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    Averno: Poems
    Averno: Poems
    Averno: Poems
    Ebook85 pages41 minutes

    Averno: Poems

    By Louise Gluck

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    About this ebook

    A ravishing collection by Louise Glück, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

    Averno is a small crater lake in southern , regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Glück's eleventh collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter, it is the only source of heat and light, a gate or passageway that invites traffic between worlds while at the same time opposing their reconciliation. Averno is an extended lamentation, its long, restless poems no less spellbinding for being without plot or hope, no less ravishing for being savage, grief-stricken. What Averno provides is not a map to a point of arrival or departure, but a diagram of where we are, the harrowing, enduring presence.
    Averno is a 2006 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateJul 8, 2014
    ISBN9781466875593
    Averno: Poems
    Author

    Louise Gluck

    Louise Glück (1943-2023) was the author of two collections of essays and thirteen books of poems. Her many awards included the Nobel Prize in Literature, the National Humanities Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for The Wild Iris, the National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night, the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poems 1962–2012, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She taught at Yale University and Stanford University and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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    Reviews for Averno

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    • 5/5
      Beautiful Imagery and I love the perspective change on the Persephone myth.
    • 5/5
      This book is an enchantment, the writing style of Louise Gluck nails you in and goes so deep, precise and sharp and you get addicted to the way she uses her words. So I read it slowly to make it last longer.
    • 5/5
      “The Wild Iris” was the first Glück collection I read. She is also an essential poet for me, in that her poems of psychological extremity tend to be perfectly pitched--aurally, rhythmically, sonically (I see this is the same characterisation as Stephanie Burt's). Lots of lyric poets want to do what she does, but none to me do it as well. Pretty much all her poems, to me, are about the unfairness of transience, the agony of knowing we aren't immortal and cannot stay in the most beautiful of all possible worlds for ever. The thing about “The Wild Iris”, it centred on the voices of plants which are, in a sense resurrected, individual flowers die but the plant flowers again next year, unlike humans - "that which you call death/I remember". When I first read that collection in 1992 I found it shattering and have read all her others since. For a long time “The Wild Iris” was my favourite, but now I would say “Averno” (I’m reading it in a bilingual translation by Inês Dias). My favourite individual poem of hers, though, would be "Arboretum" from “The Seven Ages” ("we had the problem of age, the problem of wishing to linger"). She is one of the two living poets I could least do without (the other is Paul Henry).(stanza 4 of the poem "October")To me she has an unusual capacity to reinvent herself for a poet of such an achieved manner. On at least two occasions she has put out a more tentative, or modest, volume after one brought to an impressively emphatic point--in “Meadowlands” after “The Wild Iris”, and A Village Life after Averno”. Both times I was initially baffled, and thought the following collection just a falling-off--that there was only that long, after all, a writer could sustain such intensity. But “Meadowlands”, in particular, in its scrappiness of form and thought, was more challenging than that. Glück shows us that her poetry is dominated by spoken-word-prose-poems. Reliant for success not because of any sustained original strings of linguistic invention, but on how the audience hears it spoken with emphasis and in a specific tone of voice that evokes in the reader a profoundly vague and slippery but fashionable emotional response tending to what's innately inarticulate and challenging to communicate critically with any meaning beyond a personal 'like' of it for presentational reasons. Whatever that means. That’s why it's mandatory that Glück’s poetry/prose must be enjoyed out loud.Somebody once asked me to clarify what a qualified translator was and whether it was a person with a university degree in translation. Although it is not necessary to have a degree in translation to translate, there is an assumption that just knowing a language well is enough to translate. It is not that simple. You need to go a little deeper and be a wordsmith, a willing linguistic as well. Translating is not easy. In terms of fiction, is like rewriting the story in a different language and trying to be true to the author's style. I find translating poetry incredibly difficult and I much prefer to translate technical or general fiction stuff. But one thing is absolutely true about translation: you need to understand what you are going to translate. If not, you will do a terrible job. When I'm translating I often consider the purpose of the translation, but I don't agonize over "Skopos theory". Knowledge of two languages is indeed not a qualification for translation, but most translation courses aren't worth the paper they're printed on and won't turn a bad translator into a good one. It surely is a hard gig to get right. I remember watching an American film subtitled in Japanese with a Japanese friend at the Portuguese Cinemateca many eons ago. One of the characters said, "Come here you sexy bitch!" My friend started laughing. Turns out that was translated into something more like, "Come here you good women!" Not quite the same thing. Of course, every good woman is sexy, but not every sexy woman is good. I think. Maybe. Quite possibly, I may be corrected on this point…This to say that Inês Dias’s rendering into Portuguese is top-notch and does Glück’s work justice (vide October's stanza 4 in the picture above if you want to understand what I'm talking about).What an experience it was to have read Glück’s work in the middle of the Mediterranean sea.
    • 4/5
      To be honest: I am not a real poetry lover; I prefer the broad, layered narratives of prose. The Nobel Prize 2020 made me take on this small volume (barely 70 pages). And immediately you can notice: Glück writes from her own universe, she does not have a formal focus, but a substantive one, and it is supported by a broad range of personal experience. The Greek Persophone myth is central to this collection, or at least the myth is the narrative that is used as the central guideline. With Persophone you immediately think of seasonal changes, but also of death and damnation, seclusion and varying happiness. Glück connects this in a lived-through way with physicality, and thus transience, despair and hope, appearance and reality. Barely 70 pages, I already wrote. But enough pages to enjoy for a long while.
    • 5/5
      I couldn't say it better than this. From The NYTBR:

      "Far from the dull outposts where American poets have become willfully obscure or adopted antique models to assemble poems of scant content, poets like Glück are tapping the wellsprings of myth, collective and personal, to fuel their imaginations and, with hard-earned clarity and subtle music, to struggle with some of our oldest, most intractable fears — isolation and oblivion, the dissolution of love, the failure of memory, the breakdown of the body and destruction of the spirit. Glück isn't one to flinch in the face of suffering; if it's glib talk or easy irony you want, or a soothing metaphysical cocktail that promises redemption without pain, hers is not the poetry for you."
    • 4/5
      Aching emotions and nature. Simple language, myth, and history. Will need to find more Gluck. Going for Meadowlands next.
    • 3/5
      This collection wasn't as enjoyable as "Ararat". The poems in this collection are more abstract and the themes are more repetitive. Gluck uses the myth of Persephone to explore the nature of the human soul and death. The minor themes were fields, the relationship between Mothers and Daughters (to a much lesser extent than in "Ararat"), and Seasons. I enjoyed the collection but I can't pin point a particular poem that stood out to me. 'Prisms' was probably my favorite.
    • 5/5
      Simultaneously soaring and sad. Gluck is a master of American poetry. I sense her poems becoming sadder as she ages, but the sadness is nearly majestic.
    • 4/5
      This is an interesting collection of poems. The first poem presented threw me off a bit and I really disliked the tone and ambiguity of it. Please, keep plowing through though because there are better things to come. Gluck's cynical humour and philisophical view on the world as well as fascination with the human soul connected to nature do generate some very intriguing poems. Prism is one of my favorites. This collection is not for everyone though, her style is indeed different (some would say prose in lines) and she rambles too much at times. For me though, it's something that I like to flip through from time to time and seek out the particular passages and lines that I love.

    Book preview

    Averno - Louise Gluck

    The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

    Contents

    TITLE PAGE

    COPYRIGHT NOTICE

    DEDICATION

    EPIGRAPH

    THE NIGHT MIGRATIONS

    I

    OCTOBER

    PERSEPHONE THE WANDERER

    PRISM

    CRATER LAKE

    ECHOES

    FUGUE

    II

    THE EVENING STAR

    LANDSCAPE

    A MYTH OF INNOCENCE

    ARCHAIC FRAGMENT

    BLUE ROTUNDA

    A MYTH OF DEVOTION

    AVERNO

    OMENS

    TELESCOPE

    THRUSH

    PERSEPHONE THE WANDERER

    ALSO BY LOUISE GLÜCK

    COPYRIGHT

    for Noah

    Averno. Ancient name Avernus. A small crater lake, ten miles west of Naples, Italy; regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld.

    THE NIGHT MIGRATIONS

    This is the moment when you see again

    the red berries of the mountain ash

    and in the dark sky

    the birds’ night migrations.

    It grieves me to think

    the dead won’t see them—

    these things we depend on,

    they disappear.

    What will the soul do for solace then?

    I tell myself maybe it won’t need

    these pleasures anymore;

    maybe just not being is simply enough,

    hard as that is to imagine.

    I

    OCTOBER

    1.

    Is it winter again, is it cold again,

    didn’t Frank just slip on the ice,

    didn’t he heal, weren’t the spring seeds planted

    didn’t the night end,

    didn’t the melting ice

    flood the narrow gutters

    wasn’t my body

    rescued, wasn’t it safe

    didn’t the scar form, invisible

    above the injury

    terror and cold,

    didn’t they just end, wasn’t the back garden

    harrowed and planted—

    I remember how the earth felt, red and dense,

    in stiff rows, weren’t the seeds planted,

    didn’t vines climb the south wall

    I can’t hear your voice

    for the wind’s cries, whistling over the bare ground

    I no longer care

    what sound it makes

    when was I silenced, when did it first seem

    pointless to describe that sound

    what it sounds like can’t change what it is—

    didn’t the night end, wasn’t the earth

    safe when it was planted

    didn’t we plant the seeds,

    weren’t we necessary to the earth,

    the vines, were they harvested?

    2.

    Summer after summer has

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