Presiding spirits: Marilyn Hacker interviewed by Mary MacRae
In Presiding Spirits we ask a contemporary poet to write a poem drawing on work of the past. In this issue, Marilyn Hacker has written a poem in memory of Reetika Vazirani using a traditional Spanish form, the glose. Marilyn Hacker lives in Paris and Manhattan where she teaches at the City University of New York Graduate Center and the City College of New York. She was formerly editor of the Kenyon Review and, in 2000, co-edited a special issue of the American magazine Poetry on contemporary French poetry in 2000. She has published eleven books of her own poetry, the most recent of which is Desesperanto (W.W. Norton, 2003), and five translations of collections by modern French or Francophone poets.
Mary MacRae asked Marilyn Hacker about the poem’s origin and more generally about her work.
GLOSE
The death of a sparrow has blackened the snow
But nothing consoled her
Who is the night among all nights? she asked the owl
But the owl doesn’t think, the owl knows
Vénus Khoury-Ghata: Borderland
translated by M.H.
Dumb heat, not snow, sheathes Paris in July
and sheathes suburban Washington.
Planes rip through the fabric of a frayed
afternoon torn open
by words no afterwards will clarify.
Knowing what happened, no one will know.
There was a poet, and she had a son.
There was exile, its weight on a day.
There was the heart’s ice, its insistent glow.
The death of a sparrow has blackened the snow.
Trope upon silvered trope, of what might a mirror
remind her : copper, black silk , the eloquence
intelligence gives eyes ? Reflected terror
that conscripted all intelligence.
I am a great way off and cannot come nearer.
I do not know what the night or the mirror told her
or the sense of the words she wrote when nothing
made sense,
or if they made a sense that seemed clearer and clearer.
The child raised his arms to be lifted, to be held, to hold her,
but nothing consoled her.
Put the morning away in the murk of myth :
displace the unthinkable with Radha’s dance
breaking her bangles, imploring the dark god with
metered and musical lamentations,
repeated measures meant to distance death
suggest a redemptive spiral for the soul
(child, child bleeding to death, no second chance)
in the containment of despair and wrath
within the peopled descent of the ritual.
(Who is the night of all nights she asked the owl.)
No dark god was there, and no god of light .
There are women and men, cruel or fallible.
No mild friend picked up the telephone at the right
moment ; some Someone was unavailable.
The morning which paled from an uneventful night
would have been ordinary, except that she chose.
Interrogate the hours, invent some oracle
flying overhead , read fate into its flight.
We think the snow was blackened by dead sparrows,
but the owl doesn’t think ; the owl knows.
In memory of Reetika Vazirani
Your poem is somewhat unusual for our Presiding Spirits feature as it's a response to two poets, Reetika Vazirani, now dead, and Vénus Khoury-Ghata, who provides the four-line starting-point of your poem. I think our readers would be very interested to hear something about each poet, their poetry and your poetic relationship to them. In particular, why did you choose the extract from Khoury-Ghata as the springboard for your elegy/meditation in memory of Vazirani?
Reetika Vazirani was born in India in 1962, emigrated to the United States with her family in 1968, and was raised in Maryland. She graduated from Wellesley College and the University of Virginia, and spent time traveling, studying and writing in India, Thailand and Japan. Her first book, White Elephants, which I chose as the winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize, was published by the Beacon Press in 1996; her second book, World Hotel appeared from Copper Canyon Press in 2002. She died with her young son in Washington D.C. in July 2003.
The following quote, from a sequence which was first published in the Kenyon Review (under my editorship) in 1993, illustrates some of Vazirani’s constant preoccupations, as a poet and, indeed, a citizen.
Culture shock is not your reflex upon leaving
the dock;
it is when you have been a law-abiding citizen
for more than ten years: when someone asks
your name
and the name of your religion and your first thought is
I don’t know, or you can’t remember what you said
last time;
you think there is something you forgot to sign:
your oath, for one; and you are positive
those green-shirted workmen in the room right now
want to take you in for questioning.
from Thinking About Citizenship While
the Workmen Are Here
in White Elephants
Vénus Khoury-Ghata was born in Lebanon in 1937, emigrated to France in 1973, and still lives in Paris. Bilingual from childhood, she was obliged to choose between French and Arabic as her language of expression: although she chose French, she is still pulled between the two, and their tension/attraction is one of the central themes of her poetry. She is the author of 14 novels and 12 collections of poems (also the mother of four children, a mistress of Lebanese cuisine, and the president of several literary prize juries). Her work has been translated into many languages: I’m the translator into English of two collections of her poetry: Here There was Once a Country (Oberlin College Press, Ohio, U.S.A., 2001) and She Says (Graywolf Press, Minnesota, U.S.A., 2003).
There are convergent elements in these two biographies: notably the question of emigration, experienced by both poets as at once election and exile, the memory of war in their countries of origin, the impossibility of ‘assimilating’, even if it were wished for, because of cultural and ‘racial’ divergence, the particularity of being an immigrant in France, in the United States, from a non- European culture. This, as well as the perhaps most pertinent fact that I was/ am close to both women, led me (at first unconsciously) to associate them in my poem. In fact, the dual subject of Khoury-Ghata’s poem Borderlands, which can be found in the Spring 2004 issue of Poetry London, is the poet’s mother’s death and the influx of ‘stateless’ Palestinian refugees into Lebanon after the Six Days’ War.
You choose an unusual form (in English poetry, at any rate) for your poem. What drew you to this form and why did you choose it for this elegy? And could you comment on the links between this poem and your current poetic preoccupations - possibly linking this with the preoccupations of your 'presiding spirits'?
The glose (“glosa” in Spanish) has been used with great richness in
English, in particular by the Canadian poet P.K. Page. Taking a quatrain or four-line sequence from the work of another poet and elaborating four stanzas, each ending with one of the four lines, it concretely acknowledges the links between poets, the ways in which one poet’s work can initially spring from another’s. Engaged, as I have been, in translating the work of several contemporary French and Francophone poets, and aware of the influence their work on my own as I continue, I’ve begun a series of gloses, each using four lines from a French poem I’ve translated with which to “dialogue” in the new text. So this poem, even as it stands alone as an elegy, is also part of an ongoing sequence which I hope establishes a current of poetic colloquy.
I think the obvious and even ‘triumphant’ survival of Vénus Khoury-Ghata as woman and poet, someone whose history hardly destined her for a prolific literary life in Paris, became a counter-weight to my shock and grief at the news of Reetika’s death.
Does form, in your view, help to reconcile us to the tragic, even the horrific, as in this poem?
“Reconcile,” no. But isn’t “form”, be it the elegy or the requiem, or the mundane obituary, or the news report, an attempt to give some narrative form to disaster - one of the most human, and humane, responses to the tragic or horrific ?
Much of your poetry is written in strict, often elaborate forms. What corresponding freedom or other advantages do you find this confers on the poet?
If there is any relation between the use of fixed (received or invented) form and translation, it’s in the necessary suppression of the poet’s conscious preoccupations /preconceived ideas in favor of working directly with, and being worked upon by, the language itself. Thinking, not ‘about’ but ‘in’ a chosen meter or rhythm, the exigencies of repetitions of words or echoing vowel/consonant combinations of rhyme, bring the language’s possibilities into play, bring choices - and directions of thought, image, narrative - into play which would not have been suggested by more linear thinking about the sequence of an idea, a narrative or even an emotion.
English is often described as being a rhyme-poor language (as compared with French or Italian, for example) but the disparate sources and roots of English words mean that rhyme, full or slant, can juxtapose Anglo-Saxon and Latinate words, verbs with nouns, polysyllables with monosyllables, the erudite or lyrical with the quotidian , with obscenity, with dialect. Iambic pentameter, which occurs almost inevitably in the most ordinary speech in the English language, is at once an ongoing conversation with Anglophone poetries of the past, and an illustration of how differently American, British, Irish, Caribbean and other forms of English shape and are shaped by the meter. Non-iambic meters, on the other hand – the trochaic and dactylic English equivalents of Sapphic and Alcaic stanzas, for example – oblige the poet to wrench the language out of the ‘melody’ into which it tends to fall. Many contemporary poets recall Ezra Pound’s modernist dictum :“break the back of the pentameter.” But he followed that imperative – at least, in his correspondence with a younger American poet, Mary Barnard – with the suggestion that she “write Sapphics until they were coming out of her ears”, not to stop listening to meter, but to attend to a different one.
What draws you to Khoury-Ghata's poems, and why did you choose to translate them? In his review of your translation of a selection of her poems Here there was once a country (Poetry London, Autumn 2001), David Constantine wrote that, although you and she have much in common, your poetic modes are very different so that translation must have been “an estrangement too, which it should be”. Would you like to comment on what you might have in common with her thematically, and/or on his remark about translation?
There is a similarity in the themes of the interpenetration of estrangement and familiarity, being at once of and between two cultures, also the narrative quality of her poetry, the transformation of personal and ‘public’ history, conjoined in one narrative, into lyric or fable. There is also in the forefronting of the female subject, often in the specific role of story-teller. But Khoury-Ghata’s treatment of the poetic line, and the unity of the poem, are as different as could be from mine. Hers is a line whose rhythm is that of the sentence unit, not controlled either by an external meter or by breath units, but by image, metaphor, even the segments of her story. It is, also, not a line directly descended from the French tradition, either in its classical or modernist, post- Mallarmé incarnation; but neither is it a French equivalent of the tropes of Arabic poetry, although both of these sets of roots nourish her work. Vénus Khoury-Ghata has more than once described herself as writing in Arabic by way of French – but her poetic apprenticeship was to the French classics.
I agree that translation must be “an estrangement” to be both faithful and successful. The poet-translator must strive to create a poem in the receptor language that is in some way the equivalent of, in correspondence with the original. If that resultant poem is too clearly a production of the translator’s, however accomplished it is, it is something other than a translation - Lowell’s Imitations, for example.
What other poets have influenced or inspired you?
Where to start or stop? John Donne, for the elegance , in both the mathematical and aesthetic sense, of his line, of his poetic form and of his thought; for his humor, also for his sensuality , his several kinds of daring, including spiritual courage.
Louis MacNeice and Muriel Rukeyser, two very different poets, one Irish and one American, who nonetheless shared a richness of lyric imagination combined with a wide scope of vision, enacted in an expansive prosody, always connecting the life of the individual with the socio-political evolution of the world in which they lived and acted.
Among living poets, Hayden Carruth, Marie Ponsot, Adrienne Rich - all three authors of a poetry continually evolving and surprising, all of whose works are imbued with an assurance of poetry's relevance as an agent both of memory and of change, in the worst as in the more hopeful moments of history; poets who utilise multiple registers of language, the elevated bordering the demotic, whose urgent visions of modernity are informed by a polymath body of knowledge of not one but varied pasts.
Among my contemporaries, Mimi Khalvati, Marilyn Nelson, Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin Alfred Corn, E.A. Markham, Grace Schulman, Derek Mahon, Tony Harrison, Guy Goffette, Hédi Kaddour.
There are many other poets, living and dead, whose work I return to with pleasure or urgency, with whose work I have ‘dialogued’ on paper or in my mind, but to go much further would be to create a cumbersome list.
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