So Much Secret Labor: James Wright and Translation
by Anne Wright, Saundra Rose Maley, and Jeffrey Katz
(Wesleyan University Press, 2025, 272 pp., $75.00/Hardcover, $24.95/Paperback)
I nurse a writerly fantasy that, regardless of how much traction my original poems and verse translations ever find in the marketplace, one day a word-loving grandchild will sift through my papers and discover enough treasure to merit culling and compiling a representative sample to preserve for those who might be interested. With So Much Secret Labor: James Wright and Translation, Anne Wright, Saundra Rose Maley, and Jeffrey Katz have done just this sort of loving work on behalf of the lesser-known (and for the most part previously unpublished) results of Wright’s significant work as a translator. Anne Wright, who was married to the poet from 1967 until his death in 1980, previously collaborated with Maley over a period of several years on A Wild Perfection, a collection of the poet’s letters.
So Much Secret Labor is not an academic critical study in the traditional sense, nor is it a literary biography, nor is it simply a collection of representative (or underrepresented) translations by the poet. It’s an interesting mix of all these things, and the resulting book is compelling as a case study of the role of translation in the work and life of a poet. As Jeffrey Katz explains in his “Afterward,” what this book offers is “the careful illumination of the steady work with translations that the poet himself called ‘so much secret labor.’ It is a story of … the plain, daily, hard work of moving line by line through poems” (205).
Perhaps best known for his deservedly oft-anthologized “Autumn Comes to Martin’s Ferry, Ohio,” James Wright (1927-1980) was an American poet and teacher who published numerous books of original poems and translations before dying too young from cancer. Having grown up in that small industrial town on the edge of Appalachia, Wright served in the United States Army during WWII and then studied at Kenyon College on the GI Bill. Upon graduation from Kenyon in 1952, Wright married (first wife Liberty Kardules) and headed to Vienna on a Fulbright scholarship, where he discovered—by accidentally popping in on a lecture for which he was not registered—the Austrian poet Georg Trakl. After Vienna, Wright and his growing family moved to Seattle, where he earned a master’s and PhD at the University of Washington. Teaching took him to Minnesota, where he felt very isolated and unhappy, even after meeting and striking up a wonderful friendship and fruitful professional collaboration with Robert and Caroline Bly, whose Minnesota farm became an island of joy for him. Despite professional success, Wright’s personal unhappiness persisted, and his marriage ended in divorce. In 1965, Wright moved to New York City, where he and Anne met and were married, where he found AA and relief from alcoholism, and where he became a professor at Hunter College for the remainder of his career. In 1972 Wright’s Collected Poems was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
The seven chapters of So Much Secret Labor are organized loosely chronologically. In a brief introductory chapter, Anne Wright celebrates her husband’s “First Translations” (and the Latin and English teachers who inspired the young poet at Martin’s Ferry High School). In Chapter 2, “A Solitary Apprenticeship: The German Poets,” Saundra Rose Maley, provides an overview of Wright’s deep engagement with the German poets he read and translated during his time at Kenyon College. The third “chapter” is comprised of a 22-page sample of some of Wright’s translations from the German (all but three previously unpublished). The book’s middle (and most lucid) chapter, “A Fine Weave of Voices: Translation, Whitman, and Wright’s New Style,” is essentially a long essay by Jeffrey Katz on Wright’s development as a poet, including his personal struggles with alcohol and with mental health, his deep collaboration with Robert Bly, and his transition to “free verse” in response to the perceived strictures of the formal tradition that twentieth century poets seem to have felt obligated to find offensive to their artistic freedom. Chapter 5, “Here is Nourishment: The Spanish Poets,” is attributed to Anne Wright but is comprised mostly of loosely connected excerpts from James Wright’s own journals and letters, followed by a “chapter” of about 40 pages of Wright’s translations from Spanish-language poets. In the final chapter, Jeffrey Katz offers “A Portfolio” illuminating Wright’s collaboration with Robert Bly on the translation of “Grodek,” a lyric poem by Georg Trakl.
Through this varied approach over the course of its 205 pages, So Much Secret Labor allows the reader to see that, undoubtedly, translation was central to the life’s work of this poet. In high school he was introduced to the pleasures of translating Catullus, a preoccupation that must have helped ground him during his time in the army during World War II, and a pleasure he retained for the rest of his life. At Kenyon College after the war, Wright discovered the German language and the pleasures of German poetry. Maley suggests that the decision to embrace German poetry at a time when Germany was universally unpopular “revealed his sense of poetic imagination,” and that Wright’s “brooding personality made him especially receptive to the often dark poems of the Germans, whose themes of alienation, solitude, and death were subjects he was exploring in his earliest poems” (6-7). Indeed, his interest in these poets was not a superficial one; during his undergraduate years at Kenyon, formative years for the development of his own poetic craft, Wright went on to make translations of some 300 poems by sixteen different German poets.
Maley’s 1996 PhD dissertation, Solitary Apprenticeship: James Wright and German Poetry, brought to light that, though largely unnoticed for decades, the practice of translating poetry from German was inextricably linked to the develop of his craft as a poet. “James Wright’s early career displays one of the most rigorous apprenticeships of any American poet since World War II,” Maley argues here. “He, indeed, apprenticed himself not only to British and American poetry, but to a body of German literature in the years before his better-known encounters with Spanish literature. For the most part, Wright’s early German translations were not for publication, they were openings that led him to the creation of his own poems—apprenticeship by translation” (6).
In addition to continuing to sharpen his craft through his translations, the authors make it clear that the practice of working closely with the poems of other poets in other languages spilled quite directly into his own poems. Wright often labelled his translations, especially early on in his career, as “imitations” or “adaptations.” This tendency is certainly in part a poet’s humble acknowledgement of the impossibility of actually transforming a poem in one language into an authentic version of itself in another language—unlike translating a news article, for example, at best the translation of a poem captures much of the meaning, the feeling, and the tone of the original poem, but the result is something new, a new poem that works as a poem in the target language. Beyond this acknowledgement, Wright’s tendency to refer to his translations as “adaptations” or “imitations” might also be rooted in the fact that it was a common experience for the young poet to find working with a poem from another language allowed him a get a running start in the direction of an original poem in English. As Maley explains, “The notebooks Wright kept his whole life, especially those of his early years, clearly show drafts of many translations moving right off the page from rough versions into his own poems” (8).
Once he met Robert and Caroline Bly, Spanish moved to the forefront, and collaborative translation of the works of Vallejo, Neruda, and others came to occupy a great deal of his time and creative energy, leading to the publication of several well-known books that helped to bring these important Latin American poets to American readers.
Beyond the impact translation had on his work, the authors make the case that the practice was central to his development as a person. Katz suggests that “[h]is work with translations would give Wright greater access to his own tenderness, anger, melancholy, and reverence by way of such a personal rhythm, without the constraint of what he called ‘rhetoric.’ In other words, he found in the Spanish and Latin American poets, in particular, a tonal directness, a language highly sophisticated, but left ‘unmanaged’ by the intellect and its New Critical partners—irony, tension, and paradox” (89). Wright himself makes the point even more emphatically in a letter excerpted in the “Nourishment” section, in which he says of the Peruvian poet César Vallejo, “I owe him so much because he reminded me that perhaps I too, might somehow vindicate myself not only as an artist, but even, as a human being” (119).
So Much Secret Labor is clearly a labor of love and a loving appreciation, and both the book’s strengths and its shortcomings stem from the passionate commitment its compilers have to James Wright and to his work. Wright, Maley, and Katz have accomplished their goal of providing compelling evidence that translation was at the heart of Wright’s work as a poet and that the practice was deeply sustaining for him personally as well. On the other hand, while the two chapters written by Katz offer satisfying analysis, those attributed to Anne Wright and to Maley fall short of providing in-depth analysis to support the ample evidence they offer. As mentioned above, Wright’s introduction to the Spanish-language section is mostly a compilation of excerpts from the poet’s own writings. And for better or worse, Maley makes her case for the importance of the German poets in Wright’s oeuvre through an accumulation of myriad examples discussed briefly at the expense of a thorough analysis of any of them. For this reader at least, these sections of the book would have benefitted from the addition of deeper analysis of a representative example.
The other major gap in this book was created by the decision not to provide the full German and Spanish texts of the poems presented in the two Selected Translations sections. I realize that one reason translation even exists as a phenomenon is that not all readers have access to the original language, but it is impossible to appreciate the work of a translation or to begin to evaluate its effectiveness without direct comparison to the original. Especially in a book dedicated to appreciating the work of translation, the process of translation, the opportunity for side-by-side comparison feels essential.
Unlikely to be of interest to a general reader (even a “general reader” whose reading diet includes some poetry), So Much Secret Labor will be compelling for devotees of James Wright or of the German- and Spanish-language poets in whose work he so immersed himself. More than that, this book is a valuable resource for insights into the mind, the craft, and the translation work of an important American poet. As such, it certainly deserves a place on the bookshelves of working poets, especially those for whom translation is part of their poetic practice.