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.
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