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Poetry that abounds in beauty and strangeness Grevel Lindop
sees one translation as a rich, continuing creative process, |
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VÉNUS KHOURY-GHATA RADMILA LAZIC TATIANA SHCHERBINA
Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s poems are a perfect illustration. Khoury-Ghata herself writes in French but she is Lebanese by birth and her mother-tongue is Arabic. Exiled to France since 1973, she says that initially ‘I was incapable of choosing one of these languages over the other. They could be found side by side in my drafts: Arabic going from right to left, and French from left to right.’ Gradually Arabic disappeared from her pages ‘for want of speaking it’. Yet still, she says, it ‘lives within me, and I insert it into the French language which is the tool of my trade’. So far, so complicated. Then we come to the translator. Marilyn Hacker, an American poet of huge and at times sombre gifts, a darkly-glittering meditative writer, has for many years spent much of her time in France; she is also Jewish, an inheritance explored in many of her own poems. With writers as culturally rich as these, translation is less like trading currencies — dollars for Euros or whatever — and more like cooking: the already rich and complex organic substances go into oven or pan and come out synthesized into new kinds of substance, but now ready for our consumption. One is not the equivalent of the other, but part of a continuing creative process. Khoury-Ghata’s poems are written not only in the Frenc language (however Arabic-inflected) but also in the French tradition, where an almost clinical clarity of language gives an impression of transparency. In French it is the images themselves, rather than the words, which suggest multiple meanings. We are shown clear, vivid pictures but left to speculate about what they might mean: a style which owes much to Surrealism. Khoury-Ghata’s work abounds in beauty and strangeness which suggest a feminized version of the worlds of Dali or Chirico: At that time the earth was so high up — or The cracked glass of his watch shows an hour to the west
of there To enjoy these poems at their best requires a certain discipline of the reader. Rushed through, or read in great swathes, they may seem to lack point or direction. Their landscapes — of mirrors and sheets, blood and rain, trees, stones and canaries — may come to seem monotonous. But taken one or two at a time, pictured and allowed to develop their own significance, they are haunting and powerful. And behind them, forming itself slowly like a visiting ghost, is a very clear picture: that of a woman — any woman and all women — wrenched from a hard but fruitful traditional way of life and driven through a landscape of war and desolation. Marilyn Hacker has chosen what she evidently sees as key works: ‘Words’ (Les Mots), a sequence about the writer’s intimate experience with the difficult and beautiful creatures she works with; ‘She Says’ (Elle dit, from which the lines above are taken), untitled poems about a woman’s experiences of life and death; and a short essay ‘Why I Write in French’. The essay has a great deal to say about the function of poetry for both writers and readers. It also tells the extraordinary story of Khoury-Ghata’s budding-poet brother, who in his teens was overtaken by a compulsion to speak only in hexameter verse (dictated, he believed, by Victor Hugo) and was given electric shock treatment until he forgot his French entirely. His story, a painful mirror image of Khoury-Ghata’s own, could itself be a Surrealist fable but it is true. It completes an essential introduction to a remarkable poet.
When the versions work, they hit hard and with a challenging allure: I give you the visa ('Dorothy Parker Blues') Often Lazic's poems tell good stories and (as in the visa reference above) casually but deftly point to political dimensions. A good instance is ‘Last Voyage: New York-Belgrade’, with its grimly-comic anecdote of the dead exile whose ashes are smuggled back on a flight to Serbia in an ex-mistress’s hand baggage, where he sits ‘in her lap’ while her knees …stuck out noticeably She returns him to a country Whose citizens return Unfortunately too many of the translations read like first drafts, and first drafts that haven't been properly proofread. Without knowing Serbian it's impossible to be sure what's going on, but sometimes there seems to be sheer clumsiness. Would an ageing woman refer to her genitals as 'my dry nooky'? Surely nooky is the activity, not the body-part. When Lazic is made to long for ‘a fellow / Who'll take me home’ it sounds weirdly prissy. Wouldn't ‘guy’ be more in order, if ‘man’ won’t do? When the contents of a woman's handbag are listed as ‘Maramice, uloske, tampone’ you needn't be an expert in Serbian to feel that ‘handkerchiefs, insoles, sanitary napkins’ is a fiddly line that could be strengthened by using the obvious word, ‘tampons’. As for ‘A romance or two, an occasional flirt’ — well, at the cost of creating an internal rhyme it might be better to go for precision by remembering that a flirt is a person — the relationship is known as a ‘flirtation’. Then there are the jarring grammatical and logical errors. ‘Her hands are that of a boxer.’ (How many hands does she have?) ‘One’s private homeland / On which everyone steps on in boots.’ (How many ‘on’s do we need?) Two poems reject offers out of hand by exclaiming ‘Not in your life!’ (This time we do need more ‘on’s.) Then there's the woman who decides to wear ‘high heels on [her] heels’; it makes a sort of sense, but there's no repeated word in the Serbian and surely ‘high heels on her feet’ (or just ‘high heels’!) would be natural and avoid the crass repetition. A general rhythmic limpness throughout the book adds to the impression that Simic wasn't fully concentrating when he did the work. I am hugely excited by what I can see of Lazic, but also longing for someone to translate her properly.
Unlike Simic, who provides virtually no orientation for the reader, Sasha Dugdale gives a fascinating introduction to Shcherbina’s work, as well as a group of short essays and semiautobiographical pieces which strongly illuminate the poetry. Shcherbina, it turns out, has lived in France, writes poems and essays in French as well as Russian, and nearly — like Vénus Khoury-Ghata — settled permanently in Paris. It was the sense of being ‘a false Frenchwoman’ — of a painful loyalty to Russia and the Russian language — that drove her back, only to find herself looking at Moscow freshly through partly foreign eyes, and to suffer criticism, ironically, for ‘not being Russian enough’. Her style, Dugdale tells us, is full of ‘wordplay, allusion and quotation’, abounding in ‘Song titles, cultural references and proverbs…slang, archaism, proper nouns, foreign words and expletives’. The translations grapple adventurously with all this, and even manage at times to keep some sense of Shcherbina's use of rhyme, as well as her striking use of the urban and domestic imagery she often combines with an acute sense of nature and the seasons: Summer ends at night, so as not to be seen, The poems are permeated by a sense of the crowded, insecure life of a city undergoing vibrant and dangerous post-communist transformation, of existence in flats where ‘A neighbour's snored lullaby sings me to sleep, / I wake up in the morning to the sound of a drill’ and where political and geographical definitions have been made obsolete by the internet: The Russian federation has ceased to exist, (‘9Ru.net’) Shcherbina's readiness to reinvent Russian lyric poetry for the electronic age is brave and exciting. But it’s equally symptomatic of Russia's cultural complexity that her essays, even if they discuss the craze for fridge-buying or for DIY makeovers, can suddenly start to sound like the crustiest characters out of Dostoevski. ‘The majority of the Russian nation,’ she rants at one point, ‘…had no need for freedom and found inequality unacceptable. It is freedom itself which makes this majority aggressive and helpless, and the whip which makes it obedient.’ And she seems to mean it. I suspect we shall see further translations of all these poets. Meanwhile, in their different ways, all three books offer us new poetic flavours to taste, and maybe some fresh ingredients for British poetry, which all too often seems content to work with the same old recipes, and unaware that there’s a big and enticing world out there.
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Please send books for review in Poetry London to: Scott Verner You can contact Poetry London on editors@poetrylondon.co.uk
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