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.

POETS AND TRANSLATIONS

One of the perks I enjoy from my association with Gary Entsminger, editor and publisher at Pinyon Publishing in Colorado, and from reviewing many of the books of poetry published by this  independent press is my introduction to and communication with fellow poets.  The latest poet with whom I've been in contact is Stuart Friebert, a generous-spirited man who recently sent me a copy of his newest publication, which is a translation of Puppets in the Wind (Bitter Oleander Press) written by the German poet, Karl Krolow.

Although the poetry translated in this volume quickly resonated with me, I was equally fascinated with Friebert's introduction to Puppets in the Wind. He describes Krolow as "pursuing translation with as much vigor and dedication as he gave his own work, believing poets could not develop a 'third eye' without devoting considerable attention to the art of translation..." Krolow's concept inspired Friebert to require students at Oberlin College (where he established an outstanding writing program in 1976) to schedule translation workshops. He explains that the students objected to the workshops at first, complaining: "But I came to do my own writing, not someone else's," but they later admitted that translating poets who wrote in other languages enhanced their own work. "One likened it to learning to play the works of masters before composing on one's own," Friebert writes.

Friebert taught German language and literature many years at Mt. Holyoke, Harvard, and Oberlin and claims that nothing was more satisfying to him than teaching beginning translators and slipping in German poems that he loved...and, of course, Krolow was among the poets he introduced to his students. 

After reading Puppets in the Wind, I agree with Friebert that the poems are dark by nature, but they contain just that bit of wryness and irony I appreciate in poets like Charles Simic and Billy Collins (both Pulitzer Prize winners).  Friebert writes that Krolow didn't just call on the Muse to please readers, he also wrote for "so-called dead objects, landscapes, cities, gardens, streetcorners, animals...for stones and their pores, for sadness and bodily pain."    

One of the poems in Puppets in the Wind that illustrates the irony in Krolow's work  and also the wry twist that characterizes many of the endings to his poems is entitled "History:"

"Men carried a flag across the square/At which centaurs broke from the underwood/And crushed their cloth underfoot/And history could begin./Melancholy nations/Fell apart on street corners./Orators kept themselves/At the ready with mastiffs,/And the younger women/Painted their faces for the stronger./Without end voices quarreled/In the air, although/The mythological creatures/Had long since withdrawn./Eventually what's left is the hand/That goes around a throat." This is a succinct commentary on the long history of man's inhumanity to man, and readers are jolted into an awareness of the gravity of the human thrust for power and the subsequent bloodshed that afflicts "melancholy nations." that "fell apart on street corners." The image or metaphor that lingers is, of course, "...the hand/That goes around the throat." The poem could be an offspring of Krolow's observations of the destructive Nazi years in Germany.

In "True Fall," Krolow alludes to artistic colors in his native Germany, a poem that, again, ends in a surprise wry note: "A forest of copper beeches/burns away Lake Constance/in the usual colors./You have to look quickly,/before the history of Impressionism/fades away." This poem is another example of Krolow's adroitness in creating wry imagery to end a poem with memorable phrasing.

These two excerpts from Puppets in the Wind are just the tip of the iceberg, but they should titillate poets to appreciate the process of translation that Friebert admires and exhorts all poets and students of poetry to practice. In fact, he chided me for not learning another language and taking up the art of translation so that I could develop a "third eye."

Puppets in the Wind is the third volume of Friebert's translations of Krolow collections and is a notable contribution to Ars Poetica. Copies are available on amazon.com.