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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.
Work that appears on the KR web site is from The
Kenyon Review and all applicable copyright restrictions apply.
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