James Billington: Well, it's my pleasure to welcome you tonight. And to welcome, first of all, our special guests: Carlos William, Jane Harman who is a representative from Los Angeles county and her husband, Sidney Harman a great lover of poetry and the animating spirit of the Shakespeare Theater within the marvelous new Sidney Harman Center for the Arts. Also, Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire, where Mr. Simic has lived for many years and written so much of his outstanding poetry. Because this is being recorded for the archives and for subsequent cyber-cast, I want to make sure you all turn off cell phones, electronic devices during the program. The position of Poet Laureate of the United States is the highest position that the poet can hold in the nation, and it's the only federally mandated title for a literary artist in this country. So it's always a special honor and this is the final appearance of Charles Simic in his position as Poet Laureate, and it's also the first literary lecture that a Laureate has given in recent years. As someone who reads poetry in a number of languages, myself, often imperfectly, has had the experiences and I'm sure many of you have had the experience of translating it in your own mind, I think we're all pleased that Charles Simic will not only read poetry but also talk about the process of translating it. He is in the great literary tradition of Joseph Conrad who was not originally schooled and brought up in the English but has mastered it in a way that few that have lived with it all their lives have been able to sustain and create. He has, of course, written -- [break in audio] -- 13 books of translation from mostly eastern European poets including Serbia, Slovenia, German poet Gźnter Grass, and many, many others. And tonight we'll hear a sampling of his facility with language in the poems that he reads as part of his lecture, which is entitled, "The Difficult Art of Translation." Despite a very heavy schedule, Charles Simic has been a vibrant personality here in Washington, introducing the wonderful poets we selected with his consultation for our Spring Literary Series: Ellen Brian Voit, Rodney Jones, Mark Strand, Charles Wright, David Kirby, and Lee Yung We. As Poet Laureate he's also chosen innovative poets to receive the Witter Bynner Fellowships from the Library, bringing them and their work the national attention. Matthew Thorburn and Monica Youn who read here in March, and also in March in keeping with the Libraries emphasis on education, illustrated by the new exhibits and the interactivity that we've put and that we'll continue to putting all this year into the Jefferson Building, in March he gave a poetry master class here, which is something we hope future laureates will do as well. In September 2007, Charley read poetry and spoke with an interviewer before an appreciative crowd at the poetry pavilion in the Libraries' annual national book festival. In addition to many other honors, Charles Simic was a recipient last fall of the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets in recognition of his outstanding and proven master in the art of poetry. And this spring he was also the Sydney Harman writer in residence, visiting professor at Baruch College in City University of New York. His very recent books of poetry, That Little Something and Sixty Poems will be on sale here after the talk along with two of his other titles. So you're all invited to join us for a book signing and a reception afterwards. And it's with great pleasure that I present to you our very distinguished Poet Laureate of the United States, Charles Simic. [applause] Charles Simic: Thank you very much. I thoroughly enjoyed this year in Washington. I especially -- what I grew to admire is this institution of this Library, the Library of Congress. I spent, I think, my entire life, I mean the serious life, my life that I value, much better than [unintelligible]. But in libraries -- I started going to libraries when I was a kid, I continued to go to libraries when I was a young man. I kept going to libraries. I still go to libraries, but to come to the sort of "ultimate" library, the world's greatest library and to be working with people who are idealists, who are dedicated to preserving this noble institution has been a great, great honor. I had many, many, interviews since I became Poet Laureate, 60 or 70, I lost count. It was only one interviewer who said to me, she said, "You know, Mr. Simic, I know you love books so it must be fantastic to be around three million books." And I said, "Of course, it's wonderful." I don't know if she had the right number of books but that seemed very, very appropriate. I thought I would talk today about translation because this is something that I've done for, oh, God, almost close to 50 years, and I sort of have some ideas about translation and the difficulties of translation and the difficult art of translation. And I want to talk a little bit about that and then I want to read some of my favorite translations that I've done over the years. People have said again and again that translation is labor of love, and it is, because nobody gets paid very much for translating anything. And so it is indeed that but the poems in this case, the many poems that I've translated that I love, I want to read tonight. Now against translation, there are a lot of things against translation, how translation is impossible, you cannot translate poetry. I remember once sitting on the National Endowment for the Arts, some sort of a committee many, many years ago, in the 70s with -- Stanley Elkin was their great novelist, late novelist, American novelist -- and they were talking about the possibility of giving some sort of fellowships for translation and Elkin was a very funny guy, he said, "I think translations are anti American." And everybody was stunned. And he says, "Yeah, I think it's anti American. Aren't we told every day that we're the greatest nation in the world; we have the best of everything and so forth," and he says, "The idea that there is anything out there that deserves our attention." And so forth and so on. Finally, eventually, we got the idea that it's a joke and started laughing. But more seriously, there was this sort of idea that poetry is what is lost in translation. How can we translate poetry? There's a wonderful little passage that probably Jim knows, a little poem by Nabokov, translating Eugene Onegin, and Nabokov says, "What is translation? On a platter, a poet's pale and glaring head. A parrot's speech, a monkey's chatter, and profanation of the dead." True. [laughter] A more serious objection is the genius and this character of what people contain in the language they speak. Yes, is imagination rooted in language, geography, and culture? Yes. Is it true that no two languages share an identical associative context? True. Then there's the question whether the similarities between languages are on the surface or in the depth. Can one translate a culture? Its worldview? Its metaphysics? All the accumulated connotations and meanings a word or a phrase has? There is not only the idiomatic language, there is also the idiomatic imagination; there is such a thing as stone [spelled phonetically], the accumulative effect of such idiomatic usage. German novelist Herman Broch said he kind of divided it: logos and archetype. And he said logos is the universal principal and can be found in the dictionary, but archetype is the local, contextual meaning. Cannot local, contextual meaning be translated? I remember many, many years ago I gave a reading with a poet and I will read a poem by him tonight. I think it was like 1970, 1971 -- a Serbian poet called Vasko Popa. And we had the reading at Guggenheim Museum in New York. And so I read my translations, he read in Serbian, and after the reading there was a reception like tonight, and this unhappy-looking fellow came up to me and he said, "I don't know. Translations are okay, but, you know, when Popa says hleb [spelled phonetically] and you say 'bread' it's not the same thing." [laughter] It was very funny, but he had a point. True, because can one pretend to convey another language what is of immediate value to a native reader? Even those elements that elude complete understanding and yet contribute to the character of the work. I mean there are poets who are incredibly obscure. I can think of American poets like Hart Crane or Wallace Stevens, you know, poems that are just totally resist being intelligence of the reader yet they're delightful; their ambiguities are delicious. In other words, can one translate another person's world picture, which as it happens is already in translation? This is the sort of the usual argument against translation. Then, there is the argument for translation, the utopian view. People who argue for that, they say, "If what we call objective realities is more or less persuasive descriptions proposed by various languages, translation is the most fundamental and philosophical of all activities. To translate is not only to experience what makes each language distinct, but equally to draw close to the mystery of the relationship between word and thing, letter and spirit, self and the world. To translate is to awake and find one's self in the universal house of mirrors." And I'm going to say "yes" to that, although I've said "yes" to everything against translation. I mean that's what's so wonderful about translation. But there is something, despite this impossibility and this difficulty, there is something to argue for translation. It occurred to me some years ago, before, the translators were the first multiculturalists. They're the ones who started looking at some other languages and other traditions, going back to ancient times and finding something that they wanted to translate in their own tongue. Every community, every culture in the world is enriched by other literatures. For example, in Byzantium there was a book it was called Book of India, sort of invented book, supposedly a translation from -- it was a translation of some Hindu, popular -- I don't know if you'd call something popular, we're talking about books that came out in the fifth and sixth century -- a book of fabulous beasts, of kind of creatures: a man with two heads, and a man who had no heads but only had feet, and whatever faces they had was in their chest. And this is the most popular books in Byzantium. For centuries they loved it. They loved this stuff, and then some clever fellow who traveled to the East decided, you know, "I think I can probably do well if I translate this." So there's that thing, then there's the more specifically what we're talking about tonight poetry. Even this claim that to translate poetry is impossible, I find an ideal situation. How wonderful, because poetry itself is about the impossible. All arts about doing the impossible, I mean, that's their attraction. We're talking at dinner tonight with Sydney Harman about poets, their complexing spirits, and then they put them in something small, like a sonnet. If you think about it, it's an impossibility. I mean, how can you take an experience, whatever the experience is, big or small, and then convert it into 14 lines? But it's done. All arts are like that. Every poem and every translation is a utopian project. And, as I said earlier on at the beginning, an act of love, an act of supreme empathy: one becomes another, a medium, one learns something about the other person when he's translating. It's the closest possible reading of a literary text, translation. I have been astonished, I mean, as I got deeper into translating someone, you know, how I dismantle that particular form to a degree that I never did as a teacher of literature, and I loved close, meticulous readings. Also you kind of, you're like a medium when you have it. You stand in the shoes of who ever you're translating, and very often you realize this is not the nicest person in the world, you know? So, how I got into it: well, I suppose the first translating I did was when I started writing in English. I came to this country in 1954, but oddly enough, two years later, when I was in high school, my last semester in high school, I started writing poems in English and people would always say, "Why don't you write poems in Serbian?" Those days were [unintelligible]. And it never occurred to me to write poems in my, what was then, my native language because the people I went to show the poems to, my friends, were Americans. So I couldn't say I wrote this beautiful poem. Unfortunately, I wrote a love poem to you, Linda. This is probably so beautiful, you just have to listen to it and believe me, you won't understand a thing. [laughter] So, you know, I started writing in English. In the beginning, you know, there were both languages in my head. At some point it stopped, five, six years later; I have no idea when. But I would hear Serbian; I would hear English, so there was this movement between identities. It was almost at some point became like I had two mother tongues, and the confusion between the two. And then, I continued writing but one day when I was in New York, away -- I had moved to New York City, this was 1960 -- I started going to New York public library, the big one on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, because it was a nice place to hide from the cold and to sit for hours in the reading room, and I just discovered a Slavic section. And I really didn't know anything about Serbian poetry, Yugoslav poetry, Balkan poetry -- by that time, quite a bit of French poetry and American poetry. So I went and started reading, and I had no idea how to go about it but I kind of -- in those days books were not available on the shelves so you had to go and look at this catalogs, endless catalogs until you found something interesting. Anthologies were the most attractive option because there would be anthologies that you could take out and get ideas about other poets. And then reading one of these books, I kind of start with medieval literature and this and that, I found a terrific poem, at least it was listed as a poem. I think it was ten, or eleventh century, sort of early Serbian literature; I've forgotten what it was. I never found the poem again, I showed this poem to some people who know about the subject; they had no idea. You see what happened in those days, you couldn't Xerox what you were reading so you had to copy it in long hand, and then you take it out and you translate it. But this is the earliest poem I translated and it's called "A Message of Kings Sakis and the Legend of the Twelve Dreams he had in one Night." And it's a poem -- it's a poem, I don't know what it is -- it's in 12 parts and very, very short. Like one, two-line parts: "One. I saw a gold pillar from earth to heaven. I saw a dark towel hanging from heaven to earth. I saw three boiling kettles, one of oil, one of butter, and one of water. And oil boiled over into butter and butter into water but water boiled all by itself. I saw an old mare with her colt and a black eagle pulling grass by its roots and laying it down before the colt neighed. I saw a bitch lying in the dunghill while the puppies barked from her womb. I saw many monks soaked in pitch, wailing because they can't get out. I saw a beautiful horse grazing with two heads, one in front, one in the back. I saw precious stones, pearls, and royal wreathes scattered over the whole kingdom, but the fire came down from heaven and scorched everything into ashes. I saw the rich giving workers either gold or silver or rice. Or when they asked for their own rewards, no one was left. I saw evil-faced rocks descending from the sky and walking all over the earth. I saw three maidens in the moat field bearing wreathes of sunlight on their heads and sweet-smelling flowers in their hands. I saw man with slits for eyes, cruel fingernails, and hair that rose up and those were the devil's servants." Well, here you have sort of the -- why anybody translates anything: you see something totally astonishing, amazing, odd. And of course you have friends; you have people who you know would appreciate this. And it's in a language they don't know, so you go home and you get busy and that's what you do. You translate a poem like that. Lyric poetry is the really toughest, hardest to translate, because lyric poems are formally concise and a subject matter that don't have much subject matter. Lyric sense really feeling is a kind of awe before the untranslatable. I mean that's the lyric feeling. Words fail rich experience, you know, you're looking at the landscape, you're looking at some sights: someone's face, someone's child, and then all this pours out and you feel you can't find words for this. The rule, as you know for a lyric poem, is "little said much meant." It occurred to me translating some sort of very, very poems in this mode that in a lyric poem we go back to the cave of our tribe. We sit around the fire with our tribal gods and devils. And what we experience in a lyric poem and entirely determined by the language in which it is written, so as a translator when he's confronted by not just difficulties, but the constant sense of failure, of impossibility. I mean there are poets and poems that I could never translate. I could do -- if it's a poem of ten lines, or fifteen lines, I could do half of them, but I couldn't do the entire poem. And I just want to give you a sample; I'll give you one poem. These are lyric poems, woman's poems as they're called, oral poems, or literature. Serbian, uncertain of what centuries they come from, they were collected in the beginning of the 19th century, tiny little poems. They're called "Woman Songs" because the sort of men's songs or the heroic balance which described the stories of national heroes, the myths of the tribe, and so forth. But these are sort of very intimate little lyrics which are, I guess over the centuries, have been sort of refined, you know, tinkered with, in an orally into -- just tight little constructions and here's one. It doesn't have any title: "Two sisters who had no brother, made one of silk to share, of white silk and of red. For his face they used Barbary wood: black eyes, two precious stones; for eyebrows, sea leeches; tiny teeth, a string of pearls. They fed him sugar and honey sweet and told him, 'Now eat, and then speak.'" All right, now I want to give you another example of this sort of early years why somebody would run out into the Fifth Avenue as demented, clutching a notebook, a piece of paper, and running home. You know sometimes I started translating these things in the library itself. Here is some poems by a poet I'm very, very fond of who died in I think it was '96 or there 'bouts, 1996. His name was Alexander Ristovich [spelled phonetically], and he was sort of a recluse, lived in Belgrade, but he started out in a provincial town in Serbia where he was -- south of Belgrade -- where he taught great school for many years; he was a school teacher in a little town, and his work sort of combines the sophistication of someone who has read, as he did, massive amounts of literature, and a very original way of describing this country's life. And what caught my eye, he wrote a series of poems about outhouses. In the Balkan's -- still today, lots of places, that's where you go. You go to an outhouse, especially in villages and even in small towns. So I'll just read three of his poems, the second one and the last there are nine in the series, I believe. This is called "Outhouse." The first one: "Through a crack on the right you can see the red rooster. And through the one on the left, with a bit of effort you can see the table, the white cloth, and a bottle of wine. Behind your back, if you turn you'll make out a sheep trying to fly with their woolen wings. And through the heart-shaped hole in the door, someone's cheerful face watching you shit." [laughter] This is called "Monastic Outhouse." Well, you know, there are a lot of monasteries and that's where they go. "Monastic Outhouse": "In the back of a nunnery, there's a small privy with a half-open door and evening visitors. While the one is inside the other waits for her turn with her nose in a book, and while the first one exits straightening her robes, her face almost radiant, the other one steps in, peeks into the spotless hole trembling with stirrer that what lies at the bottom may leap into her face and leave a mark on her fleshed cheek in the shape of a devil's cross." This is a final one in the series called "Out in the Open." The audience would say, "al fresco." [laughter] I think in the opera [unintelligible] he says, what is it? He wants go out there and break the door, and he says, to his mother that he's going to go out in the meadow and in one sentence in Italy it was a really bad tenor and they said go out and take a shit out there, you know, in the meadow, you know. But anyway, "Out in the Open": "While crossing a field someone who at that moment is preoccupied with thoughts of suicide. His force by nature is called to delay the act. And so from his squatting position he finds himself taking pleasure in some blades of grass as if seeing them for the first time from that close. While his cheeks redden and he struggles to pull from his pocket a piece of paper with his already-composed farewell note." [laughter] I'll just read one more by Ristovich, kind of a summer poem; it's called "Strange Students": "The buzzing of the next room must come from tiny insects who recently took up residence there. For the time being they are invisible. In the evening as I listen to them, I hear the impression that their memorizing in concert a particular subject. Most likely something to do with botany. Once in a while they come to a sudden stop, as if to hear their teacher speak. His strictness that they find so frightening, cloaked in silence. When they resume, it's on a higher note, as if now competing with each other. I'm beginning to recognize certain groupings, and among them one or two gifted individuals. And, of course, a few real dummies, too." I think I'm just going to read from different poets, just a few more poets here. I have a lot of poets but I'll spare you some of them. Here's a poet called Miodrag Pavlovi_ born in 1928. Poem about insomnia that I like, "Questionnaire of Sleeplessness." He wrote a book of poems, actually two books of sort of point of views of medieval personages, going back to medieval Serbia and I always liked this one: "Who rattles is in the keyhole? Who builds belfries under my window? Who weeps over the evil fate of the hero? Who lets the lambs out of the gate? Who drives the dwarfs out to pasture? Who threw the king's stalls into the coffin? Who gave the alarm clock to the bats? Answer! Small knight celebrates the great knight. Winter. At the inn, everyone is hurrying. The messenger in armor stumbled and fell. Who will show me tomorrow the way? Who will cook my lunch and hand me a letter? Who will rings now above my head and calls for the doctor? Or does he summon the pilgrims to witness? Who lights the big fence of kindlings? The dog already wiggles under my pillow. Who is sent the urgent invitation to suffer, and why has that invitation been directed to me?" This is a poet called -- he died also a few years ago called Yovan Reisteich [spelled phonetically]. Born 1933, died a couple of years ago. Studied philosophy, wrote plays, wrote criticism, and this is a poem called, To Phaedrus. He very often evoked a very Greek, you know, theme, Plato and so forth to address contemporary issues, because when he wrote some of these poems, it was in Communist Yugoslavia, you couldn't overtly speak of these things. Anyway, the poem is kind of eloquent, but: "This too, I want you to know my dear Phaedrus, we lived in hopeless times. Out of tragedy we made comedy. Out of comedy, tragedy. But the true seriousness, measure, wise exaltation, and exalted wisdom always eluded us? We were a no man's land. Neither being ourselves nor being someone else, but always a step or two removed from what we are and what we ought to be. Oh, my dear Phaedrus, are you strong with noble souls and the island of the blessed. Recall at times our names, too. Let the sound resound in the resident air. Let it sing over that heaven it could never reach so that now conversation at last, our souls may find peace." [break in audio] Well I'll read you a woman poet who I translated very recently. I've translated, as it was mentioned, from every language of former Yugoslavia, which means that I've translated from some languages that I don't real know really well, like Slovenian and Macedonian, which are, you know, very different. But I had help. But the woman is called Radmeo Lausich [spelled phonetically], and she's still alive and she was born in 1949 and one of the best living Serbian poets. I'm going to read you a couple of her poems because I liked them. This is called "Death Sentence": "I was born too late and I'm much too old, my dear Hamlet to be your pinkly Ophelia. To let my hair, like flattened wheats spread over the dark waters and upset the floating water lilies with my floating eyes. To glide fish-like between fishes. Sink to the bottom like a dead seashell. Burrow in sand next to shipwrecks of love. I, the [unintelligible], am entangled in seaweeds. I'd rather you take off my dress, let it fall at my feet like aspen leaves. The wind shakes without permission as if there is nothing to it. I'd rather have that death sentence, eternity of your arms around my neck." And this poem is called "I'll be a Wicked Old Woman": "I'll be a wicked old woman, thin as a rail, the way I am now. Not one of the big-assed ones with butters churning behind them. Not one of the good-natured grandmas or aunties against, whose soft and plump arms it is nice to lay one's cheek. I am more like a scarecrow, in our garden full of rosy tomatoes like children's cheeks. There's some old crows where both vivacious and angry as a bee with eyes on top of their heads. Who see everything, hear everything, and have an opinion, grumblers since birth. I'll squawk and chatter all day. Cackle like a hen over her chicks about the days when I was a young, good-looking girl. When I lead the boys by the nose, colts and stallions I tamed with a flash of my eyes, the flash of my skirt. Passing over infidelities and miseries the way a general passes over his lost battles. I'll be free to do anything as an old woman. Among things I still can and want to do, like playing bridge or dancing, the light-footed dancers of my days. I'll spin and trip on my stick-like legs attached to my body like toothpicks to a kabob. 'That old hag sure can dance,' the young [unintelligible] scattered around me will shout and applaud. An old woman, like a well-baked bun with sesame seeds. That's what I'm going to be like. I'll stick between everyone's teeth like I did before. But with a white hat and dresses down to the ground, I'll stroll through landscapes of my past life, smelling the firs, admiring the heather, on every thistle catching my undergarment, my soul." A couple more poems. One translation and then I'll read one poem of mine that I was asked to read. This is a poem by a poet that I mentioned earlier, a poet called Vasko Popa. He was born in 1922, died in 1991. The most translated and the best-known postwar Yugoslav poet -- what was then called Yugoslavia. And very interesting man, was a one of the those kind of paradoxes. In the Balkan's, he was [unintelligible] the Marx system, he believed in God. And I told him one day, I said, "[unintelligible], this doesn't make sense." And he said, "You don't understand anything." He told me, you know. So we left it at that. He also liked to write poems in sequences, in a series of poems. And he has a poem from a sequence called, "The little box." This is the first poem in this series of poems about this little box and I thought this would be a good poem to conclude because there's something here that probably, in some strange way, that only I understand, that relates to the difficult art of translation. This impossibility in which one somehow manages to overcome. Anyway, the poem is, "The little box": "The little box gets her first teeth, and her little length, her little width, little emptiness and all the rest she has. The little box continues growing. The cupboard that she was inside is now inside her. And she grows bigger, bigger, bigger. Now the room is inside her, and a house and a city and the earth and the world she was in before. The little box remembers her childhood, and by great, great longing she becomes a little box again. Now in the little box you have the whole world in miniature, you can easily put it in a pocket. Easily steal it; easily loose it. Take care of the little box." I thought it would be appropriate to conclude with a Library poem and dedicate this poem to all the fine people that I met here during this year. It's a poem called, "In the Library." And it's dedicated to the late Mexican poet Octavio Paz, who was a friend of mine, and we used to talk about books all the time. And we were talking one day about books that have incredible titles; the titles are so inviting, they're so good that one is astonished to find that the book itself, is not just a little disappointing, but actually, a lousy book. So we're trying to recall this great disappointment and of course, the history of the world is full of books like that, I mean The Tibetan Book of the Dead sounds extremely interesting, so does The Egyptian Book of the Dead. But have you ever tried to read The Egyptian Book of the Dead? I mean it's slow going, but what a title. So this poem includes a title of a book, which, you know, the title is so marvelous that you'd think this was the greatest book, a book you must have, and it's not that. So the poem tells the whole story, "In the Library": "There is a book called A Dictionary of Angels. No one had opened it in 50 years. I know, because when I did the cover squeaked, the pages crumbled. There I discovered the angles were once as plentiful as species of flies. The sky at dusk used to be thick with them. You had to wave both arms just to keep them away. Now the sun is shining through the tall windows. The library is a quiet place. Angles and gods huddled in dark, unopened books. The great secret lies on some shelf Miss Jones passes every day on her rounds. She's very tall so she keeps her head tipped, as if listening. The books are whispering. I hear nothing. But she does." [applause] Charles Simic: Thank you very much. [applause] Carolyn Brown: Well it's always very hard to say farewell to someone who's become a friend over the last year, and to say farewell to our poet laureate Charles Simic. But we do want to express our deep appreciation to you, Charles, for the particular sensibility you've brought to us. The irony, and yet the deep authenticity of that voice -- for your wonderful language and capacity to help us see differently for your translations that brought new people from other places and sensibilities into our room, and always just for you being you with us. We really thank you for our time together. And as we express our appreciation, I would ask members of the audience to allow Charles to proceed to the table to sign and you can greet him individually there, and then join us for a reception. So, please express your appreciation and our appreciation to Charles for a wonderful year of poetry. [applause] [end of transcription]