Eshleman, Clayton.
Conductors of the Pit: Poetry Written in Extremis in Translation.
Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2005. 242 pp.
Review By Jonathan Mayhew
Conductors of the Pit is a selection of Clayton Eshleman's translations from more than a dozen mostly twentieth-century authors, along with an introduction and a few brief explanatory essays. (Another, smaller edition of this book appeared in 1988, and has been out of print for quite some time.) In some cases, Eshleman has collaborated with other translators, but his is the defining vision of the book. The common element in the translated works is certain poetic “extremism,” a tradition of poetry derived from Rimbaud (whose “Drunken Boat” opens the book) and Surrealism. This conception of poetry is, in fact, one of the the major strains in twentieth-century poetry, and this book lays claim to many of the central figures of the period, including Neruda, Vallejo, Breton, Artaud, Holan, and Césaire, along with several lesser-known names.
Given the way the book came into being, the selection feels somewhat arbitrary. Eshleman happened to translate some poems by the Spanish poet José Hierro, in collaboration with Cid Corman, early on in his distinguished career, and thus they appear in this book. Why did he translate Hierro in the first place? “I no longer remember why we decided to work together on the Spanish Hierro, nor do I have the book any longer that we translated from” (xx). This arbitrary character gives the book a certain charm, converting it into a sort of autobiographical record of a poet-translator's life-long engagement with a wide variety of texts. Since the versions of Hierro are superb, reflecting in this case the influence of Corman's spare style, the reader might not particularly care that the Spanish poet is not particularly Rimbauldian or Surrealist. I wouldn't have minded seeing more Hierro here. Or, for that matter, more Vallejo (represented by only a few prose poems), or more Breton. There seems to be no organizing principle determining the length of the selections of any particular poet. Whereas the poem of Artaud or the amazing French poet Bernard Bador achieve a certain “critical mass,” other selections are tantalizingly brief. The reader in search of Eshleman's translations of Césaire or Vallejo would be well advised to seek out his other editions of these poets.
Since Eshleman is in fact one of the best American translators of Latin American poetry, his versions of Vallejo and Neruda are particularly welcome. The volume concludes with an essay explaining the history of his translation of poems from Neruda's Residencia en la tierra —an essay that he hopes will be of some value to the young poet-translator. The younger Eshleman was heavily inflluenced by the visions of two senior poet-translators, Paul Blackburn and Cid Corman. Yet the advice they gave him was utterly contradictory and he ultimately had to make his own way. For example, Corman's insistence that he eliminate unnecessary verbiage led Blackburn to conclude that he had “ruined the translation “ (232)! Of course, Corman's own sparse poetic style is antithetical to that of Neruda's bagginess. One lesson here is to distrust general precepts: the approach that worked well with Hierro might fail with Neruda.
As I read through this book I attempted to define what Eshleman's own approach to translation, his unifying vision of the art, might be. This seemed difficult at first. He speaks of
the attempt to reconcile two often incompatible aspects of the art of translation: the need to respect all aspects of the original text, to work within the boundaries that it establishes—while working out improvisational strategies to register such accuracy in language that is fresh, potent, and as captivating as poetry can be written in American English. (xviii)
The problem is that this is pretty much what all translators are after. It would have been fascinating to know what particular “improvisational strategies” Eshleman uses, but otherwise this is just another restatement of the Translator's Credo. After some thought I concluded that the organizing principle of Eshleman's career as a translator is a sort of negative capability: a willingness to be influenced both by his numerous co-translators and by the poets themselves. This openness to influence allows each poet an individual existence in English. Neruda does not sound like Vallejo or Holan, and none of these poets sound like “Eshleman.” A good translator will take a unique approach to each poet rather than imposing a single philosophy on all of them. This, ultimately, is the lesson of Conductors of the Pit, a representative sampling of the one of the most accomplished translators of the past thirty years.
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