A translated poem, and memories of the poets Kenneth Koch and Brigit Kelly

"Listen"

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A very long time ago I took a course in twentieth century poetry with the poet Kenneth Koch.

It’s funny how some things stay and others vanish. I remember moments of that course strongly: one of them was Koch’s irritation, after assigning Yeats’s “Down by the Salley Gardens,” that no one in the class had bothered to look up the word “salley.”

Here is Yeats’s poem, in case you have never come across it:

Down by the salley gardens
   my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens
   with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy,
   as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish,
   with her would not agree.

In a field by the river
   my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder
   she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy,
   as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish,
   and now am full of tears.

¹

(A salley is a kind of tree.)

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Koch’s poetry course was mostly conversational. I didn’t think that he prepared for it, until one day when I stopped by his office just before class and he frustratedly tried to get me to come back at another time, as he was busy writing out his notes for the coming hour.

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That is another moment that stayed with me; my disbelief that he actually prepared for something that seemed as formless as those class sessions did.

Now, looking back, I see that my own teaching style must have been influenced in part by what I saw of his.

There is something generative and generous about a free-flowing conversation that in fact has a hidden structure to it, a number of pre-planned beats that it is essential be hit, whether by the teacher or someone in the class, at some point in the hour or two hours or three hours of the time spent together that day.

In Koch’s course, the discussion during the class hours centered on the poetry he had assigned. Once a month or so, however, we were asked to write a poem of our own “in the style of” a poet of our choice, which would be submitted and receive comments.

A favorite poem of mine at that time was Ezra Pound’s ”Canto I.”

It begins like this:

And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day’s end.
Sun to his slumber, shadows o’er all the ocean,
Came we then to the bounds of deepest water,
To the Kimmerian lands, and peopled cities
Covered with close-webbed mist, unpierced ever
With glitter of sun-rays
Nor with stars stretched, nor looking back from heaven
Swartest night stretched over wretched men there.
The ocean flowing backward, came we then to the place
Aforesaid by Circe.
Here did they rites, Perimedes and Eurylochus,
And drawing sword from my hip
I dug the ell-square pitkin;
Poured we libations unto each the dead,
First mead and then sweet wine, water mixed with white flour.

²

The lines in most of the poem come from the Odyssey, but you can see how they are retold and reshaped by Pound into language, rhythm and structure that evoke poems that have survived from Old English.³

Notice how non-Latin most of the words in his text are, how much they feel as though they stem from the English of before the French influxes following the Norman Conquest of 1066.

Although I’ve read the Odyssey in a few different English translations, and bits of the Greek here and there, not a single line of it has ever stayed intact in my head as itself, as text (as opposed to the content) to be called up at will.

But Pound’s version/reimagining lodged itself in my skull on first reading and has never fallen out since.

That was the model when I tried to use Koch’s assignment to do the same thing with a text from Sanskrit whose content, but not language, had equally lodged itself in my skull.

I wanted to take the content and put it into English that would stay with me in the same way. I wanted to reimagine the text in my own language, from the center of my own preoccupations and concerns, which might or might not have been those of the original poet.

I wanted the text to be there in my mind as language, not just as content.

A few months ago, unpacking boxes that had long been in storage, I found the poem that I had submitted in Koch’s class back in 1987.

It included this section:

The Divine Poet
From the Sanskrit

And returned,
The two disciples, Gunadeva and Nandideva,
Bearing the blood-script leaves,
To the garden laid down by Durgi,
To the pre-set meeting place.
Joined palms and spoke at last
To Gunadhya, Mahakali, the great master,
Oath-bound now into goblin-speech,
To tell halting the words of Sata
The æsthete king.
“Drunk on learnéd things, O poet,
Great Sata, chosen receiver of the sacred epic,
Disdains the border tongues.
Unread by him, the 700,000 distichs
Are rejected.”
Grieving then Gunadhya of the divine gift
Left the pleasure-lands of Nanjaram,
Went to rocky crags, lonely and lovely
Gifts of Earth,
And dug the sacred fire-pit.
Weeping creatures with disciples listening,
Each page the master read strong aloud,
And then the flames received it.
Seven years Gunadhya’d laboured
But now his blood-ink burned.

—- From the Kathasaritsagara of Somadeva

The funny thing is that it still works for me: it still captures what concerned me then, which was the question of the cost of not being seen, and of how a person grapples with it.⁴

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The passages I drew on for my translation were in an extract from a very long Sanskrit text, called the Kathāsaritsāgara or Ocean of Story, that had been included by Charles Lanman in his 1884 Sanskrit Reader, which we had used as a textbook in my beginning Sanskrit course a year or two earlier.

The extract tells the story of a poet (to oversimplify) who writes during long years of hermit-like exile in a forest. (He has taken a vow not to speak Sanskrit, and the poem he writes is actually recounted to him by a divine figure, but we can pass over that bit.)

Because he has no access to writing materials he uses tree leaves for paper, and his own blood for ink.

When at last the immense poem is done the poet sends it to the king, whom he had known previously.

(This is really a long story — I won’t tell you the whole here, but you can read about it on Wikipedia if you like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathasaritsagara.)

The king refuses to read it because it is in a marginal language spoken by “goblins” out in the hinterlands, not in Sanskrit which the king prides himself on having finally learned, after being mocked by the queen for his own previously less elevated speech.

The rejected poet builds a fire and, surrounded by his disciples and wild animals who have come close to listen, he reads the leaves aloud, one by one, throwing each one on the fire after reading it. Much, but not all, of the text is destroyed in this way, though some is saved when the king eventually reconsiders.

---

I never did have a full conversation with Koch: the day I stopped by his office before class was the first time I had done that, and I was so embarrassed afterwards at having stayed too long that I never tried again.

But many years after that, when I was a professor in a field that had nothing to do with poetry, Sanskrit or literature in any way, I spent several winter weeks at a writer’s retreat in Vermont.

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During one of the weeks the retreat was visited by the poet Brigit Kelly, who had come to provide guidance with any poets who wanted to meet with her, and who generously offered to meet with prose writers as well.

We met for an hour, and she paid attention in a way that’s hard to describe.

She asked who I read, and what I was trying to do with the short story I was working on. She thought a bit, and discussed a bit, then told me what the problems were, and gave me advice that has stayed in my head, verbatim, ever since.⁵

That was all, except for a few conversations over dinners during the rest of the week. But it was a contact that I’ll never forget.

Nor will I forget the evening when she stood to do a reading for all of the writers and artists at the retreat.

She included what I now know is a famous poem of hers, called “Song,” that I had never heard of. It begins like this:

Listen: there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree.
All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it
Felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing
The song of a night bird. […] ⁶

That “Listen:” as I heard it that evening has stayed with me ever since, as well.

It seemed to me to be in direct response to the call of the poet at the start of the Iliad, where the first verb is also a command, but the opposite one: it is “sing,” which includes a sense of “tell.”

Here is the beginning of the Iliad, in a new translation by Emily Wilson:

Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath

of great Achilles, son of Peleus,

which caused the Greeks immeasurable pain

and sent so many noble souls of heroes

to Hades, and made men the spoils of dogs,

a banquet for the birds, and so the plan

of Zeus unfolded — starting with the conflict

between great Agamemnon, lord of men,

and Glorious Achilles.⁷

Brigit Kelly’s poem, it seemed to me, in just that one opening word, that seeming counterpart to the Iliad, addressed everything that I had been trying to address in retelling that passage from the Kathāsaritsāgara.

It bothers me, sometimes, that my preoccupations can stay the same over so many decades. I was in my 20s when I was trying to figure out whether the poet in the Kathāsaritsāgara was legitimate in responding so despairingly to the lack of being seen, being heard.

I was in my forties when it seemed to me that Brigit Kelly, who has since passed away, as has Kenneth Koch, framed the question in a simpler, more bare-boned, bedrock sort of way: so powerful, that one word with its colon: “Listen:”

I do know that speaking and listening do not really exist apart from each other, as discussed a little in this earlier essay.

Koch and Kelly were both wonderful teachers, in completely different ways. And it occurs to me, thinking back over those encounters, that they each understood and shared that double-dance, that interplay of “sing” and “listen.”

Perhaps the poet in the Sanskrit text overreacted, but the essential thing in that text is vital, and I think was conveyed by both of the later poets: that among the gifts we can give those around us is to regularly say to each other, Sing: be seen, be heard. I am here.

And also to regularly say each other, whenever a reminder is needed, among people who care each other, the equally important other thing: Listen: . I am here, to be seen, to be heard.⁸

1. Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50311/down-by-the-salley-gardens.

2. Source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54314/canto-i.

3. Pound had earlier done something similar with an actual Old English poem; his “The Seafarer” can be read at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44917/the-seafarer.

4. The poem is by me, after the style of Ezra Pound, November, 1987. The diacritical marks that distinguish Sanskrit characters from each other in transcription are missing in the text of the poem, as not all are available in the fonts I have access to here.

Koch’s comments to this part of the poem (there was a second part that I have not included) might be of interest to anyone who is reading this essay mostly to hear of him and Kelly.

He wrote “This is good [underlined three times], especially lines 1-15, I think. Please see comments.” Comments on lines 16-to the end: “This seems all too much alike, all too much in the same tone to be like Pound’s translation at the most characteristic. … This first part, too, could use a little more variation — a more contemporary version of the some lines, for example —maybe somewhere in lines 10-15.”

5. She advised that I write fiction in the voice I used for teaching.

6. Source: https://poets.org/poem/song

7. The Iliad, by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson, W.W. Norton & Company, 2023, p.1. The text in the extract should be single-spaced, but that doesn’t seem to work when including line breaks in a quoted text.

8. I had intended to write a different essay this week, but put it aside last night and started this one instead after encountering the lovely substack piece below, which brought back many memories of when I first began to study Sanskrit myself.

Please check it out, including for an extract of the author’s literary translations of classical Sanskrit poetry.

As mentioned above, I first encountered the Kathāsaritsāgara (and this precise part of it) in the introductory Sanskrit reader by Charles Lanman that she describes in more detail here.

On Sanskrit (and Latin)