Inspired by the Very Act of Writing

Moira Lovell, author of four collections of poetry and ex-teacher of The Wykeham Collegiate, started her talk with the well-poem by Robert Frost (here the final stanza):

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by ...

The emphasis of her talk was ‘Why poetry?’ Why, of all the genres to write about, choose poetry – the one that bookshops tend to hide among the so-called ‘Classics’, the one that publishers are bound to ignore (because they don’t see any profit in it). Poetry of all the writing genres, is the one that’s most crafted, the one where every comma, every full-stop and every nuance of every word is meticulously placed in the middle of clouds of white space … yet perhaps, she admits, this is the reason poets write poetry. Other than quoting Anna Akhmatova, she also quoted Alexander Pushkin, who wrote:

The Poet

Until the poet hears Apollo’s

Call to the hallowed sacrifice,

The petty cares of life he follows,

And sunk in them his spirit lies.

His holy lyre remains unsounded;

His spirit sleeps in numbing rest,

By an unworthy world surrounded,

Himself perhaps unworthiest.

?

But once his ear, attentive, shakes

When the god-given word is stirring,

The poet’s soul, its pinions whirring,

Is like an eagle that awakes.

Then wearied of all worldly playing,

He shuns the babble of the crowd;

The people’s idol disobeying,

His haughty head remains unbowed.

He runs away, and wildly, proudly,

Comes full of riot, full of sound,

Where empty waters wash around

The shores and woods that echo loudly.

Poets often don’t ‘choose’ to write poetry. According to Lovell, the poem chooses its writer and as such, we often write about the most mundane things in life because that’s what life is all about. It’s the place poets draw their inspiration from. At this point she reached for her latest poetry collection, Notes, and read a lovely poem about age and how teacups end up clattering in their saucers like castanets.

Lovell also emphasized something that many a writer talks about, and that is the poetry that ends up not being written. It’s when a poem tickles some or other sense, yet the poet doesn’t have a pen to hand and the poem gets lost forever. There is a great irony in the poem that she read to us then, because in that moment when she thought she couldn’t write anymore, she wrote this beautiful (as yet uncollected) poem:

The One that Got Away

It appeared

Just below the surface

In the river of my mind,

The whole glittering in chain-mail

Like rows of silver syllables.

I determined to reel it in,

Hoist it onto the bank of a page.

But it fought with such resistance

That I had to let it go.

In his presentation about the translation of Rumi’s poetry into Afrikaans, Dietloff van der Berg also hinted at the ‘why’ of his mammoth task. Why translate Rumi which is (1) poetry and (2) into Afrikaans? Because it’s a matter of heart. A conviction that this ‘something’ is so important that unless he does it now, no-one else would. His book, simply entitled Rumi: Liefdesverse en vertalings, took over a decade to complete!

According to Van der Berg, one of the core reasons for translating Rumi was that the American, Coleman Barks, has turned Rumi’s words into what some refer to as ‘Social Media Crack Cocaine’. Barks’ work has moved away from the original meaning completely. You can only shake your head if you consider that Barks is the main seller of all English translations of Rumi, totalling close to 4? million translations!

In fact, Brad Pitt’s tattoo of ‘Rumi’ is not a Rumi quotation at all … Van der Berg translates that phrase as follows: ‘verby anders glo en Islam, lê ’n sandvlak. Daar heers ons verlang in daardie tussenvlak, die mistikus sal biddend sak omdat hy daar anders glo, nog geloof is daar nog ’n baar’ (past all faiths beyond Islam, a sandbank separates our longing in that intermediate place where the mystic will prayerfully kneel down because he believes differently). The love that Rumi mainly wrote about was that of a Sufi and the things they held onto, not the romance Barks has turned it into. Furthermore, Barks ignores the culture surrounding Rumi to commercialize the mystic’s words. Van der Berg set out to change all that and not only referred to older translations of Rumi’s work but referenced his translation into Afrikaans throughout.

On page 101 of his translation, Rumi (in Van der Berg’s words) writes: ‘Die liefdadiges deponeer goud en wat die digter met geskenke, gul, minsaam ag. Hul ag ’n gedig ho?r as veel eerbewys veral as ’n digter pêrels op laat rys.’ Pearls (pêrels) are ‘wise words’ (Van der Berg 2024: 232), so if I were to take these words back into English, they could read: ‘The charitable deposit gold and wait for the poet. Yet a poet is regarded with far more honour, especially if his words are pearled/wise words.’

That is exactly where Lovell and Van der Berg’s presentations meet – not on a sandbank, but in their collective semantics. For what reason indeed do ‘human beings involve themselves in inventing something as ‘impractical’ as poems [it] seems to follow from our status as sapient beings who communicate and can represent boundaries to ourselves’ (D. N. Perkins) – a quote I discovered for my very first long essay on this exact question. And that path:

… that’s made all the difference!