Revealing and Celebrating a Great Poet
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Revealing
and Celebrating a Great Poet
PeopleSoft:
Where in the World is Becky Hsu?
The
very first time I sat down and put
a writing tablet on my lap,
my own
Lykian Apollo said to me: “Make your sacrifice
as fat as you can, poet, but keep
your Muse on slender rations.
And see that you go
where no hackneys plod:
avoid the ruts
carved in the boulevard, even if
it means
driving along a narrower path.”
And so I sing for those
who love the shrill cicada’s cry, and hate
the clamor of asses.
So wrote Callimachus, the greatest Greek poet of the third century BC.
Scholars agree on that judgment, but according to Professor of Classics
Frank Nisetich they also agree on his “difficulty,” and his
song is seldom heard. “When I started translating Callimachus,”
says Nisetich, “I had a vision of him as an ivory-tower, intellectual
poet who would only be of interest to people who were as learned and as
clever as he was. But as I worked on him, and as new research came out,
I discovered that his poetry was full of mischief and humor and absolute
esthetic perfection, full of variety and characterizations.”
Now, fortunately, today’s readers of English can savor these qualities in The Poems of Callimachus, newly published by the Oxford University Press and chosen as an “international book of the year” by the Times Literary Supplement.
“Callimachus was a learned poet—no question of that” says Nisetich. “But he was also alive, vital, fun. I tried to get that through.” He labored to avoid “translationese” and to find “the right tone.” The translated poem “has to be idiomatic, and it has to be concrete,” he says, “but it can’t be just an attempt to bring the poet down to earth and make him American.”
The new book is both a work of poetic re-creation and a scholarly tour de force. Much of Callimachus’s poetry survives only in fragments that have only recently come to light. Relating these fragments to each other, connecting them with explanatory text, and making the collection as complete as possible, says Nisetich, was “a little like putting together a statue that’s been blasted to pieces and scattered all over, like the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan”—without help from photos of the originals. The book’s introduction and notes also provide expert guidance through unfamiliar terrain.
Nisetich is himself a poet: his poems have appeared regularly in magazines, and he hopes to publish a collection of them soon. His Pindar’s Victory Songs (1980) is widely viewed as the standard translation of Pindar.
-Jeffrey Mitchell