Over the past hundred years or so, English-language poetry has compulsively remodeled itself after Ezra Pound’s literary commandment to “make it new.” The American rage for new ideas, new styles, new technologies, and new movements finds compact expression in this three-word ars poetica. What MFA student hasn’t encountered Pound’s advice in the classroom, over drinks at a bar, or in the pages of a literary magazine? Yet this self-styled voice of America also spouted fascist propaganda over Italian radio up to the bitter end of the Second World War. It seems that internal contradiction is an American thing, too. “Do I contradict myself?” Walt Whitman asked his fellow citizens, only to shrug off the question: “Very well then I contradict myself.” Maybe that’s why the man behind “make it new” liked to sign his letters “Old Ez.”
True to form, Pound derived his modernist credo from the most ancient of sources—a legendary inscription on the washbasin of the first Shang dynasty king Ch’eng T’ang from the second millennium BCE. A washbasin or a bathtub, nobody knows for sure—I like to imagine Ch’eng T’ang emerging from his morning bath with Pound’s motto in mind as he toweled off to begin another day ruling the known world. “Make it new,” it turns out, is very old news. And even if it isn’t un-American, exactly, it comes to us from the far side of the globe. What’s oldest and farthest away, Pound paradoxically pointed out, may light the way to a new world.
With Ch’eng T’ang’s bathtub in mind, we’ve invited writers to “make it old” in conversation with premodern poetries from various cultures for this special issue of Poetry. Old, we’ve found, is a comparative measure. An avant-garde Brazilian poem from 1912 might sound faintly archaic to American readers today; and an Egyptian hymn to Ra from four millennia ago may urgently address the poets of our time. World, too, is a comparative measure. In these pages you’ll find a Mayan creation myth, fragments of a pre-Socratic cosmology, the first circle of Dante’s Inferno stripped down to couplets, and Medieval rune poems excavated after a fire in the harbor district of Bergen, Norway. These poems testify to the making and unmaking of lifeworlds—across various geographical regions, historical periods, and cultural traditions—into something timely and, at the same time, timeless.
A Nahuatl drinking song, a late Tang dynasty love letter, Osage talk, what might be the first Japanese tanka about baby diapers—to print the original-language iterations of these poems and many others, in writing systems ranging from Egyptian hieroglyphs to traditional Chinese characters to Bengali abugida script, including accompanying notes on the historical contexts of each work, would leave us without space for the multitudinous worlds in this literary cosmos. So we’ve decided, with a collective editorial sigh, to publish only the English-language versions of the work in this print issue of Poetry, with the hope that readers will go on to explore the original-language sources, along with contributors’ notes on the poems and prose, scheduled to appear in our online edition of the magazine in the first week of May.
Reading old poems reminds us of the many forms of religion, family life, environmental stewardship, and labor that have shaped human experience writ large. Reading these translations of old poems, I also find myself thinking about the many forms of love. The contributors to this issue explore complex literary circuits of affinity and desire through their acts of translation: a woman on an organic farm in California may translate a medieval French woman’s marital complaint, or a Toronto man may translate an Anglo-Saxon man’s impersonation of an anonymous woman’s Old English feminist lament, or a transgender New England poet may translate a prayer to the ancient Greek goddess of chastity and childbirth. Some of these writers map new global intimacies across lines of race and ethnicity, too, in their literary devotions—a South Asian high school student may translate a Chinese poet from the Tang Dynasty, or a Latinx college professor may translate sixteenth-century Rajasthani devotional poetry into English. These old and faraway poems make translation itself new. Indeed, some contributions to these pages may not even appear to be “translations” at all. We’ve made no distinctions between “faithful” or “free” translations, adaptations, or original poems responding to ancient verse in the pages that follow. The diversity and variety of such work opens new possibilities for imagining translation in an expanded field.
This issue of Poetry—and my guest editorship at the magazine—concludes, perhaps a little unceremoniously, with an essay by the Japanese writer Masaoka Shiki, first published over a century ago, titled “Haiku on Shit.” It must be said that when I first began work here, I didn’t see this coming. “In everyday conversation, there are times when saying ‘shit’ sounds neither terribly filthy nor funny,” Shiki observes in Ikuho Amano and James Shea’s deadpan translation. “If the word appears in a solemn public speech, however, surely the audience would be offended.” I won’t end this introduction with any sort of solemn public speech, but with heartfelt thanks to my coeditors, to Poetry’s contributors, and to the magazine’s readers. These past few months have refreshed my faith in the transformative power of art. Poetry can make shit new.
Srikanth Reddy (he/him) grew up in Chicago. He earned a BA from Harvard College, an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa, and a PhD in English literature from Harvard University. He is the author of the poetry collections Underworld Lit (Wave Books, 2020), Voyager (University of California Press, 2011), and Facts for Visitors (University of California Press, 2004) and a book of literary...