Welcome to Plume #156

August, and noodling around this morning in the NYT archives, I came across an opinion piece by Liriel Higa, about her grandmother, Toyono Higa, published in 2018 and entitled “The Secret to Living to 103”. Wherein, as seems inevitable, we learn that its subject courageously endured many hardships (here including the horrors of living through the attack on Pearl Harbor and losing a husband and a son) but are assured that she refused to dwell on them. Instead, we discover the keys to Toyono’s longevity—which given the math probably amount to her final words—are happy ones, both mundane and practical: “sweet potato and a good attitude”, and the fact that her parents were born in Okinawa, the centenarian capital of the world.  In other words, a short article whose type one encounters here and there, every so often.

Still….

That “103”.  A faint ping from the galaxy Prope Recordatus. Te -thrum, Te-thrum. Until in three days flat, aha! — the same age at the which the great Chilean poet Nicanor Parra died, in that same year!

…and so, I can almost hear you wonder. To which I reply, Nothing, really.  Except that this — can one even call it a coincidence? —led me once again back to Parra’s work, where I found, appropriately in his Poems and Antipoems, a sort of  inverted version of Toyono’s “secret” offered below, whose typically unhappy and far from mundane lines I thrilled to first almost half a century ago and whose bleak power remains undiminished.

I TAKE BACK EVERYTHING I´VE SAID

Before I go
I’m supposed to get a last wish:
Generous reader
burn this book
It’s not at all what 1 wanted to say
Though it was written in blood
It’s not what I wanted to say.
No lot could be sadder than mine
I was defeated by my own shadow:
My words took vengeance on me.
Forgive me, reader, good reader
If I cannot leave you
With a warm embrace. I leave you
With a forced and sad smile.
Maybe that’s all I am
But listen to my last word:
I take back everything I`ve said.
With the greatest bitterness in the world
I take back everything I`ve said.

      translated by Miller Williams

ME RETRACTO DE TODO LO DICHO

Antes de despedirme
Tengo derecho a un último deseo:
Generoso lector
quema este libro
No representa 1o que quise decir
A pesar de que fue escrito con sangre
No representa lo que quise decir.

Mi situación no puede ser más triste
Fui derrotado por mi propia sombra:
Las palabras se vengaron de mí.

Perdóname lector
Amistoso lector
Que no me pueda despedir de ti
Con un abrazo fiel:
Me despido de ti
con una triste sonrisa forzada.

Puede que yo no sea más que eso
pero oye mi última palabra:
Me retracto de todo lo dicho.
Con la mayor amargura del mundo
Me retracto de todo lo que he dicho.

Antipoems: New and Selected (edited by David Unger), New York, New Directions, 1985.

Anyway. Let’s turn now to Brian Culhane’s essay on…well, you see its title. Enjoy!

Tone, Text, and the Sound of Sense

Of the many aspects of poetry resistant to translation, tone perhaps may lead the pack. But before examining this idea, let’s look at this opening sentence itself, one prosy and declarative, and play a bit with synonyms: For “aspects,” features, facets, qualities, characteristics would, as substitutes, fare well with little loss of meaning. What about “resistant”? Of the contenders my screen instantly flashes—defiant, challenging, opposed, unwilling, impervious, hardy—the first four present degrees of willful resistance and the other two a more physical sort. None, however, accurately substitutes for “resistant” as it is used here. How is a hardy plant’s resistance to disease lexically equivalent to the way a tone may resist translation? Likewise, if you glance back at my essay’s first sentence, in stating that “tone perhaps may lead the pack,” I’m not, even obliquely, referring to a dog or wolf pack; a literal translation of this idiom would be a howler, for sure.

A poem’s particular “tone” derives from a nexus of elements: e.g., the words’ particular denotation(s), connotation(s), and sounds, as well as their uses by a speaker within a particular setting, which is something we can also associate with a poem’s genre. How would a translator, for example, go about translating into English a 7^th century anonymous poem found in Amaru’s One Hundred Poems, an anthology of erotic verse? R. Parthasarathy explains the problem he faced was a matter of generic expectations: “English does not have a tradition of erotic poetry comparable to that of Sanskrit or Greek. Therefore tone becomes of utmost importance in communicating the erotic mood of the Sanskrit poem. It has to be carefully modulated to sound right to an English ear without being offensive.” He adds a further hurdle: “In translating from Sanskrit into English, one translates not just the text but an entire culture and worldview which remain hidden like so many roots beneath the text” (“Translator’s Notes: ‘The Sheets’ by Anonymous,” in the April 2006 issue of Poetry ). Yet, such roots are not easily transplanted. Witness Parthasarathy’s further explanation: “The telltale marks on the bedsheets [in the poem] bear witness to a night of wild lovemaking by the couple. . . .” In fact, “ . . . each of the telltale marks [identifies] a specific position: the “betel juice” with the “position of the cat”; the “aloe paste” with the “position of the elephant”; the “splash of powder” with the “position of the cow”; and “lacquer from footprints” with the unorthodox woman-on-top position.” Not having a handy copy of the Kama Sutra, I am happy to take his word for it, and I suspect those unfamiliar with the erotic tradition in Sanskrit would, without such help, also be unable to read between the sheets. Would a translator similarly feel the need for a gloss if, say, she rendered into Hindi an epigram of Alexander Pope’s? In the 1730s, Pope had engraved on the collar of a puppy the following couplet: “I am his highness’s dog at Kew,/Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?” And then gave the bedecked dog to the Prince of Wales. For a Hindi version, a gloss would likely prove helpful. Suddenly curious, I wondered what a puzzled American reader might find who turned to the web for help. Some clicks later, I landed on poemanalysis.com, where I learned, under the rubric “Key Poem Information,” that Pope’s “central message” is “The dog of a royal should be treated as well as its owner.” Clearly, having missed hearing the witty bite in Pope’s tone, this explicator wholly misreads the couplet’s meaning.

Tone, broadly or narrowly construed, would seem to present translators with many more ways to go wrong than to go right. For instance, Robert Lowell, in an explanatory note to his 1961 collection of translations, Imitations, offers a rationale for his own veering away from a strict adherence to the poems’ words: “Boris Pasternak has said that the usual reliable translator gets the literal meaning but misses the tone, and that in poetry tone is of course everything. I have been reckless with literal meaning, and labored hard to get the tone. . . .I have been almost as free as the authors themselves in finding ways to make these [poems] ring right for me.” Yet, in a class on translation I took many years ago at Columbia, Joseph Brodsky pronounced Lowell’s versions of Russian poets a terrible mistake, precisely because Lowell had been reckless with literal meaning.

Translators seeking to carry over a poem’s tone into another language are bound to face such dilemmas. Robert Frost, while he does not directly speak to a translator’s difficulties, does point to still another problem with conveying tone, or what he calls “the sound of sense.” In a 1925 letter, he explains that “The tones dealt in in poetry may be the broadest or again they may be the most delicate. . . . Even in lyric the main thing is that every sentence should be come at from a different dramatic slant.” His example is quite quirky and wonderful: “I ask no machine to tell me the length of a syllable. Its length with me is entirely expressional. ‘Oh’ may be as long as prolonged agony or as short as slight surprise.” In another letter, this in 1914, he suggests readers of poetry “Remember that the sentence sound often says more than the words. It may even as in irony convey a meaning opposite to the words. I wouldn’t be writing all this if I didn’t think it the most important thing I know.” But how best to gauge the sound of sense? Imagine, Frost suggests, hearing “voices behind a door that cuts off the words.” Frost is said to have famously quipped that poetry is what gets lost in translation, and one could see why he would have thought so, given his view that tone is central and “The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.”

Here’s a recent poem by Brian Brodeur, one which dramatizes the problem of tone in translation by placing it within a recognizably 21^st-century context.

On Being Asked, at JFK, to Interpret a Stranger’s Texts

And some words played between us to and fro
—Thomas Hardy, “Neutral Tones”

Her British husband messages from Maine:
I need more time 2 think. It’s peaceful here.
She writes back with an auto-translate text
from Mandarin: You’ll always be my leader.
She knows the words—but what do they really mean?
“His tone?” I ask. She scans her English reader.
“Neutral,” I say. She asks what to write next.
I hear my flight announced and drain my beer.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she says, dropping her phone
as she unsnaps her wallet’s clasp. “How much?”
Leaning so close to me our elbows touch,
she knocks a duffle from her baggage carriage.
I pack my paperback. “Please, sir, my marriage.”
Her nails click as she googles neutral tone.

When she seeks to know what her husband’s English message really means, to a native speaker the broad outline of their marital situation seems clear enough—they’re apart (possibly estranged, maybe for good), and her husband is texting that he needs “more time 2 think” about their relationship (I love the way Brodeur slips in contemporary shorthand, also something that might trip up a Mandarin speaker). What this wife doesn’t understand is his text’s “sound of sense”; in this case, a phone screen, not Frost’s imagined door, has cut off the tone of his words. For help, she looks to the native speaker seated next to her, who immediately understands it’s the text’s tone she can’t judge. In the poem’s last line, we learn she also doesn’t grasp his answer—“neutral”—just as she fails to understand his role, asking him what she should write next, as if a stranger with native fluency could dictate an appropriate response. That she winds up trying to tip him for his help suggests a further cultural misunderstanding, her misreading of situational cues.

Here, we’re watching a mini comedy of errors, of translation and decorum, but at its heart, Brodeur’s sonnet is terribly sad, even if it holds its sadness at arm’s length. For the wife’s brief sentence fragment, “Please, sir, my marriage,” underscores Frost’s admonishment that readers “Remember that the sentence sound often says more than the words.” Her four words, on the surface, look to be merely a neutral request for help, but when I read them, I can also hear what she isn’t saying and want to fill in the blank: “Please, sir, my marriage is on the brink of failure, and I really need your help.” Her husband’s “It’s peaceful here” leaves much to the reader’s imagination, as well. For instance, it’s certainly possible that he means “It’s peaceful here in a way that it isn’t when I’m with you.” Similarly, I wonder what she means when she responds, “You will always be my leader.” Is this an accurate English translation of the Mandarin or some unfortunate gaffe of the auto-translate program? And how will her husband, in turn, interpret (translate?) her tone here? He might think she’s being sarcastic. To the reader, other questions of this sort arise: Why is the speaker abrupt to the point of rudeness when his plane is called? It does allow the wife to misread his hurry as an indication she’s failed to tip him, but is there more to it—real discomfort with his position in relation to her?  What do the elbows touching suggest? Is she coming on to him, feeling lonely and despairing? To these, and like questions, we try our best to read over both of their shoulders, decoding messages both texted and nonverbal. In this way, Brodeur subtly, slyly, makes us accomplices in these acts of frustrated decipherment. Should you look up the source of the poem’s epigraph, Hardy’s “Neutral Tones,” you’ll discover how he’s also subtly, slyly, chimed his poem of romantic estrangement with Hardy’s bleaker, more bitter version:
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
On which lost the more by our love.
By bringing, by way of the epigraph, this 19^th century poem of lost love into his own contemporary one, this poet asks us to listen for such intertextual echoes, these tones we, like the wife’s husband, “need more time 2 think about.” And if you’re now in the mood to think more about Brian Brodeur’s poetry, I highly recommend his latest collection, Some Problems with Autobiography (2022), winner of The New Criterion Poetry Prize.

                                                                             ***

Spectacular, no? Incisive, erudite and light-fingered.

Anything else?  August – a slow month hereabouts, so not a lot.

Although perhaps an update on our Spring Reading period: we have worked our way diligently through a record number of submissions to a final round of some 85 or so, which should be decided upon in the next few weeks. And by “we” I mean, of course, Plume’s stellar editors and readers, Nancy Mitchell, Amy Beeder, Amanda Newell, Mihaela Moscaliuc, Sally Bliumis-Dunn, Ramón Garcia, and  Fran Richey. (Thank you!)

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

Susan Aizenberg                             A Walk with Frank O’Hara
Tomaž Šalamun                              Kiss the Eyes of Peace: Selected Poems
Jana Prikryl                                     Midwood
Robert Pinsky                                 Proverbs of Limbo
Bill Knott                                         The Naomi Poems
Carl Phillips                                    Scattered Snows, to the North: Poems
Ted Kooser                                     Raft
Scott Cairns                                   Conversations with My Greeks
Arthur Sze                                      The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems 

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

Daniel Lawless
Editor, Plume