Poetry by Louise Glück, translated by Ekaterina Dies: “Wanderer Persephone” from the Poetry Collection “Averno”

In this paper weve tried to analyze the translation of L. Glck poem about Persephone (poetry collection Averno), carried out by Ekaterina Dais. A brief outline of literary work of Louise Glck is given. Using the method of hermeneutic commentary, the leitmotifs of her poetic and prose works are characterized. Understanding these motives is an important stage in the pre-text work, since the complex codes (often implicative) presented in poems about Persephone cannot be adequately deciphered without prior knowledge, and, therefore, it is not possible to evaluate the efforts of the translator, the tactics chosen by her. The material for the analysis is the poem Wanderer Persephone from the poetry collection Averno. Another goal of the article is to acquaint the Russian-speaking reader with the work of the original American poetess, which is currently reflected in the Russian scientific discourse.

The Paradigm of the Void: Louise Glück’s Post-Confessional Deadlock

Awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, Louise Glück emerges as one of the major and most important American poets of the late 20th and early 21st century. What does this centrality tell us about the trajectory that the American poetry has traced since modernism? I attempt to offer a critical evaluation of Glück’s post-confessional stylistic, developed between the debut Firstborn (1968) and Averno (2006), by setting it in contexts that are historical and, later in the paper, psycho-theological. First, I treat her formula as a double response – to the modernist legacy of T. S. Eliot and to the challenges of postmodernity. Faithful to Eliot’s urge to transcend the biographical by connecting it with the transcendental, Glück resists the skeptical thesis of the demise of grand narratives, and writes in defiance of the postmodernist poetics of such poets as John Ashbery. Not undermining the biographical foundation of the lyric – the way Ashbery has done in his linguistic excess – she strives to make it paradigmatic. However, in this heroic search for a paradigm, Glück proposes a deeply ambiguous modification of Eliot that I characterize in psycho-theological terms. Following Agata Bielik-Robson’s research, I characterize Glück’s metaphysics as a form of Thanatic Lacanian Gnosticism. At this level we confront the costs of Glück’s post-confessionalism: a serious impairment of all those aspects of the self that make it an embodied and gendered human being.

Bodies and self-disclosure in American female confessional poetry

Far from being a mere thematic device, the body plays a crucial role in poetry, especially for modern women poets. The inward turn to an intimate autobiographical dimension, which is commonly seen as characteristic of female writing, usually complies with the requests of feminist theorists, urging writers to reconquer their identity through the assertion of their bodies. However, inscribing the body in verse is often problematic, since it frequently emerges from a complicated interaction between positive self-redefinition, life writing, and the confession of trauma. This is especially true for authors writing under the influence of the American confessional trend, whose biographies were often scarred by mental illness and self-destructive inclinations. This paper assesses the role of the body in the representation of the self in a selection of texts by American women poets—namely Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Louise Glück—where the body and its disclosure act as vehicles for a heterogeneous redefinition of the female identity.

No Wild Iris

The Philippines, as a tropical archipelago, is “concurrently a country of premodern, modern, and postmodern societies[:] our rural areas, small communities, and villages, while we may sweepingly characterize them as premodern, possses at the same time some of the trappings of postmodern cities like Manila, Los Angeles, or Paris” (Cruz-Lucero, 2007, p. 7). And yet, as a nation, this concurrence of temporalities is ultimately flattened, so as to turn it into “a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time” (Anderson, 2006, p. 26). What emerges, therefore, is a Philippine time that is also a disjuncture: multiplicities that insist on a singularity, or a singularity that insists on being multiple. Keeping time with this contradiction between the diverse temporalities in the archipelagic tropics (see Carter, 2013) and the adamant dream toward a nation-state, this poem meditates on the concurrence of various events that happen in the archipelago nation during the 2020 COVID-19 global pandemic. Taking cues from the 1992 poem “The Wild Iris” penned by the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature recipient Louise Glück, “No Wild Iris” attempts to interrogate the experience of homogenous and empty time in the longest lockdown in world history. By interweaving the personal, the political, and the ecological, it harnesses the lyrical while also disclosing its limits, if not outrightly refusing the tendency to sentimentality and universality as a poem.

“Epitaph, the Idiom of Man”

This chapter explores the intertwined power and impotence of human speech, starting from Eudora Welty’s story “Circe.” In “torment,” Circe seeks the secret of human grief; immortal, she finds that her words cannot reach the metaphors to which mortal speech has access. To explore this “frailty,” the chapter traces a passage from Ovid as it is cited by Shakespeare in The Tempest, Milton in Paradise Lost (at the crucial moment of Adam’s telling of his awakening into life), and then Wordsworth in the Immortality Ode. A layered confession of powerlessness is also, in each instance, an invocation of poetic power. The chapter isolates a particular phrase in Wordsworth as an index of its paradoxical formulation of the power of human frailty—“there is” of poetic positing—and then traces some of its appearances in elegiac poetry to link positing to “frailty”: in George Oppen’s “The Image of the Engine,” read as a rewriting of the Immortality Ode, and, briefly, in short poems by Mark Strand and Louise Glück. The chapter concludes by turning to the abyssal consideration of positing in a more monumental work in a different genre, albeit still in elegy: Gertrude’s speech announcing Ophelia’s death in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

La Humanidad, El Bosque, El Cosmos, Los Dioses

El autor nos presenta a Louise Glück, poetisa norteamericana, poco conocida en nuestro medio, y ganadora del premio Nobel de Literatura 2020. Sucintamente, nos relata como ciertos pasajes de la vida y de su afición por la mitología griega y por la naturaleza influyeron notoriamente en su producción literaria.

Queer Poetic Time

This chapter argues that the representation of ‘queer’ time in postmodernist poetry extends beyond sexuality to encompass heterodox approaches to temporality more broadly. It starts by considering English poet Philip Larkin, suggesting how he reworked modernism within burlesque forms to evoke shifts in spatio-temporal scale. The second section, ‘Against Chrononormativity’, extends this analysis across various American postmodernist poets, arguing that interrogations of normative temporality in relation to gay sexuality (particularly in Adrienne Rich and Thom Gunn) can be understood as commensurate with reconstitutions of linear time in the work of John Ashbery and Louise Glück. It concludes by drawing comparisons with two Australian postmodernist poets, John Tranter and Les Murray, both of whom seek to reorient the direction of time. It discusses Tranter’s crossing of postcolonial theory with formalism, while also examining how Murray draws upon Indigenous culture and human/animal relations to reconfigure Western culture from a posthumanist perspective.