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Alan Michael Parker |
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The Indiana Review Spring, 2007 The Imaginary Poets reviewed by Hannah Faith Notess Alan Michael Parker collected the anthology The Imaginary Poets not by asking poets for their work, but by issuing a challgnge: “Translate a poem into English, offer a biography of the poet, and then write a short essay in which the poem, the poet, and the corpus are considered–and make all of it up, without once indicating you have done so.” The twenty-two poets in the anthology responded with poems “translated” from eighteen languages, from Greek to Yiddish, from Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Swahili.In some cases the poems are actual translations. D. A. Powell, writing as João Pudim, offers a Portuguese sonnet beside his translation. Thom Ward, writing as Jan DeKeerk, provides a Dutch poem and its English equivalent; Laure-Anne Bosselaar (as Anne-Maëlle Mathieu) and Annie Finch (Rose Elbow Souris) do the same with their French poems; David Kirby, writing as Kevnor, provides the Dirja original (an invented language). In other cases, the process of translation has completely been invented, and the process is described only in the accompanying essay. For example, Victoria Redel invents Tzadie Rackel, “one of the Sewn Poets of the Jewish villages and small cities of Bessarabia,” whose poems consist entirely of Yiddish words sewn into garments. Redel offers the poem “Dish Rag” as an example: Oy, Little tumult, little racket. My nudge, this nudnick heart. Who wouldn't? What? Worry? Veys mir. that schmendrick! In Redel's accompanying essay, she reflects on both the difficulty of tranlating Yiddish because so many of its words have been “ stubbornly included into contemporary American English,” and on the difficulty of translating poems that are “truly poems to be worn (the slip, the coat, the apron poem series).” But of course, the whole tradition is Redel's own invention. This blend of a translator's actual concerns with pure invention characterizes most of The Imaginary Poets, an enjoyable blend of the academic and the wacky. The book often offers a twist to the concept of a persona poem. Because each poet had to offer a biography and a critical interpretation, it's impossiblc to read the poems apart from the imagined life behind them. At times the biography and the critical essays, which as a whole emphasize the imaginary poets' lives over their work, overwhelm the poetry. But at other points, the biography seems to weave seamlessly into the poetry. Josh Bell, writing as Chiapan revolutionary Saurah Joan Mao, offers a “New Year's Letterfrom a Guerilla Encampment in Chiapas (On the Eve of Revolution),” a persona poem that is both embedded in biography and transcending it: I am not sorry for attempting to throw the world away: where the metal kissed the metal, and in the dockwork guts of it, it always seemed disposable, built to be abandoned. . . Mao, Bell informs us, is all but unknown because she was killed by federal soldiers who believed they had accidentally shot an Anglo journalist. As a rule, the imaginary poets lived wildly diverse and difficult lives: a Dutch amateur jazz clarinetist, a pseudonymous Dadaist artist's model, an amnesiac ex-Nazi, a medieval mystic, a Japanese-Hawaiian sugar plantation worker. Some of the poems could even be considered confessional, if their authors were actual people, such as Eleanor Wilner's imaginary poet lrena Zupanik, an opera singer whose father was a magician, who writes: ... But still, I keep this trunk–its magic made my father's way, and mine. since I was the girl he sawed in half– and while the crowd cheered and he took his bows, I got away. lnventing an imaginary poet allows the contributors to this volume to invent lives whose literal circumstances are deeply connected to the contents of the poems. But the contributors themselves don't appear to share in these wild and exciting lives. Nearly all of the contributours to The Imaginary Poets are professors of creative writing, and the tone they take in discussing the imaginary poets' work is strictly academic, if occasionally coy. “I first came upon Sixteen Poems for a Dying Land at Cedi Court Boob, a small antiquarian bookstore near London's theater district” Kevin Prufer writes about discovering his imaginary poet, Wen Bo. About discovering her poet, Gertrude of BIandenburg, Barbara Hamby writes, “I found this poem several years ago when I was doing research in Mantua, in the archives of the Gonzaga family.” These fantasies of lucky discoveries, along with the vividly imagined lives, give The lmaginary Poets a hopeful feel. These are the discoveries any poet would hope for in translating poetry–to bring a distant voice to life. |
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