Transom:
How did you come to translate Šalamun’s work?
Levin:
I
met Tomaž Šalamun in January 1987, when we
were both resident fellows at The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New
Hampshire. Tomaž, who had read some of my poems, approached me on a
snow-covered path as I
was walking back to my studio one afternoon. We started talking, and he
asked
me what I was working on; I told him that I was struggling with a poem
concerning Jonah, to which he replied, pointing at a ring I always wore
(a
Florentine stone mosaic depicting a dove on a background of black
onyx), “Do
you have a Bible?” I told him that I had one in my studio, among the
many other
books I had shipped to MacDowell; and he said I should look again at
the Book
of Jonah. We spoke a bit more, and he told me that he strongly
connected to my
poems, that they made him think of the architect Borromini. He said I
was not
an American poet, though of course he knew I was an American. We spoke
at some
length in the bitter cold, and for the rest of the time our residencies
overlapped we engaged in marvelously intense conversations every
evening after
dinner. Of course I was eager to read his work. Not knowing any
Slovenian I looked
at some translations, which at that point most likely were those done
by
Michael Biggins, Anselm Hollo, or Charles Simic. When I returned to my
studio I opened up to the Book of Jonah, which I
had read
often enough without ever paying attention to the introductory note,
where I
learned to my amazement that the name Jonah means “dove.” So that is
why Tomaz
was pointing to the ring on my finger, a ring whose beautiful image
haunted me
in nightmares from which I awoke believing that the bird had flown
away,
leaving behind a blinding darkness. The thrill of this connection
further
intensified when I discovered Tomaž’s poem, “Jonah.” That initial
encounter
confirmed that there was a deep affinity between us.
Perhaps my intuitive connection to
the force field of Tomaž’s
poems made him feel that I one day could collaborate with him on
translations
and made me receptive to the possibility from the moment he proposed
it. But years
before I ever began to translate Šalamun’s work, he had translated a
group of
my poems without even telling me he had done so (it was a surprise, a
gift from
one poet to another). Some of these poems ended up being published in
1989 in
an issue of
Literatura, one of
Slovenia’s preeminent literary journals; the issue included a feature
on work
by ten American poets selected and introduced by Aleš Debeljak, who
soon became
one of Slovenia’s leading poets and an internationally recognized
cultural critic.
One thing led to the next (certainly this invitation must have been
influenced
by Tomaž Šalamun and Aleš Debeljak) and I was invited to attend the
International PEN Conference in Bled, Slovenia in May of 1993.
It is easy for me to say
that I fell in love
with the country at first sight. It is also true that an immersion in
the
landscape and the sounds of the language gave me a more visceral
understanding
of the complex worlds shaping not only Tomaž’s poetry but the work of
many
other extraordinary writers whose homeland is Slovenia and Slovene.
Not long after visiting Bled, I was
invited to apply for a
Fulbright Fellowship to Slovenia. I lived in Ljubljana in 1995 from
June until
October, traveling throughout the country, usually in the company of
writers
and artists I met though Tomaž and his incredible wife, the painter
Metka Krašovec. I
had many chances to meet with Slovenian
poets, and at some point embarked on collaborative translations with a
few of
them. With Tomaž Šalamun, the process became an ongoing one—that is, a
few
years later, when he was living in New York City as the Cultural
Attaché to the
Slovenian Consulate, we met regularly, sometimes several hours each
week,
translating a small number of poems in each session. In some cases, not
many
words would change from Tomaž’s raw English version to the finished
translation; but we would easily spend an hour or two on each poem in
order to convey
the syntax and rhythms and semantics as closely as possible, or to find
analogues in English (an effort, sometimes, at the impossible) for
allusions or
colloquialisms or metaphors. Tomaž would show me his literal
translation in
English, read me the poem in Slovenian, and then we would go to work.
Transom:
What relationships do you see between Šalamun’s work and your own?
Levin:
It is difficult to describe the
effect of Šalamun’s poems on
my imagination and on my own poetic sensibility: I could start by
mentioning
the Dionysian power and the juxtaposition of extreme subjectivity with
vivid
historical allusion. The immediacy of his voice, a presence that leaves
its
mark even in the roughest of translations, cannot be explained
logically,
though it is an experience many others have had by now. This is not the
place
to explicate Tomaž’s work or explore his style, but I will say that I
felt an
immediate identification with the persona and energy of many of his
poems,
despite our coming of age in radically different times and places. And
I
identified with the sheer nerve and liberating joyousness in his work—a
freedom
of imagination that seemed uncannily familiar, bringing me back to my
earliest intuitions
and perceptions while hurling me forward into an utterly new aesthetic
experience.
From childhood, I had a conception of
the poet’s role as
being vatic, oracular, and of the poet’s voice, however private in its
utterance, occupying a public space. Perhaps seeing Robert Frost on
television at
John F. Kennedy’s inauguration had a subliminal effect; but I suspect
this only
confirmed a sense I had already developed as a result of early reading and from
hearing my parents
recite poems from books or from memory (my father frequently intoned
stanzas without
any provocation or warning). The urgency to make a poem began and still
begins
as a physical sensation. I can also confess here that when I read
Tomaž’s “Folk
Song,” which begins, “Every true poet is a monster,” there was a shock
of
recognition, for as a child I was sometimes called a monster for saying
the
things I thought and for being so single-mindedly focused on writing,
so sure
of my destiny, so stubbornly believing that poetry was of essential
value. Though
my parents seemed to love poetry, they were alarmed (to put it mildly)
when
they realized I might become a poet. Tomaž’s fearless declarative
statements
encapsulate the immense weight of any act of creation as well as the
comic
self-awareness a poet—or any person—needs in order to stay true to
one’s
calling. Spending time in Slovenia, meeting not only artists and
writers but
people from all walks of life, I was exposed to a culture that
validated poetry
and the poet in a way I had always envisioned.
My poems have always been lyric in
nature, generated by sound and rhythm and image more than any clear
narrative,
although a shadow of narrative evolves in the process of the poem’s
unfolding.
This is another reason why Tomaž’s work meant so much for me from the
start,
because at the time I met him it was rare for me to find someone who
understood
what I was doing, what I was trying to do in language. He grasped my
technique
and the metaphysical nature of my work and the inner workings of my
method.
Naturally, I gravitated toward a poet who seemed so “other” in some
ways, yet
with whom I found such a kinship.
Transom:
Your poem in our current issue is deceptively slippery, couching in fairly
straightforward language an obsession with what’s not being said and
with what can’t be seen. “Journal” articulates those limits in terms of
privacy, and we wonder: Does one “keep a secret alive” by just not
quite telling it? Is that also how one keeps a poem alive? Or put
another way, who is the addressee in this poem?
Levin:
Originally,
my sense of the speaker
of “Journal” was the journal (or logbook or diary) itself, as an
object. Only
in a very last set of revisions did the first person singular enter the
opening
stanza of the poem; in all previous drafts the “I” appears only in the
poem’s
closing parenthetical statement. But all along, my sense of the
addressee was
anyone or any creature capable of finding and reading this human
artifact. In
the first drafts of the poem there was no punctuation at all—only a
series of
blank spaces separating pauses of breath and thought; and sometimes I
wonder
whether introducing commas has undermined the fissures I wanted to make
manifest, and which served as visual evidence of whatever is missing
because it
is secret or has been eroded or excised. For now, though, I’m trusting
that the
words themselves, the very syntax and phrase structure, are suggestive
of the
lacunae that are the central mystery of the poem and probably its
generating
source.
All
poems, I believe, are secretive
by nature (though not necessarily “private”); language itself is
secreting
something fleeting and real, and the drive to make a poem involves in
part the
desire to make palpable something that seems impossible to articulate.
Through
pulse and image, through associations of sound and meaning, something
is
uttered that the poet can barely grasp or understand. “Journal”
explores how little
of what any person experiences can be recorded. It also faces how even
an
elaborate record of one’s life may eventually reflect less and less of
what one
does, what one feels, and what one thinks—because one may change how
much one
may want to conceal or reveal of oneself and one’s history; or because
one has
decided to “remove” certain information; or because information one
wanted to
reveal to the world has been removed from the world by someone who
wanted to
suppress it; or because time itself intervenes and the material on
which the
words appear decays or is destroyed.
Somehow,
dwelling on and within this
disturbing understanding—of how much of what we think we will leave
behind may indeed
disappear, be lost or annihilated—led to a quite terrifying vision of
the death
of the planet Earth. I had no idea the poem would be moving in that
direction
when I began it, though that move looks inevitable in retrospect. My
sense of
keeping secrets alive does not depend on withholding anything as much
as
grasping the facts of the natural world, where information invisible to
the eye
or inaccessible to other senses is encoded yet translatable (if we
learn the
language that generates it or in which it resides). Everything alive
keeps a
secret, and as a species we are constantly in touch with the secret
inner life
of ourselves and of the world of nature. When I look at a tree I feel
connected
to it, but I don’t really understand how or why; I know the tree is
keeping
alive its secret and I want it to reveal itself to me just as I want to
be
revealed to it or someone else. But we cannot reveal without
concealing: the
word “reveal” means to re-veil. Remember Casper the Friendly Ghost? We
only see
him when he puts that sheet back on. One doesn’t have to try not to
tell
something for it to be secret; every time we unveil something a new
secret
appears. This is evident in the fields of biology, physics, or
chemistry, and
it is just as true in the field of poetry. The conceit of the poem, the
analogy
that “Journal” ends up drawing, can crudely be reduced to saying that
the
physical condition of the written record anyone leaves behind is
analogous to
the state of the earth after the death of the sun. As if the globe were
to
become, in the distant future, a token, a
memento
mori—of what? Does
the unnamable
become a divinity by virtue of being unnamable?
The
poem’s most intimate utterance
may be the confession (in parenthesis) that whoever is speaking or
writing
these words, whoever has left this document, does not want to leave
whatever
place or state of being he or she currently inhabits, does not want to
leave
the particular eternity of a particular present tense. Why this is so
is never
said. Maybe my instinctively introverted, private nature precludes me
from specifying
a scenario or
reason eliciting this
desire; or maybe I am a bit shy about admitting my own bliss. And this
brings
us back to why Tomaž is so electric, so central, so affirming, in the
way that
Blake and Whitman and Dickinson are, and in the way only he is, in how
what
seems most public translates into the private, and what is most
individual translates
into a communion of joy.
Sample Translations:
Thumbscrew
Parthenon West Review