Averse Miscellany: The Translation Itself

The Poem Itself (1960) would be an excellent title for a hard-nosed, uncompromising volume of practical criticism. As a title for a volume of translations of poetry in modern European languages, it is rather bolder. When we meet with translations, whether literal (like those included and examined here) or affective, can they introduce us to the original poems themselves? 

There are hundreds of books on translation theory, an area impossible to either satiate or exhaust, and I have read about three. Whatever the final word on that, this book’s close angle on each poem has garnered it much benediction over the years, including from Marianne Moore, who admired its “clues to idiosyncrasy … and rich overtones”. These features remain salient. In his discussion of two poems by Fernando Pessoa, for instance, Ernesto Guerra da Cal shrewdly articulates Pessoa’s exploration of the self through tessellated heteronyms, emphasizing how “through voluntary self-control and through conscious exclusion of such [everyday] ‘objective’ truth … [the poet] is able to simulate that other truth which is a genuine act of knowledge and a true vision of the world”. His close-readings make necessary, granular points about Pessoa’s use of Portuguese to his advantage: in “Entre o Sono”, Pessoa “makes reflexives of three non-reflexive verbs, to produce unexpected effects that are essential to the thought” and that don’t quite lucidly transfer into English. 

Naturally, some of those whose work’s presented here have fared less well. Stefan George is these days little known outside Germanic literary circles. According to a Guardian article from 2006, George “was … cited in one international newspaper as the equal of Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson” in the mid-1920s: he was “The Master” to his disciples – unsurprisingly, given his beetle-browed, vampiric appearance – and his ideal conservative and anti-bourgeois “Secret Germany” was influential (or culpable) indeed. In this volume, C. S. Brown prioritizes George’s gift of tongues (he produced “five hundred pages of excellent verse translation from seven languages”), his “ideal … of condensation, perfect formal control, and almost ascetic severity” (he dropped any “logically unnecessary words”, minimized punctuation and refused the usual German practice of capitalizing nouns) and the influence on him of French Symbolism. There is a clearly much to say about his style. Brown cannot fail to note, however, that “he preached doctrines which could be easily perverted into Hitlerism”. He makes much of George’s equivocal withdrawal to Switzerland when the Nazis “sought to make him their poet and prophet”. George’s cycle of poems The New Kingdom, from which an excerpt is given here, makes his fascination with the adolescent Maximilian Kronberger into a fascination with Hellenistic-German ideals: “the incarnation of aristocratic and ‘German’ qualities in a modern civilization whose democratic internationalization he found increasingly abhorrent”. The operative lines of the excerpt are “Du schlank und rein wie eine flamme / … / Du blühend reis vom edlen stamme” (“You slender and pure as a flame / … / You flourishing branch from a noble stem”). As with George’s excruciatingly ambiguous “The Antichrist”, it doesn’t take much to find a darker undertone in this.

The Italian poet Giosuè Carducci, one of several represented here by just one poem (French, German and Hispanic poetries are more robustly present), was once similarly famous, and won the Nobel Prize in 1906. He died the following year and, as John F. Nims notes here, “his prestige has waned considerably since”. It has waned ever more since the 1960s; others of this book’s one-poem wonders – G. C. Belli, Gabriele D’Annunzio and Salvatore Quasimodo among them – have come to greater prominence. Translating a selection of Carducci poems for the New Criterion in 2018, David Yezzi noted that “he embodied the hope of a generation and sang in classical meters of mythic visions that connected the Italian landscape to its roots in the ancient world”. The reasons Nims offers for Carducci’s occlusion, as with Stefan George, largely match those for his former fame. “Much of his work served as the vehicle for short-lived polemics and the touting of his favourite themes”: Bumbledom and ambrosial verse, or his “republican patriotism” and love of classical literature. (This is a touch unfair, given that at least some of this sort of work is juvenilia; but it’s true that lines such as “Where now the lofty dames with glance securing / What free-born knight or brave civilian dares””, from “The Ancient Tuscan Poetry” in Frank Sewall’s translation, can barely bear their own pomposity.) Clearly it is lethal to be officially relevant. The late poem selected here, in English “At the Station on a Morning in Autumn”, is by contrast “impressionistic”, like much of his better-known Odi Barbare; Nims notes that “its spleen and metropolitan imagery” will suit readers of Baudelaire and Eliot (“Where and to what end do these cloaked, silent people move, hurrying toward the gloomy cars” – or, in Yezzi’s version, “Where and to what are they going, these people, / cloaked and silent, hurrying to dark cars”). Over the page, Glauco Camson writes that “like d’Annunzio, [Giovanni Pascoli] had begun his career as a close follower of the fiery classicist Carducci” – evidently Carducci, like certain anglophone poets (Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey in the sixteenth century, perhaps; Ezra Pound in the twentieth), is now commonly revered more for other poets’ emulation and refraction of his work than for that work itself.

Where the personal angle is vaunted as “impressionistic” in men’s poetry, it is frequently demerited in women’s. Despite the formal focus of much of Cecília Meireles’s work, and her joint influences of French Symbolism and the Iberian ballad tradition, descriptions focus on her “highly personal poetry” (Encyclopedia Britannica) or “unequivocally personal art” (De Cal in this anthology). Yet one of the poems here is selfless in its focus on the poet’s white-knuckled possession by her vocation, evidently a matter for Meireles as it was for Anna Akhmatova, many of whose poems concern the way vocation overvaults her longings for familial stability and love. (Meireles often writes about solitude and the beacon of her calling: in “Serenata”, for instance, “Há uma doce luz no silencio, e a dor é de origem divina. / Permita que eu volte o meu rosto para um céu maior que este mundo” – in Natalie D’Arbeloff’s translation, “There’s a soft light in the silence, and the pain is of divine origin. / Allow me to turn my face towards a sky bigger than this world”.) Men might call this “personal”, because the impact of her choice is largely unfamiliar to them. Women artists know it to be universal. De Cal, in fairness, performs an excellent close reading of “Motivo” (“Motive”), pointing out that Meireles refers to herself as a “poet” (“poeta”) rather than “poetess” (“poetisa”) and a “brother of fleeting things” (“irmão das coisas fugidias”) rather than “sister” (“irmã”) – her gender, surely a part of personality, is “muted” (“mudo”) by her calling. The multiple meanings of the final line, “– mais nada”, are also creditably explicated: it could mean “that’s all [I know]”; “that’s all [I have to say, in this poem or elsewhere]” or “nothing more” – I expect nothing(ness), my singing voice exists in dread of the silence of the void. Hopefully the void is not where we will leave it.

Appropriately, the nineteenth-century Spanish poet Rosalía de Castro writes in the preface to her Follas Novas (1880; “New Leaves”) that “what always moved me … were the countless sorrows borne by our women … Alone most of the time, having to work from sunrise to sunset … they seem destined to never find rest but in the grave”. With slender imagination, Nims compares Castro to Sappho, but the swollen darkness of her work and the definite yet modulated musics and metres make her more a humid Emily Brontë. Nims quotes Gerald Brenan’s claim that she would be known as “the greatest woman poet of modern times”, despite her dying at the age of forty-eight, if only she had written in Castilian instead of “the dialect of her native Galicia”. Much of her work, however, communicates (as Eliot said of genuine poetry) before it is understood: these lyrics are literally felt within the reader. In “Negra Sombra” (“Black Gloom”), the final stanza makes sensational use of the nasal letters: “Pra min i-en min mesma moras; / Nin me abandonarás nunca, / Sombra que sempre me asombres” (“For me and in my (very) self you live; / and you will abandon me never, / gloom that always overglooms me”) – these “humming nasals deep within the chambers of the head”, Nims writes, create a tremolando, onomatopoeically expressive of the poet’s depth of feeling. Her work is wildly rhetorically patterned and filled with such soundplay. This is hard to carry over into English, but there will be rewards for the translator willing to try. (There have been no notable English translations, as far as I am aware, for nearly a decade.)

A question the editor and critics do not answer: why these languages? A poem by Alexander Blok, translated from Russian Cyrillic and given a Latin transliteration, is tenuously strung on at the end – why, then, is there no Greek poetry? (The reader familiar with twentieth-century poetry may also cavil at the lack of Eastern European work; but poetry from many of these nations came into its own, in world-stage terms, a little later: the internationally famous poets, such as Miłosz, Herbert, Szymborska, and Holub were born in the 1910s and early 1920s. The question of Hebrew poetry Burnshaw answers elsewhere, in The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself, 1965 and 2003.) But despite what may seem to be curious omissions, Burnshaw’s book is an exemplary, unusually endurant volume for anyone who wants to salvage or recall these poets in approximations of their “real” languages. Readers of a similar anthology of our contemporary non-anglophone poets would be lucky indeed. 

                                            *

A valediction inviting mourning: this will be the final column in my “Averse Miscellany” series for Poetry London. To date, this column has covered everything from “bad” poetry and “new” poetry to the Forward Prizes for poetry that is always one of those and sometimes both. It has pleased some, annoyed a mystery sum, and provoked the re-emergence of one poet not heard from in decades. One day it may return, unaverted and miscellaneous as ever, to look again at the pile-up and dust-up on our shelves. Until then – I’ve enjoyed writing it. Thank you for reading.