Poets Translate Poets: A Hudson Review Anthology (44 page)

cofounded the review
Szép Szó
.

Erich Kästner
. A German satirist, poet, and novelist, his 1931 novel
Fabian
, about Germany’s lost generation, chronicled the last year of the Weimar

Republic. Following military service in World War I, he became a pacifi st and an opponent of totalitarian systems. He was arrested twice by the Gestapo in

the 1930s for crossing the border to see his Swiss publisher. In 1957 he was

awarded the Büchner Prize for literature.

Jean de La Fontaine
. As a poet, he wrote fables considered masterpieces of French literature. From 1652 to 1671, he served as an inspector of forests and waterways, and, among other socially prestigious positions, he became a

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protégé of Nicolas Fouquet, the wealthy superintendent of fi nance. Whereas

his fables—the fi rst six of twelve books were published in 1668—hued closely

to the Aesopic tradition, he also drew on tales from East Asia.

Valery Larbaud
. A major fi gure of twentieth-century French literature, he was a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. With regard to the latter, he

worked with James Joyce on the French version of
Ulysses
.
Sous l’invocation
de Saint Jerôme
, his collected writings on translation, was published in 1944.

Th

e poem included here is the last piece, and only poem, in his collection of

essays
Jaune, bleu, blanc
(1927).

Leconte de Lisle
. A French poet born on Réunion Island off East Africa, he was a prominent member of the Parnassian movement, a group of nineteenth-century French poets who favored restraint and objectivity in lieu of

the excesses of romanticism.

Lope de Vega
. An outstanding dramatist of the Spanish golden age, he was known as el Fénix de España (the Phoenix of Spain). Of his estimated 1,800

plays, only 431 are extant, and only 50 shorter dramatic pieces survive of the several hundred he wrote. He was born and died in Madrid.

Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus)
. He was a Roman poet and philosopher of the tumultuous fi rst century b.c., who had a major infl uence on subsequent

poets, particularly Virgil. Little is known of his life; his dates are based primarily on a brief notice in a chronicle compiled by Saint Jerome in the fourth century a.d. His
De Rerum Natura
, a didactic epic in six books, is the only surviving full-length exposition of Epicurean philosophy.

Antonio Machado
. He was the leading poet of Spain’s renowned Generation of 1898, young writers who declared Spain’s moral and cultural rebirth following its defeat in the Spanish-American War (1898). His poetry was infused with the austere and dramatic landscape of Castile, where he lived. Exiled for supporting the loyalists during the Spanish Civil War, he crossed the Pyrenees by foot only to die a month later in France. His
Poesías completas
appeared in 1936.

Stéphane Mallarmé
. A leader of the French symbolist movement, he pub-

lished
L’après-midi d’un faun
(1876) and
Les poésies de S. Mallarmé
(1899), a
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slim volume containing his oeuvre of fi ft y poems. Writers and artists attending his Tuesday-evening salons, a center of Parisian intellectual life, were

known as
les Mardistes
, aft er the French for “Tuesday.”

Osip Mandelstam
. Born in Warsaw, Poland, he emerged as a major Russian

poet and member of the acmeist school that rejected the mysticism of sym-

bolism in favor of concreteness of imagery and expression. He was arrested in

1934 and sent into exile for reading an epigram denouncing Stalin; later, aft er a second arrest, he died in a transit camp. His works include
Tristia
(1922) and
Stikhotvoreniya, 1921–1925
(Poems, 1921–1925) (1928).

Juan Matos
. A Dominican Republic poet now living in Worcester, Massa-

chusetts, he teaches English as a second language at the Goddard School of

Science and Technology. He is a cofounder of Palabra, Expresion Cultural,

in New York City and of Tertulia Pedro Mir, a poetry-reading series in Law-

rence, Massachusetts. His latest book is
Del milagro de la espera
(Th

e miracle

of waiting) (2005).

Pero Meogo
. He was a Galician poet active in the thirteenth century. All nine of his
cantigas d’amigo
feature a mountain stag, which has been interpreted as a symbol of male sexuality.

Gabriela Mistral (Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga)
. A Chilean poet and educator, she became the fi rst Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature

(1945). She taught Spanish literature in the United States at Columbia Univer-

sity, among other institutions. Her
Poesías completas
was published in 1958.

Christian Morgenstern
. A German poet-philosopher, he was a humorist

with a whimsical imagination who manipulated word meanings and context

in dislocated sentence structures to create clever satirical poetry. His two volumes in this genre are
Galgenlieder
(1905) and
Palmström
(1910). An interest in mysticism led him to the theosophical teachings of Rudolf Steiner.

Pablo Neruda (Neft alí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto)
. A Chilean poet, he served in his country’s consular service in the Far East, Latin America, and Spain

(1927–35). Both the Spanish Civil War and the murder of Garcia Lorca, whom

he knew, resulted in his joining the Republican movement. In 1945, as an

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extreme left ist in politics, he was elected a senator in Chile. A surrealist, he revived common speech and bold metaphors in free verse. In 1971 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Th

e Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

was published in a bilingual edition in 2004.

Nguyen Binh Khiem (Trang Trinh, Hanh Phu, Bach Van cu si [White Cloud

Hermit])
. A Vietnamese poet, scholar, and prophet, he served the emperor, but, protesting corruption, he retired to his village and taught, among others, his half-brother Phùng Khac Khoan (see below). His poems treated the simple life marked by a sense of fortitude. His long poem
S?m Tr?ng Trình
(
Th
e

Prophecies of Tr?ng Trình
) has been compared to Nostradamus’s
Centuries
for the truth of its prophecies. It includes the line “
Vi?t Nam kh?i t? xây n?n
”

(“Vietnam is being created”), an early use of the word “Vietnam.”

Kostis Palamas
. He was the fi rst modern Greek man of letters, and his name gave the term “Palamic” to poetry of that period. He was central to the demotic movement to use vernacular language and founded the “new school of Athens,” favoring restraint over romantic exuberance. He wrote thirty volumes,

including epics, lyrics, and plays, and composed the words for the “Olympic

Hymn,” performed at the fi rst modern Games in 1896. His funeral during

the German occupation became a major symbolic event for Greek resistance.

Jean Passerat
. A professor of Latin at the Collège de France, he wrote scholarly Latin works and commentaries on Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius.

He was one of the contributors to the “Satire Ménippée,” the manifesto of the

moderate Royalist party in support of Henry of Navarre’s claim to the throne.

Among the poems for which he is known are “Ode du premier jour de mai”

(Ode on the First Day of May) and the villanelle “J’ai perdu ma tourterelle” (I Have Lost My Turtle Dove).

Octavio Paz
. A Mexican diplomat, poet, and writer, in 1937 he attended the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers in Valencia, Spain.

He was appointed ambassador to India but resigned diplomatic service in

1968 to protest the government’s suppression of student demonstrators at

the Olympic Games in Mexico. As a founder of two magazines devoted to

the arts and politics,
Plural
and
Vuelta
, he continued his work as an editor
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and publisher. He received the Cervantes Award (1981) and the Nobel Prize

in Literature (1990).

Peire Vidal
. Among the most celebrated of Provençal troubadours, he was a favorite performer at the courts of France, Spain, Italy, Malta, and Pales-tine during the late twelft h and early thirteenth centuries. He combined rich and elaborate metrical forms with simplicity of expression, and his witty and

humorous love songs and satires provide a fascinating insight into the courtly society of his times.

Phùng Khac Khoan (Trang Bung)
. In addition to being a prolifi c poet with Taoist leanings, he was Vietnam’s ambassador to China in 1597 during the

Ming dynasty. He was profi cient in Confucian studies and fortune-telling sci-

ences, like his half-brother Nguyen Binh Khiem (see above).

Lucio Piccolo
. A Sicilian poet, Piccolo was also a brilliant pianist and an interpreter of Wagner. He had a close friendship with William Butler Yeats,

and his style of poetry incorporates both the Sicilian baroque tradition and

the themes and techniques of Yeats’s symbolist poetry. In 1956 he published

Canti barocchi e altre liriche
(Baroque songs and other lyrics).

Dimitri V. Psurtsev
. He is a professor of translation at Moscow State Linguistics University and lives in a dacha outside the capital. He has translated modern British and American prose and poetry from Steinbeck to Dylan Th

omas

and A. S. Byatt. In 2001 he published two volumes of poetry,
Ex Roma tertia
and
Tengiz Notebook
.

Raimbaut de Vaqueiras
. Among the foremost Provençal troubadours, he

was well traveled and conversant in several languages and dialects. He was

knighted for bravery in battle by Boniface I, the Marquess of Montferrat, whom he served in the Piedmont region of northern Italy. Only seven of his

thirty-fi ve poems survive with music, including one for Boniface’s daughter

Beatrice, adapted from a dance melody played by a jongleur.

Richard I (Richard the Lionheart)
. King of England and a member of the

Plantagenet family, he was the third son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquita-

ine. He joined the Th

ird Crusade in 1190 to recapture Jerusalem from Saladin.

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He was captured and imprisoned during his return by Leopold II of Austria

and released aft er payment of a ransom. Fond of poetry and music, he was

nurtured in the troubadour culture of his mother’s southern homeland. He

became a lyric poet of considerable reputation among troubadours.

Yannis Ritsos
. One of Greece’s most prolifi c poets, he published 117 books of poetry in addition to several verse dramas and a book of essays. His poetry has been translated into forty-four languages. Owing to his left ist activities, he spent many years of his life interned in prison camps or in exile on Greek islands. He won the 1975–76 Lenin Peace Prize and other literary awards in Eastern Europe.

Francisco de Sá de Miranda
. He was a Portuguese poet and dramatist who

introduced Renaissance poetic forms to Portugal. Th

e son of a canon of

Coimbra, he grew up in the royal court at Lisbon and received a doctorate

in law. His play
Os estrangeiros
(Th

e Foreigners), ca. 1527, was the fi rst Portu-

guese prose comedy in the classical manner, and his
Cleopatra
(ca. 1550) was probably the fi rst Portuguese classical tragedy.

Sappho
. Born on the island of Lesbos at a time of cultural fl owering, she was a leader of the Aeolian school of lyric poetry. She contributed to the literary genre not only through her theme of love, but also with her emphasis on emotion, on subjective experience, and on the individual, marking her work in

contrast to the epic, liturgical, or dramatic poetry of the period. Plato hailed her as “the tenth Muse,” and she was honored on coins and with civic statuary.

Olga Sedakova
. One of the most respected poets in modern Russia, she is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, essays, translations, and literary criticism. She is also a philologist and ethnographer. As a teacher in the Department of Philosophy at Moscow State University, she is infl uential as

a thinker and essayist. She has been awarded the European Prize in Poetry

(1995) and the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Prize (2003). She continues the distin-

guished line of philosophical poets.

Motomaro Senge
. He was one of the better-known poets of pre–World War

II Japan. His poetry is characterized by a simple, matter-of-fact style that

refl ects his fascination with nature and the commonplaces of everyday life.

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