Aesthetic distance (10.24.18)

Ce n’est-pas une pipe . . .  

Last session, I brought up a new term, "aesthetic distance."  If by now you have searched the net for anything on this idea, you likely have come to the Wikipedia entry.  To the extent that a work of art of any kind is referential or representational, it establishes a “fictional reality” that we connect with when we experience it.  This fictional reality tends to override our sense of what we’re actually doing (e.g., engaging with an artifact).

We can put this into theater terms, namely the “fourth wall” of a stage or movie screen.  There is a kind of “fourth wall” in a poem that we can think of as its “meaning” or the outside world to which a poem refers.  Sometimes, we skim over the fact that we are reading a poem—highly ordered language, verbal iconography—because we are caught up in what the poem’s words point to.  We often do the same thing when looking at a painting.  We see the images: trees or the reclining nude or the field of wheat or the face.  We “look past” the paints and pigments, the brush strokes, the compositional field, the frame, the canvas or paper, and so on.  We see a painting of a pipe and see . . . a pipe.  We are in the “fictional reality” created there.

Indeed, writers and readers of poetry—and I am willing to bet that almost every one of us involved in W@1--approach a poem as something other than a verbal artifact or construct.  We interpret it.  We read its meaning.  The words are not really “there” for us.

Let’s say you write in longhand a heartfelt, passionate, beautiful letter to your best friend.  Let’s say you then type it out on your laptop.  Then let’s say you randomly put in a return after every few words or phrases to create the effect of lines.  Have you written a poem or a letter to your best friend?

Does this question imply a false dichotomy?

Let’s say you next fuss with which words begin and end the lines, and capitalize the first letter of the first word of each line.  Have you now made a more poetic poem?

Let’s go farther and say that you deliberately mess with syntax, then throw in a wide empty space, begin a line half-way across the page, then eliminate punctuation (or throw it in wherever).  Let’s say you substitute a dash where a word might be expected, or insert two dashes in a row.  You are now in company with Emily Dickinson and E.E. Cummings.

Have you written a letter or a poem?  Maybe both!  One thing you have done, to be sure, is to adjust the aesthetic distance your reader will experience to what you have written: I am reading about my friend’s day at the beach . . . or . . . I am reading art.

As far as our week’s project is concerned, “aesthetic distance” is that capacity we have for contemplating any object—a sunset, a mushroom cloud, a pear, one’s face in the mirror, a dance, a melody, an aroma, a severed hand, a murder, a birth, a howl, a painting, a gait—for itself, in and of itself.  We can contemplate from near at hand or from far away.  Either works, so long as we strive to capture the thing’s thingness.

For this project, then, I recommend the following process:

Step 1: select a simple object.[1] 

Step 2: study the object, writing down what you see, hear, feel, smell, or taste.  Consider such things as color, shape, volume, relationship to its surroundings, light and shadow, and so on.

Step 3: shape any details you have noted into a description; for example, describe the object top to bottom, surface to depth, larger feature to smaller, brighter color to duller color.  Let the object determine how you proceed.

Step 4: condense what you develop in Step 3, create lines and any new word order that you feel captures the “essence” or the thingness of the object.

And here are some examples either of a treatment of an object as an aesthetic thing, a thing of beauty in itself, and of poems that similarly insist on reminding you that they are artifacts of language themselves rather than rhythmical essays or letters to the world.

Study of Two Pears 

                            ─Wallace Stevens

I

Opusculum paedagogum.[2]

The pears are not viols,

nudes or bottles.

They resemble nothing else.

II

They are yellow forms

Composed of curves

Bulging toward the base.

They are touched red.

III

They are not flat surfaces

Having curved outlines.

They are round

tapering toward the top.

IV

In the way they are modelled

There are bits of blue.

A hard dry leaf hangs

From the stem.

V

The yellow glistens.

It glistens with various yellows,

Citrons, oranges and greens

Flowering over the skin.

VI

The shadows of the pears

Are blobs on the green cloth.

The pears are not seen

As the observer wills.

The Wild Anemone

                           ─James Laughlin

I’ll call it the daring

flower its softness its

pallor so little suggesting

the strength with which

it fights the wind its 

petals so delicate it

seems a touch would wither

them yet they’ll outlast a

three-day storm and will 

outlast I think (and now

I speak to her) the tempests

that a foolish heart invents

to plague itself    because

it hardly dares to love

the wild anemone

the daring flower.

The Lark

               ─Mary Oliver

And I have seen,

at dawn,

the lark

spin out of the long grass

and into the pink air—

its wings,

which are neither wide

nor overstrong,

fluttering—

the pectorals

ploughing and flashing

for nothing but altitude—

and the song

bursting

all the while

from the red throat.

And then he descends,

and is sorry.

His little head hangs,

and he pants for breath

for a few moments

among the hoops of the grass,

which are crisp and dry,

where most of his living is done—

and then something summons him again

and up he goes,

his shoulders working,

his whole body almost collapsing and floating

to the edges of the world.

We are reconciled, I think,

to too much.

Better to be a bird, like this one—

an ornament of the eternal.

As he came down once, to the nest of the grass,

“Squander the day, but save the soul,”

I heard him say.

The Pot of Flowers

                                ─William Carlos Williams

Pink confused with white

flowers and flowers reversed

take and spill the shaded flame

darting it back

into the lamp’s horn

petals aslant darkened with mauve

red where in whorls

petal lays its glow upon petal

round flamegreen throats

petals radiant with transpiercing light

contending

                  above

the leaves

reaching up their modest green

from the pot’s rim

and there, wholly dark, the pot

gray with rough moss.

What Is a Poem?

                              ─Ruth Stone

Such slight changes in air pressure,

tongue and palate,

and the differences in teeth.

Transparent words.

Why do I want to say ochre,

or what is green-yellow?

The sisters of those leaves on the ground

still lisp on the branches.

Why do I want to imitate them?

Having come this far

with a handful of alphabet,

I am forced,

with these few blocks,

to invent the universe. 

---

[1] I would avoid anything that already has content, like a painting or some iconic image. If you can treat a painting as a painted object and without becoming distracted by its content, then go for it.

[2] Opusculum means “a little work” and paedagogum means “slave (accompanying small children).”  My Latin is worse than rudimentary, so I have no idea about this opening line, other than that it creates aesthetic distance pretty effectively.  For me, the line is pure sound.

Love poems! (10.17.18)

Lovey-Dovey All the Time 

I don’t know about all of you, but love has been on my mind a lot lately.  Love abused and love wielded like a club.  Love misremembered and love misinterpreted.  Love denied and love decried.  Love in these registers has been shoved in my face in very public and publicized ways.  And politicized.  And weaponized.  And pounded home like a closing argument.  Through it all, though, a groovy kind of love[1] keeps wanting to have its say, namely, through poems and songs.  On more than one occasion, if anybody has been listening, I could be overheard singing “All you need is love . . . love is all you need.”

A poet friend said recently, apropos of nothing much but the times we live in, “Where are all the love poems?” Right!  Well, they’re never far away, if we listen for them.  Some of you have brought lovely love poems in to share with the group lately (including moving ones by Doug and Curt this very afternoon), so I guess it’s time that we make a project out of writing love poems.

But what kind of love poems?  What is a love poem anyway?  By this I mean, what constitutes a love poem, what does it look like, how does it work, and, most importantly, what can be said in a love poem? There was a time when I believed the only thing that could be said in a love poem had already been said: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”  “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”  What could I add to that?  Plenty, I think, if the following examples are any indication of the broad range of themes, moods, perspectives, treatments, voices etc. that love poetry opens up to us.

But please do this before you sit down to write your love poem for next week (or go rooting through your darning basket for the perfect length of thread): read these examples and my takes on them.  Then think about your own responses to them, whether they suggest new ways you can write about love.

AND NOTE: One thing I hope that you avoid is simply to write about love.  A love poem, in the sense that we are approaching it for next week, is an address to a lover or to something dearly loved.  It’s a poetic expression of love.

⤊ ⤊ ⤊

We could go back to the Greeks to have a look at love lyrics, to Sappho, for instance, and I suggest that you do so.  She wrote a very specific kind of love poem, very intimate, very poignant, very passionate, and very real (that is, not courtly).  Or we could study the Song of Solomon, in the Bible, which the literary critic Susan Sontag once described as an erotic love poem appropriated by the Established Church, which had to explain away, somehow, its obviously sexed-up language and imagery.  Or we could revisit Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, or Shakespeare’s sonnets, or Spenser’s The Fairie Queene, or any number of famous poems and sequences.  And I hope you read these incredible works (well, in the case of The Fairie Queene, maybe portions of it): a poet should not pass on to the next world without having read these works, if only because there will be a quiz the day you arrive.  Instead, I’ve elected to keep the selection American.  You’ll see in the following pieces how differently love poems can be conceived of and written.

One thing to note about the American love poem: it’s almost always intimate, private (this is a bit of a paradox), deeply personal, and addressed directly to a beloved.  (June and Curt have given us a couple of very good examples of this type of love poem recently.)  This one, by Miss Bradstreet, is of course famously anthologized.  It is passionate and expressive, and, as I say, directed to one person.  It’s actually “English” and not “American,” since America didn’t exist for another century after she wrote it, but unlike many an English love lyric, it’s not written for show, that is, for the Court, in the way Shakespeare’s and Sidney’s love poems were written.  Miss Bradstreet was not trying to establish her bona fides with this one.  It’s homespun poetry, and that’s the American-ness of it to me.

To My Dear and Loving Husband

─ Anne Bradstreet (1678)

If ever two were one, then surely we;

If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;

If ever wife was happy in a man,

Compare with me, ye women, if you can.

I prize thy love more than the whole mines of gold,

Or all the riches that the East doth hold.

My love is such that rivers cannot quench,

Nor aught but love from thee give recompense.

Thy love is such I can no way repay;

The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.

The while we live in love let’s so persevere

That when we live no more we may live ever.

Can you write a love poem about or to something other than your lover?  Can you address a love poem to someone you don’t know and will never know?  Can you express love for a corpse?  I think so.  I think Walt Whitman did in this one.

A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim

─ Walt Whitman (1865)

A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim,

As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless,

As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent,

Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying,

Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket,

Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.

Curious I halt and silent stand,

Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the first just lift the blanket;

Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray’d hair and flesh all sunken about the eyes?

Who are you my dear comrade?

Then to the second I step—and who are you my child and darling?

Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?

Then to the third—a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;

Young man I think I know you—I think this face is the face of the Christ himself,

Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.

I never thought about Emily Dickinson as a “love poet” until I read this poem in college.  I’d taken a semester-long course devoted to her work and this one really grabbed me, partly because it’s so accessible, but partly because of its obviously erotic undertones.  Emily Dickinson!  You could do with this poem what the Church Fathers did with Song of Solomon, I suppose, but why would you want to rob Emily of her private passions?

[Wild Nights]

─ Emily Dickinson (1891)

Wild Nights—Wild Nights!

Were I with thee

Wild Nights should be

Our luxury!

Futile—the Winds—

To a Heart in port—

Done with the Compass—

Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden—

Ah, the Sea!

Might I but moor—Tonight—

In Thee!

John F. Kennedy must have believed it was possible to write a love poem to one’s country when he invited Robert Frost to read this one at his inauguration.  We could use a poet (and a president) like that today, don’t you think?

The Gift Outright

─ Robert Frost (1942)

The land was our before we were the land’s.

She was our land more than a hundred years

Before we were her people. She was ours

In Massachusetts, in Virginia,

But we were England’s, still colonials,

Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,

Possessed by what we now no more possessed.

Something we were withholding from our land of living,

And forthwith found salvation in surrender.

Such as we were we gave ourselves outright

(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)

To the land vaguely realizing westward,

But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,

Such as she was, such as she would become.

Don’t be surprised to find a poet writing a love poem to himself, or more to the point, to his own image in a mirror.  Or even more to the point, to his own genius (that is, in the sense of uniqueness or essence).  And don’t be surprised that that poet is William Carlos Williams.  “Danse Russe” is set in about as private a setting as a poem can be . . . in a north room, no less.

Danse Russe

─ William Carlos Williams (1916)

If when my wife is sleeping

and the baby and Kathleen

are sleeping

and the sun is a flame-white disc

in silken mists

above shining trees,—

if I in my north room

dance naked, grotesquely

before my mirror

waving my shirt round my head

and singing softly to myself:

“I am lonely, lonely,

I was born to be lonely,

I am best so!”

If I admire my arms, my face,

my shoulders, flanks, buttocks

against the yellow drawn shades,—

Who shall say I am not

the happy genius of my household?

It’s no stretch to think of love poetry and nature in the same vein.  What is different about the following poem is its essential violence, and muted vehemence regarding mortally injured Nature in relation to Man, and the love directed toward that Nature.  Not everybody will classify this as a love poem, but it has always felt that way to me in its intimacy, its in-the-moment quality, its detail of “the beloved,” and its fatalness.

from Hurt Hawks

─ Robinson Jeffers (1928)

I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail

Had nothing left but unable misery

From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.

We had fed him six weeks, I gave him freedom,

He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death,

Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old

Implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. What fell was relaxed,

Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what

Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising

Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

Nobody said every love poem had to be uplifting or sentimental!  Robert Lowell was incapable of either of these gestures, anyway, at least in his poems.  Yet he could write soul-shaking love poems, fatalistic and downcast as they could be.  This one is part of a book-length sequence titled For Lizzie and Harriet, Harriet being his daughter, if I’m not mistaken.  So this is a love poem—intimate, almost oppressively so, and addressed to a specific person—by a very troubled man-husband-father-poet.

The Human Condition  (Harriet)

─ Robert Lowell (1973)

The impossible is allied to fact—

should someone human, not just our machinery,

fire on sight, and end the world and us,

surely he’ll say he chose the lesser evil—

our wars were simpler than our marriages,

sea monster on sea monster drowning Saturday night.

An acid shellfish cannot breathe fresh air. . . .

Home things can’t stand up to the strain of the earth.

I wake to your cookout and Charles Ives

lulling my terror, lifting my fell of hair,

as David calmed the dark nucleus of Saul.

I’ll love you at eleven, twenty, fifty,

young when the century mislays my name—

no date I can name you can be long enough.

Here’s another love poem, about love and the world, as the title plainly states.  Wilbur, who died recently, was a traditionalist all his life (in the cohort of Donald Hall, William Stafford, Donald Justice maybe).  He was an American poet, but looked to the east, to the Continent, when many of his generation were staunchly American or otherwise looking west, across the Pacific.  I think of the word urbane when I read his poems.  This poem is definitely a love poem . . . what kind of love poem, I am not so sure.  Okay, so maybe it’s “about” love rather than a direct expression of it, but it sure feels expressive to me.  Maybe it’s spiritual, or spirit, love we’re reading about here.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

─ Richard Wilbur (1967)

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple

As false dawn.

Outside the open window

The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bedsheets, some are in blouses,

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.

Now they are rising together in calm swells

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there.

The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessed day,

And cries,

“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,

The soul descends once more in bitter love

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;

Let lovers go sweet and fresh to be undone,

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating

Of dark habits,

keeping their difficult balance.”

Of course, love poems can be written as the blues, too.  Ai, which means “love” in Japanese, burst into my consciousness with her first book in 1973 (Cruelty) and then again with Killing Floor (1978). For some reason, I lost track of her after that, but she continued to produce books each decade until her death (breast cancer) in 2010.  She was known for writing raw stuff, poems suffused with violence and sex, as the titles above suggest, and as the poem below shows.  Sometimes these elements are direct, sometimes just below the surface.  I include this one to suggest that a “love” poem can express dependencies as well as passion.

Why Can’t I Leave You?

─ Ai (1970)

You stand behind the old black mare,

dressed as always in that red shirt,

strained from sweat, the crying of the armpits,

that will not stop for anything,

stoking her rump, while the barley goes unplanted.

I pick up my suitcase and set it down,

as I try to leave you again.

I smooth the hair back from your forehead.

I think with your laziness and the drought too,

you’ll be needing my help more than ever.

You take my hands, I nod

and go to the house to unpack,

having found another reason to stay.

I undress, then put on my white lace slip

for you to take off, because you like that

and when you come in, you pull down the straps

and I unbutton your shirt.

I know we can’t give each other any more

or any less than what we have.

There is safety in that, so much

that I can never get past the packing,

the begging you to please, if I can’t make you happy,

come close between my thighs

and let me laugh for you from my second mouth.

---

[1] Forgive me, please, for this nod to Pop.

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?

---

Pray for rain, endure dry spells.

---

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

---

Much business, and afterwards a welcome dry spell.

---

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

---

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

---

In a dry spell, dig.

---

Wells are valuable only in dry spells.

---

Without dry spells, who knows about rain?

---

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

---

[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.