One of the most evocative poems ever written is the Japanese haiku "Woman." It goes like this: "Woman/how hot the skin/she covers." Concise, understand, yet brimming with suggestion, this is haiku at its best. And it's one of the best poems in "99 Poems in Translation."
Edited by British playwright Harold Pinter, with help from Anthony Astbury and Geoffrey Godbert, publisher and co-publisher of the Greville Press, this book showcases poems translated into English. It is a companion volume to the earlier "100 Poems by 100 Poets," which contained some of the finest poems ever written in English.
The present book also contains many fine poems. It presents a cross-section of the world's poetry from the Greek Sappho (circa 800 B.C.) to Yugoslavian poet Janos Pilinszky, who died in 1991. Most of the French Symbolist poets are here, as are many of the great German and Russian poets of the 19th and 20th centuries. There's a little bit of everything: Catullus, Ovid, Petrarch, Dante Alighieri, poems from the Old Testament, as well as an American Indian poem. Called "Song of the Fallen Deer," it's one of the best poems in the collection.
The jacket states that the book explores the complex art of the poet and the translator. But it does not. The text contains no introduction, as found in most collections of translated poems. It names the translators but provides no information about them. Many books like this give a short biography of the translators to show their expertise and to show how their lives connect with the poems they've translated.
The book gives no biographical information about the poets. A chart at the book's end presents only the nationality and dates of the original poet. These poets span centuries and continents; many of them are relatively unknown to English-speaking audiences. Accordingly, most books of this kind tell the reader something about the poets, their themes, their writing style. But readers of this book are left on their own.
Translating is a very difficult art. It's hard enough to create a poem. The translator, though, has to re-create a poem, a task that can be even harder. Perhaps Robert Frost was thinking of the difficult job of translating when he defined poetry as that which is lost in translation.
Because translating is so difficult, collections of translated poems usually also provide the poem in its original language. There's also usually an explanation of how the translators coped with the idiosyncrasies of the original poem to make the translated poem. This book has neither.
With poetry, these idiosyncrasies can be serious concerns. One introduction to a book of Chinese poems, for example, explained that a particular Chinese line contained four characters. Yet it took 14 English words to get that meaning across.
For reasons like this, translators, such as Michael Hamburger, who has two poems in "99 Poems . . . ," have said elsewhere that it's almost impossible to translate poetry. Christopher Middleton, another translator whose poem is in this collection, once likened translating to seeing the face of God in creation. Translators work out of love for the language, or to extend the audience for a poem, or to nourish their own writing.
Some of the great English poets were translators. Some of their translations are in "99 Poems . . . ": Percy Bysshe Shelley, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Edmund Spenser are here. There are also a few American greats, such as Ezra Pound, Lawrence Ferlingetti, Elizabeth Bishop and W. S. Merwin.
Many poems that are frequently anthologized are here. There's the Chinese poem "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter," translated by Ezra Pound. Thomas Merton's translation of "Black Stone on Top of a White Stone" by Cesar Vellejo is included.
The book also includes Elizabeth Bishop's translation of "Travelling in the Family" by Carlos De Andrade. That poem isn't frequently anthologized, but it's an interesting poem, because it parallels Ms. Bishop's life, as she too traveled in the shadow of her dead father. That information isn't included in this book, but it should have been.
No planning was given to the order of the poems. They are simply arranged alphabetically by the author's last name. Sometimes that arrangement creates a dissonance. But generally, it resonates. The best example occurs as the overstated, rhyme-filled Russian poem by Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1992) faces a quiet Chinese poem by Lady Ki No Washika (8th century). Not only is the contrast enjoyable, it is also ironic, since the Russian poem puns and rhymes on the word "recant" while the Chinese poet talks about saying no.
Called "No," the poem plays on the "no" that lovers say when they mean "yes." The last four lines go like this: "If I say no, it's only/Because I fear that yes/Would bring me nothing, in the end,/But a fiercer loneliness." Rich in connotation, that poem also suggests the subtleties of sense and sound that a good translator must work with. As such, it points to the art behind the poetry in this collection.
Ms. Scharper is the author of "The Laughing Ladies," a collection of poetry. She teaches writing at Towson State University.
Title: "99 Poems in Translation"
Selected by: Harold Pinter, Anthony Astbury and Geoffrey Godbert
Publisher: Grove Press
Length, price: 149 pages, $16