Path, Crooked Path (review)

The photograph on the cover of John Balaban's newest collection depicts the shadows of four people stretching over a desert landscape. It's a fitting choice for this book, if only because the poems inside are so rife with images of human domination—over land itself, over its resources, and especially over each other. Balaban's settings, including such places as Highway 61, the Acropolis, Hanoi, Paris, and Miami Beach, are as scattered across time as they are across the globe. Yet it quickly becomes apparent that Path, Crooked Path is scattering its subjects in order to unite them under common themes, the ubiquity of war simply being the first of many.

In part, Balaban's interest in other countries, especially those in Europe and Asia, is purely genealogical: the first of two short prose pieces is set in Romania (which practically straddles both continents), in "the town of Balabanesti, the 'Place of the Balabans,' chartered by Stefan the Great in 1520." These are his roots, clearly, but their significance is also historical: Balaban goes on to identify his ancestors' birthplace as important not only because it's his, but because it lies close to the Black Sea port Tomis—now Costanta—where Ovid was exiled by Augustus in the first century AD. This sort of geographical grafting proves fruitful, enabling Balaban to write about history without sounding like a historian.

More importantly, though, it shows us his concern with the linguistic landscapes of exile, the communicative gulfs that frequently stretch between foreigner and native, even if they do happen to share the same great great grandmother. His description of Ovid's last years on the shores of the Black Sea—for the most part miserable, from what we know—contrasts the Roman's literary isolation with a communal military victory:

In his last works, he says he composed a poem in Getic, the local language. He says this with some embarrassment. Also, that one winter he stepped out with trepidation on the frozen Black Sea, and that he joined the citizenry at the ramparts to defend Tomis against barbarian horsemen who besieged the city with poison darts

(19).

War is, for better or worse, a universal language. Ovid's presence at the ramparts undoubtedly did more for his local reputation than his poetry might have done, Getic or otherwise. Yet Balaban, a traveler by choice rather than by Roman decree, clearly believes that the converse should be true. His subject may be Ovid, but as a contemporary poet he must be thinking also of his own work, especially his work in translation—a field which, by its very nature, strives to make poems more universal.

This may be one reason why, on the next page, Balaban continues with an impressionistic translation of Ovid's account of the battle in Tristia: he wants to remind us that Ovid's work, with all its concomitant difficulties, is now his. He repeats this gesture with a translation of the 20^th century Romanian poem "The Siege," in which a terrified population surrenders to a nonexistent army. There's clearly a pattern at work here. It's nearly impossible to overlook the visual similarities between these two accounts—the cavalry, the volleying arrows, the frail city walls. These similarities strikingly demonstrate the book's penchant for exploring a single emotion—in this case, fear—within two completely separate time-frames. As for Balaban's own poems, it's difficult at times to believe that they were all written by the same hand. His style is compellingly diverse. Take, for example, "Ibn Fadhlan. . .", an Arabian official in the 10^th century who encounters Christian Vikings, observes their morning ablutions, (which include washing their faces and blowing their noses in "the same filthy water"), and declares them "the dirtiest creatures of God." Here we have a perspective that few Americans have even thought about, let alone understood. Later, he tells us that "Tibetan monks, sealed up in caves for months / might sometimes make a figure out of butter," presumably for companionship, but that the...