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After Dante: Poets in Purgatory edited by Nick Havely & Bernard O’Donoghue (Arc Publications)

Posted on April 12, 2024 by tearsinthefence
After Dante: Poets in Purgatory edited by Nick Havely & Bernard O’Donoghue (Arc Publications)

It’s Easter Sunday in the year 1300. As the middle section of The Divine Comedy begins, Dante and Virgil have made the long climb back out of Hell and find themselves on an antipodean mountain island. To the horizon and beyond is undiscovered ocean, while above, the mountain towers literally into Heaven. And the ascent of this mountain – well, it’s Purgatory.   

Here, those sinners who have repented must expiate their transgressions in appropriate ways – heavy loads for the proud, starvation for the gluttons, burning fires for the lustful. On his pilgrimage through each vertiginous echelon, Dante becomes scared, amazed, tired, shocked and harried. He’s the focus of curiosity by the dead souls because he’s clearly still alive. He’s dependent on his guide, who is often lost himself. But the path, he’s told, will slowly get kinder and easier until he reaches the Earthly Paradise, where Beatrice awaits…

This edition of the Purgatorio was timed (back in 2021) to coincide with the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death. In a crowded competing field, its novel feature is that its thirty-three cantos are allocated to seventeen different poets, sixteen of them contemporary (plus Shelley). A couple have translated Dante more widely, and their contributions act also as samplers; many well-known recent translators aren’t included, but the team selection is nonetheless tempting. Some use words and phrases from Scots, Jamaican English, and various dialects of street-talk – fittingly, given Dante’s commitment to the vernacular. Free verse, blank verse and half-rhyme get variously deployed. Some put in rhymes here and there to remind the reader of the original scheme. Nearly all keep some sense of the symbolic three-line stanza. A.E. Stallings takes the most difficult route formally: her strictly rhymed tetrameter terze rime condense Dante’s lines with astonishing élan. Patrick Worsnip also excels at this testing formalism in witty pentameters:

           ‘If you cannot remember what you’ve done
               she answered with a smile, ‘then recollect:
               today you drank Lethe’s oblivion.’

Mary Jo Bang uses literary anachronism (‘beautiful pea-green boat’; ‘shuffled off your mortal coil’) and fluctuating registers:

           If I’d kept high-tailing it toward La Mire
           instead of stopping off at Oriago, I’d still be back
           where one breathes and the heart brags I am

Contrary to Eliot’s claims, John Kinsella makes Dante a difficult read:

                                […] – the arrow in triplicate
           is the spatiality of Beatrice’s aeronautics.

            And caught in the gender binary with the constellate
            Adamic, they oscillate about the tree 

while Steve Ellis adopts a concise, plainer style:

             My master and I pressed on upwards,
             just the two of us, and I was thinking
             how I might profit from his words;

The book also contains notes to each canto, an introduction focusing on the poem’s influence on English-language writers from Chaucer to Heaney and, at the back, translations of work by some of the poets referred to in the main text. These are especially welcome in a section of the Comedy that has Dante meeting or talking about many Italian and Provençal poets lesser known to most of us than the Classical ones he came across – because they were pagans – in Hell. 

Despite this range of assistance, I did wonder if the book’s expansive mix of styles and voices might be an additional hurdle for any Dante beginners already struggling with an exogenous mindset and the unabating allusions to Biblical, Classical and Medieval literature, history and philosophy. But those more battle-scarred readers, freer to attend to the language, will certainly be beguiled (or impressed, or enjoyably incited) into comparing approaches, making judgements and getting new perspectives on, let’s re-echo it, one of the world’s most inexhaustible poems.

Guy Russell 12th April 2024

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Aeneid Books VI -XII by Virgil translated by David Hadbawnik (Shearsman Books)

Posted on November 22, 2022 by tearsinthefence
Aeneid Books VI -XII by Virgil translated by David Hadbawnik (Shearsman Books)

To Virgil, the second half of his epic of Roman imperial destiny and its human cost was the maius opus (‘greater work’). The long voyaging from fallen Troy is over. Aeneas has accepted his ineluctabile fatum, arrived in an Italy already thickly settled with both migrated and autochthonous peoples, and wants land to settle and found his city. There are moments of respite: feasting, aetiological storytelling, divine portents and the extended ekphrasis of Aeneas’ God-made shield. But mostly it’s war: siege, raid, council, treaty, mass funerals and constant one-on-one combat. 

The emotional power of this, the Aeneid’s Iliadic half, accumulates iteratively. The relentless and grisly scenes in which, over and over, a character is given a mini-biog only to ‘vomit thick gore’ or have ‘his face […] covered in hot brains’ a few lines later, becomes sickening as well as pitiable. The pity is reinforced by scenes of grieving loved ones wishing for death themselves, even while each killing inspires yet more vengeful bloodbaths. The poem famously ends with a maddened Aeneas’ refusal of mercy, and its last image of battlefield murder sends us back to the real world without consolation or excuse. 

This interesting new translation gives us an Aeneid that’s Americanized (‘mom’, ‘my ass’, ‘pledge allegiance to the flag’, &c.), film-friendly (‘Zoom in on Lavinia’), humorously anachronistic, hyper-dramatized (‘“Drop what you’re doing!” screams Vulcan.’) and considerably abridged. It bypasses several whole scenes and a massive chunk of Book VII, besides countless smaller details. Many battlefield deaths, notably, become mere name-lists, soft-pedalling the horror that’s the flipside of the epic concept of glory. 

The style is richly and sometimes brilliantly idiomatic. ‘Cum tandem tempore capto/ […] Arruns’ (lit: ‘when finally, having seized the moment, Arruns…’), for instance, becomes ‘This is the break Arruns has been waiting for.’ Indents, spacing and typography stand in for the elaborate soundplay, caesurae and positional emphases of the Latin hexameters:

          When he thinks        the enemy’s
                       close enough PALLAS
                                     moves first     hoping
                        for anything that might            improve
                        the odds […]

The word virtus (bravery, manliness) gets left untranslated, along with occasional other source terms, either to flag significance or for atmospherics. Classical buffs might miss the gratifications of Roman oratory: the most frequent rhetorical device here is cacamphaton (‘What the/   actual/    fuck,’ says Juno). ‘Tough’ is the favourite translation word – the warrior queen Camilla, for instance, is a ‘tough babe’.  

The colloquial parlance co-exists nonetheless with a traditional high-flown register (‘Why/ does fate urge you to unknown war’ &c.), which generates abrupt tonal changes. When Tarchon addresses his men: ‘Now O chosen guys’, the registral discord reaches parodic levels, and when we’re told Evander ‘spews forth’ his poignant farewell to his son, and then ‘blacks out’, it’s patently self-conscious flippancy rather than tonal lapse. This translator, recasting the Aeneid as part-comedy, part-Hollywood blockbuster, is propounding that we (or he) can’t take heroic epic seriously nowadays, and is willing to burlesque the horror and pity in order to subvert its martial vanities, while transposing it to genres more accessible to a contemporary audience. It’s undoubtedly a valid approach. The result feels like it was fun to write, is certainly more fun to read than twenty po-faced translations, and adds an innovative new ribbon to the rich braid of Virgilian studies. Just maybe don’t make it the only Aeneid you read.

Guy Russell 22nd November 2022

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Cargo of Limbs by Martyn Crucefix Introduction by Choman Hardi & photographed by Amel Alzakout (Hercules Editions)

Posted on March 24, 2020 by tearsinthefence
Cargo of Limbs by Martyn Crucefix Introduction by Choman Hardi & photographed by Amel Alzakout (Hercules Editions)

As a continuation of my blog about the translations of Peter Huchel’s poetry I want now to draw attention to a very different piece of translation work by Martyn Crucefix as he transports lines from Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid in order to draw together associations between the Trojan hero’s journey to the land of the Dead and the plight of refugees seeking escape from war-torn countries such as Syria.
In the Afterword Crucefix tells of listening on his headphones to Ian McKellen’s reading from Seamus Heaney’s translation of Book VI and says

‘The timing is crucial. I’m listening to these powerful words in March 2016 and, rather than the banks of the Acheron and the spirits of the dead, they conjure up the distant Mediterranean coastline I’m seeing every day on my TV screen: desperate people fleeing their war-torn countries.’

Crucefix then goes on to bring our focus to bear upon the drowned corpse of Alan Kurdi found on a beach near Bodrum, Turkey:

‘In the summer of 2015, this three-year old Syrian boy of Kurdish origins and his family had fled the war engulfing Syria. They hoped to join relatives in the safety of Canada and were part of the historic movement of refugees from the Middle East to Europe at that time. In the early hours of September 2nd, the family crowded onto a small inflatable boat on a Turkish beach. After only a few minutes, the dinghy capsized. Alan, his older brother, Ghalib, and his mother, Rihanna, were all drowned. They joined more than 3,600 other refugees who died in the eastern Mediterranean that year.’

As the train sped across the southern counties and the fields of England ‘swept past’ Crucefix found that ‘Virgil’s poem continued to evoke the journeys of refugees such as the Kurdi family’.

In Book VI of Aeneid Virgil pleads with the Gods to lend him strength so that he can report back what he witnesses and this in turn is what leads Crucefix to use the narrative voice of a witnessing photojournalist in Cargo of Limbs. The narrator tries to bring into perspective a sense of ‘the blue-black seethe / of the Mediterranean / the longed-for the far-off / those sun-lit harbours / beyond risky nights / a body washed to the beach –’ In Martyn Crucefix’s lines Charon, the boatman ferrying the souls of the dead, is seen as a people smuggler

‘standing rich in rags
right hand out-stretched
for help as well as coin
the shadows of a beard
on his chin have not seen
a blunt razor in days’

The words ‘rich in rags’ seem to offer an image of one of the perks traditionally associated with a public executioner: the acquisition of artefacts belonging to those who are about to lose their lives. The refugees clamour to be taken aboard as they ‘plead and proffer / what little they possess’ and ‘grab his hand’ as though to seek support from the concerned ferryman. With a seeming concern for the safety of his cargo this Charon assists his passengers as they enter into the ‘dinghy’s wet mouth / the oil-stinking holds’

‘where shuttered waters
pool and the need to bale

this blue-black water
slapping on all sides
slaps across the way ahead’

In his deeply moving and disturbing account of such a present-day reality Crucefix is aware that he may run a risk of that tension between a focus upon suffering and its exploitation. He tells us of Christopher Büchel’s ‘rusty hull of a fishing boat’ that ‘was installed’ at the Venice Biennale in June 2019:

‘The vessel had foundered off the Italian island of Lampedusa in April 2015 with 700 refugees aboard. Only 28 survived. When the Italian authorities recovered the vessel in 2016 there were 300 bodies trapped inside. Büchel called his work Barca Nostra (Our Boat) and there is little doubting his (and the Biennale’s) good intentions to raise public awareness of the plight of refugees.’

Commenting upon Büchel’s work an article in The Observer suggested that the exhibition diminished, even exploited, the suffering of those who died ‘losing any sense of political denunciation, transforming it into a piece [of art] in which provocation prevails over the goal of sensitising the viewer’s mind.’ As a response to this it might be of some purpose to think carefully of the role of the translator and in his introduction to David Hadbawnik’s Aeneid Books I-VI (Shearsman Books, 2015, reviewed on this blog soon after it came out) Chris Piuma referred to translation as ‘a carrying across, from one language to another, from one culture to another, from one time and place to another.’ Translation is itself a crossing of borders, a transforming of what is there to be registered. Piuma went on to suggest that other cultures use other metaphors to talk about translation, such as ‘turning’ and he introduced Hadbawnik’s work in these terms:

‘There are enough other translations of this poem for the nervous. There is something in the original text that can only be reached by turning it. Turn the syntax of a phrase, turn the layout of a line, turn up or down the register of a speech. Turn some scenes into images…and let the reader turn to the image, to rest and reconsider.’

In Hadbawnik’s version the crowding of those refugees seeking a place on Charon’s boat is seen ‘like foliage swept up in the autumn wind’ or ‘sea birds flocking the land in winter chill.’ In Dryden’s version from 1697 the lines were brought across the border from Latin to English in a way that is still echoed in our more modern versions:

‘Thick as the Leaves in Autumn strow the Woods:
Or Fowls, by Winter forc’d, forsake the Floods,
And wing their hasty flight to happier Lands:
Such, and so thick, the shiv’ring Army stands:
And press for passage with extended hands.’

In the deeply moving and angry tones of Martyn Crucefix’s Cargo of Limbs he can raise a camera to carry us, as readers, across a border into a world of which we should be aware.

Ian Brinton 24th March 2020

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Virgil, Aeneid Books I-VI Translated by David Hadbawnik Illustrations by Carrie Kaser Shearsman Books

Posted on October 15, 2015 by tearsinthefence
Virgil, Aeneid Books I-VI Translated by David Hadbawnik Illustrations by Carrie Kaser Shearsman Books

When Christopher Logue published his 20 Poems based on Pablo Neruda’s Los Cantos d’Amores in 1958 he added a note at the end to say ‘these are not translations strictly speaking, but adaptations, and several of the poems are entirely new, although taking their theme from the original Neruda poem’. One year later Donald Carne-Ross suggested that Logue might contribute to a new version of Homer’s Iliad which he was about to commission for the B.B.C. When Jonathan Cape issued an edition of Logue’s Homeric work in 1981, titled War Music, the poet wrote an introduction which gave some background to the whole enterprise:

‘As the work progressed beyond its original limitation I paid less attention to my guides. Carne-Ross would provide me with a literal translation that retained the Greek word order; I would concoct a storyline based on its main incident; and then, knowing the gist of what this or that character said, would try to make their voices come alive and to keep the action on the move.’

Nine years before Logue’s work on Homer got going the magazine Poetry New York, A Magazine of Verse and Criticism, published a piece of prose, now become very famous indeed, which included the statement:

‘…get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen.’

It is surely no mere coincidence that the blurb on the back of this vibrant and page-turning Virgil should say ‘These translations are not only full of light, but also speed…’ (Joe Milutis, Jacket 2)

This book is terrific! Once start the adventure as ‘Clouds snatch sun from the sky’ and you will be hooked.

Example

As the serpents from Tenedos rear up to destroy Laocoön and his sons:

‘New horrors awaited us—Laocoön,
priest of Apollo, happened
to be leading a bull to the altar
when two snakes shot
from the sea (awful to think about)
half-in
half-out of the water, blood-red scales
rising ghastly above the waves
tails thrashing around in the foam.
There was a crash as they made land
eyes burning with blood and fire
hissing tongues hanging from open mouths—
we lit out at the sight of them.’

The dramatic juxtaposition of the leisurely manner in which the priest is preparing a bull for slaughter and the explosive ‘shot’; the past tense that becomes present participle, ‘rising’, ‘thrashing’, ‘hissing’; the merging of past and present in the panic to escape as ‘we lit out…’. This version of the well-known narrative comes rearing off the page.

The violence of the destruction of Troy is shocking in a visceral manner as the Trojans drag the wooden horse within the walls:

‘So we split the walls
and opened the city up wide….
Meanwhile the world turned and night
rushed in—covering with darkness
the tricks of the Greeks—and all through Troy
sleep took tired souls.’

Carrie Kaser’s illustration to this moment combines a haunting quality of movement with an eerie sense of farewell. It is quite typical of the 23 illustrations which appear at regular intervals throughout the text.
The Cantos of Ezra Pound provide a lurking presence behind Hadbawnik’s translation: ‘Canto IV’s ‘Palace in smoky light’ becomes ‘left Troy smoking in ruins’ and ‘Canto I’ is referred to more directly in the second section of Book III, ‘Wandering’, gives us ‘set keel to breakers / once more’.

This is the most lively piece of translation from Latin that I have come across in a long while and it certainly stands up well by comparison with Logue’s Greek epic.

Ian Brinton, 15th October 2015

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