by C K Williams
TRANSLATING A PHRASE
There is one little thing I’m proud about in my translation work. In Sophocles’s The Women of Trachis, there’s an odd phrase whose meaning no classicist had ever figured out, as far as I know. In the play, Heracles is commanding his son to burn him alive because he’s in agony and also because he realizes that his death by fire in this way was prophesized, and that afterward he’d become a god. Herakles then addresses himself in a complicated image that has in it something about stone and something about metal.
As I say, no one, at least no one I’d heard of, had ever made coherent sense of the words. Pound translated the phrase as, “Slap some reinforced concrete on your face,” which has to be one of the worst translations ever made. But it came to me that the image had to do with Greek statues, which were of course carved of stone but which also used metal accoutrements; a statue of a horse, for instance, would have a metal bit and reins. So what I came up with for Herakles to say is, “Put the steel bit in your teeth, weld it there, // clamp your lips on it, stone against stone.” And according to my classicist consultants, I’d solved the problem. I suppose until someone proves I was wrong.
THE UNSAYABLE
Usually when people speak of the unsayable, they are referring to perceptions, feelings, and thoughts that are concerned with the sort of things with which religion occupies itself: intuitions of divinity, of divine presence; imaginations of emotions that would not be experienced except in the realm of prayer or theological reflections. I’m not certain that what I can state in this context here about the sayable or unsayable will have anything to do with all of that because I’ve never really had any experience of it. There was a time in my life when I wanted very much to experience that kind of longing, for god, for the ineffable, for the whole realm of the divine, but in truth my desire was of such a different degree that I couldn’t and still can’t apply it with any certainty to the way I experience anything else in my life. Even those poets I admire, Herbert and Donne primarily, who seem closest to being “religious,” most often express their connection with divinity with a desire that is so dissimilar to mine that I doubt whether there was really anything in their experience that’s even close to mine.
In a nonreligious sense, though, for me there’s really no such thing as the unsayable—there’s only the unsaid or the not-yet said. What can’t be said can’t be thought and can’t truly be felt. What’s not said isn’t felt, or not wholly felt: it’s only guessed at. We feel a stir, and guess there’s something that might be called a feeling to go with that—“summoning” might be the best word—and that a thought might be implied by the feeling. (There’s already a kind of thought attached to the feeling, what I’d call a guess, because something like a guess is instantly proposed by the mind for everything, however inarticulate, and a guess is a thought en route.)
And I think this is true as well of raw perception. We perceive something and sense there may be a feeling to go with it, and then a thought, but in most cases, almost all cases, the perception is merely registered, and then stored in memory or allowed to dissipate in forgetfulness. It’s one of the functions of poetry to create connections between all these vague and disparate phenomena.
Sometimes a poem will take as its field of activity a perception. Then it will find ways to transform this perception, first into language, then into the more purely transformative aspects of poetry—figuration first of all—metaphor and simile—which, by transforming both perception and consciousness, bring the part of the self that thinks and feels into intimate connection with the thing perceived, then into one form or another of poetic music, which further transfigures the perception, and perhaps, uncertainly, moves it to another center of the brain.
What exists in the self now, having experienced the poem and its perception, was in no way sayable until the poem was said.
Poetry does the same thing with what are called feelings—which in fact are first of all, though not primarily, inner perceptions—and finally with thought. I’d say that for me thoughts are subjective speculations until they’re embodied in poetry. Though this should be qualified by saying that what I’m saying here applies primarily to others to whom poetry is a central part of their life, either the reading or writing of it. For them—us—even formal philosophy’s speculation, and even religion’s, remain just that, speculation, until they are brought into if not the poetic then at least the literary portion of experience, that part of experience that imagines other lives and the perceptions of those lives.
THE USE OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
For a poet, that can be a thorny problem. One of the assumptions about the use of “I” in lyric poetry is that the poet is telling the truth about him or herself. Whether it’s Archilochos admitting his trepidation and flight in battle, or Baudelaire celebrating his erotic phantasms, we believe in the declarations of poets as revelations or recountings of their experiences. But the tradition of narrative poetry obviously has quite different ambitions, and very different resources. From Homer to Milton, to Browning and Tennyson and early Yeats, we recognize that there are imaginations available to the poet, we call them fictions, and just as in epic and tragedy and the novel, it’s not the “truth” of the matters at hand that are important to us but the way they bring the world to our meditations. In the twentieth century, both in poetry and the novel there’s a fusion of the first person and fiction and, in poetry, of the lyric and the narrative that obviates the distinctions between the genres. In Robert Frost’s “The Hill Wife” or “Home Burial,” for instance, the third person is obviously being used to deal with experiences or emotions Frost had himself, and we have to change our notions about what’s happening in the poems in this regard.
In my own work, I’ll admit that I’ve often used fictional elements in what are ostensibly intensely personal lyric narratives. I’ve never felt any compunction about this because I’ve always believed that the core of the experience I was considering, or elaborating, or trying to make sense of, was most crucial, and the rest, the variables, were to be considered fair game for being “fictionalized,” although I dislike that term. I do feel uneasy about saying all this, because I still want the reader to experience the poems with the same trust implied in reading, say, Lowell’s Life Studies, although I’ve wondered how many of the elements in those poems might have been made up.
Lowell’s not alone in this, of course: what were once considered forbidden aspects of intimacy have become available to contemporary poets, and although there aren’t many instances of such overt usurping of someone else’s personal life as there was with Lowell, there has been a widening of the field of vision into what might be called non-sublimated expressions of very intimate matters. You can also get into quite metaphysical questions here: why we should respond at all to fictional or even mythical characters when we know very well they’re the creations of authors is one of the mysteries of art—and of the human mind. It’s one of the glories of our imaginations. But I suspect also that it has at least some of its basis in the enduring infantilism of our mental structures, the primitive response system that convinces us to give over decisions about our very existence to our political leaders and to identify with their symbolic legitimacy in the same way we find imaginary characters’ struggles germane.
WORKSHOPS
I think workshops are a fine tradition. America society is quite fragmented, and enormous. In the England and the Continent of long ago, which are our models for such things, there were coffeehouses and cafés, where young writers could come to find people to talk to about their work, and I imagine show it around. America is culturally diverse now, and there are poets everywhere. I think many of them would stay by themselves, and suffer from it, without a place to get a larger perspective. It used to be that you could move to New York, to Greenwich Village, or to San Francisco, and find communities of artists, but that’s not easy anymore, since the cities have become so expensive.
So that’s one function of workshop
s. But besides that, I do think there’s a lot to be learned about poetry. People who question the legitimacy of poetry workshops never seem to wonder about the viability of teaching painting or music, and I think what’s implied by that is that poetry is something that comes spontaneously, from the heart; if you’re sensitive enough you don’t need any training, it will just happen. Which of course isn’t true. Poetry is exactly like painting and music; there any many technical matters to become familiar with, and a workshop is a way at the very least to expose poets to issues that aren’t all that obvious until they’re pointed out.
YOUNGER POETS
There are a number of younger poets I admire, poets trying to find new directions for themselves, new sounds, new ways of assembling experience, often in wonderfully jagged ways. If I have noticed a tendency in some of the work by younger poets that I don’t find as satisfying, it’s that some seem to rely on a kind of existential irony, a mistrust of the possibility of discovering or creating meaning in the world, and a consequent resort to a wry juxtaposition of apparently irreconcilable elements of experience. Such poetry ends up embodying a world that seems to have a variant of surrealism as its epistemological first principle. Part of this surely has to do with the fact that so much of our world seems to be at risk these days, from our environment to our economic stability, and that kind of forced insouciance very well may be an appropriate response. But I do have trouble taking to heart the poems that come out of it. But who can really say? I’ve become very conscious lately of the fact that what I think and value is almost irrevocably determined by my own historical experience. You can’t stay open to everything—any single mind can only contain so much—and it may well be that I’m just not competent to judge objectively what people thirty or forty years younger than me are doing.
PART III
The Rest
Two Encounters Early On
1. COWBOYS AND POETS
The first book I ever passionately, desperately loved, and which I read devotedly probably a dozen times, purported to be a true story. I found out later, however, it was almost entirely a fabrication, a lie. The book was Lone Cowboy, the autobiography of the Western writer and artist, Will James. Not William James—I realized this fact when I looked Will up in the encyclopedia in my grammar school library and found only the uninteresting William.
I came across Lone Cowboy when I was eleven or twelve. I was mad about horses then, all I wanted to do was ride and have a horse one of my own, not a very likely prospect in Newark, New Jersey. So what I did instead was to read obsessively about horses and their riders; everything in our school library, then in the branch library not far from our house, and finally in the big central library downtown. I think I read literally every book I could find that had anything to do with horses, the way ten years or so later I’d read everything I could find on the Holocaust, and after that everything by and about the various poets whose work I’d fallen in love with. But right now it was horses, and especially it was Will James; in some ways I think I almost assumed his biography as my own. As some children have imaginary playmates, I had James, and I had that book, which recounted a real cowboy’s life: being born under a wagon in Montana, the mother dying in childbirth, the cowboy father so distraught by her death that he became careless of his own life and was killed a few years later by a raging steer. Then he was adopted by a French Canadian trapper, Bopy his name was, a diminutive I think of “Beaupré,” who was also a cowboy during the warm months when pelts were thin.
I still remember that life so well. The winter one had two wolf cubs as pets. The gift of a little horse for a birthday. Buying saddles and boots. The slow wanderings down out of Canada. The herds of cattle, wild horses, roundups, and line camps. Then the trapper, too, disappeared, probably drowned fetching water from a flooded river, and you were on your own, to wander and work as a cowboy all over the West, from Montana even down into Mexico. Then, as vengeance for some sort of affront, you stole a herd of cattle, were caught, and ended up in prison for a time, where you begin to draw and paint seriously. And so started another life as an artist, then as an artist-writer.
The part about prison, the most seemingly unlikely yarn, turns out to be almost the only thing in the book up until then that was true. I found out years later in a study of James I happened on in another library that he had actually been a French-speaking Canadian from Quebec who’d conceived a passion for cowboy life and had gone West when he was sixteen—this would be around 1908—and become one. His tragedy began when he came to believe that in order to be an authentic Westerner you had to have been born to it, so he made up that biography, which he swore was the truth no matter what, though it meant cutting off all but the most furtive communication with his original family and though it resulted in his marriage to a woman he was obviously very attached to falling apart. The direct cause of the dissolution of his marriage was that he’d taken to serious drinking, but the author of the study hypothesizes that he had turned to drink because he couldn’t bear the split between his real life and his ravening lies. He would actually drink himself to death not many years after his marriage fell apart.
I think I was too old to be brokenhearted when I found out the truth, though I certainly found it illuminating about the ways we can order our own reality according to spurious models we’re not even aware have been generated for us. I suppose no great harm had come from me wanting to be a cowboy, by my working later on in the riding stables I found outside of Newark, and finally convincing my parents to buy me a hundred-dollar horse; I certainly met a lot of people and learned about a lot of things I never would have otherwise.
But thinking about James has made me wonder about the poets whose lives I’ve probably just as gullibly used to shape the idea of my own existence in poetry. It was certainly wrenching to find out that Rilke, one of my first poetic heroes and an enduring one, could be a terrible hypocrite, a lackey of the rich, a cad with women and, worse, with his own wife and daughter, and that he was at times a crude anti-Semite. Where do I fit all that into how much, really limitlessly, I esteem his poetry?
As for the anti-Semitism, it’s all too common. A Jewish poet can forgive Shakespeare Shylock, because of that one heart-rending “Do I not bleed?” speech, but what about Chaucer versifying, poeticizing, a vile anti-Jewish blood libel in The Canterbury Tales, and what about Wordsworth choosing just that section of Chaucer to translate into modern English? And Eliot: besides his not-at-all unspoken disdain for the Jews, in prose and more shockingly in his poems, there’s his cultural elitism, his royalism, and his general social contempt. And what about Yeats, another of my heroes, dabbling with fascism?
And then one has to ask about the truths, the sensitivity, wisdom, and nobility, in so much of the work that these and other great but surely flawed poets have brought forth: do I feel suspicions about that, too? No. I believe everything the poems say, every radiant image they gather, every metaphor they imagine, every nuance of experience they register, believe it all with unquestioning conviction. Yeats of The Tower, singing his magnificent grief at a nation and a world destroying itself; Rilke in The Duino Elegies finding a way to figure human spiritual aspirations in a way they never had been before, and probably never will be again: that particular fusion between an age’s moral desolation and a genius’s transformative brilliance happening twice is almost inconceivable. And Elizabeth Bishop, who drank too much and seemed to love so ineptly, softly recording in the intricate stanzas of “The Moose” the human microcosm, on a bus ride, of all things, that becomes a repository of human longing, resignation, and joy. And William Carlos Williams, whom I heard once on Mike Wallace’s show saying that his friend Pound’s raving anti-Semitic assertions might possibly be plausible: Williams’s “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” his sinuously graceful summation of a complicated marriage, and of the history, private and public, flowers and A-bombs, lived through during that marriage.
Certainly, we shouldn’t be surprised that the voices
that inhabit works of imagination don’t necessarily jibe with the real souls who create them; we can come to feel that the sad fallibilities of even the very greatest need our forgiveness. We all make ourselves up to some extent; perhaps we can learn from the lies and sad self-deceptions of those we admire to define ourselves not by our own illusions and probably inevitable failures of generosity but by our gratitude for all the unlikely gifts the life of art generates for us.
2. SMUT
It had no title, and, as far as I ever knew, no author. As it came into my hand, there was no title page; it was a carbon, on quarter sheets of fragile onionskin paper, clipped together. The original had been typed, which meant in those days by hand, word by word, letter by letter. I suppose it would have been soiled, worn, but I only remember now the sheer miraculousness of it, of its existence, and even more of its having found me.
It’s hard to believe how efficient the system of sexual obliteration actually was in those days; this would be the 1940s. At least as far as I was concerned—I was twelve, living at the edge of a small city—the whole realm of the sexual was something that happened entirely within me, in my body in shame and delight, and in my consciousness in blind secrecy, and an absolute, all but ascetic isolation. There was this thing, about which one inferred auras from comments adults would infrequently mumble to each other; this looming, inchoate alp of experience that evoked among one’s classmates a unique kind of inexplicable, supercilious laughter, and this other thing one felt, not felt really, was taken by, wrenched, colonized by, awake and in sleep, in thought and whatever it is at that age that lurks beneath thought, perhaps in what comes to be what we call “fantasy,” but isn’t that yet, because there are no narratives yet with which to embody it.