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I first met the American poet, historian, teacher, translator Peter Viereck in 1974, when Joseph Brodsky, Michael Hamburger, Viereck and myself had lunch at an Indian restaurant in London. In 1975, some of Viereck’s translations of Stefan George were published in MPT, First Series, 21 (this selection including ‘Knights Templars’, reprinted here in a substantially revised later version).
   We corresponded for a while and then lost touch. However, I would hear about Viereck from time to time from Brodsky, who was a close friend and admirer of his and who co-taught courses with him at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, where Viereck was Professor of History. He taught there from 1948 beyond his retirement in 1987 until 1996-7. It was Viereck who brought Brodsky to Mount Holyoke. They had met in Leningrad in 1962 and renewed their friendship when Brodsky came to the US, in 1972. Perhaps the last letter Brodsky wrote before his death in 1996 was to Viereck. He was looking forward to again teaching their seminar, officially called “Poets under Stalin and Hitler”, for which their secret name was “Rime and Punishment”. Viereck adds, in a letter to me: “Or shd I say: ‘Punnishness’?”
   Born in New York City in 1916, Peter Viereck, who in 1949 was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his first book of poems, Terror and Decorum, is also among the most creative and original translators of poetry. His approach can perhaps be characterized as holistic, surrendering neither to the sense nor the sound, but trying to render both. Here is Viereck’s own characterization of his translations (to be found in his ‘Background Note on Stefan George’, partially reproduced below): “[The translator] prefers to call the result a transplanting, not a translation: because the commentaries and sometimes non-literal renderings try to reproduce the original soil (context, music, intent, connotations) rather than the dictionary-meaning denotations.” In the present climate (among translators, at any rate) of post-colonial foreignization, this might make some uneasy. But Viereck has earned the right (“The translator has worked on this ‘impossible’ translation attempt for some sixty years, starting 1936.”) to be taken at his word. He
is, it seems to me, describing a kind of translation that derives not from political conviction but from an interior knowledge of the source texts. Perhaps this is the “real” foreignization, or perhaps great translators, of whatever persuasion, converge.
   The late Katherine Washburn, herself a noted translator of Paul
Celan, among other German poets, and editor of the huge Norton
anthology World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time (1998), said of Viereck: “no one has ever translated Goethe as well into English”. She included more of his translations (Heym, George) in the anthology than of anyone else’s.
   Among Viereck’s many collections of poetry is Archer in the Marrow: The Applewood Cycles 1967-1987, published in 1987. Frederick Turner writes of it: “One reads Archer in the Marrow with the same amazement and trembling that The Wasteland must have inspired in its first readers. The language blazes out as if it had never been used before.” Joseph Brodsky again – and this returns us, in a way, to our translational theme – wrote of this volume:

Applewood is the major event in American poetry of today, on a par with Williams’ Paterson or Pound’s Cantos (although Mr Viereck would resent such a comparison). It would be considered a major event in any literature. Had Applewood been written in French or German, it would be no doubt a lot luckier: by now we’d have had it translated into English several times, hailed, imitated, parodied.

Tide and Continuities, Last and First Poems (1995-1938) was published by the University of Arkansas Press, which with some justification refers to Viereck’s poetry as “an ongoing experiment in the symbiosis of poetry and history”. The book includes an argumentative verse preface by Brodsky, from which I have extracted these stanzas:

He’s in his seventies. He saw
more of humanity’s seesaw
than you who will peruse these pages,
heart-rending, gorgeous, outrageous,
thus spanning roughly five decades
– the Nazis, the Cold War, and AIDS,
the ogres turning mediogres –
such is the nature of our progress. [. . .]

Unlike the bulk of current stuff,
rough-hewn, minimalist, and tough,
this book, left to its own devices,
is an homage to Dionysos:
it is a growth. In its design,
by turns malignant and benign,
it tends to leap, digress, meander;
in short, its target is its grandeur. [. . .]

The “punnish” invention or neologism “mediogres”, in the first of these recycled from a free self-translation of one of Brodsky’s own
poems, in English titled ‘In Memoriam’ where it also rhymes with
“progress”. The relationship between these two poets, having as much to do with prosody, a regard for metre and rhyme, as with philosophy or political beliefs, is worth exploring, but I have no space to do so here. However, I should like to quote Viereck’s unpublished memorial to Brodsky. Professor Viereck sent this to me, remarking that he had heard that MPT had had a Brodsky issue (in fact a Special Feature on Brodsky, in MPT 10 (Russia), in 1996, the year of Brodsky’s death) and that perhaps this would be acceptable as a late contribution.

Not Works
                (For Brodsky)

The night the poet died his metaphors
Gloated in liberation round his corpse.
Now rouged clichés, disguised as muse,
Ignite a bombing bombast’s purple fuse.
Cant sneaks its Trojan Pegasus
Into Parnassus. Hoarse refugees race to warn us
That exclamation marks are running wild
And prowling half-truths carried off a child.
Fixed stars his vision etched into the skies
Now gouge – as falling stars – his too-wide eyes.
   Yet he throbs on in form to shatter
   This formless mutiny of matter.
   His dust is dead, his pulse a frightening thunder.
   Bell, book, and test tube can’t exorcise its gong,
   Pulsing us into shapes of gargoyle wonder.
   In vain we drive our stakes through such a haunter.
   Are we but split iambics of his song?
   Are hearts feet lungs and couplings strummed
   By two-way thump,
   Scanning our outraged flesh with metric flow?
Yet some sereneness in our rage has guessed
That we are being blest and blest and blest
When least we know it and when coldest art
Seems hostile, useless, or apart.
Not worms, not worms in such a skull
But rhythms, rhythms writhe and sting and crawl.
They spin the seasons round from bud to snow.
And all things are because he tuned them so.
                                   [revised March 2000]

Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler was hailed by Thomas Mann for its indictment of the Nazi menace. Other historical/political works by Viereck include Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against Revolt, 1815-1949, which proposes a political and cultural programme for the West based on a new interpretation of modern history. Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals: Babbitt Jr vs the Rediscovery of Values and Dream and Responsibility: Four Test Cases of the Tension Between Poetry and Society appeared in 1953, and in 1956 Viereck published two volumes defending
the Western heritage of individual freedom against communism and
fascism: The Unadjusted Man: A New Hero for Americans: Reflections on the Distinction Between Conforming and Conserving (1956, 1962) and Conservatism: From John Adams to Churchill (1956). In Conservatism Revisited and the New Conservatism: What Went Wrong? (1962) Viereck describes the degeneration into thought control and material greed of some aspects of the “new conservative” movement which his earlier work in 1949 had helped to found.

Peter Viereck is among our few genuinely independent literary and
scholarly illuminati and has, to some extent, paid the price for his
originality. Michael Lind, author of Up from Conservatism: why the Right is Wrong for America, wrote: “Peter Viereck is one of the most accomplished and unjustly neglected thinkers of the twentieth century”. He aligns himself neither with the right nor the left. The tactics of the neoconservative right wing of contemporary politics, he calls “mean-spirited and petty”. But he is clear in one respect: “I never distinguished between Fascism and Communism [. . .] They are based on dry, cold, abstract slogans felt in the head, but not in the heart.”

Arthur Schlessinger, commenting on Viereck’s Metapolitics in his
memoirs, A Life (2000), quotes Thomas Mann: “Peter published
Metapolitics, an important and original work tracing the historical
roots of Nazi racism and messianism to the excesses of German
romanticism . . . Wagner was darkly prominent in Peter’s analysis, and Thomas Mann, though a fan of Wagner, approved Peter’s account and praised him for going back to ‘the sources of German Nationalism which is the most dangerous in existence, because it is mechanized mysticism.’” Schlessinger, recalling that Viereck, amazingly enough, was the greatgrandson of Kaiser Wilhelm I, through the Kaiser’s mistress, the actress Edwina Viereck, calls him “a romantic classicist, a poetic constitutionalist, an immoderate moderate, a Bohemian who argues for propriety and restraint”. Viereck himself put it this way: “progress is achieved in zigzags, by constant readiness to readjust to reality. A straight line is the
longest distance between two points. And the bloodiest.”

Viereck is the only Guggenheim recipient to have received a
Fellowship in two categories: poetry and history, repeating his much
earlier performance at Harvard when he received the Garrison prize for the best undergraduate verse and the Bowdoin medal for the best prose. It is not hard to understand what drew Brodsky to him. “Ideas must dance”, he wrote, “and metre is Time in leotards”. In a recent letter to me, Peter Viereck commented on his own fascination with Brodsky’s “technically ‘incorrect’” self-translations: “They give me a better, newer understanding of my own language. As if Eng [sic] were a prism suddenly turned to a new angle.” A master of the language and of its prosody, Viereck is among the few with enough generosity of spirit and freedom from dogma to be able to make this claim.

It is impossible to encapsulate Peter Viereck’s career and creative
personality in so brief a piece. Last year at my request, he sent me,
among other writings, the manuscript of his 65-year project,
‘Transplantings’. About half of this consists of translations: Goethe, in particular a number of “turning points” from Faust, which cannot be excerpted and so are not represented here; Stefan George (1868-1933); Georg Heym (1987-1912); and related poets like Hofmannsthal. The other half is short essays on the translation of each poem and on its cultural context. This prompted me to re-start MPT’s ‘Translators of Poetry’ series, which has included Michael Bullock (No 3, Summer 1993), Robert Friend (No 4, Winter 1993/4), James Kirkup (No 11, Summer 1997). We can do no more, however, than taste or dip into these allusive texts, which cross-reference one another and in a sense form a single entity. It is to be hoped that the complete work will find a publisher in due course and that other works by this remarkable poetthinker
will be brought back into print.