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
Friday, April 13, 2012
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.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Books. Banning them and promoting them.
Two conflicting views of reading:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/9140869/Dantes-Divine-Comedy-offensive-and-should-be-banned.html
The classic work should be removed from school curricula, according to Gherush 92, a human rights organisation which acts as a consultant to UN bodies on racism and discrimination.
Dante's epic is "offensive and discriminatory" and has no place in a modern classroom, said Valentina Sereni, the group's president.
I almost admire the resounding illogic:
We do not advocate censorship or the burning of books, but we would like it acknowledged, clearly and unambiguously, that in the Divine Comedy there is racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic content. Art cannot be above criticism," Miss Sereni said.
Schoolchildren and university students who studied the work lacked "the filters" to appreciate its historical context and were being fed a poisonous diet of anti-Semitism and racism, the group said.
It called for the Divine Comedy to be removed from schools and universities or at least have its more offensive sections fully explained.
What is calling for the DC to be removed from schools if not advocate [ing] censorship
And what a sad reflection on the Italian educational system if their university students are not capable of appreciating the Divine Comedy is a historical poem not a contemporary piece of reportage?
The real question is why does nonsense like this get publicity? Is anyone really surprised that a Medieval Catholic thought Islam was a heresy, and homosexuality wrong? And does anyone seriously think that reading Dante is going to convert students to his theology?
When we have removed the last book that might offend someone, what will we read? What book is so pure that it will escape all the groups like this? What is the point of reading only what you supposed to agree with? How is that any kind of freedom?
And how trivial this seems in the face of real racism and its ugly institutionalisation in so many cultures. How easy it is to get publicity by attacking a famous book. Does it raise awareness about racism? Not if the comments at the end of the telegraph article are anything to go by.
On the other hand. over at Jeantette Winterson's site (don't visit if you're easily offended by someone with passionately held convictions. The point is you don't need to agree, but if you disagree you owe it to yourself to think through the grounds of your disagreement.)
Winterson should be declared some kind of spiky international treasure. I've heard her talk about the value of literature but her article on the Reader Organisation http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=264&journalism_01_Category=The%20Times
contains this:
We were reading Othello out loud with a group who had never read or seen a Shakespeare play. After a few weeks a woman said ‘ I’ll read Iago this week. I know that bastard. I was married to him.’
Jane’s view is that while we are waking up to healthy eating, we imagine that a healthy mind will just happen on its own. ‘Schools give their pupils absolute rubbish to read because they say some piece of pulp is more relevant to the kids’ lives. Can you imagine someone saying ‘Don’t bother with fruit and veg – fast food is more your style.’
In fact that is exactly what the 2008 National Year of Reading final report did say…’is Mills and Boon to be encouraged or is Shakespeare always better?’ P36
Jane Davies knows that Shakespeare is always better. She was brought up in a pub and found literature the hard way. She’s made herself into the person she wishes she’d met when she was growing up. ‘Richness changes the brain… one sentence is not the same as another. We need complexity. The brain grows on what feeds it.’
I know which attitude to reading I'd hang my hat on. The brain grows on what feeds it. Starve it in the name of "not censorship" and based on twenty five years of teaching I guarantee that you will breed the kind of docile stupidity where racism feeds and breeds.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/9140869/Dantes-Divine-Comedy-offensive-and-should-be-banned.html
The classic work should be removed from school curricula, according to Gherush 92, a human rights organisation which acts as a consultant to UN bodies on racism and discrimination.
Dante's epic is "offensive and discriminatory" and has no place in a modern classroom, said Valentina Sereni, the group's president.
I almost admire the resounding illogic:
We do not advocate censorship or the burning of books, but we would like it acknowledged, clearly and unambiguously, that in the Divine Comedy there is racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic content. Art cannot be above criticism," Miss Sereni said.
Schoolchildren and university students who studied the work lacked "the filters" to appreciate its historical context and were being fed a poisonous diet of anti-Semitism and racism, the group said.
It called for the Divine Comedy to be removed from schools and universities or at least have its more offensive sections fully explained.
What is calling for the DC to be removed from schools if not advocate [ing] censorship
And what a sad reflection on the Italian educational system if their university students are not capable of appreciating the Divine Comedy is a historical poem not a contemporary piece of reportage?
The real question is why does nonsense like this get publicity? Is anyone really surprised that a Medieval Catholic thought Islam was a heresy, and homosexuality wrong? And does anyone seriously think that reading Dante is going to convert students to his theology?
When we have removed the last book that might offend someone, what will we read? What book is so pure that it will escape all the groups like this? What is the point of reading only what you supposed to agree with? How is that any kind of freedom?
And how trivial this seems in the face of real racism and its ugly institutionalisation in so many cultures. How easy it is to get publicity by attacking a famous book. Does it raise awareness about racism? Not if the comments at the end of the telegraph article are anything to go by.
On the other hand. over at Jeantette Winterson's site (don't visit if you're easily offended by someone with passionately held convictions. The point is you don't need to agree, but if you disagree you owe it to yourself to think through the grounds of your disagreement.)
Winterson should be declared some kind of spiky international treasure. I've heard her talk about the value of literature but her article on the Reader Organisation http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=264&journalism_01_Category=The%20Times
contains this:
We were reading Othello out loud with a group who had never read or seen a Shakespeare play. After a few weeks a woman said ‘ I’ll read Iago this week. I know that bastard. I was married to him.’
Jane’s view is that while we are waking up to healthy eating, we imagine that a healthy mind will just happen on its own. ‘Schools give their pupils absolute rubbish to read because they say some piece of pulp is more relevant to the kids’ lives. Can you imagine someone saying ‘Don’t bother with fruit and veg – fast food is more your style.’
In fact that is exactly what the 2008 National Year of Reading final report did say…’is Mills and Boon to be encouraged or is Shakespeare always better?’ P36
Jane Davies knows that Shakespeare is always better. She was brought up in a pub and found literature the hard way. She’s made herself into the person she wishes she’d met when she was growing up. ‘Richness changes the brain… one sentence is not the same as another. We need complexity. The brain grows on what feeds it.’
I know which attitude to reading I'd hang my hat on. The brain grows on what feeds it. Starve it in the name of "not censorship" and based on twenty five years of teaching I guarantee that you will breed the kind of docile stupidity where racism feeds and breeds.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Slán
About ten to four on Saturday
he’d rise to leave, whistling his way
towards the bus stop, cane tapping time
as he rounded the corner, fading.
The ritual involved two silver coins
“for the kids”, left on the mantelpiece,
always like a novel afterthought.
His tidy reticence sometimes unbuttoned
in the smokers fug of family gatherings
venturing out on streams of quiet humour
and gentle verbal lunacy, the way his brothers
had tiptoed in the edges of the sea
before diving under breaking waves.
Masters of digression who defied irrelevance.
Courteous, solid, invisibly familiar.
“Old Men with perfect manners”
Survivors of gaslight, whose father drove
a horse drawn cart. On hand when needed
to help with the necessary, without asking
for praise or credit when the debt was called.
After such a life what memories?
Coming down the steps at Connelly station
The smell and then the noise of Dublin.
He pauses, shakes his head: It was great
the big city, (laughing) anything was big
after Bettystown.
Box Brownie photos
in an old shoe box? The cars date passing decades
as the trousers, hats and hairstyles
move towards the time for his departure.
But this is so untidy. And how he would have hated that.
he’d rise to leave, whistling his way
towards the bus stop, cane tapping time
as he rounded the corner, fading.
The ritual involved two silver coins
“for the kids”, left on the mantelpiece,
always like a novel afterthought.
His tidy reticence sometimes unbuttoned
in the smokers fug of family gatherings
venturing out on streams of quiet humour
and gentle verbal lunacy, the way his brothers
had tiptoed in the edges of the sea
before diving under breaking waves.
Masters of digression who defied irrelevance.
Courteous, solid, invisibly familiar.
“Old Men with perfect manners”
Survivors of gaslight, whose father drove
a horse drawn cart. On hand when needed
to help with the necessary, without asking
for praise or credit when the debt was called.
After such a life what memories?
Coming down the steps at Connelly station
The smell and then the noise of Dublin.
He pauses, shakes his head: It was great
the big city, (laughing) anything was big
after Bettystown.
Box Brownie photos
in an old shoe box? The cars date passing decades
as the trousers, hats and hairstyles
move towards the time for his departure.
But this is so untidy. And how he would have hated that.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Peter Brooks' The Enigma of Identity
In Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (1994) Peter Brooks wrote of “..that desired place where literature and life converge, and where literary criticism becomes the discourse of something anthropologically important-where it teaches us something about the nature of human fiction making, of both the banal everyday kind and the artistic sort” .
It seems like a strikingly old fashioned idea if you’ve been wading through “modern” ‘theoretical’ versions of literary criticism. The idea that literature has something to say about human anything seems dodgy…and yet Brooks’ latest book “The Enigma of Identity” inhabits “that desired place” and does it very convincingly.
His basic premise is that the problem of identity is in some ways the defining characteristic of modernity. On the one hand a deeply personal inward search for self; on the other a self viewed from the outside “as merely the point of intersection of impoverished data”. Identity vs identification, with what Brooks calls The Identity Paradigm as crucially important throughout modern Culture.
Although the book reaches no fixed conclusion other than that, it explores the contours of that paradigm. Brooks writes in a relaxed informal style, which again feels almost old fashioned. A writer with ideas he wants to share. How quaint. Nor do you have to agree with everything he says, or accept everything he claims, but at least in this book, you’re going to understand his argument well enough to feel confident of negotiating your way through it.
Because his basic premise is that identity is something that is created in narration, it is logical that he looks at literary examples. The evidence he uses and the examples he discusses are drawn from fiction, autobiography, law and psychoanalysis. His main sources are Rousseau, Proust and Freud, though along the way he uses Stendhal, Balzac, Conan-Doyle Joyce, Yeats and others. The depth of his critical engagement with Freud’s work provides a ground for the discussion.
But in an odd way, Brooks' treatment invites or suggests a different reading of Freud. Although I suspect he might not agree, it challenges the status of Psychoanalysis as a privileged, non-literary discourse and reinserts Freud and his writing and thinking into what might loosely be described as the humanist tradition. Privilege revoked, Freud becomes another writer, but a far more fascinating provocative writer.
What makes the book so entertaining is its range. Along the way one picks up fascinating bits of information: fingerprinting has been challenged as a reliable source of identification in American courts: narrative theory is inexorably creeping into legal discussions of evidence.
The book is thought provoking and entertaining. And like most good literary discussions an incentive to go back and reread, or read for the first time, some of the authors he uses as examples.
It seems like a strikingly old fashioned idea if you’ve been wading through “modern” ‘theoretical’ versions of literary criticism. The idea that literature has something to say about human anything seems dodgy…and yet Brooks’ latest book “The Enigma of Identity” inhabits “that desired place” and does it very convincingly.
His basic premise is that the problem of identity is in some ways the defining characteristic of modernity. On the one hand a deeply personal inward search for self; on the other a self viewed from the outside “as merely the point of intersection of impoverished data”. Identity vs identification, with what Brooks calls The Identity Paradigm as crucially important throughout modern Culture.
Although the book reaches no fixed conclusion other than that, it explores the contours of that paradigm. Brooks writes in a relaxed informal style, which again feels almost old fashioned. A writer with ideas he wants to share. How quaint. Nor do you have to agree with everything he says, or accept everything he claims, but at least in this book, you’re going to understand his argument well enough to feel confident of negotiating your way through it.
Because his basic premise is that identity is something that is created in narration, it is logical that he looks at literary examples. The evidence he uses and the examples he discusses are drawn from fiction, autobiography, law and psychoanalysis. His main sources are Rousseau, Proust and Freud, though along the way he uses Stendhal, Balzac, Conan-Doyle Joyce, Yeats and others. The depth of his critical engagement with Freud’s work provides a ground for the discussion.
But in an odd way, Brooks' treatment invites or suggests a different reading of Freud. Although I suspect he might not agree, it challenges the status of Psychoanalysis as a privileged, non-literary discourse and reinserts Freud and his writing and thinking into what might loosely be described as the humanist tradition. Privilege revoked, Freud becomes another writer, but a far more fascinating provocative writer.
What makes the book so entertaining is its range. Along the way one picks up fascinating bits of information: fingerprinting has been challenged as a reliable source of identification in American courts: narrative theory is inexorably creeping into legal discussions of evidence.
The book is thought provoking and entertaining. And like most good literary discussions an incentive to go back and reread, or read for the first time, some of the authors he uses as examples.
Friday, February 17, 2012
The car story
Rural Ireland in the 1930s.
Late at night, or early in the morning two brothers walking home from a party, they decide to take the short cut over the fields rather than the long way by the winding cart track someone’s tried to dignify by calling a road.
So over the fields by moonlight, not drunk, perhaps not entirely sober, they come to a place where they have to choose: the short short cut leads directly to their farm through a copse of trees, but the elder brother had seen something in there, once, on his way home late at night, and though he arrived home white as a sheet he never told anyone what he saw and he refuses to go through it. So they take the longer short cut, which takes them over hill and through the fields.
And they hear the unmistakable, (because still rare) sound of a car. Intrigued they follow the noise til they get to the “Top Field”, and there is a car, driving very slowly round the field.
Later, they will argue over the colour: one says white, the other says silver…both agree it was too dark to see the driver or if
there were any passengers.
Spooked, they skirt the field and hurry home. Next morning, over breakfast, they tell their father, who laughs at them. He points out that you couldn’t get a car into the top field, it’s only accessible on foot through the field below it and the only entrance is small and kept locked to keep the cattle and the horses out.
The brothers do their work then agree to go back, and when they return to the Top Field, they realise their father is right. It would be impossible to drive a car into that field.
But when they go closer, they see the unmistakable sign of car tires, making a circle inside the field, with no break for entrance or exit.
Just that image: a pale car, in the dark, slowly circling the field.
They refused to work the Top Field near dark for years afterwards.
Late at night, or early in the morning two brothers walking home from a party, they decide to take the short cut over the fields rather than the long way by the winding cart track someone’s tried to dignify by calling a road.
So over the fields by moonlight, not drunk, perhaps not entirely sober, they come to a place where they have to choose: the short short cut leads directly to their farm through a copse of trees, but the elder brother had seen something in there, once, on his way home late at night, and though he arrived home white as a sheet he never told anyone what he saw and he refuses to go through it. So they take the longer short cut, which takes them over hill and through the fields.
And they hear the unmistakable, (because still rare) sound of a car. Intrigued they follow the noise til they get to the “Top Field”, and there is a car, driving very slowly round the field.
Later, they will argue over the colour: one says white, the other says silver…both agree it was too dark to see the driver or if
there were any passengers.
Spooked, they skirt the field and hurry home. Next morning, over breakfast, they tell their father, who laughs at them. He points out that you couldn’t get a car into the top field, it’s only accessible on foot through the field below it and the only entrance is small and kept locked to keep the cattle and the horses out.
The brothers do their work then agree to go back, and when they return to the Top Field, they realise their father is right. It would be impossible to drive a car into that field.
But when they go closer, they see the unmistakable sign of car tires, making a circle inside the field, with no break for entrance or exit.
Just that image: a pale car, in the dark, slowly circling the field.
They refused to work the Top Field near dark for years afterwards.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Once more round "The Wanderer".
Firstly, let’s get rid of the idea of the poem as an autobiography. Yes there is an I.
Oft ic sceolde āna ūhtna gehwylce
mīne ceare cwīþan. Nis nū cwicra nān
þe ic him mōdsefan mīnne durre
sweotule āsecgan.
But the speaker is a fictional construct: the “I” an empty space into which the performer of the poem steps. The Exeter book is a book to read from, placed on a lectern. The reader steps into the role, becomes the anhaga, who thus magically appears in the place where the performance occurs.
Imagine, urges this text, imagine a man in this situation. Speaking to you.
He has lost everything external that gives his life meaning: his kin, the bonds of fealty that tied him to his lord, the social and legal definitions and protection those afforded, the obligations which shaped his behaviour and gave him finite purpose; he has lost his country, he is adrift in a hostile world looking for context. He cannot even expect to land where his language is spoken and he may be given the chance to explain himself before they kill him.
Who is he?
Take away all those external markers of identification, those makers of social identity, and who is he?
And the poem says that you are all in this situation:, you, sitting there listening, safe in your assumption that the I speaking is not the I listening. Who are you?
What do you ground your answer in? A name (with its assumptions of family: x son of A or Y daughter of B?) A relationship? A history? The name of your village, your kingdom, your Lord? The accumulation of experience that passes as your biography? The world? Heroic actions? Acquisitions: fame, possessions, knowledge, the beauty of made things? The language you speak with its colouring of status and education and regional provenance?
Friends, lords, family, companions: they all die, says the poem. One the wolf took off, another the bird bore away, another was buried in a ditch by his kinsmen. It all rots, rusts fades, crumbles: Even the walls stand ruined, and soon it’s all gone.
And when it’s all gone...and then something odd happens. The poem wants to say; you will find meaning and context in god. That is the lesson and this is what it says. If you do not know God then your life is simply an exile lived in a hostile space. Search for him and find him and you will no longer be alone.
But lurking in the background is a different question. Not a “pagan” answer. (This is a Christian poem. Not a pagan poem topped and tailed with Christian sentiment to make it fit for the cloister, but a very obviously Christian poem.)
Ongietan sceal glēaw hæle hū gǣstlic bið,
þonne ealre þisse worulde wela wēste stondeð,
swā nū missenlīce geond þisne middangeard
winde biwāune weallas stondaþ,
hrīme bihrorene, hrȳðge þā ederas.
gǣstlic :a lot depends on how you translate that one word
The first clause could easily be translated :
A wise man knows how ghastly it is when all this world’s wealth stands waste.
Ghastly: in early use: causing terror in modern use: suggestive of the kind of horror evoked by the sight of death of carnage; horrible, frightful, shocking. (OED)
But you could also translate gǣstlic as ghostly, in the sense of “not of the body”. Peter Baker’s suggestion, by extension, is spiritual. But since I’m not doing an academic translation, how about: liberating.
A wise man knows how liberating it is to stand alone in front of the ruins of whatever he thought made him who he was.
The poem rephrases the question, cutting through the post modern waffle about identity as performative, as self as fractured an unknowable, as constructed by nationality or language and culture.
The last human on the planet, utterly alone, would still be an “I”.
So not what roles do you play, not what labels do you wear, but who or what is this irreducible, unique “I” who stands looking at the ruins?
Oft ic sceolde āna ūhtna gehwylce
mīne ceare cwīþan. Nis nū cwicra nān
þe ic him mōdsefan mīnne durre
sweotule āsecgan.
But the speaker is a fictional construct: the “I” an empty space into which the performer of the poem steps. The Exeter book is a book to read from, placed on a lectern. The reader steps into the role, becomes the anhaga, who thus magically appears in the place where the performance occurs.
Imagine, urges this text, imagine a man in this situation. Speaking to you.
He has lost everything external that gives his life meaning: his kin, the bonds of fealty that tied him to his lord, the social and legal definitions and protection those afforded, the obligations which shaped his behaviour and gave him finite purpose; he has lost his country, he is adrift in a hostile world looking for context. He cannot even expect to land where his language is spoken and he may be given the chance to explain himself before they kill him.
Who is he?
Take away all those external markers of identification, those makers of social identity, and who is he?
And the poem says that you are all in this situation:, you, sitting there listening, safe in your assumption that the I speaking is not the I listening. Who are you?
What do you ground your answer in? A name (with its assumptions of family: x son of A or Y daughter of B?) A relationship? A history? The name of your village, your kingdom, your Lord? The accumulation of experience that passes as your biography? The world? Heroic actions? Acquisitions: fame, possessions, knowledge, the beauty of made things? The language you speak with its colouring of status and education and regional provenance?
Friends, lords, family, companions: they all die, says the poem. One the wolf took off, another the bird bore away, another was buried in a ditch by his kinsmen. It all rots, rusts fades, crumbles: Even the walls stand ruined, and soon it’s all gone.
And when it’s all gone...and then something odd happens. The poem wants to say; you will find meaning and context in god. That is the lesson and this is what it says. If you do not know God then your life is simply an exile lived in a hostile space. Search for him and find him and you will no longer be alone.
But lurking in the background is a different question. Not a “pagan” answer. (This is a Christian poem. Not a pagan poem topped and tailed with Christian sentiment to make it fit for the cloister, but a very obviously Christian poem.)
Ongietan sceal glēaw hæle hū gǣstlic bið,
þonne ealre þisse worulde wela wēste stondeð,
swā nū missenlīce geond þisne middangeard
winde biwāune weallas stondaþ,
hrīme bihrorene, hrȳðge þā ederas.
gǣstlic :a lot depends on how you translate that one word
The first clause could easily be translated :
A wise man knows how ghastly it is when all this world’s wealth stands waste.
Ghastly: in early use: causing terror in modern use: suggestive of the kind of horror evoked by the sight of death of carnage; horrible, frightful, shocking. (OED)
But you could also translate gǣstlic as ghostly, in the sense of “not of the body”. Peter Baker’s suggestion, by extension, is spiritual. But since I’m not doing an academic translation, how about: liberating.
A wise man knows how liberating it is to stand alone in front of the ruins of whatever he thought made him who he was.
The poem rephrases the question, cutting through the post modern waffle about identity as performative, as self as fractured an unknowable, as constructed by nationality or language and culture.
The last human on the planet, utterly alone, would still be an “I”.
So not what roles do you play, not what labels do you wear, but who or what is this irreducible, unique “I” who stands looking at the ruins?
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