sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: poetry

I've read the Odyssey once before, over a decade ago, in the Fagles translation. And I really enjoyed it! Then when I heard about the Wilson translation, and the kinds of things she was doing, I was very curious and interested to see how different it would be.

Turns out the two translations have VERY different feels. The Fagles is far wordier and more consciously poetic sounding to the English ear, the Wilson is more plainspoken and direct. I don't know what the experience is like of reading it in Homeric Greek so I don't know which better captures the feel of the original, and trying to google for information on the homeric style gets me a lot of not-very-trustworthy sources saying very different things. But I do appreciate that the Wilson starts with a note on translation choices, so you understand what she's trying to do and her thoughts about her approach as compared to other ways it has been done. The Fagles says nothing about its translation. And because of Wilson's explanation I knew what to look for and appreciate in her version!

I had a very different experience reading the two translations as well, but that could just as easily be the changes in me in the decade between so it's not exactly a rigorous comparison, lol. The first time I read the Odyssey I was newly graduated from university, had a recent concussion, and was on an extremely long flight across half the globe; this time I'm living a settled life in my thirties. Also when I first read it I honestly had very little idea what to expect, because the things I thought I knew about it from popular culture don't actually closely reflect the actual experience of reading the work itself, so I found it constantly surprising.

So the first time I read it, in the Fagles, I engaged with it mostly just as fun story to feel fannish about. And I found it lots of fun! This time, with the Wilson, I read it more as a piece of insight into the culture and values of a very different time and place; plenty interesting, but a bit less fun. Is that me, is that the translation, is that both? Who knows.

So I guess I don't have a lot useful to say about comparative translations here, unfortunately! At any rate, the Odyssey is definitely a poem worth reading, and I'm glad I came back to it, and I'm glad I got some of Wilson's perspective on it too.

I never would have thought to nominate a translation of Beowulf for the Best Related Work hugo award, so to all the galaxy-brained folks out there who did: THANK YOU. It means I actually got around to prioritizing reading this book, which I might not otherwise have done for years! And it's SO GOOD.

Maria Dahvana Headley is the translator of this latest version, and as she says in her introduction, it's not meant to be the One True Translation, it's one among MANY; and that perspective, I think, gives a translator more freedom to do interesting things with a translation, because you don't have the burden of trying to capture e v e r y t h i n g about the original work in your translation (which is impossible). And Headley is definitely doing interesting things with it it!!

My immediate and overwhelming reaction to reading the poem as translated by Headley is that it is delicious. It's satisfying! Delightful! Fun to say! Feels good in the mouth! It is a GOOD POEM. I love the wild swings between archaic and modern, formal and informal, all in the same line, the same phrase. And the way the words fit together, with random pieces of alliteration or internal rhyme or just words that work with each other, and all with a great sense of timing, it's just great. Delicious!

Here's an example from within the opening section:

The war-band flew a golden flag over their main man;
the salt sea saluted him, so too the storms,
and Scyld’s soldiers got drunk instead of crying.
They mourned the way men do. No man knows,
not me, not you, who hauled Scyld’s hoard to shore,
but the poor are plentiful, and somebody got lucky.

Are there occasional word/phrase choices that threw me a bit? Yeah, sure, not every single thing worked perfectly for me, but when you're deliberately aiming at audacious, you're going to have some occasional misses.

The last time I read Beowulf was at least a dozen years ago, the verse translation by Seamus Heaney, and I remember being fascinated and amazed by it at the time, and even memorized the first few pages of it with the intention of eventually memorizing the whole thing (....I know!).

But mostly I was fascinated by looking through the poem to see the worldview of a very different culture than mine, rather than fascinated by the poem/translation as a quality work of art worth appreciating for itself. And that fascinatingly different worldview is still present no matter the translation.

Heaney's poetry was perfectly good. But Headley's speaks to me far more!!

If you want a bigger taste of what this translation's like, you can read an excerpt on tor dot com. The whole thing's like that!

A collection of mostly short stories and a few poems, by Ursula Vernon under her penname T. Kingfisher. I'd read most of these works before, in the various venues they'd been published, but there are a couple new ones, and also it was nice to revisit the ones I'd read before.

A solid collection, where even the works that I like the least I still like a fair amount -- unusual for a short story collection! I just really like Vernon as an author and she rarely goes wrong for me. The two stories about Grandma Harken are probably the best of the collection, but there's other great ones too, and I got something out of all the stories.

An Anthology of Russian Folk Epics, Translated with an Introduction and Commentary by James Bailey and Tatyana Ivanova

This is possibly one of my favourite folk collections I have read in years! I loved it. Apparently in Russia there is a folk tradition of oral epic poems/songs, called bylina, which I previously knew nothing about. But they form their own sort of....canon of characters, and expectation of form and subject, and even borrow bits from one bylina into another if it's gonna fit. So any individual bylina stands on its own, but when you read (or, I suppose, listen to performances of!) a whole bunch of them, you get a fuller sense of the characters and of the setting and expectations and all that.

As well as bylina themselves being new to me, this particular collection is excellent. Each translated bylina has a multi-page introduction providing interesting context to the bylina in question, and discussing the differences between all the variants of that particular bylina.

Then the translated bylina is a direct translation of one specific performance by one specific person, including the singer's errors and asides and all. And the singers are all named and the date of their performance given.

It's GREAT.

Also, you can totally see differences between the styles of different singers this way! Some of them are better than others, imo, but that's going to be the case in any art-form. My biggest annoyance was the singers who overuse repetition of whole sections, over and over again, I guess to stretch the performance out longer? IDK. The bylina for Mikhailo Potyk was one egregious example of this. Poetic repetition is a thing that has value, and it's used to great effect in many bylina in this book, but you can really take it too far!

One poetic framing device that I was fascinated to see in a number of the bylina in this collection is something that's.....kind of a simile in reverse? It's a juxtaposition of a piece of imagery with what's actually happening, by negating the imagery. And it works really well, once I got my head around it! Here's an example:

"A white birch wasn't bending to the ground,
Pale leaves weren't spreading out,
Vasily was bowing to his mother"

It's not a method of presenting imagery I've ever seen before, but it's clearly a thing in this genre, and I love it.

Something else I noticed was the degree to which there are these like....agreed-upon poetic phrases. In a bylina you never refer to someone's head, only to someone's "reckless head." Even in contexts where that makes no sense. Wine is always "green wine" and it's always served in a drinking vessel that can hold a bucket or a bucket and a half of the green wine. Heroes of bylina and their companions are "daring good youths." And so on.

Anyway I was genuinely riveted by many of the bylina in this book, and even the ones I didn't like for themselves were genuinely interesting to read in the context of the genre. I liked that the collection even includes a few parodies/humorous variations at the end. They weren't funny to me at all, because I don't have nearly enough familiarity with bylina to get all the jokes, but it's cool to see that the genre even had its performers poking loving fun at it!

I was thinking again about poetry I like, after revisiting Robert Service rather to excess, and thought I'd maybe do a reclist of 10 poems I like that you can read online.

Let's see how I am at talking about what I like about poetry. I don't have a lot of experience at that. Here we go!

1. Conscientious Objector, by Edna St Vincent Millay

This one gives me feelings and also I love the way it frames the whole thing. "Am I a spy in the land of the living that I should deliver men to Death?" God I love it.

2. My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears, by Mohja Kahf

The solidity of the imagery is amazing, how thoroughly it brings you into the specific moment the poem is talking about, but also the specific story is a window into a much larger experience.

3. This Vote Is Legally Binding, by Ursula Vernon

So like. It's funny? It's taking an obviously absurd premise to its conclusion in a really fun way. But also: yes.

4. Million-Year Elegies: Oviraptor, by Ada Hoffman

Aww yeah dinosaur poetry! Okay but like actually this is so lovely, bringing an intimate perspective on a long-dead creature that scientists at first misunderstood.

(For those who are not dinosaur obsessed: this poem makes more sense if you are aware that when Oviraptor was first discovered near a nest of eggs it was assumed it was an egg-eating dinosaur there to steal the eggs, but it's since been determined that the eggs were almost certainly the Oviraptor's own, which it was caring for.)

5. Legacies, by Nikki Giovanni

IDEK it just like. Perfectly encapsulates in this tiny wee bit of writing something that feels really real and true. The challenges of communication!

6. Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal, by Naomi Shihab Nye

This one brings to life the wonder and realness and goodness of shared connections with other people, and it's, like, hopeful, but a sort of defiant hopefulness in the face of modern realities of racism.

7. Is This the Face? by Jo Walton

Accurate at capturing a mindset that can overwhelm you when you are in the throes of puberty, in the context of Helen of Troy being 13.

8. Catch A Body, by Isle Bendorf

The way it all flows trippingly forward, carrying you through a rushing series of thoughts and feelings and images, is just really effective to me at conveying the things it's trying to convey.

9. Translatio, by Sharon Hsu

One of those poems that just tells a story about a person's life experience really well.

10. From Blossoms, by Li-Young Lee

Really evocative, taking this really specific imagery and building out and off of it in a way that takes you there.

Apparently after finishing The Best of Robert Service I then decided to just read ALL the other Service on my shelf in just a couple days. Okay then.

Songs of a Sourdough, by Robert W Service
A little too much leaning on just a couple themes, which gets repetitive in places, but also contains a couple of my favourite poems.

Ballads of a Cheechako, by Robert W Service
As a collection, reasonably formed, though of course I still don't like all the poems in it. My first introduction to a rather long narrative poem about a guy who thinks he's found the source of the northern lights, and it's delightful.

Rhymes of a Rolling Stone, by Robert W Service
A somewhat lower proportion of poems I actually like in this one. Oh well.

Rhymes of a Red Cross Man, by Robert W Service
These are poems written about WWI, in which Service was a stretcher-bearer and ambulance-driver. And....the vast majority of the poems are uncomfortably pro-war, to me. Sigh.

Ballads of a Bohemian, by Robert W Service
This is a book Service wrote after he became Very Rich from his earlier books and moved to Paris, and the whole book is from the pov of a....a version of him who's a very poor Parisian bohemian writing poetry and attempting to sell it to get by. He includes little first-person narrative interludes between the poems, from this persona, about his bohemian-writer life. The persona kinda rubs me the wrong way, and a lot of the poetry's not to my taste either.

Bar-Room Ballads, by Robert W Service
Nothing much to say about this one. I think reading this many books of Service's poetry in quick succession was getting to me.

EDIT: Oh I suppose I could link to the single poem I actually refer to specifically, it is out of copyright and all. Here you go: Ballad of the Northern Lights.

Reading Robert Service as a kid was what made me first realise I could actually like poetry. Before that I'd mostly been exposed either to children's-book doggerel, or poetry not literal enough for young me to yet have the skills to make sense of. (Also when I was a kid I was pretty rigid-minded about poetry having to have FORM and that freeform poetry was just prose you'd put weird line breaks into, so that also cut out my ability to connect with a lot of good poetry. (I mean....I will admit I still do kiiiiinda think that it's just prose with extra line breaks, I just don't think that that's a problem anymore))

Service's poetry, at its best, is snappy and satisfying, easy to follow, tells a story or says something interesting or funny, and has a good flow. A good poet to ease a poetry-dubious person into liking some poetry. Not all his poetry is him at his best, though, and at his worst he can be trite, sexist, racist, annoying, or tedious.

My bookshelf has over the years sprouted various books of Service's poetry, including this one. (There's multiple collections out there called The Best of Robert Service, btw, so for the sake of clarity: I'm talking about the 2001 McGraw-Hill Ryerson one.) Of course, even a "best of" collection won't necessarily remove the unlikeable elements of a poet's oeuvre, since the tastes of the editor will inevitably drive what's included.

So I like some of the poems in this collection, am mildly ok with others, and actively dislike a bunch more. So it goes! These days I don't consider Service my favourite poet as I would have when I was a kid/teen, but I still have a good deal of lingering fondness for him, despite his issues.

At any rate the world doesn't stop having good books in it just because everything else is horrible.

Here's a collection of short book thoughts about some books I liked, that aren't substantive or spoilery enough thoughts to get their own posts.

The True Meaning of Smekday, by Adam Rex

A reread. Still an impressively successful and delightful book! A kid's book about alien invasion(s), told from the point of view of a young biracial girl, with the conceit that it was written by her for a school project with a goal of it ending up in a time capsule. Tip is a really engaging narrator, and the themes the book is addressing are all well handled, and it's just all SO GOOD. I have a lot of feelings.

Also http://archiveofourown.org/works/1087542 is pretty much exactly right for what happens after the book imo. I love this fic. (though really I ought to read the ACTUAL Smek sequel at some point I think. There is one now!)

Quilting: Poems 1987-1990, by Lucille Clifton

An interesting collection of poems written by an African-American woman. Worth reading, though I have nothing to say about it because I'm not comfortable enough yet with poetry to have the words to describe it.

Dogsbody, by Diana Wynne Jones

A well written and charming book, as is to be expected from DWJ. I'm not the right audience for it, since I don't particularly care one way or another about dogs, and our main character is fairly thoroughly a dog for much of the book. But DWJ is a good enough writer to keep me invested despite this, and I did care an awful lot about Kathleen!

The Emperor's Soul, by Brandon Sanderson

A reread. I still love this book. But do I have anything else to say about it that I didn't say last time? No.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: Squirrel, You Really Got Me Now, by Ryan North, art by Erica Henderson

A total delight, just like the last two Squirrel Girl tpbs! I love Ryan North's sense of humour, and Erica Henderson's art is perfect for the story. Doreen and her friends are all amazing, and I love just about everything about this book.

However. The last two issues in this collection are a two-part crossover with Howard Duck. The first part (done by the Squirrel Girl team) was just about as good as the rest of the series but the second part (done by the Howard Duck team) I just wasn't as into. It wasn't as funny or as charming, and I didn't like the art as much, and I just didn't care as much. It's too bad that this is the note the book ended on, because the rest of the book had me gleeful all the way through.

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/265979.html

This is a collection of fairy tale-related short stories and poems, many of which T. Kingfisher had earlier posted on her blog as Ursula Vernon. So a number of these stories I'd read before, but some were new to me, and at any rate I don't object to rereading a good short story!

I thoroughly enjoyed the majority of the stories and poems in this book. Kingfisher's just so good at writing stories with emotional impact, striking details, and thoughtfulness. And with both love for and a critical eye towards the fairy tales she's riffing on.

There were only two entries that gave me an "eh" reaction, those being Night and Odd Season. Everything else was really great!

In my opinion the strongest entries were the bluebeard story, the loathly lady story, and the snow white story. And the titular story, Toad Words.

Dang though, I just want to read T. Kingfisher's fairy tale reimaginings forever and now I'm out of ebooks to buy! I hope she writes/publishes more soon.

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/258450.html

Oh look, once again (as always) I am behind in posting my book thoughts, so here's three at once!

( Hey World, Here I Am! by Jean Little )

( Does My Head Look Big In This? by Randa Abdel-Fattah )

( The Rithmatist, by Brandon Sanderson )

Crossposts: http://sophia-sol.livejournal.com/214704.html

I have RETURNED FROM TAIWAN. Er. I forgot to mention that's where I was going, didn't I. So. I was in Taiwan! And now I've returned! It was fun!

And that means now I get to go look at how long my f/rlist's gotten and weep. And also attack all the comments I've been meaning to respond to....

In other news, I just read The Odyssey for the first time ever. And it's, like, good or something. Shocker! ( Wait, should this get a spoiler cut? Sure. Have one. )

sentientcitizen can attest that it is pretty hilarious the way, if you get me started about The Odyssey, I will swing wildly back and forth between earnest-academic and squeeful-fan in my expressions of enjoyment. I GO BOTH WAYS, OKAY. Except that I think this post ended up being more of the latter than the former? It wouldn't take much to get me nattering academically though, I think!