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Once again, and for the second time, I must bore my readers and, I hope, annoy them by pointing out the version of "Un cuchillo en el norte" I posted is a rather literal translation by me. Here (and here's the boring and annoying part) is the Viking translation I referred to above, by Eric McHenry:
A Blade in the Northside Down there along Maldonado That today runs blind and hidden, Down there in the gray barrio That poor Carriego has sung and written, Beyond a door that is half open And looks upon the grapevine arbor, Where the long evenings listened to A lone guitar's delighted ardor, Will be a box, and at the bottom, With a rough luster that does not fade, Will sleep, among those things that time Has learned how to forget, a blade. It belonged to that Saverio Suárez, Better known as el Chileno, Who always proved himself the best In the election and casino. The little boys, who are the devil, Will look for it when they are not watched And try its metal in the yolk For places where the edge is notched. How many times it must have slipped Into a Christian's mortal breast And now it lies alone, neglected, And waiting for a desperate fist, Which is dust. Behind the glass That has been lent a golden hue By a yellow sun, through years and houses, Blade, I am beholding you. Believe me, I didn't enjoy this any more than you did. [This message has been edited by Christopher Mulrooney (edited February 18, 2001).] |
Does anyone like any of the translations in the
Collected I believe we're all referring to? It's the one that features Updike and Hollander and so on. Very few good ones, to my way of thinking, with Robert Fitzgerald leading the way in talent. Sorry, Tim, if I mixed up my pronouns in that strange post, but it was SIMPSON who was calling Borges "a foolish romantic." I can't help agreeing with you, though, about Simpson's own "verse" in the last twenty years or so--he's become what HE calls a writer in "open form." Wish Dana and Mike had come up with someone else last year at W. Chest. So the Sense of the Board likes Borges, eh? GOOD ! |
Seems we are musing here on translation, at least as much as mastery, and it was illuminating to have the three versions of Borges in close proximity. The Mezey-Barnes piece is splendid, though with the more literal Mulrooney translation nearby, it seems as much a recreation as a translation. Are the Mezey-Barnes tranlations of Borges poetry coming out in book or magazine anytime soon. They seem a gift to the English language.
And isn't the influence of the ballad form on many of the best modern poets--Hardy, Yeats, Auden, Frost--too often soft-pedalled or ignored? I want to put in a good word for non-rhyming, even non metrical, translations. Edward Snow is my favorite English version of Rilke, out of the many. By closer to a mile than a whisker. Finally, though I wouldn't trade all of Simpson for one story or poem of Borges, there does seem something compensatory going on in the literary love of the macho. Call it the Pulp Fiction Syndrome, or Mishimaitis. An differing view of "courage" from Jack Gilbert, who reminds me, metrically and in some ways otherwize, of Andrew Hudgins (Of course Gilbert precedes Hudgins, and often writes in an irregular six beat line, rather than Hudgins' four beat): THE ABNORMAL IS NOT COURAGE The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers. A magnatude of beauty that allows me no peace. And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question the bravery. Say it is not courage. Call it a passion. Would say courage isn't that. Not at it's best. It was impossible, and with form. They rode in sunlight. Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal. Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches. The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment. It is too near the whore's heart: the bounty of impulse, and the failure to sustain even small kindness. Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being. Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality. Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh. Not the Prodigal Son, nor Faustus. But Penelope. The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo. The real form. The culmination. And the exceeding. Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage, Not the month's rapture. Not the exception. The beauty that is of many days. Steady and clear. It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment. |
The sad story of the Mezey/Barnes translation can be found elsewhere on this board, in "The Discerning Eye," where Tim Murphy introduced Robert Mezey to the Sphere.
Having seen the three versions of the milonga, I wonder why Dick Barnes opted for "little boys full of mischief." He could have just as well said "little boys full of the devil," if that's the word in the original. Alan Sullivan |
Los chicos, que son el diablo... To be sure, we are not discussing the 1972 edition with John Hollander's great "The Golem", but the 1999 Viking travesty edited by Alexander Coleman, of whom it may be suspected that he has been made a stooge, the publishing world being what it is, whatever that may be.
"Phasellus Ille" This papier-maché, which you see, my friends, Saith 'twas the worthiest of editors. Its mind was made up in "the seventies," Nor hath it ever since changed that concoction. It works to represent that school of thought Which brought the hair-cloth chair to such perfection, Nor will the horrid threats of Bernard Shaw Shake up the stagnant pool of its convictions; Nay, should the deathless voice of all the world Speak once again for its sole stimulation, 'Twould not move it one jot from left to right. Come Beauty barefoot from the Cyclades, She'd find a model for St. Anthony In this thing's sure decorum and behaviour. E.P. [This message has been edited by Christopher Mulrooney (edited February 20, 2001).] |
LK, I think people are referring either to the old
Dutton Selected Borges or the recent Viking Penguin Selected. (The latter does not contain any of John Hollander's or Richard Howard's or Richard Wilbur's translations: those poets withheld their versions in protest against what had happened to Dick Barnes & me.) As for Simpson, he is a fool to call Borges a fool. I would agree that part of Borges' adulation of warriors had to do with compensation for his own timidity, but he was well aware of that and made no secret of it. That's why he identifies so strongly with the Icelandic scholar and poet Snorri Sturluson [1179-1241], who also came to realize that he was a coward. Here's Borges' touching sonnet about him: You, who left to posterity an unsparing Tribal mythology of ice and flame, You, who made fast in words the violent fame Of your forebears, their ruthlessness and daring, Were stunned to feel, as the mythic swords towered One dusk, your sorry flesh, your insides churning, Trembling. And in that dusk that bides no morning It was revealed to you you were a coward. Now in the Iceland night the heavy seas Tower and plunge in the salt gale. Your cell Is under siege. You have drained to the lees A shame never to be forgotten. Now The sword is falling above your pallid brow As in your book repeatedly it fell. And maybe Simpson was talking about the Second World War? Surely he knows there were bayonet charges and plenty of killing with bayonets in WWI. (There was some in WWII also,I believe, though maybe not where Simpson served.) We should also remember that there was not only Borges' boyhood romance with the famous knifefighters that had once roamed his neighborhood (and a few still did), but also his great respect for his ancestors, his uncles and grandfathers and great- grandfathers who had fought and died in the wars for Argentine independence, whose sabers decorated the walls of the house he grew up in. And his painful consciousness that he was bookish, and untested, and nothing like them. And now that it occurs to me, let me correct that beautiful Kipling epigram: I could not look on death, which being known, Men led me to him, blindfold and alone. What a wonderful series Epitaphs of the War is! Do you all know this one, "The Sleepy Sentinel"? Faithless the watch that I kept: now I have none to keep. I was slain because I slept: now I am slain I sleep. Let no man reproach me again, whatever watch is unkept--- I sleep because I was slain. They slew me because I slept. And "Hindu Sepoy in France"? This man in his own country prayed we know not to what powers. We pray them to reward him for his bravery in ours. And "Raped and Revenged"? One used and butchered me: another spied Me broken---for which thing an hundred died. So it was learned among the heathen hosts How much a freeborn woman's favor costs. Wiley, the milongas are in 8-syllable lines (now and then 7 syllables). I suppose I would hear "El RIfle y EL cruciFIjo" as a 3-beat line, though it doesn't matter---it's an 8-syllable line (by elision). Dick and I worked first on our own. Every few days I would give him a few I had done and vice versa. (After about 7 or 8 years I realized with amazement that we had never assigned each other poems or said in advance which ones we planned to do, yet not once did we give each other the same poem.) Then we worked on each others' drafts and met once or twice a week, for an hour or two or three or four, to argue about them and revise them further---every poem went through several drafts, sometimes twenty or thirty. We were both looking and listening for what sounded like Borges voice in English, and because we knew each other's work so well, we could spot and delete lines that sounded too much like Barnes or Mezey. Some revisions we did together in those sessions,and then afterward alone, & maybe again in the next session, and so on. We were always open and blunt in our responses, yet somehow never quarreled. It took us about 12 years to do the 420-some poems. I was very hesitant about any changes after Dick died, but I came to realize that he would trust my judgment, as I would trust his, and I did do a number of revisions and will probably do more. I think the best thing about our translations is that no one could point to a line or phrase and say that it was Dick's or mine---to me they look seamless. (I may end up dropping the initials. They mean to indicate which of us did the most work on any particular poem, but they don't always; sometimes they indicate who first undertook the poem. For example, both "The Moon" and "Ariosto and the Arabs" are marked RGB/RM because Dick did the first drafts and they are long and difficult poems, but they could as easily be marked RM/RGB, since I probably wrote most of the final version of "The Moon" and maybe half of the other one. But it doesn't matter. None of them would be what it is without the two hands, and none of them is exclusively the work of either of us.) Tim, I liked your ballad when you first showed it to meand I like it even more now; the last two quatrains are especially Borgesian. (Did you ever see the ballad Dick wrote about Borges' first sexual experience?) Christopher obviously meant to give a very literal version of the knife ballad, so it shouldn't be judged as a poem. But Eric McHenry's version, the one in the Penguin book, is very inept. You'd think he'd never read or heard a ballad before. He starts in three-beat lines, then he shifts to four, but it doesn't matter since he sounds bad both ways. And the rhymes are strained and sometimes ridiculous. For instance, there were no "casinos" in old Buenos Aires---men gambled in whorehouses and bars and general stores. None of the Viking Penguin translators have very good ears, and most have no ears at all. Ah, enough. |
Oh, judge it as a poem if you like. And let's not forget that tanka:
Not to have fallen like the rest of my blood, in battle. At night in vain to be the syllable counter. |
Mr. Mezey,
Thanks for the wonderful post--much good info and some terrific verse. I never realized you liked Kipling so much. Is this man fated never to rise again in our PC times because of "the white man's burden" and so on? If so, what will happen to the incredible "Epitaph" series, among others? (Thanks, by the way, for getting me sorted out--I was trying to do the coward's piece from memory only, and mine's like a sieve.) The Hindu Sepoy and the Sleeping Sentinel are fabulous. Yeah, I ran upstairs (finally--man, am I lazy) and checked, and yes, it's the Coleman Penguin production, but Robt. Fitzg. still does a pretty decent job. Could there be any message in that the Borges stands, on my shelf, next to Edgar Bowers? I see that this has very little to do with musing on mastery, so, adios. |
Len, one of my projects, though the Lord knows when
I'll get around to it, is to do an edition of Kipling's selected poems. (My friend and tennis partner here, Tom Pinney, is one of the two or three leading Kipling scholars, and I think I can talk him into doing it with me, and I think Modern Library might want to publish it.) He's a wonderful poet, and it's only stupid modern prejudice on the part of people who haven't really read much of him that obscures his worth. I remember seeing Levine speak scornfully of him last year, but he was just showing his ignorance. It's no accident that Frost and Robinson and Hardy and Borges and Auden &c &c all thought Kipling a great poet. And his politics were complicated; it's wrong to call him an imperialist and racist and let it go at that. (A lot of people look down their noses at him for the famous line in "Recessional" about "lesser breeds without the Law," assuming he's talking about Indians or Africans, but he doesn't mean them at all, he means the GERMANS, who committed so many atrocities and killed his son.) And I think I remembering your remarking about how much the ballad meant to Frost and Hardy and Auden and Borges and so on, and it would be a good subject for someone to write a book about. Thom Gunn wrote a very fine essay about Hardy and the ballads. Christopher, here is that tanka in proper verse, as Dick Barnes and I rendered it: Not to have been killed As have others of my kin On a battlefield. To be, in the empty night, The one tallying syllables. Some of the others in the series are also good, like the one just before that: How sad the rain is, Coming down over marble, Sad to become dirt, Sad that it can never be Man's days, or sleep, or the dawn. |
Ah, proper verse! These tanka are intriguing, because Borges seems to have adopted an operatic syllable count, something akin in Spanish maybe to the double vowel in Japanese.
Sad the rain on marble falls, sad to be earth. Sad not being days of men, dream, dawn. Obviously a tricky but delightful translating job; Reid must modulate to "wistful" in his first line. I would like to post my favorite of the Borges Milongas I know, the very familiar "Milonga of Albornoz". Again, this isn't Reid's translation, or even Di Giovanni's: Someone already counted the days, Someone already knows the hour, Someone with Whom there are Neither premotions nor demur. Albornoz walks by whistling An Entre Ríos milonga; Under the brim of his chambergo His eyes see the morning, The morning of this day Of eighteen-hundred ninety; Down in the Retiro They've already stopped counting Loves and cardgames Till dawn and tangles Of iron with sergeants, Kith and strangers. Well-sworn amongst them are More than one tough and more than one rogue; At a streetcorner on the Southside A knife is waiting for him. Not one knife but three, Before day's lightening, They were all on top of him And the man was himself defending. Somebody's steel entered his chest, Nor did his face once move; Alejo Albornoz died As if it was nothing at all to him. I think that he would like To know presently his story Continues in a milonga. Time Is oblivion and memory. [This message has been edited by Christopher Mulrooney (edited February 21, 2001).] |
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