The Eyes: Versions of Antonio Machado. Don Paterson. Faber & Faber. 53pp. £7.99 in UK.
On the Bus with Rosa Parks. Rita Dove. Norton. 95pp. £10.95 in UK
Selected Poems. Blake Morrison. Granta. 120 pp. £8.99 in UK
In his afterword to The Eyes, his selected translations from the work of Spanish poet Antonio Machado (1875-1939), Don Paterson is anxious to set the reader straight about what this volume is not. It is not a literal translation, nor is it a conventional hommage. As Paterson writes: "I can't believe that one should ever be true to a poet, least of all to the illusion of the `great poet', every decision would be infected by that sentimentality."
Paterson's lengthy explanation might have been summed up thus: "this interdependence of form and content means that a poem can no more be translated than a piece of music", and the freedom of Paterson's translations bears this out. Machado was a provincial schoolmaster and spent most of his life away from the main centres of European avant-garde culture. Even the title of his first volume, Solidades (1903) hints at the loneliness that was to become both a blessing and a burden for him.
In his work a late Romantic solipsism vies with political consciousness (he was outspoken on behalf of the Republican cause) and a philosophical-ethical imperative to acknowledge the integrity of his surroundings and of his fellow human beings. Paterson recognises this in the series of translations from Machado's Proverbios y cantares: "It's not the true/ I the poet's after:/ it's the you" and (protestations notwithstanding) his own sensitivity towards Machado's unique qualities works an astonishing alchemy in this volume.
He captures the oriental delicacy of Machado's shorter sequences with great dexterity in "from New Songs," "Proverbs " and "Marginal Notes". Minor quibbles could be made: the rather flat last section of "Three Lyrics" which Paterson renders as "alive to your heart/ dead to your poet" misses the tenderness of the original, where Machado's use of the gerund "olvidando " implies the lady's continuing separateness from him; also in "Guadarrama", " the blue indifferent eye/ of all those lonely evenings in Madrid", although a striking image, fails to capture Machado's surreal idea of memory projecting images on to the screen of the present. This would have made more sense of the final lines: "a thousand suns, a thousand Guadarramas/ are riding with me to the heart of you."
In "Promethean " and "The Reply" Paterson takes liberties, but the results are brilliant. "The Reply" ends with subtle and insistent emphasis on one of Machado's favourite images:
Beyond that there was only the road, the thin road, winding over the far mountain.
Paterson succeeds in his declared intention, to remain true to Machado's notion of poetic process, and the best of these translations possess a tremendous fluidity and vigour.
The eponymous heroine of Rita Dove's On the Bus with Rosa Parks is a black woman from Montgomery, Alabama who in 1955 refused to acknowledge that city's racial segregation laws by moving to the back of the bus on which she was travelling in order to make way for white passengers. Dove (a Pulitzer prize-winner and former US poet laureate) has written extensively about the plight of black American women, always with an acute historical sense and (unlike, say, Alice Walker) a degree of humour. Here, her consciousness of the indignity that previous generations of black Americans suffered in doing something as simple as riding a bus is ruefully juxtaposed with her own consciousness of having come up in the world, as she describes a transatlantic trip on the QE2:
I can't erase an ache I never had. Not even my own grandmother would pity me; instead she'd suck her teeth at the sorry sight of some Negro actually looking for misery.
Dove's work ranges in tone from affectionate humour to a darker, more sensuous apprehension of reality, visible in "Cameos", a series of striking vignettes from family life circa 1930. Her work is also formally challenging, with its angularity and abrupt line-breaks imparting an appropriate sense of unease.
Unease is something which Blake Morrison's work intends to provoke, but its effects are spoiled by Morrison repeatedly over-egging his pudding. Reading this Selected Poems (the fruit of his previous volumes Dark Glasses and The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper as well as more recent work) feels uncannily like reading The Guardian. The zeitgeisty feel is too calculated to make most of these poems seem anything other than occasional pieces. Morrison fills his work with all of the empty signifiers of contemporary life, but finds it impossible to resist underlining his theme. Thus "Superstore" ends with a predictable comment about how Sunday shopping is
not a mockery of churches but a way like them of forgetting the darkness where no one's serving and there's nothing to choose from at all.
"The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper" is probably Morrison's best-known poem, an attempt to describe the Ripper's activities in hammed-up Yorkshire dialect. This long poem is at best grotesquely (and probably unintentionally) comic and at worst crude, patronising and in poor taste. The breast-beating feminism, in particular, is unconvincing. One suspects that most of these poems were written because their author felt they ought to be written. But the best poetry is never didactic, as it takes someone like Machado to show.
Caitriona O'Reilly is a poet and critic