Poetry dominates this year’s translation prizes. Five of the seven winners
have translated work by poets, from Spain’s Golden Age to modern-day
Palestine. The most eye-catching title on the list is undoubtedly Ian
Fairley’s translation of Paul Celan’s Schneepart – a volume first published
some months after the poet had taken his own life by throwing himself into
the River Seine in Paris, in April 1970. Readers could be forgiven for
thinking that everything that this most translated of poets wrote has
already appeared in English, but Fairley points out that the seventy poems
that make up the original have not until now been translated in full.
Celan described Schneepart as his “strongest and boldest” book, although, as
with much of Celan’s work, the term “hermetic” also comes to mind. Fairley
explains in his introduction that the poet had not authorized its
publication, but “the care which he devoted to its fair copy . . . is deemed
. . . to be consistent with Celan’s practice in preparing earlier volumes
and to offer firm ground on which to infer his intention to publish”.
Fairley has added a further twenty poems that were published posthumously,
and wins this year’s Schlegel-Tieck Prize for his handsomely produced volume
(Snow Part; 195pp. Carcanet. Paperback, £14.95. 978 1 85754 944 7). The
anonymous TLS reviewer of Schneepart in 1971 talked of the book being
“filled with terms that are not normally part of the vocabulary of educated
Germans, terms which have to be chased up in dictionaries . . . . Such terms
are placed in unusual combinations, . . . vocabulary ‘registers’ are
deliberately intermingled, in a sustained attempt to build up a
self-contained world of language which will also mirror something of the
confusion, terror and sense of mystery that the modern world inspires . .
.”. “Splinterecho”, “sorefresh”, “enheathen” and “watershabrack” (water, ice
and stones form a motif in the poems) give a hint of Fairley’s extremely
attentive responses to the challenges Celan’s language presents to all who
approach it, nowhere better met than in this faithful rendition: “Live the
lives, live them all, / tell the one dream from the other, / look, I rise,
look, I fall, / am an other, am no other” (“Leb die Leben, leb sie alle, /
halt die Träume auseinander, / sieh, ich steige, sieh, ich falle, / bin ein
andrer, bin kein andrer”).
Paul Celan appears in a poem by Mahmoud Darwish. In “A Cloud from Sodom”, we
read (in Fady Joudah’s Arabic-English edition) of how “‘A cloud went from
Sodom to Babylon,’ / hundreds of years ago, but its poet Paul / Celan
committed suicide, today, in Paris’s river”. Darwish, who died in August at
the age of sixty-seven, was the unofficial Palestinian laureate, and a
member of the PLO’s Executive Council. He produced over twenty volumes of
poetry. Joudah’s The Butterfly’s Burden, the winner of this year’s Saif
Ghobash-Banipal Prize (326pp. Bloodaxe. Paperback, £12. 978 1 85224 788 1),
offers us three of them, notably The Stranger’s Bed (1998), which, Joudah
reveals in his florid preface, confounded readers who expected “a glorious
eulogy for the new Palestinian state yet to come”, but were instead
confronted with some deeply personal work: “You are as you dream, the summer
of a northerly land / anesthetizing its thousand forests in the pounce of
sleep. Sleep / and don’t awaken a body desiring a body in my sleep”.
This year’s Premio Valle Inclán is shared between John Dent-Young for his
edition of the Selected Poems of Luis de Góngora (270pp. University of
Chicago Press. $30. 978 0 226 14059 9) and Nick Caistor for his translation
of Alan Pauls’s novel El pasado (The Past; 474pp. Harvill Secker. £17.99.
978 1 84343 220 3). Góngora (1561–1627) is “considered by many to be Spain’s
greatest poet”, according to Dent-Young, whose aim in this volume was “to
rescue Góngora from his role as textbook example of the Baroque and give him
a human voice”, while suggesting that Velázquez’s severe portrait of the
poet (reproduced here) belies his true nature: “That bridge of yours,
Manzanares, it’s a laugh; / listen to what the people round here say: / it’s
a bridge that ought to span a mighty sea, / and you’re not river enough to
merit half” (from “The Bridge of Segovia”). Reviewing Dent-Young’s work in
the TLS of October 19, 2007, Chris Andrews wrote, “Góngora’s verse affords a
range of pleasures . . . but bringing those together requires patience, good
will and philological help. John Dent-Young has provided the smoothest
possible access to the poems . . . . The translations are inventive and
unstuffy, sensitive and bold, a pleasure to read on their own”.
Alan Pauls is an Argentinian writer who was born in 1959. El pasado (2004) was
his first novel in almost a decade. It chronicles the emotional
entanglements of a translator called Rimini from the 1970s to the 90s – a
turbulent time in Argentinian history, but Pauls doesn’t dwell much on
external events, focusing instead on the interior life of Rimini. The novel
was, in the words of the TLS reviewer Martin Schifino (December 10, 2004),
“widely acclaimed throughout the Spanish-speaking world”. Schifino went on
to say that “El pasado does what few recent Spanish-language novels, and
fewer Argentinian ones, have achieved: it creates a distinctive music.
Pauls’s range extends from poised detachment reminiscent of W. G. Sebald to
a fierceness that recalls Philip Roth . . . . It is a momentous novel”.
Caistor’s translation reads elegantly and brings to light a taste for
unusual simile: “he made love to her with all the fondness and devotion of a
goldsmith . . .”.
Modern Italian poetry has received considerable attention from
English-language publishers in recent years, with handsome editions of
Montale, Attilio Bertolucci and, most recently, Andrea Zanzotto and Vittorio
Sereni, along with Jamie McKendrick’s Faber Book of 20th-Century Italian
Poems. Peter Robinson, who translated Sereni, now gives us for the first
time in English the work of Luciano Erba.
Erba was born in 1922, in Milan, where he has lived for most of his life,
teaching at various universities. He has translated a number of poets into
Italian, including Blaise Cendrars, Henri Michaux and Thom Gunn. Robinson,
whose selection of Erba’s work from the 1960s to the present day (The
Greener Meadow; 271pp. Princeton University Press. Paperback, $17.95. 978 0
691 12764 4) wins this year’s John Florio Prize, describes it as “a poetry
of objects”. Erba has, according to Robinson, “over more than half a century
gone about producing one of the most . . . original bodies of work in
contemporary Italian poetry”, in poems that obliquely refer to historical
events but, in the main, focus on the mundane, as titles such as “After the
Holidays” and “Relocation” suggest. “Railway Suite, 1943” is inspired by
Erba’s escape from conscription for Mussolini’s republic of Salò: “I was
reading in the eyes of farmhands / my destiny my sure condemnation / in the
mountains I would go / hiking boots and overcoat / I was wanting to flee /
Italy and Salò”.
The poet George Seferis (who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1963) was an official with the Greek government-in-exile from 1942 to 1944
and subsequently ambassador to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq, 1953–6. His
Levant Journal (173pp. Ibis. Paperback, $16.95. 978 965 90125 6 5), which
covers these years, has been beautifully translated by Roderick Beaton, the
winner of this year’s Hellenic Foundation for Culture Translation Award. The
journal is a fascinating mixture of the author’s thoughts on other poets,
Cavafy (in whose city Alexandria Seferis at one point finds himself) in
particular, observation of places – he is unimpressed by the Pyramids – and
snapshots of the precariousness of life in wartime: on waiting for an
evacuation train in Jerusalem in July 1942, “My Czech colleague gave up
altogether and slit his wrists”. We are party to the thoughts of a poet in
exile – “Travel wherever I might, it is Greece that causes me pain”. The
turmoil of the times is vividly conveyed, and we are left in no doubt as to
Seferis’s opinion of British officialdom: “Whether the entire population of
my country is wiped out, or only half of it, will depend upon the idiocies
of the British generals”. Elsewhere he writes, “It’s strange, the Englishman
thinks nothing of the hatred he rouses around him . . . ”, while two
Americans bound for Baghdad had “no idea, no interest in anything”. Beaton
has also translated several long poems and provided excellent notes.
The annual rentrée in France this autumn sees the publication of some 700
novels, of which a staggering 200 are works in translation. It is hard to
imagine a similar publishing ratio in Britain, but of that select band of
novelists who have made it across the Channel the prolific Frédéric
Beigbeder first came to notice in the UK with his novel in response to
September 11, Windows on the World (2003). Holiday in a Coma (Vacances dans
le coma, 1994) and Love Lasts Three Years (L’Amour dure trois ans, 1997),
paired together in one volume, chronicle the life of Marc Marronnier, a
young, rich, superficial advertising executive, from his experiences at the
opening of a Parisian nightclub whose DJ is working on a garage version of
the speeches of Maréchal Pétain to visits to porn video booths in the rue
Saint-Denis. We follow Marronnier through his eventful love life as he puts
to the test his theory that love can only last three years. Frank Wynne, the
winner of this year’s Scott Moncrieff Prize for Holiday in a Coma and Love
Lasts Three Years (300pp. Fourth Estate. Paperback, £11.99. 978 0 00 722813
3), has caught Beigbeder’s hip, breezy style admirably, and rises to the
considerable challenges presented by French slang, although it’s not clear
why he chose to simplify the closing of the second novel, “J’ai regardé ma
montre: il était 23h 59. Encore soixante secondes, et nous serions fixés” to
“I looked at my watch: it was 11.59 p.m.”
The six prizes were presented by the editor of the TLS, Sir Peter Stothard, at
a ceremony at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on September 29. This was followed by
the 2008 Sebald Lecture, given by Louis de Bernières.
