The brilliant blue of the morning sea, of the cloudless sky,

Collected Poems, C.P. Cavafy, translated by Edmund Keeley and Phillip Sherrard

Back in 2015 I reviewed the Penguin Classics little black book edition of Avi Sharon’s translation of Cavafy poems. It was an excerpt from a longer Penguin Classics edition and whetted my taste for Cavafy.

I talk quite a lot in my 2015 post (here) of the different Cavafy translations currently on offer: the Sharon, the Daniel Mendelsohn and the Keeley/Sherrard. Of the three it was the Keeley/Sherrard I decided to press on with.

Every translation involves choices between accuracy to the text of the original and accuracy to its spirit. There’s no right answer to that dilemma: just sometimes the right translation for a particular reader. I decided that the Keeley/Sherrard translation was the right one for me.

Cavafy’s themes as a poet were typically melancholic reveries of past desire; poems inspired by or drawing upon Greek myth and history; and to an extent certain technical challenges which are difficult to translate and even more difficult for me to understand. Not everything fits those boxes, but they’re a decent guide as to what to expect.

For me, and I think for most readers, it’s the personal meditations on desire that are most effective. I have a decent(ish) grasp of Classical Greek myth and history but not at anything like the level of familiarity Cavafy had. His poems drawing on the lives of classical figures are (I understand) often technically impressive but the resonances are lost to a reader who doesn’t get the references.

Here’s one of the more accessible examples of the classically inspired poems:

THE GLORY OF THE PTOLEMIES

I’m Lagides, king – through my power and wealth
complete master of the art of pleasure.
There’s no Macedonian, no barbarian, equal to me
or even approaching me. The son of Selefkos
is really a joke with his cheap lechery.
But if you’re looking for other things, note this too:
My city’s the greatest preceptor, queen of the Greek world,
genius of all knowledge, of every art.

Like many of the poems in this edition this one comes with explanatory notes in an aftersection. Here they read:

First version written August 1896
Rewritten May 1911, and published September 1911
The metrical pattern is 15-14-14-15-14-14-16-12 syllables, rhymed abbaccc.
Cavafy does not specify the identity of the Lagid (i.e., a Ptolemy king of Egypt) and of the Selefkid (i.e.  king of Syria); the period would, however, be between 323 and 221 B.C.

I described that one as more accessible because even without any idea who Lagides and Selefkid are (and even the translator doesn’t know that) it’s pretty clear what kind of people they are. With others the clue as to what they’re like lies in knowing who they are, and if you don’t the poem risks leaving you pretty cold (or did me anyway).

There are notable exceptions. The tremendous “Waiting for the Barbarians” (which is a bit long to reproduce here but can be found at this link) works whether you know the event which inspired it or not and has a killer of a punchline. Others bridge the gap between Cavafy’s two styles, as here where the Classical and the personal intertwine:

IONIC

That we’ve broken their statues,
that we’ve driven them out of their temples,
doesn’t mean at all that the gods are dead.
O land of Ionia, they’re still in love with you,
their souls still keep your memory.
When an August dawn wakes over you,
your atmosphere is potent with their life,
and sometimes a young ethereal figure
indistinct, in rapid flight,
wings across your hills.

Regret is a key Cavafy theme. In most cases it’s personal regret: a memory of a past love that couldn’t grow because it had to be furtive, hidden (Cavafy was gay). There’s a strong sense of loss in Cavafy’s work, both in the loss of the greatness that was Greece and the loss of the love of young men each met in a café or shop and briefly loved in some rented tenement room.

In some cases Cavafy goes beyond regret and loss, and instead explores a sense of sheer waste as here in one of my favourites:

THE CITY

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart – like something dead – lies buried.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed
them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighbourhoods, turn grey in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things
elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,

you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

This is a counterpoint to Cavafy’s possibly most famous poem Ithaca (read here by Sean Connery with a Vangelis soundtrack no less! I’m not actually that fond of the poem but for many it’s a favourite). In Ithaca the journey is the destination. Here the journey is pointless as the “you” will carry their own devastation with them. On reflection, those messages are more connected than I first thought, since in each your destination carries only the meaning you bring to it.

Incidentally, the endnotes reveal that, in the Greek, The City has “elaborate metrical patterns” and “mostly homophonous” rhymes. For those interested in the architecture of poetry my impression is that Cavafy is actually pretty sophisticated, but unfortunately I’m not so it’s hard for me to comment further.

I’ll turn now to Cavafy’s more personal poems and the ones which for me are most effective. Cavafy is a poet of extraordinary sensuality, and his poems of loves lost combine the physicality of desire with the tenuousness of memory.

Here’s two examples:

AT THE CAFÉ DOOR

Something they said beside me
made me look towards the café door
and I saw that lovely body which seemed
as though Eros in his mastery had fashioned it,
joyfully shaping its well-formed limbs,
moulding its tall build,
shaping its face tenderly,
and leaving, with a touch of the fingers,
a particular impression on the brow, the eyes, the lips.

IN THE EVENING

It wouldn’t have lasted long anyway –
years of experience make that clear.
But fate did put an end to it a bit abruptly.
It was soon over, that wonderful life.
Yet how strong the scents were,
what a magnificent bed we lay in,
what pleasures we gave our bodies.
An echo from my days of indulgence,
an echo from those days come back to me,
something from the fire of the young life we shared:
I picked up a letter again,
read it over and over till the light faded.

Then, sad, I went out on the balcony,
went out to change my thoughts at least by seeing
something of this city I love,
a little movement in the streets, in the shops.

At the Café Door is a personal favourite of mine, but In the Evening is strong too with its emphasis on “scents” and playful repetition of the word “echo”. Café of course brings back those Classical Greek themes with a light reference there to Eros.

In Café there isn’t even an affair. The narrator simply sees someone beautiful and for a moment is transported by their sheer presence. It’s a could-have-been, or perhaps not even that but simply an admiration.

In the Evening by contrast is a classic Cavafy reflection in age on a passion of youth. There’s a lot of poems exploring that theme and they’re generally among the strongest. There’s a sense of youth as a fire and the long years after as a sort of wasteland. Relationships are doomed by illegality and desire by time.

Cavafy’s poetry is melancholic and beautiful and this is still I think a definitive collection. It’s far from the only strong choice – as was commented under my last Cavafy piece there’s something of a Cavafy industry – but at a little over 200 pages it’s portable and digestible and the translations are lively and evocative.

One thing that I would recommend with Cavafy is spacing the poems out. I read this collection over perhaps a two year period and it was better for that. Many authors and poets return to the same issues over and over, but when you’re reading a poetry collection the impact is diminished if you’re reading your fourth meditation on lost love or third elegy to past greatness. In this case the poetry is like brandy, you can only take so much at one sitting.

I’ll end with one final poem (I cut so many that I wanted to include here). This one because in the context of Cavafy’s life it’s both heartbreaking and prophetic. For all the problems of our time, and I know they are many, we do at least live now in the “more perfect” society he dreams of here:

HIDDEN THINGS

For all I did and all I said
let no one try to find out who I was.
An obstacle was there distorting
the actions and the manner of my life.
An obstacle was often there
to stop me when I’d begin to speak.
From my most unnoticed actions,
my most veiled writing –
from these alone will I be understood.
But maybe it isn’t worth so much concern,
so much effort to discover who I really am.
Later, in a more perfect society,
someone else made just like me
is certain to appear and act freely.

A wonderful audacity shown to the whole world!

1917, Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution, various translators

The Russian Revolution was a bloody and extraordinary period. Looking back we know what followed: Stalin’s purges, totalitarianism, the subjugation of much of Europe under Soviet military occupation. It’s easy to find supporters of the ideals of the revolution still today, but there’s not so many now who’ll defend the execution of it (possibly as there were so very many executions).

We of course have hindsight, but that lends a certainty to the past which never existed. We’ll never know how Russia would have fared had the “Whites” won, nor how the implementation of the revolution might have differed with a slightly different outcome to the power struggles following the victory of the “Reds”. It’s incredibly complex, made simple by distance and ignorance of the details.

1917 asks a very clever question: instead of looking at the Russian revolution with the benefit of hindsight, why not look to it as it appeared to the artists of the time? Russia’s poets and writers took part in the revolutionary struggle, both for it and against. They wrote their praise, their condemnation, their fears and doubts. They didn’t know what would follow.

That uncertainty gives this collection of poems and prose, all selected by editor and translator Boris Dralyuk, an extraordinary immediacy. Every work in this collection was written between 1917 and 1919.  Here’s the first in the book:

Marina Tsvetaeva, 26 May 1917, translated by Boris Dralyuk

You stepped from a stately cathedral

Onto the blare of the plazas…

-Freedom!-The Beautiful Lady

Of Russian grand dukes and marquises.

 

A fateful choir’s rehearsing-

the liturgy still lies before us!

-Freedom!-A street-walking floozy

on the foolhardy breast of a soldier

Dralyuk divides the book into sections. That one above is from one titled ‘Stolen Wine’. It’s a neat way of bringing out common themes and concerns, in this case imagery of Bolshevik soldiery careening through the streets drunk on victory and plunder.

It’s an ambiguous poem. Like much of her work too ambiguous for Tsvetaeva’s good. Dralyuk precedes each section with an introduction to the writers featured in it – their history, the artistic movements they were part of or helped inspire, their fate. The fates are often bleak. Tsvetaeva hanged herself in 1941 after charges of espionage resulted in her husband’s execution and her daughter being sentenced to eight years in prison.

This next poem was for me the standout of the collection (and possibly for some of the Pushkin team too given they quoted it on the back of the book). It’s from a section titled Purifying Fire and captures an electrifying vision of the revolution as bloody and brutal but necessary and liberating. It’s powerful stuff.

Alexander Blok, January 1918, translated by Boris Dralyuk and Robert Chandler

The Twelve

…

A bourgeois’s standing at the crossroads,

nose buried in his collar.

And near him, tail between its legs,

a mangy mongrel cowers.

 

The bourgeois stands, a hungry cur,

a question mark, a question begged,

behind him crouches the old world –

a mongrel, tail between its legs.

…

“Get lost, you mangy cur-

or we’ll tickle you with our bayonets.

This is the last of you, old world-

soon we’ll smash you to bits.”

…

The full poem is several pages long. Blok introduces religious elements into the poem which alienated those he supported, Trotsky observing that “To be sure, Blok is not one of ours, but he reached towards us. And in doing so, he broke down. But the result of his impulse is the most significant work of our epoch. His poem, The Twelve, will remain for ever.”

I agree with Trotsky. The poem is a masterpiece. The religious elements don’t quite work (which Dralyuk notes Blok himself later agreed with though he could never think of an alternative). It does break down in that sense. But nonetheless it’s remarkable. I’ve already read it several times.

In what becomes a theme, the revolution didn’t treat Blok kindly. He found the new bureaucracy stultifying and was arrested in 1919 for ‘suspicion of plotting against the state.’ He died in 1921, just 41 years old.

Other poets here include Mandelstam, Pasternak, Bely, Mayakovsky and many more. The pieces are mostly short, chosen in part I suspect for breadth and context as well as for their quality. If there were nothing here but the roughly 70 pages of poetry this would still be a thrilling collection.

The prose sections can’t have quite the same immediacy of the poetry, but are equally well chosen. Here we have Kuprin, Teffi, Zamyatin, Bulgakov and many others some more significant than those I’ve listed (I’ve quoted the names I recognised rather than the most influential).

Some of the biographical detail is fascinating. I loved the story of Kuprin taking off in a frail biplane piloted by a circus wrestler. The plane crashed from the sky, happily without casualties. Among those watching was a young Kataev who went on to be a writer himself and whose rather good The Drum is also here.

This next quote is from the ‘Of Dragons and Men’ section. It could be read as a satire on bourgeois conformity, or as a critique of totalitarianism, or of course of both. Ambiguity is a common feature here. The context is a city where a revolutionary council has assumed government, led by the popular and wise Ak who is so well respected that no matter what the council proposes there are those who will defend it.

Yefim Zozulya, 1919, translated by Alexander Berkman

The Dictator

The story of Ak and humanity

…

It seemed a day like any other. The city looked the same as usual. Streets and houses had their ordinary appearance. The sky wore its customary blue. The pavements spread grey and indifferent, as always. Suddenly some men appeared carrying large buckets of paste. They began to put up posters on the walls, doing it quickly, with tears streaming into the buckets. The posters were tense and to the point:

Citizens!

THE COUNCIL OF PUBLIC WELFARE has decided to reorganize life on the basis of justice and progress. For this purpose the COUNCIL will pass on the Right to Life of every inhabitant of our city. Those whose existence is found to be superfluous will cease to exist within 24 hours. Appeals against the decision of the COUNCIL may be filed, in writing, within that time. All appeals will be decided by the COUNCIL before sunset of the same day.

The poster goes on to helpfully explain that friends and neighbours will carry out the sentence of termination where citizens lack the courage to do it themselves when ordered. Failing that a special military detachment is available.

There’s several points in that passage which I love. The self-important use of capitalisation for example. The exploitation of language of rights – the council will pass on the right to life which in fact means the council will decide who’s going to die. Governments and corporations both love that slipperiness of language where something terrible can be clothed in virtue.

The story moves on to the interview process under which it’s decided who lives and who dies, and includes case file excerpts from individuals who didn’t pass and so were found to be “superfluous” (a very meaningful word in the context of Russian literature) and so killed.

One is a mechanic fond of cream in his coffee who beats his children. ‘Daily life grey, prosaic.’ He’s for the chop. Another speaks eight languages but bores his friends in all of them. ‘Sweetly amiable with people, purely out of innate cowardice. … Rarely experiences joy’. He’s killed too.

It’s hard not to read the story and imagine how you’d fare, and the arbitrariness of the decisions makes it impossible to guess. Still, some people defend them, until the Council changes its mind and even then some hearken back to the good old days when the superfluous were terminated rather than indulged.

One final quote, this time from the story which the title to this piece comes from.

Mikhail Zoshchenko (writing as Mikhail Chirkov), 1918, translated by Rose France

…

The bloody scar on the back of the bourgeois is verily the mark of the strongest power, the mark of a wonderful audacity shown to the whole world.

…

Doesn’t sound so good now that audacity does it?

It would be hard to praise this collection too highly. Were it not for Pedro Paramo it would be my book of the year. It’s well compiled, well researched, interesting and ever-readable. It’s an introduction not to the past, but to the present as it was. Buy now, while capitalism lasts…

Other reviews

Lots, naturally. Some I bookmarked are from Wuthering Expectations here (different quotes to mine and excellent ones), Guy of His Futile Preoccupations here (including a full list of what’s in the book) and Kaggsy of Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings here. It’s a tribute to this collection that we all seem to have our own favourites, between us they comprise most of the book. I’m sure I’ve missed others so please let me know in the comments.

One final note, I received my copy of 1917 from Pushkin Press back in January as a review title. Life, as so often, intervened so that I didn’t get to read it as planned. So it goes and I apologise to Pushkin for the criminal delay (far from my worst). At the same time, it does mean I got to read it in October/November a 100 years after the revolution which does seem somehow fitting. Unusually for me since I tend to take care of books my copy has been battered with the back cover torn and scuffed. That too seems somehow fitting.

A child of heaven, of hell perchance, Devil and god of arrogance.

Yevgeny Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin and translated by Anthony Briggs

Back in 2012 I read and thoroughly enjoyed the Tom Beck translation of Eugene Onegin. Fast forward a few years and Pushkin Press have published a new translation interestingly titled Yevgeny Onegin. Onegin (with any first name) is notoriously difficult to translate so I thought I’d return to it and see how the two translations differed.

Before I get into that a quick word: Briggs quotes early 20^th Century Russian literary historian Prince Mirsky as saying that the poetry in Onegin flows and bubbles “like champagne in sunshine”. I can’t speak to how faithful Briggs is to the original Russian – I can’t read that after all – but I can say that Briggs’ translation definitely has that sunlit champagne quality and was an absolute pleasure to read.

Isn’t that a marvellous cover? I absolutely love it.

Before I get into the translation itself it’s worth spending a moment on one of the best translator’s introductions I’ve read. Briggs explains in clear non-technical language the type of poem Pushkin is writing here – the 14 line sonnet. He then sets out the differences between what are typically called English sonnets and Italian sonnets (a question of how rhymes are paired rather than nationality).

The Italian sonnet clusters its lines in two sets of four rhymes then two sets of three rhymes. The English sonnet clusters them instead in three sets of four rhymes with a final set of two rhymes (which tend to either dramatically complete the first twelve sets of rhymes or subvert them).

Pushkin uses both forms (and other sub-forms) in Onegin which is apparently quite unusual. In most poems that use the sonnet form you can tell where you are and what’s coming by the clustering of the rhymes. In Pushkin, because the form varies, by the time you get to the mid-point you don’t know whether this particular stanza follows the English sonnet form or the Italian which means you are intentionally disorientated and often can’t resolve the individual stanza until you finish it.

Briggs explains that this flexibility of form is part of why the poem never becomes tedious to read – it’s constantly changing and refreshing itself. I found this absolutely fascinating and it really helped me understand what was happening structurally within the poem as I read it.

Briggs also touches on a particular difficulty in translation from Russian to English (which generally by his account isn’t all that hard). This is what’s known as masculine and feminine rhymes.

Masculine rhymes end in a single stressed syllable – the cat sat on the hat. Feminine Rhymes follow a stressed syllable with an unstressed one – and that’s harder to give an example of because it’s common in Russian but rare in English. In fact, it’s so rare that all the examples tend to be extremely obvious. As Briggs points out if you hear “languish” the rhyme is very likely to be “anguish”; if you hear “creature” then “feature” is likely to follow.

What all this means is that when translating from Russian in most cases where the Russian uses a feminine rhyme there won’t be a direct English equivalent. When there is it will likely be tediously obvious and therefore dull (Briggs notes “hoping/moping” and “related/dated”). This issue is very present in Onegin, which uses alternate feminine rhymes. The result is the translator needs to be creative making use where possible of part-rhymes and words that sound or feel similar  even if they don’t actually strictly rhyme.

The introduction is a good few pages long and it’s packed with this kind of interesting and useful information. I have no technical background in poetry but even so I found it very easy to follow. Briggs is never patronising but instead writes for the benefit of the intelligent lay reader. Frankly, even if you don’t like his translation the book’s worth buying for the intro alone.

I should though probably now turn to the translation. I’m initially going to quote the very first stanza from each translation, after which I’ll quote several stanzas from my Tom Beck review and after each I’ll again set out the Briggs’ equivalent. Here goes:

Tom Becks:

1
“My uncle’s acted very wisely,
to seek his best when he’s so sick;
his family’s reacted nicely
and he’s most happy with his trick.
He’s set the world a good example,
which others really ought to sample,
but it’s a bore when night and day
the sick man forces you to stay!
To keep him sweet, as if he’s dying,
give him his daily medicine
and make quite sure that it goes in,
adjust the pillows while one’s sighing:
‘Don’t even think of getting well,
The devil take you, go to hell!’”

And here, by contrast, is the Briggs:

1
“Uncle, a man of purest probity,
Has fallen ill, beyond a joke.
Respected now, and scorned by nobody,
He has achieved his masterstroke
With this exemplary behaviour,
But it would try the Holy Saviour
To tend a sickbed night and day,
And never stir a step away,
Employing shameful histrionics
To bring a half-dead man some cheer,
Plump pillows and draw sadly near,
Indulging him with pills and tonics,
Heaving deep sighs, but thinking ‘Ooh!
When will the devil come for you?’”

What immediately strikes me there is that it’s evident that Beck has prioritised flow (as he says in his own introduction – he’s a musician by training and wanted to preserve the musicality of the verse). Briggs here is trickier. See for example his pairing of probity” with “nobody” or (and I think this is rather clever) “histrionics” with “tonics”.

In places the choices change the meaning. In Beck the uncle has acted wisely, which isn’t really a comment on his character but rather on his actions. In Briggs by contrast the uncle is a man of utmost probity. Similarly, in the Beck the uncle is pleased with himself at being tended by his family suggesting a certain manipulativeness on his part whereas in Briggs the use of “masterstroke” makes the line more of an ironic comment by the narrator on the situation.

As to which meaning Pushkin intended I’ve no idea but I think it’s already possible to see how each translator pursues their different goals in the translation. I don’t think Briggs’ “ooh” quite comes off, but I also don’t think it’s fair to pick on the occasional jarring rhyme (and if I wanted to I could do it quite easily do it to Beck too).

Let’s continue. Here’s stanzas three and four from the Beck:

3
Completing service long and faithful,
his father ended his career
and left his son debts by the plateful
from having given balls each year.
And yet my friend was saved from Hades
by his Madame, a Gallic lady;
and then Monsieur took on the lad,
a lively child but never bad.
Monsieur l’abbé, who hated quarrels,
thought learning ought to be a joy,
tried not to overwhelm the boy.
He didn’t bother him with morals,
and if annoyed, he didn’t bark,
but took Eugene to Letny Park.

4
When Eugene grew and first felt passion,
was plagued by love and hope and doubt,
they did what’s always been the fashion
and threw the wretched abbé out.
My friend was free from every pressure,
could live and act as was his pleasure,
so he was always finely dressed
in what was surely London’s best.
He spoke and wrote French to perfection,
bowed constantly, his hair well curled,
and when he danced he turned and twirled,
his light Mazurka no exception.
He didn’t have too long to wait
before the world thought he was great.

And here from the Briggs:

3
With worthy service now behind him,
His father lived from debt to debt.
Three balls a year soon undermined him,
He was as poor as you can get.
Fate saved the boy, who was aware of
Madame, and being taken care of,
And her replacement, a Monsieur.
The child was frisky, though demure.
Monsieur l’Abbé, a Catholic father,
Not keen to weigh Yevgeny down,
Taught him by acting like a clown.
Morals seemed irksome; he would rather
Chide him for the odd naughty lark,
And walk him in the Summer Park.

4
Rebellious youth came in due season –
A season full of hopeful dreams
And gentle sadness – ample reason
To give Monsieur the sack, it seems.
Onegin now, devil-may-care-style,
Copied the very latest hairstyle
And came out like a London fop
To see society, Tip-top
In spoken French (no less proficient
In speech and writing), he could dance,
And with the utmost nonchalance
Perform a bow, which was sufficient
To show him in a pleasing light
As a nice lad, and very bright.

I actually think the Beck is rather good there. I like the references to Letsky Park and to the Mazurka (though again I’ve no idea if either is in the original) and again he clearly achieves the musicality he sets out for. Briggs I suspect wouldn’t be enamoured of rhymes like “lad” and “bad” but “dressed” and “best” is exactly the kind of paraphrasing that Briggs is fond of.

Briggs’ language is again I think intentionally tricksier and riskier. It’s the champagne effect. I love “devil-may-care-style” being rhymed with “hairstyle” which is inspired and I think his first three lines from stanza 4 (“Rebellious” to “reason”) are much more poetic than Beck’s equivalent first two rhymes in the same (“when” to doubt,”). Briggs takes three lines here to capture what Beck manages in two but I think to better effect and both ultimately maintain the overall fourteen line structure.

Moving on, this is from the Beck:

37
Alas! His feelings were now cooling,
he wearied of the social round,
the constant flirting and the fooling
now seemed to him absurd, unsound.
Pursuing beauties now fatigued him,
betrayals, friends no more intrigued him,
nor guzzling beefsteaks, Strasbourg Pie,
champagne until the day you die,
dispensing piquant sayings, grimace,
and bicker, have an aching head
from everything you’ve done and said.
Although he was a fiery scapegrace,
he’d lost his love of having fun,
of sabre-fighting and the gun.

And here from the Briggs:

37
No. While still young he lost all feeling,
Finding the noisy world a bore
And lovely girls not so appealing,
Not so obsessive as before.
Betrayals left him sad and weary,
Both friends an friendship he found dreary.
You cannot keep on sluicing steaks
Or Strasburg pie with what it takes –
The best champagne! And it gets harder
To please the diners with bons mots
When headaches leave you feeling low.
Yevgeny, once a man of ardour,
Acknowledged that his love was dead
For conflict, sabres and the lead.

Briggs makes nice use of French here both reminding us of Onegin’s class and at the same time rhyming “mots” with “low” which I rather like. Becks I think has a more modern feel with rhymes such as “fun” and “gun” while Briggs’ “ardour” through to “lead” feels more period to me. It’s also worth noting here how Briggs rhymes “ardour” with “harder” which I think in context he gets away with.

One final example. Here’s the Beck:

56
Oh flowers, love, you fields and meadows,
Oh idleness, yours is my soul;
I’m not Eugene, we’re different fellows,
that matters to me on the whole
in case some too sarcastic readers
or other bookish, slanderous creatures
should callously compare my quirks
with those of Byron and his works,
as if I were but merely scrawling
my effigy, just like that proud
fantast, as people put around
so shamelessly, (which I find galling),
as if we wrote of nothing else
but poems all about ourselves.

And here’s the Briggs’ equivalent:

56
O rural idyll, love and flowers!
O fields to you I yield my soul…
I mark what differences are ours,
What separates us on the whole,
So that no reader, no wild joker,
No literary libel-broker
Can publish somewhere by design
Onegin’s features as for mine,
And then repeat the claim (outrageous!)
That here my portrait has been daubed
Like Byron’s, proudly self-absorbed,
As if one could not fill these pages
By painting someone other than
One’s own self as the leading man.

I chose this stanza in the original so that I could talk about the links with Byron rather than because of any intrinsic interest to it. Even so it still makes a useful comparator. Again the translation choices impact the meaning slightly: Beck’s Onegin yields his soul to idleness while Briggs’ to the fields. Similar, particularly in context, but not quite the same.

Beck’s choice of “poems all about ourselves” is I think a little pedestrian, which I don’t think is true of Brigg’s “own self as the leading man.” Again though what shines through is the difference in intent. Becks flows well and has a clear rhythm. Briggs is more playful (note for example his “wild joker” with “literary libel-broker”).

What comes out of all this for me is a very clear pattern and a sense of very intentional translations (as of course they should be). Faced with the choice Becks goes most every time for flow and rhythm while Briggs is much fonder of linguistic tricks and little surprises for the reader.

I’m not qualified to talk to better here and I don’t think anyway which is better is an interesting question. As I said at the start of this piece I thoroughly enjoyed the Beck when I read it – so much so that I read a separate translation which is a tribute to the first (it kindled my enthusiasm). Reading his stanzas here afresh I’m reminded quite how good so much of it is. The Briggs’ delighted me. I loved the playfulness and cleverness of it.

Briggs sometimes comes unstuck. At one point he rhymes “intractable young beauties” with “Implacable non-venal cuties” which particularly stood out. That’s unavoidable though because he’s taking greater risks with his rhyme-choices and trying to capture that sense of “champagne in sunshine”. I think he succeeds.

One final remark and that’s on the title of the poem itself. Briggs notes that Yevgeny is more Russian than the commonly used Eugene which is plainly true. However, more importantly he notes that Yevgeny Onegin is a little poem in itself: yev-gen-y/o-ne-gin. Eugene Onegin just ain’t got the same swing.

I may at some future point read the Penguin Classics’ Stanley Mitchell translation. Briggs in his introduction talks a little about other translations but is at pains not to single any out for criticism, save to a small extent the Mitchell which he does raise points on. It may sound odd but I think that’s a form of compliment: Briggs clearly feels the Mitchell can stand up for itself. If I do I’ll post another comparison though I warn you now that’ll make it fifty per cent. as long again as this one…

Oh, and just in case anyone wants to know which translation I recommend you read that’s easy: both of them of course!

Other reviews

Honestly I have no idea so please feel free to leave links in the comments. Interestingly, Nick Lezard of the Guardian has also reviewed both these translations. His Beck is here and his Briggs here.

Spam poetry

I was emptying my spam folder today, when I saw the text below. I think it’s an executable spam script which my spam folder has shown as a message. The result is oddly poetic. I do wonder how much time it all took to put together, and how often people are fooled by them. Few of us twice I suspect.

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Any way keep up wrinting.|
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{Disgrace|Shame} on {the {seek|search} engines|Google} for
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{This is|That is} the {first|very first} time I frequented your {web page|website page} and {to this point|so
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{I just|I simply} {would like to|want to|wish to} {give you a|offer you a} {huge|big} thumbs up {for the|for your} {great|excellent} {info|information} {you have|you’ve
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{A lot of|Lots of|Many|Numerous} {other folks|folks|other people|people} {will be|shall be|might be|will
probably be|can be|will likely be} benefited {from your|out of your} writing.
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a feeling on the brow, in the eyes and on the lips

Remember, Body …, by CP Cavafy and translated by Avi Sharon

When I read recently Mathias Enard’s Zone, I made a note of some writers mentioned in the text that I wanted to follow up on. One was the Greek poet CP Cavafy, whom I’d never even heard of before (even the most famous poets tend to be pretty obscure if they’re not studied in schools, and Greek poets aren’t studied in UK schools).

It turned out that presently there are at least three competing major translations of Cavafy. I settled on the Keeley and Sherrard translation, the longest standing of the current crop, but it was a close run thing.

Then though Penguin had it’s rather wonderful Little Black Classics idea, and one of them was an excerpt from its own Cavafy translation by Avi Sharon. I’d already committed to the Keeley/Sherrard, but the prospect of a pocket Cavafy was too tempting to resist.

Cavafy is a poet of desire and regret. Most of the poems here are very short, a paragraph or two. They exist primarily in memory, a reverie of loves once known and lost. Cavafy was gay at a time when that was illegal, and his encounters are therefore both circumspect and fleeting.

The poems are written from the perspective of age, brimming with nostalgia for moments stolen from the world years before. For Cavafy, youth and beauty are linked. To be old is to be separated from that you most want to possess, leaving only the wistful recollection of pleasures past.

There’s a limit to how much I want to say about what is a very short collection (though a very good one). Some of Cavafy’s “greatest hits” are left out, most notably Ithaka which is his most famous work (a poem I find a bit trite, not true for most of his). Penguin though would obviously like you to treat this as a taster and to move on to the full collected works they publish, and that’s fair enough.

Sharon’s translations are smooth and evocative, reading as if poetry written in English. Whether they’re faithful I can’t say, I don’t speak Greek, but they work here. Put simply, this is a great little collection. It’s a marvellous introduction to Cavafy, and while I’d already bought a larger collection of his work if I hadn’t this would definitely have convinced me to do so.

All that said, there’s no better way to illustrate a poet than by quoting from their poetry. Here are two complete Cavafy poems from this collection, both of which were among those I particularly liked. I had planned to also quote his wonderful The Café Entrance, but WordPress breaks the lines which isn’t fair to the poem.

The Tobacconist’s Window

Near the brightly lit window

of a tobacconist’s shop, they stood amid a crowd of people.
By chance their gazes met
and hesitantly they half expressed
the illicit longing of their flesh.
Later, after several anxious steps along the pavement –
they smiled and gently nodded.

Then the closed carriage …
the sensuous mingling of their bodies;
the hands, the lips coming together.

One Night

The room was shabby and miserable,
tucked above a suspect tavern.
A window opened on to the alley,
narrow and unclean. From the tavern beneath
came the voices of workmen playing cards and carousing.

There, in that humble, commonplace bed,
I possessed the body of love; I possessed
those sensual, rose-red lips of intoxication –
red lips so intoxicating that even now,
as I write these lines, after so many years
all alone in this house, I am drunk with it again.

As a note by the way on different translations, that poem I mentioned above titled The Café Entrance is differently titled in the Keeley/Sherrard translation as At the Café Door, while in the highly regarded Daniel Mendelsohn translation it’s In the Entrance of the Café. Tricky stuff, translating poetry. To illustrate quite how tricky, here’s two other versions of One Night:

One Night – Keeley and Sherrard translation

The room was cheap and sordid,
hidden above the suspect taverna.
From the window you could see the alley,
dirty and narrow. From below
came the voices of workmen
playing cards, enjoying themselves.

And there on that ordinary, plain bed
I had love’s body, knew those intoxicating lips,
red and sensual,
red lips so intoxicating
that now as I write, after so many years,
in my lonely house, I’m drunk with passion again.

 

One Night – Daniel Mendelsohn translation

The room was threadbare and tawdry,
hidden above that suspect restaurant.
From the window you could see the alley,
which was filthy and narrow. From below
came the voices of some laborers
who were playing cards and having a carouse.

And there in that common, vulgar bed
I had the body of love, I had the lips,
sensuous and rose-colored, of drunkenness –
the rose of such a drunkenness, that even now
as I write, after so many years have passed!,
in my solitary house, I am drunk again.

The Mendelsohn works least well for me here. Having a carouse seems odd, like something from a Carry On film, and I dislike the use of the exclamation mark (though I understand it’s in the original). Threadbare and tawdry too has less impact for me than cheap and sordid or shabby and miserable.

Getting even more specific, Mendelsohn’s choice of the word restaurant is interesting. Taverna is a much more colloquial term, one that for me immediately evokes a certain kind of restaurant. Tavern to a degree does the same, but is less specifically Greek, it’s a halfway house between the Mendelsohn and Keeley/Sherrard versions.

Aguably, however, Taverna is redundant. It’s essentially a word for a small Greek restaurant, but it’s obvious this isn’t a grand establishment from the rest of the poem. Mendelsohn is perhaps being more precise by avoiding the more clichéd term (and there’s no confusion in his version as to what kind of place Cavafy is remembering). I think though that Mendelsohn pays a price for his precision with a certain loss of romance compared to the Keeley/Sherrard. Sometimes, cliché works.

Another point I noted is that the Sharon uses intoxication and intoxicating where the Keeley/Sherrard repeats intoxication and Mendelsohn repeats drunkenness. I think drunkenness loses a sense of liberating joy, but coupled with rose-colored it does bring to mind the famous wine-dark seas of Greek myth which is surely no accident. Sharon avoids repetition, but at a cost to rhythm.

It would be fascinating, though beyond my current appetite, to go line by line comparing each version of the poem. Greek doesn’t map directly to English, what language does? Every translator then makes choices, and every choice carries nuances, and in poetry nuance is everything. I doubt there’s a right or wrong here, just decisions as to fidelity, atmosphere, structure, meaning, and how to balance between them.

Ultimately, all three are very highly regarded translations. The Cavafy reader is spoiled for choice, which is why I spent a good couple of hours in Foyles deciding which version I wanted for myself. I’ve criticised the Mendelsohn here most, but I was actually very impressed by it and while ultimately I thought the Keeley/Sherrard better for me that wasn’t a quick or easy decision. Similarly, the Sharon’s worked well, read well, had power. It’s hard here to make a bad choice.

Other reviews

I don’t know of any on the blogosphere, but if you do please let me know in the comments and if you’ve reviewed it yourself please feel free to leave a link to your review below.

You had such a vision of the street / As the street hardly understands;

Prufrock and Other Observations by T.S. Eliot

It’s often thought that modernism is difficult, inaccessible, not the sort of thing most readers will enjoy. When the BBC carried out a survey to discover Britain’s favourite poet though the winner was T.S. Eliot, high priest of Modernism with a capital M.

It’s not a surprise of course that the winner was a poet taught in schools, few people read poetry after school (poetry often seems more written than read). I find it a cheering result, at least partly because Eliot isn’t the easiest poet to read (though he’s not nearly as hard as his reputation might suggest). It’s certainly a much better result than the BBC’s 2003 best novel survey which came up with a top 100 list that was staggering for its obviousness and mediocrity.

I didn’t vote in the poll, but if I had I’d have voted Eliot too. The reason I’d have voted Eliot isn’t The Wasteland, masterpiece as that is, but because he wrote what is probably my favourite poem – The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Prufrock and Other Observations was first published by The Egoist in 1917. Nowadays there’s a lovely little Faber and Faber imprint – pocket sized and printed on good quality paper and generally a pleasure to hold (as the Faber poetry volumes tend to be).

Prufrock and Other Observations contains twelve poems of varying lengths and styles. Of these the big beast is clearly The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, but there are other stand-outs such as Portrait of a Lady; Preludes (“And then the lighting of the lamps”); Rhapsody on a Windy Night; Morning at the Window; Aunt Helen; Hysteria; La Figla che Piange; as well as arguably lesser efforts such as The Boston Evening Transcript; Cousin Nancy; and Mr. Apollinax. I suspect Conversation Gallante is also a lesser effort, but one I liked and I’ll talk a bit more about below.

There isn’t a single poem in this collection that hasn’t been the subject of exhaustive academic analysis, none of which I have read. There isn’t a poem here which hasn’t been comprehensively picked clean of references, inspirations, influences and subtexts. I don’t do this for a living though, nor do I have exams to sit, which means that I have the luxury of just reading the poems for themselves, taking from them those parts that speak to me.

Here, after an introductory quote from Dante in the Italian, are the opening lines of Prufrock:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question. . .                               10
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

This is profoundly alienated language – “muttering retreats”, “restless nights in one-night cheap hotels”, “Streets that follow like a tedious argument”. There’s a sense of a grubby, tawdry reality. This is an internal monologue weighed down by the futility of its own debate (I’m aware there are other argued interpretations).

What follows is a man arguing with himself as to whether or not to confess his love for a woman. He plays through the whole encounter in his mind – the journey to her, climbing up her stairs, and then the impassable barrier of indifferent decorum.

Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions
And for a hundred visions and revisions
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

The poem is rich with images taken from religion and myth – opening with Dante, referencing Hamlet, John the Baptist, Lazarus, mermaids. Against all that though is the suffocating mundanity of a room with tea and polite conversation and the sheer impossibility of breaking through to something that actually has meaning, something profound (Mr. Apollinax brings out these contrasts much more clearly, but for me to lesser effect).

The poem is suffused with desire:

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

but there is no certainty that the desire is in any way returned. Polite Edwardian England has no place in it for passion. Prufrock, middle-aged and painfully conscious of his own absurdity, has no power to shake the age and transform it.

Eliot then shows the gap between the dream and the suffocating reality, leading to some of the most painful lines I have ever read:

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

That gap, that pause for reflection between stanzas, makes the line “I do not think that they will sing to me” hit like a hammerblow. It underlines the full tragedy of Prufrock’s (far from unique) situation. It is a poem which speaks of disenchantment, not just in the obvious sense but in that referred to by Josipovici in his What Ever Happened to Modernism? Prufrock is modern, as is the world, and our old dreams are dead and all we have in their place is form emptied of substance.

Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night also explore the disillusionment brought by mucky prosaicism and the sheer pain of existence among indifference, as does Morning at the Window (repeated below in full):

They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.

The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs

Again there’s that impressionistic conjuring of the city and the urban environment, there’s that feeling of terrible isolation and there’s that wonderful and surprising juxtaposition of images – “the damp souls of housemaids”. Above all though, for me, there is disenchantment and alienation. If this were religious poetry I would talk here as I would have with Prufrock of how the sacred remains barely visible but forever out of grasp in a fallen world, but it’s not religious poetry and the world isn’t fallen because the truth is worse than that. If the world were fallen we could climb back up, be restored to grace, but grace was only ever a dream and human voices have woken us.

The last poem I’ll single out to discuss is much lighter in tone, and it’s Conversation Gallante. Here it is, also in full:

I observe: ‘Our sentimental friend the moon!
Or possibly (fantastic, I confess)
It may be Prester John’s balloon
Or an old battered lantern hung aloft
To light poor travellers to their distress.’
She then: ‘How you digress!’

And I then: ‘Someone frames upon the keys
That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain
The night and moonshine; music which we seize
To body forth our own vacuity.’

She then: ‘Does this refer to me?’
‘Oh no, it is I who am inane.’

‘You, madam, are the eternal humorist
The eternal enemy of the absolute,
Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist!
With your air indifferent and imperious
At a stroke our mad poetics to confute — ‘
And- Are we then so serious?’

This is Eliot in much more playful form. It’s not a great poem as say Prufrock is, but it does capture nicely a certain kind of flirtatious conversation, of the woman constantly slightly ahead of the narrator. The majority of the speech is the man’s, apparently driving the conversation, but at each turn the woman outwits him and he finds his flurry of words effortlessly parried with a single line.

There is of course again here an example of the fantastic being defeated by the mundane, but for me at least without the despondency carried by the other poems. I’ve been in that situation, trying hard to impress someone who knows that’s what I’m doing and who doesn’t plan to make it easy for me, and there is an inherent comedy to it which Eliot is well aware of.

The poem illustrates one final point, which is that throughout this collection (and perhaps in Eliot’s poetry more broadly) it’s men who are sensitive and experience deep emotions for which they have no outlet. Women by contrast are sometimes attractive, but rarely reflective. Eliot is brilliant and his poetry is I think as good as art gets, but he writes firmly from a male viewpoint. Even with that though Eliot’s perception is so acute, his observations so universal, that I would have thought as many women as men would recognise themselves in his work.

In a way Eliot’s gender representations reminded me of a conversation I had years ago, where I described to a woman how as a teenager I’d sometimes been awed by girls I thought too cool to approach – utterly diminished by their impenetrably aloof beauty and unable to even speak to them. I’d naively thought it a uniquely male experience, but of course it isn’t. Her comment was that she’d had the same thing with some boys, and why wouldn’t she? Disillusion, desire, the need for something beyond the everyday, if these aren’t fundamental human experiences then what is?

the sweep of predication was more compelling than the predicated

Leaving the Atocha Station, by Ben Lerner

I bought a copy of Prufrock and Other Observations recently. It’s a tiny book, containing one famous poem taught in schools throughout the English speaking world and a number of other poems that few of those schoolchildren will ever read. That’s the thing with poetry, most of us if we ever read it at all read it at school and never again. If we do read any later, we mostly read poets we already know (so only reading poems recognised as classics). The world of contemporary poetry is a tiny one, obscure to the point that by contrast translated literary fiction looks as popular as Fifty Shades of Grey. I’ve said this before I think.

Ben Lerner is a US contemporary poet. Leaving the Atocha Station is his first novel, and it’s a novel about poetry. It’s also almost certainly going to be in my end of year list as one of the best books I’ve read this year. It’s extremely funny, beautifully written and unlike many novels written by poets it works as well at the level of the entire book as it does at the level of the sentence.

Adam Gordon is an American poet living in Madrid. He’s on scholarship, supposedly researching links between poetry and the Spanish Civil War (links he suspects don’t really exist). In reality he spends his days on an extended slacker holiday, drinking coffee and getting stoned, each day much the same as the last.

As part of his daily morning ritual he goes to the Prado, to stand before Rogier Van der Weyden’s Descent of the Cross:

A turning point in my project: I arrived one morning at the Van der Weyden to find someone had taken my place. He was standing exactly where I normally stood, and for a moment I was startled, as if beholding myself beholding the painting, although he was thinner and darker than I. I waited for him to move on, but he didn’t. I wondered if he had observed me in front of the Descent and if he was now standing before int in the hope of seeing whatever it was I must have seen. I was irritated and tried to find another canvas for my morning ritual, but was too accustomed to the painting’s dimension ans and blues to accept a substitute. I was about to abandon room 58 when the man suddenly broke into tears, convulsively catching his breath. Was he, I wondered, just facing the wall to hide his face as he dealt with whatever grief he’d brought into the museum? Or was he having a profound experience of art?

Adam has never had a “profound experience of art”. He’s not entirely persuaded they exist, and if they do he’s jealous of those who have them. What follows is a lovely comic sequence as Adam follows the man and observes the guards’ reaction to him. The man is overcome in the next room too, leaving the guards with a quandary. Is the man having a profound experience of art, which is ostensibly why the paintings are there and what the gallery is for, or is he crazy in which case should they eject him before he damages something? If they do eject him and he was just being moved by the power of the art, have they just defeated the entire point of the gallery and their place in it?

Uncertainty is central here. Adam’s Spanish is terrible, he’s made almost no efforts to learn the language and can’t read the poets he claims to be researching.

But I couldn’t bring myself to work at prose in Spanish, in part because I had to look up so many words that I was never able to experience the motion of a sentence; it remained so many particles; never a wave; I didn’t have the patience to reread the same passage again and again until the words ceased to be mere points and became a line.

His conversations with the locals become comedies of part-understanding. A woman talks to him of home “but whether she meant a household or the literal structure, I couldn’t tell”. She says something about swimming in a lake as a child, or perhaps that lakes reminded her of being a child, or asks if Adam had enjoyed swimming as a child, or says that that something else she’d said had been childish. Adam catches words, but behind them spin penumbras of meaning, ripples cast outwards by fragments of language.

For much of the book then the bulk of Adam’s conversations are notional. Things are said to him, but whether what he understands is what was meant is far from clear. That sounds potentially annoying but instead it’s very funny, and something more than that – it’s a metaphor for poetry itself. Adam understands Spanish as a reader understands a poem. Sensed meanings, which may or may not be intended. Multiplicities of interpretations, those chosen coming as much from what Adam brings to the conversation as to what was actually said. Adam’s conversations exist in the space between him and the words he understands, like poetry exists in the gap between the reader and the words on the page.

Adam falls in with a group of Madrileños who introduce him to the Madrid art scene. One of them begins translating his poems, which he thinks are essentially fake works of no real merit (but he still becomes passionate when someone misunderstands what he’s doing with them). He starts to attend readings, including of his own works, and has to face his own disassociation and the feeling that at any moment he’ll be caught out as the charlatan he feels he is. Again there’s a mismatch of understanding, not now of language but of how others clearly view Adam and how he views himself.

Later, after the first reading of his work, he reflects on his poetry and on the relationship between poetry generally with Franco and to fascism, with the world:

I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it. And yet when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without  even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I’d participated in that evening, then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills.

When the Madrid bombings occur Adam finds himself present at history. He wants to be part of it, but really he’s at best an observer. He’s not a Madrileño, he’s just a guy who was in town when the bombings happened. What do his shards of poetry mean against dead bodies, shattered limbs? Nothing of course, they’re perfectly useless.

At risk of being political that’s what those who speak of cultural dividends, of the creative industries, of the commercial benefits to a thriving art scene all utterly miss. Art is useless. It doesn’t feed us, it doesn’t help keep the elderly warm or teach children employable skills or keep us safe from criminals or rogue regimes. Good art often isn’t even entertaining. If we try to justify art by reference to utility we always fail. Art is beyond utility, which is a problem for technocratic politicians who to a one cannot understand anything that cannot be monetised.

Ahem. Possibly I digress. Leaving the Atocha Station clocks in at under 200 pages. It’s full of tremendously written lines (Adam finds himself able to follow a bad Spanish poem because it is “an Esperanto of cliches”, visiting an apartment he notes “… against one of the walls a low, Japanese looking-bed that was probably Swedish.”). It’s more though than just a collection of great sentences; it’s a comic novel that’s utterly serious.

Leaving the Atocha Station is as light or dense as you wish it to be, and while Adam may be one of the less sympathetic protagonists I’ve encountered in a while (steeped as he is in privilege and self-absorption) that in itself just becomes a reflection of the class that he, and of course Ben Lerner form part of. If art is useless, and it is, we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s dominated by the children of the well-off and by people convinced of the absolute value of their own introspection. Thankfully, they’re occasionally right about that value.

Leaving the Atocha Station has been very widely reviewed in the US, but less so in the UK. I learned about it through Just William’s Luck here (thanks Will). There’s another great review by the Guardian’s Jenny Turner here, a glowing Jeff Dyer review here and a depressingly skilled review by James Wood here (though I’m not persuaded of his Lermontov comparison). By way of contrast it’s worth reading this Amazon review by Paul Bowes, a Guardian book pages regular that I hold in huge regard (even if I do disagree with him on this occasion). In addition to all that, here‘s Tao Lin interviewing Ben Lerner (including a lovely exchange where it turns out that the art gallery passage, which was suggested to be essentially lifted from Bernhard, is actually from Lerner’s own experience making his life is an act of plagiarism).

On a final note, the title is a reference to a John Ashbery poem of the same name. The poem can be read here. Were I familiar with Ashbery’s work I could no doubt draw out some interesting conclusions about how the book relates to the poem (Adam, within the book, talks about Ashbery’s work). Since however I had to be told that’s what the title meant, I’ll have to leave that to others (Will makes some good points on that front). As Adam only speaks so much Spanish, I only speak so much poetry.

a Muscovite in Harold’s cloak?

Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin and translated by Tom Beck

How does one review a work like Eugene Onegin? It’s not that I’m nervous writing about classics, but Russian novels in verse which are so important they created a genre? That’s a big ask. Nabokov wrote an entire commentary on the poem, and a famously literal translation. Where to start?

Well, if there’s a point to blogging it’s to record a personal reaction. I’m frankly not qualified to speak to any technical aspects of Eugene Onegin. It’s only because I looked it up on Wikipedia that I know it’s in something called iambic tetrameter (and then I had to look up what that was). This then will not be an academic critique; it won’t be an analysis of the poem and its place in Russian literature. This is simply my reaction to a book written around 180 years ago in a language I don’t speak and in a style I’m unfamiliar with. I’m already thinking about reading it again.

Back in 2010 I read Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, written in the second decade of the nineteenth Century. I enjoyed it, but I didn’t read it for its own merits. I read it because without it there wouldn’t be a Eugene Onegin. Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin is the bridge between the European romantic tradition and the later Russian concept of the “superflous man”. That makes it sound of mere historical interest, but Pushkin is far too good a writer for that. This is a delicious novel, still well worth reading.

Eugene himself is a young man about Moscow as the novel opens. He’s a womanising dandy waiting for a long-sick uncle to die so that he can inherit. Here’s how Pushkin introduces him:

3

Completing service long and faithful,
his father ended his career
and left his son debts by the plateful
from having given balls each year.
And yet my friend was saved from Hades
by his Madame, a Gallic lady;
and then Monsieur took on the lad,
a lively child but never bad.
Monsieur l’abbé, who hated quarrels,
thought learning ought to be a joy,
tried not to overwhelm the boy.
He didn’t bother him with morals,
and if annoyed, he didn’t bark,
but took Eugene to Letny Park.

4

When Eugene grew and first felt passion,
was plagued by love and hope and doubt,
they did what’s always been the fashion
and threw the wretched abbé out.
My friend was free from every pressure,
could live and act as was his pleasure,
so he was always finely dressed
in what was surely London’s best.
He spoke and wrote French to perfection,
bowed constantly, his hair well curled,
and when he danced he turned and twirled,
his light Mazurka no exception.
He didn’t have too long to wait
before the world thought he was great.

Eugene’s a dilettante. He spends his evenings at the theatre and at balls, his days at leisure. He has no need to work, and no enthusiasms beyond those custom would applaud. He has taste, or at least a sense of fashion. He is also, however, quite criminally bored:

37

Alas! His feelings were now cooling,
he wearied of the social round,
the constant flirting and the fooling
now seemed to him absurd, unsound.
Pursuing beauties now fatigued him,
betrayals, friends no more intrigued him,
nor guzzling beefsteaks, Strasbourg Pie,
champagne until the day you die,
dispensing piquant sayings, grimace,
and bicker, have an aching head
from everything you’ve done and said.
Although he was a fiery scapegrace,
he’d lost his love of having fun,
of sabre-fighting and the gun.

As Pushkin goes on to say, “Childe Harold-like, he was ill-humoured”. This is of course classic territory (what do you expect? It’s a classic). A bored young blade looking for some means to alleviate his ennui, even before Byron this wasn’t an unfamiliar character. Laclos would have recognised him. Coming just 15 years after Byron’s creation though the source is even more obvious. It’s a point which raises another question: if Harold was as many thought Byron’s thinly disguised autobiography, is Eugene actually Pushkin?

56
Oh flowers, love, you fields and meadows,
Oh idleness, yours is my soul;
I’m not Eugene, we’re different fellows,
that matters to me on the whole
in case some too sarcastic readers
or other bookish, slanderous creatures
should callously compare my quirks
with those of Byron and his works,
as if I were but merely scrawling
my effigy, just like that proud
fantast, as people put around
so shamelessly, (which I find galling),
as if we wrote of nothing else
but poems all about ourselves.

If I hadn’t thought of the question already it would be firmly in my mind after that denial. Pushkin’s well aware that readers will be looking at this wondering if it’s really about him. His narrator, who is of course also a character within the novel, loudly denies that he’s Eugene – “we’re different fellows”. The narrator’s a garrulous sort though, and he can’t resist throwing his own comments into the text, reflecting on how Eugene’s life reflects upon his own and generally digressing.

That split, between Eugene as protagonist and the narrator as meta-character, is what makes this so much fun. Eugene’s story is pretty straightforward. He leaves Moscow and goes to the country, where a young and innocent girl falls in love with him and where he becomes friends with a local poet. During his stay misunderstanding and lack of thought lead Eugene to commit to a duel which ends, as duels in Russian literature generally do, to tragic consequences. In case you don’t know the story I won’t say more, but knowing it wouldn’t harm the book any. Pushkin’s not aiming to surprise the reader with plot twists here.

While all this is happening the narrator is revealing his own character. His acerbic asides reveal his own past romantic misfortune, his loss of fashion and his world-weary cynicism. As with the Tales of Belkin what at first seems to be a framing device becomes as important as what it’s framing. Pushkin, on the strength of the two books I’ve read so far anyway, is an incredibly playful writer.

I’m conscious I’m quoting a lot in this review, but I’m keen that readers get a decent chance to see the style as it appears in Tom Beck’s translation. This isn’t a full stanza, but it’s a nice illustration of how the narrator (Pushkin within the fiction) lets his own character slip into the text:

He had a chaste and upright conscience,
which he quite guilelessly laid bare,
Onegin found that he could share
his friend’s naïve and heady nonsense,
emotions which, however true,
are not exactly all that new.

All this narrative dexterity is married to a rich vein of social commentary. Pushkin’s aim is as accurate as Onegin’s, and he turns it on Russian society, on earnest Romantic poets, on the superfluous men of Eugene’s generation, even on some public figures which (as the end-notes make clear) his contemporaries would have recognised. As so often country folk come out as better than anyone else, but then the myth of the pastoral idyll is always with us (and even that is shown here as stultifyingly dull).

This is the first time I’ve read Eugene Onegin, so I can’t compare Tom Beck’s translation to others. My impression is that a straight translation of Onegin is essentially impossible. The original poetry was innovative and unique, and translating it means making a choice between exactly how faithful you are to the exact meaning of the language and how faithful to the structure and style.

Tom Beck is a musician by training, and that shows here in a translation which emphasises flow over precision. It’s not that he writes his own text (I did compare the opening stanza as it appears in several translations and Beck isn’t rewriting as such), but he wants to keep the poem as a poem and since direct English equivalents of the original Russian words wouldn’t fit the sructure it’s fair to say there will be translations which hew more closely to the original meanings (Nabokov of course being the most striking example).

Meaning though is only part of being faithful. Beck preserves the feel of the poem, he preserves its rhythm and that too is a form of fidelity. Translating fiction is like interpreting music. Two orchestras performing the same piece will each give it their own stamp. Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky when performed by say the London Philharmonic becomes the London Philharmonic’s Alexander Nevsky by Prokofiev. It’s still Prokofiev, but it’s no longer purely Prokofiev.

Is this then a good translation? Well, yes, because I read it and enjoyed it and I felt the movement of it and left wanting to read more. Is it the best translation? Best for whom? Is it a worthwhile translation? Yes, because fidelity to structure is no less valid than fidelity to meaning. There were occasions when I found a rhyme jarred slightly (else and ourselves for example, above) or where I lost the rhythm for a moment and had to reenter the poem. After the first few pages though I found the verse as natural as prose, and if you’re to have any hope of reading a book like this that’s critical.

I’ve long been a fan of Dedalus Press, so when I saw they had their own version of Eugene Onegin I had to give it a try. I’m glad I did, and I hope others will too. This is a lively and fun book, tragic and witty and clever enough to leave many ambiguities unresolved (if the end of The Sense of an Ending left you frustrated this one really isn’t for you). Russian literature has a (undeserved) reputation for being heavy, depressing and difficult. Eugene Onegin is none of those things.

A notable. A knight.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, by Simon Armitage and an unknown original author

Recently I read and enjoyed Peter Ackroyd’s take on Malory’s The Once and Future King. One of my few disappointments with it was that it didn’t include one of my favourite Arthurian myths (f0r the very good reason that it’s not from Malory, but I didn’t know that then). That myth was the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which originates in a 14th Century poem of unknown authorship.

Simon Armitage is one of the UK’s leading contemporary poets, and a while back I caught a tv programme presented by him in which he talked about the poem and about his own modern translation of it. For Armitage key elements of the poem were its relationship with the landscape from which it originated, and its use of alliteration. He wanted his translation to capture that that Northern voice and that use of alliteration, as well as the excitement he found in the poem.

The essence of the poem is simple. Arthur hosts a great Christmas feast, and all are merry. They are interrupted in their revels though by a massive knight, a mountain of a man clad in green and with green skin, beard and horse. He is a perilously ambiguous figure wearing no armour and carrying in one hand a sprig of holly:

and in the other hand held the mother of all axes,

a cruel piece of kit I kid you not:

the head was an ell in length at least

and forged in green steel with a gilt finish;

the skull-busting blade was so stropped and buffed

it could shear a man’s scalp and shave him to boot.

The handle which fitted that fiend’s great fist

was inlaid with iron, end to end,

with green pigment picking out impressive designs.

Immediately there you can get a sense of Armitage’s style. He’s not afraid of modern references (“the mother of all axes”, “I kid you not”), but at the same time this is fine visual (and visceral) poetry. The whole scene comes richly to life and I’m already considering buying a second version of this poem, in audio form read by Armitage himself (I have Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf on audio read by Heaney, and it’s a marvel to listen to).

Arthur’s court is daunted by this figure, who offers doubtful reassurance:

‘I’m spoiling for no scrap, I swear. Besides,

the bodies on these benches are just bum-fluffed bairns.

If I’d ridden to your castle rigged out for a ruck

these lightweight adolescents wouldn’t last a minute.

But it’s Yuletide – a time of youthfulness, yes?

So at Christmas in this court I lay down a challenge:

if a person here present, within these premises,

is big or bold or red-blooded enough

to strike me one stroke and be struck in return,

I shall give him as a gift this gigantic cleaver

and the axe shall be his to handle how he likes.

I’ll kneel, bare my neck and take the first knock.

So who has the gall? The gumption? The guts?

Who’ll spring from his seat and snatch this weapon?

I offer the axe – who’ll have it as his own?

I’ll afford one free hit from which I won’t flinch,

and promise that twelve months will pass in peace,                

then claim        

the duty I deserve        

in one year and one day.        

Does no one have the nerve

to wager in this way?’

The Northern voice is clear here, with references to “bum-fluffed bairn’s” and being “rigged out for a ruck” (for my non-native English readers bum-fluffed bairns are boys barely able to grow a beard, rigged out for a ruck means ready for a fight). This is regional poetry, born of a particular place and culture. That final cascade of words by the way (starting from “then claim”) is how each section of the poem ends. It should be indented but WordPress doesn’t yet allow me to do that (or if it does I don’t know how to do it).

Arthur’s knights are naturally reluctant, and it even looks like Arthur himself might have to take the task, but Sir Gawain is not content to endanger his king in that fashion and so accepts the challenge. He takes the axe, strikes the Green Knight and beheads him cleanly. Naturally though that is not the end of the matter. The Green Knight’s body remains standing, and picks up its head from the floor.

For that scalp and skull now swung from his fist;

towards the top table he turned the face

and it opened its eyelids, stared straight ahead

and spoke this speech, which you’ll hear for yourselves:

‘Sir Gawain, be wise enough to keep your word

and faithfully follow me until I’m found

This is of course a manifestation of that classic creature from English folklore, the headless horseman. It’s more than that though: the time is Christmas, the anniversary of the birth of Christ. The Green Knight bears a sprig of holly, an evergreen image of renewal. Though slain he rises again and now Sir Gawain must reenact the scene a year hence, but this time taking the Green Knight’s place. We’re in deeply symbolic territory here, winter, death and rebirth. This is Christian, but with Pagan elements too (the Green Knight being too a form of Green Man, itself an ancient personification of rebirth and renewal).

What follows is Sir Gawain’s quest to find the home of the Green Knight, and fulfil his side of the bargain. As the time for his appointment draws near he finds himself in another lord’s hall, where a great knight feasts him and makes him welcome. Sir Gawain spends his days entertained by this knight’s lady, who seeks to seduce Sir Gawain, while her husband rides out to hunt. Sir Gawain’s host says that whatever he wins at the hunt he will gift to Sir Gawain, but whatever Sir Gawain wins in the castle he must gift in turn to the host.

Sir Gawain then here faces a number of tests. Of courage certainly, but also of honesty and of virtue. Will Sir Gawain dally with his host’s wife? If he does will he give what is gained to his host? As Sir Gawain resides in comfort his host reassures him that none will judge him should he not face his challenge. Will Sir Gawain falter?

There’s little mystery in these questions, but that doesn’t make them any the less resonant or meaningful. Sir Gawain is a perfect knight, but even a perfect knight is mortal and open to temptation. The poem here serves as allegory, showing an idealised figure facing tests which while not literally like those the poem’s original listeners would face are nonetheless true in spirit to the challenges we all face.

Can we live up to our word and our image of ourselves? Can we resist the draw to do that which we desire, but know to be wrong? How do we behave in the face of what appears to be certain ruin, even death? Most tellingly perhaps for a medieval listener, can we hold on to both our faith in the next world and our loyalty in this one against both terror and temptation?

I talked above about this being one of my favourite Arthurian myths, and hopefully now you can see why. There’s just so much in this. It’s a richly allegorical tale but run through with romance, adventure and peril. It’s a meditation on death and resurrection, wrapped in magic and mystery.

Armitage takes these elements and brings them to life with language that sizzles along. His use of alliteration makes the poem a rich word-fest which is a pleasure to read and at times is positively playful. There are occasional jarring moments; Armitage isn’t afraid of anachronisms and even puns (“A human could not hear a headier music than the roaring which was raised for the soul of Reynard/who croaked!”, and at one point a reference to a “mega-blow”), but overall this left me with a new enthusiasm both for the work itself and for Armitage’s poetry more generally.

I wanted to include at least one quote describing the landscape, which Armitage makes as integral a part of the poem as any of the above. This final quote is short, but even though I don’t actually know what the word “mizzle” means I found it hugely evocative and it’s a tremendous example of Armitage’s use of alliteration. Here it is:

The clouds which had climbed now cooled and dropped

So the moors and the mountains were muzzy with mist

And every hill wore a hat of mizzle on its head.

The streams on the slopes seemed to fume and foam,

Whitening the wayside with spume and spray.

It comes tight-packed

Sea Level, by Angela Leighton

Like most people who don’t read a lot of poetry I find it incredibly hard to write about. It’s so personal. The usual analogy, one I often make myself, is to say that poetry is a language. If so I barely speak it, and often find myself lost and hoping that I’ve picked up enough of the gist of what’s going on that I’ve managed to order a beer and not an offal platter.

I have in fact once mistakenly ordered an offal platter. I don’t recommend it.

Angela Leighton is a contemporary British poet. Sea Level is her second collection, and as the title suggests it’s shot through with images of the sea, and of nature more widely. The back of the book says too that it draws on the landscape of Yorkshire and East Riding, but knowing nothing of either I can’t speak to that.

Time I think for an example. Sea Level is a 68 page collection with the majority of poems fitting on a single page. I intend to quote three poems in full in this review, which I hope will give a good feel for her work. This first one is for me an excellent example of poem as condensed description. A capturing of a moment or place in language which while not always wholly comprehensible is nonetheless powerful:

Harbour

From creel-pots’ crochet, dumped networks of nets,
staggered crates, a trailer, bales of twine,
bits and knots and art and old sea stench
under the nightly floodlight’s yellow halo,

saints’ wrack, livings, rot, planking, buoys,
rounding guts of rope, oarlock, airlock,
with acquapac and VHF, and luck,
light, weather, balance, ebb, flow,

something draws us out beyond the jerry’s
throw, its sea-sliced steps and stop, its checked
halt, systoles of dulse, litter, scum,
to falls of sea-room falling wide as we come.

I have and always have had a great love of the sea, and so of ports. Real ports are of course deeply unromantic places, full of smell, mess and odd bits of slime. Even so, I’m drawn to them. This poem captures that for me. The opening paragraph (stanza? I lack the terminology here) captures the chaos of a port. The nets heaped up in piles. The crates and rusting boats (not that rusting boats are mentioned, still I see them when I read it).

With the second paragraph we’re into the territory where poetry can so easily lose us. What is saint’s wrack? Is that something real, or something Leighton made up? What’s an acquapac? VHF? I don’t know, and yet the sense of the language remains powerful and evocative. I no longer quite know what’s being said, but I still understand it (or at least feel that I do).

Then, with the third paragraph, there’s that sense of possibility that the sea always speaks to me of. Ports are of necessity prosaic and functional, but they lead to the sea and the sea leads to, well, to a myriad possibilities of places. That’s the draw, part of it anyway.

So, as I said, poetry is deeply personal For me this poem captures the ambivalence of a port, a harbour. The quotidian mess and dirt and beyond it the draw of something vast and strange. I also love of course little phrases like “sea-sliced steps” where the alliteration helps capture that sense of the sea sliding back and forth over the stone steps leading down to the boats.

Here’s another:

Peat

It comes tight-packed, unearthly heavy, fat
with itself, intact. Handled, it crumbles to bits.

I sift and slip a landscape through my fingers,
feeling the way of forests, sun and rain,

trees that lean with the wind, that breathe with it,
and shake a hair of needles to the ground-

a plan of rusty crosses sinking in,
the wood’s crossed fingers teasing out the sun.

Whose land is this? assorted, dry as dust,
evacuated of its light and rains,

yet springy still, as if just stepped-off, live,
on some bare hillside subject to nothing but weather.

Its crumbs fall through my hands. I own the stuff,
its solving composition, settled dross,

the earth grown poor from forests it has lost.
This bit of unsoiled land is on my hands:

the bog’s muck-sweat, hill-weathers’ heavy loads,
the ways of ownership, those famine roads.

Here it’s the physicality that draws me in. As with Harbour this is deeply sensual poetry. Not sensual as in erotic, but sensual as in visual and tactile. “Handled, it crumbles to bits.”. There’s a sense of solidity here that fits the subject matter.

Here poetry becomes an examination of something quite unexceptional: a handful of soil. Leighton leaps from the feel of the peat between her fingers to the landscape it came from, and then to the sorrows of that landscape (“famine roads”). I actually find this much harder to write about than Harbour, as there’s nothing particularly personal to me in this poem. Still, for all it has no personal resonance I still find it curiously intimate. Perhaps it’s that sensuality again.

A final example:

Hotel

I pay, then climb into the night’s room.
A number tells me where I am
at home. I’ll not remember soon.

Outside, there’s too much light to dream.
The city’s talkative. Sirens scream
in fifths, tuning. Here I’m clean

out of it, free. It lays no claim
to my, my unfound hiding, name,
the puff breath makes. I am the same,

but stranger, keen. I start to learn
my whereabouts by rote, short-term:
a bed, a room, a night, by turn.

Outside, the sky must save its skin.
It lets whatever the room keeps in
out in waves. The wall’s too thin.

This night my numbered door might win
a lottery, stop an angel, summon
what lies open out there to come in.

The sense here isn’t of hotel as holiday destination, but of business travel. The narrator is alone in the room, and there’s no sense of excitement or anticipation. Instead it captures that mix of insomnia, uncertainty and the knowledge of an unfamiliar place which could include who knows what, but which you’ll likely never get to really see. Perhaps I’m projecting, but then with poetry perhaps that’s the point.

Other poems that stood out for me included a very brief one titled Dusk Chorus capturing the underlying desperation, hunger and territoriality of bird song. Another, At the Vet’s, captures that terrible moment when one stands in a vet’s room as a loved cat is put to sleep. It’s again a very short poem, but for me devastating as I’ve had to do that (thankfully only once so far) and the poem captures the scene with an accuracy that made it unsuitable for quoting. If you own cats you’ll know why I didn’t put that up to be blundered across on a blog. It’s too painful.

Some poems later in the collection lost me, being too technical or too rooted in a terrain I know nothing of. I can relate to poetry without knowing what each word means, but as with any communication there comes a point where one understands so little that any resonance there might have been is lost. That’s ok though. The trick with poetry I’ve found is not to worry that not every poem makes sense. When I studied Italian some concepts came quickly, others took years of study. Why should this be different?

I’ve previously quoted another Angela Leighton poem, here, That poem is freely available online, but also appears in this collection. It’s the poem which made me want to read more by Leighton, so if you missed that post I’d suggest at least spending a couple of minutes with it.