[...Sappho...]

Reading Sappho's poetry brought to mind, among other things, one of my favorite authors, Isak Dinesen. To me, Dinesen's prose reads like poetry. The beauty of her prose comes in its ability to shift between telling the stories to presenting the images accompanying them. Her descriptions of the people, the land, and the animals she encounters heavily emphasis sensory experiences. Some passages have a musical quality about them that when read aloud unveil hidden--almost visceral--responses that would be lost if read in silence, or simply as words on a page--as prose.

For example, in her novel, Out of Africa ("Natives and Verse"), she recounts her experience engaging the Swahili--who have a "who have a strong sense of rhythm, [yet] know nothing of verse--to her European experience of poetry. As the Natives became accustomed to her poetry with its own rhythmic qualities, they began to seek out opportunities to her more of it. On one occasion, an occasion that I think speaks to the sensuality of language irrespective of its form, the Natives ask her to "[s]peak again. Speak like the rain." Although Dinesen feigns ignorance at why the Natives would associate verse to rain--even going so far as to provide a merely practical reason why the Natives would do this in stating that "in Africa rain is always longed for and welcomed." However, when she responds that such a perspective must be "an expression of applause," she is illustrating that she is fully aware of this as being a sensory--and sensual--experience.

  

I have always been dubious about the idea that poetry is supreme in regards to its ability to convey sensory experiences better than prose. I find it simply different in form as to how it does so. Good writing, in any form, aims to evoke multiple senses in the reader. I find it difficult to imagine how anyone could reduce, for example, the very sensory and visceral experiences conveyed in the prose of Dashiel Hammet's and his 'mean streets'; or, in Chandler who conveys in his noir stories that 'smell of fear'...I cannot imagine anything more sensory (or poetic) than his image, in Trouble is my Business, that "the streets were dark with something more than night."

This isn't to suggest that poetry is better or worse, simply that I think such dichotomies are either pretentious or naive...or both. Poetry is perhaps seen as an approach more akin to the prose experiment of writer's, like Hemingway, who aimed to say the most with the least amount of words.

In this sense, I see much in common with the effects someone like Chandler was seeking to evoke beyond the words on the page, and the imagist project of poets like Ezra Pound:

In A Station Of The Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

The imagist toying with the haiku was, like Hemingway, a means to bridging experiences without leading the reader by the proverbial nose. We can see such an approach from another perspective and via a different project by poets known as 'found poetry'. Here the project is to alter the form of prose pieces (non-literary) into the form of poetry. The sources tend to be either innocuous, like those from a textbook:

Hence no force, however great,

can stretch a cord, however fine,

into a horizontal line

which is accurately straight.

(William Whewell from 

"An Elementary Treatise on Mechanics")

Or, in the great tradition of poetry as subversion, the rearranging of speeches, or other similar documents, to re-arrange the implication from the original intent as to undermine (subvert) that intent. For example, the following is from a Department of Defense transcript quoting Donald Rumsfeld speaking on "The Unknown": 

As we know,

There are known knowns.

There are things we know we know.

We also know

There are known unknowns.

That is to say

We know there are some things

We do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns

The ones we don't know

We don't know.

Another source of inspiration for found poetry comes from translations. Monty Python popularized this in their "Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook" skit. Where the intent, in the skit, is to say, "Can you direct me to the station?" The result translated is, "Please fondle my bum."

Some of the more memorable examples from this skit:

• "Do you want to come back to my place, bouncy bouncy?"
• "I am no longer infected."
• "Drop your panties, Sir William; I cannot wait until lunchtime!"

Folks can try this on their own, however, using Yahoo's 'Babelfish' translator and then finding a source in both a foregin and English version. Use the foreign language version and translate it in Babelfish and see what comes out. I tried this recently using the German news magazine Der Spiegel.

The English version reads: "Greece may make the headlines, but Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition faces a greater danger: a tax cut battle between her CDU and its CSU sister party. CSU head Horst Seehofer is furious with Merkel over being sidelined in the debate -- to the point that some in his party would like to see him let the coalition collapse. By SPIEGEL Staff"

The translation from Babelfish is:

"Ran last nothing more in Merkels troop - nevertheless now has blackyellow some important decisions pleases: The taxpayers are relieved around six billion euros, the care money come, and for dementia patient it gives more assistance. It was a hard fight - around giving and taking." 

As it is, it is a little like the Python skit, somewhat humourous; however, by changing the form it doesn't take much imagination to see imagist and sensory aspects to this otherwise poor translation:

Ran last 

nothing more

in Merkels troop 

nevertheless now has blackyellow some important decisions 

pleases: 

The taxpayers are relieved 

around six billion 

euros, 

the care money come for dementia patients 

gives more assistance. 

It was a hard fight - 

around giving 

and taking.  

What I found evocative about Sappho's poetry was similar to much of this, if for different reasons. There is much to uncover beneath the surface of Isak Dinesen's prose if readers choose to 'read between the lines' or to read beyond the words seeking broader sensory images. Equally so, with translations, or with complete or whole documents much can be drawn out of them that is not, at first glance, within them to those who seek an adventure in reading. With Sappho's poetry much is lost or unknown of the original; so, where 'found poetry' takes something whole and edits and/or re-arranges it, Sappho's poems are missing pieces and, thus, read as fragments.

This is perhaps best captured in Anne Carson's following quote:

“I emphasize the distinction between brackets and no brackets because it will affect your reading experience, if you will allow it. Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp--brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.”

Anne Carson

[emphasis added]

If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

I emphasized this last comment because it seems to highlight this adventure in reading which I previously spoke of; and, reading Sappho's poetry is, in this sense, certainly an adventure if we allow it to be so.

In addition to reading into these fragments there is the problem of translation. Although I said previously that I do not hold that poetry should reign supreme and alone in regards to its ability to create images and/or sensory experiences over prose, I would not be so naive as to suggest that, where ambiguity--especially semantic ambiguity--is a significant problem in the translation of prose, if we return to the idea that poetry is a project seeking to say the most with the least amount of words, certainly the issue of ambiguity and translation in poetry looms even larger.

Take, for example, the last lines of Sappho's "Fragment #31", as done by several different translators (NOTE: I have left the line breaks as they are in the original editions):

Anne Carson:

"But all is to be dared, because even a
person of poverty"

Stanley Lombardo:

"But I must bear it, since a poor"

Sasha Newborn:

I must feel all, since I am poor."

Ambrose Phillips (c. 1711):

"I feinted, sunk, and died away..."

John Hall (c. 1652):

"Yet, since I'm wretched must I dare..."


With each of these translations the resolution of the speakers experiences in altered--often radically--between one and another translation of the same Fragment 31. Take, for example, even the otherwise benign use of punctuation between that of Anne Carson's, containing no end punctuation, to that of Sasha Newborn's inclusion of the period making this a complete thought. In Carson's we know that "all is to be dared," but we not what comes next--we're left either with a grammatical sentence fragment, or a rhetorical device (ellipsis) leaving us hanging. Contrast this with Newborn's rendition which, as it is presented, is a declarative sentence ("I must") conveying a propositional attitude ("feel all...since...") in respect to the condition of the speaker (poor).

Between each translation we're presented with very different conditions for the speaker: from the "wretched" of Hall, to the fading of Phillips, to financial emphasis in Carson's "poverty", and the more broader ambiguous use of Newborn's "poor."

In the end, I believe that unless one wishes to read simply to finish--as though literature and art are to be simply consumed to have served their purpose--then we should aim to read more deeply into prose to tease out and engage other senses, or read varieties of translations to re-imagine different effects and perspectives. Otherwise we 're robbed of potentially great insight simply because an obstacle is placed in our path...