MAKING POETRY SING

An interview with W. D. Snodgrass | By Julianna E. Thibodeaux

Writer Julianna Thibodeaux speaks with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W. D. Snodgrass about his notoriety as a poet and the process of translating lyric poetry in a visionary way.

The troubadours, lyric poets, and poet-musicians of knightly rank who flourished in the south of France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are remembered historically with a romantic air. The troubadours were often well-educated, and therefore highly sophisticated in their poetry and music-making in the service of courtly love.

The 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W. D. Snodgrass (Heart’s Needle) began translating poems and eventually ballads later in his career, which eventually led him to an interest in troubadour songs. In the Spring 2004 issue of The Kenyon Review, Snodgrass’s recent collection of troubadour translations is published, including the musical scores. It is rare, Snodgrass points out, for a publication to print musical scores as well as poem translations.

As Snodgrass reveals, while he has translated poems and verse from many languages, the only two languages he knows are English and Greek. With the help of translators, Snodgrass is able to extract the original narrative thread and intent of the text. “A literal translation of a poem or song gives you very little of the quality of the original—you can’t afford to ignore the literal ‘message content’ but that’s only a small part of the original’s total effect,” Snodgrass explains. “If possible, I work with friends who are natives to the language or with scholars who’ve spent years becoming familiar with it.”

From there, Snodgrass works his magic. “I hope this makes clear something that people are always asking me about—I tell them half-jokingly that it’s a lot easier to translate poems if you don’t know the original… My feeling is that to leave the translation as dull, single-level prose is a betrayal; better to try to find some comparable, if different, effect in your own English.”

We caught up (via email) with the poet-translator, who was traveling in Mexico, to find out more about this unique form of music-poetry, which Snodgrass believes is a precursor to today’s love ballads.

Kenyon Review: In the preface to After-Images, you write, “I have been called a ‘confessional’ poet, a term I heartily dislike.” What does the term mean to you?

W. D. Snodgrass: The term confessional seems to imply either that I’m concerned with religious matters (I am not) or that I’m writing some sort of bedroom memoir (I hope I’m not—most people are deadly dull on such matters). When my first book, Heart’s Needle, appeared, X. J. Kennedy wrote a very favorable review but also expressed a dread that, as a result, all sorts of dullards would rush up offering him “an open-faced heart sandwich.” I’m afraid that’s exactly what has happened.

KR: You go on to say, “Autobiographical details, if they appear, should satisfy the poem’s needs, not the author’s hankering for notice or admiration.” What earned you the distinction of “first confessional poet,” and why?

WDS: That term was first used by M. L. Rosenthal, who meant (I hope) no harm by it. It may seem incredible now, but it was then considered improper to write as if you had a personal existence; private feelings were off limits. This was partly because many poets taught at universities (where you were supposed to pose as other than human—at the University of Rochester, I was requested not to read a paper which investigated the events lying behind one of my poems), but partly because of the influence of Pound and T. S. Eliot. Eliot had said that poetry was not personality but the escape from personality. No one noticed that his next sentence said that you had to have a personality in order to want to escape from it.

KR: Poet and translator William Jay Smith, who served as judge for the 1999 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award (which you received for Selected Translations), wrote: “The translation of poetry is impossible, but fortunately poets, rather than being deterred by the impossibility, have even been attracted by it.” Does this hold true for you? If so, how?

WDS: Recently, my wife, Kathleen, was translating a Mexican poet, Luis Miguel Aguilar, and was troubled about two poems, “The Narrow Bed,” a villanelle, and “The Broad Bed,” a sestina. I said why not take a fling at them—if you fail, you won’t feel bad, since no one would expect that you could do that; if it happens to work, you’ll feel like a supergenius. In no time she’d done splendid translations, preserving both difficult forms. I’m sure my reasoning came from my own attempts to translate songs and ballads—where I know that at least nine out of ten attempts will fail. Meantime, I’ll at least have become better acquainted with a fine piece of music. Anyone in the arts wants to do something highly improbable, possible to only a few persons. But if it proves that it IS impossible, you can at least give yourself credit for high aims.

KR: Did Selected Translations, which includes folk songs, art songs, and ballads, mark a departure for you? I’ve heard it said that you decided in mid-career to translate only songs. What prompted you to make this decision?

WDS: I did make such a decision in mid-career and kept it for almost twenty years. This vow came partly because many poets were already making fine translations of poems from other languages. The only foreign language I’ve been able (or willing?) to learn is classical Greek and I’ve never published anything from it. It seems to me, also, almost impossible to learn another language deeply enough to fully “get” that language’s poems—that almost has to come with your mother’s milk. Meantime, I did have a background in music and felt I might have an edge there that most others wouldn’t.

Meantime, even when I wasn’t working in music myself, it was always of great importance to me. I recently had a poem in The New Criterion addressed to the tenor, Hugues Cuenod, whose quality of voice had once totally changed the nature of my poems. I felt that my poems could only reach the clarity and passion I heard in his singing if I stopped writing about what my teachers said I should (e.g., the loss of myth in our time) and wrote about what really mattered to me—in that case, the loss of my daughter in a divorce. Meantime, I simply wanted to sing the songs Cuenod had recorded—as also, the Mahler “Kindertotenlieder”—but couldn’t do it in the original languages.

KR: How does a translator stay true to his own language and yet convey authentic meaning as well as cadence?

WDS: Surprising question! Other people demand that a translation stay true to the language of the original (of course, that could only be done in the original’s language!). As I see it, you can only convey authentic meaning by staying true to your own language (i.e., your own personal voice), your own cadences. It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it. Or to say this another way, I want my translation of a song or a poem to sound as if it had been composed in English by an individual native to our language. It will, by necessity, be different from the song or poem in the first language. I am concerned with accuracy but even more concerned with excellence as a song or poem.

KR: William Jay Smith quotes Denis Donaghue, who reviewed your second book of poems, After Experience (these followed your 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning volume Heart’s Needle), as saying of your early translations, “The old eloquence persists but it is richer now because it listens to other voices and knows something of what silence means.” Can you talk about these “other voices?”

WDS: I don’t think I can explain what Denis Donaghue meant, though I’d like to have loudspeakers blaring it all over town. Probably he was referring to a poem in that book which used the voice of Adolf Eichmann (or an Eichmann-like part of myself) or another in which the voice of a hand-to-hand combat instructor collides with the voice of Spinoza. He may have been suggesting that this book was less concerned with my personal problems and more concerned with social questions. I don’t know what “what silence means” means. Maybe he’s glad that I’ve learned to keep quiet about certain matters; possibly he’s referring to something mystical. I do hope not!

KR: When did you begin ballad translations, and why? How long have you been doing them?

WDS: I’m not sure about this. My grandfather used to sing Scottish songs and ballads. I have always thought that the best of the Scottish-English ballads were as powerful as any poems in English (unless you include things like Shakespeare’s greatest plays). My earliest attempt at a foreign ballad came, I think, shortly after the USIS sent me on a tour of Eastern Europe. I arrived in Romania just at Christmas when most poets were away. My hosts were very apologetic, but I said that was quite all right with me—I’d be even more interested in meeting people involved with folk music (I had recently been caught up in the folk song fad after having been away from active music-making for about twenty years). The USIS people got me access to Dr. Mihai Pop, head of the Romanian Folklore Institute, who had excellent English; I left his office carrying piles of books and recordings, among them a version of the wonderful ballad “Mioritsa.” I had no idea what the ballad was about, but it seemed a masterpiece; I knew at once that I wanted to translate and sing it. I worked on this with various Romanian friends for many years. My version is in the Selected Translations and I have read it aloud for several Romanian audiences; I never did sing it, though—the music is so heavily influenced by eastern (especially Turkish) music that I never felt I could “translate” it—that style does have to come with your mother’s milk. Besides, my voice never got as good as I’d hoped so I didn’t sing in public.

On that trip, I next went to Hungary where I had access to Dr. Lajos Vargyas, head of their folk institute. He introduced me to many wonderful Hungarian ballads (some of the music in Bela Bartok’s own handwritten notation!), but I never could make satisfactory versions of the earliest, most powerful, ballads. Every Hungarian word is accented on the first syllable; perhaps that’s what made my translations dull in their movement. But this may only be an excuse.

Also because of this trip, I later translated quite a few folk songs from both languages, one or two later Hungarian ballads and four other powerful Romanian ballads.

KR: What drew you to your most recent collection of ballad translations, “Troubadour Translations” (published in the spring 2004 issue of The Kenyon Review)?

WDS: I have actually translated some twenty-four troubadour songs. Many have appeared in literary magazines, but I think The Kenyon Review is the first to also print my versions of the music. Before long, a volume (working title: The Lark in the Morning) of metrical translations of the troubadours will be issued by the University of Chicago. It will include translations by Pound, Robert Kehew (the book’s editor), and eighteen of my versions. This book probably won’t have music. I still hope eventually to publish a volume containing originals, translations, and also music.

KR: Tell me more about the songs. Where do they come from and what are they about? Are they intended to be performed?

WDS: The second of the songs is by Bernhart de Ventadorn, probably now the best-known troubadour—perhaps because his songs most resemble the nineteenth-century romantic vision of the troubadour singing mournfully in the twilight to a beautiful, distant lady about his idealistic love. (More about this myth later.) Bernhart was the son (probably illegitimate) of a cook at the Castle of Ventadorn. As a singer, he was attached to several courts, the most famous being that of Eleanor of Aquitaine, granddaughter of the first troubadour whose work survives, Guillaume IX Duke of Aquitaine and VIIth Count of Poitier. Eleanor, of course, married the king of France, then later the king of England. It’s believed that, though he was once banished from her court for overzealously courting her, he did later accompany her to England. This helped spread the influence of troubadour songs and music—though that was even more encouraged by the French invasion and massacres, which scattered troubadours across the whole continent.

The first song reveals more of the actual courtly love situation. Here, the singer has managed to seduce the lady of the castle into some outbuilding near the castle. The song is addressed to their watchman on guard against the agents of the castle’s lord—presumably her husband. In another well-known song, “Reis Glorios” by Giraut de Bornelh, the singer is a friend left outdoors on guard and then to sing, waking the guy who has spent the night with the lady inside. In other songs (“Kalenda Maya”) the husband is often referred to only as the jealous one (“l’ gelos”) since the purpose often is just to irritate and make him jealous, so finding revenge for their jealousy of him—see “Can vei la Lauzeta” by Bernhart, where he speaks openly of his envy. The troubadour may actually be physically (or otherwise) attracted to the lady, yet it’s important to remember that she is very powerful (especially when her lord is off crusading or fighting with neighbors) and her favor may affect one’s quality of life. Nonetheless, the courtly love they often sing about is, no doubt, the distant ancestor of our romantic love.

Among the other troubadour songs I’ve translated is the first “talking blues song,” the earliest European song where a peasant girl gets to reject and scorn a highborn seducer, the earliest example of what Beethoven called “die fernste geliebste,” the earliest half-nonsense song, and the earliest “Hooray—I’m out of love” song. There are also several quite funny and at least one quite irreligious song.

These songs surely were meant to be (and were) sung—sometimes by the troubadour himself, but if he was high in the aristocracy he’d probably have a minstrel who might be instructed and addressed in the last stanza. Only a small percentage of the texts are accompanied with notation—usually an archaic form known as neumes, which specify exactly the notes but not their duration. So we can’t tell what the rhythm may or may not have been. The current opinion among musicologists is that the melodies were “non-mensural,” had no regular rhythm. Obviously, I’m not in their camp; their arguments are strong but don’t suit my ear. It may be that I’ve “translated” not only the texts to a foreign language, but also the music. But since the manuscripts were all written at least two hundred years later than the songs and the CDs of the period are badly decayed, I think we are free to perform the songs as sounds right to us. Also, for texts I admired but which had brought no notation with them, I’ve felt free to adapt melodies from other songs with like-patterned texts.

KR: What are the similarities between ballads and poetry? Is there a lyrical quality that’s just as essential in poetry as it is in the ballad form?

WDS: The dissimilarities are easier to point out. For much of our history, both used stanzas, regular verse forms, and rhyme. The biggest difference, I think, is that the ballads were to be sung, so their language and its devices had to be somewhat more direct. (Sometimes an excellent song may have a rather trite text—e.g., much of Schubert, Brahms, Faure, etc. Since you already know or can guess the “message content,” you can pay attention to things like melodic invention, voice quality, dramatic performance, etc.)

In the ballad, of course, the “lyrical quality” lies partly in the fact of singing. Though ballad singers usually draw little attention to their voice quality or dramatic performance, song still has a transformative effect—especially if the melody is remarkable. In the spoken (or silently read) poem, this is usually replaced by more dazzling linguistic effects, symbologies, levels of language, more pointed sound effects in the text—all demanding a different kind of attention. This is not to deny that the greatest of the ballads may turn into splendid poems if well read.

KR: What are the challenges in maintaining the musicality of a ballad when you’re in the process of writing a translation?

WDS: To my knowledge, almost nothing helpful has been written on this. Auden made a few notes on his work with Chester Kallman in translating The Magic Flute. There’s also a man named Healey Willan who was prominent in choral work and who gives some exact, practical advice, but here in Mexico, I can’t look these things up.

Of course, one has to preserve the number of stresses and, in many languages, the position of those stresses. Usually, the verse stresses must coincide with musical accents; though I’ve heard Romanian and Hungarian singers who can finesse such conflicts, most English-speaking singers can’t. (We have a devil of a time with certain of Handel’s arias and choruses.) You also want the most dramatic point of the musical cadence to coincide with the most dramatic point in the words. But all this can be undone by clusters of unfriendly consonants, vowels of inappropriate lengths, or other local foul-ups. I found that you just have to sing the phrase and see if it works—though you still have to judge whether better singers may be able to manage problems you can’t.

Julianna E. Thibodeaux writes journalism, criticism, fiction, and poetry. She is the recipient of a Creative Renewal Fellowship from the Arts Council of Indianapolis and an arts criticism award from the Society of Professional Journalists.

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