Review
The Distance, The Shadows; selected poems by Hugo
The Distance, The Shadows; selected poems by Hugo, trans. Harry Guest, Anvil Press Poetry, £6.95.
Alexander Blok: Selected Poems; trans, Alex Miller, Progress Publishers, Moscow.
R. Burns & G. Gomori, (eds): Homage to Mandelstam; Los Poetry Press.
The Distance, The Shadows is very much an act of homage to Hugo by his translator, and one need not go all the way with Mr Guest's tremendous esteem for Hugo to admire the care with which he presents his case. This volume really gives the reader his money's worth: sensitive translations, with originals for good measure; notes, bibliography, .chronological table and a thoughtful and informative introduction including an essay on translation which should be required reading for anyone about to do some.
Hugo himself comes over as a paradoxical mixture of lyric and epic; with one hand he attempted nothing less than the history of the world in verse ('La Legende des Siecles'), while with the other he poured out an apparently endless stream of brief, telling lyrics usually on intimate and personal themes. He also comes over as a fervent socialist; splendidly angry with injustice and cruelty, a good king-hater, siding with every underdog from the poor of Paris to the spider and the nettle:
Pity their ugliness. Pity
the fact this nettle
has to sting. Take
pity on evil
('Spider, nettle, loathed')
This trait in him cannot help but be likeable, and if a poem like 'Concerning the Ball at the Hotel de Ville' had nothing else but anger to commend it, it would still be very powerful:
It's not a rich banquet France requires pressingly,
it's not a dance that's urgently desired
by the mass of miseries we call a city.
The powerful should prefer to tend some wound ...
care for each child who dwells without bread in the dark,
create a paradise for the blasphemous poor,
rather than burn a thousand candles to keep
a few fools awake all night around a little noise.
In fact, however, he had much more than anger; at his best he had also insight, imagination and a very subtle and unobtrusive technique. Consider the careful simplicity of the phrasing in the flawlessly translated 'Demain, des L'aube', about a visit to his daughter's grave:
At dawn, tomorrow, when the landscape's whitening,
I shall set off. You are expecting me.
I'll take the forest road, the upland road.
I can't go on living so far from you.
He produces a kind of hush, an understatement of grief the more effective for its ominous quiet. In 'The Sower', the same quiet is used to wider purpose to exalt the dignity of a labourer. An old man sows seed at dusk:
His tall form, black now, moving
Over the soil displays
His deep faith in the useful
Passage of days.
The poem closes in describing the effect of the growing darkness on the shadow of the man's arm, outflung in its gesture of sowing:
The sower's hand now reaches
The highest star.
This poem also exemplifies Hugo's skill with concrete detail, his ability to fix precisely the environment of a poem. I might as well say that I don't go much on his epic mood and that when he gets really philosophical ('Nomen, Numen, Lumen'), I don't even understand him. But these are personal preferences and they still leave a lot of Hugo to admire.
Alexander Blok is perhaps more a poet to be exhilarated by, certainly to wish you'd met. He died at 41 but none of his poems sound as if he were, emotionally speaking, a day over 21. Though religion and the role of the artist play a considerable role in his work, the two themes I always associate with him are love and the 1905 Revolution, and some of his most famous love poems were in fact published (in Lines to the Beautiful Lady), when he was 21. Even this, though, does not entirely account for their breathtaking innocence, for the quite disturbing directness he uses where most poets' instinct would be towards obliquity. There has to be a very special naivety about even a 21-year old who can write, publish and sincerely mean:
I am young and unspoilt and in love,
Full of terror and prayer and yearning.
Eight years and a lot of experience later, he could still say: ‘...only someone in love Has the right to be called a human being'. Of course he can be more complex than this - witness the subtle delineations of character in 'She was fifteen, and 'You can walk round the church entirely' (little point, alas, in quoting unless I had space for both entire). But the keynote is still youthful enthusiasm - as it is in his revolutionary poems; for all their ominous notes, their consciousness that things aren't as easy as they seem, their mood might be roughly translated as 'Yippee!' Paustovsky, much of an age with Blok, applied Wordsworth's 'Bliss was it in that dawn...' lines to those years in Russia, and in Blok's 1904-6 verse there is a brief glimpse of the heady exhilaration being young must have meant:
The heavenly smith has rolled into the dusty city
A changing disc of fire
And out in the streets, there's a noise like a million saws
(' Anthem')
It didn't last; the obverse of the naive young enthusiast was a dark, depressed man who mirrored his misery as honestly as his Joy:
It's hard for someone dead among the living
To seem alive and passionate everywhere.
And by 1918, celebrating his second revolution, the exhilaration is that of despair; the twelve revolutionaries of the poem named for them ('The Twelve') march through a swirling night of snow looking like a 'convict crew', murdering a prostitute on the way, trying in vain to get a shot at an elusive figure with a bloody flag, half-hidden by the storm, who, unknown to them, is leading them and is none other than Christ. It is as if Blok did not doubt the justice and necessity of the cause but had the gravest doubts as to the motives of its adherents and the results of their acts. The man lived another 3 years, but the last of the great Russian romantics really died in that poem.
In the book (which is by the by a beautiful physical object) the Moscow publishers invite comment on the translation and design, and suggestions for the future (the first that occurs to me is that they move at once to Wales, where such an attitude is urgently required). I hope therefore they won't mind if I criticise the translation slightly. It is accurate: I compared some poems at random with the originals and they were very close. But the rhythms jar. The translator has followed Blok's frequent use of dactyls and anapaests. In the first place, no two languages move alike, which is why the alexandrine rolls sonorously in French and plods in English. Anapaests gallop in English, at least regular unbroken ones do, wherein lies the second flaw. Blok's metres didn't have the regularity here assigned them. He pioneered accentual metre which depended on a given number of stresses in a line, irrespective of where they fell -the principle whereby Marlowe's 'See, see where Christ's blood streams in the firmament' is an iambic pentameter, though you would have a job to scan it as one. His metres have the irregularity which sparks life and urgent, conversational movement, like Thomas Wyatt's iambics. No doubt the translator would object that it isn't that easy, and so it isn't; I couldn't do any better, but the criticism is made in friendship to a book which gave me pleasure.
Homage to Mandelstam is a collection of poems from different hands and languages inspired by another Russian poet, Osip Mandelstam, last heard of in 1938 on his way to a prison camp. As one would expect, the quality of the poems varies, from Akhmatova's majestic evocation of an ice-bound city:
And the town stands locked in ice,
a paperweight of trees, walls, snow...
('Voronezh')
to the nearly inept. I can understand why someone would want to produce this, but it does read rather like talking to oneself. It would not tell you what sort of poet he was (rather surprisingly remote and classical to have inspired such affection, actually, but maybe he is a poets' poet). There is an assumption that anyone reading is already acquainted with his life, so that there is no explanation provided, for instance, to indicate that 'Marina choking in the noose' (A.D. Hope) is a reference to the suicide of Marina Tsvetayeva, nor that the references in German poems to almonds are based on a pun on 'Mandel', the German for almond. The editors seem to have assumed that it will have a limited appeal, in which I agree with them.
Page(s) 112-116
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