Translations are the lifeblood of an insular literature. Lovers of poetry and of foreign languages will be delighted by a new series of bilingual volumes, priced at £4.50 each, which has appeared from Poetry Ireland. The individual qualities of the languages represented are fully preserved by the presence of the original texts, but as few people can claim to be at home in Italian, Catalan, Hebrew and Turkish, the versions in English are an essential guide.
In order to facilitate translation, an interesting procedure was adopted. Two poets, a man and a woman, from each country were invited to Annaghmakerrig for one week where a team of up to ten poets, mostly Irish, aided by interpreters, shared the task of translating enough poetry to make a volume of about fifty pages for each guest poet. A different team took on each language, but how the work was divided between the participants is not revealed.
As the originals are in free verse the translators have not had to strain for metrical or rhyming equivalents; and they have often found a happy turn of phrase to represent a foreign idiom. Only rarely is the reader pulled up by what seems to be a mistranslation but which was presumably sanctioned by the guest poet.
There is a perceptible grimness with more than a hint of violence in the two Hebrew books: Miracle, by Amir Or, and The Swimmers, by Agi Mishol. The Turkish books have a touch of the surreal: Hulki Aktunc writes, in Twelfth Song: "You lie down at night, you wake to a different country. . ." and a strange country, half way between dream and reality, is explored by his compatriot, Lale Muldur, in Water Music.
A more familiar urban experience is behind the books of Umberto Fiori (Terminus) and Biancamaria Frabotta (High Tide), from Milan and Rome respectively. Fiori looks from the window of a train or of an apartment block; he extrapolates from little scenes in the streets or in restaurants. Frabotta, less fond of the actual, muses on mental predicaments: "it is our nature . . . that we make dark what once was clear."
Alex Susanna's Entering the Cold and Marta Pessarro dona's Confession, both in Catalan, have a larger proportion of love poems than others in the series, which make them more readily appreciated. Susanna is concerned by the "fragility of love": for Pessarrodona love is part of the "eeriness of being alive".
Another set of bilingual volumes is the Poetry Europe Series of the Dedalus Press. No. 3 is At The Devil's Banquets, by Anise Kiltz, translated by John F. Deane, and No. 4 is Man and his Masks, by Jean Orizet, translated by Pat Boran (£6.95 each).
Koltz was born in Luxembourg in 1928 and first wrote in German, but after the Nazi occupation turned to French. The poems in this selection date from the Ninetiess. They are composed of short, self-contained stanzas whose apparent simplicity demands reconsideration. As she says:
Fish of the profound depths sentences die as soon as they rise to the surface.
Her poems are akin to those of Emily Dickinson, the memory of whom, Deane writes in his introduction, is in the back of one's consciousness.
Orizet was born in Marseilles in 1937. Like Koltz, he belongs to an older generation than the poets in the Poetry Ireland series, who come from the Fifties and late Forties. Orizet is more expansive and colourful than Koltz and he finds, like many of the French, that the prose poem is a congenial form. Here is the last sentence of a poem about the metamorphosis of a swallow: "The air began to fill with the scent of jasmine, and a warm fog was creeping up from Carthage when the swallow swooped out over the harbour and turned again into that sail whose shape, if only for those moments, the magic of the place had permitted it to leave."
It is impossible, in such a rapid survey, to given an adequate assessment of these ten books but each of them, for anyone who has felt the lure of a foreign language, will be a key to another world. Some may be encouraged to brush up their French, others to take up the study of Turkish.