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James Wright: A Life in Poetry

2018; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 92; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wlt.2018.0206

1945-8134

Fred Dings,

French Historical and Cultural Studies

an anthology of Vietnamese poetry in French, based on her immersion in studying not just the language but also the music and culture of the people. Gansel writes that the only German her Jewish Hungarian father knew was the phrase “Du bist ein stuck fleisch mit zwei augen”: You are a piece of meat with two eyes.OnesensesthatGansel’slifewasshaped by that fact, and by her desire to overcome the generalizations of Nazi bureaucracy to find the particular humanity that lies inside each language, each culture, each person. Gansel recognizes that the important things reside in the specifics: the varying names of children’s toys in each Savoyard dialect ; the rhythm and chantlike sonorities of Vietnamese poetry; the weighted meaning behind the German word sensibel, which can mean both “fragile” and “sensitive.” She recognizes the fact that poetry is the lifeblood of a language and a culture; it saves language from the meaningless currency of everyday exchange—the language that Nazi bureaucracy thrived on—and transforms it into words that breathe, that live their own life, that create an entirely different reality from the roots of words and transforms them into “glowing stones.” So she translates To Huu, a persecuted Vietnamese poet who wrote poems in prison by sticking pins into leaves to form the words and smuggling the branches out to waiting friends; Nelly Sachs, who spent her life rescuing her native German from the language of the Nazis by studying Gershom Sholem’s translations from the Zohar and the translation of the Hebrew Bible by Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig; Eugenie Goldstern, a native of Odessa who devoted her life to studying the dialects of the Savoie until, as a Jew, she was banned from her university position as an ethnologist in Vienna by an anti-Semitic administrator in 1924 and had to live in exile in Sweden. “Translation” comes from the past participle of the Latin transferre, to carry across. Like St. Christopher carrying Christ across the river, Gansel seems to be rescuing words from oblivion, carrying them across from their language into hers, with infinite care and patience. Words have to travel a long way from one language to the other, but they must seem as if they never left home, the way sheep look at home wherever they are, in summer and winter pastures alike. “Translation requires an inner urgency that will make that which is different as close to the original as possible,” writes Herta Müller . Translation as Transhumance is a proof of this inner urgency and a tribute to the courage and bravery required in every true translation. Charlotte Mandell Annandale-on-Hudson, New York Jonathan Blunk. James Wright: A Life in Poetry. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2017. 496 pages. Jonathan Blunk reaches far into the future with this luminous biography of one of the finest and most important American poets of the twentieth century, James Wright. Nearly five hundred pages, the book is replete with four hundred pages of narrative, thirty-eight judiciously selected photographs, sixty-eight pages of extensive notes, acknowledgments, and a detailed, twenty-one-page index, making the book a necessary resource for Wright scholarship. Biographies are sometimes deadened by a merely dutiful and exhaustive recitation of chronological facts that fail to evoke the complex totality of the living spirit they describe. Though Blunk’s writing is accurate, dutiful, and exhaustive (as biographies should be), it is also vividly alive: a reader feels on every page as if he or she is in the presence of Wright. The narrative distance is gauged perfectly, providing an objectivity infused with awareness of the deep humanity and importance of this poet. We seem to witness it all, the circumstances of every phase of Wright’s life, the inner and outer forces that shaped his character, events, and destiny. Through interviews, letters, journals, and unpublished poetry, Blunk develops an intimate proximity to the psychology and emotions of the poet, his motivations and his actions. In spite of the vacillations of interpersonal relationships and the vicissitudes of fortune that any life must endure, we see the poetic genius of Wright forging its self and voice in the furnace of circumstance, unwavering in...