Louise Bogan: A Portrait
Louise Bogan: A Portrait, the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, is a superbly written book that captures vividly, interestingly the highlights of both the life and the work of a major American poet who thrived in a time when American literature was at its height. With skill and enthusiasm Frank blends the life and the work so that a reader never senses a division.
The result is that the reader keeps turning the page, as with a good novel, to find out what will happen next. Frank’s astuteness as a critic is matched by her skills in making Bogan’s poems accessible to attentive readers. Frank never “dummies down” nor “shows off” but simply writes with clarity, honesty, and passion. She also tells a good story.
More readers know the poems of Theodore Roethke than the poems of Louise Bogan. Bogan mentored the younger Roethke. Bogan’s main contemporary is Edna St. Vincent Millay. Similar yet different, both are well worth reading, as is Frank’s biography. The canon of American literature would be lesser without Louise Bogan: A Portrait.
Translations
Two Poems and a Book
To Sit, To Stand, To Kill, To Die
by Attila Jozsef is translated from the Hungarian by John Batki.
This poem is structured in a series of infinitives: To shove this chair away from here,/ to sit down in front of a train. Toward the end the speaker addresses himself O you bind me and you free me/ and the last line: o my life, you make me choose. Each line is a surprise, all the parts fit the whole. It's an imagistic poem, and the emotions modulate with each image: to stroll around the banks of a lake/ to set fire to Budapest. I've never read another poem like this, and its structure, with all those infinitives, to feed, to caress, is what sets it apart.
The Little Box
by Vasko Popa is translated from the Serbian by Anne Pennington. In one translation the poem is titled The Small Box. It begins:
The little box grows her first teeth/ and her little length grows. Then in the middle of the poem : and now inside her is the room/ and the house and the town and the land. The last line: look after the small box. The box is a metaphor for a human life. It's so orderly and clear. Certainly children could appreciate this poem. In the version titled The Small Box the last line is: Take care of the small box. As with the other translation, I've never read another poem quite like this one.
Paul Celan: Poems
translated from the German by Michael Hamburger was published in 1980 as part of the Persea Series of Poetry in Translation. This is one of my favorite poetry books. It contains poems from all of Celan's major works, ranging from 1952 to 1971. Celan has been called enigmatic, though he himself resisted that word. He is haunting in a unique way, unlike any other poet I have read, and Michael Hamburger has done an excellent job in bringing Celan to an English-reading audience.