Imitations Book

" ...You must die,
And die and die and die, until the blood
of Hellas and Patroklos is avenged,
killed by the running ships when I was gone."
Homer, Iliad

"It's sweet to destroy my mind
and go down
and wreck in this sea where I drown."
Leopardi, L-infinito

"Your restlessness makes me think
of migratory birds diving at a lighthouse
on an ugly night--
even your ennui is a whirlwind,
circling invisibly--
the let-ups non-existent.
I don't know how, so pressed, you've stood up
to that puddle of diffidence, your heart."
Montale, Dora Markus

I decided to read this because I bought some other of Lowell's books recently and thought I would use that as an excuse to read the one book of his I already had. I'm a little familiar with Lowell's poetry, but this is the first entire book I've read. And I was worried this would be a bad one because it's translations but I'll say that I don't think it was. He says in the foreward that his "translations" are not translations in the strictest sense-he moves lines around, he adds stanzas-but his goal is not particularly to add something completely new and innovative but to translate the tone in a new setting and context. Once you get accustomed to that, I think it's clear Lowell succeeds marvelously with this collection. However I have some reservations both in style and translation.

The first is just a matter of preference. I wasn't crazy about all the poets Lowell translated, or particular poems (and I should really put this in terms of the individual poems because for many of them it was my first time actually reading their poetry). Some of the early German poets, Villon, Baudelaire weren't my thing. Although I did get a sense of Baudelaire's poetry, which was fun in it's own way. Pasternak was so-so although since I actually have read some Akmatova, the poem "For Anna Akmatova" was really good.

The second thing was the idea that Lowell was going for here with his imitations. It's definitely cool, but it also undermines the very notion of translation. Okay it doesn't really. If I had anything to say it would be that Lowell's poetic project succeeds. But I also feel the need to point out that if you don't know the original, then you're not getting all of what Lowell is doing with these translations. Right, that's probably obvious. For the Homer and Sappho translations I looked back at the originals after I read Lowell's and it seemed to me he did a decent job at translating. In the Iliad passage he cleverly adds "heel" to Achilles inevitable death and triples the repetition of die where there is only one die in the Iliad. Both are features of his poem that add a level of meaning for the reader not necessarily found in a more literal translation. And clearly that is what translation is, translation is hardly ever a strictly literal enterprise. But this is poetry and poetry is the realm of infinity.

So what are Lowell's imitations? They're translations. And good ones! But they also have a lil extra sometimes. And unless you read the original, you might never know. But you'll also get a Lowellized version of it. A complete poetic work itself put in another context-the context of Robert Lowell and whatever you happen to know about his circle of poetry and things in general.

Baudelaire was interesting to see for the first time; I had no idea how much of a pessimist he was. I feel though that, it's sort of his thing, perhaps my ignorance is showing. The other poets I wanted to point out were...Montale. He does a great job with Montale. In "The Eel" he actually accidentally adds a second unrelated poem as a second part, but the new intertext between the poems is actually really cool. (Thanks to Muldoon's The End of the Poem, for that piece of info). I like his Rilke a lot too, especially "Orpheus, Eurydice, and Hermes." The last poem is Rilke's "Pigeons", which he dedicates to Hannah Arendt. The other poem that really caught my eye was Leopardi's "L'infinito."

His Sappho is...not bad. Read Anne Carson instead though. Just trust me.

I got the impression that Lowell knows his stuff even if he doesn't know all the languages he's translating fluently. And I think there's also enough of Lowell's own character and style in his imitations that that part of the poetic project succeeds as well. We have a unity of style and skilled translation.

I'd recommend this to...people who are more interested in reading Robert Lowell more than any of the poets he translates. This is a work unto itself and not a replacement for the originals it despoils (harvests!).

One last thing: my edition has this really cool drawing that is a swirl of jagged pen marks that create the outline of a human like figure stretching out in the form of a tree almost like a dryad distorted in mid-transformation surrounded by black and white cross-hatching. Props to Frank Parker.