Rain and Ruin: something recalcitrant

Jane Holland has posted her compressed version of the Exeter Book's The Wife's Lament. It is interesting how much 'resonance' with the language itself is achieved here. In an earlier post I talked of how the language seems to keep saying certain things over and over, and it's this that gives us the building blocks for the musical composition of poems; it gives us the notes to play on the instrument (the instrument that Ed Dorn speaks of when he says re Gunslinger "It's really just an attempt to meditate what there is left of the available instrument. It's not an epic, but it's going to work that kind of trip.") And it's the repetitions and refrains of the language that lend good poems that sort of 'alienated majesty' that Geoffrey Hill mentions (lifting the phrase from Emerson).

In Holland's 'The Wife's Lament' the rain/ruin conjunction appears in her rendering of the line "under stanhliþe / storme behrimed" (under stone slopes / by storms berimed"). Holland's line runs "in ruins under the rain" ... this brings 19th-century associations: Longfellow's "Upon the ground I saw a fallen nest / Ruined and full of rain", or Swinburne's "For winter's rains and ruins are over" or Wilde's "Time hath not spared his ruin,---wind and rain / Have broken down his stronghold", or Stevenson's lines ..

Bursting across the tangled math
A ruin that I called a path,
A Golgotha that, later on,
When rains had watered, and suns shone,

Going back in time, Pope has

So from each side increased the stony rain,
And the white ruin rises o'er the plain

That 'white ruin' also evokes Auden's lines:

Oh dear white children, casual as birds,
Playing amid the ruined languages.

And Pope's 'stony rain' brings into view the stone/storm conjunction present in the Exeter Book, and in Pound's Seafarer: "Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten". Coming forward in time, Rexroth, in his Letter to Auden, juxtaposes "The steel rain // Voices in the old ruin".

Geoffrey Hill, in his 'A Postscript on Modernist Poetics', writes "In the act of creation we alienate ourselves from that which we have created, or conversely, the genius of language alienates us from itself. We are no longer masters of a well-considered curriculum vitae in free verse, or blank-verse sonnets, or whatever; the anecdote is no longer the agency of our self-promotion; something recalcitrant has come between us and our expectant and expected satisfaction."

Horses' Mouths

Reginald Shepherd reminds us of Allen Tate's essay where he discussed 'Ode to the Confederate Dead' and says that he is far from an expert on his own poems. Once I discovered by chance that one of my poems had been used in a Year 12 (VCE) examination paper (no one had informed the poet) .. when I got hold of the paper, which included at least one multiple choice question asking what the poet had intended, I found myself quite unsure of what the examiners thought would be the correct answer, as I recall two of the four options seemed plausible, but neither hit the mark.

A recent post by Jane Holland describes some rough notes she made on the composition of long poems. This prompted me to dig out my old copy of Helen Gardner's The Composition of Four Quartets, and it struck me how much useful and interesting is this sort of simple work record than the more common commentary and interpretation. Getting a glimpse of a poet's revisions, and explanations in correspondence of various phrases, lines, and passages, provides more insight than a shelf of criticism. Gardner's book shows how Eliot was - amongst other things - striving for clarity. And surely this is true even of many 'difficult' poets: Geoffrey Hill in the Poetry Book Society Bulletin wrote "I have no ambition to be famously - or notoriously - obscure. The difficulties of daily living get in the way and my poems, unavoidably it seems, collide with the densities of common existence"

Imitations and Serial Translation

Jane Holland has pointed out that Harry Mathews poem 'The White Wind' in P.N.Review 180 is a paraphrase of Wyatt's 'Whoso list to hunt', and that Petrarch's sonnet which served as Wyatt's model features a 'white hind' (una candida cerva) which has undergone a strange transformation in Mathews' title. It seems a little odd that no credit to Wyatt is given, but I guess poets have been using poems as models from the outset, and generally without explanatory acknowledgments. Even so, here at our 21st-century postmodern terminal moraine, maybe a small note wouldn't have been amiss.

I suspect several poets go in for this sort of thing in the privacy of notebooks - dismantling clocks to see how they work, or trying things to help move them towards a new voice or expand their range.

Derek Walcott, in an interview published in Contemporary Literature, Vol 20. #3 1980, remarked: "you know you just ravage and cannibalise anything as a young writer", and the 40-ish Robert Lowell explained, in his introduction to Imitations, that his loose translations were done from time to time when he was unable to do any work of his own. He said he was trying to write "alive English" and to do what the original authors "might have done if they were writing their poems now and in America."

Peter Porter, in a conversation published in Michael Schmidt and Grevel Lindop's 1972 book British Poetry Since 1960, said of his translations of Martial: "They're not translations at all but more - in musical terms - realisations ... They are done to give me the pleasure of reading his poems - in a very brutal and egotistical way. The only way I could enjoy his writing was to rewrite it myself." Donald Hall's drastic recasting of Horace's Odes in The Museum of Clear Ideas is another good recent example.

And of course translators typically study other existing translations when available, even build upon them. Alan Jenkins, for example, in his translation of Rimbaud, Drunken Boats (Sylph editions, 2007) states that he has stolen what he needed from Lowell and Beckett.

Indeed serial translation, where one translator builds on the good bits of earlier translations was once the norm. Felicity Rosslyn, back in PNR 111 (1996) wrote a wonderful overview of this important and relatively neglected topic.

She demonstrates how the opening of Dryden's Iliad (1700):

The wrath of Peleus' son, O Muse, resound

Whose dire effects the Grecian army found.

was clearly in Pope's mind when he wrote in his 1715 version:

The Wrath of Peleus' Son, the direful Spring

Of all the Grecian Woes, O Goddess sing!

Two days after Pope's Book I, a rival - one Thomas Tickell - brought out his ...

Achilles' fatal Wrath, whence discord rose,

That brought the Sons of Greece unnumber'd Woes,

O Goddess sing.

Pope angrily annotated his copy of this, but admired the clear initial focus on Achilles, and the unnumber'd woes, and for his 1736 edition rewrote the opening:

Achilles' Wrath, to Greece the direful spring

Of woes unnumber'd, heav'nly Goddess, sing!

Thus the completion of Pope's final Iliad can be seen as the cumulative results of many hands working in the one unified tradition - the tradition of heroic couplet translation - and thus, along with Gothic cathedrals, quantum physics and wikipedia can be seen as the flowering achievement of a dedicated community.