|
Words are not the end of thought, but where it begins George Szirtes reads poetry that explores the nature of being, or dramas of the self, or sings the echo with one’s own voice |
|
JANE HIRSHFIELD KATHRYN MARIS RAINER MARIA RILKE
It is a quite specific form of attentiveness that characterizes Hirshfield’s poems, most recently those in After, a philosophical, playful, yet deadly serious attentiveness to both nature and language where things are generally themselves, but occasionally – just occasionally – become analogies. Hirshfield has no particular interest in history. It casts no shadows in her work, which is to say that the humanity of the work – and it is deeply humane – attaches itself to perceptions of phenomena and seeks meaning in them. You will look in vain for confession, autobiography, biography, or indeed most aspects of human life that might be regarded as part of a chain of events. Nature, the poems imply, does not do what people do and is all the better for it. Human actions are, in most respects, a distraction. Where sorrow or other griefs exist – and they do increasingly in the book, building toward the end – they are general conditions rather than the effects of particular causes. Such distancing of desire and its ailments is hard for a European reader, but the precise, spry, lightly didactic tone that dazzles and surprises itself as it goes on, that demands its offerings of pain and letting go, makes it more bearable. As Hirshfield writes in the first poem of the collection, ‘After Long Silence’, ‘The untranslatable thought must be the most precise / / Yet words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins’. Where, then, is the humanity to whom thoughts need to be translatable and words the gateways to action? It is not in action but in the gentle, steady wit and care of the voice as it explores, through the quirks of language, the nature of being, just on the other side of language. After is an organized book, moving through thematic links, via a series of poems playfully called assays, small meditations on parts of speech, on interjections, on states of mind and conditions. Poems often open with statements such as, ‘For a few days any pattern lingers’, or ‘A person is full of sorrow / the way a burlap sack is full of stones and sand’, or ‘A good argument, etymology instructs, / is manyjointed’. These are like pieces of wisdom that need to be, and always are, embodied and explored. At other times they open at the height of a passion or apprehension, then work away from it into tranquillity. There is a section exploring the figure of I, the first person singular of the lyrical poem. There is a section on grief. They are also, generally, short enough to be quoted in full. This is ‘Late Self-Portrait by Rembrandt’: The dog, dead for years, keeps coming back in the dream. We look at each other there with the old joy. Which sleeps, changes, awakens, dresses, leaves. Happiness and unhappiness this painting proposes. Each carries the same water, it says. The personal is asserted almost indirectly, via the lost dog, but the emotion engendered by it is very quickly shifted into a much wider perspective in which it is the nature of the present that concerns us. Because the present behaves in a human way rather than a doggy way, it maintains intimacy (suddenly a person is dressing and leaving us) while considering the entire condition of things. The wisdom that Hirshfield’s poems are always drawn to is stated in almost proverbial form, but it is at this point that Rembrandt makes a belated entrance, albeit again indirectly, in the hammered gold bucket and its pressed tin counterpart, both of which we may read as Rembrandtesque texture, as depth and light. The image provides a sudden physical enrichment. The slightly academic tone of ‘this painting proposes’ (do paintings propose? we ask) is a way of distancing too much intimacy: it is, in effect, a moment where we may get out of Rembrandt’s way and let the enrichment have its own brief space. And so we come to the near-Confucian wisdom of the last line through a kind of pain threshold, so that desire has something substantial to let go of. The proverbial wisdom offered by the bare proposition could easily have turned into a pious calendar motto too easily arrived at, costing nothing. This poem costs a lot. It posits a difference between hammered gold and pressed tin and resolves it in a bucket full of water. Time and again it is the sudden entrance of the intensely physical that underwrites the airier aspects of Hirshfield’s poems. There is a part of me that begins to bristle slightly at a touch of a hand on the arm and the voice in the ear whispering a wise saw like Remember that happiness and unhappiness are both simply water in a bucket. Give me Blake’s Proverbs of Hell any time, I hiss under my breath. Yes, but this is not that kind of voice. This one presents us with the intensity and weight of the world and leaves us aching for it while looking beyond it. I miss the history a little, that is true. I cannot quite conceive of life as a series of eternal small-scale individual isolations, but it is a genuine life. It is indeed a life that hangs convincingly before us and has the convincing sound of water gently slopping in a bucket, a bucket that has been carried and beaten and worked on. It is, in fact, Rembrandt’s bucket and Fabritius’s goldfinch. It glows.
I seem to have lost some possessives in the rubble of accumulation. No loss is mine, for there is no me. And none is ‘his’ or ‘hers’ for
I have buried First I lost the words and then the things. I offer no reward: The register of the first two lines is edgily abstract. It hangs over the space of the stanza break before launching on a more romantic note with a faint echo of Emily Brontë’s ‘No coward soul is mine’ and a lightly poetic ‘for’ that raises the volume a touch. Having stated that there is no such creature as ‘me’ she immediately reasserts it by telling us that a rather active ‘I’ – with another romantic ‘for’ – has buried the third persons. A further stanza break appears before the single line that is half-way between statement and cry. The poem lets that settle in with another stanza break before returning to the crisp official language of personal ads that leads to the final romantic reassertion (‘losing is my lot’), then the side-stepping of the bull of melodrama with a little enigmatic pun, part elegance, part nervous shrug. Hey, it’s cool, the matador whispers, shaking just a little, reapplying her lipstick. There is nothing genteel about this; the jokes can be played at a louder volume. ‘The turtles were fucking and we were fucking / depressed at the Central Park Zoo’ begins ‘After Visiting the Job Books’. The brief image of a couple in coito at the zoo is quickly shuttled on to the emphatic assertion of depression. It’s the equivalent of a flasher in a public place who is, after all, just another kind of matador. ‘We are bloated with identity’ the poem goes on to say. Yes, and whose fault is that? readers may ask, only to realize too late that having responded they are dramatically engaged. Maris is a master at this. The world is that which exists at her finger ends, at the very limits of bloat, and because we are creatures with imaginations who will generally identify with any voice proclaiming itself an ‘I’, we take this world for microcosm and the self’s negotiation with it as cosmic wisdom. This sounds as though I were doubting the seriousness or substance of the venture but I am not, not really, I am just a little dizzied by it, as some other readers might be. Why, I ask myself, should I care what goes on in this woman’s life and mind? Aren’t there more important things in the world? But I know the answer. The answer is in the act, the act of language that holds its own space in the universe where a speck of dust is no less important than a continent. And that is the case with Plath and Dickinson and Emily Brontë too. Maris’s poems are cute in both the ‘winsome and quaint’ and the old Webster’s ‘sharp, shrewd, ingenious’ sense. A number end with rhyming couplets as if signing off an epigram: ‘He almost misses it – / reaches for my lap, takes my hand and kisses it’, ‘I said, “Goodbye. Goodbye. The attention was fun.” / He said, “Not to worry, girl – it’s only just begun.”’ This has a Dorothy Parker air, metropolitan and crowded, intimate with other lives whose own limits may never be known.
And we have the translations – Work by Joanna Macy, Anita Barrows, D. Herter Norton, Edward Snow, CF MacIntyre, S. Cohn, Michael Hamburger, Robert Bly, as well those I have already mentioned: the first major translation by JB Leishman reworked, in some cases, by Stephen Spender, Stephen Mitchell, and now Martyn Crucefix. There are also versions of Rilke’s French poems in Jo Shapcott’s Tender Taxes, and Don Paterson’s adaptation of the sonnets in his recent Orpheus, where Paterson says: ‘it is a very strange piece of work and for a long time I knew something just wasn’t coming through to me. It deals with some pretty fundamental things which I didn’t really understand until I had had the right experiences in my own life and I became more able to ask the right questions of it.’ There goes that schloss again. Interestingly, in neither Shapcott’s nor Paterson’s case does the name of Rilke figure much on the cover. The first assumption here is that the translations are part of the translators’ oeuvre as poets, rather than as functions of Rilke. The second is that Rilke requires no introduction, that he is familiar raw material to be cooked this way or that without damage to the essential fibre. This is expressly not the case with Crucefix’s versions of The Duino Elegies, that group of 10 longer poems, written in two great rushes of creative energy separated by 10 years, and regarded by most as Rilke’s masterpiece. Like Leishman and Mitchell before him, Crucefix places the German and English side by side for comparison. The book is introduced by Karen Leeder, who points out that the ‘central concern of the Elegies is humankind’s insecure place in the world and its fractured relationship to death.’ Spot on, it seems to me, though one must add to that – desire, memory, grief, loss and the sense of wonder without which nothing would happen. It is also, as Leeder further claims ‘a head-on encounter with the real’, albeit the real as perceived in a peculiarly rarefied – as one of Rilke’s friends put it, ‘literary’ – state of mind. Translation is interpretation. It is singing the echo with one’s own voice as heard through one’s own ears. There is not – nor can there be – a single right translation any more than there is a ‘right’ interpretation. Meaning in poetry does not work like an intention that might be traced to its source. There are, however, translations that a person might fall in love with and give one’s heart to, as one might to a face or a gesture. The version we give our hearts to may not be objectively the best on offer, just as the people we love may not be objectively the most beautiful beings, but our first flush of love endows them with a peculiar validity that compels allegiance. They had first claim on us and we can never quite put them out of our heads. Here I cannot help but be personal. So it is, with me, for parts of Leishman/Spender and parts of Mitchell. For me that violin will forever be utterly giving itself as in Leishman rather than leaning or yielding. And yet I feel the force of Mitchell’s ‘all those huge strange thoughts inside you / coming and going and often staying all night’. Where then with Crucefix, whose hard task it is to make me forget those other versions a little and, if not supplant them, then join in some kind of harmony with them, as if Rilke were singing with three voices, not one? Because, surely, Rilke’s voice is the one distilled by all three. That, at least, is what logic says. What does love say? In Crucefix’s case it says: ‘And these things, which live by passing away, / acknowledge your praise of them, as they vanish, / they look to us to deliver them.’ (from the Ninth Elegy). There are a number of passages like this, and, in as far as I can judge, Crucefix is often more literally true to Rilke than Mitchell sometimes is, though Crucefix’s translations are often many lines longer than the original, his line-breaks more frequent than Mitchell’s. There is the occasional awkwardness, such as ‘Late, we get left standing’ in the Fourth Elegy, that sounds clunky in my ear, (‘Late, overtaken, we...’ in Mitchell, is less so). Translation is not a beauty contest, nor an attempt to occupy limited space. Great poems require constant retranslating, ever fresher encounters. Crucefix’s version is substantial, powerful and necessary work. Readers may well fall in love with parts of it and regard the Crucefix Rilke as their life partner. The notes at the back are useful and clear. If the next translated Elegies float, as I suspect they might, a little more freely of the German text, it will be because Crucefix, like Mitchell and Leishman, has anchored it firmly enough. A little floating and flying will not come amiss then.
George Szirtes’ book of poems Reel (Bloodaxe) won the TS Eliot Prize in 2004. His New and Collected Poems will be published by Bloodaxe in 2008, together with John Sears’ study of his work.
|
|
Please send books for review in Poetry London to: Scott Verner You can contact Poetry London on editors@poetrylondon.co.uk Tel / Fax: 00 44 (0)20 8521 0776
|
|