Palabras Prestadas / Given Words

Darrell Ward: R.I.P.

Ever since Ice Road Truckers star Darrell Ward died in a planecrash at the early age of 52 - the first casualty among their core cast of daredevils - it's been a bit difficult to keep up our enthusiasm for the TV reality series.

This morning, however, I received the exciting news that expatriate Kiwi poet Charles Olsen had completed his translation of my poem "Ice Road Trucker" into Spanish, and posted it on his "Palabras Prestadas" website.

Charles Olsen

I have to say that I'm quite thrilled to see my words transformed into another language (especially one I can read) - just as I was when Dieter Riemenschneider included a couple of my poems in his 2010 bilingual German-English anthology Wildes Licht: Gedichte aus Aotearoa Neuseeland [Wild Light: Poems from Aotearoa New Zealand].

So far as I can judge, Charles has done a bang-up job. I do wonder, though, if I can repurpose his work here as some kind of witness to the immense pleasure I've got out of watching this series over the years? In particular, as a tribute to Darrell Ward himself, who strikes me as the most man of anyone I've ever seen.

That time when he managed to drag another truck out of the ditch single-handedly, by driving them both at the same time (I know that doesn't sound physically possible, but he did somehow accomplish it) had to be seen to be believed.

Anyway, here's the poem, in translation (you can read the original English version here, if you like). And what better date to have it appear online than the Cinco de Mayo?

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Jack Ross ha publicado varios libros de poesía, entre ellos City of Strange Brunettes (1998), Chantal's Book (2002), To Terezín (2007), Celanie (2012) y A Clearer View of the Hinterland (2014), además de cuatro novelas y dos libros de relatos cortos. Es director y editor de la revista Poetry NZ, y ha editado diversas revistas literarias y antologías. Tiene un doctorado en Inglés y Literatura Comparativa de la Universidad de Edimburgo y actualmente es Catedrático en Escritura Creativa en Massey University.

mairangibay.blogspot.co.nz
New Zealand Book Council – Jack Ross

Camionero sobre hielo

El motor se detuvo
a medio bajada por la rampa de salida

justo cuando cambió el semáforo a verde
para con cuidado en el arcén

y enciende
la luces de emergencia

decía Bronwyn
fuimos a buscar ayuda

me dejó en la estación de servicio
cuando llegué al coche

había un policía
un autobús había golpeado un vehículo utilitario

calle abajo
Necesitaba esto como un tiro en la cabeza

decía
el de la grúa era un viejo fibroso

que levantó el coche
sin esfuerzo

mientras dábamos saltos
en la cabina de su camión

pensé
ya sé qué se siente

al conducir un gran camión
sobre los campos de hielo

mi álter ego
radio frequencia en mano

abierta la botella de Jim Beam
entre las piernas

el horizonte gris de peltre

(Traducción del poema Ice Road Trucker de Jack Ross – traducido por Charles Olsen)

Battle of Puebla (5 May 1862)

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[19th August 2017]:

As part of his 'Poems on the Terrace' series of commentaries on New Zealand poems in Spanish, Charles Olsen posted the following video of "Ice Road Trucker" [Camionero sobre hielo].

Poem on the Terrace – Ice Road Trucker de Jack Ross

'Poem on the Terrace – poetas neozelandeses'. Una serie para dar a conocer la poesía de las antípodas de España. Los neozelandeses, Charles Olsen y Anna Borrie, recitan y comentan un poema en una agradable terraza de Madrid.

En este capítulo leen 'Camionero sobre hielo' de Jack Ross. Pueden leer más sobre el autor, y leer el poema en castellano, en Palabras Prestadas.

We present 'Poem on the Terrace – New Zealand Poets', where we introduce kiwi poets to a Spanish audience. Charles Olsen and Anna Borrie recite and discuss a poem on a relaxed Madrid roof terrace.

In this chapter they read 'Ice Road Trucker' by Jack Ross. Find out more about the author on New Zealand Book Council.

Charles Olsen & Lilián Pallares

1913: Apollinaire

Pablo Picasso: Potrait of Guillaume Apollinaire (1913)

on 7 September 1911, Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested and imprisoned as a possible accomplice in the theft of the Mona Lisa, as well as some Egyptian statues, from the Louvre in Paris. He was released after a week, but only after implicating Pablo Picasso (also called in for questioning, but not arrested). The statues, later recovered, had actually been stolen by the poet's former secretary, Honoré Joseph Géry Pieret.

As for the Mona Lisa itself, the actual thief, Vincenzo Peruggia, was not arrested till 1913, when he tried to sell the stolen painting in Florence. He had expected to be rewarded for his patriotism in returning 'La Gioconda' to Italy, but in fact the director of the Uffizi, to whom he entrusted it for 'safekeeping,' had him arrested for theft. The painting was returned to France at the beginning of 1914.

Guillaume Apollinaire (1913)

1913 was a vital year for Apollinaire. He published his masterpiece, Alcools [Alcohol], a selection of his best poems from the past two decades. He also published his classic work Les Peintres Cubistes, one of the first systematic attempts to theorise the aesthetic practice of such painters as Picasso, Georges Braque, Marie Laurencin, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp.

Louise Faure-Favier (1870-1961)

Judging from the poem below, written as a letter to his friend and fellow-writer Louise Faure-Favier in July 1913, he was in his usual state of heart-sick turmoil at the time. It's tempting to see, in the storm with which his poem ends, some kind of presentiment of what was going to happen to Europe over the next few years.

Certainly he wouldn't have been the only one to have been troubled by strange dreams and visions in this last year of peace. Carl Jung, in his autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962) has left on record the strange dreams he was plagued with in the winter of 1913-14:

In October, while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. This vision last about one hour. I was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of my weakness.

Nor was he the only one. In 1914, the painter Giorgio de Chirico painted Apollinaire in silhouette, with (as the Guardian puts it) "what looks like a target drawn on his cranium":

Giorgio de Chirico: Premonitory Portrait of Apollinaire (1914)

Apollinaire was hit in the head by shrapnel in 1916, while sitting reading in the trenches (he had enlisted in the French artillery at the outbreak of war). Despite a brain operation, he was weakened by his wounds, and died in the great Spanish 'flu epidemic at the end of the war.

As he lay dying in his hospital bed, he could hear the crowds outside chanting: "À bas Guillaume" - Down with Guillaume. They meant Kaiser Wilhelm, who was on the point of abdicating just before the German surrender, but to the poet himself, it seemed the final irony. It was 9 November, 1918. He died just two days before the Armistice was signed.

The Wounded Apollinaire

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1913
(after Apollinaire)


Sea’s edge
summer’s end
gulls fly
waves leave behind
glass blobs
of jellyfish
ships pass
on the horizon
wind dies in the pines


sun sinks
behind the islands
foam
bruises the sand
the sea
darkens to purple
you fool
nakedalone
shout your fear into the storm



[13/7/13]

(21/6-12/8/2015)

Apollinaire in hospital

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And here's a rather more literal version of the same poem:

Je suis au bord de l’océan sur une plage
I am at the edge of the ocean on a beach
Fin d’été : je vois fuir les oiseaux de passage.
at summer’s end: I see the birds of passage fly.
Les flots en s’en allant ont laissé des lingots :
The receding waves have left ingots:
Les méduses d’argent. Il passe des cargos
silver jellyfish. Freighters pass
Sur l’horizon lointain et je cherche ces rimes
on the far horizon and I look for rhymes
Tandis que le vent meurt dans le pins maritimes.
while the wind dies in the coastal pines.

Je pense à Villequier « arbres profonds et verts »
I think of Villequier's "deep, dark trees"
La Seine non pareille aux spectacles divers
the Seine unequal to the diverse shows
L’Eglise des tombeaux et l’hôtel des pilotes
the church of tombs and the pilots' hotel
Où flotte le parfum des brunes matelotes.
where the aroma of brown stew floats.

Les noirceurs de mon âme ont bien plus de saveur.
The blackness of my soul has far more taste.

Et le soleil décline avec un air rêveur
And the sun goes down with a dreamy air
Une vague meurtrie a pâli sur le sable
a bruised wave pales on the sand
Ainsi mon sang se brise en mon cœur misérable
while the blood breaks in my miserable heart
Y déposant auprès des souvenirs noyés
lying down next to my drowned memories
L’échouage vivant de mes amours choyés.
the living wreck of my cherished loves.

L’océan a jeté son manteau bleu de roi
The ocean has thrown off its royal blue robe
Il est sauvage et nu maintenant dans l’effroi
it's wild and bare now with the fear
De ce qui vit. Mais lui défie à la tempête
of living things. Defiance in the teeth of the storm
Qui chante et chante et chante ainsi qu’un grande poète.
which sings and sings and sings like a great poet!

[23 juillet 1913]

- Guillaume Apollinaire. 'Je suis au bord de l’océan...' Poèmes Retrouvés. Oeuvres poétiques. Ed. Marcel Adéma & Michel Décaudin. Préface d’André Billy. 1956. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 121 (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1966): 734.

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Pablo Picasso: Portrait of Apollinaire (1918)

Finds: Modern Poetry (c. 1938)

A New Anthology of Modern Poetry

We were up in Orewa on Tuesday, enjoying the nice weather and trying to persuade ourselves that we were still on holiday. Part of the celebrations always include looking through any vintage and op shops that happen to present themselves: in this case the local Hospice Shop.

The more glamorous books were all up on the shelves, but there was a scruffy old sack labelled 'classics' to one side of them, and this is the one treasure I found in there, among all the old hymnbooks and school editions of Shakespeare and Wordsworth.

The dustjacket was a bit ripped, but the book was otherwise in fairly good nick, perhaps because it had once belonged to the Vice Consul of the United States, a certain Clarence J. McIntosh (he'd signed his name inside, as well as using an official stamp). It cost me one dollar.

So what's the attraction of this ancient, outmoded anthology of 'Modern Poetry'? it does, to be sure, constitute a kind of survey of how the field looked in 1938, but why should that be of any particular interest?

A New Anthology of Modern Poetry

Don't you just love that little picture of 'Random House' itself? There's a reassuring solidity about their books, as if they come from a world which still - however vaguely - made sense. It was, after all, 1938.

Here's what the blurb has to say:

The dominant note of this collection of modern poetry is excitement. Here all the rules of the conventional anthology are abandoned and the chief emphasis is given to the dynamic quality and content of present-day verse. Representative poems by the greatest epic and lyric poets of the past twenty-five years in America and England are included, as well as folk-songs of the Negro, acid light verse, modern humor and satire, choruses from the experimental theatre, and even the sound-track of the pioneer movies. The result is an anthology of extraordinary vigor.

Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? And the editor himself, Selden Rodman, appears to have had an interesting time of it - judging by his wikipedia page, at any rate. He only died in 2002, having written a whole slew of books about Haiti, Latin America, poetry, and a range of other subjects.

A New Anthology of Modern Poetry

Look again at that list of 'representative' poets on the cover, though:

Robinson Jeffers -- T. S. Eliot -- Edna St. Vincent Millay -- James Joyce -- Stephen Spender -- W. H. Auden -- D. H. Lawrence -- Robert Frost -- Hart Crane -- Dorothy Parker -- Paul Engle -- Vachel Lindsay -- Ezra Pound -- Carl Sandburg -- C. Day Lewis -- Archibald MacLeish -- Kenneth Fearing -- Stephen Vincent Benét -- Elinor Wylie -- John Masefield -- A. E. Housman -- Amy Lowell -- Josephine Johnson -- Bartolomeo Vanzetti -- William Butler Yeats -- Edwin Arlington Robinson -- Malcolm Cowley -- Horace Gregory -- Frederic Prokosch -- E. E. Cummings -- Wilfred Owen -- William Rose Benét -- Muriel Rukeyser -- Louis MacNeice -- Wallace Stevens -- AND OTHERS

Among the 'others' included in the anthology but not mentioned on the cover are: Marianne Moore (with two poems], and William Carlos Williams (with one). Imagine not mentioning either of those two today!

All the British 'MacSpaunday poets' are there: Auden, Spender, MacNeice and Day Lewis, but not Hugh MacDiarmid (one poem) or Roy Campbell (also one).

There is one New Zealander - or sort of: Lola Ridge (one poem). No Australians or Canadians have managed to sneak in, however.

Christiana Spens: Lola Ridge (2014)

That's no great insult, though - of the other Americans included, but not mentioned on the cover, we have Conrad Aiken, Edgar Lee Masters, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate. Delmore Schwartz is the only one of the younger generation of poets who would come of age in the 40s (Robert Lowell, Robert Penn Warren, Kenneth Rexroth) to make it in.

I guess the real fascination for me is all those 'big names' (at the time) who have fallen almost entirely out of favour. The Benét brothers, Stephen and William, for instance - not to mention the latter's wife Eliinor Wylie. More of her later. That craggy old misanthrope Robinson Jeffers - the almost equally gloomy East Coast equivalent Edwin Arlington Robinson. My old friend John Masefield. Edna St. Vincent Millay (though she does seem to be making a bit of a comeback these days). Kenneth Fearing (who he?). What on earth is Vanzetti (of Sacco & Vanzetti fame) doing there?

I have a great affection for a number of these poets. Considerations of abstract merit - let alone 'importance' - seldom enter into my desultory poetry reading. I do love a long verse narrative, and a lot of these poets specialised in them.

The Collected Poems of Elinor Wylie (1932)

In fact, so much did I enjoy reading the two Elinor Wylie poems included in here - I'd heard of her, but not really read her before - that I've gone off and ordered her collected poems and collected prose - she wrote novels as well, it appears - on Amazon.com! If that isn't Quixotic, I don't know what is.

Collected Prose of Elinor Wylie (1933)

Anyway, here's a more-or-less complete list of the entire table of contents (I couldn't be bothered writing out all of the titles of the poems included, but the actual authors are all here):

Part One

Marianne Moore, 'Poetry'
Thomas Hardy, 'Afterwards'
Lewis Carroll, 'Jabberwocky'
John Masefield, 'from Reynard the Fox'
A.E. Housman, [3 poems]
Walter De La Mare, 'The Listeners'
Robert Bridges, "Johannes Milton, Senex'
Rupert Brooke, [2 poems]
Elinor Wylie, 'Wild Peaches' & 'Castilian'
Edna St. Vincent Millay, 'Moriturus'
Robinson Jeffers, [3 poems]
James Joyce, 'I Hear an Army Charging upon the Land'
Dorothy Parker, [2 Poems]
Marianne Moore, 'The Monkeys'
D.H. Lawrence, [3 poems]
Arthur Guiterman, 'On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness'
Gerard Manley Hopkins, [4 poems]
Amy Lowell, 'Little Ivory Figures Pulled with String'
W.B. Yeats, [5 poems]

Part Two

Carl Sandburg, 'Who Can Make a Poem of the Depths of Weariness'
A Group of Negro Songs [8 poems]
W. C. Handy, [2 poems]
Edwin Markham, 'The Man with the Hoe'
Sarah N. Cleghorn, [2 poems]
Edgar Lee Masters, [3 poems]
Edwin Arlington Robinson, [3 poems]
Robert Frost, 'Two Tramps in Mud Time' & 'The Fear'
Vachel Lindsay, [6 poems]
William Rose Benét, 'Jesse James'
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, 'Last Speech to the Court'
Malcolm Cowley, [2 poems]
Lola Ridge, 'The Legion of Iron'
Stephen Vincent Benét, [2 poems]
Josephine W. Johnson, 'Final Autumn'
Roy Campbell, 'The Serf'
Paul Engle, 'from America Remembers'
Pare Lorentz, 'from The River'
Carl Sandburg, [4 poems]

Part Three

Archibald MacLeish, 'A Poem Should Be Palpable and Mute'
Ezra Pound, [3 poems]
E.E. Cummings, [5 poems]
T.S. Eliot, [4 poems]
Walter James Turner, 'In Time like Glass'
Wallace Stevens, 'Peter Quince at the Clavier' & 'The Mechanical Optimist'
Hart Crane, [6 poems]
John Crowe Ransom, 'Here Lies a Lady'
Conrad Aiken, 'Prelude LXI'
Allen Tate, 'Idiot'
James Palmer Wade, 'A Hymn to No One Body'
Archibald Fleming, [2 poems]
Horace Gregory, [2 poems]
E. B. White, 'I Paint What I See'
Frederic Prokosch, 'The Conspirators'
Archibald MacLeish, [6 poems]

Part Four

Kenneth Fearing, 'These Are the Live'
Wilfred Owen, [7 poems]
Kenneth Fearing, 'Dirge'
Louis MacNeice, [2 poems]
C. Day Lewis, [2 poems]
James Agee, [2 poems]
William Stephens, [2 poems]
Ogden Nash, [3 poems]
Stephen Spender, [5 poems]
William Carlos Williams, 'The Yachts'
Eunice Clark, [2 poems]
Alfred Hayes, 'The Death of the Craneman'
Selden Rodman, [2 poems]
W.H. Auden, [6 poems]
Edwin Rolfe, 'Definition'
Oscar Williams, [2 poems]
S. Funaroff, 'Of My Deep Hunger'
Hugh MacDiarmid, [2 poems]
Delmore Schwartz, 'For One Who Would Not Take His Life in His Hands'
Muriel Rukeyser, [6 poems]

One of the most fascinating things about this list is to compare it with the contents of the second, postwar (1946), edition of the anthology. There were a lot of additions (as well as a few subtractions - Rupert Brooke has gone, but then so has Wilfred Owen). Here are the newbies:

Robert Graves -- Louise Bogan -- Siegfried Sassoon -- Kay Boyle -- Thomas Wolfe -- Reuel Denney -- Babette Deutsch -- Mark Van Doren -- Edith Sitwell -- Jean Garrigue -- Ruth Pitter -- John Peale Bishop -- Edmund Wilson -- Robert Penn Warren -- John Wheelwright -- R. P. Blackmur -- Kenneth Rexroth -- William Empson -- Jose Garcia Villa -- Robert Fitzgerald -- Kenneth Patchen -- Dylan Thomas -- George Barker -- Dunsten Thompson -- Ralph Gustafson -- Lawrence Durrell -- Roy Fuller -- Ruth Herschberger -- William Abrahams -- Sagittarius -- Laurie Lee -- William Meredith -- Randall Jarrell -- Hubert Creekmore -- Alun Lewis -- John Manifold -- Sidney Keyes -- John Betjeman -- Robert Lowell -- Demetrios Capetanakis -- Thomas Merton -- Karl Shapiro

One thing you can't fault Rodman on is his industry. He was determined to keep up. His prescience in selecting Robert Lowell and Thomas Merton among the new American poets is impressive. For the rest, his selection of WWII poets (Alun Lewis, Sidney Keyes) isn't bad, considering how little time there had been to process the verse of the war years. No Dylan Thomas, no Keith Douglas, but I suspect that just shows that it took a bit of time for their merits to filter through.

Elinor Wylie (1922)

Rodman attempts some knotty questions - 'Is Modern Poetry Difficult?' - in his preface (as well as 'What Makes it Obscure?' and 'Does Propaganda cancel It?') All in all, there's a pleasing New Deal optimism about his view of the future:

Our younger poets have taken the first step. They are beginning, as I believe the last part of this anthology will indicate, to fuse the naturalistic and symbolic in a new synthesis. They know that neither science nor sociology can be rejected. (45)

Well, bully for them! He goes on to explain that:

Poetry is the greatest of the arts because everyone can - and does - practise it. The ad-man and the gag-man, the housewife and the corner-grocer are latent poets.

But then he goes and spoils it all by saying, in his next sentence: 'Especially is the poetry of Carl Sandburg great for this reason.' Hmmm. Dunno about that. Rodman's touching faith in this idea of recording 'the poetry in the common speech, attitudes and aspirations of the people' culminates in his claim that:

That is why we have the paradox of the most original and indigenous American art in the anonymous outpourings of the oppressed Negro. That is why I have included the words of some of their songs. (45-46)

I guess our alarm bells may be ringing at this point in his argument. There's something so smug and patronising about that use of the word "outpourings' rather than simply 'songs' (or 'poems', for that matter). For its time, though, I think this decision of Rodman's was a brave one. It certainly attracted a good deal of attention, and (as it turned out) was the beginning of a lifetime's interest in the folk art of the Caribbean and elsewhere.

The question of tone when one is exploring the polemical writing of the past is a tricky one. On the one hand he clearly distinguishes these 'outpourings' from the consciously crafted poems of the other authors - there is no Langston Hughes in either the 1938 or 1946 versions of his anthology, for instance.

On the other hand, there's little doubt that Rodman is sincerely moved, and sincerely admiring of these great songs - as indeed we are today - so perhaps we can cut him a bit of slack, and try and avoid what E. P. Thompson once called the 'enormous condescension of posterity.'

All in all, pretty good value for one buck, I'd say!

Selden Rodman: The Miracle of Haitian Art (1974)