I have a distinct memory of Harry Stoneback from early in my time teaching at SUNY New Paltz, in late 2006 or early 2007. Newly a father, I was in my office on the seventh floor of JFT working into the night, desperate to stay awake and get some grading done. From across the hall, I heard the unmistakable sound of an acoustic guitar being strummed, followed by a mellow voice rambling around a familiar folk tune. A graduate student poked his head in my office door and asked me if I wanted to come to the café and read poetry and sing along. At that time, it all seemed faintly unreal. Although I’d spent a good portion of my undergraduate career writing poetry, neither making poetry nor performing music had been a part of my life for well over a decade, and so I demurred, hunkered down, finished grading.

Thinking back on it now, the anecdote gives me pause. I know I felt poetry’s call even then, but I felt helpless to act on my artistic impulses. Bogged, I’d forgotten the source of my inspiration for writing about literature in the first place, in the creative act. Something about the liberation and joy suggested by Stoney and his students at play lodged itself in my mind.

When I served as Graduate Director of the English Department (2012-2016), I worked alongside Stoney as co-editor of the Shawangunk Review, which of course he’d founded years before. As he mentored young scholar-poets, his generosity and a surprising lightness of touch predominated the exchanges I’d overhear from my office across the hall. Mostly, Harry would send me the completed poetry section for each issue, and I’d edit the critical essays and reviews and put it all together before seeing it through the press. But one day, in Spring of 2014, as we assembled volume 25, Stoney handed me a few crumpled computer printouts annotated with his scrawled, looping notes. On them were his poem, “Woodsmoke in Aigues-Mortes:  Late November,” and two translations of it, into French and Provençal. Harry didn’t say very much about any of this, but he indicated that he wanted to include all three in the Review and sought my editorial assistance as we hurled headlong toward the impending publication deadline imposed by the Graduate Symposium.

It has become my favorite Stoneback poem for its restraint, its consistent and wistful tone, its evocative sonorousness. The poem concludes:

The full moon summons Le Petit Rhone

To glory, to bedazzled joy. This moonlight

Makes it easy to see the white horses

In the passing pastures. The black bulls

Are hard to see. We are almost home.

Li Santi glows across the Marais.

Smoke from the last burning field of Fall drifts:

We like the way the smoke lingers, from afar,

In the late November in the dark Camargue. (87)

The poem lingers like the woodsmoke, its assonance darkling with depth, its alliterations ancient as the sense of the place it evokes. Seeing the poem in its French and Provençal translations caused me to look more closely at the original English, its untranslatable sonic subtleties. As Walter Benjamin argues in his famous essay, “It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.” It occurs to me that Harry managed to accomplish something of this liberation of English as he meditated on his travels, dwelled on the significance of place. As explained in Stoney’s meticulous textual note, included at the end, “Woodsmoke” itself had quite an itinerary:  the lyric was first composed in 1997, first saw the light as an independently published trilingual chapbook in 1998, then was the runner up in the Yeats Poetry Contest for 1999, appearing yet again in the Yeats Newsletter, before being collected in his Café Millennium & Other Poems and, finally, making its way to the Review.

When we speak of translation, we usually mean the shifting of a word or words from one language into another. At its root, the Latin translatio more literally means to move a person or thing from one place to another, as in the religious sense of the translation of a relic to a different site. It is in this root sense, the sense of always being “almost home,” that we can say with Shakespeare, “Bless thee, Stoney, bless thee. Thou art translated.”