Author Archive
A.E. Stallings
More Cavafy
Rigoberto writes here of encountering Cavafy in his high school library, and the sense of discovery and liberation Cavafy’s frank evocation of homosexual eroticism gave him as a young poet. Reginald writes in the comment box that:
All the translations I’ve read make Cavafy sound like prose broken into lines–well-written, sensitive, insightful prose, but prose nonetheless. Reading the introductions to the translations and other work about Cavafy, I understand that Cavafy was an obsessive poetic craftsman, obsessively revising and refining each line. . . . None of this comes across in any of the translations I have read. This absence, combined with the relative paucity of figurative language–as I recall, Cavafy has vivid imagery, but few metaphors and similes–contributes to the prosaic feel of his poetry in the translations I’ve read.
Cavafy is without doubt the most translated and retranslated of modern Greek poets–perhaps among the most translated of foreign poets into English period. What are these translations not bringing to the table? What are we missing when we aren’t reading Cavafy in Greek?
A.E. Stallings
Alice
When I was sick as a little girl (which was pretty often), I would lie in a darkened room with the cool whoosh of the humidifier beside me and would listen to LPs of a complete reading of Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland.” The two things are combined in odd ways in my memory, as if being unwell was a kind of going down a rabbit hole into a feverish world of the imagination. That my name is a diminuitive of Alice probably has something to do with my identifying so strongly with it. There is something about how she transforms poems that she wrongly remembers into odd original works, and how the book itself begins with reading over someone’s shoulder, “And what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversation?,” that makes this listening to the book over and over in the dark room with a cool cloth on my head seem seminal to the idea of writing.
A.E. Stallings
Happy Birthday, George Gordon, Lord Byron
I live in a town where Byron is Big. There is a beautiful statue of him being embraced by Ellas (Greece) on the corner of a main thoroughfare. There is a street named after him in the center, on which he also has an eponymous hotel. Heck, there is a whole neighborhood named after him. There are even people named after him–Byron has become a Greek given name (Vyronas).
The only place where Byron is Bigger is possibly Missolonghi (a helluva a backwater to die in), where any establishment not named Liberty is probably named Byron.
A.E. Stallings
Translation: Rhyme & Reason
Some of the lack of boldness in translation in the past fifty years or so has been a lack of technical boldness, of even attempting to get across the meter, rhyme sounds, puns, etc., of the original. After all, free verse represents a rather slim subset of poetry over the millennia. Can all poets of all times and languages really have sounded like mid-American, mid-century free verse poets in the plain-speaking tradition?
Often the translator(s) will state in an introduction that to have even attempted to convey the rhyme scheme or demonstrate a metrical pattern would have meant to sacrifice the “true” essence of the poem (the old Puritan notion that artifice and authenticity are at odds). Would it? It starts to sound to me like a cop-out. Can it simply not be done? Whose fault is that? As Daisy said, “Try harder, then.”
A.E. Stallings
Dead Letter Office
Dear Letter,
It’s been a long time since I’ve written you. But I think about you often. It’s always great to hear from you, to hold you, to gaze at the stamp of your beauty, your unique hand. Reading this article made me worry if you are OK. Are you OK?
A.E. Stallings
Rhyme Driven
As a poet who works in form, I weary of seeing in critiques–either in on-line workshops or in published reviews–the complaint that a poem or phrase or line is “rhyme driven.”
Of course rhyming poetry is rhyme driven. Rhyme is an engine of syntax. If rhyme is in the car I want her stepping on the gas, minding the wheel, eyes on the road, shifting the gears. I don’t want her there as mere ornament, nattering on her cell phone, putting her mascara on while gaping in the rear-view mirror.
A.E. Stallings
Sun-drenched translation
Reginald’s recent translation post has me thinking about translation again… as did my week-long marathon of getting in an application for an NEA translation grant (hope springs eternal!) And I had been meaning to write as well on some Greek women poets ever since Rigoberto’s post on Aurora de Albornoz many weeks back.
Some poets do seem to gain or lose reputations in English based on how well they translate or how well they are served by translators. And it does seem to me that it is the contemporary Greek women poets whose work often “translates” better than their male contemporaries. Why?
A.E. Stallings
Epiphany, or What You Will
It’s the eve of Epiphany, 12th night, the last day of Christmas. Epiphany is probably as big a holiday in Greece as Christmas (maybe bigger). As with the mornings of Christmas eve and New Year’s Eve, children are stalking the streets of Athens armed with jangling triangles to sing a carol known as “Kalanda” to unsuspecting adults, who must then give them coins. I already saw a band of children this morning hitting the toy shops with their pockets bulging with Euro coins (real money these days—not paltry drachmas).
James Merrill—who lived in Athens in a house on Lykabettos, not far from where we first lived when we moved here—has a poem that describes this tradition, “Chimes for Yahya,” which starts:
Imperiously ringing, “Na ta poume?
(Shall we tell it?)” two dressy girls inquire.
They mean some chanted verse to do with Christmas
Which big homemade iron triangles
Drown out and a least coin silences
But oh hell not at seven in the morning
If you please!
A.E. Stallings
The Best Book of 2007 that I Didn’t Read Until the Week Before Last
One of the problems with these calendar-year lists (not to mention grant and prize deadlines) is that it tends to give books published in the autumn or winter of the year rather short shrift. When asked about our end-of-year picks, I was still holding out hope that this book would have arrived, because I had a feeling in my heart of hearts that it was the one I wanted to choose. But I certainly couldn’t choose it without reading it through. Yes, I had seen plenty of the poems around in journals, and even a handful of them in process. It was a book I was excited to get my hands as soon as I learned it was coming out. But then it became something more urgent. For it is not just a terrific second book of poems, fulfilling the promise of a knock-out first book that had both nimbleness of formal execution and wildness of emotional landscape—it is also, bar a posthumous collection from manuscripts, a last book of poems. Maybe it is better to talk about it in January, that month of the two-faced god, a time when beginnings can look like endings, and endings like beginnings.
A.E. Stallings
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers
Many a Christmas carol has been spoiled by slick, oversweetened arrangement, piped into a mall to stimulate more panic buying. Christmas poems, read in a quiet moment to ourselves, are harder (though not impossible of course) to commodify. They are something of an antidote. As a member of Muzak’s marketing department remarked, quoted in a New Yorker article a year or two back, “Our biggest competitor is silence.”
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