{"id":432082,"date":"2020-05-19T09:05:01","date_gmt":"2020-05-19T13:05:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=432082"},"modified":"2020-05-26T13:06:25","modified_gmt":"2020-05-26T17:06:25","slug":"the-catalan-poems-by-pere-gimferrer-why-this-book-should-win","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2020\/05\/19\/the-catalan-poems-by-pere-gimferrer-why-this-book-should-win\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Catalan Poems” by Pere Gimferrer [Why This Book Should Win]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win<\/a> posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Award<\/a>s<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Henry N. Gifford is a writer, emerging translator from German to English, and Assistant Editor at New Vessel Press.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Catalan Poems <\/em><\/a>by Pere Gimferrer, translated from the Catalan by Adrian Nathan West (Carcanet)<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible that the titles of Pere Gimferrer\u2019s collections alone\u2014from 1970\u2019s The Mirror<\/em>, through Apparitions<\/em>, and Light<\/em>, to 2014\u2019s The Castle of Purity<\/em>\u2014evoke the spirit and development of the Barcelona-based poet\u2019s work more effectively than I could ever hope to. The Catalan Poems<\/em>\u2019s table of contents, that list of titles, selections from the aforementioned collections, translated by Adrian Nathan West as gorgeously and precisely as the poems they foretoken, is a poem in itself that, making a stronger claim than I can for why this book should win the Best Translated Book Award. The elemental titles of the poems\u2014\u201cMay,\u201d or \u201cVision,\u201d or \u201cBell\u201d\u2014speak to the effort towards the essence of things that occupies Gimferrer through his career. \u201cThere is a poetic truth deeper than scientific or material truth,\u201d Gimferrer writes. But that poetic truth is not antithetical to material truth. For Gimferrer there is great overlap between the real and the ideal.<\/p>\n

A single noun in isolation, like \u201cBell,\u201d is a beautiful illustration of this overlap. A poem, Gimferrer convincingly suggests, may in fact be an attempt to use many words when one will do. As the final lines of his 1978 poem \u201cLight of Velintonia\u201d put it: \u201cThe word of a man makes visible the real: \/ in the light, we may see the garden as garden.\u201d His succession of images, his use or eschewal of imposed form, his sometimes straightforward declarations or descriptions, come together and succeed greatly at just this, making visible the real. I am grateful to witness the success of a poet with as great a vision as a style.<\/p>\n

I am grateful, too, that West is a translator with such a remarkable capacity to convey that success without once faltering, a testament both to his linguistic dexterity and the intense care he must take as a reader\u2014In other words, to his own profound poetic sensitivity and talent. Take, for example, \u201cNow the Poet Undertakes a Practical Act,\u201d a poem in quatrains each with a strict abba<\/em> rhyme scheme and nearly each line perfectly anapestic. Within these limits, West manages a beautifully alliterative line to start one stanza\u2014\u201cWhen the swords bar your body I will not seek for death\u201d\u2014only to break the metric consistency (though maintaining the syllable count) for the painfully and powerfully fragmented line to follow: \u201cbars of darkness bars body body bowed blood in teeth.\u201d All together: \u201cWhen the swords bar your body I will not seek for death \/ bars of darkness bars body body bowed blood in teeth.\u201d I am reminded of the violently defamiliarizing language of Edmund in King Lear<\/em>: \u201cWhy brand they us \/ With \u2018base\u2019? with \u2018baseness\u2019? \u2018bastardy\u2019? \u2018base, base\u2019?\u201d<\/p>\n

It can be useful to know what a poet believes about poetry, to see first of all whether we agree, and second whether the poet follows their own prescriptions and achieves their own goals. It can be equally useful to examine a poem up close. Gimferrer\u2019s 1980 collection As an Epilogue<\/em>, from which 15 poems are included in The Catalan Poems<\/em>, offers among its very short poems a beautiful opportunity for both useful exercises: a two-line poem entitled \u201cPoetic Art\u201d:<\/p>\n

More than the bestowal of synthesis:<\/p>\n

to see in the light the transit of the light.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I agree with Gimferrer, that the bestowal of synthesis, the Metaphysical Poets\u2019 \u201cmost heterogeneous ideas \u2026 yoked by violence together\u201d of which Dr. Johnson disapproved and which T.S. Eliot reclaimed, for instance, is part<\/em> but not all<\/em> of poetry, perhaps necessary but insufficient, in the useful language of statisticians. Eliot himself, especially in The Waste Land<\/em>, the poem of fragments promising (though often withholding) union, seems to crop up quite frequently in The Catalan Poems<\/em>, especially in \u201cDeserted Space\u201d with the reference in its first few lines, if West\u2019s translation is to be trusted, to \u201ccruel \/ spring\u201d\u2014despite the greater acknowledged importance of Pound and Stevens (I rarely fully believe a poet\u2019s prose, anyway).<\/p>\n

I agree also that any purpose of the bestowal of synthesis, as imagists like the young Ezra Pound knew, was to capture something about time\u2014moment and movement. The point of seeing the light is to see the transit of the light, to see the most true sense of the light as a thing with two termini and a path in between them, not the shadow only, but the form casting the shadow. Many poets have attempted to capture this, and many philosophers have failed even more dramatically than those poets. Gimferrer succeeds to a great extent in addressing and displaying the ideal reality of \u201cthe persistence of atemporal time\u201d (\u201cLight of Velintonia l. 14). He achieves in that two-line \u201cPoetic Art\u201d the bestowal of synthesis\u2014of synthesis itself and light\u2014as well as the perception of the transit of the light. At the close of West\u2019s interview with Gimferrer in this volume, the poet and translator discuss abstraction in poetry. West remarks that if poetry is \u201cabstract, there\u2019s not really a hermeneutic entryway.\u201d Gimferrer acknowledges the importance of abstraction in poetry, for which he credits Rimbaud, and says, \u201cThis was revolutionary, and its effects are evident in certain of my poems.\u201d Its effects only, and certain only. I find Gimferrer delightfully, graciously interpretable, but with some work. Without the work, there is an abstraction to them that nevertheless succeeds in its poetic aims. For this reason, among so many others, this book ought to win the BTBA for Poetry.<\/p>\n

At the close of The Catalan Poems <\/em>we find a selection from the poet\u2019s Dietari 1979\u20141982<\/em>, a series of elegant brief essays, both diary of Gimferrer\u2019s literary life and artistic dietary for his ideal reader. The Dietari <\/em>include a story about an aging Mallarm\u00e9 delivering a toast at a banquet; pithy crepuscular anecdotes about Ruskin, Monet, and Paz; and an essay on the morality Georges Simenon and John Le Carr\u00e9. West spares none of his rhythmic brilliance or creativity in all types of rhyme in his translations of these prose pieces: \u201cLike sheaves of wheat, we await the hour of final silence. Further afield, the reaping goes on into the evening,\u201d he translates Gimferrer in a meditation on personifications of death by way of Wallace Stevens. Tolstoy\u2019s death during a sudden inspired train journey is, we are told, \u201cmoving.\u201d These brief essays are a blessing for those of us looking to understand the poems we have read. They are beautifully written, translated with remarkable insight, and offer us access to something profound, true, instantaneous and eternal: poetry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Check in daily for new Why This Book Should Win posts covering all thirty-five titles longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Awards.\u00a0 Henry N. Gifford is a writer, emerging translator from German to English, and Assistant Editor at New Vessel Press. The Catalan Poems by Pere Gimferrer, translated from the Catalan by Adrian Nathan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":423572,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67476],"tags":[62606,70862,70852,70872,70842,37876],"class_list":["post-432082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-best-translated-book-awards","tag-adrian-nathan-west","tag-carcanet","tag-catalan-poems","tag-henry-gifford","tag-pere-gimferrer","tag-why-this-book-should-win"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=432082"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":432112,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432082\/revisions\/432112"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/423572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=432082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=432082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=432082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}