Tomorrow night Cooper Union in Manhattan will host a celebration of Daniel Mendelsohn's terrific new versions of Cavafy. Daniel will speak about Cavafy's development as a poet and Olympia Dukakis, Maria Tucci and I will read from the poems. Glamorous company!
It's strange to think that were Cavafy writing now, a good many of his poems might not be welcome at Amazon, where the company has instituted a weird new policy of identifying books they classify as "adult material" and leaving these titles out of their sales rankings and thus off their bestseller lists. But what they're really doing is targeting gay and lesbian content. It's an ugly act of discrimination, and results in weird selections: a book of Playboy's best centerfolds has a sales ranking, for instance, while Mark Wunderlich's book of poems VOLUNTARY SERVITUDE does not. Neither does Paul's LAWNBOY, or Andre Aciman's beautiful novel CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, or my own HEAVEN'S COAST, or even books on healthy living for HIV-positive men. It's outrageous. The best solution, of course, is to take your business elsewhere; everyone benefits from having strong, local and independent booksellers in our communities. But also let Amazon know what you think. There's a rapidly expanding petition drive over at the excellent activist website run by Care2.
Showing posts with label Cavafy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cavafy. Show all posts
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Friday, November 28, 2008
Cavafy Reprise
James Robert Hopkins sends another version of the Cavafy poem, this one from Aliki Barnstone's recent volume. Thanks, James!
IN THE SAME SPACE
Surroundings of the house, meeting places, neighborhoods
that I see and where I walk, for years and years.
I created you with joys and sorrows,
so many events, so many things.
And you've made yourself all feeling for me.
This version makes me think about the final line in a different light, since in each of the three translations, the speaker doesn't seem to have actively transformed the neighborhood; it's never "I have made you into feeling", but rather, "you've made yourself," or "the whole of you has been transformed," or "you've been wholly remade" -- in other words, it's the world that transforms itself in us.
This is especially interesting after the active work of line three: "I created you" or "I crafted you..." But it would seem from the final line that it's the world that's really in charge here, not the artist.
IN THE SAME SPACE
Surroundings of the house, meeting places, neighborhoods
that I see and where I walk, for years and years.
I created you with joys and sorrows,
so many events, so many things.
And you've made yourself all feeling for me.
This version makes me think about the final line in a different light, since in each of the three translations, the speaker doesn't seem to have actively transformed the neighborhood; it's never "I have made you into feeling", but rather, "you've made yourself," or "the whole of you has been transformed," or "you've been wholly remade" -- in other words, it's the world that transforms itself in us.
This is especially interesting after the active work of line three: "I created you" or "I crafted you..." But it would seem from the final line that it's the world that's really in charge here, not the artist.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
In the Same Space
Here's a poem of Constantin Cavafy's that has been crucial to me for years, in Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherard's translation:
IN THE SAME SPACE
The setting of houses, cafes, the neighborhood
that I've seen and walked through years on end,
I created you while I was happy, while I was sad,
with so many incidents, so many details.
And, for me, the whole of you is transformed into feeling.
This poem speaks so much to my own sense of memory, and of the way we take cities into ourselves and make of them an interiorized imaginative landscape, that I stole the title for a poem of my own in SCHOOL OF THE ARTS, a poem that recalls Washington Square in the days before the destruction of the World Trade Center, when the two towers would loom in the south in the evening, softened and blued by twilight. It was the only time I ever thought they were beautiful, or had any aspect of friendliness about them. I even reprinted the translation above in the notes at the back of my book.
I've been reading Daniel Mendelsohn's exciting new versions of Cavafy, which are forthcoming early next year from Knopf. I trust Daniel won't mind if I post here his version of this same text.
IN THE SAME SPACE
House, coffeehouses, neighborhood: setting
that I see and where I walk; year after year.
I crafted you amid joy and and amid sorrows:
out of so much that happened, out of so many things.
And you've been wholly remade as feeling; for me.
This startled me at first, since I'd so internalized the rhythms of the previous version, but it didn't take long to begin to see its considerable strengths. That first line is artfully rendered by four nouns in a row, and something about simply naming those four things with only the connective tissue of punctuation seems to suggest from the beginning what this poem is up to, bringing that setting into the self, so that it becomes the loved internal map, a city crafted and remade within.
I love the authoritative cadence of the last line in the first version; it seems to sweep up the details in the lines that precede into it a singular, ringing affirmation. But the Mendelsohn version does something quite forceful itself, by italicizing "remade as feeling," as if to point to this act as the poem's center, a kind of definition of the common work of both memory and art.
And isn't that semicolon there, after the italicized phrase, brilliantly placed? It throws "for me" into a kind of small room of its own, at line's end. It pushes us back to the title, to contemplate the way that "in the same space" where an external city once stood, now there is the self. And for whom did I remake it? For me.
Mendelsohn's version of the poem is beautiful, and pleasingly unexpected. It has the right feel of contemporary speech to it -- just what translation ought to do, refresh the great poems of the past, bringing them into the discourse of the hour. The splendid Keeley-Sherrard versions were published first in 70s, so this feels like just the right timing: thirty years later, a bold, confident, gorgeous new Cavafy.
And it occurs to me that Daniel's version is now "in the same space' as Cafavy's original, and the Keeley-Sherrard text, too -- the three poems overlap, making a zone of meaning.
IN THE SAME SPACE
The setting of houses, cafes, the neighborhood
that I've seen and walked through years on end,
I created you while I was happy, while I was sad,
with so many incidents, so many details.
And, for me, the whole of you is transformed into feeling.
This poem speaks so much to my own sense of memory, and of the way we take cities into ourselves and make of them an interiorized imaginative landscape, that I stole the title for a poem of my own in SCHOOL OF THE ARTS, a poem that recalls Washington Square in the days before the destruction of the World Trade Center, when the two towers would loom in the south in the evening, softened and blued by twilight. It was the only time I ever thought they were beautiful, or had any aspect of friendliness about them. I even reprinted the translation above in the notes at the back of my book.
I've been reading Daniel Mendelsohn's exciting new versions of Cavafy, which are forthcoming early next year from Knopf. I trust Daniel won't mind if I post here his version of this same text.
IN THE SAME SPACE
House, coffeehouses, neighborhood: setting
that I see and where I walk; year after year.
I crafted you amid joy and and amid sorrows:
out of so much that happened, out of so many things.
And you've been wholly remade as feeling; for me.
This startled me at first, since I'd so internalized the rhythms of the previous version, but it didn't take long to begin to see its considerable strengths. That first line is artfully rendered by four nouns in a row, and something about simply naming those four things with only the connective tissue of punctuation seems to suggest from the beginning what this poem is up to, bringing that setting into the self, so that it becomes the loved internal map, a city crafted and remade within.
I love the authoritative cadence of the last line in the first version; it seems to sweep up the details in the lines that precede into it a singular, ringing affirmation. But the Mendelsohn version does something quite forceful itself, by italicizing "remade as feeling," as if to point to this act as the poem's center, a kind of definition of the common work of both memory and art.
And isn't that semicolon there, after the italicized phrase, brilliantly placed? It throws "for me" into a kind of small room of its own, at line's end. It pushes us back to the title, to contemplate the way that "in the same space" where an external city once stood, now there is the self. And for whom did I remake it? For me.
Mendelsohn's version of the poem is beautiful, and pleasingly unexpected. It has the right feel of contemporary speech to it -- just what translation ought to do, refresh the great poems of the past, bringing them into the discourse of the hour. The splendid Keeley-Sherrard versions were published first in 70s, so this feels like just the right timing: thirty years later, a bold, confident, gorgeous new Cavafy.
And it occurs to me that Daniel's version is now "in the same space' as Cafavy's original, and the Keeley-Sherrard text, too -- the three poems overlap, making a zone of meaning.
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