I no longer know what’s good and bad. I’ve read so much poetry from 1870-1930, my head has cracked open. At this point I’m thinking of just putting WHATEVER into this anthology and explaining why I like it or not, or why I picked it to translate, rather than being so ambitious as to judge everything’s literary quality relative to each other and to everything else in the entire world. Overwhelmed.
Meanwhile, I thought this was charming:
To Aurelia (from Mercedes)
They say in the valley one day,
a sweet, innocent lily,
full, proud, happy,
shone in the sunlight.
“Could there be another, tell me true,
so white and pure as I?”
And she died of envy,
howling with madness,
when she met Aurelia,
who was whiter, more pure.
To Mercedes (from Aurelia)
They say that one day in the valley
a certain lark complained
because she had learned a tune
and couldn’t sing it.
“Could there be another, tell me true,
as unfortunate as I?”
And the lament that she sang
was so divinely harmonious
that all songs stopped
and made her their queen.
(1892)
(Perhaps more charming when you know that M3rcedes was extremely fond of S4ppho.)
It’s the opposite of duel-poems, doing the dozens, or flyting (the norse tradition of insulting and boasting in improvised verse). Instead, clever, loving praise of each other, one poet to another. I had not thought about those poetic genres together (insult exchange vs. praise exchange) but only thought of poets praising patrons, kings, or their beloved. What fun when you have both sides! I get the impression that this exchange was very public and possibly verbal, at some cafe or “salon” or perhaps it was public in a newspaper. Part of the charm of the originals is their perfect conformation to form – the oct0syllabic d3cima – 10 lines and 8 syllables to a line. (Harder to say something complex in that form than in a sonnet.) The duel-poem also uses oct0syllabic couplets…
Well- so, I would happily go on about that sort of thing in the anthology. I can’t help wincing at the thought of the readers’ possible reaction at how the poems are so often about lilies and roses, jewels and mist, but, wtf it’s the modern1sta aesthetic. (and how these poetisas aren’t modern1sta, I’m JUST not seeing. ) There are also a lot of mirrors and statues: a feminist thing, I think, a way of expressing subjectivity as women, and a way to distance from being-your-body the way that poems to women by men make the women into their bodies. The women tend to write about their own bodies as merged with nature but then when they want to speak and can’t (as flowers) they become statues or mirror-images or other imaginary-people, products of artifice that are trying to produce their own artifice. A strange pattern I am seeing again & again.