Gary Snyder was a marquee poet in the Sixties, when his eco-Buddhist paeans were read in every commune from Maine to Baja. Decades later, their misty imagism, indebted equally to Ezra Pound and Japanese haiku, seems cloying and sentimental, dependent on the Zeitgeist for its effect. The poetry of the day is passé when the day is past, its beauties no longer beautiful; and even a style stronger than Snyder’s may sooner or later seem obsolete, like the picket fences of Augustan couplets when the hurricane of romanticism swept through.

The poems of Danger on Peaks, Snyder’s first volume of new verse in twenty years, are a throwback to those heady days of Haight-Ashbury, free love, and Volkswagen buses, though what used to be poems are now mostly half-hearted diary jottings followed by a snippet of verse.[1] Snyder has been influenced by the travel journals of Bash? (the style of poetry mixed with prose is called haibun), but if prose is to have the force of poetry it can’t be as badly written as poetry.

In 1945, Snyder climbed Mount St. Helens and on coming down learned that the United States had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The awful contrast—the tranquil splendor of the mountain, the hideous deaths of innocent civilians—brutally affected him:

Horrified, blaming scientists and politicians and the governments of the world, I swore a vow to myself, something like, “By the purity and beauty and permanence of Mt. St. Helens, I will fight against this cruel destructive power and those who would seek to use it, for all my life.”

It’s easy to forgive the pretensions and naïveté of the young man, harder to bear the self-satisfied maunderings of the older one. Thirty-five years later, the mountain erupted with far more violence than a mere A-bomb—and, reader, guess what! The explosion reminded him of Hiroshima! The romantic sublime ended not with a whimper but a bang. As Snyder says elsewhere, in an argot that promises the Sixties never died, “West Coast snowpeaks are too much!”

Snyder has long been a guru for the ecology movement, his poems reflecting the woodsy self-reliance, the search for knowledge, that forms an appealing part of his character. He studs his poems with a geologist’s lingua franca—doab, schrund, tephra, lahar, cirque—and has a cheerful disregard for the small formalities of English. Fortunately most of his wilder notions were corrected, between the proofs and the finished book, by some cigar-chewing copy-editor of the old school, one who still cares for the distinctions between “lay” and “lie” and has no love for idiosyncrasies like “fistfull” and “millenia” (though he missed the animal whose neck had been “ate out”). Oh, man! you can hear Snyder say, don’t be so uptight! None of this would matter, if the poems weren’t like the disconnected thoughts of a man trying to make verse with magnets on a refrigerator door:

white-hot crumbling boulders lift and fly in a
burning sky-river wind of
searing lava droplet hail,
huge icebergs in the storm, exploding mud,
shoots out flat and rolls a swelling billowing
cloud of rock bits,
crystals, pumice, shards of glass
dead ahead blasting away—
a heavenly host of tall trees goes flat down
lightning dances through the giant smoke

That’s the volcano erupting, and it looks as if it erupted in Miss Hathaway’s eleventh-grade English class. The words couldn’t have been thrown onto the page with more abandon if the volcano had hurled them there.

The reader is left with desultory scraps from journals, even when Snyder’s not writing journals (“I’m 63 now & on my way to pick up my ten-year-old stepdaughter and drive the car pool./ I just finished a five-page letter to the County Supervisors”). At one point he tells us, in case we’re interested, that he’s going to try an ostrich burger, and then that he’s busy eating it—“The Ostrich burger is delicious. It’s big, with lots of lettuce, onions, hot mustard …” Stop! you want to say. The poor poems, when they can get a word in edgewise, would embarrass even a county supervisor:

Earth spirit please don’t mind
If cement trucks grind
And plant spirits wait a while
Please come back and smile.

This compassionate, benign, grizzled patriarch, supporter of just causes, sensitive to the land around him, a Buddhist (more or less), is the sort of man you’d call if you had to overhaul a tractor engine or drag a cow out of the mud (he’s also the sort who asks a mountain for help and thinks it answers). If you want someone to write you a decent poem, however, you’d better look elsewhere. A lot of readers buy books because they agree with the author’s character or politics and like to be thought of as people who read such things—perhaps they don’t mind too much when the writing has grown slovenly (a dozen or more poems end with a cute three-word tag like twitchy pine boughs or velvet-dusty pigs). Poems like Gary Snyder’s should come as a free gift in a box of granola.

To read a lot of criticism these days, you’d think the most important thing about a poet was his ethnic identity or sexual proclivities and the most important thing about a poem was its ethnic identity or sexual proclivities. This is a recent notion, as well as a bad one; but it isn’t bad because who our ancestors were and whom we sleep with have no consequences. (To treat people badly because their skin has a different hue, or because they don’t share our lusts, or because they’re lame, halt, or blind, is a despicable way of behaving. It is also impolite.) The notion is bad because poems of identity offer only a narcissistic, needle’s-eye view of the world (when poetry is used merely to build self-esteem, it’s time to make Larkin required reading). Thank goodness Homer didn’t go on about being blind and Ionian.

Even so, Rita Dove’s American Smooth reminds us how important it is never to ignore the sins of the past, or to pretend the past hasn’t afflicted the present.[2] Dove has a natural interest in the history of blacks in America, a history she has labored into verse. It’s curious that it so often seems a labor. A long section of poems consists of accounts by black soldiers of their service in World War I. Unwelcome in the segregated American forces, they served overseas because France asked for them, and there fought furiously and bravely. One poem, however, consists of eleven pages of diary entries about life aboard a troop ship; and for tedium it rivals building the Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks. Worse, the poet’s note to the sequence bristles with resentment.

Blacks in America have a lot to be resentful about, but I’m not sure the poetry of resentment is the best way to deal with it. The scene is a country club, and some thoughtless white woman has just complimented Dove on her dress by telling her she looks “good in every color.”

For once I was not the only
black person in the room
(two others, both male).
I thought of Sambo; I thought
a few other things, too,
unmentionable here. Don’t
get me wrong: I’ve always loved
my skin, the way it glows against
citron and fuchsia, the difficult hues,
but the difference I cause
whenever I walk into a polite space
is why I prefer grand entrances.

“Don’t/ get me wrong” suggests the poet worries that we might think, for a moment, she’s ashamed of being black. Something hidden and mortifying is touched here, but like those “unmentionable” things it’s skated over in favor of a swish of indignation and a self-satisfied nod of triumph.

Very occasionally you get a hint of the angers and sharp-toothed motives that swim like great predators beneath the tranquil waters of these poems. Dove instead tries to fob the reader off with sentimental rubbish—say, about the heart, “I can’t wear it/ on my sleeve,/ or tell you from/ the bottom of it/ how I feel.” You read that and you know the price of saccharin just fell through the floor. Or perhaps you’d prefer some love couplets, tossed off seemingly on the spur of the moment:

I could choose any hero, any cause or age
And, sure as shooting arrows to the heart,
Astride a dappled mare, legs braced as far apart
As standing in silver stirrups will allow—
There you’ll be, with furrowed brow
And chain mail glinting, to set me free:
One eye smiling, the other firm upon the enemy.

It’s like something scribbled on the table of a medieval-theme restaurant, where men in armor are bashing away at each other a few feet from your table. The inflated language, the sloppy pun on “sure as shooting,” the dappled mare, and that ridiculous smiling eye! Sir Walter Scott can take the blame for the props, but the ugly composition (almost every line desperate for its rhyme) and ungainly meter (now too many iambs, now too few) are all Dove’s own.

No matter what subject she touches, it turns to lead in her hands: Salomé, Hattie McDaniel, chocolate, Adam and Eve, a drive-in, dance lessons. Dove rarely does more than what’s expected (she’s steady as a gyroscope and twice as dull), and increasingly writes as if lecturing a class of third-graders:

Don’t hold your breath. Don’t hold
anything, just stop breathing.
Level the scene with your eyes. Listen.
Soft, now: squeeze.

Is that another love poem? Yes, about owning a hand gun (Glock or Keltec seems to be the choice). If this conflicts with her liberal values, she makes no mention of it—then she writes in the voice of a bullet (“o aperture o light let me off/ go off straight is my verb straight/ my glory road.” My glory road!).

In her best work the former poet laureate catches some residue of black experience, but she scarcely realizes that in herself lie the tensions that reveal the long sorrows of race in this country. Even when a poet doesn’t trade in confessions, the reader wants some sense of the private world behind the mask. Dove’s poems have become so superficial, so lacking in felt life, they might have been ordered from some poem sweat-shop in a third-world country. After a series of banal commissioned poems, written to be carved on the backs of twelve marble chairs in a federal courthouse (Dove’s poetry has invited more commissions than a corrupt police department), you wonder if this is what the end of her poetry will be: all public spirit and no private life.

The ancient heroes who slashed and burned their way into epic were the bully boys of their time, tearaways, real roarers, greedy and careless, their deeds so exaggerated they’d overwhelm any kernel of fact, if we didn’t have historical examples like Alexander and Caesar to remind us how much a man might accomplish without fiction. If Achilles and Odysseus, Beowulf and Gilgamesh never existed, they were lucky in their poets. Derrek Hines’s knockabout version of Gilgamesh shakes some of the dust off a poem too often translated with white gloves (a 1946 version modestly rendered the dirty bits in Latin), as if simply by being the oldest of western epics it must be treated with the courtesy due some doddering relict wearing the family jewels.[3] This is disastrous for that venerable antique, which can be made to sound more like a monumental inscription than a poem.

If there was once a king named Gilgamesh, he ruled the Sumerian city-state of Uruk nearly five thousand years ago (from Uruk the name Iraq is derived) and was worshiped as a god longer in his culture than the Holy Trinity has been in ours. The tales that accrued around him have come down to us in Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Elamite, Hurrian, and Hittite, the tablets that bore them salvaged from the great rubbish dumps of ruined cities across the Middle East. The standard text consists of eleven tablets (with a twelfth misfit), all of them damaged or fragmentary, in a version edited in Nineveh in the seventh century B.C. Anyone attempting to bring this old yarn to life has a lot of broken crockery on his hands.

Hines has thrown the cuneiform back onto the scrap heap and started fresh:

Here is Gilgàmesh, king of Uruk:
two-thirds divine, a mummy’s boy,
zeppelin ego, cock like a trip-hammer,
and solid chrome, no-prisoners arrogance.

Pulls women like beer rings.
Grunts when puzzled.
A bully. A jock. Perfecto. But in love?—
a moon-calf, and worse, thoughtful.

Not all readers will care for a translation that takes such liberties (“two-thirds divine” violates any sensible genetics; but that’s the ancient poet’s fault, not the translator’s), though Hines is hardly the first poet to re-tailor the past to the fashions of the present. Dryden long ago saw the value of what he called “imitation,” where the translator aims, not for the vanities of fidelity, but for the violations of license. Hines’s Gilgamesh is only the latest in a long line that descends from Samuel Johnson’s “Vanity of Human Wishes” and Pound’s translations of “The Seafarer” and the Chinese poems in Cathay down to Robert Lowell’s infamous Imitations and Christopher Logue’s peculiar and muscular versions of the Iliad, which have carried the tradition farther than Dryden might have imagined.

Since Hines has learned many of Logue’s virtues and a few of his vices (no one would want Logue’s mannerisms to become the default style for the classics), you have to be prepared for a jazzy tone and language that careers slangily across the centuries. Here one of Gilgamesh’s soldiers lodges a complaint during the campaign to cut down the cedars of Lebanon:

So, we figured, no snatch for medals in this caper.

A month now, desert-yomping in full kit.
Scorpion wind in the face, crotch rot, boils.
Not helped by our great King, who wakes each morning
from dreams like multiple car crashes.

Yomping in full kit, for British squaddies, is what GI’s call humping full packs. (American readers may find a few references bewildering, such as the “toff’s precious Hooray Henrys”—this may be a good thing in a translation from Babylonian). The language, though often hopped-up and bug-eyed, carries some of the strangeness of the shattered text.

At the outset Gilgamesh is a royal monster who takes full advantage of jus primae noctae (the right to sleep with a man’s bride on his wedding night). The gods answer his subjects’ pleas by creating a musclebound wild man, Enkidu, who is soon civilized by the sexual gymnastics of a temple prostitute—this suggests the Fall might have been more interesting if caused not by food but by sex (the original sometimes reads like Akkadian porn). Enkidu fights the king to a draw and they become great friends; but, after they kill the wizard Humbaba, who guards the famous cedars, and then for good measure the sacred bull of heaven (the heroes are like two WWF wrestlers on a tear), the gods decide that as punishment Enkidu must die. Afterward, in mourning, and in terror at his own mortality, Gilgamesh travels to the underworld; but the herb of youth he brings back is stolen by a snake. (The relations between Gilgamesh and Old Testament myths are a minor scholarly industry.) He must then prepare for his own death.

Hines will do most anything to get the reader’s attention (though not as much as Logue, who introduced helicopters to the weaponry available in the Iliad). Point of view descends from on high to the common grunt; and the language has, not the priestly rhythms of a poem once sung to a lyre or intoned like prayer, not the panoply of tedious repetitions, but the density of modern poetry.

Euphrates’ airy, fish-woven halls,
a sleep of reed beds, the éclat of date palms,
wind-glossed corn. And in the distance

desert—the sun’s loose gunpowder.
Green rolls up
and rasps along it like a tongue
wetting sandpaper.

Hines makes vivid what might have died as a dusty footnote: his temple prostitutes strut like fashion models, “striding down/ the cat-walk of Uruk’s high street/ in the designer gowns of Paradise.” The night is “soft-mouthed as a gundog,” the sound of ghosts drinking blood like that of “surgical tape ripped off skin,” and a goddess “pulses into focus before him:// breasts taut as airships/ from hangars nosing.” The mannerisms are the manner here, but line by line you have a poem hauled fresh from the sands again.

Such radical revision loses much the old epic had to offer; yet even the King James Bible, with its learned committee of translators, had to make occasional accommodation to its own world, if it was not to lose the meat with the method. Indeed, it would have been interesting to see what the committee would have done with Gilgamesh, written in the same broad culture that produced the Old Testament and scattered with parallels to the Bible—including its own version of the Flood, which Hines unfortunately omits.

It’s disconcerting to have a Gilgamesh who plays backgammon and drinks ouzo, who dresses in silks and apparently suffers the attentions of paparazzi; but then it is disconcerting to read in a history of Babylon that in 600 B.C. Nebuchadnezzar asphalted the streets. The past is stranger than we imagine; and, if a translation like Gilgamesh does not get us closer to the past as it was, it gets us closer to something almost more important—the past that must exist continually in the present. If you want Juvenal, you don’t go to Johnson—you go to Johnson to see what the eighteenth century made of the second, what post-Augustan London thought of post-Augustan Rome. At best you find that the modern teases out some nuance asleep in the old lines, like Hines’s evocation of Gilgamesh waiting for death, “swallowing this fist of fear in a quayside café/ beside these old men/ like rows of buttons waiting to be undone.” When men try to update Shakespeare, what they usually get is Bowdler; when they try to modernize Homer’s Achilles, they get Brad Pitt (Logue’s Iliad, though scrappy and intermittently awful, is a fine exception). We are fortunate to have a new version of Gilgamesh that makes the ancient world another world altogether.

By contrast, Stephen Mitchell’s earnest, forelock-tugging new version of the epic is homely as a mud fence, which shows how fidelity can make this gaudy and musclebound artifact merely workmanlike.[4] (For a very different ranking of these books, see the intelligent review by John J. Miller in the October issue of this journal.) Mitchell’s translation, which has a longwinded high-schooler’s introduction, drags a heavy sledge of notes; and his attempt at four-stress accentual meter is a foot-dragging failure. If you want the incidents Hines cuts in his fast-forward version, and some of the nuances (or even contradictions) of behavior, you have to read Mitchell: in the original, Gilgamesh beats Enkidu in their wrestling match and no army accompanies them in the attack on Humbaba, who is a terrible monster, not some distant ancestor of the Wizard of Oz. The beautiful Babylonian tale of the Flood is here, as is the full story of Gilgamesh in the underworld, which he reaches by ship, using three hundred punting poles! Though Mitchell’s is more cheerfully vulgar than previous versions (other than those in Latin), he has no particular gift for language and his Gilgamesh might have been better translated by a team of UN bureaucrats.

Derek Walcott’s The Prodigal is a valedictory book, the long poem of a man who has seen the world and been left with a handful of airline ticket stubs.[5] For half a century Walcott has been one of the great stylists of English verse, in an age when style has been more and more a badge of shame, when sentences grow ever shorter and sins ever longer. The poem begins as a whistle-stop tour of cities and countries: dashing through Pennsylvania, New York, and Boston, flitting now to Zermatt and Geneva, now Florence and Abruzzi, Pescara and Genoa, then Madrid, Germany, New York again, Colombia, all before the poem is half spent—it’s hard to keep track without an itinerary and a GPS device. This is a book of transit, of voluntary exile, of almost pathological restlessness, the travel conducted with a bored melancholy that infuses even the poet’s wandering eye, for this is also a book of erotic liaisons, sly glances, closet desires—in short, of wanting to screw anything that walks. As a man ages, his romantic opportunities shorten with his odds, and Walcott seems at times a character in James, waiting and waiting for his moment, until he realizes the moment has passed.

The prodigal son “wasted his substance with riotous living,” according to St. Luke, but at last returned home to be fêted as someone dead returned to life. The divided racial heritage of St. Lucia, Walcott’s home island, shadows his uncomfortable and wary relation to the traditions of English poetry. To what extent, his poems have asked, is a man born in the colonies a traitor if he adopts the language and literature of his masters? Walcott has instead become a “vague pilgrim,” never at home even at home, a man for whom all frontiers become one.

The poet has never flinched from what he saw as his duty to the tradition; and reading his long, elaborate sentences is like watching a master goldsmith fashion a coronation crown and decorate it with rubies, diamonds, and amethysts in bold array.

Chasms and fissures of the vertiginous Alps
through the plane window, meadows of snow
on powdery precipices, the cantons of cumuli
grumbling or closing, gasping falls of light
a steady and serene white-knuckled horror
of speckled white serrations, inconceivable
in repetition, spumy avalanches
of forgetting cloud, in the wrong heaven …

Cantons of cumuli! The passage is lovely, but the sentence is scarcely begun. On and on it goes—in this new book Walcott does what he has always done, except now he overdoes it with an old man’s desperation. The figures are as boldly formed as ever; but when reading them you think, “Didn’t the bird arrow by a few pages ago? Hasn’t Walcott often described the ocean as like tinfoil, or glistening water like minted coins? Haven’t the island days often been compared to hot zinc?” The sentences seem endless; and, if the reader on occasion gets tangled in their complex syntax, so at times does the writer.

This long poem reads like a pendant to Walcott’s precocious verse autobiography, Another Life (1973), published when he was just forty-three. (The Prodigal is what the poet of Dove Cottage might have called The Postlude.) Walcott is remarkably honest about his priapic instincts (he even manages to give a woman soldier his bedroom gaze), though he succeeds only in making himself ridiculous:

Past the stalagmites of the Duomo
the peaches of summer are bouncing
on the grids of the Milanese sidewalks
in halters cut close to the coccyx.
I look and no longer sigh for the impossible,
panting over a cupidinous coffee
like an old setter that has stopped chasing pigeons.

The peaches of summer? Oh, you think, he means breasts. But what is that setter doing panting over a cupidinous coffee? Too often, as the cities come and go like buses, the poem lounges there, drowsy and fractured, the buttery lines of Walcott’s descriptions so rich they’re worse than a diet of chocolate icing. Besieged by the deaths of strangers, of friends, of family, the poet already feels like a “name cut on a wall that soon/ from the grime of indifference became indecipherable.” This has the doomed grace of lines by Keats; but then it’s back to the flood of purple passages, the gouts of adjectives and fatty verbs, until the poem becomes a kind of numbing mad mutter. There was a time when Walcott gave his style point, a time when his poems didn’t just finger his memories like fragments of the True Cross.

The death of Czeslaw Milosz a few months ago at the age of ninety-three has deprived us of one of the most interesting exiles of the twentieth century. Born in Lithuania to a Polish family that once owned great estates, as a boy he traveled with his parents across Russia and Siberia (his father was a highway engineer for the tsar’s army). After university he lived in Paris, where he came under the influence of his uncle Oscar, a French poet of an eschatological and mystical temper. (Milosz notes wryly that, when he received the Nobel, some French newspapers wrote “that it had been given to the wrong Milosz.”) During World War II, the young poet served as a radio operator, after the fall of Poland living in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, where he wrote for the resistance. He later became a minor diplomat in Washington and Paris, where he sought political asylum in 1951. From 1960 he taught at Berkeley, though not until the late Sixties were translations of his poetry available in English.

Being an exile under such conditions hardly compares to the banishment of Ovid to the Black Sea; yet Milosz’s poetry, darkened by war and memories of the Holocaust, more and more took on an elegiac cast, until in this book he is surrounded by throngs of ghosts, like Odysseus in the Underworld. The question that troubles him is the source of evil. As a skeptical believer, a Christian with a rational tongue (his faith tended to be sturdy but gentle, like Emily Dickinson’s), he could not help echoing the Epicureans: “If God is all-powerful, he can allow all this only if he is not good.” This made his poems a fruitless search for redemption and consolation.

The poems in Second Space at times seem muted by their journey from Polish.[6] For many years the poet has been fortunate to have as his translator the talented Robert Hass, whose own poetic gifts allow him to ride herd on Milosz’s work without feeling it necessary to put his brand on every line. The best of the poems offer visions with a retrospective burden:

An English horn, a drum, a viola making music
In a house on a hill amidst forests in autumn.
A large view from there onto bends of the river.

I still want to correct this world,
Yet I think mostly of them, and they have all died.
Also about their unknown country.
Its geography, says Swedenborg, cannot be transferred to maps.

Translation, if we’re lucky, leads us out of the conventions and proprieties in which our own poetry is mired (poetry in another language suffers conventions, too; but at least they’re not ours). A poem in translation is like a newspaper report of a ballet—the only thing lost is the dance. Even when a translation has been cast in the same form, it may have different weight or bearing—Dante’s terza rima is nothing like terza rima in English. It’s surprising, therefore, how much of Milosz’s personality—his scratchy wit, his wry pessimism, his joviality (“I should be dead already, but there is work to do”)—comes through the baffles and cofferdams of English. For the poor translator, finding the equivalents for a foreign language can be like wandering through a fabric store trying to match the pattern of the sofa Aunt Matilda re-covered in 1937.

The shorter poems here often consult, rather than confront, problems of faith and belief—they’re mild-mannered, meditative poems that perhaps wish to be darker and danker. The book ends with four long poems, two so tangled in religious themes they’re like cats lost in a great ball of yarn. The others cut deeper into conscience, one a portrait of Milosz’s uncle, the depressive romantic who once shot himself in the heart, but survived to become a well-known French poet. Belabored with footnotes, which prove surprisingly helpful in setting the poem in history and explaining references that might otherwise be lost (opacity is rarely a virtue in translation), the poem is an homage to a great spirit, a “master of alchemy” from whom Milosz received his sense of vocation. As the younger poet counts his debts, the poem turns rather dry and Swedenborgian, echoing the only rational thing one can say about the past (as well as the only irrational thing), Goethe’s words: “Respect! Respect! Respect!”

The final poem opens with a witty portrait of Orpheus at the gates of Hell:

Standing on flagstones of the sidewalk at the entrance to Hades
Orpheus hunched in a gust of wind
That tore at his coat, rolled past in waves of fog,
Tossed the leaves of the trees. The headlights of cars
Flared and dimmed in each wave
succeeding.

Here the problems of faith and trust that have haunted Milosz find their way to antique myth. For a man who seemed to hear footsteps behind him most of his life, there is a terrible pathos when Orpheus turns, having led Eurydice almost out of Hell, and no one is there. 

William Logan‘s most recent book of poetry is Macbeth in Venice (Penguin).

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. Danger on Peaks, by Gary Snyder; Shoemaker & Hoard, 112 pages, $22. Go back to the text.
2. American Smooth, by Rita Dove; Norton, 143 pages, $22.95. Go back to the text.
3. Gilgamesh, by Derrek Hines; Anchor Books, 66 pages, $9.95 (paper). Go back to the text.
4. Gilgamesh: A New English Version, by Stephen Mitchell; Free Press, 292 pages, $24. Go back to the text.
5. The Prodigal, by Derek Walcott; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 105 pages, $20. Go back to the text.
6. Second Space, by Czeslaw Milosz; Ecco, 102 pages, $23.95.Go back to the text.