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11 mar 2005

I found, written into my old copy of The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara, a list of "10 best O'Hara?" I must have done this list many years ago. I know I had the book since the 1970s. Not all the poems I list are in the Selcted poems.

Poetry
Memorial Day 1950
Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun)
To the Harbormaster
A True Account of Talking to the Sun on Fire Island
Mr. O'Hara's Sunday Morning Service
A Young Poet
Poem (There I Could Never be a Boy)
Naptha
A Step Away from Them

I still agree with this list, more or less, though it's missing the poem for Morton Feldman ("Who'd have thought / that snow falls") "On Rachmaninoff's Birthday,." "Biotherm," "In Memory of My Feelings," "The Day Lady Died." It's like trying to fit forty poems into a list of ten. I would put the best thirty poems of O'Hara against a comparable number of poems from any other poet of this period.

***

Here's a translation I'm working on:

As though a lantern yanked me up
from the middle of the night,
so you uncovered me, so you pointed me out.
So you drilled through my steep silences and minted
the borders of my island.
Naming me, you expose me, you place me in the bull?s-eye.
There is no place for a ruse, there is no place to hide.
I am a paralyzed target, center of your will, destiny
of your attention and your warning.
What are you waiting for?
I won?t shrink from the light.
Let what your dart decrees be done in me.

(Ana Rossetti)

While I only really need a literal version, I want something much more satisfying. This incredibly clunky version is not it. Much too preposition-y for one thing. The last line doesn't work at all. She's really saying "thy will be done," with a biblical overtone, but speaking of a pagan love god. It could be a Lorenz Hart lyric: "I'm a sentimental sap that's all / what's the use of trying not to fall. You've cooked my goose / so what's the use / 'cause you took advantage of me." I'm so hot and bothered that I don't know my elbow from me knee. So lock the doors and call me yours. What kind of car would Shakespeare drive? I really need a sort of Petrarchan vocabulary.

Translating you usually discover the strengths and weaknesess of a poet. Rossetti is a bit campy, redundant, over the top in rhetoric, sentimental, and those are the strengths).

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