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I’ve been really enjoying Eva Bourke’s The Latitude of Naples. It contains a lot of interesting poems, but I’ll focus only on three here.

In Praise of Round Things, is an attack on ratiocination as much as a homage to the curve. Or so it would seem on first impression. But reading closely we discover that the orrery of the Great Earl and the great ear of the observatory and the astronomical clock at Strasbourg with its one small cogwheel are among subjects of Bourkes praise. This is not an attack on anything, it seems, but rather a homage to what the poet loves. And she loves lots of things listing: seasons returning, the apple’s round cheek, boreens, watery notation of the concert pitch A, Cezanne’s blue apples, Parmigianino’s self portrait (currently in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) and green domes of cathedrals among many other things in her dazzling spiral praise. What a beautiful paean. It catches the ear, the eye, the mind, and the tongue all at once.

Burke has also translated Rilke’s Late Autumn in Venice (Spätherbst in Venedig), a poem which frequently seems to attract such efforts. Lets look at the last three lines of the poem and then compare them to some other translations:

First here’s the original:

mit einer Flotte, welche ruderschlagend
sich drängt und jäh, mit allen Flaggen tagend,
den großen Wind hat, strahlend und fatal.

Now Bourke’s version

with a fleet which moving countless oars
jostles, hoists bright flags, all at once,
has the great wind, radiant and fatal

Here’s an online attempt by Delmore Schwartz.

The fragrance of pitch, pennants aloft,
the butt of oars, all sails unfurled,
the fleet awaits the great wind,
radiant and deadly.

And a penguin modern poets translation by J. B. Leishman

by an armada, oaringly outpressing,
and suddenly, with flare of flags, possessing
the great wind, radiant and invincible.

And finally Google:

with a fleet, which stroke-end pushes itself and suddenly, meeting with all flags, which has large wind, radiating and fatal.

It’s interesting to watch the meaning drift. Schwartz has mysteriously slipped up on replacing fatal with deadly and flag with pennant. Google, looses with stroke-end pushes itself, and Leishman has sunk with invincible and the marble mouthed oaringly outpressing. Bourke’s version too has its idiosyncrasies. She draws light from the radiant wind to the flags for example, but it is the wind which is most important in these three lines, and on the whole her lines catch this elemental and ominous force better than the other versions. Not that it's a competion, but such discernment is important.

Boy in the Garden, gets into my all time favourite lists. Set in Boston, it’s an evening mediation on sorrow, loss and death. The action takes place at a reading, but what’s amazing about it is that such is Bourkes craft that very soon you find yourself there, listening to the words of others, looking out a window, feeling the night air.

We had been talking of war,
That in war time lies multiply and breed new lies
And word become worthless as inflationary coins.

...

but I also knew that this would stay with me always:
the poet, tired from study, resting his head on a cushion of words,
the other mourning his lost young life,
the visitor from the cave of shadows retreating,
the boy mysterious and solitary as Adam in the garden.

Without quoting the whole lot it’s difficult to get across the brilliance of such a poem. I closed my eyes several days after reading the poem, and remembered not the poem, but the place. In fact, I remembered the other poets, I remembered the night air, and I remembered the boy in the garden. This poem is too special not to memorise.