REVIEWS

Luis de Góngora: The Solitudes: A Dual-Language Edition with ParallelText. Translated by Edith Grossman with an Introduction by AlbertoManguel. Pp. xxiv + 149. London: Penguin, 2011. Hb £20.

With the circulation in manuscript of his Soledades (1613), Luisde Góngora y Argote (1561–1627) became the chief avatar of asophisticated, difficult, frequently extravagant style that, rightly ornot, has come to emblemize Spanish Baroque poetry. Derided byLope de Vega, Quevedo, and Jáuregui for writing ‘pestilential’ poetry,but defended by a host of commentators as ‘the Andalucian Pindar’,Góngora in these poems tests the possibilities of lyric language in waysthat exhaust the Renaissance tradition mastered by Garcilaso and thatanticipate modernist, experimental verse. The Soledades are riddledwith Latinate diction, elliptical allusions (especially to classical myth),extended periphrases, bold hyperbatons, self-conscious hyperboles,and, above all, metaphors that serve less as ornaments and more assemantic building blocks for ingenious, elaborate conceits. Further, thesilva, a metre that alternates lines of seven and eleven syllables withouta fixed strophic pattern or rhyme scheme, gives these poems greatformal latitude. Briefly put, Góngora’s use (or abuse) of the stylisticresources of classical rhetoric and poetics works to cultivate admirationat how language itself, freed from decorum’s constraints, can produceaesthetic marvels.

Still, this is not l’art pour l’art. Góngora defends his style in the‘Carta en respuesta’ by invoking St Augustine’s praise of difficulty inScripture for provoking ‘sweet’ spiritual labour. At respectively 1091and 979 lines, the two Soledades hang on a threadbare plot tracing theerrant via of a spurned Petrarchan lover, the pilgrim, through first asylvan landscape where shepherds and their ways provide the poetwith his material, and then a litoral one, where fishing and falconryspur his invention. Thus for all their rhetorical ingenuity whereby the

Translation and Literature, 22 (2013), 111–48© Edinburgh University Presswww.euppublishing.com/tal

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literal is made figurative and the ordinary becomes extraordinary, thesepoems, written from Góngora’s self-imposed exile in the Andaluciancountryside, overflow also with quotidian objects and realities. As such,they variously represent as well the moral dangers associated with theCourt and the Spanish colonial enterprise.

Given their enormous difficulty (and despite their canonical placein Spanish letters), the Soledades have rarely found English translators.Thomas Stanley offered a paraphrastic version, in rhyming couplets, ofthe Soledad primera in 1651. Buried, though, in a volume of translationsranging from Anacreon to Marino, it had little afterlife. Centuries later,with the encouragement of F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot, E. M. Wilsontranslated both Soledades. First published in 1931, lightly revised andreprinted in 1965 with a dedication to Dámaso Alonso and WilliamEmpson, Wilson’s text is at once scrupulously literal and weirdly,deliberately, archaic in its diction and syntax. Its rhymes also roughlymatch Góngora’s, though they do so less rigorously than GilbertCunningham’s translation (privately printed in Scotland also in 1965!),which valiantly if not always felicitously mimics Góngora’s silvas.

Now, in the last several years, two further attempts have beenmade. ‘Eliminating or replacing a few of the classical or mythologicalreferences and sometimes making substantial changes to the orderin which ideas and images are presented’, John Dent-Young ‘freely’translates the Soledad primera in his Selected Poems of Luis de Góngora(2007). Eschewing end-rhyme, Dent-Young’s ‘First Solitude’ vividlyappeals to contemporary readers. Edith Grossman likewise largelysacrifices rhyme in her splendid versions of both Solitudes; remarkably,however, she also endeavours to ‘duplicate’ the metre (p. ix). And,in the event, her efforts to keep the metre, line breaks, and thus thesyntactical units intact are luminously successful. Just as admirably,her interpretations of the poems’ myriad meanings enable the Englishreader to tread nearly all the semantic and metaphoric labyrinths thathave won Góngora such copious praise and blame.

In Why Translation Matters (2010), Grossman contends that the trans-lator should aim above all to create a ‘context’ in which the author’s‘intention’, be it that of Cervantes, García Márquez, Nicanor Parra, orother writers she has translated, can be gleaned. Indeed, her Solitudesmasterfully construct their own contexts – a task made still more cru-cial by how her self-referential source texts tirelessly vary and amplifythe same words, images, and conceits. So, for instance, we are able totrace the errant ‘steps’ (pasos), which belong to the poet as well as tothe poems’ protagonist, the shipwrecked pilgrim (peregrino), as theymove through pastoral scenes in the First Solitude to piscatory ones in

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the Second Solitude. These ‘steps’ begin immediately in the dedicatoryverses:

Pasos de un peregrino son errantecuantos me dictó versos dulce Musaen soledad confusaperdidos unos, otros inspirados.

(Ded., 1–4)

Steps of a wandering pilgrim are these,the verses my sweet muse dictated to me:

in perplexing solitudesome lost, yet others enlivened and inspired.

The translation finely recreates the euphony of ‘Pasos . . . perdidos’with ‘Steps . . . some’, even if it ignores the hyperbaton in the first lineand pads, presumably to keep the metre, the fourth line. Still, suchpadding is the exception rather than the rule, as generally Grossmanshows great care not to further diffuse or obscure Góngora’s verse.Thus, while ‘errante’ is translated here as ‘wandering’, and later‘errantes pasos’ (Ded., 31) become ‘errant steps’, she preserves theconnotation of ‘pasos’ as metrical feet when she renders ‘pie acertado’in the same line as ‘unerring foot’. In this manner, the active readercan become complicit in Góngora’s self-conscious semantic errancy ashe exhausts the limits of Renaissance lyric expression and confuses thedistinctions between words and things.

For the remainder of this review, then, I would focus on anotherexemplary word-thing, espumoso(a)/espuma, as it, too, runs throughoutthe Solitudes and, more to the point, vividly illustrates the challengesfaced and largely met in Grossman’s translation. In the dedicatoryverses, Góngora lauds his patron’s hunting skills by figuring the bloodof dying ‘beasts’ in a river as ‘foaming coral’ (‘espumoso coral’, Ded.,12). Then, in the First Solitude, the adjective propels a straightforwardhyperbole used to condemn the foolish audacity of mariners who,to satisfy their greed, brave the sea and its ‘foaming mountains’(‘montañas espumosas’, 437). Another instance of the adjective, onedecried by some contemporary commentators, unfortunately does notsurvive translation. Here Grossman also uncharacteristically swervesfrom Góngora’s imagery and syntax:

Próspera, al fin, mas no espumosa tanto,vuestra fortuna sea,que alimenten la Invidia en nuestra aldeaáspides más que en la región del llanto.

(1.926–9)

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May your fortunes prosper, butbe not so lush that in our village more aspsfeed on envy than in the pit of woe.

While ‘pit of woe’ nicely captures ‘región del llanto’, in choosing ‘lush’over ‘foamy’ (or ‘spumy’), Grossman briefly breaks Góngora’s semanticchain. Perhaps, though, the notion of ‘foamy fortune’ was as distastefulas to her as it was for a handful of Góngora’s first readers.

Meanwhile, the noun espuma occurs numerous times in the FirstSolitude. Here it works in consort with other vivid images describingthe pilgrim’s shipwreck:

By Ocean first gulped down, by Ocean swallowedand then vomited, spat out

not far from the reef rising from the seacrowned with dry weeds and rushes, still warm feathers [‘calientes plumas’]

– all seaweed and ocean spume [‘alga todo y espumas’] –he found refuge in the place where Jupiter’s

favored raptor built a nest.(22–8)

The pilgrim as ‘ocean spume’ is a neat metonymy (or metalepsis) notonly for the voyages of discovery and their baleful consequences, butalso for his amorous failures at Court. For if the pilgrim, like Odysseusshipwrecked on the shores of Phaeacia, is a refugee from epic, he isalso the constant object of Góngora’s allusive play. As John Beverelyhas noted, the rhyme of ‘plumas’ and ‘espumas’ looks forward to thelast lines of the First Solitude where Aphrodite, the goddess ‘born ofthe foam’ (aphrogeneia) is invoked: ‘the daughter of the foam prepareda field | of swan feathers for the battles of love’ (‘bien previno lahija de la espuma | a batallas de amor campo de pluma’). Yet it alsolooks backward to ‘Arion’ and the ‘dolphin’ (14, 18), an animal sacredto Venus, and who here stands in for the ‘slender plank’ that savesthe drowning pilgrim. Thus by mining myth and metaphor, and bytranslating it from an epic to a lyric frame, the poet transforms the‘ocean spume’.

In the Second Solitude, the pilgrim returns to the litoral, not toventure on the open sea again, but to experience, seemingly, a moremediated, less extreme version of the same. Here espuma, translatedalternately as ‘foam’ or ‘spume’, may be said to emblemize Góngora’sentire poetic enterprise. Early in the poem Neptune is ‘crowned inwhite algae, wreathéd in green foam’ (espuma verde, 26). This mythicassociation is then marvellously supplemented by an elaborate conceit

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involving two small fishing boats:

Aquél, las ondas escarchando, vuela;éste, con perezoso movimiento,el mar encuentra, cuya espuma canasu parda aguda proraresplandeciente cuellohace de augusta Coya peruana,a quien hilos el Sur tributó cientode perlas cada hora.Lágrimas no enjugó más de la Aurorasobre víolas negras la mañana,que arrolló su espolón con pompa vanacaduco aljófar, pero aljófar bello.

(61–72)

The first flies, frosting the waves;the second, in an indolent motion meets

the sea, whose white-colored foammakes of its dark slender prowthe bright resplendent throat

of an august Coya, empress of Peru,to whom the Southern Sea rendered each hour

one hundred strands of pearls.The morning dried no more of Aurora’s tears

shed on black violetsthan the pearls, fleeting but beautiful pearls

overridden and crushed bythe cutwater in vain show.

By virtue of a complex analogic chain, which links ‘foam’ to ‘throat’to ‘pearls’ to ‘tears’ (i.e. dew) back to ‘pearls’ again, the violenceof the Conquest is artfully displaced even as the conquered issubtly eroticized. Moving from an exotic, historical referent to amythic one (‘Coya’ > ‘Aurora’), Góngora both renews and eclipses theimagery of the celebrated navigation-‘exkursus’ in the Soledad primera(366–502) where he sceptically figures the costs of empire. Further,as ‘espuma cana’ becomes ‘espolón’, which Grossman neatly turnsinto ‘cutwater’, evanescent emblems of the Baroque, ‘pearls, fleetingbut beautiful pearls’, emerge. (It is widely accepted that the term‘Baroque’ is derived from the name of a ‘misshapen pearl’.) Here,too, we have the desengaño (disillusionment) so central to Baroquepsychology and epistemology: for all the beauty of the imageryand the sophisticated play of the conceits, the strophe’s final notesuggests that all is, as Grossman has it, a ‘vain show’. And while

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the translation loses some euphony, needs to amplify to save themetre (‘overridden and crushed’ for ‘arrolló’), and sacrifices thehyperbatons of ‘vuela’ and ‘hace’, it deftly saves all the metaphorics andimagery.

A subsequent strophe (2.137–43), in reconfiguring the Icarus myth,adds a still darker tint to the espuma theme while deepening, too, thethemes of audacity and overreaching that riddle the poems:

Audaz mi pensamientoel Cenit escaló, plumas vestido,cuyo vuelo atrevido,si no ha dado su nombre a tus espumas,de sus vestidas plumasconserverán el desvanecimientolos anales diáfanos del viento.

With audacity my thoughtscaled the heights, clad in feathers,whose daring incautious flight

– if it has not given thy foam its name –of its well-feathered raiment

the diaphanous annals of windwill perserve the vanishment.

Grossman deftly mimics the spatial and temporal movements graphedby Góngora’s syntax, even if perforce the conceit yoking ‘plumas’(‘feathers’ but also ‘pens’) and ‘los anales’ is occluded. Another loss issignalled by the the striking ‘vanishment’. OED cites three nineteenth-century instances wherein it is synonymous with ‘disappearance’. The1732 Diccionario de Autoridades, however, gives ‘desvanecimiento’ apurely ethical meaning (‘vanidad, presunción, altaneria, sobérbia’),which it traces back to the Latin ‘vanitas.’

A still greater challenge is the metaphoric, metamorphizing,serpentine description of ‘una fuente’, which Grossman renders as both‘fountain’ (2.315) and ‘stream’, though only the latter makes sense inthe context:

Ella pues sierpe, y sierpe al fin pisada,(aljófar vomitando fugitivoen lugar de veneno),torcida esconde, ya que no enroscada,las flores que de un parto dio lascivoaura fecunda al matizado senodel huerto, en cuyos troncos se desatade las escamas que vistió de plata.

(2.320–7)

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A serpent, after all, a trodden serpent– spewing short-lived pearls instead of poison –twisting and hiding, when it is not coiled,the flowers that fecund dawn joyously birthedin the shaded bosom of the orchard

among whose trunks it lets goof the silver scales it wore.

Commenting on these and subsequent lines, Góngora’s contemporarySalcedo Coronel writes: ‘It does not seem to me that there is anythingmore worthy of esteem in all these Solitudes than these verses, nor anythat more justly merit applause from all the great wits of Spain.’ And incondensing the periphrasis into a single, sharp pentameter, Grossmannicely solicits our ‘applause’. The strophe still marvelously twists likethe ‘serpent’-stream it describes, even if the erotic connotations of‘lascivio’ are blunted and ‘lets go | of ’ falls somewhat flat.

Later Grossman helps explain Góngora’s fascination with espuma inlines that also provide a rationale for his own inimitable fusion of lyric,pastoral, and epic genres. Gesturing at why he turns his poetic gaze ontwo lowly fishermen, the poet addresses Cupid or ‘Amor’ directly: ‘Porescultores quizá vanos | de tantos de tu madre bultos canos | cuantasal mar espumas dan sus remos’ (2.662–4), which Grossman liberallyand with rolling ‘o’s’ translates as: ‘Perhaps because like sculptors withtheir oars | they shape fleet forms of your mother born of foam’. Thusnature, art, and myth conspire together in a recollection of Venus,‘born of foam’. And if the precision of Góngora’s syntax and imagery isslightly blurred – bulto generally means ‘shape’ but Autoridades glossesit also as ‘Imágen, efigie, ò figúra hecha de madéra, piedra ù otracosa’ – Grossman vividly underscores the iconic role such ‘foam’ playsin Góngora’s transformation of a quotidian world. For it is ultimatelyGóngora’s own ‘pluma’ that, with Grossman’s assistance, shapes theseliving monuments to Baroque audacity.

Finally, a quibble about editions. Grossman readily admits to relyingheavily on Dámaso Alonso’s ‘groundbreaking edition’ published in1927 ‘and his indispensible prose version and explication of the poem’.Similarly, when translating Don Quixote in 2004, she relies principallyon Martín de Riquer’s scholarly edition and largely ignored otherefforts, such as Francisco Rico’s of 1998. Thus here again she preemptsperdition in scholarly labyrinths by trusting a single guide. Yet onp. xxiii, in her ‘Suggestions for Further Reading’, we are told simply:‘The best edition in Spanish of the Soledades is that edited by RobertJammes (Madrid: Castalia, 1994).’ Both Alonso and Jammes give aprose paraphrase of the poems and learnedly explicate their myriad

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cruxes; but the editorial decisions, the punctuation, and the mise-en-page of the lines and strophes in Jammes’ text – which this reviewhas used – stick much closer than Alonso to the Chacón manuscript,copied under Góngora’s supervision. This is to say that Grossman’sloyalty to Alonso occasionally affects the translation. For example, sherenders thus the First Solitude’s opening lines where Jove is figured as abull:

It was the flowering season of the yearwhen Europa’s false-hearted abductor– a half moon the weapon on his brow,the Sun’s rays all the strands of his hair –

Following Alonso’s text (‘y el Sol todos los rayos de su pelo’), insteadof Jammes’ (‘y el Sol todo los rayos de su pelo’) (‘and the wholesun the rays of his hair’), obscures the parallelism of ‘media luna’with ‘el Sol todo’. But generally speaking, Grossman’s Solitudes areamazingly resplendent.

Christopher D. JohnsonHarvard University

DOI: 10.3366/tal.2013.0102

The Works of Lucy Hutchinson, Vol. I: The Translation of Lucretius.Edited by Reid Barbour and David Norbrook, Latin text by MariaCristina Zerbino. Part 1: Introduction and Text; Part 2: Commentary,Bibliography, and Index. Pp. cxlvi + 797. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2012. Hb. £200.

Among the merits of Reid Barbour and David Norbrook’s new editionof Lucy Hutchinson’s Lucretius is its bringing together a wealthof recent academic writings: on Lucretius, on Hutchinson, on earlymodern science, translation, and editing, and on significant individualssuch as Pierre Gassendi, John Evelyn, Walter Charleton, and MargaretCavendish. More than 100 such articles and books, from the last fifteenyears or so, are cited in the introduction and select bibliography, andmany more in the commentary. So this translation of Hutchinson’s,which once seemed to belong nowhere, is now at the confluence ofseveral streams of scholarly activity, which enrich the editors’ workand are enriched by that in turn. The quantity of illustrative materialis such that even an introduction and commentary well over threetimes as long as Hutchinson’s text must be somewhat selective. Thecommentary has many different things to do, and much of it is

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necessarily taken up with simple explanation. Not that the manuscriptis problematic: both the scribal hand (Books 1–5) and Hutchinson’sown (Book 6) are very legible, and scrupulous attention to spellingcorrections and what may or may not be punctuation marks providesalmost all textual notes. The difficulty is, inevitably, with Lucretius,and more particularly with Lucretius as encountered by a seventeenth-century reader.

An editor might initially propose – and one writes from chasteningexperience – to treat Hutchinson’s poem like an original work,noting obsolete words and allusions, while referring the philosophicallycurious to the great editions of Lucretius waiting on library shelves. Butthe poem frequently fails to explain itself, and a Lucretian context mustbe supplied as clarification. Those great editions – by Munro, Bailey,and more recent scholars – help only up to a point, as the editionHutchinson used, by Daniel Pareus, is based like all early moderneditions on very inferior manuscripts and perplexed by ill-informedconjecture. Hence the need to refer to Pareus from time to time andvindicate Hutchinson’s translating something quite different from theLatin text as now established. To go further – beyond the glaringinconsistencies and errors, and occasional glimpses of her experienceas a translator – Pareus must be kept constantly in view. Barbour andNorbrook take that further editorial step: commendably rejecting a CDor other electronic resource – Pareus is now advertised as a Googlebook – they print his complete Latin text opposite the English. Theirexhaustive introduction to Pareus’ life and work finds some merit inhis edition, traditionally written off as derivative, and Maria CristinaZerbino’s carefully reconstructed text is, unlike the original, a delight tobehold. It is not entirely what Hutchinson saw, as ‘for reasons of space,it has been impossible to reproduce Pareus’ very extensive annotations’.Signalled by an alphabetical letter in the verse line, those side-notes,frequently extending to the foot of the page, require an effort of will toignore, and constitute a more or less inseparable part of what is read.Their omission is largely made up for in the commentary – whenever anote has bearing on the translation – but is worth remembering whenthe editors justify their retention of Pareus’ accent-marks and otheraccidentals with the statement that ‘current interest in the materialforms of texts and their historical variations strengthens the case foran unmodernized edition, which alone can give an accurate sense ofLucy Hutchinson’s reading experience’.

The commentary is extraordinarily detailed, with few linesundiscussed. The primary concern is to show where and howHutchinson’s translation diverges, either by choice or error, from the

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literal sense of the Latin text, and further where Pareus’ readings differfrom those of other editors before or since. It is very helpful to beshown what rival translators did with the same Latin words or phrases,although this is somewhat complicated by their working from differenttexts. The editors draw most frequently on the two other Englishversions of the 1650s, one by John Evelyn, the other an anonymousBodleian manuscript; also on Creech’s later and enduringly popularversion. (These works remained unstudied until fairly recently, apartfrom Hermann Real’s pioneering monograph on Creech’s Lucretius in1970.) Less use than one might expect is made of Dryden’s brillianttranslations – just one remark on his longest selection, ‘Against theFear of Death’ (3.971n) – although Dryden’s freer paraphrastic methodmay be a factor here. The more general task of the commentary isto explain Lucretius as he is understood today – which requires acomprehensive knowledge of the scholarship – and also to explain howhe was understood in Hutchinson’s time. All this is done exceptionallywell. There is a wide range of reference to contemporaries who heldsome Epicurean or quasi-Epicurean opinions – most prominentlyCavendish, Charleton, Gassendi, and Milton – and to earlier writerssuch as Bacon and Montaigne; also to those who disparaged Lucretius’doctrine, such as Evelyn in his commentary, the independent divineJohn Owen (important because Hutchinson would later translate him),and most significantly Hutchinson herself in her later biblical epicOrder and Disorder. Occasionally some well-known parallel is neglected,such as the ‘various atoms’ interfering dance’ in Dryden’s ReligioLaici, corresponding with Hutchinson’s ‘dance of Attomes’ (Dedication,68–9n.); but overall – discounting such minor omissions and theoccasional copying errors inevitable in so large a work – readers willfind the editors’ expert deployment of a host of Lucretian translatorsand commentators, from Lactantius to the present day, most impressiveand informative. Some comments are substantial little essays; forexample, some 500 words on what ‘policie’ implied for Hutchinsonand the other translators (5.1149n.).

Printing Pareus is of value to readers who can follow the Latin, atleast when helped by Hutchinson and by Barbour and Norbrook’scommentary, where quoted words have English glosses. Other readerswill gather enough from the commentary to do without the Latin text.But those other readers, unlike the Latinists, may not know as muchabout ancient history and beliefs as the editors seem to assume: what‘the Theban warrs’ were; which ‘old Greeke poetts’ may have sungthe ‘high-minded Phaeton’ story; where to find out more about the‘conquering floods’ that ‘many nations drownd’ (5.338, 421, 429). They

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could do with some help finding their way in multi-volume classicaltexts: where Lucretius writes that ‘ravenous lions’ are frightenedby ‘the shrill cock’ (4.743–5), Barbour and Norbrook comment‘as P[areus notes], the standard reference work for such habits ofanimals is Pliny’s Natural History’, when the precise references Pareusactually gives would (modernized) be much more useful. A little earlierthey credit Pareus with glossing ‘Romes high towers’ (4.713) as theCapitol, saved by its geese, but omit his reference to Livy. As thecommentary is normally punctilious in its citations, their occasionalabsences are the more noticeable.

The introduction addresses the perennial problem that first puzzledH. A. J. Munro, writing in 1858: ‘What were the motives which inducedthe noble Puritan to translate into elaborate verse the whole of a poemthat develops principles so abhorrent from her own, it is not easy toconceive.’ One strategy is not to see her narrowly as the woman whobecame a Baptist in wartime Nottingham – although her conversion,begun with reading some soldiers’ anti-paedobaptist notes, could itselfbe evidence of her intellectual curiosity. Another is not to acceptLucretius’ presumed distance from the current of thought in which shemoved. The introduction argues in detail and at length along theselines, through biography and cultural history, cleverly interweavingHutchinson’s changing life with the changing fortunes of Epicureanbeliefs. A more or less chronological treatment of ‘The Early Years’,‘The 1630s’, and ‘The 1650s’ (the decade of the translation) leads todiscussion of ‘The Epicurean Revival’ and ‘Women and Epicureanism’.Only after long sections on Pareus, Epicurean philosophy, and thetranslation as poetry do the editors resume Hutchinson’s biographyapropos of ‘The 1675 Manuscript and its Contents’. The 80-pagebreak between ‘The 1650s’ and ‘1675’ emphasizes the fact that virtuallyeverything had changed – her husband was dead, her estate was sold,and, as she told her daughter at the outset of The Principles of theChristian Religion, ‘my infirmities and imperfections, ioynd with myoutward ill successes have much weakened my authority, and made it ofno force with all persons’. Her dedication of the Lucretius manuscriptto Lord Anglesey reflects her personal anxieties and her sense of guilt,unanticipated when she made the translation, that it could do greatharm in the hands of the new libertins érudits – and yet, as the editorsshrewdly observe, the dedication ‘falls short of a complete repudiationof her work on Lucretius’. Both introduction and commentary discussher substantial omission – at least from the fair-copied manuscript –and partial rewriting of passages on sexuality at the end of Book 4,pointing out the complexity of her ‘highly independent-minded

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response to Lucretius’ and making telling comparisons with othertranslators and commentators (4.1083n.). As Barbour and Norbrookso often show in this edition, ‘In the reception of the De rerum natura,ambiguity and contradiction are the rule rather than the exception.’

The editors use a technique of parallel lives, specifically of couplesassociated, despite some major political and religious differences,through some interest in Lucretius: Lucy and John Hutchinson,Margaret and William Cavendish, John and Mary Evelyn, and laterLord and Lady Angelsey. This certainly fills out the narrative andsuggests some personal reasons for Hutchinson’s being drawn toLucretius. The clearest parallel is with Cavendish, in view of whosewhimsically Epicurean Poems and Fancies Hutchinson ‘is likely tohave felt a particular investment in challenging such a prominent,indeed notorious, woman writer on her chosen terrain’. The editorsvery reasonably see women’s interest in natural philosophy andEpicureanism as a response to exclusion from the traditional neo-scholastic university education, and they argue persuasively thatHutchinson’s translating Lucretius was ‘an ideologically chargedprocess’, from which ‘she clearly relished the “glory’’ she had obtained’.Not that secondary sources could have been a serious alternative forher: it is hard to acquire an overall sense of Lucretius from Gassendi,and Charleton’s eccentric prose does not inspire great confidence. Thesame independence of mind can be seen in her theological studies,together with a more open contempt for the established authorities,which had caused her more pain and trouble than lack of formaleducation could ever have done. (One need only think of her husband’scortège detained literally at a vanity fair, where the priest wanted tobury him.) Her feelings for the Anglesey family in her later yearswere significantly different from what she may have felt about theCavendishes or Evelyns: in her gift of the manuscript to the Earl shedissociated herself – but not entirely – from Lucretius, and presumablyshe worshipped with the Countess, ‘to make one of the holy sistersat her conventicle’, as Humphrey Prideaux sneeringly put it (letter toJohn Ellis, 20 September 1681).

In discussion of Hutchinson as a translator the editors note bothher tendency towards and her resistance to Augustan smoothness andabstraction; they illustrate very well how ‘she adapted her versificationto capture some equivalent of the tension in Lucretius between theabrasive and the harmonious’. They have little difficulty in showing hersuperiority to the glibly Augustan Creech and to Evelyn, whose recitalof his shorter poems prompted Pepys’ memorable ‘not transcendent’

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(5 September 1665). Having quoted the anonymous accusation thatCreech debauched women with his Lucretius, it might have beenpermissible to mention his subsequently killing himself, allegedly likeLucretius from amorous madness. (By contrast, the Victorian translatorJ. S. Watson murdered his wife.) But this and more serious instancesof Lucretius’ influence on later British writers are beyond the boundsof the edition, extensive as they are. When Munro tempered hispraise of Hutchinson with the proviso that ‘this work, if publishedin full, would hardly increase the reputation of the author of theMemoirs’, he was striving as an editor to free Lucretius from thecorruptions and misconceptions of outdated scholarship, and couldnot believe that anybody would want to return there. In recent yearsthat scholarship has been rediscovered and reappraised; even Latineditions, such as the Loeb revised by Martin Ferguson Smith, showrekindled interest in their predecessors. Barbour and Norbrook havegiven us in Hutchinson’s Lucretius a splendid example of the bestnew research in many related areas and a magnificent tribute to theenterprise of the author herself. It is a brilliant beginning for Oxford’sambitious project of her complete Works.

Hugh de QuehenUniversity of Toronto

DOI: 10.3366/tal.2013.0103

Übersetzen bei Johann Gottfried Herder. Edited by Clémence Couturier-Heinrich. Pp. 256. Heidelberg: Synchron, 2012. Hb. e34.80.

Late eighteenth-century Germany saw an explosion of literaryand philosophical creativity. The Lutheran clergyman, philosopher,theologian, linguist, and critic Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803)was central to it. His path-breaking reflections on language have manyimplications for the theory and practice of translation, and Herderhimself translated from an extraordinary range of languages. Thepresent volume brings together established and younger figures fromHerder scholarship to present a conspectus of his work as theorist andpractitioner of translation.

After a useful introductory survey by the editor, the book beginsproperly with a tremendous defence of Herder against his detractors byMichael Maurer. Herder’s enthusiasm for the creative energies of theGerman language and the German people caused him, from the 1860sto the 1940s, to be celebrated as a proto-nationalist and prophet of

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German greatness. More recently this false picture has been presentedin negative form by critics who decry him as a nationalist, ‘centrist’,and opponent of intercultural mixing. In fact he was an upholderof the Enlightenment who found some value in every culture andopposed nationalism and colonialism. Maurer’s defence supplementsthe excellent book by Sonia Sikka, Herder on Humanity and CulturalDifference: Enlightened Relativism (2011).

Herder’s theory of the origin of language derives it initially fromemotion and sensation, but associates it also with the reflective capacitywhich enabled early man to distinguish, interpret, and classify featuresof his environment. Hence poetry, the language of affect, which staysclose to the concrete, is ancient, whereas abstract prose is a recentaccomplishment of civilization. Since language consists of arbitrarysigns, the distinctive quality of each language comes not from the worldit refers to, but from the nature of its speakers. Each language expressesa different national character. Hence we have a closer relationship toour mother tongue than to any other. But, for this very reason, we needto learn other languages which can express things that our own cannotand give us access to the different character of their speakers. We mustnot shut ourselves off from other cultures, like the ancient Spartans, butshould explore them as living linguistic communities whose languagescan enrich our own. Herder’s journal of his voyage from Riga to Nantesin 1769 ends delightfully by evoking the excitement felt by many first-time visitors to France on finding that the French they learned at schoolis really spoken there.

If every language has a distinctive character, how is translationpossible? Sometimes it isn’t: Herder instances English humour assomething that cannot be translated, and, as the editor shows, hethought translation between German and French particularly difficult.Mostly, however, one can translate poetry (Herder’s main concern) ifone tries to capture the emotional tone of the original and the oralaspects of its language. One should not dress the text in modernfashions, such as French alexandrines, but try to recapture its energyand simplicity. Thus in Herder’s version of Genesis 1, God speakswith concise force: ‘Gott sprach: Sei Licht! | und’s war Licht!’ Thetranslator should also be a good philologist who understands thecultural context of the original. Herder favours translations in whichthe text is interspersed with commentary, as in his own essay on thepoetry of the Old Testament, Vom Geist der Ebräischen Poesie (1782–3).Thus he includes the subjectivity of the translator, and invites activeparticipation by the reader. A translation should never pretend to be

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a substitute for the original, but should offer one possible means ofaccess to it. A really good translation can be an original work in its ownright, and can inspire creative literature.

These principles of translation can be collected, with some effort,from the first few essays; a single, longer presentation might havebeen more helpful. Then comes practice. Daniel Weidner and RüdigerSinger write fascinatingly on Herder’s translation of passages fromthe Bible and on his opinions of various translations of Homer. Wehave studies of his translations from the Greek Anthology (by thelate Wulf Köpke) and from Petrarch (by Elena Polledri), with muchinformation on his enthusiasm for Italian literature. English literatureis well represented: Gregory Moore, who has recently translatedHerder’s major aesthetic writings into English, discusses his versionof Pope’s Messiah, which – in keeping with Herder’s awareness ofcultural inheritance – returns for inspiration to the source text inIsaiah, and Christine Roger compares Herder’s translation of passagesfrom Macbeth with the more elaborate version by Schiller. Since Herderchampioned primitive poetry, particular interest attaches to his workwith poetry from the margins of Europe. We have two studies ofHerder’s dealings with Ossian, by Howard Gaskill and Wolf GerhardSchmidt, who show that both Herder and Goethe engaged with theGaelic text, ‘Specimen of the Original of Temora’, that Macphersonappended to the 1763 edition of his epic. In the only English-languagecontribution, Kristina Jaremko-Porter investigates how he championedthe vernacular poetry of Latvia, where he taught from 1764 to 1769,giving him due credit for denouncing the maltreatment of Latvian serfsby their Russian masters and for helping to inspire the Latvian nationalawakening of the nineteenth century.

All these essays are substantial contributions to Herder scholarship.Inevitably, many of his translation projects receive only brief mention:his version of the Song of Songs as Lieder der Liebe, much of the folkpoetry he anthologized, his translations from the neo-Latin poetryof Jakob Balde, and his rendering of the medieval Spanish epicEl Cid, which was hugely popular in nineteenth-century Germany.Nonetheless, this book performs a service by drawing attention to thework of one of the eighteenth century’s leading proponents of worldliterature.

Ritchie RobertsonThe Queen’s College, Oxford

DOI: 10.3366/tal.2013.0104

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A Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and Translation. By Sinéad Mooney. Pp. 278.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. £60.

A Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and Translation is three books in one. It isan informative and well-researched history of Beckett’s activities as atranslator, of others and himself, and how those activities influencedworks which are not simply or not only translations. It is an account ofhow Beckett’s writings, as a translator, author, and self-translator, can besaid to have contributed to the destabilizing of ideas of ‘the omnipotentauthor’, ‘the realist contract’, ‘language as simply instrumental’, andsimilar abstract notions. Finally it is a contribution to the continuingaccommodation of Beckett’s work to the literature of an Irish nationstate – something which, in the not-so-distant past, neither the authornor the state would have wished. There are problems with the writingof this three-in-one book and in the relations between the parts,which much of the time don’t seem in mutually enlightening dialogue.The book is attentive to the vast secondary literature in Beckettstudies, as well as Translation Studies and other areas of theory andcultural criticism. However, this secondary material is sometimes usedto support observations vitiated by unexamined assumptions, and itsometimes contradicts the readings it is adduced to support.

Does the book’s main title reflect Beckett’s real position? SinéadMooney puts it thus when discussing how the late prose of Mal vu maldit formed a prompt for Ill Seen Ill Said: ‘If the English language canstill, residually, be seen as more Beckett’s than his acquired, if fluent,French, then there is a sense in which, like the rapacious eye of thetext, the translation process possessively grinds the French originaldown into its language of origin.’ There’s a confusing echo between‘the French original’ and ‘its language of origin’ – as if the text (is thatthe referent of ‘its’?) had somehow begun in an English version fromwhich it is rendered as a French work – only then to be ‘ground down’by being translated back into English. The phrase ‘language of origin’sounds theoretically fluent but may merely refer to a mother tongue.The main problem, though, is generated by Mooney’s description ofthe ‘translation process’ as a moving of material from one languageinto another – which hardly begins to describe Beckett’s compositionof the related but different Mal vu mal dit and Ill Seen Ill Said. There is,further, a conceptual problem in thinking that the translation of a workdoes anything, literally, to its original – which, so long as it is correctlyedited and proof-read, appears perfectly the same, intact as ever, inen face editions, such as the 1994 Einaudi volume edited by NadiaFusini, which includes an Italian version by Renzo Guidieri.

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Beckett, I take it, grew up speaking either a single native language,English, or, at most, an official English learnt at school and a Hiberno-English learnt from the air. He then became an assiduous secondlanguage learner, mastering French and having good Italian, goodGerman, and workable Spanish. However, it seems mistaken to callhim bilingual, or to compare him with genuinely bilingual childrenwho grow up speaking two languages. It is also strictly wrong to callhim a polyglot, because again, none of his second languages, evenFrench, have the ontologically embedded native fluency and depthof nuance, vocabulary, and allusion of his English – or, allowingfor his knowledge of Hibernian and other variants, his ‘Englishes’.Mooney interchangeably refers to his being ‘bilingual’ and ‘polyglot’,and compares his writings with the reported behaviour and psychologyof fully bilingual writers, such as French-Canadians, or of childrenbrought up to speak more than one language. This confuses the issuesand mischaracterizes the linguistic situation of Beckett’s work. Yet hertitle does, among other things, imply that Beckett was not a nativespeaker of French: French was ‘a tongue not mine’.

Most of Beckett’s translation work – whether solo or with collabo-rators – was from French into English, something you would expectof a writer who had mastered a second language, but who sensiblytranslates into the one he learned from his mother. Mooney is at herbest in those parts of her early chapter ‘Paying Lip Service: Beckett,Translation, and the 1930s’ where she explores the consequencesof his doing so much translation to keep body and soul together.She writes helpfully of his versions for Nancy Cunard’s Negro: AnAnthology (1934) and the translations of Surrealist poetry made forTransition. Her success here lies in exploring Beckett as a translator,understood in the ordinary way, such that various theoretical nettlesregarding self-translation need not be grasped. Yet even here itis disappointing that she barely ever offers a sustained account ofBeckett translating sentences and paragraphs, let alone caesurasor enjambments. The best attempts are where renderings of shortphrases are sampled to make a general point about the translationstrategy, as when Mal vu mal dit inspires the archaizing inventivenessof Ill Seen Ill Said:

Beckett’s English resurrects, for instance, archaic variants of commonwords: ‘to dimmen’, ‘washen’; the French ‘tête haute’ becomes ‘headhaught’ and ‘plus blafarde que nature’ becomes ‘death-paler than life’.‘Invisible planète’ and ‘d’autres invisibles’ in French becomes the odd,Keatsian ‘viewless planet’ and ‘other viewlessness’.

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Mooney’s choice of the verb ‘becomes’ misleads us, appearing tosuggest that the French phrases turn into the English ones. Theydon’t. The English has been recognizably prompted by the French,but is not bound to it and has in no way supplanted it. Rather, ithas the authority of utterance that a self-translator can assume byright – because the interpersonal ethics of translating another’s wordsdo not apply. Similar ethics might be drawn upon or flouted by theself-translator, but in either case not for the same reasons or with thesame consequences. This is one explanation for why self-translationsby canonical authors are unlikely to ‘date’ as translations by others aresaid to do.

There is a similar i-dotting passage about translation and envy,occasioned by remarks of Rosemary Waldrop’s; but the psychology ofwhatever envy might be involved in self-translation is a Pandora’s boxthankfully left unopened. Mooney hurries on:

Its archaism [Ill Seen Ill Said’s] also mimics the action of time upon thetext, although this translation was made almost immediately after itsoriginal was completed; the effect both illustrates Schleiermacher andDerrida’s view of translation as telegraphic, working from a potentiallyinauthentic distance, and is an ironic chronological joke, in that a pair oftexts written so close in time are so sharply differentiated by their idiom,which suggests their having been written a century or more apart. In thisBeckett follows Pound’s archaizing practice as a translator, the translatoracting like Charon, ferrying into modern English something ‘relegatedto the realms of Lethe’.

Here the idea that Beckett’s strategy illustrates the views of the twotranslation theorists is partially retracted by Mooney’s cautioningus that the distance from one text to another is only ‘potentiallyinauthentic’, not actually so, while her notion that the ‘action oftime’ is perhaps mimicked by the translation process is underminedby her confusion of an ‘old’ usage and an ‘archaic’ one. The latter,however much it harks back, simultaneously announces its newness.That’s one reason why Pound’s archaizing is compatible with his ‘makeit new’ slogan, but not why Pound’s ‘blood for ghosts’ metaphor oftranslation fits Mooney’s argument in her concluding chapter ‘Self-Translation and Death’. Pound was no more intent on deadening orincreasing the deathliness of his originals (as she argues Beckett’s latetranslating does), than Charon’s normal service was to ferry anythingor anyone back from beyond the river of forgetfulness. The paradoxesin resurrecting old usages to deaden a text are noted by Mooney, buttheir consequences do not much shape her argument.

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There are then a number of challenges that Mooney shirks. Oneis to explore the exact processes by which Beckett made himself intoa writer of non-native French, and then translated his own Frenchand English words. This did not, as Mooney would have it, split hisunitary self into multiple selves: decisions over time can be puzzlingto us without our lacking such continuity of selfhood as allows usto acknowledge that it was we who made them (and without whichthey would not be puzzling). She notes a contrast between ‘Beckettas heroic bilingual author’ and ‘the more muted and riven figure ofthe translating writer’; but for much of the book, she too uses theterm ‘Beckett’ in the standard, unified, hagiographic sense (meaningthe one person who produced this admired art) while, simultaneously,flirting with notions of the multiplicity of the ‘riven’, polyglot author –as if a speaker of more than one language weren’t using the sametongue to speak them. The ethical issues appropriate to a study ofself-translation cannot be engaged with because at the theoretical,as distinct from the hagiographical, level no subject is allowed thatcan reflect on its compositional and translational decisions. Thissingularly self-conscious subject is nevertheless ordinarily referred to,at a biographical level, as complaining on 27 September 1953 of‘an indigestion of old work with all the adventure gone’, or on 11 July1962 about how ‘all the arrears of translation have me paralysed’, oradmitting on 19 January 1967 that he ‘lacks the courage’ to translateWatt alone.

Mooney has a need for illusory totalities which her prose can yetonce more ‘deconstruct’ or ‘undermine’ – inertly, of course, for theillusory totalities must live to be blown up another day, and all togive rhetorically radical salience to an ordinary thought: ‘Yet, whileKrapp seems to seek out self-coincidence via his tapes but his multipleselves doom him to dispersal and multiplicity, conventional translationpractice seeks a chimerical coincidence with the original which cannever, of course, be realized.’ Here the description of Krapp’s activityresembles what any of us might do in later life when looking through afamily photo album, noting the self-coincidence with bodies and faceswe now resemble only faintly. This familiar experience is presented tous by the critic as a radical intervention because it supposedly exposesthe fantasy of total union in ‘conventional translation practice’. Yet onlyrarely do translators imagine any sort of close affinity between theirtranslations and originals. Conventional translation practice involvesthe production of passable semantic resemblances, and experiencedtranslators have long since abandoned, if they ever held, fantasies of‘chimerical coincidence’. In Mooney’s account the thing that makes

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Beckett’s play gripping and significant (our being able to recognize thequite ordinary truth of Krapp’s activities) is presented as profoundlydisturbing (which it isn’t), and it is made to seem so by contrast with anidea of translation that is said to be conventional (which it isn’t) becausetranslators worth the name don’t waste their time with what they tooknow ‘can never, of course, be realized’. Since they know coincidenceis impossible they work to produce a dialogic appropriateness betweentexts in different languages.

A couple of pages earlier, Mooney explores an analogy betweenBeckett’s directorial interventions in his own plays and his self-translation:

Directing and dramatic self-translation overlap, thus, as forms ofessentially revisionist impulse which diffuse the restrictions of publicationand unsettle the boundaries of the text, suggesting that the work asoriginally conceived (and, in some cases, as originally published) wassomehow provisional. Such interventions make his texts retrospectivelyincomplete, unsettling their claims to comprehensiveness.

Calling revising an ‘essentially revisionist impulse’ is a further instanceof an attempt to make the ordinary sound radical. Mooney asks us toimagine the existence of a totality (this time the text’s supposed ‘claimsto comprehensiveness’) as the setting for her supposed insight into theeditorial fact that texts, especially plays, frequently exist in more thanone version (as in the two Quartos and the Folio of Hamlet). A moment’sreflection on all the canonical authors with variorum editions rendersall but void this analogy between Beckett’s practice as a director andself-translator: it is skewed by unreflecting assumptions about materialtexts in authorial histories.

A Tongue Not Mine has its problems with the Irish diaspora and thenational ownership of persons, words, and things that have long beenexported across the world:

Beckett’s trilogy, with its play with ‘translatedness’ in both its languages,actively flaunts its impurities. As well as the promiscuous admixture ofIrish names – Molloy, Moran, Malone, Macmann, Quin, Christy, and soon – with such un-Irish references as horse butchers, aspects of Frenchtopography, Bastille Day, and the Bank of England, the trilogy makesplay with the self-proclaimed lack of fluency of the implied translator;the French Molloy makes a pantomime of being unsure of whatgender the noun ‘existence’ is, and apologizes for the ‘awfulness’ of hislanguage.

Again this is over-written: ‘actively flaunts’? What’s ‘promiscuous’ aboutthe use of Irish names for his characters? Is the promiscuity in

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mixing them with English and French institutions a metaphoricallyembedded fear of miscegenation? When Beckett was a child, the Bankof England issued the Irish currency; Bastille Day is a fact of Frenchhistory, one that Frank O’Hara is able to refer to in New York in1959 without being any less an American poet. What’s more, linksbetween Ireland and France go back a long way: Patrice de Mac-Mahon,the French general and president of the Third Republic in 1875–9,had an Irish-French name because of his ancestral connections withCounty Clare, Limerick, and Monaghan. His people, being supportersof James II, had left the country in the seventeenth century. Mooneyis troubled by the fact that words and the people speaking themare more transportable than actual countries on a map: you cantake your man out of Ireland, but you can’t take Ireland out ofyour man.

However much a reviser, Beckett was, of course, as Mooney wellknows, no revisionist – a word haplessly conjuring up an apologist forthe Vichy government. Quite the contrary, Beckett was awarded theCroix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance for his servicesto France during and after the Occupation. Mooney interestinglyassociates Beckett’s un-broadcast script ‘The Capital in the Ruins’,written for Radio Éireann in 1946, with the Hiberno-French amalgamsof the Trilogy. Yet her author’s sensitivity to the complex nature ofliving between diverse cultural configurations of history cues morecritical fantasies. The opportunities that consideration of Beckett’sparticular case might have opened up are once again shied awayfrom:

‘Their way of being we,’ Beckett writes, ‘was not our way and [. . . ] ourway of being they, was not their way’, adding that ‘[i]t is only fair to saythat many of us had never been abroad before’. Beckett’s sliding ‘we’ and‘they’ show him apparently identifying a porous model of inclusion andexclusion, intermittently identifying with the Irish audience for whom thebroadcast was written, and his untravelled Red Cross compatriots, whileclearly also standing outside this somewhat isolationist ‘us’, as a translatorand hence a linguistic and cultural conduit between these ‘home andvisiting temperaments’.

Notice how that ‘apparently’ allows her to assert something aboutBeckett’s writing which sounds, to me, ill-matched with the sensitivityto experience and to representation carried by the only imaginedbroadcast medium that her citations from her author illustrate.Mooney then feels obliged to assert that ‘No clear distinction canbe maintained between self and non-self, sameness and difference,

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“original’’ and “translation’’ ’, adding that ‘binaries collapse’ – thoughevidently not in the language that articulates the collapsing. Butdo Beckett’s quoted sentences at all suggest that the Irish RedCross volunteers had somehow by osmosis become ever so slightlyFrench? Or that Beckett’s use of ‘us’ means he is any more or lesssimilar to those fellow-countrymen who had never been abroad? Itseems to be suggesting rather the opposite. This same paragraphconcludes:

Myths of national identity are posited as traces, but – inconsistent andoften mutually exclusive as they are in Beckett’s deliberately inconsistenttranslatorial universe in which francophone men with Irish names movethrough a linguistic universe in which French and Irish norms cohabituneasily – in fact undermine or provide indeterminate counter-narrativesto totalizing identity politics, insisting, as Anthony Uhlmann notes, onthe heterogeneous and on ‘difference, which always lurks within anddecomposes identity’.

From the passive construction of the first main clause, through theuncertain referent of the ‘they’ (myths or traces?) in that parenthesiswith its redundant doubling of terms, to the alternative active verbswithout a clear operative subject in the second main clause, Mooney’sbroken-backed sentence fails even to have its syntax perform what itbelieves itself to be asserting. That she fails effectively to say this can’tbut suggest that what she thinks she is proposing about identity andnationality cannot be true. But then at the very start to qualify ‘nationalidentity’ as mythical means that difference doesn’t lurk within anddisintegrate identity. Individual identity is already implicitly differentfrom national myth. What Beckett was describing, with his pronounspromoted to nominal status, is a situation in which the Irish Red Crosscontingent and the population they were assisting found it difficultto understand each other and to behave in ways that made sense tothe other. That Beckett had lived in France and was able to move(uneasily, his words suggest) between these ways of belonging and notbelonging might also have been said plainly by Mooney – thoughperhaps then without the assurance, one I find it hard to imagineBeckett (failing better, as ever) would have countenanced, namelythat his writing could make binaries collapse and nations, or at leastnational myths, topple. The world is already less tractable and morevarious.

Peter RobinsonUniversity of Reading

DOI: 10.3366/tal.2013.0105

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After Semyon Izrailevich Lipkin. By Yvonne Green. Pp. xv + 105.Sheffield: Smith/Doorstop Books, 2011. Pb. £9.95.

Regina Derieva: The Sum Total of Violations. Translated by DanielWeissbort. Pp. 161. Todmorden: Arc, 2009. Pb. £10.99.

Regina Derieva: Corinthian Copper. Translated by J. Kates. Pp. v + 88.Grosse Point Farms, MI: Marick Press, 2010. Pb. $14.95.

It is hard to explain why two important Russian-language poets, oneonly recently dead at the age of 92, the other in her 60s and ather peak, are not only virtually unknown outside Russia, but evenwithin Russia are valued more by their fellow poets than by theeducated public. A cynic might attribute their neglect to Russiananti-semitism, now, like homeopathic medicine, even stronger forthe extreme dilution of Russia’s Jewish community. But Lipkin’sJewishness is largely private, and Derieva in 1990 had herself baptisedand became a fervent, rather apocalyptic Catholic. More plausibly,Semyon Lipkin’s achievement has been overshadowed by his nichereputation as a translator, a friend of more famous poets, a memoirist,a facilitator, as the midwife to Vasili Grossman’s novel Life and Fate.Regina Derieva, however, has always been an outsider and exile: bornin Odessa, spending half her life in Karaganda, Kazakhstan’s mostdismal location, then emigrating to Israel and deported to Sweden,she has circled Russia like an avenging angel.

No Russian poet has written poetry over such a long period asLipkin: his first poem appeared in 1926 when he was fifteen, his lastshortly before his death in 2003. The thousand or so poems he haswritten over those seventy-five years are all beautifully crafted, thought-ful, and original. If he has never been ranked with Osip Mandelstamand Marina Tsvetaeva (both of whom patronized him, and were helpedby him), it is because he deliberately aligned himself with poets suchas Ivan Bunin – craftsmen, not magi; silver, rather than gold. UnderStalin, Lipkin remained, by some miracle, an honest intellectual andan observant Jew, seeking neither approval nor martyrdom. He was,in his way, an orientalist, and was most admired as a translator of theKyrgyz national epic, a modest career that became dangerous whenStalin in the late 1930s changed official encouragement of such na-tional epics to condemnation of their ‘nationalist’ deviations. After thefall of the USSR, Lipkin’s most widely read work has been his Kvadriga,memoirs of his extraordinarily long and wide-ranging friendships:the humour and observation are offset only by a certain Puritanism –Lipkin could not accept the poet Kliuev’s homosexuality, his ‘great

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sin’. Lipkin also wrote novels, one of them, Dekada, a thinly disguisedaccount of Stalin’s deportation in 1944 of the Balkar people from theNorth Caucasus, but their narrative and characterization are wooden.

But Lipkin’s poetry, not gathered in book form until the 1990s,is important, both as art and as political testimony. Like his friendGrossman he dared to make the Holocaust his subject, and, like veryfew Russian poets, he mourned the premature deaths of those whoreturned, physically destroyed, from the Gulag. All the more notable,then, is the publication of Yvonne Green’s book of translations,appropriately called ‘After’, rather than ‘From’ the original. Green’sEnglish bears the same relationship to the Russian as good cognacto fine claret: she distils, rather than translates. The left-hand pagesof this book usefully (and bravely) give the Russian original, so thatwe can follow the process of distillation, often reducing a poem (suchas More – ‘By the Sea’) to half its volume. The losses are obvious,but understandable: Lipkin is a skilful practitioner of traditionalRussian rhymes, many, like polnyi, volny (‘full, waves’) dating backto Pushkin, and of traditional Russian iambic pentameters. English,which ran out of new rhymes a century before Russian, and whichturns regular iambic into doggerel, has to seek other formal structuresand strictures. Green’s versions often have the cryptic quality of ahaiku, but she keeps the best of Lipkin’s similes – ‘waves who aresalesgirls with buxom hips’ – and skips the predictable descriptions;her rhythms substitute pseudo-classical hexameters and pentametersfor the Russian iambic, and the effect of this radical reworking isremarkably comparable to the original. What is particularly strikingabout her work is that, knowing little Russian herself, the translatorhas gone to great lengths to make sure she accounts for everythingessential to each poem. We might fault her on the losses in herdistilling process, but there is no contamination, no misreading ofthe original Russian. Five-line stanzas become tercets (Reflections inSarajevo), the long Kaddish-like lyrical lines of Lipkin’s poem to Inna,his wife, become short gasps of three or four syllables, but the finaleffect on the reader is just as powerful, even if achieved by differentmeans.

The only faults of Green’s selections from Lipkin are, firstly, thatforty poems are perhaps too few to represent the poet fully. Arguably,Lipkin’s longer poems, such as Nestor and Sariia, about the murderof Nestor Lakoba by Lavrenti Beria on Stalin’s orders, are interestingmore for their politics than their poetry, but they complete the pictureof his civic courage; of the 600 poems published in Moscow in 2000, atleast a quarter cry out for translation. Secondly, Green’s unfamiliarity

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with Russian leads to a few infelicities in the notes: chikhir is fizzy newwine, not ‘chirchir’; Tatars should not be called Tartars. The bonuses inthis little book are appetizing: an extract translated by Robert Chandlerfrom Lipkin’s memoirs, and a piece on Lipkin’s role in saving VasiliGrossman’s novel from obliteration.

Regina Derieva, though as productive a poet as Lipkin, is verydifferent. She has in common with Lipkin a firm religious faith, andthe scars of someone who has witnessed the Gulag. Unlike Lipkin,however, she is an inveterate exile, achieving the remarkable status fora Russian citizen of being deported from Israel to find sanctuary inSweden. Her poetics, too, are very different: she has the ironic and curtobservations of Anna Akhmatova, only ten times more acerbic, and shehas the flow of similes and metaphors, inspired by her extraordinarybreadth of reading and her travels, of Josif Brodsky. Like Brodsky, sheknows the poetry and prose of John Donne and the topography ofLondon. Unlike Brodsky, Derieva is impervious to alien influences:her values remain rigidly Russian and Catholic (like the philosopherPiotr Chaadaev, whom she evidently reveres); she travels England asdid Dostoevsky, Herzen, or Goncharov, from one Russian-inhabited orRussia-saturated house and street to another, with the natives as mereexotic extras in her film-like sequence.

Like Brodsky, Derieva is equally adept at two types of verse: shecan produce ingeniously taut classic Russian stanzas, and blank verseeffusions. For translators she offers a tremendous challenge, as well asa choice between the difficult (the classic) and the easy (the effusion).Daniel Weissbort and J. Kates are both experienced and, at times,inspired. Weissbort’s anthology gives the Russian original on theleft hand page; Kates does not. But neither shuns the challengeof Derieva’s longer poems. The two translators only once coincidein their choices: there is one major poem with an English theme,which naturally attracts an anglophone reader. This is Archangengland.Kates’ translation has been avowedly ‘helped’ by Weissbort’s version.Strangely, this does not stop Kates making mistakes that Weissbortavoided. Radishchev travelled from St Petersburg to Moscow, saysDerieva, so that Anna Karenina could fall under the wheels of thetrain – ‘his’ train in the original and in Weissbort, but ‘her’ trainin Kates’ misapprehension. Likewise, Kates strays from the original,changing archangels’ ‘sighs’ into annunciations. In some cases, bothEnglish versions err, even though free verse, with only accidentalrhymes, gives them no pretext for distortion. When Derieva says thatEngland ‘slezhalas’ (‘become compacted or composted’) and there’sno point pitch-forking it up, she use verbs specific to haymaking,

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Daniel Weissbort decides ‘the country has gone to the dogs’, andKates notes that it ‘has diminished’. In both cases the metaphoris lost; Derieva’s idea – that the British mixture of Celtic andAnglo-Saxon has now composted – now sounds like a Daily Maileditorial. Likewise, Derieva’s ‘latest batch’ of panthers and jaguarssupposedly roaming Surrey becomes a ‘pride’ (Weissbort) or a‘pack’ (Kates). Sometimes, however, Kates improves on Weissbort:he recognizes that a Russian ‘killer’ is not just a killer, but ahitman; he spells the philosopher Chaadaev properly; his ‘gays’ (whomDerieva loathes even more biblically than Lipkin) don’t ‘strain’ and‘choose’, but are ‘affected’ and ‘gush’ happiness (the original has them‘conscientiously acting out’ happiness). Archangengland is, however,such a well-observed and opinionated poem that both translations stillbring out Derieva’s disconcerting tone, that of an archangel longing togive London the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Ironic snarls work better when they are short, though. In heralienated observations of lovers, friends, and authority, Derieva is amore effective poet, particularly when she uses her skills (learnedfrom Innokenti Annensky and Marina Tsvetaeva) in rhyming whatwere previously thought empty words (e.g. pronouns) and makingtraditional metres resound with the rhythms of arguments and rants.These short poems, however, challenge the translator. ‘Although Idon’t agree with most of your words | I still greet you, my enemy’is archetypical Derieva. The poet decides it is best to grit her teethand ‘become a horizon: no sounds, numbers, pathetic inventions orcrude conclusions, just a combination of distance and height’. Thisclear thought is obscured by Kates’ misreading ‘horizon’ as ‘horizontal’,so that the poet merely ‘lies down’. And Derieva’s teeth are unclenchedby a translation that fails to impose her lockjaw rhymes on this grimresponse to interrogation. Russian, like any other language, offers thetranslator quandaries: a word like rodinka means any blemish from afreckle to a birth-mark, and moreover echoes rodina ‘motherland’ androdnik ‘spring of water’. When Derieva begins a poem ‘A trout swimsall covered in speckles, | a stream flows all speckles’, Kates flounders:‘Every trout swims in motherlands, | every stream flows in birthmarks’.He disregards the syntax dictated by Russian case-endings, too, sothat the ending, ‘the water which is called trout, cannot be scoopedin the hand’ finishes up as ‘the water called by the trout is not to bescooped up in hands’. Here, too, the twelve lines are tightly bound byrhyme, and there is no device in Kates’ repertoire to give a comparablestructure. Consequently, it is harder to divine Derieva’s idea, of theinseparability of physical and metaphysical, of static and dynamic, of

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trout and water. Elsewhere, Kates’ misunderstandings – stemming froma patchy knowledge of Russian grammar and idiom, and a failureto consult a decent dictionary – weaken the impact of the poem. InDerieva’s ‘An outsider looks at a star’ he ignores the double meaningof svet (‘light’ or, when preceded by ‘this’ or ‘the other’, ‘world’),so that when Derieva says that the Evangelist ‘has the next world,Christ’s, in mind’, Kates reduces this ‘to a particular light in mind,the light of Christ’.

Daniel Weissbort, apart from being a friend of Derieva’s (Katesclaims friendship only with Derieva’s husband), has the advantage ofdecades more experience in translating from Russian. As a versifier,he knows when the lines have to be bound together, if only by a coupleof half-rhymes per stanza. But even Weissbort misses a step fromtime to time. There is one key poem, echoing Tiutchev’s ‘Silentium’:‘Aposeoposis’ or ‘Aphasis’. This is mistranslated, without regard tothe technical rhetorical meaning of the Russian Figura umolchaniia, as‘Passed over in Silence’. In this poem Derieva rejects writing at lengthbecause you ‘still won’t have time to say everything’, and then writingbriefly, because ‘you won’t have the skill to say everything’: the keydistinction between ne uspeesh’ ‘won’t have time’ and ne sumeesh’ (‘won’thave the skill’) is lost when Weissbort repeats ‘Can you ever hope totell all?’

Although we are offered roughly the same number of poems inboth selections, Weissbort has found a thematic thread of exile, aswell as examples of Derieva’s different techniques, that give a morerounded view of Derieva. It cannot, however, be wholly accidental thatKates, apart from Archangengland, chooses poems not translated byWeissbort, so that the English reader will need both books to form a fullimpression of a remarkably, if often disagreeably, perspicacious poet.

Donald RayfieldQueen Mary, University of London

DOI: 10.3366/tal.2013.0106

Saturn’s Moons: W. G. Sebald – A Handbook. Edited by Jo Catling andRichard Hibbitt. Pp. xv + 677. Oxford: Legenda, 2011. Hb. £45.

In the introduction to Unrecounted (2005), his translation of W. G.Sebald’s sequence Unerzählt, Michael Hamburger recalled his puzzle-ment over the divergent and apparently contradictory wording of twoversions of a poem (‘Feelings’) that cites a dictum of Robert Schumann.

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The passage in question, which revolves around a simile comparing‘feelings’ to stars that guide us ‘only under | a dark sky’, had firstappeared in another form, in English, in Sebald’s volume For Years Now(2001). But in the German version in Unerzählt, which Hamburger,I think correctly, took to be the later of the two versions, the starsguide us ‘nur am lichten Tage’ – ‘only | in brightest daylight’, inHamburger’s rendering. Hamburger, he told me at the time, felt suffi-ciently unsettled by these conflicting versions, each with Sebald’sauthority behind it, to attempt to track down the source, which thepoem implied was a journal or letter by Robert Schumann. Hamburgerhoped to discover not only what Schumann wrote, but some clue as towhy Sebald should have decided to swap dark sky for daylight.

The phrase am lichten Tage is certainly more striking than ‘undera dark sky’. It feels more recherché, too, and is unlikely to be foundin current, even literary German. It is, in fact, biblical. Where theAuthorized Bible has God exhorting Ezekiel to ‘prepare . . . stuff forremoving, and remove by day in their sight’ (12:3), in Luther’s hesays ‘nimm dein Wandergerät und zeuch am lichten Tage davon vorihren Augen’. In the context of Sebald’s poem the historical resonanceand distance of the phrase help to suggest it could have been used bySchumann, and perhaps that was Sebald’s reason for changing it. ButHamburger was unable to find a source in Schumann’s writings, andended up commenting that Sebald’s revision of Schumann’s night skyto daylight revealed ‘one more instance of the freedom from literalnessthat distinguished Sebald the imaginative writer from Sebald thescholar’. It seemed to him an example of the licence Sebald took inremodelling documentary material in fictional works.

The origins of the Schumann ‘conundrum’, as Hamburger calledit, lie not in the late 1990s, when Sebald was assembling the materialfor Unerzählt and For Years Now, but most probably in the early 1980s,when Sebald wrote a poem entitled ‘Poesie für das Album’ (‘Poetry foran Album’). When I came to translate this poem for a posthumouscollection of Sebald’s hitherto untranslated shorter poetry, Across theLand and the Water, I had been made aware of the textual variantsby Hamburger’s introduction in Unrecounted. ‘Poesie für das Album’,a much longer poem than those mentioned above, begins: ‘Gefühlemein Freund | schrieb Schumann | sind Sterne die bloß| bei hellemHimmel | leiten’, which I translated as: ‘Feelings my friend | wroteSchumann | are stars which guide us | only when the sky is | clear.’ AsI did so, I wondered whether the phrase bei hellem Himmel could havecontained the germ of Sebald’s later decision to amend the phrasingto the more resonant am lichten Tage. In the early poem – a critique

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of Enlightenment ambitions – Sebald makes Schumann contrast thereliable guidance afforded by feelings/stars with the dangers of ablind fidelity to reason, whose lucid principles may offer guidanceirrespective of sense data, but may equally lead us (Sebald’s poemcontinues) onto the rocks. The adjective Sebald/Schumann uses todescribe the clarity of the night sky is the German hell, which primarilymeans ‘bright’. We do the same in English: a bright night sky is a skywhose clarity allows us to see the stars, but a bright sky can also bea light blue sky. Sebald’s rephrasing of a clear night sky in terms ofdaylight seems to have transported into the final version of the poemsome of the antagonism between clear feelings and blind reason thatformed the crux of the passage in the earliest of the three versions. Afigure emerges by which feelings can be said to guide us when we areleast aware of them. The guiding stars are surely above us ‘in brightestdaylight’, too, only we cannot see them. But in addition to thesesubtleties, the elusive source of the dictum can indeed be confirmedas a letter Schumann wrote in July 1827 – a letter in which the passagein question is itself a quotation from Jean Paul Richter. Translated, thispassage reads: ‘Feelings, he said, are stars which only guide when thesky is clear; but reason is a magnetic needle that carries on guiding theship even when the stars are hidden and shine no longer.’ No mentionof ‘rocks’ here.

One thing all this goes to show is the kinds of use that readers,critics, and researchers might have for a vade mecum to the intertextualmaze of Sebald’s writings. The fuss I have made of a couple of linesof poetry suggests some of what might ideally be expected of such aguide: conscientious scrutiny of biographical and bibliographical facts;evidence of the compositional history and development of the texts;explanation of how the English translations of Sebald’s work cameinto being, and what may have been lost in the process. The presentvolume, Saturn’s Moons, satisfies all of these desiderata admirably, ina blend of facts, figures, essay, and memoir. At just under 1.5 kg,this is a compilation which is unlikely to fit anybody’s pocket, butthe generic term ‘handbook’ suggests a deliberate departure fromthe more common format of the ‘companion’. Here the editorsforego the characteristically uniform sequence of scholarly articles,presenting a far less streamlined, and far more varied, enterprise. Anomnibus-sized holdall, this handbook is a heterogeneous collectionof genres and materials: essayistic witness (by Sebald’s friends,students, and colleagues), previously unpublished work of Sebald’s,scholarly commentary and information, and a generous assortment ofphotographs and other documents.

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Among the most useful contributions are two essays in biography.Mark M. Anderson’s annals of Sebald’s early years, influences, andreading locates ‘the point where history and what one might call thelandscape of Sebald’s “imaginary homeland’’ begin to merge’. RichardSheppard’s scrupulous account of his student years (at Freiburgand Fribourg) and early academic career (at Manchester and UEA)points up Sebald’s immensely significant encounters with the worksof Benjamin, Adorno, Bloch, Horkheimer, and Marcuse. These helpedinspire his repudiation of werkimmanente Kritik (a German equivalentof New Criticism) and encouraged him towards what Ruth Klüger(cited in Uwe Schütte’s valuable chapter ‘Against Germanistik: W. G.Sebald’s Critical Essays’) has described as the author’s ‘biographism’,a taboo-flouting critical conflation of life and work resulting in‘biographies which are partly authentic, partly invented’. For his part,Sheppard finds himself wondering ‘how many of Max’s anglophoneadmirers understand that a straight, albeit subterranean line runsfrom his early saturation in revisionist Marxism to the nostalgia-laden critique of the postmodern, “hamburgerized world’’ (Max’sphrase) that informs his literary work of the 1990s’. Other essentialcontributions to this volume include Michael Hulse’s and AntheaBell’s very different records of their collaboration with Sebald on thetranslation of his major works, Clive Scott’s erudite analysis of ‘Sebald’sPhotographic Annotations’, Ulrich von Bülow’s ‘Reflections on W. G.Sebald’s Nachlass in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach’, and JoCatling’s ‘Bibliotheca abscondita’, her description of Sebald’s personallibrary. The final 280 pages will prove particularly helpful to those insearch of the bare facts: they include ‘A Catalogue of W. G. Sebald’sLibrary’ ( Jo Catling), as well as primary and secondary bibliographicalsurveys, and Richard Sheppard’s year-by-year, and sometimes day-by-day chronology not only of the frequently peripatetic life of this authorand academic, but – intertwined therewith – the events, meetings, andjourneys of his narrators.

Besides essays in which Michael Hulse and Anthea Bell addressthe subject of translating Sebald’s work and of collaborations betweenauthor and translator, readers of this journal should be intrigued bya hitherto unpublished interview conducted by Jon Cook. Here, theauthor reflects on his decision to write in German rather than English,the extent of his intervention in the English translations, the poeticalaspects of his prose, his view on what may be ‘lost in translation’ (this isthe title the piece is accorded), and the relationship with his translators.It perhaps comes as no surprise – although much is made in this bookof Sebald’s excellent command of English – that what he looks for in

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a translator is ‘somebody with a good English ear, which I have notgot’, somebody, in particular, able to do justice to the rhythms of hislong sentences. At the same time, his translator needs a good ear forGerman, too, if he or she is to respond appropriately to the Southernregionalisms and ‘shadings of earlier forms of German’ – what Sebaldcalls ‘the finer grain’ of his writing. This emphasis on the ‘ear’ intranslation is welcome, for it is a faculty frequently overlooked, anddifficult to describe. According to Sebald, ‘getting the rhythm right isjust a question of fiddling and changing and adding and shaving thingsoff and it’s very much a craft-type of work’. But when we speak of the‘ear’ in translation, as in poetry, we are surely referring to a translator’sresponse to the musical structure and overall auditory effect of thetext in all its complexity. A talent for singing is not universal, andthe invention of melody is, as Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, ‘le mystèresuprême des sciences de l’homme’.

As for the question, often asked, why an author with such ‘anexcellent command of English’ does not translate his work himself, theassumptions this implies are questionable indeed. To translate one’sown work into a different language is to rewrite it. If it were possible toimagine Sebald writing The Emigrants without the German language,the result would surely be an entirely different book. However, asthe pages of early draft translations that are reproduced in MichaelHulse’s essay in this volume demonstrate, Sebald participated to nolittle degree in turning his works into English – claiming, for example,that ‘combing through The Rings of Saturn’ had taken 350 hours. Inone sense, the double presence of the author-translator in the Englishtext signifies a continuation of the writing process rather than a newdeparture.

Writing a new book is rarely the stated aim of a translation, however.At one point in the interview with Cook, Sebald is asked whether heconsiders the translated or the German text to be ‘the original’. ForSebald, the German is ‘certainly the original’. But can we speak of anoriginal if there is no translation? To write a translation is to enter adialogue between texts and, by implication, between languages and allthat they mean. It is a dialogue whose heroic intention is to constructthe original – translation’s own way of approximating to the real. Toget as close as possible is the usual aim, which, bearing in mind that atranslator changes every single word, calls for a degree of legerdemain:‘no perfect translation can ever be achieved’, writes Anthea Bell, ‘butwe have at least to try to make the pretence convincing, and to walkwhat I think of as the tightrope of illusion’. The hypnotic undertow ofSebald’s prose in Austerlitz is a testimony to her sleight of hand.

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I am not sure that Michael Hulse, whose essay bravely and truthfullysets out the patterns and difficulties of his collaboration with Sebald,would wish to describe his translations in terms of pretence. ‘Fidelity’is the operative word in his essay, and he writes that his ‘instinct’, evenwith an author who has the temerity to rewrite passages from Conrad’sHeart of Darkness, ‘is always that whatever exists as a historical documentshould not be falsified’. Sebald himself describes his relationship withHulse as ‘complicated’, ‘subdued because we daren’t talk about thecomplexities too openly’. This view of their affairs is confirmed byHulse, albeit between the lines. When he writes of his collaborationwith Sebald as a meeting between ‘two sets of ethics’, or describesSebald’s reply when Hulse wonders about the balance of ‘truth’ andimaginative re-creation in his work as ‘canny, and perhaps even wily’,one senses how much has been left unsaid. The ‘wily’ Sebald is theone who not only feels free to invent or remodel quotations, but, inthe face of Hulse’s principles, describes his ‘biographism’ (see RuthKlüger, above) as ‘no more than extending the vectors a little’. Therelationship, whose clash of morals and aesthetics made it vulnerablefrom the start, nonetheless commands our respect. It is difficult notto admire the forbearance and professionalism on both sides of acollaboration that produced such excellent translations of three ofSebald’s major works. In light of their shared achievement, the finalsentence of Hulse’s essay adds a forlorn note to a book in which thesense of loss seems already all but pervasive: ‘That was the last I heardfrom him, and we never met again.’

Iain GalbraithWiesbaden

DOI: 10.3366/tal.2013.0107

Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry. Edited by W. N. Herbert, YangLian, Brian Holton, and Qin Xiaoyu. Pp. 359. Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2012.Pb. £12.

According to Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading (1934), the most trenchantpoetry declares itself as ‘news that stays news’. From one angle on theJade Ladder we can view recent Chinese poetry in translation as newsbulletins from foreign correspondents reacting with seditious verve tothe historical flashpoints of the last thirty-five years. They variouslydocument how officially sanctioned ‘slogans’ and rhymed propagandafor the inoculation of dogma lapsed into the grotesque chaos of theCultural Revolution (Bai Hua, ‘Autumn’s Weapons’); how this gave way

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to the thaw of the immediate post-Mao era; later on the TiananmenSquare ‘Incident’ and the return of Hong Kong to Beijing’s control.Huang Canran, whose poem ‘Flowers Circulating’ is featured in thisvolume, has worked as an international news translator in Hong Kong.Like many other authors showcased in Jade Ladder, Huang Canranchronicles a period of what editor W. N. Herbert calls dizzying yet‘deeply problematic growth’ by gauging how the political traumas ofstate persecution, censorship, and exile are encased within the ‘crises’of literary form and voice/lessness. While Jade Ladder is not by anymeans a compendium of political verse, much resonant work herereminds us that composition, attentive close reading, and translationstrategies have far-reaching social ramifications.

The chief editor W. N. Herbert is well known as a poet, and hispreface sets forth in illuminating detail how Jade Ladder was assembled.Roughly forty per cent of the poems in this anthology are cherry-picked from existing translations recommended by the co-editors YangLian and Qin Xiaoyu. All other new translations were undertaken byBrian Holton, who is one of the most acute translators of classicalas well as contemporary Chinese poetry operating today. (His finecollaboration with Yang Lian on the Riding Pisces volume was reviewedin 2009 in T&L Vol. 17). For Jade Ladder Holton would producean initial draft before sending each text to Yang Lian for detailedfeedback. Herbert and Holton would then work closely on furtherredrafting.

Herbert’s influence as the target-language poet who does not speakthe Mandarin source-language fluently can be felt at the level of whatHolton terms ‘the structured musicality’ of each poem. Unlike rivalanthologies, Herbert and Holton explicate ‘a totally different way oflistening’ (Ouyang Jianghe, ‘Who Leaves, Who Stays’) in order to distila ‘rhythmic pulse on the page’, so that the English poems of Jade Ladderecho the architecture of the Chinese text. This translatorial template,reminiscent of Robert Louis Stevenson’s memorable exhortation topinpoint ‘phrases that shall be musical in the mouth’, prioritizes acts ofcreative dialogue. Indeed, Herbert’s opening paragraph observes thatthe results of cross-cultural interaction between poets and translatorscan be ‘synaptic, a means of resolving cultural lacunae’ – operatingas ‘engines’ to amplify and probe the limits of language as a mediumof seeing and showing; not only of recording appearances but also ofmaking things appear.

Jade Ladder’s selections are subdivided into five categories: first of allthe historic ‘mainstay’ of Chinese verse, the lyric poem; narrative verse;neoclassicism; the sequence; experimental and long poems. Herbert

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makes a compelling case for this editorial arrangement, though Iwondered whether there was room for a more audacious organizationalploy: an alternative structure that might prompt anglophone readersto compare Chinese and European poetic genres. How aware, forexample, are today’s Chinese poets of the possibilities western poetsfind in pastoral, elegy, satirical parody, even the epigram? I would haveliked Herbert’s otherwise wide-ranging and witty preface to say moreabout how the anthologized writers function as thought-adventurers –mapping, extending, or destabilizing the generic choices available totheir Western counterparts.

Herbert’s preface is especially persuasive in setting forth how the‘ladder’ of this collection’s title refers to the structure which facilitatesthe gestation of the Chinese poem from conceptual abstraction totangible specificity; from the delicate ‘spiderweb of dreams’ (QingPing, ‘Evolution’) to a verbal performance mirroring ‘the often-tragicpressures exerted on Chinese writers throughout the last century’. QingPing’s ‘Evolution’ epitomizes one of the keynotes of this anthology: tobe ‘cut off by the billowing broad ocean’ signals enforced estrangementfrom contemporary China itself. In co-editor Yang Lian’s words, ‘exileis not merely the result of events; it has become all poets’ commonform of existence’. As he portrays it in Notes of a Blissful Ghost: ‘thereare no homeless ghosts | home is what is homeless’. Yet there is alsoample evidence in Jade Ladder of energizing cross-pollination withother national and expressive traditions; poems address how lines offlight, displacement, and disguise promote a quickened appreciationof a hitherto uncharted and intellectually curious global readership.On the one hand Jade Ladder illustrates how the condition of beingliterally and metaphorically ‘on edge’ triggers fraught reflections onthe time-space compression and breakneck pace of global modernity:‘One minute of the American dream, half a minute of Made in China’(Ouyang Jianghe, ‘One Minute, Oh, Heaven and Men Have GrownOld’). Yet in this same poem the rudderless subjectivity is able towitness ‘a clamorous world of miracles’ that augurs a new geometryof representation.

Jade Ladder then rewards a reading of the contemporary Chinesepoet as proudly peregrine; traced by protean flux and mutability – acultural chameleon ‘with plenty of aliases’ according to Holton’s adroitrendering of Zhang Zao. Zang Di’s ‘Guessing About Joseph Conrad’provides a teasingly disconcerting meditation on how this rovingpoetic self oscillates between the ‘feathery fragments of the classics’(Zhang Zao, ‘Gently Swinging’) and the ambiguous enticements ofwesternized modernity. Zang Di’s speaker is removed not only from the

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consolations of a geographical homeland, but also from the tradition oforthodox Confucianism that exalted poetry’s status as a diagnostic tooluniquely suited to exposing the pernicious maxims of despotism. Inthe unquiet spirit of Conrad – a polyglot Polish sailor who reinventedhimself as a lauded English man of letters – Zang Di’s speaker finds atireless navigator of ‘alien landscapes’ (Mai Cheng, ‘Symbols’):

As a way of waking up, the hootingsteam whistle just doesn’t work. But,at the moment the whistle stops,the seagulls sound like wordsacclaiming victory: they fly outof a Conrad novel, free fromthe fetters of printing or history . . .

(Zang Di, ‘Guessing About Joseph Conrad’)

The sound of the seagulls, even as it takes issue with language’s status asan instrument of objectification, becomes an utterance that presages aspirit of lyrical inspiration and liberation. In a text that reaches for thecoruscating promise of what lies within or behind the émigré’s cadence,it is especially apt that the translation puns on a much-maligned 1915Conrad novel (‘acclaiming victory’) whose formally intricate plot affirmsthe vital relationship between a European, Axel Heyst, and his Chineseassistant Wang. However, as Xiao Kaiyu’s poem ‘Mao Zedong’ reveals,‘the fetters of printing’, imaged as the redacted or occluded truthsfavoured by party ideologues, and the vestiges of embedded pasts, arenot so easily abjured. ‘Mao Zedong’ is a poem shaped by a powerfullydisturbing discontent, in which the challenges of processing the insularatavisms synonymous with the Cultural Revolution are portrayed as aprofound, even irresolvable quandary of translation:

He sleeps in a swimming pool full of old booksin between rebuilding work, watching the airspeaking in short hermetic linesunanalysable meaning hidden in tough briars of language,warrior’s language from an invisible battlefield, who understands it?

(Xiao Kaiyu, ‘Mao Zedong’)

Xiao Kaiyu’s speaker broods on how the associative work of the sensesand the sympathies is distorted or effaced by the slowly destructiveattrition of history. Personal or cultural memory does not inauguratea ritual of redemption in his poem; instead it triggers feelings ofsoured introspection, even paralyzed inadequacy before the patternsof tension and resistance to critical comprehension (‘who understandsit?’). At the end the speaker resembles an imaginative archaeologist, for

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whom the stratified layers of ‘old books’ are so many barren leaves orchoking residues, making the task of exhuming shards of the ‘warrior’slanguage’ not only frustrating but fruitless. This disappointed sign-seeker narrates his own insecurity about whether any knowledge canbe salvaged from the repressive rubble of the Cultural Revolution. AndMao’s timbre remains stubbornly encrypted. What is left is a spectralpersistence that cuts across and prevents the immediate, empiricalworld of the present from being itself.

Herbert and Holton have a zealous commitment to ‘a testing ofcultural equivalences’ and a ‘constant balancing of relative socialvalues’. For them the ‘tough briars of language’ include not only theformidable technical problems endemic to translation from Chinese toEnglish, but also the fact that each language is freighted with its ownunique aesthetic and metaphysical charge, whose musical, metrical,and symbolic facets demand ‘nicety, nuance, angle of approach’. Whatwill make Jade Ladder’s ‘angle of approach’ appealing to anglophonereaders unfamiliar with the anthologized poets is the editorial decisionto include a ‘supportive framework’ of culturally contextualizing essaysfrom both Chinese and European standpoints. Given the dearthof ‘authoritative resources’ available, Herbert and his team go toimpressive lengths to help us surmount what are often intimidatinglinguistic and socio-cultural obstacles. This gives Jade Ladder a clearadvantage over rival publications from the last three decades, suchas Edward Morin’s The Red Azalea: Chinese Poetry since the CulturalRevolution (1990), Donald Finkel and Carolyn Kizer’s A Splintered Mirror(1991), Michelle Yeh’s Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry (1993), andZhang Er and Chen Dongdong’s Another Kind of Nation (2007).

Zhang Er and Chen Dongdong’s bilingual anthology, which ismentioned briefly in Herbert’s preface, arranges its selections oftwenty-four poets alphabetically – a curious call given that Chinesedoes not have an alphabet. Zhang Er’s opening gambit, though itcanvasses well the links between invigorating instabilities of form incurrent Chinese verse and the flows of global modernity, is sometimesmarred by grammatical glitches and typos. Chen Dongdong’scompanion essay, entitled ‘Robinson Crusoe on the Mainland’, isoffered in Chinese only, which renders it inaccessible to a sizeableportion of its intended audience. Unlike Jade Ladder, Another Kind ofNation is vulnerable to the charge of packaging contemporary Chinesepoetry as an overly neat cultural phenomenon, eliding weighty issuesof caste, ethnicity, self-declared allegiances, and group formationsdefined by a Taoist, Confucian, or Buddhist aesthetic. Without theaid provided by individual overviews for each of the featured poets,

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readers of Another Kind of Nation have to rely on rather cursory authorbiographies in the final pages.

Jade Ladder is a more coherent and commanding enterprise both inits scholarly apparatus and narrative arc. Herbert is an urbane andknowledgeable guide while Yang Lian supplies what is aptly describedas an ‘insider’s report’. Anchored in personal reminiscence, this deeplyfelt assessment throws into relief the core issue of how we measureour own prejudices and preconceptions about Chinese language andits venerable poetic repertoire. Yang Lian poses important questionswhich are not fully broached by Another Kind of Nation: do currentChinese poets feel short-changed by their coverage and treatmentin literary translations published for a principally Anglo-Americanacademic audience? How is the artistic effort to craft insurgentdefinitions of and stories about the human voice vitiated when the ‘pastbends its menacing knee to court you’ (Pan Wei, ‘Village Clique’)? YangLian reacts to these questions here as elsewhere in his critical writingswith characteristically impish wit and stylistic brio. He implies that thetranslator should be construed as the practitioner of an advanced modeof creative writing; or as showing a mediumistic flair to goad and guidethe spectral traces of the source text into startling configurations thatnevertheless take something essential from the source.

Yang Lian’s essay has much to say about a topic which is givenshort shrift in rival volumes. In anthologies of this type it is ofteneasy to forget how the source texts were printed, disseminated, andconsumed. Yang Lian’s nuanced discussion of Jintian, arguably themost influential ‘little magazine’ in post-1949 Chinese literature,helps us trace particular Jade Ladder poets along specific pathwaysof composition, production, distribution, and reception, materiallygrounding Herbert’s sense of recent Chinese verse as being truly globalin its impact. Running for only nine issues and shut down by theauthorities after a couple of years, Jintian is a vivid reminder of howavant-garde expression is tied to the fortunes of literary cadres, creativeeconomies, and networking clusters. Yang Lian’s account makes forfascinating reading, especially in the light of the ‘new modernist’and translation theorists such as Haun Saussy and Steven Yao whocanvass the infrastructures of dissent and formal innovation instigatedby private presses and little magazines which operated as harbingersof the ‘underground’ blogs and bulletin boards geared towards a newgeneration of Chinese experimental authors.

The richness and range of Yang Lian’s ‘insider’s report’ also imbuesthe Chinese associate editor Qin Xiaoyu’s introductory essays whichopen each section of Jade Ladder. Herbert refers to these essays as

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‘complementary critical perspectives’, but they do much more thaninform about the highly variegated terrain of contemporary Chinesepoetry. In a droll tribute to the traditions of classical Chinese erudition,these essays steer us according to the impressions of an eminent‘previous reader-scholar’. But such measured ‘interlinear commentary’also leaves us free to form our own judgements as to the relativemerits of individual poets, and how their thematic concerns – such asgender, the urban/rural gulf, civil strife, and colonialism – intersectwith modernist, avant-garde, or socialist-realist canons.

Reading this anthology validates Yang Lian’s eye-catching andpuckish proposal that Jade Ladder is an ‘extreme’ book. On one levelhe is paying tribute to the collection’s ambitious scope (over sixty poetsand more than two hundred poems of great tonal diversity). Moreimportantly, he has in mind how Jade Ladder will foster a ‘revolution’in the way anglophone readers parse these anthologized authors: asinventively eclectic campaigners for ‘a world poetry written in Chinese’– a bracingly borderless and hybridized cultural phenomenon.

Yang Lian’s ‘insider’s report’ begs a final question: how will a Chineseaudience react to this ‘extreme book’? Mainland Chinese literarypundits have grumbled – with some justification – at the tendency ofan Anglo-American commentariat to see the bulk of recently translatedMandarin poetry as sobering historical documentation at best, or associological screeds at worst. Such reductive readings are exacerbatedby a failure properly to distinguish between the modern (Xian Dai) andthe contemporary (Dang Dai) periods of poetic endeavour. However,Jade Ladder is capacious enough to contain much more than protestsongs by embittered exiles or renegade secessionists. When Ezra Poundextolled great poetry as ‘news that stays news’ he was painting aportrait of the artist not just as a political provocateur, but moreexactly as a path-breaker with a flair for energetic eccentricity, whose‘lightning turn of phrase’ can ‘revive the mind of the reader’. Themost accomplished work in Jade Ladder not only harmonizes withPound’s tenet but evokes a questing sensibility that, in Brian Holton’stranslation of Zang Di, seems ‘to have come to a new place’.

Andrew RadfordUniversity of Glasgow

DOI: 10.3366/tal.2013.0108

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