founded in 1912 by harriet monroe

November 2014

translation

FOUNDED IN 1912 BY HARRIET MONROE volume ccv • number 2 CONTENTS

November 2014

POEMS ilya kutik 99 Sea Sickness Translated by Reginald Gibbons and the author lev oborin 102 From “Translations in Bare Outline” Translated by John William Narins dafydd ap gwilym 104 The Wind Translated by Gwyneth Lewis bertolt brecht 106 “When I’d reported to the couple, thus” Translated by Tom Kuhn shuzo takiguchi 107 Joan Miró Yves Tanguy René Magritte Translated by Yuki Tanaka and Mary Jo Bang liu xia 110 Empty Chairs Transformed Creatures Translated by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern jerzy ficowski 112 August 5, 1942 Translated by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer fanny howe 114 Sheets larry levis 116 François Villon on the Condition ... víctor rodríguez núñez 117 From “from a red barn” Translated by Katherine M. Hedeen yves bonnefoy 122 They Spoke to Me The Museum Translated by Mary Ann Caws ko un 124 Ear Taklamakan Desert Asking the Way Translated by Suji Kwock Kim and Sunja Kim Kwock suji kwock kim 127 Rice-Field Road at Dusk matthew rohrer 128 Poem Written with Bashō Poem Written with Buson Poem Written with Buson Poem Written with Buson Poem Written with Issa Poem Written with Issa Poem Written with Issa Poem Written with Bashō seán ó ríordáin 136 Switch Translated by David Wheatley max jacob 137 The Demoniac’s Mass Atlantide Périgal-Nohor Translated by Rosanna Warren grigori dashevsky 140 From “Ithaca” Translated by Valzhyna Mort seán ó coileáin 143 The Ruins of Timoleague Abbey Translated by Tony Hoagland and Martin Shaw abraham sutzkever 146 “What potion should I give ...” What Will Stay Behind Translated by Zackary Sholem Berger The Blade of Grass from Ponar Translated by Maia Evrona

comment geoffrey brock 151 Exhuming Vallejo gwyneth lewis 162 Extreme Welsh Meter james longenbach 172 The Medium of the English Language

contributors 184 Editor don share Art Director fred sasaki Managing Editor sarah dodson Assistant Editor lindsay garbutt Editorial Assistant holly amos Consulting Editor christina pugh Design alexander knowlton

cover art by lise haller baggesen “Entanglement Practice,” 2011

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Poetry • November 2014 • Volume 205 • Number 2

Poetry (issn: 0032-2032) is published monthly, except bimonthly July / August, by the Poetry Foundation. Address editorial correspondence to 61 W. Superior St., Chicago, IL 60654. Individual subscription rates: $35.00 per year domestic; $47.00 per year foreign. Library / institutional subscription rates: $38.00 per year domestic; $50.00 per year foreign. Single copies $3.75, plus $1.75 postage, for current issue; $4.25, plus $1.75 postage, for back issues. Address new subscriptions, renewals, and related correspondence to Poetry, PO Box 421141, Palm Coast, FL 32142-1141 or call 800.327.6976. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, IL, and additional mailing o∞ces. postmaster: Send address changes to Poetry, PO Box 421141, Palm Coast, FL 32142-1141. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2014 by the Poetry Foundation. Double issues cover two months but bear only one number. Volumes that include double issues comprise numbers 1 through 5. Please visit poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/ submissions for submission guidelines and to access the magazine’s online submission system. Available in braille from the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped. Available on microfilm and microfiche through National Archive Publishing Company, Ann Arbor, MI. Digital archive available at JSTOR.org. Distributed to bookstores by Ingram Periodicals, Ubiquity Distributors, and Central Books in the UK. POEMS Translators’ notes are available in the digital edition and at poetrymagazine.org. ilya kutik

Sea Sickness

O mer! O mœurs! O merde contemporaine!

What’s left of my battles and my turmoil is in my seaside cabin: this roiling air. And yet it’s what’s outside that makes me shiver. Not the ocean coldness — something heavier.

Hot black tea might help — it revives. Two kinds of glass are at hand for my thirst: that windowpane, this tumbler for my tea. If I stare through the faceted clear sides of the second at the first, I’ll see the darkness squinting back at me. I can’t deny that even though my eye — clairvoyant as a crystal ball — clinks like it can see something, I don’t know what comes next ...

(Zek — zek — whetstones on knives ... a nickering ... Here comes a horse, it whinnies and the rider — Stick him!, thieves shout as they leap down from a tree and stab, then they lead the horse away down the long snowbound shore.)

Windswept snow and sand are sorrel: tea leaves scalded by sunset. Sea foam rushes up these shores to decorate some fir trees but not others. And on the withers of a wave a gull-equestrian comes riding in —

Haie! Here they both are! Snow explodes like sugar

ilya kutik 99 that someone is stabbing with a spoon in a glass of chai.

And the tea-air sweetens, the snow-sand dissolves, the light of it switched off, spent, an omen: now look — from deep within the firmament Time has bobbed up like the moon: the clock face of a slice of lemon. I clink the teaspoon in the glass — what’s that about? And even though each hourly radius of the lemon slice is fixed in the white rind, between these translucencies pressed pulp spills out.

Like lime or lemon, the taste of Time is sour — and yet it has no odor, color, hour.

My clinking teaspoon’s yet another of my self-delusions, since it’s only the glass that answers it, and Time says nothing in reply — like all the other governings that invite us to believe they have their power over us.

In every object, quick or dead, there’s Time, yet Time itself is unaware of Time — the way a gull (such a polyglot of fish-tongues), soaring in the dark, unknowingly glows at ten to two, her wings the phosphorescent hands of a clock.

No people in this region. But — do people exist at all? And the so-called base and superstructure get, at best, a grade of C (in Russian, “three,” troika — a kind of carriage — in which the Uriah Heeps are riding toward our “bright new future” ... ).

100O POETRY Oh, plenty of hearty pink-faced people (gray-faced, too) here ... but are they that real? There’s only sea and tides and more of the same. Sea air throws bombast at my cabin and makes it talk. My window’s blinded by a heavy foamy sea-pulp blast.

At the bottom of my tea glass — sweetest sweet. But sugar specks are stuck to the sides, scarcely rinsed by waves of tea, whether attacked or not by my spoon.

Now come the many stars that the sky is, or was — like the American flag on the moon — but under such a sky, who feels he needs Kant’s categorical imperative? So Time is always empty, a negative, and doesn’t bother us the way this landscape does.

I could have sparkled like a Cicero! But even out here all words are turned into a game of ping-pong, which makes my silenced brain come bubbling out my throat — it’s just one more white foam ...

And only an insatiable gull’s scream of dissent marks this deaf land not as the island of a castaway but as a massive continent.

Translated from the Russian by Reginald Gibbons and the author

ilya kutik 101 lev oborin

From “Translations in Bare Outline”

Mr. President! The monsoon season is approaching. This raises the question: What steps are planned to ensure the timely gathering of the harvest and to prevent farms from being inundated along the floodplains of the Amazon river?

Mr. President! I just wanted to express how grateful I am. Never have I been so proud of my country. Under your presidency everything’s finally been made right. Allow me just to say a simple, heartfelt thank you.

Mr. President! I have received my veteran’s pension. I am returning it to you, and thank you for your concern. Where were you, where was your human feeling, when my fingernails were being torn out?

Mr. President! How long will our schools keep taking bribes for passing gym class?

Mr. President! I’ve received a message that I must deliver to you. I’ve been ordered to do it. “Government of Earth! We, the representatives of the Delta Orion star system, inform you that if you do not renounce atomic weaponry and psychic intervention, we will annihilate you.”

Mr. President! I wish to express my concern. It seems to me that there isn’t enough freedom of speech in our country. I await your response.

Mr. President! We are two belle ragazze and we want to have your children! And if that isn’t possible, we want our future men to be just like you and no one else! Ciao! xoxoxo.

102O POETRY Mr. President! Mikey’s cursing again!

Mr. President! How do you patch KDE2 under FreeBSD?

Mr. President! Yesterday I had a dream. There was nobody around. The entire planet Earth was empty. Tell me, can that be done? Or where can I go to dream that again and so it would never end?

Translated from the Russian by John William Narins

lev oborin 103 dafydd ap gwilym

The Wind

Skywind, skillful disorder, Strong tumult walking over there, Wondrous man, rowdy-sounding, World hero, with neither foot nor wing. Yeast in cloud loaves, you were thrown out Of sky’s pantry, with not one foot, How swiftly you run, and so well This moment above the high hill.

Tell me, north wind of the cwm, Your route, reliable hymn. Over the lengths of the world you fly, Tonight, hill weather, please stay high, Ah man, go over Upper Aeron Be lovely and cool, stay in clear tune. Don’t hang about or let that maniac, Litigious Little Bow, hold you back, He’s poisonous. Society And its goods are closed to me.

Thief of nests, though you winnow leaves No one accuses you, nor impedes You, no band of men, nor magistrate’s hand, Nor blue blade, nor flood, nor rain. Indeed, no son of man can kill you, Fire won’t burn nor treason harm you. You shall not drown, as you’re aware, You’re never stuck, you’re angle-less air. No need of swift horse to get about, Nor bridge over water, nor any boat. No officer or force will hand you over To court for fingering treetop feathers. Sight cannot see you, wide-open den, But thousands hear you, nest of great rain.

104O POETRY You are God’s grace across the world, The roar when breaking tops of oaks are hurled, You hang clouds’ notes in heavens’ score And dance athletically over moors Dry-humored, clever creature, Over clouds’ stepping-stones you travel far, Archer on fields of snow up high, Disperser of rubbish piles in loud cries. Storm that’s stirring up the sea Randy surfer where land meets sea. Bold poet, rhyming snowdrifts you are, Sower, scatterer of leaves you are, Clown of peaks, you get off scot-free, Hurler of mad-masted, foaming sea.

I was lost once I felt desire For Morfudd of the golden hair. A girl has caused my disgrace, Run up to her father’s house, Knock on the door, make him open To my messenger before the dawn, Find her if there’s any way, Give song to the voice of my sigh. You come from unsullied stars, Tell my noble, generous her: For as long as I’m alive I will be her loyal slave. My face without her’s a mess If it’s true she’s not been faithless.

Go up high, see the one who’s white, Go down below, sky’s favorite. Go to Morfudd Llwyd the fair, Come back safe, wealth of the air.

Translated from the Welsh by Gwyneth Lewis

dafydd ap gwilym 105 bertolt brecht

“When I’d reported to the couple, thus”

The Augsburger walks with Dante through the hell of the departed. He addresses the inconsolable and reports to them that on earth some things have changed.

When I’d reported to the couple, thus That up there no one murders now for gain Since no one owns a thing, the faithless spouse

Who’d beguiled that woman so improperly Lifted his hand, now tied to hers by chains And looked at her and turned perplexed to me

So no one steals, if there’s no property? I shook my head. And as their hands just touched I saw a blush suffuse the woman’s cheeks.

He saw it too and cried, She hasn’t once Shown so much since the day she was seduced! And murmuring, Then there’s no abstinence?

They moved off swiftly. And the ties that fused Them tight were of no weight or consequence.

Translated from the German by Tom Kuhn

106O POETRY shuzo takiguchi

Joan Miró

The wind’s tongue. The always clear cobalt sky bit at your painting. In a prehistoric poster words doze like pebbles.

A gallop of feathers kidnaps the conversation between coarse ropes and wild beasts. You paint within a blinking birthmark the marriage of heaven and hell faster than tying a ribbon in a mirror.

Children’s playground. From some rolling balls one transparent ball flies off. I call it Miró.

shuzo takiguchi 107 Yves Tanguy

Is it a weightless pistol — your hand.

The tail of smoke like a limitless conversation risks blooming and death. The head of a desert. A blank crawls parallel to lines of combed hair. A barometer pursued its dream without even blinking. A released piglet pricked up its rose petal ears and vanished like a star.

Everyone waits for everyone on an unknown but familiar infinite chessboard.

108O POETRY René Magritte

Released silhouettes flow incessantly like water, flow between mountains swiftly like a kaleidoscope. The solitude of the North Pole bustles with human silhouettes. Endless transmission of ABC.

On the shredded shore a silk hat burns like a mirror trick, like a human echo burns a silk hat endlessly. Then the flames were received like ABC.

On the night of a beautiful lunar eclipse the silhouettes smiled.

Translated from the Japanese by Yuki Tanaka and Mary Jo Bang

shuzo takiguchi 109 liu xia

Empty Chairs

Empty empty empty so many empty chairs everywhere. They look charming in van Gogh’s paintings.

I quietly sit on them and try to rock but they don’t move — they are frozen by what’s breathing inside them.

Van Gogh waves his paintbrush — leave leave leave there’s no funeral tonight.

He looks straight through me, and I sit down in the flames of his sunflower like a piece of clay to be fired.

110O POETRY Transformed Creatures

You have a strange pet — one eye is a cat’s, the other a sheep’s. Yet, it won’t socialize with felines, will attack any flock. On moonlit nights, it wanders on the roof.

When you’re alone it will lie in your lap preoccupied, slowly studying you until — on its face — a challenge.

Translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern

liu xia 111 jerzy ficowski

August 5, 1942

In memory of Janusz Korczak

What did the Old Doctor do in a cattle car riding to Treblinka on the 5th of August over a few hours of blood flow over the dirty river of time

I do not know

What did Charon the volunteer do ferryman without an oar did he give the children the remains of his breath and leave for himself just the shiver in the bones

I do not know

Did he lie to them for instance in small numbing doses picking from their sweaty heads the skittish lice of fear

I do not know

but for that but later but there in Treblinka all their terror all the tears were against him

oh it was only so many minutes a whole life is that a lot or a little

112O POETRY I was not there I don’t know suddenly the Old Doctor saw the children become old like him older and older they had to catch up to the grayness of ash then when he was hit by an Askar or SS man they saw how the Doctor became a child like them smaller and smaller until he was not born since then together with the Old Doctor there are plenty of them nowhere

I know

Translated from the Polish by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer

jerzy ficowski 113 fanny howe

Sheets

After I.F. Annensky

First the sky was yellow then white snow followed.

On a hand was an amethyst: a cube of lilac in hospital light.

•

Whose fault is it when no one visits?

•

Last night I dreamed I was in a peaceful place but woke up freezing and ashamed.

On a side street (on my sheets) one I loved passed as a shadow. Maddish, reddish, his fist clenched for a fight.

•

I recalled his body color being soft like a child. The drunken nipples.

•

114O POETRY Honey I called. We were too late. God and the gods have moved outside the jeweled air and sun motes ... to where a star is: an amethyst minus a poet.

fanny howe 115 larry levis

François Villon on the Condition of Pity in Our Time

Frères humains qui après nous vivez, Soon they’ll have the speed freak twisting On a scaffold, soon the birds Will come to peck out his eyes, & when He’s too weak & exhausted to turn His head away, they’ll do it, too, They’ll peck his eyes right out. You’ll want to watch it happen, you’ll want To witness it. You’ll want to see Paolo And Francesca almost touch before They’re swept away again, him in one line Waiting for rations, her in another one, Both of them naked, standing there, Cock & nipples shriveled in the cold.

Frères humains qui après nous vivez, N’ayez les cœurs contre nous endurcis. In wind & rain, the lovers almost touch, And gulls & ravens settle on his shoulders. You watch because you love to watch. In plague times, the streets fill with voyeurs. I know. The sockets of my eyes are dry As little thimbles made of blistered skin, And that inward savor of the infinite Is salt again, one wave hidden in another. We’re broken buttons, we’re blown dust. There’s not one tear left in all of us. I know, for I am François Villon, murderer, Thief: pustules, blisters, triumphing sores, Your disappearing likeness on the cross!

116O POETRY víctor rodríguez núñez

From “from a red barn”

1 the weeds thick between sugar mill drums without batting an eye the moon strung through the smokestack’s pupil the connecting rod and piston shameless before the cane gone to seed rust scuffles with grease the toadstool atop the heap of filings in the smoke box to be shielded from the abysmal ribbing infinite nuts to throw at the rustproof head of the enemy Agabama spoon lunchless oxidation’s honor

víctor rodríguez núñez 117 2

you know by name every tool in the museum of wood within reach of the waves clamp brace brush set square

boathouse in Coconut Grove withstood fourteen hurricanes like the soul transpires like the body transcends

even the seagull recognizes you when you piss the sea three sheets to the wind rasp box of miter joints socket chisel

the old cushionless rocking chairs rising up in pieces so you can spy on your childhood

118O POETRY 3 they yell out but you don’t answer you’re in the yolk of a marabu patch no one looks for you where nothing can go not even the guinea hens running wild in secret you cleared a path one evening with your plaid shirt the only thing to get past the thorns is the voice of your mother meticulous like a hurricane you spread out over the dry corollas below a sky stripped of leaves by the clouds like a string of ants and you undress only for you to await the Indians

víctor rodríguez núñez 119 5

at the crossroads there’s a smell of mother crystallized sweat shadows in simple syrup an irrefutable knife

between encrusted cans for coffee and lard there’s a taste of mother at the crossroads molasses in its light

rice pudding soul a knife to cut everything but essence Peruvian guava

ripened by flies the sharp destiny of a mother that can be wrapped in banana leaves

120O POETRY 7 a dog facing a bookcase in the middle of see-through ruins the bookcase was the work of asthma there was a spot for the old oilcan the bunch of basil the goat tallow still the house curdled with books the dust’s bad temper the prompt unforeseeable water leak the dog was the work of no one a good swimmer did it all ’til its dying breath his ear bitten in the backwoods worms ate him alive now you do whatever you can to stop from howling

Translated from the Spanish by Katherine M. Hedeen

víctor rodríguez núñez 121 yves bonnefoy

They Spoke to Me

They said to me no, don’t take any, no, don’t touch, that is burning hot. No, don’t try to touch, to hold, that weighs too much, that hurts.

They said to me: Read, write. And I tried, I took up a word, but it struggled, it clucked like a frightened hen, wounded, in a cage of black straw, spotted with old traces of blood.

122O POETRY The Museum

A clamor, in the distance. A crowd running under the rain beating down, between the canvases the sea wind set clattering.

A man passes crying something. What is he saying? What he knows! What he has seen! I make out his words. Ah, I almost understand!

I took refuge in a museum. Outside the great wind mixed with water reigns alone from now on, shaking the glass panes.

In each painting, I think, it’s as if God were giving up on finishing the world.

Translated from the French by Mary Ann Caws

yves bonnefoy 123 ko un

Ear

Someone’s coming from the other world.

Hiss of night rain.

Someone’s going there now. The two are sure to meet.

124O POETRY Taklamakan Desert

Why I’m going to the Taklamakan Desert: the emptiness there.

Why I’m going to the Taklamakan Desert at seventy-five, leaving all words behind: the cry of the emptiness there.

Why I’m going to the Taklamakan Desert: I can no longer stand the world’s greed or mine.

There, in the Taklamakan Desert, the silence of a thousand-year-old skull.

ko un 125 Asking the Way

You fools who ask what god is should ask what life is instead. Find a port where lemon trees bloom. Ask about places to drink in the port. Ask about the drinkers. Ask about the lemon trees. Ask and ask until nothing’s left to ask.

Translated from the Korean by Suji Kwock Kim and Sunja Kim Kwock

126O POETRY suji kwock kim

Rice-Field Road at Dusk

After Ko Un

In the village it’s the season of dried grass, the smell of burned dirt, gaslight glinting through blackened stubble. I walk home across the rice-fields, brushing insects away from my face, remembering old Namdong who was buried yesterday. What does death ask of us? I must change whatever it was I was when the old man was alive. I keep looking at the rice-fields, glinting in the dark. Blasted by mildew, more withered than last year — how much work and love it must have taken. In autumn, no matter how bad the harvest, how big the debts — no thought of leaving here, no thought of rest. As life goes on, time isn’t the largest thing to think of, it’s the smallest. Growing, going in drought or monsoon, mold or blight — what is the rice if not alive?

With Sunja Kim Kwock

suji kwock kim 127 matthew rohrer

Poem Written with Bashō

The sound of the water jar empties in the open graves where the refugees live. Because it does not touch me near my pillow I can sleep and dream of the clean lines of summer. What I thought were faces turn out to be elaborate plates of sweets not this human sadness. One or two inches above my head until the mosquito sticks his snout into my dream.

128O POETRY Poem Written with Buson

In a minute among the river reeds I will debut my composition a urine-stained quilt is the flag of early summer rain and when I open my mouth not even a bird singing contains all my ideas for rising and falling all day my phone vibrates its tiny mouth in the mountain’s shadow

matthew rohrer 129 Poem Written with Buson

How long and thin she seems today a field of mustard smiling up at the sun it draws her eyebrows together in a little pain I don’t think I ever saw calligraphy of geese like this overseas oaks and pines pretending to be asleep not quite dark yet as it is at home poor people, midnight

130O POETRY Poem Written with Buson

The whole country in a courtly dance its tiny mouth open I pour another cup of wine and falling, rising the children remove their toys around the small apartment to their bunk beds not quite dark yet early spring with snow on the wind the woman across the street bent like a sickle collecting bottles and cans knocks, goes on I wonder where she lives and the stars shining on her greasy clothes

matthew rohrer 131 Poem Written with Issa

The kids fighting over 4 or 5 pennies my ears ringing bent to the shape of the spring moon I am a crybaby

132O POETRY Poem Written with Issa

A friend e-mails how much are you enjoying yourself? a dripping faucet loose cat litter no doubt about it a good world is difficult I say as if I were tilling a field ashamed of myself I apologize to the sleeping child

matthew rohrer 133 Poem Written with Issa

In my dream his voice began to fade I had to call him the next day I feel about average he said I’m going out to buy some juice a huge frog was in the driveway a small boat drifting the river flowed in silence

134O POETRY Poem Written with Bashō

A photograph on the back of a hand mirror resembles someone you knew who sang themselves utterly away. It cannot touch you or the sound of the rapids. Leave it, and walk farther crawling up my leg to find me all smiles attached to nothing. You and I can stay in the morning dew. My little telephone in the mulberry fields going unanswered on that blade of grass.

matthew rohrer 135 seán ó ríordáin

Switch

“Gwawnowwdat,” said Turnbull, “and take a good look at the pain in a horse’s eyes. If you’d a pair of dragging hooves on you, it’s short work they’d make of the smile on your face.”

You could see that he understood, and his fellow-feeling for the pain in the horse’s eyes; and that dwelling on it so long he’d finally stolen into the innermost space

of the horse’s pain that I saw, too, trying to plumb the depths of pain that it felt; until it was Turnbull’s eyes I saw starting out from that suffering horse’s pelt.

I looked at Turnbull and saw set under his brow as I looked him up and down twice the two, too-big eyes that were speechless with sorrow: the horse’s eyes.

Translated from the Irish by David Wheatley

136O POETRY max jacob

The Demoniac’s Mass

Placare ... Christe ... servulis ... serviculis ... beatam me dicent orifice astral

He’s really too cute to be a canker. He’s really too ugly to be a cantor. (I won’t allow you to write such a thing You’ll go to Hell for daring such a thing) Misericordia animi anima anima mea Ma mama mea maria la grosse ma ... Maria ... Oh! Give me a break ... There’s someone bawling over the chatter. There’s someone splashing dishes with vomit splatter. There’s someone of the ones with a grainy voice. If you think I don’t see you laughing at me, think again, you choir boys! Resurrexit homini hominum Pelléas nostrum And in the painting in back, the guys are sinister scum. They’ve lit Catherine wheels for the Black Mass. The angels in the painting in back have no place to sit, alas. It’s night, tick tock, too crass, plutocracy. Our Lord swells, deflates: he wants to go out. The last statue of Mary — the one to the left, Connects, disconnects — oh pardon me, pardon, is it a dream? She dons a snout ... like the others, Like all the others, in fact, For there are no humans here. Intumescitur anima mea, longitudinal, Neither in the full scale of the voices, the voice in the choir stalls, Nor in my own voice in malaise, in malady, malalaïa, And all this for having brought a wolf or a hyena into the works. — Oh! I saw it perfectly well! — But God terribly takes revenge, We eat God deliciously to make amends, And the sacrilegious go to Hell. What to do? That is What’s the meaning of soul, of the Mass, of the female ass Except ... inept ... ept ...

max jacob 137 Atlantide

A younger continent awakes: After Bellona, we’ll have Eve! A new landscape rises from the wave: No foam is flung yet on the rocks The first drop bubbling from a spring Hasn’t yet washed a single field. A giant on the Eiffel Tower’s crown — With moonlight threading through his hair — Rejects his heavenly offspring, to give birth To people living upon earth. The lighthouse the tempest licked all night Is a basket of seaweed crinkled tongues It’s tangled, and the tide brings in the heads Of Eves pale and rumpled in their flight. They’re preparing the new continent up at Sacré-Cœur. A young man showed off the model houses there On a byre and our Savior’s hands By my bed on the hill where pilgrims flock all year. Some fry eggs on a little camping stove One’s got nothing left but one shoulder and his chest There’s a Breton peasant woman. And the young man still stays by me In this dormitory room Our Lord is nude He offers his wounded hands The new continent will take work and thought It’s at Sacré-Cœur it will be wrought.

138O POETRY Périgal-Nohor

My azure sky surged in its market share For my epithalamion two lions bowed And Saint Catherine brandished aloft her blade To trim my hedges of their honey-colored hair — Two castles thickly pinnacled with cones — Crawfish crawled around the turret stones. Nothing else remained in this capital And scraps of gardens scattered here and there And we saw, too, your dainty coiffes of lace Madame Adamensaur Pickled-herring-color Madame Mirabeau, Madame Mirabelle Nebuchadinosaur, the Queen-Mama, said she. Back toward the cathedral sailboats raced One laden with treasure, the other with coal tar The third caught fire, carrying Abelard There was something vegetal about the sea In block letters laboriously I trace I’ll always be a schoolboy in this art Scholar foolscap collar we wear a crown that glows The one who receives is worth him who bestows.

Translated from the French by Rosanna Warren

max jacob 139 grigori dashevsky

From “Ithaca”

The night approaches. Dusk drafts on buildings their future ruins. Dusk deepens windows and apertures. It hollows stones with shadows like with water. It foretells the near death of a hundred clouds to the shining host. A thin layer of dust, the seer leaves his footprints on the roofs as he walks home from the future not his own, swallowing his voice — in its rays, fat blood flows down the golden armor. Wet blue entrails. Large heads have rolled down the shoulders. Speech has grown silent in deep mouths......

The signs of a life without past will emerge like lies through the lines of an old page, emptiness will turn into loss, foreign sand into Ithaca.

Ithaca is the time when there’s nowhere to go. If it’s night, it means the night is the end of the voyage. A sackcloth hiding the shoulders of the stranger is truer than speeches about past and future he won’t make. Nobody will. On the streets rain readies hollows for the funeral, already overgrown with grass.

In a long puddle he sees: a pauper, a random victim of the skies hangs with his head down.

140O POETRY In height, he is a cloud, the size of a lost faith in returning home......

So should I, a pauper sitting by a stranger’s door, declare: I’m Odysseus, and I’m back. Should I say: I’m recognized. After the mourning songs tears are still rolling down my face. I have been summoned to clothe the past in the shining ice.

The twilight pushes a heavy box of reflection out of the windows and thumbs through a pale face as if it were a stack of letters lying in a vacuum, written by an unfamiliar hand. You are in Ithaca, but you are not yet home.

The soul goes home the way of flesh, clothed in white rags, so that to say upon arrival: I recognize and I am recognized. Window water, vapor of window reflections harden not in the shining of the ice that has come out of a secret thought, but from a permanent neighboring frame, which has embraced life into its shores of death, where my steps on the sand are uneven and flled with water.

Old rags are stronger than old life. Night, like dead water, sows together

grigori dashevsky 141 the tattered contours of the past. A stranger’s death is a seed of your homeland, sprouting from the graveyard statues, from the clouds, forever still.

Translated from the Russian by Valzhyna Mort

142O POETRY seán ó coileáin

The Ruins of Timoleague Abbey

I am gut sad.

I am flirting with the green waves, wandering the sand, feeding reflection into the seaweed foam.

That Shaker’s moon is up. Crested by corn-colored stars and traced by those witchy scribblers who read the bone-smoke.

No wind at all — no flutter for foxglove or elm.

There is a church door.

In the time when the people of my hut lived, there was eating and thinking dished out to the poor and the soul-sick in this place.

I am in my remembering.

By the frame of the door is a crooked black bench.

It is oily with history of the rumps of sages,

seán ó coileáin 143 and the foot-sore who lingered in the storm.

I am bent with weeping. This blue dream chucks the salt from me.

I remember the walls god-bright with the king’s theology,

the slow chorus of the low bell, the full hymn of the byre and field.

Pathetic hut. Rain-cracked and wind-straddled. Your walls bare-nubbed by chill flagons of ocean spit.

The saints are scattered. The high gable is an ivy tangle. The stink of fox is the only swinging incense.

There is no stew for this arriving prodigal, no candled bed.

My kin lie under the ground

144O POETRY of this place.

My shape is sloughed with grief. No more red tree between my thighs. My eyes are milk. Rage my pony.

My face has earnt the grim mask. My heart a husky gore.

But my hand. My hand reaches through this sour air and touches the splendid darkness of my deliverer.

Translated from the Irish by Tony Hoagland and Martin Shaw

seán ó coileáin 145 abraham sutzkever

“What potion should I give the night so she’ll always wonder?”

What potion should I give the night so she’ll always wonder? Her pounding heart’s a rider galloping from the burning wood.

Maybe my pharmacist is awake the next street over? In a crucible of bone, snake tears mixed with herbs.

Should I hurry? Call the doctor? A heart like hers is rare. And to tell the truth, if it shattered, what would I do?

146O POETRY What Will Stay Behind

Who will stay behind, and what? A wind. Blindness from the blind man disappearing. A token of the sea: a strand of foam. A cloud stuck in a tree.

Who will stay behind, and what? A single sound as genesis regrasses its creation. Like the violin rose that honors just itself. Seven grasses of that grass do understand.

More than all the stars hence and northward, that star will stay that sinks into a tear. Forever in its jug, a drop of wine remains. What will be left here? God. Not enough for you?

Translated from the Yiddish by Zackary Sholem Berger

abraham sutzkever 147 The Blade of Grass from Ponar

I kept a letter from my hometown in Lithuania, from one who still holds a dominion somewhere with her youthful charm. In it she placed her sorrow and her affection: A blade of grass from Ponar.

This blade of grass with a flickering puff of dying cloud ignited, letter by letter, the faces of the letters. And over letter-faces in murmuring smolder: The blade of grass from Ponar.

This blade of grass is now my world, my miniature home, where children play the fiddle in a line on fire. They play the fiddle and legendary is their conductor: The blade of grass from Ponar.

I will not separate from my hometown’s blade of grass. My good, longed-for earth will make room for both. And then I will bring a gift to the Lord: The blade of grass from Ponar.

Translated from the Yiddish by Maia Evrona

148O POETRY COMMENT

geoffrey brock

Exhuming Vallejo

I first read César Vallejo in college, when a Peruvian friend present- ed me with several of his poems as if they were national treasures she had smuggled through customs. I was struck most forcefully by a strange sonnet called “Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca,” and though I knew none of the existing translations, I was minoring in Spanish and could read the original well enough. Here is that original followed by my latest attempt at a translation of my own:

Me moriré en París con aguacero, un día del cual tengo ya el recuerdo. Me moriré en París — y no me corro — talvez un jueves, como es hoy, de otoño.

Jueves será, porque hoy, jueves, que proso estos versos, los húmeros me he puesto a la mala y, jamás como hoy, me he vuelto, con todo mi camino, a verme solo.

César Vallejo ha muerto, le pegaban todos sin que él les haga nada; le daban duro con un palo y duro

también con una soga; son testigos los días jueves y los huesos húmeros, la soledad, la lluvia, los caminos ... — Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca

I’ll die in Paris in the pouring rain, a day I have a memory of already. I’ll die in Paris — I won’t try to run — a Thursday perhaps, in autumn, like today.

A Thursday, yes, because today, as I prose these verses, I’ve put my upper arm bones on poorly, and today, turning toward all my road,

geoffrey brock 151 I see myself, as never before, alone.

César Vallejo is dead. Everyone hit him, though he’s not doing them the slightest harm. They let him have it hard with rods

and hard with ropes. These are his witnesses: Thursdays, and the bones of his upper arms, and loneliness, and falling rain, and roads ... — Black Stone on a White Stone

I recall my younger self being astonished by this: the arresting vatic opening, the disorienting shift of both perspective and tense at the turn, the cosmic trial implicit in the final tercet. But I was also puz- zled by some parts (the title and the often mistranslated line about the humerus bones) and repelled by others: I thought I saw, particu- larly in the sestet, self-pity of a high order, and I felt a callow urge, not well received by my Peruvian friend, to mock poor, whiny César. Not long afterward I spent a semester abroad in Italy and traded in my Spanish for Italian and put Vallejo’s poem aside. But I never forgot it, and when another poem led me back to it a decade later, I finally sought out some translations (including versions by Robert Bly, Eugenio Florit, and Clayton Eshleman) and even attempted one of my own, as a way of deepening my understanding of the original. By then the poem seemed, strangely, to have changed: I no longer felt the slightest urge to mock it. Vallejo’s speaker now put me in mind of the radical alienation of Josef K., whose futile struggle against the inexorable machinery of prosecution, always in Kafka indistinguish- able from persecution, can lead only to death. What humor I now saw in the poem was closer to the gallows humor of The Trial: by turns, or even simultaneously, funny and horrifying. With a tilt of my head, the color shifted, as with shot silk.

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Some say that in Vallejo’s hometown there is a tradition of placing a black stone on a white one to mark a grave; it is in any case tra- ditional in some cultures to place rocks on gravestones as memorial gestures. In this light, the title seems to offer the poem itself as a kind of grave marker: black stone of ink on the white stone of the page.

152O POETRY Two other ancient customs are worth bearing in mind. In Book 15 of The Metamorphoses, Ovid refers to the Roman custom whereby the guilt or innocence of an accused was decided by jurors who, after hearing the evidence, placed a stone — black for guilt, white for in- nocence — into an urn. And in his Natural History, Pliny refers to the Thracian custom of putting into an urn, at the end of each day, a white stone for a good day or a black one for a bad, so that at one’s death a tally could reveal the quality of one’s life. This latter custom is alluded to in various later works, including a Martial epigram and Don Quixote. (Quixote, for example, asks Sancho Panza: “¿Podré se- ñalar este día con piedra blanca, o con negra?” — “Should I mark this day with a white stone, or a black one?”)

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The poem that led me back to “Black Stone on a White Stone” was Donald Justice’s “Variations on a Text by Vallejo.” Justice’s poem is often called an “imitation,” a term that has been central, at least since Dryden, to understanding the freer end of the translation spec- trum. Though Dryden names three points on this spectrum, only the first two correspond to what we typically think of as translation: metaphrase, which is the most literal sort of translation, almost a trot (“turning an author word by word, and line by line, from one lan- guage into another”), and paraphrase, which aims more at the spirit than the letter (or “translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense”). “The third way,” wrote Dryden,

is that of imitation, where the translator (if now he has not lost that name) assumes the liberty, not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion; and tak- ing only some general hints from the original, to run divisions on the groundwork, as he pleases.

This “third way,” which indeed is an apt description of what Justice has done, may be seen as the stretch of the spectrum where transla- tion and original work bleed into each other. (Samuel Johnson con- sidered imitation “a kind of middle composition between translation and original design.”) Famous modern examples include Yeats’s “When You Are Old,” an imitation of a Ronsard sonnet, and the

geoffrey brock 153 poems in Robert Lowell’s 1961 collection Imitations. Justice also wrote many, though he tended to depart from his models more vig- orously than Lowell, and the title of Justice’s 1973 volume Departures suggests an alternative term — and an even greater distance from translation proper. “Variations on a Text by Vallejo” is an ideal ex- ample of Justice’s approach, which one might think of as hinging on the translation not of the language of a text but of certain of its key gestures: “Me moriré en París con aguacero” becomes “I will die in Miami in the sun”; “César Vallejo ha muerto” becomes “Donald Justice is dead”; and so on. For me as a young writer, poetry and translation remained dis- tinct categories. But I was fascinated by the Justice piece and by other “imitations” and “departures” that seemed to blur the line between the two. I was already suspicious of what I saw as the fetishization of the idea of originality in the arts at large, a fetishization that seemed to drive a lot of trendy experimentation and yet seemed a hand- me-down from the Romantics, and so I liked this disruption of our categorical assumptions and the questions it raised.

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In the forty years since the publication of Justice’s imitation of Vallejo’s poem, poets and poetry teachers have frequently used these two texts as models. There’s even an anthology, Homage to Vallejo (2006), that gathers dozens of imitations and tributes, half of which were inspired by “Black Stone on a White Stone.” The editor, Christopher Buckley, dedicated the volume to Justice and spoke for many, including me, when he wrote that he had often brought the pair to his workshops “to show a great original and a great variation.” There’s also a recent craft book — Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry (2011) — that instructs poets to read several imitations of “Black Stone on a White Stone” and then to write their own. As Wingbeats and the Buckley anthology illustrate, Vallejo’s poem has become a kind of proverbial original, which several generations of poets have now chosen to imitate, adapt, or use as a point of depar- ture for their own versions. And it is, indeed, enormously imitable: its key gestures provide an elastic, easily adaptable structure. Yet despite the fact that the Vallejo poem has been imitated by everyone from Justice to my students’ students, I’d like to challenge its status as an “original,” because I now think that “Black Stone on

154O POETRY a White Stone” was itself an imitation — a variation, a departure. Vallejo does not, as Justice does, acknowledge his model, which has been largely, but not completely, forgotten. It was Justice himself who first led me to understand that Vallejo’s poem may not have been quite as sui generis as most of us had imag- ined. When “Variations on a Text by Vallejo” was republished in A Donald Justice Reader in 1991, he added this note:

The Greek poet Kostas Ouránis (1890–1953) deserves some credit for this motif. Though I did not come across it until years after my own version, Ouránis has a poem apparently dating from 1915, the first line of which, in Kimon Friar’s translation, reads: “I shall die one day on a mournful autumn twilight.”

But Justice’s note covers only half the motif story. What it doesn’t mention, and what I didn’t discover until recently, when I finally bothered to look up the Ouránis poem, is that not only does the Greek poem begin with a similar opening gesture, it also contains the self-naming phrase “Ouránis died abroad.” Taken together, these two gestures establish, in my view, a stronger link between the two poems than Justice’s casual note suggests, and they make what first seemed to me to be the two most strikingly original gestures of Vallejo’s poem (the opening of his octave and the opening of his ses- tet) seem like second-hand wares — though beautifully refurbished and repurposed.

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Kostas Ouránis was, according to Kimon Friar, “perhaps the last of the Greek Romantics.” Steven Fowler called him “a Greek Baudelaire, without the energy for the bile.” (Ouránis’s second book was even called Spleen.) In Italy, he might have felt at home among the Crepuscular poets, who saw the world, even at the dawn of mod- ernism, through backward-looking, twilight-tinted glasses. Here is the poem Justice mentioned — it is one of Ouránis’s best known poems — in a new translation by A.E. Stallings:

I shall die one gloomy autumn evening In my cold room, just as I lived, alone. In my last agony I’ll hear the street’s

geoffrey brock 155 Familiar racket, and the rain’s monotone.

I shall die one gloomy autumn evening Among rented furniture, scattered books, debris. I shall be found in bed by a policeman. They’ll bury a man who had no history.

Among those friends who sometimes meet for cards One will stop, “Has anybody spied Ouránis lately? He’s not been seen for days.” And another, playing, will answer, “But ... he’s died!”

They’ll pause a moment dumbstruck, holding their cards, And shake their heads, sadly and slowly, saying “What a thing is man! Just yesterday He was still alive.” And then resume their playing.

Some colleague will write in the notices “Ouránis died abroad, before his time, Part of our circle, who at one point published A promising collection of his rhyme.”

And this will be my only obituary. In my village, only my aging parents will cry, And hold a memorial with priests galore: My friends will come, and my foes might pass by.

I shall die one gloomy autumn evening In the roar of Paris, in a rented room, And some “Kitty,” thinking I’ve left her for another, Will write me a letter ... and find me in the tomb. — I Shall Die One Gloomy Autumn Evening

The differences, clearly, are great. In Ouránis’s twenty-eight-line poem we learn that, despite the poet’s solitary, foreign living quar- ters, he has friends (if only casual ones), parents who, though distant, will mourn him, even a lover; the only “foes” mentioned are inconse- quential. In the Vallejo sonnet, by contrast, there are no friendly pres- ences at all; everyone is brutal, and the speaker’s solitude is absolute. Such differences do not, however, obscure the family resemblance.

156O POETRY In addition to the vatic opening and the self-naming, both poems identify their authors as poets, and they share a constellation of charged images: autumn, solitude, rain, and, of course, Paris. Yet I doubt that Vallejo knew the Ouránis poem at all. Because, as it turns out, there is one more turn of the screw: the Ouránis poem was also an imitation. And I suspect that the family resemblance be- tween it and the Vallejo poem is that of siblings — that they shared, that is, a common progenitor.

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The progenitor of the Ouránis poem, at least, is clear. In 1910, Ouránis, who was born in Istanbul and traveled widely throughout his life, went to Geneva on his parents’ dime, ostensibly to study (ac- cording to Friar) business and agriculture. But in the previous year he had published his first volume of poems, and he proved far more in- terested in travel and poetry than in agribusiness. It was likely during this visit that he learned of the work of Henry Spiess (1876–1940), a Genevan lawyer who was among the leading Francophone Swiss poets of his generation and whose third collection of poems came out the year Ouránis arrived in Geneva. But it was Spiess’s first book, Rimes d’audience (1903), that contained the poem (“Je mourrai ... ”) that Ouránis was to imitate. (When his imitation first appeared in the journal Noumas, in 1915, it included an epigraph, later dropped, from a different Spiess poem.) Here’s my version of “Je mourrai ... ”:

I will die on a peaceful, rainy day, a day made gently sad by late September; I’ll die on a day of mute ennui, on the way to another session of the Fourth Chamber.

From the Tower, nine slow bells will tumble down, and I’ll have left the Contamines forever. The girls will go on strolling through Old Town, showing their ankles, smirking, seeking cover.

The junior clerks will still bustle and prate, scurrying toward their hearings, clutching files. People will say: “The Court is running late.” And then: “Let’s go and listen to the trials.”

geoffrey brock 157 Henri Martin, hunched over a brief, will say: “Have you heard? Spiess is dead.” Then the small crowd will take their seats, as small crowds do each day. Rossel will enter, unhurried, his head bowed.

The scraping of the chairs will soon subside. Someone will ask: “The experts — are they here?” Airless, that room. Cold gusts of rain outside. The grime on the windowpanes will slowly smear.

And I won’t be there, thumbing through the Journal, pausing to light another cigarette and ask what makes Coulin so radical ... And De Morsier won’t say: “Bonjour poète!”

They’ll all say: “Spiess is dead; he’ll never again walk in that door with a book; he roamed too far.” Those who don’t love me will forgive me then. Aubert will reckon when he will cross the bar.

Some verses, measured out one autumn day to the rhythm of rain, will be all that remains of me. They’ll say: “He’s dead.” And: “Winter’s on the way.” And: “He did have a good insurance policy.”

And I, who think so often of death, will know, perhaps, whether to believe in metempsychosis. Oh I shall miss you, friends down here below, from that high heaven of lawyers without cases ... — I Will Die ...

I can’t prove it, but I’m confident that it was Spiess’s charming and witty poem, rather than Ouránis’s charming and witty poem, that inspired Vallejo’s bleak and bitter poem. Some of the evidence is cir- cumstantial: when he wrote his sonnet, Vallejo lived in Paris, where several of Spiess’s poems, including this one, appeared in the seminal anthology, Poètes d’aujourd’hui (1908), which was reprinted dozens of times throughout Vallejo’s life and was influential well beyond the borders of France. (Eliot bought a copy around 1910; Pound in 1918 published “A Study in French Poets,” based largely on its contents;

158O POETRY Montale read it in the early twenties as he was writing Ossi di sep- pia — and so on.) While we know little about the books on Vallejo’s shelves (according to his wife, nearly all of them were confiscated by police from his Paris apartment while he was in Spain in 1931) it’s hard to imagine that Vallejo didn’t know this anthology. Ouránis’s poem, on the other hand, was not, as far as I know, available in French or Spanish at all. But it’s the textual evidence that I find most convincing. The opening three lines of the Vallejo and the Spiess are strikingly similar in structure: the first lines both begin with an “I will die” statement, the second lines then describe the day on which said death will occur, and the third lines offer variations on the first “I will die” statement. Further, the line “César Vallejo is dead” / “César Vallejo ha muerto” seems closer in shape and effect to “Spiess is dead” / “Spiess est mort” than to “Ouránis died abroad.” (But note how Vallejo’s poem, by releasing the declaration of the poet’s death from quotation marks, abruptly erases its own speaker, leaving only a disembodied voice — a brilliantly disconcerting gesture that seems to enact the very death it reports and that has no counterpart in either the Spiess or the Ouránis.) And, finally, Vallejo’s striking reference to “witnesses,” might possibly be seen, in this context, to have been inspired by Spiess’s courtroom setting.

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My argument for Spiess as Vallejo’s model is admittedly not iron- clad. After all, in Spiess’s poem he dies in Geneva, while Ouránis, like Vallejo, dies in Paris. More intriguing, the Swiss poem lacks even the whiff of exile and solitude found in the Greek imitation of it; indeed it is a positively chummy piece whose speaker, in stark con- trast to Vallejo’s, seems quite at home in the world. I would argue, however, that these and other differences between the Spiess and the Vallejo are best understood by reading Vallejo’s poem not simply as an imitation of the Spiess, but as an inversion of it. I imagine that the Peruvian poet, who wrote from a profound compassion for the suffering of others and who himself suffered from poverty and fear of persecution, must have disdained the cozy bourgeois world of Spiess’s poem, which stands in stark contrast to Vallejo’s view of the world as a terrifying, unjust, wounding place. How better to express such disdain than by turning Spiess’s poem

geoffrey brock 159 upside down? The weather, for example, may be rainy in both places, but it’s a hard rain (“aguacero”) in Paris while it’s peaceful in Geneva. One poem is full of friends, the other of faceless foes. In one, the speaker is a lawyer, part of an apparently extensive machinery of justice; in the other the speaker is an abject victim, the only “wit- nesses” are voiceless, and there is no prospect of justice. And finally, the speaker in one ascends, if ironically, to a lazy lawyer’s heaven, while everything about the other renders inconceivable the idea, even ironic, of heaven or any other haven. The worlds evoked by the two poems couldn’t be farther apart, and perhaps for Vallejo that was part of the point. If the Ouránis, in other words, seems slightly closer in spirit to the Vallejo, that suggests to me not that it may have been Vallejo’s source but rather that Ouránis — like Vallejo, if much less forcefully — also sought to subvert certain qualities of the Spiess. It’s not only the similarities, then, between the Vallejo and the Spiess that convince me that the Spiess was Vallejo’s model, but also the vig- or of Vallejo’s departures from it, a vigor that feels almost violent. If we do see Vallejo’s poem as an antithesis, it is perhaps no wonder he did not acknowledge his source: it’s as if he were trying to blot it out. Justice seems also to have proceeded by means of inversion. In his poem, though there is still a sense of melancholy and solitude, Vallejo’s hard rain is replaced by sun, and hostile foes are replaced by friends, cousins, wife, son — even a pet dog. The very gravediggers are respectful. Ironically, then, without knowing either the Spiess or the Ouránis, Justice seems to have turned Vallejo’s world back in the gentler direction of its source.

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However charming the Spiess and the Ouránis poems are — and I’m fond of them both — they both seem quaint beside Vallejo’s brutal vi- sion of his own absolute existential solitude. And part of the horror (and the glory) of that vision is that it may well cause us, his readers, to fear that his absolute solitude is ours as well, whether we have fathomed that yet or not. It is the poem’s ability to generate this fear in us that seems to me now to redeem what I once saw as self-pity, to transform it into a kind of universal pity for our human condition. Reading Vallejo’s great poem as a link in a chain of imitations illustrates the frequently rhizomatic nature of poetic propagation. And seeing all the many imitations of it as descendants of a little-

160O POETRY known original by a Swiss lawyer named Henry Spiess offers a good opportunity to dust off and remember Spiess’s poem. It should not, however — as I hope is clear by now — do anything to diminish our appreciation of Vallejo’s originality. On the contrary: it enlarges it and suggests that originality is fully available, even to imitators.

geoffrey brock 161 gwyneth lewis

Extreme Welsh Meter

Imagine that the most popular show on your NPR radio station was a poetry competition, with local teams fighting to win a national tro- phy. Each poet’s given a subject and a meter, then invited to leave for twenty minutes to compose his or her offering. In the interval, the judge entertains the packed hall with anecdotes about poetry and examples of the participants’ past work from memory. The emphasis is on enjoyment and the laughter is often raucous. This is a descrip- tion of the most-listened-to show now on Radio Cymru, the BBC’s Welsh-language radio service. The meters in which the poets are ex- pected to compete make a villanelle look like free verse. Cynghanedd (literally, “chiming”) developed in fourteenth- century Wales and grew out of a combination of the French trou- badour measures and a Celtic love of intricate ornament for its own sake. American readers may have come across the idea of these com- plex Welsh forms in books like Miller Williams’s Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms and Lewis Turco’s The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. W.H. Auden used to recommend that young po- ets compose Welsh stanzas, like the three-line englyn, for technical practice. Mind you, he once told a friend’s mother that an intelligent woman should never be seen without a typewriter. Compared with free verse, the Welsh meters are an extreme sport, like kitesurfing set alongside paddling. So, why should anybody care about this arcane branch of contem- porary poetry? Because it keeps cropping up in the most unexpected places. Take, for example, the opening of an Ange Mlinko poem pub- lished recently in The Poetry Review:

Injurious oranges, that is, mildewed on the ground, you don’t make winter any less sad after all, not even in a climate that supports citrus. — From Seasonal Disorder

In poetry we hear shapes. The sound pattern in the first two words makes you hear the oranges as whole fruit, before they fall from the tree, begin to rot, and lose their integrity. If I map out the clusters

162O POETRY of consonants in relation to the main beats, we can see Mlinko’s describing the two oranges:

Injurious oranges j´rs ´rngs

The correspondence isn’t perfect but, because j and g sound the same, the pattern’s distinct enough for us to get a sense of the complete oranges before they deliquesce into the ground. So, here’s a con- temporary American poet using a medieval Welsh metrical trick as a central tool of her exploration of language as it looks, puzzled, at the world. In this article I want to explore where that distinctive sound came from and what it can tell us about poetry in relation to the world. Cynghanedd (pronounced kung-han-eth and, indeed, it is a kind of kung-fu) is a form of patterning of consonants, accents, and rhyme that has been present in Welsh-language poetry since the sixth century. In Anglo-Saxon verse the line can be divided in two, with corre- sponding consonants on each side of the break. Here are lines from Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney and mentioned for their allit- eration in his introduction to the poem:

The fórtunes of wár fávoured Hróthgar (l. 64) the híghest in the lánd, would lénd advíce (l. 172) and fínd fríendship in the Fáther’s embráce (l. 188)

The Welsh tradition makes this patterning even more complex by in- sisting that the sequence of consonants in one half of the line follows the order in the other. This includes getting the accents in the right place. Here’s an example from a thirteenth-century elegy for the last Prince of Wales, whose death in 1282 meant the end of Wales as an independent country. Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch (Griffith son of the Red Abbot) writes (with my accents):

Poni welwch-chi hynt/y gwynt / a’r gláw? Poni welwch-chi’r déri’n/ymdáraw? ...... Poni welch-chi’r gwír/yn ymgywéiriaw?

Don’t you see the course of the wind and the rain?

gwyneth lewis 163 Don’t you see the oaks clashing? ...... Don’t you see the truth being tuned?

In the first line, the rhyming and chiming between the weather and the writing suggests that even though the world sounds chaotic, its dissonances are part of arriving at a poetic truth. The consonantal repetition in the second and third lines are like the piano tuner’s ob- sessive intervals, moving closer and closer to making the instrument fit to play a beautiful lament. Nature and politics are part of the same song, only poetry can make it audible. From the thirteenth century onwards, cynghanedd developed from being an occasional poetic effect to being codified into four types, of varying complexity. Thick handbooks detailing permitted and doubtful combinations of sounds are published. For example, there is one flaw in rhyme, which is called “bai rhy debyg,” the fault of being too alike. If you’d like to know more, Mererid Hopwood has written a useful introduction in English, Singing in Chains: Listening to Welsh Verse (2004), which contains examples of headlines in English-language newspapers and adverts using cynghanedd. Waldo Williams, one of the great twentieth-century lyricists in Welsh once wrote an englyn in English for fun:

On my own. Oh! I manage — I prepare A repast with courage. I live, active for my age, In a cute little cottage.

Williams, who was a Quaker and pacifist, saw poetry as “an extension of the light which put the world together ... I felt an unreasonable unity between the thing and the name.” He here draws attention to the theology of intricate sound patterns. If words in various combi- nations make music then one might infer that those objects to which words refer are also interrelated. This holds for end rhymes, such as the famous womb/tomb or wind/mind combinations and also for more subtle echoes within a poetic line. Going back to the elegy for the Prince of Wales, if “gwir” (the truth) and “ymgyweiriaw” (tun- ing) share sounds then they’re also mutually implicated in the world. Writing about Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes draws attention to her “slow, small meter, a device for bringing each syllable into

164O POETRY close-up, as under a microscope.” This applies even more to lines with complex echoing effects. It’s impossible to read them quickly because the sheer number of consonants forces your mouth to take its time articulating each letter, much like talking with toffee in your teeth. I’ve recently discovered a wonderful late medieval poem on- line, describing dolphins sporting in waves. Its author, Thomas Prys (1564?–1634), had seen this sight many times because he was a buc- caneer during the reign of Elizabeth I and helped repel the Spanish Armada when it tried to invade the British Isles. The poet addresses the dolphin:

Yr ydwyt yn aredig y tonnau brau yn eu brig, y môr hallt yma a hollti, eigion y don a fyn di. Ysgod glew yw’r esgud glân, ysgwl môr, ysgil marian; gwiber dwfr ymgeibia’r don, golwg a ofna galon. Torwyn wyd, tirion odiaeth, tramwywr y cefnddwr caeth; twrch heli, taer uchelwaith, treigla’r môr, tro eglur maith. — From Y Llamhidydd

Here you are at your ploughing, Fragile wavetops breaking, Turning water as you till Salt waves, wherever you will. You are land’s swift shadow, Sea predator in the shallows; Digging the waves, sea’s viper, You strike at the heart with fear. Turning the spray so tenderly, Treader of the captive bay; Ocean’s hog, you leap up high, Shedding sea, seen from far away. — From The Dolphin

In this long cywydd — a seven-syllable couplet rhyming alternatively

gwyneth lewis 165 on an accented and unaccented end word — he uses the technique of dyfalu (“guessing”). Even though the answer — dolphin — is already known, fanciful terms are accumulated in order to defamiliarize the object. The poem’s over a hundred lines long and its wildly inventive sequence of metaphors gives us glimpses of the dolphin swimming through the lines, as it does through the waves, always tantalizingly out of reach. The lines beat regularly like the ping of sonar on a contemporary boat’s fish-finder. The cywydd form works like radar before radar was even invented and, ironically, mimics the echoloca- tion used by dolphins themselves. To writers who are familiar with the free verse tradition only, this degree of metrical complexity must appear bewildering. In order to qualify as a licensed bard in the fourteenth century, an apprentice had to show mastery of twenty-four such forms and undertake a nine- year qualification — quite a lengthy MFA. Once licensed, the bard traveled around the courts of the nobility and asked for patronage. Ordinary people wrote poems and songs as well, but the ability to handle the twenty-four meters with ease marked you out as educated and, therefore, one of the elite. A rare female writing in these meters was the fifteenth-century Gwerful Mechain, who composed an ode to the vulva, possibly in answer to Dafydd ap Gwilym’s comic eulogy to his penis. Cynghanedd is an excellent mnemonic device. If you can’t remember the second half of a given line, all you have to do is fit in the words needed according to the pattern in the first half. The psychological reasons for this artistic compulsion are more dif- ficult to pin down. In reordering the world by the means of language, the poet was mimicking God’s work as creator. Any combination, however fanciful, can be a way of praising God because there’s no part of the verbal and actual universe that could be untangled from His being. Just like the fancy work in the Book of Kells, there was nothing too intricate to speak of the endless, abstract patterns of sanctity. This is all very positive, but I do also detect an element of anxiety in these obsessive reformulations. This was the time of the Black Plague, which killed millions in Europe, including, perhaps, the great medieval nature poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. In the face of such a pandemic, complex poetical games were a useful displacement activity. There is, I feel, a big clue in a comment made by John Ruskin in relation to the visual arts:

The more beautiful the art, the more it is essentially the work

166O POETRY of people who feel themselves wrong; — who are striving for the fulfillment of a law, and the grasp of a loveliness, which they have not yet attained, which they feel even farther and farther from attaining, the more they strive for it.

However ingenious, man’s formulations of the complex world are always inadequate. No sooner are they completed than they need to be re-drawn. The sheer busyness of these medieval poems make them feel as if they come from a universe closer, artistically, to a lin- guistic Big Bang when sounds and images were more intimate with each other, and the idea of having a larger space between them had not yet occurred to artists and writers. Think of the matter-filled uni- verses of Fra Angelico, as opposed to the cooler spaces of the slightly later Piero della Francesca. The complex meters hold this dense, ear- lier universe together like dark matter. We can also read the minute details as a fractal account of infinity where, no matter on how small a scale we look at the universe, further vistas of patterns reveal them- selves. Welsh is one of the earlier Indo-European languages. When a Sanskrit scholar heard me recite some Welsh verses, she commented that they reminded her of the sound of Sanskrit — a most intriguing connection. Welsh poetics have an unlikely and prominent place in the mod- ernist tradition. While he was a student in late-nineteenth-century Oxford, Gerard Manley Hopkins was in the habit of making word lists based on the same sounds. For example:

Grind, gride, gird, grit, groat, grate, greet ... Greet, grief, wearing, tribulation. Grief possibly connected. Gruff, with a sound as of two things rubbing together. I believe these words to be onomatopoetic. Gr common to them all rep- resenting a particular sound. In fact I think the onomatopoetic theory has not had a fair chance. Cf. Crack, creak, croak, crake, graculus, crackle. These must be onomatopoetic.

Hopkins spent some of the happiest times of his Jesuit novitiate in St Beuno’s College in the hills of North Wales. He wrote to his mother that he’d always regarded himself as half-Welsh and that he was taking lessons in the language from a Miss Susannah Jones. Together they translated Cinderella. Hopkins wrote a Welsh poem in perfect strict meter at the time he was working on “The Wreck of

gwyneth lewis 167 the Deutschland,” a mini metrical maquette of the elegy. Hopkins imported cynghanedd into his English-language poetry, like this ex- ample in “The Sea and the Skylark”: “Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend.” When he came to write his great elegy “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” Hopkins chose accents as the main structuring prin- ciple for his lines, rather than the syllabics of Welsh poetics, but he relied heavily on a loose cynghanedd system. Toward the end of the poem he writes: “Now burn, new born to the world.” Hopkins is taking the order of the world apart and finding the hidden sonic prin- ciples (his poetic signature for God) to show the divine will operat- ing in the shipwreck. He examines the same question of God’s part in the world in “To What Serves Mortal Beauty?”:

What do then? how meet beauty? | Merely meet it; own, Home at heart, heaven’s sweet gift; | then leave, let that alone. Yea, wish that though, wish all, | God’s better beauty, grace.

Here Hopkins has used a rough version of the seven-syllable cywydd couplets (with the second lines six syllables, a different layout and no end rhymes.) Chiming is still there, though, between the first and second lines here quoted:

own, / Hóme / at heárt

It’s like an under-melody to the overt subject of the poem; it’s the rhythm of “God’s better beauty, grace.” Elizabeth Bishop responded strongly to Hopkins’s use of a supranatural mimesis behind human grammar. In a letter she linked Baroque prose with Hopkins’s work:

But the best part, which perfectly describes the sort of poetic convention I should like to make for myself (and which ex- plains, I think, something of Hopkins), is this: “Their purpose (the writers of Baroque prose) was to portray, not a thought, but a mind thinking.”

Bishop goes on to divide poetry into two types:

The “at rest” sort occupying properly almost the entire history

168O POETRY and field of poetry. Only Donne occasionally, a few stray poems in his century, and Hopkins have done the kind of thing I mean — yes, and strange to say sometimes Chatterton.

So, here we have the medieval Welsh meters traveling through a nineteenth-century monk and into mainstream American poetry. Bishop’s friend Marianne Moore used syllabics and, in poems like “Enough,” used the cywydd pattern:

Some in the Godspeed, the Susan C., others in the Discovery,

found their too earthly paradise, a paradise in which hope dies,

found pests and pestilence instead, the living outnumbered by the dead.

This is not to mention Robert Graves, whose White Goddess gives a credible account of early Welsh mythology. The dedicatory poem to the Goddess which opens the book uses several Welsh techniques, including the matching of masculine with feminine rhymes (know/ echo) and proest (men/mean), in which consonants stay the same but the vowels in the rhyme word mutate:

All saints revile her, and all sober men Ruled by the God Apollo’s golden mean — In scorn of which I sailed to find her In distant regions likeliest to hold her Whom I desired above all things to know, Sister of the mirage and echo. — From In Dedication

Wilfred Owen, who also fought in WWI, used proest to great effect in “Strange Meeting.” Cynghanedd played an unlikely starring role in mid-twentieth- century modernism on both sides of the Atlantic. Dylan Thomas refused the idea that poetry was about anything but the event created by words themselves. His parents and extended family were Welsh speakers and he exploited the clotted sound of the cynghanedd to

gwyneth lewis 169 create his dramas of the WWII self. The last poem Thomas wrote, the “Prologue” to the Dent edition of his Collected Poems, uses a loose cywydd form and touches of cynghanedd (“dark shoals every holy field”). Thomas is as intent as Hopkins on showing a hidden or- der to the world, except it’s a nihilism masked by religious language rather than the unlikely harmony celebrated by Hopkins. Basil Bunting, who lived in the North East of England, where Welsh had been spoken in the sixth century, researched the Welsh meters, using them in his musical masterpiece Briggflatts, first pub- lished in Poetry in 1966. For Bunting, “the sound of the words spoken aloud is itself the meaning” of a poem. Describing winter, Bunting uses both cynghanedd and proest to slow the tongue’s movement in the mouth, suggesting how speech thickens in extreme cold:

Even a bangle of birds to bind sleeve to wrist as west wind waves to east a just perceptible greeting — sinews ripple the weave, threads flex, slew, hues meeting, parting in whey-blue haze.

Bunting piles on complexity — “threads flex, slew, hues meeting” — suggesting the infinite regress of fractals. There was no reason for Bunting to conform to the exact rules of Welsh prosody; he was in- terested in broadening the principle:

Cynghanedd is of course all the things that hold poetry together by way of sound; various kinds of rhyme, real ordinary rhyme we are used to, the peculiar rhyme the Welsh like, when you come to the rhyme word and it doesn’t rhyme but the next word rhymes instead, or when a rhyme goes in the middle of the next line, or the end of the line rhymes with the middle of the line before. And they like rhymes that don’t have the same vowel, only the same consonants each side of it, and funny things like that, and a tremendous variety of possibilities in the alliteration and so on.

So enthusiastic was Bunting about the Welsh meters that he wrote at length about them to his friend Louis Zukofsky. In a key section of

170O POETRY “A”-8 Zukofsky exploited the mathematical principle of cynghanedd using, for example, the sounds r and s to help structure these lines:

De massa run, ha! ha! De darkey stay, ho! ho! So distribution should undo excess — (chaseth), Shall brothers be, be a’ that, Child, lolai, lullow.

Given that cynghanedd itself came out of the encounter between troubadour and Welsh poetry, it should be regarded as part of the European sources that were so influential for Pound and his successors. Writing in the fourteenth century, Dafydd ap Gwilym could see no difference between birdsong and poetry, as both use repetitions with variation. Perhaps it would be more accurate now to describe meter as an equivalent of a bird’s call and poetry itself as improvisa- tion. Now Welsh-language poets post cynghanedd online in tweets, Twitter being the perfect size for this ancient/modern meter. Of all modern poets, though, it’s the Australian Les Murray — who spent some time living in Wales — who’s come closest to catching how the technique sounds in English and what its theological purpose is. In “Bats’ Ultrasound,” Murray parodies a Welsh englyn — “Oer yw’r eira yn Eryri” (The snow in Snowdonia is cold”) — and ascribes the sound to bats:

ah eyrie-ire; aero hour, eh? O’er our ur-area (our era aye ere your raw row) we air our array, err, yaw, row wry — aura our orrery, our eerie ü our ray, our arrow.

A rare ear, our aery Yahweh.

This poem restores the religious aspect of medieval Welsh poetry, seeing the syllables as an orrery (a model of the cosmos) and, ulti- mately, as a name for God. He exposes the deep theology behind the sound of poetry — whether you believe in logos and its music or not.

gwyneth lewis 171 james longenbach

The Medium of the English Language

The medium of Giorgione’s Tempest is “oil on canvas”; the medium of Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed is “oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet.” Descriptions of a work of art’s medium seem to tell us every- thing and nothing, for our entire experience of art is dependent upon the artist’s intimacy with the medium, and yet the medium itself may seem weirdly mundane, especially when the artist harnesses every- day materials like a sheet. In the nineteenth century, the stuff from which art is made came to be called the medium because for hundreds of years the word had referred to something that acts as an intermedi- ary, a piece of money or a messenger. The artistic medium enables a transaction between the artist and the world, and, over time, the his- tory of those transactions has become inextricable from the medium as such, an inherited set of conventions. It’s not coincidental that it was also in the nineteenth century that the word medium was first used to describe a person who conducts a séance, a person who exists simultaneously in the worlds of the living and the dead. Lots of people sleep on sheets. Very few people handle oil paint as provocatively as Rauschenberg, and even fewer deploy sheets as a way of forging a transaction between the interior space of the mind and the exterior space of the world, a transaction that gives other people, the audience, an enticing and sometimes puzzling way of rethinking their own relationship to those spaces. Members of the audience may draw a little, they may have a fine sense of color, but they respect the transaction that the artistic medium does not simply record but presents as a unique and enduring act in time. Sometimes, however, when the sheer otherness of the medium is foregrounded at the expense of a conventional signal of the artist’s mind at work, they don’t respect the transaction, in part because the artist doesn’t covet such respect: how can art be something made of a bed sheet? How can art be something made of words, the same words used for newspapers and parking tickets? Unlike the media most com- monly associated with visual and sonic artistry, words are harnessed by most people during almost every waking moment of their lives; they’re more like bed sheets than like oil paint or the notes of the dia- tonic scale. Even small children are skilled manipulators of language,

172O POETRY capable of detecting and repeating the most subtle nuances of in- tonation and tone: how swiftly we learn that by shifting the accent from one syllable to the other, the two-syllable word “contract” can be either a noun referring to a kind of agreement (“contract”) or a verb meaning either to acquire or constrict (“contract”). But while children rarely confuse such words when they’re speaking, children don’t write the poems of Shakespeare or the novels of Henry James, and neither do most adults. We may sustain an easy mastery of lan- guage in our daily lives, but once we engage language as an artistic medium, that mastery is never secure: our relationship to language is constantly changing as we discover aspects of the medium that our prior failures and, more potently, our prior successes had occluded. My medium is not language at large but the English language. When I was young I took this for granted, but over the years I’ve be- come increasingly conscious of the qualities shared by poems because they’re written in English, rather than Italian or French. I’m not flu- ent in those languages; while I’ve lived for a time in Italy, where my children attended Italian school, I spent much of that time sitting at a desk, trying to write poems in English. But my lack of fluency heightened my awareness of my medium. Living in Florence, I was incapable of taking my mastery of language for granted, and this inca- pacity not only reared its head when I was speaking broken Italian to our landlord; it infected my relationship to English, demanding that I hear the medium of the English language in particular ways, ways in which it has also been heard before. In Italian, the word for what we call a landlord is proprietario, just as in French it is propriétaire. And while those languages contain no version of the word landlord, a typically Germanic compound noun, the English language does con- tain the Latinate word proprietor: when we savor these possibilities, we are (as the meanings of the word medium suggest) undertaking a complex negotiation with the dead. Every language has different registers of diction, but the English language comes by those registers in a particular way, one that reflects the entire history of the language. Unlike the romance languages, which were derived from the Latin spread throughout Italy, France, and Spain during the Roman Empire, English descended indepen- dently from German. Old English, the language of the eighth- or ninth-century poem we call “The Seafarer,” now looks and sounds to us like a foreign language, close to the German from which it was derived: with some study, one can see that the Old English line “bitre

james longenbach 173 breostcaere gebiden hæbbe” means “bitter breast-cares abided have” or “I have abided bitter breast-cares.” The language of Chaucer’s fif- teenth-century Canterbury Tales, or what we call Middle English, feels less strange, in part because its sense now relies largely on word order rather than on word endings: “Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrim- ages” or “then people long to go on pilgrimages.” And the Modern English of the Renaissance we can read easily, because it is the language we speak today, even though the language has continued to evolve: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments.” Many complicated factors determined this evolution, but one of the most important was the Norman invasion of England in 1066. Once Norman French became the language of the English court, a new vocabulary of words derived from Latin began to migrate into Germanic English. The Old English poet could abide breast-cares, but he could not go on a pilgrimage or suffer impediments; those Latinate words were not available to him. Even today, we raise pigs and cows (from German, via Old English) but eat pork and beef (from Latin, via French), because after the Norman conquest the peasants who raised animals generally spoke English while the noblemen who ate them spoke French. We similarly inhabit a body but bury a corpse because the English language contains Germanic and Latinate words for the same thing, and, over time, we have made discriminations in their meanings. The traditional language of English law is studded with pairs of Germanic and Latinate words (will and testament, breaking and entering, goods and chattels) in which the meaning is not discrimi- nated but reiterated, made available to the widest variety of people who spoke the rapidly developing English language. Speakers of English may or may not be aware that their language is by its nature different from itself, but any interaction with English as an artistic medium depends on the deployment of words with ety- mologically distant roots — words that sound almost as different from each other as do words from German and Italian. Notoriously, T.S. Eliot incorporated quotations from foreign languages into his poems, but in The Waste Land, when he jumps from German words (“das Meer”) to words borrowed from the French (“famous clairvoyante”), he is exaggerating what English-language poems do inevitably all the time. The line “Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages” mixes Germanic and Latinate diction strategically (the plain folk playing off the fancy pilgrimages), and the sentence “Let me not to the mar- riage of true minds / Admit impediments” does so more intricately,

174O POETRY the Germanic monosyllables let, true, and minds consorting with the Latinate marriage, admit, and impediments to create the richly polyglot texture that, over time, speakers of English have come to recognize as the very sound of eloquence itself. One hears it again in Keats (“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”), in Browning (“the quiet-colored end of evening smiles”), or in most any poet writing today. Coleridge famously called Shakespeare “myriad minded,” a phrase that itself wedges together Latinate and Germanic words, and the very medium of English-language poetry is in this sense myriad minded. It’s possible to write Modern English as if it were an almost ex- clusively Germanic language, as James Joyce does in this passage of Ulysses, evoking the alliterative rhythms of Old English poetry by giving priority to Germanic monosyllables and treating English as if it were still a highly inflected language, in which sense need not depend on word order:

Before born babe bliss had. Within womb won he worship.

It’s also possible to write English as if it were an almost exclusively Latinate language, as Joyce does in this passage of Ulysses, frontload- ing Latinate vocabulary and weeding out as many Germanic words as possible:

Universally that person’s acumen is esteemed very little per- ceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed.

But these bravura efforts of parody and pastiche sound more like the resuscitation of a dead language than the active deployment of a liv- ing one; it’s difficult to speak English so single-mindedly. In contrast, Shakespeare’s language feels fully alive in Sonnet 116, and yet its dra- ma nonetheless depends on the strategic juxtaposition of a Germanic phrase (“true minds”) with a highly Latinate phrase that a speaker of English might never say (“admit impediments”), just as that speaker probably wouldn’t say “babe bliss had” or “with sapience endowed.” We don’t speak of the cow who jumps over the moon as “translunar,” though we could. We do speak of the “Grand Canal” when we come to Venice, de- ploying two Latinate words; but to a native speaker of Italian, the

james longenbach 175 word grande simply means big. As an Italian friend of mine once said, all we’re thinking about is size: the canal is big in the same way that your hat might be too big, “troppo grande.” The difference be- tween our deployment of the Latinate phrases “Grand Canal” and “admit impediments” is that in the former case we are scripted by the language we deploy, our typically awe-struck response to the his- tory of Venice produced by the language we speak. In the latter case Shakespeare has made a choice, as in other circumstances any speaker of English might also make a choice: saying “look how big the canal is” is different from saying “look how grand the canal is.” It is at such junctures that our language begins to function as a medium, some- thing that acts as an intermediary, a transitional object. Nothing is automatically an artistic medium, though anything could be. A medium, says the psychoanalyst Marion Milner in On Not Being Able to Paint, is a little bit of the world outside the self that, unlike the resolutely stubborn world at large, may be malleable, subject to the will while continuing to maintain its own character. The medium might be chalk, which cannot be made to produce the effects of wa- tercolor. It might be a copper plate coated with a thin layer of silver and exposed to light. It might be a rosebush, pruned and fertilized into copious bloom, or an egg, exquisitely poached. In the realm of psychoanalysis, the medium is the analyst, a person who can be counted on to respond to the wishes of the analysand without needing to assert his own, as any person in an ordinary human relationship inevitably would. But neither the analysand nor the artist may indulge in any infan- tile wish of dominating the medium completely. A visitor to Picasso’s studio once recalled that, after squeezing out the paint on his palette, Picasso addressed it, first in Spanish, saying, “You are shit. You are nothing.” Then he addressed the paint in French, saying, “You are beautiful. You are so fine.” This conflict of attitudes (in this case so contentious that two languages are required to enact it) seems crucial. For if the artist loves the medium enough to submit himself to its actual qualities, resisting exaggerated notions of what the medium can do at his beck and call, then the result will likely be something recognizable as a work of art, a transaction between the mind and the world that is played out in the material reality of the medium. The satisfaction of art may consequently be found in a poached egg or a child’s speech, but I suspect that we’re most often moved to call a work of art great when we feel the full capacity of the medium

176O POETRY at play, nothing suppressed, as if the artist’s command of the medium and the long history of the medium’s deployment by previous artists were coterminous — which, in a sense, they are.

It is for Shakespeare’s power of constitutive speech quite as if he had swum into our ken with it from another planet, gather- ing it up there, in its wealth, as something antecedent to the occasion and the need, and if possible quite in excess of them; something that was to make of our poor world a great flat table for receiving the glitter and clink of outpoured treasure. The idea and the motive are more often than not so smothered in it that they scarce know themselves, and the resources of such a style, the provision of images, emblems, energies of every sort, laid up in advance, affects us as the storehouse of a kind before a famine or a siege — which not only, by its scale, braves deple- tion or exhaustion, but bursts, through mere excess of quantity or presence, out of all doors and windows.

These two sentences by Henry James enact the Shakespearean work they describe: they overwhelm us with a feeling of an unstoppable excess that’s registered in rhythm, sonic echo, syntax, and, most fundamentally, diction. The strategic juxtaposition of Germanic and Latinate words is as immediately apparent here (“constitutive speech,” “great flat table,” “the occasion and the need”) as it is in Shakespeare, and at the end of each sentence this strategy is raised to virtuosic heights with phrases that revel in the collision of Germanic bluntness and Latinate elaboration: “the glitter and clink of out- poured treasure,” the “mere excess of quantity or presence, out of all doors and windows.” These sentences sound like James, but by performing the action they describe, the sentences also imply that linguistic virtuos- ity in Modern English is in some indelible way Shakespearean, and the implication, though easily abused, is not merely sentimental. Shakespeare was a powerful writer who in his lifetime was poised at exactly the right moment to take advantage of the medium that the English language had only recently become. He could reach for effects that had been unavailable to the poets of both “The Seafarer” and The Canterbury Tales, and because of the particular power with which he did so, poems we think of as great, poems that harness the full capacity of the medium, tend to sound to us Shakespearean. But

james longenbach 177 what we are really hearing in such poems is the medium at work; what we are hearing is the effort of a particular writer to reach for the effects that Modern English most vigorously enables. The polyglot diction of a phrase like John Ashbery’s “traditional surprise banquet of braised goat” feels idiosyncratic because it is also conventional, empowered by its author’s intimacy with his medium. Yet unlike Shakespeare, James, or Ashbery, some writers hang back from harnessing the full capacity of the medium. At least since the time of Plato, artists working in any medium have been both covet- ous and distrustful of artifice, and at least since the time of Chaucer, writers working with the English language have tended to associate apparently trustworthy plainness with Germanic vocabulary and possibly suspicious artifice with Latinate vocabulary: the diction of the English language has become the site of an ancient conflict.

Would you believe, when you this monsieur see, That his whole body should speak French, not he? That so much scarf of France, and hat, and feather, And shoe, and tie, and garter should come hither, And land on one whose face durst never be Toward the sea, farther than half-way tree?

These lines from Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s contemporary, express a common enough impatience with the affectation of French fash- ion, associated here as it might be even today with insincerity and pernicious notions of femininity. The lines sound different from Shakespeare (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit im- pediments”) or James (“the glitter and clink of outpoured treasure”) because Jonson has clothed the English monsieur in an unnaturally high proportion of Germanic words (body, speak, hat, feather, shoe, tie, land, face, sea, tree), avoiding the French-derived Latinate vo- cabulary that the monsieur would presumably affect. Our propensity to associate truthfulness with this strategically plain diction is en- couraged by a directness of argument (“Would you believe”) and an attenuated series of nouns (“and hat, and feather, / And shoe, and tie”). Jonson’s condemnation of artifice is achieved through exqui- sitely artificial means. One can think easily of more polemical versions of this strategy in both verbal and visual art, versions that encourage us to imagine artifice as something categorically to be avoided. But inasmuch as the

178O POETRY medium of the English language offers choices, those choices must constantly be renegotiated, for once they harden into principles (“good writing depends on direct statement and plain vocabulary” or “good writing depends on elaborate surfaces and arcane vocabulary”), then the language is no longer being engaged profitably as a medi- um. The formulator of the principle has suffered the illusion that his love for the medium has conquered the medium, and the words are no longer (like the paint on Picasso’s palette) beautiful shit; they’re simply beautiful. Shit, from the Germanic scitte. Beautiful, from the Latin bellus, via the Old French bel. English words derived from German may often seem vulgar or truthful; English words derived from Latin may often seem officious or magical. But while words come trailing centuries of associations, the context in which the words are redeployed may alter those asso- ciations instantly, if not permanently.

They have imposed on us with their pale half-fledged protestations, trembling about in inarticulate frenzy, saying it is not for us to understand art; finding it all so difficult, examining the thing

as if it were inconceivably arcanic, as symmet- rically frigid as if it had been carved out of chrysoprase or marble — strict with tension, malignant in its power over us and deeper than the sea when it proffers flattery in exchange for hemp, rye, flax, horses, platinum, timber, and fur.

The effect of these final lines of Marianne Moore’s “The Monkeys” depends, like the effect of Jonson’s poem, on a variety of interde- pendent elements (syntax, line, rhythm, sonic echo), but once again the effect is registered most deeply in the poem’s diction. Moore manipulates her medium, segregating Germanic from Latinate dic- tion, so that when we finally reach the catalog with which the poem concludes, its string of mostly Germanic monosyllables seems to rise magically, extruded from the intricate sentence that has preceded it: “hemp, / rye, flax, horses, platinum, timber, and fur.” In con- trast, almost all of the nouns preceding the poem’s final line have been derived from Latin (protestations, frenzy, tension, power, flattery,

james longenbach 179 exchange) and so have most of the modifiers (inarticulate, difcult, inconceivably, symmetrically, frigid, malignant). But of the verbs driving us through this sentence, luring us through a verbal texture that is almost overwhelmingly rich but never grammatically unclear, only about half of them are Latinate (impose, examine, proffer); the other half of them are as bluntly Germanic as the string of nouns with which the sentence concludes (understand, fnd, carve). And of the seven nouns in that final string, while six of them would readily have been harnessed by the Old English poet of “The Seafarer” (hemp, rye, flax, horses, timber, fur), one of them stands out as egregiously Latinate. Platinum was first discovered in the new world by the Spanish, who thought it was an inferior form of silver: they called it platina, a diminutive form of the word plata, meaning silver. Why does Moore compromise her division of her medium into Germanic and Latinate vocabularies if the effect of the final line depends on that division? Moore is an incessantly virtuosic writer, but it’s important to see that in this sentence the power of her diction is not showy or con- trived. A blunt shift from Latinate to Germanic vocabulary might seem like a trick or a joke, as when T.S. Eliot begins “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” with the word (which is also a tetrameter line) “Polyphiloprogenitive.” Such effects have their place, but it is almost always a place created by comic juxtaposition. In contrast, Moore wants her shift in diction to feel revelatory or uncanny, not clever, and the effect depends not on a principled division of the me- dium of the English language into its constituent elements but on a more nuanced inhabitation of the medium’s varieties of diction, the blunt string of nouns (hemp, rye, flax) prepared for by a group of more widely spaced verbs (stand, fnd, carve) that have already opened our ears to the range of possibilities available in our language. Though Moore’s sentence is a theatrical manipulation of those pos- sibilities, it sounds not like an artificial reduction of the medium (“babe bliss had”) but like an inhabitation of the medium (“the glit- ter and clink of outpoured treasure”). Even today, more than a century after her birth, Moore is often thought of as an egregiously fastidious or impersonal poet, a writer who offers us the verbal equivalent of something like embroidery. I find this judgment of her achievement unfathomable, as does any- one who registers the way in which the passionate momentum of her sentences embodies her convictions. What we’re hearing in those

180O POETRY sentences is, once again, the power of the harnessed medium, for Moore is, like Shakespeare or James or Ashbery, not simply a writ- er with an extraordinarily large vocabulary but also a writer who is acutely conscious of inherited gradations within that vocabulary, gra- dations we harness unconsciously in every sentence we speak. This is why her sentences, like those of her greatest predecessors, may feel simultaneously ordinary and revelatory, elaborate and plain. The sentence I’ve quoted from the end of “The Monkeys,” a sentence that asks us to attend not to what is artificial or contrived but to what is fundamental and plain, is after all spoken by a cat. Once again, a work of art’s interrogation of artifice is achieved through exquisitely (or, perhaps in this case, bluntly) artificial means. Is platinum a false kind of silver or is it a thing unto itself, like hemp or flax? It would be difficult to register the force of the collision of proffers flattery with hemp, rye, flax in a more exclusively Latinate language or a more exclusively Germanic language, but this does not mean that anything is lost when Moore’s poem is translated into German or Italian; on the contrary, it means that something is discovered, just as something is discovered when we look at Zanetti’s engrav- ings of frescos by Giorgione on the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice, frescos that are so damaged that one can barely see them at all. We can’t expect one language to replicate the effects to which another is particularly amenable, but the act of translation does, when the host language is engaged as a medium, create a new poem, a poem that asks us to attend to the sound of the words, just as we attended to the words of the original. Poetry, no matter if it is spoken or written, is most fundamentally a sonic art: we experience the language as an event in itself, not as a disposable container for meaning. In Old English poems the sounds of the words are organized in lines, lines that have four stressed syl- lables that must alliterate with one another in one of several patterns.

Bitre breostcaere gebiden hæbe

This line ends where it ends not because of how it looks but because of how it sounds, and when Old English poems were finally written down, they were written down as if they were prose: the line, which emphasizes the sound of the language, did not need to be registered visually on the page. In contrast, Shakespeare’s way of organizing the sound of the English language into lines (lines that contain five

james longenbach 181 stressed syllables that do not necessarily alliterate but have a particu- lar relationship to the unstressed syllables surrounding them) was registered visually on the page.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments.

We nevertheless recognize the first nine words of this sentence as a strategic variation of the iambic pentameter line not because of how they look; we recognize the line because of how it sounds, just as Shakespeare made it by listening to how the words sound. Yet our now long-established habit of looking at poems, fostered by the rise of print culture, has altered the way poets think about the sound of poetry. Beginning in the later seventeenth century, poets we call Augustan or neoclassical grew to prefer a smoother iambic pentam- eter line, free of egregious variation, as if the line’s neatness of finish were a reflection of its appearance on the printed page. More recently, the habit of looking at poems has encouraged the production of a toneless free-verse line whose length is determined merely by its visual relationship to other lines on the page. Just as it seems logical that films will change to the degree that we expect to watch them on an iPad rather than in a movie theater, poems have changed because of the changing technologies through which the English language has been experienced, print being the most obvious. What electronic media will do to poetry remains largely to be seen. But what is more remarkable is the fact that, over many hundreds of years, poetry in the English language has changed so little. The iambic pentameter line, which eclipsed the alliterative four-beat line deployed by Old English poets, was developed in response to the prosody of French poems that entered the ears of Middle English writers along with the French language itself, and no subsequent change in the sound of English-language poetry has been more momentous. It would be difficult to wedge Latinate words like “im- pediments” or “pilgrimage” into the Old English alliterative line even if those words had been available to Old English poets, and as Middle English settled into Modern English, the pentameter became essential not only to Shakespeare but to Pope, Keats, and Stevens. The line remains essential to innumerable poets writing in English today, but this continuity of formal procedure is a symptom of a deeper continuity, one that also underlies the disruptive formal

182O POETRY procedures of innumerable poets writing today. Like many of her modernist contemporaries, Marianne Moore avoided the pentam- eter; she often organized her poems in purely syllabic patterns, lis- tening to syllables as such rather than to stressed syllables in relation to unstressed syllables. But the difference between Moore’s syllabic lines and Shakespeare’s metered lines — or Henry James’s prose, for that matter — pales in comparison to the pressure exerted on these lines by the material fact of the language. “The marriage of true minds,” “the glitter and clink of outpoured treasure,” “the sea when it proffers flattery in exchange for hemp,” “the traditional surprise banquet of braised goat” — this is the medium of the myriad-minded English language talking. Once, when I was living in Florence, my daughter came home from school amused that an Italian friend had called her an “amica preferita” — a preferred friend, or what my daughter would have more naturally called, employing a Germanic rather than a Latinate modifier, a best friend. To my daughter’s ears, the friend’s Italian phrase sounded a little grand, but to Italian ears the phrase sounds completely ordinary, since Latinate vocabulary is the baseline in Italian, not an imported level of diction conventionally associated with high-class, official, or magical speech. Of course Italians have other ways of registering such distinctions, especially since the lan- guage we call Italian, which is what Latin became in Tuscany, is still for many Italian citizens a second language, the first being the lan- guage that Latin became in their particular region. But when English or Italian or any other language is harnessed as a medium, these givens become opportunities. There aren’t many occasions when a speaker of English would employ the phrase “preferred friend,” yok- ing the Latinate word with the Germanic, but in the unexpected context of a work of art, this phrase makes the music most typical of a great English sentence.

james longenbach 183 contributors

dafydd ap gwilym* is thought to have lived circa 1315–1350. He was influenced by the French troubadour tradition and reinvented Welsh nature and love poetry. lise haller baggesen’s * work includes painting, curating, writ- ing, and multimedia installation. Her first book isMothernism (The Poor Farm Press/Green Lantern Press, 2014). mary jo bang is the author of six books of poems. Her translation of Dante’s Inferno, with illustrations by Henrik Drescher, was pub- lished by Graywolf Press in 2012. zackary sholem berger* lives in Baltimore, where he works as an internist and writes in Yiddish and English. He is working to- wards a book-length collection of Abraham Sutzkever translations. yves bonnefoy is an art historian, poet, translator, and essayist, and held the chair of comparative poetry at the Collège de France. bertolt brecht (1898–1956) was a German poet, playwright, and theater director. “When I had reported to the couple, thus” (“Als ich den beiden so berichtet”) copyright © 1964 by Bertolt-Brecht- Erben/Suhrkamp Verlag and copyright © 2015 by David J. Constan- tine and Thomas Mark Kuhn. geoffrey brock is the author of Voices Bright Flags (The Waywiser Press, 2014) and the editor of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). He lives in Arkansas. mary ann caws’s books include Pierre Reverdy (New York Review Books, 2013), Surprised in Translation (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and Surrealism (Phaidon, 2004). grigori dashevsky* was born in Moscow in 1964. He has pub- lished four books of poetry and a number of critical articles, as well as translations from English and French. ming di* is a poet, translator, and editor of New Cathay: Contempo- rary Chinese Poetry (Tupelo Press, 2013). She received a Henry Luce Foundation fellowship in 2013 and 2014.

184O POETRY maia evrona’s* poems, translations, and excerpts from her mem- oir on growing up with a chronic illness have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Harpur Palate, Pakn Treger, Ploughshares, and other places. jerzy ficowski* (1924–2006) was a prolific poet, songwriter, and scholar on the Polish Roma population as well as the artist-writer Bruno Schulz. His selected poems was edited by Piotr Sommer. reginald gibbons’s most recent book is Slow Trains Overhead: Chicago Poems and Stories (University of Chicago Press, 2010). He teaches at Northwestern University. jennifer grotz’s* third book of poems, The Window Left Open, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2016. She is director of the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. katherine m. hedeen’s * latest translations include thaw (Arc Publications, 2013) and Every Good Heart Is a Telescope: Early Poems (Toad Press, 2013), both by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez. tony hoagland’s new book, Twenty Poems That Could Save Amer- ica and Other Essays, was published by Graywolf Press in November. He teaches at the University of Houston and elsewhere. fanny howe’s Second Childhood was published in 2014 by Graywolf Press. The poem in this issue was commissioned by the Reva and David Logan Foundation in Chicago. max jacob (1876–1944) was a prolific French modernist poet, nov- elist, and playwright. “Atlantide” and “Périgal-Nohor” are from La Laboratoire central, © Gallimard, 1960 and “La Messe du démoni- aque” is from La Defense de Tartufe, © Gallimard, 1964. suji kwock kim is the author of Notes from the Divided Country (Louisiana State Univeristy Press, 2003) and Disorient, which is forthcoming. ko un* was born in 1933 in Kunsan, North Chŏlla province, in what is now South Korea. He is the author of more than 150 books of po- etry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, and children’s literature. tom kuhn* teaches German at the University of Oxford. His trans- lation, with David Constantine, of Brecht’s Love Poems is out this month from Liveright, W.W. Norton.

contributors 185 ilya kutik is a founder of Russian metarealism and has been trans- lated into nineteen languages. He has published seven collections of poetry in Russian, most recently Epos (Russkij Gulliver, 2011). sunja kim kwock’s * work focuses on the conjunction of Bud- dhism and Christianity, particularly liberation theology. larry levis (1946–1996) published five books during his lifetime and two have appeared posthumously. The work in this issue is from The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems (Graywolf Press, 2016), edited by David St. John. gwyneth lewis’s two memoirs are Sunbathing in the Rain: A Cheer- ful Book About Depression (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2006) and Two in a Boat: A Marital Voyage (Fourth Estate, 2005). liu xia’s * Empty Chairs: Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2015) was translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern. james longenbach’s most recent books are The Virtues of Poetry (Graywolf Press, 2013) and The Iron Key (W.W. Norton, 2010). He received a 2014 Arts and Letters Award in Literature. valzhyna mort is the author of two poetry collections, Collected Body (2011) and Factory of Tears (2008), both published by Copper Canyon Press. john william narins* is a bilingual Russian English poet, writer, and translator. lev oborin* is a Russian poet, critic and translator. His two poetry collections are Zelenyi Greben (“The Green Ridge,” Ailuros Publish- ing, 2013) and Mauna Kea (ARGO-RISK, 2010). seán ó coileáin* (1754–1817) was a Gaelic-language poet born in County Cork, in a time of faded Irish glory. He lived as a village schoolmaster, with a large family and no patron. seán ó ríordáin* (1916–1977) was born in Baile Mhúirne, County Cork, and is among the most important Irish-language poets of the twentieth century. His books include Brosna (1964) and Eireaball Spideoige (1952), both published by Sáirséal agus Dill. víctor rodríguez núñez* has published thirty books of poetry throughout Latin America and Europe, and has received major awards all over the Spanish-speaking world.

186O POETRY matthew rohrer* is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Destroyer and Preserver (2011), published by Wave Books. martin shaw* is a mythologist, storyteller, and author of two books: The Snowy Tower (2014) and A Branch From The Lightning Tree (2011), both published by White Cloud Press. piotr sommer is the author of Continued (Wesleyan University Press, 2005). His collected poems, Po Ciemku Też, appeared in Po- land in 2013. jennifer stern* is an American poet and translator. abraham sutzkever (1913–2010) was born in modern-day Belarus and is considered the greatest Yiddish poet of the twentieth century. A survivor of the Vilna Ghetto, his peregrinations took him from Vilna to Moscow, from Paris to Tel Aviv. shuzo takiguchi* (1903–1979) was a poet, painter, and art critic, and one of the most prominent surrealists in Japan. His first collec- tion of poems is The Poetic Experiments of Shuzo Takiguchi 1927–1937 (Shinchosha, 1967). yuki tanaka* was born and raised in Yamaguchi, Japan. His trans- lations of poems by Shuzo Takiguchi (with Mary Jo Bang) have appeared in Asymptote. rosanna warren teaches in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her most recent book of poems is Ghost in a Red Hat (W.W. Norton, 2011). david wheatley has published four collections with Gallery Press, including A Nest on the Waves (2010). He lives in rural Aberdeen- shire, Scotland.

* First appearance in Poetry.

contributors 187 November_Events_Ad_v1 9/24/14 1:58 PM Page 1

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