EthicalDative

‘L’avidité de tes muqueuses cannibales’

Posted on June 23, 2023 by JMN

Emilie Moorhouse’s translations of the verse of Joyce Mansour (1928-1986) in Poetry, June 2023, give full-throated voice to the satisfactions of the originals.

Take the line from “Fever your sex is a crab” that serves as my title: Lack of good judgment would make me argue for “The avidity of your man-eating membranes” over “The eagerness of your cannibalistic tissues,” which is Moorhouse’s civilized rendering.

“Muqueueses” is a hairy caterpillar of a word, a phonological jamboree oozing with vowels, glorious as French can be. I love saying “muqueuses cannibales,”talking about saying it, imagining being heard doing so.

Mansour’s language seems notably “musical” to my ear, not tinkly but savage. A pleasurable aspect of reading the poems alongside their translations is savoring their acoustic power while leaning confidently on Moorhouse for help with unfamiliar words. The bolded terms in the extract below were new to me:

Rhabdomancie
…
Puis affalée dans l’armoire près du lit
Projetez votre oméga plus une poignée de salamandres
Dans le miroir ou l’ombre se dandine
…
Taquinez ses penchants avec un blaireau de soie
Saupoudrez son phalène de sang et de suie
…
Malgré moi ma charogne fanatise avec ton vieux sexe débusqué
Qui dort.

Dowsing
…
Then sprawled in the armoire next to the bed
Project your final word along with a handful of salamanders
In the mirror where the shadow sways
…
Tease his kinks with a silk brush
Sprinkle his moth with blood and soot
…
In spite of myself my carrion fanaticizes over your ousted old cock
That sleeps

This writing seems very current though its author died over 3 decades ago. It conjures words going for a walk as Klee took line for a walk. The sensuous fact of themselves is that to which they lead, and what they share with dream is the quality of slipping capture.

What does “surreal” mean, anyway, to a lay reader of today? It’s easy to call much contemporary verse surreal insofar as it doesn’t “make sense” in the ordinary way, doesn’t correlate to realities that are objective, if that means perceptible or conceivable in an awake, reasoning state of mind. I thought perhaps that’s what Eliot meant by “objective correlative,” but a quick Wiki-dip reminded me that what he meant was too abstruse to be memorable.

Posted in Anthology | Tagged French-English, language, poetry, reading, translation | 1 Comment

The Poem of an-Nābiḡa (Died ca. A.D. 604)

Posted on June 21, 2023 by JMN

In this complicated, ancient poem* I glimpse the life of squalid intrigue and dependency that was ever the courtier’s lot. At the mercy of the tyrant’s whim and the plots of competitors, his is a routine of flattery, complaint and cunning self-promotion. Skill with panegyric is a tool for survival.

A brute comparison of the Arabic text’s word count to that of my paraphrase highlights Arabic’s extraordinary facility for compression.

As a matter of style, consider verse 6. The English speaker yearns for active voice, yet the Arabic verbs are passive, as if to underscore the speaker’s lack of agency in the matter of his own welfare.

At the end, verses 11 and 12 twist fulsome praise of the patron, self-abasement and special pleading into a tight weave of indirection.

1 ‘atā-nī ‘abaita-l-la^n(a) ‘anna-ka lumta-nī | wa-tilka-l-latī ‘ahtammu min-hā wa-‘anṣabu
2 fa-bittu ka-‘anna-l-^ā’id(āti) farašna-nī | hirās(ān) bi-hi yu^lā firāš(ī) wa-yuqšabu

1 Word reached me — may you shun cursed behavior! — that you blamed me and things over which I am vexed and exhausted.
2 So I spent the night nagged by thoughts that seemed to spread a spiny bush for me, by which my bed was tossed and poisoned.

3 ḥalaftu wa-lam ‘atruk li-nafs(i)-ka rībaẗ(an) | wa-laisa warā’a-l-lāh(i) li-l-mar’(i) maḏhab(u)
4 la-‘in kuntu qad bulliḡta ^an-nī ẖiyānaẗ(an) | la-mubliḡ(u)-ka-l-wāšī ‘aḡašš(u) wa-‘akḏab(u)

3 I swore, leaving no doubt in your mind — and beyond God there is no escape for a person.
4 If you’ve been whispered to about treachery on my part, your slandering informant is a conniving liar,

5 wa-lakinna-nī kuntu-mra’(an) liya jānib(un) | mina-l-‘arḍ(i) fī-hi mustarād(un) wa-maḏhab(u)
6 mulūk(un) wa-iẖwān(un) ‘iḏā mā ‘ataitu-hum | ‘uḥakkamu fī ‘amwāli-him wa-‘uqarrabu

5 Whereas I am a man with a tract of land on which to wander and find retreat.
6 With kings and brothers, when I’ve come to them, I’ve been made responsible for their possessions and treated as an intimate,

7 ka-fi^l(i)-ka fī qaum(in) ‘arā-ka-sṭana^ta-hum | fa-lam tara-hum fī šukr(i) ḏālika ‘aḏnabū
8 fa-‘inna-ka šams(un) wa-l-mulūk(u) kawākib(un) | ‘iḏā ṭala^at lam yabdu min-hunna kaukab(u)

7 Just as you’ve done with persons I’ve seen you favor, and yet not consider to have sinned from lack of gratitude.
8 For you are a sun, and other kings are stars; when (your sun) rises, not one of those stars appears.

9 fa-lā tatrukan-nī bi-l-wa^īd(i) ka-‘anna-nī | ‘ilā-n-nās(i) muṭlīy(un) bi-hi-l-qār(u) ‘ajrab(u)
10 ‘a-lam tara ‘ana-l-lāh(a) ‘a^ṭā-ka sauraẗ(an) | tarā kull(a) malk(in) dūna-hā yataḏabḏabu

9 Don’t leave me with the threat as though I were, to the people, smeared with tar, covered in scabs.
10 Don’t you see how God has given you power, and how every monarch quakes before it?

11 wa-lasta bi-mustabq(in) ‘aẖā(n) lā talummu-hu | ^alā ša^aṯ(in) ‘ayyu-r-rijāl(i)-l-muhaḏḏab(u)
12 fa-‘in [‘ak] maẓlūm(ān) fa-^abd(un) ẓalamta-hu | wa-‘in [tk] ḏā ^utbā fa-miṯl(u)-ka yu^tibu

11 You are not one to spare a brother whom you have not straightened out. What man is the refined one?
12 If I am wronged, I’m a slave you have treated badly; and if you are disposed to restore me to your good graces, a man like you grants favor.

Notes
*The text I use is A.J. Arberry’s Arabic Poetry, A Primer for Students, Cambridge University Press, 1965.
1 may you shun cursed behavior: Lane: (A greeting addressed to kings): “Mayest thou refuse… to do a thing that would occasion thy being cursed…”
2 tossed: the Arabic says “lifted” or “raised.”
3 I swore: Presumably an oath of innocence invoking God’s name.
4 slandering: the Arabic says “embroidering” or “embellishing.”
5 I am a man: I.e., man of substance.
11 Which man…etc. I.e. “Which man can claim to be truly refined?”
12 Key words are verb yu^tibu and its derivative ^utbā. Of the latter, Lane says: “Its primary signification is the returning of one whose good will, or favour, has been solicited, or desired, to the love of his companion.” As an example of the former, Lane translates ‘a^taba-hu as: “He granted him his good will, or favour; regarded him with good will, or favour; became well pleased, content, or satisfied, with him.”

Posted in Anthology | Tagged Arabic-English, language, poetry, translation | 1 Comment

Sometimes I Miss the Forest for Dwelling on the Trees

Posted on June 17, 2023 by JMN

In reading “The ‘Change’ in Climate Change” by Jacob Shores-Argüello (Poetry, June 2023), I stiffened attentively at the following:

… Because a year before,
a hurricane reaved its way across this country for the first time
in recorded history…

The country is Costa Rica. “Reaved” looked vaguely familiar; I thought of Faulkner’s The Rievers, a book I know of but haven’t read. I wasn’t sure if it was the same word, nor what it means in either case.

“To reave” is to carry out forays in order to plunder, rob, despoil or purloin. My research revealed that the Faulkner title is spelt The Reivers, and that “to reive” means the same as “to reave.”

Here’s the rest of “The ‘Change” in Climate Change”:

…Tornado or torbellino or something else,
I ask her about the valley’s strange wind. And she laughs, says

that she was calling to ask me the same thing. I don’t know why
I keep forgetting the change in climate change. My grandmother

sighs as the sky darkens to the color of rum. Why I still think
that we’ll have names for all the things that will come.

This straight-talking text pulls what I took at first to be a kind of turn in its final sentence — the reader of Poetry braces for bumps in the road. After I had drafted a catchy paragraph of deconstruction, the climax of which was, “I’m left in a sweet agony of dangling,” my various re-readings caused the penny to drop. My agony was no longer sweet. I had simply read wrong.

The key to grasping the writer’s conclusion is this: The independent clause which is antecedent to the final dependent clause — Why I still think…, etc. — is in the penultimate stanza: I don’t know why…. The last sentence fleshed out is, then, (I don’t know) why I still think / that we’ll have names for all the things that will come.

Once I had snapped to the discontinuity, it was as obvious as the nose on my face. Such are my misadventures with lined speech, given a weakness for skies darkening to the color of rum, forgetting that lucid exposition isn’t coin of the realm in the genre.

No sé por qué aun creo que sabremos darle nombre a todo lo que ha de venir.
Je ne sais pas pourquoi je crois toujours que nous aurons des nombres pour tout-ce qui viendra.

Posted in Anthology | Tagged English-French, English-Spanish, language, poetry, reading, translation | 3 Comments

A Tenacious Seeking of Certainty Sows More Doubt

Posted on June 15, 2023 by JMN

Virginia Gabrielli. [New York Times illustration]

I’ve saved this passage by Kafka translator Ross Benjamin in my notes since early February. In re-reading it I realize anew how cogently it expresses my own experience of reading poetry, never mind translating it. It ends with a compelling recommendation to let certain writing speak for itself — “as far as possible”!

***

My translation [of “The Diaries of Franz Kafka”], which I delivered to my publisher shortly after turning 40, Kafka’s age when he died, was the result of eight years spent groping and straining to make sense of Kafka’s groping and straining to make sense. Not only could I not always — or even often — be certain that I knew what Kafka meant, but I also didn’t know whether at any given moment he himself knew what he meant. Like many diarists, he didn’t always achieve a clear-cut articulation of his inchoate consciousness, to say nothing of his unconscious, but often relied on a kind of mental shorthand or associative logic hinted at only barely in the words and syntax.

I typically translate by circling back to unresolved quandaries as many times as it takes for me to feel convinced of my choices. But chasing Kafka’s almost physically elusive sense, I found myself in the same predicament that afflicts many of his characters: the more tenaciously certainty is sought, the more insistently doubt and frustration are sown. It’s a self-perpetuating, potentially interminable cycle. I came to realize that only by putting aside my demands for clarity and coherence could I do justice to what was strange, disconcerting, and even baffling in Kafka’s writing, to what unsettled any narrow interpretation or reductive theory we might otherwise be tempted to impose on it. Kafka’s irresistible appeal is preserved— indeed, in my view, it’s only enhanced — by, as far as possible, letting his writing speak for itself.

(Ross Benjamin, “A Century On, the Search for the Real Franz Kafka Continues,” New York Times, 2-2-23)

Posted in Quotations | Tagged language, poetry, translation | 5 Comments

A Compelling Rationale for Taking Up Versifying

Posted on June 13, 2023 by JMN

… Credit… Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York Times.

Monet grew up in East New York in Brooklyn and started writing poetry when she was 8 because she was “fascinated by typewriters and people who would sit at typewriters,” she said.

Monet fondly recalls her former college adviser: “I remember her suggesting what schools to go to and it wasn’t Harvard, you know what I mean?”

I think I know what she means. It’s just as well. The Harvard English department has dropped its poetry requirement for an English degree.

Monet’s YouTube video, The Devil You Know, serves up sensory tumult ending with an affecting diminuendo dissolve. Memorable line:

Silence is a noise, too.

I also relish the phrase “word-workers” among her honor roll of callings in the video. I could wish only that Monet’s word work were slightly more audible amidst the lively instrumentation that includes the sterling horn of Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah.

Sources
Marcus J. Moore, “Aja Monet, a Musical Poet of Love,” New York Times, 6-8-23.
Maureen Dowd, “Don’t Kill ‘Frankenstein’ With Real Frankensteins at Large,” New York Times, 5-27-23.

Posted in Commentary, Quotations | Tagged language, poetry | 4 Comments

Words, Words, It’s Always the Words

Posted on June 12, 2023 by JMN

These are the generations of mice…

The phrase introduces each of three meaty stanzas in John Kinsella’s “Familiars” (Poetry, June 2023). The device, with its mock portentous sonority and homiletic repetition, has a pleasing (to this Jean-Luc Picard fan) Star-Trekkie smack. Syntactically the stanzas are clearly structured and marked, as if built of hewn and fitted stone. What a relief.

… I am their familiar, restless and emolliated
in sweat, something not quite right with my
body clock, my systems…
…
So we drywall to reinforce, almost a corbeling.
…
… The heat wears me down.
Wall spaces fluctuate. A haunting of the endocrine.

Two words are new to me: “emolliated,” which means “weakened,” and “corbeling.” A corbel is a structure jutting out from a wall to support a weight. I listened to the pronunciation of “corbeling” to know which syllable is stressed (the first).

I also confirmed my understanding of “familiar” (a spirit) and “endocrine” (relating to hormone-secreting glands), two words I recognize but rarely use. When reading verse, I do considerable look-up of words I think I already know!

Diction is a big deal to me, and I’ve been ridiculed as snooty for using language perceived as pretentious. A coach I subbed for once in the high school where I taught mocked me for reassuring him in a note that no student had misbehaved “egregiously” in his absence. It hurt me. That’s how I talk; he took it as affected and pompous. I felt emolliated.

When a writer of verse uses words of rare occurrence, I think of Louise Glück’s quip that “poets” are conventionally thought to be writers who are fond of words such as “incarnadine.” She writes that she herself is inclined to stick with common language, because it can have, she believes, the widest range of connotation. As a reader I’m of two minds on the matter; it’s how I roll.

Posted in Anthology | Tagged language, poetry | 4 Comments

Notes on Poetry (Compound Pizza)

Posted on June 10, 2023 by JMN

To make it clear, I don’t think there’s anything mystical
about “ghosts” — they are an isness. There’s no secret code
or system of access, and they are there whether you want
them to be or not. They are enjambments within your narrative.
(John Kinsella, from “Clarity,” Poetry, June 2023)

My translation:

Hablando claro, no creo que haya nada místico
en lo de “fantasmas” — son una es esencial. No hay código secreto
ni sistema de acceso, y están allí quiéraslo
o no lo quieras. Son encabalgamientos dentro de tu narración.

A speciality pizza lay hot on the chopping block: Pacific Vegetarian, thin crust. My sister on the sofa needed only a surface on which to rest her plate before diving into the junk food. I said, “You know what? I have a lapboard that should be just the thing. Lemme go get it for you.” She said, “Yeah, that should work.” I strode away only to return in a moment toting the lapboard and affably affirming on the heels of her comment:

“I can’t say but what I’d be unsurprised if it didn’t work.”

My translation:

No puedo decir otra cosa que afirmar que quedaría yo lleno de sorpresa si me sorprendiera el caso de que no fuera solución del problema.

Handing her the lapboard I added laughing, “You know, Nan, I’m not entirely sure what I just said!” And we ate our pizza.

Reflecting on the exchange and the feeling it gave me, I realize that what had bubbled out of me unbidden was a burst of poetic speech. I had emitted language rife with feisty pleonasm that escaped known, sensible boundaries. It was a blip of quantum-level expression able to be in several states at once — not contradictory so much as adversative in a poke-in-the-eye but reconciling way. It compressed so much into such tightly elusive utterance, and gave me such pleasure to say in that particular way, knowing full well neither Nan nor I could any longer unspool its latency into straight statement, and knowing that it didn’t make a damn to her or me that we couldn’t, that it gave me, I say, a quiver of joy comparable to pizza.

You scoundrels who call yourselves poets, I salute you. So that’s what it’s all about! I’ve had a taste of your satisfactions.

Posted in Anthology | Tagged English-Spanish, language, poetry, translation | 2 Comments

‘Eat Bitterness’: Xi Jinping

Posted on June 7, 2023 by JMN

The ditches at the edge of the field were thick with poke, which I did like, even loved. The poison root of the poke grows down deep and snaggled like a mandrake.
(Kathryn Nuernberger, from “A Sense of Belonging,” Poetry, May 2023)

There’s video on YouTube of a young Tony Joe White singing his immortal song. For some reason it’s tagged “Polk Salad Annie” everywhere on the platform. Polk?

A guy on mudcat.org vaguely hinted at the following back in ‘99:

Just to add that bit of unneeded fluff…..the “polk” as opposed to “poke” and I don’t know that you can accurately reproduce in print the way the word is spoken in the deep south. Somewhere between the two in a way, but there IS the vaguest hint of the “L” aand [sic] is quite similar to the way you’d say “Pork” in the region, with the vaguest hint of the “R” instead. Clear as mud huh? In the final analysis….Who cares?

I care. The Swamp Fox makes a point of articulating it very deliberately early in the song:

Po…kuh — full stop, allowing the voiceless velar plosive to let out its full acoustic kick on his dorsum — Sellid.

That’s how he says it: Poke Sellid. Maybe he wanted to make sure it didn’t get confused with “polk” or “pork” in the future. Further along Tony Joe says:

Cuz that’s about all they had to eat. (Pause) But they did all right.

There it is, easy to miss, the strongest line in the song: But they did all right. Defiant understatement. Bottom-up glorification of the kick-ass, cussèd intransigence, the scrappy survivalism, the righteous ruggedness of the rural populace rooting and rutting in its canebrakes and truck patches, eternally scratching a living from the dirt and bragging on itself. Suck it up. Embrace hardship. Don’t bellyache about your deprivation. Sing it.

Posted in Anthology | Tagged China, language, music | 8 Comments

Translating a Cryptic Text Helps Weather It

Posted on June 4, 2023 by JMN

Rodney Gómez, “Mortification by Census,” Poetry, May 2023.

Mortification by Census

brown but which kind?
no entry for oleander
no entry for ocean spume

this cell by which various selves are collocated
this cell by which various selves are evaluated

to geocode the soul
part sweat stain part hunger

swaddling to say I live in a particular bin
and am recognized
to fish funding there

a thrush passes through me, a former
gate crasher
wind too bestows a compounding value

the numbers in the north are human
the numbers in the south pull wagons

what kind?
no entry for survivor
no entry or apogee

When a text in my native tongue glances off me, I find that putting it into an acquired language sharpens my focus on it. Here’s my translation of Rodney Gómez’s verse.

Mortificación por Censo

moreno pero ¿de qué tipo?
ningún rubro para adelfa
ningún rubro para espuma de mar

esta celda por la que se coubican varios seres
esta celda por la que se evalúan varios seres

geoencifrar el alma
en parte mancha de sudor en parte hambre

mantillas que dicen que vivo en cierto recipiente
y que se me reconoce
para pescar fondos ahí

un tordo me atraviesa, antiguo
intruso
el viento también otorga un valor compuesto

las cifras del norte son humanas
las cifras del sur tiran vagones

¿de qué tipo?
ningún rubro para superviviente
ni rubro ni apogeo

Posted in Anthology | Tagged English-Spanish, language, poetry, translation | 3 Comments

Mona Kareem’s ‘Nights’: Stanzas 5-7 (End)

Posted on June 3, 2023 by JMN

This post is continued from here.

Poetry, May 2023 publishes the Arabic text of Mona Kareem’s poem Lailayāt (“Nights”) along with a translation into English by Sara Elkamel.

My translation follows below.

5
tawallada ^ajūz(un) baina yad(aī) šajaraẗ(in)
tuqaddimu lī tuffāḥaẗ(an) masmūmaẗ(an)
tarā hal sa-‘amūtu min-hā?
‘am sa-‘uṣbiḥu šajaraẗ(an)?

5
Born between a tree’s two hands, a crone
proffers me a poisonous apple.
Do you think I’ll die from it,
or will I turn into a tree?

6
nazīf(u)-l-qamar(i) fī-ṣabāḥ(i) yuqallidu-nī
‘ibtisāmaẗ(u)-l-šams(i) fī-l-masā’(i) tasẖaru min-nī

6
At morning the moon’s bleeding just like me.
By end of day I’m the grinning sun’s punchline.

7
‘al-fatāẗ(u)-n-nā^imaẗ(u)-l-^ainān(i)
tudaḡdiḡu laila-yātī
fa-‘u^īdu kulla lailaẗ(in) mušāhadaẗ(a) šarīṭ(i) maut(i)

7
The girl with the soft eyes tickles my every night,
so nightly I watch reruns of my demise.

Posted in Anthology | Tagged Arabic-English, language, poetry, translation | 2 Comments