Comments on: and the pleiades

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 05:33:53 +0000

I am not sure it is the fault of the sonnet form exactly–though maybe it is a consequence–but the problem, it strikes me, with Santos’ “To Anaktoria” (a poem I’ve translated myself) is that it is heavily padded–and Sappho really doesn’t survive padding.
He begins:
Some men say it’s the sight of ramparts fronted by cavalry,
others that it’s a field of foot soldiers closing ranks,
still others claim that the heart thrills to no spectacle more
than a fleet of warships churning the wine-dark waters white.
The workaday prose of Campbell’s Loeb is actually more effective here, because it doesn’t add anything:
Some say a host of cavalry, others of infantry, and others of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth, but I say it is whatsoever a person loves.
There are essentially only two modifiers–black (”melainan”) and beautiful (”kalliston”). Weirdly, Santos has also omitted “the black earth.” Perhaps free versions work better translating lesser-known poems, and less exacting authors.

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 15:38:09 +0000

I was hoping you would comment, Alicia! I’m willing to believe that some of Catullus can work in sonnets, and I know that Catullus read Sappho, and I know that we receive Sappho in fragments, or as somehow essentially fragmentary, which isn’t how she seemed to her first audiences (either to her girls’ school, if she really did run a girls’ school of sorts, or to the first people who read her poems as transcribed). I certainly favor the translation of some classical poetry into rhyming versions in English, even though classical poetry doesn’t rhyme– shoutout here to Ben Jonson, who would barely exist as a nondramatic poet if he didn’t think it OK to make Horace rhyme. And yet I just can’t believe in Santos’ Sappho as a sonnet-writer. The problem isn’t that it is anachronistic; it’s that it sounds and feels anachronistic: Santos doesn’t convince me that sonnet form fits.

By: Alicia (A.E.)

Alicia (A.E.) — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 14:51:59 +0000

PS–and then I’ll stop, really! Just to add that Santos’ versions are themselves often supply metrical and elegantly and lightly rhymed.

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 14:39:52 +0000

oops–don’t think I can correct a comment after I posted–read “hexameter” for “heptameter”… sorry!

By: Alicia (A. E.)

Alicia (A. E.) — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 14:33:41 +0000

Hi Steve,
This is a subject close to my heart!
I admire the verve and spirit and variety of Santos’ Greek Lyric Poetry very much, though I agree they are certainly versions.
But as to being distracted by, say, turning a poem of Catullus into a sonnet—the suggestion, perhaps, that all ancient poetry needs to be turned into lucid free verse or loose blank verse—I don’t agree. There are many poems of Catullus that strike me as essentially proto-sonnets—that is, poems of 13, 14, 15 lines, often with a turn, and in hendecasyllables, the syllable count of the sonnet line for many Romance languages, and only one syllable off form our own usual iambic pentameter. And indeed Petrarch’s tropes and unrequited romance are heavily indebted to Latin love elegy and its situations of love-lorn poets and cold and unattainable mistresses.
Choosing free or even blank verse (which was invented for translating Virgil) for a line of classical metrical poetry (which is metered in a different system of syllable length rather than beats) is just as arbitrary a decision as turning it into iambic pentameter. The advantage of free verse is that there are no metrical or rhyming considerations to take into account, and so one has none of those pressures in rendering fidelity to the meaning. But one has certainly not been faithful to the formal pressures of the poem. So be it—it may be a wonderful free verse poem in English. All translation is compromise, and any decision leans one way or the other, but the idea that free verse is automatically the best and most “transparent” choice is full of assumptions, as is the idea that blank verse is somehow the perfect choice for the dactylic heptameter of classical epics. The suggestion seems to be that free verse is the default mode in our language.
A stripped-down fragment of Sappho may be beautiful to our ears, accustomed as we are to Modernism’s love of the fragmentary, but it does not represent Sappho as she wrote. That isn’t to say it can’t be beautiful in its own right. I certainly admire Carson’s recent volume of translation for getting across the impression of reading these in their fragmentary textual state. And I admire Mary Barnard’s for getting across Sappho’s charming limpidity. With translation, I am very much of the “more the merrier” camp.
And to get back to Devil’s advocacy–isn’t it just as distracting to read, say, a tightly rhymed (rime riche) poem of Cavafy’s, such as “The City,” in the plain spoken free verse idiom of contemporary American poetry? Yet this is how most people know the poem in translation. Are we starting to expect all poetry of all ages to sound like our own? Is anything other automatically distracting? Is “distracting” in reading poetry of other cultures and times always a bad thing?
Sorry to put so much into a comment! I was energized by the post.