The American Frank Bidart’s peculiar contribution to poetry is finally available in Swedish.
Agri Ismaïl wanders through a treasure trove that dances springily across the pages.
Frank Bidart is one of America’s greatest poets.
Agri Ismail is a writer and lawyer.
Photo: Fredrik Sandberg/TT
RECENSION. In an interview with The Paris Review, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet is described Frank Bidarts (born 1939) home as a chaotic collection of books, VHS tapes, DVD movies and various other things. Bidart believes that he wanted to live in an apartment from which Western civilization could be recreated if it were lost.
His poetry has a similar ambition: a hoard where large parts of Western poetry and psychiatry are hidden, but which has been allowed to develop into something very special.
The interest in poetry appeared in his youth, when as a young man he discovered TS Eliot and Ezra Pound, poets who, through mythology, depicted the recurring doom of the world wars. Then, in the sixties, Bidart studied with Robert Lowell, a portal figure in confessional poetry, who also taught Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.
In the collection volume “I den västra natten”, which contains Bidart’s poems from 1965 to 1990, and now published in Swedish translation for the first time by the publishing house Rámus, there is both the mythological and the personal, but also what – above all – made Bidart such an influential poet: the personal poems.
One can only hope that one day Rámus also publishes Bidart’s poems written between 1990 and 2016, and that Jonas Brun translates them as well.
In these dramatic monologues, Bidart uses the methodology of confessional poetry to embody other destinies: in “Waslav Nijinski’s War” the self is Nijinsky himself — the world-famous Russian ballet dancer who choreographed “Spring Sacrifice.” In “Ellen West“, the self is an anorexic who was a patient of the psychologist Ludwig Binswangerand in “Herbert White” we find ourselves inside the head of a murderer and a necrophile. These are outstanding long poems, which should be read by anyone interested in poetry.
Or, in and of itself, those interested in drama should also give the poems a look: Namely, Bidart prints his poetry with a rather peculiar typography, where the punctuation marks appear almost as instructions to future actors, as in a poem about his mother simply called “Confession”:
She had no profession, —
she had painted a little, and
wrote a handful of poems, and knew that nothing
of this was particularly good, or even REFLECTED HER…
She CREATED nothing.
I was what she created. —
The big challenge in translating Frank Bidart is to keep the rhythm, to get all the punctuation marks and italicized words to end up exactly right in the stanza. Jonas Brown has done a phenomenal job here, there is hardly a line where the translation falters.
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See, for example, how Brun translates ”miles distant from the usual soprano’s / athleticism,—” with “miles from the common soprano’s / resilience, —” in the poem “Ellen West”, where the word “resilience” retains the verse’s alliteration, or in “Herbert White” where ”Everything flat, without sharpness, richness or line.” received a new ending to transfer the original sound image to a Swedish one with “Everything flat, without sharpness, details and edges.” I sit with the two languages in front of me and sometimes even find myself thinking that I prefer Swedish.
One can only hope that one day Rámus also publishes Bidart’s poems written between 1990 and 2016, and that Jonas Brun translates them as well.
LYRICS
FRANK BIDART
In the western night. Poems 1965–1990
Translation Jonas Brun
Ramus, 243 p.
Agri Ismaïl is a writer, lawyer and employee on Expressen’s culture page.
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