Imitation VII: Early Summer

This is a series of translations I am calling Imitations, inspired by the poet Robert Lowell. You can read my first five imitations here. And my sixth imitation here.

Lowell’s Imitations comprise a collection of loose translations of poems by classical and modern European poets, including Rilke, Montale, Baudelaire, Pasternak, and Rimbaud, for which he received the 1962 Bollingen Poetry Translation Prize. Critical response to Imitations was mixed and sometimes hostile (as was the case with Vladimir Nabokov's public response to Lowell's Mandelstam translations). In a review of Lowell's Collected Poems, the poet Michael Hofmann wrote that although he thought Life Studies was Lowell's best book, Imitations was Lowell's most "pivotal book," arguing that the book "marks the entry into his work of what one might term 'international style', something coolly open to not-quite-English." In the book's introduction, Lowell explained that his idiosyncratic translations should be thought of as "imitations" rather than strict translations since he took many liberties with the originals, trying to "do what [his] authors might have done if they were writing their poems now and in America.1

Following in the footsteps of Lowell, I’ve sourced these poems for my imitations from books I have shelved around my house. The poems in these books are in the original Russian, French, Spanish, Italian and German. I’m fluent in Spanish, and passable in French and Italian. My Russian and German are extremely elementary. My process goes something like this: I read the poem in the original. I scribble out what I understand about it...the big ideas, the first images that come to mind. Then I let my imagination fill in the blanks and transform the poem into something new.