Some of what follows may be repetition, but a good thing
bears repeating, especially in an age when so much bad stuff is prevailing. So
what I am discussing and explicating are touchstones and consolations, as far
as anything can console and encourage.
Though I consider Guillaume Apollinaire and Jacques Prevert
much greater poets, it is one stanza by Louis Aragon that travels with me, and
I quote it here, perhaps not entirely correctly, from memory—I am not a very
good memorizer.
Mon amour, j’etais dans tes bras.
Au dehors quelqun murmura
Une vieille chanson de France.
Mon mal enfin s’est reconnu
Et son refrain, comme d’un pied nu,
Troubla l’eau verte du silence.
This was written during the Occupation, when people tried to
inure themselves against terrible
times, as presumably did the very leftist and quasi-surrealist Aragon, when
what this poem says presumably occurred. I translate:
My love, I was in your arms,/ When outside someone murmured/
An old song of France./ My hurt at last recognized itself,/ And its refrain, as
with a bare foot,/ Troubled the green water of silence.
What, I wonder, was that old song that had such a great,
shaming and redeeming impact on the surrounding silence? The recognition it
provokes—that one cannot accept even unspoken Collaboration with the
Nazis—stirs up dormant patriotism and Resistance. The allusion, I take it, is
to kids on the border of a lake dangling their feet in the water in carefree
leisure. But what is that “green” doing there? I assume that it refers to the
treasonous allure of resignation. Green can be the peaceable color of standing
water, eliciting inaction, however seductive.
But, this being poetry, there is also the matter of sound.
In the last line, the ou and a and au are dark sounds, with er and
e transitioning to the brightness
of u, i. en. and mute e forming a lure toward connivance. That last line is
sheer seduction, wrought by alluring music.
Speaking of music, English poetry offers magisterial means
for it. This is largely, but by no means solely, so because the poet has such
opportunities provided by there being so often a choice between a romance and
an anglo-saxon word, on the order of friendly and amicable, lengthy and long,
peaceful and pacific, happy and felicitous, murderer and assassin, verity and
truth, endanger and imperil, and so on and on. In my book “Paradigms Lost,” I
have a whole chapter on that subject, entitled “Sibling Rivalry.”
Even though my favorite poets in English are Robert Graves
and Richard Wilbur, let me reach back to a stanza by the melodious (or tuneful)
Swinburne. One concluding (or ending) quatrain of his runs, “And the best and
the worst of this is/ That neither is most to blame,/ If you have forgotten my
kisses/ And I have forgotten your name.”
This I find sublime. Take the wonderful rhyme “this is” and
“kisses.” That is a feminine. i.e., bisyllabic rhyme, in pleasing alternation
with the masculine, i.e., monosyllabic one, “blame” and “name.” It is good that
both sets use rather commonplace words, which still manage to be surprising in
context, without having to reach for less plain, more recherché, words to
create rhyme. This is what makes the artful device of rhyme come across as
perfectly natural.
And then we have the powerful idea of something being both
best and worst, both good and bad. That is no ordinary insight. Haven’t we all
gotten over lost loves, and yet this calming oblivion (or forgetfulness) makes
something basically sad livable with. It not only neutralizes our suffering, it
also exculpates the one who caused it. We are both equally guilty and innocent
in a world where there is no black and white, but rather a merciful (forgiving
or at least extenuating) gray. And how the words sing!
In German, one favorite bit of poetry comes from an obscure
poem written for Marthe Hennebert, a weeping young working-class girl whom
Rilke encountered in the street and proceeded to console by making her his
girlfriend. A final stanza runs like this:
Befriedigungen ungezaehlter Jahre
sind in der Luft, voll Blumen liegt dein Hut
und ein Geruch aus deinem reinen Haare
mischt sich mit Welt als waere alles gut.
Appeasements of innumerable years
are in the air, your hat lies full of flowers
and a smell from your pure hair
mingles with world as if all were well.
The scene is as in Seurat’s immortal painting, a Sunday
afternoon on the shore of the
Seine, with the poet and his new young mistress enjoying a respite, regardless
of other people with the same idea. It is all very idyllic, the flowers obviously
purchased as a rich bouquet, and laid on top of the divested hat, yet the scent
is coming not from them, but from the beloved’s pure hair. Somehow that
wonderfully clean and presumably opulent hair exudes an odor di femina (as
Italians would have it), something not shop-bought but, dare one say, naturally
erotic.
A terrific effect is achieved by that inner rhyme, “deinem
reinen”; not only does it intensify the purity of her hair and so flatter the
new mistress, it also speeds up the movement to that terrifying ending despite
all these wonders still unable to make the world better. That “as if” is quietly devastating.
But what about “the “appeasement of incalculable years”? A tribute, I suppose,
to la Grande Jatte,” that playground for so many folk to indulge themselves as
Sunday compensation for
working-class stiffs--no need to evoke the Sondheim musical.
By
locating te appeasement “in the air,” Rilke makes its charm truly ubiquitous,
as universal as can be, and yet ultimately not enough. Particularly poignant is
calling the world, which in German should be “die Welt,” merely “Welt,” something
more mysteriously permeating, as “World” is more cosmically overpowering than
an ordinary, known, cozy, everyday “the world.” And yet, with all these
inducements to happiness, to a dejeuner sur l’herbe almost, it is still only
that hapless quasi-world or threatening superworld, too little or too much. Or
“ the best and the worst”—and, as it were, no real picnic.
That is one of the great attributes of poetry, the ability
to say so much in so little, to which the apt rhyme-scheme also contributes:
the effective alternation of feminine and masculine rhymes, concluding with
that strong yet deceptive closer, “gut.”
All of this leads me to a powerful, to me saddening, proof
of the impossibility, or near so, of translating lyrical poetry, where so much depends on sound. A marvelous
poem by Hungary’s Baudelaire, the fountainhead of its modern poetry, Endre Ady,
has a great ending in “Testamentumot, szornyet, irni/ Es sirni, sirni, sirni,
sirni.” (Imagine accent marks on the second o and on the capital E, making
them, respectively, an English er
and an a as in lake). I have tried in vain to translate the poem into rhyming
verse; in prose, that ending translates “To write a testament, a dreadful
one,/And weep, weep, weep, weep.” The prime reason for the untranslatability of
this crushing distich is those four “sirni”s, comparable to Lear’s heartrending
four “never”s. In English, weep and cry are monosyllables, and those do not
resonate as horribly as a quadruple bisyllable, pronounced more or less like
“sheerni.” Four “weep”s, like four “cry”s, just don’t do the trick.
To be sure, sometimes a not so great poem can be effectively
translated; I have, if I dare say so, published a Serbian verse translation of
Kilmer’s “Trees” that works as well as the original.
In English, there are single lines of poetry that do the job
for me, notably Cummings’s “Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands”
that affects me even without the assist of Tennessee Williams’s famous
appropriation of it. And then there is, horribile dictu, Poe’s horrendous
“Quoth the raven Nevermore,” the latter owing its immortality through
persiflage. Note that the repeated vowel--e in Poe’s raven and Lear’s outcry,
like the i in Ady’s sob--add to the quotability, another poetic device that defies
translation. Observe the poetic iteration in device and defies.
Still and all, I tend to wonder why these particular
quotations come to me the way equally fine verses do not. Add that fact to the
mysteries of poetry. As is the force
of compression, say, in that great early English lyric (circa 1530),
which runs: “O Western wind, when
wilt thou blow,/ That the small rain down can rain?/ Christ that my love were
in my arms/ And I in my bed again?” Or, perhaps even earlier, the Scot William
Dunbar’s “Timor mortis conturbat me,” i.e., “The fear of death unsettles me.”
The penultimate and last quotation are less frequent
visitors. The former, because it does not apply to my condition; the latter,
because it applies all too much. But even as, in the mystery play, Good Deeds
accompanies Everyman to his demise, so do these quotations companion me through
life. They do not cure, but they do facilitate.
