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Did you love well what very soon you left?
Come home and take me in your arms and take
away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.
Never so full, I never was bereft
so utterly. The winter evenings drift
dark to the window. Not one word will make
you, where you are, turn in your day, or wake
from your night toward me. The only gift
I got to keep or give is what I've cried,
floodgates let down to mourning for the dead
chances, for the end of being young,
for everyone I loved who really died.
I drank our one year out in brine instead
of honey from the seasons of your tongue.
MARILYN HACKER
Come home and take me in your arms and take
away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.
Never so full, I never was bereft
so utterly. The winter evenings drift
dark to the window. Not one word will make
you, where you are, turn in your day, or wake
from your night toward me. The only gift
I got to keep or give is what I've cried,
floodgates let down to mourning for the dead
chances, for the end of being young,
for everyone I loved who really died.
I drank our one year out in brine instead
of honey from the seasons of your tongue.
MARILYN HACKER
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I walk past a woman with a pink backpack and a turqoise/green scarf on campus. Is that her? What would be the chances?
I nearly didn't make it - plan a had been to get to campus for noon, but then the bath overran, and it seemed sensible to have lunch, and listen to Deefback, and then, because I was tired, to have a little lie down. It was gone three by the time I caught the bus, the traffic was heavy and the level crossing against me. But still, campus achieved, and library entered.
The main item of the agenda was to see a lecture by Marilyn Hacker with Brisingamen. I'm not quite sure when I first read her, but I must have bought a collection of her poems second hand having read Delany's The Motion of Light in Water. I'd like to bet I'd look at Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons prior to that, in Sheridan's. And now a chance to hear her live, twice.
Having failed to find a book in the suspicious gap between HQ600 and HQ1200 (I wanted HQ1154), I adjourned to the Carbuncle, where Brisingamen was already there, and recognised me by my feet. Scary, with new Death baseball boots as well. After a chat we wandered over to the lecture theatre.
The guy doing the introduction - presumably someone senior in the faculty, introduced the TS Eliot Memorial Lecture, and noted how he hoped they'd have great speakers in the future. Way to insult your current speaker. Hacker was also to discuss a different topic from the one advertised - translating poetry.
This she described as the continuation as the struggle (with language) by other means, the struggle with the angel (a Blake reference), or at best a dance with another writer, another language. It demands a removal of ego, and Hacker figured that it was a skill like playing chess, or rollerblading, one she could watch and adore from the side lines. She is aware of how poetry has cadences, rhythms, rhymes, echoes and connotations, and it is hard to keep all of these.
But she noted that she had read Emily Dickinson with more insight, having discussed the problems of translation. Reading, after all, is often an act of translation.
She'd been an advisor on a translation of New York poets into France, and had attended a conference where she'd acted as interpreter. Having done a rough translation, she began to work on it more, and do more. Translation is the most involved of readings, demanding an earthy involvement in language.
Hacker notes that there is no anthology of French women poets, or Algerian poets, Franco-Jewish poets, Belgian-born French poets, and that womens' poetry had been neglected by the academy. There is a tension between the Francophone and the French, but it seems not to be acknowledged. Hacker was interested in the cosmopolitans and the borders crossers, preferring poetry in conversation with other traditions, finding luminosity in quotidian objects and constructing history from normal lives.
Particularly striking was the work of a French poets born in Israel, who engaged with the Yiddish tradition, who railed against the Israeli partition wall, and effectively wrote haiku about the Holocaust -
every Jew is his own Christ carrying the cross of who he is
the just do not only inhabit one hemisphere of speech
The one name I noted down was Hedi Kandour, who has written a novel called Waltenberg which shades into sf, is a Germanist and is a Tunisian-French poet. Again his poetry was very striking. I wanted a reading list.
Translation, argued Hacker, is like writing in a fixed form (like the sonnet) and is working within restraints, sometimes going for rhythm, sometimes for cadence, sometimes for connotation. In the process the ego has to be amputated, producing work which is plausible, coherent and memorable.
Oh, and the woman who I walk past on campus was Marilyn Hacker.
I nearly didn't make it - plan a had been to get to campus for noon, but then the bath overran, and it seemed sensible to have lunch, and listen to Deefback, and then, because I was tired, to have a little lie down. It was gone three by the time I caught the bus, the traffic was heavy and the level crossing against me. But still, campus achieved, and library entered.
The main item of the agenda was to see a lecture by Marilyn Hacker with Brisingamen. I'm not quite sure when I first read her, but I must have bought a collection of her poems second hand having read Delany's The Motion of Light in Water. I'd like to bet I'd look at Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons prior to that, in Sheridan's. And now a chance to hear her live, twice.
Having failed to find a book in the suspicious gap between HQ600 and HQ1200 (I wanted HQ1154), I adjourned to the Carbuncle, where Brisingamen was already there, and recognised me by my feet. Scary, with new Death baseball boots as well. After a chat we wandered over to the lecture theatre.
The guy doing the introduction - presumably someone senior in the faculty, introduced the TS Eliot Memorial Lecture, and noted how he hoped they'd have great speakers in the future. Way to insult your current speaker. Hacker was also to discuss a different topic from the one advertised - translating poetry.
This she described as the continuation as the struggle (with language) by other means, the struggle with the angel (a Blake reference), or at best a dance with another writer, another language. It demands a removal of ego, and Hacker figured that it was a skill like playing chess, or rollerblading, one she could watch and adore from the side lines. She is aware of how poetry has cadences, rhythms, rhymes, echoes and connotations, and it is hard to keep all of these.
But she noted that she had read Emily Dickinson with more insight, having discussed the problems of translation. Reading, after all, is often an act of translation.
She'd been an advisor on a translation of New York poets into France, and had attended a conference where she'd acted as interpreter. Having done a rough translation, she began to work on it more, and do more. Translation is the most involved of readings, demanding an earthy involvement in language.
Hacker notes that there is no anthology of French women poets, or Algerian poets, Franco-Jewish poets, Belgian-born French poets, and that womens' poetry had been neglected by the academy. There is a tension between the Francophone and the French, but it seems not to be acknowledged. Hacker was interested in the cosmopolitans and the borders crossers, preferring poetry in conversation with other traditions, finding luminosity in quotidian objects and constructing history from normal lives.
Particularly striking was the work of a French poets born in Israel, who engaged with the Yiddish tradition, who railed against the Israeli partition wall, and effectively wrote haiku about the Holocaust -
every Jew is his own Christ carrying the cross of who he is
the just do not only inhabit one hemisphere of speech
The one name I noted down was Hedi Kandour, who has written a novel called Waltenberg which shades into sf, is a Germanist and is a Tunisian-French poet. Again his poetry was very striking. I wanted a reading list.
Translation, argued Hacker, is like writing in a fixed form (like the sonnet) and is working within restraints, sometimes going for rhythm, sometimes for cadence, sometimes for connotation. In the process the ego has to be amputated, producing work which is plausible, coherent and memorable.
Oh, and the woman who I walk past on campus was Marilyn Hacker.
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