The Brooklyn Rail

I didn’t have full command of Spanish as an undergrad translating poems of Jorge Guillén. Still, I was surprised my versions “sounded” authoritative when published without the originals. What is the sound of authority? I discovered then and there that all commanding poems read as translations “after a lost original,” to quote a David Shapiro book title.

So when I came to translate ancient Hebrew psalms in my late twenties, I asked myself what were the lost originals for the psalmists. We have no idea, they might have answered, they were dictated by God. Well that’s it, I thought, God in the form of Mr. Inspiration knew exactly how they sounded. For secular poems, any sort of muse will do, including the modern ones of consciousness, the unconscious, and what stands in for the autochthonic in our day, namely the human body as ironically idealized by William Blake. We are all colonizers of that body, and it’s nothing so prosaic as reinhabiting a fondly recalled namesake, whether a relative’s or Adam. Since we still have the same Homo-sapiens brainpans as oral poets of a hundred thousand years ago, we may unwittingly write the same poems.

When I read a modern poem like Ginsberg’s “Howl” I think of it in Ancient Greece, O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” in Catullus’s Rome, Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” in the Punic Wars, or Charles Reznikoff’s “By the Well of Living and Seeing” (“Beer Lahai Roi”) in Neolithic Israel. You may ask, what about Marianne Moore’s Fables of La Fontaine, aren’t the lost originals translations themselves? After all, the “Aesop” behind them was a lost original him/herself, their fables derived or translated from missing sources. Does that render Moore’s work unoriginal? In my own experience, an editor of the Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature, himself a translator of Neruda and Celan, explained that translating reimagined lost Hebrew poets of the Bible was not acceptable as original poetry.

We might as well say the New Testament is not original prophecy because it repurposes centuries-older poetry in the Book of Isaiah. Yet that is somewhat the NT’s point; it has converted Isaiah to mere original poetry while superseding him messianically. And not “him” exactly. There are several poets from the School of Isaiah contributing to his book. Since I’m arguing the case for original poetry and not simply Western religious history, I can add that the lost original behind Isaiah goes back to Sumerian laments for their lost city gods. But today I’m suddenly faced with a contemporary poem that draws on a similar lost source. Instead of a lost poet, however, it captures one on his deathbed, beside which he is addressed by a living poet within a cosmic theater: the dead speak and are spoken to, and the poem’s author is herself sometimes lost in an eternal background of timeless dream.

[Disclaimer: I was spellbound by this poem of Alice Notley’s, “Doug—April 21, 2000” in her latest collection, Being Reflected Upon (Spring, 2024), after I’d already started writing this essay. It had arrived via advance galley.]

“…he who could neither walk nor sit, sat up
cross-legged straight-backed, prostate cancer
metastasized into spine and looked impishly like himself
It’s you! I said (again, like with my dead father
when I heard him speak from death…)

He nodded, and proceeded to talk to the air in the room,”

As I read, I had the uncanny apparition of lying on my own deathbed—my reader’s body translated into the future—upon which I felt not my own but the acute pain of my wife Rhonda surviving beside me. I was, in other words, transposed into her body. My own body had become the lost original of something Rhonda might write beside me, as was Doug’s body the lost original—literally!—behind Notley’s poem.

Rhonda’s living (“untranslated”) language might be suggested by these ending lines from the previous poem in the book:

“…..The language
My father translated into English when he
Spoke to me from death. Try to speak that, untranslated.”

I recalled my version of Isaiah from Chapter 30, in A Literary Bible, where the lost poet of Israel passes through memory, thought, and imagination—the human mind—to stand in for the living body, our original teacher:

“…and though your mouth is dry
from the suffering you've recorded

and your hand weak from the journey
from the inner severing
of the hands you've had to let go

the teacher you've carried deep within
in the seat of your conscience
will come out

passing memory and thought
and the huge mirror of imagination
to stand in front of you…”

Postscript:

It’s nothing so easy as saying teachers like Jesus and Moses, Buddha and Enheduanna lived the lives of poets. Although their authority may have reached back to the first words spoken and thought by the original Homo-sapiens (what Alice Notley in her new book calls “The Old Language”), so too science teachers like Darwin, Freud, Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin, Melanie Klein, Jane Goodall, George Washington Carver, or Marjory Stoneman Douglas struggle against culture and academe to explore our unencumbered species mind. As the great astronomer Vera Rubin (Dennis Overbye: “Her discovery of dark matter helped usher in a Copernican-scale change in cosmic consciousness”) cautioned just two decades ago: “Science is out of kindergarten, but only in about the third grade.”

The authority I intimated for myself when a college senior writing and translating poems came down to this: I had made it out of second grade. I’d need a poet’s lifetime to acknowledge the authority of an archaic Homo-sapiens unconsciousness—what the Book of Genesis improves, in a grand irony, to humankind created in the potential image of God. The image is a lost original.