Paz’s Anthology
An Anthology of Mexican Poetry, ed. Octavio Paz, tr. Samuel Beckett
Not that many years ago, the Santa Monica
Museum of Art (which is a commercial building made over by Frank O. Gehry as a temporary
exhibition space, and has no collection) had a show the tenor of which
purported that Ireland and Mexico were cultural equivalents. This was at a time
when Santa Monica College promulgated a document soliciting contributions for a
new planetarium which would, among other things, monitor the racial component
of the city, somehow.
The rationale appears to have been the
Chicano movement and its murals in comparison with Sinn Fein and the Ulster
muralists. I did not see the show, but it is remarkable that one of the great
feats of translation in our time has been Octavio Paz’s selection of
Mexican verse rendered into English by Samuel Beckett.
How this project came to be must be in
Deirdre Bair’s biography, which one can no more bear to read than Brian
Boyd’s Nabokov (one does not like to hear one’s friends spoken of
behind their backs, and Boyd has an awful air of Jack Cockerell about him, or
so it seems to me).
In a nice swing at a ball thrown by the
memory of one of Nabokov’s comments about book reviewers, I would say
that it would be for example a most interesting and curious match for the mind
to know how the proposition was put to or by Beckett, and what amount he was
paid for all the verses he made.
There are only two schools of translation,
and one can say that there is no preferring one to the other, A poem is literal
when its terms are translated literally, and poetic when it transcends these
considerations. Mathematics speaks across boundaries; a poem is a problem or a
formula whose elements or terms may be regrouped or reformulated somewhat, so
long as the equation is made. One gives you a literal crib (you the poet), you give one back an unobstructed rendering. Contrariwise,
the mumbo-jumbo of a paraphrase gets sorted out with a new diligence, until the
meaning of the poem is now clear.
Nabokov and Shelley are the emblems. Beckett
is a Shelleyan. He will have verse made, as in the Elizabethan days, or damn
the attempt. His “Drunken Boat” is practically a new invention,
recomposed like the inside of a caterpillar, before the chrysalis breaks.
Some other time it would be worthwhile to
ask of the originals how they have metamorphosed, but for now let’s note
the original English.
Spender says “green with envy.”
Auden loved the rare word and placed it in one’s hand like the Mallarméan
traveler. Beckett’s thrift comes with a packet of associations that have
no ornamentation:
For
the people the bard is grace, not cark.
The boat at the dock in Le Voyeur
emits a sound from its sirène, and translations of Calvino and Neruda
often give a restless feeling. Beckett says the verse is important, the makers
are poets, there must be poetry.
Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin
advances the parallel opinion with the same result.
A seventeenth-century poem (Luis de Sandoval
y Zapata), evidently a sonnet:
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Beauty on a Western Balcony On the Occident she shed her light I, in the Occident guitaring light, Thou gainest from
the Occident on the Sun; In the Orient still he fans his pyres; |