Douglas Dunn’s ‘Terry Street’ and Thoughts of 1969

October 20, 2015October 22, 2015 martyn crucefix autobiography, contemporary American poetry, contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, poetry in performance 1969 Poetry International, Barbarians, Douglas Dunn, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Book Society, Robert Bly, Terry Eagleton, Terry Street, The Movement, Tony Harrison, W H Auden

Recently, in my local Oxfam shop, I found a remarkably well-preserved hardback first edition of Douglas Dunn’s debut collection, Terry Street (Faber, 1969). Since living in a very similar street in Lancaster exactly 10 years after Dunn’s book was published (Aberdeen Road, up on the northwest-facing terraced streets above the town, looking out across Morecambe Bay to the – occasionally snow-capped – peaks of Cumbria), I’ve always had a soft spot for the book. But I hadn’t read it in years, I now realise.

images — Aberdeen Road, Lancaster, in a recent photo

The particular copy I bought (for £2.50) still had the Poetry Book Society’s Bulletin in it as Terry Street was the PBS Choice for Autumn 1969. It printed a review by Julian Jebb of the PBS’s second Poetry International staged at the QEH, South Bank, in July 1969. Jebb praises the organisers for attending to the faults of the first such event (noted as an over-crowded audience and over-running readings by poets). WH Auden is there in the “blackest of spectacles”, reciting recent work from memory including ‘On the Circuit’ (1963) in which he satirises the lecture/reading round he has been treading in the USA: “so large / So friendly, and so rich”. He read precisely: “15 minutes and hardly a fluff”, reports Jebb.

He was followed by “a ponchoed American poet, Robert Bly”. Jebb’s tone here will have been addressed to the original readership of his review (it appeared in The Financial Times) but it’s still an interesting period piece. Bly seems to have flailed his arms while reading “in tragic-comic, uncoordinated circles, strongly reminiscent of Peter Cook’s imitation of Macmillan in Beyond the Fringe”. Later he over-ran shockingly with 20 minutes of his “sloppy, deranged images about Vietnam”. This was delivered, Jebb tells us, to a growing slow hand-clap.

Later in the evening, Edward Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, Ogden Nash, Miroslav Holub, Vasko Popa and Janos Pilinszky also read. Few details are given on these contributions unfortunately, but the experience of the latter three poets of the Second World War and Eastern Europe in the first half of the 20^th century prompts Jebb to observe: “We have felt safer than these three men and we are grateful to them for their eloquence in telling us so”. Here is evidence that poetry was making very little happen when it came to the heavy lifting required to shift the entrenched sense of superiority and national egocentricity of the period.

So the review both evokes an earlier age of extraordinary poetry and also shows how far we have come. With Ted Hughes’ and Daniel Wiessbort’s founding of Modern Poetry in Translation in 1965. British poetry was just at this moment becoming exposed to worldwide influences (even if some were hardly listening). In this light, Douglas Dunn’s PBS Choice reads like the dying edge of the 1950s, of The Movement. The Terry Street poems themselves may be memorable evocations of working class life in Hull but what I notice now more than anything is Dunn’s obsessive use of the plural subject: young women, girls, the children, mothers, old men, the chatty women, men of Terry Street, old women, revellers, neighbours, street tarts, trawlermen, young women, the people who live here, men on bikes. These are versions of Larkin’s typological “cut-price crowd” (‘Here’), the women in ‘Faith Healing’ and the fathers and mothers and newly married couples of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. The difference is that Larkin would as often turn his acerbic gaze on himself. In Terry Street, Dunn makes the choice to keep himself out of the picture (behind glass) and there are hardly any delineated individuals in the book (though we all remember the man who wheels an optimistic lawnmower down Terry Street).

Dunn viewed ‘these people’ through a window – “our window” says a self-lacerating, retrospective poem of mourning addressed to his late wife, Lesley (‘Envoi’ in 1981). While the belief that these people were a fit subject for poetry is admirable, many of the poems now read as patronising, still mired in the English class system (despite Dunn’s Scottishness). To that extent I disagree with Terry Eagleton who, in 1970, praised Dunn for being able to “transcend the two major pitfalls of poetry concerned with working people – bourgeois voyeurism or sympathetic mythification”. Dunn seems to me to fall foul of both of these.

In the 1969 PBS Bulletin, the young Dunn himself wrote “Terry Street became for me a place of sad sanity . . . an alternative to the gaudy shams everywhere”. It was this sense of the real that Dunn needed (for himself) as a mature student in Hull, pursuing an English degree, and perhaps was a substitute for what he was already declaring: “Scotland is what I most want to write about and what I am least able to”. Later, Morrison and Motion’s 1982 Penguin anthology of contemporary British poets, pigeon-holed Dunn with Tony Harrison in being “sharply conscious of background and upbringing, which sets them at an angle to the cultural establishment”. But Dunn’s chosen strategy in the longer run was to acquire the ‘language’ of the poetic establishment in formal terms and try to speak up for those men and women of Terry Street (or their Scottish equivalent) rather than merely observe them from afar. ‘The Come-On’ appeared in Barbarians (1979):

Our level is the popular, the media,

The sensational columns,

Unless we enter through a narrow gate

In a wall they have built

To join them in the ‘disinterested tradition’

Of tea, of couplets dipped

In sherry, and the decanted, portentous remark.

Therefore, we will deafen them

With the dull staccato of our typewriters.

But do not misbehave –

Threats and thrashings won’t work: we’re outnumbered.

Whatever piece it was Bly read that night in July 1969, the voice of the establishment regarded it as threats and thrashings and was too easily able to dismiss it.

How far have we come? Is it still the case that alternative poetic voices look to disguise themselves – whether with formal display like Dunn’s or with an obscuring erudition – to pass through the narrow gate into poetic acceptability? Or is it now that we anxiously seek out and fetishise what is different so poets and their publishers feel the need to define and confine work with USPs like race, gender, sexual orientation, locality, even disease – whole books focused on life events that begin to sound like the prose genre known as ‘misery memoirs’? Do poets actually articulate this to themselves: in my Creative Writing graduation ceremony, how do I ensure I stand out?

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

One of the Best Poets of the Present Moment in France

April 22, 2015May 7, 2018 martyn crucefix contemporary French poetry, creative writing, poetry, translation, writing Charlestown Blues, close analysis of poetry, French Poetry, Guy Goffette, Marilyn Hacker, Modern Poetry in Translation, Paul de Roux, Poetry London, Rimbaud, Verlaine, W H Auden, Yves Bonnefoy

So here’s a poet well worth getting to know (if you don’t already). The new issue of Modern Poetry in Translation contains a new translation by Marilyn Hacker of the great contemporary French poet, Guy Goffette. Hacker has referred to Goffette as “one of the most unabashedly lyrical contemporary French poets, who claims Verlaine . . . as one of his literary godfathers”. He’s an admirer of Auden and his own work is not oppressively ‘literary’, not referential, not obscurely self-referential. He’s a poet somewhat to the ‘English’ taste (OK – you got me – to my taste), using quotidian words, everyday expressions, making them new, re-investing them with humour, connotation and emotion. Hacker has argued that “after a period in which much of French poetry eschewed the concrete, the narrative and the quotidian”, Goffette’s poems have recently found an enthusiastic readership. Yves Bonnefoy admires him as a writer who “has decided to remain faithful to his own personal life, in its humblest moments. He keeps things simple, he is marvellously able to capture the emotions and desires common to us all . . . without question one of the best poets of the present moment in France”.

The new poems in MPT – a sequence of 6 sonnet-like pieces published in 2009 – make up an ‘Elegy for a Friend’, the poet Paul de Roux. The form used is a thirteen-liner, made up of three usually unrhymed quatrains and a last line which sometimes, though not always, reaches the classic 12 syllables. Since the early 1990s, this has become “Goffette’s ‘signature’ strophe” (Hacker again), whether used as part of a sequence or standing on its own. I reviewed Goffette’s last recent major appearance in English, Charlestown Blues, for Poetry London in 2007. I reproduce the review here and add comments on the new poems at the end.

The longer term coherence and success of a poet’s work is not – ought not – to be something willed. Like the oyster with its grain of sand, there is surely always something fortuitous about it. Marilyn Hacker’s fine translations from the French of Guy Goffette’s work suggest that, in this instance, Rimbaud’s declaration that “You never leave (“On ne part pas”) has proved a spectacularly productive starting point. Rimbaud’s comment suggests restlessness and desire for the other, yet also the tragic recognition of human limits as well as the idea that imaginative travel is more real than any form of mere physical tourism. These are indeed the topics and tensions that weave through Charlestown Blues.

Hacker’s introduction characterises Goffette in contrast to the Anglo-American preconception of contemporary French poets and not only due to his interest in form. She suggests we see modern French poetry as “abstract, more concerned with concepts than with human experience . . . resolutely “difficult””. Goffette’s work, in contrast, is diffused with “humour, longing, tenderness, nostalgia and occasional cruelty” and, though Hacker over-states his likeness to James Wright and Seamus Heaney, the general thrust of her argument is right. Born in 1947, of the same generation as our Motion and Raine, Goffette grew up on the shifting French/Belgian border (travelling without moving?). He now lives in Paris but still tends to look to the provinces while the metropolis is more often “a place from which his speaker is perpetually ready to depart” (Hacker’s introduction).

The title sequence, using a decasyllabic dixain and written during a residence in Rimbaud’s Charleville, seems scatter-shot and observational but with a strong thread of erotic longing: “your drying / stockings and scanties of a nun at bay – / poisonous flowers for a lonely man” (‘Letter to the Unknown Woman across the Street, 1’). Sex is one form of ‘leaving’ and Goffette catches such longing vividly: “oh beautiful stranger, / that creature who’s so often on the move” ((‘Letter to the Unknown Woman across the Street, 2’). Goffette’s work certainly revels in such demotic pleasures and Rimbaud himself puts in an appearance shouting “Fuck off! to puttering poetry” (‘February ‘98’). Earlier he wrings “the neck of the azure, which always puts / too much honey on the tails of verse-worms” (‘Farewell, Chateaux’). In the context of French poetry, it is this combative stance that leads Goffette towards the more grounded – even sordid – presentations of life that Hacker argues make him attractive to readers of English and American poetry.

Goffette’s natural reach approximates to the sonnet and these are frequently arranged in sequences, such as in ‘Waiting’. Largely from the point of view of a woman addressing her lover, these pieces suggest that it is the ultimate ‘leaving’ of death as well as desire that fuels his poetry. Here, eroticism is more explicitly a stay against death and time – “the judgment of this absence crushing me // like an insect on the pane” – though the final poem ventures a kind of romantic nostalgia, suggesting that even sex must fall short of human longing. The woman is made to envisage an island “where the surprise / of being lasts . . . the heart is still / in place, captain of the old ship”. This paradisal view is left to stand in stark contrast to the lovers’ reality, as they undress each other “amidst time’s peelings”.

So Goffette’s themes are the classical ones of love, time and death and though his diction is familiar enough with the contemporary, much of his imagery has a timelessness in its reference to journeys, rivers, trees, rooms, seashore, roads, stars. ‘Boarding the Streetcar: Variations’ responds to a photograph of New York in 1900 in which a woman climbs onto a streetcar watched intently by a male passenger and a (male) conductor. In a miracle of economy, the passenger’s viewpoint is sketched in and within six lines the moment of voyeuristic pleasure has come to represent “everything”:

the swift brightness of minnows

in a current, the taste of the first

fruit swiped from a market-stall, and how

the hazel switch whistled in the air

when it was about to strike a child’s

back

Yet when the passenger tries to articulate this moment he can manage “nothing” or the best he achieves are “words // like paper littering the grass after a fair / when shadows as they lengthen chill our hearts”. In contrast, the conductor’s view of the incident suggests its mix of beauty and danger, its very ordinariness, provides him with some memory which makes “the blood of things beat lengthily like a heart / in the shadow of dead rooms”.

Hacker’s selection covers ten years from 1991 and concludes with a longer sequence published in 2001. ‘The Raising of Icarus’ is based on the same Breughel painting that inspired Auden’s ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’. Constructed from sonnet-like pieces once more, Goffette does not dwell long on the painting itself and instead seems to be observing people in the Paris metro, “running // against each other, same face same / night, and each one was night for every other” (‘In the Depths of the Labyrinth’). Rimbaud’s phrase is again apposite; these commuters travel without arriving anywhere and yet “To embark and not return is what they wanted” (‘In the Depths of the Labyrinth’). Later, they turn on the Shepherd in the painting who – they enviously feel – leads an idyllic pastoral life, while they must be “winning gold . . . cheers . . . bread” (‘The Shepherd Reproached’). It may be that the Shepherd is an artist figure but his response is that his life is no different to the crowd, though the one thing he does know is that death and the final dissolution of things is what serves to “raise every object up from darkness” (‘The Shepherd Answers’).

Death is, of course, the subject of the more recent sequence, ‘Elegy for a Friend’. It opens with memories of two friends in their youth, “When life was strong”, once again drawing on Rimbaud’s sense of restlessness, the youthful ease of travel, transformation, the passage of time unnoticed, yet (ominously) “it was already dancing there”, the shadow that “burns all shadows”. In the second section, temporal words become sand grains, become silence that eventually “takes up all the space and screams”. Yet, as the Shepherd figure in ‘The Raising of Icarus’ suggested, it is the presence of death that leads the poet to his creative “double question” about identity and time. If there is any regret, it is that this wisdom was not learned soon enough and, like stricken teenagers, the youthful poets sat too long in their “afflicted bedrooms”, or bickered unsympathetically, ignorant for too long of the real “desert of life”. Goffette’s elegy maintains a classical distance and relative impersonality with the sixth section using the first personal plural pronoun to sound more universal than intimate: “One day we must depart”. It’s a bleak ending full of thorns, scorched earth, what remains is “paltry”. There do remain the words on paper, “read and reread”, but their author is ambiguously described as a “blind man dancing in the fire”. Do we stress the blindness, our ultimate ignorance? Or the all-consuming fire? Or should it be the struggle to make art, the act of dancing?

This is challenging and wonderful contemporary poetry and – though the parallel text faces each page in Charlestown Blues – I seldom found myself checking the original which suggests that Hacker is doing a magnificent and valuable job of bringing Goffette’s work into English.