Proteus Bound: Selected Translations, 2008-2020 by Ryan Wilson. Franciscan University Press, 2021. 224 pp. $15.00 (paper)

Ryan Wilson’s Proteus Bound compiles twelve years of short translations into a single volume of protean versatility and vision. The scope of its literary pilgrimage is impressive. From Catullus, Horace, and Sappho to Saints Francis and Ambrose, to Dante and Petrarch, all the way to selected French Symbolists and beyond: forty-three different poets, if the Anacreontea’s collective authors count as one. But Wilson’s book is no mere miscellany. It is a quest, both personal and literary, as Wilson offers in his preface: “[T]his book is, perhaps, the most personal I’ll ever write, in that it reveals, however obliquely or imperfectly, ‘scenes’ from my private Theo-Drama”—that is, the drama of a spiritual life played out against the broader context of a Christian vision—“that may not ever find their way into print as original poems” (“Preface: Proteus Among the Monuments”).

This is a remarkable passage. The yardstick for any translation’s success is often assumed to be fidelity to its source, yet Dryden’s classic categories (metaphrase, paraphrase, and imitation) acknowledge that translators must engage in creative reinvention in order to arrive at versions both recognizable and readable. Wilson accepts these terms, viewing his own work here as encompassing all three categories, with most qualifying as paraphrase—that middle ground between metaphrase (word-for-word translation) and imitation (freer versions with significant departures). What’s remarkable is Wilson’s invitation that readers follow a personal thread throughout the book—not to hunt for ego-driven disclosures, but to engage the subtler mysteries of spiritual growth that animate his versions (Wilson dubs them “conversions”) in subtle ways.

To Wilson, the poet is “a kind of shapeshifter, one who imaginatively assumes the likeness of whatever is beheld by the speculative faculty”—hence, kin to the mythic Greek herdsman of sea-dwelling creatures who knows past, present, and future but resists telling all he knows (“Preface: Proteus Among the Monuments”). Like Proteus, too, the translator is guided by text and context into producing a transfigured self—a fusion of original author and linguistic intermediary, pledged to honor both voices and to reconcile their differences. What’s easily said in one language may be difficult in another, but Wilson, ever inventive, grasps an important truth: although the translator must be willing to change shape as needed, or as languages necessitate, shape matters all the same. Throughout the book, Wilson’s commitment to preserving—or at least suggesting— each original’s verbal music is confirmed by his assured treatment of meter, rhyme, and other formal qualities.

Not that Wilson shows undue restraint, either. His approach to poète maudit Charles Baudelaire’s ironic sonnet “Le Mort joyeux” (“The Happy Dead” in Wilson’s version) is a case in point. Like most of Baudelaire’s metrical translators, Wilson knows that the bounce and surge of Baudelaire’s mostly twelve-syllable lines have no viable English equivalent. Iambic pentameter will do, and Wilson’s tone is suitably urgent (rightly histrionic, too): “Worms! Dark companions with no eye or ear, / Behold a corpse that comes in joy, not dread…” The poem’s opening quatrains preserve Baudelaire’s abab cdcd pattern, but the concluding tercet pair rhymes differently: eef gfg (Baudelaire) versus efg gef (Wilson). Still, the priority is not to mirror the original blindly but to achieve a compelling closure. Addressing those worms, Wilson does not disappoint:

Festive philosophers, children of rot,

Through my remains, therefore, with no sad thought,
Come tell me if some torture’s left to fear
For this old body, soulless, dead among the dead!

The translation’s final hexameter line, a foot longer than the rest, feels longer, too, successfully approximating the duration of the French in which a medial caesura at “et” (“and”) creates a mid-line pause (“Pour ce vieux corps sans âme et mort parmi les morts!”). Wilson’s translation wisely steers between the strictures of two languages, making intelligent tradeoffs as needed in order to craft a better poem.

Whether “The Happy Dead” is a defiant gesture toward mortality or an anguished surrender (for Baudelaire and Wilson), its final query—“Come tell me if some torture’s left to fear”—reflects the age-old question: is there an afterlife? St. Francis of Assisi’s thirteenth-century Umbrian psalm “Cantico delle creature” (rendered in English as “Canticle of the Creatures” by Wilson and others), addresses the same question from the standpoint of Christian belief:

Praise be You, my Lord, for bodily death, our sister,
From whom no living human can escape:
… Blessèd are those whom she shall find in Your most holy Will,
For the second death shall do no harm to them.

The canticle’s “creatures” are not animals but creatures in a sense that harks back to the Latin creare or creatura: that which is created. Named here are “Master Sun, our brother,” “sister moon,” the stars, wind, water, fire, air, more—and “bodily death.” But St. Francis is unafraid: his Christian faith compels him, instead, to celebrate Creation’s marvels and to view the “second death”—the spiritual one—as “harmless.” (Judeo-Christian readings of the term “second death” vary a good deal but include separation from God, Hell’s torments, and other possibilities.) Wilson is not alone in sharing either Baudelaire’s doubt or St. Francis’ faith.

Elsewhere, Wilson’s pagan streak is evident. Ancient Rome’s “Catullus III,” about a girl’s dead sparrow, either embraces the conventions of the pet elegy by applying undue ceremony to a trivial death, or serves as humorous “elegy” to the loss of male sexual power. (I’m not a Latinist, but the Internet informs me “passer” may indicate “sparrow” or “penis”—such are the risks that we translators take.) The second reading is certainly tempting: “O evil deed! O bird of suffering! / It’s your work now that, while my darling cries, / She turns to me with red and puffy eyes.” The translator, however, plays it straight: “While many readers find this a lascivious poem, I have chosen to render it as I read it: a gentle and charming blend of sympathy and silliness,” Wilson says in an end note. His slightly heightened style serves the subject well, as does the use of pentameter and alternating rhymes:

Weep now, you Venuses and Cupids, weep
You charming men in Venus’s employ!
My darling’s sparrow sleeps an endless sleep,
My darling’s sparrow’s dead, her pride and joy.

Whether the speaker is playfully teasing a girl for her excess of sorrow (personally, I think it’s tough to lose a beloved pet), or mourning lost priapic powers, I like to think Wilson would be pleased to know he succeeds whether we accept the poem as innocent or prefer the double entendre’s amusements. (The girl, incidentally, may be no girl at all but Catullus’s lover, the wife of a Roman aristocrat.)

Wilson’s elegant, judicious approach to translation reaps dividends throughout the book. In rhymed couplet tetrameters both lively and light-hearted, his reinvented Anacreontea bear the Dionysian stamp of their anonymous creators: “Upon this lovely lotus laid / Underneath soft myrtles’ shade, / I’ll drink till all my cares recede / With Love himself my Ganymede” (“Anacreontea XXXII”). Wilson’s German language translations are accomplished also: Georg Trakl’s scavenging corvids “trouble the brown quietudes / Of a field rapt in its own private trance,” then “like a funeral procession fade / Away on winds that quiver with delight” (“The Ravens”). Rilke’s famous feline predator paces these pages as well, trapped behind what seems like “a thousand bars / And out beyond the thousand bars no world” (“The Panther”). There are surprises here, including Tristan Corbière’s “The Toad” (“Do you not see his glittering eye… / No: he creeps, cold, beneath his stone”) and Gérard de Nerval’s sonnet in French “El Desdichado” (Wilson retains the Spanish title which serves Nerval as reference to the outcast protagonist of Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe). Another unexpected gift: three poems by Paul Claudel, onetime French diplomat, and younger brother of noted sculptor Claudine Claudel. Of these, my favorite is the prose poem “December,” notable for its ambivalent evocation of a stark season, compellingly voiced by Wilson: “These December afternoons are gentle. Nothing in them speaks of the tormenting future….From so much grass and from so great a harvest, nothing remains but scattered straw and withered stuff; icy water mortifies the ploughed earth.”

The opposite is true of Ryan Wilson’s Proteus Bound, a great harvest indeed and one thoughtfully gathered into this generous volume. It is refreshing to hear him speak of the authors he translates in terms that are not abstract but deeply felt: “So it is that the translator who translates widely and with some depth may come to feel the translated authors congregating within himself, inhabiting him.” Poignantly, he continues, “I have turned repeatedly to translation to bring the light of speech to those hushed and tenebrous chambers of the heart for which I cannot, or have not yet, come independently to articulate language.” As translator, Wilson is not invisible but an active force: he absorbs the voices of those whose words inspire his own—their spirit, in a way; and yet, he knows they’ve beaten him to the punch: these “strangers, ancient and modern, across millennia and geographies and tongues” have already found words for his own unexpressed experience (“Preface: Proteus Among the Monuments”). No wonder the book is called Proteus Bound: the mythic figure who repeatedly changes shape to avoid serving as captured oracle echoes the poet’s struggle to grant form to feeling: the wrestling of language into its necessary shape, the conversion of inchoate turmoil into clarifying verse. (Wilson’s honest humility reflects the self-examination of a serious artist who is also a scholar, editor of Literary Matters, and faculty member at the Catholic University of America. His outstanding debut, The Stranger World, received the 2017 Donald Justice Prize, with praise from former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky.)

“Obliquely” and “imperfectly,” then, we glimpse Wilson’s own biography, the elements of his “Theo-Drama” only partially illuminated. Still, Wilson’s “Autopsychograph” (a “conversion” of “Autopsycografia,” a mini-ars poetica by Portugal’s revered Fernando Pessoa) is a useful reminder that searching for authors (or their translators) in the text of their own work is both impossible and easy: they are nowhere and everywhere, uniquely themselves yet archetypal, their inner lives ever elusive yet not so different from our own.

The poet is the one who feigns.
He so completely fakes the real
He even fakes the awful pains
And sufferings that he does feel.

If the translator, too, is a faker whose mask is meant to seem authentic, he succeeds because he locates a genuine self in the course of his impersonation. Whether it is the author’s, his own, or some fusion of the two is beside the point: love, death, loneliness, pleasure, fear, and more belong to every human life. For Wilson, whose Christian stance requires spiritual vigilance, translation is an expression of love—in particular for those authors to whose excellence he aspires: “The originals of the poems in this book have all been important to me, have transformed me over many years, and out of love for those poems, I have attempted to transform them into English” (“Preface: Proteus Among the Monuments”). In these versions, Wilson has risen to the task for which his proem seeks blessing in the voice of ancient Sparta’s Alcman. (“The Kerylos” of the title may be kingfisher, heron, or a product of imagination).

                    If only I could be
The kerylos, and soar among the halcyons
Above the flower of the cresting wave, heart free
From grief, a holy bird, the purple of the sea…