Jesse Scott Owen

I thought I'd write a blog post about translating Apollinaire, but I realized I have first to back up to Roger Shattuck, then back from Shattuck to Rimbaud and Delmore Schwartz, then from there back to Auden, and back from Auden, well, the person who introduced me to Auden will always be near (and dear) to my heart, but I won't start there, I'll start with Auden.

A few years ago a syllabus of Auden's surfaced on the internet, for Fate and the Individual in European Literature, a class he taught at the University of Michigan. His assigned reading list is considerable, and I decided, working at a bookstore, I would collect the entire list.

Some of the list was easy, but I made it a point, when possible, to acquire the particular translation or edition Auden had specified. This project is not yet complete; last night I bought my fourth copy of Pascal's Pensees, my second W.F. Trotter translation, but this was the assigned Everyman hardcover I've been looking for for over a year, and last night I found it, in a pile of books at Unnameable.

Others remain elusive: the Loeb edition of Augustine's Confessions is hard to find, and I was fooled once, thinking I'd found it, only to realize Loeb had issued a new translation, and the one Auden assigned is still far from my grasp. Louis MacNeice's Agamemnon I found, after months of searching, in an anthology in a bookstore in Melbourne, Florida.

I wasn't sure who translated Rilke's Journal of My Other Self (now titled The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) for Norton, so I read the Mitchell translation, then realized Norton was actually the translator, Mary D. Herter Norton. There was no assigned Racine translation, so I own the Wilbur and the Lowell.

The one truly maddening book is Delmore Schwartz's translation of A Season in Hell, which New Directions only printed twice, which was critically panned, the reception of which threw Schwartz into a deep depression, and is now near-impossible to find. I know the NYPL has a reading copy, and I've emailed New Directions asking if they might reprint it, but at this point owning a copy seems a distant dream.

Roger Shattuck once in The New York Review of Books lamented all English Rimbaud translations, but concludes that Schwartz's is the finest (un)available. That article was my introduction to Shattuck, and it persuaded me to read The Forbidden Experiment, his short history of the wild boy of Aveyron. Then I bought Shattuck's translations of selected Apollinaire and rediscovered Le Pont Mirabeau, a poem of Apollinaire's.

Out of boredom and avoidance I translated the poem myself and submitted it to the fall edition of my bookstore's employee zine, where it may or may not be printed, but I, impatient, and the translation, "made to sell and sell quickly," am eager to have it read.

As yet I feel unable to post the translation here, so here instead is my short story There Lonely Lessors, which was published in the same zine's spring edition, and which is inappropriate for young children or my mother to read.

As for any loose ends in this post I neglected to tie up, I'm sorry, it turns out I'm not as good at this as I imagined, but in the words of the man I love, John Jeremiah Sullivan, on reading, "We're not on a ladder here. We're on a web."