Author and journalist George Jonas in 2006
Most readers know George Jonas as a geopolitical columnist and author of books on criminal matters, but his first three books were poetry collections.
The Jonas Variations is one, too, but it reworks 50 other poets as thematic improvisations, imitative impromptus and more or less straight translations from Latin, French, Italian, German, Russian and Hungarian.
Jonas brings a dependable toolkit of poetic devices, multilingual fluency and, occasionally, Nabokovian resourcefulness.
Within translation's limits, he ably serves the originals, though he sometimes sacrifices tone for the sake of a rhyme, and his most persuasive remakings are, naturally enough, from his first language, Hungarian.
Tiresomely modest about his translating talents, he's capable of conjuring four marvellous lines from Attila Jozsef's Mama:
My whine has become permanent. She's silent. Her shadow fills the firmament. A giant. Her grey hair floats as she bends to apply More blueing mix. Mama rinses the sky.
With Jozsef, it's hard to know where to stop. In Jonas's version of Consciousness:
I live near the tracks. Trains come and go here. When one passes rows of bright windows disrupt evening's fluttering semi-darkness.
That's how illuminated days hurtle through endless night's reprise. Lit up by each private compartment, I lean on my elbow. Keep my peace.
With each selection he pairs breezily sardonic commentary: "Gyula Juhasz was born in 1883 and it took him until 1937 to kill himself." Of Goethe, he notes, "I could view being a pompous windbag, if not a requirement for the job of a great poet, at least as an occupational hazard." He provides the context of his encounter with the source poem, or the composition of his version.
Piloting a small plane from Toronto to Windsor, Ont., for example, he found that the engine's drone echoed a Rilke opening line. By the time he landed, the engine "had translated Autumn Day's 12 lines into English and fixed them firmly in my mind. Once safely on the tarmac, I wrote them in the logbook."
Yet his commentary has lacunae. Though he lists virtues of the originals, he never tells us how he privately feels about the poems he adores. Nor, other than vaguely citing "influence," does he say how the poems affected his own work. The longest, most affectionate commentary is devoted to his friend, the immensely charming George Faludy, who lived 22 of his 96 years in Canada.
He largely refrains from political comment, though he once mildly pokes prudery in the women's movement: "Mrs. Grundy went briefly out of fashion in the 1960s, only to return as Ms. Grundy in the 1970s." He does editorialize when he pointlessly defends those stardust twins, rhyme and metre. (They are as likely to produce a bad poem as a good one.) With equal pointlessness, he advises that poems "should be read: out loud." (Poems should be read silently, too. Poems should be read.)
As coolly Apollonian as he seems, Jonas's choice of poets favours the ragingly Romantic lifestyles of rogues or reprehensibles such as François Villon (whom he translated at 16), Benvenuto Cellini and the fascist freebooter Gabriele D'Annunzio; syphilitics such as Charles Baudelaire and Endre Ady; the terminally unstable such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Georg Trakl.
He amusingly matches dedicatees and sources: His former wife and co-author Barbara Amiel is awarded a 12th-century troubadour ( The Falcon Song); her husband, Conrad Black, gets St. Ambrose ( The Rooster's Hymn); and Eddie Greenspan, Black's former lawyer and another Jonas co-author, is matched with a poem by the Swiss Nobelist, Carl Spitteler ( The Kindly Procurator).
Nothing in this book resembles the unadorned declarations and prose rhythms of The Absolute Smile, Jonas's first collection (1967): "The grass of which I am thinking grows in public parks," or, "It makes sense for me to die for Barbara." Apart from the riches in the present anthology of personal taste, what the reader can best take away is that Jonas, who began as a poet, remains one.
Fraser Sutherland writes in English. His most recent poetry collection is The Philosophy of As If.