Hopewell, NJ, 2018.
Small folio, 9 3/8 x 12 7/8 inches; [10], [82], [2] pp. Japanese linen cloth-covered boards with letterpress-printed Fabriano Roma cover and spine labels.
Snow Watch is published to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the passing of poet and translator Robert Fagles, who died on March 26, 2008. This first edition in book form is made possible by the initiative and support of Lynne Fagles, who selected the poems and translations.
Design, artwork, hand-setting, letterpress printing and binding by David Sellers. The types are Monotype Garamond 156, composed at the letter-foundry of Michael and Winifred Bixler, with additional hand-setting by the printer, and American Type Founders Garamond 459 & 460, hand-set by the printer. The artwork was printed from magnesium photoengravings made from the artist’s drawings by Owosso Graphic Arts in Owosso, Michigan. The paper is Somerset Book, made in England by St Cuthberts Mill, hand-sewn and bound in Japanese linen cloth-covered boards. Printing on the Vandercook Universal I proof press was finished in October 2018.
The edition comprises 35 copies, numbered 1-25 for Lynne Fagles and I-X for the printer’s proofs. Each copy is signed by Lynne Fagles and David Sellers.
In due course the 10 printer’s proofs will be accompanied by a separate suite of the eight prints, printed on dampened vintage hand-made paper, and titled, numbered, and signed by David Sellers. The printer’s proofs, and a portfolio for the separate prints, will be enclosed in cloth-covered clam-shell style book box.
About the poet/translator(courtesy of Penguin Random House): Robert Fagles was Arthur W. Marks ’19 Professor of Comparative Literature, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He was the recipient of the 1997 PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His many translations include Sophocles’s Three Theban Plays, Aeschylus’s Oresteia (nominated for a National Book Award), Homer’s Iliad (winner of the 1991 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award by The Academy of American Poets), and Homer’s Odyssey. For additional information: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/243445/robert-fagles
The Poetry of Robert Fagles by Susan Wheeler
In the hurling rush of “Snow Watch” (1983), Robert Fagles remembers the snow of his own childhood “blanketing . . . over pain oblivion all-enclosing//snow.” Now, at a time when he and his wife Lynne are “parent spirits/dear familiar ghosts aswirl in the eyes of our two daughters,” this snow storm “sweeping in off the Great Plains” begins peaceably but mounts “fast maturing/lashing love to hate and back compassion born of rage/that murderous innocence the only rage worth bearing”.
It is the character of this moment, the furious full-on blizzard with its still eye, that he wishes his daughters in the final couplet, not the “blanket” of snow that was his own childhood solace but
snow, in the calm clear eye of your careen and rearing
bless them now grant our girls momentum not contentment
Momentum, not contentment. His poems – and the translations which were also his poems, his brilliant language giving us the poems he loved for their nerve, their reach, their momentum – not only celebrate but enact speed, life-force, the full force of feeling, in a passionate and precise English.
The early translations of Catullus and Pindar, both poets of passionate enthusiasms (as well as griefs, and grievances), reveal Robert Fagles’ twinning spirit. When we read his Pindar, whose own work was marked for the color and the vigor of its figures and phrases, we hear the arena’s banks before us; we see the horse and car sweeping the track; we watch as the boxer staggers out from the place of his contest and fixes his eyes on land that was ruled by his father before him. We hear Catullus’s relief in setting foot back on Sirmio, anticipating a night in his own bed after a journey; and his wit as he invites Fabullus to dinner as long as Fabullus brings the dinner – all courses must be “sumptuous,” mind you.
Wit, color, passion: these drive Robert Fagles’ own poems. The vigor and momentum of his English is not Whitman’s: an Audenesque restraint holds back hyperbole, and he makes no large claims for himself; he is only representative as one among many. The figures who are emblematic (Jacob, Achilles, Marc Blitztein, JFK – and any soldier in battle) are those for whom circumstances have forced inner passion to coincide with forceful action and, in this apex, “where Good and Bad/square off like warring angels,” embody our own conflicted souls.
He described best the English he wielded in a 1999 interview by Patricia Storace for The Paris Review: “. . . rough and ready on the one hand, ‘high, wide, and handsome’ on the other – strong with a kind of burly courtesy.” Read a poem by Robert Fagles aloud and it sings like a Cole Porter lyric, with a wit so offhand and a propulsion so catchy you won’t be able to stop until the poem itself ends and lets you go. The burly courtesy that drives the music embraces its undertones; in his poems, the warring angels coexist in the language as well. The acknowledgment of both angels, the poems suggest, gives them, and anything and anyone, power.
For the poems are anchored by gravitas. As electrifyingly celebratory as his encomia, fittingly, could be, Pindar did not feint from describing the dismemberment of Pelops and, even in the fire of battle, extolling the force of life found there: “blazing tracks/where heat meets burning heat and a man’s/power flexes tense to the peak/of combat.” Robert Fagles’ own poems tap the fierce oncoming of this power, but bring a grieving to its path; we are always aware that the persons in his poems – be them the speaker or the characters – are caught in the best and the worst of their deepest natures. It is as though hindsight moves the bass-line through his meters, and the anticipation of death is always present.
Where we are caught off-guard (and, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson on what makes a poem good, where the tops of our heads lift off) is in the acknowledgment that this grief, too, carries as much of our vital natures as the surge of victory. This is enacted in his language itself, as in his poem for George Seferis, “Orestes,” where the six lines in each of three stanzas improvise on the lines of the prior stanza. The race for victory is glorious in the first stanza –
the fast banked turns where the names of the stallions float
and the axles whir in the wind and the eyes look on
and sing his praises high in the victor’s car
he lifts his arms to the crowd and the sun comes over
– while in the second stanza, these same middle lines acknowledge
the murderous turns where the stallions strain for air
and the axles heat under foot your knees are buckling
yes and conscience cries you on it lashes you on
and mother sea is lost and the sun blacks out
– or, the heavy, driven cost of that victory. But the poem does not stop there. The third stanza fuses these frames, and we understand that instead of frames, what we have been given is the whole glorious, tragic picture. Here is the final stanza:
down rockfalls how many rockfalls more on the track
the crucial turns where the breakneck stallions plunge
and the axles screech in flames and the furies race
my heart beats faster headlong on on I can see
the great gods laughing on the heights the acropolis
look the impossible sunrise blazing dead ahead
The “and and and” of parataxis here only heightens the urgency, and the “blazing” beside the “dead” – or the contradictory, the “impossible” – is what brings out the gods’ laughter and beats the driver’s heart faster. We have not been given a morality tale: the poem has not clucked at the cost of sport. We have been given a race fully breathed and felt and run.
The same formal arrangement (three stanzas of six lines each, almost operating as strophe, antistrophe and epode) appears in “Achilles and Hector,” one of three poems wherein we become Achilles, forced to inhabit his actions by the second person voice. Robert Fagles’ forms are opportunistic – the formal arrangement each poem takes is fashioned for the demands of the poem – and yet they are worn lightly. We always feel the armature on which the poem is shaped, and its pressure on the surging lines lends them further energy. The seven-line stanzas of the harrowing “Aerial Reconnaissance,” with their internal rhymes, their vowel rhymes, their slant rhymes, gently nudge the reader’s “naked eye” into focus, direct that eye to the “thin gray line” at the Birkenau extermination unit and, finally, lead us, with the speaker, into the line itself.
Beside him, we see the man in the poem reach for his wife, his daughters, and we see him shoved off,
where we belong, thank God,
here in a day when such things
are clearly unimaginable –
facing this blank white page
blank as the smoke in the photograph
or the light-years to come
blank as the eye of God
That eye, again: the “calm clear” eye of the storm. Or: our “naked eye,” open to the world, which is, to the statement’s contrary, quite able to imagine the unspeakable and to speak – write – it in the blank white storm that both blankets and blows, the momentum of a life lived passionately. About Susan Wheeler:https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/susan-wheeler
Note: Images are slightly cropped for website fitting.
