Dark Matter
Golden and poxed with frost, tarnished and sere.
(from "Sarabande on Attaining the Age of Seventy-Seven")
Hecht revels in synesthesiac wonder in "An Orphic
Calling," describing a stream in language that tumbles and whirls
dizzyingly, currents "now folding into each other, flexing, swirled/ In
cables of perdurable muscle-tones," while hearing music in its
movements:
The stream's courante runs on, a force majeure,
A Major rippling of the pure mind of Bach.
The inventive rhymes and slant rhymes of this poem are
trademark Hecht -- force majeure/ far, Bach/alpenstock, fons et origo/
flow, Interlaken/ unbroken, muscle-tones/ headphones. So is the dense,
baroque language. The Russian poet Evgeny Rein once said that if a
magic veil could be put over a poem, removing all the adjectives and
verbs, the page should still be dark with nouns -- if so, Hecht is
still the golden standard.
It's no surprise that Baudelaire and the acerbic and
technically inventive Horace surface most frequently in the
translations included in this volume. Hecht has many of the strengths
of both.
Hecht has said it takes "serious necromancy" to conjure
burden and bitterness away -- and to find the point at which ugliness
conjoins with beauty ("Constable/ Claimed he had never seen anything
ugly," Hecht recalls). In this volume, he attempts to alchemize the
death of friends, the tawdriness of lust, loss of love -- and,
inevitably, the idiocy of colleagues.
For the years of hardship have been replaced by years of
plenty -- university professorships, a Pulitzer, a Bollingen and other
awards. The atrocities Hecht writes about nowadays are as likely to
take place in a garden or bedroom as a concentration camp -- the slow
death of feeling, the slow unveiling of one's vices.
He has a few of his own: He's waspish on occasion, as
when denouncing certain feminist scholars as "the ladies' auxiliary of
the raptor clan/ With their bright cutlery" in a way that might make
one forget that this cattiness adorns what is finally a love poem to
his wife ("a quarter-century of faultless love"). Some of his biblical
poems are among his weakest -- for instance, wan, coy "Miriam" seems
little more than an aging debutante ("O I could sing and dance with the
best of them").
Too often, the poems in "The Presumptions of Death"
section read like anecdotes in an extended gag, though he also rises to
his caustic, epigrammatic best: Death the Carnival Barker brags "Come
in and see the greatest show on earth!/ I promise it will take your
breath away!" and Death the Mexican Revolutionary promises "a brand-new
social order/ Six cold, decisive feet/ South of the border."
As noted, Hecht has always been a strong antidote to the
time -- alas, that makes him, more than anyone else, subject to easy,
reductionist caricature. Even prominent journalists comment on his
neatly trimmed beard; his jacket, bow tie and cane; the precise
inflections that make his accent sound "almost" English (it's not; it's
the forgotten accent of an educated American) -- the Bernard Berenson
of the poetry world, the granddaddy of New Formalism, a
paleo-formalist.
It's too bad, for he's among the best that we've got, and
superficiality is one step away from disregard: His elegant, insistent
humanity, surfacing persistently like springs among the severe crags of
his dark morality, will give his poetry life and interest long after
the smoother pebbles of today's more popular voices are washed to
silence by the sea. ï
Cynthia Haven writes for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times and the Times Literary Supplement.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
|
