Category: Poets and poetry

It’s almost axiomatic that any poetry that relies too heavily on word-play for its effect can’t be translated. I remember my brother marveling at the elaborate double-meanings in Kalidasa when he was learning Sanskrit: lengthy passages could have two, completely different meanings depending on how one reads them. According to poet and translator John Balaban’s Introduction to Spring Essence, something similar is going on in the poems of the 18th-century Vietnamese courtesan Ho Xuan Huong (sorry, I’m not doing the diacritical marks!). Since a syllable in Vietnamese can have up to six different tones, each with a different meaning, the possibilities for imperfect puns are correspondingly large. And in Ho’s work, “These second meanings, and phrase reversals, or noi lai, are usually obscene.”

I think it’s very much to Balaban’s credit that he manages to convey something of these double entendres through a combination of suggestive imagery and informative endnotes. The resulting poems often feature panoramas of erotically charged natural imagery. I also thought the mountains in traditional East Asian landscape paintings looked phallic; evidently Ho thought so too.

A twisting pine bough plunges in the wind,
showering a willow’s leaves with glistening drops.

Gentlemen, lords, who could refuse, though weary
and shaky in his knees, to mount once more?

The author herself was a fascinating figure, one of the most skillful poets of her day, who somehow got away with tackling forbidden subjects like sex and corruption in a repressive, Confucian society. In one especially risqué poem, “Swinging,” she capitalizes on the fact that the word for “swing” and the word for “copulate” are virtually identical — and the translator in turn gets to take advantage of the double meaning of “swinging” in American English.

A boy pumps, then arcs his back.
The shapely girl shoves up her hips.

Four pink trousers flapping hard,
two pairs of legs side by side.

Spring games. Who hasn’t known them?
Swingposts removed, the holes lie empty.

Not all the poems are about sex, though — or if they are, it wasn’t obvious to me. In almost all cases, Balaban makes the surface meanings appealing; what’s unusual is that he didn’t stop there. And the publisher matched his efforts with its own, getting special typefaces made to reproduce the two Vietnamese versions, one being the obsolete Nom writing system, which Balaban wanted because some of Ho’s puns are visual, relying on the similarities between the Chinese character-derived Nom graphemes.

What I’m trying to say is that the book is a treat for readers of every interest level, from the most casual to the most scholarly. Two or three of the Amazon customer reviews by people fluent in Vietnamese criticize the translations, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t. Even without the puns, accurately reproducing the complexities of highly formal verse in another language is a fool’s errand. None of the critics offers a specific example of a passage that they would translate differently.

In my response to Du Fu the other day, I suggested that it was no longer true that “the state goes to ruin, but mountains and rivers survive.” Writing during a similarly chaotic period of political upheavals a thousand years later, Ho Xuan Huong offers a very different estimation of what endures, and what other precious thing is fated to collapse:

A bell is tolling, tolling, fading
just like love. Only poetry remains.

(I’m reading a book a day for National Poetry Month. Click on the book cover to go to its page in Open Library.)

These poems are so good, they almost make me want to watch a baseball game. But why read a book of baseball poems if I’m not a fan of the sport? Well, for one thing, Maddox is a Central Pennsylvania poet, and I wanted to get to know her work better. And I’m interested in tightly focused poetry chapbooks, having just published one of my own. People who know little about tools claim to have enjoyed my tool odes, and I was curious to see if I’d find these baseball poems similarly engaging.

I found I did, largely because of the abundant word-music. I was hooked from the second line, “their limbs limber with summer.” And at least half the poems didn’t require more than a casual knowledge of the game, as in “Readying the Field,” which begins,

His tractor tugs dirt in a circle,
combs through clods as solid as baseballs,
then hoes the whole again,
signaling the mound a bull’s eye.
Only then does he tip
his stare to the square
diamond, smooth all earth
between home and first.

Maddox keeps things lively by varying the contents as much as possible, and her family connection to a pivotal event in baseball and civil rights history — her great-uncle was the Dodgers general manager who signed Jackie Robinson — adds an additional layer of interest. She also lives in Williamsport, home of the Little League World Series, so of course there’s a poem about that, too. Other unique takes on the sport include “Baseball at the Historical Village,” “The All-American Girls’ Professional Baseball League,” “The Babe’s Babes,” and “Patron Saints of Baseball,” the opening poem, which assigns Catholic saints to the various positions. Maddox even captures the giddy anticipation of the season in “The Calm Before”:

Between hands, the shifting tip
of sky chatters, rattles, taps its bebop of a ball
into something large. There is nothing
to say that can’t wait for spectators
that may not come. These nights,
practice swings at our world
with a whoosh and misses
nothing.

The collection ends with the multi-part “Rules of the Game,” which lost me more often than not, though I was curious enough to look up the unfamiliar terms on Wikipedia. I had no idea, for example, that there were so many ways of, and reasons for, sliding into base. And I was captivated by the contrast between “The Pop-Up” and “The Sacrifice Bunt,” the first a “disastrous beauty,” the second a graceless yet gracious maneuver in which

humility makes the hero
squaring off to fail his own trail to base.
He entices the ball with his bat,
kills it with a tap,
shoves the coveted corpse
part way to first.

Of course, the real test of a book of poems on any specialized subject is whether it can draw out universal lessons without straining too hard or hitting the reader over the head. In poem after poem, When the Wood Clacks Out Your Name shows how to do it right, as in the closing stanzas of “The Pitch”:

Snap here for a fastball,
here for a curve,
cut your fingernails square
for a knuckler, that pigeon
flapping awkwardly
out the barn door of a hand.

Never let the eyes tell
the fingers’ deception,
the plans of the palm,
deep-secret mathematics
shooting great lengths
from arm to plate.

Sounds like good advice for poets, too, somehow.

(I’m reading a book a day for National Poetry Month. Click on the book cover to go to its page in Open Library.)

The ancestors have returned in their white skins to the New Guinea highlands and strain the rivers for the golden grains of their bones. Or perhaps these are descendents of the white-skinned giant who slept with his daughter and fled the land out of shame. They carry lightning in a stick. Reading this, I am reminded that I once was yang guezi, foreign devil, in the frightened eyes of a boy from a civilization centuries more sophisticated than my own.

I make a list of the words that are not here: primitive Stone Age heathen superstition, and the words that are: knife sorcerer taro mountain spear spirits pig. Worldviews blend and merge in the imagination of the missionaries’ boy, this Aaron who identifies with the smooth-talking Aaron in the Bible, who merely threw gold in the fire, he said, and out came bull. Myths from the desert mingle with myths from the forest. His father goes between two sides in a local conflict and tries to make men love their brothers, while he and the other boys play war with fern stalks for spears. “We kill, are killed, so often in these games.” A rusting cockpit suspended in a treetop, the Rising Sun still visible on its side, bears witness to wider, more brutal wars.

I read: “when the blade slits/ its throat and the pig’s blood is poured// into yours, rise and fill its shuddering flesh/ with your life.” I put the book down to start making supper and promptly slice open my thumb while peeling a potato. It’s a shallow cut, and I don’t feel like pausing to put on a bandage. I let blood drip into the stew — who will notice? But the cut burns when I touch it to the slab of venison.

It’s hard to believe this is the author’s first book. He writes with great delicacy and precision, leaves the obvious lessons implicit, and avoids melodrama and gratuitous exoticism. This vision of a very different culture seems natural, for whose childhood memories don’t become impossibly distant with age? And as children almost all of us believed in magic to some extent, so when, for instance, Aaron’s friend tells him that “evil sorcery brought up the bees” that stung him, that doesn’t seem so unfamiliar, and even the cure — caking him in mud to draw out the sting — is something I can imagine doing myself as a kid, especially when his friend takes it to an extreme and coats Aaron’s entire body with mud.

Meugle crouches,
amazed at the work of his hands

as the mudman dances, impervious to pain—

and I can’t tell if this is white or black magic,
his gestures to summon or ward me away.

On the other hand, this is not an extensively end-noted book, so unless you happen to be well versed in the ethnographic literature on New Guinea highlanders, some of it is bound to go over your head as it did over mine. But for me, this is like taking an intensive language class taught total-immersion style: just a thin thread of comprehension is enough. I reach into my right ear and extract a small round black hard thing.

(I’m reading a book a day for National Poetry Month. Click on the book cover to go to its page in Open Library.)

The unknown child bending the map at my mother’s bedside, this map of skin in my father’s silver boat, before some music and desire limn the body’s mercator: miracles enough. Dog days snow toward January, and I fly to my father in late August on the Kenai Peninsula, 2 a.m.

If I loved him it would be this way, my angel: reeling in a skate on Kachemak Bay, daguerreotype, light made from nothing. Laudamus, soul suite: why I decided to be born. Now and then, Scheherazade and the lost order Lepidoptera ghost hunger for an inner harbor at the Rio Grande gorge, Eden in the rearview mirror.

The foregoing paragraphs consist entirely of the titles in the table of contents to Eden in the Rearview Mirror, rearranged and supplemented by just a few small connector words. Perhaps this is too light-hearted an exercise for a book of such power and quiet beauty, but it does demonstrate at least how rich a table Elbe sets for the feast that follows. If it leaves you hungry for more, I’ll be featuring a conversation with her next Tuesday on the Woodrat podcast.

(I’m reading a book a day for National Poetry Month. Click on the book cover to go to its page in Open Library.)

Spoof or homage? The poet herself confesses she isn’t sure. And what if her initial guesses about the thing floating in the river (bouy, plastic object, last summer’s melon) had been correct? It wouldn’t matter. The act of recognition is decisive — we relive it everytime we call someone or something by their name. But what if, Purpura wonders, the bedraggled vagrant one invites into one’s home turns out in the morning to be the king, going about in disguise to take the measure of his subjects? This folktale is key to my own understanding of the book. Hospitality always involves a balance between homage and spoof, between worship and make-believe. No matter how outlandish the guest, one has to keep a straight face.

I’ve never read a book where the cover photo was so essential to comprehension, though a few of the features mentioned in this odd cycle of hymns cannot be seen, nor of course can we hear the thing. (We are told it rattles when shook.) King or baby? Ancestor, I’m thinking, but the poet never directly mentions this possibility. She does see it as a role model of sorts: “Oh, let me be odd in my surroundings.”

Her own origins are only probed toward the end of the book: “Often I assemble myself/ back at the beginning,” and a poem later:

Where was I going
before all the trees,
breathing and fallen,
made, with the river,
the day I’m in now
and the tasks it requires…

And then three poems from the end, she asks, “Do I hasten things by saying?/ Am I that terrible child?”

Her son originally spotted the icon they came to call King Baby in the river on the coldest day of the year, and she pulled it out and carried it inside to thaw. So we do have this origin tale, retold often, plus another, more speculative one about a marketplace for tourists. Then too, over the course of the book, a long, cold spring arrives, and I’m thinking: a new year is always represented as a baby in the cartoons. Purpura quotes Nabokov:

The spiral
is a spiritualized circle.
In the spiral form, the circle,
uncoiled, unwound,
has ceased to be vicious.
It has been set free.

She quotes this in a different context, but it applies to the turning of the seasons better than anything, I think. Re-reading the poems today, I’m struck by their spatial and temporal grounding. What might have I found and brought home this winter? What made thing or found object among my collection might even now be waiting for its song, unrecognized mouth ajar?

(I’m reading a book a day for National Poetry Month. Click on the book cover to go to its page in Open Library.)