By Sabine Schmidt
Poet, translator, and soccer enthusiast Thom Satterlee teaches English at Taylor University in Indiana. After getting a BA from Houghton College and an MA in English from SUNY Brockport, Thom Satterlee entered the program in Literary Translation at the University of Arkansas and received his MFA in 1998. We caught up with Thom when he visited Fayetteville last fall to give a reading and meet with graduate students.
Thom, what is it like to be at the intersection of poetry and literary translation?
I was a poet before I was a translator. I learned Danish as an exchange student in Denmark. I went to Denmark at 16, at a time when I had no real interest in literature or writing. I went over to play soccer. I’d met a Norwegian exchange student in my hometown and we played soccer together on a team. He invited me back to Norway to play soccer on his team for a summer. My father thought I should go to school there for the whole year as an exchange student. The program I went through didn’t have any spots left in Norway, so they suggested neighboring Denmark. While I was there, I started to become more interested in poetry. This was also the first time that I read living poets, for instance Philip Larkin, who was Jim Whitehead’s [late writer and co-founder of the University of Arkansas' Creative Writing Program] favorite poet.
What triggered that interest in poetry?
There were two things. One was homesickness. Dana Gioia spent a year abroad,
I think he was in Italy, and he said that he started reading more poetry because
of the homesickness for his own language. When I heard him say that, twenty
years ago, it resonated. I also wanted to find something that I believed I could
do well, that I could do better than other people¾and I discovered that
the Danes played soccer much better than I did. But I had the upper hand when
it came to English … I wasn’t going to be the star striker on the
team but I could kick butt when it came to English. So I started reading and
writing poetry in English and learning Danish all the time.
It wasn’t until I got towards the end of my second year of graduate school
in the creative writing program at Brockport, when I was writing my thesis,
that I decided that instead of writing my own poems I would translate a Danish
poet. I was maybe 24 and it occurred to me that because I had the skills in
Danish and an interest in poetry I could be a translator of Danish. I went looking
for a poet I thought was interesting and could sustain a thesis project for
me. And that’s how I found Henrik Nordbrandt. I think I saw translation
largely as an apprenticeship where I got to work very closely with a master
poet, a world-class poet. While translating him I was learning the craft of
poetry because I had to pay attention to the original in making my translation.
I paid attention to line breaks in a way that I hadn’t before¾the
weight of lines, the movement from one image to another. Translating made the
craft of poetry more concrete to me.
Do you remember how you made that leap?
I don’t know if I was real sure what I was trying to do in my poems.
Poetry was something that I wanted to do. I was reading a lot of contemporary
American poets, finding a lot of poets whose work I liked. I was writing my
own poetry. I was very disciplined. I worked from five in the morning until
seven, Monday through Friday. I still keep to a routine pretty much like that.
I was a disciplined student, working hard. But I wasn’t really sure what
I was trying to do with my poetry. I don’t think I could have articulated
it. But I found in Henrik Nordbrandt this poet, this work that I very much admired,
and then I had to render in English what he had done in Danish.
Now more and more I’m seeing that poems I’ve translated, particularly
those by Henrik Nordbrandt because he is the poet I’ve worked with for
a decade, I’m seeing how his poetic sensibility and his unique kind of
imagination come up in my own poems. There is one poem in particular where I
have definitely borrowed from Nordbrandt in order to write a new poem of my
own. I hope it’s not plagiarism, but I know I wouldn’t have written
certain lines without Nordbrandt’s influence. The translation I’m
thinking of is called “A Dream of Freedom,” and I finished it in
1992 or 1993. Here are the lines that had a shadowy presence in my head when
I was composing my own poem some ten years later:
It is dark in the world, and I wake late
bound and tied by beings I can’t see
but whose movements I can sense
when they grope through the dark, uncertain and desperate,
while they measure me with their instruments.
Then, as I said, ten years or so later, writing my own poems about John Wyclif I set down these lines in the poem “Habitus”:
But no: Wyclif had got it all wrong.
He was not going to see the words.
They were coming to him
with their arms loaded with robes
stacked so high he couldn’t see their faces,
and before he knew it, invisible hands
began measuring him with ropes
stretched between his wrist and chest,
from his hip down to the ground,
around his waist and around his neck
The fitting took all day….
When I was in the middle of writing the first draft of this poem I became half aware of the Nordbrandt echoes. I almost stopped writing to look up the translation, but then I made myself keep writing.
I remember Miller Williams saying when you write poetry you should write drunk and revise sober. He said this in an interview around the time he was writing the inaugural poem for Clinton’s second inauguration. I’ve always remembered that line, and I tell my students this. You need to just write whatever comes to you and don’t censor what you’re writing and don’t worry that you can’t understand it. A poet I worked with at Brockport, William Heyen, would say that poem writing is done in a trance or trance-like state. Both make sense to me.
It’s difficult to know when to give your gratitude and express your indebtedness to other writers for what appears in your own writing. Remember the James Whitehead poem John DuVal [Director of the University of Arkansas' Translation Program] read us last night? He said you may not have caught it but Yeats is all over here. Well, Yeats is a little different than Henrik Nordbrandt. Any serious reader of poetry should catch that it’s Yeats, right? We didn’t but we should have and we feel bad that we didn’t. But when the writer is more obscure, Henrik Nordbrandt for instance, how do you do that, how do you give credit to him? My book of poems is about the 14th century philosopher John Wyclif and his times. So they’re historical poems. My publisher asked me to write notes at the end. So I have pseudo-scholarly notes, explaining for instance what a diptych is or who John Purvey is or John Ball, things most readers wouldn’t know. But should I put a note in there, “These eleven lines in the poem ‘Habitus’ came to me from translating Henrik Nordbrandt”? Would anybody even appreciate that? Would it make any difference? I considered the Notes as something that would enhance my readers’ appreciation of the poems. Bringing a Danish poet into it seemed like it would just muddy things unnecessarily. I will publicly come clean at the reading tonight, though, when I talk about the translation and the poem that owes thanks to the translation, to Henrik Nordbrandt¾but then who would have called me on it?
And anything can go into a poem as inspiration; it can be a line of dialogue overheard on the street. It’s all part of a bigger discourse, and your poem is a new contribution to that discourse.
I like thinking of poetry as ongoing discourse, as a longstanding conversation. A new poem is not standing on its own, it’s joining a long conversation. Some of the poems that are behind a new poem that’s being written, the poet may or may not be aware of. Is ignorance of the inspiration an excuse?
When you are translating, do you try to keep the flow, try not to interrupt the mode you’re working in by looking up words or thinking about an image? Is there such a thing as translating drunk?
This doesn’t happen to me nearly as much translating as it does writing my own poems. I know what you are talking about. I remember at least one poem where I got so excited while translating it. There were words I would have otherwise had to stop and look up and I didn’t. I put the word in brackets and kept going and it did seem like translating drunk. Most of the time I’m translating sober, though. I’m maybe three or four lines into the poem and hit a word I don’t know. So I’ll stop and that interrupts things. I look at that word and try different possibilities. I wish I were completely fluent in Danish or a native speaker of Danish. You have many more times when you don’t have to look up a word, you can almost simultaneously translate, you’re not breaking your momentum.
Your next project is something quite different.
I’m working with two other editors to put together an anthology. At the moment it is titled Words for Football: World Writings on Soccer and the Human Condition [after this interview, Satterlee informed us that the project will be published by University of Nebraska Press]. We’re gathering poems, fiction, and literary essays on the sport of soccer from many different languages and time periods. It’s an interesting project for me because it brings together my love of soccer, my interest in translation, and my love of literature and poetry. A few years ago I remember remarking to a friend that I have these interests that have nothing in common: poetry, Danish, translation, and soccer. How do any of these go together? With this book, they actually do.
How old is the oldest piece?
There’s a line from Shakespeare about a lousy footballer. It’s an insult from one character to another where he calls him a footballer. Whether there’s a piece older than the Shakespeare reference I’m not sure.
Will there be poetry, too?
Poetry is a little difficult. There’s a lot of football poetry. In fact, there’s a website called footballpoets.org. A lot of these poems are fan poems, so there’s not much to them. But we found some that are good as poems and fit the requirements for the anthology.
Anything written by soccer players?
There is a short story by an Argentinian who played on the national team with Diego Maradonna. We might use that one. But most of the entries are from writers who, along with their other work, have an interest in soccer.
Are all selections by men?
No. One of the distinctions of our anthology compared to other literary anthologies about soccer is its greater focus on the women’s game and a greater focus on soccer in Asia and Africa. In other soccer anthologies you usually get primarily European soccer pieces, but ours will be broader than that. If we follow the timeline that’s been suggested the book will come out in the fall of 2007. When we first envisioned this project we thought, let’s try to get this done before the World Cup, but it would have been too much of a rush. Instead, the other two editors and I will be meeting to make our final selections sometime in mid-June, during the Cup. We’ll meet in one of our houses and talk literature between soccer games.
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