Oregon Humanities Spring 2008

Cover of Oregon Humanities Spring 2008
Kathleen Holt
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Review: Collaborations among Strangers

Some Business of Affinity by Paul Merchant (Five Seasons Press, 2006)

Monochords by Yannis Ritsos; translated by Paul Merchant (Trask House Books/Five Seasons Press, 2007)

by Jim Carmin

A meeting of strangers can provide surprising opportunities, and collaboration among those strangers can produce spectacular results. Paul Merchant is a Portland scholar, translator, teacher, and poet whose recent books are products of those literal and figurative meetings with strangers.

Merchant's Monochords is the first complete English translation of one-line poems by the Greek poet, Yannis Ritsos (1909-1990), who was no stranger to persecution by Greek governments: his books were publicly burned in the 1930s, and he was imprisoned often because of his outright Communist support. Merchant first met Ritsos in Greece in 1966, a year before the poet disappeared during a coup by the Greek military and was exiled to the island of Samos, where he wrote the 336 poems in Monochords during a single month of 1979.

Ritsos's single-liners are tied to his past on Samos. From the book's first poem--"With a bird for a pillow, I lie awake night after night," to its last "So you'll know--these monochords are my keys. Take them." Merchant's crisp translations reveal Ritsos's ambiguity of his imprisonment on the island that is rich in history and popular with tourists. Memories of his imprisonment surely flooded Ritsos's mind while writing: "Now he's sitting on the rope they tied round his neck," and "The man has become hoarse from silence." Ritsos, via Merchant, gives readers a moving testament of his life, of the past and present combined, of sorrow and pleasure separated only by time: "Soldiers, boots, curses. Mother say a prayer." and "Summer islands without bookstores. Wet towels on the line." Monochords offers us slivers of life, glimpses of memories, and fleeting glances of the future: "Let the dead sleep so at last we can sleep too."

Merchant rightly regards translation as a form of collaboration, a retelling of one's own words that have origins in another's. His extraordinarily ambitious book, Some Business of Affinity, which was nominated for an Oregon Book Award, is all about collaboration. In addition to his own poems, Affinity includes new translations of Ritsos as well as Catullus, Aeschylus, and the medieval Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym.

Merchant's command of Welsh, Greek, and Latin places him solidly in the realm of classics, but Affinity also reveals his personal and lofty understanding of historical thought and visual arts, past and present. Each group of poems allies itself to an existing premise, a work of art, or a historical event or figure, for which Merchant provides a keen response. In "Bronze Door: From the Life of Catullus," where the poet conducted an exchange--a collaboration with a stranger--with Oregon artist Dale Rawls, Merchant captures the melancholy of aging: "The world is ours so briefly./Others made that path. Now only a scatter/of white flowers show where they walked."

The nearness of death is a common concern of Merchant, as in his translation of Catullus's "Lazy Day Blues": "We blaze in temporary light/before we sleep an endless night." And again in Merchant's own "The Conversation Room": "Some talk that began here/will echo after I am gone/down the long corridor." Merchant's language is as gorgeous as it is haunting. In "Eight Views of an Exiled Mandarin," he writes: "Suddenly/above us the shadow of a ghost ship appeared/on the purple sky, wild geese flying south at last,/a galley rowed by slaves from a conquered country/calling to each other in their harsh forgotten tongue."

The works chosen by Merchant to translate, and the manner in which he brings his own liveliness to the words of another, such as Dafydd's marvelous tale of mischief in "Tavern Trouble," show that Merchant has a broad concern and respect for all humanity, of cultures East and West, high and low. But it is in the conclusion of "Author's Envoy" where Paul Merchant most clearly reveals himself:


Tell them my ancestors were miners,

Their sons and grandsons fledged and flown

we inherited everything but wealth.

Say also under dictatorship in Greece I know

one of the immortals, and his equal

In bourgeois Britain. Say I was stocky, with

receding hair, and loved to sit

Under my vine-trellis. Quick to find fault, I was

easily won over. As for history,

Tell them in the middle of my sixth decade

Bush and Cheney stole the presidency.


It is Merchant's interaction with others--living artists with whom he traded verse for image and poets who no longer inhabit this earth whose words are inaccessible to many of us--that is the driving force throughout these two books. For the poet, these others were at first strangers but in the end they became in these poems intimately and forever tied to one another as close friends.

Jim Carmin has directed the John Wilson Special Collections at Multnomah County Library since 1998 where he also curates exhibitions on literary topics and the book arts. He regularly reviews works of fiction, Oregon history, and book history for several publications, and recently published an essay on the letters of poets for The Oregonian.

Published in the Spring 2008 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2008 Oregon Council for the Humanities