A Curtain of Reeds: two translations of poetry by novelists

The Romantic Dogs, Roberto Bolaño
Picador, £8.99

Michel Houellebecq, The Art of Struggle
Alma Books, £10.99

Almost every review of Roberto Bolaño’s The Romantic Dogs and Michel Houellebecq’s The Art of Struggle will tell you the same thing: they were both poets before achieving fame as novelists. This distinction, as if being both a poet and a novelist is akin to being both a Capulet and a Montague, seems to be cropping up a fair amount of late. Wena Poon, in a recent interview, confessed to having a poetry collection that she will never publish:

‘I’m a novelist first and foremost and if I publish poetry as well, there would be a perception problem. People think if you’re a poet, you can’t write a novel, and vice versa.’

Yet, it doesn’t seem that unusual in practice for authors to dabble in both. Most recently, the discovery of Angela Carter’s unpublished poetry would suggest that it is in short concentrated verse that she honed the magic realism that would go on to delight readers in her prose.

It comes to no surprise then that the very qualities that make Houellebecq and Bolaño’s prose stand out also have echoes in their poetry. Bolaño’s poetry collection is inventive, surreal, wryly violent and has a healthy number of detective-related poems; and Houellebecq uses his trademark humour noir and clinical turpitude to good effect.  As far as poetic form goes, neither is particularly experimental, sticking mostly to blank verse or — in Houellebecq’s case — many examples of rhymed alexandrine verse with some prose poems interspersed.

It is a ménage à cinq that we are looking at in this review, with two poets and three translators looming over the broth, all dying to throw their pinch of salt in — and, in the case of Bolaño, I am only able to see half the dish.  Whereas in Houellebecq’s collection the collection is helpfully prefaced by the two translators, Delphine Grass and Timothy Matthews (and I am able to understand the originals), in Bolaño's collection, the translator, Laura Healy, is voiceless, without a biography (and my Spanish is pitiful).

It’s therefore difficult to understand, at times, how close or deviational Healy is when translating. Is she translating for the target audience, or keeping the strangeness alive? This is an issue with the poem, ‘Day Bleeding Rain’, for instance, where one is not sure whether the ‘Bleeding’ is a slang expression used by the translator to put across an equivalent slang, or whether Bolaño was indeed literally saying ‘Day Bleeding Rain’. Perhaps it is both. It sits uneasily, three words to be gulped at once, summoning red rain: a day opening its wound. You don’t know whether to trust the words or not and that is what, somehow, gives the poem its oddly compelling edge. Even though the words that greet us further down would sound dire in a lesser writer’s hands — ‘from fury towards desire’ — in context they seem raw, powerful, like a ‘curtain of reeds that opens itself and dirties us and embraces us’.

‘The art of struggle’ is a more difficult book to review, in this sense, as the translations are like distracting subtitles at a movie, frustrating at times for their odd choices. Take the poem ‘Holiday Club’ for instance and its line, ‘Et j’était à la fois ailleurs et dans l’espace’. Translated literally, it means: ‘And I was both elsewhere and in the (physical) space’ — the last part could also mean ‘in space’ but not necessarily so. Grass and Matthews chose to translate this as ‘My mind had wandered, I was completely spaced out’ which is an unsatisfying deviation. It’s as if the strange beauty of Houellebecq’s poetry has no place in the translation. On the other hand, and this is why the imagery occasionally has to take a hit, Grass and Matthews are particularly skilled at replicating the rhythm of Houellebecq’s originals. In the un-titled ‘Comme un week-end en autobus, …’ for instance they pull off a mixture of sound and tempo so suited to the original that it is almost a mirror image.  Some end-rhymes such as ‘quiescence’ and ‘acceptance’ particularly suit the bleak monotony of the original’s mood and its stifling rimes plates.

There is much that is enjoyable in Bolaño’s collection, from the way he country-hops to the mixture of the everyday with history:

Old age for her was thirty,
The Thirty Years’ War,
Christ’s thirty years when he started to preach
An age like any other, I told her while we dined
(‘La Francesca’).

At the same time, behind the humour, there is a backdrop of grief, found most eloquently in his sequence of poems based on detectives. In ‘The Detectives’, loss is something to be escaped from, delicately; and when you can’t, when the nightmare is complete, all you can do is smoke ‘in a bedroom caked with blood’ as time drips by. The theme returns in ‘The Lost Detectives’, where the detectives are lost once again in the city, but they themselves are hard to pinpoint: their footsteps are heard, their voice comes ‘like an arrow’, they have invisible wounds and a past that can’t be recalled. In ‘The Frozen Detectives’ the protagonist dreams once more, and within the dream the detectives are ‘trying to keep their eyes open/ in the middle of the dream’. In all three there is blood: detectives careful ‘not to step in pools of blood’ (‘The Frozen Detectives’), ‘Destiny stained by their own blood’ (‘The Lost Detectives’), and the aforementioned ‘bedroom caked with blood’ (‘The Detectives’). Yet the blood is almost inconsequential; the horror is in the unending quest.

The Art of Struggle does not seem intent on putting up much of a fight. It is all laconic lines, deadpan lines, or even bare expressions of depression. ‘And now I feel oddly sad’ (‘In the semi-vacant metro…’), ends one poem, having not made the effort to merit the simplicity. Elsewhere, he is more affecting, such as in ‘Insects run about the stones…’ where Houellebecq informs the reader that we are trapped like objects yet more fragile, for we are:

A very poor thing
Always waiting for love
For love, or a metamorphosis.

This frustration at the frailty of the physical envelope of mankind and its link to love recurs throughout the collection: bodies ‘collapse like meat’ (‘The point of life is to love…’); ‘Skin is an object and a limit,’ starts an un-titled poem; a dead, loved girl’s eyes are ‘gnawed away’ (‘Before there was love…’). Elsewhere he cries, ‘Where is living? Where is dying?’ (‘My body’s affinities…’). Houellebecq’s skill is in keeping the poems in this collection differentiated, despite their strong similarities to other poems.
Yet, however inventive Houellebecq’s attempts are, angst itself is limited in its scope to affect; it is too inward, too selfish, too introverted to persist in the memory. The poems are well crafted, almost too well crafted, and one is not sure if they ever have the potential to explode. Bolaño’s poetry is a direct contrast: vibrant, dizzying, overwhelming, it is a collection that fireworks almost too much. However, if, as Anne Michaels said in Fugitive Pieces, reading translated poetry ‘is like kissing a woman through a veil’ then I’ll take the passion of Bolaño’s poetry over the detachment of Houellebecq’s any day.

Claire Trévien