Yves Bonnefoy, little by little

This is the first part of a sequence by Yves Bonnefoy, titled L'été de nuit.  Another try at translating this beautiful poet.  (see original below)

SUMMER NIGHT

                  I

It seems to me, this evening,

That the starry sky, spread wide,

Draws near to us; and that the night,

Behind so many sparks, is less obscure.

And the leaves blaze too under the leaves,

The green, the orange of ripe fruit, intensified,

Lamp of an angel near; a shudder

Of hidden light seizes the universal tree.

It seems to me, this evening,

That we entered the garden, of which the angel

Has closed the gates without return.

from a sequence by Yves Bonnefoy

Brief poem by Yves Bonnefoy

Another poem, in my halting version, by Yves Bonnefoy (from the series A une terre d'aube) :

THE BIRD AMONG RUINS

The bird among ruins is freed from death,

He nestles in gray stone facing the sun,

He leapt over all suffering, all memory,

He knew no more what is tomorrow in eternity.

the same voice (Bonnefoy)

Another brief poem from the fine, the superfine, Yves Bonnefoy :

THE SAME VOICE, ALWAYS

I am like the bread you break,

Like the fire you burn, like the pure water

That will escort you to the land of the dead.

Like the foam,

Which hemmed for you the light and the harbor.

Like the night bird, who erases the banks,

The night wind suddenly more rough and cold.

Yves Bonnefoy, from sequence "A une terre d'aube"

Yves Bonnefoy, encore

Another attempt at translation.  This is Yves Bonnefoy, "Le Pays Découvert", from his sequence A une terre d'aube.  (The last word of this poem seems nearly untranslatable, since le temps can mean both "time" and "weather".)

THE OPEN COUNTRY

Star on the threshold.  Wind, held

In motionless hands.

Word and wind in a long contest,

Then there was this gust of silence.

The open land was only grey stone.

Very far and low lay a flash of empty stream.

But night rains over the surprised earth

Awoke an ardor that you call time.

Bonnefoy, la traduction du jour

Here's another fling at translating Yves Bonnefoy... the poem is "L'Éternité du feu", from the sequence Le chant de sauvegarde.  (see original below)

ETERNITY OF FIRE

Phoenix says to the fire, which is fate

And bright landscape throwing its shadows,

I am one who awaits you, says he,

I come to lose myself in your grave land.

He regards the fire.  How it comes,

How it plants itself in the gloomy soul,

And how dawn breaks at windows – how

Fire goes mute, falling to sleep deeper than fire.

He feeds on silence.  He hopes

Each fold of an eternal silence,

As it descends on him like sand,

Will aggravate his immortality.

Quatrain by Yves Bonnefoy

Another stab at translation.  This is an untitled poem from Yves Bonnefoy's sequence "Le chant de sauvegarde" :


If the bird were torn into pebbles, you said,
He would be, aloft in his dawn sky, our shore.
But he, shipwrecked from harmonious vault,
Already sank weeping to the clay of the dead.

The Best Translation of Akhmatova's Epigram

Anthony Madrid is one of those rare birds who listens in to the fine mesh of subtle rhetoric, syntax, metrics & style - the nano-landscape - of poems.  His brief article on translation & Akhmatova's famous sarcastic epigram, just published at the Paris Review website,  is a good example.

I think perhaps he slightly exaggerates the difference in tone between the first and second halves of the quatrain.  Akhmatova's powerful persona could mediate & blend both the archaizing poetickal "high style" of the first half, with the earthy directness of the second : she did this often.  Her poems are littered with the Ancient Greats, not merely as references or allusions, but by direct address : she could "naturalize" the most magisterial, heightened, exalted strains.  Still, I think he is correct & perceptive to note the satire on traditional patronizing male attitudes toward female poets.

Here's my own version of the epigram into English.  I reckon I have preserved something of the original meter & rhyme-scheme.  I have a little more Russian than Anthony, I think - though not much more; & anyway that's no guarantee of a better translation.  I just happen to think mine is the best.

Could Beatrice like Dante compose?

Or Laura glorify Love's fiery rose?
I taught the women how speech flows...
but how to shut them up - God knows!

Reply to Brandon Brown & the Harriet blog

Harriet, the popular poetry website managed by the mighty Poetry Foundation, recently featured a "Craft Work" posting by Brandon Brown.  Brandon fashions his essay in reply to some comments I had posted to a previous Harriet feature, way back in February, 2010 (which was a dialogue on the art of translation between Brown and David Larsen).  So I'd like to respond briefly to this recent article.

(As an aside, it seems slightly ironic to me that the editors of Harriet, after closing down their "comments" function and no longer allowing online discussion, would feature an article whose entire argument is a response to some comments posted there over two years ago.)

First, I apologize to Brandon Brown for giving him the impression that I was tarring him personally as "effete, decadent."  For despite his claims to the contrary, his essay is in fact a light-hearted parody of his own "decadent" lifestyle.  He seems to have taken my comments to heart indeed.  My criticisms of Brown & Larsen's positions were most definitely not meant to be "about" Brown & Larsen : they reflect differing views on the craft of translation, & nothing more.  Again, I'm sorry if my oftimes grouchy-old-guy manner hurt anyone's feelings.

As for the substance of these debates, though, my own view remains the same.  Brown & Larsen's take on translation seems to participate in trendy recent currents in the American poetry scene.  They involve different kinds of procedural interventions, meant to detach art from perceived outdated modes of originality, uniqueness, personality, and willed craft.  "Conceptual poetry", "uncreative writing", chance operations based on appropriation of prior texts, parodies and pop-cult travesties of "traditional" works - this is the mode in which Brown & Larsen participate.  They represent a generation following in the footsteps of Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein & the "Language" school, who sought to replace the conventional "creative writing" styles of the 1970s with methods modeled on postmodern theory (abstraction, displacement, non-referentiality, simulacra, etc. etc.).

Both generations piggyback on the 20th-century zeitgeist of Western science, in which "objective" technical knowledge is rooted in abstraction, de-personalization, and a detachment of language from direct representation of things.  Western science deals in aggregates, probabilities and statistics, rather than distinct entities or individualities.  (This reigning zeitgeist, however, is not actually congruent with the most advanced thinking in 20th century physics and mathematics.  See a little-known work by Marie von Franz, Number and Time, for a terrific comparative exploration of Western & Chinese science/philosophy.)

Works of poetry and art, like ancient China's oracles and modes of divination, are rooted in distinction :  an irreducible uniqueness and singularity.  Art is an expression of wholeness, or a vision of the whole, by way of the particular : the unique moment :  the incomparable person, place or thing.  Art is a conjunction of opposites : the one with the many, the specific with the general.  These may sound like commonplaces, conventional cliches : but the attitude one takes toward the unique and incomparable has implications for the art of translation.

There is no doubt that chance and creative spontaneity play a huge role in both art and science.  But translation and the making of original poetry are two different activities.  Original poetry subsists in a particular milieu : a distinct language, culture, landscape and historical time.  Poetry emerges and speaks from that distinct milieu.  It is from that irreducible field that poetry addresses our own particular place and time.

The only real conversation involves a recognition of the other : an acknowledgement of a personhood distinct and different from our own.  The only real learning that takes place involves an encounter with something different, something unknown.

The principles I'm trying to sketch out here seem to be rejected by the trends in poetry and translation represented by Brown & Larsen.  When Brown (half in jest, I suppose) proclaims an art of translation based in a "revolt" against the quasi-political or ideological "sovereignty" of the original work, I read this as an admission of cultural solipsism.  We are not going to encounter the original, by way of an effort to understand a foreign language or a different culture.  We are going to forgo any attempt (however limited & imperfect) to transmit the values of a foreign literary text into our own language.  Instead we are simply going to appropriate chunks of already pre-translated versions, or untranslated originals, and absorb them into our own creative projects - leaving the original and its distinct milieu lying in the dust.  We are not really interested in the other writing, the other culture, or interested in trying to share it by way of an equivalence : we don't actually believe in the substance of translation, which is that literary values can be shared (in a limited, imperfect way) across different languages.

Paradoxically, the capacity to transmit and exchange poetry and literature depends on an a recognition of the irreducible singularity and otherness of the works we are trying to share.  It seems ironic to me that American poets would, even in jest, dispute the ideological "sovereignty" of a work in another language, from another land.  Here we are, in the great & powerful United States, pathetically unwilling and unable to master diverse foreign languages, incurious about history, geography, and just about anything outside our own sophomoric pop-cult narcissism.  How sad.

Curious thing... I just discovered (reading a bio in this month's Poetry magazine) that Elena Shvarts, whom I've been out of touch with for a while, has a new book out from Bloodaxe Books, in England. The title is Birdsong on the Seabed. & it makes me wonder : is she taking the title from this poem, which she addressed to me (it was originally published in Russian, in a book of hers in St. Petersburg - this is my own, probably-inaccurate translation) :

To the Poet Henry Gould in the City of Providence

At your time's perihelion
the bird-clock sings.
Strange hours on the wall - as
if Keats devised their workings.
When, over there, an owl
hoots, representing midnight,
here a raven drops a crust
beside my windowpane.
I myself am on the wane -
needle-thin, grown accurate,
wheezing over cheap tea in winter
sunlight, a pudgy nightingale.
He, in deep dark, without hope
- poet left alone with his icon,
still-ineffable loving brother -
offers his Promised Land…

Over the ocean, two birds feed
halfway - and where they salute,
fallen rooted to the sea-floor,
a pearl aches - ripening
under the hard bark of the waves.

*

I will have to get ahold of that book, & find out! p.s. the "bird-clock" she refers to is an Audubon Society singing clock (with different bird-calls for the hours), which I sent over to her, & which she seemed to enjoy. (I had to keep sending her battery replacements. & a new clock, after her apartment fire.)

*

p.s. next day : I WAS WRONG. Wishful thinking. Got ahold of the book. Title comes from an earlier poem by ES.

A video of the April 23rd reading at Brown, with Anny Ballardini & Peter S. Thompson, is now on the web. You can view it here.

It's about 90 min. long. I open with a Shakespeare sonnet, in honor of his birthday (and because "Let me not to the meeting of true minds" made me think of the art of translation).

(& I know, I need to work on my delivery...)

Pondering (in the shower, on way to work, etc.) next week's events with A. Ballardini.

We'll be reading in libraries (RWU, John Hay). Yesterday visiting British poet John Cayley orchestrated a performance piece in my library, via linked computers, called "Impositions" - involved chanting, singing alphabetical algorithms - very unusual ambience for "the Rock"...

the poet in the ancient matrix of texts...

reminded me of the also-ancient, generative duel between the poet and writing, texts. (I've tried to deal with this before.) Poetry's roots in oral performance and personal presence set up a kind of rivalry with the more-distinct separation of speech & text represented by prose. cf. Whitman on/in Leaves of Grass : "this is no book... but a man". There must be a rhetorical term for this kind of exaggeration - certainly a paradox, anyway. Of course, it is, in fact, a book you are holding in your hand... but Whitman's statement - his persuasive, beguiling poem generally - plants a doubt in the reader's mind.

So I was thinking about this, and then about Pound's Cantos. Pound set himself as the heir to Whitman. With the "beak of his ego", as Olson put it, he attempted to bring old documents, old texts to life - by setting them in vivid, poetic juxtaposition. The poet setting the "beak" of his person within the dry nothingness & vast wastes of history & historiography - & in so doing, identifying himself with the lifegiving Osiris or Orpheus - bringing the millennial vision of springtime renewal into earthly history. This is how Pound set out to "re-do" the epic task of the epic poet, in the path of Homer & Dante.

& he saw his approach as specifically marshalling the special rhetorical powers of poetry, in order to challenge the displacement of the epic role in literature, from poetry to prose fiction & other forms of prose discourse.

So I was thinking about some of this this morning, in relation to the talks & readings I'll be giving with A. Ballardini. Back in the early 80s, I started to glom onto these special long history-documentary poems - Pound, Williams, Olson, David Jones, & others. They had an immediate appeal to someone like me, who has been avidly reading history since early childhood (I remember that big terrific Random House series for young people - the "We Were There" books, the history of science books - which I devoured when I was about ten or so).

& I started walking in that path, of the long history-epic poem. & now, due to Anny's translation/interpretation of In RI, I'm starting to think of these things in the context of translation. If poetry, in its rivalry with prose, is manifested under the sign of embodiment - of personal presence - how does this relate to translation, & specifically to In RI?

Just as there is more than one way of considering translation, there is more than one way of considering presence or embodiment. A. Ballardini provides an example of 2 types of translation, as I've noted previously - linguistic (English into Italian), and conceptual (text into interpretation - ie., her essay on the poem).

The Bible, correspondingly, offers at least two kinds of presence - both of them hovering near the sign of translation. In the King James version, Elijah, when he rides his burning chariot into the sky, is "translated" into heaven. Secondly, in the New Testament, there is the paradigmatic event of Pentecost, or Whitsuntide. Here, the ghostly presence of the Third Person of the Trinity is manifested by an explosion of translation - the famous "speaking in tongues", when the disciples from many nations saw flames flickering over each other's heads, and, though speaking in many languages, immediately understood each other. (This is a representation of the dual aspect of translation - linguistic & conceptual - fused together.)

We could say that this narrative of personal (or Personal, or supra-personal) presence - ordering and translating language into a new efficacy - is analogous to the role of poetry, in which personal presence manifests, vivifies and celebrates linguistic meaning.

So I was thinking of these things this morning, and of how A. Ballardini's attention and understanding of the text of my poem to some extent brings it to life; just as a poetry reading brings text to (celebratory) life.

In the context of In RI, we are talking about the epic tale of a "hero" (Roger Williams) who was, in many ways, both the product and the agent of translation. The new "counter-state" of Rhode Island, for which founding he was most responsible, was in a sense the outcome of a clash between the medieval & renaissance culture of autocratic state and enforced civil religion, on the one hand, and the radical, anarchic power of the newly-vernacularized Scripture on the other. When ordinary people could read the texts for themselves, forces of liberation were set in motion : forces which Williams, perhaps more effectively than anyone else, marshalled on behalf of the actualization of real political liberty. (p.s. some scholars have suggested that the term Williams used to identify RI as a "sanctuary state" - defining it as a "refuge" - might have been borrowed from an old report, in Italian - the first European description, by explorer Giovanni da Verrazano - of Narragansett Bay as a pleasant "refugio".)

So I was thinking about these things... and also about the title of the poem, In RI - which has a sort of double meaning. You see it in many medieval & renaissance paintings, as an inscription printed by the Romans over the crucified Jesus. Here is a counter-symbol, the polar opposite of that of Pentecost : an authoritative text inscribed over a dead body. At end end of her essay, A. Ballardini quotes an email I sent her in this regard :

"[The poem] is political. About founding a "counter-state", based on rights and popular sovereignty, which themselves in turn depend upon human empathy, fairness, openness, solidarity. Thus the title "In RI" sort of telescopes two things: an abuse of judicial language, and a special place (RI). By the abuse I mean the inscription 'IN RI' written by the Romans over Jesus' crucifixion. They had a procedure of writing the crimes of the condemned in this way, on the very instrument of execution. 'In RI' stood for 'king of the Jews', thus accusing Jesus of rebellion vs. the Roman state (actually a sort of stand-in for Barabbas). The political foundation of that "special place" (Rhode Island), through the agency of Williams, effects a sort of reversal (in world history) of the type of injustice represented by the inscription "In RI" (a mirror-image of the founding of Rome in Virgil's Aeneid...)."

So... anyway, I've been thinking about the role of poetry & the poet, in the context of a centuries-old literary predominance of prose. & how these varied elements of presence & translation - embodiment & ghostly transposition - are somehow activated by poetic performance...

In RI : book-length poem (200 pp.), bilingual edition (English-Italian), translated by Anny Ballardini.

You can preview a few pages - & sample some of Anny's Italian - at the same link.

(The book is distributed by Lulu only in the US, I believe - but I hope to make it available overseas in the next few weeks, through their "global distribution"
option.)

p.s. 7/29 : I stand corrected. Anny just ordered a copy from Italy. & I looked at Lulu's website again - they do ship internationally now. Andiamo!

I'm in between chapters of Rest Note. Looking forward to resuming that. Meanwhile, have been prepping bilingual edition of documentary/history/"investigative poetics" poem written about 12 years ago, called In RI. Anny Ballardini translated it all into Italian - a marvel, to me!

Still reading O'Donovan book mentioned recently (Desire of the Nations). I feel more kinship with Hebrew poets of 2600 years ago than with my fellow po-blogmeisters. That's a strange way to feel. It's a strange world, po-biz & all.

I should probably keep working on that little translation. What's hard to get, among other things, is the balance in both syntax (so different in Russian) & versification. But it may be too much for me. I sort of like it as is, though it has none of the original's delicate syncopation. Nor did I get the rhymes right.

& there's probably a vast field of tone & implication of which I am completely unaware. Fools rush in where Russians laugh to read.

SELF-PORTRAIT

 
In the uplifted forehead, a winged
suggestion.  But the coat looks awkward.
There's a hideout of pure impulse
in closed eyes, an arm's repose.

 
Here is one who floats and chants -
his word become ductile flame
in order to overcome inborn
clumsiness with innate rhythm.

- Osip Mandelstam (1931).
(provisional trans. by yrs truly)

(M. wrote some variations on this, in a series of little poems addressed to a goldfinch - kind of a personal emblem.)

Two incredibly good poems by Rimbaud in latest issue of Poetry, translated by John Kinsella. They stopped me in my tracks, so to speak.

Sympatica Anny Ballardini put up an old Pavese translation of mine, here.

& I mentioned Go Little Sparrow to Rev. Jo-Ann Drake, minister at my church. She decided to start a blog for Redeemer! (I will have to show her how she can upload weird music too!)

I understand I think why chelovek Rm Service was bored by Merwin/Brown Mandlestam Selected Poems. There are many 70s Merwin mishaps there; it's never entirely pleased me either. There are better translations. But it was a good project at the time. Some of them are beautiful. Clarence Brown wrote a very good monograph-biography of M.

It would be a pity not to see (through 20-20 hindsight) through the weaknesses & bowdlerizing. The miracle of these little poems' even reaching the light of day is one of THE great tales of 20th century civilization (cf. Hope Against Hope, etc.).

353

 
What has held out against oxidation
and adulteration, burns like feminine silver,
and quiet labor silvers the iron plow
and the poet's voice.

"feminine silver" = MERCURY

357

 
Once a line of verse, in disgrace, father unknown,
fell from the sky like a stone, waking the earth somewhere.
No supplication can alter the poet's invention.
It can only be what it is.  No one will judge it.

"father unknown"

[trans. by Brown/Merwin. written in 1937, the year OM died in exile. The poems want to be read in context, as much context as possible. The context is suffering, hunger, exile & persecution. & a scribbling, muttering compositor.]

He's always looking off into the distance, at the forest, the steppe, the taiga.

351

 
Oh the horizon steals my breath and takes it nowhere -
I'm choked with space!
I get my breath back, there's the horizon again.
I want something to cover my eyes.

 
I'd have liked the sand better - a life in layers
along the sawing shores of the river.
I'd have clung to the sleeves of the shy current,
to eddies, hollows, shallows.

 
We'd have worked well together, for a moment,
a century.  I've wanted rapids like those.
I'd have laid my ear under the bark of drifting logs
to hear the rings marching outward.

                    
                    - Voronezh ("raven-knife"), 16 Jan. 1937

Here he seems to be talking to me. The river design mediates the vast empty plains of exile, and elegant St. Petersburg, his architectural tinker-toy native home. Yes, the last stanza I interpret as being about my poem July.

One of Osip Mandelshtam's late little poems. Translated by me. I know I've posted this before - just wanted to remind everybody.

                   I'll whisper it - in an outline.
                   Its hour has not yet come.
                   The chessgame of measureless heaven
                   is mated with sweat - and wisdom.

                    
                   And under purgatory's transient sky
                   we grow absent-minded - forget
                   that lucky heaven-vault on high...
                   is a limber, everlasting habitat.

Jonathan's comments on translation & Milosz are interesting. But to say you have a unique aversion to translation's effects seems a little like special pleading. Obviously the reader has to make allowances. But a diet consisting solely of poetry in the original would exclude a lot of readers, for one thing, and impoverish poetry in general on the other. Poetry thrives on translation and mongrelization.

Jonathan's aversion (should this be a name for a symptom?) is connected also with what seems to me to be a rather narrow focus on surface elements of style. Some of the awkwardnesses of Milosz might even be seen as virtues, if the telos or overall motive of his poems is viewed from a different angle (say, in Poundian jargon, through the lens of logopeia rather than solely through melopeia).

He's probably right, though, that much of the clumsiness is due to the translating.