Tolkien's household and poetic places

Knight_of_the_woeful_countenance_05424uFAMILY MATTERS: Andrew O'Hehir gives a nice overview of Tolkien's "The Fall of Arthur" in the pages of the New York Times that only stumbles at the very end. A couple of reasons why Tolkien abandoned that poem, which his son Christopher notes in the new book, involved the pressures of work and his family. Tolkien the Elder's interest also seemed to flag as his conception of Middle-earth started to grow.  All sounds pretty reasonable to me. If you've ever tried to compose a long work of fiction or nonfiction, and you have a young family, that line about Tolkien's situation might resonant as strongly for you as it did for me. I can relate to the bard. I can easily see us, side by side in the pub down the road from Merton College, throwing back what's left in our pint glasses.

"I'm stuck!" he says. "I can't get a bleedin' moment to meself  for Arthur!"

Tears pop from my eyes. I pound my fist on the bar.

"Aye John, you dinna hae to tell me!  Barkeep, two more glasses!"

Near the end of his review, O'Hehir thinks Tolkien more likely broke off his work because the alliterative, Anglo-Saxon style of the poem doesn't fit the Arthur of history: "If there was ever any historical cognate to Arthur, he was a Celtic Briton who spoke a language ancestral to modern Welsh and Cornish. To write about him in the Germanic or Anglo-Saxon verse style of later centuries ...  can only have struck this eminent philologist as an uncomfortable linguistic and historical pastiche."

Holy smokes that's fancy. Maybe it's true, but more compelling for me is the fact that in the years when he composed his Arthur fragment, Tolkien and his wife had four kidlings -- two early teens, two pre-teens. I'm sure any attempt to write about Arthur's clash with  Saxon invaders paled beside the battles taking place in the Tolkien house!

OH, THE PLACES YOU'LL GO: A post last week on worthwhile poetry websites drew some nice responses from my friends, Jilanne Hoffmann and Michael Odom. Along with my recommendations:

Red Hen Press

Sarabande Books

Copper Canyon

they suggest a couple more that you should start patronizing:

SPD (Small Press Distribution)

Marick Press

Bookmark them and make a point of dropping in on a weekly (or more frequent) basis. You don't have to do too much, but the small gestures count for so much. They encourage the small publishers to continue on with their sacred work and, who knows? You might find yourself discovering some exciting new voices. Hope you're having an excellent week, friends.

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Poetry: More salt, please

Salt and pepper granules: credit -- Jon Sullivan Poet Michael Odom passed along a recent item from the UK edition of the Huff Post that illustrates poetry's continuing difficulties in the publishing marketplace. (Read Michael's work at Mao's Trap.) One of the big supporters of new and upcoming poets, Salt Publishing, has decided to scale back from publishing books solely devoted to a single author. Instead, they're sticking to the anthology and "best of" routes, and I get it, even though I'm not happy to hear about it. The official Salt announcement doesn't mention the business side -- anthology publishing, it says, will be used for "raising [poets'] profiles and reaching new readers" -- even though that's clearly what it's about.

The part that bugs me more is Robert Peake's response in the Huff Post blog, which I like and don't like. There's plenty to admire in his post (check it out for yourself), especially his inspiring words about the power of poetry to transform "our grey morning commute" and "[take] the top of our head off." But there's also a real defeated tone to the whole thing:

Maybe we're doomed. But we are doomed in good company--you and me--which is to say we are blessed indeed. Ask anyone. The poets always throw the best parties. They dance like they have nothing to lose, because it's true. And you and me, we've made it this far somehow, getting by, doing our thing, making life just about work.

John Keats died largely unrecognised. But ask his friends at the time, and he meant as much to them then as he does to many of us now. Do we really expect better for ourselves than the respect of a few respectable peers?

The audience is dwindling. Fine....

Really? It's fine? Yikes. I cherish Keats, but I don't think any working poet today wants to die young of consumption in some forgotten corner, right?  I understand that words are immortal, but isn't it good to stick around and belong to a community? Here are a couple of small things I'd suggest:

1) Buy poetry.  Don't just attend a poetry reading at your local bookstore: buy the book after the reading is done. Readings are about sharing and supporting each other, and if we can spend eight or nine bucks on two extra-large mochas with extra whipped cream, we can certainly invest in a chapbook of someone's observations.

2) Show some support to nonprofit and small publishers of poetry. Let them know you're out there. Here are three that I admire (the third one, by the way, keeps W.S. Merwin's works within easy reach):

Red Hen Press

Sarabande Books

Copper Canyon Press

3) Blog about the poets you've read and drop a link to their websites. Give readers a taste (and a place on the web) so that they won't have to wait for an anthology by Salt or somebody else. Let them know (along with the publishers) that you're out there and what they say is important to you.

In the comments field of this post, you're welcome to drop links to poetry publishers deserving of support. Onward, my friends.

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Dante and Dylan? Translating the translator (part 2)

pencil_tip "Translating the Translator" continues with a brief master class on translation. Andrew Frisardi describes some of the choices he made in translating a key moment (and key poem) of Dante's "Vita Nova."

What influenced his choices? Many things, it turns out. He wanted to preserve the meaning of the original, capture a feeling of breathlessness and joy ... and follow the example of Bob Dylan.

Huh?

Read on,  friends.

***

Here are three versions of the opening lines of “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” —the third is yours. [Note: The three excerpts appear at the very end of this post.]   I wonder if you'd discuss a few of the choices that you made in comparison to what the other two poets, J.G. Nichols and Dante Rossetti, respectively, have done in their versions. The most immediate ones, for me, were your decisions not to use the words "ladies" or "intelligence" in the opening line.

I used “women” instead of “lady” or “ladies” to distinguish other women from Beatrice. Only she is Dante’s “lady,” donna in the Italian, which comes from domina in Latin: female lord. Donna, then, was a term of respect, as in Bob Dylan’s “Lay lady lay” (which in any case would sound awful as “Lay woman lay”!).

At the same time, the word donna simply means “woman.” In order to heighten the contrast between Beatrice and the other women in the Vita Nova, I generally reserved the word “lady” for her, “woman” for the others. Dante’s original uses donna for both Beatrice and the others, but I felt that too much of the old-fashioned-sounding “lady” would be, well, too much. After all, he uses the word donna over 200 times in that short book. Neither “woman” nor “lady” in current usage carries both senses of donna, so I divided them up.

Your opening line is so different from the others.

I spent a lot of time trying to get that famous first line of the poem right. “Intelligence” in Rossetti and Nichols translates intelletto, which means intellect, not intelligence. In Dante’s time phrase avere intelletto meant “to understand”—the poem opens with “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore,” literally “Women who have intellect of love.” In any case, “intelligence in love” is not what Dante is saying. It has nothing to do with being smart in love, which would be trite compared to what he is talking about.

Also, the phrase intelletto d’amore, intellect of love, is a translation of the Latin phrase intellectus amoris, used by medieval theologians to refer to the union of knowledge and love—this union being one of the main themes of Dante’s writing from start to finish. One theme that the stilnovists [Editor’s note: see part 1 of this interview], especially Dante, harp on about is that love and beauty carry real knowledge, not just sentiment. This poem’s opening phrase conveys this meaning in a very compact way.

In the end you decided against using the word “intellect.”

I felt I could not use “intellect” in this line without killing the poetry’s resonance. “Understand the truth of love” brings together the essential elements of Dante’s meaning, while making the phrase completely accessible to any contemporary reader, without having to know the theological background. It’s more lyrical, in short.

Above all in this poem, which is my own personal favorite in the Vita Nova, I aimed to convey, through the poem’s cadence and sound, a sense of the joyous quality of the original. In the lines you quote, there are a lot more enjambments [line breaks in the middle of grammatical units] than there are in Rossetti’s or Nichols’s. I did this to create breathlessness in speaking the lines, as one way to simulate joyful speech.

This poem’s your favorite—and Dante’s, right?

vita nova coverIn that passage in Purgatorio where reference is made to the dolce stil novo or sweet new style, mentioned, Dante is recognized by another, earlier Tuscan poet (one of the poets Dante and the other stilnovists blew away with their virtuosity) precisely as the man who wrote “Women who understand the truth of love.” So we know that Dante himself held this poem very dear, and considered it a milestone in his development.

Fluidity and melodiousness, along with openheartedness or joie de vivre, are the signature characteristics of this poetry. So that is what I aimed for above all in this poem, and in a few others in the Vita Nova that are especially representative of that stage of Dante’s writing.

What translation project are you working on now?

Dante again. This time his philosophical-allegorical treatise the Convivio, which he wrote in 1304-7, about ten years after the Vita Nova, while he was in exile. Convivio simply means “Banquet”; Dante says it’s meant to be a banquet of knowledge for those (such as civic leaders) who are hungry for philosophical knowledge but whose social obligations don’t leave them enough time to seek it out.

Like the Vita Nova, the Convivio is a combination of prose and poetry, although much more prose in this case. And also like the Vita Nova, it is written in the Florentine vernacular, a highly unconventional choice at that time, when philosophy was always written in Latin. Dante probably stopped writing the Convivio, which is unfinished, so he could write the Divine Comedy.

***

What do you think? Three versions/excerpts from “Vita Nova” by Dante

Ladies who have intelligence of love, It is my lady I would speak about. I cannot hope to make her praise complete, But if I speak it will relieve my mind. I say, when I consider her perfection, Such is the sweetness that Love makes me feel That, if my boldness did not flag and fail, My speech would force all men to fall in love. (J.G. Nichols)

Ladies that have intelligence in love, Of mine own lady I would speak with you; Not that I hope to count her praises through, But telling what I may, to ease my mind. And I declare that when I speak thereof Love sheds such perfect sweetness over me That if my courage fail'd not, certainly To him my listeners must be all resign'd. (D.G. Rossetti)

Women who understand the truth of love, I want to talk with you a while about my lady—not because I could run out of words and ways to praise her, but to set my mind at ease. Her worth is so above the rest, I feel such lightness in my heart, that if speech didn't stammer I'd impart new love to those who are not lovers yet. (A. Frisardi)

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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."

********

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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Publishing's fate, reviewer style, and coming soon

PUBLISHING TODAY: A fascinating overview of what's going on in the marketplace was passed on to me via a friend on LinkedIn, and now I'm passing it on to you. Evan Hughes' overview of the publishing marketplace at Wired opens with an anecdote that falls into the "fairy tales do come true" category: It's the story of sci-fi author Hugh Howey, who started out as a self-published author and today is.... well, you'll have to read it for yourself. It's not all butterflies and sunshine in this report, but there are some things here to renew your optimism about the industry, no matter what the pundits keep saying about it in the papers. no-return-by-zachary-jerniganNUANCE, NOT A HATCHET: Anybody can write a negative review, and some critics are especially good at wielding the hatchet when they don't like something. Striking a balance is more difficult, but Rebecca Lovatt manages to do just that in her review of Zachary Jernigan's sci fi/fantasy hybrid "No Return" at The Arched Doorway. She notes her problems with the book in a way that mixes nicely with what she appreciates about it. Life is hardly ever black and white, and reviewing, as this example reminded me, doesn't have to be, either.

COMING SOON TO CALL OF THE SIREN: What's it like to translate the work of a poet who's 700 years old? I talked to Andrew Frisardi, translator of Dante's pre-Commedia masterpiece, Vita Nova, for an upcoming interview post. You might have seen Frisardi's name on this blog before: He used the Call to respond to an unfair criticism of his Dante work. This, I can tell you, is good stuff. Primo. L'ultimo. If you enjoy listening to someone discuss their insights into the nuts-and-bolts of translation, this Q & A will definitely be for you. Stay tuned.