The Limits of Imitation

IMITATIONS (149 pp.)--Robert Lowell --Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($4.50).

Poets, like pumps, sometimes need priming. Schiller kept a drawer full of rotten apples, and sniffed at them whenever he required inspiration. When Shelley decided to invite his soul he took off all his clothes and wandered about the house, oblivious to the shrieks of such proper English ladies as happened to be taking tea with Mrs. Shelley. Pulitzer Prize Poet Robert Lowell (Lord Weary's Castle) likes to rouse his sleeping powers by flirting with other men's muses--he writes what he calls "imitations" of poems in other languages.

An imitation, as Lowell sees it, is not a translation, which is frequently true to the letter but false to the tone of the original ("and in poetry tone is everything"). An imitation is rather a transubstantiation, an attempt to re-create in another idiom the essential effect of the original poem.

This slender volume--in which Poet Lowell assembles his imitations of 66 "important poems" by 18 poets (from Homer to Pasternak) in five languages (Greek, German, French, Italian, Russian)--suggests that, in Lowell's case at least, one man's muse is another man's poison. About half of the poems still show the smudge of translation; about half read like English originals composed by a talented foreigner. But a few of them roil and hiss with the vigor and brilliance that makes Lowell, at 44, one of America's major minor poets.

The Homer and the Sappho are routine, and the randy-romantic Villon ploddingly pedestrian ("Oh where is last year's snow?"). The quiet golden glow of Leopardi's L'infinito, one of the supreme sonnets in all literature, is messily extinguished; the wild-strawberry innocence of Hebel's Sic Transit acquires a chemical tang of quick-frozen fruitiness; and the fine dandiacal glitter of the Baudelaires is spotted with phraseological mudballs--"this obscene beast," for instance, is scarcely a felicitous rendition of "ce monstre delicat."

Lowell's talky, even sometimes tabloid tone is more appropriate to the moderns.

The whole valley bubbled with sunbeams like a beer-glass is not bad Rimbaud, and in Portrait of My Father as a Young Man Lowell achieves a couplet

Oh, quickly disappearing photograph in my more slowly disappearing hand almost worthy of Rilke's original. Perhaps partly because Lowell knows no Russian, his Pasternak pieces read as well as any in the book. Relieved of an oppressive sense of obligation to the original, he never seriously attempts to refeather the Russian's wings but simply spreads his own and soars to a respectable altitude--as when, after the description of a violent storm, he writes:

Something in my mind's

most inaccessible corners

registers the thunder's illumination,

stands up, and steadily blinks.

Unhappily, such moments of magic come infrequently. Imitator Lowell can quite rightly feel superior to most translators--he calls them "taxidermists" and their poems "stuffed birds." But taken entire, Imitations suffers from a certain staleness, the staleness of rebreathed air.

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