On Yves Bonnefoy’s ‘The Tombs of Ravenna’

In my last blog I was discussing Keats’ ideas about Negative Capability, provoked by a visit to Keats House and a discussion there about Negative Capability and psychoanalysis. The speakers were Dr Margot Waddell, a child psychotherapist from the Tavistock Clinic, and Dr Toni Griffiths, Trustee of the Keats Foundation. Waddell focused on the acknowledged influence of Keats’ idea on the work of psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. In the aftermath of such major stimulation, the new issue of PN Review fell through the front door, containing John Naughton’s excellent new translation of Yves Bonnefoy’s 1953 essay, The Tombs of Ravenna. Keats and Bonnefoy melded in my mind and I was reading the latter in terms of the former as follows.

Bonnefoy observes that though many philosophers have discussed death, few have bothered to ponder the places where we traditionally lodge the dead: sepulchers and tombs. The explanation he offers introduces a key term for both his prose and poetry from 1953 to the present day: the concept. The concept, as in conceptual thinking, is a human creation, abstracted from the plentitude, the flood and flux of actual, particular human experience. It is “always a means of escape” into a more fixed abode. The concept denies time and is “a profound rejection of death”. It denies the fact of death as our inevitable fate and constructs an illusory “dwelling place of logic”, a more alluring place of “permanence and identity”. Also, and crucially, the concept is “made of words”. Language is a similar construct, also seeming to promise the same sort of escape into the timeless, the unchanging. All forms of conceptual thinking seem to promise an achievable resolution but, Bonnefoy argues, “what is pondered is no longer the real object”. Instead, we contemplate “a dubious knowledge” though it may soothe our “initial anguish and trivialises that most somber melody with words that mask the reality of death”.

So the concept promises a “strange immortality” but only if we can “forget brutal reality” – which, of course, we can and readily do. One reason is that there are general truths in conceptual thinking and a particular kind of power derived from it. It “allows thinking” of a certain kind; it is linked with “the vast power of words”. But any gain is predicated on a significant loss, the abandonment of the actually existing “world of things”. Conceptual thinking is “systematized”, generalizing, categorizing; it’s in this that its “flight” from the real is found. The only sort of thing that can be held up to counter the concept are specific particularities of human experience: Bonnefoy asks “Is there a concept for footsteps in the night, for a cry, for a stone rolling in the brushwood? For the feeling evoked by an empty house? No [. . . ]”

In his letters, Keats calls this sort of non-particular thinking “preresolved” and he encountered it especially in his friend Charles Dilke: “a man who [. . . ] has made his Mind up about every thing” (303; page numbers in brackets are to John Keats: Selected Letters (Oxford World Classics, newly revised 2002)). Dilke is one of the “stubborn arguers” who never begin on any subject “they have not preresolved upon” (303). In contrast, Keats argues the only means of strengthening one’s intellect and identity “is to make up one’s mind about nothing – to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts” (303). Keats’ best formulation of this idea arises when several things “dovetailed” in his mind after a frustrating debate with Dilke. The quality that marks out the artist – Shakespeare especially, he says – is Negative Capability. He defines this as consisting of a passive openness to the full range of particular human experience (“uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts”) without any imposition of preconceived notions, preresolved ideas or language: “without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (41/2). Bonnefoy’s insight is that rather than being an occasional tendency, this reaching after fact and reason (conceptual thinking rather than direct, particular, various experience) is our default status. We pass our days in a delusion of resolution and systematization because if we did not we might fry our brains with the overload. In his last ever letter, Keats laments “the knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense)” as having become a great enemy to his “recovery” from his present state of illness. (369).

Yet the dully pragmatic ought not to be allowed to displace truth: Keats in better health argued this and Bonnefoy does the same in The Tombs of Ravenna. Bonnefoy’s essay for several paragraphs plays devil’s advocate, expecting to find “horror” in visiting the tombs of the dead, yet admitting that he felt “nothing but lightheartedness”. Initially, he locates this sense of up-lift in the ornamentation of the tombs, the “braids and interlacing [. . .] bows and foliage”. The essay playfully misleads its reader, suggesting that this effect of the ornamentation must be because it is comparable to the “concept” in denying the fact of death. Bonnefoy says he believed (note the past tense here) that ornamentation also abstracted towards the universal from the real, that the ornamentation presented “a closed world”, a world of “harmony”. Hence, just as the concept “seeks to establish truth without death [. . .] It seemed to me that ornamentation sought to build a dwelling place for us without death, and to have death no longer be here”. Visiting Ravenna, Bonnefoy felt lighthearted beside the tombs because its skilled and delicate ornamentation persuaded him of a world of permanence and consoling abstraction (beyond death, other than death).

But the essay now turns dramatically to deny the validity of such consoling sophistry. It’s invalid because Bonnefoy had failed to understand “the power of stone”. His insight is that it is not the ornamentation which is at the root of his lightheartedness but the very material out of which it has been carved. Stone is “unfathomable, and this abyss of plentitude, this night covered by an eternal light, is for [Bonnefoy] the exemplary form of the real”. What he means is that stone deflects the grasp of conceptual thought; conceptual thought distances itself from stone as it does from death. Stone is or represents “the difficult real” and it is or represents the “dawn of the sensory world”. Stone’s resistance, its very hardness, gestures towards the fullness and particularity of human experience (what Keats calls a “Life of Sensations”), towards “everything that has flesh, heartbeat, immanence”. The stone leads us towards the “truth tenaciously present beneath the truth of the concept”. And it is the latter ‘truth’ that Bonnefoy declares he must “tenaciously contest”.

The battle in Bonnefoy’s thought between the sensory world and the concept reflects Existentialism’s concern for existence rather than essence. His faith in a world resistant to and actually prior to the draining, withering forces of the intellect, his resistance to post-modernism, are reasons why he strikes many as such an inspiring figure. He says: “This world here exists, of that I am certain [. . .] It is simply with us. In what can be felt and sensed”. In The Tombs of Ravenna he names this underlying truth, not as existence, but “presence”. It is “what is perceived by the senses” and it was a dimly stirring awareness of this truth that constituted the “lightheartedness” he felt before the tombs of Ravenna. Through an encounter with the stone from which the tombs are constructed, the resistance of both life and death to the abstracting processes of conceptual thought was made clear and the pleasure induced arose from his closer approach to a fundamental truth.

Just as for Keats, such ideas have consequences for art and poetry. For Bonnefoy, poetry seeks to represent the real particular truths of human experience, to convey what it can of the “dawn of the sensory world”, as opposed to succumbing to the lure of conceptual thinking, even that conceptual thinking inherent in the very fabric of language itself. This specific paradox is not explored very far in The Tombs of Ravenna in which he confines himself to declaring that we require “another language than that of the concept” to articulate such truths. He concludes poetry’s only concern is “for that spot in the world I can sense” and because it must, as far as possible, resist the lure of conceptual truths (truth without death) it follows that “poetry and journey are of the same substance, the same blood”.

What such a poem might look like is suggested in those few moments when Bonnefoy himself resorts to “minute particulars”. On one such occasion, drawing from his own life, he tells us of “the cry of a bird I heard as a child, at the crest of a kind of cliff. I don’t know where that valley is anymore, or why or when I was there. The light is the light of dawn or of evening, it doesn’t matter. Through the brushwood runs the pungent smoke of a fire. The bird sang. Rather I should say, to be exact, it spoke, raucous on its misty height, for a moment of perfect solitude”.

Or as Keats put it in 1819, having listened to a nightingale singing on Hampstead Heath:

Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep

In the next valley-glades:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

A new translation of Brecht’s ‘Of poor B.B.’

August 25, 2015September 2, 2015 martyn crucefix poetry, translation Bertolt Brecht, Charles Tomlinson, David Constantine, Derek Mahon, Fyodor Tyutchev, German poetry, Michael Hamburger, Michael Hofmann, Modern Poetry in Translation, Of poor B.B., Rainer Maria Rilke, Ted Hughes, translation, Von armen B.B.

Having posted last week about Brecht’s poem ‘Of poor B.B.’ it felt pretty inevitable that I should have a go at translating it myself. Though it can’t always be the case, most translations are like this – undertaken as a tribute to the original poet and poem, a public declaration that this fascinated me, an attempt to really work out how the text functions and achieves its ends. Disseminating the text to the target language’s reading public is also an aspect of this tribute paid.

David Constantine, writing in Modern Poetry in Translation (No. 2 2015) about Derek Mahon’s recently published translations (Echo’s Grove (Gallery Press, 2013)) considers the “liberties” Mahon tends to take with such work to produce “almost” original poems in English while allowing their sources to remain audible. Mahon does this by working from “cribs of one kind or another” and Constantine suggests that this has become a very common practice. Indeed, “Mahon practices the belief that you don’t actually need to know well or even at all the languages you translate out of; even – a possible sub-text – that knowing them might be a disadvantage” (MPT, No. pp.111-113). As someone who was remarkably poor at languages at school, this is something I have found myself saying in recent years since going public with a few translations (for example, see post on translating Rilke). I like to think of the source poem as a series of gestures – like a dance performed by the original author – so the translator must try to achieve similar effects but with his/her own body (of language). A crib will guide me to the main movements, even to much of the details, but tone, emotional colour, shades of irony are harder to trans-late and cannot merely be copied. This gesture made by this body, if repeated precisely by my body, will more likely look awkward, or meaningless, or comic when it was intended as serious. I have to achieve the end (as far as I see it and understand its intended impact – you have to rely on the translator for that certainly) by using the resources at my disposal, my physique, my body of language.

In practice, what this means is that once the basic outline and incontrovertible details are in place in a translation, I have to close the source book and try to pump some life into the target text. Ted Hughes imagined a poem without true life in it as limping (Poetry in the Making, p.15); a translation without true life in it is only going to be a halting performance you’d rather not witness, worrying about whether such a gesture was intended or not, ironic or not, you fear the whole is not coherent, a mere series of movements, not a dance at all. I’ve always liked Charles Tomlinson’s formulation of the translation task: in introducing his now 50-year-old translations of Fyodor Tyutchev, he claimed ‘The aim of these translations has been to preserve not the metre, but the movement of each poem – its flight, or track through the mind’ (Versions from Fyodor Tyutchev 1803-1873 (Oxford: OUP, 1960)).

Happily, ‘Of poor B.B.’ is not a text of great complexity. Brecht is usually concerned to communicate clearly and he says in ‘On Rhymeless Verse with Irregular Rhythms’ (Poems 1913-1956, pp. 463-471)) “what was needed was the tone of direct and spontaneous speech”. He mostly wanted to use “everyday speech” and “sobriety of expression” which he felt was “by no means irreconcilable with poetry”. So Brecht is not exactly Rilke or Mallarme for the translator. Looking at Hofmann and Hamburger’s translations (as referred to in last week’s post), most of Brecht’s dance is clearly conveyed with little variation between the two versions. Though Brecht’s lines are pretty irregular he does keep a ballad-like rhyme in lines 2 and 4 of each quatrain and I miss this in Hofmann’s version. Hoffman also (to my mind) overelaborates in a few of his English choices. “Sterbsakrament” (Hamburger has “last sacrament”) becomes “every sacramental perquisite”. Hofmann’s narrator looks at the two women in quatrain 4 “insouciantly” and his pine trees “micturate” (when the point of the contrast with the city asks for something more downright like Hamburger’s “piss”). I don’t think lexical adventures here are quite right for this poem. Also in quatrain 7, Hofmann’s antennae “underwire” the Atlantic. Brecht is referring to transatlantic cables but the allusion to supportive bras seems distracting and gives mankind’s efforts too much power. I read the point as suggesting our technology is dwarfed by the ocean in the remarkable image that our best advances merely entertain (“unterhalten”) or “amuse” (Hamburger) the Atlantic.

Regarding the hat donned by the narrator to fit in with city folk, Hofmann’s “top hat” seems a little too up-market, while Hamburger’s “hard hat” conjures up a building site. I have gone for “bowler hat” of a clerk or business man. The sound of the birds in quatrain 6 is important. Hofmann’s “bawl” catches the anti-pastoral tone of the poem but Hamburger is forced by the needs of form to go for “twitter and cheep” (to rhyme with “sleep”). There is also some ambiguity in the final stanza where the narrator hopes to keep his “Virginia” alight in the coming earthquakes of social disruption. The German suggests the cigar will hopefully not go out (“nicht ausgeher”) and the cause: “lassen durch Bitterkeit”. Hofmann renders this as hoping the cigar will not “go bitter on me” whereas Hamburger (again in part for the sake of form) hopes to keep the cigar alight “embittered or no”. Hofmann’s phrase feels too narrowly concerned with the smoking experience but Hamburger’s rather awkward phrase does successfully suggest what I see in the final lines – the narrator’s hope (if not altogether sincerely) that he himself may avoid becoming bitter. My solution tries to hold both literal and transferred metaphorical senses of the bitter cigar equally within the line. I’ve come to think of this as important to the poem as the narrator is blessed with a degree of self awareness as much as he is cursed with a cynical, dismissive hedonism.

Of poor B.B.

I, Bertolt Brecht, came from the black forests.
My mother bore me into the city
while I was in her womb. And till my dying day
the chill of the woods will lie there inside me.

In the asphalt city I’m at home. From the beginning
supplied with every last sacrament:
with newspapers – and tobacco – and with brandy.
To the end, suspicious, lazy, content.

I’m amicable with the people I meet. I don
a bowler hat in just the way they do.
I say: they’re animals with a quite peculiar smell.
And I say: so what – I am too.

In the morning, in my vacant rocking chairs,
I sometimes set for myself a couple of women
and carelessly gaze at them and converse with them:
in me you have one here you can’t rely on.

When night falls, I gather men around me;
we address each other as ‘gentlemen’.
They swing their feet onto my table tops.
They say: things will improve for us. I don’t ask when.

Come morning, in dawn’s grey light, pine trees piss
and their vermin, the birds, start to shriek.
At that hour, in the city, I drain a glass and fling
my cigar butt away and, troubled, fall asleep.

We have settled, a superficial crew,
in houses that to our minds will never fall derelict
(we’ve built tower blocks over Manhattan Island
and spindly antennae that tickle the Atlantic).

What will last of cities is what blows through them: wind!
Houses make happy eaters: wolfed in a moment.
We know it – we are temporary
and after us comes nothing really worthy of comment.

In the earthquakes that are to come, I hope I’ll keep
my Virginia lit, not doused, grown bitter.
I, Bertolt Brecht, carried off to the asphalt cities
long ago from the black forests inside my mother.

tr. Martyn Crucefix

Things of the Earth: Joaquin Giannuzzi’s Poems

July 1, 2015September 6, 2015 martyn crucefix contemporary South American poetry, creative writing, poetry, translation A Complicated Mammal, Acumen Poetry Magazine, Argentina, Argentinian poetry, CB Editions, Jessica Sequeira, Joaquin Giannuzzi, Nia Davies, Poetry Wales, Richard Gwyn, Samuel Beckett, The Glasgow Review of Books

Here’s a game: search the little haystack that follows for the several needle-reasons why I wanted to blog something this week about the poetry of Joaquin Giannuzzi.

In a review in Poetry Wales, Nia Davies praises Giannuzzi’s “singular, destabilising and pessimistic, but humane take on the world” and, in part, she links this to the turbulent political landscape of Argentina through the twentieth century. This is poetry “always aware of the presence of violence behind a wall” though Giannuzzi is probably a less explicitly political writer than this suggests. The violence he sees in the world is a harshness even beyond politics and his humanity lies in a hard-won sympathy that we all inhabit a world in which human endeavour has become something of a “mockery”, death the only certainty.

Giannuzzi was born in 1924 to a family of Italian immigrants in Argentina. He chose journalism as a career and his observational gifts are obvious, poems often focusing on individual objects or people. He is a poet of disengagement, the objective gaze (as much as that is ever possible) though what is revealed is in part the poet’s response to what he sees, in part an ironic detachment from it. These are points made by Richard Gwyn (who also links him with Samuel Beckett) in a selection of his brilliant translations of Giannuzzi’s work from 1977 on, A Complicated Mammal (CB Editions, 2012). It was reading with Gwyn in Wales a few weeks ago that first brought Giannuzzi’s work to my notice.

The title ‘Garbage at daybreak’ says a lot about Giannuzzi’s approach. There is the distancing effect of reporting that a “sociological interest” brings the narrator to examine the garbage bins though what he learns is that “things don’t die but are murdered”. His listing of items begins obviously enough but takes a more troubling turn with “a doll’s torso, with a dark stain” (that turbulent twentieth century again?) into a more metaphysical malaise suggested by the ambiguous phrase “rosy meadow death” (una especie de muerte en un campo rosado). The poem ends with a discomforting “comfort”, realising that “not even this excrement / is obliged to abandon the planet”. Why do we harbor such crap and ugliness? But what if we compelled it to be ejected, might we be left even more empty-handed?

It was while completing an interview about my own writing (to appear in Acumen Poetry Magazine later this year) that I found myself saying “I’d be happy to accept I am committed to the empirical. As a child, though very quiet and reserved, I don’t remember living in any kind of fantasy world: I would be observing things going on around me. I used to find objects when I was a kid – coloured stones, shells, lost coins – and I remember the pleasure when my mother would say, ‘You’re always on the look-out. You never miss anything’. To this day, I like poems that focus on small things and, in effect, make arguments for the ways in which they communicate the bigger issues”. From this, it’s obvious why I respond to Giannuzzi’s work and ‘Coffee and apples’ is a good example of what Gwyn calls Giannuzzi’s concern for “thingitude” or las cosas de la tierra (things of the earth). He locates the poem in an afternoon in June, a moment of uncharacteristic ease since the world “has become hospitable”, though this is immediately cast into doubt with the simile comparing this to “a truce”, a mere postponement of hostilities. But for a while the things of this world give off an allure of “radiance” and “steam” while the narrator sprawls on his “backside”. But the truce is indeed short-lived as the poem ends with a bomb blast, police arriving, all delivered in a tone suggestive of the commonplace.

Giannuzzi’s narrators are often solitary and self-critical. In another moment of what seems like ease, one turns accusingly on himself: “I sold out my youth”. The waste of time, sucking on the “ribs of aesthetics” has yielded nothing, not even (look how quickly the Absurdist gulf opens in the course of these three lines): “a personal system of language / I mean an act of writing / That my contemporaries might interpret sufficiently badly” (‘Self-criticism). What Giannuzzi does do is see things and poetry (argues the poem ‘Poetics’) “is what is being seen”.

There are rare moments of tenderness. In being aware of his daughter dressing for a night out, another narrator reaches for religious hyperbole as she evokes a second Eden, “a second perfection of nature”. What propels her to this is a “faith” he cannot share or even imagine and as she puts finishing touches to the creation of herself – especially memorable in the clicking of her bracelets closing – he sees her leave the room “and everything that I am not goes with her”. This treads a fine line between self-pity and an excoriating nihilism that risks wiping out his daughter’s youthful optimism: but it is a line Giannuzzi treads so skillfully, leaving the reader with the strange pleasures of a hard-headed modernist perception alongside a touching evocation of paternal love. Brilliant – especially so when it floated into my mind lying awake waiting for my just-eighteen-year-old daughter turning the lock downstairs, back from late-night clubbing in Shoreditch. She’s back safe and sound; that big world out there.

Gwyn notes that Giannuzzi’s narrators are often caught gazing through a window at the big world out there. In one case, what is observed is only an “indistinct appearance”, fragments, colours, a suffering, “tangled up in itself”. The poem imagines a million other similar windows, each framing its “failed theologian” and for Giannuzzi the adjective makes the point here; divinity is only present “by gloomy delegation”, though even that is probably too strongly put. Desertion, perhaps would be better, more truthful. Giannuzzi’s is not the best of all possible worlds, it is the “only possible” and ‘Theologian at the window’ ends by suggesting the human animal has little choice but to suffer “a corresponding headache”.

These are a great poems, short, modern, dark lyrics (that would knock most of the 2015 Forward shortlists into a cocked hat) by a poet compared by Jessica Sequeira in the Glasgow Review of Books to Montale, Auden, Pavese and T. S. Eliot. Richard Gwyn has done a magnificent job of translating him for us – the least we can do is go and buy it.

Joaquin Giannuzzi is interviewed (in Spanish) and reads his poem ‘La desaparición’:

Bathing in the Olt #7

June 3, 2015September 6, 2015 martyn crucefix contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, translation, writing abecedary, First World War, Mihail C Vladescu, Romania

Introduction to the abecedary form of this sequence: click here.

Previous installments: #1 / #2 and #3 / #4 / #5 / #6

Bathing in the Olt

The past behind its drawn curtains

the train to Slatina

their loved ones emerged from the glittering water

their property stood on a hill of red soil, a few hundred feet distant but facing the river Olt

they were making for the other bank

they had no thought for the tragedy that had already

this was Violetta now in love with Virgil

though she would have been happy to be rescued

to irresistible longing

to swim where the currents allowed

two nights of absence . . . to her that was evidence enough

urgent matters would force delay

Violetta seemed to have handled the short separation well enough

Violetta suddenly disappearing from sight

Violetta took her revenge

Violetta was a powerful swimmer

Virgil Trancu and his family lived close by in the neighbouring village

waiting for the scandal to break at any moment

waiting for what he felt sure would happen

warm sand under leafy osiers in the breath of a day drawing to a close

was meant simply to entice him

was out of danger

was wrong and she suddenly burst into tears

yawning, carefully, she un-

zipped her “maillot” and lay indifferently, beautiful and seductive

Bathing in the Olt #6

June 2, 2015September 6, 2015 martyn crucefix contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, translation, writing abecedary, First World War, Mihail C Vladescu, Romania

Introduction to the abecedary form of this sequence: click here.

Previous installments: #1 / #2 and #3 / #4 / #5

Bathing in the Olt

Reasons for panic at Milcoveni as the heated imagination of his girlfriend

she bent briefly forward as if liable to fall

she had a simple plan

she had made it the night before and she would carry it out

she seemed to be begging for help and attention which she did not truly need

skirting the strongest currents of the river, he managed to reach the other bank

slave to her own impressionable nature

so hard to counter. Cautiously, he tried to spare her any pain

so it was that the two couples often met

soil erosion caused by the powerful and frequent flooding of the waters of the

mighty Olt

some high society woman in Craiova

something of a coward and Benedict a mere beginner

struck out decisively for the side where the current seemed most powerful

taken aback and then enchanted by this new music

the “maillots” were brought out and Violetta’s was especially fine

the delay seemed to make sense no longer

the fear lovers experience when the one they love is not beside them

the grace and elegance of the two girls contrasted sharply with the ravines and the

river bed, hollowed out by the destructive fury

the material evidence . . . He found the two “maillots”

(Next installment posted tomorrow)

Bathing in the Olt #5

June 1, 2015September 6, 2015 martyn crucefix contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, translation, writing abecedary, First World War, Mihail C Vladescu, Romania

Introduction to the abecedary form of this sequence: click here.

Previous installments: #1 / #2 and #3 / #4

Bathing in the Olt

Near the bank the river was quiet

neither love nor life in the old, white house in Milcoveni

no direct path so they had to make a detour to reach the water

no inkling that anything was amiss

no trace of Benedict

not at all hard to convince. And he surrendered

not taken in by his gesture; it merely fuelled her suspicions

nothing seemed to threaten their happiness

now they had lost almost everything

on the opposite bank something strange was happening

one solitary gesture: one of renunciation

perfectly covering her body it emphasized her beautiful figure

pretending fatigue and weakness

quickly went under without trace

(Next installment posted tomorrow)

Bathing in the Olt #2 and #3

May 30, 2015September 6, 2015 martyn crucefix contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, translation, writing abecedary, First World War, Mihail C Vladescu, Romania

Introduction to the abecedary form of this sequence: click here.

Previous installment: #1

Bathing in the Olt

Dawning on Benedict

deeply

delightful entertainment during the long, hot summer days, bathing in the Olt

did not shout

did not threaten, did not say a word

drowning in the whirlpool of the Olt

Elegant, young, attractive

even Benedict seemed to have lost his confidence

forests of osiers, of dense, hollow willow trees and huge sand bars that gave the impression of tremendous disturbance in the landscape

for her these were dreadful moments

given the opportunity to sneak back she swiftly dressed herself

going to bed that night they abandoned themselves to passionate embraces

he would not be able to keep the promise he had made when he’d left his girlfriend, Violetta

her eternal threat never left his mind

her misfortune was not something Violetta thought greatly about

hidden under the shaggy willow trees on the fine, dry sand, beneath the melancholy rays of twilight

his athletic body and complete absence of hair

his body found where the current had brought it to the river bank

his was unexpected

(Next installment posted tomorrow)

Bathing in the Olt #1

May 29, 2015September 6, 2015 martyn crucefix contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, translation, writing abecedary, First World War, Mihail C Vladescu, Romania

Introduction to the abecedary form of this sequence: click here.

Bathing in the Olt

A modest apartment

a swimsuit which on a famous beach last year in high season caused quite a stir

a well-lit house on a quiet street of the Capital

all part of the performance

an absence that had been longer than expected but through no fault of his own

as all miserable people

as they tried to hide

as you might after a funeral, having stood for hours, the welter of powerful emotion

at that very moment Violetta exacting her revenge

aware of his girlfriend’s fierce jealousy

Benedict had been adamant

both reproach and bitter disappointment

bringing the conversation skilfully round to bathing

cheat on me – on the very same day you cheat on me – I’ll cheat on you

children were taking cows to the pasture

close by he saw their naked bodies vanishing among the shade of the willow trees

crushed by the incident, imagining her happiness in ruins, her soul flared

(#2 posted tomorrow)

Bathing in the Olt #4

May 29, 2015September 6, 2015 martyn crucefix contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, translation, writing abecedary, First World War, Mihail C Vladescu, Romania

Introduction to the abecedary form of this sequence: click here.

Previous installments: #1 / #2 and #3

Bathing in the Olt

I am miserable. I am very miserable . . .

I knew you would want to save me

if it was achieved without much effort on her part

important business would keep Benedict in Craiova for two more days

in contrast she appeared flawless

in his every action he could leave no room for any suspicion

in the horse-drawn carriage on the way they talked little

in vain she pleaded to accompany him

just some beautiful hotel waitress

keenly looking for the dining car waiting to catch sight of

left at home alone, spawned a host of suspicions

lovingly aroused by desire, the thought that she belonged to him

Milcoveni to take tea, served according to the rules of a fine house

more than once Mr. and Mrs. Virgil Trancu had been invited to join them bathing in the Olt

(Next installment posted tomorrow)

The Abecedary Form / Carolyn Forche

May 28, 2015September 6, 2015 martyn crucefix contemporary American poetry, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, translation, writing Bloodaxe Books, Blue Hour, Carolyn Forche, Daodejing, First World War, Gnosticism, Lidia Vianu, Mihail C Vladescu, pleroma, Psalm 119, Rainer Maria Rilke, Shearsman Books, University of Bucharest

The Form: I wanted to share here some thoughts on my experiments with the form of the abecedary. An abecedarium (or abecedary) is originally an inscription consisting of the letters of an alphabet, listed in order. Abecedaries were often practice exercises, teaching aids, but also developed as an ancient poetic form guided by strict alphabetical order. The earliest examples are Semitic, found in religious Hebrew poetry and the form has been used in various cultures for prayers, hymns, and psalms. Psalm 118 (or 119 by King James numbering) consists of twenty-two eight-line stanzas, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Chaucer’s An ABC is a medieval example of the form. Some abecedaries found in the Athenian Agora appear to have been left deliberately incomplete and the imperfection of these examples may have had a magical or ritual significance.

For those who have come across this form in contemporary poetry at all, it was probably (as in my case) through the poem called ‘On Earth’ in Carolyn Forche’s Blue Hour (Bloodaxe, 2003). I reviewed the book in some bewilderment at the time (see below) but have since come to see it more favourably. Forche herself says: “Gnostic abecedarian hymns date from the 3^rd century AD. Along with Christian and Buddhist texts, they were recovered from small towns on the northern fringe of the Taklamakan Desert, early in the 20th century”. She also links the form with the idea of the pleroma, defined as the totality or fullness of God’s creation, the One. Over the 46 pages of ‘On Earth’, she adheres rigorously to the form in which alphabetical order guides not only the stanzas, but also the words opening every single line:

languid at the edge of the sea
lays itself open to immensity
leaf-cutter ants bearing yellow trumpet flowers along the road
left everything left all usual worlds behind
library, lilac, linens, litany

Poets.org says that abecedaries are now more commonly used as mnemonic devices and word games for children such as those written by Dr. Seuss and Edward Gorey. A derivative form is the much more familiar acrostic.

From my 2003 Review: The book contains 11 pieces in 65 pages, 46 of which are taken up with the long poem ‘On Earth’ and phrases do echo throughout the poems so there is a sense of unity to the whole. For the most part, Forche writes by assembling fragments and images, often without clear syntactical or narrative connections to surrounding lines. The reader experiences the verse as successive waves (lines stretch across the page and usually come in twos or threes), or as threads floating disconnectedly, but creating a striking impression of beauty. Forche’s obscurity comes more from an unshakeable confidence in her project, in her voice, in her idiosyncratic style and in her subject, largely concerned with the significance or recovery of the past in the present moment.

My difficulty with what Forche does is that all kinds of experience seem to be subjected to the same treatment, so that in the end the reader swims through an undeniably glittering, but rather gloopy, phenomenological soup in which “a city a thousand years” has the same weight as “a field of birds roasted by the heavens”, which has an equivalence to “a sudden reticence that seizes the heart”. All of the material – several deaths, the madness of a grandmother, a mother’s life, early years with a child, Chernobyl, some war-torn territories – is recorded with a swooning sensitivity, a recurring softness of diction and a penchant for grammatical inversion which seems to strain after the poetic: “In the blue silo of dawn, in earth-smoke and birch copse, / where the river of hands meets the Elbe.”

These doubts are brought to a head in the ambitious ‘On Earth’ which is (to quote the blurb) “a transcription of mind passing from life into death, in the form of an abecedary, modelled on ancient gnostic hymns”. The form is an alphabetical sequence and this additional random factor only increases this reader’s sense of a steamrollering of experience to ensure a smooth poetic passage. There is no doubt that Forche can produce some stunning images and when she strings them together in more conventional ways and the reader can hold on to her coat-tails, you can see why her reputation is so high in the U.S.

My interest in abecedaries: Has grown with my interest in looser forms of verse (I have given up on punctuation in most of my own poems these days) alongside a more-than-philosophical sense of the truth of the wholeness of being, reflecting Forche’s idea of the pleroma. This – see Rilke, see the Daodejing – is a condition impossible to be caught in the net of more conventional language and poetic form. Abecedaries encompass the whole alphabet (at least in theory – though I like the idea of the deliberate imperfection; perfection belonging only to God). An abecedary can therefore be seen as an appropriate poetic gesture (futile for sure) towards a unified field, an encompassing of everything, the only true state.

The Material: But the unified field, for an individual human being, must be regarded with some perspective; if this was not the case we would indeed be seeing with the eye of God, with his/her distance and utter impersonality. I wanted to write affective texts. I wanted my abecedary to be (paradoxically) limited. I wanted people in it; even a narrative of events. But all still subject to the demands of the form. I realised I did indeed have some suitable materials to hand. I had been asked by Professor Lidia Vianu, of University of Bucharest, to assist with the translation into English of several short stories by the relatively unknown Modernist Romanian author, Mihail C Vladescu. He published a collection of eight stories, In Retreat, almost 100 years ago. These are stories written in war-torn Eastern Europe but more significantly, Vladescu forensically portrays the sense of corruption in his society, with materialistic motives and adulterous behaviour most prominent. It seemed to me, and not merely because the centenary of the First World War is still in process around us, that this was material worth working on. I thought Vladescu’s relative obscurity to an English-speaking readership was also an advantage in such an experiment.

The Process: I selected phrases as far as possible randomly from the prose translation. These were then ordered alphabetically (via Excel spreadsheets) and subjected to as little editing as possible, though I have sectioned and created stanzas where it seemed best. Not surprisingly, my abecedaries are incomplete (x and z are more often than not the Persian flaws in the poetic carpet).

The results? Over the next 6 days I will post up the full 7 sections of my abecedary ‘Bathing in the Olt’ (from Vladescu’s original story called ‘Bathing’) and any observations would be welcomed. The text has already appeared in full in Shearsman magazine, 103/4, April 2015.

Click here to see each section posted: #1 / #2 and #3 / #4 / #5 / #6