Five Islands press; Advance Information: Exciting new poetry
Let us imagine someone, me, who is doing a PhD on narrative poetry, and is therefore interested to learn that FIP are releasing a “Novel in Verse”. Let us imagine him reading the advance information for this book supplied by the publisher ( I’ve added the quotes I'm discussing to the bottom of this post). What does he learn about the book?
It’s a novel in verse, with narrative sweep and drive and it’s true poetry, with some familiar adjectives stuck on the end (Brilliant, poignant, disconcerting magical and irresistible). And the poet has won some prizes.
How does that give me enough information to decide whether or not I want to read it? (I will, but not because of this advertising.)
What this flier doesn’t say about the book is revelatory about the publishing of Poetry. Apparently telling me this is a "novel in verse" is all I need to know to part with my money.
We are not told the content of the narrative, the style of the narrative nor are we told what type of "verse" is being used. Could you sell a novel by advertising it as a “Novel in Prose” and leaving it there? You’d expect at least a one sentence plot summary?
Surely you’d at least assume the potential reader (me) wants to know what this novel is about ? “Romance holds hands with science and takes to the ocean” is the nearest we get. (Visions of underwater sex reinforced by the cover?).
And what kind of “Novel”. A narrative? What kind of narrative? (conventional: The Monkey’s Mask/ different: For all we Know/”experimental”: Deep Step Come Shining) What kind of verse? Chopped prose, Tennyson on Ecstasy, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry…. as formal as Freddy Neptune?
Why is it that the people who are supposed to be selling this book seem to think these questions are irrelevant to a potential buyer?
And what do they offer instead?
Three generic blurb quotes (see below) and a biography of the poet?
A risk-taking work of rare, imaginative power. What could that possibly mean? It might describe Flann O’Brian’s The Third Policeman or Pound’s Cantos, but we’re getting close to the hundredth anniversary of The Waste Land and there was a risk-taking work of rare, imaginative power. Should I expect something of the class of Deep Step'? The Waste land, Briggflatts, the Anathemata?
What could “risk taking” and “rare imaginative power” possibly mean without some kind of context. And why is "risk taking" admirable? Drug addicts take risks.
As for the narrative drive of the novel with the perfect pitch of true poetry. With no information about the plot or the style of narrative which novel? Ulysses? Murder on the Orient Express? How is "the novel" anymore a meaningful category than "a novel in verse"? What could narrative "drive" or "sweep" mean? War and Peace on Benzedrine?
As for the perfect pitch of true poetry …..answers on a post card please…why is it considered meaningful to use the phrase “true poetry’ on the back of a decent writer's work? it sounds like something one of my grade eights might write about her favourite bit of poetry in Dolly magazine or one of the "comments" posted on Authorsden.com.
So let us assume that the publisher actually wants people to buy the book. The question then is why do they present it in such a way? It may well be the most exciting thing to be published in Australia since The Monkey hit the stands but how would you know from this information?
The quotations below are the three in question. The rest of the flier simply has a paragraph about the author. And if my grumbling makes you curious go buy the book. (-:
The Sunlit Zone is a moving elegy of love and loss, admirable for its
narrative sweep and the family dynamic that drives it. A risk-taking work of
rare, imaginative power.
The Sunlit Zone combines the narrative drive of the novel with the perfect
pitch of true poetry. A darkly futuristic vision shot through with bolts of
light. Brilliant, poignant, disconcerting.
Adrian Hyland, author of Kinglake 350 and Diamond Dove
This novel in verse, at once magical and irresistible, draws us into a vivid
future. In Lisa Jacobson’s telling, the Australian fascination with salt water
and sea change is made over anew. Romance holds hands with science and
takes to the ocean.
Chris Wallace-Crabbe, author of The Domestic Sublime and By Title
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Friday, April 13, 2012
Bunting's Persia, edited by Don Share
Bunting's Persia: Translations by Basil Bunting, Edited by Don Share. Flood Editions 2012.
Despite the Blurb's claim that Bunting is widely regarded was one of the most Important British poets of the twentieth century, his reputation still seems a closely guarded secret. Despite the acclaim of critics like Hugh Kenner and Donald Davie, almost thirty years after the man's death there is still no scholarly Collected (the Forthcoming Faber edition is endlessly forthcoming), no decent biography [ 2013 update: Burton's 'A Strong Song Tows Us' (2013) at least remedies the problem of a decent biography] This , no edited correspondence and full length critical works are few and far between. Bunting was a great poet, the blurb's adjective is unnecessary. I'll take his collected over Eliot's, but unless you have patience, a fair bit of disposable income and access to a good online second hand book search, you're not going to be reading a great deal about him and his work, even in your University library.
So those of us with Bunting Fixations owe people like Don Share and Richard Swigg a debt that should have some kind of adjective in front of it conveying its enormity. I can’t think of one that’s adequate so the noun goes naked. Without their work and enthusiasm there would be little to feed our own.
This book collects Bunting's translations from the Persian, and contains a much needed Glossary and Notes on the Poets. The introduction succinctly gathers what, to a small group of readers, might be the well known story of Bunting's Persia but to those who don't it provides the essential information distilled in one place, where it should be, introducing the poems.
While Bunting was dismissive of criticism and critics, I suspect he would have appreciated the effort that’s gone into making these poems available. Sharp study and long toil were Bunting virtues. The book contains poems that were not included in the Collected, though hints of their existence abound and Don Share deserves more than just the appropriate crate of wine for his efforts in tracking these down.
What I was hoping to find in this book is here: the translation of Ferdowsi’s “Shahnameh” which he began and then abandoned. The section published as an ‘uncollected overdraft” called ‘From Faridun’s Sons’ made me read the ‘Shahnameh’ in Dick Davis’ translation. (I am not Bunting, I did not decide I had to learn Persian.) The story of Buntings attempts to translate the whole poem is told by Makin in “The Shaping of Bunting’s verse”, as is Pound’s disparagement of the results and their ensuing argument about poetry. When time allows I want to compare Bunting’s verse with Davis’s prose translation; what gets lost , what is gained by telling the story in verse? And what does it say about that argument Bunting had with Pound about poetry in general.
The book raises two obvious questions: the first is the quality of the poems: first as poems in English and then as translations.
There are few people capable of assessing the latter. Most discussions of Bunting will sooner or later address his approach to translation. One gets the feeling that most English critics feel more at home discussing his treatment of Horace. Latin was, until recently, the common currency of the educated. However there are essays by Persian specialists in both "Man and Poet" and "The Star you Steer By" which are complimentary. In the first, five of Bunting’s translations are assessed almost line by line against their originals, in the second there is a detailed discussion of his translations of Hafiz. The conclusion, that anyone reading Bunting’s translations would go away thinking Hafiz was a poet but Hafiz might not recognise his own poems, needs to be read against Dick Davis’ article “On not translating Hafez[sic]”.
Bunting’s versions proffer one possible way of dealing with the problems that stopped Davis. The latter is quoted on the back of the book, praising the translations.
To answer the question about their standing as poems in English might require the context of that argument with Pound.
The other question, which I'm looking forward to this book illuminating, is what was "Bunting's [version of] Persia." but I suspect that has to be answered by putting these poems back into the context of the rest of his work. The Persian interest carries through from ‘The Spoils’ to “Briggflatts”, where in that most localised of British poems, a Persian story doesn’t seem out of place.
In case you’re intrigued:
Parvin Loloi and Glyn Pursglove 'The Worse for Drink Again': Basil Bunting’s Translations of Hafiz in “The Star you Steer By” and Basil Bunting’s Persian Overdrafts: A commentary in “Basil Bunting Man and Poet”
On Not Translating Hafez by Dick Davis New England Review (1990-)
Vol. 25, No. 1/2, Translation: Double Issue (Winter - Spring, 2004), pp. 310-318 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40244407
Despite the Blurb's claim that Bunting is widely regarded was one of the most Important British poets of the twentieth century, his reputation still seems a closely guarded secret. Despite the acclaim of critics like Hugh Kenner and Donald Davie, almost thirty years after the man's death there is still no scholarly Collected (the Forthcoming Faber edition is endlessly forthcoming), no decent biography [ 2013 update: Burton's 'A Strong Song Tows Us' (2013) at least remedies the problem of a decent biography] This , no edited correspondence and full length critical works are few and far between. Bunting was a great poet, the blurb's adjective is unnecessary. I'll take his collected over Eliot's, but unless you have patience, a fair bit of disposable income and access to a good online second hand book search, you're not going to be reading a great deal about him and his work, even in your University library.
So those of us with Bunting Fixations owe people like Don Share and Richard Swigg a debt that should have some kind of adjective in front of it conveying its enormity. I can’t think of one that’s adequate so the noun goes naked. Without their work and enthusiasm there would be little to feed our own.
This book collects Bunting's translations from the Persian, and contains a much needed Glossary and Notes on the Poets. The introduction succinctly gathers what, to a small group of readers, might be the well known story of Bunting's Persia but to those who don't it provides the essential information distilled in one place, where it should be, introducing the poems.
While Bunting was dismissive of criticism and critics, I suspect he would have appreciated the effort that’s gone into making these poems available. Sharp study and long toil were Bunting virtues. The book contains poems that were not included in the Collected, though hints of their existence abound and Don Share deserves more than just the appropriate crate of wine for his efforts in tracking these down.
What I was hoping to find in this book is here: the translation of Ferdowsi’s “Shahnameh” which he began and then abandoned. The section published as an ‘uncollected overdraft” called ‘From Faridun’s Sons’ made me read the ‘Shahnameh’ in Dick Davis’ translation. (I am not Bunting, I did not decide I had to learn Persian.) The story of Buntings attempts to translate the whole poem is told by Makin in “The Shaping of Bunting’s verse”, as is Pound’s disparagement of the results and their ensuing argument about poetry. When time allows I want to compare Bunting’s verse with Davis’s prose translation; what gets lost , what is gained by telling the story in verse? And what does it say about that argument Bunting had with Pound about poetry in general.
The book raises two obvious questions: the first is the quality of the poems: first as poems in English and then as translations.
There are few people capable of assessing the latter. Most discussions of Bunting will sooner or later address his approach to translation. One gets the feeling that most English critics feel more at home discussing his treatment of Horace. Latin was, until recently, the common currency of the educated. However there are essays by Persian specialists in both "Man and Poet" and "The Star you Steer By" which are complimentary. In the first, five of Bunting’s translations are assessed almost line by line against their originals, in the second there is a detailed discussion of his translations of Hafiz. The conclusion, that anyone reading Bunting’s translations would go away thinking Hafiz was a poet but Hafiz might not recognise his own poems, needs to be read against Dick Davis’ article “On not translating Hafez[sic]”.
Bunting’s versions proffer one possible way of dealing with the problems that stopped Davis. The latter is quoted on the back of the book, praising the translations.
To answer the question about their standing as poems in English might require the context of that argument with Pound.
The other question, which I'm looking forward to this book illuminating, is what was "Bunting's [version of] Persia." but I suspect that has to be answered by putting these poems back into the context of the rest of his work. The Persian interest carries through from ‘The Spoils’ to “Briggflatts”, where in that most localised of British poems, a Persian story doesn’t seem out of place.
In case you’re intrigued:
Parvin Loloi and Glyn Pursglove 'The Worse for Drink Again': Basil Bunting’s Translations of Hafiz in “The Star you Steer By” and Basil Bunting’s Persian Overdrafts: A commentary in “Basil Bunting Man and Poet”
On Not Translating Hafez by Dick Davis New England Review (1990-)
Vol. 25, No. 1/2, Translation: Double Issue (Winter - Spring, 2004), pp. 310-318 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40244407
Friday, April 6, 2012
Good news
Apparently Bunting's Persia is in the post. Also, my next collection of poems will be published in Australia sometime late this year (2012).
At the moment the first is more exciting.
At the moment the first is more exciting.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)