Sherry Chandler

Long time ago, back in July, a couple of poets considered The Collected Poems, 1956-1998 of Zbigniew Herbert, which had just come out. The issue was that Herbert’s longtime translators, John and Bogdana Carpenter, had not been invited to do this translation. Instead the job had been given to an unknown, Alissa Valles.

Michael Hofmann, writing in Poetry, did not like this decision at all. He articulates his unhappiness in detail. David Orr, witing in the NYTimes is more circumspect.

I have very little knowledge of Herbert and can’t form an opinion of my own but I was interested in the questions the reviews raised about translating. So I pulled the quote, which has been sitting here all this time, waiting for me to get my thoughts together about it.

I had a distracted fall.

But here’s what I had in mind to say.

Hofmann reads no Polish, and yet he had very strong ideas about what made Herbert great based on the Carpenter translations. He makes a very good case that the Carpenters write better poetry but do they give us the real Herbert?

How can we know?

Here is what Orr had to say:

Still, Herbert wrote many poems; mistakes are to be expected. And as always, the central difficulty for any translator lies in conveying words and concepts that lack true analogues in our language. In such cases, is the literal meaning best? Or what you think the poet might have said if he were an English speaker? To understand how complicated these questions can be, consider “On the Road to Delphi.” In this short prose poem, Apollo is shown idly toying with the severed head of Medusa while repeating a particular line. In Polish, that line is “Sztukmistrz musi zglebic okrucienstwo,” to which a Polish-English dictionary offers this translation: “A performer must get to the bottom of cruelty.” The Carpenters, however, render the line: “A craftsman must probe to the very bottom of cruelty.” “Craftsman” is surprising, but it makes a certain sense — the poem is exploring the old idea of art as an essentially coldhearted activity (as Yeats said, “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death”), and Herbert has deliberately avoided the Polish word for “artist” (“artysta”) in favor of “sztukmistrz,” which means “performer, juggler, conjuror.” In doing so, Herbert is emphasizing the side of art that has to do with performance for its own sake — by extension, he’s pointing out the chill at the core of technical excellence. So “craftsman” may help bring that aspect of the poem into English.

But it isn’t what Herbert said. Which is perhaps why Valles gives the same line as “a conjuror must plumb the depths of cruelty.” Aside from “plumb the depths,” which is overdone, this version is almost certainly a better word-for-word translation. But it doesn’t make much sense in English, probably because the figure of the traveling magician doesn’t figure prominently in American consciousness. Consequently Valles’s version, while accurate, has the unfortunate effect of making the casual reader think of David Blaine. Talk about plumbing the depths of cruelty.

So if translation is always a matter of approximating, does it matter that Herbert’s “Collected Poems” has its weaknesses? Well, yes: after death, a translated poet may, as Auden said, become his admirers, but only after he’s become a poet in English who’s interesting enough to attract admirers in the first place. Herbert is now a complete poet in English, and he’s not as strong as he should be.

Here is strong language from Anthony Lewis writing in the New York Review of Books onlline. The book is Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. The subject is Bush vs Gore:

The Court found a denial of the constitutional principle of equal protection of the laws in the fact that counties were recounting votes in different ways. It was a decision that defied reason, since plainly the most equitable way to determine the Florida vote accurately was to recount it everywhere, not to stop where it was being recounted. It was also a decision without legal precedent. Justice Kennedy in his opinion said the legal reasoning was “limited to the present circumstances.” In other words, as another justice said years ago, the decision was like a restricted railroad ticket, “good for this day and this train only.”

In my judgment the Court did not even have legal jurisdiction to consider the case, because there was no federal legal issue. The Constitution leaves the counting of votes to the states, and a statute commits challenges finally to the judgment of Congress. Toobin describes the Court’s conduct as “inept and unsavory” and says the justices displayed “vanity, overconfidence, impatience, arrogance, and simple political partisanship.”

Was it pure politics? The justices may have reasoned to themselves, and believed, that they were acting in the national interest—to protect the country from being leaderless during a long election contest. But would they have come to the same conclusion if Al Gore had led by a few hundred votes and had sued to stop a Bush-sought recount? I doubt it.

The country quietly accepted the decision in Bush v. Gore, liking it or not. At the time I thought that was right. We have to be able to look somewhere for finality, and in our system that is the Supreme Court. Today I am not quite so sure. More vocal protest against a lawless decision might have been better for the country and the Court.

Also this:

Judging by what he has done on the Court, John Roberts is a committed legal conservative: not an originalist like Scalia or Thomas but someone determined to read the law and the Constitution to achieve conservative ends. But why would he be in such a hurry? One possible answer is that, given the makeup of the Court, he sees an opening right now to move the law toward what the conservative movement wants, in matters like abortion and affirmative action, and you never know whether that opening will last.

There is another possible explanation for the chief justice’s single-mindedness. He was a litigator in his legal life before he went on the bench, someone who (unlike most lawyers) argued cases in court. He was an exceptionally brilliant one. Litigators have to have a high level of competitiveness. They want to win. Everything they hear and learn is devoted to building their side of a case. They do not have the experience of an officeholder or legislator, who must listen to many viewpoints, or the reflectiveness of a scholar.

In the end the Supreme Court is what presidents make it by their appointments. The framers intended that: presidential appointment was the link of a remote institution to political democracy.

“Presidents pick justices to extend their legacies,” Toobin says. “By this standard, George W. Bush chose wisely.” Future presidents can include in their legacies a concern to rebuild the legal principles on which the Court based its decisions in such cases as Lawrence v. Texas and Grutter v. Bollinger. If we want a different Supreme Court, we have to pay attention to that issue in electing a president.

Much Appalachian poetry tends toward the nostalgic and the defensive. How could it not, when so much has been lost? And when the region has been treated as a national joke? Still these characteristics don’t always make for good poetry.

In Meditation Upon the Invisible Ceremony of Breath (Finishing Line, 2007), Rebecca Bailey has integrated the stuff of Appalachia into a sort of New Age/age-old mysticism mixed with a mountain Zen. Her nostalgia is not just for Granny but for the granny woman: the one who delivered the babies and cured with herbs and knew a little magic, like how to remove warts or witch water. It is these women, the crone aspect of the Triple Goddess, the moon, the earth, that she reaches out for.

She remembers

…Everything imagined and unimagined,
logical and irratrional, nestled, waiting, in the crooks of
           ridges and hollows.

I remember smelling it. I smell it sometimes now.
—from “What I Learned from Grandma Bailey

The grandmother in this chapbook is an invocation of the earth spirit:

Coffee is the way to call the old gods.
Brew as black as Earth…

I call my mother’s ancestors with the patchwork quilt.
O Grandmother, put your arms around me now
and dance with me…
— from “Invocation of the Grandmother”

There is little that is gentle in Bailey’s hills, though there is wild joy:

I say I am of the ground.
I am made from no man’s rib,
but from a giant thigh of redrock
twisted into a gnarled maze indecipherable
by anything as superficial as intellect.
You have to understand rock and dirt,
ground, with the soles of your feet…
— from “Grounded”

And there is ecological disaster everywhere. As, for example, in “The Devil Comes to Rose Fork”

But then the devil came down from the ridge top,
to tap me on the shoulder
as I looked down the well box
because sludge was coming out of the faucets…

or in my favorite poem in the collection “Birth of the River God:”

He sent his maddening brown hair
across the scrappy gravels of the road
the Sunday after my father returned to earth.
His wet hair grabbed tree trunks
and swung crazily, mercilessly,
through low places. Love, he says,
is like water for it flows into the
lowest places and judges not.

Love — of place and family — is of the earth in this collection. Sorrow is of the earth. It is wild but beautiful.

Fred Smock has published a very nice review of Leslie Shane’s haiku collection, Point of Rock (Larkspur Press, 2007), in last Saturday’s Courier-Journal:

These days, a book of haiku is an especially welcome gift to the spirit. We live in an age of excess — of spending, wasting, killing. Haiku poetry practices a strict economy, and it is a model of careful, respectful attention paid to the natural world. Shane works in the classical Asian mode: poems about nature, in a 5/7/5 syllable count, with often a surprise or clever turn in the last line.

“You can write poetry without being able to write haiku, but you can’t write haiku without being able to write poetry,” observes James Baker Hall in his foreword.

Shane is well-practiced in the art.

My review of Christine Stewart-Nuñez’s chapbook Unbound & Branded is up at Rattle E-Reviews. This Finishing Line chapbook, like Joanie DiMartino’s Licking the Spoon, is a good example of how to use this short form for a tight collection of poems on a single subject.

I hope you enjoy the review and I would recommend the chapbook. As are all of Finishing Line’s books, it is well made and attractive.

While you’re over at Rattle, read the other E-Reviews. They range from A. R. Ammons to d’bi.young.

The NYTimes (or at least Virginia Hefferman) loves Kevin Kline and so do I:

Mr. Kline delivers Jaques’s beloved “All the world’s a stage” soliloquy to images of nature and the sound of chirping birds. (A lion later intrudes in a scene between Orlando and Oliver; nature is fully incorporated into stagecraft here.) This is odd, and it misuses Mr. Kline, who seems unable ever to hit a false note. As a thoroughgoing depressive here, he brings some clairvoyance to melancholy, which suits him.

Mr. Kline has, without fanfare, become a kind of elder statesman of American acting, with no taint on him. His face is so kindly and his voice so unforced that viewers can’t help wanting the satisfaction of seeing him cover the big hits; it’s not fair to deny us his face during this speech.

Kenneth Branagh, however, does not love Rosalind and so has cut Ron Howard’s daugher’s part in his production that airs tonight on HBO.

“She does go on a bit,” Mr. Branagh said, blandly explaining his resizing of the part to a reporter for The Los Angeles Times.

Alas! I have no cable. Not that I often regret this. And I don’t seem to be alone. According to Harry Shearer, about 20% of the country still grabs its television programming from the air waves.

Still I’d like to see this production if only to see Kevin Kline do Jacques. It also has Brian Blessed, whom I have loved since his days playing Augustus in I, Claudius.

Maybe it will be offered by Netflix later on.

Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak (Univ Iowa Press), reviewed by Dan Chiasson:

“The Detainees Speak” is this book’s subtitle: but putting aside the real question of whether lyric poets ever “speak” through their art, in the sense of revealing a historical person’s actual life story (they have rarely done so through poetry’s long history, and often poets “speak” least revealingly precisely when they claim to be telling the truth), in what sense could these poems, heavily vetted by official censors, translated by “linguists with secret-level security clearance” but no literary training, released by the Pentagon according to its own strict, but unarticulated, rationale — “speak”?

Given these constraints, a better subtitle might have been “The Detainees Do Not Speak” or perhaps “The Detainees Are Not Allowed to Speak.” But the best subtitle, I fear, would have been “The Pentagon Speaks.”

Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press), reviewed by Janet Maslin:

The abundant doomsday plotlines in “The World Without Us” make it a useful conversation piece, if a grim one. Traveling down many different avenues of scientific research, Alan Weisman postulates the complete disappearance of mankind from planet Earth. Then he extrapolates about what would happen without us. By his estimate most of our leavings would rot and crumble; much of our damage would take eons to undo. There’s one tiny bit of good news. Depleted sea species might recover if we would do them a favor and go away.

Over all, this book paints a punishingly bleak picture. Entries in its index indicate the scope of its pessimism. For instance: “Birds, plate glass picture windows and”; “Central Park, coyotes in”; “Earth, final days”; “Embalming, arsenic and”; “Human race, robots and computers as replacements”; “Great Britain’s shoreline, rubbish along”; “PCBs, and hermaphroditic polar bears.” “Dessication,” “Meltdowns” and “Slash-and-burn” also play their roles here.

Mr. Weisman speaks to the darkest parts of our collective imagination as well as some of the strangest. Consider the lowly exfoliant. These lotions contain tiny plastic particles that are meant to scrub. But they wind up fulfilling other purposes, like clogging the innards of the tiny sea creatures that ingest them. This book cites research on bottom-feeding lugworms, barnacles and sand fleas as evidence of the damage the particles do. All three species became terminally constipated from ingesting this man-made microlitter.

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road: The Original Scroll (Viking), reviewed by Luc Sante:

Contrary to legend, the scroll was not a roll of teletype paper but a series of large sheets of tracing paper that Kerouac cut to fit and taped together, and it is not unpunctuated — merely unparagraphed, which makes a certain physical demand on the reader, who is deprived of the usual rest stops. Also contrary to received ideas, Kerouac by his own admission fueled his work with nothing stronger than coffee. The scroll is slightly longer than the novel as it was finally published, after three subsequent conventionally formatted drafts, in 1957. The biggest immediate difference between the first draft and the finished product, though, is that while we know “On the Road” as a novel — the great novel of the Beat Generation — the scroll is essentially nonfiction, a memoir that uses real names and is far less self-consciously literary. It is a dazzling piece of writing for all of its rough edges, and, stripped of affectations that in the novel can sometimes verge on bathos, as well as of gratuitous punctuation supplied by editors more devoted to rules than to music, it seems much more immediate and even contemporary.

Billy Collins, in the introduction to Best American Poetry 2006 (Scribner 2006):

Once Walt Whitman demonstrated that poetry in English could get along without standard meter and end-rhyme, poetry began to lose that familiar gait and musical jauntiness that listeners and readers had come to identify with it. But poetry also lost something more: a trust system that had bound poet and reader together through the reliable recurrence of similar sounds and a steady dependable beat. Whatever emotional or intellectual demands a poem placed on the reader, at least the reader could put trust in the poet’s implicit promise to keep up a tempo and maintain a sound pattern. It’s the same promise that is made to the listeners of popular songs. What has come to replace this system of trust; if anything? However vague a substitute, the answer is probably tone of voice. As a reader, I come to trust or distrust the authority of the poem after reading just a few lines. Do I hear a voice that is making reasonable claims for itself—usually a first-person voice speaking fallibly but honestly—or does the poem begin with a grandiose pronouncement, a riddle, or an intimate confession foisted on me by a stranger? Tone may be the most elusive aspect of written language, but our ears instantly recognize words that sound authentic and words that ring false. (p. xxii)

Answered by The Constant Critic:

Picking on the Best American Poetry series is like shooting a fish in a barrel. Picking on the Best American Poetry series as edited by Billy Collins is like shooting a minnow in a shotglass.

So despite the fact that the subsequent criticism doesn’t even really require Rocket Science Powers and can be more graphically appreciated via the brutally, brilliantly maladaptive cartoons of Jim Behrle, I’m going to criticize anyway, because I want to clarify the distinction between judgment and taste and demonstrate the potentially degrading consequences of pretending that the latter can ever replace the former, even if the former does in part depend on the latter…

Collins then commences to assemble a shaky approximation of argument as to why his tastes are, in fact, something more than a peevish expression of his own private literary utopia. The term on which his standard seems to hinge is voice, even though he never bothers to qualify or explore what voice is, or how it might operate. Like a biblical seer or pyramid-scheme confidence man, Collins simply trusts that those who have ears to hear will do so, and assumes that for those who do not “speak” to him the fault is theirs alone, and no prejudice or inadequacy on his part. He is thus happy and comfortable to report that he would reject a poem because “he failed to hear a human voice speaking,” all the while knowing that what he describes as a “failure” is in fact a patronizingly polite way of declaring unworthy the poem he’s allegedly failed. Elsewhere, he explicitly pines for “the recognizable sound of a human voice…” and finally defines his “process” as characterized by the following question: “Do I hear a voice that is making reasonable claims for itself—usually a first person voice speaking fallibly but honestly – or does the poem begin with a grandiose pronouncement, a riddle, or an intimate confession foisted on me by a stranger? Tone may be the most elusive aspect of written language, but our ears instantly recognize words that sound authentic and words that ring false.” Would that we had ears of such surpassing precision and wisdom! Our poetry might be as bland as Collins hopes, but our political culture would be much improved. Fortunately and un-, the belief is false.

And yet, despite narrowing the range of his taste to admit what is, essentially, only one kind of poem, Collins insists that the poems he’s chosen represent the art as a “wild hodgepodge of verbal activity” and reassures us that he is … “bored by poems that are transparent from beginning to end…”, thereby implying that we won’t find any of those poems in the following pages, no sirree, only wildness of the varieties both hodge and podge.

Okay, okay, I know all this is old news. But I’m just now getting around to reading it. I haven’t yet read the poems — from the TOC, I figure they’re probably “some fairly decent poems” with no great surprises. But the introduction strikes me as it strikes the Constant Critic — as patronizing. Collins, to quote the Critic again, opines that most poetry (he even estimates a literal percentage) is crap, and hoping against hope that those from whom such crap issues will take it upon themselves to shut the f*** up.

Not that I think all poems are created equal, by any means. But if you are going to tell me that I’d be better off learning to tat lace doilies, I want the advice to be based on something more than your (no doubt superior) taste.

I found this announcement at Eyewear:

Nthposition’s global headquarters is a minuscule eyrie in North London, and now that In The Criminal’s Cabinet has been in print for nearly three years, publisher and chief editor Val Stevenson is keen to get a few boxes of unsold copies out of her bedroom, though not nearly as keen as her long-suffering husband… If you would like one, please email Val.

Copies will be sent out on a ‘first come, first served’ basis, and when they are gone, ITCC will be officially out-of-print.

Copies will be a staggeringly reasonable £2.00 plus postage and packing (for airmail outside the UK) per copy

As a matter of full disclosure, I’m a contributor to In the Criminal’s Cabinet, and I must say that I’m impressed with myself to be included among so much lucid and edgy work by an international cast from the e-pages of nthposition.

I’ve been reading my way through the anthology again this summer, and I’m pleased with what I find. It’s a very attractively produced volume with 215 pages of poetry and fiction from Robert Allen to Harriet Zinnes. To quote the introduction by edtors Val Stevenson and Todd Swift:

Since 2002, London-based nthposition has featured several hundred poets, from almost every place where people write poetry in English, especially America, Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and South Africa. …we have tried to offer a full-spectrum report on the state of poetry of the start of the 21st century, to suggest the various ways — from linguistically innovative to mainstream — a poem can be imagined and created. Good poems occur at all points of the writing compass, from political to just plain weird.

Within these pages, you will find, quite simply, indelible poets and poems to reckon with — from India’s Ranjit Hoskote to Ireland’s Kevin Higgins; from Canada’s Stephanie Bolster to UK’s Jen Hadfield; from American’s Charles Bernstein to South Africa’s Isobel Dixon…

And this, of course, is just the poets, in whom I am most interested.

The prose, too, is all “tight, vivid.” Nine short pieces from the UK, America, Canada, Ireland, Bulgaria, and Japan. I took time to read it this summer, which I had not done before, and I was blown away by works like Kieran D”Angelo’s “The Internal Life of a Brick” and amused and touched by Kenneth J. Harvey’s “No Better a House.”

Invest a few dollars and get hours, years, of enjoyment in return.

Prosecution had sympathy but jury found against:

JT LeRoy, the authorial “other” whom the writer Laura Albert employed as her alter ego and self-protective proxy in the world, was found yesterday by a jury in Manhattan to be not just a fictional creation, but a fraud.

More on this ever-fascinating story here.

Meanwhile, I’ll opine that our country has turned sort of vampiric, feeding on other people’s pain, which is what sets us all up to be suckers for this kind of story. If I really wanted to strecth that analogy, I’d say it’s sort of our version of the Roman coliseum.

Tina Brown’s Couples

Why these couples? Why H. G. Wells and Rebecca West; Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry; Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim and John Francis (Earl) Russell; Vanessa Bell and Clive Bell; Lady Ottoline Morrell and Philip Morrell; Radclyffe Hall and Lady Una Troubridge; Vera Brittain and George Gordon Catlin? All were literary or artistic figures, famous in their time (some still are in ours). All had the useful (to the rest of us) habit of writing everything down. They did their thinking aloud on paper — in urgent, dashed-off notes, carefully hoarded correspondence, diary entries, hand-delivered notes and unsent emotional manifestos. All of it was “eyes only,” so to speak, but time has declassified it. The result is YouTube in a time capsule.

Reading Judas:

Pagels and King do an excellent job explaining why, according to the author of this renegade gospel, mainstream Christianity has gotten it so wrong for so long. Along the way they introduce us to, among other things, a goddess named Barbelo (for some Gnostics, a divine mother figure who often symbolized heaven) and try to make sense of teachings that to most readers today will seem like nutty musings on numerology, cosmology, astrology and eschatology. On the perennial question of death and the afterlife, Pagels and King explain that whereas other early Christians affirmed the doctrine of bodily resurrection, the Christians to whom this gospel is addressed believed in the immortal spirit. Here the body is suspect. Jesus is not reborn in the flesh but simply appears. The eternal life he offers is lived in the spirit alone, and it is won more through Jesus’ teachings than through his sacrifice on the cross.

I read this book with a great deal of pleasure. It seemed to me that Pagels and King don’t make an argument one way or another; they just explain what the argument is. The reviewer sees it differently and has his reservations. Anyway I wouldn’t really recommend this book for beach reading.

Body of Work:

Poetry and death have been seen around town for quite some time. Among all the literary musings on death, the most affecting and surprising, it strikes me, are by the poet who daily confronts it. To the fine essays of the poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch must be added this gleaming, humane work by the poet Christine Montross, written during, and about, her first year of medical school. (She matriculated at Brown University when she was 28 and is now a resident in psychiatry there.)

…

Montross’s response is to break down in tears, and the oncologist quickly steps in front of her to take over the discussion. On the one hand, she realizes that it “should not be the responsibility of sick patients to bear the burden of unease.” As doctors in training, she writes, “we are reshaping the ways in which we react — in fact we are suppressing universal reactions of fear and grief and horror.” The danger is that one will go too far and suppress all emotion. “I do not wish,” Montross writes, “to hear ‘stroke’ and think of the distribution of vessels to the brain and the territories they serve instead of my grandmother’s now-curled left hand and stooped walk.”

And, last but not least, not from the NYTimes Book Page, Lance Mannion on poets and the truth:

I like the poem better when I think that it’s made up. When I suspect it’s the truth—Glück’s version of the truth—it feels like a lie.

I think that Glück has a streak of perversity in her that allows her to “remember” the past in ways that appeal to her vanity. I think she is vain about being gloomy and withdrawn, vain about being a person who responds to affection and emotional claims upon her by going cold and turning mean.

I think she is nursing a grudge that has no cause but her own self-loathing.

I think she is a female, poetic Dr House.

You know why I think this?

Because I have read other poems by her in which she presents herself as just this kind of person.

I didn’t pick the most coherent part of the Mannion argument here. You can get that by reading his whole post, which is fun. But I like comparing Louise Glück to Gregory House, one of my favorite tv characters, and so I chose to put that part of the post here.

(One little side note: one reason why I think Hugh Laurie is so successful as House is that that whole House world is about as silly as Bertie Wooster’s.)

Update: Also not from the NYTimes Book Page but from Juan Cole’s Informed Comment:

Al-Hayat says that the Iraqi legislature issued a statement on the knighting by Queen Elizabeth II of author Salman Rushdie: “At a time when we call for a dialogue of religions and civilizations, and work to combat terrorism in all its forms and wherever it exists, we express our amazement and our regret that the Queen of England has honored a person who has insulted Islam and millions of its adherents.”