Anent the jaa and stour: poetry in translation
Reading "Interpret" and "la revue de belles-lettres"
Those of us with dual British-French nationality are having a busy week of voting, with the two rounds of the snap French election, called inexplicably by Macron less than a month ago, taking place last Sunday and this coming Sunday, and the UK general election today. While the outcome of the UK vote looks pretty predictable, in France the atmosphere is tense and uncertain — a very messy hung parliament looks the most likely outcome. As an antidote, I thought I’d look today at a couple of uplifting examples of the best of British and Francophone literary culture: two very different but genuinely enticing journals with an international outlook and a particular interest in translation.
When I wrote about Poetry Review back in January, one of the things that most irritated me about the issue was its handling of verse in translation — printing several poems in English translation without any indication of the language from which they had been translated. I criticised the same thing in a recent review of the Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse, so PR is hardly alone, but I wish Anglophone publications would stop doing it. I am probably unusually sensitive about it, but I do think it’s a peculiarly crass kind of linguistic imperialism: whether or not you have any knowledge of it at all, it surely matters in which language a poem (a poem!) was originally written.
I’ve heard good things, incidentally, about the latest issue of Poetry Review (which hasn’t yet reached me — hopefully not because I’ve been blacklisted . . .). So my intention is not at all to reignite controversy, but instead to take a look at a two quite different journals that in my opinion both do poetry in translation really well — James Appleby’s Interpret, founded in 2010 in Edinburgh; and the venerable la revue de belles-lettres, published in Switzerland and now in its 148th (!) year.
The latest issue of Interpret is no. 11. The magazine is slim, accessible (there’s a pdf edition available online if you can’t afford a subscription), printed in a very portable A5 format on slightly glossy paper and readable in a single (generous) sitting. (If you subscribe, you receive four issues a year for £39.) It presents all texts — prose and poetry alike — in both original and in English translation: in parallel text for short poems, otherwise consecutively. The quality of translation — based on the pieces where I was in a position to judge — seems high. Several of the English translations are successful poems in their own right. I was impressed for instance by Appleby’s own translation of a Spanish poem ‘Ritmo’ (‘Rhythm’), by Juan Cristóbal Romero, which begins:
Qué mal puede haber en seguir
et ritmo oculto de las cosas.
Qué mal en marcar con los pies
el golpe de lluvia en las pozas.What could the harm be? To follow
thing’s hidden rhythms. To play
the beat of the march of our footsteps
to the beat of the puddles in rain.
This issue features poems and prose in Farsi, Arabic, Spanish, Russian, Bulgarian, Latvian and Burmese, all printed in parallel text (a typesetting achievement in itself), as well as some original English and Scots pieces. I also enjoyed reading two interviews, one with Burhan Sönmez (President of PEN International and a novelist writing in Kurdish and Turkish) and one with Angela Rodel (winner of the 2023 International Booker Prize for her translation of the Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter).
I was also struck by Colin Bramwell’s ‘Oorglesses’, a poem in Scots in the distinctive stanzas of George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’. The poem is presented (exceptionally) without a translation, but with a glossary instead beneath the poem (rather like some editions of Chaucer) and a note on the facing page. I was particularly interested by Bramwell’s suggestion in this note that Herbert’s poem acts as a kind of ‘explicatory English text’: a translation is less necessary partly because we have this allusive framework to hand. This is the sort of observation that is obviously true about a great many apparently “difficult” poems, but it’s not that common to see a contemporary poet make it so clearly. Here is the first stanza:
O Lord, the time yuv grantit us is plenty.
But aftwhile huv we pleened its lack
Lamentin oan wan knee
Oor owerswak,
Yir sea.
Tho sair
We aa maun stand
Anent the jaa and stour
Tae sing yir graces fae the sand
And mak oor seicont endless in its oor.
oor - our/hour | aftwhiles - often | pleened - complained about | owerswak - surge and sound of waves breaking on one another | sair - sore, stormy, severe | maun - must | anent the jaa and stour - against the wave and storm | seicont - second
A poem in Arabic by Najwan Darwish, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, is another example of light but very well-judged commentary. Here the translator’s brief note tells us just what we need to know to appreciate something of the literary context of the poem, its place within its own tradition:
He said to me:
I was weary before death
and weary after it,
and in the vineyards
of my exhaustion
people pressed the clusters
and felt no pain.1
Translator’s note: These poems, called Mukhatabat (‘discourses’) in Arabic, are modelled after a genre the most famous of which were written by the Sufi mystic Al-Niffari, who died circa 965 CE. Al-Niffari’s texts are spiritual discourses of sorts, each beginning with the words “He said to me”; the “He” refers to God, the spiritual presence, or the higher Self of Al-Niffari. Najwan Darwish is playing with that genre and diversifying its themes.
La Revue de Belles Lettres is a much more substantial object (the most recent, 2024.1, is just over 200 pages long) and — as is typical of French literary publications — more austere in its style. It, too, publishes both poetry and prose: prose, when translated, appears in English translation only, while poetry is in parallel text. The typical issue contains both work written in French and a range of translations, and there are a few pages of reviews in smaller type at the back. A subscription costs €56 a year (two issues), €30 for students, though I also see it in bookshops quite regularly, at least in Paris.
RBL typically prints quite significant chunks of writing by single authors, often sets of five or six poems and sometimes quite long poems too. In this respect it reminds me of PN Review which often runs fairly substantial bundles of poems by a given author. This limits the scope of any individual issue, but as a reader I appreciate it, and I’m much more likely to follow up by buying a collection if I’ve had a chance to read a decent selection.2 It also gives the impression that the editor or editors have real confidence in their choices, and that they are choosing poets to feature as much as individual poems. RBL also includes regular dossiers devoted to a single author — I bought the 2017.2 back issue for its set of essays by Pierre Chappuis (whom I wrote about briefly here) and his translators — this feature of the journal reminds me of Agenda, who used to do quite a lot of things like this.
The same 2017 issue of RBL contains a section dedicated to the New Zealand writer Janet Frame, who died in 2004, printing a series of twelve of her poems followed by two short prose pieces. (This reminded me a bit of the work PN Review has been doing with the poetry of V. R. (“Bunny”) Lang, who was born in the same year as Frame (1924), though Lang died young in the 1950s.) I hadn’t read any of Frame’s poetry before, and it was interesting to encounter a new (to me) Anglophone poet in a Francophone poetry journal. Here’s the shortest of the Frame poems:
Before I get into sleep with you
I want to have been
into wakefulness, too.
In the current issue of RBL I was particularly struck by a series of five poems by the Russian poet Polina Barskova, some translated into French by Henri Abril and some by Eva Antonnikov. The biographical notes at the back tell me that Barskova, like Abraham Cowley whom I mentioned last week, published her first collection of poetry at 15; these poems are from her most recent collection, published in 2023. The issue also includes poetry by Belarussian and Ukrainian poets, alongside Russian.
It’s interesting, in the first place, to see a series of poems like this, by one poet but with two different translators. And then the final poem, titled ‘p. p. s.’, has been translated twice, once by each. The editors have added a prefatory note of explanation: D’une très grande densité sonore et sémantique, le poème suivant, à notre demande, a été traduit deux fois. (‘Due to the particular density of this poem, both in sound and sense, it has, at our request, been translated twice.’) The poem has many multiply-repeated rhymes, and both versions gives a sense of this, while bringing out different aspects of the poem. Here are the first few lines in both versions (not the Russian, I’m afraid, being once again beyond my typographical capacity). First, by Eva Antonnikov:
Dois-je façonner
un petit pot
pour y loger des boyaux
en déloger des vermisseaux
pour la beauté de mon pays
de ma pauvre terre natale
ma terrible terre natale?
Secondly by Henri Abril:
Dans un vase, un pot pétri
par moi vaille que vaille
pourrai-je glisser des entrailles
en ayant ôté les vers
de ma si belle terre
de ma malheureuse patrie
de ma terrible patrie?
This means something like:
Into a vase, a pot I have shaped myself, will I somehow be able to slip entrails, having removed the worms, for my beautiful land, from my unfortunate homeland, from my terrible homeland?3
As someone with no real Russian (I know the alphabet, but can only recognise a few words), I gained a great deal from this double translation of this remarkable poem.
One quite marked difference between RBL and most Anglophone journals is the style of the reviews. (Here the latest issue of Interpret is more typical of the English-speaking world, with just one quite cautious and largely descriptive review.) In the 2017.2 issue of RBL, for instance, a single-page review by Jean-Charles Vegliante of Philippe Denis’ Si cela peut s’appeler quelque chose (2014) describes that collection in reference to the poetry of Mallarmé, Dante, Emily Dickinson, the Japanese poet Masaoka and the Italian poets Giacomo Leopardi, Andrea Zanzotto, Vittorio Sereni and Giovanni Raboni, with an additional comparison to the sketches of Pisarro. This is a very high-culture approach to the poetry review which would seem pretentious in English (and perhaps seems a bit pretentious even in French), but I can’t say I didn’t find it stimulating and in its own way engaging, not least because I know nothing of Masaoka and very little about modern Italian poetry.
Interpret and RBL are noticeably different — not just in the visual style of the journal itself, but also in their history, cultural orientation and the tone of the editorial elements. But both are excellent in a serious and unshowy way and I think they complement one another well too. Do consider subscribing — and do of course comment with any other recommendations for journals specialising in translation.
Some housekeeping:
in proper French style, we’ll be away for August. As Horace & friends now has a substantial archive, and most subscribers are relatively recent, during August I’ll be sending out again some lightly edited pieces from the early days. Apologies to very loyal subscribers who may have read them before.
Since resigning permanently from my UK professorship, I’m now working purely as a freelancer with the concomitant very significant drop in income. There’s a lot of writing on here now, which at the moment is all completely free to access. At some point over the next few months I plan to paywall the archive — in other words, if you’re a free subscriber, you’ll still receive that week’s piece, but you won’t be able to read earlier pieces in their entirety.
I am very grateful to those of you who pay already even though you receive nothing extra for it. Everyone who is already paying when I introduce a paywall will receive a complimentary extension of three months to their subscription.
Arabic typography is beyond me so I have not attempted to give the original text for this poem.
One new online journal which does something similar is the very lively Only Poems, showcasing one poet at a time.
This is I’m afraid a composite translation based on the two French texts, not the Russian.
I rather think you mean Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), the haiku and tanka poet and theorist. Here’s one of his poems, topical for 4 July in the UK:
haru no hi ya
hito nani mo senu
komura kana
it's a lovely day
people are doing nothing
in all the small towns
(tr. Harry Gilonis)
The Arabic poem, in particular the reference to vineyards and clusters (of grapes? or something else?), put me in mind of a gloriously long entry titled 'Arabic poetry' in the Oxford Companion to Wine, which goes into a lot of detail on early Islamic poetry, in particular on the Sufi poets such as Abu Nuwas and the use of wine as a sexual metaphor. (I am sure there are better and more academic sources on early Arabic poetry, but this was an entirely unexpected encounter!)
It may be pushing it, but can that poem be read as post-coital?