A DOUBLE LIFE

A Double Life: In Poetry and Translation by Stuart Friebert, one of the last books Gary Entsminger, editor and publisher of Pinyon Publishing, worked on before he died last month, appeared on Pinyon’s publishing list this past week. Susan Entsminger, co-editor and publisher of Pinyon, never missed a beat as she carried on the press’s work, executing Gary’s wish to publish the work of distinguished Stuart Friebert, a poet translator and co-founder of the Field Translation Series, Oberlin College Press, and Field Magazine. Friebert’s credentials are formidable, and this collection of memoirs and “late poetry” give the reader double magic in Friebert’s encounters with famous writers; e.g., Gunter Grass, Maya Angelou, Hilde Domin, Michael Mann, and other literary noteworthies. 

A touch of Friebert’s wry sensibilities introduce this volume as he recounts his experiences in an MI (military intelligence unit) in which he is left standing alone when every man receives a sharpshooter medal except him, and a man in another unit shreds the human hand holding a stick at which the sharpshooters fire when it strays above the sight line. Friebert follows this accessible essay with more solemn interviews about his visits to German poets when he receives a grant to publish poets in a textbook containing the poetry of Gunter Grass, Paul Celan, Karl Krolow, Hilde Domin and other authors who he writes were on their way to illustrious careers. The textbook never materialized, but Friebert’s narration of his encounters with these renowned German writers constitute legendary material.

During Friebert’s interview with Hilde Domin, readers share his enjoyment of her pot of tea and ginger cake before hearing her recite her famous “Only A Rose For Support,” which Friebert describes as a poem without metaphor and written in plainspoken diction. The poem begins with the lines: “I make myself a room in the air/among the acrobats and birds/my bed on the trapeze of feelings/like a nest in the wind/on the outermost tip of the branch…” Domin’s poetry reflects an immediacy indicative of several other poets Friebert has translated during his career as a translator: Karl Krolow and the Romanian poet, Marin Sorescu.

Friebert relates that although he and David Young never got around to publishing the aforementioned textbook on which they had based their grant application, “other fruits were harvested”: many translations the Field Translation Series published and the actual stimuli to publish that was engendered through interviews with imminent German poets.

Friebert’s interview with Gunter Grass in Berlin included Grass’s approval of the poems Friebert and Young had chosen to translate, via a donation of cognac and cigars from the interviewers and Grass making sure they understood his poems, “stopping painfully short of suggesting we were dumbing them down,” Friebert relates. Later, in the 90’s, when Friebert revisits Germany to work with Karl Krolow on translations of his poetry, he reads that Grass is having a noon reading in Reichelsheim and attends the event, after which Friebert joins a line of congratulators and is crushed when Grass doesn’t remember him or the cigars and cognac he and Young had provided the writer. Friebert’s wit forms the tone of this essay, as is manifested in many of his narratives.

The above is only a peek into Friebert’s encounters before he concludes with a “how-to-teach” essay on literary translations, followed by a section of Friebert’s late poetry. As I am reading Michael Cunningham’s The Hours alongside A Double Life, I was drawn to the introductory verses of Friebert’s “Cowbelly”: “Look it up: ‘Patches of superfine silt/in the slowest part of rivers.’ Can’t help/thinking Virginia’s last step might have/sunk pleasurably and brought her to/a stop till the stones pressed against/a hip, jolting her on down to the bed./A life spent looking at things less simply/than the rest of us, once tuned up won’t /stop playing…” For me, this is Friebert at his most reflective best, written with his typical spirit of irony.

Friebert creates humorous visual images in “Universal Rights,” relating his discovery of a live mike in a gazebo on the town square where he warbles “The longer you live, the sooner you’ll bloody well die,” an Irish ballad that draws an audience of an albino squirrel, tourists, and a cop who asks ‘Are you all right buddy? Need me to call your wife to pick you up?’” That’s Friebert — lively, outrageously authentic, magical, and engaging.

Readers can double their reading pleasure with this volume that Gary and Susan Entsminger produced — one of Gary’s many legacies, carried on by Susan, where they “glide on thermals /for hours, nary a flap, mated for life.” (from Friebert’s “For Life” at the conclusion of A Double Life.

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

ALL LOVE,

Border Press Books, Sewanee, TN, announces the publication of All Love, by Diane Marquart Moore, a volume of poems about relatives and relationships, death and dying, illness and recovery, and includes a special section about a three-week sojourn in Mexico. Also featured are prose poems and excerpts from “Everyday Journal IV” about ordinary and extraordinary daily happenings, as well as observations about present-day social issues.

Reviewers celebrate Moore’s new book:

“Mindful of Diane Moore’s ‘other life’ as a Deacon in the Episcopal Church, ‘It is truly right and just’ to celebrate these poems that beat with such a steady pulse our hearts, and by extension, our spirits flourish. Deeply faith-based in her own way but accessible to all of ‘other’ or indeed those of no faiths at all, her words ‘extend to infinity’ (see title poem, which, as all good poems strive to do, means much with fewest means employed), help us negotiate ‘the boundary between twilight and dark,’ and are a sturdy ‘cane’ to rely on as we wend our way through the challenging landscape of this tome.” 

- Stuart Friebert, author of Decanting: Selected and New Poems, founder and director of the Oberlin Creative Writing Program and co-founder of Field Magazine, the Field Translation Series, and the Oberlin College Press.-

“In the epigraph for her poem ‘Music,’ modern mystic Diane Moore cites a line from Rumi. ‘Music’ is a lyric poem celebrating love in the sound of a wren’s singing, the sun’s laughter, and a loved one’s voice. Narrative poems convey Moore’s gift for agape: an Amish woman selling corn and flowers recognizes the poet as ‘a good little lady,’ a child necklace dealer in Mexico, ‘Christ’s vendor,’ displays ‘Jesus on a black string’ with a peephole revealing Christo Rey 'who takes away…all the sins in the world,’ as well as ‘my pesos at the rate of 20 a day’… In ‘A field of Battered Weed,’ Moore reveals the reality of long-lasting love through a thistle, ‘an ancient symbol of both pain and pleasure.’ 

-Kathleen Hamman, editor, Plateau Books, Sewanee, Tennessee.-

Diane Marquart Moore is a retired archdeacon of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Louisiana, poet, writer, and journalist who lives part of the year in New Iberia, Louisiana, and part of the year in Sewanee, Tennessee. She publishes “A Words Worth” blog at revmoore.blogspot monthly.

The beautiful cover photograph is Karen Bourque’s glass adaptation of a lotus appearing in Why Water Plants Don’t Drown as illustrated by Susan Entsminger and authored by Victoria I. Sullivan. Cover design of All Love, by Martin Romero.

All Love, as well as 49 other titles by Moore, are available through Border Press Books, P.O. Box 3124, Sewanee, TN and amazon.com.

FIRST AND LAST STORIES

A few years ago, I reviewed a book of poetry entitled Floating Heart by Stuart Friebert, a writer whose work has been published in numerous literary journals, including Pinyon Review, an independent press in Montrose, Colorado. Friebert responded to the review by sending me copies of several books featuring his translations of books by the German poet Karl Krolow, and we corresponded sporadically about the books that are included in a series entitled the Field Translation Series, founded by Friebert at Oberlin College in Ohio. This week, Friebert made another appearance on the publisher's list of Pinyon Review with First and Last Words: Memoir and Stories, a stellar collection of literature about German-Jewish characters and Friebert's sojourn in Germany as one of the first exchange students following WWII, as well as memorable short stories from Friebert's wry pen.

In the Prologue to this volume, Friebert at once captures the reader's interest with a commentary about how Nazi-German infected German classical language, citing Victor Klemperer's Language of the Third Reich, in which Klemperer notes the word "Umbruch," a beautiful poetic word before the Nazis perverted it, which had to do with "turning the earth over to plant anew but was diabolically redeployed to mean a glorification of being rooted in the soil of the Fatherland..." Although Friebert claims he never became a linguist, he fell under the spell of German poets, particularly Rilke, and was inspired to study German abroad by Professor Doberheim who was a refugee from Darmstadt where Friebert was sent as an exchange student. Friebert later studied with Martin Joos who advised him that the only salvation for Germany was if Jews returned (Friebert's heritage) ... "to the language, the literature, to the land as well. That in and of itself would be a miracle...whatever you do, read German, teach it if you can, and above all live it."

When Friebert crosses the ocean on the Queen Mary, he experiences a "rogue wave" that injures a priest who has become a companion to him and Ellie Klarner, a fellow student in the exchange program. The ship lands in Rotterdam to seek medical help, a place described by bitter crew members as a city where citizens had been shown no mercy by invading Germans. Friebert becomes more aware of Third Reich corruptions after he meets victims of WWII when he reaches his destination at the Technische Hochschule or the "TH" where he has been sent to study. After leaving Germany, he faces a career decision, pondering whether to help ferret out former Nazis, or to stabilize the new democratic Germany, or to apply for a Foreign Service job. Instead, he returns to his studies, completes his B.A. at Wisconsin State University, takes an M.A. and a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in German Language and Literature, and later teaches at Mt. Holyoke College and Harvard, settling at Oberlin College where he taught German, founded and directed Oberlin's Creative Writing Program, The Field Translation Series and Oberlin College Press — all unfolding as a unified career path, which he had pondered following his year abroad.

When Friebert sent me volumes of Karl Krolow's poetry, he offered his opinion about writing the kind of poetry that impassions readers — the notion that learning another language and translating the poetry of that language results in successful poetry in a writer's native language and voice. His fifteen volumes of poems and thirteen volumes of translations bear out this advice. First and Last Words is a living legacy that recounts the past without surrendering to an easy sentimentality, and is one of those timeless volumes that showcases a master of language and lends credence to an international audience.

Readers will enjoy three fulsome sections, including miscellaneous short stories and memoir stories, my favorites being a fish tale entitled "Some Lunkers," and "July 14-15/1998," a story about Friebert's father's death following rehab from a broken hip. In the story, Friebert discovers that his father had scrawled poems written by the poet Miroslav Holub in a prescription notebook. Friebert had sent his father translations of Miroslav's poems, and the poem that moved his father the most was "Autumn," regarding the end of life. "But next year/The larches will try/to make the land full of larches again/and larches will try/to make the land full of larks/And thrushes will try/to make all the trees sing,/and goldfinches will try/to make all grass golden/and burying beetles/with their creaky love will try/to make all the corpses/rise from the dead."

Friebert has created a tour de force volume, writing from a well of memories and nostalgic thought that will perturb some and delight others in a range of subjects and characters with sharp bits of philosophy couched between the lines: "The best science is often the simplest way through the maze of possibilities. The key, of course, as it often is in most of life's exigencies, is being able to formulate the decisive question at the outset of your investigations..."

Order from Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, CO 81403. Also on amazon.com.

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