Spring Ulmer on Political Poetry, Personification, and Translating as Gardening

Lit Hub is excited to feature another entry in a new series from Poets.org: “enjambments,” a monthly interview series with new and established poets. This month, they spoke to Spring Ulmer. Spring Ulmer, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow and a 2016 Willis Barnstone Translation Prize winner, is the translator of Exercises, 1950–1960, by Yannis Ritsos.

She is the author, most recently, of Phantom Number: An Abecedarium for April (Tupelo Press, 2025), selected by Diane Seuss as the winner of the 2022 Dorset Prize. Ulmer teaches at Middlebury College.

*

Poets.org: Who or what are your main influences and inspirations in poetry?

Spring Ulmer: Political poetry has always been my North Star. Mahmoud Darwish speaks of such poetry as “similar to the riposte of small creatures when they are threatened by a storm. They hide between two stones, in the cracks, in the holes, in the bark of a tree. Poetry is only this. She is this small creature that doesn’t have the strength that we suppose she has. Her strength is her extreme fragility” (quote translated by Amira El-Zein and Carolyn Forché in Palestine as Metaphor).

I find extreme fragility crucial. I’m currently spending lots of time with Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony, her brilliant conception of translation is akin to watching birds freely fly over militarized borders, looking down on the human beings torturing one another below.

Poets.org: What is your approach to the craft of translating poetry, and did it evolve while working on this book?

SU: I’ve learned a lot from building small stone huts and stacking wood. Translating Yannis Ritsos’s Exercises, 1950–1960, was repetitive work—almost manual labor. I plodded, word by word, unearthing each poem, one after another for roughly the same number of years it took Ritsos to write them.

When I was a child, I loved Knossos. My parents withdrew all their savings and took me, at age nine, to bicycle across Greece; and we began our months of pedaling on Crete.

Knossos was living history; I delighted in its murals’ designs and colors, not yet understanding Sir Arthur Evans’ hubris. How could he pull the rug out from under Minos Kalokairinos, who first found the site, and pour concrete into this ruin?

Knossos is considered a “creative restoration.” I suppose this is a kind of translation. I am just as blind, I imagine, as Evans was. English pours concrete on everything. Maybe some young person, though, might delight in my translations.

Poets.org: Can you speak about a poetic device that Yannis Ritsos uses in Exercises, 1950–1960?

SU: I am particularly attuned to Ritsos’ animist turn; the manner in which he employs personification gives me so much joy. I love the lemon tree, for instance, that runs in τὸ νυφικό της, δίχως κανεὶς νὰ καταλάϐει [“its wedding dress, without anyone noticing”] and then falls into a well in “Gardener’s Perception.”

The freedom of Ritsos’ imagination frees the reader, who, in turn, begins to register and then celebrate the vital force of the nonhuman world.

Poets.org: How has your approach to translating Ritsos’s work differed from previous ones, and what have you learned from the translations of your predecessors?

SU: I’ve loved Ritsos since I was a teen. I was first introduced to his poetry at age sixteen or seventeen. I was riding the Greyhound bus across the United States, reading The Sense of Sight, a book by John Berger which I am chagrined to admit I nicked from a college library (the only time I ever felt the need to nick a book, intuiting as I must have that it would change my life).

There was something about stumbling upon Berger’s quotation of “Saturday, 11 a.m.,” translated by Nikos Stangos, that I couldn’t put my finger on; the poem hollered at me. The dead and the living were out on the street, the doughnut man was shouting, “Doughnuts, / warm doughnuts,” and the violinist was throwing his instrument onto the sidewalk. I felt part of the scene. The poem knew everything about everyone, even what the parrot was thinking.

Language came alive for me through this translation. Sometimes the stones Ritsos painted are visible in the translations of his poems; sometimes the sensibility of translator and poet match and some wild thing happens—the charge transfers. Sometimes I can’t feel it and the translations feel too ornate or too cardboard.

As I was working on my own translations, having purchased a battered copy of Ritsos’s Ποιήματα [Collected Poems] at an outdoor market on Corfu and translating poems for my dying father, Edmund Keeley and Karen Emmerich released their elegant translation of Ritsos’s prison notebooks Diaries of Exile. They know what they’re doing, their research is impeccable, Keeley has been translating Ritsos (and C. P. Cavafy and George Seferis) for years, and Emmerich is an equally impressive modern Greek scholar and translator.

I’m just the gardener, struck deaf and dumb by the lovely lemon tree as it falls into the well. I’m over here just trying to get the tree out, drying off its veil. There’s a lot of feeling around, a lot of stumbling. But when the poem emerges from the well and I get it dry, the feeling is like I’ve watched the lemon tree get married all over again in reverse—if it ever did get married. (Maybe it just loved the dress?)

Poets.org: If you could pair one of the poems in Exercises, 1950–1960, with a work of art, song, recipe, or some other form of media, which poem would you choose, and with what would you pair it?

SU: I would pair Ritsos’ “Every Winter” with Abdallah Zrika’s “Letter from a Prisoner,” translated from the French by Doog T. Wood. Snails populate both poems. Both poets were jailed for their Marxist beliefs.

In Ritsos’s poem, some snails go out for a walk after it rains; others stay underground. Women gather the visible ones, and ϐροχὴ μπαίνει ἀπ’ ὅλες τὶς παλιές, λησμονημένες τρύπες [“rain comes in through all the forgotten, old holes”].

In Zrika’s poem, a prisoner writes a letter in his dreams to his mother, even as he “would like to send” her “a snail / loving the ground passionately /…a snail” that would gather poems into a shell and send them across the sea to where his mother rests. The poem ends: “Hello mother! Have you received the snail?”

Zrika’s poem takes place internally. Ritsos writes the wetness, slime, soil. Imagine their snails (those underground and those out to sea) conspiring!

Poets.org: What are you currently reading?

SU: I just read Zheng Xiaoqiong’s In the Roar of the Machine, translated by Eleanor Goodman. It’s a haunting book about modernity and its abuses as measured against a pastoral life that also has its limitations (primarily loneliness).

The nostalgia for village life permeates this poet’s experience as a factory worker. Women workers’ lives are foregrounded and rendered in excruciatingly caring detail. I found it haunting, as I am filled with similar nostalgia for my childhood lived off the grid.

Poets.org: What are your favorite poems on Poets.org?

SU: Because this is an impossible question, I will just choose a few Poem-a-Day selections (from poets I had never been introduced to before) that have resonated of late:

“War” by Gary Copeland Lilley is a prose poem that barrels on without punctuation, intentionally dropping us into the intensity of “Daniel,” the poet’s friend who is a “brother-man genocide survivor,” “army airborne paratrooper,” fighting secret U.S. wars “in anywhere-South America,” who just wants to heal. It’s furious, and its language digs into this late-stage racial capitalist economy, whereupon the state renders certain persons, like Daniel, disposable.

In “Ways to Measure Trees,” MaKshya Tolbert listens to trees, asking “Where does it hurt?” The poem’s ending is so perfect. I imagine this poem whispering to Ritsos’ lemon tree.

Muna Lee’s “Vendor of Green Coconuts” surprised me. Lee was born in 1895, but the poem feels new, fresh, save for the poet’s arguably ethnographic gaze: “A world has been gutted by fire and disaster, / Nations wasted to ashes,” all the while the coconut vender has been “hacking and chopping / Dusky nuts from their sheaths of ivory and green.”

What beautiful phrasing. What a political and poetic scene. Who has the privilege to contemplate the world burning? The poor must keep working.

Lastly, Tim Seibles’ “Naïve” is pitch-perfect. Before the reader knows it, they are privy to two grinning Black boys walking down the street, arms slung around one another’s shoulders.

The reader knows that pain is around the corner, and here it comes: “This itching fury that / holds me now—this knowing // the early welcome / that once lived inside me // was somehow sent away.” It doesn’t get more heartbreaking. So when the poet still walks “these streets // believing in the weather / of the unruined heart,” we learn to keep going, keep loving in the face of horror.

______________________________

“enjambments,” a monthly interview series produced by the Academy of American Poets, will highlight an emerging or established poet who has recently published a poetry collection. Each interview, along with poems from the poet’s new book, and a reading by the poet, will be published on Poets.org and shared in the Academy’s weekly newsletter.