Bucknell University Press

Edimus quod nobis libet.

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University Press Week Day 1: Guest blogger Manu Chander

To kick off the 10th annual University Press Week (UP Week) celebration, we invited author Manu Samriti Chander to share his thoughts on publishing with university presses and why they matter. Professor Chander’s first book, Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century, published by Bucknell UP in 2017, calls for the academy in general and scholars of European Romanticism to acknowledge the extensive international impact of Romantic poetry. Reviewers agree, proclaiming it “the kind of book that Romantic literary studies has needed for a very long time”[1] and declaring, “[t]here’s no doubt that it will be looked back upon as a landmark work in Romantic studies.”[2]

“‘Leo’s’ poems have not even the thinnest guise of poetry. They illustrate a strain of trite, and often silly reflection, and a sentiment of ‘goodiness’ that is nauseating.” That was one London reviewer’s assessment of a poetry collection called Leo’s Poetical Works, which was published in 1883. The author in question, “Leo,” was an Afro-Guianese poet and essayist whose birth name was Egbert Martin. The review, which appeared in the Saturday Review on May 3, 1884, made its way across the Atlantic and back to Martin, who, understandably, took offense, writing in the preface to his second collection, Leo’s Local Lyrics, “Some…held that my book of poems published in 1883 contained too much ‘goody-goodiness,’ and I must confess that I have deliberately searched through at least two dictionaries without being able to discover such a word.” In a world in which an English reviewer’s opinion would always trump that of a Black colonial subject, Martin nevertheless found a way to express his frustration with the imperial order of things.

I learned of Martin’s poetry while conducting research for my first book, Brown Romantics, which looked at the way that colonial writers in the nineteenth century struggled to be considered as what Emerson (whom Martin had read and admired) called a “representative man”: “a monarch who gives a constitution to his people; a pontiff who preaches the equality of souls and releases his servants from their barbarous homages; an emperor who can spare his empire.” Or, in the case of the Brown Romantics, a poet capable of unifying diverse readers into a coherent whole. Martin, along with such figures as Henry Derozio in India and Henry Lawson in Australia, saw poetry as a means of community-building, a way of forging connections among peoples through the shared experience of reading. My book sought to recognize these figures in a way that reviewers from centers of literary power rarely did. 

Shortly after the publication of Brown Romantics, as I was preparing an edition of Martin’s collected works, I visited Le Repentir Cemetery in Georgetown, Guyana, where, I knew from my research, Martin was buried. When I arrived at the cemetery office I was met by a woman who had never heard of the poet. She asked me to write down his information, name and date of death: “Egbert Martin,” I wrote, “June 24, 1890.” Just wait, she told me, and she headed to a back room, returning after several minutes with a large log book. When she found the page for June 1890, my heart sped up, and it continued to race as she ran her finger down the yellowed page. It landed on Martin’s name, penciled in neat cursive. Age: 29. Nation: Demerara. The log indicated where he was buried by division (New General), space number (30), and grave number (108). I asked if I could visit the spot, and I was told it’s a “mud grave,” no marker, nothing to see.

“Pecuniary success,” wrote Martin in the preface to Leo’s Poetical Works, “is…outside the Author’s anticipations; and fame, the idol of so many, for him has so little attraction that he cares not so much as to couple his name with his works.” And yet, we know from his response to his London critic, he was not without pride. I wonder what it might have meant to him to know that, over a one-hundred twenty years later, someone would see in his poetry something more than “trite” and “silly” “goodiness.” I wonder what it might have meant to him, as he labored daily over his verse, a “confirmed invalid,” as one British Guianese newspaper described him, largely confined to his home at 317 East Street in Georgetown (this, at least, is the address listed in an issue of the London periodical Truth on January 6, 1887)–I wonder what it might have meant for him to know that someone would one day see in the poems he wrote a serious contribution to that literary movement we call “Romanticism,” worthy of collecting and making available to readers across the globe.

Poetry is not as popular as it was in Martin’s time (although it is making a bit of a comeback). It is not regularly published in daily newspapers for readers to peruse casually as they get caught up on the events of the day. Nor is the study of poetry the stuff of popular books, not usually at least. It is largely sustained by scholars and, importantly, publishers who see value in poetic labor, both the labor of producing poetry and that of thinking through poetry in prose. Beyond–to recall Martin’s phrase–“pecuniary success,” we believe that something is gained, that the world is somehow better when we reserve a space for the analysis of line breaks and metrical substitutions, textual variations and publication histories. Perhaps that belief makes us Romantics, as well. If so–if we who publish with and work for university presses are inheritors of certain Romantic commitments–we have figures such as Martin to thank for sustaining these commitments, and for reminding us to sustain them as well.

Manu Samriti Chander is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark and the author of Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (Bucknell UP, 2017). He is currently editing The Collected Works of Egbert Martin (Oxford UP) and The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race (Cambridge UP) and writing a second monograph, Browntology, under contract with SUNY Press.

[1] “Manu Samriti Chander’s Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century is the kind of book that Romantic literary studies has needed for a very long time. Brown Romantics examines how and why poets from India, Guyana, and Australia placed themselves into conversation with authors now commonly associated with British Romanticism. The book significantly expands our understanding of canonical Romanticism’s transnational reach and revises critical commonplaces that have defined Romantic aesthetics since the nineteenth century.”
— Papers on Language and Literature

[2] “This book has already provided a focal point for a new direction in Romantic studies, as emerging research clusters around its central claims. There’s no doubt that it will be looked back upon as a landmark work in Romantic studies.”
— Romantic Circles

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A Good Surprise in a Terrible Year

The Nobel Prize in Literature for Louise Glück

A Guest Post by Lee Upton

At last, a good surprise in a terrible year.

My mother-in-law brought me the news first: Louise Glück had won the Nobel Prize.

Glück has often been the recipient of awards (the Pulitzer in 1993 and the National Book Award in 2014) and served as the U. S. Poet Laureate in 2003-2004, but the Nobel Award for Literature is an honor like no other.  It’s a wonderful irony that a remarkably private poet who writes of rejection, of emotions that arise from the trauma of abandonment, a poet who has illuminated themes of abjection and oblivion, should find herself receiving the most distinguished of all literary honors.

Her voice that draws us in is one of rigorous self-examination, a voice that doesn’t ask for acceptance and certainly not popularity. In her lapidary prose she has praised the artist who “cultivates a disciplined refusal of self-deception.” She might be speaking of her own efforts in poems that refuse relief or gratification or even a shred of complacency. Behind her poems is the velvety backdrop of mythology, and the cruelties that occupy those myths. The Greek and Roman myths, familiar to her since early childhood, remain current in her poetry, illuminating recurrent traumas and revealing common human patterns of behavior.

She dismisses cultural pieties, including pieties about how women and girls are expected to behave in kindly, affirmative, and harmonious ways. She dismisses the pieties that often attach to poetry as well. Gleefully, she bursts the idea of “bravery” among poets, declaring in an essay, “the poet engaged in the act of writing feels giddy exhilaration; no occasion in the life calls less for courage than does this.”

I’ve heard from friends that Glück’s poems have been comforting to read in times of crisis, and I don’t doubt that. But I think it is an uncanny form of comfort—it is the comfort of exposure, of encountering poems that acknowledge ranges of emotion that are often bewildering to experience, to express, and to witness: anger, shame, grief, resentment, revulsion, vulnerability. She writes of what is unresolved and disturbing, such as the fear of aging and death, the sensation of emotional deprivation, the repetitive trauma of abandonment. 

Emily Dickinson’s declaration that “No is the wildest word” echoes through the refusals in Glück’s work, the charged unwillingness to accept unearned consolation. When the Swedish Academy referred to Glück’s wit they were right to apply the adjective “biting,” for Glück’s poetry has the power to unsettle.  Consider the unforgettable opening of “Mock Orange” in which dissatisfaction and the unrelenting pressure of desire give voice to the following:

It is not the moon, I tell you.
It is these flowers
lighting the yard.

I hate them.
I hate them as I hate sex,
the man’s mouth
sealing my mouth, the man’s
paralyzing body—

and the cry that always escapes,
the low, humiliating
premise of union

In “Mock Orange” and in many of her poems, Glück works toward a new understanding of the dramas that entangle us. She offers a bracing reminder of the value of our emotions and of an internal life that cannot be possessed, that in a time when our public lives may be subject to surveillance, when sensitivity may be ridiculed, when privacy may be intruded upon and our every impulse catalogued, surveilled by marketers and powerful agencies, her poetry puts down its marker—for the right to believe an individual self has value, to question the meaning of a life and find, by questioning again and again, a way to resist compromising the dignity of privacy and an inner life we call our own.  

Her poetry, passionate and disciplined, defends an interiority that is not legible to those who would seek to define us—a poetry that doesn’t easily accept the conditions we’re born into. 

In American Originality: Essays on Poetry, Glück writes about artists: “What is constant, what seems to me the source of resilience (or fortitude), is a capacity for intense, driven absorption.” That intensity, that absorption, is the gift her poetry not only gives to the poet but to us as readers: a willingness to be engaged deeply with those mysteries that can’t ultimately be solved. 

I’ve had the challenge and pleasure of writing about Louise Gluck often—at most length in chapters devoted to her work in The Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity, Mastery in Five American Poets (1998); and in Defensive Measures: The Poetry of Niedecker, Bishop, Glück, and Carson (2005), both published by Bucknell University Press. Each time I’ve written about her poems I’ve found myself magnetized by her questing intelligence, her finely crafted sensibility, her distinctiveness as a writer who returns to the ancient theme of loss and reanimates that theme for contemporary readers. 

In each new book she attempts to alter her style, but her voiceprint is immediately recognizable. In recent years, she has relaxed the lines of her poems and experimented further with a range of formal devices, yet the stinging sense of self-examination is still present. 

And what also remains: throughout this poetry—a body of work that is now awarded with the highest honor for literature that our world offers—pain releases meaning as experience is attended to with intense awareness and a refusal of easy acceptance. Consider the beautiful ending of Glück’s “First Memory” from Ararat—a poem that extends toward a great clarity and puts into relief the poems of grief and loss that preceded it:

…from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.

Although I’ve written about Louise Glück’s poetry often, I’ve never met her.  It’s her words that have drawn my attention repeatedly.  I’m greatly pleased that she has achieved this highest award—and pleased for all of us as recipients of what Glück’s poetry offers and what the prize recognizes: the individual inner life and the dignity of that life that poetry defends.

Lee Upton is the author of fourteen books, including three published by Bucknell University Press: Obsession and Release: Rereading the Poetry of Louise Bogan (1996); The Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity, Mastery in Five American Poets (1998); and Defensive Measures: The Poetry of Niedecker, Bishop, Glück, and Carson (2005). She is a poet and a fiction writer as well as a literary scholar. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, and in many journals as well as three editions of Best American Poetry. Her most recent books are Visitations: Stories and Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles: Poems.

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Author profile: Emily Grosholz on translation

Emily Grosholz discusses the craft of translation and her most recent collaboration with French poet Yves Bonnefoy: Début et fin de la neige / Beginning and End of the Snow. The book, published by Bucknell University Press in 2012, includes Bonnefoy’s original poems in French opposite Grosholz’s English translations as well as artwork by Farhad Ostovani.

 

What first attracted you to Yves Bonnefoy’s poems?

When I was in graduate school, studying philosophy at Yale University in the 1970s, I was introduced to the poetry of Yves Bonnefoy by a fellow student who lent me a copy of Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve. I thought it was wonderful—haunting— and translated some of the poems in it, just for myself. Returning from a year in Germany in September 1977, I learned that Bonnefoy was teaching at Yale that semester, and so attended his lectures on Baudelaire and Hugo, those two great and utterly disparate poets, both of whom I’d tried my hand at translating earlier, in high school and college. At the end of the semester, I gave Bonnefoy some of my translations of his work, and some of my own poems, in particular an elegy for my mother that I wrote in Germany, “Letter from Germany,” the first of my poems to be published in the Hudson Review. He was very appreciative, we struck up a correspondence, and I got to know him and Lucie Vines Bonnefoy a bit when I spent half a year in Paris in 1981. I have been translating his poetry ever since, somewhat haphazardly, choosing poems that I especially liked. Because his sensibility seemed close to my own while his poetic habits were very different, it was a challenging combination.

How do you approach the task of translating another writer’s work?

At first, I dealt with the affinity-and-distance by writing ‘versions,’ like Robert Lowell, allowing myself a great deal of freedom in departing from the original text. I like some of my translations from this earlier stage, especially “To the Voice of Kathleen Ferrier,” which is included in the forthcoming collection Poets Translate Poets: A Hudson Review Anthology, edited by Paula Deitz. But after collaborating with Larissa Volokhonsky on translations of poems by the Russian poet Olga Sedakova, I was persuaded that I should try harder to remain true to the original, its vocabulary and prosody. Thus I went about translating Début et fin de la neige in a different way, after Yves Bonnefoy asked me to translate this ‘American’ book of poetry, inspired in part by the time he spent teaching at Williams College. I consulted with the poet (and his American wife Lucie Bonnefoy) more often, going over every line, and listened more attentively to their advice.

What is the connection between the artwork and the poems in Beginning and End of the Snow, and why did you and Yves Bonnefoy choose to include Farhad Ostovani’s watercolors in the book?

Yves Bonnefoy is widely considered the greatest post-war French poet, and has worked with many important artists, including Giacometti, Tàpies, Cartier-Bresson, Ubac and Miró, as well as more recently Alechinsky, Palézieux and Ostovani. I think the explanation why he and Ostovani have collaborated on almost two dozen books and catalogues in the recent past is the excellence of the artist’s work and Bonnefoy’s accurate estimation of it. Farhad Ostovani was born in northern Iran and lives and works in Paris; his work has been exhibited at the Jenisch Museum (Switzerland), the Museum at the Rembrandt House (Netherlands), the Morat Institute for Art and Art Research (Germany) and the Chateau de Tours (France). Thus it was natural to ask if we could use some of his work for this book too.

Are you working on any other projects in conjunction with Bonnefoy or Ostovani?

Five years ago, I collaborated on a book with Farhad Ostovani, Feuilles / Leaves, with translations of my poems into French by Alain Madeleine-Perdrillat; it was published by William Blake & Co. in Bordeaux. I wrote an ‘ekphrastic’ poem about one of his works, which was published in American Arts Quarterly last year; and I recently published a review of one of his exhibitions as well as a poem dedicated to him (and Orhan Pamuk) in the Hudson Review. I plan to go on translating the poems of Yves Bonnefoy in my accustomed, haphazard, admiring way now that the book is finished.