Translating the translator (part 1): Talking to Andrew Frisardi

Vanitas (still life): Michael Conrad Hirt, 1630 Now that the buzz around Dan Brown’s novel “Inferno” is settling down, let’s talk about Dante—the real Dante.

Andrew Frisardi is a celebrated translator and poet who calls Orvieto, Italy, his home and whose creative home is Italian literature. His most recent translation work includes the prize-winning Selected Poems of Giuseppe Ungaretti and Dante's Vita Nova. He's also an excellent critic, and I've had the pleasure of editing his book reviews (reading more than editing, actually) on several occasions.

Often, Brown gets kudos for introducing unfamiliar readers to a classical artist through his thrillers. Ok, that's superficially true, but the fact is, anyone truly interested in a deeper understanding of medieval Christendom's greatest poet would do better by considering Frisardi's translation, which critic Adam Kirsch praises as a "rich new edition" in his Barnes and Noble review.

In part 1, recently conducted via email (part 2 is coming later this week), Frisardi discusses his affection and admiration for Dante, as well as his views of the extremely cool circle of young Italian poets, the stilnovists, who changed 13th century poetry with their "sweet new style."

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You’re known as an acclaimed translator of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s poetry. How did the decision to translate Dante's Vita Nova come about? 

I’d actually translated most of the Vita Nova a few years before the Ungaretti, long before I was ready to do it. Not that this helped me this time around--in fact, I never even looked at the old version, although I think I still have it somewhere in a box. That translation was awful anyway. But when I came back to the Vita Nova I was returning to an old love.

vita nova coverAn old love?

Yes. A little while after the Ungaretti, I fell for Dante even more than before. My earlier reading of Dante didn’t have the knowledge of Italian I’d gained by living in Orvieto for a number of years. By then I was in a position to notice my semi-literate neighbor using idiomatic expressions that Dante uses in the Divine Comedy—even though she’d never read Dante. Orvieto is in central Italy, as is Florence, so there is plenty of overlap of idiom. All of this really got me interested in the language of Dante, in a much more personal way. And, for three years, I was very enjoyably focused on the Divine Comedy, as part of an ad hoc reading group in town. I’ve been reading him ever since.

 Why does Dante's work continue to attract you, and how does translating Dante differ from translating Ungaretti? I can imagine that it was difficult to shift gears between them.

What drew me to Dante most of all was my own search for a visionary and metaphysical poetry. Dante is a great spiritual poet, maybe the greatest in the Western tradition. His writing goes to the roots of what it is to be human, to the most fundamental questions of who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. Ungaretti doesn’t have anything close to Dante’s range and scope and profundity. Then again, hardly any other writers do.

Ungaretti and Dante are very different poets, from very different periods of Italian history. But poetry is poetry—artful language and thinking/imagery/metaphors that get us out of the mindset of what Yeats called the “bundle of accidents that sits down to breakfast.” I don’t think of their differences so much as that they are both poets who have been important to me at particular phases of my life.

Was it difficult to keep the influence of other translations of Vita Nova from interfering with your work? 

This was easy for me for a few reasons. I didn’t look at any other translations of the poems until my version of a particular poem was more or less set. My process is to read the poem in Italian, go over it with a fine-tooth comb, using commentaries and other secondary sources, and then to do a prose translation. Then I memorize the original poem. Only after this do I begin translating it. Memorizing it enables me to see and hear things in the poem I’d miss otherwise.

Once my translation is all done, I often look at others’ versions at some point, to check against mine, but not always. I’m certain of the accuracy of my translation, so the only test left is the translation’s sound and texture, which I can get from the poem itself. That, and of course feedback from other poet-translators.

At this distance, I think it’s easy to forget that the stilnovists were flesh and blood. But they wrote in response to each other, challenged each other. (If they were alive today, they'd probably be bloggers on WordPress. That's the sense I get from the introduction to your new book.) Were Dante, Cavalcanti, and Company very aware of the larger public beyond their circle?

frisardiThey were a dynamic group, no doubt about it. Guido Cavalcanti was incandescently brilliant, both as a thinker and as a poet, and others such as Cino da Pistoia were very much engaged with the society of their time. Cino was a jurist. Dante was a leading politician in the Florence of his early adulthood, before his exile.

That said, the stilnovists or poets of the so-called “sweet new style” (as Dante calls it in Purgatorio canto 24) were not populists in our sense at all. They were avant-garde poets, but their accessibility quotient was closer to that of the French Symbolists than to the American Beats. They didn’t hesitate to express their vitriol for people they considered willfully ignorant--those who put material riches and prestige before the life of the mind or the soul.

In other words, they had swagger.

Definitely. Boccaccio tells a story in the Decameron of how Guido Cavalcanti was walking through a cemetery in Florence one day, when a group of young Florentine party animals--into being popular and rich, and that’s about it--came riding in on their horses, cornering Guido among the tombstones. They wanted to goad him, and started to ask him in an ironic tone why he always snubbed them.

He gave a brief and enigmatic response: “You can say anything you want to me in your own house.” And with that he leaped over one of the tombstones and started walking away. When he’d gone, they weren’t sure what he meant, until one of them realized he was referring to the graveyard, to their affinity to dead places. He was saying that people as ignorant and dull as they were, in comparison with him and his literary friends, were like dead men.

It definitely sounds like they didn't worry too much about cultivating an audience.

One common statement of the stilnovists is that their refined love poetry is for those who can get it, and those who cannot--well, that is their tough luck, they’re going to have to try harder.

Yes, they were aware of a public but they weren’t concerned with appealing to everyone. On the other hand, they were as famous in their time and place as lyrical poets generally get. Dante’s poem that we discuss [in Part 2 of the interview] was popular enough to be copied down by a scribe in Bologna well before the Vita Nova was published. But the stilnovists saw themselves as innovators in Italian poetry, ahead of their time--as in fact they were.

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The Last Tolkien?

Trampled underfoot: The Saxons are overcome by Arthur and his forces. No, the above title doesn't refer to the bloodline of J.R.R. Tolkien's family -- it has to do with the most recent addition to the collection of Tolkien's writings, "The Fall of Arthur" edited by Christopher Tolkien (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

It's probably not a good idea to say "last" when it comes to a writer like Tolkien. There are too many fragmentary pieces lying around, and his son Christopher is far too skillful as a weaver and interpreter to deprive his father's hungry audience of more.

But "The Fall of Arthur" is hardly a minor fragment even if it's far from complete. Tolkien the Son provides us with not only the thrilling manuscript of Arthur's final wars against Mordred and Germanic invaders, rendered in alliterative half-lines

As wary as wolves     through the wood stalking to the marches rode there      Mordred's hunters, huge and hungry      hounds beside them the fewte followed      fiercely baying...

but also with several context-setting essays about the poem's relationship to Tolkien's evolving ideas about The Lord of the Rings. This is the kind of rich, fascinating material that will send you to eBay in search of a broadsword and shield (if Game of Thrones hasn't made you already).

225px-The_Fall_of_ArthurChristopher Tolkien is an ideal guide, poring over his father's notes and scribbles  -- Tolkien abandoned the poem in the 1930s -- and showing us his father's earliest ideas for The Silmarillion and how, for instance, that epic's "Lonely Isle" of the elves was first associated with Arthur's Avalon, or "Fortunate Isle."

Several times, in my reading, something odd happened to me. I forgot that Tolkien belonged to the 20th century. His alliterative style, meter, and word choice are thoroughly convincing. And I forgot that his son was an editor and I started treating him like a translator -- like the poet Simon Armitage, who recently gave us a version of the 15th century poem, The Death of King Arthur.

This isn't dry, academic reading, my friends. Not only is the poem convincing, it's frequently moving. There's an especially powerful moment near the fragment's end, as Arthur contemplates the wars ahead of him before he can restore his beloved country:

With woe and weariness    and war sated, kingship owning     crowned and righteous he would pass in peace     pardon granting, the hurt healing    and the whole guiding, to Britain the blessed     bliss recalling. Death lay between     dark before him ere the way were won     or the world conquered.

Such a sentiment could be Tolkien's own yearning for peace in his time. Or ours for that matter.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has done readers an immense service--with the Tolkien Estate and son Christopher--to bring this work to the public. Here you'll find one of those rare chances to closely examine the creative process -- all the selections, all the choices and changes, all the omissions -- of a great storyteller.

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What does poetry mean? A talk with Michael Odom

The Poet: by Jean-Bernard Restout When it comes to writing, a friend's comment has guided me whenever I've reviewed a book or thought about my own work. It's not the size of the book that matters but the distance the reader travels in a sentence (I'm sure he borrowed that idea from someone).

I kept thinking about that insight as I read Michael Odom's book of poetry, "Strutting Attracting Snapping." At 27 pages, this slender volume is anything but a quick read -- there's an intricate architecture to each poem that undoubtedly required time to assemble, and requires plenty of time to read and truly understand. You can find Odom's book through a variety of book  outlets, and here's one.

Michael generously agreed to share his thoughts on poetry and his writing process in the following exchange, via email. You can also read more about his book and views at Jilanne Hoffmann's blog, and at Odom's own blog, Mao's Trap.

This entry is a bit longer than the usual ones, but it's entirely worth it. Pour yourself a tall cold one (just don't spill it on the keyboard), relax, and listen to one poet's views of his craft and the role of poetry in our modern world.

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How did you start writing poetry, and what’s your definition of it? To you, what does poetry mean?

I remember crafting my own edition of Peter Pan out of tin foil at 6 or 7 and co-opting my older sister’s college literature anthology when I was still in high school. But serious writing began with a year of study in West Yorkshire, England, beside the Brontes and the English Romantics. I was a Philosophy student on a year abroad when I found myself unwilling and/or unable to turn from William Blake back to A.J. Ayer. The turn to Poetry from Philosophy was so violent I almost didn’t finish my B.A. It was indecision between the fields that kept me from the MFA.

What happened after that?

For 20 years after college, I worked in bookstores at all levels, chains and independents, almost always as the Poetry Buyer. Poets and publishers came to me with their works and I hosted their readings. Books were free or discounted. It was easy to keep up.

All of the stores I worked at, except one (Barnes & Noble), are out of business now. It was the reality of bookstores in our time that made the MFA a real need. Even so, it took Ilya Kaminsky to steer me to it (he was Ilya, a law student/customer in San Francisco. Now he’s Professor Kaminsky, internationally famous, award-winning poet).

Most poets coming up through the MFA programs respond to one recent school or another. In the 21st century, when there is nothing more cliché than an avant-garde poet, I never accept a poetic that cannot include Alexander Pope & Basho, Plath & Li Po, Millay, Ausías March & Thom Gunn. If, to read or write like Hejinian, you must refuse everything to be learned from Yeats, your poetic is false. If Shakespeare is a counter-example to your theory, give up.

The poet works language for aesthetic effect. At its best, as with all culture, poetry engages and broadens our minds. At its worst, it narrows. In art, the great goal is the beautiful, not the pretty: the beautiful is attractive in the sense that your 75-year-old spouse dying of colon cancer is attractive. Your suffering spouse will attract your full attention because he or she means too heavily to not engage you in crisis. It is meaning that gives beauty. And the order, distance, & evocation of beauty in a creation make of it a work of art.

Reading the poems in your book requires time, slowness. At least it did for me. Your language demands it. There's density here — the way Dylan Thomas’ language is often dense.  For instance, “Under the tutelage of Orion’s arm/Lording above in the ocean’s leprous cousin...”  It seems to me that images like these don’t come quickly or easily — that it must have taken a long time to piece together the language and the obscurity of the images. 

odom_bookI do count obscurity as a flaw in poems, but a flaw that cannot be remedied by writing more directly. A poet must, like a poetry reader, come to the aesthetic experience of a poem, not the paraphrase, not the philosophy, not the story. In my best poems, I believe I reach that ideal.

The line you cite is one of my favorites both for itself and the role it plays in that poem. As to how I created it, that poem is one that came from the collision of a translated model (it is so far as to be unrecognizable) a collection of words & phrases I wanted to use, a memory & psychological guess.

The image of the night sky -- with its pimples, dimples, rashes, and dropping parts, as the ‘cousin’ of the ocean which at night can seem all but a blank dark sheet, and from that disease, Orion comes as a violent school master – is derived logically from the sensibility of a pubescent boy going wrong matched with the description of the night sky. I’ve heard the reasoning of poets contrasted with the works of logicians. With degrees in Philosophy and Poetry, I can tell you the logic is the same, if more intuited than diagrammed for poets.

As for Dylan Thomas: my son is named after him.

The technological world tries to invade your poems, but you give it a firm backhand and transform it. For instance, I like the subtle sudden shift from technology (cellphones) to the physical body in the line :  “Cell? All of your cells....”   Do you think poetry still matters in our twittering, technology-saturated society?

Technology is like houses, trees, grass, sky, people, etc: it is scenery and props. Twitter is a figurant in the daily drama. The essential, the poetry part of the drama, is still the same and as essential as ever. That said…

Google, Skype, email, etc., give the individual brain infinite memory, infinite capacity: Many libraries worth of reference works and an Earth of contacts are within a few seconds’ reach.

Also, though Twitter is limited, YouTube, Skype, Google, self-publication, blogs…  limited attention spans, so readily distractible, are an opportunity for an art form that begins in an acorn but grows to the size of an oak tree for the enticed.

But it will have to be a pretty interesting acorn. Like Shakespeare needed the stage, so poets may find great use for YouTube. Of course, they will have to be better at it and at least try to engage the muffled curiosity of the browser. The novel, even the short story, may be in trouble. Poetry has an opportunity for a michael-odomrenaissance.

It does?

Yes, but we lack the true gatekeepers, the critics, who once played a sorting role for readers. YouTube has many critics playing that role for videogames with varying degrees of prominence. My son watches them and his buying choices, experience of games, and his best work in school reflect them. Most critics who bother with poems, unfortunately, are poets themselves. Their primary goal, conscious or not, is self-promotion.

We need to transcend the chumminess of poet/publishers, poet/editors, poet/critics. We need poet/poets and the rest can be readers. The internet could create a demand for the sorting kind of critic and, in doing so, share poems far beyond the confines of academia.

The blurb on the back of your book describes these as "love poems." But when I come across lines like "The snail leaves slime here. She leaves lust" and  "The bible never called her sirloin. It called her prime rib" (about Adam's Eve, a great line), I feel like editing that blurb so that it says "poems of violence and desire" instead. For you, in your poetry, what is love?

When our most basic needs are kept behind the will of another, there will be anger, pleading, desperation, resentment, even hatred. When not functional, these pass and, functional or not, return again. Wisdom and intimacy play roles I’ll get to one day but, for now,  the cultural nightmares come when denied need becomes an ideology of oppression, repression, renunciation, or demand.

These are Love poems in that they concern that Homo sapien need that precedes social construction. But I have to admit a kind of Stephen King fascination with desperation. I think the half-worked conundrum of Feminism/ objectification/stalking mixed with Romeo waiting in the bushes outside Juliet’s window is the most existentially traumatic modern transition the West is trying and failing to make.

What poets do you read and admire?

The 20th Century canon is always in my head. When I first got the job at Tower and became enamored of poet’s voices, I bought all the Caedmon tapes and many more. I would take long walks listening to poems and have them in the background when I washed dishes and such. Ezra Pound was on my answering machine declaiming “…this is a darn clever bunch”. To this day, I read first as a listener.

I read a lot of translations and classics. My great passions are usually lyric poets, often canonical (recently Louis MacNeice) or translations (Salvador Espriu).

Of contemporaries, I believe Anne Carson and Alice Notley (The Descent of Alette) are essential. Kaminsky has been a friend and an enormous influence but I suspect his book to top all is being revised yet one more time and we will all die before it comes out. I admire David Ferry and A.E. Stallings but the most fun I’ve had reading poetry lately was in Stephen Scafidi’s books.

You're also a translator. What translation work has been the most meaningful for your life and your poetry?

Linguists translate language. Poets translate Poetry. But poets translate the way burglars study architecture. I’m best at identifying the rich people’s houses and deciphering their locks.

Over the last two years, with the poet on Skype watching like a security camera, I’ve been translating Lluís Roda’s Nadir from Catalan. His influence has lopped the terrible titles off of my poems and affirmed the broadest & greediest approach to language and love.

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Carol Ann Duffy's songs of the Earth

Credit: Jacopo Werther It almost sounds like British laureate Carol Ann Duffy is responding to news headlines about bee populations and cellphone usage when she says:

Where bees pray on their knees, sing, praise
 In pear trees, plum trees; bees
 Are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them.




Guard them—against what? Cell phones? Against our environmental ignorance?

Duffy might have that situation in mind, but her  poem “Virgil’s Bees” also evokes Caesar Augustus’ favorite bard and his praise of bees and their labor in the  Georgics.

It’s a poem belonging to Duffy’s yellow-and-black-themed collection, “The Bees” -- one of two volumes published by Faber and Faber this spring to welcome the season (how many publishers are classy enough to have such poetic timing for publication dates?) from a poet who’s scooped up every contemporary poetry prize worth winning, from the T.S. Eliot Prize to the Costa Book Award to the Dylan Thomas Prize and on and on.

“There were flowers at the edge of the forest, cupping/the last of the light in their upturned petals. I followed you in...” she writes in “Forest,” a poem in the other volume, “Rapture,” about a memory of lovemaking in the woods that ends with a poignant, painful request:


I am there now, lost in the forest, dwarfed by the giant trees. Find me.



This is elemental stuff that's rich with mythic associations (how many dark woods are there in fairy tales and myths? Can you count them all? Impossible!). This is what I look for in poetry — language that I can think about the way someone else thinks about songs from the radio; and a sensibility whose roots are deep in ancient tradition and whose branches spread a lovely, contemporary shade.

Duffy prides herself on using plain, simple words — a poet like Seamus Heaney, who relishes strange, Latinate language, seems to annoy her (I don’t see why) -- but that doesn’t mean her poetry is without shadows or mystery, beauty or grace. When morning light falls on “the softening earth,” in the poem “Grace,” Duffy experiences a moment of spiritual transcendence:

...the moon stepping slowly backwards
 out of the morning sky, reward
 for the dark hours we took to arrive and kneel
 at the silver river’s edge near the heron priest....



We should all be so lucky to experience such a moment. And if we can’t, at least we can read Duffy’s work. That’s a good consolation.

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Banking on Banks

Cancer's a thief. It's not a stealthy one, though. In most cases, it doesn't sneak in and out of a window while the owners of the house snore in their beds. It's more like a robber with an extreme taste for vandalism -- it robs you of loved ones and leaves wreckage behind. Still, many artists have put a brave face on this condition (I'm sure there's a more substantial post here somewhere ... for another time). I'm reminded of a beautiful beautiful beautiful poem (it's clear that I think it's beautiful, right?) by Stanley Plumly, "Cancer," that mythologizes it:

Mine, I know, started at a distance five hundred and twenty light-years away and fell as stardust into my sleeping mouth, yesterday, at birth, or that time when I was ten lying on my back looking up at the cluster called the Beehive or by its other name in the constellation Cancer, the Crab...

The poem is found in "Orphan Hours: Poems," published by W.W. Norton & Company. At $25.95 it's a steal -- worth every penny.

Iain Banks in 2005 (credit: Szymon Sokol)

And, at the other end of that noble spectrum, there's Scottish novelist Iain Banks, who just announced a terminal diagnosis of gall bladder cancer on his website. The Guardian provides the full story.

Where Plumly is glorious and epic, Banks resorts to the type of black humor you find everywhere in his work, from his mysteries to his sci-fi Culture novels. What's the sentence in his unhappy announcement that knocked me over and then out? This one:

"I've withdrawn from all planned public engagements and I've asked my partner Adele if she will do me the honour of becoming my widow (sorry -- but we find ghoulish humour helps)".

I truly admire that voice. I'm sure there's fear and terror behind it, but it's still extraordinary to me that anyone receiving such serious news could muster the energy to make their readers smile a little in spite of it all. (I wish I could have carried such an attitude when my own loved ones suffered from it.)

The Guardian article does much more than announce this news, however. It also gives readers a taste of what Banks' work is all about (something else beautiful and strange? Banks' novel "The Wasp Factory") and an opportunity to read him while we still have the pleasure of including him in our company.

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