Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: you have to learn the rhythm of respiration, acquire the pace; otherwise you stop right away. The same thing is true of poetry. Just recall how unbearable poems become when they are recited by actors, who, wanting to “interpret,” ignore the meter of the verse, make dramatic enjambements as if they were declaiming prose, concern themselves with the content and not with the rhythm. To read a classical poem in rhyme, you have to assume the singing rhythm the poet wanted. It’s better to recite Dante as if he had written children’s jingles than to pursue only his meanings to the exclusion of everything else.
(Umberto Eco, author’s postscript in his novel The Name of the Rose. This quotation was shared with me by OutsideAuthority.)
The horror vacui principle applies to messaging. A logodivergent text provokes suck-up from the reader’s own psychic aquifer. Demands are made, surmises enacted, leaps taken. A lucky text seduces its audience of one into a slow-reading entanglement.
Is it the translator’s job to help a text make sense? Putting it into “natural” or convincing English seems contingent on doing so. Or is the job rather to convey something of the experience of reading the original? Can you ride both of these bulls?
Are there cases where reading in one’s native tongue is an act of translation? Is paraphrase a legitimate recourse? My impression is that poets think it’s namby-pamby.
Maybe it’s not the writer’s role to care how the text feels to the reader. This is a challenging premise; it makes the act of writing look devil-may-care: Fuck you, reader, I’m doing me. But the mere act of propelling one’s words by hook or crook into the public sphere is an act of hawking. A reader is a buyer.
None of this is dark gray or light gray; it’s somewhere in between. To write (or draw) fulfills by alleviation; we talk to the self we occupy and fend off terror. But it’s also a way to drop a piece of that self in the dirt to see if anyone picks it up. When someone does, it feels good.
There are poems whose gist I imperfectly apprehend. Putting such a poem into an acquired language can be a form of beaconing for bounce-back from latent referents. It’s therapy for bafflement. The drill induces closer confrontation with the text, on one hand, and gives an airing to my cloistered Spanish on the other. There’s potential for lossy gain: Certain of the poem’s images may stick faster in the mind; a hint of narrative or of grounding context may gel; a turn of phrase may grow in appeal. What amounts to a deflecting process can provide a path to Pyrrhic defeat, as it were; no victory, to be sure, but a modicum of salvage and a hint of closure.
“Alarm” by Bradley Trumpfheller is in Poetry, July/August 2023.
Alarm
Self are you toward the pool No then closer
Yo estás hacia la piscina No entonces más cerca
Night’s not on the list of the glass-green water
La noche no está en la lista del agua color de vidrio verde
It loves your legs the water It is mica and night honey mushrooms and legs
Adora tus piernas el agua Es mica y miel nocturna champiñones y piernas
I tell you about my childhood You hum over your future tattoos
Te hablo de mi niñez Tú canturreas sobre tus tatuajes futuros
Who is this Phillips person? — I wondered after reading aloud what had looked like a forbiddingly long poem in Poetry, July/August 2023. (The biographical note tells me what I dread knowing: He’s a distinguished professor of English!)
The poem, “Child of Nature,” has knocked me silly and induced a state of maudlin rapture. (Everything I jot down here I’ll surely regret as hasty over-sharing, leaving a good poem hard done by with my petty tribute. That’s my disclaimer.)
Only a dozen lines or so into “Child of Nature” did I detect blank verse — so unforced, transparent, vernacular, yet so true to measure throughout. The writer weaves internal rhyme and flashes of sonic dazzle, light-touch literary and of-the-moment cultural reference, ironic self awareness, and language-conscious wit with an extended meditation on what “nature” is and how it’s intuited by one whose roots are urban.
Starting with the line No one is ever alone with their thoughts, I had to stop reading for a moment. You know that constriction in the throat and onset of congestive nasality that signals getting all swimmy-eyed, when your next words will surely be croaky or sound like a wheeze, so you fall silent to regroup? That’s what happened before I steadied voice and followed the poem to its serene consummation:
Alone on a cliff or here beside me, We are crowded by presence and perchance Where listening to stream and street we hear The other, even as one of them gleams And the other gleams we can’t forget One or the other; ethereal stream And electric street are parts of the same long Link in the same human chain. I came To this poem, the long one, with a lot to say. I’d sung my art before this with real zeal, Chanting through three moods so as not to forget: The ground, then heaven, then the weapon. Years Passed. And now from my high window, the cliffs And canyons of these avenues call me Back to sing through fire for their sweet sake.
My title sounds like a hoary aphorism distilling virtuous wisdom passed down through the ages in simple, God-fearing households. But I just made it up.
The “aphorism” models usage gone all but missing from English. An encounter with it in current writing, especially journalism, is bracing, and feels like hearing English spoken by a harpsichord.
Here’s the specimen encountered in the New York Times (my bolding):
But the way we typically test advances in medicine — a rigorously designed randomized clinical trial that takes years — won’t work here. After all, by the time the trial were complete, the technology would have changed. Besides, the reality is that these technologies are going to find their way into our daily practice whether they are tested or not.
Most speakers would write “by the time the trial was complete.” “Was” is the way English works now. Correctness isn’t at issue, only modern versus classical style.
What the doctor who writes the article expresses is a condition contrary to fact followed by its future, theoretical outcome. It calls for a verbal mode that English has (mostly) discarded. That mode, the subjunctive, is alive and well morphologically in other languages. In Spanish, for example, the sentence might look like this:
Después de todo, cuando se hubiera completado la prueba, la tecnología habría cambiado.
It’s a conditional sentence that’s also predictive. The pluperfect subjunctive “hubiera completado” marks the protasis, the conditional perfect “habría cambiado” the apodosis. The construction can show a shift from indication or confident expectation to conjecture, doubt, fear, joy and other speaker states of mind concerning the message.
A reader may have noticed that my aphorism doesn’t quite align with the topic. It should read:
When the work were done, then rest would come.
Or better yet:
When the work had been done, then rest would have come.
(Daniela J. Lamas, “There’s One Hard Question My Fellow Doctors and I Will Have to Answer Soon,” New York Times, 7-6-23)
The text I use is from A.J. Arberry, Arabic Poetry: A Primer for Students (Cambridge University Press, 1965). Arberry says the poem is likely not by ^Antara, but is in the spirit of “one of the greatest hero-poets of the sixth century” who “became in medieval Islam the central figure of an extensive popular romance.”
The speaker glorifies his prowess in battle, the gleam of whetted weapons, and the fiery spirit of his war horse. Two different words are used for “spear-head”: one is qarn ( pl. qurūn), which is “horn”. Early spear-heads were made of horns, according to Lane*. The other word used is sinān, from the root for “tooth.” The whiteness of the teeth is an analog for the gleam of polished metal, bright enough to guide the warrior as he moves in the night. At the end the speaker invites predators to nourish their offspring on the brains of “the people,” i.e., corpses strewn on the battlefield. There are 14 verses.
1 Wage war on me, nighttime travails, from my right side now, again from my left. 2 Do your utmost to be hostile and resist me: by God, you haven’t camped inside my head.
3 Mine is a determination harder than rock, stronger than towering mountains; 4 I have a sword with which I deal blows such as keen spear-heads fall away from;
5 And mine is a spear-head that guides me at night and keeps me from straying; 6 Mine a charger that has only to move to trail lightening from its spark-making shoes;
7 ‘adham(un) yaṣda^u-d-dujā bi-sawād(in) | baina ^ain-ai-hi ḡurraẗ(un) ka-l-hilāl(i) 8 yaftadī-nī bi-nafs(i)-hi wa-‘ufaddī- | hi bi-nafs(ī) yaum(a)-l-qitāl(i) wa-māl(ī)
7 Dark in hue it cleaves the gloom with blackness, a crescent-moon blaze between its eyes; 8 It ransoms me with its life, I it with mine and with my treasure on the day of battle.
9 And when the market of war of the tall is afoot, ablaze with the sharpened and polished, 10 I am its broker and my spear-point a merchant purchasing valuable souls.
11 Predators of the desert, when war burns bright, follow me from the empty wastelands. 12 Follow me and see the blood of enemies flowing between the hills and the sands.
13 ṯumma ^ūdī min ba^d(i) ḏā wa-škurī-nī | wa-ḏkurī mā ra’ai-ti-hi min fi^āl-ī 14 wa-ẖuḏī min jamājim(i)-l-qaum(i) qūt(an) | li-bunayy(i)-ka-ṣ-ṣiḡār(i) wa-l-‘ašbāl(i)
13 Then return and thank me, remembering what you’ve seen of my exploits, 14 And take food from the skulls of the people for your little ones and your cubs.
Notes *Edward William Lane, Arabic English Lexicon, 1863 — reprint by Suhail Academy, Lahore, Pakistan, 2003) 9 I’ve kept the Arabic’s metonymy on the shaky premise that the resulting obscurity conveys a “modern” tone! “The tall” may be tall lances, “the sharpened and polished” swords and spear-heads.
Midway through Wong May’s poem titled “The Last Film,” the speaker’s mother-in-law melts down briefly after a movie (“8 Women” by François Ozon) and a restaurant dinner (fried courgette flowers, salade Niçoise) with the family.
In my Texas dialect “give out” means to break down from exhaustion: The old boy plumb gave out. Wong May’s usage feels different, more akin to “letting out” emotion. She does so “with some vehemence.” I like the phrase “you lot” a lot. It’s often proffered sneeringly, and I associate it with British English: You lot are spewing an inverted pyramid of piffle.
The mother-in-law quickly recovers her composure; the outburst is absorbed into embarrassed silence by her offspring, never to be spoken of. The poem ruminates on the circumstances surrounding a lifespan haloed with winter misting, ending with a question.
The lady who glitches outside the restaurant is 83 years old. Time’s wingèd chariot tailgates her. The flare and sputter of the match is a glowing emblem for the outburst pondered in the poem: an access of rage at decline, possibly of ambivalence and exasperation over the impudent vitality of progeny. The phrase woefully alive stamps her dismal moment.
British radio presenters report someone’s death by inserting a formulaic “sadly”: So-and-so sadly died. It’s a bargain basement bauble of bogus sympathy, threadbare and fatuous like America’s “thoughts and prayers.” Death, be not proud — nor slobbered by pious rhetoric, please. Those who are woefully alive may well go happy into that good night, glad to be quit of their lot.
The issue’s appealing yellow-jacket cover is credited to Tré Seals.
“Ejiri in Suruga Province” from the series “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji “ by Hokusai, about 1830-31. Woodblock print depicting travelers blown off a twisting road by a sudden gust of wind. Credit… William Sturgis Bigelow Collection; via Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. [New York Times captioned illustration.]
As for Fuji… it’s nothing but three quick strokes: a swoop to the top, a bobble for the summit, a long glide back to the ground.
[…] What Hokusai and his successors affirm over and over is that there’s no such thing as a pure “culture” divisible from others — not even the culture of a shogunate whose subjects couldn’t leave on pain of death. Culture is always an ebb and flow of fragmentations and recombinations, of encounters both violent and peaceful. You cannot stay separate; everything floats […].
(Jason Farago, “How Hokusai’s Art Crashed Over the Modern World,” New York Times, 6-22-23)
I’m passionate about is trotted out like a mirror, I adjust the last of my hair, my dubious neck folded
into my collar: a dirty wad of dollars. (Randall Mann, from “The Ritz,” Poetry, May 2023)
Many are “passionate” about this, that, or the other. It makes them shouty. They could cool their jets with some good poetry. We’d be none the worse for it.
“Is it ever easier?” a young writer asked me recently. “Do you ever grow a thicker skin?” She was suffering because an essay she’d written about the death of her mother had been rejected by every outlet that conceivably might publish it. I had no answer, so I told her a story. Just before the outbreak of Covid, the novelist and short story writer Nathan Englander had moved into my neighborhood in Toronto, and we would sometimes sit around my backyard firepit, drinking and complaining. “Is it ever easier?” I asked him one night. “Do you ever grow a thicker skin?” Englander had no answer, so he told me a story. He had once been at dinner with Philip Roth. “Is it ever easier?” he asked Roth. “My skin will get thicker with each book, right?”
(Stephen Marche, “A Writer’s Lament: The Better You Write, the More You Will Fail,” New York Times, 2-11-23)
EthicalDative 