Zoë Brigley talks to A.M. Juster about translation, Petrarch and Gwerful Mechain
Zoë Brigley: I was intrigued to see a recent translation of yours from the Medieval Welsh-language poet Gwerful Mechain, who has been a favourite of many poets and writers, including translations by Katie Gramich, Jon Stone, and John Goodby. I wanted to start our conversation by comparing our translations. Here is yours:
Wetting a Petticoat
My slip is dripping and splattered by spray—and my blouse
And silky scarf are in disarray.
I may be drenched on St. Daniel’s Day
And on St. Sulien’s still be that way.
Here’s mine:
Gwerful Mechain Wets Her Petticoat
In my camisole wet through – my chemise
and my sweet, silk panties too,
I’ll never be dry again, unless it is true
that good fucks pass by like rainclouds in June.
And here is the Cymraeg original:
Fy mhais a wlychais yn wlych—a’m crys
A’m cwrsi sidangrych;
Odid Gŵyl Ddeiniol foelfrych
Na hin Sain Silin yn sych.
I obviously take more liberties than you do. Katie Gramich has a note after her translation about the change in the weather between St Daniel’s Day and St Sulien’s Day – you are more faithful than I am. What was your thinking and why did you want to translate Gwerful Mechain?
A.M. Juster: I used to write essays for the literary journal Light. I decided a decade ago to do one on women who wrote humorous poetry because it didn’t seem like anyone else was doing it. That essay became: “A Brief and Inadequate History of Female Comic Poets” . In the course of doing research for this essay I stumbled upon a small group of New England professors who had a medieval feminist LitServ. They were excited to hear about a couple of poets I discovered, and I was excited to learn about Gwerful Mechain – so excited I started teaching myself Middle Welsh with online tools and then audited the Middle Welsh graduate seminar at Harvard. I started translating her work with the notion that I would try to replicate the rhyme, rhythm and alliteration in ways that most poets would not care to do.
My first effort was “Poem of the Pussy,” which is not only a very funny poem, but a stunningly brave poem. Women of this period rarely wrote poetry and they usually stuck to safe subjects when they did, so writing a bawdy poem was quite bold. It was even bolder because it was a response poem to the great Dafydd ap Gwilym’s “Poem of the Prick” (which I have also translated). Writing a response poem to arguably the greatest Welsh poet up until her time was her cheeky way of saying “I can do whatever the men can do, and I can do it as well or better.” I was thrilled when this translation won the Barnstone Translation Prize.
I also translated Mechain’s “To Her Husband for Beating Her” and published it in Rattle. It’s a remarkable poem, an englyn like the one we have both translated, and I think it is the first poem in European literature by a woman objecting to domestic violence. I also think it has been mistranslated – in my opinion the pronouns are ambiguous, and it is not clear whether Mechain is standing up for herself or for another woman – which she does at least once in her other poems.
I have done a few other Mechain translations but lost several drafts in a computer meltdown. I am in the process of donating my papers to Boston College, so I will be carefully going through my notebooks to find the starts of those drafts before the notebooks go to live in Chestnut Hill.
For the englyn we both translated, I think the differences stem from our philosophical approaches to translation. I am a traditionalist and work hard to keep the meaning very close to the original while also echoing the sounds and rhythms of the original. My take, I think, works well for the first two lines, but falls a little flat in the last two because modern readers don’t connect to the references the way that Mechain’s would have.
Your version is less literal, but more striking and very much in the spirit of Mechain.
Zoë Brigley: I translated the domestic violence poem too and I agree with you about the ambiguity. It would be great to compare some of those other translations.
I love that you discovered Gwerful and that you enjoy her work as much as I do. I was also impressed that she wrote back to Dafydd ap Gwilym’s ode to the penis. He is a wonderful poet himself, though I would probably rewrite some of the images in his poems – his line about the penis as a pillar that holds together the two halves of a girl is striking but perhaps out of step with the times. He is extremely charismatic though, just as Gwerful is. What a sparring pair they would have made.
That’s interesting about our different approaches. What other poets have you enjoyed translating?
A.M. Juster: The text that I have most enjoyed translating was Saint Aldhelm’s Aenigmata, a collection of one hundred seventh-century Latin riddles that are the source for many of the more famous Old English Exeter riddles. Scholars had used the riddles for many philological analyses, but it was only rarely treated as a work of literature. As a result, many aspects of the riddles were unclear without doing background research, which eventually led me to do a combined translation/commentary for the University of Toronto Press. The commentary was like a scavenger hunt of medieval history, cuisine, superstitions, techniques of war, and other topics, and it was great fun – I was sad when it was it done.
I enjoyed translating Horace’s Satires too for a long time. He was so much fun and so remarkable, and it was a pleasure to work his Latin into heroic couplets. I did, though, get translator’s fatigue about 2,500 lines in while working on Book II, Satire III, which is about a quarter of the text. I kept remembering that the Satires translator I admire most, William Matthews, died while working on Book II, Satire III.
I am proudest of my translation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, which was the most challenging work I have taken on. There have been publication delays, but it should be out from W.W. Norton in October 2025.
Zoë Brigley: Could you tell us a bit more about your Canzoniere? How did that come about and what would you most like us to know about your handling of that?
A.M. Juster: I studied the Canzoniere in college but fell in love with it fifteen years later when I was teaching myself to translate formal poetry. At Dana Gioia’s instigation I made a run twenty-five years ago at translating the entire text but fell far short – I wasn’t ready and I was too busy.
In 2019 I somehow felt called to try again, and soon it became my pandemic project – I did little else for 2½ years. It’s different from previous translations in at least two ways: 1) it closely mimics the rhyme, meter, music, wordplay and other aspects of the text to an extent not done before; and 2) it strips away the “troubadour” claptrap of many translations and doesn’t sanitize the intense religious or erotic aspects of the poems, which record Petrarch’s struggle between lust for a woman and love of God. In many ways these poems are our first confessional poems, so it is important to capture the music and the messaging as accurately as possible.
