The Poem Itself Book

Poetry is notoriously difficult to translate and Stanley Burnshaw believes that...the only way one could experience the poetry of a language one did not command was by learning to hear and pronounce (if only approximately) the sounds of the originals and "simultaneously" reading literal renditions. Since the poetry inheres in the tonal language (the sounds of the poem in its original tongue), how could one possibly experience a Spanish poem in any language but Spanish, a French poem in any language but French?Even this, Burnshaw adds a few lines later is not enough:...My literal renditions were scrupulous, yet in certain key places a single French word could not be rendered by a single English word -pieces of two or three might be required. Other words with double denotations in French, had to be halved in English or equated by impossible compounds. And certain phrases that looked easy in the dictionary carried quite untranslatable connotations essential as meaning. As for syntax, the reader would have to untangle it for himself. And the allusions -although at times they might hold the key to the poem, they would not even be considered, since they stand outside the purview of all translation.So what Burnshaw and his collaborators do is to provide each poem in its original language with a literal line-by-line translation with alternate readings set within square brackets, plus notes and commentaries on the poet, the allusions, the syntax, the poetic structure, prosody and sonorities. For some readers, the apparatus may be too cumbersome, but in general the translators make valiant and noteworthy efforts to keep it brief and to the point. The apparatus is either on the same page or the opposing page to the original verses, so it is always at hand.

Is this method successful? Each reader must judge this for himself. I found the method worked wonders for me in French, failed miserably in German, tantalizingly kept most of the Italian poems just out of my ken, and most Portuguese poems within my reach. This unevenness is not the fault of the translators or the associate editors, but rather a sharp and painfully accurate reflection of my language abilities. A smattering acquaintance with a few German words is clearly not enough for Burnshaw´s method to work, whereas my knowledge of French, while not deep was enough to allow me to successfully experience most of the French poems. Since I am bilingual in English and Spanish, I had no problem reading the poems in Spanish and appreciating the apparatus from the inside, as it were. Some familiarity with Italian and Portuguese, born of their common romance origins with Spanish and brazilian and italian films were very helpful, but alas, not quite enough to actually grasp most of the poems in Italian.

The collection qua anthology is a peculiar one. In his introduction, Burnshaw states that he has included modern poetry and by modern, he means poetry written within the modern historical period, a period which he defines as beginning with the outbreak of the Industrial Revolution and ended with the close of World War II, some one hundred and fifty years. The oldest poem in the anthology dates from 1798 (Friedrich´s Hölderin´s Hyperions Schiksalslied) and the most recent ones from 1956 (Eugenio Montale´s L´Anguilla and Eugene Florit´s La noche). Some of the inclusions, and many omissions are very puzzling and the various languages are certainly not represented equitably. Thus, there are 110 pages covering one hundred years of French poetry, from Gérard de Nerval´s 1854 El Desdichado to Saint-John Perse´s 1953 Plueis VIII compared to 45 pages spanning one hundred and twenty nine years of German poetry from Hölderlin´s 1798 Hyperions Schiksalslied to Bertolt Brecht´s 1927 Grosser Dankchoral. It is a welcome surprise to find 105 pages devoted to poetry in Spanish, Galician and Portuguese, the vast majority of which is in Spanish and selected from a period of a mere 53 years and ranges from Antonio Machado´s 1903 Yo voy soñando caminos to Eugene Florit´s 1956 La noche. The 57 pages are selected from 123 years of Italian poetry range from Giacomo Leopardi´s 1835 La sera del di di festa to Eugenio Montale´s 1956 L´Anguilla. Burnshaw himself clearly states in his introduction that:The book makes no claim to being representative of the last hundred yearsand apologizes for only including one Russian poem, an untitled 1910 poem by Alexander Blok.

If the anthology is occasionally puzzling in its selection(and omission) of poets and its coverage of poetry in different languages and time periods, there is an inexcusable gaffe in subtitling the book "150 European poems translated and analysed" and including such latin-american masters as Manuel Bandeira, Jorge de Lima and Cecilia Meireles (Brazil), César Vallejo (Peru), Eugenio Floret(Cuba) and Pablo Neruda (Chile). This as bad as considering as English or British poets, say, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens and e.e. cummings!

If you are at all interested in translations of modern poetry into English and have a at least some knowledge of French, Spanish, German or Italian, you would be well advised to at least dip into this book and try it out for size and take a look, for contrast, at the Penguin Modern European Poets series.