Fire and Knowledge

Abraham Piper has written a love sonnet for a Prairie Home Companion contest.

You cannot translate a poem into an explanation, any more than you can translate a poem into a painting or a painting into a piece of music or a piece of music into a walking stick. A work of art says what it says in the only way it can be said. Beauty, for example, cannot be interpreted. It is not an empirically verifiable fact; it is not a quantity.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 117

Translators of poetry must accept failure as the primary condition of their work. They must settle, at best, for second best: Their translations must succeed or fail as new poems in their own language which at the same time serve as approximations or shadows of the original poems. Nobody, I think, has ever believed that there was an equation between a translation and the original.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 117

Part of The Reading Interviews series.

Could you tell us a little about yourself?

I’m Brooklyn-born and have been living for the last 22 years in downstate Illinois, where I teach college English. I’ve been married for all of those years (and a few months more) to Elaine Fine, a composer, violinist, and violist. We have two children, one in college, the other starting in the fall. I’ve published widely but modestly—literary criticism, book reviews, and poetry. Most of my writing now takes place on my blog, Orange Crate Art. Aside from reading and writing, my main interests are musical, mostly 1920s and 30s jazz and blues.

What are your favorite books? What do you like about them and how have they influenced you?

If I don’t begin by mentioning Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (in Stanley Lombardo’s translations) and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (in the recent Penguin translations), anyone who knows me will think that someone else is answering these questions.

Homer’s poems seem to me deeply true to human experience, its tragedy and comedy, the sorrow of war, the importance of memory, the difficulty of homecoming, the ways in which selfhood is a matter of relations to others. (Odysseus is only truly Odysseus when he becomes, once again, Telemachus’ father, Penelope’s partner, Laertes’ son). The Iliad and Odyssey give me a very strong sense that we are all participants in a single abiding human culture. Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America are two specific demonstrations of Homer’s relevance to recent American history.

Proust, whom I read (in translation) for the first time last year, seems to me to be the great writer of memory and consciousness. I doubt that I could have come to his work though at an earlier age (I’m 50). Proust’s work still leaves me more awestruck than articulate.

I’ll mention one more novel: Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, which is not nearly as well known as it should be. I first read it almost thirty years ago, and I’m now almost the age of its protagonist. It’s one of the best depictions of the emotional difficulties of growing older that I know.

Who are your favorite writers?

There are many. Among the ancients, Homer and Sappho. Among novelists, James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov (and of course Cather and Proust). Among poets, Guillaume Apollinaire, Emily Dickinson, Lorine Niedecker, Frank O’Hara, and William Carlos Williams. I tend to like writers who are, in a variety of ways, "difficult."

What is the best non-fiction and fiction book you have read recently?

Non-fiction: Mark Edmundson’s Why Read? (2004) is a great defense of the practice of reading literature as a way to enlarge the possibilities of living.

Fiction: I’m reading Proust for the second time, all the way through. Once through is not enough.

Why do you think reading is important? What has led you to make it a priority in your life?

The poet David Jones says that we are sign-making creatures. Our capacity to represent thought and feeling and reality in language is distinctively human. We live, one might say, in language. Reading is the most direct way to gain access to what has been said and felt beyond one’s immediate range of reference.

How many books do you normally read at a time?

Not many. Right now I’m getting in my Proust, 25 pages a day. I’m also reading Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, due back at the library soon.

Do you mark and take notes while you read? If so, how?

Yes. I usually use pencil. I tend to underline, draw boxes around key phrases, and write in the margins. Often that involves page numbers—tying a passage on one page to something earlier (or later). When I’m rereading something older and already marked up, I’ll use pencil or pen. The only exception to these practices that I can think of was my first trek through Proust. My thinking seemed so provisional that I used Post-it Notes, hundreds of them. I just couldn’t bring myself to write in the books. Now I’m taking the notes out and marking things up.

I often show my students what a marked-up poem looks like on the page—it’s a vivid way to emphasize that reading requires active participation.

When you finish a book, how do you decide what to read next?

I might go to something that’s an adjunct to what I just read (a book of letters by an author), or something that’s simply a contrast. I have no very clear answer to this question. I like the poet Ted Berrigan’s advice: that whatever you’re reading is what you should be reading. I can’t see how that’s really so, but it’s a reminder that people come to different works at different times.

Do you have any advice about reading that others might find helpful?

We live in a culture that invites us to lose our minds in endless distractions. It’s thus important to undertake sustained, dedicated acts of attention. Reading is in this sense a way not to lose one’s mind.

Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions!

Thanks for the chance to think and write about these questions!

Poetry reproduces an indefinable mood that is more amorous than love itself.

–Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), “On Some Verses of Virgil” in The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate (1994), p. 67

How To Be a Poet
(to remind myself)

by Wendell Berry

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill-more of each
than you have-inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

From Given: New Poems © Shoemaker Hoard, Washington, D.C.

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit—not a fossil earth, but a living earth.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), p. 255

Commuter–one who spends his life
In riding to and from his wife;
A man who shaves and takes a train
And then rides back to shave again.

–E. B. White, Commuter (1929)