November 2005
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  Dear Editor, Garry Wills observes that the classics “are no longer vital to the culture” (modern secular culture), and he takes Sherod Santos’s selection of Greek Lyric Poetry as a symptom of that decay [“Slop and Gossip,” October 2005]. There is no question that we have lost the intimacy with the Greek and Latin poets that educated readers in the later Renaissance and the eighteenth century could assume. Wills, with his own superb classical training, usefully points out instances where Santos has needlessly decorated the Greek or failed to take account of some crucial assumption shaping the original. But Wills’s devotion to the originals has deafened him to the artistic achievement in Santos’s collection. Let me declare my interests (and conflicts therein). I looked over Santos’s versions in manuscript, though I didn’t have time to offer a poem-by-poem critique; I recognized the enterprise as what Dryden would have called “licentious.” I admired them sufficiently to praise them on the book jacket for “finding new harmonies for old, accepting change and reinvention as a law of art.” I should also say that I have translated a few poems by Sappho, Alcaeus, and Alcman myself, working closely from the Greek, so I know what it is to grieve over lost Greek metrics and crystalline diction. While it’s true that Santos’s title announces “A New Translation,” in his introduction he admits his ignorance of Greek and calls his work “not proper translations, in the strict sense, but not exactly imitations or paraphrases or verse transfers either.” He thinks of them as “collaborations,” and that strikes me as a good description. Wills grants Santos “a deft quiet music,” but accuses him of not being “interested in or capable of dealing with” the formality of ancient Greek metrics and rhetorical convention. What is missing here is any appreciation for the subtle formality—let us retain that word—Santos brings to his reinventions. This is not slapdash free verse but an art of disciplined and lively cadences, bound sometimes by off-rhyme, sometimes by disposition in well-weighed couplets, tercets, or larger stanzas, with the syntax cannily ferrying the sense forward beyond the linear bounds. The diction may strain here and there, but that is a small price to pay for its savor and idiomatic freshness. Doesn’t it matter that Santos has made living poems in English? Look at his version of Alcaeus’s ship in the storm: I can’t make sense of these offshore winds. Compare it to Diane Rayor’s worthy, semantically accurate rendition, and you see the difference between art and trot: I don’t understand the conflict of the winds, Occasionally, Santos’s delight in the poems, coupled with his lack of feel for Greek, can lead to inflated phrasing. It is an effect of generosity, of ebullience, and it overruns the economy essential to Greek lyric beauty. Yet in most of these cases Santos has not betrayed the originals so much as amplified them in his imagination. So in Alcman’s fragment about the sleeping creatures of the night, Santos expands the landscape to include “the low scrub thickets and the riverine glades” and several other features absent from the original, and concludes in a lush line of summation (“all are asleep in the depthless conjuring of that sound”), whereas Alcman ended simply with the long-winged birds. Why begrudge the modern poet his riff? It has its own beauty, and Alcman’s birds survive. It is not as if Sappho & Co. had fared so very well in the classicizing centuries. Each era imposes its own poetic conventions and inventions upon the classics. Sappho’s first appearance in English, in 1652 in John Hall’s version of her famous “Phainetai moi” (“He seems to me equal to the gods”), traded in all the clinical specificities of the Greek for sausage links of clichés (“sweet languors to my ravish’d heart”) far worse than Santos’s occasional indulgences. And if one traces the history of that poem in English, one finds betrayal after betrayal. Santos is not a classicist. He does not know Greek. But his poems plucked from the Greek Anthology have more vitality, strength, and delicacy than a good number of so-called original works that cram the pages of our magazines these days. Why not be grateful? Rosanna Warren Roslindale, Massachusetts Dear Editor, In 1980, at the PEN Club down on lower Fifth Avenue in New York, I introduced the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges. After a long chat—for blind Borges, a favorite literary form—a woman in the audience asked, “Mr. Borges, do you have a special criterion for determining the worth of a book?” “Indeed, madam,” he said. “I open the book and read the first two pages. If they give me pleasure I go on reading. If not, I shut the book.” The honored historian Garry Wills did not find pleasure in Sherod Santos’s Greek Lyric Poetry but kept reading and documented his discontent by comparing Santos to translators essential to society, from Chapman, Pope, and Dryden to the “fading” talents of Shelley and Swinburne. Wills is in his domain, with a Yale PhD in classics, as he reveals his command of Greek and demolishes Santos’s volume. However, his diatribe is profoundly unfair and ill-informed. Sherod Santos tells us in his introduction what he is doing. He is closer to the Greek than the imitations of Robert Lowell, who followed the grand tradition of Elizabethan and Renaissance authors and of medieval Chaucer, known as the “grand traducteur” in transforming earlier European texts and making them into superb poetry. Santos, in closer versions, adds texture, a shrewd and compelling craft, and always comes up with a good poem. Literary translation is a friendship between poets, one of respect. Ultimate fidelity in conversion is there when in the new tongue the poem sings. Santos is faithful to the song of English. He has transformed the Greek poets, promoting many obscure poets whom none of us earlier had touched. His volume is a major, autonomous book in English literature. It will live. Wills’s examples from epic are fascinating, but why all these pages on epic? Santos translates lyric and epigram. And Pope’s immaculately polished Homer as a model? With scant Greek and a Latin trot, Pope turned Homer into a heroic coupleted eighteenth-century gentleman. If Wills does not like divergence from the original, then Pope, my God, like all the old grand translators, was an unredeemable sinner. Wills also attacks Santos about Sappho and Archilochus, never showing what in Santos he is aiming at. Some of his assertions are hopelessly outdated and bigoted, such as the notion that the key to Sappho’s poems is the thiasos, a band of pupils that the Lesbian aristocrat disciplined for marriage and good behavior. From the nineteenth century on, critics like William Mure and John Addington Symonds have pooh-poohed standard notions of Sappho’s higher “purity,” which, until Denys Page’s impatient denunciation of the cover-up of Sappho’s homoeroticism, was prevalent even halfway through the twentieth century. Wills does not deny Sappho’s homosexuality but brings in the usual and, in this review, expanded nonsense about Sappho’s training school for “girls.” But what does a thiasos have to do with Santos’s versions of Sappho? Similarly, Wills cites dubious scholarship about Archilochus’s birth in Thasos (not Paros?) to prove that, because of Archilochus’s noble parentage, his proletarian utterances are false and silly. Because Baudelaire was stepson of a top French general, are the poems that the Parisian poet writes of the blind, the drunk, the poor, and the hopeless merely a pose by a dandy? Again, what has this observation got to do with Santos? Wills should return to these English poems he dislikes that have provoked distemper. If the cause is Santos’s flawed method, then Wills’s examples from the major tradition of great imitators withers his “condemnation by category.” I see once again how a translation becomes the easiest target for an ungenerous and angry mind. There are many ways to good translation; all are valid if the way is acknowledged and the result euphonious. To prescribe one and then condemn deviation is not to understand the profound history of translation as literature, how even the distinctions between translation and originality are dubious. Octavio Paz writes that “all originals are translations, and all translations original.” Santos’s conversions work as fresh originals. But Wills will have none of this. He is blind and deaf to Santos’s unparalleled versions. His arguments focus largely on questions alien to Greek Lyric Poetry, and he misses all the rhetorical cunning. His message is that there was once a great way, but our age, with its unheroic deviations, has determined the poverty of modern translation and especially that of Sherod Santos. Bless the reviewer for his lifelong achievements and national awards. But this time Garry Wills damns his own irrelevant revelations of classical scholarship through banal error, and above all he damns his perception of poetry in a ferocious adventure against Santos’s amazing book of evenly beautiful poems. Willis Barnstone Bloomington, Indiana Garry Wills responds: I was not impugning the skill of Sherod Santos, which I acknowledge, but using his example to note that the classics are no longer crucial to our culture, as when Chapman, Pope, et. al. changed the literature with their versions. Santos has not changed the literature, and I tried to show how the gap between cultures is manifested in what I call his deft poems. I expressly said of that gap (in my first paragraph): “This is not the fault of the translators.” The title put on my piece was not mine, and surprised me. I would never say that Santos is sloppy. There is no anger in my piece. Willis Barnstone projects his own upon it. Editors’ note: We intended the title to be an accurate representation of Garry Wills’s essay. We apologize if we misrepresented it. As the first publisher of many of the poems in Sherod Santos’s Greek Lyric Poetry, we agree that the poems are anything but sloppy. Garry Wills Dear Editor, While I appreciate the recent editorial regarding Poetry’s policy on selecting books to be reviewed [“Editorial,” September 2005], as well as its rules for book reviewers, Judith Kitchen’s position that recent negative reviews seem to be written “with no other purpose than to prove the cleverness of the writer” [“Letters to the Editor,” September 2005] is not easily dismissed. It seems that the poetry community, in this instance, has traded the sin of reviewers aggrandizing undeserving authors in the spirit of nepotism for the sin of reviewers aggrandizing themselves at the expense of authors. The problem with the current three rules for book reviewers mentioned in the editorial is that they do not seem to contend with Kitchen’s most accurate and necessary statement: “A thoughtful review brings a vision larger than the self to the task of assessment.” Many of these negative reviews seem to be pure self, without this necessary larger vision. William Neumire Baldwinsville, New York Dear Editor, I have to agree completely with Judith Kitchen in her assessment of your reviewers whose work often seems “like the work of cheeky young narcissists,” and, judging from your editorial in the same issue, this is exactly what you’re after. On behalf of poets and writers over the age of forty, I resent the notion that productivity equals plodding, boring, dull work, as you conclude. I also challenge you to prove your outrageously unsubstantiated statement that “it’s the young who most consistently identified the best...poetry of their time.” Really, I quit making facile statements like this when I was nineteen. Young poets, like young reviewers, are just that: young. Unripe, unformed, inexperienced, and, yes, narcissistic. Age, in poetry as in wine, is a good thing. As long as the poetry world continues to value its youth at the expense of its elders, poetry will continue to fade from the public view. Jane Galer Elk, California Dear Editor, I was happy to see such a clear statement of your review policy in the last issue, and in general would like to praise you for your efforts to re-involve all of us in the important work of commenting on contemporary poetry. I would encourage you, however, to offer an equally reasoned explanation for how you exercise your editorial discretion as regards the publication of reviewer responses to letters, specifically letters addressing omnibus reviews. Such reviewer responses seem to disrupt your magazine’s efforts to encourage poetry to, as you say in your editorial, “pull its head out of its behind.” Is it wise to reward those who have written letters in good faith with a response that can only be read as mean-spirited and small (see Dan Chiasson’s response to Kevin Simmons, June 2005)? Surely you want such letters and many of them, but the effect of reviewer response seems to me largely counterproductive to that goal. Carol Ann Davis Charleston, South Carolina Dear Editor, Originally, I agreed with the many readers who sent letters in recent months, expressing doubts over the current state of reviews in your magazine. Certain reviewers were harsh (often superfluously so). The poetry community in recent years has, to say the least, lost a great deal of its broad appeal, and I did not see how seemingly petty bickering was going to benefit either the particular titles being reviewed or the state of poetry in general. As the months have passed, however, and I’ve had a chance to see the resulting back-and-forth dialogue, I’ve grown increasingly tolerant and even heartened by these exchanges. As Elie Wiesel famously put it, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” With that in mind, it’s good to see people actually caring enough to take a stand—either positive or negative—in the name of poetry. In a society that has grown more and more indifferent to poetry and its diminishing role in our daily lives, one can find reason for hope in the heated debates presented in your pages. Keep up the good work. Mark Steduel Tuscaloosa, Alabama |
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