Collected French Translations: Poetry & Prose by John Ashbery

Edited by Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie, the two-volume set of Collected French Translations by John Ashbery gives us a glimpse of a major influence in his life that I hope will also become part of ours.

Nevertheless, when review copies from Farrar, Straus and Giroux arrived, I eagerly received Ashbery’s translation of French poetry but did not look forward to prose essays in any language, so I started with that book to get it out of the way! What I found, however, was a delightfully colorful, eclectic mix of prose written over the centuries by French poets, artists, musicians, novelists, and other creative persons who have much to say to creative persons now.

“From To Oneself,” for example, the French symbolist painter, Odilon Redon, wrote, “There is something in the heart which dries up when one reads pages written too close to human nature. The fault of certain writing is to have stripped it naked, made it cynical and abject; it would have been better to reveal it in what it possesses of grandeur and consolation.” Repelled by those who speak of nature “with greedy mouths, and nothing in their hearts,” Redon contrasted that perspective with his view of Michelangelo of whom “I would have spoken of his soul. I would have said that what it is vital to see in a great man is, more than anything, nature, the force of soul which animates him. When the soul is powerful, the work is too…. His life is beautiful.”

In a similar vein, artist Giorgio De Chirico wrote an essay on the nineteenth century French realistic painter “Courbet,” saying “The sense of reality is always linked to a work of art. The deeper it is, the more poetic and romantic the work will be. Mysterious laws and reasons of perspective govern such facts. Who can contradict the disturbing relation that exists between perspective and metaphysics?”

And what a perspective we see from poet Pierre Reverdy, whose thought-provoking words managed to impact major art movements. In “Haunted House,” for example, Reverdy writes – or, perhaps, rails, with these highly visual words and images: “What are you doing there, you, skyscraper without hope or life, empty nest, without satisfaction, amid rectilinear forms, cast shadows, streets without atmosphere, drunken sidewalks, abandoned windows, uninhabited water drops, songs without light, heads with no price on them, hearts without matches, portraits without models, drawn and quartered nudes, advantages of integrity, speculations on the stock market of health, poorly ventilated neighborhoods, and finally migraines of overheated poetry, before a jury of robust men covered with feathers, sharpened into penholders in the form of skeletons, men of letters, actually? What are you doing?”

What indeed, as this “silence I have kept for thirty years” explodes, pummeling readers with his beautiful words and wisdom where “All the unhappiness of the intelligence resides in its inability, beyond a certain degree of development, to enjoy the present moment.”

I could go on and on quoting Pierre Reverdy, but the words of French playwright and poet Antonin Artaud in his “Correspondence with Jacques Rivière (1886-1925)” drew me to keep reading. On May 25, 1925, for example, Artaud wrote, “Dear Sir, Why lie, why seek to place on the literary level a thing which is the very cry of life, why give the appearances of fiction to what is made of the ineradicable substance of the soul, which is like the plaint of reality?”

These poetic arguments and insights among earlier artists continue to inform our work and ourselves. For instance, French poet and art critic Jacques Dupin, whose father was a psychiatrist, sees into the artistic impulse, saying, “It begins with the painful awareness of solitude, a desire to communicate with others, and anguish before the recognized impossibility of that communication.”

Besides that small beginning most of us share, this highly recommended book once again raises the standard of writing, poetry, and other artistic endeavors that have, quite possibly, sunk to a new low in light of self-publishing ventures gone rampant.

After years of writing prose and fiction for traditional publishing houses, I’ve turned my focus back to poetry reading, writing, and revising, which returns me now to my primary interest in the poetry part of Collected French Translations. Beginning with an excellent introduction to Ashbery’s work, written by the editors, the book proceeds to the poetry of Jean-Baptiste Chassignet (1571-1635), whose sonnet “V” begins:

Seat yourself on the edge of a wavy river;
You’ll see it flow in a perpetual course,
And wave upon wave rolling in thousands and thousands of turns
Release among the meadows its damp career.

But you’ll see nothing of that first wave
Which flowed once, water changes every day,
Every day it passes, and we still name it
Same river, and same water, in the same way.

Jules Supervielle (1884-1960) most likely wanted a changed way of looking at the same things, and so in “47, Boulevard Lannes” he takes the familiar and writes:

Since I recognize the front of my house at this height
I am going to hang up the portraits of my father and mother
Between two trembling stars;
I shall put the antique parlor clock
On a mantel carved in the hard night
And the astronomer who will someday discover them in the sky
Will whisper about it to the end of his days.

Admired earlier for his prose, Pierre Reverdy appears here, too, for example in “That Memory” where “The star came out of the water” and “A ship passed flying low,” but for all the surreal moments, he admits to hearing “in the midst of everything that lives and wakens/ The same and single voice persisting/ in my ear.”

I could go on and on quoting the poetry of Reverdy where “Everything is clenched in that hand that never pardons,” but we’d miss so many other amazing artists of word pictures featured in this book.

For example, in prose poem “The Cloud Distributes Its Rain Impartially…,” Maurice Blanchard writes of “this alternating chorus of a world made and a world rejected, this battle in shadows, this irresolvable symphony, these rendings and these smiles will pass slowly into darkness and solitude. In autumn the horizons disappear, hollows appear in the surface of the earth, and we perceive that the world has changed.”

In the long poem “Prose Des Buttes-Chaumont,” Pierre Martory (1920-1998) gives us a glimpse of just how much the world of the earlier French poets and artists has changed from ours, and yet the problems of art and life remain the same:

A book begun in manuscript by a monk
And finished on the screen of a computer terminal
In a bruised language like overripe figs
Where the perfume of a little-known alphabet stagnates…

Nothing stagnates, however, in “Fords, Channels” by Frank André Jamme (1947) who, along with the remaining poets in this fine book, challenge us in their own creative ways to:

“Drink the living water,” she said, “animate the drum. Get your things together too, so that their voices may be heard: the conch shell and the lance, the letters of light. Listen again to what nurses us, the fire and its venom, the pearl that sleeps in the echo. And only then, look at me, walk at last on the glitter. Look me in the eyes for a long time: You’ll see, I’ll catch fire.”

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© 2014, Mary Harwell Sayler ~~~

Collected French Translations: Poetry, John Ashbery, hardback



Collected French Translations: Prose, John Ashbery, Kindle e-book edition



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The Life and Death of Poetry: poems by Kelly Cherry

When a review copy of The Life and Death of Poetry arrived from the publisher, Louisiana State University Press (LSU), I felt a bit disappointed at first not to have an autographed copy from Kelly Cherry -- a poet whose work I’ve long admired. I was relieved, though, not to have to worry about marring such a treasure when my pencil and I immediately began to carry on a conversation with the poems in the margins of each page.

Although I still do this with almost every Bible I own, I seldom scribble in poetry books now, jotting down thoughts or, in earlier days, marking rhyme schemes and deciphering patterns as I learned to tell a terza rima from a villanelle.

With Kelly Cherry’s poems, however, I perched on the edge of discovery as the book opened with the “to be” of a new genesis, a birth, a being in the poem “Which is a Verb,” where:

We fell out of eternity
into time, which is a verb.
Life was rushing past us,
and we began to rush too.
Everything was a blur.

From that chaos, “We lay down on the red grass/ and clung to the world as it whirled.”

Like Dante, we enter the poems as a wayfarer or pilgrim, but, instead of falling into The Inferno and working our way up and out, we find something of a reversal or, perhaps, a divergent path from the one where Dante began “midway in the journey of our life” and found himself in a dark wood. Conversely, “A Sunday in Scotland” begins as the “I” of the poem finds a path through the wood, “past fallen stone – a Roman wall in ruin” and into a sonnet, rather than the terza rima pattern Dante employed.

The life of poetry, however, consists of more than clothes, and so the poet casts aside traditional patterns for such poems as “Fields with Shrew,” where “…every living thing/ inscribes itself on land, sea, or air.” But then, in the next poem, the writing, the being of poetry begins, interestingly, with the realization of death.

In “Field Notes,” the bee is silent and bird flat on its back, so one cannot help but wonder if the shock of death, the knowledge of death, the awareness of death that separates us from the clueless creatures of the earth provided the first instance of poetry.

Despite the initial reminder of our own mortality, the poems practice new verbs of music (“melody/ heard only by the bees”), imagery (“blue jay in the snow” as a “text/that cannot be read”), repetition (“The Loveknot”), chant (“Night Vowels”), and a medley of the many aspects of language to be played with and explored.

The sounds and music of language and its silences continue in the sequence “Welsh Table Talk,” mid-way in the journey of our book reading. Accompanied by couplets, sonnets, free verse, and mad friars, the lines lay out the uniqueness of story as the topic each of us must consider in reading poems by other poets or in writing our own inimitable poetry.

Kelly Cherry not only writes hers with skill and levity, she shows us the life of poetry, culminating in the final section, “What the Poet Wishes to Say.” With wit, musicality, and wisdom, she tells her students, “A writer with nothing to write/ is in danger of falling into/ one or more of four/ pitfalls: drink, drugs,/ adultery, and translation.” She then concludes the long poem with a penetrating question each translator must surely consider before stating, “God help you now” – advice I take literally as a fifth route into prayer or, perhaps, as an antidote for the other four options.

The remaining poems of this highly recommended book continue to offer good counsel, insight, and interesting experiences for poets, poetry students, and poetry readers, reminding us in the end that “Poetry’s just poetry.” Nevertheless,

The body
Is as helpless as a reed,
But it has a heart
A poem can move to love.

©2014 Mary Harwell Sayler, poet, reviewer


The Life and Death of Poetry



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