Joseph Brodsky tried to write a poem every Christmas, concentrating the vanishing energies of the year on a day when even unbelievers may be forgiven a twinge of belief—that is what myths are for. Nativity Poems collects the nineteen poems he finished, of which more than half have never been translated into English. [1] Brodsky has been a difficult poet to bring over from Russian—the rhyming forms he favored have fewer and fewer masters in English, and the longer he lived in America the more cocksure he became in his adopted language. In his last books, he was translating without help and writing too many poems directly into English, in which he had a wooden ear as well as a wooden tongue. Poetry, unlike prose, is almost impossible to write in a language not mastered until adulthood.
Nativity Poems is the best book of Brodsky translations since A Part of Speech (1980), from which a few poems have been reprinted. It would be tempting to say that what is good in these translations isn’t Brodsky and what is Brodsky isn’t good (it would be tempting, but it wouldn’t quite be true). Most poets would benefit from having Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur, and Anthony Hecht render their poems in English—even if the poems were in English already. Heaney wears his Irish warmth like a badge of authority; Walcott is a master of scumbled image; and Wilbur and Hecht could make a list of telephone numbers look as classical as a Corinthian column. You might think such translations would be simply a version of Heaney, or Walcott, or Wilbur, or Hecht, but it’s by just such supplements of personality that translation regains some of the losses incurred in the dark passage from one language to another. This is Brodsky through Heaney:
(but in the cerulean thickening over the
Infant
no bell and no echo of bell: He hasn’t yet
earned it.)
Imagine the Lord, for the first time, from
darkness, and stranded
immensely in distance, recognizing Himself
in the Son
of Man: homeless, going out to Himself in
a homeless one.
The ending is as hard to swallow as a whole potato (you can see from the en face Russian text—a luxury—that in the last line Brodsky’s syntax is more impacted and the wordplay more charged), but the rest has the quiet tremble of Heaney’s domestic scenes.
Poetry is what gets lost in translation, as Frost said, but a shadowy portrait of Brodsky emerges when you subtract his translators’ quirks of style. Behind Heaney or Walcott lies Brodsky’s way of pacing the landscape against the line, or moving from the sandy particular to the starry universal. A reader is more likely to find the range of the original when the translations are by different hands. (When Brodsky translated himself it sounded as if he’d been translated by committee—a committee of refrigerators).
The weaknesses of Brodsky’s poems in English aren’t always the translators’ fault. You might blame Glyn Maxwell for the matey tone of “‘There is no God. The earth’s a mess.’ ‘Too right. I’ll take up chicks, I guess,’” but you must condemn Brodsky, in the same translation, for the clumsy imagery (if not the grammar) of “Everyone …/ is really in essence a girl, a virgin/ keen to unite—like your slacks imagine/ a skirt out there to go running to.” You might quarrel with Paul Muldoon over the hopped-up idiom of “those hotshot/ wise men… schlepping along with their groaning coffers,/ for all the little children in their carry cots,” but only Brodsky, who translated himself (like a barber cutting his own hair), is responsible for this doggerel, with its ludicrous allusion to Frost:
And staring up where no cloud drifts
because your sock’s devoid of gifts
you’ll understand this thrift: it fits
your age; it’s not a slight.
It is too late for some breakthrough,
for miracles, for Santa’s crew.
And suddenly you’ll realize that you
yourself are a gift outright.
A couple of Brodsky’s self-translations are restrained when they could so often be grotesque, though a poet who in English can commit lines like “The star would resemble/ no other, because of its knack, at its nadir,/ for taking an alien for its neighbor” translates himself in peril of his mortal soul.
Brodsky was no Christian, or at least no churchgoer (he mockingly said he was a Calvinist), but you don’t have to take on the beliefs of Christianity to be moved by the nativity and passion, myths that lie beneath the art of two millennia. (Even if the religion faded into nothingness, an end unlikely given the power of its fictions, there would be people who wept at the beauty of its art.) Brodsky, who liked to pass Christmas in Venice, that sinking monument to the decay of architecture and belief, saw with what magnificence a skeptic could contemplate centuries past—these poems express a fealty to the past without being enslaved by it. And there is, almost like frailty, the doubt beneath Brodsky’s doubt —you sense he felt the myths might just possibly be true.
Too many of these nativity poems are not good, despite the subtle designs of their translators, but they have the advantage of at least sounding like poems, unlike so much of Brodsky’s last work in English. (The poet’s hot personality was not much advantage to the cold words left behind.) At times you hear something, not like a bell, but like the echo of a bell, of what this poet must sound like in Russian.
Eavan Boland’s poems mix Irish charm with a dose of political blarney. The steamy, observant lines of Against Love Poetry [2] often have something cold and repellent beneath them:
Hester Bateman made a marriage spoon
And then subjected it to violence.
Chased, beat it. Scarred it and marked it.
All in the spirit of our darkest century.Far away from grapeshot and tar caps
And the hedge schools and the music
of sedition
She is oblivious to she pours out
And lets cool the sweet colonial metal.
Boland loves to use language against itself, to convict it of crimes it hardly knew it was committing. I admire the resource that drags the neutral terms of craft (chasing, beating) into the cruelties of the slave trade, that binds the simple fidelities of a marriage spoon into a “mediation/ Between oppression and love’s remembrance.” She’s a confident rhetorician, one who never questions the bullying of her methods, and if you believe marriage is as simple as oppression, you’ll love the simplicity of what she says.
Boland’s politics may be commonplace in the halls of academe, but I’m sorry to find them in poems. As soon as you see the word violence or colonial, the creative possibility is over (when you see colonial, you know empire waits in the wings). Of course we should remember the human cost of the silver (as we should not ignore the cost of mining coltan for our cell phones), but the idea that marriage has much to do with persecution in the colonies is mortally suspect (the spoon would have marked their faithfulness no better if the couple had clawed silver from the ground themselves). It’s very close to the argument that Jane Austen should be convicted for everything she doesn’t say about slavery.
If you’re against love poetry, whatever are you for? It’s like being against mom or apple pie. You sense what Boland means —the conventions of love, and love poetry, can be iron fetters, though surely in poems like Sonnet 130 Shakespeare broke them long ago. A book against love poetry is defined by what it opposes (even if there’s a touch of irony in the antagonism), so it’s odd that after all her railing against convention, against the incarcerations of marriage, Boland collapses into the coziness of a love that chastens and redeems (though a poet who casts her marriage as “A Marriage for the Millennium” is asking for trouble).
It’s not that these clean, well-written poems are political, it’s that they glory in self-righteousness. When you know Boland’s politics, you know what’s coming: she doesn’t telegraph her punches so much as hire Western Union by the hour. After a while you resent being treated like a child in the schoolroom, captive to the poet’s self-satisfied opinions (shaped in the violence of Ireland though now practiced in California). Boland is so wide-eyed about politics she’s deaf to the things her complacent outrage makes her say: “I did not find my womanhood in the servitudes of custom,” or “they were both found dead./ Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history” (cold and hunger were probably enough).
And yet. And yet. Under the influence of Seamus Heaney, Boland has matured beyond the household trivia of her earlier work. At times she achieves Heaney’s sense of a land darkened by human presence—the fallen world that surrounds and shapes the landscapes we see, and how we see them.
Silence spreads slowly from these words
to those ilex trees half in, half out
of shadows falling on the shallow ford
of the south bank beside Yellow island [sic]
as twilight shows how this sweet corrosion
begins to be complete: what we see
is what the poem says:
evening coming—cattle, cattle-shadows—and whin bushes and a change of weather
about to change them all: what we see is how
the place and the torment of the place are
for this moment free of one another.
A poet who can write with such quiet confidence doesn’t need the cant of politics to support her. Boland is still too susceptible to easy answers (and easier questions) —if there’s an ax to grind, she’s sure to grind it, and the deficit of humor is too often supplied by a surfeit of pretension. You wish she had an ounce of Heaney’s quiet indecision, his ability to balance on the knife-edge of principle. Her Irish world is so full of shamrock stereotypes you’re surprised her characters aren’t armed with shillelaghs and hunted by leprechauns.
Maxine Kumin lives on the farm, where she owns the franchise to a certain sort of farm poem. You can’t walk around her barnyard without stepping on one. The Long Marriage, her twelfth book of poems, is earnest, sensible, maternal, often composed in a barnyard prose that wishes it were poetry. [3] When she writes (sensibly, prosily) about bindweed, or potatoes, or thistle, you remember instead the baroque elegance of Wilbur’s eggplant. When she writes (earnestly, maternally) about porcupines or horses or scavenger dogs, you recall the delicious flamboyance of Marianne Moore’s pangolin. Kumin, perhaps like the good farmer she is, doesn’t have much use for language that isn’t serviceable—her poems are held together with baling wire, and her idea of a juicy idea is a meditation on home canning.
It’s hard not to think of other poets when you read Kumin, because she’s forever dragging them onto her property and into her poems. Wordsworth waits to go skinnydipping at the water hole and Hopkins lurks by the compost heap. When she travels, Rilke, Marianne Moore, and Henry Vaughan follow like bellhops, but their presence only reminds you that even homespun poetry requires a force beyond ordinary language. Kumin prefers the genial woolgathering that lapses into lecture at one end (“The animals have different enzymes/ from us. They can eat amanitas/ we die of”) and diary jotting at the other. It was a sad day when free verse became the pursuit of prose by other means.
Like many farm poets, Kumin’s full of mawkish notions about the land, a New Age farmer (she invites an “animal psychic” into her horse barn) masquerading as a granite Yankee like Frost. Even when she dresses up her language, the tone goes slightly rancid. She falls into ecstasy over the compost:
from
our spatterings and embarrassments—
cat vomit, macerated mice,
rotten squash, burst berries,
a mare’s placenta, failed melons,
dog hair, hoof parings—arises
a rapture of blackest humus.
Dirt to top-dress, dig in. Dirt fit
for the gardens of commoner and king.
It’s disgusting, but disgusting because it’s prettified by the arty alliteration, the calculated balance of phrases.
You have to love a poet not to laugh at a frontispiece that pictures her with her husband and their two dalmations, Gus and Claude (it’s like being forced, at gunpoint, to look at the family album of perfect strangers). When Kumin writes of the scars left by cancer and a crippling accident, the poems are lurid as blood-spattered photographs:
You can see the path of a forest fire
that devoured one breast leaving
the other shyly hanging in space,
my still abundant hair whitening,
my almost bald pubis still useful.
Still useful! What to a farmer is practical may seem tasteless to everyone else. You wish Swift or Rochester were here to advise Kumin how to make such observations sardonic. You couldn’t ask for a poet more kind-hearted—her heart bleeds in all the right places. Her opinions about war (anti), mutilation (anti), the extinction of species (anti), capital punishment (anti), and starving children (anti) could have been bought wholesale, at a discount. She doesn’t preach to the converted so much as try to sell her congregation hair shirts.
And what of the big-headed stick-figured
children naked
in the doorways of Goma, Luanda, Juba,
Les Hants
or crouched in the dust of haphazard donkey-
width tracks
that connect the named and the nameless
hamlets of Want?
The most moving poem in the book, however, is a Dinka boy’s report of the effect of civil war on his village. It is reserved, terrifying, with dry touches about life in a refugee camp (“I studied geography, read Lord Jim// and coached younger boys in basketball/ a game made for Dinkas”). His quiet tragedy measures the banality of all the country mire Kumin is fond of. When he gets a pair of Nikes, it’s a triumph.
Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi and raised in Kashmir. A Muslim, he calls himself a Kasmiri-American, which suggests the tangled heritage to which he is heir. Rooms Are Never Finished, like his earlier books, straddles cultures west and east, Hindu and Muslim, its English like a Persian miniature: fabulous, delicate (even finicky), alien. [4] (It is no surprise that Ali has been drawn to the most glittery, jewel-like American poet of the past half-century, James Merrill.)
The cultures of India are strange to us, uncomfortably strange—they remain outside the influences of our tradition, despite rogue notes like Schopenhauer’s nirvana or the end of The Waste Land. An immersion in the Indian subcontinent (as opposed to Renaissance Italy) has never been the mark of sophisticated education, though Western scholars over long centuries have devoted their lives to its bazaar of literatures and religions. Ali’s poems are attractive in their very exoticism, and his formal ambition gains the advantage of Western forms like terza rima and the canzone as well as Eastern forms like the ghazal and pantoum.
This new book opens with a long elegy for Ali’s mother, whose body he brought from America home to Kashmir, a province half-destroyed by war.
All the flames have severed themselves from
candles,
darkened Kashmir’s shrines to go find their
lost one,
burning God the Moth in stray blasphemy.
His
Wings have caught fire,
lit up broken idols in temples, on whom
Scripture breaks, breaks down to confess
His violence:
what their breaking’s cost the forsaken nation
that now awaits herat the wind- and water-stretched end of
Earth—to
which, veiled, she’s being brought back from
Goodbye’s other
sky, the God-stretched end of the blue,
returning
as the Belovéd [sic].
Ali is a charming, capable, even whimsical poet (his excursions into the war in Kashmir are never convincing—his touch is for lyric and lament), but his poems seem slightly out of focus, descending into phrases barely acquainted with each other, often sentimental or silly (Goodbye’s other sky?). His lines drift into the ether, a tendency exaggerated by his preference for forms that require repetition. (Even Merrill, a poet of incandescent formal gifts, seemed adrift in the canzone.) Ali has been instrumental in renewing interest in the ghazal, but results have been mixed.
In Jerusalem a dead phone’s dialed by exiles.
You learn your strange fate: You were exiled
by exiles.One opens the heart to list unborn galaxies.
Don’t shut that folder when Earth is filed
by exiles.Before Night passes over the wheat of Egypt,
let stones be leavened, the bread torn wild
by exiles.
The knotted internal rhymes, the monotonous falling rhythm, the postcard images (which sound wrenched from Indian pop songs) are lovely but empty, and those “unborn galaxies” are the stuff of greeting cards signed by weeping scientists. There have been fashions in poetic forms (recall the sonnet-mad 1590s), and even a gradual succession: in the past century we have seen the sestina become the poor man’s sonnet, the villanelle the poor man’s sestina, and the pantoum (just in the past decade) the poor man’s villanelle. In each case strict meter has gradually broken down into free verse, the rhymes or endwords become laggard and elective. (There are triumphs of formal evasion, like Bishop’s villanelle “One Art,” but far more misses than hits.) Too often in recent poetry the demands of form exceed the poet’s invention.
Some of the difficulties of Rooms Are Never Finished (and, admittedly, some of its shy pleasure) come from a poet not wholly at home in English, subject to slightly awkward syntax (“as her/ shrine is onto Srinagar’s tarmac lowered”) or idiom (“Kashmir would soon be in literal/ flames”), or to small errors of usage (“rpms” for “rpm”; “Belovéd,” repeatedly, for “Belovèd”). Ali has brought into English verse a culture rarely seen there (contemporary fiction has a far livelier Anglo-Indian strain). It’s a pity that his recent books have ignored the America he once rendered, like de Tocqueville, with a foreign intelligence—the exoticism works both ways. The fragile beauty of his lines conceals a poet whose skills have yet to match his ambitions.
When a writer abandons his homeland, or it abandons him, he must remake himself in the motley of exile, or night and day resist the seductions of foreign landscape. Ovid was of course the most famous intransigent (there were few attractions on the Black Sea), Nabokov and Conrad the most famous chameleons. In Landscape with Chainsaw, a witty title (with a wittier dust jacket, showing Grant Wood’s famous version of Washington chopping down the cherry tree), James Lasdun tries to come to terms with losing Britain and gaining America. [5]
Lasdun, who is better known for his short stories, has an almost childish delight in words (when he doesn’t stumble across the words he wants, he makes them up, like unnibbleable or mammaly). A writer so word-drunk finds it hard to suit subjects to his style—it’s easy to seem frivolous, a Dylan Thomas without the benefit of alcohol or the excuse of being Welsh. Lasdun’s style has calmed down since his jazzy poetic debut, A Jump Start (1987), but his attentions to language can still be hyperkinetic:
Stripmall country: the chain
molecule of a shingled cinderblock cube
polymerised into HoJo’s, Jiffy Lube,
Walmart, Kmart, and—where we’re headed
—Miron:Museum of the American Present,
where can-do meets do-it-yourself,
where you can grab a dump-truck off the shelf
or a family-size nuclear power plant.
This is not to fill every rift with ore but to stuff it with junk food—the satire has bloated beyond the bearing of wit. Lasdun’s America is a paradise of brand names, an Eden where Adam would be responsible for product placement. If manufacturers paid poets for endorsements (a British writer recently wrote a novel commissioned by Bulgari), Lasdun would be rich—he’s so taken with the perfume of name brands he can hardly shut up about them.
Lasdun’s gifts have developed in a style drawn heavily from Life Studies (which judged an America whose symptoms it exhibited), though he lacks Lowell’s killer instinct, his pressure on the condition of the spirit (Lowell licensed the use of brand names in his wonderful line “Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother’s bed”). Lasdun is a genial bloke, inclined to be bullied—when his wife gives him the chainsaw that features in many of the poems, it scares the hell out of him, but he can’t quite force himself to return it (the salesman makes him an offer he can’t refuse). It’s hard to like a character so feckless (the British have a stronger word, gormless)—let’s face it, he’s a prat. A poet plays the fool at his own risk—the risk is the loss first of the reader’s sympathy, then of his patience. When Lasdun writes Lowell pastiche, he’s just another Lowell wannabe, but at times he recasts the style (where Lowell’s language bore down on his rhythm) for a new century.
The mirror was oval like her face.
Almond eyes, the blue-black curls
an equivocal admirer
once plied his fingers through
wistfully, before letting go.Outside, hedgerows glittered;
rosehips, ripening cobnuts,
stitched in like silk as if the county
had slid from a palace wall and settled there.
Why do I long to be here when I am here?
Alert to the richness of words but not overwhelmed by them, the lines edge toward revelations more unsettling than the pangs of consumer culture. (Like many an émigré, Lasdun makes minor errors about his adopted home. It’s worth mentioning that Owsley, not Owlsley, was the famous manufacturer of LSD; that the corporation styles itself Wal-Mart, not Walmart; that Ken Kesey’s group was the Merry Pranksters, not the Yippies; and that Jimi Hendrix played, not a left-handed Stratocaster, but a right-handed one upside-down.)
There are far too many precious and unnecessary poems in this book (Lasdun is a poet who should never be happy, because it makes him slightly stupid), but half a dozen are a joy in their intellectual seriousness, their sensuous love of words, their cool unstitching of place. I’d include “The Apostate,” “Hops,” “Bluestone,” and two remarkable short poems, “Chainsaw” I and II. Lasdun doesn’t know what sort of poet he wants to be, and some of his thrashing around—this is his third book, and in each he’s had problems settling into style— reflects a long crisis in poetic identity. At his best, exile or not, he is among the strongest young poets in America.
W. H. Auden long ago reversed the European pilgrimage of American modernists. Lasdun is part of a remarkable diaspora of British and Irish poets, many of them drawn to American universities over the past two decades. The new group of émigrés, little different from other economic immigrants, includes Geoffrey Hill, Paul Muldoon, Eavan Boland, Glyn Maxwell, Dick Davis, Eamon Grennan, and part-time visitors like Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison, and Michael Hofmann. That these poets, here in our midst, have had so little effect on American poetry indicts the sorry parochialism of our verse.
Czeslaw Milosz wrote A Treatise on Poetry nearly half a century ago, in the backwash of the war that almost destroyed his country. [6] In this complex meditation on Poland and Polish poetry, the poet grapples—at the climax, weirdly, wonderfully, in the backwoods of Pennsylvania—with his own compromised relation to his art. You can feel the influence of The Waste Land (there are objective correlatives scattered like candy), though Milosz, attempting to write the history of a sensibility, has his long eye on The Prelude.
The treatise opens during la belle époque, in a Kraków all Romantic manners and Symbolist cafés:
Cabbies were dozing by St. Mary’s tower.
Kraków was tiny as a painted egg
Just taken from a pot of dye on Easter.
In their black capes poets strolled the streets.
Nobody remembers their names today,
And yet their hands were real once,
And their cufflinks gleamed above a table.
An Ober brings the paper on a stick.
The history of Poland is, in Milosz’s version, bound to its poets; this may be self-delusion, though American poets so used to being ignored can hardly imagine a culture in which a broadside of poetry can be threatening as a broadside of cannon. The dead Polish poets whose names mean little to us (and would mean nothing but for long and informative notes) created the milieu into which Milosz was born. A Treatise on Poetry is, like The Waste Land, an invention of the past that must collaborate with its notes (notes as long as the poem itself). Like a mule train, they bear the provisions for lines that have galloped ahead.
The treatise (called Traktat poetycki in Polish) shifts to Warsaw, a down-at-heels capital at the end of one war that lay in ruins at the end of the next.
You, alien city on a dusty plain,
Under the cupola of the Orthodox cathedral,
Your music was the fifes of regiments,
The Cavalry Guard was your soldier
of soldiers,
From a droshky rings a lewd Caucasian ditty.
Thus one should begin an ode to
you, Warsaw,
To your grief and debauchery and misery.
A street vendor, hands clumsy with cold,
Measures out a peck of sunflower seeds.
The verse is too sepia-toned and sensuous to make debauchery convincing, the lines sometimes just a mess of glowing detail (often transformed to symbol in the notes). Milosz argues, with pride and sorrow, that in each age the poets failed not their country but their poetry. In the library of the past, he sees the temptations to which other poets succumbed—the pure poetry, the propaganda—and records their lonely and sometimes heroic deaths. (Milosz makes himself seem not heir to a tradition, but the result of inevitable Hegelian necessity.)
In the final section the poet floats in a rowboat on a lake in Pennsylvania, waiting for a beaver, a totemic animal of his childhood that represents the wildness of another land, another history, a life outside history. He gets only a brief glimpse of the beaver, but cannot remain in the artifice of nature, or in America—he must return to the harsher world of petty diplomacy, to a poetry that names names. (It is a mild irony that Milosz, a diplomat, later went into exile in Paris and then America.) This last section suggests the torment of a poet out of tune with his time. Milosz is a Polish patriot—in the notes, you hear about the Nazi liquidation of the Polish intelligentsia and the Russian massacre of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, but nothing about the Poles who collaborated in the Holocaust (he often excuses Poland as a special case).
Milosz has been an émigré so long he has outlived the country he left and become an immutable part of its past. Poets love to write treatises about poetry, but Milosz can offer nothing like the sophistication (or sophistry) of Horace or Pope—the philosophy buried in his notes is innocent guff (it’s one thing for Keats to write “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” another for Milosz to opine—there’s a lot of opining here—that poetry “is wrested from the world not by negating the things of the world, but by respecting them more than we respect aesthetic values. That is the condition for creating valid beauty”). He leaps into platitudes as into a warm pool—to write poetry, we’re told, you need a) a classical education, and b) forests and streams. A pedestrian ode against City and Society, far too much like the propaganda he scorns, might have been written by a troop of young Communists.
Reviewing translations is a mug’s game. If you don’t know the original tongue, the translator is too often a used-car salesman, offering goods gleaming on the surface but dodgy underneath—you have to take the poetry on trust. Milosz has had the aid of his long-time translator, the gifted Robert Hass, whose love of image and ease with idiom are reflected in a poem whose lines seem natural in their borrowed tongue. Hass has used a relaxed, even indolent pentameter to adopt the strict unrhymed syllabics of the original. In A Treatise on Poetry, Milosz and Hass have made what is so difficult, a beautiful poem in English that wasn’t written in English.
Notes
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William Logan will have a volume of early selected poems out in the spring
more from this author
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 20 December 2001, on page 77
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