French

Toward the Exit (Dem Ausgang zu)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Hans Arp was born split in two. His mother was French. His father was German. I just called him Hans, the name he was given at birth, but he used a French version of his first name as well, Jean.* He was born in Alsace–Lorraine, a set of disputed provinces that were alternatively French and German as wars whipsawed borders. During Arp’s lifetime, those two countries, those two languages, would be fighting as principals in two World Wars. Just by existing Hans Arp could be an enemy alien simultaneously in two ways.

Until this month I knew Arp vaguely as a 20th century modern artist, but while scrolling on Bluesky I saw four lines of an Arp poem that had been translated by Herbert Read as “The Exit To” posted. That immediately intrigued me.

These were eerie, surprising, wild lines – a kind of poetry that has long attracted me.** Was this all of the poem? Could I find it in its original language and work out my own translation for performance? What else could I find out about Arp and his art, visual and literary?

Luckily, I was able to quickly find Read’s 1968 book Arp, which covers Arp’s life and work. The book provides a good number of examples of that work, including not only the entire poem I was seeking in Read’s English translation, but the full text of two versions in the original German (as “Dem Ausgang zu”)  and in Arp’s own French translation. Read spends most of the pages on the visual art, but tells us that Arp was a life-long poet that considered his literary work an integral part of his expression.

Arp’s lifetime reflects his dual nature. Born in a then German territory, and soon connected with the early 20th century avant garde in France and Germany, he fled to neutral Zurich Switzerland at the outbreak of WWI. Significantly for the fleeing Arp, Zurich was the birthplace of the nonsense-word-named art movement called Dada.

Dada was formed by young people from all the sides in the First World War, who didn’t want to be on any of the sides offered. As France and the various monarchies ground themselves into doit and wurst on the battlefield, the Dada folks were pretty sure that exuberant non-sense was the best rebuttal. Arp himself dispatched his German draft status by going to the German consulate in Zurich, genuflecting and making the Sign of the Cross at every picture of the German minister Hindenburg there, and making non-sense patterns on the forms. He did not seem to the German recruiters there to have a keen tactical mind, nor the possessor of the cool sanity required to make sacrificial charges and retreats through no-mans-land.

You, valued reader and possible listener, may counter that patriotism and bravery, like poetry and art of wisdom and clarity, are not valueless. I myself am a confused soul. I like to fancy that I, gratefully, can engage with either outlook – a variety. I do weigh and consider that this is a luxury. Earnest warriors and confounding satirists have each expended their lives in dialectic for that luxury in art.

A man such as the great French Surrealist poet Éluard I recently featured here can fight on what I think of as the good side of the two World Wars, and still write Dada and then Surrealist poetry. I know much more about Arp now due to the English poet and critic Herbert Read’s book about him – Read who was a decorated and profoundly discouraged vet of the WWI trenches who became committed to art, pacifism, and anarchism as a result, yet then felt compelled to serve his native country when the armies of fascism were arrayed against his nation in the second World War.

To the best of my initial knowledge, Arp seems like a fine person. Modest, unpretentious though a persistent artist, with a sense of humor and somewhat rare ability among his peers to see value and collaboration with women artists in his circle and romantic life. Spontaneously he took to abstraction in his visual artwork quite early in the 20th century, independently of, and often ahead of other Modernists. He explained this by saying that he felt humans are pretentious when they try to depict nature, and that instead they should create things like nature does – not reflected depictions, but abstract though attractive, palpable things like a stone or leaf.***

So where does that leave him with poetry? Dada enjoyed nonsense of course. Surrealism brought forth odd and even random combinations. We may be more accepting of these tactics in visual object than a poem, but in today’s poem the young Arp is using those Dada and Surrealist tactics in this 1912 poem before either movement had been declared. What are we to make of poetry such as this that seeks to surprise us without the comfort of giving a clear path to a denotative meaning?

We might be attracted to its novelty. We might take comfort in our surprise rather than displeasure in our confusion. We might choose to delight in our sense of disorientation. In the same way that we might enjoy the texture and shape of an abstract sculpture, we can enjoy the words as sounds and texture. But I suspect all these are fleeting things to most of us much of the time. So, let’s look at such Dada verse as Arp’s poem another way, the way I had to in order to make my translation. The world of generative AI could easily produce endless combinations of nonsense, but it’s trained to go the other way, to give us the very thing we’ll think is expected of it.   Arp chose his words in German, and then went at it again and chose his words in French. A particular human made a particular set of choices. In Read’s account Arp did intend beauty in his art along with the humor, and he seems absent of any haughty sense of the hermetic artist who means to be misunderstood. He also had a sense of humor. My working understanding of the poem I perform today is that its mood is darkly humorous.

Dem Ausgang zu in three languages

I’ve changed, and think I’ve improved, my last line since I recorded my musical performance earlier this week.

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Long time readers here will recall my primary goal in translation: find the images and convey them vividly in contemporary English. I’ll continue to do this, even as Arp’s images wish to burlesque and fracture reality. When an AI LLM hallucinates (and we use that very term) we are disappointed in it. When another human wishes to speak of an altered reality we wonder at the purpose, the intent, even unexpressed or accepted-accidental intent. This isn’t stone or wood that’s being shaped abstractly, this isn’t a dollop of paint, these are words we must array to make our human sounds, and we will find it hard to avoid making shards of meaning out of them. Arp may be laughing as he wrote down these words in one language, and then another – two languages that would be fighting and killing each other multiple times in his era – but he’s also delighting in the sound and stretch of his words, and I tried to convey that in English too. In the first two lines I see reflective eyes and mysterious night. In the next three lines, a litany of time and movement constrained by something as old and massive as the mountain.**** I see a tree’s lifetime subject to a timber harvest, long ago logs, then cut down and floating away. The poem concludes with night birds in barn lantern light gobbling a season’s harvest that must then have needed the labor of a manual threshing floor to gather, while the divine (angels) are effervescently seen condensing in clouds (baskets of air). And the final line: (as “when pigs fly” in another idiom) fish are holding their hiking sticks walking through the stars, a rising litany of impossibility leading to a certainty, that the poem and all our human effort will end.

If Arp was to perform this poem at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, would some patrons be availing themselves of the exit? For that matter, how many are still reading this far down in this post of mine, how many will want to hear this poem?

Did Arp intend for that to be in a cryptic poem about the absurdity of life’s effort? I can’t tell, but that’s what I found there, and he surely didn’t intend hard enough to prevent me from finding this.

You won’t have to work hard to hear my musical performance of Arp’s poem. I composed the guitar part in my head, silently, while doing other things this week, visualizing exactly the fingering I would use to play it. That’s something I used to do in my youth, but I can’t recall the last time I did it as an old man. I derived a chord structure from the guitar line for a piano part, laid down a bass line, and worked out a drum pattern, and there you go: angels in a basket of air. The audio player should be luxuriously there for you, brave listener. No player? No, Elon hasn’t muted Starlink, but you can also use this highlighted link which will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*I’m using Hans Arp as I relied here much on Herbert Read’s book, and Read uses Hans. Wikipedia lists him as Jean, says than name is preferred in English, but there’s a German language page under Hans. Arp seems to have continued to use Hans when speaking German, and Jean when speaking French throughout his life.

** Yes, I enjoy Dada, oftentimes more than I think I would, and I take pride that I work to make fresh English translations of Dada poems publicly available for poetic work that is hard to find online in English, but I have noticed that even my hardy audience, whose attention I’m grateful for, has little interest in this. I cut my recent early Paul Éluard Dada-style poem series short due to lack of interest.

***To give some flavor to Arp sense of unpretentious, humorous absurdity, here’s his 1921 account of Dada first being uttered as a name:

I hereby declare that on February 8th, 1916, Tristan Tzara discovered the word DADA. I was present with my twelve children when Tzara pronounced for the first time this word which has aroused in us such legitimate enthusiasm. This took place at the Café Terrasse in Zurich, and I wore a brioche in my left nostril. I am convinced that this word has no importance and that only imbeciles and Spanish professors can be interested in dates. What interests us is the Dada spirit and we were all Dada before the existence of Dada….The morality of idiots and their belief in geniuses makes me shit.’”

Arp’s last sentence there sums up a lot of my current newsfeed and the pronouncements of our honored and self-sacrificing leader and his cadre of acolytes.

****In the black horse hitched to the mountain litany I thought of an element of Arp’s biography summarized in Herbert Read’s book. Arp joined in and exhibited with The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) group of artists around the time he wrote this poem, and that brought to mind Franz Marc’s 1911 painting that I visit at one of my local art museums.

Habitude

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today I’m going to wrap up my late summer series of fresh English translations of the early poems of French Surrealist Paul Éluard. Frankly, these poems are having trouble finding an audience – and in my suppositions, this is understandable. Earlier in the series I wrote (generalizing) that modern audiences have expectations of poetry – pre-requisites for our attention and valuation – and these early Éluard poems refuse to meet those expectations.*  That’s a large part of what I like about them: their laughter at their refusal.

This abrupt ending means that I won’t get a chance this month to write more about what I know of Éluard’s life and how it might inform that refusal. I probably should know more about the details before writing such an account anyway, but the shortest summary would say: WWI vet therefore likely suffering its endemic PTSD, a leftist in a world where communist and fascist regimes are the current weather fronts, and an unruly, committed lover bilaterally lucky and unlucky in love. He would eventually write some grander poems, poems more full of the stuff that might please more readers and listeners, but this summer’s set of early refusenik poems are one way to confront the way of the world.

Talk to the hand Eluard

Paul Éluard, not a window-shutter hand.

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As performed, Éluard’s “Habitude”  is so short that it’s one of the shortest pieces in the history of this Project. It says, I think, a few things about the rules of desire and constraints of propriety. Written when Éluard was helping found Surrealism, it shows how influential the absurdity of Dada was in that movement’s birth. The poem is just long enough to have a contrasting middle section, and I try to highlight that contrast by switching from speaking to singing in performance. The truth, that Éluard proclaims “without saying it” here is that he wants an open window and an ever-expanding wind rushing in.

Habitude

Even with this foreshortened series, my  translations here have likely increased the number of easily online-available English translations of Éluard’s early poetry by 50% or so.

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I’m not sure what the next piece will be (I have several in various stages of completion), but your presenter values variety highly, so it’ll likely be different. This Project is “oversized” and off-the-rack clothes can’t contain it.

To hear my translation and performance of “Habitude”  you can weigh the audio player that should be below – but Internet viewing doesn’t make that gadget mandatory, so I offer this highlighted link which will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*It’s also possible that my musical settings and performances might have been less worthwhile, or my being unable to refrain from connecting Éluard’s poems with present political and civic concerns in my recent posts was tiring or awkward to readers. I almost released another musical version of “Habitude”  late last week, but I decided my singing on it – though my singing is always roughshod – wasn’t up to the impeccable standards of exquisite vocalizations you’ve come to expect here.

Giorgio De Chirico, but this is a poem

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Returning now to my series presenting the early poems of French Surrealist Paul Éluard, you may recall that I was talking about the small contemporary presence early Surrealist poets like Éluard have in America compared to their contemporaries in Surrealism who were painters and visual artists. I wrote then about few reasons you may not have heard of, much less considered, Éluard’s poetry. Here’s another reason: we generally expect poetry to deliver a message to us, if not an explicit moral, memoir bit, or assayable philosophical, spiritual, or political point, then something that conveys a comprehensible, palpable, report of the experience of these things. Sure, poetry might be condensed and shorn of elaborate contextual frameworks – just as a text we might receive on our phones would seem vague to those not party to the conversation and the ongoing relationship of its writer and reader – but we fill in those things most of the time when we consider a poem worthwhile, while visual art is allowed a great deal more freedom. No one is required to hold forth on what water lilies or sunflowers mean in a painting, and melting clocks or obscuring apples may sport with our expectations, but still intrigue us.

So today’s Éluard poem is an appeal to readers to cut him some slack by presenting an ekphrastic poem, a poem implying a case that you could consider its set of words beyond finding its message, but to just enjoy it as a not-fully-decodable object in itself. If we don’t know what a Surrealist painting means, we might still have an experience with it, and one such experience is what Éluard’s “Giorgio De Chirico”  means to convey.

One side-effect of that open field we allow visual art is that we may have varied and dynamic experiences – derive entirely new and novel “frames” in our experience of it. As I wrote recently in my run-down of the most popular posts over the decade of this Project: the most popular post here was about how the Statue of Liberty, which is most often seen as a clear expression of freedom and welcome, has another context, partly intended by its creator, but unseen from our usual perspective, the metal giant’s feet have broken free from shackles and chains, and the small island its pedestal rests on once had a jail. Or let’s take the ubiquitous image of the Mona Lisa. What did Da Vinci intend? We don’t know, and we even like to think the enigmatic smile depicted intends for us to wonder. To its patron, the painting they commissioned might mean something about patriarchal ownership. Some surmise that the woman is pregnant and is musing on the child that is to be born. Others, pregnant themselves, could take that same framing and wonder if that face is attempting to misdirect its body from a bout of morning-sickness nausea.

So, as I translated “Giorgio De Chirico”  I could see things about De Chirico’s paintings that Éluard was experiencing and reporting on. I enjoyed finding singing English words to convey that from his French. I performed it, tracking just voice and solo acoustic guitar this time, during the same sessions where I was working on the other Éluard poems that I presented in August.

Four De Chirico paintings

Here are four representative De Chirico paintings. The sharp lines of shadows and bright light, the tiny people dwarfed by structures, all were motifs he commonly used.

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Then yesterday, instead of buckling down and preparing a final mastered mix of the song I’d made, I watched a documentary about 9/11. The one I watched focused on the part not usually considered: the experience in the Pentagon, that giant military office building in Washington D. C. that also suffered a deadly hit by a hijacked airliner that day.

In it, one survivor told her tale of that day. She was a light colonel, working in an administrative desk job, in a building that (other than its massive size) is like a great many other office buildings many work at during any workday, and furthermore she was about to give a presentation on some matter in that common workday misery, a morning meeting in a small conference room there.

And then the speeding fuel-laden airliner slammed into the wall of her facet of the five-sided Pentagon. In darkness, thick smoke, and heat she led a small group trying to find an exit. She grabbed a damp sweater that she found by touch to try to stifle the smoke. She didn’t know the dampness was from jet fuel, not water. The building segment was already aflame, parts not yet immediately destroyed were collapsing in the heat. No one could see much of anything, they had to hold hands to stay together. Her small group made it to a window, a bit of light in the dark chaos. Like many modern office windows, it was not designed to be opened – more than that, it had recently been upgraded to be “blast proof” as protection from something like an outside truck-bomb attack. It was made so that it couldn’t even be broken! Someone in her party picked up that trouble-spot of many an office day, a heavy laser printer, and hurled it at the window. It bounced right back off the glass. Somehow in the dark and smoke, they found the printer again, and threw it again – and that time the blow started to uncase the window’s frame. They pried it out and leapt outside.

Now that’s more excitement than many poetry blogs will offer you most days. Watching this account, everything was intensified by the story’s setting, for I’ve worked in modern office buildings like this, I’ve had the boredom or anxiety of meetings, I’ve carried heavy laser printers and made them work again the second time – frames that make it easy to share that experience.

The documentary also had an account from a man standing outside who saw them pounding ineffectively on that window and who went into the burning building to try to see if he could lead them out, only to find the destruction and conditions inside made it impossible to find any way to them from that exit. It wasn’t until a decade later he found out those pounding at the window had escaped, but for ten years he thought he was the last one to see them alive.

And then, I expanded in my empathy as I watched these accounts, including those who didn’t escape. It called to mind that folks elsewhere in buildings or working boats struck, perhaps nowadays with un-maned mechanisms that don’t need suicidal fanatics inside them, but have up-the-chain commandants upwards to the Commander in Chief who’ve loosed them thinking they have good and sufficient reason to do so.

Now, I’ve ruined a perfectly good essay on art and poetry – and your expectations if you came here for that – but as I revisited this performance this morning to make a final mix you can hear below, those sudden and shuddering skies, the words I translated in August from French: denounced and spinning walls, daylight through leaves, and those who speak without knowing. Mysterious, enigmatic poems and songs can act like objects (as painting or sculpture) engender new feelings, new meanings.* Perhaps it takes a Surrealist, with a willingness to combine outlandish things without favoritism to sensible intent to portray some realities.

Giorgio de Chirico

A chord sheet of the song I made from my translation of Éluard’s poem.

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If you want to hear my performance of my own translation of Éluard’s “Giorgio De Chirico,” there’s the audio player below. If it’s not there, don’t throw a printer, there’s this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

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*Regarding art and unintended re-framing due to the events of 9/11, I think of the breakthrough work by one of my acknowledged models for this Project, Laurie Anderson’s 1981 “O, Superman.”   What with it’s “Here come the planes. They’re American planes” and the spookiness of disembodied voices abstracted and preserved by machines, it can be, and has been, experienced differently post 9/11.

Among Others

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

After our Anniversary Month celebrations, I’m returning to performances of some more poems by principal Surrealist poet Paul Éluard. It’s struck me that Éluard is less well-known to English speakers than he should be. I have only half-formed ideas why that may be so. Let me briefly list them.

Was it his politics? He was a self-avowed Communist – which as we know from the wisdom of our peerless American leader is correctly the name for anyone with a smidgen of concern for how the government might organize it’s efforts beyond the interests of the wealthy – but back in the midcentury when I was growing up, it meant support for corrupt one-man-rule authoritarians who erected bulwarks against free elections, sent spies and armed thugs against their opponents, and gloated in jails, prisons, and the power to exile. Despite his full-throated poetic odes to liberty and acknowledged heroism in the resistance to fascists during WWII and the run-up to that war, Éluard didn’t forthrightly oppose Communism when those things were mistakenly taken to be the bad things about Communism – before we knew better.

Was it Surrealism, or specifically being a Surrealist poet?  Defined broadly, at least in my youth, Surrealism as a force in the visual arts was important and popular. How popular? Magritte, Dali, and Escher were inescapable as LP record-covers, posters, or reproductions on the wall. But Surrealist poetry? Not so much. Oddly, Surrealist poetry’s 19th century inspirations as well as its post-WWII descendants were popular enough. Baudelaire to Rimbaud to Bob Dylan to New York and Black Mountain School poets have substantial presence in our culture, but in the middle parts between the World Wars where we have Surrealists like Éluard, their Dada and Surrealist poetry falls into a memory hole.

Is it something as simple as the tastes of translators?* The masses of monolingual readers in English-speaking countries rely on them to embody poets like Éluard. They are an underappreciated and (even within the realm of poetry) underpaid lot – but they, for a large part, get to pick who we pay attention to. Maybe they just didn’t encounter or take a liking to Éluard? Particularly in his early poetry, which supplies the examples I’ve used so far, Éluard doesn’t have as much esoteric imagery as some other Modernists. It may sometimes be hard to explicate exactly what he’s saying in his poetry, but he often writes, at this point in his career, in what I read as plain-spoken colloquial speech that doesn’t dazzle with its decoration while remaining elusive in intent. I’m not immune to being caught by surprising language myself. Afterall, the first Éluard poem I ever translated (and likely his best-known in English) begins “She is standing on my eyelids…” – and once you translate that, you want to continue and complete a translation of the entire poem. Today’s poem, “Among Others,”  doesn’t go that hard.

None of the above have stopped Spanish language poet Pablo Neruda from having a footprint in English-speaking culture that I casually measure as being a bit larger than Éluard’s. Go Figure.

Among Others

This can’t be so: if I complete everything I’ve planned in this Éluard series, will this blog will be the site of nearly half of all the English translations of his French poems on the Internet?

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So, now let’s get to another of Éluard’s early poems, “Among Others.”   My usual mode of translation is to try to convey the poem’s images. As a side effect, that allows me to land a beachhead without having forward intelligence as to what the poem means to say as if it was ordinary prose. Best as I can tell (I’m not a French linguist by any means) the language here is as plain as that in “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “Fog,” or “In a Station of the Metro” – poems from American Modernists in the demotic yet diffuse-meaning mode. There’s a single clue simile that something in Éluard’s short poem may call for extraordinary attention: “as in the time of miracles.” Could this be an ordinary bit of French idiom, or is it a tip that something miraculous is to occur?**

What is Éluard getting at in this poem? I’d say the betting odds are that he’s portraying some men talking about whatever they think is important and compelling, but the poet’s voice says that while he is among those men, his attention is on other, more carnal or incarnated thoughts, a vision of a desirable woman.***

Yet, as I worked with the poem, and as I finally performed it, I decided to place my bet on the longshot: that it’s not that the poem’s speaker’s thoughts are just like a woman, but that the poem’s speaker is, at least for that moment “in the midst of all these men,” seeing themselves as that vision of a young, tall, beautiful woman – in other words, in his image he gender changes.

Now, I am sporting with authorial intent there – but even in the first, best odds, version there could be an element in the male poet’s imagination seeing union with that woman.

Anyway, here’s my performance which is taking the long odds, including side-bets that my voice can put this song, from this point of view, over. There’s a good chance there’s a player gadget below. If not, don’t tear up your betting slip, there’s a highlighted link too – and if you click that, it’ll open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*I base my estimate of Éluard’s popularity by casual searches for English-language translations of his poems on the Internet. I haven’t done any strict count, but my impression is maybe 10-20 poems are extant there. “L’Amoureuse”  and “Liberté”  have a footprint in English online, but the air gets thin quickly past those two poems.

**If an American football fan was to write about a “hail Mary play” we know not to call to imagination the venerated Blessed Virgin being hurled tens of yards through the air by desperate athletes. Some naïve translator-from-English making that image clear and literal would likely mistake the authorial intent.

***A more facile and time-granted musician might be tempted to musically quote one of the last hits from England’s The Hollies while they sing the poems last sentence.

The Naked Truth

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Last time I had a chance to record a new piece using guitar, I rattled the bones of a Jazzmaster amid synth keyboards played with the same guitar. Monday I had another chance. My studio space was quiet, I could have made it loud – or I could open a sensitive microphone. Organic, wooden music? I uncased an acoustic guitar. I do like the directness of that instrument. I have microphones setup for recording in my studio space, so it’s as simple as opening a preset template on my computer recording software, arming the tracks, and clicking the red screen button.

The contrast that resulted could have been even greater. I tend to attack the strings on an acoustic guitar pretty hard. I use a flat pick, but I’m most often not strumming the way other plectrum players do. Instead, I skip from string to string, not striking them consecutively or with a “boom chuck” alternative strum either. I use that single flat pick’s point to do in succession what a “finger picking” guitarist does.* Many years ago when I tried to learn how to finger-pick, I noticed that many patterns didn’t strictly require that you strike two or more strings simultaneously, and I just spontaneously started to move the single point of a flat pick around to play what I would have done using thumb and fingers.

I had a new song to record – really new. Over the weekend I decided to crack open my old paperback of Paul Éluard’s Capitale de la douleur, Mourir de na pas mourir , Éditions Gallimard, 1966. The book’s entirely in French, and I can’t remember what bookstore I found it at in Iowa. As I’ve mentioned occasionally here, I had the impression that French poetry was an important influence on English Modernist verse, and living in a state (Iowa) that retained some French place names and seeing French on signs and labels when I visited Canada for fishing trips as a kid made me feel that French was a logical second language for me.**

Somewhat like finger-picking, I was a washout studying French in school. I had a terrible time pronouncing the words anywhere near correctly, and the introductory classes I took in high school and in my foreshortened college years had nothing to do with the French poetry I wanted to get ahold of.

So, kind of like guitar playing, I just went self-taught. Back in the 20th century I brute-forced my way through a handful of poems with a French-English dictionary and vague memories of basic French syntax and grammar from my school-room failure. Eventually, it was just easier to get the poetry already translated, where and when available.

It was only once the Parlando Project got underway in the twenty-teens that I returned to translation. Nearly all the English translations I had read are not in the public domain and free to reuse. And furthermore, I found that not every poet’s work I was interested in had even been translated extensively into English. This was true for many of the Dadaists, and I was also somewhat surprised that it was true of Éluard.

Éluard, as best as I can tell, is a big deal in Modernist French poetry. Present at the creation of Surrealism. Not just an important avant-gardist, admired for his love poetry too. Patriotically valorized for being a stalwart member of the anti-fascist Resistance during WWII. But none of that makes him all that important in America.

I wanted to go through the early poems collected in my book that would be in the public domain. Many of them do not have English translations I can find propagated on the Internet. I used my limited French vocabulary to scan them for what looked like interesting lines, and concentrated on the shorter ones that fit this Project’s needs.

I took the ones I picked out and put them through machine (computer) translation. Machine translation has gotten much better in the past few years,*** but it still doesn’t produce poetry. What it does produce seems, to my inexpert eyes, to be mostly accurate glosses of the literal poem. My job is to take those words, discern what they are trying to represent, and to make that into a poem that will seem vivid to a modern American reader.

In that process I would find even a pristine word-for-word translation inadequate. I want to translate the sequence of images as much as the words, and I want the result to have some musical or incantatory power (even if I don’t usually go so far as to try to duplicate a meter or rhyme scheme).

The Naked Truth in French

The poem, “Nudite De La Verite,” in its original French

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Éluard’s “The Naked Truth”  was not hard to work with. There’s not much wild imagery to it. There is the image of the incorporeal state of despair that has no wings in the literal translation. I decided to sharpen that to “no flight,” both to link it with the rest of the short catalog of always-present no-action and so that the sound of “no flight “ can better flow into the “no face” that follows.

I really wanted that negative flow about resistance to despair, and for that I made the most significant choice to change the sentence structure of Éluard’s text, which has the line stating despair at the start followed by the line about love. I reversed the order, putting the line about love first, almost as an interrupted side-thought that prefaces the statement about despair that we will momentarily think is what all the adamant stubbornness is about – until we get to the payoff at the poem’s end.

Perhaps this isn’t the best choice? It’s not the order Éluard wrote down in French, and I want you to know that I changed that order. I may have been influenced by the way I, and many others feel – particularly in my town – with the current regime and its performative cruelty and callousness. Goddammit, we might see this through this little poem: a hope that our level of our despair at those things must be equal to a level of love.

The Naked Truth

My version in English, presented as a chord sheet for those that want to sing it themselves.

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You can hear my musical performance of my translation/adaptation of Paul Éluard’s “The Naked Truth”  with the audio player below. What? Has any such audio player taken wing the way your despair or love hasn’t? Well, I offer this consolation: a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*For the added volume and sharp attack, some guitar finger-pickers use picks too, but different ones than a flat pick – typically a plastic thumb-pick that fits ring-like, but over the distal part of the thumb, and metal or plastic picks somewhat like half-spoon thimbles on one to three fingers. Others use some combination of fingernails and flesh. I have terrible nails and my skin can only allow me to play a limited amount of time with my thumb or fingers on bass. I tried to use fingerpicks as a guitarist, but found them finicky to manage.

**If I was a kid in my present residence, it would be natural to have gravitated toward Spanish. While my town has a significant number of Francophone African-Americans, Latin American Spanish is often in the air around here, and whenever I delve into Latin American poetry I find great riches.

***I suppose these computer-translations could be called Artificial Intelligence of a kind.  The AI label gets thrown on a wide range of things these days both for promotion and disapproval. In my defense I’ll point out that computer translations aren’t “generative AI,” the thing that (deservedly) gets the most heat. When I type Éluard’s French into a machine translation entry box I’m not asking it to generate some reheated reprocessed slop of other, uncredited, artists’ work in order to present the pretense of originality. I’m asking it to do what I did when thumbing through my French-to-English dictionary, along with making some effort at producing an understandable syntax order for the resulting words. As for other AI issues: I casually assume my request to render a 35-word poem has a modest carbon footprint.

I still end up working with French-to-English dictionaries to check significant words, to see examples of the words or phrases in use, and to make at least an effort at understanding possible idiomatic usage. Would it be better if the poetry was translated by a bilingual poet with extensive knowledge about early 20th century France? Yes, but I’m not sure that Éluard’s fate has given us that – and so I make my efforts.

Paul Éluard’s “The Life” and behind the veil of translation

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I’m starting on one of my New Year’s Resolutions early: to spend more time presenting fresh translations here. I expect a sizeable portion of them will be from French. Today’s piece, from the poet Paul Éluard, will be one example. Since there will be others, I’m going to start today with an aside about the translator’s tasks and my tactics and credentials for doing them, before we get to today’s combination of poetry and music.

I am not a native French speaker, nor do I have great facility with that language. Growing up in a little Iowa town, I had the luck to be able to take French at our small community high school, and later attempted to study it in college. French was Hobson’s choice for any foreign language classes at my small high school, but I welcomed that particular chance. In at least one previous post I’ve mentioned some of my accidental connections to the French language, but let me summarize them for newcomers. I first encountered French during my father and his brother Bill’s fishing trips to Ontario Canada, where I, a grade-school aged kid, was amazed to find the labels on many boxes and cans were bilingual, French and English. Around the same time my beloved Auntie Red, found herself and her young family stationed in France when her military husband was restationed there. Back stateside, she would amaze me by reeling off French phrases still retaining elements of her Southern US accent. That there was such a thing, an entire other language to describe the world, presumably as rich as English, seemed marvelous.

My academic career with French was none-the-less fraught – both in high school and college. Much of the work was based on getting conversational mastery, and I was terrible at it. I have something (I’ve always suspected neurological) that frustrates me with vocal mimesis. It’s likely part of the reason I struggle with singing. Helpful correction of the “no, it’s pronounced like this” kind only made me seem stupid or uncooperative, because my second and further attempts would still be way off in trying to make the right mouth sounds. Though my academic career was eventually stunted anyway, I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I had lucked into a class based on silently reading and appreciating literature in another language.

But that wasn’t on offer, or affordable, to me. So, in my 20s, largely out of school, I started to translate French poetry. This was a laborious process. I would page through a French to English dictionary for all but the most common words. I still retained a smattering of knowledge of French syntactical and grammar practices back then, and putting the two together I was able to produce a handful of translations. One that survived from this work was my translation of Paul Éluard’s “L’Amoureuse”  which was presented here some years back.

My activity then, and my activity now, might occasion questions, ones I don’t know that I have a good answer for. Should I be doing this? Wouldn’t it be better if someone fluent in both English and French did any such literary translation? Isn’t the answer the that last question obvious?

My answers (then and now) would be: some of these poems don’t seem to have English translations I have access too, and even if translations exist, isn’t an attempt to do my own translation just another variant of doing one’s own “deep reading” of a poem? If for example, Helen Vendler has written an essay on what she found in a poem, does that mean I shouldn’t look at the poem myself and ask what all is in there – not because I think of myself as more learned or insightful than Vendler, but more at because I’m another human consciousness engaging with the consciousness of the poet.

What gave me such audacity, with so small a mastery of French, to do this? Well, I wanted to – enough for a stubborn young man. Now as an older man, still translating without mastery in the source language, I also tell myself that I did (and do) self-consider myself a poet, a chooser of words, focuser of images, composer of word-music. Part of the task of translation is to do the primary work of literal translation, but to produce the full pleasure to the reader of poetry, the poetic work is at least as important. Decades ago, I read that Ezra Pound used only someone else’s English glosses of Li Bai to create his landmark Cathay  collection. Eventually I became aware that Pound’s Chinese translations were not very accurate depictions of Li Bai – and since learning that as a young man I’ve sometimes “checked” translations of poems to see how varied the translator’s version may be from some literal word for word, or from other translators’ versions. I was too uncertain of my own translations to think I was doing better work, but what I read as taking liberties bothered the younger me. Are translators like Pound “cheating” by not serving the original poet faithfully? These resulting English poems (I would say of Pound’s Li Bai) were as much or more the translator’s poem as the source author’s.

But what if I publish my translations? There are what I call “guild concerns” there. In the same way that I worry that my naïve musical compositions and make-do musical skills are, in their small way, part of a flood in the musical culture that reduces the shrinking opportunities for “real musicians” and trained composers, am I doing the same for translators with better knowledge and cultural grounding? Back to Pound: his work out-shadowed other translators who knew Chinese, and I’ve featured here a contemporary of Pound, Shigeyoshi Obata, whose Li Bai translations are largely unknown.

As a guild concern for people who depend, or wish to depend, on income from their art, this can be considered an existential issue, and I wish them no harm. Yet they may think: no matter, you are  harming us. And now there’s another monster in the forest that they might view me as riding in on: computer-based artificial intelligence.

Since my early thumb-worn French-English dictionary forays, computer translations have become quite facile. An instant’s click will produce a literal gloss on one’s screen of a poem such as today’s selection. Let me stipulate to all, and to those that fear and dislike AI, these instant computer glosses are not good poetry.*   I will click for them, but I will still spend time with dictionaries. What are the various contexts of a word? Which choice in English brings the most to the poem?**

Herein lies one problem. I’m trying to read the source author’s mind, and that will bring in my own mind, experiences, and knowledge to filter that process. This part of translation is unavoidable for causing both errors and accuracy! As I’ve grown older, I now often understand those “cheaters” as other blind ones assessing the elephant of the poem. If, as Frost had it, poetry is what is lost in translation, then a translator’s job is to reclothe the poem’s bones in English poetry, using modern English poetic expression. Doing this has limits, dangers: readers may like their foreign poetry to sound, well, foreign, with an exotic awkwardness – and having ancient poets sound like your contemporaries at a local poetry reading risks unintentional humor.

So, here we go: an early poem by French Surrealist Paul Éluard, “La Vie.”   I start with a machine translation.

Life x2

The 1926 poem in its original French, and a computer translation

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The syntax comes out somewhat scrambled or hard to follow. As a prime Surrealist, one that knew and went through the Dada predecessors to Surrealism, this is likely there in Éluard’s original French I think. My first questions are what are the images: what does the author want me to see, or otherwise sensually appreciate? This can be hard with Surrealist poetry or the like: they often seek strangeness or even nonsense in images. All good imagery works with some degree of mystery or novelty, anything less risks cliché. Even one of those images that you read and think “I’ve never seen it like that before, but once I’ve read this, I’ll always think of this comparison” has to surprise you, cause you to take the leap of likeness. Surrealism says you need to outright react that’s impossible or outrageous to fully free and implement the imagination. So, my primary task is difficult with Surrealist poetry – they may want to be impossible or impenetrable, yet I still try to make the images clear, and this may be subject to mistakes. It’s also possible that in psychoanalyzing the poem that I may be putting things in there that the conscious intent of the original poet didn’t intend. ***

Examining the gloss, I think Éluard is describing a woman whose consciousness is either in a dream state mimicking waking life or living her waking day informed by, or as if, in a dream state. I think the image wants that ambiguity, to have it both ways. Either way, the people and things she meets are like strangers who have been hiding and she has found them for the first time.

The Life tranlated by Frank Hudson

My translation, used in today’s short musical performance

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I take the liberty while translating this image in giving double meanings to some words, using more than one English word to stand for a single French word. I’m doing what “rescaling” a lower resolution digital image does, I intersperse additional pixels/words to bring the image out. “Neu” is rendered “naked” and “new;” “fraiche” becomes both “cool” and “fresh.” This is a judgement call, and my choice may be wrong. In making those word choices, using a French dictionary with multiple meanings and usage examples of the word used in context remains useful. Another thought, that AI will miss, but bears considering: the author may have intended a pun or other wordplay .

The final two lines gave me a word-music chance to put a rhyme in to tie things up, what with “gaze” and “sways.” I was so pleased how that worked out that I overlooked one word, a mere possessive pronoun, “ses.” I’m enough of an idiot regarding French usage that I can’t be sure if it’s a male pronoun such as “his” or a general pronoun, a “he/her/it” equivalent. Who’s gaze is it? The woman in the poem? The poet, the male Éluard? Something else, life or imagination?

In my ignorance, and as an admitted failure of craft, I just put down “her,” because at the time I finalized my translation my focus had moved from the word-for-word elements to what is the vivid image; and I thought, this woman that Éluard is admiring in the poem, living the Surrealist outlook, is confident in her own gaze as she sways in either the intoxication of fresh experience or the artistic refinement of dancing her day forward, and so I wrote in my translation “her.” I thought the poem is about the woman – even should be about the woman in the conclusion if I was writing it – but Éluard might have chosen to end it with his gaze evaluating the woman’s experience: I’m the artist, they’re just “life.”

So unintentionally a feminist recasting of the poem? Surrealism does have a problem there: open to women as muses, yet not as open as it should have been in allowing them to be concrete artists themselves. Shades of Éluard and Breton, may I call my ignorant choice a “Freudian slip?”

Today’s music? This was a little exercise on my part using a depiction of a couple of chord progressions from a Joe Pass performance as the basis for the music. Pass was a great Jazz guitarist – but for external practicalities, once more there’s no guitar in this version at all! Dada composition! You can hear my musical performance of Paul Éluard’s “The Life”  with the audio player gadget below. No player visible? Not a mistake or slip, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog won’t translate into showing the player. If so, here’s a highlighted link that will open a new tab with an audio player.

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*They don’t generate good literary prose either – producing as they do some estimate of the most probable word to be used, not the one chosen by another human’s consciousness that may not be the most common one-for-one. Moreover, with poetry the word-music issue is ignored by the AI translations, and poetry is musical speech. I generally don’t do rhyming accentual-syllabic translations, the cause of many an “inaccurate” translation, but I want the resulting translated poem to sound like poetry in modern English.

**These choices are a reason I highly recommend translation as training for poets. I don’t believe I undervalue topic, message, or prose-level-meaning in poetry, but many poets are stuck in finding the best combination of what they want to say with how it’s said. While I acknowledge the real issues with AI, for a monolingual, working with a literal/prose gloss of another poet lets one develop those selection-skills of the right word, right order, right connection, while one-step-away from their own experience and desired message.

***This may be proper since Andre Breton, another founding Surrealist, thought Sigmund Freud was on to something crucial with his recent theories and psychoanalysis. That Breton may be wrong about Freud or that Freud may be wrong about how the layers of consciousness and personality work only reinforces my stipulation that this outside consideration of the poet’s fellow consciousness is necessary for accuracy and errors.

Beautiful Justice

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

This poem by the French Surrealist poet Paul Éluard wandered into my view earlier this month, and it seems like it, and my work translating it into English, slots right in between my late wife’s poem I performed last time and this Saturday’s planned #NoKings protests planned around America.

I’ve mentioned earlier this year that in my youth I became interested in the French Modernists because I had gotten the impression that they were a key force in English-language Modernism. Later, from my work for the Parlando Project, I came to learn that this is only partially so. I wasn’t far into the Project when I realized that there was in London before WWI (at that time still the center of English-language literature) a “reverse British Invasion” going on as crucial as the 1960’s British Invasion that helped revitalized rock’n’roll music. Americans: Pound, Eliot, H.D., Frost, and even the important British Imagist theorist T. E. Hulme who had spent some expanded-sky time in Canada, were all there shaping up a make-it-new freshness. Now it’s also true that Eliot and Pound were fond of some French poets,* but as I later traced those French poets with the greater resources I could obtain this century, I found that some of those French writers were taken with Whitman and Poe.

Still, the French Symbolists, and the more internationally-sourced but eventually Paris-centered Dada and Surrealist poets were  important. Having only High School French it was hard for me to absorb a great deal of French Modernist poetry, but what I was able to find in translation, or painstakingly translate myself in the 1970s was an important influence on me.

It was soon enough that I came upon Paul Éluard then, who as far as the French were concerned, was a big deal, often rated as the greatest Surrealist poet. Well, ratings are silly – ought to remain so – but his poetry had striking imagery and was often concerned with some combination of erotic love and anti-fascist politics. In the 1970s, the first attracted me primarily, while the latter seemed a noble history lesson.

Ha ha! History, it seems, has jumped out of the past, and the anti-fascist Éluard is due for a revival – and so I welcomed seeing his poem “Bonne Justice”  appear on BlueSky in its original French. I could make out enough of it (my French is even more scant than it was in my 20s) to want to do a translation and possible performance.

bonne-justice-paul-eluard-manuscrit

I don’t know why his handwritten manuscript uses a circular format. Éluard may be trying to convey the eternal in natural law. Cynics might read “circling the drain.”  Young moderns seeing this would need to start with the translation task of reading cursive.

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Translation moved quickly. Vocabulary issues are easily handled by computer these days, and online sources help to drill down on a word’s flavors.**   Éluard’s language here is not fancy, there are no obscure or archaic words, and he seems to me to be speaking to a general audience, not artistic theorists or avant-garde cadres. I proceeded as I normally do when translating from a literal gloss: first finding the images and what word choices will most clearly illuminate them, while giving care in preserving the “music of thought” in how the poem introduces the images and sets them off in the context of each other – though then I will take a hand at using a modern English word order and sentence structure that has some new music of sound in its new language. I rarely try to make rhyming translations. This poem’s word-music retains Éluard’s original repetitions, which I think are sufficient.

Beautiful Justice

A chord sheet presented so that others can sing this fresh song created in English from Éluard’s poem.

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So, my “Beautiful Justice”  keeps all of Éluard’s parallels, though I made one set of considered changes, both for the benefit of myself as the performer of the result, and from my reading of Éluard’s intent. This poem seems to be speaking of qualities and situations of mankind as a whole, but he uses “hommes” (men) for this, and in another case a masculine noun for brothers (“frères”) which I rendered as “family.” I decided these gendered words were outdated conventions that would benefit from translation. Yes, I was thinking too of my late wife’s poem, “In Another Language,”  performed here last time, who in those same 1970’s was dreaming a genderless language.

It’s just a single acoustic guitar and my rough-hewn voice for this performance. If one wanted to remember this poem, now song, when marching on October 18th, it could be portable that way, though I don’t think my own performance is a stirring march – it’s more a reminiscent prayer. Prayer is focused speech. Song adds intensity of breath and music to speech. Marching and standing together, as simple as that is, adds action from our bodies (even this old man’s body). There may be more going forward that we will be called to do – who can tell with accuracy – but I think it’s not a bad start to be praying in song for those laws old/yet new, those always perfecting laws that protect us, the laws that aren’t capricious decrees to persecute and sever us.

You can hear my song in English made from Paul Éluard’s French poem with the graphical audio player below. No player? This law says you’re permitted to click on the highlighted link and it will open a new tab that will have its own audio player.

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*Core Imagist F. S. Flint, working-class-born, but a native Londoner, worked hard to promote modern French poetry in this pre-WWI era for one.

**Though an online French dictionary I use for that had a service outage while I was working, and I began to dismay that I’d given away to charity my large old French-English dictionary volume.

At the Threshold: marvels with French on sky-blue waters

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

We’re going to travel to one of the best short poems that late 19th century American poet Richard Hovey ever wrote, a strange poem about approaching death, a place far or near, with no trusty mileposts. As I like to do, we’re going in a round-about way. Let’s start with a blue lake.

I can remember what a wonder it was. My father and his youngest brother loved to fish on lakes, and in search of ever more pure sport-fishing beyond the sky-blue waters of northern Minnesota, they took to traveling up further into Ontario Canada. I was maybe 10 or 11, still at an age when I was open to whatever my parents led me toward. We stayed at a family-owned fishing lodge at the end of a gravel road outside of Reddit. A few small, well-kept cabins, a couple of outhouses, and a lake-dock — which was all the two brothers needed, as the day was mostly spent out fishing.

As I said, I was accepting of this. I gamely came along, earnestly operating a rod and reel, waiting, sensing for any piscatorial tugs on the line, listening to the two men occasionally talking about what fishing tactics were most promising. My youngest uncle, maybe 18 or 19, had been about my age when their father died, and my father now served as his younger brother’s father-figure. I was unaware then that more than lures and casting targets was in their talk.

I was never bored. I had a vast imagination when young, and could sit quietly daydreaming stories and ideas in my head for hours. I suspect a good poet would have been more observing of the boundless nature around me; and while I watched and listened to my dad and uncle some, they were too commonplace for me to treasure.

Instead, here is what I recall being fascinated by: I was in another country, Canada, subject to its laws, and a Queen, a governmental oddity that seemed a little out of time to me. A gallon wasn’t even the same gallon there, nor a dollar exactly a dollar! The lodge owning family and everyone we met in Canada spoke English of course, but since my imaginative and book-minded mind lived in words, I was amazed that all the groceries we picked up in Kenora on our way up had bilingual labels including French.

I was as if I had found the Rosetta stone all by myself. As a native Iowan, I already had a passing place-name experience with French from my state’s then 160 year past life as a French possession, but here in Canada a box of Wheaties or a carton of milk could be held inside other words. So, later in high school and in my truncated college studies, I selected French as my foreign language.

I was terrible at it as a school subject. I did OK (not outstanding) in basic vocabulary. I was passable in recalling the tenses and such. I accepted the arbitrary gendering of nouns. But my mouth stumbled entirely in the speaking of French, so obtusely bad at speaking it that I strongly suspect it is something in my neurological wiring. That I persisted with French as I entered college was at least in part because I was learning that French poetry had been so interactive with English language poetry, particularly in the formation of Modernism.*

After my formal education ended, I continued translating French poetry, not by any right of fluency, as I’ve confessed above, but because I wanted to bask in the secret sauce that helped form Modernism.

Richard Hovey seems to have been greatly enamored of what was modern French poetry to him. His published work includes translations of Verlaine, Maeterlinck, and Mallarmé. While going through his published work this summer I came upon this sonnet “Au Seuil,”  in French, dated as having been written in 1898. When I translated it, I found this graceful consideration of dying and some possible judgement and afterlife which I present to you in English today. As an old person, dying no longer requires any heroic situation, acute illness, or grandiose gothic stance to make such consideration apt for me. It’s a matter of petty logistics now.**

At the Threshold as published in French

The poem as published posthumously in a collection by the Vagabondia co-author titled “To the End of the Trail.”

At the Threshold

My translation, presented here as a chord sheet for the musical performance you can hear below. In performance I refrained the final line of the sonnet as shown here.

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Was today’s poem written by an old man, or a young man staring down a deadly disease? No, Hovey was 34 years old, likely in vigorous health. Still, in less than two years he’d be dead, dying during a routine operation for something as unromantic as a varicocele. One can only wonder how he would have coped with the upcoming English poetic Modernism that would be sparked in part by French writers he admired.

Though subject to my language limitations, today’s poem to song turned out to be a relatively straightforward and faithful translation — with one exception. My usual poetry translation tactic is to primarily find the images in the poem and work at carrying them over vividly to English. I strive to have a non-creaky, natural syntax and word choice in the target language, and to make from that a poem in modern English word-music rather than trying to mimic the prosody of the poem’s native language. What was that one exception? In the poem’s 13th line, “ Qui nous benira de ses grands yeux bleus,” there’s an image I think.***  It could be that Hovey intends a witty little aside about a Nordic male god-in-heaven sitting on a throne of judgement, the cliché being then his point. As I worked on this line I wanted the possibility, however unexpected and wishful, of something universally marvelous. I dropped the andromorphic gendered pronoun as more than unnecessary, and then perhaps unconsciously recalling the poetry of the first-nations name for my current home-state of Minnesota, made the apprehending eyes more than humanly large.****

You can hear my musical performance of what is now an English language poem with the audio player gadget below. No player seen?  This highlighted link is the alternative, and it’ll open a new tab with its own audio player.

*Oddly it wasn’t Spanish poetry. In England we can assign this to not forgiving the Armada and all that — but large portions of the United States had been Spanish possessions after all. And while Canada’s French is spoken regionally, Spanish is the predominate language across our equally large southern border and in the American commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

**For example: when I replaced two bicycles stolen early this summer, ones I’d ridden for 20 and 40 years, I wondered at the return-on-investment of spending like-amounts in current market prices to replace them. My favorite old-person’s joke is that when someone offers me a lifetime guarantee, I ask if there’s a better offer.

***Literal: “Who will bless us with his big blue eyes.”

****Lakota compound word for the place of sky-reflecting-waters. And there I have returned to that boat with my father and his youngest brother, as Hovey wrote in a different language: “we know this hidden way/as one knows the ghost of a dead friend.”

The Death of Guillaume Apollinaire for National Poetry Month

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

World War I entered the worlds of both of our last two poems, and that war’s poetry was one theme we visited over the early years of this Project that coincided with the centennial of that conflict. The interaction between that war and the arts was complex, but here’s a simple question: did WWI cause Modernism?

My best short answer: not exactly. The Modernist experiments were already underway before the war broke out. What the deadly and at times absurd war did for Modernism in the arts was twofold: it validated its breaks from past tactics and traditions, and it toughened it up and gave it more existential stakes. Hear, for example, of how quickly Imagist poetry could be turned from short poems about red-faced farmers to the harrowing urban bombing account of F. S. Flint’s “Zeppelins.”

One Modernist source-point that did owe something directly to the war was Dada, which emerged in neutral Switzerland among Europeans who had fled the conflict. Dada was all about experiment and tweaking tradition, and if I audaciously suggested that one can get something from the later High Modernism of Eliot’s “The Waste Land”  by reading it as if it were Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,”  Dada was clearly willing to use outright random non-sense in service of breaking down old patterns.

One of Dada’s originators was a pan-European man Tristan Tzara. And if the young Tzara and European Modernism had an overall figurehead in the years before the end of WWI, it was another pan-European man Guillaume Apollinaire. Americans (who had an outsized influence on English-language poetic Modernism) may not fully credit how invaluable Apollinaire was in this era. He coined the terms “cubism” and “surrealism,” he wrote poetry in a freer and more freely-associative way,* and he began to lay his words out on the page to typographically break up the phrases, predating and serving as a model for E. E. Cummings.

Apollinaire’s war-time fate was to bookend Rupert Brooke’s. Still convalescing from a head-wound suffered in military service, Apollinaire became another victim of the great flu epidemic that swirled around the end-game and aftermath of the war.

And that story brings us to today’s National Poetry Month poetry prompt for those looking to do more than simply add to the solitary outcroppings on the mountain of poetry, another way to mesh and meld with our poetic ancestors. Why not translate a poem?

What, you don’t know a foreign language? Well, you know something about poetry (or wish to) if you write it. Poetry itself is a second language you either already speak or wish to speak fluently. Translation is the way to work hand in hand, eyeball to eyeball, with another poet, and I maintain that any poet can benefit from it, even monolinguals. The Internet offers increasingly adequate automatic translators and online dictionaries for some languages.**  Mixing the two, some research, and your own knowledge of the dialect and tactics of poetry can produce worthwhile translations that can be shared — but here’s the main creative benefit: you’ll learn, intimately, the way a poem can be constructed under the skin. The exercise of trying to find the right sounding, feeling, and meaning English word for another poet’s vision is powerful.   If I could make one request, one rule, for creative writing programs everywhere, it would be to make translation part of the curriculum.***

In was in that spirit that I chose to translate Tzara’s poem “The Death of Guillaume Apollinaire.”   What would Dada’s young provocateur say about this death of this influence? I was surprised at the emotional depth of the piece — it’s an eulogy as a love poem — with opposites-imagery mirroring the opposites of the living considering the dead. I’m not sure how much better a translation of it I could do today, and I’m particularly proud of my rendering of the concluding two lines, a striking gothic image.

With Tzara’s “opposites-imagery” in his poem I couldn’t help but think of M. C. Escher’s later art used in this video.

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You can hear my performance of my translation of Tzara’s “The Death of Guillaume Apollinaire”  from the French “La mort de Guillaume Apollinaire”  three ways. There’s a graphical player below for some, this highlighted link for others, and if you’d like to see the words and well as hear them performed, this brand-new lyric video.

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*For an example, consider Apollinaire’s own poetic witness to the outbreak of WWI, “The Little Car,”  which I translated and presented here.

**You shouldn’t use those automatic translations as anything more than guide and gloss. Your appropriate aim is to produce a poem in English rather than the literality of one-to-one words, to bring the images and the way they are arrayed over to our language. Dictionaries, particularly ones that provide examples of the word used in context, are important adjuncts to the online AI translations.

***Another benefit: this kind of crowd-sourcing of translation can increase the number of translated poems available, increasing the diversity of our culture. And then, like Wallace Stevens 13 lookings at blackbirds, having a spread of translations of the same poem may be a truer representation of the poem’s essence and spreading possibilities than any single one. Cubism activism!

The Orphans’ New Year’s Gifts

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Last time I said I looked through Arthur Rimbaud’s collected works in the middle of the nighttime looking for something to translate, combine with music, and perform. I guess I could have saved myself some time, because I eventually chose the first poem in the collection, The Orphans’ New Years’ Gifts,  placed first because it was the first poem he ever published. When it appeared in print on January 2nd, 1870 Rimbaud was all of 15 years old.

On first reading, it’s not representative of the poems Rimbaud would be writing in little more than a year or so. While the entire poem is a gothic story, it’s also quite sentimental and largely conventional. For reasons of time and preferring shorter works, I decided to only perform the first part, but spoiler alert: it’s soon revealed that the children are recently orphaned and they are dreaming of their family still being intact and how they will give their now dead mother they expect to find in their dreams a pair of “for mother” plaques from each of them as a New Year’s gift.

But for us, the performer and listeners today of this first section only, this is no matter, because it’s the last day of 2021 and tomorrow is a new year. We know nothing of 2022 save for dreams pleasant or frightening. The coming year is a more mysterious ghost to us than our past years.

It might seem odd to say, but I’m an orphan — that’s not unusual, at my age most everyone is. It’s a different matter to write this as a 15-year-old, as an adolescent, as Rimbaud was. Those are the years that children learn how to gradually break away from their parents in whatever manner they fall into. Rimbaud instead would do this early and abruptly, leaving his mother — and for Paris, and unrest, and rebellion of all sorts  in that “about a year” timeframe. Poetically and emotionally, this poem hardly seems to be a rehearsal for the Rimbaud of 1871 and after.

As I worked on translating this poem, I saw a little window into that other Rimbaud in this short first section. Those intimations were unlikely put there by conscious choice. Maybe they were slipped in by Rimbaud’s future ghost?

A few notes on how I translate. I generally don’t try to bring over the word-music (too tough, too damaging to other elements of the translated poem). I start attempting to be as faithful as I can, but then while in process I am often tempted to sharpen or expand on the images I’m trying to bring forward into contemporary English; because those images expand in my mind as I consider them, and because I want them to remain vivid. I’m of two minds about doing that, and I try to make clear here when I’ve really inserted something altogether invented. If you’d like to read the whole poem in it’s original French, here’s a link.

The Orphans New Years Gifts

My local forecast says –11 F (-24 C) for New Year’s dawn. I think of a blues song Leo Kottke used to sing with the line “So cold in China, the birds don’t even sing.” Maybe that’s why I choose the guzheng today?

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Here are a few examples in this one, in ascending order of significance. I suspect the curtain Rimbaud has blowing in the winter drafts is a bed canopy, a largely unfamiliar antique item, and instead I’m leading you to see a window curtain. Leading you to the window lets me transition to an image I sharpened. Rimbaud doesn’t explicitly say the cold winter birds are walking, but I think he did intend to tell us they aren’t able to fly in this moment, and I thought I’d underline that. And the final image, the one of New Year arriving as a woman in a dress of snow, I wanted us to see a tipsy celebrant whose party gown is no longer arranged neatly. Did the 15-year-old Rimbaud intend that image? I don’t know, but his future ghost might well have chosen it!

Yesterday I revealed that I wanted to do this piece to honor ardent Rimbaud admirer Patti Smith. Obligation completed, though you may notice this is nothing like how Patti Smith or her band would characteristically perform this. The first instrument you hear is a Chinese guzheng,* a sophisticated zither family instrument, then eventually a variety of drums and percussive sounds arrive along with electric bass, and finally a low synth moan. But did I make clear in talking about Smith yesterday: one of the things she demonstrated was that untapped possibilities of presentation styles are the point, not just duplication of one’s heroes.

The player gadget to hear my new translation of Rimbaud’s New Year’s Day poem is below for some of you. Don’t see it? This highlighted hyperlink is an alternative way to hear it.

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*With expensive and exotic instruments like this I usually use what are called “virtual instruments” that sample the notes and sounds of the entire range of the instrument; and as in today’s piece allow you to articulate some of the instrument’s particular attacks and variations, like the guzheng’s vibrato. I select and play the notes with a little plastic keyboard or my guitar with a MIDI interface.