At the outset Gilgamesh is a royal monster who takes full advantage of jus primae noctae (the right to sleep with a man’s bride on his wedding night). The gods answer his subjects’ pleas by creating a musclebound wild man, Enkidu, who is soon civilized by the sexual gymnastics of a temple prostitute—this suggests the Fall might have been more interesting if caused not by food but by sex (the original Gilgamesh sometimes reads like Akkadian porn). Enkidu fights the king to a draw and they become great friends; but, after they kill the wizard Humbaba, who guards the famous cedars, and then for good measure the sacred bull of heaven (the heroes are like two WWF wrestlers on a tear), the gods decide that as punishment Enkidu must die. Afterward, in mourning, and in terror at his own mortality, Gilgamesh travels to the underworld; but the herb of youth he brings back is stolen by a snake. (The relations between Gilgamesh and Old Testament myths are a minor scholarly industry.) He must then prepare for his own death.
Hines will do most anything to get the reader’s attention—though not as much as Logue, who introduced helicopters to the weaponry available in the Iliad. Point of view descends from on high to the common grunt; and the language has, not the priestly rhythms of a poem once sung to a lyre or intoned like prayer, not the panoply of tedious repetitions, but the density of modern poetry.
Euphrates’ airy, fish-woven halls,
a sleep of reed beds, the éclat of date palms,
wind-glossed corn. And in the distance
desert—the sun’s loose gunpowder.
Green rolls up
and rasps along it like a tongue
wetting sandpaper.
Hines makes vivid what might have died as a dusty footnote: his temple prostitutes strut like fashion models, “striding down / the cat-walk of Uruk’s high street / in the designer gowns of Paradise.” The night is “soft-mouthed as a gundog,” the sound of ghosts drinking blood like that of “surgical tape ripped off skin”; and a goddess “pulses into focus before him: // breasts taut as airships / from hangars nosing.” The mannerisms are the manner here, but line by line you have a poem hauled fresh from the sands again.
Such radical revision loses much the old epic had to offer; yet even the King James Bible, with its learned committee of translators, had to make occasional accommodation to its own world, if it was not to lose the meat with the method. Indeed, it would have been interesting to see what the committee would have done with Gilgamesh, written in the same broad culture that produced the Old Testament and scattered with parallels to the Bible, including its own version of the Flood, which Hines unfortunately omits.
It’s disconcerting to have a Gilgamesh who plays backgammon and drinks ouzo, who dresses in silks and apparently suffers the attentions of paparazzi; but then it is disconcerting to read in a history of Babylon that in 600 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar asphalted the streets. The past is stranger than we imagine; if a translation like Gilgamesh does not get us closer to the past as it was, it gets us closer to something almost more important—the past that must exist continually in the present. If you want Juvenal, you don’t go to Johnson—you go to Johnson to see what the eighteenth century made of the second, what post-Augustan London thought of post-Augustan Rome. At best you find that the modern teases out some nuance asleep in the old lines, like Hines’s evocation of Gilgamesh waiting for death, “swallowing this fist of fear in a quayside cafe / beside these old men / like rows of buttons waiting to be undone.” When men try to update Shakespeare, what they usually get is Bowdler; when they try to modernize Homer’s Achilles, they get Brad Pitt (Logue’s Iliad, though scrappy and intermittently awful, is a fine exception). We are fortunate to have a new version of Gilgamesh that makes the ancient world another world altogether.
By contrast, Stephen Mitchell’s earnest, forelock-tugging new version of the epic is homely as a mud fence, which shows how fidelity can make this gaudy and musclebound artifact merely workmanlike. Mitchell’s translation, which has a longwinded high-schooler’s introduction, drags a heavy sledge of notes; and his attempt at four-stress accentual meter is a foot-dragging failure. If you want the incidents Hines cuts in his fast-forward version and some of the nuances (or even contradictions) of behavior, you have to read Mitchell: in the original, Gilgamesh beats Enkidu in their wrestling match, and no army accompanies them in the attack on Humbaba, who is a terrible monster, not some distant ancestor of the Wizard of Oz. The beautiful Babylonian tale of the Flood is here, as is the full story of Gilgamesh in the underworld, which he reaches by ship, using three hundred punting poles! Though Mitchell’s is more cheerfully vulgar than previous versions, other than those in Latin, he has no particular gift for language. His Gilgamesh might have been better translated by a team of U.N. bureaucrats.
Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott’s The Prodigal is a valedictory book, the long poem of a man who has seen the world and been left with a handful of airline-ticket stubs. For half a century Walcott has been one of the great stylists of English verse, in an age when style has been more and more a badge of shame, when sentences grow ever shorter and the confession of sins ever longer. The poem begins as a whistle-stop tour of cities and countries, dashing through Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts, flitting now to Zermatt and Geneva, now Florence and Abruzzi, Pescara and Genoa, then to Spain, Germany, America again, Colombia, all before the poem is half spent—it’s hard to keep track without an itinerary and a GPS device. This is a book of transit, of voluntary exile, of almost pathological restlessness, the travel conducted with a bored melancholy that infuses even the poet’s wandering eye, for this is also a book of erotic liaisons, sly glances, closet desires—in short, of wanting to screw anything that walks. As a man ages, his romantic opportunities shorten with his odds. Walcott seems at times a character in Henry James, waiting and waiting for his moment, until he realizes the moment has passed.
The prodigal son “wasted his substance with riotous living,” according to St. Luke, but at last returned home to be feted as someone dead returned to life. The divided racial heritage of St. Lucia, Walcott’s home island, shadows his uncomfortable and wary relation to the traditions of English poetry. To what extent, his poems have asked, is a man born in the colonies a traitor if he adopts the language and literature of his masters? Walcott has instead become a “vague pilgrim,” never at home even at home, a man for whom all frontiers become one.
The poet has never flinched from what he saw as his duty to the tradition; reading his long, elaborate sentences is like watching a master goldsmith fashion a coronation crown and decorate it with rubies, diamonds, and amethysts in bold array.
Chasms and fissures of the vertiginous Alps
through the plane window, meadows of snow
on powdery precipices, the cantons of cumuli
grumbling or closing, gasping falls of light
a steady and serene white-knuckled horror
of speckled white serrations, inconceivable
in repetition, spumy avalanches
of forgetting cloud, in the wrong heaven …
Cantons of cumuli! The passage is lovely, but the sentence is scarcely begun. On and on it goes—in this new book Walcott does what he has always done, except now he overdoes it with an old man’s desperation. The figures are as boldly formed as ever; but when reading them you think, “Didn’t a bird arrow by just a few pages ago? Hasn’t Walcott often described the ocean as like tinfoil or glistening water as like minted coins? Haven’t the island days often been compared to hot zinc?” The sentences seem endless; and, if the reader on occasion gets tangled in their complex syntax, so at times does the writer.
This long poem reads like a pendant to Walcott’s precocious verse autobiography Another Life (1973), published when he was just forty-three. (The Prodigal is what the poet of Dove Cottage might have called The Postlude.) Walcott is remarkably honest about his priapic instincts (he even manages to give a woman soldier his bedroom gaze), though he succeeds only in making himself ridiculous:
/> Past the stalagmites of the Duomo
the peaches of summer are bouncing
on the grids of the Milanese sidewalks
in halters cut close to the coccyx.
I look and no longer sigh for the impossible,
panting over a cupidinous coffee
like an old setter that has stopped chasing pigeons.
The peaches of summer? Oh, you think, he means breasts. But what is that setter doing panting over a cupidinous coffee? Too often, as the cities come and go like buses, the poem lounges there, drowsy and fractured, the buttery lines of Walcott’s descriptions so rich they’re worse than a diet of chocolate icing. Besieged by the deaths of strangers, of friends, of family, the poet already feels like a “name cut on a wall that soon / from the grime of indifference became indecipherable.” This has the doomed grace of lines by Keats; but then it’s back to the flood of purple passages, the gouts of adjectives and fatty verbs, until the poem becomes a kind of numbing mad mutter. There was a time when Walcott gave his style point, a time when his poems didn’t just finger his memories like fragments of the True Cross.
Czeslaw Milosz
The death of Czeslaw Milosz at the age of ninety-three deprived us of one of the most interesting exiles of the twentieth century. Born in Lithuania to a Polish family that once owned great estates, as a boy he traveled with his parents across Russia and Siberia (his father was a highway engineer for the czar’s army). After university he lived in Paris, where he came under the influence of his uncle Oscar, a French poet of an eschatological and mystical temper. (Milosz notes wryly that, when he received the Nobel, some French newspapers wrote “that it had been given to the wrong Milosz.”) During World War II, the young poet served as a radio operator, after the fall of Poland living in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, where he wrote for the resistance. He later became a minor diplomat in Washington and then in Paris, where he sought political asylum in 1951. From 1960 he taught at Berkeley, though not until the late sixties were translations of his poetry available in English.
Being an exile under such conditions hardly compares to the banishment of Ovid to the Black Sea; yet Milosz’s poetry, darkened by war and memories of the Holocaust, more and more took on an elegiac cast, until in this book he is surrounded by throngs of ghosts, like Odysseus in the underworld. The question that troubles him is the source of evil. As a skeptical believer, a Christian with a rational tongue (his faith tended to be sturdy but gentle, unlike Emily Dickinson’s barely controlled passions and distastes), he could not help echoing the Epicureans: “If God is all-powerful, he can allow all this only if he is not good.” This made his poems a fruitless search for redemption and consolation.
The poems in Second Space at times seem muted by their journey from Polish. For the latter part of his career, the poet was fortunate to have as his translator the talented Robert Hass, whose own poetic gifts allow him to ride herd on Milosz’s work without feeling it necessary to put his brand on every line. The best of the poems offer visions with a retrospective burden:
An English horn, a drum, a viola making music
In a house on a hill amidst forests in autumn.
A large view from there onto bends of the river.
I still want to correct this world,
Yet I think mostly of them, and they have all died.
Also about their unknown country.
Its geography, says Swedenborg, cannot be transferred to maps.
Translation, if we’re lucky, leads us out of the conventions and proprieties in which our own poetry is mired (poetry in another language suffers conventions, too; but at least they’re not ours). A poem in translation is like a newspaper report of a ballet—the only thing lost is the dance. Even when a translation has been cast in the same form, it may have different weight or bearing—Dante’s terza rima is nothing like terza rima in English. It’s surprising, therefore, how much of Milosz’s personality—his scratchy wit, his wry pessimism, his joviality (“I should be dead already, but there is work to do”)—comes through the baffles and cofferdams of English. For the poor translator, finding the equivalents for a foreign language can be like wandering through a fabric store trying to match the pattern of the sofa Aunt Matilda reupholstered in 1937.
The shorter poems here often consult rather than confront problems of faith and belief—they’re mild-mannered, meditative poems that perhaps wish to be darker and danker. The book ends with four long poems, two so tangled in religious themes they’re like cats lost in a great ball of yarn. The others cut deeper into conscience, one a portrait of Uncle Oscar, the depressive romantic who once shot himself in the heart but survived to become an honored French poet. Belabored with footnotes, which prove surprisingly helpful in setting the poem in history and explaining references that might otherwise be lost (opacity is rarely a virtue in translation), the poem is an homage to a great spirit, the “master of alchemy” from whom Milosz received his sense of vocation. As the younger poet counts his debts, the poem turns rather dry and Swedenborgian, echoing the only rational thing one can say about the past (as well as the only irrational thing), Goethe’s words: “Respect! Respect! Respect!”
The final poem opens with a witty portrait of Orpheus at the gates of hell:
Standing on flagstones of the sidewalk at the entrance to Hades
Orpheus hunched in a gust of wind
That tore at his coat, rolled past in waves of fog,
Tossed the leaves of the trees. The headlights of cars
Flared and dimmed in each succeeding wave.
Here the problems of faith and trust that have harried Milosz find their way to antique myth. For a man who seemed to hear footsteps behind him most of his life, there is a terrible pathos when Orpheus turns, having led Eurydice almost out of hell, and no one is there.
Verse Chronicle
The Great American Desert
John Ashbery
John Ashbery was born when Pola Negri was still box office, yet his poems are more in touch with the American demotic—the tongue most of us speak and few of us write—than any near-octogenarian has a right to be. He has published more than a thousand pages in the last fifteen years, almost twice as many as Wallace Stevens wrote in half a century—and Stevens was no slouch. Ashbery’s poems are like widgets manufactured to the most peculiar specifications and in such great numbers the whole world widget market has collapsed.
Where Shall I Wander (a title lifted from the nursery rhyme “Goosey, goosey, gander”) begins with a typical piece of Ashberyian folderol:
We were warned about spiders, and the occasional famine.
We drove downtown to see our neighbors. None of them were home.
We nestled in yards the municipality had created,
reminisced about other, different places—
but were they? Hadn’t we known it all before?
Ashbery’s poems revel in such intimations of disaster (they’re a tease without a strip), a disaster curiously similar to the nameless wars and borders and betrayals of Auden’s early poems. In the middle of these Egyptlike plagues, punctuated by small touches of absurdity and big doses of nonsense, the reader may wake wondering if he hasn’t read this poem before. Almost all Ashbery’s poems, those dead-ends of deja vu, offer the dream of meaning endlessly deferred—the deception finally becomes the expectation. “There’s a sucker born every minute,” said a banker involved in the hoax of the Cardiff giant, and in Ashbery there’s a sucker born every line.
When the contract between writer and reader is so fragile, the poet can pretend to fulfill it with no more than the chaff and loose ends of sentences, fragments that never grow up to be wholes. In general, the more of Ashbery there is, the less there is (the worst poems here are prosy and interminable). Much of the book, despite its local fireworks, is the exhausted repetition of his old vaudeville routines:
Attention, shoppers. From within the inverted
commas of a strambotto, seditious whispering
wat
ermarks this time of day. Time to get out
and, as they say, about. Becalmed on a sea
of inner stress, sheltered from cold northern breezes,
idly we groove: Must have
been the time before this, when we all moved
in schools, a finny tribe, and this way
and that the caucus raised its din.
And so on and on. Here we have the embrace of American idiom, whether high-stepping or lowbrowed (Ashbery’s range is as broad as Whitman’s), the steep descent of tone, the enjambment almost as flirtatious as Milton’s. Ashbery offers some things few other poets do (including the patented double take and stop-on-a-dime volte-face) while being incapable of offering what most think absolutely necessary. This makes him not just a slapstick artist for our fallen times—no, it means that when you read Ashbery you have to forget much of what you know about reading poetry. You have to take satisfaction where pleasures are rarely given and never let yourself wish for what isn’t there. (There’s so much that isn’t there.) Ashbery undermines many of the axioms on which poetry rests—he’s smiling, not like Carroll’s cat, but like Schrodinger’s, neither dead nor alive but always already both.
Some of the most engaging passages here comment archly on parties or clothes. They make you wish that, instead of writing poems like a man with an attention-deficit disorder, Ashbery were capable of writing a novel as long as Remembrance of Things Past. Though sometimes it’s a perverse pleasure to see large issues reduced to candy floss, there’s a devious moral world, largely untapped, beneath his nonsense—Ashbery is a man not afraid to write whatever rattles into his head (if he had an internal censor, one logical as a lawyer, he’d lose all that devil-may-care charm). Alas, it’s no use asking this poet to be something he isn’t—and sometimes no use trying to like the something he is. When you read his poems, you sigh with pleasure to see a thing so odd done with such panache, such savoir-faire, such élan, such … well, whatever the word is, it would be French, in order to apply to that ultimate boulevardier of American poetry, Mr. Ashbery.
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