Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot? - the faithful translation of Edward FitzGerald

The only task FitzGerald finished and published in his lifetime was his marvellous rendering of the Rubaiyat of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam, with whom he felt a curiously close affinity across a distance of eight centuries.  FitzGerald described the endless hours he spent translating this poem of two hundred and twenty-four lines as a colloquy with the dead man and an attempt to bring us tidings of him.  (W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, Ch. 8)

W. S. Merwin became a translator so he could become a poet.  He was following Ezra Pound’s advice: “[Pound] spoke of the value of translation as a means of continually sharpening a writer’s awareness of the possibilities of his own language.”  Merwin insists that he keeps his own poems and his translations “more and more sharply separate,” but his phrasing simply emphasizes the truth that when I read Merwin’s Apollonaire I am reading some blend of the two, and that the proportion of the blend can vary greatly from translation to translation.  See the introduction to Selected Translations 1948-1968 for this and more.

Some people, I know, are deeply – I want to say shallowly, but let’s stay with deeply – bothered by this lack of certainty.  These people seldom read much poetry at all.  The enthusiast embrace the conundrum, makes the puzzling magic of translation part of the fun.

The most magical puzzler in English must be Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859 and on).  Or second most, after the King James Bible.  FitzGerald’s translation, whatever it’s qualities as such, is now an English poem, with its own descendants, it's own life.

Quatrain 36 (1859 version)

For in the Market-place, one Dusk of Day,
I watch'd the Potter thumping his wet Clay:
    And with its all obliterated Tongue
It murmur'd--"Gently, Brother, gently, pray!"

Fred’s Place has been examining The Rubáiyát quatrain by quatrain, including all of FitzGerald’s revisions.  I picked this stanza because that’s where Fred is right now, and because it features my favorite part of the poem.  The bowls, possibly the ones destined to contain all of the wine required by this oenophilic poem, begin to talk.  Bowls have lips, so they must have mouths, so they can talk (see quatrain 34).  Bowls are made of clay, men are made of clay, men can talk, so bowls can talk.  Poetry logic.

The bowls fall silent for a bit, but some come back to life in quatrain 59, the beginning of The Book of Pots.

And strange to tell, among that Earthen Lot,
Some could articulate, while others not:
    And suddenly one more impatient cried –
“Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?”

I want to adapt this.  Who is the Poem, pray, and who the Poet?  Whenever I come across an ordinary reader wondering about the fidelity of a translation – sometimes I am that reader – I try to remember The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, which is supremely faithful, faithful to the art of poetry.

Sebald’s claim, by the way, that FitzGerald only published a single “task” is untrue, a fiction.  FitzGerald’s loose translations of the plays of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, are excellent, alive and performable.  They were most recently available as Eight Dramas of Calderón, University of Illinois Press, 2000.  The Rings of Saturn is a work of fiction.

Oh the autumn the autumn has been the death of summer - an Apollinaire poem

Autumn, Guillaume Apollinaire, from Alcools (1913)

A bow-legged peasant and his ox receding
Through the mist slowly through the mists of autumn
Which hides the shabby and sordid villages

And out there as he goes the peasant is singing
A song of love and infidelity
About a ring and a heart which someone is breaking

Oh the autumn the autumn has been the death of summer
In the mist there are two gray shapes receding

Another W. S. Merwin translation, p. 130 of Selected Translations 1948-1968.  I also just finished Roger Shattuck’s book, Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire (1948), which does not include this poem but is full of other original and amazing things.

Does this Apollonaire poem seem particularly original?  Observed scene followed by small revelation about the poet – that’s an old form.  How many T’ang Dynasty poets wrote how many variations of this form?  The French poem looks even more conventional, by which I mean, it rhymes:

Dans le brouillard s'en vont un paysan cagneux
Et son bœuf lentement dans le brouillard d'automne
Qui cache les hameaux pauvres et vergogneux

Et s'en allant là-bas le paysan chantonne
Une chanson d'amour et d'infidélité
Qui parle d'une bague et d'un cœur que l'on brise

Oh ! l'automne l'automne a fait mourir l'été
Dans le brouillard s'en vont deux silhouettes grises

Merwin only hints (-ing, -ing, -ing) at the French rhyme scheme (ABA BCD CD).  The sounds of the rhymes are wonderful, and it’s a shame to lose them.  The switch from the dark, round (-eux, -onne) to the bright, sharp (-é, -ise) vowels is pleasing.

Shattuck helpfully informs me that Apollinaire’s rhymes violate all sorts of rules of classical French prosody, which is a nightmarish tangle that I don’t pretend to understand.  He also identifies Apollinaire’s expungement of punctuation marks, even at the occasional expense of sense.

Apollinaire repeats “Dans le brouillard” in the first and last lines.  Merwin repeats “receding.”  He can’t repeat “brouillard / mist” because, curiously, he has rearranged the first two lines to emphasize the repetition – “Through the mist slowly through the mist of autumn.”  Odd.  But he is then able to keep the ox and the peasant together in the first line, more closely resembling the two silhouettes grises at the end.

I’m fussing around, ignoring what I really like.  Two things, the obvious ones.  First, the peasant’s song, which the reader can never quite hear, but which now has a tune, almost, and all because of the single concrete object, the ring.  That one small addition turns a generic song into the suggestion of a specific one.

And second, of course:  “Oh the autumn the autumn” etc.  Poor mournful poet.  What happened last summer?  He’ll never tell.  Or, he has already told all he can.

A resplendent and blessed dream from Juan Ramón Jimenez - Wait, wait; do not run

Selected Translations 1948-1968 is the fifth book of W. S. Merwin’s translations that I have read.  Spanish, French, Latin, and then this book, which contains translations from, well, everything.  Russian, German, Chinese, Quechuan, Welsh, Eskimo, etc.  Merwin does not know those languages.  If it makes one more comfortable, retitle the book Selected Adaptations or something like that.

Merwin does know Spanish, and most of what I have read are translations from Spanish – the medieval Poem of El Cid, the fifteenth century picaresque Lazarillo de Tormes, miscellaneous old ballads and romances.  Much of this can be found in one essential book, From the Spanish Morning (1985).  Merwin includes some substantial scraps in Selected Translations, too, along with some 20th century poets: Neruda, Borges, Lorca, the startling Nicanor Parra.

This one is by Juan Ramón Jimenez.  Won a Nobel Prize, don’t you know.  The poet, not necessarily this poem.  Merwin’s version, p. 78, is untitled.

I shall run through the shadow,
sleeping, sleeping, to see
if I can come where you are
who died, and I did not know.

Ah, what problems I have, right from the start.  Is the poet sleeping, or the shadow, or, given the repetition, both?  The echo of Psalm 23 in the first line becomes a full-fledged reference in the last.  Yes, that shadow may be of the valley of death, but this fellow is going to run, not walk.  Perhaps he fears evil.  Perhaps the Lord is not with him.

Wait, wait; do not run;
wait for me in the dead water
by the lily that the moon
makes out of the light; with the water
that flows from the infinite
into your white hand!

What confusion – has the voice shifted?  Is the “you” of the first stanza telling the “I” to wait, to not run?  Or is it the same speaker, calling to the fleeing “you”?  I have no idea.  I love how the moonlight on the water forms a lily.

                                 Wait;
I have one foot already through the black
mouth of the first nothing,
of the resplendent and blessed dream,
the bud of death flowering!

That’s it, the entire poem.  We must be back to the original speaker, if we ever left him.  The black mouth pulls us pack to the first line’s shadow.  Does the explicit mention of a dream reassure me that the poem is about a dream, the poet dreaming about a dead or lost lover?  The Gottfried Keller poem I looked at yesterday could also be a dream poem.  Two dreams about women in the “dead water.”

I would hardly want to pin the Jimenez poem to a single meaning.  The blessed dream is also a metaphor, an inversion of the meaning of death.  Maybe this is a poem about suicide.  Or childbirth – the missing woman is the poet’s mother.  Or she’s the Virgin Mary (the lily is suspicious).  Or the “I” is a woman, and the “you” a man.  And so on.

Can this all really be in this one poem, fourteen lines, eighty-some words?  I guess so.

Gottfried Keller, failed poet - It rises in my mind without end, without end

Gottfried Keller is the great Swiss fiction writer of the 19th century.  Last year, I read his enormous portrait of the failed artist as a young man, Green Henry (1854), perhaps the most Goethe-suffused fiction not written by Goethe that I have ever read.  I think I am just repeating something I wrote last month, but who read it carefully enough to remember?  A new, late New Year’s Resolution: more repetition.  More repetition.  Where was I?

Keller was a poet before he was a novelist.  Here’s the beginning of an untitled* poem of his:

Every wing in the world had fallen.
The white snow lay still, glittering.
No cloud hung in the stars’ pavilion.
No wave hammered the hard lake.

This is just stillness, yes, the winter stillness after a heavy snow.  Is there a contrast between the softness of the first couple of lines and the hardness of the last one?

The lake’s tree came up out of the depths
Till its top froze in the ice.
The lake spirit climbed up the branches
And looked hard through the green ice, upwards.

The poem has taken a strange turn.  That first stanza was generically descriptive, of a mood more than a place.  This is something different.  The point of view has been thrown off, hasn’t it?  How does the observer of the still lake see the spirit in the branches?  Keller has thought of that.

I stood on the thin glass there
That divided the black depths from me;
I saw, limb by limb, her beauty
Pressed close under my feet.

Why, I wonder, is the poet out on the ice?  Was he actively seeking the lake spirit?  We’ve had one color per stanza: white, green, black.

Through muffled sobbing her hands
Played over the hard lid.
I have not forgotten that lightless face;
It rises in my mind without end, without end.

Keller switched to the prose for which he is primarily known after failing, so he thought, as a painter and as a poet.  This is the only poem of Keller’s that I have read.  The greenish spirit, entangled in the underwater branches, trying to escape through the ice, or draw the poet to her, or whatever she is doing, the face rising through the water, and then through the poet’s memory – what failure.

The translation is by W. S. Merwin, and is on page 148 of Selected Translations 1948-1968 (1975).

* Untitled by Merwin!  Keller's title is "Winternacht," "Winter Night."