My new translation of a long(ish) Jürgen Becker poem (the first ever into English) has just been posted on the US site, Asymptote. Do click the link above and have a look at it. You can also hear an audio recording of the opening passages of the poem read in German (thank you, old friend, Tim Turner). Becker’s work is really very unusual – and hardly known at all in translation. I have been working on a particular collection of his poems, published originally in 1993 – Foxtrot at the Erfurt Stadium. Asymptote is a marvellous site with a whole range of creative work, so once you are there, stay and have a look around.
autobiography
‘Midsummer at High Laver’: a return to an old poem of mine
We were out in Essex recently. My daughter is planning to get married and she wanted to look at wedding venues! I know. Things you do. I’ll give nothing away but just to say the trip was a success – the happy day will be in 18 months time. But while checking google maps as to how to get to the venue, I noticed that we were going to be driving near the village of High Laver. All sorts of bells clanged as a friend of mine used to rent a house up near there and we visited him many years ago. The house was a classic English cottage, must have been 16/17th century; nothing in it was straight, wood paneling everywhere, and he told stories of ghostly presences, things moving about in the night. I remember him opening an old wooden chest – something out of Wolf Hall, I now think – and inside was a fine old vinyl record player. Nice mix of old and new. The landscape was Essex-flat in the main, large fields. It must have been summertime – water irrigators were spraying the fields, and the fields seemed to be full of potato plants coming into flower.
There was a party in the evening – of which I remember nothing – but at some point, we drove to High Laver itself, to All Saints’ Church. I imagine this was just a local ‘sight’, though it may well have been that I initiated the trip as I knew who was buried in the churchyard. Wikipedia tells me: High Laver is a village and civil parish in the Epping Forest district of the county of Essex, England. The parish is noted for its association with the philosopher John Locke. Yes – I may well have been fan-hunting an old philosopher’s grave. But this was not long after I’d completed my doctorate on the philosophy and poetry of PB Shelley and Locke’s influence on PBS formed a major chapter. Wiki again: one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the ‘father of liberalism’, Locke was one of the first of the British empiricists in the tradition of Francis Bacon. His ideas include social contract theory and significant contributions to epistemology and political philosophy.
The poem – a sequence of 5 short lyrics – that came from this visit was eventually published in my first book, Beneath Tremendous Rain (1990). I don’t remember the truth of the chronology, but the poem suggests I’d been to my parents’ home in Wiltshire, perhaps immediately before. Remember, I was coming out of years of Higher Education, probably wondering what (if anything) I was now fit for, ceasing (at last) being a child, becoming an adult, looking back and forwards into my own and my parents’ futures. So the ‘journey’ motif with which the poem opens is both literally geographical and autobiographical – the long summer roads of childhood…
I’ve beaten roads dusty with summer to be here.
Left the two of them, hands held, then waving
before the groomed hedge. Both looked older
again, walking Wiltshire fields, where slopes
have browned and stained poppy-red in places
like a bloody graze across sun-burned knees:
a hurt from those days quickly soothed by Mum;
bragged up later to a great exploit for Dad.
The two of them . . .
I remember I was pleased with the image of the Wiltshire fields (to be contrasted a bit later with the fields of Essex) and I know I was thinking/seeing in my mind a particular field beside the A4 from Silbury Hill to Marlborough on my regular route from Wiltshire to London: the dry field browning, the red poppies drifted through it: a graze on a sunburned knee. The drive to Essex goes on in the poem….
Absentminded,
my body alone has felt the pedals, held the wheel
as I’ve unearthed older and younger days
as precisely as those thumb-nail steps carved
in the solid encyclopedia I homeworked from,
perched at a desk on the edge of my bed.
The process of psychological recovery – the unearthing – of past youth: hence both ‘older and younger days’. As a schoolkid, I’d take homework upstairs, exactly as described here, unfold a little card table (green baize), sit on my bed, and work. The dictionary, I still have it. The Universal English Dictionary, edited by Henry Cecil Wyld, in the Thirteenth Impression of 1960. It smells musty, but still somehow of home. Is there a technical name for the thumb-nail steps for each letter of the alphabet? It is the precision of these steps and the idea of dictionary definitions that enter the poem here in the shape of my childhood and teenage faith in reason and empirical accuracy as a way forward (till I was 19 I thought I was going to be a scientist). The second part of the poem runs:
I bolted knowledge then.
The cuckoo, beak biggest part of itself.
A schoolboy stealing coinage from lucid books,
laying instalments on a life of smart logic.
The irony being applied to my younger self, my self-(over-)confidence, is a bit obvious I guess in the choice of ‘bolted’, the cuckoo image, the thieving image, ‘lucid’ and ‘smart’ as easy adjectives, and the hire purchase image of ‘instalments’. The contrast is made immediately in the poem via natural images of earth and stars (the potato flowers):
Now I drive through the fecundity of earth,
through these hectares of flowering potato,
white constellations adrift on undulating green,
with the conviction that this is a watershed:
x
so much of the talk at home is of death;
how do I brazen that out with an argument?
My old subject: time. Against which there can be no argument. What does the reasonable man say to time and death?
The third part of the poem re-states this same idea through a rather caricatured version of John Locke (the ‘stodgy book’ is his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) which I’d waded through for my thesis). Time and death are restated also via images of the graveyard at High Laver, trying to make sense of my inclination to visit graveyards, finally accepting that the impetus for this is of the ‘heart’ not of the head.
I’ve come to where jet-sprays of irrigation
relieve the cracked fields of hot midsummer.
I’ve come in self-conscious homage to High Laver,
burial place of that logical father,
whose stodgy book of rational commonsense,
sprung the tradition I’ve clung to long enough.
x
A laburnum sapling creaks in its rubber thong
at a stake, where I stalk the graveyard to find
the oldest stone . . . Always I’ve done this,
yet surreptitiously, plotting false explanations
for myself as it’s the heart that says this
is a powerful place, where generations
of local good and ill in swathes
have gone down like centuries of grass.
In the fourth part of the poem, I am caught off-guard on what began as a ‘reasoned’ piece of literary tourism by an access of powerful emotion in relation to the lives and (feared) deaths of my own parents: ‘there’s more than I feared / of the two of them’.
But I forget what I’m here for.
Stood beside this body volume of displaced earth,
piled weeks ago beneath the trees –
on that last day some stranger’s beloved mother
had more flowers than she ever dreamed of.
x
The blown wreathes outstare me.
In a blink aside there’s more than I feared
of the two of them, wrapped against coming cold:
Dad, hands stuffed in his pockets,
standing off on his own; Mum, struggling
to peg out snapping shirtfuls of wind.
The sequence ends with more ‘straight’ description of the rural landscape of Essex. I remember labouring hard over the image of the water irrigation system which directs its spray (often 40 feet into the air) in one direction and then (through some mechanism I don’t know about) it flips and begins spraying in a quite different direction. I knew this was the ‘objective correlative’ of what felt like a significant shifting of my own outlook; simply, a recognition of the importance of the ‘heart’, though ‘judder’ ‘slam’ and ‘sudden’ suggest a near traumatic shift at that. Nor did I want the ending of the poem to be too gloomy, and those white-flowering potato plants return in the final phrase to suggest the psychic shift I’m trying to explore will have a fertility of its own (even if yet unseen) personally and artistically.
I watch the flailing mare’s-tail, the jet-stream
spray of the irrigator beside the church.
Its white angle above the potato fields
seems to crumple to a vaporous nothing, yet
a judder slams sudden clouds of fizzing spray.
It’s drenching some different sector of the field,
this drained, tearful, flowering place.
‘Muzzle’ – a new poem for the New Year
Happy New Year to all of you. We are hoping for the best aren’t we? Come rain, shine or named storm, the poems go on, saying something at least for the individual, the social, for careful consideration of the world out there, the world in here, and the languages we use. I’m posting a poem which has just appeared on New Year’s Day at the excellent Modron Magazine, its strap line is ‘Writing on Nature and the Ecological Crisis’. Glyn F Edwards also interviewed me about the making of the poem and I’ll post the text of that below, along with the link to Modron. Do go and take a good look at what other work they have put up in this new Issue 5. And then subscribe to them. My poem is weirdly formatted – so here is an image of it, lacking its title which is: ‘Muzzle’
On the Writing of ‘Muzzle’
MC: It’s so interesting to be encouraged to look back at the process of writing a poem. I seldom do it (I suspect I’m not alone), forever rushing on to the next ‘best’ thing (we think, we hope). In looking back at ‘Muzzle’ (I find I have the very first draft and several subsequent ones) two things strike me: that it took so long to get to a ‘finish’, and that I’d forgotten how important the context of the poem was to what it might be expressing.
The first draft was scribbled in a notebook in the autumn of 2016. Earlier in the same notebook, I was sketching out thoughts on my, then, just-published version of the classic Chinese poems, the Daodejing (Enitharmon, 2016), preparing for readings I was to give from the book. Elsewhere there are fragments about my parents’ growing difficulties at home and (later) in their care home, plus some quite late drafts of the longish poem about the plight of refugees in the Mediterranean which was published as Cargo of Limbs (Hercules, 2019), and even first drafts of the poems which have eventually come to make up my most recent collection, Between a Drowning Man (Salt, 2023). Remember, the Brexit referendum took place in June 2016 and if there is an idea that links all these differing creative endeavours (including ‘Muzzle’) it is the idea of ‘division’.
Q1 – Only with the word ‘dog’ at the end of the third stanza does the reader gain a semantic connection to the ‘Muzzle’ in the title of the poem. Of course, Chekhov’s gun was ‘cocked’ all along, and the ‘muzzle’ becomes the open end of a weapon where a bullet escapes. Can you explain a little more of the rationale for this subtle title?
MC: To my surprise, I find, the first draft has no ‘muzzle’ mentioned in it at all. But the shape and a lot of the substance of the finished poem is already there: the flag-waving men during an idyllic autumn walk (on the Sussex Downs, as far as I remember), the shooting party, even the man and his dog at the end of the poem. The muzzle of a ‘smoking gun’ is clearly implied but the final dog’s muzzle does not make an appearance till quite late (I mean 2020 or so!). In fact, in the first draft I clearly don’t know how to end the poem. There, the walking couple emerge from the wood ‘unscathed’, the dog in the field grows tense, and there’s a sense of the man’s day being ‘interrupted’ by the couple. But these final 5 lines are crossed through. In the later draft, the dog now ‘cantilevers up’ onto all fours (the mechanisation of the creature is part of the male group’s malign influence in my mind) – but still no muzzle as such. That only comes via a reference to the man’s gun and, with its proximity to the dog’s head and ears, there is a transference of the word/idea to the dog itself. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t till this point that I thought of calling the poem ‘Muzzle’ and that I also wanted the word to apply to the walking couple who have been (by the experience, by their apprehension, if not their genuine fear) muted or muzzled themselves. The idea was actually there early on; the first draft briefly sketched in, ‘no human voice we do not talk’.
Q2 – The refrain ‘not at us’ is repeated, and echoes again in ‘not for us’ – amongst the ‘white flags’, and the reassurances of safety, there appears a growing threat to the speaker. The reader is left with the feeling that somehow this danger extends beyond the shooting party, and beyond bloodsports. Did you seek for the poem to act as a wider allegorical foreboding, and, if so, would you elaborate on the metaphor?
MC: Yes, the ‘not at us’ phrase or versions of it are already in the first draft, indeed on four occasions. This is one of the main sources of the idea of ‘division’ in the poem. It’s a simple ‘us’ and ‘them’ situation. The white flags – I think these would simply be the shooting-party’s beaters’ flags being waved to move the birds across the field into the woods, or possibly they are genuinely ‘monitory’ (meaning simply to warn or admonish), but in being white they also have (ironic) resonances of surrender (these guys were not going to surrender anything). The repeating phrase emphasises the gulf between the two elements of the encounter and particularly the sense (clear on the actual occasion) that those holding guns did not seem much concerned that unsuspecting, endangered walkers might be near at hand. We felt ignored; they seemed not to look at us. Being England, there is a strong class element here, which does not map easily onto the question of the voting intentions by class in the Brexit referendum, but factions on all sides seemed not to be paying much attention to any other. The devastating Tory defeat of 2024 should be regarded as reflecting much of this: eventually the country at large felt those in government were simply not paying any attention ‘to us’. I’ve always been pleased with the adjective ‘established’ to describe the shooting-party’s positioning, their being arrayed as the ‘establishment’. The finished poem ends ambivalently. The walking couple escape the shooting-party but are faced with another threatening situation: the gun, the dog. The ‘guard-like’ posture now puts me in mind of prison camp patrols the world over and I’d be happy for readers to get there too: there is a policing of freedoms going on here, a sliding scale from rural pastimes, to political enforcement, to genocidal pograms.
Q3 – ‘Muzzle’ zigzags, indents, retraces its steps. Some stanzas loop longer, and when the final sestet ends abruptly, without full stop, the reader becomes aware of the absence of punctuation throughout. You have a very idiosyncratic approach to presenting and punctuating the poem – could you share your intentions in this poem, and elaborate on whether these ally or counter your conventional style?
MC: The final form of the poem – which you describe so well – came very late. Most often my poems ‘find’ their own form – they don’t begin with any sense of the shape they will eventually take. The 2020 draft was coming out in tercets and I remember liking the ‘walking pace’, step by step, which that shape suggested. But in the end I wanted the poem to be more radical, to suggest a sense of freedom (in contrast to what is felt by the couple during the incident), a freedom to roam as it were, for lines to wander across the page and back again, while also acknowledging that this meandering might well yield some uneasiness in the reader (where’s he going?!). Both freedom and anxiety would be appropriate here. The form and the absence of punctuation (the latter I have been working with for several years now) are intended to generate some ambiguity. For example, I’m hoping for a fluidity in the opening lines, with the putative subject or focus being the flag-waving men, eliding to the walking couple – the ‘you’, then the ‘I’ – the birds, the leaves turning, finally to the ‘grizzle-headed men’. Within this fluency, a bit later, I want several adjectives to be hovering between subjects. The word ‘unconsidered’ floats between the lack of consideration given to the couple and the waiting circle of parked cars. Similarly, ‘impatient unscathed’ buzzes between the couple (again) and the waiting man and dog. This culminates in the rattling throat in the final line which (I want) to be as much about the man as the dog itself and so the ‘discipline’ demanded of the situation ought to be seen as human as much as canine. I guess I’m trying for fertile ambiguities, trying to suggest two things at once. The opening of the Daodejing says: ‘the path I can put a name to / cannot take me the whole way’ (my version).
Q4 – The shooting party negatively influences their surroundings, their presence ‘Hanging’ and ‘spoiling’ the woods, and the walk of the speaker. How much familiarity do you have with these ‘grizzle-headed men’, and do any occasions, such as the one in ‘Muzzle’ stand out as memorable, or significant?
MC: As you suggest, I have allowed the shooting-party to be, and remain, those wearing the black hats. More often than not I feel the need, the wish, to revisit such emphatic designations: what’s to be said ‘on the other hand’ (ever the wishy-washy liberal). The jaw-dropping presumption of the shooters in the original incident (the poem says pretty much exactly what happened), coupled with the generally felt anger and dividedness of the UK at the time (and since) goes to explain why I have not done so here. Do I know people like this? I guess not. A remote acquaintance likes to share his stories of attending such exciting shooting-parties, but it’s hard even to find the language to create much common ground. Perhaps I am just too urban, metropolitan even. About hunting wild animals, Rilke says, ‘to kill is one form of our restless grief’ (Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 11; my translation). Nothing I witnessed on that day in 2016 served to convince me otherwise; the taking out of another living thing for no useful purpose seems to require an arrogant presumption that I cannot get my head around and I find rather terrifying; the ‘monitory’ urgency in the final poem is as much concerned with how this sort of attitude plays out in the political, even in the military, sphere as it is with ‘blood sports’ more narrowly defined.
December 2024
Here’s the direct link to Modron – https://modronmagazine.com/a-poem-and-interview-with-martin-crucefix/
Translating Georg Heym’s ‘Berlin II’
Michael Hofmann’s Faber Book of Twentieth Century German Poems includes four pieces by Georg Heym – not bad for someone who died at the age of 24 (in 1912 – an accidental drowning in the frozen Havel River, probably while trying to save a friend). Heym is generally regarded as an early Expressionist writer (of poems and short prose/novellas), though his early poems are very much under the influence of Hölderlin, then much of the surviving work suggests the powerful influence of Baudelaire (in both form and content), though in his final months there seems to have been a return to the looser forms of Hölderlin. His best-known poems combine a gothic, morbid imagination, often with extremes of Expressionistic distortion, with a counterbalancing devotion to regular forms. The sonnet ‘Berlin II’, when it appeared in Der Demokrat, in November 1910, led to the publication of Heym’s only collection published during his lifetime: Der ewig Tag (The Eternal Day).
Antony Hasler’s translations, published by Libris in 2004 (Hofmann also includes translations by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky, and Christopher Middleton), are the best to be had at the moment and I’d definitely recommend searching them out (Libris has since folded). I’ve been in a bit of a translation lull for a few months so thought I’d try a few of Heym’s poems myself. The challenge is to make something readable in English, while not toning down the dark brutality, yet also staying close to his classical chosen forms.
In ‘Berlin II’, Heym’s Petrarchan rhyme scheme is ABBA CDDC EFE GHG. The opening quatrain is fairly straightforward. A literal transcription might be: ‘Betarred barrels rolled from the thresholds / of dark warehouses onto the high barges/boats). / The tugboats moved in. The smoke’s mane / hung sooty above the oily waters’.
Hasler has:
From the dim warehouse thresholds barrels caulked
with tar went rolling down to the tall lighters.
The tugboats started. On the oily waters
a mane of soot was trailing from the smoke.
The ‘lighters’ / ‘waters’ rhyme is a stroke of genius (a lighter is a river boat) but the opening line and the fourth seemed to me less successful. I kept the opening line simple and turned ‘waters’ into a possessive and I rather saw the (lion’s) mane more visually linked to the billowing of the smoke which is ‘soot-filled’ (I also tried ‘sooty’, even ‘smutty’). This is what I ended up with:
The tarred barrels rolled from open doorways
of dark warehouses onto the tall lighters.
The tugboats closed in. Across the waters’
oily surface hung the smoke’s soot-filled mane.
I went for the tugboats ‘closing in’ – not merely approaching, but something more threatening – as it seemed in keeping with the ominous atmosphere which develops as the poem goes on (the drumming in line 11).
The second quatrain might be given as: ‘Two steamers came with musical bands. / Their funnels cut/clipped the arch of the bridge. / Smoke, soot, stink lay on the dirty waves / of the tanneries with their brown skins’.
Hasler has:
Two pleasure-steamers came with music playing.
They dipped their funnels at the bridge’s curve.
Smoke, soot, stench lay on the dirty waves
by tanneries where the brown hides were drying.
I couldn’t quite see the funnels being dipped under the bridges (though I believe some boats do this) and I feel the bridge’s ‘curve’ (for roof or arch?) not quite right. So I went with the sense of the funnels actually scraping the roof of the bridges (as if these pleasure steamers did not really fit the generally grim, sordid scene). I was very happy to arrive at the bridge/stench half-rhyme for the middle couplet because the sounds there conveyed more of the Heymian ugliness of the scene. Like Hasler, I felt the need to explain a little what the pelts/skins/hides were doing hanging up at the tanneries. Here’s my second quatrain:
With music playing, two steamers passed by:
their funnels clipped the roof of the bridge.
On the filthy waves, smoke, smut, and stench
at the tanneries, where brown pelts hung to dry.
Lines 9-11 probably caused me the greatest difficulty, not so much in getting the word order and form right, but in simply grasping what was being said in relation to the bridges, the barge, and the narrator’s position. Literally they might read: ‘In/at/all the bridges, beneath us the barge / Carried through, the signals sounded / As if in drums, growing in the silence’.
As I see it, the speaker is being carried on a barge, through and under bridges, and there are signals/sirens sounding that bring to his mind an ominous drumming. So Hasler has:
Every time the barge that bore us travelled
beneath a bridge, the signal’s sudden parley
swelled out of stillness like a deep drum’s rattle.
The ‘barge that bore us’ has echoes of TS Eliot (perhaps not irrelevant in context, and I felt I couldn’t better it in the end) but I’m not sure Hasler makes sense (to me) of the signals and the ‘parley’ metaphor he introduces here is not there in the original. The ‘deep drum’ also seems to be picking up on the ‘ominousness’ of the scene but (for me) a bit heavy-handedly. In the end, I went for:
Through all the bridges, the barge that bore us
made its way, signals resounding as if
a drum’s beat grew louder in the stillness.
In the final 3 lines I made the biggest alteration, the biggest interference with the original poem. Literally, the lines might read: ‘We let go and drifted in the canal / Alongside the gardens slowly. In the idyll / We saw the giant chimneys’ night beacons’. Hasler loses the ‘letting go’ idea, but otherwise keeps the order of these lines well:
We entered the canal, and drifting journeyed
slowly alongside gardens. In the idyll
we saw the night-flares of the giant chimneys.
‘In the idyll’ is perhaps puzzling, though it’s pretty clear there is a bitter irony at work – this is no idyllic scene, and Heym’s other Berlin poems confirm this, the city is a monstrous megalopolis. But there has been a slight shift of scene with the boat moving along a canal now, between gardens. Perhaps this (more bourgeois?) setting might be thought of as more idyllic? But even so, the massive smoking and flaring chimneys of industrial Berlin can still be seen. I confess that I shifted the ‘idyll’ to the final lines to get the final rhyme with ‘canal’. But I have left it – translators, like poets, have the power of veto, whether we exercise it or not. And I have persuaded myself that the savagery of the irony comes out better if the final phrase of the poem contains it. So I went with:
We cut loose, went drifting along the canal,
gradually, between gardens, glimpses of
the vast chimneys’ night-flares in the idyll.
x
So – to sum up (though translations are always really a work in progress) – here is Heym’s original German followed by my own version of the poem:
Berlin II
Beteerte Fässer rollten von den Schwellen
Der dunklen Speicher auf die hohen Kähne.
Die Schlepper zogen an. Des Rauches Mähne
Hing rußig nieder auf die öligen Wellen.
x
Zwei Dampfer kamen mit Musikkapellen.
Den Schornstein kappten sie am Brückenbogen.
Rauch, Ruẞ, Gestank lag auf den schmutzigen Wogen
Der Gerbereien mit den braunen Fellen.
x
In allen Brücken, drunter uns die Zille
Hindurchgebracht, ertönten die Signale
Gleichwie in Trommeln wachsend in der Stille.
x
Wir ließen los und trieben im Kanale
An Gärten langsam hin. In dem Idylle
Sahn wir der Riesenschlote Nachtfanale.
x
Berlin II (tr. Martyn Crucefix)
The tarred barrels rolled from open doorways
of dark warehouses onto the tall lighters.
The tugboats closed in. Across the waters’
oily surface hung the smoke’s soot-filled mane.
x
With music playing, two steamers passed by:
their funnels clipped the roof of the bridge.
On the filthy waves, smoke, smut, and stench
at the tanneries, where brown pelts hung to dry.
x
Through all the bridges, the barge that bore us
made its way, signals resounding as if
a drum’s beat grew louder in the stillness.
x
We cut loose, went drifting along the canal,
gradually, between gardens, glimpses of
the vast chimneys’ night-flares in the idyll.
On Revisiting Blockley
A rather more personal post than usual, though a poem (an older one of my own) is attached to it. Last week, I spent a few days with family in the beautiful village of Blockley, in the Cotswolds. The weather was very good for late November and we walked a couple of times – from Broadway up the muddy hill to the folly of Broadway Tower (once frequented by William Morris apparently) and around Hailes Abbey (now a ruin, local lore has it that Thomas Cromwell watched the destruction of the Abbey from a nearby hilltop). Blockley itself is near Moreton-in-Marsh, a place almost destroyed by the volume of traffic flowing through it (even in November), where The Bell Inn was once a favourite of JRR Tolkein, and is supposedly the model for The Prancing Pony in The Lord of the Rings. But Blockley, for me at least, had another powerful ghost haunting it.
As a couple, with young children, we stayed in the village over 20 years ago, in one of the original silk weavers cottages built along Park Road, which looks down over the village and valley. The house was owned by a colleague of mine at the time, Laurence Bowkett. He taught Classics and Latin and often spent the summer vacations away on archaeological digs of various kinds. That must have been the situation then as he’d allowed us to use the house in his absence. His early death, within a year or two of this, was a shock to us all. He had no family of his own and I don’t know what happened to the house later. So, fast forward to 2024, and here we are staying in Blockley again, only partly by coincidence. We have always had good memories of the place and (again, partly by an AirB&B chance) we ended up renting an almost identical cottage in the very same terrace above the village. Indeed, maybe it was the same cottage – I couldn’t remember enough of the details. The layout was certainly the same – the front door in off the road, straight into a little front room, a chilly basement kitchen and upstairs two small bedrooms.
Laurence’s was not the first death of a contemporary I knew well, but it greatly affected me and I tried to express something of this in the poem – an elegy – I wrote for him later. It is called ‘The umbrella and the bay tree’ and it mixes memories of him, his enthusiasms (he had a lot of those – all his students loved him for it), with details from my own family life at the time. It opens with an imagined scene, all his teaching colleagues gathered (as we often did then) in the local pub, remembering him in his absence. The ‘laral gods’ – the Lares – are Classical Roman guardian deities. The laurus nobilis refers to a little bay tree I bought after our first stay in Blockley as a thank you gift . . .
x
By seven-thirty, you are with us all
tonight in the gloom of The Washington,
though we omit you from every round.
Powerless as laral gods who gave you
no protection, even laurus nobilis,
x
the bay tree I bought you, proved no use.
x
Our children were at Infant and Junior School at the time and – to be honest – I can’t now remember if the details the poem goes on to mention are truth or fiction. But Laurence was the kind of guy who’d keep his own books in scrupulous order (as he did with his extensive collection of Marvel comics) so the library setting has always felt right . . .
x
Today, I searched 570 and 790,
in the Dewey decimal classification
your fingers ran through a thousand times,
for the facts of death and irrepressible life,
x
as if I looked for you now and you then.
You taught shard-life and careful fieldwork,
the near-dead language of not giving in.
You offered the heroic a modern face,
though death proved the more determined.
x
You understood lives alter what they touch:
a house, a street, a flowering tree,
for those who know us are not struck dumb,
a library unread the moment we die.
They roar like a lantern with our life inside.
x
The idea of lives of the dead altering the lives of those they have touched in life is familiar enough, though I was working on my translations of Rainer Maria Rilke around this time and I’m sure his influence is in here. It is not just the remembering of a friend who has passed away, but also that our own perceptions of ‘a house, a street, a flowering tree’, for want of a better word, spiritualises the material object, giving it a life, a light, an existence, beyond the ordinary. The resurrection of the bugs stomped by my daughter in what follows is probably an allusion to the early primitive computer games the kids used to play in which a failed – hence fatal – leap from a high building would result only in a brief ‘death’ and their 1st person avatar would soon revive and carry on in pursuit of adventure.
x
In Hornsey Central at 570
this morning, I found books to undermine
my daughter’s smiling confidence
that bugs she crushes beneath her shoe
lie dead a while, then revive good as new.
x
At 790, I leafed through life and death
in Ancient Egypt for her older brother:
how they wash their dead in water and oil,
then bind them in linen smeared with gum
and priests wrap lucky charms inside
x
in hope that none will break the seal
till the dead themselves in time of need.
x
The ‘lucky charms’ idea naturally led the poem on to what I myself might place in a good friend’s sarcophagus and gave rise to a list of his multifarious likes and loves, concluding with the heartfelt wish that his (prematurely unhirsute) head might – even in death (though he had no religious belief as far as I know) – remain somehow protected. The image on the underside of Laurence’s umbrella is a truth!
x
Then I’ll wrap Homer for you, Wolves black-
and-gold, your Micra, Marvel, Blockley
and booze, moist, sweet cake for the road,
x
Frederick Leighton, Sir Frankie Howerd,
Wisden, The Smiths and that Italian umbrella
you flourished one day and thundered open –
behold! the Sistine roof appeared
to keep your bald head from the hissing rain.
x
‘The umbrella and the bay tree’ was originally published in An English Nazareth (Enitharmon Press, 2004).
Two Poems by the late Jürgen Becker
The sad news that Jürgen Becker (1932-2024) died recently at the age of 92 was particularly poignant as I have been translating his work for the past 3 years. I first read about his poetry in an essay I was translating by Lutz Seiler (published in In Case of Loss (And Other Stories, 2024)). There, Seiler characterises Becker’s work as ‘a process that integrate[s] both immediate and more distant modalities of language, his own voice as well as materials drawn from other sources such as events, photos, maps as well as interjections from neighbouring rooms, from the mail, the news, weather conditions and whatever else stray[s] within range’ (my translation). History, politics, the importance of recording ‘small things’, an extraordinarly porous kind of poetry – these were the aspects that drew me to his work (as a writer of my own poems as much as translator).
Becker’s ‘typical’ poem works at length, resembling a stream-of-consciousness, but better thought of as a kind of collage or montage. His effects are slow-burning, allusive, even elusive, and I don’t think his work is likely to top any UK chart of popular poetry any time soon. But his revered status in Germany is remarkable and I have actually had a couple of successes recently with my translations: a Highly Commended in the 2024 Stephen Spender Trust Translation Competition, judged by Taher Adel and Jennifer Wong (with the poem ‘Meanwhile in the Ore Mountains’), and one of Becker’s longer poems in translation being published (‘Travel film; re-runs’ – see below).
Becker grew up in the German region of Thuringia which, after World War II, was in the Soviet occupation zone, later the GDR. By then, his family had moved to West Germany and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, the writer often returned to his childhood landscape. I have concentrated my translation efforts on Becker’s 1993 poems in Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium, published by Suhrkamp. The full translation is due to be published by Shearsman Books in 2025. The Spender Trust Competition poem is a short piece which I can quote in full. The Competition requires entrants to say a few words about the poem and the translation process. Here is a video of the Intro and Reading of the poem for the prize event, and (alongside) the text that I originally submitted:
Commentary – The Ore Mountains lie along the Czech-German border. Borders are important in this poem. Born in the East German region, brought up in West Germany, after the fall of the Wall in 1990, Becker often returned to his childhood landscape. Though relatively brief, this poem is just one sentence, woven together with the conjunction ‘wie’ (translated here both as ‘how’ and ‘the way’). The weave is dense and it’s not possible to tell whether what is observed – the children, the oil spill, the tree stump (resembling a body) – are contemporaneous or from different eras. My translation keeps these possibilities open: borders here are temporal, as well as geographical. The German word ‘Avantgarde’ has artistic as well as political implications, but my choice of ‘vanguard’ also brings out the militaristic connotations which are reinforced by the ‘spitzen, grünen Lanzen’ (‘sharp, green spears’) which are swiftly transformed into a bunch of sprouting snowdrops. These flowers of Spring are referred to as a ‘Konvention’ and I retained the English equivalent, intending to suggest both a performance (something conventional, perhaps not genuine), as well as a political gathering or agreement (like the Convention on Human Rights). The ambiguity felt relevant. The final vivid, visual images – a TV screen seen through a window, a script on the screen, a woman talking, but inaudible to the observer – sum up Becker’s concerns about the media, political and historical change, borders real and imagined, exclusion, and the need to ask questions of those in power. Issues as real today as when the poem was written.
Meanwhile in the Ore Mountains
Sitting still, watching how the afternoon below
waits for the dusk, the way snipers vanish
behind the remains of a wall and children run
after a white, armoured vehicle, the way a line
of hills, which marks a boundary, divides
the nothingness of snow from the nothingness of sky,
and along the frontier, one this side, another
along the other, fly the only two crows
to be found in this treeless landscape, the way
the iridescent pattern of an oil spill develops
with darkening edges, the way a tree stump
in the field becomes the shape of a body with
severed arms and legs, how, under the cherry,
the vanguard shows with sharp, green spears,
which later, over the next few days, assumes
the convention of snowdrops, how dark windows
are lit by screens, and on each screen appears,
at first, lettering, and then the face of
a woman who is soundlessly moving her lips.
The longer poem – ‘Travel film; re-runs’ – which does indeed run to over 100 lines in full – has just appeared in The Long Poem Magazine, Issue 32, eds. Linda Black and Claire Crowther. This brilliant magazine is one of the few outlets for poems stretching beyond the ‘competition’ mark of 40/50 lines only. Poets/translators again have the opportunity to comment on the work being published. This was my Introductory paragraph:
Given his 1000 page Collected Poems (Suhrkamp, 2022), it’s remarkable that Jürgen Becker’s work has been so little translated into English. This poem, published in his 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium, is imbued with Becker’s sense of the changes in this particular part of Europe. The interleaving of the child’s and returning adult’s vision is what yields Becker’s characteristic poetic mode: a flickering between past and present, often without warning to the reader, a past frequently oppressed by the rise of fascism in the 1930s. The translator’s difficulties lie not in his word choices (Becker plainly describes, he states), but, to some degree, in his cultural references (here, the allusion to pimpf kids (cub, little rascal, little fart) is to members of the Hitler Youth), and, primarily, in dealing with his style of montage-composition, his commitment to ‘the apparently incidental’. Becker’s porous verse contains multitudes of perspectives, voices, inner and outer events, photos, maps, postcards, news, weather reports. In translation, it’s hard to flex, to permit these into English, and I have had to learn to trust Becker’s arrangements of them into long, semi-colon linked passages, utterly remote from conventional ‘lyric’. The opening 24 lines here elide landscape, weather, employment, domesticity, and history, then on to the natural world, compositional ideas, back to history. Becker is a great poet of the present moment and of the past. He grew up in Thuringia which, following World War II, lay in the Soviet occupation zone, later the GDR. By then, Becker’s family had moved to West Germany, and, after 1990, he often returned to these childhood landscapes. This poem was published in his 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Becker worked for many years in German radio, and, in this poem, we might imagine a small production team visiting an un/familiar landscape in the East, perhaps where a childhood was spent, a place later abandoned.
Travel film; re-runs (extract)
the landscape: like corrugated cardboard, an enduring, fixed
motion, on a smoky grey day. The wind came
somewhere from below, from a region beneath
the weather chart; in the evening, we could no longer
reach our correspondents. We drove out
to the country house; we ate
Spanish green asparagus. It was a moment
from yesterday that rolled slowly past the shelf
with its yellow calendars and diaries and pictures;
something had begun,
and you’re aware of it,
the sound of that reiteration. You can … and
you allow it … push the off button; outside the window,
the blackbird flutters up, simply waiting
to be mentioned. Now you notice the way the paint
has peeled from the window frame, and where
the ants are coming from, in January the only
living creatures in the house. Perseverance pays off
at some point, even if you have little alternative
but to gather piece after piece together. Paint pots
in the shed, shades of green and white, but
we are waiting for a consistent light,
on either side of the house. Is it too late now,
to leave again
… lake shores, before they are all
accounted for, can still be appreciated, with sandy paths
reaching the purple horizon … subjunctive, without end;
a game of evasion that you can watch until you
whistle, or shout, and it’s nothing like awakening
from a dream. In the evening, we light a fire; it’s
a sudden, impromptu decision; then follows
the next draft of the letter: your sketches litter the table
… you no longer need a pass; highways,
the middle of the village … standing beside you
on the jetty; on the opposite side, the yellow ribbon
of the shoreline…
clips from the travel film just now
set going in the blink of an eye; then the meadow
is mown; there are a few old clumps of snowdrops
we leave standing. The fact is, we have missed out
on the moment of adulthood, even if, in the evening,
you say: never, not once, did the door open, from
which a little something left, and what you are now
entered in. The contrast, the changes … the fear has
been networked, so many of these shortcomings went
into production. Piano, from beyond French windows,
Shostakovich plays Shostakovich, and the life story
draws a curve out towards the northeast. Ice floes,
accumulating along the coast; in boots and furs,
walking over the frozen river, passing pimpf kids,
and old men, and a young woman who’s most likely
Polish, and you’re not going to stop staring at her
any time soon; freezing cold on the sledge back home,
your mother doesn’t live here anymore; the whole scene
darkens under the smoke of an engine pulling
the fast train to Lusatia . . .
A Run of Readings in October/November
Talk to whomsoever (among the poets you may know) and a common theme is just how hard it can be to get invitations to read. It really is hard going and for those of us – most of us – who have an aversion to the push and flaunt that is required – it can even feel quite painful. But do it we must. So it’s really nice when it produces a few results. This, by way of saying that I have a few appearances – brief in the main – not as headline reader – coming up at the end of this month and the opening of November. A couple of these readings are translation-related, two others are to mark the publication of extracts from some more experimental work (in original poetry) that I have been pursuing in the last couple of years. I’m particularly happy that these more ‘odd’ compositions have found such warm responses and it makes me think I ought to be looking to publish them in full. Though I have another, other book sitting ready to go… publishers??
Some more event details….
On 26th October, 2pm, at The Library, Conway Hall, London, as part of the Small Publishers Fair, Wivenhoe-based Dunlin Press will be launching four new pamphlets of writing: Kathmandu by Andrew Shaw, Bomb by Samuel Reid, From Stone to Clay to Butter by Lily Petch, and A Raven on a Writing Desk by Julie Hogg. These talented people were the winners of the Press’ 2024 competition for experimental writing. Sad to say, I’ll not actually be reading here, but some of my work is included in the accompanying anthology (those who just missed out I like to think!). My contribution is an extract from A Shout Across Dursey Sound, a sequence of poems set on the Beara Peninsula in Ireland. The anthology’s title is Objects (buy it here) and it includes work by Galia Admoni, MW Bewick ,Emma Bolland, Richard Capener, Tessa Foley, Anthony Ogbonnaya Chukwu, Richard Skinner, Isabella Streffen, and others.
Then, on Wednesday, 30th October, 6pm-9pm, I’m off to Oxford to read for the Oxford Poetry Circle, as announced in a previous post. This is taking place at Common Ground, on Little Clarendon Street, Oxford. There, I’ll be reading work in translation only – from my recent Rilke book published by Pushkin Press (reviewed here on The Friday Poem by Victoria Moul) and from my 2019 Shearsman Books collection of poems by Peter Huchel. I’m particularly pleased to be reading on this occasion with the brilliant and super-industrious translator, academic and friend, Karen Leeder. Other readers are Alex Murdoch and Laia Watkins – and there will be readers from the floor.
A couple of days later, the evening of Friday 1st November, I will be reading from a second experimental sequence of my own poems at the launch reading for Steve Ely’s anthology called Apocalyptic Landscape (Valley Press). My poems, a sequence called Olga Liking Sunflowers, roam through the pandemic experience, the work of David Jones, my local landscape and the delights (or otherwise) of social media. Contributors were encouraged to generate visionary responses to the crisis of the Anthropocene in the context of landscapes important to them. I will be reading alongside Steve, Jill Abram (who is organising the London launch for the book), as well as Katy Evans-Bush, JP Seabright, Anita Pati, and Caroline Maldonado. Steve Ely is also reading from his book Orasaigh, a collaboration between Steve and photographer Michael Faint, inspired by the landscape around the tidal island of Orasaigh, located on the coast of South Uist at Boisdale. This event will take place upstairs at the Devereux pub, 20 Devereux Ct, London WC2R 3JJ. Doors open 6:30, Poetry starts 7pm FREE event.
Finally, I have also been lucky enough to have a translated longer poem (by the contemporary German poet Jürgen Becker) accepted to appear in Issue 32 of The Long Poem Magazine and I will be reading ‘Travel film: re-runs’ at their launch event in the afternoon of Saturday 16th November 1.30 to 3.45, at the Barbican Library, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London, EC2 8DS. Other readers will be: Angela Gardner, Charlie Baylis, Sue Burge, Sharon Holm, Claire Cox, Sian Thomas, Peter Robinson, Khaled Hakim, Timothy Ades, Julian Stannard. FREE ENTRY and there will be a short interval for sales and chats. Refreshments are available downstairs from the Barbican Cafe and Bar. I hope to see you at one or another of these events. I’ll leave you with a few lines from my sequence in Steve Ely’s apocalyptic anthology:
Olga likes my post of the tall sunflowers in the square.
Through google translate, her post in Russian reads: adrenaline is my doping.
I draw for the soul.
x
There are hundreds of images of herself. Some with wild animals.
Surely, they’re not really wild.
In a zoo. Under lock and key.
x
Others touch the hem of the pornographic.
Others look like cheap advertisements for luxury cars.
The kind of posts, I wonder, that end with an offer of marriage from the viewer.
x
Another shows her bald headed, holding a snake, just weeks after the remission of her illness.
x
I want to ask her: what was the exact nature of the disease?
I want to ask her.
What mark will this make in history?
x
I want to ask her. When will this stop?
Reading in Oxford 30th October
I will be reading from my German translations – Peter Huchel and Rainer Maria Rilke. NB the best german translator currently at work in the UK – Karen Leeder, of Queens’ College, Oxford – will also be reading. Not to be missed!!
New Review of ‘Between a Drowning Man’ – from Shanta Acharya
We all know that reviews of poetry books can take a long time to filter through whatever system they do come through. But then they always come as a pleasant surprise (if that’s not making too many assumptions about their likely contents). Any way – almost 12 months after the appearance of my most recent full collection, Between a Drowning Man (Salt, 2023), the ever-lively site, Everybody’s Reviewing, has just posted a detailed and insightful commentary on the book by poet and novelist, Shanta Acharya.
Amongst other things, the review comments: ‘A poet, translator, reviewer and poetry blogger, Martyn Crucefix has won prizes for his poetry and translation. As a translator of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, The Sonnets to Orpheus, Laozi’s Daodejing, Huchel’s These Numbered Days, among others, Crucefix has been building bridges for those who want to cross the divide between cultures, countries, ways of seeing the world and each other. Words are bridges, language itself a bridge – yet we inhabit an increasingly complex world where loneliness and isolation are on the rise. In ‘fifteen kilometres of traffic’ an acceptance of this isolation is disconcerting: ‘you make a choice you go your own way … / because all the bridges are down.’ His understanding of the central role language plays in our lives, that creation of bridges between humans, is a fundamental aspect of his work’.
Here’s a link to the full review
And coincidentally, Seren Books have also just recently posted a rather older poem of mine in their Poem of the Week slot. This is from my 2017 collection with Seren, The Lovely Disciplines. It’s about visiting the opticians for a check-up – though also about the desire (my desire) for clarity and absoluteness (if there is such a word), a desire, of course, never to be fulfilled. Read the full poem here.
Reading Rilke’s poems – 6pm this Saturday in Bristol
I will be giving a reading from this year’s Pushkin Press publication, Change Your Life: Essential Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke. The reading is being organised, and taking place at Heron Books in Bristol as follows:
Heron Books Unit 5, The Clifton Arcade
Bristol, BS8 4AA United Kingdom + Google Map
Join us for Poetry In Herons with Martyn Crucefix
Join us in the Arcade after hours for our monthly poetry series. 6pm, Saturday 17th August. We will be celebrating the publication of Martyn’s translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, Change Your Life.
You can buy tickets in advance online or in the shop. For more details and booking click here
Tickets are £4 or free with the purchase of Change Your Life. All tickets include a glass of something sparkling on arrival.
Tickets are fully redeemable against buying the books on the night.
Book orders will be ready for you to pick up and get signed at the event.
And here’s a taster poem – an unusual one from Rilke which perhaps we read these days with an ecopoetic slant – a translation of a poem in German by Rainer Maria Rilke (from New Poems II; The Other Part (1908)
Dolphins
Those realists were happy for their kind
to thrive, content that they lived anywhere,
sharing a sense of kinship, they found signs
of their peers in the ocean’s fluid empire,
which the old sea god, with dripping tritons,
would sometimes stir to tempest and flood;
for there surfaced the creature that showed
itself to be far more than the dumb,
dull-witted breed of fish: blood of their blood,
and distantly inclined to the human.
x
A school of them, rolling, leaping, appeared,
seeming conscious of the glittering sea:
joyful, trusting, warm-blooded, they wreathed
the sea voyage with their brave assembly
and would sport round the ship’s prow with ease,
as if tracing the curved outlines of a vase,
heedless, blessed, never fearing injury,
now enraptured, breaching, speeding along
and diving deep as if to exchange places
with the waves that calmly bore the trireme on.
x
And the sailors took these newly discovered
friends into their lives of lonely hazard
and they contrived for these companions—
and believed it true—a world of gratitude,
in which they loved gods and music and gardens
and the year’s silent, deep constellations.
Martyn Crucefix 