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November 11, 2011
Tags:
Bagg, Junkins, North Dakota Quarterly, poetry, classical, Madonna of the Cello, Cello Suite, ostrakon, Ostrakoi
Review by Donald Junkins in The North Dakota Review, Fall 2009, pp. 190-192
Robert Bagg has one of the few uniquely identifiable voices of his poetic generation at once open and condensed, yet poignantly explicit, probing and multilayered, a voice would one could call Baggian straight talk. In The Tandem Ride, he has compiled a versatile collection of not only a kaleidoscope of imagery and Classical allusions but also a dazzling assortment of personal experience and literary resonance. The distinguishing feature of Bagg's poems, early and late, is that he writes with a deft hand and gliding hawk's eye. He takes his subjects not only to heart but to mind, and the reader receives willingly the full force of both.
A ribbon for Bagg's penetrating diction and his excursions into the heart, for his invitation into the sensual worlds of his and our our own pasts, his minglings of the classical and modern worlds of what it is to be aware and human. No American poet has so updated, dramatized, and clarified within modern experiential settings Greek historical overtones and geographies as has Bagg. His intellectual range is prodigious, and his original diction testifies to his literary perceptions and his openness to human experience. His voice is authoritative and penetrative, and his lines simmer with overtones and undertones rife with wit and melodic in sounds.
In the opening poem, “Ostrakoi”—fragments of clay pots; one use to which 5th century B.C.E. Athenians put them was to find the matching half held by a long-lost relative—he remembers (more…)
November 5, 2011
Tags:
Bagg, Scully, Sophocles, Oedipus, Antigone, Kolonos, Elektra, Aias, Philoktetes, Ajax, Athenian drama, Greek plays, Athenian Theater
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From The Philadelphia Inquirer
Bagg, Scully stress the dramatic
in translating Sophocles
The Complete Plays of Sophocles
A New Translation
Translated by Robert Bagg and James Scully
Harper Perennial. 880 pp. $16.99
Reviewed by Richard Lindsey
There is a pithy old Italian saying: traduttore, traditore - (a translator is a traitor). Sophocles, one of the three major dramatists of Athens in the fifth century B.C., certainly hasn't lacked for betrayers in the last 2,400 years.
So in addressing this new translation of Sophocles' seven surviving plays by poets Robert Bagg and James Scully, the inevitable first question is: Why another translation?
For one thing, every translation, like every betrayal, is different. Because no translation can ever be exact in every way, each one has at least the potential to show us something different about the original work.
For another thing, languages and their users change over time. As the translators point out, although Sophocles' plays "communicate in and through time, translations of them do not. Each generation . . . renders them in the style it believes best suited for tragedy."
The equally inevitable second question is: Why this translation? The answer to this question is less simple and perhaps more provocative.
Bagg and Scully argue that Sophocles has often been translated with a kind of general elevation and elegance that doesn't always reflect what is in fact a quite wide emotional and linguistic range. Although Sophocles' language can certainly be formal, dense, and allusive, some of it is simple, direct, and even blunt. The translators have made a point of trying to highlight these differences.
To translate Sophocles' breadth of expression, Bagg and Scully have required "the resources not only of idiomatic English but also of rhetorical gravitas and, on rare occasion, colloquial English as well." Consequently, they've adopted "a wide and varied palette" for vocabulary and levels of speech, striving for "a language that is spontaneous and generative as opposed to studied and bloodless."
In doing so, (more…)
October 16, 2011
Tags:
Sophocles, review, PerSe
I finished this newly published (2011) volume of translations of the seven existing plays by Sophocles recently. I unhesitatingly recommend this new work of the translators, Robert Bagg and James Scully, as they really did an outstanding job of presenting these powerful dramas with extraordinary lyricism and emotional impact. For your information, I am providing (more…)
February 26, 2011
The Power of Myth
Horsegod: Collected Poems, by Robert Bagg ’57 (IndieReader.com)
Reviewed by Amelia Klein ’00
[Poetry] To read Horsegod is to enter a fairly complete world, a world made coherent by a symbolic logic at once deeply private and derived from the wellsprings of ancient mythology. Robert Bagg is in fact the author (more…)
May 16, 2010
I've withdrawn HORSEGOD: Collected Poems from publication by iUniverse following some disagreements with iUniverse's management. I expect to publish a revised and expanded Collected Poems under a new title next year. Used copies of HORSEGOD are available on Amazon and new copies IndieReader, but these will be drawn down as they are sold.
February 6, 2010
Tags:
Translations hibernation, Complete Sophocles, Richard Wilbur biography
I've removed the Sophocles play excerpts from the site's Translations page, now that HarperCollins plans to publish the versions Jim Scully and I have made of Sophocles' seven plays in August 2011. Some of this material may eventually be restored to this and our sister site, www.staginggreekdrama.com
I'm also one-third of the way through my critical biography of Richard Wilbur––including his fascinating and largely unknown combat service in WWII––and expect to finish the entire project by December, 2011. For Wilbur fans out there, his latest book, Anterooms, will appear in November 2010.
October 29, 2009
Tags:
poemshape.wordpress.com, Gillespie, HORSEGOD, poems, review, poetry, Bagg
Horsegod: Collected Poems by Robert Bagg
October 26, 2009
by Patrick Gillespie
• In exchange for a complimentary copy, I expressed interest in reviewing poetry by poets “in exile” – the self-published. Specifically, I was looking for poets who trade in meter or rhyme, the disciplines of traditional poetry. This book, Horsegod: Collected Poems, by Robert Bagg, was the first book I received. What a great way to start.
Me? A reviewer?
And in addition to this book, I have two more books to review. I ask myself: What if it were my own poetry? No poet wants a comment that discourages readers from reading their work.
I favor criticism that analyzes poetry on its own terms rather than according to the tastes of the reviewer. For an idea of what I mean, check out my post on Marjorie Perloff’s criticism. (What poet wants to read that his or her rhymes are too simplistic when that is precisely the kind of rhymes they are pursuing.) Poets make aesthetic choices, and my own philosophy is not to criticize them for that – but to observe. Let’s see how I do.
About Robert Bagg
Just a couple words, because there’s a perfectly good biography of Bagg at his own website. The thing worth noting (and to my profound envy) is that he met and studied with (more…)
September 28, 2009
Tags:
Bakkhai, rock opera, Euripides, Utah, Larry West
I'm just back from a visit to Salt Lake City to attend a performance of my translation (University of Massachusetts Press, 1978) of THE BAKKHAI by the University of Utah's Theatre Department. I was persuaded to fly out after listening to some of the production numbers (set by composer Joe Payne) posted on the internet and by news that a performance scheduled at Bingham Young University on September 21st (my birthday!) had been cancelled by the BYU Theatre Dept Chair as unsuitable for BYU undergrads. (Apparently it was some same-sex kissing, the maenads' décolletage, (more…)
August 23, 2009
Tags:
Self-publishing, iUniverse, Horsegod, poetry contests, subventions, slanted playing fields
Self-publishing has long been synonymous with vanity publishing of books that can’t pass commercial or literary muster. Most established authors recoil from going that route, though many will also have an unpublished, but cherished, manuscript on their hard drive or in a drawer. While it may never completely shake its historic stigma, self-publishing (more…)
June 21, 2009
Tags:
Poems, Kirkus, Horsegod, Bagg, Review, Editors' Choice
HORSEGOD is moving steadily through the fairly elaborate editing and publication process at iUniverse. So far, I've been impressed by the expert attention my manuscript has received––at least as good as that provided by my trade and university press editors. The initial evaluator was extremely helpful. I accepted virtually all of his/her tough-minded suggestions and strictures, one of which led me to rewrite almost completely my early long poem in 29 Spenserian stanzas, "The Tandem Ride." Curious readers may read it now in its updated version on the Poetry page of this site. iUniverse has also made HORSEGOD an Editor's Choice, which means they'll promote it a bit. It will also be available to bookstores on a free return shipping basis. I'm not sure if that will entice bookstores to stock it, since many are wary of contemporary poetry, except by the Billy Collinses of the genre. But we'll see.
Kirkus Discoveries has issued an the following pre-publication review:
A gorgeous collection that tells the author’s life story in exquisite verse. Bagg writes that he follows Ezra Pound’s dictum, that “poetry should be as well written as prose.” This is curious advice from the Modernist master, since many believe poetry to be the more scrupulous mode—or at least one that requires more careful attention to writing. But after reading a few of Bagg’s poems, readers begin to understand how well written he expects prose to be—and how deeply that expectation has infused his work. In all his verse, the author brings the comprehensibility of prose together with the accuracy of poetry, and accomplishes a near-miracle. Many of his works recall the easy expertise of John Ashbery, another experimenter with prose poems. Listen to the unadorned, unpretentious force with which he announces his mother’s death in the collection’s opening, and perhaps strongest piece, “Ostrakoi”: “The morning Mother died, Dad walked me / through her roses: ‘It’s so unfair … Mom dying / at sixty-two.’” Such economy of language allows for the communication of complex emotion without the embarrassment of showy melodrama. (Another highlight is “The Closest Thing,” the author’s account of his brief brushes with Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, a delicious treat for lovers of 20th-century literature.) Like a well-made shoe, Bagg’s writing is comfortable, durable and put together with meticulous care. But the author is a bit of a cobbler himself, filling his works with myriad allusions to topics from Greek myth to Roman architecture to Dantean tragedy. In the curious “Notes,” the author explains some of his references, but perhaps they are the book’s only real weakness. Bagg seems desperate at times to make sure readers understand his encyclopedic mind, but readers will surely make the effort on their own.
Superb poetry from an established talent.
I agree (in part) with this reviewer's questioning of my 20 pages of notes and have dropped the ones that most poetry fans will not need.
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