Colin Carberry: An Interview with Marjan Strojan

Marjan Strojan (16 August 1949), a Slovenian poet, journalist and translator, has published six collections of poetry and numerous translations. He studied Comparative Literature and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, and worked as a journalist at the Slovene section of the BBC World Service, and now works at Radio Slovenia. He has translated Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Beowulf, poems by Robert Frost, James Joyce, and Milton's Paradise Lost into Slovene, and received awards for his translations, including the Veronika Award (2000) for his poetry collection Parniki v dežju (Steamers in the Rain). He is president of the Slovenian section of PEN International, and an honorary fellow of the University of Iowa and Hong Kong Baptist University.

You have published six books of poetry, and numerous translations, among them Beowulf. When did you first become interested enough in Beowulf to consider translating it into Slovene, and how did the process unfold?

I first read Beowulf in translation in my final year at the University. I thought translating kennings, compound noun words with one single meaning (i.e. whale-road for ‘ocean’, world-candle for ‘the sun’, etc.) might be fun, and I was amazed by the whole atmosphere of it, animistic and strange, as I thought. The idea of rendering the whole poem into my own language came many years later. I was stuck with some lines in Milton’s poem, and I thought I’d give myself a break. Well, the break lasted for four years and my Beowulf was the final result of it. After that it was somewhat easier to go on with Paradise Lost.

During the 2010 Linares International Literary Festival, I overheard you quoting long passages of Beowulf in the original to Albert Moritz. How long did it take you to understand and articulate Anglo-Saxon?

At first I had no intention of dabbling in Anglo-Saxon. I read four or five translations into modern English and found myself looking into the original on practically every page, and later, into every paragraph of it. Some of the lines I read differed so much among themselves that they seemed to tell a different story on almost every occasion. Consequently I had to consult commentaries, critical editions and such and I learned as I went along. In the end, it was easier for me to consult the original then read all the secondary stuff that goes with it. Alliteration was a great problem, though. Practically all Slovenian long verse narrative poetry of that period has been lost or recreated by our Romantic poets and collectors of oral literature in a way which suited their own tastes. Alliteration only survived in a sort of funny children single verse line, in nursery rhymes etc. Beowulf is a serious (though sometimes very funny) epical poem of more than 3000 lines and I had to invent or, perhaps, re-invent the form in our modern idiom. It took four or five years and then some more for the production of the book… But by then I was already back to Milton and the process went on simultaneously as it were.

You also translated Milton's Paradise Lost, a selection of Robert Frost's poetry, and a Slovenian Anthology of English Poetry. What proved to be the most difficult and the most rewarding aspects of the process?

The Anthology, no doubt. There’s some 17 thousand lines of it, encompassing all the forms and styles of English poetry from Beowulf to Lavinia Greenlaw (born in 1965, I think), and I translated half of it myself.

What draws you, a Slovenian poet, to identify so deeply with the English literary tradition?

I don’t identify with it. I am, as you say, a Slovenian poet and would find any such thing impossible. However, I find some aspects of English poetry fascinating… the voices of past and the present that I can, perhaps, identify with as a reader. Anyways, it’s not the contents that I can relate to but rather those that I cannot that I find most compelling.

What role has translation played in your own development as a poet?

None whatsoever, for all I know. I might have learned some facts, acquired some skills or even tastes etc., but this is not for me to say, is it? Other people may judge it differently, of course. For all I can see, the principle effect of translating work on my own poetry was that there’s less of the later that there might have been. Who knows, but in any case it’s been great fun all the way.

Your own poetry that has been translated into many languages, including Spanish. Which poem do you think comes closest to capturing the spirit of the original?

I don’t know that either. I can’t (or won’t) speak Spanish, I read some of it, but there’s a sea of difference between our languages and, in translation, the quality of poetry is primarily decided at the receiving end of the act. Personally, I think it’s an act of magic; and it’s a miracle if anything comes out in another language.

Which project(s) are you working on now?

For some years now I work on the second edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I first published my selection of Chaucer in 1974; now it’s time for me to complete the tales.

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Love Poems: An Interview with Colin Carberry

When did you first come across the work of Jaime Sabines?

In 2001, I moved to Linares, a small, northern Mexican city, and had been living there for about six months when I first heard of Jaime Sabines. I had begun to meet for coffee with a young teacher from the private school where we both worked. One rainy, August afternoon Verónica read me the following, opening lines of a prose poem:

I HOPE TO BE CURED OF YOU one of these days. I have to stop smoking you, drinking you, thinking you. It’s possible, following the moral guidelines of our times. I prescribe time, abstinence, solitude.

And immediately I knew in my bones that I had stumbled upon a major poet. From then on I felt compelled, destined even, to translate him.

What, do you think, accounts for his overwhelming popularity in Mexico?

I believe his enormous popular appeal in Mexico derives, in large part, from his ability to communicate universal truths in an original and accessible, authentically Mexican colloquial diction utterly without pretensions. His work is autobiographical to the point where the reader senses instinctively that Sabines the poet and the man are in fact one and the same person. There is no emotional or psychological distance between the poet and his audience. Ordinary Mexicans recognize him as one of their own. According to Mario Benedetti, “His contradictions are not pretences but vital paradoxes, junctions where he confronts heart and soul. This is why they affect us so deeply, why they call to us and give rise to doubts, why they become intersections and perplexities that we feel as our own.”

He has been called, among other things, 'the sniper of literature.' What, exactly, is meant by this?

His verse is direct, sometimes brutally so, and the effect on the reader is that of a sudden, intensely pleasant shock of illumination. Philip Levine writes: “His best poems are revelations of truths, odd truths, truths we immediately accept, which we long suspected as truth but have never before heard articulated.” This co-relates precisely to my feelings and thoughts the first time I read Sabines. W. S Merwin describes Sabine’s poetry as “shockingly powerful”.

What made you decide to take on the task of translating him, in order to bring him to wider attention in English?

I had been long familiar with the work of Borges, Julio Cortázar, Roque Dalton, Paz and Lorca, among many other Spanish-American authors, in English translation, so how could it be that a poet of Sabines’s caliber had escaped my attention? It was only when I began to learn Spanish in Mexico that I stumbled upon him, but the Mexicans with whom I shared daily contact, even those who didn’t read anything beyond the sports section of the daily newspaper, knew who he was and were aware, however vaguely, of his significance in Mexican literature. I purchased some previous translations of his work into English, and it quickly dawned on why Sabines hadn’t made the impact he should have in the English-speaking world. I made a private vow there and then that I would do my level best to do him justice.

What proved to be most difficult about the process? Most rewarding?

The most difficult part of the process was, firstly, being absolutely sure I properly understood what it was he was saying, and then, finding the appropriate equivalent for the idiomatic phrasing of the original in English. The most rewarding part is the sudden shock of knowing that you have adequately rendered a poem’s essence, when the poem “has been, so to speak, undressed of Spanish and dressed up in French” (in my case, English), as Canadian author and fellow Sabines translator Émile Martel put it in an email exchange.

Which poem in Love Poems do you think comes closest to capturing the magic of the original?

I like to think that there are a number of poems in Love Poems that came close to capturing the magic of the original, but the one that I am quite partial to is “In the open eyes of the dead…” (“En los ojos abiertos de los muertos…”), taken from Sabine’s second book, La señal (1951):

IN THE OPEN EYES OF THE DEAD

there is a strange, lustrous sheen!

Film of air in the motionless pupil,

shadowy veil, tender light.

Love keeps vigil in the open eyes

of dead lovers.

The eyes are like a coveted,

impenetrable, half-open door.

Why does death defer lovers, entomb

them in a place of silence like the earth?

What is it about the weeping light

in the water of the eye—in that wasting

meniscus of trembling glass?

Guardian angels took them to their breasts;

in their gaze, they breathed their last,

died of their own veins.

Those eyes are like stones

left by a blind hand on the face.

Mystery spirits them away.

Ah, the beguiling sweetness

in the casket of the air that entombs them!

This poem underwent an almost natural rebirth into English; it seemed to come out whole, with comparatively little effort on my part, perhaps because I had read it so many times.

What role has translation played in your own development as a poet?

Because to translate is to sing in another’s skin, an awesome, almost sacred responsibility to faithfully and accurately render the work of a poet I purport to represent, this has caused me to be sharper, more cautious, focused, critical, patient, and less trusting of my ego when writing my own poems. In the broader sense, I’d estimate that a good forty percent of the books on my shelves are translations, many of them from languages that I cannot understand, and so translated works continue to edify me, and to enrich and inform my poetry.

Which project are you working on now?

I am working on a collection of poems, new and old, tentatively titled Sonnets and Cantos, which I hope to publish with Biblioasis upon completion. I would also like to translate a selection of the poems of Mario Benedetti, if I can get permission to do so.

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Love Poems: Poetry by Jaime Sabines

Translated by Colin Carberry

MY HEART EMBARKS from my body to your body
on its last voyage.
Offspring of light,
ageless waters that in you, woman astray, are born.
Come to my thirst. Now.
After everything. Before.
Come to my thirst long savoured
in mouths, scarce well-springs.
I love that rapt harp that lulls wild children
in your womb.
I love that taut moisture that arouses you,
that watery moisture that burns you.
Woman, gentle muscle.
The skin of a kiss between your breasts’
darkened surf
roams in my mouth
and measures blood.
You, too. And it isn’t too late.
We can still die in each other’s arms:
this no-man’s land is yours and mine.
Woman, hatred’s tenderness, ancient mother,
poison, flame, absence, bitter,
bitter sea, I want to enter,
penetrate, cross you.
Each cell is female, open country,
parted waters—a thing that opens.
I was born to enter you.
I’m the arrow lodged in the loin of a dying gazelle.
I’m poised to know you,
grain of anguish in a bird’s heart.
I’ll be upon you, and every woman
everywhere will have a man on top of her.

THE LOVERS

The lovers fall silent.

Love is the finest, the most shuddering,

the most unendurable, silence.

The lovers seek,

they are the ones who relinquish,

those who change, who forget.

Their hearts tell them that what they look for,

what they seek, they will not find.

The lovers go around like lunatics

because they are alone, alone, alone;

yielding, giving themselves up at every turn,

crying because they can’t hold on to their love.

Love obsesses them. The lovers live

for today; knowing little else, it’s all they can do.

They are always going,

forever heading elsewhere.

They wait—

for nothing, but they wait.

For what they know they’ll never find.

Love is a perpetual prolongation,

always the next, no, the following, step.

The lovers are incorrigible,

those who always—good for them!—have to be alone.

With serpents for arms, the lovers

are the hydra of the tale;

their neck-veins, too, swell up, serpent-

like, in order to throttle them.

The lovers cannot sleep,

for if they did the worms would devour them.

They open their eyes in the darkness

and terror seizes them.

They see scorpions beneath the sheets

and their bed floats as though on a lake.

The lovers are mad, stone mad,

forsaken of God and Satan.

Trembling and famished,

the lovers come out of their caves

to hunt ghosts.

They laugh at those who know everything,

at those who love forever, heart and soul,

those who believe in love as in an lamp filled with inexhaustible oil.

The lovers play at gathering water,

at tattooing smoke, at going nowhere;

they play the long, sorrowful game of love.

You don’t have to give in;

no one has to give in, they say.

The thought of conforming with anything mortifies them.

Hollowed out (picked clean from one rib to the next),

Death gradually distills behind their eyes,

and they cry and wander, adrift, until daybreak,

when trains and roosters bid their painful farewell.

Sometimes, the smells of damp earth, of women

who sleep, soothed, a hand between their thighs,

of trickling water, and of kitchens, reaches them,

and the lovers begin to sing between pursed lips

a song never learned.

And they go on crying, crying for

this beautiful life.

I’M NOT DYING OF LOVE: I’m dying of you,

my love—dying of the love of you,

of my dire need for my skin of you,

of my soul and my mouth of you,

of the miserable wretch I am without you.

I’m dying of you and me, of both

of us, of this–

ripped to shreds, torn apart,

the two of us are dying, dying of it.

We’re dying in my room where I’m alone,

on my bed where you’re missing,

in the streets where my arm goes unaccompanied,

at the movies and in parks, on trams,

in places where your head rested on my shoulder,

and my hand held yours,

and all of you I know like myself.

We die in places lent to air

so that you can be away from me,

and go to airless enclaves where

I cover you with my skin

and we come to know each other in ourselves,

unworlded, joy-saturated, without end.

We’re dying, this we know, ignore, we are dying

together, now, sundered

each from the other, daily,

moulded into multiple statues,

in gestures we don’t see,

in our hands that need us.

We’re dying, love, I’m dying in your womb

that I neither nibble nor kiss,

in your sweet and living thighs,

and in your unending flesh, I’m dying of masks,

and of dark and incessant triangles.

I’m dying of your body and of mine,

of our death, love, I, we, are dying.

In love’s pit at all hours,

inconsolable, in sobs and screams

inside me, I mean to say, I call you,

those who are being born, who are coming from

behind, from you, those who reach you, are calling you.

We are dying, love, and, hour by hour,

we do nothing but die a little more,

and write and talk to each and die together.

IN THE MOUTH OF THE BONFIRE burn my days,

the dead leaves and dry grass that I am.

My soul feels like scorched earth.

Eyes: see nothing but the everyday ghosts.

Mouth: say nothing but the greeting, “Good evening,”

and, for weather: “A fine evening,” or “It’s pouring rain.”

Hands and fingers: go on gripping the desk,

the wine-glass, banknotes, and thighs.

Sole of my foot: you must walk the beaten path,

alongside the same cars, over the same ants.

Heart: devote yourself to your blood, and my lungs.

And you, dear stomach: digest whatever I fill you with.

Millwheel: we’re no strangers.

For you, my most beloved, most hated, I’ll be seeking out

the sweetest names

and secreting them in your ear with my tongue.

I want to fill your head with that foam of the sea.

I’m no good for anything but the birds.

God, my tree: let me fall from you like your shadow.

MY LOVE, MY DEAR, love suddenly

found in the oyster of death,

I want to eat with, be, love with you,

touch and watch you.

I tell myself, the blood pulsing

through my veins tells me,

and this pain and my shoes,

mouth and pillow, tell me so.

I love you, my dear love, absurdly,

foolishly, all lit up, head over heels,

rose-dreaming, conjuring stars; saying

goodbye to you walking beside you.

I love you from the pole on the corner,

from the carpet of that empty room,

on the warm sheets of your body

where a vase of poppies sleeps.

Long hair of the restless air,

river of night, dark banana grove,

blind beehive, unearthed love,

I’ll follow your footsteps upwards,

from your feet to your thigh to your rib.

10:47 10 comments