'The impossible language’

“Translation can’t be done; it’s the impossible language,” said poet W.S. Merwin in an interview in the February 2015 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle. Merwin, who has translated many volumes of poetry himself, went on quote Auden on translating from a language you don’t know. “This is the best way of doing it, because if you know the original, it just confuses you,” he said. “It’s much better to have it at several removes.”

I thought about that when a Brazilian friend who’s a sculptor asked for my help translating a poem she wrote in Portuguese. “As pedras falam,” it begins, and then recounts what stones say, presumably to the sculptor. She provided a literal translation, which didn’t say who the stones were speaking to. My translation (or maybe I should say my adaptation) put my friend in the poem and added some details to the stones’ speech:

The Stones
by Elizabeth Freire, adapted by Sally Zakariya

The stones speak to the sculptor, each
in its own language.
Listening, she understands.

The stones choose their own shape and size,
their own destiny.
The granite chooses to be a monolith,
standing strong.
The soapstone chooses to be carved,
transformed.
The marble chooses to flaunt its
rosy color.

To decipher the stones’ desires is to bring
out what has been in them since
the world was new.

The sculptor’s work is hard, but she is patient.
She takes time to know the stones.
She gives them time to reveal themselves.

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A Little Horn Tooting

A few of my poems have been published recently:

• “What It’s Like When You Escape,” Lunch Ticket, Winter/Spring 2015. Try to ignore the photo of the author …
• “The End of the Day,” ELJ Black Orchid Designs (broadside), 2014. This one was written in response to a photograph supplied by the publisher.
• “U.S.S. Jeannette,” “Home Improvement,” and “Maine Ghosts, 1952,” Broadkill Review, Nov/Dec 2014.
• “Why We Live with Cats,” Purrfect Poetry, Lost Tower Publications, 2014. An anthology about, well, cats.
• “May Meteor Shower,” Emerge Literary Journal, Issue 9: 2014

And watch for one more: “Mackerel Sky,” The Northern Virginia Review, vol. 29, spring 2015, forthcoming.

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Protest Poetry II

A little while ago I quoted NPR critic Juan Vidal’s call for protest poetry. “We need our poets now more than ever,” he said. Canadian poet Kevin Taylor, author of Between Music and Dance, stepped up to the plate and sent us this reminiscence:

This poem was written 15 or 20 years ago. At that time Vancouver was passing bylaws to restrict street artists, an oppressive move. Today there are few buskers left, many were forced to beg instead. I took this poem down to the art gallery, to the old courthouse steps, where a protest rally had formed, and I read it with a bullhorn in hand.—Kevin Taylor

Members of the Jury—

It was a drive-by versing
A poem invasion
An act of irresponsible aesthetics
Unmitigated form and passion
Premeditated meter
Alliteration
Aggravated by both rhythm
And rhyme

It was a drive-by vision
A prose inversion
A wilding of fact and fantasy

By all accounts
A Declaration of Words

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In and Out

My friend Jacqueline Jules and I meet each month at a friendly bagel shop to read and critique each other’s poems. I’ve noticed that frequently, all our poems really need is judicious pruning—deleting those extra words (and even lines) that elaborate rather than illuminate. Sometimes, too, the critique boils down to a simpler, more direct way to say something.

This month, after our meeting, I got to thinking that the word “while” in one of Jacqueline’s poems seemed if not unnecessary at least a bit soft, so I emailed her to that effect. She emailed back, “I took the ‘while’ out and put it back in several times this morning. I am happy to have the incentive to take it out again.”

All of which leads me to one of my very favorite poetry quotes. It’s from the inimitable Oscar Wilde: “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”

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Are You a Walt or an Emily?

A class I’m taking is reading Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, two very different 19th-century American poets who, each in his own way, transformed American poetry—Dickinson with her reclusive, particularist rhymed verse, and Whitman with his loose, expansive, universalist lines. Many contemporary American poets fall into one camp or the other, the lyric or the bardic. Am I an Emily or a Walt? More likely neither, but here, for the sake of argument, is a little poem of mine inspired by Emily’s line “In the name of the bee.”

Why I Do Not Trim My Mint

In the herb garden the mint slants
north, each stalk its own compass needle

Finding their way, three bees hover over
the blossoms, drawn by the promise of pollen

Their busy buzz lulls me as I laze
here on the porch, dreaming of blooms

and of the world bees make possible
for us, a world of fields and fruitfulness

Cut the mint before it flowers, they say
but where would these three forage then?

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Galway Kinnell, 1927-2014

With the death of Galway Kinnell in late October, America lost one of its premier poets. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, among other distinctions, Kinnell blended the political and the philosophical in his work, which was often compared to that of Walt Whitman. In a 1985 speech, he recalled having been a silent child who felt isolated from others. “Gradually I felt that if I was ever going to have a happy life,” he said, “it was going to have to do with poetry.” That kind of happiness can be a quietly private thing, as suggested by the closing lines from Kinnell’s 2006 poem “Why Regret?”

Doesn’t it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

For more on Kinnell’s life and work, visit the Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets.

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