[nyctom]

I am reading Pinsky's "The Sound of Poetry: A Brief Guide" and decided to look up his books on Amazon. I was very surprised to see how polarized the opinions of his work is--everything from "he is essential reading" to "what a pompous ass." I am finding "TSOP" interesting, if a bit heavy-going. He does seem to have a tendency to "talk down" to the reader--or at least that is how I feel as I am sloughing through the pages. I don't know any of his poems. So, what do people on here think about him? Apparently he writes in form (though people on Amazon lambasted him for it). Worth reading? Worth fleeing from?

Thanks!

nyctom

[A. E. Stallings]

Somewhere in between, I think. I haven't read the prosody. I like a few of his poems, such as The Shirt (in a sort of loose ip). Probably the most interesting thing is his translation of Dante's Inferno into slant-rhyming terza rima. (Though I bought it primarily because it had the Italian on the facing pages, and with my Latin & a little Spanish, and the Pinsky as a trot, I could sort of make heads or tails of it.) Weirdly, though, he is unapologetic for attempting it with no Italian at all, and just did his translation from other translations. This system seems to be fairly commonplace these days--a state of affairs I find disturbing.

Here is another translation of his, of a Cavafy poem. What I like is that he has tried to keep the enveloping rime scheme. (Cavafy is nearly always translated into free verse. Of course, a lot of Cavafy is free verse, but a lot of the early stuff is rimed, if often heterometric.) He doesn't have Greek either, and it is clear (from the order of the phrases and lines) that he heavily relied on the Keeley translation. But, to be fair, he calls it "after Cavafy", not a translation at all. I quite like it:

An Old Man

after Cavafy

Back in a corner, alone in the clatter and babble
An old man sits with his head bent over a table
And his newspaper in front of him, in the cafe.

Sour with old age, he ponders a dreary truth--
How little he enjoyed the years when he had youth,
Good looks and strength and clever things to say.

He knows he's quite old now: he feels it, he sees it,
And yet the time when was young seems--was it?
Yesterday. How quickly, how quickly it slipped away.

Now he sees how Discretion has betrayed him,
And how stupidly he let the liar persuade him
With phrases: Tomorrow. There's plenty of time. Some day.

He recalls teh pull of impulses he suppressed,
The joy he sacrificed. Every chance he lost
Ridicules his brainless prudence a different way.

But all these thoughts and memories have made
The old man dizzy. He falls asleep, his head
Resting on the table in the noisy cafe.

[nyctom]

Hmm, thank you for posting that translation. I did not know the Cavafy original rhymed. All the translations I have read of Cavafy have indeed been in free verse. I like it--but that may be less because of the translation and more because I treasure Cavafy, not only because he is one of the few "gay" poets who actually writes about something more interesting than "coming out," but because he writes with such fierceness about aging and lost youth--as amply evidenced in this particular poem.

I admit I am completely astounded that Pinsky writes up translations without knowing the acutal language he is translating! The chutzpah is admirable, though it does make me hesitant to actually read any of his "translations." At least as far as Dante, I will stick to John Ciardi. But I was amazed to see such polarization in the reviews of Amazon. If I remember correctly, one person said "The death of poetry begins here." I thought I was reading a review of Rod McKuen or Jewel!

nyctom

[A. E. Stallings]

If you have the Keeley and Sherrard Cavafy, you will see in the notes in the back that they tell you if a poem is rimed or scans, and the rime scheme, etc. In fact, a lot of Cavafy rimes aren't exactly rimes, but homophones (such as: I read/ eye red). Greek is a very rime rich language (because its endings are inflected, and because 5 of the 7 vowels & dipthongs are all pronounced "ee"), so this is less obtrusive than in English.

Am not sure why the vehemence against Pinsky. Possibly due to his popularity as poet laureate (with his "favorite poem" project)?

[Roger Slater]

Lots of translators work with languages they don't speak. Did you think that Merwin spoke 60 different languages? They generally work with native speakers, and often the results are pleasing to scholars of both languages. I'd rather read a Merwin translation than one by a lesser poet with a greater knowledge of the original language.

Anwyay, some years back I read "The Situation of Poetry," which I found very engaging and informative, though I understand that some folks disagree with the premise that contemporary poets still write, by and large, in the romantic tradition.

I'm surprised that this excellent book was written by the same smarmy and unappelaing fellow who sometimes chants poems for the camera at the end of the Newshour, or the fellow I've seen at poetry events complaining to strangers that he has not yet been given his check. His own poetry is highly regarded by many, including a strong recommendation by Robert Hass during an online poetry chat, though I've never been fond of it and I find it somewhat wordy, however skilled, and it doesn't do much for me.

[A. E. Stallings]

Don't get me wrong--I'm not against translating without a knowledge of the source language per se, especially if one uses the collaboration of a native speaker and/or scholars (and especially if it is an obscure language), or wrestles it with a dictionary and grammar. Or if, as in the Cavafy, one does not call it a translation, but a version, etc. We can't all know every language. And I agree that one would rather read a translation by a good poet without the language, than one by someone fluent but with a tin ear. It has to be a poem in the target language as well. ("Better a live sparrow than a stuffed owl" in the words of E. FitzGerald.) But some seem to dispense with even the native speaker bit, and to think that it is enough to trust other translations and "poetify" them. This strikes me as a cavalier stance for a poet to have--one who is in theory so bound up with the exactness of language. I confess that this attitude does worry me--as if we can just throw out the original. (As with the case of Cavafy, a person might assume all the poems are free verse from reading only other translations.) Merwin is, I think, fluent in French and some other romance languages. But should he be translating from 60 (!) other languages? Gads. I don't know.

[Len Krisak]

Pinsky's "prosody" book is just what Dana Gioia
called it--"a gesture rather than a book." It's all
of about 50 pages or so, and widely spaced out prose at
that. It also contains a pretty good selection of
snippy putdowns about rhyme and meter and the names
of feet, etc. Ugh.

Amazon? Who the hell knows? Pinsky was at a reading
in Cambridge in '95 when his "Inferno" was lit, and he claimed to the audience at the time that he actually had a pretty good grasp of medieval Ialian AND that the Ciardi
translation was not very good (he said this latter on a radio station in Boston).

Pinsky is NO friend of meter or rhyme.

As for Merwin, he's no freind of good poetry.
Like Kinnell, he seems to think it's perfectly
OK to translate a rhymed, metrical poem into free
verse--and leave out the punctuation along the way.

As for Hass, good grief, he's an old friend of Pinsky's, so of course he approves of his work. But who the hell thinks Hass is a good poet?

[Roger Slater]

Merwin no friend of good poetry? If good poetry in your book needs to be metrical and rhyme, then there's no point in taking up the gauntlet you threw down. But if good poetry needn't be metrical, then I think it's absurd to be dismissive of Merwin. He's written so much that it wouldn't be hard to find some examples of bad poems he has written, but if you can't find Merwin poems you admire I suspect you don't like poetry all that much. Just my opinion, which I share with many lovers of poetry.

I don't know if Merwin actually translates from 60 different languages. I am competent to judge his Spanish translations, and I find them to be among the best there are both in terms of the end result and fidelity to the original. You won't find Merwin adding images or substantive words that are not expressly in the original, a virtue that most translators of Spanish poetry do not share.

I don't believe Merwin is competent in any Asian tongues, yet his "Asian Figures" are thoroughly engaging and quite wonderful, and Merwin in fact "discovered" these poems because some of them weren't even meant to be poems in the original.

Odd that I've become the Merwin booster here, since he is certainly not a favorite of mine or particularly near to my heart. But the need to respect him and his accomplishment to me seems hugely obvious.

[Len Krisak]

Not to me.