Curious, isn’t it, that the etymologies of “translation” and “metaphor” turn out to point to the same meaning? Latin in the one case, Greek in the other, they combine roots that mean “across” and “carry.” So they’re both about carrying something across, moving something from one place to another, displacement. Another word that comes up in dictionary entries for both words is “transfer”—you know, like when you need two different buses to reach your destination. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to translate the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé—how to catch that bus and ride it to where I need to go. I recently wrote about Mallarmé as our contemporary while trying to face down the fact that his contemporaneity might have more than anything else to do with his skepticism of that very idea. To quote myself quoting him: “Uninformed is he who would proclaim himself his own contemporary, when the past seems to cease and the future to stall.” To carry his poetry over into our context means recognizing both its almost eerie actuality and what’s so untimely in it that it seems almost illegible. That’s why I was so happy to discover William Benton’s loving and irreverent ways of displacing Mallarmé in the versions he wrote, he says, between 1975 and 1979 or ’80, though they were only published as a group in 1997 (with encomia from Robert Creeley, Guy Davenport, Richard Howard, and Ronald Johnson, no less) under the title—don’t laugh!—of Marmalade. An acidic, possibly bitter fruit, sweetened, watered, and preserved? Maybe. I suspect Benton was thinking Mallarmé’s poetry might already have been too well preserved. Let’s just say that Benton’s poems function more like metaphors for the poems they carry over than like what we’d usually think of as translations. If you’re looking for a would-be paraphrase, these are not the poems for you—and neither are the poems Mallarmé wrote in French, part of whose point is their resistance to paraphrase, a resistance incomplete but all the more spirited for that. And yet the poems Benton has drawn from Mallarmé’s are restatements, in his own American twentieth-century terms—“as central to my own occasion as I could make it,” Benton says—of things he found in the French verse. The approach is unsystematic, one might even say opportunistic, but tenacious, not casual. You never feel like he’s taking too much advantage of the fact that the old fellow’s not around to object to any rough handling. In fact one might feel that the longer poems, such as “L’après-midi d’un faune,” might have yet been more productively mistreated. In any case, just the right quantum of anachronism is a virtue; no matter that the sonnet Mallarmé began with the line “M’introduire dans ton histoire” mentions neither a Vespa nor Glacier National Park. The giddy sense of movement Benton discovers in the poem is authentic. Benton’s bent is toward poems of desire, and he knows that desire swells with—as we read in “Petit Air”—“Solitude, the medium / time occurs in.” To love a poem, as to love a person, may entail the poignancy of a connection missed or too transitory. From “Autres poemes et sonnets”: “I don’t believe two mouths / ever knew the same kiss / they seemed to have in common.” Is that another way of saying, not that poetry gets lost in translation, but that in translation poetry finds the poetry of its own evanescence? The final poem here, “Prose / For Elaine,” shares with Mallarmé’s “Prose (pour Des Esseintes)” little more than its opening reveille—little, but not nothing. Among other things there’s the realization: “he was / born to be a goddamn book.”
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William Benton, Marmalade: Drifts, Gists, Versions, Drafts, and Takes, drawings by James McGarrell, was published by George Adams Gallery Press, New York, 1997.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.