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Elliot Roberts: Like the wings of the great blue heron lifting for flight, your left hand beached against your side trembles, moved by forces beyond your control like golden leaves of quaking aspen, translucent brilliance that brings tears.

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Your voice fills the air with the music of aspen of the heron in flight, moved by forces beyond your control, by the silent wind that touches all. Your hand trembles on the aged bow of your body and your voice wings through the air, singing

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of the lands beyond the sea. Morton Marcus: That was Elliot Roberts, tonight's guest on the poetry show reading, "Quaking Aspen," poem for William Iverson. Tonight, we will be talking to him. Stay tuned.

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Good evening everybody, this is Mort Marcus, and this is the Poetry Show and tonight we are talking with Elliot Roberts, who is the author of several chapbooks, "The Sweet Taste," and, "To Marry After Eight." He also is the editor of a college

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reading textbook, called, "Bridges," and his poems have appeared in small towns, road stops and cafes, the Point Lobos historical association newsletter, Mira and many, many other places. Elliot, welcome to the Poetry Show.

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Elliot Roberts: Thank you, glad to be here, Morton. Morton Marcus: Well, it's good to have you and as I do with all of the people who first come on, I ask the question, what got you into writing? When did you decide that you were going to be

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a poet, or you knew that you had a calling that had to be fulfilled, let's say? Elliot Roberts: Well, I'm not sure I ever made a conscious decision about it. I think the only really conscious decision

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I've made recently is to devote more of my life now to the writing of poetry. I think I can remember back to the time I was in grade school when I wrote a poem which my teacher loved and somehow, the only image I remember are ants crawling along

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a tombstone, but poetry has always intrigued me. I've always enjoyed it and I just found myself starting to write and so it was just a part of my life. Not that I made any particular conscious choice, just that it was something I did like breathe

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and eat and walk. Morton Marcus: Did you do it after you started to teach, or were you doing it even before then? Elliot Roberts: Well, I was doing it before then. I remember

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I wrote one very, very long poem, a love poem, when I was still in college, which I think really kind of got me started and since then, I've just been writing when, I guess, when I'm moved greatly, or when I feel there's something I have to say.

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Morton Marcus: Okay, this does get us on to the next question I was gonna ask, which is, what do you feel you want to accomplish in the writing of poetry, if anything? Elliot Roberts: Well, that's hard to say because I'm not

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really certain why I write totally, but what I find is, I think it's more almost the act of writing, which is the important thing for me, it's kind of like, if you've ever thrown a pot, you get so involved in the whole process

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that you lose a sense of self, and it's just you and clay that you're working with, and when I work on a poem, the same kind of thing happens, there's a kind of loss of self. It's almost, in a way, very much like a religious experience, and I think reading

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is the same way whether it's my own work or even the work of other poets. There's something that happens, which has a transforming quality to it, which is very difficult to pinpoint, but which really puts me in a different space and a

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different place, and I think in terms of writing, it's really that is, for me, one of the most important things. Most of my poems also deal with, or relate to, many of them, to other people and in a way I'm writing in many ways to set straight

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relationships or to come to some better understanding, and in a way the poem has that kind of quality and it can be a very healing process to. It's hard to, it's really hard once again to pinpoint it all, but in a way, almost each poem has its

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own history and its own reason for being written, so it's really hard for me to, to say that I just I do it for a particular reason. Morton Marcus: Well, we will be talking to you tonight and I

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certainly want to hear some of those poems for those people out there. I should also say that Elliot has worked with musicians and he has been translating from different dialects of what we would consider East Indian language like Hindi or Tagalog,

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not Tagalog but telugu, Telugu, right, and we have been listening, in fact, a very intriguing music is by David Clay, who you did a show with and you'll be doing another show with him won't you at the Cherry Foundation?

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Elliot Roberts: Right, at the Cherry Center for the Arts on March 31st, David and I will be doing an Evening with David Clay and Elliot Roberts, poetry and music, discovering new things about both the music and about the poetry. I think, for me,

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that's the most exciting thing about working with artists in different fields is that as the works of art reverberate against each other, you not only have the work of art, but then their relationship to each other and that in a way, allows you to say

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hear music differently, or to hear a poem differently or to see a picture differently. Morton Marcus: Well, it is intriguing music and we'll be playing it throughout the show at different break times, and

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we'll remind people about this performance at the end of the show, but right now, Elliot, why don't you read for us several of the poems especially, maybe we'll start out with that one because I actually don't know them, I know most of your nature

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work. Those poems may be dealing with people, though you can read whatever you want, of course, obviously and what you would consider to be, you know, healing poetry, which is very interesting.

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Elliot Roberts: Okay, well, this particular poem is about my father and actually, it evolved from an actual event, which was my father was walking up to the studio where he was going to stay at my house and he happened to fall. He tripped and fell,

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and as he fell I reached out to grab him and missed and he fell, and fortunately, he didn't hurt himself but somehow, that image of him falling outside my reach seemed very appropriate of our relationship and, in a way, trying to define that and to, in

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a way coming to accept it, not that I've discovered my father doesn't love me, but rather that it's very difficult for him to communicate and to express things. And so, in a way, this poem is a poem which is healing in the sense that I'm accepting

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that, accepting the fact that my father will always be the way he is, and that will be just beyond my reach. And so this poem is called, "My Father Falling." MY FATHER FALLING

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Falls off the walkway, as lightly as an autumnal Sycamore leaf falls. He slips away so gently, I reach but he is beyond my reach, falling, falling under the branches of the redwood tree that fills the night air with redwood scent. He falls into

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rich dark garden loam among ripe garden fruit beyond my outstretched hands. Oh, there will be other falls beyond my reach, other falls less soft, in hotel rooms a continent away, on concrete streets of distant cities, falls which cut and

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bruise. Then, will come the fall and he will fall forever beyond my outstretched hands, just as I fall now, weighted with the knowledge that my father falling will always be beyond my reach. Morton Marcus: Very nice. You know, at times I think that what

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we do is recognize those moments of connection between an actual event and that event becoming a metaphor, and when it happens, because, of course, you can't make it happen and you got to be there to see this connection. It really is magical and that

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certainly seems to be one of those areas, or does that happen to you a lot? Elliot Roberts: Well, actually, in terms of my poetry, I think that's really where the poem leads me, in terms of discovery,

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is the image itself and then discovering the meaning of the image. Everything, of course comes from within within ourselves and the act of my father falling is a physical act outside of me, but the actual act itself becomes metaphoric,

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when suddenly I realize what it means on a very deeper level to me. And in my poems, I try to do that, I try to find the metaphorical meaning in the images that had come up before me. For example, I'm not certain this is quite like a metaphor,

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but I try to ground my poems in the truly physical world and this actually happened. I was in Mexico and I just finished eating fish, an order of fried fish, when one of my- actually one of my colleagues who was vacationing with me came up to

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tell me that my mother had died, and I remember walking down the beach, sitting down, weeping, and then I came back and I wrote this poem and the only thing that I changed about it later was simply to take the first line and make it the title, but

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the poem simply came out entire- simply because somehow I picked out all the physical details to fit the metaphor. AND WHEN WORD CAME OF MY MOTHER'S DEATH I had just finished an order of pescado frito, fried fish. I had

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picked clean the spinal column, lifting it entire and whole from the meat and skin. I had sucked the meat from the cavities of the head, had crunched and eaten the crispy tail and fins, leaving nothing edible, just the way my mother would go with

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boiled lobster, picking and sucking meat from every cavity, from every crevice, from every hidden chamber, even the spiny, spindly, reed-thin legs, leaving behind nothing, nothing but their shell.

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Morton Marcus: Just continue, just anything you wanna read and make comments for our listeners out there. That's great. Well, I'll make comments then since I'm back on the air here. In that one, for the people out there, what Elliott has done is

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he just leaves the image. He lets the image have its own power and makes no connections whatsoever. Just the comparison of him eating fish and the way his mother eats fish and what leaving the empty shell means, which is really all that's left

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of her now and the reality of the person has gone and only his memory keeps it going. Elliot Roberts: That, and I think more. Actually, some of the things that intrigued me about some of the poems I write

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is that when I read them later, I find other things in them that I hadn't seen before and there's that too, there's that, and it's not the empty shell, but the bare shell. And in a way, this is a celebration poem, and it's a celebration of how my mother

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lived her life and what she taught me and the fact that there is nothing but bare shell, in a way, turns out, I think, to be a positive image. Morton Marcus: Okay because you both have zest in living which

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is the act of eating. Elliot Roberts: Well, that too, but that there's no like, rotting meat left, that our relationship in a way has been sucked dry in the sense that it's, I mean, there's nothing

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left hanging and which I think is what, in a way, what this poem is about. The, I mean, one what I've learned from her, about enjoying life, about zestfullness in life and, of course, through her and her concern for food, which- which

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is very appropriate to her, but also simply in terms of the relationship, it being complete, finished. I mean, not in the sense of just that she's now dead, but also that I'm not feeling any regrets, really, only love and not grief in a

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way. Morton Marcus: Great, good. I like these explanations still. Elliot Roberts: It may change tomorrow. Well, I'll read one other poem and this one gave me a great deal of difficulty, and

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finally, what I discovered was, I was unable to articulate what I was trying to say, and the only way I really could articulate it was through an image. The poem in its original versions had more kind of analytical conclusions to it and

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it just didn't work, nothing clicked, and in part because what I wanted to say was too complex to say in words, it only could be said in images. And it seems to me that that's the value of metaphor and that's the value of image, is that it

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allows for that complexity, but it's a complexity which can only be articulated through the image. It can't really be fully articulated any other way. And this is called, "The Lightness of Wings, The Heaviness of Bones," and it's about my

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relationship with my three children and the- the really kind of an acceptance of what needs to happen in life. THE LIGHTNESS OF WINGS, THE HEAVINESS OF BONES. My son caws at me, sullen as a jay waiting on a redwood limb

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for picnickers to leave so he can forage for scraps. He will not come while I sit here, and when I move toward him, even when I have bread in my hand, with one last angry caw, he flies away, disappears into the shadows of the redwoods on the

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far side of the Big Sur. I could chase after my eldest daughter all day, like a dog chases after sandpipers on Carmel Beach, splashing back and forth through the surf as the birds skim over the waves, wheel and turn, wheel and turn, while the dog barks

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and settles heavily in the sand as the birds alight at the ocean's frothy edge. My other daughter stands in distant silence, still erect like an egret on the mud flats of Morro Bay, a safe distance between herself and the shore. Ready for

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flight, she keeps a wary eye on me. Were I to step onto the flats, I would sink up to my ankles and she would be gone with a beating of wings. Not hollow bird bones these, neither feathered wings nor feathered tail, oh, the lightness of

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wings, the heaviness of bones. Morton Marcus: Very, very nice and that just does let the images- after you give the children their images, you just let the image do its work, that's something very hard for a

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young poet to learn and even some of us older ones. Elliot Roberts: I have David Gitin to thank for a lot of that. He looked at some of my poems and just said, you're too verbose, and showed me how to cut them down.

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Morton Marcus: David has been on this program several times and is certainly I mean, his poems are just pardon the pun, cut to the bones, right? Okay, Elliot, go on, these are marvelous family poems, a marvelous poem about one's children and the

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sense of their own life that they have, which is separate from your own and which you cannot enter anymore, I hope you realized, than you could enter your father's life. So, we're stuck alone, right?

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Elliot Roberts: Well, I'm not sure about that. I've got some more poems to write about my father yet, so and I think poems which deal more with kind of accepting things the way they are, and actually, I have a series of poems I'm working on

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right now called the language of love, at least tentatively, and where what I'm trying to explore, and I think this may be one of not just the tragedies in my own life, not necessary a tragedy, one of the difficulties of my own life and maybe one of

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the tragedies of many people is that, different people speak different languages of love, they express their love differently and unfortunately, many times it doesn't meet the needs of the people they're loving. And so, there's this

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tremendous miscommunication, like my father can express his love a certain way, but it's not a way that meets my needs and so, there's this kind of tragic lack of communication, where one has to learn the language of love of other people on how it's

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expressed and I guess at the same time, recognize one's own needs, and to accept that they're not really going to be met because the person can't express love that way. And this became very clear to me with my father and- but I'm beginning to

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see that it's also true with other members of my family as well. So, I hope to have a series of poems called the language of love exploring that, and hoping, coming to some resolution about it. This particular poem is a poem for my

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oldest daughter, and our relationship has been a stormy one at times, and now we seem to have worked many, many things out and this poem was one way of doing that. In fact, I think it's easier for me to express myself poetically than it is

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face to face in a way, maybe that's a cowardly way out, but this poem was written for her and it's one where I tried to deal with our relationship and also to, perhaps, put it in terms of a language of love which which meets both our

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needs. Morton Marcus: Is this the daughter who's an egret? Elliot Roberts: Uh no, this is the daughter who flitz along the shore with a dog chasing after her. Okay and this is:

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30 LINES FOR MY DAUGHTER ON HER 30TH BIRTHDAY and it's for Barry. A gift, you lay in your mother's arms, she cradled you, counted fingers, baby corn and toes, snow peas, again and again,

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smiled and said, "look, she's perfect." In the supermarket, you stood in the front of the cart, shouted, "Hi, hi, hi!" to startled shoppers who smiled as like a ship's figurehead you broke through the ocean of their sadness. In the woods, you

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disappeared over an embankment. I leaped over without looking, fell next to you into the berry brambles, a lifetime of picking out thorns. Boyfriend, brother and you in Point Lobos past me, running in the opposite direction. Your skin's dappled

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by tree filtered sunlight, three sleek cheetas. You and I thunder at each other, lightning strike, twisted, splintered heart, the trunk split, fell apart. You glowing, the sun itself, played your dulcimer and sang sweetly to the grandfather, who would

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not hear such music but listened to yours. All those times I drove unawares with the hammer of my anger nails into your bones reaching the marrow. I would not chance this cold, cold ocean, but you have served among harbor seals and sea lions and

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gazed into the blue eyes of cormorants. On Thanksgiving, you drew up your reserve of courage, came home, juiced carrots and beets. Hesitant, I sipped and drank even the dregs. On this, your birthday, I give thanks again for this gift, this

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potion. I drink it slowly. Mmmm, perfect. Morton Marcus: Marvelous, great stuff. Elliot Roberts: Thank you. Morton Marcus: We are going to take a musical break now and

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we'll be back with some announcements and we'll be back with some recordings Elliot has made as a translator and also with the musician who we'll be listening to right now, who is David Clay and whose work we're listening to is "Jig" and I

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believe now we're into the digital clock. So, Elliot once more we are with you and we've been listening to poems that you have written mostly now about your family, and I know that you teach and have taught for a number of

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years at Monterey Peninsula College. You have organized a number of readings down in the Monterey area, readings by such well-known people as Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, Jane Hirshfield, and William Stafford, to mention a few.

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So, Elliot, once more we are with you and we've been listening to poems that you have written mostly now about your- your family, and I know that you teach and have toured for a number of years at Monterey Peninsula College. You have

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organized a number of readings down in the Monterey area, readings by such well-known people as Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, Jane Hirshfield, and William Stafford, to mention a few. What I did not ask you was, where are you from?

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Elliot Roberts: Well, I was born and raised in Brooklyn. Morton Marcus: You see, I knew those answers were so good, so sharp. What happened to your accent Elliot? Elliot Roberts: Well, I worked real hard in getting rid of it

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because I grew up in Brooklyn and then when I went into teaching, I figured it would work against me, so I stopped talking like that. Morton Marcus: You just stopped talking like that?

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Elliot Roberts: Well, I worked on it. Morton Marcus: That's amazing. Okay, I've been out here for I don't know how many years and people can tell where I'm from immediately. I guess I haven't worked on it hard enough.

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Elliot Roberts: Well, maybe it wasn't an issue for you. Actually, that's another thing I'll be writing about too. Morton Marcus: When did you come out here? How many years ago did you come out here?

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Elliot Roberts: Well, we first came to, we've kind of worked our way across country, spent two years- well, went up to Ithaca for a couple of years and then I was in Ohio for two years and then Berkeley for three years, and we were at Berkeley

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from '62 to '65, and '65 we went down to Monterey where I was offered the teaching position at Monterey Peninsula College. So, we've been living in California since 1962. Morton Marcus: Wow, very interesting. I would have never

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guessed it, but marvelous. Elliot Roberts: Yeah. Well, I imagine had I stayed in Brooklyn, my imagery would be very different. Morton Marcus: Yes. I mean, you really have embraced the coast

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imagery and very much in the tradition of Jeffers and William Iverson who the first poem that you read was dedicated to. Elliot Roberts: Well, what's kind of interesting is, I very distinctly remember there was when I was teaching in Ohio, in

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1962, and one of my colleagues and who became a close friend and was a very, very fine poet who was then several years after we came to California, was tragically killed in a car accident, but he was in the local bar absolutely soused and

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lamenting the death of this particular poet, whom I had never heard of before and that was Robinson Jeffers. And it's kind of amazing how Jeffers still was not within the so-called canon of literature, you take college texts and

00:29:03.700 - 00:29:25.300

college anthologies and you're lucky to find a single poem by Jeffers. And when I came here, I kind of discovered Jeffers and also Eric Barker whom we talked about earlier on your show and William Iverson and- I do feel a lot of the- what I like about

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Jeffers especially is his line, his poetic line and that kind of line, you know, line which goes beyond the edge of the paper really. And also, that kind of very strong, well the the use of the images from the coast and that kind of driving narrative

00:29:43.780 - 00:30:03.460

quality to his poetry, so it is the same landscape, I mean, that I look at, and sometimes I see it very differently, other times, I don't. Other times, I'm actually, in a way, I kind of agree with Jeffers' vision and I have written several poems which

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express that kind of agreement. Morton Marcus: Do you want to read one of those, or I mean, that's up to you. Elliot Roberts: Let me see if I can find it.

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Morton Marcus: Okay, you know, while you're looking for that, there's a marvelous poem on Robinson Jeffers by Czeslaw Milosz, have you ever seen that? Well, it's when he moves out to California, he writes a poem to confront Jeffers and Jeffers'

00:30:28.710 - 00:30:46.560

vision, which is also confronting the Nordic vision and he plays it against his own Slavic vision. It is an unbelievable poem and he rejects Jeffers, you know, because there is a totally different psyche, which he will not let go and

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I've got to send you that poem. Come on, anyway, read. Elliot Roberts: Okay, this is called, "On Reading the Fate of the Earth," and if you remember that series of articles in the New Yorker and also which then later came as a book, looks at

00:31:05.910 - 00:31:25.560

the world in terms of what will happen in the event of a nuclear holocaust and the fact that given the uniqueness of the human creation in the event of a nuclear war and the destruction of humanity, the earth, this one will never happen again, this is

00:31:25.710 - 00:31:45.860

our one time around. And so, this is: ON READING THE FATE OF THE EARTH, for Robinson Jeffers. I hear, in rock, your silence above roar of surf, storm wind, gull screech, seal, sea lion yelp. You watch in

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craggy-featured disinterest. Should this world blaze through human foolishness, hot wind, scour ocean, crown Cypress in flames, incinerate birds in flight, vaporize the living. You would continue to watch in stony silence. Old man, you are

00:32:05.000 - 00:32:20.060

patient, you would sit deep in granite for a million years, alone with ocean and sun and river valley and with the light, observe in the foaming soup beneath you, new non-human beginnings.

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Morton Marcus: The thing about the translations, why don't you tell us something about the translations and at the same time, hand me the tape so that I can have this all queued up and we will go and it is side one, right? Okay.

00:32:45.770 - 00:33:05.180

Elliot Roberts: Okay, well, along with one of my colleagues at Monterey Peninsula College, J S R L Narayana Murthy, I've been involved in translating two Telugu poets, and Telugu was one of the four Dravidian tongues spoken in Southern India, and

00:33:05.210 - 00:33:23.270

Murthy is from that area, so he is fluent in that particular language, and so, we worked together on these translations. The first of which is called Sudha, Nectar, and it's by a contemporary Telugu poet by the name of Chalam and there were

00:33:23.270 - 00:33:44.420

two other translators with us, Souris Pramoda, who is Chalam's daughter, and Julie Wellings, and this particular poem is- Chalam was very within the Telugu language, the Telugu tongue, was very, very well known especially as a political

00:33:44.420 - 00:34:00.470

and social rebel, and his main area of writing was the novel. He has two collections of poetry, and this is one of them, and this particular poem, actually, it's a series of poems but also a single poem chronicling his spiritual

00:34:00.470 - 00:34:18.290

enlightenment and in the tradition, Indian tradition. It's 108 lines, 108 being a holy number, and it begins with his physical awakening in the morning, and ends with his spiritual awakening at the very end of the poem. And the second,

00:34:18.290 - 00:34:42.500

and this was published in 1990, by Motilal Banarsidass in New Delhi, India and it is part of the UNESCO series of literature. Well, it's called the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works, Indian series, and Murthy and I also translated a 17th

00:34:42.500 - 00:35:07.040

century Telugu poet by the name of Vemana, and this particular book called, "Verses of Vemana," will be published this year, the date is March I think, by this Sahitya Academi in Bangalore and this is a poet was an oral poet and his verses were transcribed

00:35:07.040 - 00:35:21.800

onto banana leaves and it's from the banana leaf manuscripts that most of the modern additions have come forth and he wrote, some 3000 poems have been attributed to him, and we have collected about 350 in our edition.

00:35:22.910 - 00:35:40.070

Morton Marcus: Do I figure that most of them are short? Elliot Roberts: Yes, actually the well, the Sudha, Chalam's poems are not short and Chalam was very unconventional in terms of his poetry. Vemana, however, it was pretty formulaic, all of

00:35:40.070 - 00:35:58.310

his poems, or most of his poems, are within a particular set form, most of them have four lines, the last line being a formulaic line, which we decided to omit in our translation, simply because our translation was going to be a visual

00:35:58.310 - 00:36:09.290

translation, not an oral presentation. Morton Marcus: Chalam is contemporary, and what about Vemana? Elliot Roberts: Vemana is- they- generally people say around the

00:36:09.290 - 00:36:23.210

17th century, somewhere in the 17th century, and so most of them in his poems are of four lines with the last line being a formulaic line. Morton Marcus: Okay, let's go to Chalam now, and then we'll come

00:36:23.210 - 00:36:37.300

back to Vemana and what you'll be obviously reading yourself it's not on a recording. Elliot Roberts: Right, the recording is of Murthy and I doing a bilingual reading of the some of the first poems in

00:36:37.300 - 00:36:48.370

Sudha. Morton Marcus: Okay, and then when we come back, I'd like to ask you about those formulaic lines that you have omitted right now, here for the people out there is in the original

00:36:48.370 - 00:38:26.620

language and then Eliot reading his translations of the poet Chalam. J S R L Narayana Murthy: [Foreign Language - Telugu] [Foreign Language - Telugu]

00:38:32.850 - 00:38:50.940

Elliot Roberts: The lord of night, yearning for a last glance from you, waits at the window with cupped hands. The cool sunshine arriving at the bedside is inviting your mind sunken sleep to the celebration of a new day. The cool mountain

00:38:50.940 - 00:41:05.460

breeze attracted by the fragrance of kaitiaki, tangled in the mysterious dark recesses of your hair is begging be released. Open your eyes. J S R L Narayana Murthy: [Foreign Language - Telugu]

00:39:50.270 - 00:40:10.210

Elliot Roberts: Come with me to our natural, the shadow of the banyan tree, the flow of the waterfall, a song on your lips and you by my side drunk with the honey from newly blossom flowers, the sunbirds singing with intoxication, the waves of

00:40:10.300 - 00:40:32.080

wind touching softly with the smoothness of tender Ravi leaves the temple bells ringing in the distance. The Shadows of clouds and circling the peak the fragrance of mountain grass and wild Jasmine from the spheres of the sky. The plaintiff call of

00:40:32.170 - 00:41:32.420

the eagle the longing cry of the dove for her mate J S R L Narayana Murthy: [Foreign Language - Telugu] Elliot Roberts: Just the other day, I lay in my bed not quite awake, the dawn looked startled, unable to decide whether or not

00:41:32.420 - 00:41:51.710

to come down or not into this dark, impure world. At that moment, I heard a divine voice from the summit of Arunachala. To the metal flower looking with open eyes, to the honeybee jumping from the flower to the skipping kid nibbling the grass,

00:41:52.130 - 00:42:09.560

to the reeling when intoxicated with its fragrance, to the minor darting without stretched wings, to the dog running aimlessly to the lunatic laughing at the dog. Welcome on this brilliant morning, thus set the voice.

00:42:11.300 - 00:42:57.080

J S R L Narayana Murthy: [Foreign Language - Telugu] Elliot Roberts: Everywhere, flowers blossom in this light in this world is there a single lotus of the heart, which has opened its petals to this light, showering for eons in a downpour

00:42:57.080 - 00:43:22.850

from the sky. The voice exhorted, all dwellers of this earth, eternal travelers, you who face a new life, fill the cups of your hearts with this divine nectar of light. Morton Marcus: And that was the poetry of Chalam, read

00:43:22.850 - 00:43:39.200

bilingually by our guests, at least the English part of it, our guest, Elliot Roberts. Now, Elliot, tell us how you did that translation. Obviously, you do not know the language. What was the way that you work because I know a lot of people out there

00:43:39.200 - 00:43:58.750

are very interested in that. Elliot Roberts: Well, initially, Murthy and Sowris and Julie Wellings put together a translation of the poem and it was very, very rough. It really did not have a poetic form, and

00:43:58.750 - 00:44:17.110

so Murthy brought that to me and asked me to work with him on putting it into poetic form, and essentially, that's what I did. And in the process, though, we had to work very closely with the text, and of course, one of the real difficulties- In fact,

00:44:18.520 - 00:44:31.630

it's really hard to say that this is written- that any work is a translation because as soon as you change it from one language to the other, you just simply change it. You've changed the music of it and you can sense that difference just in

00:44:31.630 - 00:44:48.640

listening to the two, but also, it's so difficult to find words which are equivalent, the equivalence, and so we would- I would suggest things and Murthy would say, no, that's not right, that's not exactly what the word means. You know, well, what does

00:44:48.640 - 00:45:04.930

the word mean? And so, we go back and forth with that for quite a long period of time until we could choose something which might not be actually the literal meaning, but which in English would express the sense of it and of course, there's

00:45:04.930 - 00:45:19.750

always a lot of interpretation going on, and the thing about the Telugu, not so much with Chalam but with Vemana, is the- you get into textual problems about where these, where the typographical errors in the spellings as these were

00:45:20.410 - 00:45:43.750

transmitted and the impreciseness of the meaning of the words. So, essentially, once we felt comfortable with what was happening and the poetry that I had written with that Murthy felt accurately conveyed the meaning, then we left the

00:45:43.750 - 00:45:59.050

poem as it was. Morton Marcus: Okay, now we're on to the poet Vemana, an 18th century poet, and obviously, he writes as you said, in quatrains, the poems are in quatrains, and they had a

00:45:59.050 - 00:46:11.200

formulaic line at the end now what do you mean by a formulaic line? What you said then you left out? Elliot Roberts: Right. It was essentially the same line and one of the problems with the line is that many of the Telugu

00:46:11.200 - 00:46:29.350

scholars have really been unable to agree on what it precisely means, but the way we would have translated it would be something like, "you are dear to the giver of all, oh vema, listen," or "you are dear to the giver of all, listen, vema."

00:46:29.860 - 00:46:43.810

Morton Marcus: And that would be every poem would end with that? Elliot Roberts: Well, every within a certain meter and there were some other poems and they had a slightly different ending, but yeah, every one of the poems within the poems that were four

00:46:43.810 - 00:46:57.190

lines, were quatrains, a very popular meter, all ended with that particular line. Morton Marcus: Well, it's a true problem that I've had in doing versions of gazals because they always end in the end with an

00:46:57.190 - 00:47:16.090

address, usually to the lover who is really a symbol and they usually cause one to write a poem that just sounds very foreign to contemporary American ears. Anyway, why don't you read some Vemana poems while as you can see, time runs out very

00:47:16.090 - 00:47:35.140

quickly. Elliot Roberts: Okay, well his poems are short, aphoristic, in some ways he's a critic of the culture of his time, especially with externals and so, here are some of the poems:

00:47:35.740 - 00:47:52.470

FAST AND YOU'LL BE BORN AS THE VILLAGE PIG. Practice rigours and you'll be born poor, vow to stones and you'll turn [cut-off], Brahman resides in your hearts.

00:47:55.750 - 00:48:11.290

Morton Marcus: As you turn the pages, what's so wonderful about these Hindi poems and also poems from the Farsi, which are very, very influencial on us, is that they just so naturally speak in terms of the natural world and turning that natural world and

00:48:11.290 - 00:48:25.420

the small objects in it into metaphors, and into a kind of logic like you bow to stones, you bow to statues, into a kind of metaphorical logic which we have to work for, but it seems as though they're right on the wavelength of all of time.

00:48:25.720 - 00:48:39.460

Elliot Roberts: Yeah, the poems that Murthy and I felt were most successful as poems, are the poems which end with that kind of an image, where, which kind of conclude was an image, but many of the poems that kind of didactic and you know, just say

00:48:39.460 - 00:48:52.810

if you practice yoga, you'll reach heaven, things like that. And so, the quality of the poems varies tremendously and some of them are not what we would consider to be poetic, they're more didactic, kind of like when Jeffers steps out and starts

00:48:52.810 - 00:49:07.030

lecturing at you, except it doesn't have the rest of the poetry around it, it's just there. Morton Marcus: It's very abstract. Yeah and a lot of the other [unknown], all of these poets actually are religious

00:49:07.570 - 00:49:26.080

teachers, and so therefore, their concerns weren't making poetry as we see it, but it was really with teaching. Elliot Roberts: Right, with teaching. All castes in the Cosmic Egg were born together, when all

00:49:26.080 - 00:49:41.200

meet in the same place, aren't they all brothers? The following is one of his more famous ones, and Vemana is known, as Chalam too, for attacking the caste system in India.

00:49:42.220 - 00:50:03.400

SERVE FOOD TO ALL MEN IN THE WORLD IN ONE DISH. Feed them together, abolishing caste. Place your hand on their heads and persuade them. He also, and this is one thing we had difficulty with has a great deal of anti-feminist writing,

00:50:03.970 - 00:50:22.060

and the first time we sent this manuscript out, we received a response, especially to that. And of course, this creates a real problem if you've got a poet who grew up at a time when women were pictured a particular way. How do you deal with that?

00:50:23.080 - 00:50:47.530

But admiring a sweet lip, he forgets the path. Seeing women's beauty, he forgets to hold his mind steady. Feasting on her breasts, he forgets all yogas. This mortal sweeps the house called body every day, mops, smears, plasters and makes it

00:50:47.530 - 00:51:12.610

habitable. At the end, he abandons custody and departs. Morton Marcus: Elliot, this has been all too short an hour, but why don't we end with a poem of yours or two poems of yours and call it a night with that?

00:51:13.840 - 00:51:32.650

Elliot Roberts: Okay, that sounds good. Well, this this one poem might take place of two. And it's a poem called, "Ulysses," and it's, it's in memoriam, to my neighbor, Ephraim Doner. And the reason I wrote this poem was because

00:51:32.650 - 00:51:51.610

watching him in his old age, and the fact that he stayed to live with his wife, even though she was becoming incapacitated, was a tremendous sign of courage. And I kept thinking of Tennyson's Ulysses where Ulysses just says, well, I'm going to go

00:51:51.610 - 00:52:08.560

out and make that last effort, and you know, and forgets about his wife and so, in a way, this is a kind of response to that. It's called Ulysses and this- little kicker is, "It little profits that an idle king," which is the first line from

00:52:08.800 - 00:52:28.000

Tennyson's Ulyssses. His queen, her body lied still, her gray hair splashing like froth of ocean. A siren sings to him songs from the past. Come on, girls, let's go get him. Come on girls, let's go get him.

00:52:28.030 - 00:52:48.760

Come on girls, let's go get him way down yonder in the paw paw patch. Wraith-like, she glides through the house on lightfoot, tends to him, puts on his shoes, hands him his shirt, offers her arm as he struggles up the hill, his nails digging into her

00:52:48.760 - 00:53:09.010

flesh. She improvises lyrics which surface like bobbing kelp, keeps three quarter time finds a rhyme, wonders again and again. What is that nice young man's name? Will their daughter visit? What day of the week is it? She drifts unbound by the present,

00:53:09.130 - 00:53:33.220

sings unburdened by the past. Come on, boys, let's go get her. Come on, boys, let's go get her. Come on boys, let's go get her way down yonder in the paw paw patch. Forgotten griefs jogged to memory, she feels anew, she weeps for her long dead brother.

00:53:33.220 - 00:53:52.480

Oh, has he died? The tears have dried. His artist arm and hand now useless, his legs unsteady. He too waits and patiently serves. Here's the deep oceans call, but the heavy consciousness of the present keeps him in this harbor of

00:53:52.480 - 00:54:13.300

thankfulness for small joys. Fog-shrouded oak, his daughter's visit, brandy-laced coffee, her in her song-filled wanderings through the vastness of the house, endlessly wiping clean the table at which he sits. Only the last journey remains. Weary,

00:54:13.390 - 00:54:31.300

he desires to slip away over the sea but her songs of childhood enter tears for ancient sorrows experienced anew wreck him on the reefs of his old, old age, drawn there by her siren song of grief and love.

00:54:33.100 - 00:54:44.320

Morton Marcus: Thank you very much. We have been talking with Elliot Roberts. Thanks a million, Elliot for coming down, sharing your poetry and translations, or coming up, actually. Right. And I hope that we'll have you again on the

00:54:44.320 - 00:55:02.500

Poetry Show. I do want to say that I have two tickets for the Norakaian(?) poets who will be here on Saturday the 29th at 8pm. If you are a subscriber, do call me at 476-2800, I'd say within around two or three minutes. Right now though, stay

00:55:02.500 - 00:55:19.840

tuned for Larry Blood and Out Front, Outback. This is Mort Marcus saying that I'll be back in two weeks with Dick Maxwell, the poet from Foothill College and founder of the Foothill Writers Conference, and I also would like to say that next

00:55:19.840 - 00:55:36.580

week, my-co host Joe Stroud will be doing a program on the wonderful contemporary American poet, well, modern American poet, Elizabeth Bishop. Stay tuned for Out Front, Outback. This is KUSP 88.9 FM in Santa Cruz, also serving Monterey and

00:55:36.580 - 00:55:37.810

the Big Sur area.