I truly do believe no maiden that will live To look upon the brilliance of the sun Ever will be contemplative Like this one.
‘I truly do believe no maiden that will live’ may simply mean: I think no girl will ever be as sophos (clever) as this one.’ However, ‘To look upon the sun’ (a stock epic and tragic phrase meaning simply ‘to live’) raises the register, and the lines may express admiration for a girl who has already come to appreciate all that the sun symbolizes in the preceding poem. The sun here contains, in the abstract, qualities of shiny luxury items – glitter and glamour.
Translated poetry is always a bit problematic; you just can’t get the nuances exactly as intended by the original writer – especially when the original writer wrote in a dead language more than two and a half thousand years ago, and most of her known poetry survives only in fragments. But Poochigan seems to me to have made a good effort here. I’m not familiar enough with other translations to make a firm judgement, but I also appreciate his explanatory notes for each poem.
Most of the fragments are short, and have been preserved because of a single arresting image or turn of phrase. A couple of the longer ones jumped out at me. There’s an intense moment of jealousy (pp 22-23 here) when she sees the girl she likes talking to (?flirting with?) a man, and her heart throbs and her tongue “shatters”. The next poem (pp 24-25) is a break-up story, of the last conversation with your lover when you both realise it is over. The langauge is ancient but the sentiments are eternal.
The (very short) book ends with two poems which were very recently discovered on scraps of papyri, one about Sappho’s brother not yet having returned from a sea voyage, one a brief entreaty to Aphrodite about love. Poochigan does not mention it, because the scandal had not yet broken, but both of these passed through the hands of the notorious Dirk Obbink, so their provenance is very murky indeed; on the other hand, scholars do seem united in believing that these are genuine Sappho texts. It is awful and shameful that Obbink muddied the waters so much, both in this case and in the more notorious cases of the New Testament manuscripts.
In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore became the first writer of colour to get the Nobel Prize for Literature, “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West”. It’s unusual for the prize to be awarded on the basis of a single work, but the Academy makes it pretty clear that the basis of its decision was this collection, translated into English by Tagore himself and published in November 1912, only twelve months before the Nobel Prize was awarded.
The collection has a rapturous foreword by W.B. Yeats and clearly caught the 1912-1913 Zeitgeist. Its 103 poems include 53 of the 157 in the original Bengali collection of the same name, and another 50 of Tagore’s other poems, freely translated.
Second paragraph of third poem (English version):
The light of thy music illumines the world. The life breath of thy music runs from sky to sky. The holy stream of thy music breaks through all stony obstacles and rushes on.
Second paragraph of third poem (Bengali version):
পুরানো আবাস ছেড়ে যাই যবে, মনে ভেবে মরি কি জানি কি হবে, নূতনের মাঝে তুমি পুরাতন, সে কথা যে ভুলে যাই। দূরকে করিলে নিকট, বন্ধু, পরকে করিলে ভাই।
When I leave my old home, I wonder what will happen if I die, Among the new, you are old, That is a thing I forget. You bring the distant near, friend, And make the stranger a brother.
My translation combining Google and Deepl.
I was not able to identify either the Bengali source verse of the English text above, or the English translation of the Bengali text given immediately after it.
I was somewhat bemused by the prominence that this collection of poems thrust upon Tagore. They are very strong expressions of devotion to the divine, without giving offence by supporting any one religion over another, and I found them a bit repetitive and not really inspiring. Tagore had a Hindu background, was and is very popular among Muslim Bengalis, and was writing here (well, translating here) for disaffected Christians. Perhaps I just was not in the mood.
Amartya Sen, in an essay about Tagore on the Nobel Prize website, argues convincingly that the intense but short-lived popularity of Gitanjali is not a fair reflection of Tagore’s talents. His reputation has endured in both India and Bangladesh, both of whose national anthems were written by him. Certainly I had previously read his The Home and the World, and enjoyed it much more, and I may continue my exploration.
One must also give Tagore credit as the first person on record as renouncing a knighthood awarded by the British state. He was knighted by George V in the 1915 New Year’s Honours (as were Lord Kitchener and General Haig), but after the Amritsar Massacre in 1919, he wrote to the Governor-General:
The disproportionate severity of the punishments inflicted upon the unfortunate people and the methods of carrying them out, we are convinced, are without parallel in the history of civilised governments…
The time has come when badges of honour make our shame glaring in their incongruous context of humiliation, and I for my part wish to stand, shorn of all special distinctions, by the side of my countrymen.
Sandra’s seen a leprechaun, Eddie touched a troll, Laurie danced with witches once, Charlie found some goblins’ gold. Donald heard a mermaid sing, Susy spied an elf, But all the magic I have known I’ve had to make myself.
(unusually, this poem doesn’t have an accompanying illustration.)
I was really surprised to find that this is the top book of 1974 among Goodreads users, by a very long way (almost twice as many users as second-placed Carrie) because I had never heard of either book or author. It’s an immensely popular short collection of a hundred or so poems, aimed perhaps at the 10-ish age range. I suspect that the use of the word “sidewalk” in the title has made it less appealing to the many countries where that is simply not a word that is used, including where I grew up.
I quite like the title poem despite the peculiar terminology for ‘pavement’. I found most of the other poems much less impressive, more often just framing a smart phrase than digging very deeply into life and experience. I did like the illustrations. I’m struck that Goodreads reviewers, even though so many of them like the book, tend to say that Silverstein’s other collection, A Light in the Attic, is better. Anyway, you can get it here.
Second section of Part 3 of Carrie:
From the national AP ticker, Friday, June 5, 1979:
CHAMBERLAIN, MAINE (AP)
STATE OFFICIALS SAY THAT THE DEATH TOLL IN CHAMBERLAIN STANDS AT 409, WITH 49 STILL LISTED AS MISSING. INVESTIGATION CONCERNING CARIETTA WHITE AND THE SO-CALLED ‘TK’ PHENOMENA CONTINUES AMID PERSISTENT RUMOURS THAT AN AUTOPSY ON THE WHITE GIRL HAS UNCOVERED CERTAIN UNUSUAL FORMATIONS IN THE CEREBRUM AND CEREBELLUM OF THE BRAIN. THIS STATE’S GOVERNOR HAS APPOINTED A BLUE-RIBBON COMMITTEE TO STUDY THE ENTIRE TRAGEDY. ENDS. FINAL JUNE 5 030 N AP
As with A Passage to India, I think I had seen the film of Carrie many years ago but I certainly had not previously read the book. It’s every bit as good as I expected, with the horror gradually mounting, and the sense that this is the reflection of ordinary teenage meanness and bullying. The tick-tock switching between official reports and documents, and omniscient third-person narrator, also keeps you on your toes and maintains the momentum. This despite the fact that we are told that hundreds of people will die as early as a third of the way through the book.
The other thing that struck me is that Carrie is set in the future. Though published in 1974 (and presumably written in 1973), the action is firmly dated May 1979, with flashbacks to her parents’ relationship in the 1960s and flashforwards to the various official reports on what Carrie did. There is a sense of “it can happen here…” It’s also mercifully short, compared to some of King’s otherwork.
Of course, in 1974 the idea that a teenager would engage in the mass murder of their fellow students was outlandish fantasy. Columbine was still 25 years in the future. It’s actually within living memory that school shootings were not a thing that happened very often, even in the USA. Wikipedia tells me that 17 people have been killed in American school-related shootings so far this year including four yesterday, compared to 14 in the whole of the 1950s. Carrie unwittingly told us what was coming.
Opening of third chapter, the poem “Lent” by Jean M. Watt:
Lent is a tree without blossom, without leaf, Barer than blackthorn in its winter sleep, All unadorned. Unlike Christmas which decrees The setting-up, the dressing-up of trees, Lent is a taking down, a stripping bare, A starkness after all has been withdrawn Of surplus and superfluous, Leaving no hiding-place, only an emptiness Between black branches, a most precious space Before the leaf, before the time of flowers; Lest we should see only the leaf, the flower, Lest we should miss the stars.
This is a devotional book, not my usual genre, with a poem for every day of Lent (other than Sunday) and for the week after Easter, plus a page or two of reflection and spiritual challenge for the reader. I was reading it two months late, and perhaps am not the target audience, but I did enjoy discovering a few more poems. Here is Philip Larkin’s “The Trees”:
The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too, Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
And here is “The Skylight”, a sonnet by Seamus Heaney, which starts off as a domestic architectural argument, and then abruptly twists to the Biblical:
You were the one for skylights, I opposed Cutting into the seasoned tongue-and-groove Of pitch pine. I liked it low and closed, Its claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof Effect, I liked the snuff-dry feeling, The perfect, trunk-lid fit of the old ceiling. Under there, it was all hutch and hatch, The blue slates kept the heat like midnight thatch.
But when the slates came off, extravagant Sky entered and held surprise wide open, For days I felt like an inhabitant Of that house where the man sick of the palsy Was lowered through the roof, had his sins forgiven, Was healed, took up his bed and walked away.
This was the shortest unread book that we had acquired in 2018. Next on that pile (if I can find it) is an official Norn Iron publication on The Combined Election of 2001.
My normal practice is to give you the second paragraph of the third chapter of the books I read. Here there is a problem because the second paragraph of Liber III of the Metamorphoses is a bit meaningless out of context, and also not translated by Hughes; whereas the second paragraph of the third of Hughes’ extracts from Ovid is an interpolation by him with no original Latin text to compare it to. So instead, here is the third paragraph of Liber I, starting with the original and the McCarter translation, part of the passage on the Creation:
Sic ubi dispositam quisquis fuit ille deorum congeriem secuit sectamque in membra coegit, principio terram, ne non aequalis ab omni parte foret, magni speciem glomeravit in orbis. tum freta diffundi rapidisque tumescere ventis iussit et ambitae circumdare litora terrae; addidit et fontes et stagna inmensa lacusque fluminaque obliquis cinxit declivia ripis, quae, diversa locis, partim sorbentur ab ipsa, in mare perveniunt partim campoque recepta liberioris aquae pro ripis litora pulsant. iussit et extendi campos, subsidere valles, fronde tegi silvas, lapidosos surgere montes, utque duae dextra caelum totidemque sinistra parte secant zonae, quinta est ardentior illis, sic onus inclusum numero distinxit eodem cura dei, totidemque plagae tellure premuntur. quarum quae media est, non est habitabilis aestu; nix tegit alta duas; totidem inter utramque locavit temperiemque dedit mixta cum frigore flamma.
When he (whichever god it was) had carved that now neat heap and shaped it into parts, he next, to make it equal all around, sculpted the earth till it became a sphere. He poured out seas, then ordered them to swell with gales and wrap the shores of circled land. He added springs, great lakes, and ponds. He shut the sloping rivers in meandering banks— some of these are absorbed by earth, while others flow to the deep and, welcomed in its vast expanse of water, pound not banks but shores. He ordered fields to spread, valleys to sink, leaves to enshroud the woods, and peaks to rise. And as two zones divide the sky’s right side and two the left, the middle fifth one warmer, just so the god partitioned earth within, imprinting it with tracts of this same number.⁹ The middle zone is far too hot for life, the outer two too deep with snow. He placed two more between, a blend of heat and cold.
⁹48 tracts of this same number: The earth is divided into five zones: the middle equatorial zone (too hot for life), the two outer polar zones (too cold for life), and, between these, the two temperate zones (conducive to life).
Ted Hughes’ translation of the same passage:
When the ingenious one Had gained control of the mass And decided the cosmic divisions He rolled earth into a ball. Then he commanded the water to spread out flat, To lift itself into waves According to the whim of the wind, And to hurl itself at the land’s edges. He conjured springs to rise and be manifest, Deep and gloomy ponds, Flashing delicious lakes. He educated Headstrong electrifying rivers To observe their banks – and to pour Part of their delight into earth’s dark And to donate the remainder to ocean Swelling the uproar on shores. Then he instructed the plains How to roll sweetly to the horizon. He directed the valleys To go deep. And the mountains to rear up Humping their backs. Everywhere he taught The tree its leaf. Having made a pattern in heaven – Two zones to the left, two to the right And a fifth zone, fierier, between – So did the Wisdom Divide the earth’s orb with the same: A middle zone uninhabitable Under the fire, The outermost two zones beneath deep snow, And between them, two temperate zones Alternating cold and heat.
Way way back 40 years ago, I studied Latin for what were then called O-levels, and one of the set texts was a Belfast-teenager-friendly translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I loved it. If you don’t know, it’s a narrative poem in fifteen books re-telling classical legends, concentrating in particular on those where there is a change of shape – usually humans turned into animals, vegetables or minerals, though with other variations too. It’s breezy, vivid and sometimes funny, and it’s been a store of easily accessible ancient lore for centuries.
I’d always meant to get back to it properly, and it finally popped up on my list of books that I owned but had not yet blogged here. However, my 40-year-old copy is safely in Northern Ireland, so I acquired both the latest Penguin translation, by Stephanie McCarter, and Ted Hughes’ selection of twenty-four choice chapters, and read them – I took the McCarter translation in sequence, and then jumped across to read the relevant sections if Hughes had translated them, though he put them in a different order.
I do find Ovid fascinating. In some ways he speaks to the present day reader very directly – a lot of the emotions in the Ars Amatoria could be expressed by lovers two thousand years later. But here he’s taking material that was already very well known, the Greek and Roman classical legendarium, and repackaging it for a sophisticated audience in the greatest city in the world. The book ends (McCarter’s translation):
Where Roman power spreads through conquered lands, I will be read on people’s lips. My fame will last across the centuries. If poets’ prophecies can hold any truth, I’ll live.
And he did. I have been particularly struck by Ovid’s popularity among the patrons of my favourite 17th-century stuccador, Jan Christiaan Hansche. A number of his most interesting ceilings feature stories from Ovid, some of them well known, some less so. Sixteen centuries after Ovid laid down his pen, his work was still part of the standard canon of literature known to all educated Western Europeans.
So. The two translations are different and serve different purposes. McCarter’s mandate was to translate the whole of the Metamorphoses into iambic pentameter in English. She is necessarily constrained to giving us an interpretation of Ovid’s text, with all of its limitations, and confining her own original thoughts to footnotes and other supporting material.
In a very interesting introduction, she is clear about the many scenes of rape in the story. But she also makes it clear that Ovid has a lot more active female characters than are in his sources, and they get more to do. She gives some telling examples of previous translators projecting later concepts of femininity onto Ovid’s fairly unambiguous original words.
Given the contemporary debate, it’s also interesting that Ovid has several examples of gender fluidity – not really presented as a standard part of everyday life, but nonetheless as a phenomenon that happens. For Ovid, we must simply accept that someone’s current gender may not be the one that they were born with.
Ted Hughes, on the other hand, was translating favourite bits of Ovid because he had reached the stage of his career where he could do what he wanted. He could leave out all the bits he found boring (I haven’t counted, but I think he translates about only 40% of Ovid’s text), and he could add his own flourishes at will. Inevitably this makes for a more satisfactory reading experience, though it is incomplete.
Both translations bring to life Ovid’s vivid imagery, which really throws you into the narrative. For a compare and contrast passage, here is the beginning of their treatment of the story of Phaethon, the son of the Sun who crashed to disaster trying to drive his father’s chariot (a favourite topic for Hansche). I think that the differences speak for themselves:
McCarter
Hughes
The Sun’s child Phaethon equaled him in age and mind. But Epaphus could not endure his boasts, his smugness, and his arrogance that Phoebus was his father and declared, “You crazily trust all your mother says! Your head is swollen by a phony father!” Phaethon blushed as shame repressed his wrath. He took these taunts to Clymene, his mother, and told her, “Mother, to upset you more, although I am free-spoken and quick-tempered, I could not speak, ashamed these insults could be uttered and that I could not refute them. If I am truly born of holy stock, give me a sign and claim me for the heavens!” Wrapping his arms around his mother’s neck, he begged—by his life, Merops’ life, his sisters’ weddings—that she give proof of his true father.
When Phaethon bragged about his father, Phoebus The sun-god, His friends mocked him. ‘Your mother must be crazy Or you’re crazy to believe her. How could the sun be anybody’s father?’ In a rage of humiliation Phaethon came to his mother, Clymene. ‘They’re all laughing at me, And I can’t answer. What can I say? It’s horrible. I have to stand like a dumb fool and be laughed at. ‘If it’s true, Mother,’ he cried, ‘if the sun, The high god Phoebus, if he is my father, Give me proof. Give me evidence that I belong to heaven.’ Then he embraced her. ‘I beg you, ‘On my life, on your husband Merops’ life, And on the marriage hopes of my sisters, Only give me proof that the sun is my father.’
I think I’d recommend that a reader unfaniliar with Ovid start with Hughes and then go on to McCarter to get the full story. You can get the McCarter translation here and Hughes here.
This was the top book on my shelves that I had read but not yet blogged. Next on that list is rather different – The Cider House Rules, by John Irving. It’s also right at the end of my 2023 books queue so it will be a while before you hear about it.
I like to track the winners of the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize because of my own past association with it, and was really interested to see that earlier this month it went to a book of poetry, The Sun is Open, by QUB-based writer Gail McConnell. In fact the 119 pages of text are one long poem broken into chunks, playing with text and with font colour, processing the writer’s reaction to going through a box of her father’s things, long after he died in 1984 at 35, shot dead by the IRA while checking under his car for bombs, in front of his wife and his then three-year-old daughter.
Gail McConnell barely remembers her father and has no memory of that awful day, but of course it has affected her whole life, and the poetry captures that disruption and the effect of engaging with her father through a box of personal souvenirs, most notably a diary and a Students Union handbook from his own time at QUB. There is some incredible playing with structure – quotations from the box are in grey text, documents are quoted in fragments to let us fill in the blanks, at one point the page fills with vertical bars to symbolise the prison where her father worked. It’s provocative and unsettling, and meant to be. You can get it here.
This moved me to seek out an earlier poem by Gail McConnell, Type Face, which you can read here. It’s funnier, though the humour is rather dark; the theme is that it explains her reaction to reading the Historical Enquiries Team report into her father’s murder, and discovering that it was written in Comic Sans. The third verse is:
‘Nothing can separate me from the Love of God in Christ Jesus Our Lord’. Nothing can, indeed. I am guided by Google, my mother by Christ. Awake most nights, I click and swipe. I search and find Bill McConnell Paint and Body. Under new management!!!!! Northeast Tennessee. Where is God in a Messed-up World? Inside the Maze. (My phone flashes up a message like a muse.) Straight & Ready: A History of the 10th Belfast Scout Group. (35) (PO) (IRA) – for more and a photograph, push this link>> the maroon death icon on CAIN.ulst.ac.uk You visited this page on 06/02/15. And here I am again. And in The Violence of Incarceration (Routledge, 2009), eds. Phil Scraton and Jude McCulloch (page thirty-three), he ‘oversaw, but later denied in court, the brutality of prison guards, [and] was executed by the IRA on the 8 March 1984.’ (He’d been dead two days by then.) Execute. Late Middle English: from Latin exsequi ‘follow up, punish’. There’s a listing on victims.org.uk, ‘an [sic] non-sectarian, non-political’ nook complete with Union Jack and Ulster flag campaigning pics, the Twitter feeds and tags, a calendar and videos. Powered by WordPress. And then there’s Voices from The Grave (and this one’s hard to bear, though can I say so? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.) I won’t write down the page. But something in me, seeing that crazed portrait – something’s relieved.
Really good stuff, and very different in presentation from The Sun is Open. Both are recommended.
