| Saturday, April 28, 2007 4:11PM | | | | Reading for the magazine Circumfere | Posted By: Mindy Aloff
|
| Tags: Circumference, Parcerisas, Uribe, Macklin, Eliot Weinberger | Circumference Reading: Poetry in Translation
A journal devoted to translations of poetry from all times and places, Circumference is associated with the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia University. The editorial content provides a showcase for translators and languages as well as for poets, and each issue on display at the Housing Works Bookstore Café, where this reading took place, contained so many tastes of world civilization as to suggest an attempt to reconstitute the Tower of Babel. The 35 or so individuals in attendance despite a drenching night rain overflowed the available chairs, and some of us had to stand or to perch on a step of the bookstore’s spiral staircase.
The centrally-placed reading was by the Catalan poet Francesc Parcerisas, who offered all but one of his poems in English translations by Cyrus Cassells (whose name I hope I spell correctly). These lyrics and odes were strongly focused and often structured by a small narrative. One poem concerned Calypso, who offered Ulysses and his sailors “everything,” but whom Ulysses abandoned because he “can’t give up memory.” Another poem, “Pebbles,” concerned everyday things that one takes for granted. A third poem—called, I think, “Then”—presented an image of a monstrous female ogre and is based upon a traditional Slovenian ballad. (Parcerisas: “Traditional ballads are very cruel, indeed.”) We also heard “December Orange,” a light lyric, and “The Syrene,” a political poem whose topic was the shopkeeper who helped Christ carry the Cross and that was inspired by the poet’s recent visit to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Mr. Parcerisas followed each English reading with a reading of the Catalan original; however, as he lacked the English translation for one poem, whose title he translated as “The Girls,” he only read the Catalan version. “It’s a poem about girls,” he said. “Girls are beautiful, always. And when you are younger, they are even more beautiful. You look at the calves! When it [the poem] gets to the calf, you will hear it!” That must have been the line when he slowed his pace and his vowels juicily swelled.
By arriving 20 minutes late, I missed a portion of the first reading by the young Basque poet Kirmen Uribe. His American translator, the poet Elizabeth Macklin, whom I know, spends part of every year in the Basque country, and she has kept me posted about Uribe from the time she discovered him. His work, at least in her translations (a collection has been recently published by Graywolf), sometimes approaches the condition of music. Its emotional statements take one by surprise, and its metaphors demonstrate a delicacy of sound and thought, combined with restraint and taste, that make Mr. Uribe’s voice quite individual. These poems are truly constructions, and the mysterious logic and cool timing of Ms Macklin’s own poetic voice serve them exquisitely. During the reading, Mr. Uribe, who speaks English, commented that when he was a boy, his mother gave him a box with a baby chick in it. “I felt its heart,” he said. “For me, that’s a good poem, a package with something alive in it.” Two weeks ago, he appeared on a radio program at WBAI, and he was led by that experience to write a brand-new poem, “The Words That Died in the War,” which Ms Macklin reminded us we’d hear in “a brand, brand-new translation.”
At my request, Ms Macklin has emailed a reply to the question, what writers of the past have been important to you? A rigorous copy editor, herself, as well as a poet, she has a reason for every comma and detail of formatting, and I present her answer exactly as she sent it:
“Flicking back past Auden, Lorca, Vallejo (“Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes... Yo no sé!”), I end up with Dante, because right at the moment I am in love with clarity, and the Divine Comedy is clear at length. The birds in a high wind that get to rest for a moment, tell a true story. Virgil’s lovely characterization of il ben de l’intelletto—the good, the use of intelligence, whose loss is what gets you into Hell. And all of it told so plainly and clearly (until he gets to Paradise, naturally). I like to think about his having been writing for the first time in the language he spoke in, and I like his having found the perfect rhythms for a long haul.
The concluding reader at Housing Works, an unadvertised participant, was Eliot Weinberger, the well-known writer and translator. What a different kind of energy he brought to the evening, and what local charm. “I guess you’re wondering why I’m here with a Basque nationalist and a Catalan nationalist,” he said by way of introduction. “I’m a New York nationalist. I’m waiting for New York to secede from the U.S.A.” He also commended Housing Works as “the most honorable bookstore in the U.S.A. It believes that poetry is also practiced outside the U.S.A.” Mr. Weinberger read three brief prose pieces, in a form that is somewhere between parable and prose-poem. He described the new book from which they were drawn as “a serial essay in the manner of the American serial poem.” The first and third were about animals, respectively a donkey who dies from love for a “beautiful donkey-girl” and an anecdote from André Malraux about Mallarmé’s cat, Blanche. The second selection, “Vamiki,” based on an incident in the Ramayana, relates elemental tragedy in the wording of a police report. Whether one hears it or reads it, “Vamiki” stops the breath and chills the very air.
| | | |
| | |
|
