Robert Lowell’s Helen appears in the volume of Imitations (1958).
It
GEORGE STEINER
Translation as Homecoming
Let us consider two American translations of Valery’s sonnet Helene from
the Album de vers anciens:
Azur! c’est m oi. . . Je viens des grottes de la mort
Entendre l’onde se rompre aux degres sonores,
Et je revois les galeres dans les aurores
Ressusciter de l’ombre au fil des rames d’or.
Mes solitaires mains appellent les monarques
Dont la barbe de sei amusait mes doigts purs;
Je pleurais. Ils chantaient leurs triomphes obscurs
Et les golfes enfouis aux poupes de leurs barques.
J’entends les conques profondes et les clairons
Militaires rythmer le vol des avirons;
Le cbant clair des rameurs encbaine le tumulte,
Et les Dieux, ä la proue heroique exaltes
Dans leur sourire antique et que l’ecume Insulte
Tendent vers moi leurs bras indulgents et sculptes.
Richard Wilbur’s version is included in the collection Things of this
World (1956):
It is 1 ,0 Azure, come from the caves below
To hear the waves clamber the loudening shores,
And see those barks again in the dawn’s glow
Borne out of darkness, swept by golden oars.
My solitary hands call back the lords
Whose salty beards beguiled my finger-tips;
I wept. They sang the prowess of their swords
And what great bays fled sternward of their ships.
I hear the martial trumpets and the deep-
Sea conches cry a cadence to the sweeps;
The oarsmen’s chantey holds the storm in sway;
And high on the hero prows the Gods I see,
Their antique smiles insulted by the spray,
Reaching their carved, indulgent arms to me.
reads:
I am the blue: I come from the lower world
to hear the serene erosion of the surf;
once more I see the galleys bleed with dawn,
and shark with muffled rowlocks into Troy.
My solitary hands recall the kings;
I used to run my fingers through their beards;
I wept. They sang about their shady wars,
the great gulfs boiling sternward from their keels.
I hear the military trumpets, all that brass,
blasting commands to the frantic oars;
the rowers’ metronome enchains the sea,
and high on beaked and dragon prows, the gods —
their fixed, archaic smiles stung by the salt —
reach out their carved, indulgent arms to me!
Valery’s poem is not among his foremost achievements (which raises the
question of why Wilbur and Lowell should have chosen it for translation). As
does much of Valery’s early work, Helene derives from a twofold inheritance.
There are tonalities and single elements derived from Mallarm£ (Azur! c est
m o i. . .), and there is a general motion of ,antique* solemnity and a metallic
sheen which descend directly from Heredia and the Parnasse. There are
also, though only incipiently, compressions and simultaneities of possible intent
of the sort which will make for the difficulty of the later Valery.
Wilbur observes rhyme but alters the scheme from abba to the rather
more flexible abab in the octet. It is only fair to note that Valery himself
exhibits both patterns in the Album. From the outset, Wilbur attempts to
simulate the density of Valery’s vowel-texture and the under-current of
internal echo in the original: CavesIwaves, barks/darkness are cases in point.
In some measure, at least, Wilbur also seeks to echo the subtle gamut of o-
sounds which organize Valery’s text (O, below, loudening, shores, those,
glow, Borne, out, golden, oars). This fabric is reinforced by the anomalous fact
that Wilbur, unlike Valery, preserves the initial dominance of o-sounds in the
rhymes of the first quatrain — mort, sonores, aurores, or in the a rhymes
of his own second quatrain (lords/swords) whereas Valery in fact switches to
a characteristic Mallarmeen u in purs/obscurs. In short: Wilbur goes beyond
the original in aiming at a vocalic continuity in the octet.
Both in word-order and meaning Mes solitaires mains poses problems.
Irremediably, solitary carries a different charge of sense and inference from
solitaires; add to this the fact that My solitary hands is, so far as idiomatic
English goes, very awkward. The Notorious crux of a perfect/imperfect
duality in the verb-form Je pleurais is equally inescapable. The English-
language translator must opt, as Valery need not, between / wept and I was
 weeping and his choice bends the sonnet, however slightly, in one direction
or another.
With the sestet, Wilbur moves into an intensely nautical ambience. But it
is nautical in a rather specific manner: sweeps and cbantey are vividly ,New
England' and not Mediterranean. The whole aura is made less jocund. Insulted,
like beguiled earlier, misses the exact nuance of lightness and play in amusait
and que l’ecume Insulte. ,Insult' and ,guile‘ have a much sharper edge than do
the corresponding terms in Valery’s picture of Helen (in which there might
even be a hint of Offenbach). To rescue his rhymes, Wilbur inverts the order of
the closing epithets: Indulgents et sculptes becomes carved, indulgent. This
is a major shift. VaMry’s sonnet ends, very deliberately, on a marmoral,
hieratic note. If there is amused forgiveness by both parties to the dialectic,
there is none the less a terminal solemnity and sculptural force. Wilbur reverses
the whole movement to close on softness.
Lowell abandons the constraints of rhyme except as between lines
seven/ten and eleven/fourteen, and even here, of course, the rhymes are ,false‘.
He takes the sonnet en bloc, abandoning the octet-sestet Separation. I am the
blue! for Azur! c’est m o i. . . is inexplicable as restatement or transformation
even by the widest license of the Pound-Lowell theory of free imitado. It is
very probably a simple howler and contresens of the sort Lowell will commit
and, through enigmatic dispassion, refuses to correct when his attention is
drawn to them. The second line, by contrast, is masterful in its acoustic rendit-
ion of the breaking surf and in its ability to transpose Valery’s fricatives
into Anglo-Saxon sibilants. With lines three and four Lowell initiates his own
partly arbitrary gloss on Helene. He sets the vision in the menacing context of
the return of the Greek galleys to Troy on the fatal dawn of the Trojan Horse.
The use of shark as a verb is characteristically arresting and remote from the
original. The shady wars are a brilliant stroke, arguably faithful to the
ambivalent register of triomphes obscurs, precisely apposite to the ghostliness
of Helen’s invocation, and morally pungent. The point being that shady, in
American parlance, carries the strong sense of ,disreputable‘, ,corrupt‘, ,con-
trary to respectable semblance'. Though presumably suggested by Wilbur’s text,
Lowell’s eighth line is a formidable improvement and, almost disconcertingly,
the marker of a major poet. Brass continues and aggravates the polemic, ironic
commentary incipient in shady: in American wartime argot it signifies the
officer dass, those in visible command, and the connotations are distinctly
pejorative. Blasting commands to the frantic oars contravenes Valery at nearly
every point. Rythmer and vol des avirons (the latter possibly indebted to a
famous passage in Inferno XXVI) are light, instinct with ordered speed and
musicality. Lowell’s inferences is one of brüte military pretense and actual
chaos. Yet the following verse astutely returns to Valery’s ground. Behind
the French lies an ancient topos: Orpheus’ music taming bestial nature, Arion
riding the dolphin in emblematic control of spiritual harmony over the fury
of the elements. The bizarre, almost surrealistic positioning of the ,metronome‘
in midst the tumult of the sea precisely evokes the organizing genius of music,
of cadenced form over discord. The final triplet is very close to Wilbur,
though stung by the salt is nearer than Wilbur to the luminous lightness of
Valery.
The ,Färbung' given to Helene by Wilbur was, as we saw, already ,New
England'. In Lowell the bias towards Americanization, towards the Nantucket
and North Atlantic atmosphere of Lowell’s own early work, goes much further.
Such touches as shark, shady, brass, frantic, salt inevitably internalize the
sonnet in a context of New England meditations and ironies about war entirely
representative of Lowell’s Mills of the Kavanaugh. The great gulfs are un-
mistakably Massachusetts or Maine, not Asia Minor. Is there any justification,
save appropriative instinct, to this westward transfer?
Valery’s interest in Poe is thoroughly documented. Indeed he regarded
Poe’s abortive philosophic tract Eureka as one of the seminal works of modern
thought. In Poe too there is an invocation of an antique Helen:
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wunderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
A nd the grandeur that was Rome.
Lo! in your brilliant window-niche
H ow statue-like I see thee stand!
The agate lamp within thy hand,
Ah! Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land!
These fifteen lines are in so many ways illustrative of Poe’s elusive case, of an
essential indefinition guarded, given a factitious but singulär energy and music
of motion, by the poet’s extraordinary uses of sound and hushed allusion. That
so inherently weak a poem should contain among the most musical lines in
English (Like those Nicean barks of yore) and a household quote — the end
of stanza two — without gaining in essential strength or definiton is charact-
eristic of the problem of Poe. But what concerns us are possible contacts with
Valery’s sonnet.
The evidence is at once suggestive and awkward to pin down. The
sonority of Valery’s first quatrain is phonetically reminiscent of that of Poe’s
first quite magical stanza. The barks of yore may point to the les galeres.. .
Ressusciter de l’ombre. Airs is, of course, polysemic: it häs a threefold implicat-
ion of ,appearance‘, ,atmospheric scent' (perfumed sea) and, most saliently, of
,music'. The latter, with its inference of rowers guided by harmony, is echoed
in Valery’s chant clair. But the analogy between the two poems lies much less
in points of detail, which are at best tentative, than in two general organizing Being exceedingly literary and even academic in their temper, both
aspects. In both cases we deal with an invocation of Helen which is, at the Richard Wilbur and Robert Lowell may well have been aware of affinities or
same time, specific and unlocalized. Valery’s Helene is clearly the Homeric thematic continuities between Poe on the one shore and Mallarme and Valery
personage in some moment or gesture of resurrection and remembrance. Poe’s on the other. Such awareness could help explain why these two modern Ameri­
Helen is a figure of perfect, dreamlike loveliness, of the type invoked in many can poets chose this particular sonnet of Valery’s (by no means among his
of his poems. But she is definitely in the antique mould and enters the field of strongest) for translation. And it may help us understand why Val£ry’s
luminous vision, as does Valery’s Hel&ne, from the land of shadows (Psyche, Mediterranean antique seems to modulate so fluently into an American key.
from the regions which Are Holy Land! / Je viens des grottes de la mort). The The example is only of modest interest, and the evidence is provisional. But it
second general aspect which relates the two treatments is that which I have does suggest a much wider, important issue. The hermeneutic of translation will
called ,sculptural‘. Valery builds up to a marmoreal effect, sourire antique often contain an impulse to circularity. Consciously or not, the translator
leading to hras. .. sculptes. In Poe the motif is specific: H ow statue-like I see selects a foreign text in which there are elements which derive originally from
thee standl supported by the polished hardness of agate in the verse following. his own native speech and literary inheritance. He seeks to re-import values,
Poe’s haunting cameo had already entered the language before Valery. thematic resources, motifs which had once been exported abroad (Borchardt s
Mallarme rendered it thus: Dante Deutsch being, perhaps, the most conscious, wilful example of such re-
Helene, ta beaute est pour moi comme ces barques niceennes appropriation). The best of Poe had been acquired and very nearly domesticat-
d’autrefois qui, sur une mer parfumee, portait doucement ed by French masters. Wilbur’s and Lowell’s versions of Valery’s Helene are,
le defait et le las voyageur a son rivage natal. at some level, a return or restitution. There can be in the act of translation,
Par des mers desesperees longtemps coutumier d’errer, ta there often is, a homecoming.
chevelure hyacinthe, ton classique visage, tes airs de Naiade
m’ont ramene ainsi que chez moi d la gloire qui fut la
Grece, d la grandeur qui fut Rome.
Lei,! dans cette niche splendide d’une croisee, c’est bien
comme une statue que je te vois apparaitre, la lampe
d’agate en la main ah! Psyche! de ces regions issue qui sont
terre sainte.
There would be much to say about Mallarme’s absorption of the original. By
delicately gauged internal rhymes and vowel sequences, Mallarme succeeds in
giving to cadenced prose Poe’s elusive but nevertheless exact duality of taut-
ness and vague musicality. Such elements of syntax as ainsi que and bien comme
are calculated to blur the habitual clear outline of French constructions in
order to convey the dream-fabric of Poe’s text. Portait doucement le defait et
le las voyageur for That gently . . . The weary, way-worn Wanderer bore
achieves an uncanny similitude, transferring to a falling cadence of dentals and
liquids the exhausted movement of Poe’s famous alliteration. Nor should one
miss the extreme fidelity of Mallarme’s segmentation, his ability to close each
stanza on the same verbal unit as Poe and to keep the sentence-order closely
parallel with the original.
We know of Valery’s admiration for Mallarme’s versions of Poe. It was
via Baudelaire and Mallarme that Poe had come to occupy in French poetics
and post-Symbolist sensibility a place considerably higher than that which he
held on native ground. It is difficult to suppose that Mallarme’s masterful
restatement of To Helen was totally absent from his own approach to the
antique Helene, to the ancient seas and to the touch of statuary which
contrasts with the motion of the waves.