99 Poems in Translation: An Anthology

99 Poems in Translation: An Anthology (London: Faber, 1996) Eds. Anthony Astbury, Geoffrey Godbert, Harold Pinter

From Sappho to Popa via Catullus, Li Po, Pushkin and Brecht, this anthology dazzles in its attempt to represent different pockets of history. The selection of poems is inspiring and subversive, and the quality of the translations first rate – probably because the translators are all poets in their own right. While the editors (who include Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter) demonstrate a bias towards European voices, this bias can be forgiven as the book is concerned with charting the development of a very specific poetic mode.

Virgil’s ‘Copa: The Barmaid’ typifies the poems in this book: bawdy, exuberant and charged with erotic energy, its speaker is intoxicated by sexual desire. The voice could be that of any number of drunks who spend their time lusting after barmaids; but the beauty of the poem lies in that balance between the speakers’ crushing sexual needs and the seething desperation which arises from those needs being ignored, or even despised.

The barmaid is addressed publicly and directly – “Come here, lie down, and be drunk awhile, you fool” (p. 133, line 6) – while the speaker’s desperation is satirised as his language becomes rich and overblown. “The crickets are splitting the thickets with shrilling complaints” he says; “The lizard is lurking cool in a bramble-lair.” (p. 134, lines 27 and 28) The sumptuousness of the language only amplifies the speaker’s urges, and his attempt to win the barmaid over with talk of “tankards, cups, bowls, roses, flutes, and zithers”, or “little cheeses drying in baskets of rush” (p. 133, line 7 and 17) is humorous and slightly cringy. But the self-awareness in the voice, and in the poem, allows the reader to laugh at the pathos of unrequited lust.

Jack Lindsay’s translation conveys an even mix of awkwardness, confidence, persuasiveness, and amateurism. He captures the double narrative perfectly, and in doing so presents us with the kind of needy, bitter (but articulate) barfly we can all recognise. In the final couplet the speaker declares: “To hell with the future! Bring wine and the dice-box here”, (p. 134, line 37) which rings with defeat but also optimism; he’s the kind who always bounces back.

In a similar vein, Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘The Stolen Heart’ explores the double feelings of hope / desperation, confidence / despondency, self-assertion / wretchedness. Wallace Fowlie’s beautiful translation – with its repeatings and its rich soundscape – brings the poem to life with a sensual, textured energy. The sheer recklessness of the syntax – for example: “They spew streams of soup at it”; and “Their jeerings have depraved it!” (p. 107, lines 3 and 10) – is electrifying, as is Fowlie’s lovely neologistic phrase “O abracadabratic waves.” (p. 107, line 13) It is almost as though rejection has pushed Rimbaud (and his translator) into more inventive ways of speaking – as though abject emotional depths have opened up the pressure valve of language. But the emotional intensity is offset by a tone of detachment. The speaker’s control of language is almost too good: his image of the heart “covered in tobacco-spit” (p. 107, line 2), for example, is a kind of artifice: a heightened, kitsch version of reality in which exaggeration acts as a form of exorcism.

Indeed, the way in which many of these poems behave involves an awareness of the poem’s artifice. A number of them achieve a freshness of expression through the swaggerings, posturings, and attitudes of their male speakers – and here’s the thing. This is a relentlessly male anthology which, at times, reads like a potted history of male fantasies, desires, frustrations and disappointments. But this singleminded ‘maleness’ is the thing I admire most about it. Because while it may be politically incorrect in both its male-centredness and its Eurocentric attitude, this nevertheless reflects the geographical and historical concentration of human power. What is unusual about the anthology is that it identifies a very particular strain, or timbre in that male European history – one characterised by a confessional voice which often expresses contradictory emotions. As in the poems discussed above, these male voices can be brash, ebullient, swaggering; but they are often simultaneously melancholy, self-pitying, blubbering. The book presents us with a case history of the male psyche obsessed with death, drink, lust, war, and the wretchedness of existence. It also presents us with utterances which are simultaneously public and private, and which always strain towards tenderness even while they speak brutally.