www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/books/review/adrienne-rich-essential-essays-selected-poems-1950-2012.html
I don’t mean to claim some instant, magic woke-ness upon reading these books. But Rich offers me a powerful and necessary reminder of the continuous self-reflection required to fight ignorance — one’s own and others’. We need to reread these books, especially now.
…
Rich never really suffered the indignity common to poets with long careers: merely self-imitative late poems that strain for effects the poet discovered decades ago. But many of Rich’s late poems seem to want to state their politics without grounding them in the life of the body, from which language learns its metaphors. This is a voice edging toward rhetoric, away from poetry, and away from us.
(Craig Morgan Teicher, “Two New Volumes by Adrienne Rich, Game-Changing Feminist, Poet and Essayist,” NYTimes, 12-12-18)
(c) 2018 JMN.
Unsung Heroes, Sung Villains
Hannah Arendt lamented the damage done by translators to some of her favorite German poems. (“Remembering W. H. Auden,” The New Yorker, Jan. 20, 1975 — recently reprinted). As best I recall, she as good as said that trying to translate poetry is foolish.
What I’ve read of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, as well as the prose and poetry of ancient Greece, Rome, Persia and India, is in translation. I owe “War and Peace” to Constance Garnet. I owe “Beowulf” to Seamus Heaney. Goethe, Cavafy, even Chaucer — all translated, for me. You see where this leads: It can’t — and must — be done. Translators — including those who dare to assay poetry — have made, and make, important contributions to world culture.
I spill this thought to see if the cat licks it up: Yes, yes, yes — let’s agree that a masterful poem is ineffable, etc., but even a lyric has some “dross,” a residue of “content” of some sort able to be suggested, if not fully conveyed, in another language after the poem’s unconveyable essences are boiled away, as it were. I hazard that, if the poem is truly well crafted, said content is not a throw-away component to be dismissed highmindedly because other dimensions of the poem have necessarily been forfeited in the exchange. And I agree that even the content of a given poem may be slippery, and interpretations may vary, but bring ’em on — the more the muddier.
Robert Lowell, in his “Imitations,” takes an interesting position on translation. Also a complicated one in its way — so much so that I’d best save mulling it over for another blurp, lest this one turn long.
(c) 2018 JMN.