Here in Baroque Mansions we've always been fascinated with book groups, you know, where everybody reads a book and then you go to someone's house and talk about it - or, as so many people report, talk about everything but the book. I've even felt envious of friends who are members of book groups, though I think that was more envy of the social aspects, or of the kind of life where that would seem a viable idea of what to do with your time. I've always been afraid of the books you'd have to read. Random current novels, that sort of thing. One a month. Any kind of thing, just because someone else in the group likes it, and they'd be saying, "you never know, you might discover something you love!"
Not likely.
But here's a book group even I can love.The wonderfully named Words without Borders has a bi-monthly online book club forum, with features on a particular book or author in translation. This month's club, which will include interviews with the translators etc, has just started. The subject is the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, whose Collected Poems came out last year. (I wanted a copy; still haven't got it; damn.) The discussion has just been kicked off with an excellent biographical introduction by my friend James Marcus, and with an interview with Peter Dale Scott, one of Herbert's earliest translators, by Cynthia Haven.
Now, last year I was pretty shocked when I read the eminent translator Michael Hofmann's review in Poetry magazine of Herbert's Collected. Hofmann absolutely slates the new translation, by Alissa Valles; it is possibly the single most damning review I've ever read. I've just read it again and I find it hard even to think what I think about it. I realise as I write this that Alissa Valles is the poetry editor at Words Without Borders, so I know I probably shouldn't even mention it, but I always think it's better to know about the controversy rather than just wade in and not get what's going on. Much of his outrage seems to stem from a sense of grievance on behalf of the husband-and-wife team who have been translating Herbert for years, and who didn't translate this Collected; and from a sense of outrage at the literary-world wrangling that went into the commissioning of the book, with Andrew "the Jackal" Wylie, of fame (though thankfully not of "Fame"), coming into it.
But Hofmann's article is very interesting for other reasons and in other ways. First, it explicitly discusses at length the question that always plagues me: what is translation for, what can it achieve, how much does poetry suffer under it? It provides some real insight into how a translator approaches his work. Also, in his discussion at the end of all the egregious things Valles is supposed to have done wrong, he gives a sort of masterclass in sloppy diction. I think workshop poets everywhere, and many published poets in many locations, should read this and then go and look again at their own work.
I don't intend to say that Valles' translation is no good or that she is some kind of living exemplar of the sloppiness that I, too, hate in so much contemporary writing; I think Hofmann comes across as too unreliable a narrator for that, with - frankly - his complete inability to see anything good in Valles, or to exonerate her from what were surely editorial decisions. (I also disagree completely with his whole extraordinary section about "choice - the great false god of our consumer age" and how a great poet should, be definition seemingly, have ony one, equally great, translator; he trashes utterly Valles' perfectly equable, I thought, assertion that a poet should have many translators.) But I do think that in the pained quivering of his delicate instrument we can learn how perfection might sound. It's like being given a cup of tea by one of those few people in the world who taste tea leaves for a living.
One thing Hofmann doesn't give much insight into, overall, interestingly, is Herbert's poetry. He's too busy writing the poetry equivalent of the letter my friend Christine wrote to Homerton Hospital last summer. As a rant, it is a fine rant. But a rant is what it is.
No, if you want a real flavour of Herbert, I'd go to the equally distinguished Charles Simic's review, over at the New York Review of Books. He is much more forgiving, by the way, saying: "Herbert has been lucky in his translators. Alissa Valles's renditions here, despite an occasional awkward phrase, inevitable in a book this big, are admirable." Simic gives an excellent review of Herbert for an audience he supposes is more likely to think "Miloscz" or "Szymborszka" in response to the phrase "Polish poet".
(One thing that amused me in Simic's essay was this: "Another poem, 'What Mr Cogito Thinks of Hell,' debunks the popular opinion that hell is populated by despots, matricides, those who lust after the flesh of others, and so forth. Actually, it is a bit like Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, for Beelzebub is a lover of the arts who boasts that his choirs, poets, and painters nearly equal those in heaven." It has a delicious beauty... no doubt Leonardo is down there, and they are having a Renaissance.)
And here is his description of Herbert's own tea-tasting sensibilities: "He later attributed his reluctance to fall on his knees before the mighty not to his bravery or strength of character, but to his sense of taste: an inability to bear the regime's execrable rhetoric, its torturer's dialectic and reasoning without grace. In other words, aesthetics saved his soul: beauty played a subversive role in his refusal to become one of the corrupted."
This is not, of course, to be confused with the fascists' dishonest invocations of "beauty" or "aesthetics," not that you would, but it can sound dodgy when people say these things! But as Keats so usefully wrote of beauty, it is truth - "and truth beauty" - just so we're clear. Words do have precise meanings, though Hofmann also mentions, wonderfully, "the infinitely ramifying nature of language," and it may be that true beauty lies in the joining-together of moral truth and precise language.
Particularly interesting to me in Simic's piece are two things: one, his discussion of Herbert's "Apollo and Marsyas," about the satyr who was flayed alive by Apollo for daring to challenge him to a music contest (which he inevitably lost) - a much finer poem, I think, in all senses of the word, than Robin Robertson's much more - well - sadistic poem about Marsyas, which is so well-known here (in the UK) and now.
And two, the poem "Two Drops." Which Herbert wrote when he was fifteen.
And when you've done all that, do go and have a look at Words Without Borders! It's an impressive site, with educational resources and an impressive masthead. Read the interviews and James' piece. Leave comments.
See, with all this going on, who has time to join their local book group?
