David Hinton On "The Native Cosmology Of Classical Chinese Poetry"

David Hinton is both a poet and a translator. He is the editor and translator of FSG's upcoming collection of classical Chinese poetry. His comments on translation--particularly on translating ancient Chinese verse--were incredibly enlightening to me. I've never considered that translation can be this sort of a vessel. Check out what Hinton had to say:

"Every poetry gets its deep form from its native cosmology. The native cosmology of classical Chinese poetry is a system we might now describe as deep ecology, in which humans are an organic part of the earth—a very contemporary insight, and altogether different from the Judeo-Christian worldview that has shaped Western poetry until very recent times, a worldview in which we are spirits visiting this merely material earth almost like aliens. The ecological implications of these two worldviews are obvious, and I’ve found that translating classical Chinese poetry is a way for me to make contemporary poetry that operates outside of the Western cosmological or mythological system, even so far as to register a very different sense of what the self is."

How interesting is that? The idea that one can find a truer self through the words of the past than the current climes of today. I'm going to hazard a guess here--one that might be way off--but it sounds like Hinton's experience of translating poetry is far different than Marilyn Hacker's experience, which she calls "the angel-wrestling with language."

Are there any translators out there who would care to offer their thoughts? Are these two sides of a coin, or are they vastly different approaches?

 

 

A Tip Of The Hat

No week spent focusing on the work of translators would be complete without bringing up the work that Michael Orthofer does on his blog, The Literary Saloon, and website, The Complete Review. The site compiles online reviews of books into one convenient place, while also taking care to offer color commentary when appropriate. 

Special attention is given, especially on the blog, to works of literature in translation. (I should say here that this is my interpretation of the focus--I suspect Mr Orthorfer might say that he's just giving literature in translation it's due, and fair enough.)

If you're new to the site, as amazingly loads of people are, and are a translation geek, be sure to check out their reviews of books that have not yet been translated into English. (Don't worry: the reviews are in English.)

Marilyn Hacker On "That Balance Of Foreignness And Familiarity"

And now, we have another guest post from poet and translator Marilyn Hacker. Her translation of Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen was the first winner of the Robert Fagles Translation Prize earlier this year, and it will be published by FSG in the fall. Marie Etienne is a French poet who has published eight volumes of poetry, five novels, and two books on the theater.

Here is Marilyn Hacker speaking about what drew her to Etienne's poems (if you have not read Hacker's earlier comments on translation, you might want to read this post first):

"In the case of Marie étienne’s poems, I am attracted by a considerable otherness: the absence of a unified lyric « I »;  a lifelong familiarity with and reference to landscapes, languages and cultures I have not experienced. But there is, too, a comity of interests including an intense focus on form and its inflections of content; on the disjunctive ways the poet can utilize and subvert narrative. King of a Hundred Horsemen’s sequences derive from both the sonnet and the prose-poem. They are oneiric and ekphrastic, and delight in blurring limits between the two as they (also) swiftly shift landscapes. As poets, we share pleasure, in very different registers, in integrating correspondence and dialogue, sometimes at its most demotic, into a poem. This not unrelated to the insistence on irony and humor as possibilities for poetry, noting the way irony can metamorphose to tragedy, to political statement, or both.

It is perhaps just that balance of foreignness and familiarity which draws the bilingual or polyglot poet-reader to the exercise, the art, of translation, and the maintenance of that balance in the translated poem which may most intrigue and delight its reader."

--Marilyn Hacker

 

Marilyn Hacker On "The Most Engaged Form Of Reading"

Poetry-in-translation week continues, readers! And today we have our first guest post on the subject.

I was especially excited when Marilyn Hacker agreed to to write about her experiences translating because she a long history as a poet and writer herself. In addition to her award-winning translations, Hacker is the author of eleven collections of poems and seven published books of translations from the French. Information about her original books of poetry can be found here, and her most recent translation, of Marie Etienne's King of a Hundred Horsemen, will be published by FSG this Fall.   

You'll find more information about her translation of King of a Hundred Horsemen in the post later today. Below is what I think of as a perfect introduction to the art of translating from someone who connects with poems in much the same way as I do. Here is the first word from Marilyn Hacker:

"For the poet who is also a translator, the great pleasure of translation – of poetry – is, shall we say, the continuation of the struggle by other means. The struggle in question is the angel-wrestling with language of which poetry largely consists, and here, the participant in the « Mental Fight » (Blake, of course) is handicapped by the removal of ego, and, indeed, of the resources of anecdotal memory, from the translator-poet’s corner. What can happen at best is the transformation of a struggle to a dance, performed by two resonating but never-exactly-mirroring constructs of language. Capoeira, anyone?

More concretely: I have translated a dozen or so (almost all contemporary) French or Francophone poets, and I’d be hard put to explain my choices except for that chemistry poems exercise on their destined readers. Translation is at once the most engaged form of reading and (as above) an earthy, hands-on engagement with language. The translator must be faithful to the text’s linguistic valence, its connotations, to its music as well as its meaning; yet a translation succeeds when it exists independently as a poem in the receptor language. Poet-mathematician Jacques Roubaud’s theory of translation leads us to deduce that there are an infinite number of possible valid translations of a poem (Baudelaire’s sonnets as prose poems! Baudelaire’s prose poems as sonnets!), thus an infinite number of independent poems one poem might generate. But dizzying oneself staring in a kaleidoscope distracts from the work."

--Marilyn Hacker

This Week We Translate

We're stepping into uncharted waters here, folks. Welcome to the FSG poetry blog's first official poetry-in-translation week.

Full disclosure: I am possibly the worst person ever to host this. Seriously bad. I don't actually speak any other languages. I choose to do my study abroad in Australia.

Somehow despite this--because of this?--I am fascinated by translating poetry. It almost seems willfully complicated, like the literary version of those terrible Strongest Man in the World competitions that you always see on cable. Except, instead of pulling an airplane with her teeth, the translator will remain faithful to the meaning of the original poem while putting her own flourish on the language within! (Audience cheers wildly.)

But I digress.

Luckily we will have some experts to lead us through this wilderness. We have a range of poets and translators who are guest blogging to discuss the subject, including the fabulous Marilyn Hacker, Clare Cavanagh, David Hinton, and several of folks who worked on recent translations of Mayakovsky.

To get yourself psyched up, you can find Yves Bonnefoy audio from last year here and here. Bonnefoy introduces the poems in English and then reads them in French. It's gorgeous.

Sleeping It Off In Rapid City (Part 3)

And here, for your Monday morning, is the last section Maureen McLane's essay on August Kleinzahler's new selected poetry collection, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City. (You can find more information about Maureen McLane here--her poetry collection Same Life will be released by FSG in September.) Part 1 can be found here, and part 2 here.

I am going to want to sit with his stunning title poem for a long while. I don’t think I’ve read a more vertiginous, powerful take on US myth-history in a long while. “Sleeping It Off in Rapid City”: this is some world-historical hangover! AK plunks us down in “the exact dead center of America,” and diagnoses (or gives an autopsy of) the current condition of “the dead solid center of the universe/At the heart of the heart of America.”  Even to put it this way abuses the poem, since AK doesn’t write poems announcing their “about-ness” (“here is my poem about the state of the nation; here is my poem about X, about Y):  but with its layering of and cutting between geologic time, Oglala myth, General Custer’s writings, Mt Rushmore, Kevin Costner, historical monuments, stripmall culture, the “heritage” industry, and the question of what might be “sanctified ground/Here, yes, here,” this poem sounds out a ramifying homage to and critique of what he satirically, but not only satirically (as I hear it), calls “this great land.” “God bless America/We’re right on top of it, baby…on a great slab of Mesozoic rock.”

I could go on and on, but one art these poems embody is the art of knowing when to stop.

--Maureen McLane   

Sleeping It Off In Rapid City (Part 2)

And now, part two of Maureen McLane's post about August Kleinzahler's new book of selected poems, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City (part 1 can be found here and the final section will arrive later today):

Precisely naming. A “sense of where you are” is what Bill Bradley had on the basketball court, according to John McPhee, and that’s what these poems paradoxically offer—paradoxically, because many of these poems seem to distill themselves out of apparent dislocation, a condition which seems to be one true “home” for the Kleinzahlerian adventurer. He puts us in transit—on airplanes; in Vancouver, the Coney Island boardwalk, Cork (Ireland), and what seems to be Amsterdam; cinematically zooming down on couples in a plaza in one city, a hotel in another; elsewhere taking us through the postmodern “no-places” that seem to constitute the spaces and strange hours of certain western travelers.   

--Maureen McLane

Sleeping It Off In Rapid City (Part 1)

Dear God, do I love the poetry of August Kleinzahler. So I was thrilled when Maureen McLane (author of the upcoming FSG collection Same Life) offered to write a post about his new book of selected poems, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City. I've separated it into three chunks for you, so be sure to come back for all of them. Here's the first:

Funky tunings! Lots of gongs! Thanks to iTunes and August Kleinzahler, I am sitting here listening to ethnomusicologist Colin McPhee’s transcriptions for two pianos of the Balinese Gamelan, played by McPhee and Benjamin Britten. Here are some of the first auditory-consumer fruits of reading August’s “Sleeping It Off in Rapid City,” one of whose poems. “A History of Western Music: Chapter 49,” draws on excerpts from McPhee’s memoir, “A House in Bali.” 

AK has “big ears” and there’s enormous sonic vroom but also delicacy here—“Chopin floats; Schubert, as well./What is it exactly?”  The nervy, fascinatingly inventive music of the new poems in this new-and-selected volume take off from some previously established motifs: the “History of Western Music” series, installments of which appeared in his last book, “The Strange Hours Travelers Keep,” are wonderfully, episodically continued here (and torqued to non-Western musics in the case of the gamelan). There’s a lot of talk out there, for those who like poetry-talk, about poetry and/or information, and what’s amazing to me is how this poet processes the most apparently diverse data-bits into propelled, simultaneously attitudinal and elegant poems. AK’s poems land somewhere between a blow and a caress.  It’s been argued that when you read a poem you meet a person, and not in some dopey “confessional poetry” way; whatever is going into these poems, the peculiar, distinctive neurological dance we might call “voice” is always signaling here a governing, wily, sensitive intelligence. I don’t know how AK manages to get a “9-cyclohetadecenone-addled marionette/Mewing” in a poem “(Secondary Sexual Characteristics”), but he does.  Nothing—and certainly no register of style or diction—is alien to him. Let’s pivot from “Kill me, fuck me, write me bad checks” to “Hold on, the jacaranda’s gone missing” to “Downstairs, Sol, of Sol’s Paradise Club,/mixes a fizz drink for a mummy blonde./--Thanks, Sol.” And on to “You’d figure the hawk for an isolate thing,/commanding the empyrean.”  There’s a lot of rain in this book, as well as clouds, airplanes, music, drinks, love, wiseguys, motorcycles, birds, jets, and precisely named chemicals and geologic strata.

--Maureen McLane

I Belong To The School That Is Against Schools

Those of you who were reading the blog last year will remember that we had a wealth of audio from Pulitzer Prize winning poet Paul Muldoon. There was our first poetry ringtone, a meditation on poems by Rilke and James Wright, an enthusiastic reading of John Berryman, and a rendition of 'The Sightseers' from his book Horse Latitudes, all well worth a listen if you didn't catch them the first time around.

So I've been feeling a bit bereft this year without his pleasant demeanor around the place. To remedy the situation slightly, here is a great interview conducted with Paul Muldoon shortly after he was appointed poetry editor for The New Yorker. Matt Dellinger interviews him for the magazine (and cracks a pretty good joke about Paul's rock band Rackett).

The interview is wonderfully wide reaching, touching on good, weird stuff like geodesic domes, hip hop, and the pleasing variety found in the work of younger poets today. Here's a snippet:

Q: I'm sure readers are wondering what you might have in store for New Yorker poetry, and whether you feel you have any particular mission?

A: The answer is that there is no mission, I have no mission except, except, except...to be open to the possibility of offering a wide range of poems. I tend to go in fear of schools of any kind, I tend to go in fear of those who would insist that poetry must take any particular shape or form in the world, or indeed perhaps any lack of shape or form. So I belong to the school, one would say, that is against schools. So I am open to anything.

I Am Sorry To Tell You

Imagine my surprise this morning, laying in bed this morning, wondering if I had the desire to get up and make coffee before noon (I didn't) and listening to This American Life, when I heard a completely unique take on that old chestnut 'This Is Just To Say' by William Carlos Williams. 

I don't want to ruin the surprise for you, but I feel that I can say that there are several responses to the poem, written by TAL's contributors, and David Rakoff's is a wonderfully nasty little gem of a poem.

Well worth a listen if your Sunday plans include a relaxing morning with the paper. You can find a listing of their air times here.