Jack Gilbert - Waiting and Finding

Periodically, I will be posting great poems by great poets that have been published in the BIG magazines, such as The New Yorker. Enjoy.

Waiting and Finding

by Jack Gilbert March 2, 2009

While he was in kindergarten, everybody wanted to play
the tomtoms when it came time for that. You had to
run in order to get there first, and he would not.
So he always had a triangle. He does not remember
how they played the tomtoms, but he sees clearly
their Chinese look. Red with dragons front and back
and gold studs around that held the drumhead tight.
If you had a triangle, you didn’t really make music.
You mostly waited while the tambourines and tomtoms
went on a long time. Until there was a signal for all
triangle people to hit them the right way. Usually once.
Then it was tomtoms and waiting some more. But what
he remembers is the sound of the triangle. A perfect,
shimmering sound that has lasted all his long life.
Fading out and coming again after a while. Getting lost
and the waiting for it to come again. Waiting meaning
without things. Meaning love sometimes dying out,
sometimes being taken away. Meaning that often he lives
silent in the middle of the world’s music. Waiting
for the best to come again. Beginning to hear the silence
as he waits. Beginning to like the silence maybe too much.

Tags: poetry, Jack Gilbert, Waiting and Finding, The New Yorker

Review - Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry, Translated by Vladimir Nabokov

The New Republic reviews a translation of three centuries of Russian poetry by the renowned author Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Brian Boyd and Stanislav Shvabrin. Bad title, but interesting review.

Vlad the Impaler

by Alexander Nemser
Post Date Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry

Translated by Vladimir Nabokov

Edited by Brian Boyd and Stanislav Shvabrin

(Harcourt, 441 pp., $40)

I.

Vladimir Nabokov, who throughout his career cultivated his reputation as the most famous literary exile since Ovid, was recognized in his lifetime not only for his novels but also for his authority on Russian cultural and aesthetic matters. He gave packed lectures extolling Tolstoy and annihilating Dostoevsky, and published dozens of translations of Russian verse. This new collection contains translations of lyric and narrative poetry from just after his arrival in America in 1940, when he was most in need of money, through his years of teaching Russian and European literature at Wellesley and Cornell, to his last years in Montreux, where he settled with his family in 1961 after the unexpectedly great success of Lolita. Nearly twenty poets are represented, including all the major poets who made up the first great period of Russian verse in the nineteenth century--Pushkin, Lermontov, Tyutchev, Fet--reaching back to the mid-eighteenth century polymath Mikhail Lomonosov, the "godfather of the iambic tetrameter," and forward to the Soviet-era Georgian bard Bulat Okudzhava, who died in Paris in 1997.

In an essay on translating Russian poetry, a famous scholar of Slavic literature once deplored the fashion for translations that retain the meter and the rhyme of the original at the expense of complete semantic fidelity. "As a result," he wrote, "the canned music of rhymed versions is enthusiastically advertised, and accepted, and the sacrifice of textual precision applauded as something rather heroic, whereas only suspicion and bloodhounds await the gaunt, graceless literalist groping around in despair for the obscure word that would satisfy impassioned fidelity and accumulating in the process a wealth of information which only makes the advocates of pretty camouflage tremble or sneer." The scholar's comments present a remarkable indictment of many of Nabokov's translations in Verses and Versions, which is full of limply rhymed quatrains and baffling torsions of sense. But the scholar who wrote that article, in 1965, was Vladimir Nabokov.

At a certain point during his career as a translator, Nabokov underwent a violent shift in sensibility--from formal translations in which the meter and the rhyme of the original are preserved but not the exact sense, to literal translations based on word-for-word fidelity. Verses and Versions is in part the story of that shift. Owing to the editorial choices, however, the book fails to illustrate vividly what was for Nabokov a momentous renunciation, which put him at odds with much of the literary establishment, and pegged him as an eccentric in the grip of a nostalgic obsession, and set off a bitter and remarkably enduring literary feud between himself and the man who was arguably his closest literary companion.

Nabokov's translations can be divided roughly into two groups: formal translations up to about 1950, and literal translations after 1950. The shift took place while Nabokov was in the process of translating Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, the novel in verse considered to be the greatest poetic accomplishment in the Russian language. Nabokov, fed up with the misleading and inelegant versions of the book he saw all around him, began translating Onegin as early as 1945. At first he intended to adhere to the trademark "Onegin Stanza" form (fourteen lines of iambic tetrameter with a specific order of masculine and feminine rhymes) that Pushkin invented, and in which he composed the entire work. But having rendered several stanzas in accordance with the original form, but with multiple additions and flourishes not in the original (the way he had been translating poetry for years before), Nabokov concluded that only a truly literal version would not "traduce the author."

Over the course of the next two decades, during which he published, among other works, Lolita and Pnin, Nabokov worked intermittently on a scrupulously word-for-word version. He finally published it in 1964, accompanied by a second volume containing five hundred pages of extensive and fastidious notes on everything from the dishes consumed by Pushkin's characters to the dance steps to the exact locations of their strolls (which, Nabokov is careful to note, were some of his own favorite spots as a child). And it was Nabokov's genius to recognize in his own obsessive project the structure for his funniest and most tragic book, Pale Fire, told in the form of a long poem by the invented poet John Shade, followed by hundreds of pages of deranged footnotes to the poem by the scholar Charles Kinbote, who believes himself to be the exiled king of a tiny Eastern European state called Zembla.

About half of Verses and Versions, a piecemeal chimera of a book, is composed of translations of lyrics by Pushkin and his contemporaries that can be found among the five hundred pages of commentary to Nabokov's translation of Onegin. Then there are the slim volumes of nineteenth-century verse that he prepared for New Directions and Lindsay Drummond; and the excerpts from Strong Opinions, his collection of interviews and articles; and the liner notes to an album of arias sung by his son Dmitri. What is new here is a handful of unpublished iambic scraps salvaged from the far-flung Nabokov archives, many of them only a few lines long. Certainly an argument can be made for thoroughness, but must we include everything found in the archives? When the boxes of Isaac Bashevis Singer's archives were opened, half a pastrami sandwich fell out.

Here are few sample stanzas from the book, the first from a humorous poem by Pushkin, translated literally:

Of the four-foot iambus I've grown
tired.
In it writes everyone. To boys this
plaything
'Tis high time to abandon ...

The next example, translated similarly according to the original form, is from Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841), who lived his life in a frenzy, wrote some of the most purely melodic lines in Russian poetry, and died in the Caucasus at the age of twenty-seven in a needless duel which, in accordance with the uncanny ability of Russian poets to predict their own deaths, he had already anticipated in his novel A Hero of Our Time:

Farewell! And be wise, do not grieve:
our love was too short for regret,
and hard as we found it to part
harder still would it be if we met.

And finally, in literal translation, a stanza from a poem addressed to Russia by Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921), the prophetic and hypnotic lyric poet who harbored mystical dreams of the Revolution and died in poverty and disillusionment:

I know not how to pity you
but tenderly I carry my cross;
you may abandon your brigandish
beauty
to any wizard you choose.

I can imagine three sets of readers for Verses and Versions: people interested in Nabokov, people interested in Russian literature, and--these may be hit the hardest--people interested in poetry. The first group, presumably coming to the book because of their admiration for Nabokov's prose, will be dismayed to encounter pages and pages of dull constructions and lackluster diction. Nabokov's novels, enjoyed for their linguistic virtuosity, induce at their best the sensation of being taken in by the work of a rare illusionist. Verses and Versions, by contrast, produces the discomfiting feeling of watching a Houdini promise to escape from an iron safe wrapped in chains and submerged in a tank of water, and then get tangled in his own chains until he barely makes it to the surface before he drowns. So this group of readers will have to make due with a few signature lines from Nabokov's brief introductions to each poet (Baron Anton Antonovich Delvig "curiously combined the classical strain and the folksy one, the amphora and the samovar ..."). For those concerned with Nabokov as a translator, this volume is a bonanza of yesterday's mashed potatoes. The best antidote for them would be to go and re-read Pale Fire.

For the second set of readers, the ones interested in Russian literature hoping for a representative selection of Russian poetry, the book is also disappointing. Nabokov's choice of what to translate was guided by the demands of specific projects or incidental concerns, and as a result the full constellation of themes and voices, so bright and unique in Russian poetry, is lost. Instead the reader is presented with a cache of bizarre, monotonous, and tepid lyrics whose relation to each other is obscure at best. This is too bad, because the tiny group of plaintive men who single-handedly created Russian poetry in the nineteenth century were remarkably linked in their themes of friendship, tears, auguries, desolation, the figure of death as a woman, visiting familiar and long-forgotten places, ghosts, hatred of the mob, hoping to be understood by the next generation, prophecy, mental illness, and everyone dying in a duel or in Baden-Baden.

If this second group of readers has not yet lost hope in Russian verse, there are alternatives: for the nineteenth century there is the collection of translations by Alan Myers called An Age Ago. (The book includes a foreword by Joseph Brodsky, one of the poet's most acute and economical essays, on the acceleration of time and the twentieth century's suspicion that everything had already been expressed by the nineteenth.) Myers's versions rhyme and scan, but they relate their sorrows and joys accompanied by at least a few chords on the piano, and sometimes by a violin. An Age Ago is also organized so that the themes echo very clearly.

Read the rest of this review.

Tags: Verses and Versions, Three Centuries of Russian Poetry, Vladimir Nabokov, The New Republic, poetry, reviews, translations

Celeste Thompson: Dreams of Fishing

Dreams of Fishing

Finally, evidence for God in a mosquito’s buzz.
Male D plus female G creates a perfect fifth,
overtone begets mating.

Do you know Al Jolson? Of course.
Like I know Django Reinhardt.
Esteemed. Finesse. Scone crumb on your saucer,
creamed dill on your spoon. I want.

There’s poetry everywhere, my boss texts from Minneapolis.
Which hat to take fishing? Suddenly I’m tall.

* * *

~ Celeste Thompson lives in Hillsboro, OR, where she blogs Ardent Shanty and plays the banjo. I have been trying to get her work here for over a year, so this is a treat. You can buy rabbit fur purse, her first collection, through Amazon.

Tags: Celeste Thompson, poetry, Dreams of Fishing, Ardent Shanty, rabbit fur purse

Judith Skillman: Four Poems

The Death of Pan

We were only playing in the pasture,
wearing a patchwork of sun and sky,
ragged with the coming autumn.
That is to say we didn’t mean
to drown out the sound of his flute—
our piper, nor meddle with the conch shell
that caused our fathers to panic.

And his Arcadia—
how we adored her. We made wreaths
of wildflowers, twined tendrils of her hair
around our stubby hands as we brought
her one more gift: a leaf bloodied with color,
a spare sapling, an agate choked in quartz.

Until the river-god,
happy as ever to be plunged in cold,
took him from our arms and flung
his instrument against the rocky shore.
The syrinx shattered into seven reeds or nine,
and we, still infatuated with the echoes
our voices made in that valley, called out
to one another, not so much from loneliness
as the excitement of recitation.

Light breezes
dog us as we go forward in reconnaissance,
teaching one another how to suffer
being schooled by lechers. Our appetite
for the one called Pitys—another nymph
loved by him, who turned into a pine tree
to escape his overtures,
runs nil to none.

* * *

Lemon Balm

The first stem topples
as if in slow motion.
The rest go quickly,
followed by the familiar—
her mother’s dust motes

rising into September air
heady with wax.
Where did it come from,
this need to cut back
and down, to insinuate

orange-handled clippers
gloved with the casual
obstinacy of the guillotine.
And now there is no place
left to look for letters,

for the secret whispers
and shared blood
of women as good as sisters
pledging fidelity
to one another.

She makes her way
through the thicket,
wearing the queasy face
of grand motherhood.
This notion that she

would remain the same person
all her life: snip snip—
even that tractable fact
replaced by the memory
of a memory of a dream.

* * *

A Selfish Death
for Kurt

What you said
about an airplane crash—
I wouldn’t want
to share my death
with hundreds of other
screaming humans….
made me think of death
as something private,
perhaps a gift given
in plain brown wrapping.

The same gift, regifted.
I liked that train
of thought so I followed
it here, to my room
where morning comes
always too soon
and too late,
bringing the headache
that’s won’t quit my temples
even given caffeine
and Tramadol.

Another Pacific front
comes in waves, fat raindrops
blown against south-facing
windows, a carnage
of twigs and green leaves.
I like that so much
is hidden: three s’s
in your name. Scandinavia,
you said. Your signature—
another mystery:
two o’s—large spirals
with space for some kind
of treacherous treble clef
in between.

You’ll take death quietly,
away from traffic,
a cat carrying the bloodied
mouse by the nape, holing up
to test the tortured animal
once more with its claws.

* * *

The Travails

They welcome you in, scarred, scuffed brown as leaves
piling at curb and porch. They have no reason
for being what they are except perhaps in memory
where one looks back and sees the self dressed in a hospital gown,
legs dangling off the flat cot of a bed where the tortures happen
in a deep sleep. They hound you like the seasons, one on the heels of the other…

* * *

~ Judith Skillman’s most recent book is “Heat Lightning, New and Selected Poems 1986 – 2006,” Silverfish Review Press. “The Carnival of All or Nothing” is forthcoming from Cervéna Barva Press in March, 2009. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, FIELD, The Southern Review, JAMA, The Iowa Review, The Midwest Quarterly, and numerous other journals and anthologies. She has been a frequent Writer in Residence at Centrum.

Tags: Judith Skillman, poetry, The Travails, A Selfish Death, Lemon Balm, The Death of Pan

Lilya Oliferuk: Two Poems

Hitch-Hiking with Mushrooms

I am hitching a ride to Kiev
with a friendly furniture delivery
man who speaks the funny dialect
of the village folk. The roads are
rough and my new friend jovial, telling
me about his wife and his garden when
we stop for a woman who got
old too soon and two buckets of
fresh wild mushrooms. She sits
between us and her rubber boots
squeak gently. A happy old man,
a sullen woman nearing middle age
and a world weary young girl -- we look
each other over carefully, we have the luxury of time!
The old man laughs.
Look at you, so young, so bleak!
The world is bright and
fresh faced on mornings like this, the
herons rejoice on telephone poles!
We part ways on the outskirts
of Kiev, a happy old man two
joyful young women and two
buckets of fresh wild mushrooms.

* * *

Abandoning Christ

Half of this country
is empty, the Dniepr dotted
with vacant villages,
overgrown and forgotten
the young ones move to cities
and the old ones die and
are forgotten
I venture into their
homes, push through
the sweet smelling grass
still wet with dew and
find remnants of
their abandoned faith
Christ propped
up against the wall,
neglected and worm
eaten but he calls
out still, I forgive
I forgive

* * *

~ Lilya Oliferuk, a student of my former teacher, Bill Hotchkiss, sent me these poems.I have no other information.

Tags: Lilya Oliferuk, Abandoning Christ, Hitch-Hiking with Mushrooms, An Old Woman in Alexandrovka, poetry

Michelle Kern: On Awakening

ON AWAKENING

We see the two of us

In the field like oxen.

The mourning doves

Bear the tortured war

In the field like oxen,

We see the two of us.

* * *

~ Michelle Kern is currently working to put together the Sixth Annual Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival, the largest free poetry festival in New York State. It will feature eighteen nationally known poets, such as Rita Dove, CK Williams, Jorie Graham, Tom Sleigh, and Linda Gregg. For more information about the festival's events and readings taking place April 24-26, 2009, go to link: http://www.slc.edu/poetry-festival/index.php

Tags: Michelle Kern, poetry, On Awakening, Sarah Lawrence College Poetry Festival

Jason Arbegast: Calvary

Calvary

A demon-being waits
beneath a moist stairwell
in a musty, mothball basement,
with machete fangs
and crude, oiled fur,
glittering
its jade eyes
and brigand teeth
like a rapist
in a minatory midnight moon,
rejecting our Will,
turning us against us,
to guard a second stairway
descending to the Being
that which we might become.

* * *

Graven

The forgotten stone
was once chiseled,
but like a talcum tale
age whittled
at the inscriptions
on its ivory face
swallowed
in tattered grass
despite the keeper’s efforts.

A neighboring statue,
sculpted and finished
to a linoleum sheen,
eclipses the sun
while the keeper,
with hair cycling
through a white-scale rainbow,
fends the foliage,
ignoring yesterday’s
achievements,
laboring,
never noticing
time’s slight smoothing
of refined cuts.

* * *

~ Jason Arbegast a graduate of the creative writing program at SUNY Oswego, with no prior publications. This is his first appearance in Elegant Thorn Review.

Tags: Jason Arbegast, poetry, Graven, Calvary

Donovan White: A Poem

Deaf first

We’re left without connecting strings -
A painting without solid lines
Whose clash of color thins to wine.

A fog enshrouds a blue Monet
Where waterlilies leave wet feet
And all else fades in gray retreat.

It did not all, does not all go
At once, or even bunched or paired.
It goes in chunks, mad cow despair.

The rest will not work just quite right
A synapse fails into a gap
Where meaning has no shape, runs flat.

But not just deaf, the rest go fast -
The sight, the taste, the touch, the smell -
And leave behind a fractured hell.

The hidden sense that lies in clouds
Where scented arm and tremored hand
Stretch out to clasp a frenzied strand,

We only lose the ones we love,
The rest slip off unheard, unseen.
What’s left is jangly space between.

* * *

~ Donovan White lives in West Townsend, Massachusetts. This is his first time in Elegant Thorn Review.

Carand Burnet: A Poem

a litany

Tonight, it pours as if God has casually scattered sequins
upon the ground
Tonight, I can't count how many times
I have been knitted and tucked away while the world seems to be ignited,
flaming, oh tonight, not now,
Does the wind howl here only for itself, or helm its way
tossing through the chevroned trees? for they never intend
on dying out
Tonight, all I can do is be the child who soaks for hours
after her grandmother has passed
and years after
that stench of hotel water reminds the face of it while you wash at home
home only resembles her more
Tonight, to think of all those people who die in cars
pilgrims on the Brookshire piled into ravines
tonight
this tunnel vision will do no good.

* * *

Carand Burnet is a painting student at the New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire and is originally from South Carolina. This is her first appearance in Elegant Thorn Review.

Tags: poetry, Carand Burnet, a litany

C. K. Williams - All Around the World the Same Song

A great article from one of my favorite poets, C.K. Williams, posted at the Poetry Foundation site. He muses here on the solitary work of the artist, which is not loneliness, but rather, a communion with other artists from the past, as exemplified by the poets whose work lives on in the books on his desk.

All Around the World the Same Song

How globe-trotting poetries may not beat scrawls in a cave.

by C. K. Williams

A few years ago, when I gave a reading at one of a series of conferences an old friend of mine organizes for people from various fields—scientists, inventors, architects, designers, show-biz folk, and even one poet, me—my friend said to the audience, after I was finished, something about how moved he was to think of all the years I’d spent, had to spend, working by myself, all alone and, he implied, lonely. I was startled: I’m quite a gregarious person, and sometimes I do become lonely, but it’s something that never happens to me during the hours I’m at work. When I’m at my desk, my room is filled, overflowing with the presence of a vast number of poets I love, and some others I don’t know at all, whose books or poems have recently arrived but who are there waiting for me to become acquainted with and possibly love, too.

Here are some of the poets that are with me on my desk or the table next to it as I write this: two different translations of Osip Mandelstam’s poems; a book of translations of Giacomo Leopardi; a collection of Thomas Wyatt; another of Gerard Manley Hopkins; an anthology entitled New European Poets, which includes poems from every possible nook and cranny of Europe; a book of essays of Eugenio Montale, as well as his last book of poetry, It Depends, the astonishing singularity of which I only recently came to appreciate; Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies; a collection of Blake; Alcools by Guillaume Apollinaire, in French; a book of translations of early Celtic poetry, with those magical strings of modifiers; a translation by Marilyn Hacker of a contemporary French poet, Guy Goffette, whose work I’m not familiar with, but which I plan to read soon; and several anthologies of English and American poetry.

What I find striking about this list is how many different languages, cultures, and moments of history are represented in it. When I first began to write poems at university, we were offered in our courses no poetry whatsoever in languages other than English, except very rarely as exercises in language classes. Still, somehow the first two poets to whom I found myself intimately attached were the French poet Charles Baudelaire and the German, Rainer Maria Rilke. Furthermore, when I was released from university (or perhaps I should say paroled, since I’ve ended back in academe for my livelihood), I found myself during the first years of my apprenticeship, which seems never to have really ended, spending almost all my time with poets from languages and cultures other than English and American. To mention just a few, there were Pablo Neruda; César Vallejo; Federico García Lorca; Miguel Hernández, in Spanish; Baudelaire, again, still, French; and Rilke, German, still as well. Then a little later Arthur Rimbaud, Jean Follain, Francis Ponge; the Polish poets Czesław Miłosz, Tadeusz Rosewicz, and Zbigniew Herbert; Eugenio Montale, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Pier Paolo Pasolini from Italy; the Alexandrian Greek Constantine P. Cavafy; Tomas Tranströmer, from Sweden; the Russians Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Mandelstam; the classical Chinese, Du Fu and Li Po particularly; as well as the centuries of Japanese haiku masters; even quite a lot of poetry from cultures without a written tradition which were being collected and published or republished around then. And this, as I say, is a very partial accounting.

The question that comes to me now is: why? English certainly has a great poetic tradition, it might actually be the very greatest, so why was I driven so fervently to other languages and cultures? And I should add that I certainly wasn’t alone in this: there was a terrific amount of translating and reading of translations of poetry going on at that time. Many literary journals in the early sixties were crowded with translations from every place in the world, and for a while I think there were as many books of translations being published as poetry in English. Again: why?

I’ve thought sometimes that there were extra-literary reasons for it. Much of this turning outward, this searching for new poetic resources, came during the years of the cold war when America took on, or had imposed on it by circumstances, an imperial sense of itself, an identity of power from which we have suffered and caused much suffering since. There might be something to this, and something also to the fact that there were such profound social changes underway in race and gender relations in America at that time, but I’m not really sure about how much either of these were the reasons for what was happening in poetry. Perhaps because so much of my attention has been devoted to poetry—learning to write it, and learning about it—I’d feel disingenuous if I didn’t limit my reflections to the areas in which I can be less speculative.

It’s one of the miracles of art that no matter how many times we experience a poem, painting, or piece of music, no matter how much time we spend reveling in it, analyzing it, each time we return to it, it feels utterly spontaneous, seeming to be improvised anew as we experience it. Furthermore, if a work even on a tenth reading or viewing or listening, or a hundredth, doesn’t convey that quality of freshness, of renewal, it will seem moribund, perishing before our eyes like a fish on a beach.

The truth is that the creation of art is laborious, or if that’s not quite the word, it certainly is the case that all art is generated out of the necessities of an aesthetic system, its demands and restrictions, as well as its opportunities, its propulsive energy. Such systems are dauntingly intricate, though fortunately many of the variables of an art form will have been absorbed into what might be called the unconscious of the artist before a creative act is undertaken.

Read the rest of this fine article.

Tags: poetry, essays, C.K. Williams, creation, art, history, solitude