Posts Tagged ‘Don Share’

Mary and John Felstiner at their campus home in 2009. (Photo: Linda Cicero)

Literary critic, translator, and poet John Felstiner died last week, on Friday, Feb. 24. He was 80, and had suffered from aphasia for six years. The Stanford professor of English is perhaps best remembered for his book Paul Célan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (Yale, 1997). His translation of Célan’s legendary poem, “Todesfuge,” is widely considered a masterpiece in itself (read more about his translation of the poem here). He is remembered by colleagues for his passion, humor, and fierce intelligence.

Don Share, poet and editor of the nation’s preeminent Poetry magazine, praised “an exemplary life in literature.”

Exemplary. (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

“As [poet/translator] Michael Hofmann put it, his book Paul Célan: Poet, Survivor, Jew was ‘of inestimable value to anyone wanting to read Célan with understanding.’ That’s because John didn’t just translate the work, he translated the life – both difficult to narrate, but he succeeded. It should also be remembered that Felsteiner’s scholarly and literary service extended to the likes of work on Henry James, Max Beerbohm, Pablo Neruda, Franz Kafka, and editing collections of nature poems and Jewish-American literature, just to give a sampling.”

He was also known for his book Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems (Yale University Press), published in time for Earth Day, April 22, 2009. An NPR interview here; I wrote about the book here. An excerpt:

I’m not a scientist or a policymaker, I’m not a nature writer,” he said, deciding that he must be an environmentalist “for fear of being irrelevant.”

“In fact, environmental urgency trumps everything else,” he said. “I say that with due respect to the horrible tragedies happening all over the world.”

He began to wonder how he could use poetry about nature to reach people, using “the pleasure of poetry to reach their consciousness, and their consciousness to reach their conscience.”

“What’s the transition from consciousness to conscience—so that you will never drop an empty beer can in a bush?” he said.

The book that emerged from his labors—including six years teaching the Introduction to the Humanities course titled Literature into Life—took nine years to write.

At that time, I had interviewed John over the phone – he was at the couples’ home in the Santa Cruz mountains. But I interviewed both Mary and John face to face when I interviewed John and his wife, Mary Felstiner, a visiting professor in history, about a course they were teaching a course on what they called “creative resistance” during the Holocaust. They had given a talk at Stanford Hillel’s Koret Pavilion on their research.

What I wrote:

Felstiner was born in Mount Vernon, New York, on July 5, 1936, and grew up in New York and New England. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College, A.B. (magna cum laude), 1958, and Harvard University, Ph.D., 1965.

From 1958 to 1961, he served on the U.S.S. Forrestal, in the Mediterranean. He arrived at Stanford in 1965 as a professor of English, retiring in 2009.

He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities. Paul Célan: Poet, Survivor, Jew was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. His Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan was published in 2001. See more of his books here.

He was three times a fellow at Stanford Humanities Center; a Fulbright professor at University of Chile (1967–68); visiting professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1974–75); and visiting professor of Comparative Literature and English at Yale University (1990, 2002).

His collection of Célan’s manuscripts and letters, along with Felstiner’s own translation archive, are at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

He continued to swim every day until his final weeks, despite his illness. He went on expeditions with those around him, continued to enjoy music and poetry, and looked forward to visits from his children  and grandchildren. From my own occasional meetings with him, I know losing language and cognition frustrated him enormously, and I was moved to hear that he struggled against it to the last.

He is survived by his wife Mary, his two children: Sarah and Alek, and also two grandchildren.

Jane made the cut.

Seth Abramson is an intrepid man in a country that publishes 20,000 books of poetry each decade, among 75,000 poets (who counts them, and how?) Here’s why: he has issued a list of “The Top 200 Advocates for Poetry (2013)” in the Huffington Post – it’s here, as well as on dartboards across the U.S.  We all love lists, of course, and everyone has an opinion on how they should be done – this one, particularly.  Two hundred is long enough to give the impression that everyone ought to be included, but short enough that not everyone can be. So Abramson’s gesture is akin to wearing a “Kick me!” sign on your back. He begins by almost apologizing: “The poets favored by one reader will invariably not be the poets favored by another; in fact, it’s getting harder and harder to find two readers whose reading interests or even reading lists exhibit much overlap at all. Too many such lists, such as the widely- and justly-panned one recently published by Flavorwire, exhibit obvious age, race, ethnicity, and (particularly) geographic biases.”  We would like to fault him, first of all, for hyphening an adverb that ends in “ly,” which is never done – moreover, it’s dangerous to begin a list by dissing someone else’s. In that way, you’ve made your first enemy already.

Lifetime achievement, for sure.

He continues for some paragraphs in the same vein: “As a contemporary poetry reviewer who publishes his review-essays in The Huffington Post, I have no special access to knowledge of who is or isn’t doing the most to be an advocate for American poetry (a term I define very broadly) on a national or global scale. While I’m lucky to have access to many more published poetry collections than most poets or poetry readers do, as like any reviewer I regularly receive poetry collections in the mail from U.S. and international publishers, because the list below isn’t intended to detail who’s presently writing the best poetry, but is rather simply a list of who’s doing the best to advocate for American poetry by any and all means (including by writing it, but by no means limited to the authorial function), I’m not in a much better position than others are to generate a list of the most influential poetry advocates in America and beyond.”

Well, sure, I guess.  That said, we were pleased to see a number of friends and colleagues on the list – Kay Ryan, Jane Hirshfield,  W.S. Merwin, Don Share, Ron Silliman, Helen Vendler, Heather McHugh, Allison Joseph, Eavan Boland, Mark McGurl – and nonagenarian Richard Wilbur, a lifetime achievement award, for sure.

Where’s Ed?

Abramson qualifies that “the list below is neither exhaustive nor authoritative nor superlative. I have no doubt that I’ve missed a number of important names, due either to forgetfulness or an unconscious bias or simply (and most likely) sheer ignorance of who’s doing what across the vast landscape of American literature. … Those poets and allies of poetry offering contributions to American poetry commensurate with the contributions of the individuals listed below should therefore consider themselves honorary members of the ‘Top 200 Advocates for American Poetry” list as well.’

Then he issued this invitation: “I strongly encourage readers of this list to contribute their own names to the comment section below the article.”  Needless to say, there were a number of people ready to take him up on the offer, including other friends’ names.  What?  No Edward Hirsch?  What?  No Robert Hass?  And no mention of Dana Gioia, whose work at the NEA was tireless?

Naturally, Humble Moi didn’t make the list – but to my surprise, I did make it in the first few comments in the section afterward, for which I’m grateful to R.S. Gwynn, another friend, who did make the list:

“I’m happy to be listed here (even though I’d like to be known as ‘poet and critic’) but I miss the presence of such names as Alfred Corn, the late Tom Disch, Dana Gioia, Cynthia Haven, X. J. Kennedy, and David Mason, all of whom are (or were in Tom’s case) great advocates.

As a small plug, I’d like to mention that I edited a book of the works of modernist poet-critics some years ago. Its title?  The Advocates of Poetry.

Just for that, here’s a picture of Sam Gwynn’s book, which discusses John Crowe Ransom, Randall Jarrell, Allen Tate, John Ciardi, and Robert Penn Warren – great advocates of poetry all.

From an early 20th century edition of the Rubáiyát

We can’t lose an opportunity to wish Omar Khayyám a happy birthday, even though it’s already late afternoon in California. He was born in 1048 in Nayshapur, now in modern Iran.  And fortunately, we have Don Share to remind us of the event over at his blog “Squanderman.”

As Don notes:

“A brilliant polymath, Khayyám was a mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, physician and poet. Most renowned during his lifetime as a mathematician, Khayyám wrote the influential Treatise on Demonstration of Problems of Algebra (1070), which, according to this Wikipedia entry, ‘laid down the principles of algebra, part of the body of Persian Mathematics that was eventually transmitted to Europe. In particular, he derived general methods for solving cubic equations and even some higher orders.’”

Mostly, however, Khayyám is remembered for his Rubáiyát, and in the English language, that means Edward FitzGerald‘s free translation:

Now the New Year reviving old Desires,
The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires,
Where the White Hand Of Moses on the Bough
Puts out, and Jesus from the Ground suspires.

Iram indeed is gone with all his Rose,
And Jamshyd’s Sev’n-ring’d Cup where no one knows;
But still a Ruby kindles in the Vine,
And many a Garden by the Water blows …

Alright, alright … these are really really tired rhymes.  But keep in mind that FitzGerald was writing in the late Victorian era, when nobody had gotten sick of them yet. To criticize today would be like getting grumpy at the words of Christmas carols.  They have to be taken on their own terms.

According to Carol Rumens over at The Guardian:

The 101-verse semi-narrative FitzGerald finally assembled is the product of a ruthless editorial job – but how much poorer English poetry would be without it. His endeavour might more generously be termed “transcreation”. Khayyám, an agnostic famed during his lifetime as a mathematician and astronomer rather than a poet, and his mediator, a nineteenth-century English sceptic who believed that “science unrolls a greater epic than the Iliad”, may not meet in a true linguistic union, but there seems to be a “marriage of true minds” nevertheless (and, yes, you’ll note a passing trace of Shakespeare in FitzGerald’s diction).

The speaker that emerges with such authority and panache, despite the stiffish western dress of iambic pentameter, has a voice unlike any other in Victorian poetry, and a philosophical sensibility which, while it has been compared to that of Epicurus and Lucretius, is new and distinct. A whole culture must have suddenly seemed within the imaginative reach of the poem’s first audience.

Illustration from the early, undated edition I have.

“Stiffish western dress of iambic pentameter”?  Who sez?  We must also respectfully disagree with the wise Don Share when he refers to the “jiggered” verse of  FitzGerald.  We’ll grant him the use of that word in the sense of “exhausted” or “shopworn.”  Khayyám’s verses had been quoted by cheesy wannabe seducers until the maidens began laughing them out of the room.  But FitzGerald’s verses would not have become clichés if they had not been so good in the first place. Would we even talk about Khayyám today if it were not for FitzGerald’s verses?

Khayyám is remembered in other ways, as Journalist Kourosh Ziabari reminds us:

Tunisia has constructed a set of hotels named after Khayyam. One of the lunar craters has been named in honor of Omar Khayyám. The Omar Khayyám crater is located at 58.0N latitude and 102.1W longitude on the surface of moon. The Outer Main-belt Asteroid 1980 RT2 is also named in honor of Omar Khayyam. The Argentine Marxist revolutionary and guerrilla leader Che Guevara named his son Omar in honor of Khayyám and his work. Omar Pérez López is a Cuban writer and poet.

The American clergyman and activist Martin Luther King Jr. quoted Khayyám in his speech Why I oppose war in Vietnam: “It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to come back home. Come home America. Omar Khayyam is right ‘The moving finger writes and having writ, moves on.”

The late American novelist Kurt Vonnegut refers to Khayyám’s “moving finger writes” quatrain in his novel Breakfast of Champions when the protagonist Dwayne Hoover reveals that he had been forced to memorize it in high school.

Don Share reminds us that poet Basil Bunting also was a fan:

A letter from Bunting to Louis Zukofsky (30 August 1933) included a transliterated and untranslated version of a rubai by Omar Khayyám – may their correspondence someday be published! – and in his introduction to Omar Pound’s Arabic & Persian Poems in English, Bunting wrote:

“Persian poetry has suffered badly, Arabic rather less, from neoplatonic dons determined to find an arbitrary mysticism in everything. You would think there was nothing else in Moslem [sic] poetry than nightingales which are not birds, roses which are not flowers, and pretty boys who are God in disguise. An anthology of English verse selected exclusively from George Herbert, Charles Wesley, and Father Hopkins, plus ‘Lead, kindly light’ and ‘The Hound of Heaven,’ would be as representative as the usual samples of Persian poetry. FitzGerald’s Khayyám is the only serious exception.”

The big problem, Persian scholars tell me, is that it’s not really Khayyám.  For that you must look elsewhere.  Or you might simply f0llow Don’s suggestion and try his two favorite editions of FitzGerald’s adaptation:  the one by Daniel Karlin in the Oxford World Classics, and the critical edition by Christopher Decker.

But meanwhile, check out Don’s post here.  He’s promising to lift a glass for old Khayyám tonight … and a second for Basil Bunting.

Postscript from Jeff Sypeck over at Quid Plura?, the day after Omar Khayyám’s birthday:  FitzGerald’s translation has its stuffy moments, but its influence and ubiquity are remarkable–and so is the speed with which our culture has lost its knowledge of English-language poetry. I recall a “Garfield” comic strip (of all things) from the early 1980s that included the line, “A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou.” I can’t imagine anyone hoping that a few young readers might catch the reference today.