May, 2024

May, and on my mind this evening is – unsurprisingly, perhaps – the eclipse of 8 April. Partial, yet thrilling, in these environs. Still, it was an event — altogether unsurprisingly – about which poets down the years have had their say, from Milton and Wordsworth, Hardy and Dickenson, to Michelle Boisseau to Bly, and innumerable in media res Tik Tok recitations.

And not only poets. For my money, one of the very best of such meditations and in truth one that reads as prose poem, is from Annie Dillard, quoted below:

Annie Dillard, Total Eclipse

I turned back to the sun. It was going. The sun was going, and the world was wrong. The grasses were wrong; they were platinum. Their every detail of stem, head, and blade shone lightless and artificially distinct as an art photographer’s platinum print. This color has never been seen on Earth. The hues were metallic; their finish was matte. The hillside was a 19th-century tinted photograph from which the tints had faded. All the people you see in the photograph, distinct and detailed as their faces look, are now dead. The sky was navy blue. My hands were silver. All the distant hills’ grasses were finespun metal which the wind laid down. I was watching a faded color print of a movie filmed in the Middle Ages; I was standing in it, by some mistake. I was standing in a movie of hillside grasses filmed in the Middle Ages. I missed my own century, the people I knew, and the real light of day.

An excerpt from Annie Dillard’s, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), page 16.

Astonishing, no?

But before we leave the subject, allow to me to give a shout out to Nancy Micthell, for this month’s cover art, “Eclipse with Colanders”.  Nancy is a Plume Associate Editor, a vastly accomplished poet, a painter and photographer, and recent Poet Laureate of Salisbury, Maryland.

And another to Plume Associate Editor Amanda Newell, whose new book, POSTMORTEM SAY is fantastic; out now from Červená Barva Press.

All right, then. Let’s turn now to Joseph Campana’s essay that begins with books and libraries and bookstores, before addressing the work of translation, offering us as sublime example, Catullus 48.

There wasn’t a bookstore in my hometown, not, at least, when I was growing up. Perhaps a gift shop on Main Street had some books, though nothing memorable. I’ll have to ask my mother. That left me hunting for sustenance in sad shopping mall bookshops. There was a gorgeous Carnegie library blocks from my house, where my mother worked for years and where, at times, I fantasized I might move to live with the books. Its shelves were full of wonders, the way of browsing in a library and the way of browsing in a bookstore is fundamentally different One makes a book an acquired treasure, lasting as long as you keep it, while the other is, like lyric, precious but finite in time. At some point the book leaves you–you must give it back–making it more cherished. But both afford browsing, something I’ve become less accustomed to when I can order, in seconds, nearly any book to be delivered to any one of a number of devices I own. A handy trick, sure. I miss the physical browsing of most kinds of shopping–something nearly impossible in stores arrayed now with an assortment of goods that seem the result of an algorithm I’ll never understand. Piles of nothing I want or need abound as a strange cocktail of needless profusion and scarcity.

This has nothing, really, to do with the poem I’ll discuss in a moment except that it comes from a beautiful small edition of the Love Poems of Catullus published by New Directions, edited by Tynan Kogane, and featuring their authors. It’s a little book–more the size of an octavo, about the size of a hand–the textured black cover dotted with white circles, like a galaxy not so far away. My husband bought me a copy here in Houston at a wonderful store: Basket Books and Art, which started me remembering some of my favorite bookstores, now mostly gone. Perhaps there’s hope that the love of the touch of a beautiful book has not, in fact, gone out of style. The last reading I attended there featured a reading by Martha Collins and Nguyen Ba Chung’s of their glorious translation of Tue Sy’s Dreaming the Mountain, which I wrote about in July.

So I’m thinking this month about translation. Catullus has also, always, felt like a gift–the brevity alone evidence that the accumulation of small things may make for the weightiest of poems. And Catullus loves to accumulate, here and elsewhere, the sheer number of kisses the lover would give the beloved. This volume prints two versions of 48, the first by Bernadette Mayer:

I’d kiss your eyes three hundred thousand times
If you would let me, Juventius, kiss them
All the time, your darling eyes, eyes of honey
And even if the formal field of kissing
Had more kisses than there’s corn in August’s fields,
I still wouldn’t have had enough of you.

Mayer opts for action, moving the poet’s urge to kiss to the first line. “I’d kiss your eyes.” Word order being more fungible in Latin, it’s not more or less correct to do so, but the emphasis makes the lover the star of the show. Mayer’s taste for repetition and embellishment works largely because of the rhythm she creates: (“your darling eyes, eyes of honey”). Embellishment lends urgency–I don’t see “all the time” or “the formal field of kissing” anywhere in the Latin. And yet that’s because Mayer has cultivated a little lyric in which there’s room for “corn in August’s fields.” Thus the ancient Roman lyric moves somewhere else–the midwest or the northeast. Wherever corn grows, ready for husking and eating, by the end of summer. Of course, in ancient Rome “corn” would really be wheat. But does it matter so much in a poem that peaks with the final line “I still wouldn’t have had enough of you”?

Arthur Symons offers the second translation, one that hews closer to the poem in most respects. (You can find the original Latin below.)

Your honeyed eyes, Juventius,
If you would let one kiss,
Three hundred thousand would to us,
Seem nothing much amiss:
Could all earth’s ears of corn eclipse
That heavenly harvest of the lips?

The beloved comes to the fore here in a rendering in which “I” does not appear. Inadvertently, I’ve begun to rhyme, which is something Catullus would never have done but that Symons does in making every line an off-rhyme with “Juventius”: the sibilance of which keeps the beloved at the heart of the poem. It’s a simpler form of praise–the “honeyed eyes” need no amplification because in the economy of the poem one kiss is really hundreds of thousands. The harvest language makes the most of the beloved even as its abundance is in tension with the youthfulness of the figure. But maybe, too, there’s a hint of something borrowed here. The young beloved (who is either named Juventius or the name might indicate a youth) too comes to harvest time. But it’s not autumn yet, even as May begins to unfurl. The lyrics of Catullus take us, briefly, away from our troubled worlds to a place where love changes the rules of the universe. And in troubled times, maybe a brief visit to restore a sense of the power of love, as Symons might have said, would be “nothing much amiss.”

You can follow these links to the Academy of American Poets for biographies of Catullus, Bernadette Mayer, and Arthur Symons.

Catullus 48

Mellitos oculos tuos, Iuventi,
siquis me sinat usque basiare,
usque ad milia basiem trecenta,
nec unquam videar satur futurus,
non si densior aridis aristis
sit nostrae seges osculationis.

Oh, to be so beloved ! To be so besotted !

OK. Anything else? Ah..

As you may have noted, Plume’s Spring Reading Period has just concluded – an…estimable number of submissions in two weeks. Our staff will be busy weighing and re-weighing each I assure you before we make our final selections, so it might take a while for us to get back to you. Please be patient. And know, too, that we are grateful – more than we can say — for the work you send us.

Finally, our habitual nod to a few of our contributors who have books recently published, soon-to-be, or fresh acceptances.

Vinid Kumar Shukla               Treasurer of Piggy Banks
Charles O. Hartman               Downfall of the Straight Line
Steven Cramer                       Departures from Rilke  
Jean Valentine                        Light me down: The New and Selected Poems of Jean Valentine
Donald Revell                         Canandaigua
Sophie Cabot Black                Geometry of the Restless Herd

That’s it for now – be well — as always, I hope you enjoy the issue!

Daniel Lawless
Editor, Plume