A SALUTE TO STUART FRIEBERT AND LISTENING ALL NIGHT TO THE RAIN

Although my blogging has suffered a gradual demise, when notable books and events cause a stir in this isolated household, I feel an old impulse to write a few lines as I am doing this morning after receiving Pinyon Publishing’s latest book of poetry, Listening All Night to the Rain by Su Dongpo (Su Shi) and translated by Jiann I. Li and David Young.  This collection of poems arrived the same day as I received notice that a friend and “comrade in words” (as Stuart Friebert inscribed one of his books to me) had died. The Pinyon publication, Listening All Night to the Rain is a translated book of poetry from one of Friebert’s colleagues at Oberlin College where Friebert formed the Oberlin Creative Writing program and co-founded Oberlin College Press.

Friebert was a poetry pen pal of mine who endorsed several of my books and who was a master of poetic translations. He not only inspired poets and translators, he wrote precise and extraordinary poetry and prose and received The Ohioana Book Award for his book of poetry, Floating Heart published by Pinyon in 2014. In that collection of poems, he wrote about his own “Eve of the End:” “No one told us anything about/ this before we started out. When we’re out/of sight, you may go back to your reading,/but expect a bright light,/your eyes to blink.” I think he wrote his own wry epitaph. A man who loved word play, Friebert often sent e-mails to me that showed his playful and endearing personality. I valued his insights about writing poetry (“learn to be lightning”) and his willingness to be audacious about whatever vocation a person pursues in life. 

Jiann I. Lin and David Young, who translated Listening All Night to the Rain, must have pleased Friebert with their choice of poems from Su Dongpo that “combine simplicity with universality” David Young writes in the Introduction to this volume. According to Young, Taoism and Zen Buddhism helped show the 11th-century poet Su Dongpo the way to wonder and delight and reinforced his poetic sensibilities. Readers can visualize him wandering through remote Chinese provinces, living through exiles because of his political affiliations and writing quatrains about his excursions, sometimes involving heavy drinking during his explorations.

Su Dongpo’s brother, Su Zhe, was also a poet, and Su Dongpo exchanged poems, as well as gossip, with him in deeply emotional poems using brief and beautiful imagery that characterizes Chinese poetry: “The lamp drops cinders/the darkening candle wick/hangs down/I poke the ashes in the stove/over and over/sniffing the last fragrance…across the sea between us/the moon shies clear as crystal/I share it with him now.”

I enjoyed many of the temple poems; e.g., “At a temple, asked to help name a pavilion:” “Glory will flourish and decay/as transitory/as any wind or thunder./What lasts can be/as simple as/red blooming flowers./The master priest sits quietly/watching an empty shelf/thinking about a name,/observing the concept of ‘real’/and also the concept of ‘nothingness’/because they’re both the same.” Like most of the lyrics in this collection, this collection reflects the economy of Oriental poetry; but the compression still conveys time and place without exaggerated documentation.

The wandering and exposure to rain, snow, and seasonal changes sometimes troubles this vagabond poet, and he often expresses a weariness with which aging readers can identify: From “A Weary night”: “In this lonely village/one dog barks all night/the moon wanes/few people on the road/my thinning hair /has turned bright white/my years of travel have taught me/how to be homesick/out in the empty fields/spinster cicadas are buzzing/nothing to show for their labor/nothing accomplished.” 

For readers who’re drawn to Oriental poetry, Su Dongpo offers eloquent and peaceful reading during this time of stress and isolation due to disease and political upheaval in our country. The book is one that expresses the poet’s enduring spirit through adversities where he endures punishments for his political associations. In “At Spirit Mountain, touring with friends in rain,” he thumbs his nose at bureaucrats “off duty,” “…I’ve spent the day/ strolling around/with my two friends/here in the rain and mist/big magpies soar/rising up and diving down/while travelers cross/appearing and disappearing/among the groves of trees.”

Listening All Night to the Rain contains the Chinese version of all poems on opposite pages from the English version pages, and a look at the enchanting symbols made me wish that I’d learned another language to translate as Stuart Friebert once urged me to do.

The book could be viewed as another tribute to the master translator, Friebert. It’s a wonderful collection by Jiann I. Lin and David Young and emerges as another of Pinyon Publishing’s remarkable publications. Kudos to Susan Entsminger, who continues to carry the tradition of excellent literature established by her and her deceased husband, Gary Entsminger.

Copies available at Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403

THE OLD COASTLINE

Nobel prize winner, Shirin Ebadi of Iran, has said that in order to have understanding of and peace in the world, we must read each other’s literature. I’d add that the emissaries of that mission are translators: think of Coleman Barks translating the Persian poet Mowlavi (Rumi); Jane Kenyon translating the work of the Russian poet, Akhmatova, Stuart Friebert translating the German poet, Karl Krolow…Think also of the independent press, Pinyon Publishing in Colorado, which often publishes international poetry translations, such as its recent release: a volume of selected poetry by M. Vasalis (1909-1998), a Dutch psychiatrist who specialized in treating children and whose work has been translated by Fred Lessing and David Young.

In the introduction to this volume, translators Lessing and Young emphasize that the poet Vasalis had little interest in promoting her work but that her poems “come out of her life, her experience of the natural world, her professional practice, and her family relations, arising from the press of occasion and necessity rather than from an ambition to originality or greatness…” That description alone impressed me because I admire the qualities of humility and modesty that inhere in a writer’s life mission.

Vasalis’s immediacy and simplicity in “Spring,” a poem describing the spring season readers in the northern hemisphere are presently experiencing, resonated with me early in the volume and is perhaps the most whimsical one in The Old Coastline: “The light gusts across the land in spurts,/waking the hard, brief glitter/of the blue, wind-ruffled ditches and canals;/the grass lights up, dims down, goes dark./Two newborn lambs next to a grizzled sheep/stand white, printing youth’s picture against grass./I had forgotten how this was, and that/the spring is not a quiet blossoming,/dreaming softly but a violent growing,/a pure and passionate beginning,/jumping up out of a deep sleep,/and dancing away without a thought.” Although Vasalis has been likened to the American poet, Elizabeth Bishop, I hear the voice of Emily Dickinson in this selection the translators included from her first book, Parks and Deserts (1940). 

A reading of selections from her third book, Vistas and Visages, published posthumously in 1954, reveals more serious poetic treatments as Vasalis probes the deeper subjects of suffering and loss arising from Vasalis’s own tragic loss of a child who lived only a year and a half. The imagery in “Star” carries this message of loss in a departure from any formalism and pivots on the figure of her lost child, then concludes in a pastoral scene featuring a cow, a powerful entry into the natural world. “Tonight I saw a star for the first time./He stood alone, he did not quiver./Instantly, he pierced me through./I saw a star, he stood alone, belief/made out of light: so young and from a time/before there was such a thing as grief./The meadows lie unspoken in the light./The cows, so often painted,/restrain, with a young wet eye,/any account of their warm mystery.” That one verse , so much akin to Japanese haiku, underlines the beautiful simplicity of Vasalis’s oeuvre.

In the same volume, Vistas and Visages, Vasalis reveals her love and appreciation of children and her journey as a psychiatrist dealing with youth. “Children Coming Home” evokes strong emotions in those of us who parented young offspring and welcomed them as they returned home from an all-day absence. Her description of them as “big flowers” coming out of the gathering dark, “the chilly evening air/that lightly drapes their cheeks and hair/they are so warm!” is neither Elizabeth Bishop nor Emily Dickinson but simply a mother experiencing intimacy with her young in an intense immediacy. Further, she writes: “Clasped/in the strong clamp of their soft arms/I glimpse the love, shadowless and full./ [not yet exposed to Jungian psychology about shadows that will beset them later] that lives at the bottom of their penetrating eyes,/It is not mixed with pity, which comes later,/and has its reasons — and its boundaries.” It is Vasalis who has the penetrating eyes and appears watchful about the boundaries of innocent children.

In The Old Coastline (2002), readers will enjoy some of Vasalis’s poems about older relationships; i.e., a poignant characterization of her grandmother, a cherished member of the poet’s family constellation in “Old Age”: “Grandmother/snow-white-lace on/her calm sweet, white-satin head/carried when she was in Holland, at home,/the smallest muff in the whole world:/inside a tiny bottle, no bigger/than an ampule./ There was just room/for her hands. Plus one child's hand,/oh, what a delicious nest of fur and/the very softest satin lining/…Her eyes were a constantly changing blue;/you could look into them as long as you liked:/as if you were seeing, through two small openings,/the calm sea on a summer day.” That intimate tribute is both exacting and graceful, two recurring components of the selections chosen by Vasalis’s translators.

Vasalis also gives readers a glimpse of her own ideas about mortality, one with which most of us in our eighties can identify: “I practice like a young bird on the edge/of the nest I must soon forsake/in little faltering flights/and open my beak.”

This translated work by Vasalis is a powerful addition to the canon of international expression and vision.Translator Fred Lessing, a Holocaust survivor, psychotherapist, and retired professor of philosophy, retained his native Dutch language after moving to America at age 12. His fellow translator, David Young, is a poet (Field of Light and Shadow, 2010) an editor of Field magazine, Oberlin College Press, and a translator who enjoys collaborative work with his long-time friend, Fred Lessing.

Thank you Gary and Susan for contributing to the mission of sharing international literature through expert translations! The Old Coastline is another occasion for celebration. 

Order from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403.

VALUABLE NAIL

Recently, Stuart Friebert, a poet friend who had been introduced to me through Pinyon Publishing, sent me copies of poetry translation collections in the Field Translation Series published by Oberlin College. He thought I might enjoy reading them and would be inspired to learn another language so I could translate the language of poetry from other countries. Of course, I'm too old for the latter adventure, but I enjoy reading some of Friebert's translations of German poets and am often surprised by a package of books published in the Field Translation Series that he sends to me.

The most recent surprise package contained a copy of Valuable Nail, Selected Poems by the German poet, Gunter Eich, translated by Stuart Friebert, David Walker, and David Young. Friebert's interest in Gunter Eich was piqued when he traveled to Europe on an H.H. Powers Grant to meet with a number of West German poets. He became so intrigued by the poet that he made second and third visits to study Eich's ideas about the "minimum," or, as translator David Young writes: "the claim staked to shreds and remnants, to the things we begin to notice and prize when our dignity and comfort are stripped away ...especially in [the] tendency to find mysterious signs and tokens in the natural world..." Thus, the title of the book, Valuable Nail, becomes plausible to readers when it appears as a commonplace object in the poem "Inventory" and denotes the symbol for Eich's life and thought.

In the introduction to Valuable Nail, David Young explains Eich's "glancing technique" where subjects brush past quickly as readers grasp issues that are at the edge of the vision and two or three words make up a small image that accounts for what Young calls "...a great chunk of terrible history..." Readers may dismiss many of the poems as trivial, but the simplicity of the imagery is comparable to the simplicity of more accessible (and not so dense) poets like our Robert Frost or Robert Francis, New Englanders who know how to create arresting visions using lyrical brevity. Readers recognize this simplicity in Eich's poem, "Days with Jays:"  

"The jay does not throw me

its blue feather.

The acorns of his shrieks

grind in the early dawn.

A bitter flour, food

for the whole day.

All day, behind red leaves,

with a hard break

he hacks the night

out of branches, seeds, nuts,

a cloth that he pulls over me.

His flight is like a heartbeat.

But where does he sleep

and what is his sleep like?

The feather lies by my shoe

unseen in the darkness."

Gunter Eich was a soldier and prisoner of war during World War II. Following the war, he found that the German language had been distorted by propaganda and lies, and he felt the need to revive his native tongue through poetry. Images of the war appear in a poem entitled "Too Late For Modesty," in which he achieves the "glancing technique" for which he became famous: 

"We took the house

and covered the windows,

had enough supplies in the cellar,

coal and oil,

hid death in ampules

between the folds in our skin.

Through the crack in the door we see the world:

a rooster with its head cut off,

running through the yard.

It's crushed our hopes.

We hang our bedsheets on the balconies

and surrender."

The poem that resonated the strongest with me was one entitled "Insight," a graceful and simplistic example of Eich's effort to renew the German language. It is also a cogent representation of Eich's interest in Chinese poetry: 

"...As I opened the kitchen cupboard

I found the truth

hidden

in labeled canisters.

The rice grains

are resting up from the centuries.

Beyond the window

the wind continues on its way."  

In such concise lines, we see how small images give the reader a glimpse of this "chunk of history" to which Young alluded in the introduction to Valuable Nail.

Although Stuart Friebert won't succeed in luring me into the world of translating poetry, he has certainly inspired my interest in the genre and the poets featured in the Field Translation Series, and I appreciate the introduction to these translations published by Oberlin College where Friebert taught German for years. He also founded and directed Oberlin's Creative Writing Program and co-founded Field Magazine, the Field Translation Series, and Oberlin College Press. Pinyon Publishing recently published a collection of poems by Friebert entitled Floating Heart.

I might add that Friebert is a faithful correspondent, and I enjoy his humor and audacity. This week, I opened a package from him and found a card imprinted with a bright yellow cactus that his sister had photographed—lovely artistry that tells me Friebert is a member of a gifted family—generous with "glad surprises." *

*a phase attributed to Thomas Aquinas