Wayne Knight, who played Newman on Seinfeld, also appeared in Space Jam, surely one of the top ten movies about cartoon characters and basketball ever made. When asked what it was like to work with Michael Jordan, he diplomatically replied: “Acting with Michael Jordan is like bowling with Picasso.” Just because you’re the best in the world at one thing doesn’t mean you will excel at something else.
Which brings me to Michelangelo’s poems. I am sufficiently uncultured that I always thought of Michelangelo as basically a sculptor, perhaps a bit of a painter. But then I reviewed a book for Princeton University Press, and they offered as recompense to let me choose a few volumes from their back catalogue; that’s where I came upon his Complete Poems. Who knew?
Michelangelo was not exactly writing Hallmark cards. Think early Leonard Cohen. He specialized in sonnets and madrigals, and while there are a number of love poems, usually he ranges from grumpy and forlorn to deep existential despair. Here’s a sunny little ditty you can reach for whenever you feel your own artistic endeavors are falling short. (Translation by Creighton Gilbert.)
I keep a hornet in a water jar,
Inside a leather sack some strings and bones,
And in a canister three balls of tar.My pale blue eyes are powdered into grounds,
My teeth are like keys on an instrument,
So, when they move, my voice is still or sounds.My face has the shape that causes fright;
In wind when there’s no rain my clothes would scare
Crows from the seed, without another dart.A spider web is nestled in one ear,
All night a cricket in the other buzzes;
With spitting breath I do not sleep, but snore.Love, and the flowered grottoes, and the muse,
My scrawls for tambourines or dunces’ caps,
Go to innkeepers, toilets, bawdy houses.What use to want to make so many puppets,
If they have made me in the end like him
Who crossed the water, and then drowned in slops?My honored art, wherein I was for a time
In such esteem, has brought me down to this:
Poor and old, under another’s thumb,I am undone if I do not die fast.
He needs a better translator. This sort of reminds me of the storied translation from the Russian, “his mother had sausagy arms”. It might be accurate, but it isn’t idiomatic or graceful.
Translation is the key — more art than science. The late translator is described as a preeminent Renaissance art historian. I don’t know if he wrote poetry himself.
I’ve always preferred translators who were also poets — Robert Bly comes to mind. In my opinion he wasn’t a “great” poet, but his translations of, for example, Pablo Neruda, were sublime.
It’s enlightening to lay translations side by side — one by an academic or language specialist, and the other by a poet. The later is almost always better.
In any event, I like this poem — quite a bit actually. Lines like “My pale blue eyes are powdered into grounds, / My teeth are like keys on an instrument, / So, when they move, my voice is still or sounds.” and “In wind when there’s no rain my clothes would scare / Crows from the seed, without another dart.” are really very nice.
But perhaps that says more about me than the poetry. 😉
Listen to the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo set to music by Benjamin Britten. Magical.
Sounds more like one of those Saxon riddles, as in http://www.abdn.ac.uk/english/beowulf/riddle.htm or http://www2.kenyon.edu/AngloSaxonRiddles/texts.htm “I’m this, I’m that etc, What am I?”
I’m guessing the answer here, if such is sought, is an ornately carved but dilapidated fountain head, with water issuing from an open mouth. 😉
It’s no accident that the Italian word for ‘translate’ has the same root as the word for ‘betray’.
Poetry cannot really be translated properly – it can only be re-composed in the target language, which requires another poet.
Been reading H.R. Hays translation of Bertolt Brecht and even tho Hays is a poet himself, it helps a lot that the books is dual-language and I read German.
And for my next post: a Fourier transform of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
If you lived in a sewer with a rat and three confused turtles, fighting inter-dimensional brains, knowing you’d never score with that pretty journalist, you’d write poems too, my friend.
I did not know he could sculpt. That was news. He does make a good oven-baked pizza.
My respect for this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle grows by the day.
One thing for sure – Michelangelo was a lonely man . Always over-doing it, being mistreated by just about everyone, feeling sorry for him self and living to a ripe old age.
“It’s no accident that the Italian word for ‘translate’ has the same root as the word for ‘betray’.”
“Translate” means “carry across”, as does “metaphor”. The “tray” in betray also means carry. We have a very spatially based language, and the fact is that a lot of words are about facing or going in a certain direction.
I am Michelangelo, i am a painter, a sculptor and a poets laurete