Boundless Energy: My flash review of the new poetry collection My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree by Yi Lei, translated by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi (Graywolf Press, 2020).
Category Archives: Reviews
Translating Emily Dickinson
Last week, the University of Massachusetts Translation Center and the Emily Dickinson Museum hosted an online event featuring two translators who have taken on the difficult but rewarding task of translating Emily Dickinson into their native languages: Adalberto Müller and Marcel Riera i Bou. Müller, an associate professor of literary theory at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro, has recently finished translating Dickinson’s collected poems into Portuguese (see links, below). Riera, a poet and editor, has translated a comprehensive anthology of Dickinson’s work into Catalan. It was a fascinating discussion. Here are some highlights from each speaker’s remarks about translating this unique American voice.
Adalberto Müller
It took 7 years to translate Dickinson’s complete work into Portuguese. Müller got into the habit of translating one to two poems a day. Now that he’s done, he said he “doesn’t know what to do every morning.” He was completely drawn into her poetry, joined the Emily Dickinson International Society, and visited Dickinson’s home museum in Amherst, Massachusetts. He found it an extraordinary experience to be in the presence of her everyday objects: “In the museum, we can feel the proximity of her life in her garden, her clothes, her room… This is so important for a translator.” For Müller, it is crucial for a translator to know not only the text, but the context.
“Poetry is what happens between sound and meaning.” Müller emphasized that it was very important to capture the sound as well as the meaning of the original; this is a subtle balancing act. To not honor Dickinson’s play with sound and rhyme would be “to kill the poem.”
Dive deep into the work. To translate a classic, one must become thoroughly familiar with it, including the many translations that have come before. This familiarity can only enrich a new translation. As part of his process, Müller read all the great previous translations of Dickinson, not only in the target Portuguese, but in German, Russian, and Spanish. The translator must ask the question, “how can I do the translation now, considering the translations that came before?”
Dickinson is an important poet for this moment. Müller reminds us that she “lived in a moment of great divide in America,” and that part of her project was to “break down walls and barriers.” Despite her circumstances, Dickinson had a cosmopolitan worldview, somewhat unusual for her place and time. She was aware of issues taking place abroad, and referenced other countries and locales in her work. Importantly, Dickinson was a founder of modern poetry, and deserves this recognition. Müller considers this a social justice issue: “It is more important to translate female poets right now.”
Marcel Riera i Bou
Gaining a deeper understanding. Riera first encountered Dickinson’s poetry in English as a reader whose interest was piqued. Wanting to gain a deeper understanding of the poems he was reading, he made copious annotations in the margins, which eventually led to the translation of entire poems. He called translating Dickinson into Catalan “the most difficult thing I have ever done.”
Interest grows. After he had prepared a number of translations of Dickinson’s work, Riera approached an editor to discuss publication. The editor was dismissive, believing there would be no market for such a volume, miscategorizing Dickinson as “old-fashioned and elitist.” Eventually, however, Riera convinced the editor to publish a soft-cover collection of about fifty translated poems. This generated enough interest that the editor agreed to put out another volume, this time of a hundred poems (“but still soft-cover”). After that, a volume of two hundred poems was authorized — “and in hard-cover,” Riera chuckled.
Just look at the difference. Riera spoke about some specific challenges a Dickinson translator faces. “I can never manage to make things as brief, in a Latinate language, as Dickinson does in English.” Riera put a Dickinson poem up on the screen (“My life closed twice before its close”), a perfect example of how Dickinson says so much in so few words. He read his translation aloud, which was displayed beside the original. The visual difference alone was striking, the lines in Catalan often twice as long.
About those dashes—. Other challenges for the translator are Dickinson’s sometimes idiosyncratic syntax, punctuation, and grammar, which include extreme compression and ellipsis. Indeed, the act of translating lays bare the very bones of a poem’s being. Riera credits this process with sharpening his own writing skills.
Dickinson in Translation: Amherst Arts Night Remote, 11/5/20
Presented by the Translation Center of UMass Amherst and The Emily Dickinson Museum
Featured speakers: Adalberto Müller and Marcel Riera i Bou
Links
Event details
Müller’s volume of translations
Riera’s volume of translations
“My life closed twice before its close” by Emily Dickinson
Poetry Reading Review: Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith via Zoom, sponsored by the Smith College Boutelle-Day Poetry Center on 10/21/20
How wonderful to have Tracy K. Smith read her poems in your living room. While in-person poetry readings are special — the poet projecting from podium or stage, the feeling of community with fellow audience members, the excitement of shared experience — there was a real intimacy to this online reading which was captivating.
Smith kept her gaze outward toward the listener as she read, something not always possible when reading pages from a podium at an in-person event. And despite the digital distance between the poet and audience, she easily established a shared space.
Smith’s selection focused on recent pieces, several of which are found poems (see links below). “I make use of what’s around me,” Smith explained, “what startles, illuminates, and consoles me.” Working with historical texts, the poet had an epiphany “that history, which I felt was behind us and represented closure, suddenly felt undone, in progress, and very, very near.” A deeper examination of our past, with fresh eyes and insight, can shed light on our present predicament. Hers is a process of uncovering the text beneath the text, by paying close attention and hearing other, hidden voices.
For example, while she worked with the Declaration of Independence to create the erasure poem “Declaration,” Smith said the historical text “presented facets of itself I hadn’t recognized before.” The resulting poem, stitched together from phrases several hundred years old, speaks to today’s continuing struggle for Black lives and equal justice under the law. Smith then read “The Greatest Personal Privation,” a found poem mined from the family papers of Charles Colcock Jones, a mid-19th century slaveowner and minister. Out of letters composed a century and a half ago that exhibit an acceptance and promotion of enslavement comes something new, spoken in the voice of a slave.
Smith read several other found poems, the starting points of which were an essay by Woodrow Wilson that celebrated Robert E. Lee and the correspondence of Helen Plain, president of The United Daughters of the Confederacy and Klan sympathizer. The cumulative effect of the found poems was indeed a startling sense of history’s nearness and all its unfinished business.
Smith then read “Rapture.” An after-image of the last lines, which depict a woman lifted up and carried away, stays with me. In “The Wave After Wave is One Wave Never Tiring,” the poet wonders whether movements for justice ever end, or are instead crucial parts of one long, arduous movement.
She read a new poem inspired by a recent news article about the mysterious elephant die-off in Botswana, titled “The Elephant in the Poem.” There are silences written into the poem, missed beats that stand in not only for the noun “elephant,” but the elephants’ very vanishing.
Lastly, Smith read a few selections from her forthcoming volume of translations of Chinese poet Yi Lei, My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree. A line from the translated poem “Black Hair” stood out: The story of black hair is my story. Smith explained that the image of black hair in Yi Lei’s poem has to do with youth, sensuality, and aging. But the translator’s voice is unmistakably there, too, coming from beneath the text, or perhaps even nearer, in chorus with it. Pay attention to the multitude of voices around you, Tracy K. Smith encourages. Train your ear to pick up hidden frequencies. Turn up the volume.
Links to poems and books from this reading:
“The Greatest Personal Privation”
“Rapture” & “The Wave After Wave is One Wave Never Tiring”
About the poet Yi Lei, with 3 poems translated by Tracy K. Smith
Poetry Reading Review: Thomas Lux
I went to see Thomas Lux read the other night at Smith College. I hadn’t read much Lux before, so I didn’t know what to expect. I figured it’s the last night of summer and the chill of fall is in the air, so why not go to a poetry reading? It was a whim, so I was surprised to discover a voice I’m eager to explore and learn from. I learned something, too, about how poems actually unfold as they’re being spoken—I experienced them in a physical, concrete way I seldom do at readings. It was enough to keep my hands warm in the chilly air on the walk across campus back to the car.
It had something to do with the way Lux read. He was focused deeply on the poems, the experience of them. I witnessed a poet not reciting poems, but living them. They had flesh and breath. He read them slowly and naturally, with a certain amount of emphasis for flavor, but without affectation. He held the book with his right hand, his left hand often moving freely with the sound and action of the poems. It gave the poems body. Sometimes by accident he’d knock the microphone—no matter, it only underscored how ridiculous and unnecessary microphones are.
Lux read exclusively from his forthcoming (2016) collection, To the Left of Time, which contains poems that are mostly odes, he said. In the poems there was hay dust flying, and all the little cuts that get your arms when you’re haying and which sting suddenly hours later when washing up. There were swords settling at the bottom of river beds and kids venturing out onto untested ice. There were those pigeon-holing high school aptitude tests and the summer job painting fire hydrants red, the summer everyone asked about your bloodstained clothes. What struck me is that Lux is in perfect control–of voice and pacing, syntax and image. There’s nothing extraneous, nothing to distract. Every word lands just right. A spare directness is elegantly braided with more complex mysteries.
I’m looking forward to the new collection, and I look forward to becoming better acquainted with Lux’s oeuvre. Here’s a brief introduction to Lux and his work. Here’s a poem he read at Smith from the forthcoming book: “Ode to the Unbroken World, Which Is Coming.” And here’s “Empty Pitchforks” from New and Selected Poems 1975-1995.
Karina Borowicz 