There’s nothing but a book in a foreign language.
Somebody read it and shut it on the table,
Forgot it, went away.
(‘Without Rhyme or Reason’)
In the introduction to this collection of the translations he has been publishing since the mid-sixties, John Ashbery addresses the implied tragedy of this image:
“And after I began translating him, that is, after I began to realize that his marvelous poetry would likely remain unknown unless I translated it and brought it to the attention of American readers, I started to find echoes of his work in mine.”
In place of the usual few lines from one of the poems themselves, this quote is reproduced on the back cover of this Carcanet edition, and the marketing choice is telling: Whatever one takes from Martory’s life’s work collected here, Ashbery’s role in its delivery exceeds the normal task of translation. Still, should it matter who recommends a good book? Should Ashbery’s relationship with Martory in Paris, where they lived together for nine years in the 50’s and 60’s, cause any suspicion toward his suggestion that ‘Martory’s work ranks with that of the finest contemporary French poets’? Of course not.
Nevertheless, as Martory saw little success in France in his lifetime (he died in 1998), this bilingual edition is grouped according to the three volumes of Ashbery’s translations which have finally seen publication over the last two decades. Making one’s way through the eighty-something poems this comprises, it is as difficult not to imagine the American’s famous fingerprints or his itching to fiddle with the personal pronouns as it is not to hear his voice between these quotation marks:
“I draw you like a salary.
You are my superfluous statue
Hatched beneath hot tears.
I’m digging toward the antipodes.
I unwind the bandages, the horoscope:
It’s my body, it’s my coccoon, surprised
In a sleep of prolific sand,
That I’m uncovering, like a Cyclops that fainted.”
(‘The Landscape is behind the Door’)
There are indeed such ‘echoes’, as promised, if one is interested, especially in the poems from first chapbook, Every Question but One (1990). Martory comes closer to materializing as an important figure when that linguistic showmanship opens itself to other reverberations, however. Certain poems from the second and longest volume reproduced, The Landscape is behind the Door (1994), sing in their own unique accents from deep in Hölderlin and Rilke country, as in the title poem, ‘The Landscapist’, where the language coaxes the hills and every blade of grass into being, out of the ‘Infinite dark’. An Idealist’s preoccupation here with the tension between the ‘applied design’ of consciousness and ‘the tree itself!’—which ‘elude[s] every concept. / The regulated disorder of its branches obey[ing] no / Rhythm.’—leads to the rather Hegelian conclusion that the scene’s
… liberty can only be absolute,
Enclosed, as it is, in the laws which surpass
Every idea of law.
And yet, so many poems in this book also indulge themselves in the fine detail of ‘you’-addressed memories of beaches and bedrooms, where ‘our life is loaded like a camera…’ (Of Nights and Bodies). It becomes near impossible to position Martory as either a truly philosophical poet or as a thought-purveyor like Eliot’s Donne, who is ‘more interested in ‘ideas’ themselves as objects than in the ‘truth’ of ideas.’ Or, more like Ashbery himself, for whom the single, fundamental law that the stuff of language always wins is only ever really affirmed by demonstration.
In a good few of the poem from Oh, Lake, the third volume included here, this question is superseded in places where Martory’s form and sense of line appear to congeal more sturdily. Whether or not it’s an effect of coming at the end of this collection, the perspective in at least some of these poems feels more tempered, and the ‘I’ and ‘you’ more often reconcile themselves to their linguistic role. Consequently, the best poems there expend more of their energy on projections and constructions of scenes more amenable on the page. In other words, independent of Martory of Ashbery, their own voice emerges from the darkness, as in ‘Obscure Gestures,’ taking its title from the epigraph by Michel Foucault, the ‘I’ of which succeeds by having reconstituted itself upon that
Blank space peopled with empty shapes.
I say: You. I see my blurred image
As the bottom of emptied glass.
Gold paillettes stars to die for
Or sun-umbrella of stratagems. My life.
J. T. Welsch