Bad to Worse by Edeson Robert;

Author:Edeson, Robert;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fremantle Press
Published: 2017-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

Most liberally educated readers will know the Erico Satroit poem referred to by Sigrid Blitt from translations deemed suitable for school and college study. This author admits to a longstanding interest in the problem of ekphrasis, and was disappointed to revisit standard sophomore texts and realize that taught versions of ‘Poet Regarding Artist’ suppress elements of a very deliberate harshness quite uncompromised in the original. A new translation is offered with approval of the trustee of his literary estate, Libraire Satroit à Istanbul. It is argued that the tone and ambiguity of Satroit’s language have been rendered here more honestly in order to convey the disharmony and oppressing counterpoint that was surely intended.

Mirror, palette, canvas, mirror.

Reflected restless eyes return

while in the hand an articulate blade

scrapes oils to elegy, or exclamation

or some eloquent phrase

more suddenly seen than I can speak

then pastes a wintry depth on worsened flesh

that is his face. Yet, by airy sable touch there comes

a nuance to the lips and resignation to the pose

and greater knowing in the analytic gaze

that rests ungrateful on this violent man

rebuilt in mineral pigments with a solvent smell.

The master in the wilderness steps back.

His brush is hesitant and I am quiet.

We are stopped before the crossing fears

that words were better made in paint

and paint in words.

We can be confident of Satroit’s intention because the theme is discussed elsewhere (see, for example, his memoir Damascene, and the preface to the collection Black Levant). For him, the problem of ekphrasis is simply expressed: the descriptive is interpretive is paralysing. (The first equivalence because description is inevitably analogizing, the second because the arrogance implicit in this erodes artistic confidence.) In consequence, Satroit’s ideal poet is one who comes to observe everything and state nothing—which might explain a spareness in all his work. Whatever its ugliness, our sympathy must turn to the object of ekphrastic intrusion, be it the art, its maker or the process; if not, we are complicit in a fatal indecision where art is stopped in time. Actually, Satroit demands even more of us: to accept that for the artist his mental wilderness is properly ineffable, and never more so than within the pain and introspection that is a self-portrait. Here is a place in which to be creatively lost, and not for visiting by outsiders.

But for the poet, too, there is a wilderness. The symmetry of doubt in the closing lines dissolves both privilege and any belief that the one regards the other. When the artist looks to the mirror, he sees his visitor reflected. And so the poet enters the portrait, just as the portrait enters the poem. This is the problem of ekphrastic translation; within it is contained an infecting dialectic that is mutually subverting. Satroit’s response is a form of silence.

(Indeed, the spareness noted above is a poetry of the missing—replete, we can assume, in substance and sentiment, and safe in the privacy of observant withdrawal. The contemporary British poet Vissy Mofo, whose philosophical sympathies with Satroit have been argued by

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