Madagascar: Poems and Translations

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

I was initially attracted to this collection for two reasons: first (a
poor reason), because I have recently visited Madagascar; second (a
better one), because I am interested in the art of translation.

I have to report that I found the book intriguing yet at the same time
puzzling. It is divided into three sections: “Madagascar,”
“Letters Outward,” and “Translations from Martial.” The first is
not, as one might expect, a travel report. Rather, the subject of the
brief title poem that opens the section is dancing with the dead, a
theme that extends through the rest of the book, since subsequent poems
are often about death and loss, and, in a sense, translation itself is a
dancing with the dead.

Yet the image of dancing seems, from another perspective, oddly
inappropriate. For the most part, Fetherling’s is a poetry of crisp
statement that dispenses with metaphor. These poems are full of
dazzlingly clear and often evocative one-liners. Examples include: “We
might as well believe in something”; “There’s scarcely enough
sadness for all the death going round”; “I have come here to avoid
the twitter of fax machines heralding spring.” The challenge resides
in moving from one epigrammatic sentence to another: there are a number
of jumps in subject matter and tone. As a result, one tends to respond
to single lines rather than to whole poems.

Stylistically, then, it is hardly surprising that Fetherling should be
attracted to Martial, the classic epigrammatist. Yet here again I was
puzzled. We are told that Martial was “a Spanish-born Roman poet of
the first century CE”—information that most readers are likely to
possess already—but we are not told why Fetherling translated only 18
out of Martial’s more than 1500 poems; nor are we given any
explanation for his choosing these particular examples. The translations
seem accomplished, but they constitute a very small sampling.

Madagascar, then, is readable but enigmatic.