Translating Our Times

...Ye t inevitably, these styles—not the verse of each school’s best exemplars, but imitations by their followers—began to seem parochial, even petty...

...Many of us use words to hide our true meaning, but Shakespeare, Hughes insisted, honed his language until it could describe us as we are: life as it happens, the fates as they move history...

...URVA...

...Thankfully, Weissbort provides only a snippet of this play...

...Their styles differ, yet each experimented relentlessly and was obsessed with the role of history...

...In 1971 director Peter Brook staged the work at the Shiraz Festival of the Arts in Persepolis, with the actors standing in the ruined palace of Darius the Great...

...Each gets hold of the mouth, tears and bites the mouth, smashes it to shreds and bitter blood...

...Elizabeth I ’s “prolonged suppression of old Catholic (the armies and armadas of the Catholic empire behind it) and new Puritan (the jihad ferocity of the continental Reformation behind it) was productive...

...Eliot, W.B...

...His poetry assumes we are molded by our times, and that the actions of our ancestors play a part in shaping who we are...

...The other is A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (Farrar Straus Giroux, 216 pp., paperback, $15.00), selected and introduced by Hughes for British audiences in 1991...

...If the notion of a theater audience listening to an evening of made-up words sounds bizarre, remember that people nock to operas in languages they don’t understand...

...If only we could grasp what went wrong, we might regain our innocence...

...The passion and paranoia of internationalized civil war were pushed down into the private theater, the fiery crucible, behind every Englishman’s navel...

...He collaborated with Amichai on many translations of his work, which he believed reflected both the life of a fledgling nation as well as the Shoah that preceded its rebirth...

...Hughes claimed that he liked to impose himself as little as possible on the works of others, yet in practice he could be inconsistent about sticking to his principles...

...To mark the anniversary, two unusual examples of his work have just been published that do more to enlarge our understanding of him than any recapitulation of his more well-thumbed output, not to mention the legendary story of his ill-fated marriage to Sylvia Plath...

...His themes and style differed from that of our poetic movements, and his language resonated with an almost Elizabethan richness—resembling the violent, death-haunted rhetoric of John Webster or Christopher Marlowe...

...Their successors mostly abandoned epic themes to focus instead on the personal and particular...

...These translations capture Amichai’s powerful directness: A weeping mouth and a laughing mouth in terrible battle before a silent crowd...

...Both neoformalists and the New York School cultivated a bittersweet frivolity...

...Not knowing Hungarian, Hughes took an English version he did not care for and rewrote it according to his own gut feeling about what the original might be like...

...They sounded magisterial but became impossible to live up to...

...The confessional school adopted the tone of a patient revealing all to a therapist, while the Beats experimented with druggy stream-of-consciousness-like jazz riffs...

...A letter Hughes wrote to the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, quoted by Weissbort, describes their fellow writers riding “coaches crammed indiscriminately with great men, brilliant women, comedians, charlatans, ninnies, etc., but all racing along the flashing rails, in a resounding 150 mph concatenation of modern poetry, hurtling through the century, [while] on the other side is you—absolutely alone and apart from them—standing I imagine on a dusty hill over Jerusalem—the sole shepherd of the voices of human beings...

...Feminists accused him of destroying her and censoring her writings—even though less biased observers might have concluded that he had carefully nurtured her posthumous reputation...

...Hughes concentrated on the dramatic monologues, contending in his Introduction that many of them are “self-sufficient outside their dramatic context and capable of striking up a life of their own in the general experience of the reader...

...Despising the “arty,” Hughes admired Amichai and certain Eastern European poets because they focused on basic realities of survival rather than on the angst of the overcivilized...

...Auden—whose solemn works pronounced on culture and society, human history and myth, often with sweeping generalizations...

...The ruler is guilt-stricken, but his friend Heracles goes down to Hades to wrestle death and wins her back, turning grief into joy...

...Tackling Seneca’s version of Oedipus, he portrayed the characters as “more primitive than aboriginals...

...Critics made much of these and other fashions, small magazines were founded to encourage them, and pompous books filled the pages of remainder catalogs...

...In fact, this passage is not so different from Freud’s claim that the ancient Greek dramatists uncovered the complexity of human psychology millennia before the therapeutic method defined them, or Shelley’s assertion that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world...

...But his version of “The Boy Changed into a Stag Cries Out at the Gate of Secrets” by the Hungarian Ferenc Juhász sounds very much like his own attempts to render Celtic myth into modern verse...

...It also provides further clarity about Hughes’ philosophy of poetry...

...In a 38-page note at the book’s end, Hughes elaborated on his own unusual perspective of Shakespeare’s power as a writer...

...Like Lowell, too, Hughes turned more and more to translating new versions of ancient literature in his last years...

...Performance poetry dovetailed with the growth of coffeehouse culture...

...In the scene where Oedipus blinds himself, a slave recounts how suddenly he began to weep everything that had been torment suddenly it was sobbing it shook his whole body and he shouted is weeping all I can give can’t my eyes give any more let them go with their tears let them go eyeballs too everything out is this enough for you you frozen gods of marriage is it sufficient are my eyes enough Hughes’ translation reminds us that Seneca was an inspiration for Elizabethan playwrights who reveled in severed body parts and declamatory speeches...

...One of these is Selected Translations (Farrar Straus Giroux, 237 pp., $25.00), edited by Daniel Weissbort, Hughes’ longtime coeditor of the British magazine Modern Poetry in Translation...

...Yeats, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, W.H...

...Anglophone poets of the postwar generation on both sides of the Atlantic struggled to emerge from the long shadows of the giants of Modernism—T.S...

...Hughes’ version closes with the words, “Let this give man hope...

...Macbeth has as much to say about the eventual emergence of Cromwell in the explosion of the civil war, after Shakespeare’s death, as King Lear has to say about the English King Charles—hunted, like an animal, through England by a ruthless commoner at the head of the English Army, amid apocalyptic ‘change of times and states.’” That makes huge claims for artistic farsightedness, since Shakespeare died over two decades before Charles I was executed or Charles II had to flee for his life from the armies of the Commonwealth...

...For Hughes, Shakespeare is the ultimate truth-teller: Cordelia in King Lear cannot describe her love for her father in the flowery rhetoric of her sisters because their professions of feeling are mere flattery, and she really does care for him...

...The music of inflection and tone can sometimes convey what is transpiring as powerfully as the actual meanings of the words...

...By the century’s end, it was apparent that one of its most significant and lasting movements sprang from the influence of non-English-speaking poets, especially Latin American and Eastern European writers...

...Hughes, however, chose to print 218 verses with no identification other than consecutive numbering...

...Hughes insisted that the most effective translations, instead of imposing a translator’s interpretation between the original and the reader, should present an almost wordfor-word rendition: “Those purists who claim that it is precisely ‘the poetry’ which is lost [in literal translation] are speaking as though ‘the poetry’ were some separable ingredient, some additive like the whitening agent in a detergent...

...On the page, however, we are soon bewildered by such lines as “KHSHMAIBYA...

...In his quest for elemental simplicity, he sometimes went to extremes...

...His gripping Tales from Ovid came out in the United States shortly before his death, almost simultaneously with Birthday Letters—his poignant retelling of the story of his marriage to Plath...

...Although Hughes had established his reputation in England by the early 1960s, it took him many more decades to win over a large following in the United States...

...Again one sees the parallel with Lowell, whose late poems largely concerned the breakup of his second marriage to Elizabeth Hardwick, and his fraught union with Lady Caroline Blackwood...

...Commonly, poetry anthologies divide Shakespeare’s verse into sonnets, songs from the plays, the long poems (“Venus and Adonis,” “The Rape of Lucrece,” “The Phoenix and the Turtle”), and then, almost as an afterthought, include a few set speeches from the tragedies...

...Her writings portrayed him as Heathcliff to her Catherine...

...readers felt they were eavesdropping on party chitchat among close friends...

...Hughes’ last major project was a translation of Euripides’ Alcestis...

...For generations, Shakespeare has been portrayed as an invisible man behind the masks of his characters...

...The interpretation has much in common with Hughes’ vision of 20th-century poets crammed into train coaches as they flit across the landscape, while Yehuda Amichai stands, a lonely ancient shepherd on the hill, speaking the elemental voice of humanity...

...GEUS...

...a soliloquy might be flanked by a sonnet and a song...

...Neither volume would be an ideal introduction for new readers, but they provide intriguing insights into the minds of their compilers...

...Some writers turned to what might be termed backyard-nature-journal verse, minutely describing birds, plants or small animals with the exactness of a field guide...

...Among American Poets, Hughes most closely resembles Robert Lowell...

...Fair enough—Robert Browning and Robert Frost wrote many poems that read like soliloquies taken out of some drama, and they stand perfectly on their own...

...Consequently, “Shakespeare” has becomes a template upon which poets project themselves...

...GEREZHDA...

...Like Yeats, Hughes immersed himself in occult systems in an attempt to make sense of the cycles of history...

...As Hughes observed in 1982, the fad for books of poetry in translation began in the same era that brought “the mass epidemic of infatuation with hallucinogenic drugs, the sudden opening to all of the worlds of Eastern mystical practice and doctrine, particularly of various forms of Buddhism, the mass craze of hippie ideology, the revolt of the young, the pop music of the Beatles and their generation, the W a lpurgisnacht of new psychotherapies...

...Accustomed as we are to Sophocles’ elegant version of the myth, there is something crude and savage about Seneca’s retelling...

...The clairvoyant depth of Shakespeare’s involvement in the national trauma can be estimated from two of his dominant themes: the horrors of civil war, and the figure of the regicide who rules as a doomed tyrant...

...Normally, an anthology of this kind is a publisher’s gimmick...

...Both men were so self-conscious that it was hard for the critic to keep up—you slaved to say something revealing, only to discover that they had already made exactly that observation about themselves...

...To Americans, then just discovering the acerbic, wry lyrics of Philip Larkin—a British poet whose clear-eyed portraits of cramped and stunted lives were certainly personal and particular— Hughes sounded overheated melodramatic and gothic...

...By his reckoning, humanity was locked in a perpetual struggle to come to terms with its darkest impulses against the constant temptation to look away, soften the truth, and distract ourselves from the worst in our natures...

...But ultimately Hughes rejected this worldview...

...Moreover, as Sylvia Plath’s star ascended interpretations of her husband’s role in her suicide became the stuff of literary gossip...

...Till the weeping mouth surrenders and laughs till the laughing mouth surrenders and weeps...

...Because he detested anything “literary” (what Americans usually refer to as “academic”), he favored foreign poets who wrote out of a folk tradition...

...We know next to nothing about him as a person...

...His A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse is one of the most eccentric reinterpretations of one poet by another since the strange anthology of William Blake edited by Yeats...

...But in this case the 20th-century poet rearranged the Bard’s work in such a novel fashion that it helps us hear Shakespeare as if we were encountering him for the first time...

...Fitting words for a writer who spent a lifetime wrestling with his craft and left a legacy readers will ponder for years to come...

...HERE IT IS WORTH LOOKING at what Hughes did with the Bard himself...

...He saw the trend as a reaction to the horrors of the Holocaust and the gulag, an impulse to believe that Hitler and Stalin had somehow corrupted a hitherto naïve humanity...

...English readers, more aware of his work on translation, caught on sooner to why he chose a direction so different from his contemporaries...

...Inspired by experimental dramatist Antonin Artaud he once tried to devise a “wholly auditory” language of nonsense syllables for a production of Orghast—an avant-garde version of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound...

...Meanwhile, Hughes doggedly followed his own path...

...Number 72, the lyric “Tell me where is fancy bred” from The Merchant of Venice, is followed by Sonnet LXXIII (“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”) and the Nurse’s bawdy, rambling speech about Juliet as a little girl...

...Ye t if you believe great works of the imagination tell us something profound about where humanity has come from, or what lies in its future, there is nothing preposterous in Hughes’ reading...

...When they discuss his virtues, they are outlining their own understanding of poetry and their deepest aspirations...

...His father was one of only 17 survivors of a regiment that fought at Gallipoli, and though father and son never discussed this, the poet felt his parent’s experiences had exerted an irrevocable influence on his personality...

...It begins as a tragedy of a selfish king, so afraid of dying that his wife is moved to perish in his place...

...They are a spider people, scuttling among hot stones...