Red Letter Poem #180

 Red Letter Poem #180

 

 

 

Had we only known. . .  Back in our school days, when learning a foreign language might have been a somewhat easier task, we simply couldn’t imagine how—much later in life—we’d find ourselves wishing we could read Horace in Latin or Seferis in Greek; Szymborska in Polish or Li Qingzhao in Mandarin.  Most Americans sidestep the scholar’s path and do not master a second (let alone a third or fourth) language.  And so, when we crave the work of much-loved writers such as these, we’re reliant on the intermediary efforts of translators.  But it’s curious how that discipline has changed over the years.  At one time the province of academic scholars, their highest ideal was semantic accuracy—though sometimes the readability of the text ended up suffering.  At the beginning of the 20th century, poets like Ezra Pound pushed translation toward a new direction: reproducing the experience of the original work using the most compelling linguistic effects and literary techniques of the new cultural host.   These days, seeking to combine the best of both worlds, we’ll often find collaborations pairing the creative skills of poets with the technical expertise of language specialists.

 

But in his new book, Departures from Rilke (his seventh collection, issued this very week by Arrowsmith Press), poet and educator Steven Cramer is attempting to take a third course: having immersed himself for decades in the two volumes of Rainer Maria Rilke’s groundbreaking Neue Gedichte (New Poems,1907, 1908), he began to feel the texts taking root within his own life.  Some of the new poems that began to appear in his notebook felt very much like paired-down translations with a contemporary sensibility.  From the abundance of adjectives and adverbs in the original German, Steven worked hard to remove all but the necessary ones, and to update archaisms.  After all, Rilke referred to these as Dinggedichte, or ‘Thing-Poems’—and this is how such ‘poetic objects’ might appear if written today.  But at other times, Steven ended up reimagining a Rilke text, filtering it through his own personal experience.  That’s how the German original “The Death of the Beloved” has been transformed into “Death of a Best Friend”, a meditation on the borders between life and death, and the aspect of love that endures beyond loss.  It feels to me like a commiseration between two poets, two ages, revealing how some experiences transcend what we can say about them.

 

After spending time inside this collection, I ended up imagining them as a form of poetic cultivation: Cramer’s mind grafted onto the Rilke’s old grapevines.  Or perhaps it’s Rilke’s imagination transplanted into 21st century American soil.  But in any case, the fruit of this experiment (as Rilke himself described in another poem) has been pressed into a new ripeness, “chasing the last sweetness into the heavy wine.”  And isn’t there something intoxicating, just thinking of the all the generations of poets and translators who, like Steven, have relished and invested themselves in Rilke’s achievement, taking the body of this work inside their own lives?  I’ll happily raise a glass to this latest harvest, and to the way poetry has its ways of finding us, despite time or distance.

 

 

 

Death of a Best Friend

 

 

About death, I thought what everyone thinks:

it subtracts. But you weren’t taken from me

so much as eased from my eyes, then given

 

a getaway to some haven—strange, familiar,

the way all moons smile the same smile.

 

Your ways of remaining kind stay fresh—

my best friend making friends among the dead!

 

Through you, I meet them, we talk, but just

before they give directions to their harbor,

I shut them up.  I have my ways to find you.

 

 

––Steven Cramer

 

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

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* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

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@StevenRatiner