Calling Cards

Abstract

Calling Cards Thomas F. Dillingham (bio) A Brahms Card Ballad: Poems Selected for Hungarians. John Ridland. Dowitcher Press. http://dowitcherdesigns.com/dowitcherpress. 64 pages; paper, $13.95. The best ballads give us stories of quests. The adventurous youth sets out to find or win a treasure, whether a person (the ideal loved one) or a valued object, sacred or profane. The quest requires journeys through time and space, overcoming obstacles and, most important, providing proof of the hero's worthiness. The title poem of John Ridland's new volume provides a curious modern instance; subtitled "From, for, and to Tibor Frank," the poem retells the quest of the dedicatee to add to his collection of calling cards of famous people, a card from the composer, Johannes Brahms. As a boy, the seeker finds a Brahms calling card in a bookstore, But its price—400 Schillings— Would barely buy enoughFor his mother to sew a dress from Of ruffley Austrian stuff And so, he refrains from satisfying his quest. With a graceful leap, the ballad takes us forty years later to a repeat performance—the same or a similar card would cost as much as his "monthly stipend," and so he looks again and again, choosing self-denial, fails to realize his quest, but plans to continue, at appropriate intervals, visiting "secondhand bookshops / To check the Brahms card prices." As does this pleasing example of a literary ballad, many of John Ridland's poems show the rich interaction of traditional forms with characteristic modern themes and situations. The splendid and wrenching psalmody of "Elegy for My Aunt," the Herrick-like lilt of the ten-line stanzas in "Life With Unkie," the deft control of "My First Villanelle," the clever sestina of "Explosion in the Slat Factory" (about Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 [1912]) all testify to Ridland's commitment to the discipline of the poetic art. They also show the added intensity of emotion or thought subjected to the discipline of strict form. In 1999, John Ridland published his English translation of a greatly revered Hungarian poem, John the Valiant (revised, Hesperus Press, 2004); Sándor Petőfi's nineteenth-century "folk epic," a poem alternating between fanciful adventure and buffoonish comedy, is described as the best-known of all Hungarian poems. Ridland's translation was a result of several visits to Hungary and a testament to his fondness for the nation and its culture. In appreciative, even grateful response, his "selected poems" translated into Hungarian was published in Budapest in 2004. This volume included works selected from nearly fifty years of Ridland's career; the opening poem, "New Zealander," is dated 1956, and the rest of the poems, chosen by Gyula Kodolányi, translated by Kodolányi and five other Hungarian poets, extend into the twenty-first century. The volume contains a variety of poems, but leans heavily toward the elegiac and the literary or artistic. In addition to Ridland's elegy for his aunt and reminiscences of life with Unkie, we find "Last Poem for My Father," the brilliant "The Poet Who Didn't Smoke" (in memory of Hungarian poets Ernő Szép and Miklós Radnóti), and the deeply affecting sequence, "The Little John Poems," in memory of "John Forbes Ridland, 1963-1969"; its conclusion, "Anniversary Elegy," will stand with the very finest short poems about loss of a loved one. (I think of Ben Jonson, of Thomas Hardy, of James Wright.) Along with the elegies are the low-keyed and witty poems of commentary—the tight couplets of "Letter to Huck Finn" (telling him that contrary to rumor and hope, Pap is not dead, and never will be), the self-effacing "On Translating Janos Vitez," a fine example of the authorial trope of modesty, or the clever "Dear Absolute," a missive with dismissive reply. There are also several ekphrastic poems, including the fine evocation of Johannes Vermeer's "The Little Street": Where all is labor, labor may turn art,And through an art like his draw up to love,Straighten bent spines and the bruised knees that jutAgainst the beauty they are remnants of,Before the creaking winter slams them...