This week, at the Omnibus Theatre on Clapham Common, I was invited to deliver a brief, personal talk about Lorca’s poetry, particularly from the perspective of translating it. I have always found his poems difficult to work on – beyond a superficial level – though, as what follows suggests, I hope I have made some headway with it over the years. There are plenty of very poor translations around. I’m posting two blogs on this and including two of my own translations, the first, unpublished as yet, the second appeared a while back in a small magazine. I’ve left my talk pretty much as . . . My translation of ‘Reyerta’ can be found at the end of the posting. I will post on the even more astonishing poem, ‘Romancero sonambulo’, next week.
My personal story with Lorca maybe begins even before I’d read him. When I did come to read him – in a Penguin Modern Poets collection with (quote) plain prose translations – I didn’t get it. Later – as I often calculatingly do with a poet I don’t get – I tried to translate a few poems. To begin with, I didn’t get it then either.
Actually, my problems are genuinely surprising, in retrospect, as I’d long before this responded powerfully to something which I can now see had a strong Lorca quality to it. Let’s go back to the early 1980s. Imagine the beard, the much longer hair. The ignorance . . . A friend of mine loved his Irish folk music. He told me to listen to a song sung by Christy Moore. I say a song – a ballad really.
The song’s voice (a young man) tells us he went to a wood, he cut a branch of hazel, went fishing with it and caught a trout. What drove him was the fire in his head. The scene is vividly conveyed, neat turns of phrase like the white moths and moth-like stars and, as he lights a fire, the trout turns into a girl who calls to him but runs off.
Then the youth’s narrative jumps – the kind of moment that really does take the top of your head off. The voice concludes:
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
I really didn’t know it at the time, but the song’s words are, of course, by W.B. Yeats. It is his poem ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, from The Wind Among the Reeds (1899).
But I knew well enough that I found it moving – the yearning of the narrative, the devastating presentation of time passing, the strange images and most of all the mystery that spread itself over the whole like endlessly suggestive moonlight.
II
And so eventually, in Lorca too, I began to understand three big things – his poetry’s sense of generative mystery, the strange unexpectedness of his images and the boldness – the jump cuts – of his narrative development.
I’m focusing on these things tonight and what better place to start than a lecture he gave. Lorca typically (both self-deprecating and boldly idiosyncratic) calls it rather a talk about something no one has taught him – a lecture about the collection of poems called Gypsy Ballads. He published this best-selling book in 1930 and here he is speaking in October 1935. Of course, within the year he would have been murdered, his body dumped somewhere never to be found.
But in these lecture comments, we catch the man very much alive, I think, plus the poet’s love of outlandish metaphors. He says that lectures, in the traditional sense, tend to “fill the audience’s eyes with the pinpoints where Morpheus hangs his irresistible anemones”. For those of you already nodding off, he means in such talks we often fall asleep. Or at least, the speaker inadvertently fills the hall with “yawns too big for even the mouth of an alligator”.
I have now translated a number of Lorca’s poems and one of the great difficulties is to carry over such metaphorical leaps into English where they risk sounding very silly indeed. Fair enough, the alligator is, on the face of it, obvious enough: its gaping jaws give a good jolt of comic hyperbole to his image. But it’s still surprising in the context of a be-suited, bespectacled lecture hall in Spain. There is an exoticism there on the verge of surrealism and is characteristic of Lorca’s images. This search for novelty in image is clear when he argues later that a real poet must “shoot his arrows at living metaphors and not at the contrived and false ones which surround him”.
The Morpheus image does something else which is typical. Lorca takes up a creaking old mythic figure and with his sustained and vividly specific imagination, a vigorous verb, plus the kind of adjective on which he always liked to turn the volume up to 11, he brings the god of sleep and dreams to modern life: “the pinpoints where Morpheus hangs his irresistible anemones”. This sort of thing really is at the heart of Lorca’s project to take up traditional forms and stories and invest them with a modern vitality. One of his fellow students in his brief time at Columbia University reported that for Lorca, “new metaphors were the core and mainstay of any new poetry [. . .] Lorca’s central idea in writing was to employ phrases which had never been used before [. . .] an attempt to place together two things which had always been considered as belonging to two different worlds, and in that fusion and shock to give them both a new reality”.
This is the root of his belief that by means of poetry “a man more rapidly approaches the cutting edge that the philosopher and the mathematician turn away from in silence”. Never a proper, card-carrying surrealist, we can see why his work was working along that same grain. The well-honed, well-trodden, conventional, empirical/logical grooves of the philosopher or mathematician need a down-right shake up and poetic images easily seize the liberty to do this.
III
The Gypsy Ballad called ‘Reyerta’ or ‘The Quarrel’ or ‘Fight’ shows a lot of this for me. Lorca’s own comments on the poem suggest his interest in the way groups attack each other for unlikely reasons – a glance, a rose, a love affair centuries old, a man feeling a bug on his cheek. It opens:
Halfway down the gulley,
knives of Albacete,
beautiful with enemy blood
glinting like fish.
Like fish? A surprising image – but perhaps the silver and red (of fish fins; of steel and blood) makes this a vivid visual opening to the poem. But the surprise holds my attention; I can’t dismiss the slipperiness of the fish, the literal and metaphorical slipperiness of knives in a fight, perhaps the speed of movement of fish/fighters.
The images of the next quatrain are vividly expressive but hard to be literal about:
In the crown of an olive,
two old women mourn.
The bull of the brawl
heaves itself up walls.
The women weep but to see them apparently perched in a tree top explains less and reveals more. So – they are far from the quarrel, putting distance between themselves and the ruckus, and where better than an olive tree, symbol of rootedness, domesticity perhaps, a long rural history, the bark’s wrinkles echoing their old weeping faces. Then the quarrel as an utterly non-literal, aggressive bull might seem an obvious image but again Lorca fixes our attention and conjures an independent life for it – as in a bullfighting ring – crashing into walls, even beginning to climb them.
Mysterious black angels float through this poem at various moments. They are partly obvious, ominous, harbingers, though not of salvation but doom. Again, Lorca commits to them, commits details to them which tend to deepen the mystery of their significance: they are “bringing / meltwater, handkerchiefs. / Angels with wings as wide / as these Albacete knives” and, at the conclusion of the poem, they are seen “wheeling / in the air to the west. / Angels with trailing braids / and with hearts of oil”. With hearts of oil? Golden, greasy, liquid, melting, fast-beating, lacking healthy blood, anointing the earth, the good stuff spilling everywhere? Its meaning is a mystery and I suspect one Lorca would not venture to explain himself.
Just one last detail from this great poem. Juan Antonio de Montilla is killed in the fight and – in one of Lorca’s characteristic jump cut edits (more of that in a minute) suddenly (it seems) the “judge and Civil Guard / come through the olive groves”. Somebody – a participant, one of the old women? – gives them an account of events in the form of exactly one of Lorca’s startling metaphors. This may have been a quarrel over a card game, or a girl, like so many others, but Lorca dizzyingly elevates it into an historical, even epic context:
Just as they always do:
four Romans have died
and five Carthaginians.
Here is my translation in full – the original Spanish follows:
.
Fight
Halfway down the gulley
knives of Albacete,
beautiful with enemy blood
glinting like fish.
a harsh playing-card light,
silhouettes on sour green,
the infuriated horsemen.
In the crown of an olive,
two old women mourn.
The bull of the brawl
heaves itself up walls.
And black angels bringing
meltwater, handkerchiefs.
Angels with wings as wide
as these Albacete knives.
Juan Antonio Montilla
rolling dead down a slope,
his body full of irises,
pomegranate on his brow.
He rides a cross of fire now
down the road to death.
*
The judge and Civil Guard
come through olive groves.
Slithering blood moans
a serpent’s mute song.
Masters! Civil Guardsmen!
Just as they always do:
four Romans have died
as have five Carthaginians
*
Evening crazed with figs
and hot rumours falling
faint on the wounded
thighs of the horsemen.
And black angels wheeling
in the air to the west.
Angels with trailing braids
and with hearts of oil.
Reyerta
En la mitad del barranco
las navajas de Albacete,
bellas de sangre contraria,
relucen como los peces.
Una dura luz de naipe
recorta en el agrio verde,
caballos enfurecidos
y perfiles de jinetes.
En la copa de un olivo
lloran dos viejas mujeres.
El toro de la reyerta
se sube por las paredes.
Ángeles negros traían
pañuelos y agua de nieve.
Ángeles con grandes alas
de navajas de Albacete.
Juan Antonio el de Montilla
rueda muerto la pendiente,
su cuerpo lleno de lirios
y una granada en las sienes.
Ahora monta cruz de fuego,
carretera de la muerte.
*
El juez, con guardia civil,
por los olivares viene.
Sangre resbalada gime
muda canción de serpiente.
Señores guardias civiles:
aquí pasó lo de siempre.
Han muerto cuatro romanos
y cinco cartagineses.
*
La tarde loca de higueras
y de rumores calientes
cae desmayada en los muslos
heridos de los jinetes.
Y ángeles negros volaban
por el aire del poniente.
Ángeles de largas trenzas
y corazones de aceite.
Akbar doesn’t generally do the more familiar, simply focused poem. There are a few in the book like ‘Learning to Pray’, in scattered unrhymed triplets, in which a young boy (Akbar allows a straight autobiographical reading usually) watches his father pray, “kneeling on a janamaz” or prayer mat. The wish to emulate the admired father is conveyed pin-sharp. A later poem also starts from childhood and (mostly in loose unrhymed couplets) traces the boy’s later maturing in an America “filled with wooden churches / in which I have never been baptized” (‘Personal Inventory: Fearless (Temporis Fila)’). This poem also attracts threads of two of Akbar’s other main themes: his personal addictions and the ubiquitous sense of living in a fallen world.
One of the main elements of this fallen state (again Akbar allows a simple autobiographical interpretation) is the damage caused by his past addictions, especially to alcohol. This is the main hook Penguin hang the book on (a cover of empty beer bottles, for example). Poems styled ‘Portrait of the Alcoholic …’ recur throughout the book, but the first section is most focused on this. A familiar comment from W.H. Auden is used to firmly yoke spirit to bottle: “All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation”. Many of the poems then have this sense of inebriation, muddling, confusion which Akbar’s style of writing is very at home with. ‘Portrait of the Alcoholic with Home Invader and Housefly’ presents the drinker waking up, seemingly attacked by a home invader with a knife. Memories of keeping a housefly on a string intervene, perhaps because in the fly’s death the young boy confronted the idea of death: “I opened myself to death, the way a fallen tree // opens itself to the wild”. The poem returns to the threatening situation, then to more abstract thoughts of scale, a TV programme and the speaker passively returns to sleep. This is a great poem of the self as both endangered and paranoid, distanced from danger, the blurring of perception, thought and memory.
But when it works, these are marvellous poems – and, for my money, this book would make a worthy winner of the 2018 Felix Dennis Prize. ‘Wild Pear Tree’ – as if in one breath – conveys a wintry scene/mental state, recalls halcyon days (of spring) and ends lamenting the forgetting of an “easy prayer” intended for emergencies: “something something I was not / born here I was not born here I was not”. ‘Exciting the Canvas’ is much more risky in its jig-sawing together of disparate elements – a bit of Rumi, the sea, a child’s drawing, a drunken accident, the Model T Ford, crickets, snakes – but somehow manages to hold it all together to make a snap-shot of a troubled, curious, still-open consciousness. And finally, ‘So Often the Body Becomes a Distraction’, dallies with the Rilkean idea of dying young, alludes to recovery from addiction, then grasshoppers, ice-cubes, personal ambitions and the self-image of “rosejuice and wonderdrunk” (which is merely one side of Akbar’s work). This one ends with the not-infrequent trope of a re-birth from burial in the earth. I like these images, suggesting that, for all the fretting about lost paradise, the absence of God, the self-destructiveness of the individual, whatever redemptive re-birth may be possible is only likely to come from our closeness and attentiveness to things about us, an eschewing of the “self-love” Akbar struggles to free himself from in ‘Prayer’: in a lovely phrase –though I’m still figuring it – he concludes, “it is not God but the flower behind God I treasure”.
There is a sequence in the middle of the book which offers a clearer view of Ramlochan’s approach. ‘The Red Thread Cycle’, on the face of it, explores the traumatic consequences of rape. How to articulate the event is one theme and there is a magic-real quality which initially seems to add to the horror: “Don’t say Tunapuna Police Station. / Say you found yourself in the cave of the minotaur”. But this shifts quickly instead to reflect how police and authorities fail to take such a literal description seriously, even blaming the woman herself: “Say / he took something he’ll be punished for taking, not something you’re punished for holding / like a red thread between your thighs”. Other poems trace improvised rituals (real and semi-real) to expiate the crime and trace the passage of years. Some moments suggest the lure of suicide with allusions to Virginia Woolf’s death by water, carrying “pockets of white stones”. Seeing the unpunished rapist at large eventually becomes possible: “Nothing drowns you, when you see him again”. The sequence is a lot less chronological than I am making it sound, but what the woman has been doing over the years is, in a striking phrase, “working to train the flinch out of myself”. This has been achieved partly through art. Ramlochan certainly sees such pain as an essential part of the artist’s apprenticeship, that it will “feed your best verse”, and the sequence ends with her reading poems in public as an act of strength and self-affirmation, marking the psychic death of the aggressor: “applause, hands slapping like something hard and holy / is grating out gold halleluiahs / beneath the proscenium of his grave”.
The gateway to Richard Scott’s carefully structured first book is one of the most conventional poems in it. It’s a carefully punctuated, unrhymed sonnet. It is carefully placed (Public Library) and dated (1998). It’s the kind of poem and confinement Scott has fought to escape from and perhaps records the moment when that escape began: “In the library [. . .] there is not one gay poem, / not even Cavafy eyeing his grappa-sozzled lads”. The young Scott (I’ll come back to the biographical/authenticity question in a moment) takes an old copy of the Golden Treasury of Verse and writes COCK in the margin, then further obscene scrawls and doodles including, ironically a “biro-boy [who] rubs his hard-on against the body of a // sonnet”. Yet his literary vandalism leads to a new way of reading as – echoing the ideas of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick – the narrator suddenly sees the “queer subtext” beneath many of the ‘straight’ poems till he is picking up a highlighter pen and “rimming each delicate / stanza in cerulean, illuminating the readers-to-come . . .”
You will have gathered that one of Power’s things is to mix English and Austrian German. This happens several times in ‘A Tour of Shrines of Upper Austria’ (though in this book we only get 7 parts of the full sequence). An observer stops at various shrine sites, jotting down some thoughts and taking a picture or two. Nothing is developed though Power’s poems do show an interest in religion on several other occasions. ‘The Moving Swan’ opens with a centre-justified prose description of candles flickering in a cathedral and another poem is drawn to the grave of two goats, observing: “two heaps of ivy/straw / one unlit red tealight”. And ‘Epiphany Night’ is a more extended series of notes recording a local celebration with bells, dressing-up, boats, lanterns. This is all observed in loosely irregular lines by the narrator from her “wohnung” (apartment). To wring all engagement or emotional or imaginative response from such a text is, I suppose, quite an achievement but to spend 70-odd pages in such company really is wearisome.
Mr Knightley is an absent figure in that poem, but Jinx is repeatedly visited by powerful, seductive, dangerous males who – in ways now very familiar since Angela Carter started the ball rolling – are morphed into animal figures. ‘Hare’ is an early example, leaning invasively over the female narrator at a wedding party, “those fine ears folded smooth down his back, / complacent. Smug. Buck-sure”. As in ‘Daddy’, the woman is drawn to the man despite (or because of) his obvious threat but unlike Plath’s powerful final repulse (“Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through”), Parry’s narrator is fatalistic: “Your part is fixed: // a virgin going down, / a widow coming back”. Elsewhere, ‘Goat’ and ‘Magpie as gambler’ work similarly and ‘Ravens’ is a particularly Plathian version: “In fact, every man I thought was you / had a bird at his back / and a black one too”.
For all the frenetic playfulness of the book, Parry’s mostly female narrators and subjects are beset by threats. ‘The Lemures’ re-Romanises the creatures into psychological pests, aspects of self-doubt perhaps, appearing on the furniture, at the roadside, in a reflection in a lift door: “They will steal from you. Pickpockets, / rifling the snug pouches at the back of your mind”. Parry is evidently a fan of mid-twentieth century film and she explores Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Wolf Man from the perspective of dark powers surfacing. The question being asked is whether such forces represent the overturning of the real self or the manifestation of it in contrast to what a later poem calls “the dreary boxstep of propriety”. Locks and keys recur in the poems – are we confined, or about to set something loose, or to leap to real freedom?
Then I have been reading poems for Grenfell Tower (The Onslaught Press) and picking away at some link between the (in)adequacy of a certain English poetic voice to confront the scale of ecological issues, or as a vehicle for expressing certain cultural differences, or as a way of exploring the kind of tragic and grievous event represented by the Grenfell fire and its aftermath. This struck me particularly as, in the Grenfell anthology, there are well-know poets alongside others less well-known, plus some who felt impelled to write as a direct result of the catastrophe. I felt many of the more well-known names struggled to find a sufficient voice for this appalling event, often sounding too careful, overly subtle, perhaps too concerned with Mort’s “linguistic originality”. Does such a devastating, large scale, well publicised event require a different kind of voice from poets?
The difficulties of addressing such a subject are expressed by Joan Michelson’s contribution which announces and extinguishes itself in the same moment: “This is the letter to the Tower / that I cannot write”. One of the best poems which does display evident ‘literary’ qualities is Steven Waling’s ‘Fred Engels in the Gallery Café’. It cleverly splices several voices or narratives together, one of these being quotes from Engels’ 1844 The Condition of the Working Class in England. Other fragments used allude to gentrification and the wealth gap in the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Other poems, like Pat Winslow’s ‘Souad’s Moon’, focus on the presence of refugees in the Tower, or the role of the profit-motive in the disaster (‘High-Rise’ by Al McClimens), or the presence of an establishment cover-up after the event (Tom McColl’s ‘The Bunker’).
But more often than not, these poets opt for more tangential routes to expression. Other disasters – such as Nero watching Rome burn, the 1666 Fire of London, the bomb falling on Hiroshima and the Aberfan disaster – prove ways in for Abigail Elizabeth Rowland, Neil Reeder, Margaret Beston and Mike Jenkins. The naivety and innocence of a child’s eye is another common device. Andrew Dixon’s ‘Storytime’ takes this approach, the child’s language and vision allowing simple but nevertheless powerful statements: “Mama don’t be afraid. Do you / want us to pray? I know what / to say. We’re both in a rocket / and we’re going away.” Finola Scott does the same with a Glasgow accent, a child staring from her own tower block home: “she peers doon at hir building, wunners / Whit’s cladding?’ A young life cut off before its full development by the fire is also the theme of two poems that refer to the death of Khadija Saye. She was a photographer who died in the blaze, whose work had been exhibited in Britain’s Diaspora Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Michael Rosen’s contribution again uses childlike simplicity and obsessive repetition – as much representing a struggle to comprehend as the gnawing of realised grief:
Waiblinger was a real Holderlin fan. The older poet’s novel, Hyperion, had appeared in 1822 
![moulin-glacier-11[2]](https://martyncrucefix.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/moulin-glacier-112.jpg?w=352&h=264)
Another young female narrator deliberately stays at home while her parents (conventionally) go to church on Sundays. She’s a teenage rebel without a cause as “The truth is I’m not sure what I did / those mornings”. The poem is built from a list (one of Littlefair’s favourite forms) of what she did and did not do. Littlefair is almost always good with her figurative language and here the girl is variously an undone shoelace, an open rucksack, a blunt knife. The urge to non-conformity outruns her imagination as to how she might spend her growing independence and there is an interesting tension at the last as her parents return, “whole” having “sung their hallelujahs” while the young girl is till restlessly revising her choice of nail polish, as yet unable to find what she’s after.
I think I find this with some other poems too, though it’s partly because Littlefair is admirably intent on presenting the working world, the world of labour, as routine in contrast to the allure of a more adventurous life. ‘Assignment brief’ presents itself as an old familiar’s introduction to a new girl’s routine office job; the lists and proffered options are funny but they slowly run out of steam. Likewise, the promisingly titled ‘Usually, I’m a different person at this party’ flags latterly. I’m imagining this as narrated by an older version of the girl who half fell in love with Tara Miller. Here, she shadow-boxes the risks of conventionality by over-insisting on her own sweeping and glamorous life, in the process claiming all sorts of ‘interesting’ aspects of herself: “I only ever have large and sweeping illnesses. / My lymph nodes swell glamorously. I never snuffle”. But the contrasts here are again rather roughly hewn and, in the end, close to cartoonish.
The latter view is more than a possibility given that Littlefair’s poems also boldly explore the self’s relation with itself. The encounter between self and future self is plainly and humorously told in ‘Visitations from future self’ and it finds the present self in trouble, pleading “I can’t go on / like this, my life a tap that won’t / switch on”. Here, the present self’s cliched and optimistic hopes for a “rain-before-the-rainbow thing” are denigrated and stared down by the future self. ‘Sertraline’ echoes Plath’s The Bell Jar in its evocation of a summer spent on an anti-depressive drug. And ‘Giraffe’ itself is a prose poem (there are 3 prose pieces in the whole book) in which a voice is offering reassurances to someone hoping to “feel better”. In a final list, images of a return to ‘health’ are offered. Particularly good is the idea that suffering will remain a fact but “your sadness will be graspable, roadworthy, have handlebars”. And lastly, “When you feel better, you will not always be happy, but when happiness does come, it will be long-legged, sun-dappled: a giraffe.”
The designation ‘a young poet to watch’ is over-used but on this occasion it needs to be said loudly. Giraffe contains a number of fresh, intriguing and fully-achieved poems. It’s well worth seeking out. I well remember reading and being very impressed by Liz Berry’s 2010 Tall Lighthouse debut chapbook, the patron saint of schoolgirls, and this selection from Bryony Littlefair’s early work runs it close. My review of Liz Berry’s subsequent, prize-winning full collection, 
Martyn Crucefix 