In Search of Poetry: Richard Murphy

What is the cost of poetry? Or rather, what is the cost to oneself and others of a life of dedication to a lonely art? Which perfection, in the Yeatsian formula, do you choose, the life or the work? The title of Richard Murphy’s new book suggests a reflection on the art of poetry from a master practitioner now approaching his 90th birthday, but the book is much more personal and intimate than that. Part journal, part working diary, part memoir, all from the early 1980s, it charts the initiation and development of the sonnet sequence that would make up The Price of Stone, the poet’s much praised 1985 collection. Each poem in what became a 50 sonnet sequence ventriloquises a building that has a resonance for the poet. This in turn means that the poet becomes the addressee, the biographical subject matter displaced into the consciousness of a roof-tree, restaurant, industrial school or ancestral home. They are free to address and accuse the poet so that the sequence also functions as an oblique self-examination.
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To Mark Anthony in Heaven

Another I couldn't resist


William Carlos Williams

To Mark Anthony in Heaven

This quiet morning light
reflected, how many times
from grass and trees and clouds
enters my north room
touching the walls with
grass and clouds and trees.
Anthony,
trees and grass and clouds.
Why did you follow
that beloved body
with your ships at Actium?
I hope it was because
you knew her inch by inch
from slanting feet upward
to the roots of her hair
and down again and that
you saw her
above the battle's fury--
clouds and trees and grass--

For then you are
listening in heaven.

What Gets Lost

I couldn't resist this one, by the brilliant poet, essayist and translator of Borges, Neruda, José Emilio Pacheco, Herberto Padillo, Eugenio Montejo and others.

Alastair Reid

What Gets Lost

I keep translating traduzco continuamente

entre palabras words que no son las mías

into other words which are mine de palabras a mis palabras.

Y, finalmente, de quién es el texto? Who has written it?

Del escritor o del traductor writer, translator

o de los idiomas or language itself?

Somos fantasmas, nosotros traductores, que viven

entre aquel mundo y el nuestro

between that world and our own.

Pero poco a poco me ocurre

que el problema the problem no es cuestión

de lo que se pierde en traducción

is not a question 

of what gets lost in translation

sino but rather lo que se pierde

what gets lost

entre la ocurrencia -sea de amor o de desesperación

between love or desperation-

y el hecho de que llega a existir en palabras 

and its coming into words.

Para nosotros todos, amantes, habladores

as lovers or users of words

el problema es éste this is the difficulty.

Lo que se pierde what gets lost

no es lo que se pierde en traducción sino

is not what gets lost in translation, but rather

what gets lost in language itself lo que se pierde

en el hecho, en la lengua,

en la palabra misma.

from Inside Out, Selected Poetry and Translations, Polygon, 2008

Fictions of otherness

 (An essay on poetry translation, from the Dublin Review of Books, December, 2016

We carry poems around with us in our heads, part of the internal tradition we create for ourselves. Often these are translations, although that fact may not necessarily register. When something causes us to dwell on the poem as translation, the result can be troubling. To give just one example, Czesław Miłosz’s “Encounter” has been part of my own personal anthology for many years. Recently I had cause to dig it out again. Here, first of all, is the poem in the English version I remembered:

    Encounter

    We drove before dawn through frozen fields,
    The red wing was rising, yet still the night.

    And suddenly a hare shot across our path.
    One of us pointed to it with his hand.

    That was long ago and both are dead:
    The hare and the man who stretched his arm.

    O my love, where are they, where do they lead,
    The flash of a hand, the line of movement, the swishing icy ground?

    I ask not in sorrow, but in contemplation.

    Wilno, 1936

The translation is by Adam Czerniawski, and I liked the poem primarily for its central image of the hare shooting across the path of the travellers and the pointing hand, and the quiet registration of the disappearance of both, a moment in a rich tradition of such registrations of mortality. I also liked the opening line – “We drove before dawn through frozen fields” – maybe because of its simple directness, its alliterative forcefulness, and the sense that anything could follow. The early hour, the frozen fields, the purposeful journey – it seemed like the opening to a thousand evocative stories and poems. I was less happy with the phrase “yet still the night”, which seemed to have been lifted from an anthology of nineteenth century poetry, and the final line seemed a little weak: “contemplation” didn’t really do it, didn’t seem like a strong enough alternative to sorrow. However, Czerniawski’s is not the version sanctioned by the poet, as I discovered when I pulled down my copy of the Collected Poems. Here is the poem as translated by the poet himself and Lillian Vallee:

    Encounter

    We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
    A red wing rose in the darkness.

    And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
    One of us pointed to it with his hand.

    That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
    Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

    O my love, where are they, where are they going
    The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles?

    I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

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The lure of the troubadours

David Cooke has published a selection from Sway in his online poetry magazine The High Window.

The book will be out later this year, I'll post details later.

The High Window is full of all sorts of goodies -- well worth checking out.

Sway

My new book, Sway, Versions of Poems from the Troubadour Tradition, will be published by Gallery Press in October. This one is a riff rather than a version, taking as its starting point a line by the 12th century trobairitz, Beatriz, Countess of Dia.


Riff for Beatriz
Ab joi et ab joven m’apais

I feed on joy and youth    the rest
forget    all texts
abandoned     I feed
with joy     I feed on you or would
were you here    were I there
by the lake    in the wood    where the
nightingales are    I hear them
the buds along the branches roar
the frost withdraw    I feast on the season
that you may come to me
like light to the trees    I set
my pilgrim heart to roam
I am here   your loosened armour  your
Saracen hands   I feed
on spices and desert air
the rest is argument    discourse
the lines unwinding
the lines bound like the twigs of a broom
to sweep you away and pull you back
my dust is yours together we blow through the meadows
I was here but now
a stir of language in the trees     birdsong
in the composed season    a voice
before the frost comes   before the wind and the rains
bear me off    come to me please

A Shared Wonder of Light

I'm launching A Shared Wonder Of Light, Poems & Photographs From West Cork & Kerry", poems by John Kinsella, photographs by John D'Alton on Sunday 12 June at 3pm in Arthur Mayne's, Donnybrook, in case anyone is free. It's brilliant collaboration ...