March
1, 2002
Quidnunc
The Soil Must Suit
the Root
Peter Viereck, MHC Professor Emeritus of History, is the featured
translator in the most recent edition of Modern Poetry in Translation
and the subject of an essay by Modern Poetry editor Daniel
Weissbort. Weissbort discusses Viereck's translations and poetry,
as well as his relationship to poet Joseph Brodsky, who cotaught
courses with Viereck during Brodsky's fifteen-year tenure at Mount
Holyoke. A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Viereck received a Guggenheim
Fellowship in two categories, history and poetry, and is "among
the most creative and original translators of poetry," says
Weissbort. He describes Viereck's translation as a kind that derives
from "an interior knowledge" of source texts. Weissbort
writes: "His approach can perhaps be characterized as holistic,
surrendering neither to the sense nor the sound, but trying to
render both." He also quotes the liberal historian Michael
Lind: "Peter Viereck is one of the most accomplished and
unjustly neglected thinkers of the twentieth century." Weissbort's
essay includes Viereck's memorial poem to Brodsky, titled "Not
Worms," and a generous sampling of Viereck's translations,
together with Viereck's comments on them. In "Transplanter
Credo," Viereck writes this of the art of translating: "Be
bilingual, of course, but also bicultural, steeped in both histories,
both nightmares. Always bear in mind that the same words may have
different cultural contexts in different languages. The soil must
suit the root. Synonyms may not be synonymous. Given its history,
‘Volk' means more than ‘folk,' being more sentimental
and more sinister. Not dictionary but context is all." Agni
magazine will publish "Something Relentless," the key
poem from Viereck's unpublished poetry collection, titled Door.
Viereck contributes all his literary earnings to the Clio-Melpomene
Scholarship, an annual scholarship for Mount Holyoke seniors studying
history or poetry, the two areas of Viereck's own writing.
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