he/it” elsewhere in the poem. And just overtly go with what seems Rilke’s intent. __________ Rainer Maria Rilke SPANISCHE TÄNZERIN Wie in der Hand ein Schwefelzündholz, weiss, eh es zur Flamme kommt, nach allen Seiten zuckende Zugen streckt -: beginnt im Kreis naher Beschauer hastig, hell und heiss ihr runder Tanz sich zuckend auszubreiten. Und plötzlich ist er Flamme ganz und gar. Mit Ihren Blick entzündet sie ihr Haar und dreht auf einmal mit gewagter Kunst, ihr ganzes Kleid in diese Feursbrunst, aus welcher sich, wie Schlangen, die erschrecken, die nackte Arme wach und klappernd strecken. Und dann: als wurde ihr das Feuer knapp, nimmt sie es ganz zusamm und wirft es ab sehr herrisch, mit hochmütiger Gebärde und schaut: da liegt es resend auf der Erde und flammt noch immer ergibt sich nicht -, Doch sieghaft, sicher und mit einem süssen grüssenden Lächeln hebt sie ihr Gesicht und stampft es aus mit kleinen festen Füssen. … Rainer Maria Rilke —tr. Art Beck SPANISH DANCER The way a sulfur match, cupped in the hand, whitens before it flames, licks out in every direction: - within the intent ring of watching eyes, the quick, bright heat of her circling feet shivers until it flares. And suddenly he and the dance are altogether fire. With a blink, she ignites her hair, then instantly with seductive mastery, whirls her entire dress into the bonfire from which her naked arms rear up like startled rattlesnakes. As the fire finally clings to her like a slip, she strips it off completely, aristocratically tosses it aside with a haughty shrug. And watches: There it lies, smoldering on the ground, still burning and unwilling to surrender. And with a smile on her face and a sweet “hello,” she stamps it out with small, sure steps.

LIFELINES

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Am amazed

Saturday, June 16, 2012

www.rattle.com:About poems

Monday, June 4, 2012

Looking Back

Africa-By Maya Angelou

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