W.S. MERWIN: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the poet W.S. Merwin went up on The Guardian online yesterday; it should appear in the paper paper soon. You can link to it here, it is mostly as written with just a few cuts for simplicity's sake, which is instructive because Merwin's was a complicated life to unravel. I actually wrote the piece a week earlier, just before I flew to Florida, and did some changes (mostly to clarify publication details) in the airport after I arrived but before I picked up my car and headed for the Everglades.

It was trying to sort the chronology of his relationships and his early work that was the most difficult, especially because things like wedding and divorce dates, maiden names and the like are important for the paper's sense of record. Before I filed I dropped a few things I found interesting, two in particular: his secondary education at Wyoming Seminary, a Methodist-founded school between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre and his relationship with Moira Hodgson. I'd know people who went to Wyoming, which tended to produce high achievers--but it was also interesting because Merwin claimed he applied originally to Princeton thinking it was an actual seminary. I found that somewhat fanciful. Hodgson seemed to be a steadying influence on him; the British-born writer was working at the UN in New York when she met Merwin; they lived together for ten years, mostly in Mexico, and he was still technically married to Dido for at least part of that time. Anyone who's read her food writing would be interested.

I also included a longer list of the fellowships which kept Merwin going through the Fifties and beyond. This ability to win them was the segue point to mentioning his charm, and I thought the idea that he was a successful 'establishment' poet was one that was necessary to make. I also mentioned that when he received the Academy of America Poets prize there was a minor controversy in that he was a Chancellor of the Academy, and the judges, inevitably were all friends.

This was interesting in light of the Great Naropa Poetry Wars. Ed Sanders had his students in 'investigative poetry' do a long report about it, and I think I read something by Tom Clark, who's the poetry equivalent of a tabloid journalist, about it at the time. But what I found fascinating was the way the poetic community divided as I describe, with Merwin representing the establishment, and some Naropans, representing the other side, the underground, whatever. I recall asking Anne Waldman about that at a reading, because it seemed to me the dispute, beyond the defense of students toward Trungpa their master, was one of 'business' of poetry, not poetry itself. She didn't like that question.

But I drifted back to it as I wrote the obit and tried to analyse Merwin's work in terms a general audience might understand. I was trying to draw connections, but apart from the obvious one to Auden (who stylistically, placing words to accentuate their ambiguities, is not as far removed from later Merwin) and the less obvious (but for proximity) one to Lowell, I felt I'd be getting into a kaleidoscope that would mean little to my audience. Merrill and Kinnell I mentioned, and would have liked to elaborate on in terms of their work.

I see links to a lot of the people who might be thought by casual observers to be on the other side of the Naropa wars. Given the obvious influence of Ezra Pound, some of the names seemed obvious. The most telling to me was Robert Creeley, who also worked as a tutor for Robert Graves, and whose work, albeit punctuated, is very similar to Merwin's in style, if someone more grounded in the personal, maybe even the romantic. I thought of Paul Blackburn, not immediately similar in the elegance of the language, but with a sense of rhythms and music that also draws from the Provencal. Merwin at his most elegant reminds me sometimes of Robert Duncan too--again not too close, too exact, but it is easy for me to think that as his own work was changing, Merwin was aware of these people already working in open (and projective) verse, and he is never looked at as someone related to that. The final comparison I longed to make was to Gary Snyder, like Merwin a Buddhist and an early champion of ecology. That's Merwin (above left) with Carolyn Kizer and Snyder, in Oregon in 1966

I was also thinking about Robert Bly, who on the face of it would look like an unlikely comparison, but whose sense of nature, if not the surreal, seemed like a fit. And John Ashberry, close than Duncan but also for the austere sense behind the words. It also occurred to me, after a comment by Helen Vendler, how many American poets were born in 1926-27: she mentioned a couple but the 1926  list includes Creeley, Blackburn, Ginsberg, Merril, Bly and W.D. Snodgrass (whose obit I also had the privilege of writing), A.R. Ammons and Frank O'Hara; while 1927 boasts Kinnell, Ashberry and James Wright. I wondered if this might have something to do with the Depression or the War, or maybe the burgeoning of poetry and new movements in the Fifties, or the growth of creative writing programmes in colleges which provided a living for many of these poets.

The Merwins' work with his Conservancy was also a step decades ahead of its time, and this might in some ways wind up being his most enduring legacy. I wondered, as I filed my copy, if perhaps he would have had a tougher road to success had he been born a couple of decades later, but if perhaps his poetry might have found a wider, more ecologically aware audience. I'm not sure the work would have been as good, but the thought that it will continue to find a new audience from that direction as well as the literary one is a heartening one.

GREGORY RABASSA: IN MEMORIAM

Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said that his novel One Hundred Years Of Solitude read better in the English translation by Gregory Rabassa than it did in Spanish. Marquez's novel is more than simply one of the greatest, and most popular, of the Twentieth Century. It opened the door for multiple generations of Latin American novelists to reach out in the world, and it ignited a spread of so-called 'magic realism' which had such a huge affect first in Canada and then in Britain.

Marquez waited three years for Rabassa to be ready to do his translation; he did so on the recommendation of Julio Cortzar. And I came to Marquez via Rabassa just as slowly, and also through Cortazar. 

Cortazar originally became a sensation because his short-story 'The End Of The Game', was the source material for the film Blow Up. I remember finding the short-story collection, in an intriguing Vintage edition, but though I have been scouring my memory I cannot recall which of two motivations brought me to the book. It may have been because of the ferocious debate between two teachers at my high school over the meaning of the final scene on the tennis court ('the meaning is that there IS NO MEANING', one of them shouted, impressing us students no end). But it was more likely that I'd been struck by Paul Blackburn's marvellous long poem 'The Watchers' which I found in an old issue of The New Yorker I read in a doctor's office while waiting for my head to be stitched. I was seeking out Blackburn's work, and he had translated Cortazar's stories.

Either way, I moved from those stories to Cortazar's novel Hopscotch, a dazzling work meant to be read twice, the second time in a different order of chapters dictated by the author. Hence the title. It was baffling but engaging, and its translator was Gregory Rabassa. Even as a youth, with no knowledge of Spanish, I could sense the dexterity of the translation. Later I read an interview in which Rabassa commented that translating the book was 'fun', because Cortazar knew 'humour and pathos are really all the same thing, what should be called love, maybe.'

My copy of Hopscotch was a Signet book, but it led me to a relatively uniform series of Latin American paperbacks issued under Avon Books' Bard imprint, edited by a young Peter Mayer. Ironically, I still like the Signet Hopscotch better than Bard's. These were the days when imprints like Signet, Bard, Vintage, or New American Library issued classics and what would now be ghettoised as 'literary fiction' in mass-market editions that sat on the wire-racks of drug stores and newstands alongside potboilers, science fiction, mysteries and everything else.

They were cheap and portable and they opened new worlds to readers tempted to just a hint of adventurousness. Bard published One Hundred Years Of Solitude, and through them I moved on to discover the likes of G. Cabrera Infante, Alejo Carpentier, Mario Vargas Llosa, Marcio Souza, and Manuel Puig. Many of them were Rabassa's translations: Autumn Of The Patriarch and Chronicle Of A Death Foretold; Jorge Amado's Captain of The Sands, and Mario Vargas Llosa's Conversations In A Cathedral. He didn't do more with Vargas Llosa, partly, he told an interviewer, because 'his English is not as strong as he thinks it is'.

Rabassa chose his projects well. Simply looking for his name as translator would lead a reader to the discoveries of Miguel Angel Asturias' Mulata; Jose Lezama Lima's Paradisio, and Luis Rafael Sanchez's Macho Camacho's Beat. But I'm not sure of exactly how Rabassa could judge such things; he said that he translated as he read a work, rather than reading it first and beginning the translation afterwards.

Although one felt drawn to the exotic nature of Rabassa''s translations, his actual background was more prosaic. His father was Cuban, but he grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire. He studied languages at Dartmouth and Columbia, worked as a cryptographer during the war, taught at Columbia and at Queens College afterward. He died in the unlikely setting of Branford, Connecticut in a hospice where I am sure some members of my family's circle saw out their last days.

Rabassa wrote a memoir, If This Be Treason: Translation and its Dyscontents. Remember how he worked, translating as he read? You can see why it worked so well, because in the memoir he reminded us: 'The translator, we should know, is a writer too. As a matter of fact, he could be called the ideal writer because all he has to do is write; plot, theme, characters, and all other essentials have already been provided, so he can just sit down and write his ass off.'

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ: AN INCOMPARABLE, ILLIMITABLE VISION

You could argue that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was the best, and possibly the most influential, novelist of the second half of the last century. One Hundred Years Of Solitude was near the top of my own list of the 20^th Century's greatest novels, and it's one of those rare books that both appeals to critics and to the general non-literary public. Love In The Time Of Cholera is not all that far behind Solitude, and he wrote a number of other fine books.

He's often described as the major figure in 'magic realism', though that was a term he didn't have much time for. You might say he, and his contemporaries, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Manuel Puig, and others who made Latin American fiction so dynamic in the 70s and 80s were influenced by Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortazar and Alejo Carpentier—but they were also influenced by many more traditional story-tellers, not just in the Spanish language. And they were able to find a kind of fiction that reflected the illogically fantastic world of history and reality in Central and South America. What sets Marquez apart from his contemporaries is his sense of historical scope, matched only by Vargas Llosa, combined with a wide humanity, and a loving, humorous approach which can easily be absurdist, a sort of Vonnegut without the stand-up punch lines.

Gene Wolfe once said that magic realism was 'just fantasy written in Spanish' and there is a certain amount of truth in that too—I think these Latin American writers in the 70s were also using elements of that post-modern revolution of the Sixties, breaking down boundaries of fiction, and giving their own familiar tales a new spin. A similar thing was happening on a smaller scale in Canada; you'll think immediately of Michael Ondaatje, maybe early Margaret Atwood, but there were others, most notably Ray Smith and his novel Lord Nelson Tavern, who reflected a similar approach. Later, as the term magic realism took hold, its influence spread, and you can see it in everything from Salman Rushdie to Toni Morrison to Tom Robbins.

I'm surprised that, as magnificent as One Hundred Years Of Solitude is, I don't remember better when and where and how I came to read it. But I don't. I recall vividly my beautiful Avon/Bard edition, which wasn't published until 1971, so it had to have been sometime after that, probably not long.

I do know by then I had read Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, in its 1967 Signet edition, another handsome paperback not unlike Pynchon's V, and with much of the same appeal. Hopscotch would later be reissued in a later Avon/Bard reprint—I should say that I could fill a shelf with those Bard translation of Latin novels, with their uniform look and imaginative covers. Hopscotch was what we might call post-modern; you read the novel and then went back and re-read it in a different order selected by Cortazar. You can see the link with Borges, and in its playfulness, the link to Marquez. The translation was by Gregory Rabassa, who would later do Solitude, and for it win the first-ever National Book Award for translation. Marquez has been well-served by his translators—Rabassa and then Edith Grossman.

So I may have come to Marquez via Cortazar, which would mean via Paul Blackburn. I remember reading Blackburn's poem 'The Watchers' in an old New Yorker in a doctor's waiting room; I think I was getting my head stitched up. A little research reveals it was the 10 December 1966 issue of the New Yorker, which means it was probably early 1967, and I was either 15 or 16. My poetic eyes had been opened by E.E. Cummings, but this was something new, another step forward. From there I then noticed somehow that Blackburn was the translator of End Of The Game, a collection of Cortazar's stories that would soon be retitled Blow Up, after the movie based on that story came out. That led me, in my own literary hopscotch,  to Hopscotch, and at some point, to Solitude.

And years later I would meet a woman who had attended Marquez's son's wedding in Mexico City, and it had snowed. I wrote a poem about that, which you can read here.

I have to say I knew even as I was reading the novel, it would be one of the greatest I would ever read, and nothing in the past four decades has changed that opinion. I have huge admiration for his other writing, Autumn Of The Patriarch and The General In His Labyrinth in particular, and as I say, with Cholera he came up with another novel whose beauty resonates on a vast human level. He was an astute journalist and a courageous figure politically—he was barred from the US for decades before Bill Clinton at last invited him to the White House. His politics remained on the left even as Vargas Llosa moved past the third way into a run at the Peruvian presidency as a free-marketeer. The feud which disturbed their friendship was personal, but the political differences widened and strengthened the rift. His memors read almost exactly as you'd expect, as if the magic and the realism were blended together out of personal history. His is an incomparable, illimitable vision.