In the world of contemporary English poetry, A. E. Stallings is a giant. Known for both her innovative, various work within traditional poetic forms as well as her extraordinary translations of ancient Greek and Roman texts, her poems celebrate both the timelessness and resilience of technique, as well as how ancient constructions can continually metamorphose and evolve to enliven contemporary internalities and realities. In this following interview, she speaks to the allure of the classics, the essential work of keeping words alive, and the symbiotic relationship between translation and poetry.
Sebastián Sánchez (SS): Although you’ve spoken on writing poetry from a young age, you did not start to learn Latin until you were an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, where you switched from an English and Music major to a Classics major. What was it about Classics that attracted you?
A. E. Stallings (AES): I think I probably always had a sneaking attraction to it… to anything a bit arcane or out of the ordinary. My grandfather had studied Greek in seminary (he was an Episcopal priest), and was proud of his accomplishments in that regard. My Dad had wanted me to take Latin in high school (having been quite good at Latin in high school himself), but in the end, defiantly, I took Spanish—which I also much enjoyed. But I think I started to feel I was missing out, missing something. You know, you would run into these Latin or Greek tags in English literature, and feel that this was something you really ought to know. In the end, I thought I’ll just take Latin 101 and get a taste for it, but I had an extraordinary and extraordinarily eccentric professor, Dr. Robert Harris (at the University of Georgia). The class was riveting. And my classmates were interesting too, harder to pigeonhole than the average English major or even music major.
I then just kept taking Latin classes (because what was the point, Dr. Harris would say, unless we were going to get as far as some Virgil, which he recommended we read in the graveyard), until one day the department head (Dr. Rick LaFleur) took me aside and suggested I might as well change my major at that point. As an aspiring poet, I also appreciated the rather old-fashioned close reading we did of poems—scanning the meter, memorizing, looking at allusions and sound effects, rhetorical devices. This felt useful to me as a writer. I was not particularly interested in theory, which perhaps was having an ascendance in other literature courses at that time.
SS: In 1999, you moved to Athens and have lived there ever since. What led you to make this decision, and how did this impact your development as a writer?
AES: It was supposed to be, like so many things in life, a temporary decision. My husband is Greek, and he wanted to try moving back to Greece and living there a while. I think we said two years. Two children and two decades later, of course, it seems more momentous than it did at the time. It is hard to say how it may have affected me as a writer. It did probably affect how I wrote about Greek mythology (it all seemed less… mythological, I guess), and no doubt made me more aware of modern Greek literature. It probably pushed me more towards Greek generally, even though I had trained more as a Latinist. It has affected me in other ways; being in Greece and married to a journalist, I felt like I was both on the edge of where things are happening and at the forefront of some more general trends—the economic crisis, the migration surge, and climate change, all of that seemed more visible and more towards the surface of things in Greece, which is on the border of so much. That in turn has changed how I read classical literature, with an understanding of the geography: the placement of Greece, in the Aegean, is further towards the East and the global South than Western classics departments tend to place it, at least theoretically. It has re-oriented my sense of Classical literature quite literally.
SS: Yes–those in the West tend to locate Greece as the origin of their intellectual and literary traditions, centring it in a way that obfuscates its marginality. You say this has changed how you read classical literature, could you provide an example? Has it also changed the way you translate it? Akin to how Emily Wilson has, among other things, tried to bring re-emphasize the rich complexity and Otherness in Homer.
AES: In 2015 or so, when significant numbers of asylum-seekers (at that time mostly from Syria, which can be seen in the Cavafyian sense as part of the Greek-inflected world) started crossing the water from Turkey to the nearby Greek island of Lesbos, with many drowning in the process, I had this sudden realization that this is the same patch of water that Achilles crosses and crisscrosses in the “grand foray” that immediately precedes and indeed triggers the action of the Iliad. It is around the Bay of Edremit, and the island of Lesbos, that he is sacking towns and pillaging, slaying young men like Andromache’s brothers, and enslaving women such as Briseis and Chriseis or the beautiful weaving women of Lesbos, who become Briseis’s “chorus” when she does her aria of lamentation on the death of Patroclus.
War and slavery, exile and migration, this is happening now and has been happening for millennia, and often in areas abutting the Eastern Aegean. When I was translating Hesiod, I realized his father was an economic migrant who had crossed over from Asia Minor (now Turkey) to Boeotia in Greece. People (hominids) have been crossing this body of water from even before, say, homo sapiens. It’s an awareness of diachronic time, of the present and the past coexisting in the same space. I think once your understanding of a thing changes, inevitably your take on translating it changes.
SS: Archaic Smile, your first book-length collection of poetry, was published in 1999 and your second, Hapax, was published in 2006. Meanwhile, your translation of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura was published in 2007. Had you been translating throughout this period, or did you make a conscious decision to return to translation?
AES: Oh yes, the translation was ongoing. It took about a decade. De Rerum Natura is a long poem, and a difficult one, and once I had translated it through, I almost had to go back and redo it with a different (and I hope better) understanding of the work. It was a transformative experience for me as well as the text, as it were.
SS: Could you tell us a bit more about the interplay between translation and poetry in your work? Do you think that focusing on your own poetry allowed you to become a better translator?
AES: Translation is a great activity for a poet. I always have a project I am working on, so I don’t need to wait on inspiration. Translation uses the same muscles as original poetry—in my case, it could be meter and rhyme, as well as register and diction and metaphor and syntax. I love how I learn by translating, and can also step outside myself. I do think writing my own poems helps my ear for translation, but translation helps my poems too—for instance, I learned how to sustain longer pieces. And I think it helps stretch your reach in terms of subject matter, and so on.
SS: You have previously said that you have a predilection for form poetry because you consider limitation a boon to your creativity. You also have written in a wide range of different forms, from villanelles to multiple choice questions. How do you choose which form to use for a poem? Do you have an idea which you then seek to actualize within the most productive form possible, or do you begin with the form itself?
AES: There is no formula: if there were, the poems would turn formulaic. Sometimes I want to try out a particular form (I hadn’t written a successful ghazal before my “Ghazal of the 50th Danaid), and sometimes I have an idea for a poem but I have to keep casting about for a form; this was the case, oddly with “Bad News Blues,” which started out as quatrains, and then a sonnet. Sometimes a line or two comes, and it seems to want to rhyme or repeat. Sometimes I write a sixteen-line poem in blank verse, and it then occurs to me that I could cut two lines and that the rhetoric of the poem is already in sonnet territory. I recently wrote my first sonnet crown, which turned out to be about crown shyness in trees and also about the Homeric epics. I am fond of nonce stanzas too, and a kind of rhyming I call “cat’s cradle” rhyming, where there is no scheme and I just rhyme pairs with abandon and over great distances. Of late, I have been interested in stanzas bigger than quatrains (such as the Venus & Adonis stanza) and in syllabics. I think stanzas are a great way to think and explore more complicated connections and thoughts. And I still feel syllabics have relatively unexplored potential.
SS: One possible pitfall of focusing on poetry written in traditional form is that it becomes easy to primarily read poets who write in an antiquated diction. Ezra Pound once accused one of his peers of writing English as if it was a dead language. Your poetry is the opposite of this, as you excel in using form in a way that keeps language alive and modern–which really comes across in your selected poems, This Afterlife (2022). Are there any other contemporary poets that write in received form who inspire you? What is it about their work that you admire?
AES: Thank you for these good words! I’m not sure form and antiquated diction have anything to do with one another, and I’m not against using the odd bit of old-fashioned language either. I’m against the flattened language of the page and social media and the screen, which seems to have infected our spoken language, homogenizing it and taking out the quirks, including archaisms and regionalisms. People almost inevitably write more flatly than they actually speak, but then speech patterns start to follow the flat, written ones. Lots of contemporary poets are both formally accomplished and write in a vigorous vernacular. Some that come to mind are Don Paterson, Ange Mlinko, Josh Mehigan, Ishion Hutchinson, Patricia Smith, Jericho Brown, V. Penelope Pellizon, Rachel Hadas, Catherine Tufariello, Rhina Espaillat, Christian Wiman, and Mark Jarman, to name just a few.
SS: What have you found most useful in avoiding this flatness in your writing? Do you draw inspiration from things like everyday speech and music?
AES: When you hear or come across a word and you think, I have not used that word in a long time, or maybe ever, and it occurs to you that this word is about to slip out of your spoken or written vocabulary, or maybe slip out of use altogether—you become determined to use it. Listening to people speak can help, but again, I’m afraid our speech is now very influenced by television writing and flat academic writing. Reading now is probably the best way to keep words and phrases alive—reading widely across region and time and gender and class and race and culture. I am concerned that AI will worsen and hasten this. There seems to be some anxiety in the writing world that AI might make poets or writers obsolete, or might even outdo them in composing a poem, say. But I think the danger is the other way around: we are all going to be influenced by the machined banality of AI unless we actively resist it.
SS: You have expressed your admiration for Sapphics before. What do you consider to be an underappreciated verse form that you would like to see more of? What do you find special about it?
AES: Sapphics are fun because they allow for different sorts of words than traditional accentual/syllabic verse—they are fond of proper nouns and brands and place names (in English, anyway), and prosaic expressions. But I also like what I’d call the “English Sapphic”, which is to say, a quatrain, usually rhymed, where the fourth line is pulled up a foot or two short. There is something satisfying about that musically, and it often comes with an unexpected lurch of the heart. As for other forms? Ah! As I just said, syllabics. I like how the tension is between heavy and light syllables, between polysyllabic words taking up lots of real estate, and monosyllables filling out their measure. And what can be done with syntax and enjambments.
SS: You have now returned to Oxford as the 47th Professor of Poetry, having succeeded Alice Oswald. How does this feel? Do you have a set idea of what you want to focus on during your tenure?
AES: I’m excited about it, and about being actively engaged with young writers and translators at Oxford, from within and without the University. I will probably be focused largely on craft in my talks, as well as literary translation, and my readings of classics against the contemporary world. I have already held a couple of generative workshops with students, and I aim to do one such thing at least once every term, as well as hosting some seminars on, say, meter, rhyme, literary translation, etc. I’m about to do one I am calling a “title clinic,” as, having just been involved in judging a contest, I was struck by how many poems would have been improved simply by more thoughtful titling. I hope to attend student events as well, and generally to be present. And I’d like to arrange some readings and events, again with an eye to the cross-fertilization of influences, languages, and approaches.
SS: You recently delivered your inaugural lecture for the Professorship, entitled “The Bat Poet: Poetry as Echolocation.” Could you expand on this notion for those of us who were unable to attend?
AES: It’s available online, and I will also be putting together a transcript. I wanted the talk to be something of an introduction of myself, so I started with something of a geographical and aesthetic introduction to the times and places that have influenced me as a US poet. I made a point of focusing on poems from non-British isles poets in that first lecture, poets that would be less well known to an Oxford audience, like Randall Jarrell or Theodore Roethke or John Crowe Ransom or Robert Hayden. (Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost I imagine are well enough known, but they were also key to this particular talk.) My interest was in poems that proceed by sound more than by metaphor or image—rhyme and stanza being part of this—and so move by echolocation, by calling out and listening.
SS: I imagine that the Professorship will keep you quite busy, but are there any on-going translation projects you could tell us about?
AES: I am working on three translation projects at present. I am working on a performable version of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo for a theater project. I am in theory working on a translation of Virgil’s Georgics, which would mean finishing the trifecta of the big didactic epic poets of the ancient world (Lucretius, Hesiod, and Virgil). But I have mixed feelings about how that is going and confess to being a bit stuck—maybe I should do a presentation of a work in progress and see what the audience thinks! I am also translating some contemporary Greek poetry, particularly work from the poet Stamatis Polenakis.
SS: That’s a very exciting series of projects! For De Rerum Natura, you translated Lucretius’ dactylic hexameter into fourteeners, whereas for Hesiod’s Works and Days, you translated it into “not-strictly-heroic couplets.” Apologies if this is one of the points on which you are stuck, but what form are you thinking of using for Virgil’s hexameter?
AES: At present, it is also in heroic couplets, though of a slightly different flavor to the Hesiod, which (the ip couplets I mean) might be a mistake, I don’t know. Obviously, this strategy has been done before (marvellously by Dryden, for instance), but so have most methods—free verse, blank verse, hexameter verse (done beautifully by C. Day Lewis). I guess what I am trying to bring forward, again, is the plainness of the Latin—if not in syntax, in vocabulary. I am not trying to do anything fancy with the vocabulary, but to make it quite plain English. I am also not hewing line for line, because I don’t want to over-tighten the syntax, but to let the sentences have their sprawl.
A.E. Stallings is a poet, critic, and translator. Her latest book is This Afterlife: Selected Poems. She was recently elected the Oxford Professor of Poetry.
Sebastián Sánchez is a Chilean-American poet, translator, and Asymptote’s Assistant Interview Editor. They have most recently had their work published in Protean Magazine and the Oxford Anthology of Translation. They run a translation blog, de Rokha & Others, where they publish translations of Chilean poetry. Their translations focus on poetry published and written by Chilean women and queer people in the 70s and 80s during the dictatorship. These poets and writers (such as Soledad Fariña, Malú Urriola, Diamela Eltit, and Pedro Lemebel) used their position of social oppression and political repression to develop radically innovative forms of writing which expanded the possibilities of what language can do, and are deeply under-appreciated in the Anglophone world.