Sunday Wonder Question: Two Arts -- Bishop and Frost? -- with a small excursus on Cristina Peri-Rossi...

[What follows is prompted by the mention of Bishop's "To a Tree" in Michael Hood's lovely "First Encounter" last Sunday. It appeared in a slightly different form in the Newsletter of the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia in the Spring, 2001 issue. -- JAB]

"Poetry is what is lost in translation," Robert Frost remarked slyly, but for someone of my generation and national origin, poetry can sometimes seem to be Frost in translation. Perhaps it seemed so, or came to seem so, to Elizabeth Bishop in 1927, when she wrote "To a Tree". Had she seen, one wonders, the July issue of the Yale Review that year, and been moved to respond to Frost's "Tree at my Window"? Or did she learn of its existence only after writing her own poem?

Oh, tree outside my window, we are kin,
For you ask nothing of a friend but this:
To lean against the window and peer in
And watch me move about! Sufficient bliss

For me, who stand behind its framework stout,
Full of my tiny tragedies and grotesque grieves,
To lean against the window and peer out,
Admiring infinites'mal leaves. [1]

* * *

Tree at my window, window tree
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.

Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.

But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.

That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather. [2]

What a windfall this juxtaposition would be for the poetics of coincidence! Is the grotesquerie of 'grieves' as a pun on 'greaves', for example, to be taken as a criticism of the ambiguities of Frost's 'sash', -- just a saucy sixteen-year-old sassing an elder? Or is this one of those archetypal encounters Poetry is so fond of: two looks... Two Look at Two... two poems translating each other...

Bishop translates Frost again in one of the first letters we have [August 14, 1947] from her correspondence with Robert Lowell. She breaks off mid-sentence because she has been called away to see a calf being born in the pasture behind the house. "You come, too", that letter never quite says; instead, it ends by telling Lowell (and us, now) what Frost does not: "The calf's mother has started to moo, and the cow in the next pasture is mooing even louder, possibly in sympathy. It seems that if they take the calf away immediately, then they don't have the trouble of weaning it. It will drink out of a dish, says Mr. McLeod; he has promised to call me when they try it the first time." [3]

There are some who would say that translators are Mr. McLeods, but I think it is both kinder and more accurate to call them cows in the next pasture. The metaphor is refined by considering other cows in Bishop's poetry: the cow standing in the dugout in "Santarém", say, "quite calm, chewing her cud while being ferried, tipping, wobbling, somewhere, to be married," [4] keeping the Tapajós and the Amazon from intermingling in their dazzling dialectic. Or the tiny cows in the water meadow in "Poem", two brushstrokes each, but confidently cows, munching their way ever nearer to that crisp and shivering iris - is it shivering with cold, or with fear of being devoured? Frost has his bovinities as well. Any translator on the prowl for those lovely windfall poems that seem at the touch of a pen to have dropped effortlessly from the branch of one language to the stubbled field of another, -- even harder to find than, say, Capote's windfall pecans ("among the concealing leaves, the frosted, deceiving grass"), [5] -- has a visceral understanding of "The Cow in Appletime".

Both Frost and Bishop, I suspect, would object to being called Wobblies, but it is the calm confidence that both display when oscillating between two enormities which is one of their chief affinities as poets -- Frost the poet of the semi-revolution, climbing black branches up a snow-white trunk toward heaven, till the tree will bear no more but dip its top and set him down again, the poet who comes to recognize himself, perhaps, (in "On Being Idolized") in the tottering of that new-born calf, and makes the poem containing it the introduction to his collected volumes; -- Bishop the poet of shadows taken for shallows, mammoth man-moths, the compass needle wobbling and wavering, undecided. Only when they come to death do they diverge: Frost may return if dissatisfied with what he learns from having died, while Bishop's rainbow bird, freed from the narrow bevel of the empty mirror, flies wherever it feels like, unimpressed by the ambiguities of the word 'bound' in Frost's line "I'm bound - away!"

Bishop gives her most detailed characterization of Frost in a letter to Randall Jarell (February 25, 1965):

[...] I think, if you will take it the way I mean it, that you are the real one and only successor to Frost. Not the bad side of Frost, or the silly side, the wisdom-of-the-ages side, etc. - but all the good. The beautiful writing, the sympathy, the touching and real detail, etc. Also your psychology is, of course, much in advance of Frost's! Not his kind of idealized "lost world" of the small farmer at all - which may look as if it leaves me with nothing much of him left, and yet it does, and if I were a more skillful critic I think I could really write quite a piece on this. You're both very sorrowful, and yet not the anguish-school that Cal seems innocently to have inspired - the self-pitiers who write sometimes quite good imitations of Cal! It is more human, less specialized, and yet deep. [6]

On the other hand, she is not above a wicked epithet: in a letter to Robert Lowell (October 30, 1958) she writes "Frost - the Bad Gray Poet." Her sharpest gibe, though, is tied again to the nature of what is lost in translation. She reassures Lowell about his potential Brazilian audiences (March 30, 1959):

One good idea I think is to have the poems you intend to quote or read mimeographed, to hand out to the audience. They are amazing linguists, of course, but poetry is hard to get the first time. Just the poems - not the lecture itself. Spender made that mistake - gave them the whole lecture to read while he read it and the audience felt quite insulted. I suppose one should just speak a bit more slowly and clearly than usual. (Frost did marvelously, of course - the Brazilians got his every joke.) [7] [My italics -- JAB]

Bishop's "One Art" is, in its own way, a poem about translation. Here is the original and two Russian versions (one could characterize the differences among Bishop, Frost, and Capote by the differences in the trips to Russia each of them made), followed by back-translations as literal as I can make them:

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Простая наука

Забвенье - как проста наука эта!
Предметы исчезают - сами будто,
И их уход еще не гибель света.

Теряй всегда. Смирись со всем. Пусть где-то
Утерян ключ, истрачена минута, --
Забвенье - как проста наука эта!

Теряй быстрее, больше, и совета
Послушай: позабудь пути-маршруты
Далекие: они не драма света.

Дома последнего моего лета,
А может предпоследнего - падут. О,
Забвенье! Как проста наука эта...

Теряла города и лица: нету
Вселенных и миров; ищу их всюду,
Но и они все ж не источник света.

-- И даже ты. (Шутливостью согретый
твой жест люблю.) Тебе я лгать не буду:
Забвенье - не сложна наука эта,
Хотя и кажется: она - погибель света. [8]

A Simple Science

Oblivion - how simple this science is!
Objects disappear - as if by themselves,
And their departure is still not the end of the world.

Lose always. Become reconciled with everything. So what if somewhere
A key is lost, a minute is spent, --
Oblivion - how simple this science is!

Lose faster, more, and listen
To advice: forget ways, distant
Routes: they are not the world's drama.

The houses of my last summer,
Or perhaps the one before - fall. Oh
Oblivion! How simple this science is...

I lost cities and faces: gone
Are universes and worlds; I seek them everywhere,
But even they are nevertheless not the source of light.

--And even you. (I love your gesture,
Warmed by joking.) I won't lie to you:
Oblivion - this science isn't complicated,
Although it seems: it is the end of the world.


Одно искусство

Потерь искусство не замысловато;
такое множество вещей изнемогало
потерянными быть, что не беда увидеть их утрату.

Теряйте каждый день. В темпе токкаты
потерянных дверных ключей тот час, где время застывало;
потерь искусство не замысловато.

Потом терять беритесь больше и быстрее во стократно:
места, и имена, и то, куда предназначалось
вам отправляться. Ничто из этого не принесет утрату.

Я потеряла матери часы. И посмотри! Куда-то
последний или предпоследний дом из трех домов любимых сник;
потерь искусство не замысловато.

Я потеряла пару городов, мне милых. И когда-то
присвоенные мною царства, также две реки и материк;
скучала я по ним, но это не была фатальная утрата.

И даже потеряв тебя (шутливый голос твой и мимику,
которую люблю), все сказанное остается в силе. Ты уже привык
к тому, что потерять -- искусство не замысловато.

Хотя, заметь, потеря может быть похожей на фатальную утрату. [9]

One Art

The art of losses is not intricate.
Such a multitude of things have grown faint
in being lost, that it is no misfortune to see their loss.

Lose every day. At the tempo of a toccata
of lost door keys is the hour where time froze;
the art of losses is not intricate.

Then undertake to lose more and faster by a hundred times:
places, and names, and where it was
you were to go. Nothing of this will bring loss.

I lost Mother's watch. And look! Somewhere
the last or next to last of three loved houses vanished;
the art of losses is not intricate.

I lost a pair of cities, dear to me. And a realm
once acquired by me, also two rivers and a continent;
I missed them, but it was not a fatal loss.

And even having lost you (your joking voice and the mimicry
which I love), everything said remains in force. You are already used
to losing - the art isn't intricate.

Although, take note, a loss can look like a fatal loss.

* * *

Native speakers of English can see, I think, the cost in translation, although the precarious purchase gained can be clear only to someone who knows Russian. Whether one totters on a brink with the generalities of the first, clinging to the beauty of 'наука' ['science'] with its allusions to Osip Mandelstam's "Я изучил науку расставанья" ["I have studied the science of parting"] in his poem "Tristia", or wobbles in the direction of the greater detail of the second (sometimes too great a detail, for the translator, forced to specify the gender of the 'You' of the poem, has chosen the masculine form), gasping at the many different words Russian has to convey the nuances of what we have only the word 'loss' to express, or grasping at them like straws, one cannot but admire the balancing act.

There is a second art, though - not the juxtaposition of "equivalents", as Bishop's and Frost's tree poems might be taken to be, but the one Bishop pursued in her first letter to Lowell. This is the art at work in Uruguayan writer-in-exile Cristina Peri Rossi's short story "El arte de la pérdida", [10] which combines "One Art" with "In the Waiting Room" and takes a quick trip beneath the trans-gendering rainbow (I shall resist the temptation to refer to it as the "Bi-Frost Bridge", and trust readers are correspondingly grateful) to examine the anxiety of the masculine. Peri Rossi, by grasping the nature of the loss of identity in "In the Waiting Room" in the gasped 'oh!', moves beyond the concerns of the word-by-word to those of the Secret that sits in the middle and knows.

Ten years ago, when I wrote this essay, only four of Bishop's poems had been translated into Russian, as far as I had been able to determine: "Armadillo", "Insomnia", "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance", and "One Art". Now there are many, many more, including at least eight different versions of "One Art". An image from the first of the four pioneering efforts, however, may serve as well as any to represent a last correspondence of the two arts, of writing poetry and translating it:

"the paper chambers flush and fill with light
that comes and goes, like hearts."

Why not pair them, as they steer between the kite-sticks of the Southern Cross, with Truman Capote's "...I keep searching the sky. As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven."? [11]


NOTES

[1] Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems, 1927-1979, (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983), 192.

[2] Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost, (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969), 251.

[3] Elizabeth Bishop, One Art. Letters Selected and Edited by Robert Giroux, (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994), 147.

[4] "Santarém" can be considered a kind of translation of Bishop's remarks in that first letter to Lowell: if we let the calf be the matte white wasps' nest, then Mr. McLeod is Mr. Swan...

[5] Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory, (New York: Random House, 1956), 15.

[6] Elizabeth Bishop, One Art, 432. Anna Akhmatova was also put off by what she termed Frost's "farming streak", while Frost thought her "very grand and very sad".

[7] Elizabeth Bishop, One Art, 370.

[8] Translated by Boris Leivi [http://spintongues.vladivostok.com/Bishop.html]

[9] Translated by Anna Zhdanova.

[10] Cristina Peri Rossi, Una pasión prohibida, (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1986), 129-142. English translation: "The Art of Loss" in Cristina Peri Rossi, A Forbidden Passion, (Pittsburgh: Cleis Press, 1993), 105-114.

[11] Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory, (New York: Random House, 1956), 45.