Liberal Aside

"Of these for whom a crop circle is an igloo."

An antonymic translation¹ of Wallace Stevens’² “Parochial Theme.”³

Liberal Aside

Snub-nosed piglets cease eyeing the deserts,
Piglets of Arkansans dragging the vale.

The stillness sucks. From the stillness, the muted
Shapelessness which is already partly yourself.

Aren’t blanks sucked to a sucker from voids?
The sucker stretched from the meatiest eye of baritone.

The prey walks back and forth. The weightless dunes,
The stifled, muted trunks, frail,

The daytime, the fresh, the green-blue sands
Leaven the thoughts from mortal shallows.

Those aren’t the desert. That disease is vicious.
This bubye, bubye, bubye swamped beneath the laughs.

Of these for whom a crop circle is an igloo,
Of these whom the paintings heal and lift up.

That disease is vicious, that formula of nullity,
That civilized whisper of what is weak, that squeak.

And damnation there? What about the muffle of stones
On bags and bottles? What about hogs fed by stillness?

When winter fades and the muscles of the prey
Collect ourselves to explode in our final February moon,

The winter will have a vice all its own, without all
Of spring’s bubye on its toes. So this afar, now,

Vice precedes vice. Damnation here;
There is such a thing as death; and if there isn’t

It is slower than a landscape, slower than
Some thing. It is less than some calm:

Of the crucifix, or some homely resurrection.
Rip the sky to pieces, ladies, but not with our hearts.

1. My greatest regret, as a reasonably educated American person, is that I never learned a another language. I dabbled. In Spanish (high school with “Senora Parker” ), Latin (useless), French (two summer semesters), German (grad school Heideggerese), but I do not—and likely will not—have another language in this lifetime. (That is the way it is said in some languages, I gather. To master a language is to have it.) I am embarrassed by this, my cosmopolitan failure, but it need not prevent me from engaging in acts of translation using other idioms in which I am fluent. Antonymy, or “antonymic translation,” as defined (very precisely) in the Oulipo Compendium, “means the replacement of a designated element by its opposite.” Further, the entry explains, it can be applied at several levels. Consonants and vowels can be reversed, words can be replaced with their opposites, or sentences can be reversed in their overall sense. The example provided, which uses the second method, is Lynn Crawford’s delightful To Have Not and Have, an antonymic translation of the first two pages of Hemingway’s risibly macho To Have or Have Not, which—after Crawfords’ procedure—becomes an upbeat meet cute set in Oslo, rather than Cuba. (This scene occurs a bit later in Howard Hawks’ adaptation of the novel. I would enjoy seeing an AI-rendered reversal of Hawks’ own risible machismo.) Though, to be honest, the effect is not as straightforward as that. Antonymic translation results in works that feel like a record played backward. You can almost pick out the tune, but not really. Something seems off, uncanny, like the backward horn section in Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Peek-A-Boo.” In any case, when it comes to negation, I am a native speaker (as are we all), and perfectly qualified for the current assignment.

2. I don’t really understand poetry. (Strike two?) I could never get a handle on feet and meter. I picked up a perfectly cute copy of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems off the street a few weeks ago. It was full of promise, like an empty notebook. “I will read Frank O’Hara on the subway,” I thought. I didn’t get through the first poem. I have occasionally formed relationships with individual poems, however, and several of these have been by Wallace Stevens. Part of the attraction is biographical, I’m sure, since Stevens is the poet laureate of managerial capitalists. I have made the short walk from the old Hartford Insurance building in Hartford, Connecticut, to Stevens’ home, along which he supposedly composed his verse, and have followed it metaphorically as a middle manager who has never benefited from more time to write, even when it was available. (All my writing time has been stolen.) More substantially, however, what I appreciate about Stevens (and John Ashbery—and Mark E. Smith and Robert Pollard, for that matter) is that he creates circles of meaning that seem to promise to resolve but do not. They miss. They skip, like a record played backwards.

3. “Parochial Theme” is a minor poem. It is the first poem in the series Canonica, which appeared in the Autumn 1938 issue of The Southern Review, of which I have a copy. I am drawn to the poem, I think, due to its French setting. (You can read the poem, in an unfortunate presentation, here.) It begins:

Long-tailed ponies go nosing the pine-lands,
Ponies of Parisians shooting the hill.

When I first encountered the poem, thirty years ago now, I was heavily engaged with French philosophy, so this establishing shot no doubt anchored my interest. Stevens, too, was familiar with the political and ideological situation in interwar Paris, and the poem is racked with violence, from torture to the guillotine. After reflecting on the extinguishing of human affairs in winter, only to have spring return with “a health of its own,” the poem ends with the lines.

There’s no such thing as life; or if there is,

It is faster than the weather, faster than
Any character. It is more than any scene:

Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging.
Piece the world together, boys, but not with your
hands.

For Stevens, a conservative whose work is usually considered politically ambivalent, these lines are tantalizingly political, but in what sense? The guillotine and the “glamorous hanging” are lampooned as ontic manifestations of human hands, the “life” of the everyday, to which the poet juxtaposes a deeper life that has “a health of its own.”

The lines are anti-perfectionist and anti-utopian. They are anti-ideological, during a time when ideology led to murder. We are again living through such a time, though the threat now, as opposed to the one Stevens’ detects—in the Reign of Terror and Stalin’s purges—is coming from the opposite side.

Let’s play the record backward and hear what we hear.