August 31, 2014

Rare & Retired Content

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April 15, 2013

THE CHANGING ROOM by Zhai YongmingPosted by Rattle

Review by Art Beck The Changing Room by Zhai Yongming

THE CHANGING ROOM
by Zhai Yongming
tr. by Andrea Lingenfelter

The Chinese University Press of Hong Kong
& Zephyr Press
50 Kenwood St
Brookline, MA 02446
ISBN 978-0-9815521-3-2
2012, 163 pp., $15.00
www.zephyrpress.org

… You can kill without meaning to make it a habit
Swallow poison without thinking of death
Fall in love and never wonder what the year might bring
—Zhai Yongming from “Things Are Always Like That,” tr. by Andrea Lingenfelter

There are two ways to read translated literature. One is in the context of the source culture: What does/did the work say to its original readers? What is/was its historic dynamic? But there’s a second focus: What does the work say when transmuted into a new language and culture? Consider, for example, Oedipus Rex. For Sophocles and the ancient Greeks, Oedipus is one man trapped in a unique situation; for Freud, he’s become everyman. Or perhaps, more pertinent to the material at hand, there’s the I-Ching as resurrected by Richard Wilhelm and Carl Jung from ancient arcane cosmology and divination, into an intuitive touchstone for exploring the modern unconscious. It’s a truism that culture mutates into multi-culture as it travels.

In the case of The Changing Room, Zhai Yongming’s poems, while referentially intensely Chinese, seem also immediately cosmopolitan. Some of this is, no doubt, due to Lingenfelter’s elegant translation which won last year’s Northern California Book Award for poetry in translation. The bilingual publication partnership between the venerable New England, Zephyr Press (which specializes in translated poetry) and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, also imparts the expectation of an international audience. The volume is, in fact, a short “selected poems” marketed to both Chinese and U.S. readers. So perhaps it’s worthwhile to look at the poems in The Changing Room from both Chinese and translated perspectives.

A Chinese Introduction

Zhai Yongming was born in 1955. As the introduction by the expatriate Chinese writer and poet Wang Ping enumerates, she’s endured the difficulties of being “a Chinese woman poet who has survived drastically different eras in Chinese modern history; the Cultural Revolution, ‘educated youth in the countryside, Post Cultural Revolution … New York City Diaspora, and China’s current economic reform and boom. Zhai Yongming has lived through all these historical eras, and her poetry vibrates with an energy born out of the tumult.”

Zhai is a few years younger than most of the poets of the “Misty School.” This is a movement originally pejoratively named due to its perceived self-absorption and hermeticism. A departure from the socialist realism that had officially dominated Chinese poetry since Mao, and persisted even into Post Cultural Revolution reformist “scar literature.” The name stuck as a compliment, while many of the “Misty” poets, including the exiled Bei Dao and the exophone, Ha Jin, made their mark as expatriates. Unlike her somewhat older Misty siblings, Zhai Yongming’s reputation flowered primarily domestically.

But perhaps “flowered” is too mild a word. In a 2004 article on American and Chinese Confessional Poetry in the Canadian Review of Contemporary Literature, Jeanne Hong Zhang recounts how random translations of Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath by Chinese poets began appearing in both “official” and “semi-official” student or informally circulated journals in the early ’80s. The fractured psyches and wounded imagery of the American Confessionals seemed to strike a fertile, timely chord when transmuted into Post-Mao era Chinese. That influence seemed to coalesce when, as Zhang notes, Zhai Yongming’s 1986 poem sequence, Woman, received an “overwhelming nationwide response” spearheading a feminist/confessional poetry movement characterized by Zhang as “the Plath Tornado,” and by Zhai as a “ Black Whirlwind.”

The Confessionals influenced both men and women Chinese poets, but Zhai staked a (for China at the time) novel feminist claim and still often evokes the sobriquet of China’s “foremost feminist poet.” She is also a noted essayist, has travelled widely and was recently honored with a regional Italian literary festival prize. Along the way, the Chengdu cafe’ she started in 1998, has evolved into a trendy gathering place for the arts.

In the early ’90s, Zhai spent some time in New York accompanying her artist husband. An attempt by Wang Ping to have her poetry translated by Anne Waldman proved frustrating. According to Wang Ping, who got to know her well during that period, Zhai struggled with English, had a hard time fitting in, and eventually returned to China, where she “split up” with her husband and opened a bar, the White Nights Cafe in Chengdu. At the time, Wang “wondered if (Zhai) had ‘plunged into the sea,’ a euphemism for those who abandoned their previous profession to become business people, a tsunami that had swept the whole of China.”

But Wang was sure Zhai would continue to write and her faith was confirmed when in 2006 she found Zhai’s poem “Child Prostitute” in a Chinese journal forwarded to her by Bei Dao:

I read it, again and again as tears streaked down my face … a devastating poem about a little girl kidnapped … The voice definitely belonged to Zhai Yongming—dark, hauntingly beautiful, but it was also the voice of a lioness that had come out of her maze and was now roaring with indignation and grace …

The Translator’s Preface

For Wang, the early Zhai seemed most influenced by the “Misty” poets, and their “dark, heavy, collage—like imagery that reflected the influence of French Imagism. But what made Zhai’s poetry really stand out was the complex maze of her interior world—a world filled with darkness, water, moon, mystery, courage and a will to live …”

But Lingenfelter, the volume’s translator, is also aware of the above-mentioned American Confessional poetry influence. Lingenfelter notes that beyond being grouped with the “Misty” poets and the successor “Newborn Generation,” Zhai Yongming has been categorized as a “stream of consciousness” poet: “Like others of this group she drew inspiration from the American confessional poets … Plath’s early influence is palpable, particularly in the groundbreaking 20-poem sequence Woman, in which Zhai forcefully articulates women’s subjective physical and social experiences …”

For the reader of Zhang in English translation, I think this is, indeed, a useful frame of reference. Perhaps not so much for similarity, as for richness of contrast. The first poem in the selection is “Premonition,” from her Woman sequence. It begins:

A woman dressed in black arrives in the dead of night
Just one secretive glance leaves me spent
I realize with a start: this is the season when all fish die
And every road is criss-crossed with traces of birds in flight

A corpse like chain of mountain ranges dragged off by the darkness
The heartbeats of nearby thickets barely audible
Enormous birds peer down at me from the sky
With human eyes
In a barbarous atmosphere that keeps its secrets
Winter lets its brutally male consciousness rise and fall

I’ve always been uncommonly serene
Like the blind, I see night’s darkness in the light of day …

And ends:

Fresh moss in their mouths, the meanings they sought
Folded their smiles back into their breasts in tacit understanding
The night seems to shudder like a cough
Stuck in the throat, I’ve already quit this dead end hole.

For me, the funereal feminist imagery of “Premonition” seems eerily reminiscent, not so much of Plath, but of a short poem by Anne Sexton, “The Moss of His Skin,” which opens with the epigraph: “young girls in old Arabia were often buried alive next to their dead fathers, apparently as sacrifice to the goddesses of the tribes …” The Sexton poem contains lines that resonate with Zhai’s: “… the black room took us/ like a cave or mouth/ or an indoor belly/ I held my breath/ and daddy was there … I lay by the moss/ of his skin until/ it grew strange …”

Two Kinds of Dark Sides

Zhai’s long sequence “Fourteen Plainsongs for my Mother,” which looks back from the age of 40 to her conception, birth, adolescence and genetic heritage might similarly be a compatible anthology companion to Sexton’s “The Division of Parts,” set not long after her mother’s death. Although Sexton’s poem delineates various inherited items, including jewelry, clothes and a fur coat, her real inheritance is the morbid pull of death: “Mother, last night I slept in your Bonwit Teller nightgown …” Years later, in real, not poetic, life she dressed in her mother’s fur coat to gas herself.

And perhaps, for English speaking readers, this points up a useful contrast between Zhai and the Confessionals, so many of whom were consumed by their own darkness. In Zhai’s “Plainsongs,” her young mother visits her in the night, not as solace but as insomnia, and death is inseparable from ancestry:

Head bowed, I listen deep underground
bones are talking with other bones
glittering eyes dart around
like the spirits of the soil
listening to daylight
from any dark place
a rooster pecking at grain as if it were alone

Zhai’s sense of darkness is undeniable. But unlike the dark chasm that ultimately swallowed up poets like Plath, Sexton, Berryman, and so many of their generation, Zhai’s shadow seems to project a generative energy. Wang’s preface refers to “yin” forces in Zhai’s poetry—“feminine, moon, water.” And Lingenfelter quotes from an essay in which Zhai herself references:

An individual and universal inner consciousness—I call this Black Night Consciousness … female consciousness, beliefs and feelings … As one half of humanity, from the moment of her birth, a female faces a completely different world. Her first glimpse of this world is of course colored by her individual spirit and sensibility, and possibly even by a psychology of private resistance.

On surface, a feminist statement that many Western readers can easily relate to. But, if you turn her words over a bit, there’s a difference. This seems an organic femaleness, not just social feminism. It’s not the organization of society, but the dynamics of nature that evoke her “private resistance”. Being a Westerner my concept of yin/yang is probably more Jungian I-Ching than Chinese, and for me Zhai’s “psychology of private resistance” evokes Jung’s “individuation”. A wholeness with nature that can only be attained within one’s unique self.

The Confessionals were plagued by the depression side of the manic-depressive coin. But what Wang Ping characterizes as Zhai’s “will to live” seems to imply an elemental yin aspect in her “darkness.” Wang, in fact, ends her preface by saying about Zhai’s development: “Her journey from interior to exterior, from self to world, from yin to yang, had finally come full circle.” And of course, Zhai, whose adolescence coincided with the Cultural Revolution and rural “re-education,” had to forge and protect her “interior world” in circumstances far different than those of Lowell, Sexton, and Plath’s formative years. The 14^th and last “Plainsong for my Mother” (set in boldface in both Chinese and translation) seems to finally complete the process and mark a readiness to move on to some still unattained but necessary somewhere:

So when we speak of poetry we no longer waver:
____it’s like stirring ice cubes
it’s like pairs of cymbals crashing into each other’s faces
Wounded suffering like glass____
words, fair faces and love at an impasse.

From Yin to Yang

The order of the 40-some poems in Lingenfelter’s selection is roughly chronological, and there’s a sense of slowly moving from interior to exterior. Lingenfelter confirms that Zhai was closely involved in the editorial and selection process, so it’s valid to intuit her voice in this. And as you pass the halfway point, the poems seem increasingly less self-absorbed and more socially and/or societally absorbed—as if the need to protect a sensitivity steadily grows into the ability and need to impart it.

There are sardonic dialogues with lovers—“I’m Drunk and You’re Dry,” “Daylight Slumbers,” “In the End I Come Up Short”—in which the poetic dynamic is as much a certain quizzical detachment as sensual inhabitation. A sensibility that sometimes seems an almost surreal blend of Dorothy Parker and Emily Dickinson as in “I’m Drunk and You’re Dry”:

… suddenly I’m flushing red
but you get bluer all the time
if it isn’t alcohol it must be
a wound
shoring up the strength
your sobriety softly sucks away …

There are poems like “Lightly Injured People, Gravely Wounded City” and “The Language of the ‘50s” in which social commentary is personal and slightly surreal. But others—“Report on a Child Prostitute” and “The Testament of Hu Huishen,” taken directly from local news reports—in which Zhai abandons her naturally intricate aesthetic and speaks wholly within the perspective of child victims.

And in yet other “historical” poems like “Climbing the Heights on the Double Ninth,” she revisits recurring themes of Classical Chinese poetry and seamlessly breathes them in, then out in her own present day, consciously female, voice.

… Beyond the North Bank        are beautiful women without number
Every man who climbs these heights               will think of them
Even if in the next thousand years                  mammals
And humans               merge into one …

… Today I raise a cup alone                  while River and mountains change color
The green months of spring depleted me …

… Faraway peaks above and below

Plunge naked into my heart …

Longing is miserable                Being drunk is miserable too
How many sighs in the soughing of the wind Who will answer
my echo?
Wine poured down the throat             flows into the body’s deepest reaches
Problems of desire and mortality
Problems of separation and health
Also change inside the throat              and flow into the body’s deepest reaches
They become nimble                yet meticulous
They’re drunk             and they’re everywhere.

As an oenophile, I’ve often wondered what the “wine” those old Tang poets drank was made of. Probably something closer to sake’? One thing that makes Zhai “contemporary” is that her White Nights Cafe in Chengdu (named after the Baryshnikov/ Gregory Hines movie) is a wine bar. So we do—probably—know what she’s drinking.

An Exchange of Gifts

Of course, all the lines I’ve quoted above aren’t really Zhai Yongming’s, but the English translations which accompany her poems in Chinese on facing pages. Like Lowell or Plath speaking Chinese, they’ll strike different chords than they did in their native tongue. This volume may attract its share of bilingual readers, but few of them will be equally at home with both sides of the facing pages. And, unlike European poetry, the difference between alphabets will preclude those with no Chinese from sounding out the Chinese lines. So, the English-speaking reader owes a great deal to Andrea Lingenfelter’s ability to translate poetry into poetry. An act of re-creation that—beyond linguistic knowledge—can demand almost telepathic, intuitive skills and an inborn ear/eye for poetic equivalence.

Other English versions of some of these poems are accessible on the internet. Lingenfelter cites Michael Day’s. And the Poetry International Rotterdam site has a number of translations by Simon Patton along with links to other translators. Various readers may prefer various translations of various poems, but Lingenfelter’s volume provides an added plus in that she worked directly with Zhai. The reader has the benefit, not only of Lingenfelter’s bilingual skills, but of being invited to share a long, ongoing conversation that took place in life as well as on the page. In Lingenfelter’s words: “I could not have completed this project without the gracious help and encouragement of Zhai Yongming herself, who has shown me around Chengdu … taking me to (historic) sites … all the while placing everything we were looking at in a larger context. She has also treated me to many memorably wonderful meals …” Translation is, after all, a matter of the tongue, and, ultimately, nourishment.

Note:

An interview of Zhai Yongming by Andrea Lingenfelter, including several poems from the book, can be read online at Full Tilt.

__________

Art Beck is a San Francisco poet and translator who’s published two translation volumes: Simply to See: Poems of Luxorius (Poltroon Press, Berkeley, 1990) and a selected Rilke (Elysian Press, New York, 1983). Beck’s translation of the complete poems of Luxorius, a Roman poet whose 90 extant poems were literally lost for a thousand years, was recently published by Otis College Seismicity Editions.

October 10, 2011

THE DRUNKEN BOAT AND OTHER POEMS tr. by Eric Greinke.Posted by Rattle

Reviewed by Art Beck The Drunken Boat

THE DRUNKEN BOAT AND OTHER POEMS FROM THE FRENCH OF ARTHUR RIMBAUD AMERICAN VERSIONS, BILINGUAL ADDITION
tr. by Eric Greinke.

Presa Press
PO Box 792
Rockford, MI 49341
ISBN# 0-9772524-7-7
108 pp., expanded 4th addition, 2007
www.presapress.com

Arthur Rimbaud had, arguably, the most productive adolescence in modern literary history. Born in 1854 and raised by a difficult and single mother on the edges of poverty, he nonetheless began publishing accomplished poems in his early teens. The title poem of this selection–Le Bateau Ivre–was written at the age of 16, and marks the beginning of a brief career that impacted not just French poetics but world poetics generations later. It’s hard, for example, to imagine Howl without the touchstone of Rimbaud. And it’s become a commonplace observation that each new crop of poets finds itself searching for the “new Rimbaud.” In the American imagination, Rimbaud, has become the brilliant bad boy personified. James Dean on poetry steroids. A patron saint of the Beats and rock musicians.

Somewhere in his very early twenties Rimbaud stopped writing. As suddenly as any suicide. Which only adds to the mystique. After a year or two of wandering, he went to work for a colonial merchant firm in North Africa. Part adventurer, part fortune hunter, he peddled arms as well as trading in coffee and tusks.

He might have continued for years, living as far away as he could from the scenes of his turbulent youth. Denying–as he was said to have–that he’d ever written poetry when the subject of poems by a certain Rimbaud circulating in Paris came up. “Preposterous.” But a knee that slowly began to swell with a persistent tumor finally forced him back to France for medical attention.

In 1891, his right leg was amputated in Marseille. In July of that year, he returned home to his family. Would he also have eventually returned to literature? Invalided, with nowhere else to turn? And, if so, to what kind of aesthetic in the fast arriving twentieth century?

We’ll never know. Stifled and sick, he resolved to go back to the colonies. But made it only as far as the hospital in Marseille. The swelling in his knee had been diagnosed as a carcinoma, which had evidently spread. He died in November, 1891, barely 37 years old. As brief as it was, the roughly ten year period of his poetic production seems significantly longer when viewed in the context of his, also, brief life.

Translations

If you browse the internet, you can find a number of individual Rimbaud postings and a few small press volumes, but, surprisingly, for all his popularity, there seem to be only a handful of major press collections. I’m no doubt overlooking some, but primary translators include Louise Varese and Wallace Fowlie in the 1950s, Paul Schmidt and Oliver Bernard in the 1960s, and Wyatt Mason, whose complete Rimbaud appeared in 2002. In any case, this group provides a wide backdrop for Greinke’s versions. Also noteworthy are the twelve adaptations of Rimbaud pieces included in Robert Lowell’s 1958 volume Imitations.

I’m attracted to Greinke’s approach for a several reasons. First, because he’s a poet who’s unapologetically trying to translate poetry into poetry. A tough proposition requiring shameless intuition and not only the courage–but the inner need to risk “poetic flight.” The need to work without a net.

The paradox of scholarly, linguistic translation is that by the time you do your research and test your facts, the poem’s as often as not gotten tired of you and refuses to come out and play. There are notable exceptions, but I’m also of the opinion that the disciplines that make for an accomplished linguist may also work against what John Berryman characterized as “the freedom of the poet.”

The problem, of course, with poetic “intuitive” translation is that when you shoot from the hip, you have to accept that from time to time, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot.

Another reason I’m attracted to Greinke’s approach is that for him Rimbaud is a labor of love, not a “project.” In his introduction he talks about a feeling of déjà vu when first encountering Rimbaud. And describes what seems an almost compulsive sense of appropriated ownership. An annoyance at the existing translations. A need to do his own. To a non-translator, these feelings may sound a little over the top. But to any one who translates poetry they’re instantly recognizable. Greinke’s only saying what most poetry translators think, but usually think twice about saying.

Greinke also recognizes that “a literal translation is never possible…” And that “in many ways, a translation is a new poem, modeled on the original.”

I personally would take this concept even further. I’ve often felt that a translator needs to look beyond the words and beneath the text for the roots of the original poem. But maybe, the best metaphor for this was one given by Robert Pinsky at recent reading of his version of The Divine Comedy. When the question of accuracy came up, Pinsky opined that somewhere–in whatever place these things exist–is the Platonic ideal of The Divine Comedy. Dante tapped it first, and no one will ever do it better. But Dante’s American and Chinese, and German, and etc. translators need to find that place that Dante tapped and try to tap it themselves.

“Common Ground”

In the introduction to his 2002 Rimbaud volume, Wyatt Mason draws a distinction between what he considers Fowlie’s almost prosaically trot-like versions and Schmidt’s highly personalized, poetic–but spun–translations. In his versions, Mason wants “to find common, rather than middle, ground between the two poles.”

It may be informative to see where Greinke fits here. One of his better pieces, I think is “Ma Boheme,” a light and early poem but full of the “adolescent exuberance” that Greinke finds lacking in existing translations. Rimbaud’s first stanza reads:

Je m’en allays, les poings dans me poches crevees;
Mon paletot aussi devenait ideal;
J’allais sous le ciel, Muse! et j’etais ton feal;
Oh! la la! que d’amours splendides j’ai revees!

Schmidt’s version seems, on surface, straightforward, until after comparing it you realize how much of Schmidt has been added (But as Mason points out, this may come down to a matter of taste).

I ran away, hands stuck in pockets that seemed
All holes; my jacket was a holey ghost as well.
I followed you, Muse! Beneath your spell,
Oh la la, what glorious loves I dreamed.

With Mason, we lose what seems an interjected “holey ghost,” but we also seem to lose some of the voice.

And so off I went, fists thrust in the torn pockets
Of a coat held together by no more than its name.
O muse, how I served you beneath the blue;
And oh what dreams of dazzling love I dreamed.

Does Greinke find the “common ground” that Mason is looking for?

So, I’m walking along, hands in torn-out pockets
& my coat is looking really perfect
Under the Romantic sky, & I’m a slave
To my dreams of splendid love!

On first reading, I miss the “Oh! la la!” of the original, but yes, maybe oh la la does Frenchify the poem too much. And “I’m a slave” really replaces it well. What really differentiates Greinke’s version though is that unlike the other two (both of which are undeniably good)–is that it reads like a poem written in English. And I think this was accomplished by tapping the roots as well as the words of the original. By “internalizing” the original and letting the new poem shape itself in the new language. Rather than forcing the French into English.

It’s also interesting to look at another instance of a poet appropriating the original: Robert Lowell’s version from “Imitations”:

I walked on the great road, my two fists lost
in my slashed pockets, and my overcoat
the ghost of a coat. Under the sky I walked,
I was your student, Muses. What affairs

we had together…

Whether you prefer Greinke or Lowell in large part comes down to taste. But both versions seem exemplary of what happens when a poem is internalized by a translator and then re-created in the target language, as opposed to just translating the text.

That being said, you also have to question whether–by migrating “muse” into “romantic sky”–Greinke loses what may be the one serious point of the passage? The young Rimbaud’s dedication to “the Muse,” i.e. Isn’t it poetry he’s a slave to, not love? But I think Greinke may compensate enough for this later in the poem: “…as if I was in some fairy tale, I shouted poems / as I went & I had a room at the Milky Way / & of course the stars were rustling like leaves.”

Greinke’s best passages exhibit that kind of fluidity and unstrained melody.

From “The Clever Maid”:

In the brown dinette, perfumed
with the aroma of varnish & of fruits, at my ease
I scarfed a plate of various foreign
Delicacies, & I sprawled in my big chair.

or the maid “At The Green Inn”:

That one–never one to avoid embraces!–
Giggling, served me buttered bread
With warm ham on a multicolored plate.

Poop

Greinke’s preface states that he wants to bring across the “musical and painterly qualities” of the original. Along with the “adolescent exuberance … and the feeling.” The inference is that much of this rests in the music and metrics. As he puts it: “Restoring the surface qualities has…been one of my goals. The meaning emerges when the tone and persona are restored.” But if Greinke’s strength is musicality, I think there are places the pursuit of sound may work against him.

For me, “Le Couer Vole“–“The Stolen Heart”–seems an almost impossible poem to capture in translation because its outer surface of jaunty, slangy rhyme protects something shattered within. Enid Starkie devotes a chapter to it in her biography of Rimbaud. And Wallace Fowlie discusses the poem and its presumed basis at length in his 1946 treatise The Myth of Childhood.

As the legend goes (and perhaps it’s been revised in more recent biographies?), Rimbaud, while visiting Paris during the Commune uprisings, was sodomized, either willingly or not, in a military barracks. He was sixteen and Starkie considers it his first real sexual experience. He transmuted the experience into a poem with emotions that Starkie characterizes as both violated and fascinated. First entitling it “Couer Supplice” (“Tortured or Martyred Heart”), later changing the title to “Couer de Pitrie” (“Buffoon’s Heart”) before settling on “Stolen Heart.”

The French first stanza is:

Mon triste couer bave a la poupe,
Mon coeur couvert de caporal;
Ils y lancent des jets de soupe
Mon triste couer bave a la poupe:
Sous les quolibets de la troupe
Qui pousse un rire general,
Mon triste coeur bave a la poupe,
Mon Coeur couvert de caporal.

Fowlie’s translation begins as follows:

My sad heart slobbers at the poop
my heart covered with tobacco-spit.
They spew steams of soup at it.
My sad heart drools at the poop.

Or in the 1962 Oliver Bernard version (on the WEB) entitled “The Cheated Heart”:

My poor heart dribbles at the stern
Under the gibes of the whole crew
Which burst out in a single laugh,
My poor heart dribbles at the stern
My heart covered with caporal.

Looking at the French rhyme scheme, if you didn’t know the content and background of the poem, you’d be inclined to presume this was something a lot lighter, a clever vulgar sound poem along the lines, say, of Jandl’s “Otto’s Mopps.” But reading Starkie and Fowlie–and if the story is at all credible–you start to view the protective shell of rhyme and slang as a tough ostrich egg with a small fatal crack from which the yolk is beginning to leak.

When Rimbaud sent the poem off to his young teacher and mentor Izambard, he stressed “This does not mean nothing.” And “I implore you not to score it too much with your pencil or with your mind…”

Izambard, however didn’t realize what the poem was. He later said he thought it “a hoax in the worst of taste.” But wanting to appear broadminded, he answered Rimbaud with what he thought was a clever parody of the poem. Starkie dates the beginning of the end of their friendship from this letter.

It would be hard to criticize anyone for being less than successful in capturing “Le Coeur Vole,” but I think Greinke’s beginning tries too hard.

My sad heart gushes in poop,
My heart drenched in tobacco spit;
They vomit currents of soup
My sad heart drowns in shit.

The sounds work, but the image they bring across is that of a conscious sentimentalist making tough fun of himself. Not a 16 year old boy, losing his anal virginity and “dribbling at the stern.” Substituting “poop” (as in shit) for the French poupe–a nautical term for stern from which we derive “poop deck” is arguably okay, because I think in this case poupe signifies astern as in behind. But “gushing” and later “drowning in shit”–while musical and jaunty, as well as nautical–just seem to kill the essential image. While “dribbles,” or, the even more complex, “drools” retains the damaged heart of the poem.

…de Fleuves Impassibles

Another instance where image may be unduly sacrificed for sound is at the very beginning of the title poem, “The Drunken Boat.”

The original begins:

Comme je descendais des Fleuves impassibles
Je ne me sentis plus guide par le haleurs:
Des Peaux- Rouges criards les avaient pris pour cibles,
Les ayant cloues nus aux poteaux de couleurs.

The voice speaking, is that of the boat itself. Wyatt Mason’s translation is:

While swept downstream on indifferent Rivers,
I felt the boatmen’s tow-ropes slacken:
Yawping Redskins took them as targets
Nailing them naked to totem poles.

My own French is atrocious, but piecing out the stanza from a dictionary and with some help from French speaking friends, my stab at a trot is something along the lines of:

As I descended the impassive Rivers, I sensed
myself no longer guided by the (hauling) bargemen.
Howling redskins had taken them as prey (or targets)
and nailed them naked to painted poles.

Louise Varese translates the stanza as:

As I came down the impassible Rivers,
I felt no more the bargemen’s guiding hands,
Targets for yelling red-skins they were nailed
Naked to painted poles.

Note that Varese changes “impassive Rivers” to “impassible Rivers.” Impassibles (impassive) seems a “false friend” that’s almost impossible to resist in the context of a river. And Schmidt, possibly wanting to have it both ways says “I drifted on a river I could not control.”

Greinke moves this further along:

As I flew down the raving river,
Free at last of the boatman’s hands
That nailed themselves to my mast,
That forced me into Indian waters

Certainly a melodious entry to a poem rich in sound. But what Greinke has done is to switch the images. He’s objectified the impassive river system into a “raving river.” And turned the raiding band of scalpers into an abstract–“Indian waters.” He’s also interjected a–for me–surreal image of a boatman nailing his own hands to the mast. Does a translator have the right–in creating a new poem in English–to bend the original this much? Yes, of course. I have no doubt that if Rimbaud were translating, he’d have no compunctions. But to me there are several questionable consequences.

One of these is to remove an image that marks this as the poem of a, albeit brilliant, sixteen-year-old. And I don’t know what’s worse–losing the “impassive Rivers” which to me impart a sense of expulsion and alienation. Or losing the Redskins with all their adolescent energy. And the sense of ordinary workaday river commerce suddenly invaded by the wild.

One thing that strikes me is that, not only is Fleuves plural in the original–it’s also capitalized–which seems to imply the name of a system of waterways flowing to the ocean in whatever imaginary country we’re in. Do we really want to give that animist presence up?

Another unintended (or maybe intended?) consequence of leaving out the murderous Redskins is that of sanitizing the stanza the way stage productions of Huck Finn refer to Jim as “River Jim.” Are the Indians essential to the poem?–maybe not. But, I think the “expelling” impassive Rivers foreshadow the poem’s penultimate stanza, where the now exhausted boat yearns to return to a childhood scene. A childhood the sixteen-year-old Rimbaud already felt expelled from? In Greinke’s sensitive rendering:

If ever I shall return, it will be to the pond,
Where once, cold and black toward perfumed evening,
A child on his knees set sail
A leaf as frail as a May butterfly.

“The Drunken Boat” is a long poem and a translation doesn’t sink or swim on one stanza. But if Rimbaud is the lifelong companion he seems to be for Greinke, I’d hope that in some future revision, he might revisit that first stanza.

But then again, there’s Robert Lowell’s “imitation” which turns the impassible rivers into the “virgin Amazon.”

I felt my guides no longer carried me–
as we sailed down the virgin Amazon,
the redskins nailed them to their painted stakes
naked, as targets for their archery.

Another example illustrating how different poetic translators will look for the “poem” in different aspects of the original. There’s no “correct,” definitely no final, version. What resonates for one translator, may be static to another’s ear.

__________

Art Beck is a San Francisco poet and translator who’s published two translation volumes. Simply to See: Poems of Lurorius (Poltroon Press, Berkeley, 1990) and a selection Rilke (Elysian Press, New York, 1983). He’s currently trying to atone for some of his earlier Rilke versions by retranslating the Sonnets to Orpheus.

July 5, 2010

THE RESTORED NEW TESTAMENT translated by Willis BarnstonePosted by Rattle

Review by Art Beck The Restored New Testament tr. by Willis Barnstone

THE RESTORED NEW TESTAMENT: A NEW TRANSLATION WITH COMMENTARY, INCLUDING THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS THOMAS, MARY AND JUDAS
translated by Willis Barnstone

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10110
ISBN 978-0-393-06493-3
2009, 1504 pp., $59.95
www.wwnorton.com

The Crucified Rabbi and the Unconquered Sun

On Parker Street in San Francisco, just across from the cathedral-like, self-described “Jesuit Baroque” Saint Ignatius Church is the humble Carmelite Monastery of Cristo Rey. My experience is limited, but the monastery’s small chapel is unlike any other Catholic church I can remember visiting. Some twenty rows of simple chair-pews look up to the altar where, instead of the expected crucifix, a larger-than-life gilded image of Christ stepping out of the sun glorifies the hushed room. At times, the cloistered nuns can be sensed more than actually heard, whispering incanted prayer from behind a screen. Or perhaps what you “hear” is just the aura of their vow of silence?

The impression is pre-medieval, evoking, perhaps, the time of Constantine, when the Christian Church was finally accepted by the State, but co-existed with mystery religion cousins like Mithraism. A time when the cross was abstract, symbolic. The graphic, bloody crucifixes of the dark ages would have been distasteful for most in a generation when crucifixion was only just about to be abolished. And when Constantine built his new namesake city at Byzantium, personifications of Sol Invictus, the Invincible Sun, served to simultaneously honor the newly risen God of Christianity but still preserve a traditional symbol of the Mystery cults.

The secluded chapel of Cristo Rey has always had this effect on me: A sense of suddenly not only walking out of my era, but of bypassing intervening history, of stepping into late antiquity without effort. Drawn, in fact, by the energies that preceded it, rather than impeded by the years that separate us from it. The chapel doesn’t look forward, but backward to its pre-Christian roots.

Conversely, the dust jacket of Willis Barnstone’s new translation portrays a 20th century crucifixion scene—Marc Chagall’s The White Crucifixion. A haunting image of the bleeding Messiah hanging dead on the cross, with a Jewish prayer shawl for a loincloth. The condemned Rabbi Jesus is surrounded by Holocaust and pogrom images. The cross bears the INRI inscription, but over a Hebrew prayer.

The Chagall reproduction was a natural cover choice for a New Testament translation that seeks to preserve, though its word choices, both the Jewish and Greek Koine roots of the Gospels. In Barnstone’s version, Jesus the Messiah is the Meshaih Yeshua. The angel of the Annunciation is Gavriel. The Virgin is Miryam; her saint of a husband, Josef. Prayers end with an amain. And Biblical terms we’re accustomed to in their Graeco-Roman Vulgate forms are returned to their Hellenic roots. The Apostles become messengers; disciples, students.

None of this is too jarring, but you begin to feel like you’re reading the story for the first time when John the Baptist becomes Yohannon the Dipper. When the scriptural interjection “behold” is routinely translated (and intensified) as “look.” When, where you expect to see the word “servant,” you almost always find “slave.” As in the opening of an epistle, in which “Simon Peter” introduces himself as “Shimon Kefa, slave and messenger of Yeshua the Mashiah.”

The cumulative impact is that you begin to feel you’re reading the iconic text not through the patina of 20 centuries of subsequent Christianity and whatever childhood interpretation you might have grown up with, but through the ancestral eyes of believers who weren’t quite sure just what they believed and were definitely uncertain about what was going to happen.

Bring the Work to the Reader or Vice Versa

A primary choice in translating archaic texts is whether the translator decides to bring the reader to the work, or to bring the work to the reader. The question is akin to the decision of a director to stage a Shakespeare or Classical Greek play in period or modern dress. If the latter, something of the original is lost, or rather, retreats. But when contemporary staging (or translation) works, the resonance of intervening history, the echo of the present, can impart a sense of resurrection and reincarnation.

Paradoxically, bringing an archaic text forward can—in time—produce another archaic text. The King James Version of the Bible is a prime example. The KJV along, with Shakespeare, became the foundation of a new English literature, serving as a storehouse of image and expressions for poets and writers into our own day. It’s such a standard touchstone that there’s that rural legend about the fundamentalist farmer who, when asked if he was interested in learning a foreign language, replied, “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me!”

But insofar as literary translation is akin to performance, the KJV might be characterized as the Bible performed on a Shakespearian stage. And what was contemporary in the early 1600s has now become a 17th century prism. For a 21st century reader, the cultural “feel” of The King James New Testament evokes Jacobean England as much, if not more, than the Age of Augustus, Tiberius, Nero, Vespasian, etal.

20th century Bible versions have again brought the work to the contemporary reader, generally by way of un-stylized, plain speech prose. But, as Barnstone himself has noted, the KJV opened a door to poetic, literary translation that sets the bar of expectation well beyond the prosaic. Translation is both interpretation and expression—a yin to yang continuum. Why add another expressionless version?

Barnstone too uses plain speech. The original New Testament Greek Koine, was, after all, the common spoken, as opposed to “classical,” Greek. But the stylistic flourish of opting for Semitic rather than Hellenized names serves handily to help wipe away the echo of the centuries and bring the reader to the original stage.

But Barnstone is an accomplished poet as well as a highly credentialed translator and scholar. And this also becomes an essential element in a translation that attempts to evoke what Barnstone perceives as an underlying poetic pulse. In doing so, he sets large portions—including Jesus’ parables, St, Paul’s Epistles and the entire Book of Revelations—into eloquent blank verse, a subtle shift in language that moves us away from the everyday into a sort of timelessness. His grasp of meter and nuance is usually effortless and invisible, adding to the sense that we’re hearing the speakers in their own unadorned voices, not ours.

In the 1971 Oxford Revised Standard edition, Romans : 11 opens with St. Paul saying:: I ask then, has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin. God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. Do you not know what the scripture says of Eli’jah, how he pleads with God against Israel? “Lord, they have killed thy prophets, they have demolished thy altars, and I alone am left and they seek my life.

In Barnstone’s version, Paul (nee, Shaul) speaks in poetry:

Then I ask, “Did God reject his own people?”
Never! I am also an Yisraeli, from the seed
Of Avraham and of the tribe of Binyamin.
God did not reject his people, not those
Whom he has chosen before. Do you not know
What Eliyahu says in his writing, how he pleads
With God against Yisrael? As written in Kings:
Lord, they killed the prophets, torn down your altars.
And I alone am left and they are after my life.

The Quality of Love

With Barnstone it’s clear that Paul was a Jew sermonizing to Jews on behalf of a Jewish sect still trying to define itself. And by presenting Paul as a poet as well as apologist, Barnstone’s treatment allows Paul’s thorny contradictions to add energy rather than impede logic.

The great flights of Korinthians Alpha are meant to soar:

Now brothers, I say this, that flesh and blood
Cannot inherit the kingdom of God,
Nor will corruption inherit incorruption.
Look, I am telling you a mystery.
Not all of us will sleep, but we will all
Be changed. In an instant, in the twinkling
Of an eye, suddenly the last ram’s horn,
The ram’s horn will blow and the dead will wake
Uncorrupted, and we shall all be changed…

Set as poems, even the—to our ears—offensively anti-sexual/sexist passages take on a certain homely logic:

Concerning those things about which you wrote,
It’s best when a man doesn’t touch a woman,
But because of filthy sex let each man have
His own wife and each woman her own husband.
Let the husband pay his debt to his wife
And let the wife render hers to her husband.
The wife does not possess authority
Over her own body. That is her husband’s.
The husband does not have authority
Over his body. That belongs to his wife.
You musn’t spurn each other’s needs except
Through an agreement for a time so as
To give yourselves to prayer. But then come back
Again out of fear that Satan
Seduce you both into incontinence.

Barnstone points out that we expect self contradiction in poetry, citing Whitman’s “Do I contradict myself? Very well… I am large, I contain multitudes.” Setting the Epistles as sermons in verse allows us to experience Paul as a multi-dimensional personality, speaking from the heart as much as reasoning and moralizing. From a heart more than capable of sweeping away his cranky prudishness with a helpless upwelling:

If I speak in the tongues of men and angels
But have no love, I am but sounding brass
Or a clanging cymbal. If I have prophecy
And understand all mysteries and all knowledge
And if I have all faith to remove mountains
But love I do not have, then I am nothing.
If I give all my goods to feed the poor
And give my body to be burned, and love
I do not have, in all I have gained nothing,

Love suffers long and love is kind. Love has
no jealousy and cannot boast and has
No pride. Love isn’t crude and doesn’t seek
Things for itself, is not provoked to anger,
Nor counts up wrongs. Not gloating in misdeeds,
Its happiness is truth. Love bears all things,
Believes all things; it hopes and endures.

Love never falls. Yet prophecies will cease
And tongues turn dumb and knowledge also vanish.
We know only in part, we prophesy
Only in part…

When I was a child I spoke like a child,
I thought like a child and reasoned like a child.
When I became a man I put an end
To childish things. For now we look into
An enigmatic mirror. One day we will gaze
Face to face. Now I know in part, but then
I will know in full even as I am fully
Known. Now faith, hope and love remain,
These three. Of these the greatest one is love.

This passage, Corinthians #13, doesn’t submit easily to logic; in fact it forces a choice between clerical logic and poetry. Barnstone argues that the Greek word used by Paul, agape, simply means “love” in all its expressions—an elemental, permeating force. When St. Jerome translated agape into Latin for the Vulgate, he chose not amo, but caritas. A less passionate sub-category of endearment, although not particularly “spiritual.” In the King James Version, the translation became “charity,” begging some level of metaphysical interpretation. And, according to Barnstone, Paul’s KJV “charity” was even also sometimes used as an opportune sermon exhortation for tithing.

Twentieth century Bible versions have generally translated Paul’s agape as “love,” leaving the interpretation to the various theologians. Setting this passage in poetry evocative of Shakespeare’s “quality of mercy,” Barnstone , I think, exploits an expansiveness and pulse that would be difficult to capture in prose and with any other English word but “love.”

…and to Forge in the Smithy of my Soul, the Uncreated Conscience of my Race.

In Romans, Paul consciously struggles with his doctrinal contradictions and the religious contradictions of the Yeshua sect—the dissenting Jews who were the first Christians. Paul’s Epistles (letters that served as sermons to be read in the sect’s synagogues) are the earliest extant New Testament documents, written in the mid 1st century, a couple of decades before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD and the great Jewish diaspora it triggered. But his co-sectarians appear to be already expatriated, in fact, as much exiles as emigrants.

Their Meshaiah Yeshua was executed, (possibly) at the insistence of the religious establishment, condemned for blasphemy. At this distance, they might be characterized as the Jewish equivalent of excommunicates. Traditionally, the first “Christian” martyr, St. Stephen (Stephanos) was stoned to death, circa 35 A.D., by an enraged congregation after speaking in his own synagogue.

Centuries later, Stephen would be invoked as the patron saint of stonemasons and headache sufferers. These medieval niceties would probably horrify Paul, who, according to legend, passively assisted at the stoning while still an unconverted Pharisee. Rather than invoking the martyrs, Paul, in Romans, spends a good deal of time constructively reasoning that theirs is the new orthodoxy. To Paul, the Yeshua sectarians were both the true heirs and progenitors of the millennia of Jewish heritage. The fulfillment rather than anathema of Torah.

But these were Jews living among the Gentiles, the “Greeks.” And they seem to have been actively assimilating Gentiles as well as being assimilated. Paul was as fluent in Greek as Hebrew or Aramaic, an ex-Pharisee, Roman Empire cosmopolitan, but with a convert sectarian’s passion to proselytize. A sympathetic Greek would like to join, but couldn’t understand having to give up lobster? No problem, just stay away from the pagan temple burnt offerings that tend to attract demons when eaten.

And circumcision, that ancient bond and badge? That’s a hell of an impediment to would be converts. Wait, isn’t circumcision really just a metaphor?

Obey Torah and circumcision helps
But if you break the law your circumcision
Becomes uncircumcision. Others who
Are the uncircumcised yet keep the law,
Will their uncircumcision not be seen
as circumcision?…
Someone is not a Jew by what is seen.
Rather one is a Jew by what is hidden.
Circumcision is of the heart, the spirit.

From an orthodox standpoint Romans might seem, in large part, a heretical manifesto. But there are parts of Romans, as conveyed by Barnstone, that, for me, conjure, not so much Luther’s “ Here I stand,” but Stephen Daedalus’ “I will not serve.” By the end of the Epistle, one gets a sense that as with Ireland for Joyce, the “mother country” of Judea has become an entanglement. In Stephen Daedalus’ words (in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) :

When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets. … I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile and cunning..

But “eloquence” not “silence” is Paul’s strong suit as he cuts the Gordian knot of entangled Judaic law:

Owe no one anything except to love.
one another. For, in loving the other.
Torah is fulfilled. And the commandments:
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not murder.
You shall not steal.
You shall not covet.
And any other commandment there may be
Is comprehended in this one statement:
Love your neighbor as yourself.
Love does not work harm on your neighbor.
Love is the fulfillment of Torah law.

A Seder Like no other Seder

The New Testament forms a multi faceted, iconic text that’s engendered scores of sectarian and theoretic interpretations from the second century to this day, and will no doubt continue to do so. So I think it’s incumbent on any translator or commentator to declare their bias and intent. Barnstone does so, identifying himself as a non-observant Jew and religious agnostic translating the New Testament as literature in the way Homer might be translated. He makes no religious or cultural judgment, presents miracles as miracles, resurrection as resurrection and sets parables in poetic eloquence. And a Biblical scholar will find no shortage of source material and historic context discussion in Barnstone’s annotations and exhaustive background essays.

But as aforementioned, the one “spin” Barnstone explicitly employs is to stress by way of word choices that Jesus and the apostles were Jews preaching and debating within a Judaic context. As a reviewer, I should also address my own perspective and bias. I might be characterized as the Christian equivalent of Barnstone’s non-observant Jew—a purposely “fallen away,” “cultural” Catholic. As a reviewer, I’m primarily reviewing Barnstone’s Restored New Testament on its literary, not theological or theoretical, merits.

But as I read Barnstone’s version, I also find myself drawn to the historic context of a canon that records an essential shift in Western culture. A turning point so pivotal that no adjective could be too strong to describe it. Perhaps the simple terms A.D. and B.C.E. best point up that the first century, Rome’s golden age, also planted the seeds of the slow decline of Classical Graeco-roman culture that culminated in the dark, pre-Renaissance, Middle Ages. A dynamic the historian, Charles Freeman characterized as “The rise of faith and the fall of reason” in the subtitle of his 2002 study, The Closing of the Western Mind. This is a theme as old as Gibbon, but history tends to be better at telling us “what happened” than at putting us in contact with the energies of “why it happened.”

Of course, there’s the believer’s simple explanation of “God’s revelation and Divine will.” But even the believer might want to get a feel for the dynamic of the time, a sense of “what were they thinking?”

That sense of historic voice first struck me when I decided a good entree to Barnstone’s version—for someone like me who hadn’t read the Bible since childhood—might be to return to my Catholic childhood and read the Passion sections of the Gospels during Holy Week. Although an internet query will reveal a fair amount of theologically defensive controversy on this point, in Barnstone’s version there’s little question that the Last Supper was either a seder, or meant to evoke a seder.

From “Markos”: “On the first day of the Feast of the Matzot, when the Pesach lamb was sacrificed, his students said to him ‘Where do you want us to go arrange for you to eat the Pesach lamb?’ “Mattityahu” and “Loukas,” the other two “synoptic” evangelists, relate a similar message.

In a critical epilogue entitled “Historical or Mythical Jesus, the Passover Plot and the Rap of Deicide,” Barnstone eloquently argues that the only known historical fact of the Crucifixion is that the Romans carried out the execution. And that the Gospels written, at earliest, some generations later (and whose only manuscripts date from the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries), portrayed the story in a Roman-centric perspective. If Christianity were to establish itself in the greater Empire, Jesus couldn’t be cast as a rebel against Rome. And so the Jews became the scapegoat for deicide. And the seeds of anti-Semitism were planted. A respectable segment of modern scholarship, as cited by Barnstone, supports this view.

But it’s not the historic Jesus (of whom the early Christians knew as little as we do) but the mythic Jesus that drove history. And in the Gospel Last Supper accounts, especially in Barnstone’s translation, Yeshua is the rabbi of a small congregation of very unorthodox Jews. There’s none of the ritual of a seder—the dishes, the questions, the recounting of Jewish history. Reading the gospel accounts with Barnstone’s Hebrew names, you almost want to ask, “Why is this seder different from all other seders?”

Instead of tradition, there’s the institution of the Holy Sacrament. In Markos :

While they were eating, he took the matzot, and blessing it he broke it and gave it to them and said
Take it, this is my body
And he took a cup and after giving thanks, he gave it to them, and they all drank from it. And he said to them,
This is my blood of the covenant
Which is poured out for many…

A phrase, according to Barnstone’s note, that infers a kinship with God, foreshadowed by, and equal to, Moses. Wouldn’t this seem heretical, if not blasphemous, to the orthodox? Over time, the established Christian church would be burning its own heretics. Why wouldn’t it be logical, as Christianity became an institution, to imagine that the orthodox Jewish religious establishment would treat its heretic any differently?

Yerushalayam Encircled

But there was something else going on at the time the Gospels were being committed to writing. The Mark, Matthew and Luke (“synoptic”) Gospels all include Yeshua’s prophecy of the fall of Jerusalem. From “Markos”:

Do you see these great buildings?
No stone on stone will be left that will not be thrown
down…

From “Mattityahu”:

And Yeshua left the Temple and was on his way when his students came to him to show him the buildings of the Temple. But he said to them:
Do you not see all this? Amain, I tell you,
Nothing here will escape destruction. No stone
Upon a stone will not be thrown down.

And in “Loukas”:

When you see Yerushalayam encircled
By armies, then know that its devastation is near
Then those in Yehuda must flee to the mountains
And those in the city must escape
And those in the fields not go into her,
For these are the days of vengeance to fulfill
All that has been written by the Prophets…

The Diaspora

In 70 A.D., at the culmination of a four-year rebellion, the Roman army, under the future emperor Titus, laid siege to Jerusalem. Some five months later, the great Temple, elaborately rebuilt by Herod on King Solomon’s thousand year site, was flattened and the city sacked and burned. The citizenry was indiscriminately punished with extreme cruelty. Josephus, the Jewish historian who accompanied Titus’ army, wrote that some 500 crucifixions took place daily outside the walls. In the end, Josephus estimated over 1,100,000 Jews were slaughtered with most of the 100,000 or so remaining residents taken into slavery. The Romans continued to pursue anyone connected with the rebellion, culminating in the mass suicide (or possibly slaughter) of resistors at Masada.

Judea then became an occupied territory under the direct control of Rome. A second revolt in 132 AD, led by a purported Messiah, Simon Bar Kokhba, was even more savagely suppressed. According to the historian Cassius Dio, some 580,000 Jews, apparently the bulk of the local population, were killed and over a thousand towns and villages razed—the survivors expelled or sold into slavery. Hearkening back some 50 years to Paul’s comments on circumcision, it might be worth noting that one of the sparks of the Bar Kokhba revolt was a ban placed by Hadrian on circumcision, which most Romans viewed as mutilation and child cruelty.

After the suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt, Judea essentially no longer existed. Hadrian ordered the names Judea and Israel removed from maps, to be replaced with Syria and Palestine. Jerusalem was re-named and made a Roman colony with statues of Jupiter and Hadrian erected at the former Temple site. Dispersed Jews were forbidden to return or visit. To be a Jew was henceforth to be an exile.

Reading Barnstone’s Hebraicized version, it seems impossible to view the Gospels and other contemporary documents without reference to these horrendous calamities. It doesn’t really matter whether Yeshua’s prophecies about the destruction of Jerusalem were actual prophecy. Or later emendations to oral tradition, not committed to writing until well after the events. The Yeshua followers who told the Gospel stories to each other and to their Gentile converts weren’t acting as historians but as propagators of a story that seemed to gather strength and depth with the retelling.

And insofar as they considered themselves heirs to Judaism, how could a late 1st or early 2nd Christian separate the trauma of their crucified Rabbi—even as they came to see him as the Meshaiah son of God—from the trauma and humiliation of 70,000 crucified Jews at the siege of Jerusalem? If Christianity is indeed a product of Jewish culture, how can it be separated from the cultural and physical genocide of the late 1st and early 2nd centuries in which it took form?

For a non-believer like myself, Barnstone’s version doesn’t really bring me any closer to an understanding of why Christianity–supplanting long and still vital traditions of philosophical reason and quizzical religious diversity with “faith” and monotheism–came to transform a sophisticated Classical Graeco-Roman culture.

But it does leave me with an—albeit stretched—metaphoric image. Imagine that the Axis won the Second World War and that Hitler became as revered as Julius Caesar: the founder of a new world order. But that some years after Hitler’s death (maybe from assassination, like Caesar?), the shattered descendants of a handful of accidental extermination camp survivors began to gather and reach out to simple Germans with the forbidden Torah and Kabbalah. And over the next two hundred or so years, bruised by the excesses of the Thousand Year Reich, Europe, quietly, little by little, then inexorably, became Jewish. An idle metaphor, maybe, but the kind of thought that occurs reading Barnstone’s version.

A Summary of Sorts

Barnstone’s Restored New Testament is much more than a re-translation of the canonic New Testament. It also includes the known apocryphal texts, is judiciously but not excessively annotated, and provides ample separate chapters of sophisticated, wide ranging commentary both on Biblical and translation theory. The commentary is a storehouse of information. But it’s the almost Blake-like, quirkiness of the core translation and the reliance on verse as a central component that seem to energize the text, much in the manner of medieval illuminations.

Barnstone maintains a disciplined neutrality in doctrinal interpretation and I doubt he will be off-putting to either believers or skeptics. But while he’s concerned with accuracy and often footnotes alternate interpretations, I don’t think he was aiming for an “authoritative” version. He doesn’t try to supplant other versions. Rather The Restored New Testament unabashedly strives to be literature, poetry, and “translation as performance.” Taken as such, it’s a unique work, and—whether or not to one’s taste—a magnum opus.

__________

Art Beck is a San Francisco poet and translator who’s published two translation volumes: Simply to See: Poems of Lurorius (Poltroon Press, Berkeley, 1990) and a selection Rilke (Elysian Press, New York, 1983). His chapbook, Summer with all its Clothes Off, is reviewed by Ellaraine Lockie in Rattle E-Reviews. His article on Rilke, “And Yet Another Archaic Torso–Why?” can be accessed in the Australian online journal Jacket.

March 7, 2001

Disappearing Fiction & Form

Rattle e.3 released in late September 2007, previewing issue #28’s Tribute to Nurses, including an excerpt from our conversation with Tess Gallagher. The e-issue includes two book features, with excerpts from Jeannine Hall Gailey’s Becoming the Villainess and Lynne Thompson’s Beg No Pardon. Norman Ball extols the virtues of poetic difficulty, and Art Beck reviews a new translation of Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat. Plus photography from the Salton Sea by Daniella Zalcman.

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American Kissing by Any Means

Rattle e.6 released in late March 2009, foreshadowing Rattle‘s Tribute to African American Poets (#31). We interview Michelle Bitting about his first book, Good Friday Kiss, and also feature five poems from Timothy Green’s American Fractal. Also in the issue, Art Beck introduces his translation column with an exploration of the effect of a single pronoun in Rikle’s “Spanish Dancer,” and Bruce Cohen gives his advice on submitting poems: “By Any Means Necessary.” Black and white photography throughout by Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

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Hello Yo-Yo Uber-G!

Rattle e.7 released in early October 2009, foreshadowing the sonnet issue (#32). We interview Bruce Cohen about his first book, Disloyal Yo-Yo, and also feature five poems from Christopher Goodrich’s Nevertheless, Hello. Also in the issue, Dan Waber introduces his Eye Contact column with a look at the textarc and typography of interaction designer W. Bradford Paley, and in his second column on translation, Art Beck hunts for echoes of Catullus. Abstract paintings throughout by Dan Ruhrmanty.

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