Tuesday Poem: "Translation"

TRANSLATION

In Memory of Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918)

Liberte¢, egalite¢, fraternite¢ -

you put your courage where your pen was

and poetry bloomed in Flanders Field

alongside the poppies.

With Owen and Sassoon, you rescued

the soldier-poet from antiquity

and wrought from mud and blood

the words that gave the lie to

The War to End All Wars.

You fell just as the race was nearly run

and France wept copiously to lose a favourite son.

Translation - a flawed art,

but perhaps no more flawed

than any art or, indeed,

any science.

Was it Frost that said:

“What is lost in translation is the poetry”?

Any smith learns the limitations of his materials

yet still he pushes them to breaking point.

Translator of the heart,

you took us to the Zone

where the sacred was profane

and the heavenly mundane.

Only the poet dares to look down

as Christ “ascends beyond the aviators”

because the poet knows that

life is a found object

and in any language the greatest gift

is the silence between the words.

NOTE: The phrase quoted from Zone by Guillaume Apollinaire comes from a new translation by John A. Scott which appeared in Meanjin, Volume 48, Number 4, 1989 Summer.

The poet wishes to acknowledge Valley Micropress in whose pages an alternate version of this poem first appeared.