Aphorism (9.26.18)

Fun with Aphorism

You can probably find a better, more accurate definition of “aphorism” than the one I am about to give: an opinion rendered memorably.  We experience aphorism as insight into human nature and the human condition.  Aphorism is a social thing—it could not be otherwise.  Even a recluse is being social when writing an aphorism.  It implies a degree of civilization in the writer and the reader of it, not to mention a certain shared understanding.  And in this sense, aphorism belongs to the family of pun, joke, allusion, satire, parody, and, in an extended way, metaphor, image, even poetry.  That is, it’s a figure of speech, meaning speech given shape.

An aphorism is somebody’s opinion about the state of the world and humankind.  It can be acerbic, caustic, sardonic, ironic, politic and impolitic, homiletic, Vedic, anarchic, archaic, [1] heuristic, rustic, mystic, gnomic . . .  As I just mentioned, it is a figure of speech.  It expresses a thought about “the world we live in” and the “we” who live in it.  It is an opinion rendered memorably.

Here are some synonyms for it: maxim, saying, adage, saw, truism, axiom, apothegm, and, perhaps more tenuously, truth, principle, precept.  And like these more or less synonymous terms, an aphorism can become a cliché, inviting mockery or satire.  Here’s one that became cliché the very first time it was uttered: “There is no ‘I’ in ‘team’.”  I used to hear certain executives—especially those who routinely made you do all the work while they took all the credit (but deflected any blame back onto you)—say this in “team meetings.”  One day I wrote down an antidote to it: Beware the boss who says ‘there is no I in team’; he often means there is no You.  Let me put this as aphoristically as I can: in aphorism we sometimes find respite from the self-regarding.  

But in aphorism we also find poetry, or something like it; like it enough that writing aphorisms is probably a good way of exercising our figurative skills—turn of phrase, compression of language, color, music and rhythm, tone.  I’ve spent many happy hours writing aphorisms in journals.  My method is usually to select a word, something concrete or abstract,[2] it doesn’t matter, and then to incorporate it in statements of one or two lines (never more).  What I find, often enough, is that I refresh my understanding of the word, how it can be used, how far its meaning can be bent to some insight or thought, and how it can produce a thought or an insight.  (And I always aim for the fresh, not the clichéd.  I don't always succeed.)  I also find among these aphorisms lines for poems to be developed later, sometimes years later.  Page two shares an example of the method from a 2003 journal.

So have some fun with aphorisms.  Save what you write.  You may want to use a line or two somewhere, sometime, say in a poem.

Dry Spells

Dry spells . . . How can one put them to use?

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Pray for rain, endure dry spells.

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We call them dry spells because they induce thirst, or torpor?

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Much business, and afterwards a welcome dry spell.

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To suffer a dry spell is to miss its greater interest.

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You can find deep pools of insight even in a dry spell.

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In a dry spell, dig.

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Wells are valuable only in dry spells.

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Without dry spells, who knows about rain?

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Imagine the discomfort and inconvenience of a dry spell; remember it in the soggy times.

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[1] Please, someone stop me!

[2] Some examples: command, fog, cursing, time, work, compromise, seconds (as in not being first), the usual, talk, giving, dry spells.  I steer clear of cliché-inducing subjects like love, friendship, God, sorrow, happiness.

Translation (9.12.18)

You Say Tomato, I Say Tomato—Translating Poems

We’ve established ourselves enough (I’m talking about trust here) that I think we can take on a more ambitious project: translating poems.  While translation is not easy, neither is it impossible.  My bookshelves are full of books of poetry translations whose introductions acknowledge that the translator has only a rudimentary understanding of the original language.  Sometimes these translators collaborate with fellow poets who are fluent in the original.  And customarily, they share their translations with colleagues, such as academics, practicing poets, or natives who speak the original language fluently.

But one thing all good translators of poetry have in common is that they are poets.  They have mastered the craft of poetry in their native tongue.  They know what makes a poem work: image, tone of voice, line, syntax, compression and expansion, rhythm and meter, onomatopoeia and so on.  That is, they know poetry technically.  But more importantly, the successful translators know how a poem moves emotionally and sonically. [1]  This is poetic knowledge.

Here are the tools you need to “translate” a poem from an original language into your native tongue:

• A fairly comprehensive bi-lingual dictionary (comprehensive enough to provide examples of usage, shaded or nuanced meanings, contextual meaning, idiomatic usage, and perhaps even slang usage).  I use a Cassel’s New French Dictionary with about 75,000 entries, which is now somewhat dated (sometimes useful for all that), and a more recently compiled Collins Robert French-English Dictionary that includes ample context usage examples.  And of course I use Google Translate.
• Experience writing poems in various formats, styles, themes.  After nearly a year of Wednesdays@One sessions, I think everybody has sampled the necessary smorgasbord! 
• Patience and a free imagination.  This last “tool” is critical, for translating a poem is not so far afield from writing a poem from scratch in your native language, even if you’re fluent in the original language.  It’s freedom of imagination—what you might also call fearless imagination—that helps you see the possibilities in converting a poem from one language to another.

That’s all you need, really.  But you will note that I enclosed the verb translate, above, in quotation marks.  That’s meant to suggest the question, What is a translation?  In my experience, “translation” is a loose term, loose as poetic composition itself.  Converting a poem from one language to another is often a matter of a sliding scale of effort and imagination, one that looks like this:

Transliteration     < >     Translation     < >     Rendering

At one end of the scale is mere word conversion: you Google each word of the original text for its English equivalent and simply write that down in the order it appears within each line of the original.  Now this is a mechanical way of translating that nets a clumsy result.  

Les Portraits      ─Jean Follain (1903-1971) Les portraits aux murs de nos villas montrent d’autoritaires enfants de dentelles et de velours vêtus; à dix ans déjà prêts pour la lutte leurs mères les embrassaient avec sauvagerie et quand la nuit tombe sur ces portraits pâlis tout est si morne que le monde nous semble à jamais mort à ses mythologies.	The Portraits      ─trans. Clark Holtzman The portraits on the walls of our villas display authoritative children of lace and of velvet clothes; at ten years already ready for the struggle their mothers kissed them with savagery and when night falls on these pale portraits all is so gloomy that the world appears to us ever dead to its mythologies.
	The Portraits      ─trans. John Ashbery The portraits on the walls of our villas are of authoritarian children dressed in lace and velvet; at the age of ten already prepared for the struggle their mothers kissed them savagely and when night falls on these faded portraits everything is so dismal that the world seems to us dead forever to its mythologies.

 Translation means the attempt to convert not just a word’s dictionary meaning but also its context, its syntactical value, its connotation; that is, its “color.”  Note the difference between my line-by-line transliteration above and John Ashbery’s translation.  A translation will attend to idiom, the colloquial usage, slang.  It will also “translate” proper word order or syntax: la blouse rose in French will be translated not as “the blouse pink” in English, but rather as “the pink blouse.”  This makes the translation a kind of “secondary” or dependent text, dependent, that is, on the original for its meaning and effect.[2]  Following is another Ashbery translation of a Follain poem.  Note his translation of the first two lines.  Then consider this transliteration: To place one evening one’s [literally: his or its] bare foot / on a nail.  The difference, you might agree, is entirely poetic, even considering that the original is written in the surreal mode.

Les Accidents      ─Jean Follain (1903-1971) Poser un soir son pied nu sur un clou tomber des branches boire à même une eau trop froide sont les accidents mortels qu’impose le vieux destin le monde alors n’a plus d’âge le ciel reste intact et bleu les murs sèchent inexorables.

The Accidents      ─trans. By John Ashbery To step barefoot on a nail one evening to fall from the branches to drink straight from the source water that is too cold these are the mortal accidents that ancient destiny imposes at these times the world has no more age the sky remains intact and blue the walls, inexorable, dry up.

Here is another translation from French to English . . . 

Chanson ─Jacques Prévert Quel jour sommes-nous Nous sommes tous les jours Mon amie Nous somme toute la vie Mon amour Nous nous aimons et nous vivons Nous vivons et nous nous aimons Et nous ne savons pas ce que c’est que la vie Et nous ne savons pas ce que c’est que le jour Et nous ne savons pas ce que c’est que l’amour.

Song ─trans. Lawrence Ferlinghetti What day is it It’s everyday My friend It’s all of life My love We love each other and we live We live and love each other And do not know what this life is And do not know what this day is And do not know what this love is.

Again, the transliteration of the first two lines might read, “literally,” “What day are we / We are every day.”  Ferlinghetti’s translation works to preserve the sense of the original in its English version.  This, along with the Ashbery translations above, are basically preservative.  They mean to preserve the style, sense and progression of the text, of the poem’s meaning (as the translator understands it).  But they mean to capture that meaning in a new context—American English from a New York action writer’s point of view, or from a San Francisco beat poet’s sense of language play.

At the far end of the scale is rendering.  Rendering is more or less free-form translation of the kind that we will try for next week.[3]  Rendering a poem from one language to another simply means that you take a) a poem in an original language and b) YOUR EXPERIENCE OF the poem in the original language, and write a NEW POEM.  The finished product is no longer the first poet’s work but the second poet’s work (which could not have come into being without the first).

In a rendering, you might be less “faithful” to the original language or text of the poem, in favor of attempting to recreate (note: not necessarily to preserve) the spirit of it.  Here is one of my favorite examples of this admittedly violent rendering of a poem from French into American English:

De Profundis Clamavi
     ─ par Charles Baudelaire, dans Les fleurs du mal, 1857

J’implore ta pitié, Toio, l’unique que j’aime,

Du fond du gouffre obscure où mon cœur est tombé.

C’est un univers morne à l’horizon plombé,

Où nagent dans la nuit l’horreur et le balsphème;

Un soleil sans chaleur plane au-dessus six mois,

Et les six autres mois la nuit couvre la terre;

C’est un pays plus nu que la terre polaire;

— Ni bêtes, ni ruisseaux, ni verdure, ni bois !

Or il n’est pas d’horreur au monde qui surpasse

La froide cruauté de ce soleil de glace

Et cette immense nuit semblable au vieux Chaos;

Je jalousie le sort des plus vils animaux

Qui peuvent se plonger dans un sommeil stupide,

Tant l’écheveau du temps lentement se dévide !

The Profound Clambake

     ─ rendered by Andrew Klimek, in The Flowers of Mel, 1990

I implore to pity, you, the unique queer jam,

With a fondness for obscure guff or my heart is entombed.

It’s a universe in the morning with a horizon of aplomb,

Or nagged about the night of horror and blasphemy;

A sun without shale planes without six mes,

And the six other mes of the night cover the earth;

It’s higher pay for a new queer polar earth;

— No beds, no Russians, no green, no trees!

Or ill nests passed in horror by the world surpassing

The cold cruelty of the icy sun

And set immense night resembling veiled Chaos;

I, jealous of the sort of more vile animals

Who prevent the plunger of a stupid waiter

Taunt the horse of time that slowly divides!

You don’t have to know much French to see that Klimek is having fun with the original, that he renders words and phrases as they sound to his ear in some cases, or as they appear to call to mind certain English words.  He tosses in just enough cognates to lend his rendering some basis in original sense, but basically ignores what most of the words mean.  As a result, his version feels a bit untethered.  But given that Klimek is working with an original Surrealist text, might we conclude that his rendering is actually truer to the spirit of the original than a more faithful textual translation would be? 

⥎ ⥐ ⥎

Well!  It’s time for our project for next Wednesday.  Translate or render the following poem.  Whether you attempt a translation or a “tethered” rendering, I recommend that you first complete a transliteration (that is, a word-for-word dictionary conversion) to serve as a foundation for further flights of fancy!  Alternatively, you can attempt a more untethered kind of rendering, as Andrew Klimek does with the Baudelaire poem, and translate by sound and apparent cognate.  Keep in mind, though, that this approach has its own complexities of composition.

You might also want to print out this poem first so that the text is easier to read.

Portrait du Soleil

     ─ par Daniel Maximin, dans L’invention des désirades et autres poèmes, 2000[4]

Dès l’aube

j’ai reconnu l’appel des flamboyants

ils m’ont donné force et courage de me relever

j’ai ouvert les persiennes pour habiller la vue

j’ai vu désaccorder les rêves et les réveils

les actes et les paroles

pleurer sur la sécheresse critiquer l’hivernage

j’ai déserté les terres d’inhumanité

et offert mon zenith aux pays de misère

sur mer, j’ai dessalé la soif

j’ai éclairé l’amour qui rayonnait ma nuit

j’ai goûté dans ses larmes la seuer des sentiments

le soir, j’ai fait semblant de me noyer

lorsque le fil des jours suit l’aiguille de l’espoir

je raccommode le destin

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[1] I have read many translations of poems done by non-poets.  These are never satisfying.  The translations are often technically—that is, denotatively—correct, but the results are almost always wooden, flat, unpoetic.

[2] In this sense, “The Dover Bitch” from last week’s project is a “translation” of “Dover Beach.”

[3] You are welcome to go for a bona fide translation, if you’re up to the challenge.

[4] Paris: Editions Points, 2009.

Parody (9.5.18)

Funny!  Funny!  Funny!

We may think of parody as a kind of satire: art meant to improve the world by highlighting its faults and weaknesses.  But where satire usually has some moral and social underpinning (I expose a wrong!), parody has more to do with taste, art and culture.  Parody targets a product of literature or art, dance or film, even music.  It extrapolates the target’s more salient qualities or features—a certain style, a telling point of view, a typical subject matter, a “voice”—and then apes them.  

You might satirize a war strategy (Dr. Strangelove), but you parody George W. Bush’s malapropisms.  You might satirize government by Tweet, but you parody Donald Trump’s personal hygiene or the way he walks or combs his hair (assuming it’s really his) or pinches up his face when he talks.

In poetry, you might satirize work that ignores the political moment or the greater social crises (or vice versa), but you parody a clumsy or outdated style, or conversely, a style that’s over-the-top new or “difficult” or avant-garde.  

Think of parody and the parodist as calling attention to any style, subject-matter focus, or treatment that appears to be unself-conscious or unexamined—taken for granted—by its consumer.  Parody says to the thing/person it parodies, as well as to its potential devotee, “Do you hear yourself?” 

Exaggeration is the métier of parody, and this is why most parody is funny.  Sometimes it’s pretty acid in its humor, sometimes it’s gentle, but it’s often funny.  As consumers of parody, we are meant to laugh at (never with) what’s being parodied.

Here’s a famous example of two poems related by parody . . .

Dover Beach

                        -- Matthew Arnold, 1867

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The Dover Bitch

                             ─ Anthony Hecht, 1967

A Criticism of Life: for Andrews Wanning

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl

With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,

And he said to her, ‘Try to be true to me,

And I’ll do the same for you, for things are bad

All over, etc., etc.’

Well now, I knew this girl. It’s true she had read

Sophocles in a fairly good translation

And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,

But all the time he was talking she had in mind

The notion of what his whiskers would feel like

On the back of her neck. She told me later on

That after a while she got to looking out

At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,

Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds

And blandishments in French and the perfumes.

And then she got really angry. To have been brought

All the way down from London, and then be addressed

As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort

Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.

Anyway, she watched him pace the room

And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,

And then she said one or two unprintable things.

But you mustn’t judge her by that. What I mean to say is,

She’s really all right. I still see her once in a while

And she always treats me right. We have a drink

And I give her a good time, and perhaps it’s a year

Before I see her again, but there she is,

Running to fat, but dependable as they come.

And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d’ Amour.

. . . plus a less famous contribution to the conversation . . .

The Dover Bandit

                              ─ Clark Holtzman, 2002

I thought of writing this poem in Spanish but it

came out in Romanian instead, in a remote mountain

dialect of Romanian, which is strange, not because

I know so very little Spanish and even less Romanian,

but because I was thinking about the poem in Latin,

in Church Latin, to be exact, that is, in an “Italian way.”

Yes, what a strange thing to be thinking in the Mother

Tongue that connects me to you and therefore me

to the rest of the world, the crazy misspelled un-

pronounceable world we go through talking each day

like Sophocles with the sea coming in and going out,

only, I guess, he wouldn’t have thought of it in Latin?

Well, it is a strange thing that I was thinking at all,

about the pissy world, about you, this poem.

Are these poems funny?  Or rather, are the two poems responding to the original poem funny, since clearly the original is not?  Make of them what you will.  But another characteristic of parody, as you might gather from both of the responding poems, is anachronism.[1]  Hecht’s poem looks at (rewrites) the theme, characters and spirit of a mid-19^th Century poem (research indicates it was actually first drafted in 1849-51), from the point of view of a mid-20^th Century poetic/cultural sensibility.  The century and more of war, technology, literary tradition, political and social change that intervened are folded into Hecht’s poem.  

The Arnold poem was famous in its time; it is still a staple of LitSurv anthologies. It has been assigned reading and a focus of classroom analysis and “discussion” for a hundred years.  Hecht’s poem is a response not to “Dover Beach,” which I suspect he admired as a work of art, but to that tradition of study and interpretation that has calcified around it.  He meant to shock you into a different reading of the original, a 20^th Century reading, and this way his parody was a critique of modern academic scholarship and teaching.  

As for “The Dover Bandit,” all I can say is that I tried to horn in on that conversation.  I used to teach “Dover Beach” and “The Dover Bitch” in tandem; in fact, some of the anthologies I worked from grouped these two poems together, just so I could introduce my students to parody.  Many of my colleagues taught the poems as a pairing as well, so that I began to notice that the one, having made the other famous, could no longer be discussed in its absence.  

Sometime in the early 2000s, I overheard a couple of graduate instructors comparing their own experiences teaching the poems in tandem.  They approached the topic just as I and my colleagues had years before; they came to many of the same conclusions; they emphasized the same meanings and assumed the same intentions as my generation of teachers had.

That’s about the time that I wrote “The Dover Bandit,” not so much as a critique of either poem—both of which I admire greatly—but as a parody of that threadbare literary pedagogy I overheard from the graduate teaching assistants.

So there!  I hope you have fun writing a parody for Wednesday’s session.  You can focus on a famous poem, the way Hecht does, or you can imitate a style—think Whitman’s long and flowing lines; Williams’ breathy three-beat lines and simple subjects; Sylvia Plath’s “daddy” subject; even Jorie Graham’s splattery, disjointed look on the page.  You can mimic, for parody’s sake, the bombastic oratory of somebody like Yeats or Jack Gilbert or even the heavy pace/subject matter of the English poet, Geoffrey Hill (look him up, you’ll see what I mean).  It’s high time that somebody parodied W. S. Merwin, Mary Oliver or Billy Collins! You can parody just about anything or anyone, but make it a poet, a poetic style, or a poem.

See you next week.

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[1] A topic we might consider for a future project.