LTAC

Last night, Phyllis Aronoff, president of the Literary Translator's Association of Canada, invited members to her place for a potluck supper and to read selections of their work by candlelight. A friend of mine suggested that being in a roomful of literary translators would be like being in a roomful of well-groomed cats. There was some truth to that speculation; of the fifteen or so people who were there, most were, I'd say, professional translators for whom literary work can only serve as icing on their cakes. All were well-read, cultured, and pleasant, and there were some delightful creatives among them to delighten the mix. The seven people who shared their work read very poetic prose, if not poetry. Beautiful stuff! Naturally, I read some of my translations of Santos, and I'm gratified to say they were well received. It seems this is an annual affair. I look forward to next year's.

Hate to say it, but the LTAC site gets my vote as possibly the ugliest on the web. I know literary translators frequently complain about being invisible; this kind of visual presentation pretty well ensures that! Time for an upgrade, obviously... in the meantime, the art of literary translation remains (to use a Buddhist metaphor) a hidden wish-fulfilling jewel that could bring peoples together and kindle refreshing trends if brought into the light. Earlier remarks on cultural diplomacy (see label below) are a propos.

Apr. 22: Just got a note from Howard Scott, the webmaster of the site, acknowledging that the site is very dated, but that redoing it is always being put off due to lack of time...

SAD ADVICE

If it isn't fun, don't do it.
You'll have to do enough that isn't.

Such is life, like they say,
no one gets away without paying

and since you don't get to keep it
anyhow, who needs it.

-- Robert Creeley, Selected Poems, 1991.

Words on the Move

Every year the Literary Translator's Association of Canada stages "Words of the Move". Members of the general public are invited to translate an English or French poem by a living Quebec poet into the language of their choice. Their translations are posted on the association website, and they share their work with the poets who wrote the originals at a round-robin reading, which will take place this year on Friday April 4 (7 pm) at the Depanneur Cafe. I'm sure the event is always pleasant; it's also the first one I'll be able to attend, because it doesn't fall on a teaching night.

The English poet this year is Catherine Kidd (you can read her poem here); the French poet is Patrick Coppens. The Coppens poem was fun to recast into English: I did that last weekend. I don't know if it's an extract from a larger work, or meant to be a complete poem in itself. Here's my translation, followed by the original:

Secret Notebooks
of Agathe Brisebois

Patrick Coppens

******

I work for eternity,
in evanescence.

Space invades forms
mind intimates colors

…regarding colors,
those that fade
were not made to last.

Sleigh: words. Bells: chill.

Poetry puts in disorder
my forgotten memories.

*****

He asked me the time.
I refused.
At his befuddlement, I said:
worry not, it will come.

It was noon.
One day, I lived my life,
the next day, yours.
Then it was done.

"I think you are a poet
but you will never find the new,
that is to say, the essential,
except in contemplating your own naval."
(Max Jacob,
letter to Francois Gachot, May 7, 1926)

*****

Don’t forget the photos,
us dancing in Sospel,
near Merlanson.

Summer love
a gooseberry in the head.

Mysteries breed
like rabbits. Hat!

"The assemblage of illusion and reality
in the same subject made him
the disturbing mirror of our inner selves. "
(Bernard Noël,
Les peintres du désir, 1992)

I love abstraction
in the interstices of the real.

*****

Anonymity,
some days, weighs on me,
on others, hurts;
I welcome it all the same:
none can take that away from me.
But when I write, when I draw,
I am the Queen, adulated by my subjects.

Pleasing exhausts
those who do not love themselves enough.

*****

Style.
What can I do?


LUCK IS A PAINTING
BY WINNING NUMBERS

-- translation by Brian Campbell ©Mar. 2008

Carnets secrets
d'Agathe Brisebois

Patrick
Coppens


*****

Je travaille pour l'éternité,
mais dans l'évanescence.

formes occupées d'espace
raison intime des couleurs

À propos des couleurs,
celles qui passent
n'étaient pas faites pour durer.

Froid de grelots, traîneau des mots.

La poésie met du désordre
dans mes souvenirs oubliés.

*****

Il s'approcha pour me demander l'heure,
Je lui refusai.
Devant son air interloqué, je précisai :
ne t'inquiète pas, elle viendra.

Il était midi.
Un jour, j'ai vécu ma vie,
et le lendemain, la tienne.
Apres, c'était fini.

« Je crois que tu es poète
mais tu ne trouveras du nouveau,
c'est-à-dire l'essentiel,
qu'en contemplant ton nombril à toi. »
(Max Jacob,
lettre à François Gachot, 7 mai 1926)

*****

Ne pas oublier les photos ;
celles où nous dansions à Sospel,
au bord du Merlanson.

amours d'été
une groseille dans la tête

Les mystères se reproduisent
comme des lapins. Chapeau !

« L'assemblage de l'illusion et de la réalité
dans un même objet fait de lui
le miroir troublant de notre intériorité. »
(Bernard Noël,
Les peintres du désir, 1992)

J'aime l'abstraction
dans les interstices du réel.

*****

L'anonymat,
certains jours, me pèse,
d'autres, me chagrine;
je m'en réjouis tout de même
car personne ne peut m'en priver.
Mais quand j'écris, quand je dessine,
je me sens reine, adulée par mes sujets.


Plaire épuise ceux
qui ne s'aiment pas assez.

*****

Le style.
Qu'y puis-je ?


LA CHANCE EST UNE PEINTURE
À NUMÉROS GAGNANTS.

Just came back from Words on the Move. It was a fascinating event, where at least 8 translations of each poem were read out. The translations differed quite widely -- but I tell you, there were phrases from each one I would steal, and quite viable ones that would never have crossed my mind. Makes one think that composite translation would be the best approach. Will add some highlights to the post below.

Most, I imagine, would think that it would be tedious to hear and read 8 versions of the same poem -- but really, quite the opposite is true. It helps one to improve one's own prowess, to think outside the box of one's own perceptions.

Here are some highlights from other translations:

Where I translated,

I work for eternity,
in evanescence

Maxianne Berger wrote,

I towards forever
but within evanescence.

Where I translated,

Sleigh: words. Bells: chill.

Maxianne Berger translated

Chill of sleighbells, sledding words.

and Hugh Hazelton translated

Shivering bells, sleighing words.

Karin Montin

jingling cold, sleighful of words

and Greg Kelm wrote

Jingle jangle, words in a tangle.

Where I translated,

Poetry puts in disorder
my forgotten memories.

Maxianne wrote,

Poetry makes a muddle
of the memories I don't recall.

and Hugh Hazelton wrote,

Poetry messes up
my forgotten memories.

and Greg Kelm wrote,

Poetry jumbles up
my forgotten memories.

Where I (and others) wrote, quite literally

Summer love
a gooseberry in the head

Maxianne wrote

summer love
pudding head

Jonathan Kaplansky wrote

summer loves
giddy-headed

and Claire Maryniak

summer loves
berries for brains

and Greg Kelm

summer love
a currant in my brain.

And for the final line, where I wrote

LUCK IS A PAINTING
BY WINNING NUMBERS

Maxianne wrote

BY NUMBERS THAT WIN

Jonathan Kaplansky

WHOSE NUMBERS HAVE WON

while Karin Montin wrote,

FORTUNE IS A PAINT-BY-NUMBER KIT
WITH LUCKY NUMBERS

and Aviva Shimelman

LUCK IS A PAINT-BY-NUMBERS
MASTERPIECE

Robin Blaser & Phil Hall

Saw Robin Blaser and Phil Hall read at the Atwater Library last Friday night. (One can catch this reading, along with other Atwater readings, here.) Neither poets I knew particularly well, although from my bookcase I fished out Robin Blaser's Pell Mell, which a friend gave me at about the time it came out in 1988. Blaser, friend of Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan and intimately associated with what has come to be known as San Francisco Renaissance (even after he came to Vancouver and took Canadian citizenship in the early '70s), is now 83, and clearly, probabilities are I wouldn't have a chance to see him again. So I read through 50 pages of his book to get a sense of his style and see if he was worth going to hear read. I liked what I saw, although his work took a while to grow on me. Clearly, Blaser is an academic and rather abstruse at that, but he's not in the slightest bit stuffy. Free-wheeling, whimsical, ethereal ... emphasis on vision, evocation, delight in multiple possibilities, accidental juxtapositions that tend toward hermetic. A looseness of diction I associate with the West coast. Definitely a happy writer. Here's one brief poem I liked, although it is certainly more straightforward and "concrete" than most of what he does:

My Window

of neighbours and pumpkins
and sweeties, private kisses, sky

and wonderful, superstitions

to begin the day, knocking on

wood, rhythmically, musical

breakfasts, soft, boiled,

toasted with currents, intimate

wandering of questions and belief,

the thin skin wanders the adventure

of clothes-off-clothes-on, and

Mattress Mary, across Rock Creek,

out of bounds, summers

There's stuff here about which I wonder whether it belongs: "and Mattress Mary, across Rock Creek"? Could the poem do better without it? (By the way, there are no stanza breaks -- somehow the encoding included them, and I can't get rid of them.)

Many of Blaser's poetic clusterings are gathered under abstract titles: Belief, Anecdote, Romance, The Soul, Desire. Here's The Soul, another poem I enjoyed. Curious that it also features windows and summers.

The Soul

someday, the windows    the transparency
screams      open and zippers

the last minute -- processions -- marriages --
meetings   such rainbows or corners

raindrops--the sound of--which
winds slap or wander

solitude   perfect  agreement
disordered

take it this way or that way
upwards and downwards, sideways
and backwards

reminders of rivers, streets,
sidewalks, the pathways

of whatever form, reforming
a definition backward and outward
of this misnomer--

there it wings, homing, dim
or not, flashes, caught, and
then winters,

a slip of a thing, in and out,
statues and stillness, walks easily

the thigh of the things, between things, golden
and repetitious

surfaces swim, collecting
the depths and inevitable summers of
there-it-is

This poem is particularly successful because it cleverly invokes an heraldic notion of "soul"-- flashing wings, borne aloft -- as locus of being, the "there-it-is", gliding artfully among the flotsam. (On Explorer I discover the stanza breaks -- every two lines or so, are lost: best to look at this post through Firefox.)

Pell Mell is a good title for a collection of such joyful skitterings among seeming (and frequently not-so-seeming) non-sequiturs. These have been amassed with all his other poems into a larger vision called "The Holy Forest", an impressive tome published just last year. (I wasn't convinced enough to shell out for it, but I might...) On stage Blazer was warm but humble presence, if at times too soft-spoken for that microphone. A couple of times a member of the audience served us all by asking to repeat a poem that was just barely audible the first time.

Phil Hall was a good poet to pair up with Blaser, because he is also cerebral and very quirky, but if anything intenser, darker, and given to offbeat and sometimes genuinely funny wordplay. Consider these lines he read from his newly published "White Porcupine" :

self-sufficiency is the worst crime
if what I have to say seems unconnected -- wider!
there is a further from lies than truth

I begged for this fresh day
to run as I have others -- a day that is already a day
to bend out of its spelling into yada yada

the landscape is lined up around the block
to get in to see The Landscape: A Wire Circus

bare coat-hangers tossing their horse heads
triangulating closet leagues & fathoms

giving their harness-bells a shake
where has it gone she gone he gone?

no one humiliates the dead (yeah right)

Perhaps to the uninitiated these lines seem remote, but now I can't read them without remembering Hall's superb reading of them. Hall performed these lines so well -- with the edgiest of inflections and pregnant pauses -- that he had the audience quite cracking up, particularly at the word "wider!": he exclaimed it, jerking his hands apart to make it clear that was urging himself and the reader to be even more disconnected. This singular sense of "wider" is not that obvious on the page, where it could be taken as simply an additional and alternative adjective to "disconnected". (Even that exclamation point doesn't quite make the point.) I should add that Hall's high-pitched voice sharpens those points, and is pretty well perfect for what he has to deliver.

Both Blaser and Hall play with abstractions and arbitrary inclusion in a fashion that goes quite against the grain of what I was saying in the foregoing post on craft, which was, essentially, interrogate those loose ends ruthlessly, cut 'em out. Refreshing and even illuminating that these poets also succeed, in their ways, so well.

A couple of new bloggers for my blogroll: fellow Montrealer Stephen Morrissey, and one Indran Amirthanayagam, a Vancouver-based Ceylonese (Sri-Lancan)-born poet-diplomat who writes his posts in flawless English, Spanish, French, and who writes poetry in all three languages. I just read an excellent post of his reflecting on Latin American poetry, and international influences in general.

... a rare Parrot Flower from Thailand. These thanks to a student of mine from Laos.

POLISHING: SOME CRAFT SECRETS

Today I dipped into Jon Franklin’s Writing for Story, one of the most brilliant books on writing craft I’ve ever come across. Of course, the main focus of this book – how to plan and structure a novel or short story (or Franklin’s specialty, the dramatic non-fiction piece) – is only indirectly relevant to yrs. truly: I just don’t seem to be genetically structured to write extended fiction, however much I enjoy reading it. (The closest I've come are dramatic monologues, prose poems and little "storyettes" now fashionably called "postcard stories".) But what Franklin writes about word choice, under a section on polishing the story, any poet could take cues from. I’ve arrived at pretty well the same conclusions my own way. But refreshing it was to read this. Frankly, I’ve never seen it said better. (To know precisely what Franklin means by “active images” or “complication”, you’ll have to read his book.)

SPECIFICITY AND UNIVERSALITY

The key to word choice, as well as to the inherent power of active images, is specificity.

Specificity is a concept that applies exquisitely to the level of polish. On the conceptual level, stories benefit from sweeping summarizations and even from clichés: “Man seeks love” is a powerful complication.

But at the polish level, the story must be told in terms of unique individuals and their specific actions and thoughts. As in poetry, the universal is finally achieved by focusing down, tightly, even microscopically, on specific events and the details that surround them.

Clichés, precisely because they are so widely applicable (and not, in my opinion, because they are “tired” – whatever that means), destroy the writer’s effort to be specific and therefore universal.

SIMPLICITY INTO ELEGANCE

Simplicity, or the quality of straightforwardness, is a key concept of polish. Clarity of image is as sensitive to complexity as structure is to woodwork. If you have any doubts, read Huckleberry Finn and then follow it, without pause, with Faulkner’s The Hamlet. Or try to. The sensation is something like running full-tilt into that familiar brick wall.

This is not a total criticism of Faulkner. Faulkner, like Joyce before him, was an experimenter and inventor. To criticize him for lack of clarity is much like criticizing the Wright brothers because their airplanes couldn’t carry troops. Still, the example makes my point.

The quest for simplicity is complicated by two great dangers. The first is that the image will not be simple enough; the second is that it will be too simple.

Simplicity ultimately boils down to the use of as few words as possible. If you need very many words to create your active image, and particularly if very many of the words are modifiers or if the image is bracketed by prepositions, you probably aren’t using the right words. This is the reason that virtually all polish experts issue frequent dire warnings against the use of modifiers (adjectives and adverbs), prepositions, and words that end with “ing”.

Modifiers, prepositions and so forth are not in and of themselves evil. The problem is that the writer tends to need them only if he is trying to make do with an almost-right word. If you need a modifier to alter the meaning of a word, then the chances are very good that you don’t have the right word. If you did, it wouldn’t need modification.

If this is the case, simply cutting out the modifiers and prepositional constructions may simplify the thought, but it will also make it inaccurate. The situation calls to mind Albert Einstein’s observation that he liked things to be as simple as they could be…but not any simpler than they really were.

At the same time, lest the apprentice hide behind Albert’s baggy trousers, it should be pointed out that Einstein was the same fellow who summed up the entire physical universe in a single mathematical image.

The writer’s pursuit, like the physicist’s, is a combination of simplicity and accuracy. A master craftsman by choosing exactly the right words, can sum up great segments of the psychological universe. What he achieves in the process is not mere simplicity but elegance.

For a poet polishing his or her poems (oh, that hardest thing to do – that’s why hundreds of writing programs are full), I'd say the advice is similar: regard your modifiers, prepositional phrases, and the like, with suspicion; see if your lines can do better without them.

Many poets, myself included, are voluptuaries of words… oh how we love the sound of them! The struggle between sound and sense: maybe I could write my first novel about that. Any
parallelism (these often disguise excess), any use of two or three images to express a feeling or idea where one would do, beware! And those dear, cherished phrases – especially the clever, abstract ones – most especially those that may have inspired a poetic flight – interrogate them! Even if they’re your dearest children, be prepared to kill them off. Or, to use another metaphor (here’s me using two where one will do – but I think this one’s illustrative) those phrases may have served as scaffolding you needed to build your poem. Try taking them down: if the house still stands solidly on its own, be ruthless, clear ’em away.

Of course, the nutshell from the workshops is, write loose, edit tight. You really can’t allow editorial consideration to interfere with creative flow. But for any poet in the process of editing his or her work, I’d say absorb the above and then read Creeley, Creeley, Creeley – the epitome of poetic concision. Even -- especially -- if your style is quite different. Then examine your work with the same acid eye.

Sent some stuff out today -- by e- as well as old fashioned snail.

"If a fellow wants to be a nobody in the business world, let him neglect sending the mail man to somebody on his behalf."
--Charles F. Kettering, American engineer, inventor of the electric starter, 1876-1958

Could be said of the literary world.

(I wouldn't mind having that man's starter...)

Censorship through the back door

So the latest flap is that our wonderful Harper government is trying to push through a tax bill that would enable the government to effectively censor art that doesn't conform to its ideas of "public policy" -- even after that work has been publicly supported and produced. You can read more about it here in the Toronto Star. Of course, film and theatre associations are especially up in arms, as the legislation is most directly is aimed at them. But it does effect other arts as well. Here's a letter the president of the League of Canadian Poets composed yesterday; its National Council (including yours truly) approved of it last night; he gave me permission to print it here.

Dear Senator W. David Angus (and other members of the Senate Committee on Bank, Trade and Commerce),

In my capacity as president of the League of Canadian Poets, representing more than 700 members across Canada, I am writing to urge the senate to defeat this bill and return it to the House of Commons where it can be sensibly amended so it does not include section 119 (3) (b). The problem with that section, as has now been widely reported in the media, is the government’s proposal to act as a censor on Canadian films and other works of art by withholding tax credits on works that have already been produced, so that “public financial support of the production would not be contrary to public policy”. “Public policy” in Canada has never included government’s right to censor works of art that receive or have already received public subsidy. Government policy of this kind is normally associated with dictatorships. Please defeat this bill.

Maurice Mierau
President,
League of Canadian Poets

Sponsors -- whether corporate or government -- are, as Naomi Klein so well put it, the courteous censors of the western world. Already creators have quite burdensome implicit pressures to deal with, with funding and publication bodies and policies as they now stand.

For those (including our government) who are out of touch with artists and with the nature of the creative process, it has to be stressed that having to second guess what "public policy" is puts a serious chill on artistic creation right at its inception.

Ironically, as Peter Darbyshire points out, foreign (i.e. Hollywood) imports wouldn't have to undergo such scrutiny, creating an immediate double standard.

The question of course remains whether this move is a conscious one, part of a very deliberate strategy to curtail freedoms, or some idea a semi-conscious moral-majority (?) government thought would be a good one, without imagining the implications. Considering the controlling and secretive nature of this government, with its close ties to the Bush administration, I frankly wouldn't be surprised if the former was the case. If the latter -- also quite possible --is the case, it sends a strong message of insensitivity, if nothing else.

The Star article suggests the crescendo of protest will likely pressure the government into amending the bill. "Of course, the guidelines don't exist. So there's nothing to worry about. Isn't it silly the way arts folk get into a flap about nothing?" is the article's blithe conclusion. Well, if we didn't get into such a flap, that nothing could easily turn into quite something. And it could just yet.

Fri. Mar. 7: This post underwent some revision from yesterday. On reflection, I chose to tone down certain wording, but to entertain the possibility of sinister intentions on the part of this gov. more seriously.

Epiphany of Epiphanies

Today, I had an aha moment. An epiphany. All at once, these Four Supreme Precepts, these Four Mighty Pillars of Civility and Wisdom came to me in a blinding vision:

• Be polite
• Assume good faith
• No personal attacks
• Be welcoming

Where did I find these? In the Lotus Sutra? The Tao Te Ching? The Analects of Confucius? The writings of Eckhart Tolle, Deepak Chopra, or any of that ever-expanding host of New (and Improved)-Age Sages? In the profoundest recesses my own marvelously sensitive, poetic ticker?

No -- in the ground rules for Wikipedia's discussion board.

May they be ground rules for this blog...particularly, the comments boxes.

You out there know who you are.