Translating Georg Heym’s ‘Berlin II’

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Review of ‘Modern Fog’ by Chris Emery (Arc Publications, 2024)

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Chris Emery’s most recent collection both presents, and intends to see beyond, the Modern Fog of its title. The poems revel in describing aspects of this world and – in keeping with the images on the book’s cover – the occasions for such descriptions arise from journeys (often walking – the cover shows a hand-holding rambling couple) and the highlights of such journeys are frequently encounters with creatures (the cover has a deer and a fox). So ‘The Path’ leads us past ‘chalk beds’ and ‘clay beds’ and ‘dirt paths’ to excited sightings of a jay and a buzzard. Presenting more of a pause in such a walk, ‘The Day Storm’ is composed largely of the poet’s characteristic ‘noticing’ of blackthorn, blackberry and nettle. But once the eponymous storm has passed, the trees are now found to be ‘gashed . . . / splintered’ and this gives rise to one of Emery’s most interesting observations that, in their damaged state, the trees are in some mysterious way ‘clarified’. More of this later.

There is more than a little of Philip Larkin in Emery’s work – particularly the detail-listing-Larkin of ‘Here’ and ‘To the Sea’. Emery’s ‘All the Routes Home’ offers us an inclusive list of a Roman road, a Viking lane, an unclear path, a Puritan track. The poem ‘The Bay’ might be read as a more condensed version of Larkin’s ‘Here’ as, ‘after hours of hill torture’, the trail walker arrives at a bay, dotted with ruined buildings: ‘the afterthought of winter crofting’. This image of transience, of ultimate human failure, in effect a memento mori, is softened a little with Emery’s insistence that the homesteads ‘still hold their ounce of love’. In contrast to Larkin, and reminiscent of those earlier ‘gashed’ trees (somehow being advantaged by their damage), Emery is reluctant to accept death as an absolute ending and it is in this that the reader will find indications of his religious belief.

Similar spiritual themes emerge in the many encounters these poems have with creatures. ‘The Buzzard’ is another hill walk on a ‘churchless’ afternoon, but the flight of the bird on its thermal suggests an upward aspiration, a craving that the human observers also ‘hope to crave’. There is a beautiful little poem ostensibly about a dove returning to its dovecot:  

Small snatch of air, sole white arc,

crisp handclap, then ritual landing.

All followed by cossetting and fuss

at the stoop. The laughable dance

with lots of nodding and wittering

before the tricky hop up

to the dovecote . . .

The poem is transformed to something unconventionally angelic by being given the title ‘Pentecost’. The more lengthy ‘Day Fox’ vividly captures the ‘living amber’ of the creature against the green of grass, but its death at the roadside is equally clear: ‘his pelt was tar black and slicked back / on the tiny lump of him’. Here again, Emery goes a step or two beyond the plain facts of death as, in the corpse’s decomposition, ‘the world / relaxed into him with all its fiery prayers’. To suggest this is an image of an afterlife is to lack the poem’s own subtlety, but Emery is surely probing Eliot’s idea (not original to TSE) that ‘In order to arrive at what you are not / You must go through the way in which you are not’ (‘East Coker’). The remarkable poem ‘Stags’ does this more explicitly in that the momentary sighting of the creatures is (in the poem itself) now no more than a shaky memory, an ‘absence’ that stands ‘at the edge of what’s never / fully grasped’. But the recall of their passing still has a potency as a ‘store of grace and loss’ and is here declared ‘the last religion of these woods’.

St. Andrew’s, Wickhampton in Norfolk

But Emery is equally at home describing the ‘dreck’ of our modern world. It’s surely more this sort of thing that constitutes the ‘modern fog’ of the book’s title. There is an NCP car park, the final destination perhaps of the couple in ‘Newbies’ who are driving along ‘old roads, lobbed estates seeping / by the rim of each roundabout’. The tacky nature of modern life is also found in ‘Edgeworlds’ which encompasses 4x4s parked up beside a ‘ratty beach’ and coach tours, detergent-smelling corridors and TV reruns. But such scenes function in this book partly as a foil to the (again) Larkinesque ‘churchgoing’ side of Emery’s character. ‘The Wall Paintings’ – a visit to St. Andrew’s, Wickhampton in Norfolk – opens, not with cycle clips, but with the equally evocative ‘thunk of a latch and then your eyes adjust’. And far more monumentally, ‘At St Helen’s, Ranworth’ is a 12-part sequence (each shaped like the church’s tower) more explicitly contemplating the building’s impact on the poet’s religious experience.

I guess I’m more attuned to Emery’s art when he is working up from the roots of the secular and material world, as in ‘One Drive in Winter’, in which the travelling couple go beyond satnav reach, the petrol tank close to empty, beyond any very obviously attractive destination, yet they still discover something worthy of a return, something about themselves, an opportunity to ‘solemnise the marginal and lost’. It may be that the great churches of the Norfolk Broads are themselves part of the category of the ‘marginal and lost’ these days and I do admire Emery’s attempts to bring them back into contemporary poetry, but I find his more slantwise and paradoxically inclined images (evocative of ‘East Coker’s ‘In my end is my beginning’) more accessible emotionally. To give one more example, in ‘The Elders’ – a poem written in memory of Adam Zagajewski – Emery again deploys an image of trees damaged after a storm (this time perhaps more metaphorically damaged by ‘revolution’) and these oak limbs also ‘lie / broken with new life’.

This intriguing collection’s two concluding poems are perhaps variations on this same theme. ‘The Start of It’ is – here’s the paradox again – the beginning of the end prior to the beginning: in this poem we read of frank intimations of mortality, of moments when ‘something abstract stiffens in the grace’ of a life, when we may come to glimpse ‘the formal shape [we] make in time’. In a completely different mode, ‘The Legacy’ eventually reveals itself to be a poem about the gentle removal of an empty wasps’ nest, its ‘featherweight’ and ‘strange paper weather’. In the transformative effect of real poetry, the nest comes to be seen as a human life lived, ‘sad and gorgeously dented’, but from which the creatures that made it have departed to another place: ‘to drone in apple acres / elsewhere darkening / with sweet ruin now.’ Whether we believe in such a place – and the oxymoronic ‘sweet ruin’ casts a shadowy doubt – is, with writing as good as this, hardly the point, appealing as it does, through vivid imagery, confidently written, to a fundamental human longing for continuation in the face of what we think we know of the end of life.

Remembering John Burnside

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With yesterday’s announcement of John Burnside’s death, I thought of this review that I wrote in 2006 of his Selected Poems, published by Cape Poetry. His work meant a lot to me around that time and I enjoyed the chance to try to articulate what I found fascinating in it.

John Burnside’s poetry has, for some years now, been offering us a modern egotistical sublime. With Wordsworth, he shares a responsive delight in nature and daunting powers of self-analysis; also similarly, he can slip towards the prolix and portentous and there is something of the same difficulty with projection into another’s experience. But Burnside’s work frequently achieves a moving sublimity without loosening its grip on reality. He is the only contemporary poet who consistently demonstrates the power of a poetic form that is something other than mini fictional narrative, raw confessional, or condensed dramatic monologue. That he is also successful in writing prose makes his achievement all the more impressive.

His work was recognised in the early 1990s despite bucking the trends of secularism, formalism, and plain/street language. His poetry’s brooding intensity lacked laddish brouhaha. The palette was never broad – rural twilights, leaf litter, owls hunting, tracks across snow – but his eye was always on the margins of such things, where the human and the natural met and negotiated. It felt like something spiritual was about to be said or had been articulated and just missed. This was twinned with the powerfully felt absence of fixed personal identity that has remained so deeply engrained in his work. In poems that in many ways were hardly radical, it was this element that made Burnside feel modern. In a self-regarding culture ever more attached to the teats of mobility, individuality, celebrity and fashion, his relentless worrying away at the obscurity of the self, his flirting with its non-existence, struck dissonant but resonating chords.

Burnside’s themes are frequently disturbing. But in a poem like ‘Halloween’ (from The Myth of the Twin, published in 1994) his exquisite ability to conjure up the British countryside proves to be an essential part of the pleasure of reading him. As often, the season is autumn – cold, mostly deserted, snow, rain, “the fernwork of ice and water”. The narrator peels bark from a tree to smell “its ghost” in a characteristic movement from the precisely evoked physical to the almost casually implied spiritual. What the figure in the landscape is trying to do is to “define my place”. Even scraping down in the leaf mould, he finds fungal traces that look “like the first elusive threads / of unmade souls”. Nearby village bells provide “nothing” and the poem typically ends with the figure’s sense of “other versions of myself” on the periphery of vision and these can be taken to imply other futures, untaken pasts, other roles familiarly adopted, even selves beyond the physical – the inconclusiveness is the point.

Burnside has pursued experiments with differing perspectives that were first signalled by the opening and closing poems of The Myth of the Twin. For example, though in the end less successful than its predecessor, Swimming in the Flood (1995)dramatically broadened his poetry’s reach to include the experience of others, often in more extended form and in dramatic monologues. Persecutors and victims inhabit these poems and speak disturbingly of abuse and “the inexplicable / malice of being” (‘Schadenfreude’). This was a turning point in Burnside’s development as what now flooded into the poetry was what had lain buried in the delicacy and tentativeness of the earlier work. In the ‘The Old Gods’ he declares their power is strongest “when anger or fear / is fuzzing the surface, / making us dizzy and whole”. The process of uncovering is shown to be one of healing and this selection includes the sequence called ‘Burning a Woman’ which seems nakedly to speak of the poet’s mother and father. Equally, the ‘Parousia’ sequence (not included in this Selected) ends with what appear to be sceptical reflections on his earlier inquisition beyond the merely physical: “All resurrections are local . . ./ the sign I have waited to see / is happening now / and always”. Here Burnside seems to arrive at a sense of secular miracle (a version of Rilke’s “Hiersein ist herrlich”) less concerned with the reality of religious presence than with the individual’s response to its possibility.

And yet, the dramatic monologues proved something of a cul de sac. With his subsequent work, Burnside has returned to his best subject: himself. Partly what makes the award-winning The Asylum Dance such a magnificent achievement is the development of the fluid poetic form he combines with a second person plural address that achieves the universal without being either hectoring or twee. The influence of William Carlos Williams is obvious, but Burnside extends this beyond a fluent impressionism concerned with the truth of things to encompass a philosophical musing, the lines flickering across the page as if viewed through water. This new selection is too brief to achieve the full sense of his development, but one of the marvels of Burnside’s work is its continuing delivery of extraordinary evocations of the natural world that have become gradually melded with an introspective depth that does not merely offer insight, but sustained meditation. The four long sequences from The Asylum Dance are rightly given space here and constitute a masterpiece in which the poems offer up rich, disturbing, beautiful, precise, profound, and sustained experiences undergone in the act of reading, rather than a lesser poetry’s marshalling of moments of insight and feeling. Burnside’s career already provides ample proof of a fascinating and significant artistic development, and this selection will prove a good starting point for anyone not yet following it.