As the poem is languaged, it is a game, an imagined space, as is any use of language (at its base). But the poem heightens this as it purports to foreground its otherness, its distance from unconscious taken-for-granted language games.
- John Gallaher, “A Line is a Hesitation, Not a World”
It is not a piano he plays, but a beautiful woman, and he caresses her.
— Balmont, speaking of A. Scriabin
April, the end of.
My views on literary translation are closest to those of perhaps Pierre Joris. And April it remains, or at the sheer end of.
Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, “Aus Einem April,” often gets rendered in English as “From an April.” Certainly it seems to be.
There is a poem written by Frank O’Hara in April 1954 titled after Rilke’s “Aus Einem April.” In Frank O'Hara: Poet Among Painters, Marjorie Perloff refers to O’Hara’s poem as a “loose adaptation” of Rilke’s. David Lehman has called it a “deliberate mistranslation.”
Frankly, I’m not sure what ‘translation’ has to do with O’Hara’s poem at all.
If I had to find words for it, I’d say O’Hara borrowed the structure of Rilke’s poem and cast it into the shape of Rilke’s “Aus Einem April.” The title acknowledges this Aus-Einem-April mode; there is no epigraph pointing to Rilke because the pleasure of an O’Hara poem (much like the pleasure of an Ashbery) comes from reaching the reader who recognizes the source. Even the way O’Hara closes this poem — “and out there everything is turbulent and green” — shares almost no bones with Rilke’s quiet glistenings and “still” details ordered by awe.
Speaking of shapes and modes and stanzas, Susan Stewart’s new poetry collection, Bramble, has sharpened my appetite for clusters of single-stanza poems composed from 8 lines. The duration of a morsel or instant, Stewart’s octets feel like cavalcades of close attentions. This one comes from a series of “Psalm Octets”:
Ps. 52
The little minds brag at the meeting,
while the rest yawn and read their mail.
The surface wounds smart, then itch,
while the deep wounds wash away
like shale on the cliffs. I was laughing
at you, not with you. I was meant
to be a sapling, supple and green,
and waiting alone in that wind.
Susan Stewart
I’ve been playing around with a draft of a concrete poem titled “liebestod,” which landed me in a rabbit-hole of Tristan and Isolde, which — at some point — led to my discovery of this poem by Thom Gunn titled “Das Libesleben”:
by Thom Gunn
Much luck to you, Member;
— Thom Gunn
The artist is higher than the Tsar, so kings must bow before him.
— A. Scriabin
O, how little you know, dad. And how I would die to prove you wrong.
— Ariadna
*
John Gallaher, “A Line is a Hesitation, Not a World”
Susan Stewart, Bramble (University of Chicago Press)
The Dandy Warhols, “Nietzsche”
postscript to April as a poem by David Berman
“CATALLUS CX: A TRANSLATION”
Alfie, honest mistresses are lauded;
The presents they receive they earn, but you,
Who lead me on with lies, leave me defrauded.
My anti-mistress, brazen what you do;
You keep my gifts but, suddenly demure,
Renege on my reward. Either be chaste
Before accepting fees or be the whore
That you pretend, your total body placed
Where just your mouth is. Greed and 'virtue' make
Strange bedfellows, each sure the other's fake.
David Berman