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The black mirror a poet/translator looks into Laurence Lieberman’s close reading of two new books relating to Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire |
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STEPHEN BERG STEPHEN BERG
Berg’s passion for inventions, versions and translations spans nearly five decades. In 1997 he published The Steel Cricket: Versions (l958–l997), a tour de force compendium of poems taken from a diversity of tongues, ranging from the seventeenth-century Japanese Zen master Bankei to Aztec songs and to the Inuktitut verse of Canadian Eskimos – all of these intermixed with modern poetry from such giants as Octavio Paz, Antonio Machado, Marina Tsvetayeva and Miklós Rodnóti. In subsequent years Berg wrote five poetry collections in his own voice, so this year’s two new books mark his return to a favourite enterprise. The multifaceted Rimbaud: Versions & Inventions (subtitled ‘still unilluminated I’) fluctuates from ‘versions’ – free adaptations of the originals – to ‘inventions’, original Berg poems inspired by kindred Rimbaud verses. In contrast, The Elegy on Hats is a single book-length poem in decasyllabic couplets, which purportedly undertakes to complete a sketchy masterwork of Baudelaire’s, freely drawing upon a few pages of journal entries that were discovered in the French poet’s notebooks after his death. Berg provides two pages of the rudimentary fragments, which he cites as his chief source, in a ‘Notes’ section at the back of his own version of the Elegy. He says that Baudelaire believed his hat poem would become his supreme opus, exceeding even Les Fleurs du Mal. I believe that a motivating force in Berg’s poetic vision that links these dissimilar books is his passion for bonding with authors who mirror parts of his own psyche: why care about Baudelaire my wild fate For Berg, being absorbed in reading these poets and responding to them becomes a way to espouse, in Conrad’s phrase, his ‘secret sharers’ in the community of spirits. Rimbaud and Baudelaire, for all their dissimilar sensibilities, have clearly taken their place in Berg’s ongoing pantheon of literary doppelgangers, a roll call of his ghostly doubles. It is an inclusive fellowship not restricted by gender, nationality or epoch. Reading these books, I witness the amalgams of the author’s voice partnered by each current mon semblable, in turn (he calls the linkages a ‘fusion of selves’), and I’m reminded that Stephen Berg has been – from the start of his writing life – a voracious and clairvoyant reader of poetry in a multiplicity of languages. But I suspect that his single most influential stimulus in the craft of translation was Robert Lowell, who had in fact been Berg’s teacher in Boston 50 years ago. Lowell’s book, Imitations, may have inspired his student to undertake his own experimental works advancing the translator’s art. (Edward Hirsh, writing in The Washington Post, cited The Steel Cricket as ‘the most compelling book of its kind since Robert Lowell’s controversial Imitations’). Both Lowell and Berg make a strong case for freely altering the form of the original poems. Lowell refers to ‘strict metrical’ translators as ‘taxidermists, not poets’, whose renderings are ‘stuffed birds’, and he makes a plea to give the translator ‘license’ to switch to prose, as well as ‘free or irregular verse’ (from Lowell’s ‘Introduction’ to Imitations). I believe it is appropriate to quote from Berg’s ‘Afterword’ in the Rimbaud book: ‘I had no method for my blindly composed experiment. Most of Rimbaud’s poems in metre and rhyme are here. I distorted some of them into prose poems because I was impelled to make versions outside the forms of the originals... I have have been caught by similar projects before because the English translations I read did not seem to achieve thorough enough transformation of the originals into good English poems. Each time this has happened I have been forced to proceed any way I could, use whatever materials I could find, not sure I could rescue living elements of the original... I concentrated on the poems as English poems only, free to consider any change that might improve them, whatever the original in prose translation said.’ Stephen Berg has proven himself to be so resilient a stylist that he is equally adept and illuminating in free verse, metrical, or prose versions, and in his Rimbaud book he works alternately in all three modes. Of the book’s four numbered parts, he devotes the first to ‘fairly strict sonnets’, the last to prose poems, and the middle sections vary from free verse to patterned stanzas. The opening section of l4 sonnets gives the reader a foretaste of the book’s psychic range. A tumultuous seesawing between worldly satire and ecstatic transcendence is laid out for us as the pervasive norm. This sonnet cycle sets the stage for the book’s metaphysical sweep, enabling Berg to launch a Yeatsian dialogue between self and soul. And I find that this strategy provides a springboard for the flux of intersecting voices, Berg and Rimbaud by turns, blending and suffusing, to create, in a sense, a third identity. In Rimbaud’s precocious youth the pendulum swing between soul and self would take another form, with life dominating art. Berg says of Rimbaud, ‘Language and action must be one [that] was his Godless religion... before his teens were over he gave up language for action’. But in the incandescent vision of Rimbaud’s poetry, the soul’s flaming torch appears to have finally prevailed over the worldly self, the embattled terrains of Flesh, Church and State. I take this domination by spirit to be the import of Berg’s choice of epigraph to his Rimbaud book, an excerpt from the l7-yearold’s letter to a friend: ‘The poet would define the amount of unknown awakening in the universal soul in his own time.’ The last six poems in Berg’s sonnet section evoke the soul’s outcry in its rage to free itself from the bonds of flesh, as in ‘The Extent of My Innocence’: Nothing’s left of me not even the weight In the last of the 14 sonnets, ‘Agate, Mahogany, Gold’, in a sense a posthumous opus, the disembodied voice of the speaker queasily returns to this world to speak of afterlife marvels: ‘It’s over nothing but things now nothing but / qualities the I the We the You gone’ and ‘...no human breath to mist the empty mirrors who / speaks these words never was now only / otherness truth in one soul one body’. This sonnet strips away all trappings of the bodied self, dramatizing a conversion of fleshly substance into taint-free soul. With this tone of reinvented ‘Being’, Berg breaks through into a new dimension of consciousness, via his coupling with Rimbaud’s voice. Only on one occasion years before writing The Elegy On Hats did Berg so completely transport the core of his identity into the kindred voice of one of his spiritual doubles. But in that earlier book, With Akhmatova at the Black Gates, his gender mask gave him a safer remove from his doppelganger. His female disguise remained virtually intact, so he was able to sublimate many of his private crises without blowing his cover. However, the artistic gambits in The Elegy on Hats are far riskier, as he negotiates the many mercurial shifts from Baudelaire to himself and back. A horrific oedipal mother-son juncture between them is a near-exact mirror image: ‘why else would Baudelaire have planned to write / their elegy his mother’s my mother’s / twin objects of desire catastrophic’. The nexus between these poets is so intertwined in such lines there’s no differentiating them. As never before, perhaps, Berg welcomes momentary blurrings of all margins between translator and translatee. The two personae must freely overlap and cohabit in one verse skin. The book’s structure of wonderfully fluid couplets rhythmically enhances the playful twinnings and coincidings. In some passages we witness a bold new looping prosodic freedom as Berg’s loquacious persona burbles into flights of erotic humour. Chief among the book’s uproariously funny vignettes are the catalogues of high-piled hats found to be overspilling his mother Hilda Berg’s two closets; the elaborate descriptive eulogy to the ‘yarmulkah’ (a mini-poem in its own right), following the surprise revelation that Baudelaire had secretly converted to Judaism, and loved to cavort in his billowy supply of the velvet hats filched from various synagogues, peaking in Berg’s own erotic fondlings of the soft ‘petite bonnets’: to plunge my hands into a mound of skullcaps would be like hearing God mumble my name… And finally, he secretly doffs ‘one of those idiot frizbees’ on his head, as he has sex with a woman who is none the wiser. One of the Elegy’s most electrifying moments is a midbook passage in which Berg shares with the reader the amazement he felt when he first came upon those enchanted pages found in one ‘trunk’ of Baudelaire’s posthumous papers: parts of the hat poem were written out in deep blue ink on a few sentences lists of phrases stacked on top of each other nearly touching to be one key to the hat poem’s meaning a justification of the object of a human head designed redesigned some vision of the pure true clear godhead Instantly one can share the sleuth’s passion in his archive discovery. What great findings for this linguistic coroner’s inquest, as he examines the remains of the body of words left behind at death. Berg’s excitement is both archival and somehow carnal: (‘the poem inscribed in bold slanted letters / on genuine vellum has no order / no beginning or end a reader / because the pages are not numbered / has to collate organize edit intuit / …and is therefore in a sense one of the / authors of the poem’). Whatever the shifting mix of fact and fantasy in this beguiling work, we’re now persuaded that these notebook entries have been Berg’s authentic source for the Elegy, affording him yet another rationale for surging beyond the limits of conventional translation. Since there are few extant fragments, he may legitimately claim fuller licence to assemble his own ‘inventions’ prompted by Baudelaire’s haphazardly scattered phrases and notes. But Stephen Berg’s boldly original project veils a private agenda – the pursuit of the key to his own soul’s enigma, in the process of sorting out his ghostly double’s afterlife fragments – flashes glimpsed in a black mirror.
Laurence Lieberman’s most recent collections, following a dozen previous books, are Hour of the Mango Black Moon and Carib’s Leap: Selected and New Poems, both published last year by Peepal Tree Press. His poems have also appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The American Poetry Review, Paris Review, etc. He is a Professor of English at the University of Illinois and poetry editor of the University of Illinois Press.
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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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