Gwyn Thomas’ 'You've Lived'.

Gwyn Thomas (1936-2016)

This is the first of a run of poems in which poets use other works of literature or characters from literature to make a point or to consider an idea. Hamlet is one of the most famous characters in the western tradition, so much so that he has escaped his play and lives a life of his own. People who have never seen a version of the play or read it have heard of him. ‘To be or not to be’ entered everyday speech so long ago it may be used without any knowledge of what the rest of the speech contains.

It’s a young man struggling to verbalise a reason for either living or dying.
Anyone can be driven to ask ‘what is the point’ or ‘what is the meaning of life’. You don’t need to be haunted by what may be the revengeful ghost of your father, or suspect your mother of adultery with your regicidal, fratricidal uncle. Once the religious and philosophical answers have been rejected, the purpose of life becomes finding a a purpose that will make life seem desirable. As Thomas says in this poem, it doesn’t have to be a desire to win an olympic medal or climb mount Everest. Growing onions will do it. Only when you have a reason to live, that matters to you, will you fear death, and only having feared death will you have lived.

I found this poem quoted at the end of Tony Conran’s introduction to ‘Welsh Verse; Translations by Tony Conran.’ Poetry Wales Press 1986. I knew of Gwyn Thomas as a translator of The Mabinogion and his reputation as a poet. I know very little about this poem except I assume it’s translated by Tony Conran from Welsh. If anyone knows differently please let me know.

Anna Akhmatova's 'Requiem'

Akhmatova’s statue opposite the prison in St. Petersburg.

Anna Akhmatova 1869-1966

‘Requiem’ is Akhmatova’s memorial for those who waited with her outside the prison in Saint Petersburg in the 1930s, hoping for news of their loved ones during ‘the terrible years of the Yezhov Terror’.

The context of the poem is explained properly in the second section, a prose ‘By way of a preface’. Some sections have titles, others numbers.

This translation, by Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward is taken from ‘Twentieth century Russian Poetry; Silver and steel, An anthology’. Selected and Introduced by Yevgeny Yevthushenko, edited by Albert. C. Todd and Max Hayward. ( Doubleday 1993)

Taliesin's 'Marwnat Owein'. The lament for Owain son of Urien Rheged.

A page from the Book of Taliesin showing the start of Marwnat Owain at the Large black capital.

Taliesin (6th Century)

There are at least two Taliesin’s. There was an Historical bard who composed poetry in the courts of ‘Welsh Princes’ in the Sixth Century, a contemporary of Aneirin. There was also a character from a folk tale, who gained knowledge and inspiration from a cauldron he was stirring, and after many transformations was born again as a miraculous child who could speak as soon as he was born and went on to be a magician and prophet as well as a poet.

The Book of Taliesin is one of those precious medieval manuscripts which are worth their weight in Guttenberg bibles. It dates from the 14th century, and the two figures have obviously merged. Brilliant scholars have spent their careers trying to untangle the poems, trying to date which may belong to the Historical Bard and which have been attributed to him. Most seem to think this one might be ‘authentic’.

It’s a marvellous controlled howl of a poem that belongs to a very different world. “King’ and ‘Prince’ dignify men who spent their lives raiding and being raided by their neighbours. Enthusiastic cattle thieves. It’s also a world where poetry served a very public function and the poet was an honoured member of the court.

Taliesin laments the dead Owein by celebrating highlights from his ruthless destruction of his enemies. The highest praise possible is to state that he was a generous, ferocious killer. The line ‘Medel galon geueilat’ could be translated almost literally as ‘A reaper of foes, a predator’.

This translation is taken from The Book of Taliesin, Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain, translated by Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams. Penguin Classics 2020.

My pronunciation is not up to inflicting the original on an audience, but if you can, find a Welsh speaker reading the original.

Dafydd ap Gwilym's 'Love's affliction'. (Cystudd Cariad)

Dafydd ap Gwilym (?1320-?1350?)

 Dafydd ap Gwilym is not only one of the great poets of the Welsh Tradition, but of the  European Middle Ages.  If you haven’t heard his name before, you’ve missed out.

For a non-Welsh reader the attraction of Dafydd's poems in translation often lie in the persona he creates. He may be one of the great love poets of the Middle Ages, but his range marks him out. There’s desire to regret, with the usual amount of unrequited pining thrown in but the mix is seasoned with self-depreciation, humour, and an enjoyment of his own absurdity.

This particular poem is almost a cliché. The old poet looks back on his life and sees no future. It’s all over. ‘unless she beckons’. In which case everything he’s said should be immediately forgotten. 

It's one of those final lines that is awe inspiring in its 'correctness'. It closes the poem on a visual image that realigns everything that comes before it. It's as good as it gets.

 And as far as I can tell it's not what Dafydd wrote. 

On the University of Swansea Website, the last four lines of the translation read:

There rises in me (poetry's memory)
no joyful thought or passion,
nor any pleasant talk of them,
nor ever love, unless a girl asks for it. 

Rachel Bromwich translates the same lines as:

No joyful thought nor passionate desire
Arises in me-memory of song-
Nor is there any talk concerning them
No ever more of Love. Unless a girl should ask? 

Merchant and Feletra, whose translation I’m reading, point out the difficulty of transferring Dafydd's superb control of a fiendish poetic into English and hope 'If in our versions the poet seems uninhibited, eccentric, and outrageously ambitious, we have partly succeeded.'

Perhaps the best testimony to their success is that last line. To make the poem work as an English poem, they have made an imaginative leap from ‘ask’ to ‘beckon’ which as far as I can tell is not supported by the dictionary. It’s one of those fine moments of creative translation. 

  Unless She Beckons poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym. Translated by Merchant and Faltra. Redcoat books. 2018

Dafydd ap Gwilym. Poems Translated by Rachel Bromwich. Gomer Press 1982.

You can hear this poem read in its original Welsh at the superb University of Swansea site dedicated to Dafydd and his work.
Unfortunately it won’t let me link directly to the poem:
Click on this link…which will open a new window.

http://www.dafyddapgwilym.net/eng/3win.php

Choose poem 82 from the drop down menu in the left hand corner, then click the ‘audio’ link at the bottom of the page.

Luis Quintais' 'Amphitheatre' (trans Lesley Saunders)

Luis Quintais (1968-)

You can read about Luis Quintais, a poet writing in Portuguese as well as this translation and four other others by clicking on the link below. It will open in a new page..

https://brazen-head.org/2020/12/15/poems-by-luis-quintais-translated-from-the-portuguese-by-lesley-saunders/

This is a good example of what happens when one fine poet translates another. We live in a great age of translation. Which means we have access to poetry in languages you’ve probably never considered

Hafez 'What memories' (trans Dick Davis)

Hafez, 1315 (?) -1398/90)

We live in a great age of translation, and there's no excuse for not exploring poetries other than English. Hafez is one of the world’s great poets, in one of the history’s great literatures, and Dick Davis is one of the great translators.

Ironically i first came across both of them, a long time ago, in an essay Davis wrote called ‘On not Translating Hafez’.

This poem is taken from Davis’ ‘Faces of Love: Hafez and the poets of Shiraz’ Mage Publishers 2012/2019

from Prudentius' 'Hamartigenia'. On Free Will.

‘Prudentius’, Aurelius Prudentius Clemens. (348-405?)

Originally written in Latin, this poem was part of a contemporary theological argument. This sounds dour, but it rocks along in Martha M. Malamud’s translation.

The section I’ve read here is about free will. Prudentius argues that when God gave man power over the beasts, he also gave him power over himself. The first five or so lines I’ve read here present the point of view that Prudentius is arguing against. Therefore good and evil are choices we make. A man with no choice, who is forced to do good, cannot be good.

The first five or so lines I’ve read here present the point of view that Prudentius is arguing against.

Strikingly, for all the misogyny of the poem, when Prudentius comes to relate the genesis story of Adam and Eve, although he doesn’t name Eve, he doesn’t blame her either. Adam had a choice, and he made it. He choose to do what he knew was wrong. Therefore he, and no one else, was to blame for his actions.

Given the medieval habit of blaming Eve for ‘The Fall’ it’s a striking departure from the normal way the story is presented. Malamud claims that Milton would have known this poem, and and she points out, it’s fascinating to read the whole poem with Paradise Lost in mind.

This reading is taken from ‘The Origin of Sin, An English Translation of the Hamartigenia’, by Martha. A Malamud. (2011) lines 879-957.

Dick Davis' 'A Translator's Nightmare'

Virgil leads Dante through Hell. Which isn’t what happens in Davis’ ‘A translator’s nightmare’.

Dick Davis (Born 1945)

Widely regarded as the leading English translator of Persian Poetry, Davis is also a fine poet, as his Collected poems, ‘Love in Another Language’, demonstrates.

In this poem his fluency with rhyming couplets allows the humour of the nightmare to swing. And the humour doesn’t hide the serious point that’s being made, that no matter how good the translator, there must be times when he or she wonders what would happen if they met up with their source in the hereafter.

And then, what about the poets you didn’t translate? What will you say to them?

Alfred De Musset's 'On a Dead Woman' (Sur une Morte)

Alfred De Musset (1810-1857)

Alfred De Musset

The woman in question was not dead. According to the translator, Stanley Appelbaum, ‘The ‘Morte’ of the poem, the Princess Belgiojoso, was not at all dead but coquettishly indifferent to the poet’s advances.’

This is taken from “Introduction to French Poetry’ edited by Stanley Appelbaum, who claims in his introduction that the translations are ‘definitely not intended to be poetic recreations of the original works, but merely aids to the understanding of the content’. In this case the English version seems to stand on its own..

The Archpoet's confession

The Archpoet (12th century)

‘The Archpoet’ is the name given to a writer of a handful of Latin lyrics of which this ‘Confession’ is the most famous. Almost nothing is known about his identity or the details of his life.

Imagine a priest or monk, accused of a string of vices. The ‘Confession’ confronts the accusations and gleefully admits to them all.

There’s a debate about whether it’s genuinely autobiographical or a rhetorical exercise, and that is unlikely to be answered. But the poem was popular in its own time: the attraction of saying, yes, I am all the things you say I am and why should I not be, may have been as powerful then as it is now, especially amongst people who do none of the things they’d like to admit to having done.

The translation is by Helen Waddell and taken from ‘The Wandering scholars’ which is one of the great books about the middle ages. Waddell claimed this poem ‘is something more than the arch-type of a generation of vagabond scholars, or the greatest drinking song in the world: it is the first defiance by the artist of that society which it is his thankless business to amuse: the first cry from the House of the Potter, "Why hast thou made me thus?". (P.265)

Enjoy.

Federico Garcia Lorca's 'Somnambule Ballad'

A still from Un Chien Andalou

Frederico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936)

(Translated by Stephen Spender and J.L Gill)

For those outside Spain, who read no Spanish, Lorca is probably the most famous Spanish poet of the twentieth century.

This is a very different poem to the ones I’ve previously read on the podcast.

It helps, listening to this poem or reading it, to remember Lorca was friends with Dali and Bunuel. There is a story that when those two were making Un Chien Andalou, their ground breaking ‘surrealist’ film, one would sketch scenes and the other would say, no, that means something, throw it out.

‘Avant Garde’ and ‘Surrealist’ are terms that might be useful as pathways to approach this poem without necessarily being definitive or even accurate as labels.

For a long time I used this poem as an example of what happens when readers are confronted with work they find initially incomprehensible. Read it, I’d say, then come back and tell me what you think it means. The answers were often ingenious. They varied greatly. They were all interesting.

So what does it mean they’d ask.

It means what it says. Images that link without narrative, suggesting narrative, cohering because they linked in the writer’s mind at the time of writing. The links are not made explicit. But the images sing together.

Yes, but what does it mean?

Wrong question.

This is taken from ‘The Selected poems of Federico Garcia Lorca’ edited by Francisco Garcia Lorca and Donald m. Allen. A New Directions paperback 1985.

from Christopher Logue's 'War Music'. 1 Patroculus pleads with Achilles.

Christopher Logue (1926-2011)

A fine poet in his own work, Logue’s most lasting achievement should be his ‘account’ of Homer’s Iliad.

Logue never called his work a translation. In 1959 he was asked to translate a section of the Iliad for a radio performance.  In his memoire, ‘Prince Charming’ (p.221), he relates that when he pointed out he knew no Greek, he was told:. ‘Read translations by those who did. Follow the story. A translator must know one language well. Preferably his own.’ It is an unusual piece of advice, and not one usually given to translators.

The results however were spectacular, appearing as separate books, until in 2016 they were collected and published as ‘War Music; an account of Homer’s illiad’. I would describe it as one of the great narrative achievements in English Poetry.

Although neither finished nor pedantically ‘accurate’, it makes Homer seem attractive. However, as an introduction to Homer its one drawback is that it makes the standard translations of the Iliad seem very dull.

Ovid's 'Pygmalion' trans Arthur Golding

Arthur Golding (1536-1605)

Publius Ovidius Naso (43 Bc-17/18 AD)

Ovid’s ‘Metamorphosis’ written in Latin in the first decade of the First Century AD, long before England was invented, is ironically one of the key texts in English poetry and Ovid one of its most influential poets. One of the reasons for the popularity of the Metamorphosis after the Middle Ages is Golding’s translation, which influenced so many who read it, including one W. Shakespeare.

The story of Pygmalion lives on in Shaw’s play and the musical version of Shaw’s play, and nothing makes it any less disturbing. It also lives on in ‘The Pygmalion effect’, the idea that high expectations in management or teaching can lead to enhanced results because of the ‘self fulfilling prophecy’.

Whatever the leadership gurus make of it, like most of Ovid’s stories, it’s disturbing. But then you’ve probably met at least one deluded person who recreated a human being as an unrealistic ideal and you might have been unlucky enough to be around to see the damage that caused.

Sappho's 'Fragment 31'

Sappho (c600 BC)

Possibly the most famous female poet in history? Well known and highly respected in her own Greek culture. Her name is still very well known, though perhaps for the wrong reasons. Very little of her work survives, and most of it seems to be fragments.

There are numerous attempts at translating this particular poem: Catullus, Campion, Bunting and others have done their best. I like this version because it respects the fragment and works as a poem.

This is taken from Sappho, Poems and Fragments, translated by Josephine Balmer. Published by Bloodaxe books.

C.P. Cavafy's 'The God Abandons Anthony'

Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933)

This is the second of Cavafy’s poems on the Podcast. Like the first it plays off a classical story. In this case it takes an incident from Plutarch’s life of Anthony, and shifts from the particular historical event, when Anthony is supposed to have heard his patron God, DIonysus leaving the city, to a more universal poem about loss and defeat. How should you behave when faced with failure?

The poem offers advice to an unnamed protagonist.

Leonard Cohen used this poem as a starting point for his song Alexandra Leaving, turning Alexandria the city into a human Alexandra and turning the general defeat into a romantic one.

This is taken from ‘C. P. Cavafy Collected Poems, revised edition’, trans Keeley and Sherrard, edited by George Savidis (Princeton University Press)

Yevgeny Yevtushenko's 'The City of Yes and the City of No'.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933-2017)

For my generation, perhaps the best known Russian Poet. Possibly better known than the more critically acclaimed Brodsky. Whether he was best known because he was marketable in ‘The West’ or because he was the best of his contemporaries in Russia is, for those of us who rely on translations, an unanswerable question. But sometimes, dealing with poetry in translation, you can be forgiven for wondering what’s being valued.

Not in the case of this poem. Even if it were English it would still work.

One strange evening I took a group from the high school where I worked to Brisbane (Australia) to hear Yevtushenko read. He was tall, elderly, wearing a puce suit and a huge, bright yellow tie. He had just published a novel call ‘Don’t die before your death’.

He didn’t so much read this poem as dance it down the aisle.

This is taken from Twentieth Century Russian Poetry. Silver and Steel, an anthology. Selected, with an introduction by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, edited by Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward (with Daniel Weissbort) Doubleday 1993.

James Laughlin's 'O Best of All Nights, Return and Return Again"

James Laughlin (1914-1997)

I knew very little about Laughlin except that he founded New Directions Publishing after Pound had told him ‘to do something useful’. I think this poem is a ‘version’ of a Latin poem by Propertius rather than a strict translation.

I’ve taken it from ‘World Poetry’ edited by Washburn and Major where the poem’s title is followed by:

(After the Pervigilium Veneris and Propertius’s ‘Nox Mihi Candida’.)

Centuries after the originals were created, I suspect most people might recognise the sentiment.

Christopher Logue's 'Caption for a photograph of four organized criminals'

Christopher Logue (1926-2011)

Logue’s reputation rests securely on his version of Homer. ‘War Music’ may be one of the best narrative poems of the twentieth and twenty first centuries.

But his ‘Selected poems’ show he was equally skilled with shorter, non-narrative forms.

The Selected contains two versions of well known poems by Franciose Villon (?1431-?1463). They are very much versions rather than strict translations. The French original for this one goes by different names: Ballade des pendus, Epitaphe Villon or Frères humains. The most arresting images in Logue’s poem are not in the original, nor is the ‘argument’ the poem offers.

If you’re interested in seeing what Logue did with that original, the French text and a literal translation can be found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballade_des_pendus

This poem is taken from Christopher Logue, Selected Poems Faber 2019.

Anon (1160 B.C.): The Harper's song for Inherkhawy

This is Annoymous, Egyptian, from 1160 BC, and it’s translated by John L. Foster.

‘Let your heart be drunk on the gift of Day,
until that day comes when you anchor’.

Good advice really.

It’s taken from the magnificent ‘World Poetry. An anthology of verse from Antiquity to the our time’ edited by Washburn and Major.

Zbigniew Herbert's 'Mr. Cogito on Virtue'

Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998)

Mr. Cogito again. This time contemplating Virtue and her failure to seduce ‘real men’.

This is taken from ‘The Collected Poems’ (Atlantic books 2008) a magnificent and dangerous book.