20 Canadian Poets Take on the World
edited by Priscila Uppal
Toronto: Exile Editions, 2009, ISBN 978-1-55096-122-5, 298 pp., $24 paper.

Editor Priscila Uppal prefaces this anthology of poems translated by Canadians by explaining her rationale for having such an anthology published: most contemporary poetry anthologies in translation have been undertaken by major American and UK poets and, since Canada prides itself on being a bilingual country, such an anthology is long overdue. The anthology is eclectic, ranging from translations of European, South American and (one) Asian poets, but does not set out to be comprehensive. Not only are there necessarily omissions of noteworthy foreign poets but also of whole continental regions. While Pablo Neruda, Arthur Rimbaud and Rainer Maria Rilke, for instance, are included, Federico García Lorca, Derek Walcott and Czeslaw Milosz are not. While Spain, France and Korea are included, China, Japan and the whole of Oceania including Australia and New Zealand are excluded. In fact, the selection of poets to be translated and their country of origin seems to have been determined by the Canadian poets invited to participate in the project.

The decision to allow individual translators--all of them poets themselves--to choose which foreign poet and poems to translate may be an inspired one. After all, poetry as a literary form that is shaped by the language in which it has been conceived and crafted requires a reader and translator sensitive to language, as a poet must be. Yet translating poems remains a tricky business since, as Steven Heighton quotes Robert Kroetsch, every poem is to start with "bad translation" (130) so that another "translation" beyond the original poet's transcription of experience represents a further distancing. Interestingly, many of the Canadian poets who undertake the translations, including the editor herself, may not even be familiar with the language in which the poems were written but had a third party roughly translate them before they undertaking their metamorphosis into successful English poems.

In the preface, Uppal quotes Derrida on the special challenges faced by the poet translator in this "most intimate act of reading" involved in the translation (xv). Poetry may be considered a leap in the dark to reach intuited meaning, and poetry-in-translation therefore adds a foreign dynamic to that original bridging of chaos.

As a first consideration, the poet-translator must seek to preserve the spirit of the original poem over more superficial matters of form and content. Since poems, however, are brought alive by both the physicality and associative resonance of their images, the presence or absence of rhyme and the particular emotive influences of rhythm, new images and further adaptations in the language and form may have to be introduced to convey the spirit and to elicit the meaning of the original conception.

I was struck by Steven Heighton's variant approaches to translating Horace's Latin poems. While in the renamed "Pyrrha," Heighton retains much of the original imagery and meaning in "Ode I, 5," in "Chloe" the twelve-line "Ode I, 23" is translated into a kind of Petrarchan sonnet complete with octave and sestet but including variant line lengths and a spatial dropline more common in free verse. Just as Sir Thomas Wyatt inspires the lines beginning "you flee from me" in "Chloe," so that English Elizabethan poet inspires the "A Strange Fashion of Forsaking" (Odes i, 23). In contrast with the more faithful translation in "Pyrrha," in "A Strange Fashion of Forsaking" the poet takes free range to wax lyrical on the disgruntled theme of an old man's vicarious lust and displacement by age:

The cold will be what finds you then--northeasters
whining down in the gloom of the moon, and lust
in riddled guts twisting you like a stud in must
          who has to stand watching

his old mares mounted. You'll know then, the desire
of girls is for greener goods--such dry sticks
and wiltwood, blown only by the cold, they just figure
          who has the time for. (137)

I note that the Latin version uses half the words and images, its starker form more Classical in feel than Heighton's more Romantic takes. Most intriguingly, Heighton's translation in "A Strange Fashion of Forsaking" adds a melancholy ache and a world-weary expansiveness less apparent in the clipped, monosyllabic-sounding Latin.

Further challenges that face the Canadian poet-translator include the difficulties of working with a language whose speaking rhythms differ from the English iambic. George Elliott Clarke remarks on these challenges while translating Alexander Pushkin's Russian with what he describes as its dactylic stress pattern that remains at odds with the typical English iambic beat. Clarke's solution is to retain the content but to transform the poems into a format more typically associated with the English-speaking tradition. Similarly, Evan Jones and Sonnet L'Abbe in translating, respectively, the Greek Kiki Dmoula and the Korean Ko Un discuss the even more fundamental challenges of translating poems conceived and written using languages with foreign alphabets. I remained untouched by the concrete renderings (translations?) of Ezra Pound, which perhaps better belong in the Visual Arts.

Perhaps what is most satisfying about this collection of translations is its introduction of less well-known poets--some with extremely interesting backgrounds. Before coming across this anthology, I had never heard of Nichita Stanescu, Maria Elena Cruz Varela, Leopold Staff or Joao Da E Souza. So I enjoyed hearing about their politically and/or socially driven lives and savoured the sample of their work. "Fifth Elegy" by Stanescu, "Circus" and "The Exterminating Angel" by Varela and "Dethroned Beauty" by Souza are poems that will stay with me. Although I enjoyed selections from Neruda's 100 love sonnets and Rilke's quartet of poems on the seasons (which I did not recognize as ones usually anthologized), I was also delighted to come across poems and poets I knew little about, such Juan Ramon Jimenez. Although Jimenez won the Nobel Prize for Poetry, his work is not so frequently translated as that of Rimbaud, Rilke or Neruda, and the reasons A.F. Moritz offers are interesting, that the language of his poems is not based so much in the discrete images as in their rhythm and shifting interrelations and consequent moods. High praise for Moritz's translating that gem of a poem, "Sky," that expresses the speaker's troubling experience while looking back on settings associated with childhood as seen through the widening frame of an adult's perspective.

I left my sky
singing back there on land
with everything I've learned
                              And through this sea
I went out under another sky, more empty,
limitless like the sea, and bearing some other
name, its own, that still is not
a name to me...
                              It's like that evening
in adolescence when I came across
other regions of my house,
which is mine the same way the world is,
and I left, down by the white
and sky-blue garden, my room full of toys
along like me and grieving. (195)

Some of these poems are translations of previous translations and I wondered how far removed from the original conception the poet-translator not versed in that particular foreign tongue may have strayed. Still, there are wonderful poems in this innovative selection that make me eager to look for other translations of some of these same poets, maybe in the future undertaken again by Canadian as well as European poet translators.

Gillian Harding-Russell lives, reviews, edits, teaches and writes in Regina. Her latest collection of poetry is I forgot to tell you (Thistledown Press, 2007).

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