English words in Wartime; A fascinating blog...

https://wordsinwartime.wordpress.com

A fascinating study of the effects the First World War had on the English Language.
When I was writing Anhaga I had intended to make Mr. Normal use slang terms from the First World War, but so many of them have passed into general use it seemed pointless.
I wish I'd found this Blog earlier.

Basil Bunting the Complete poems, The problems of Annotation 2a/3

To add to the previous post before completing the sequence.

Literary critics  habitually  use the statements made by poets about poetry or about their own poems as though they were forensic evidence relevant to an enquiry, given under oath by a poet who has not only considered the idea carefully before writing or speaking, but has polished the statement and spoken or written in full knowledge that it will be used, publically, in evidence against him or her for eternity. 

I've done this. 

But the assumption this practice is based on won’t stand scrutiny. People change their minds, they say things off the cuff, they exaggerate, forget, they shape the story for the audience. Letters are written late at night, to old friends, for their amusement, a line is tried out, thrown into silence to see what it sounds like? We all do this.  But apparently Poets are different. Anything a poet says about poetry or poems or poets can be treated as revelation from the mountain. 

Critics plunder the letters and interviews, journal entries and articles for a quote that substantiates their preferred reading of the poem, or illuminates the poem for them and then they ignore the things that don't.

But what happens with the poet who grew up, became well-informed and changed her mind, realizing her youthful enthusiasms were just that: youthful enthusiasm and over confidence. Or the one who worked his way through a sequence of half-formed ideas to a point that was only final because it was the last one he wrote down? What about the gulf between half-guessed theory and the reality of practice? ‘Fear adjectives, they bleed nouns” wrote Bunting. Go scan the first line of Briggflatts. 

Imagine taking Pound’s early statements about poetry and applying them to his own later work. How may interviews are there with Bunting in which he feels obliged, or is asked, to clarify what he might have meant when he made that famous statement about poetry and sound?

We talk about Poetry as though all poems were the same, all poets operating under the same conditions, with the same aims and expectations. Which in itself is stupid, so consider how strange it is when one poet’s ideas, lifted from its context, can be used as some kind of Law of Poetry which is then applied not only to his or her poems which were already written, but to all poems.  

Frost’s “poetry is what gets lost in translation’ is a fine example. His definition of poetry was idiosyncratic. But people with no idea what that definition was will happily quote or misquote his statement about translation as though it were a law on the level of ‘pure water boils at 100 degrees centigrade at sea level’.

It’s rarely that you see a Critic take conflicting statements made by the poet at different times and in different contexts.

One of the many fine things about Richard Burton’s Biography of Bunting, A Strong Song Tows Us, is the way he gives alternative versions of the same event. His handling of  ‘What happened to Bunting in Paris’ is not only a fine piece of biographical juggling, but a salutary warning against the simplicity of finding a useful quote and using it to explain the poem or the poet’s beliefs and attitudes.

To return to that line: I hear Aneurin number the dead,  which I was imagining annotating in the previous post. Sister Mary Forde records Bunting saying Aneirin was someone who ‘ought to be known to all, but probably isn’t, the great Welsh poet of the early Dark Ages who left a splendid poem called Gododdin mourning the men killed at the battle of Catterick by the newly arrived English”. Qtd Forde, 1991 The Poetry of Basil Bunting p. 233

So we should add to our note on Aneirin: ‘Bunting believed Aneirin should be known to all’.  That’s what the words say. Convicted out of his own mouth yer honour?

But was he that silly? Does ‘known to all’ really mean everyone, including Mandarin speakers, Inuit and Basques? Of course not you say, you’re being silly.  

Does it even mean ‘known to all the people present where I’m currently speaking’, or ‘known to people with an interest in my poem’, or does it just mean  ‘There’s this chap Aneirin and I think he’s interesting and you should look him up?’ Or was Bunting being mischievous and name checking a poet he knew most people have not heard of?  Either the statement, taken at its denotative value is nonsensical, or it obviously can’t be taken at face value and its usefulness is questionable.  

And ‘Known’ what does that ‘known’ mean? The indisputable facts about Aneirin could be written on the back of a fag packet. The poem? Is he really suggesting everyone read Y Gododdin? Hands up all those people who have read the whole thing in translation, not just the odd extract? Not many.  Why would you? What's splendid about it? The number of people who have read the whole thing in the original, if you excluded undergraduates slogging through it under duress, could probably be written on the other side of the same fag packet.

This was a small digression. Back to annotations next post.

Tim Kendall on Ivor Gurney

From George Simmers' fine blog  "Great War fiction" a link to Tim Kendall's excellent short documentary on Ivor  Gurney:



Anyone interested in the literature of the Great War should visit Simmers' blog. It's a excellent source of information.

Basil Bunting, The Complete Poems 2/3 the Problems of annotation.

In which he goes down the Rabbit Hole.

(This is the second of three posts about the forthcoming edition of Basil Bunting's Complete Poems.)

Annotations.

More than one of  Anhaga’s blurb writers noticed the acknowledged ghost of Bunting and Briggflatts. For the Blurbs click here 

So Briggflatts is a poem I think I know well, which often alludes to a period of history I’m supposed to know very well.  But I’d struggle to annotate it. One of the reasons I’m looking forward to this new edition is that I want to see how an experienced editor deals with this problem. I’m glad it’s his problem, not mine.

This new ‘complete’ promises to be ‘scholarly’, which means it’s for people who want more than just the poems. At a promised 320 pages (the Amazon.co.uk page currently says 624 which is daunting if correct as number of pages escalates) )  it will add 80 +/- pages to the existing text. I admit that I am a devoted reader of footnotes, endnotes, prefaces, introductions, appendixes, bibliographies and other scholarly apparatus.  Edna Longley’s editing of Edward Thomas raised endnotes to a work of art that at times were more interesting than the poems they claimed to elucidate.  If there is a rabbit hole to go down, I will go in search of the odd, the arcane and the interesting for its own sake.  However, I think it’s worth remembering that Peter Makin said Briggflatts was a poem that ‘should not need annotation but would tolerate it.’ I think he’s right.  

The first danger of annotation is that it can perpetuate the myth that Bunting really was ‘complex and allusive’. Allusive perhaps. And Complex. But complex in the way the carpet pages of the illustrated Gospels he so often invoked are complex patterns, not complex in the way the Cantos are complex blocks of words incomprehensible without notes.

There’s an example of this problem in Peter Makin’s book, Bunting the Shaping of his verse. Quoting the lines from section three:

Banners purple and green flash from its walls

pennant of red, orange blotched on pale blue,

glimmer of ancient arms

to pen and protect mankind.

Makin wrote that Bunting remarked in a letter that these were ‘of course the aurora Borealis’. Makin claims that this was traditionally regarded as a fortification to pen in mankind. The image, according to Makin, is from Lucretius, referring by implication to Epicurus, and that leads to a discussion of the latter and to a conclusion, a page later: ‘Epicurus is both Alexander the courageous quester, and the gentle slow-worm’. 

I have never read Epicurus and have only glanced at Lucretius in translation, having no Latin and less Greek and so this kind of annotation might as well be written in a foreign language. Should I now go and read both in order to understand something I’m reasonably sure I understand anyway?  I admire Makin’s book, but some of his readings of individual poems are far harder to follow than the poems themselves. (See for example his reading of To Mina Loy, Ode 17 in the First book of Odes. P.298ff))

Annotations are based on assumptions that cluster around two centres in opposition to a third.  

The first is the idea of the literary allusion with all its well-known problems. ‘Over there’, outside of the poem, independent of time and knower, is a body of knowledge which the poet explicitly gestures towards for effect.  The facts can be linked to the poem and that linking will be an important contribution towards your understanding of the poem.  

So yes Liam, off to the library with you, read Lucretius and study Epicurus and while you’re at it learn about Slowworms and marble and how to carve a tombstone.  And find a good map to check the route followed by the boy and girl, who apparently didn't go anywhere near Stainmore.

The other cluster groups around the more recent idea of Intertextuality, though different people use the term in different ways. The words of the poem are nothing more than a linguistic portal: you enter through them into language and trace out possible lines of allusions that lead away behind it like the tendrils of a man of war jellyfish in an infinite number of possible directions.  Or if you prefer a more visual metaphor, the poem is like a settlement on a map, seen from above, with all sorts of paths and roads leading away from it to link it to other settlements. 

Choose your metaphor and then if you trace these connections, not pausing to consider whether they’re there or you’re creating them, or Bunting knew they were there, you will eventually end up a long way from the poem.  You won’t know anything more about the poem, but the poem is really just a node where various linguistic strands mingle on the way through so it doesn’t really matter.

You can’t map the limits of a connotation. How do you annotate an allusion?  How do you even decide, once you’ve gone past obvious names, what constitutes a ‘significant allusion’?

Even if you accept, and there’s no reason not to, that there is an set of facts out there about who Cuthbert or Aneurin [sic], or Eric Bloodaxe ‘were’, the ‘objective facts’ especially in the case of Bunting’s early medieval allusions, are never going to be straight forward.

‘Follow the clue patiently’ wrote our poet, ‘and you will understand nothing’.

Take an apparently simple case where I don’t need a footnote. I translated both Aneirin and Taliesn while studying medieval Welsh. 

I hear Aneurin number the dead, his nipped voice.

Aneurin (Aneirin): Semi-legendary ‘Welsh’ or ‘Scottish’ or ‘British’ poet who may have lived in the 6^th Century.  He is credited with the composition of (or some of) Y Goddodin, a poem or series of poems which commemorate a (possibly legendary, possibly historical) massacre in which, after a year’s feasting, a brave group of ‘Welsh’ or ‘British’ warriors rode out from Edinburgh (?) to fight the encroaching ‘English’ and only the poet, or three warriors, or one warrior, or one warrior and the poet, or three warriors and the poet, survived.  The poem is made up of individual verses, often praising a named individual who died in the battle. Aneurin, or the poem attributed to him, certainly ‘number[s] the dead’.  

How much of that knowledge is necessary to illuminate that line? Or how much is your reading of that line improved by that knowledge if you didn’t know who Aneirin was.

Is there a reason why Bunting spells Aneurin with a U?  Should we add that Y Gododdin is famously difficult, if not actually impossible in some places, to translate? Editors from Williams to Jackson and on have been forced to admit that in places their reading of the words in the manuscript is highly educated guess work.  Arguments over its authenticity, authorship and the historical reality of the battle have kept scholars happily busy for years. Or do we need to consider the role of the poet in 6^th Century northern Britain, if we knew it, in order to contrast it with Bunting’s own experiences on his return to Northumbria after his final exit from Persia.

And why is Aneurin’s voice described as ‘nipped’. Perhaps nipped is more important than Aneirin. 

Once you start, where do you stop? And how do you decide what is and isn’t important. The other question, which is the one I’d like to know the answer to, is how much did Bunting know about Aneirin? 

Did he know Early Welsh? He taught himself Persian so it isn’t hard to believe. Or where did he get his translation from if he didn’t. The version I used as an undergraduate was not published until 1969 and its editor, Kenneth Jackson, pointed out that while there had been prior translations some were ‘absurd’ or ‘inadequate’ and the ‘epoch making edition of Sir Ifor Williams’ was published in Welsh.

What did Bunting know? There’s a throwaway comment about Welsh in an interview Bunting gave in October 1982: ‘Somebody wrote to us in Rapallo, I don’t remember who, calling our attention to Welsh, possibly. ..I took it up,  and have since been so greatly interested in cynghaned and so forth, and what you could do with the Welsh Ideas’ (Paideuma 38, p.20). But it’s not hard to look up cynghaned and you don’t need to know any Welsh to understand the idea.

And to what extent would the answer to that question qualify the annotation or illuminate the poem? David Jones used Sir Edward Anywyl’s translations from 1909-1910 to provide the epigraph for each section of In Parenthesis (1937), and much has been made of this. But Jones hadn’t read Y Goddodin until after he’d finished his own book. (See the letter to Harman Grisewood (12^th August 1957) qtd in Robichaud, Paul (2007): Making the Past Present: David Jones, The Middle ages and Modernism p. 58.)

Tangled in here are the associated questions of how much of what we know as ‘objective fact’ was available to the poet at the time of writing and how well the poet knew it, and if there are variations between ‘fact’ and its use in the poem are they significant. (There's another related one: How well does the person doing the annotations know the subject?)

Briggflatts is flatly declarative about Eric Bloodaxe’s career, but the history is nowhere near that straightforward. If you’re interested, watch Michael Wood’s ‘In Search of Eric Bloodaxe’ written and presented over a decade after Briggflatts was written, to see an historian sifting through the information about Eric’s career and what happened to him at the end of it.  https://youtu.be/Mokjnea_enM

Peter Makin, in his discussion of Eric Bloodaxe, relies on a book published in 1977 that obviously wasn’t available to Bunting.  Bunting knew Sir Frank Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon England, (see letter qtd in Makin p. 170) but Stenton makes it clear that whatever happened to Bloodaxe at the end is not clear from the sources. He died on Stainmore, but whether ‘in flight’ or in battle against enemies (unspecified) is not clear.

Would it matter if  Bunting got it wrong? Or did he make some of it up for the glorious roll of: Bloodaxe, king of York/king of Dublin, king of Orkney at the end of part one which becomes, King of Orkney, king of Dublin, twice/ King of York in part two, with its ambiguous dangling ‘twice’. (He was twice King of York, whether or not twice King of Dublin, or even King of Dublin or King of Orkney is not certain).  

Bunting did discuss his use of history and his knowledge of it in his letters though they often sound contradictory. If Burton’s biography is anything to go by, Bunting did love a good story. And the stories seem to have changed to entertain the audience, as they should do, when one is not on oath. Retrospective justifications and explanations by any writer are always suspicious.

The use of letters and recorded interviews to illuminate a poem walks the problematic line outlined by Wimsatt and Beardsley long before Bunting wrote Briggflatts. They might say this is all interesting, but once you import external evidence into a reading of the poem, the reading becomes ‘private’ and its public value diminishes.

I said there are two clusters of assumptions about annotations that are in opposition to the third.  See next post for the third.

Faber's Long Awaited Basil Bunting the Complete Poems. 1/3

I will return to Joseph Campbell, and the footnote poets.  Chronic illness has a way of interrupting plans. However, one is excited.  

(What follows was meant to be a short expression of excitement, but it got out of hand. There were fascinating rabbit holes which just appeared as I was writing it and since I’m not late for any important dates, I gleefully accepted their invitation.  So this ended up in three parts).

Part one:

Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, even further than last Friday, Faber began advertising a hardback edition of Basil Bunting’s Complete Poems, edited by Don Share.

The current Amazon blurb reads:

This is the first critical edition of the complete poems, and offers an accurate text with variants from all printed sources. Don Share annotates Bunting's often complex and allusive verse, with much illuminating quotation from his prose writings, interviews and correspondence. He also examines Bunting's use of sources (including Persian literature and classical mythology), and explores the Northumbrian roots of Bunting's poetic vocabulary and use of dialect.

I preordered mine in April 2010, and at regular intervals for the past five years I have been receiving updates from Amazon, which politely tell me they are still waiting for the book to be published.  

But now, six years later, there is a publication date of 16^th of June and an estimated delivery date.

One is excited.

Why? That’s a good question. Well, there is dearth of things Bunting so anything new is welcome.

The claim that this is the first ‘critical edition’ is perhaps bending the definitions of the word ‘critical’.  There’s a Complete Poems, published by BloodAxe (1999) and edited by Richard Caddel. It contains a section of  ‘uncollected poems’. It’s a paperback and mine is starting to fall apart. It was falling apart five years ago so a hardback at least promises longevity.

There’s a chance that there remain some poems that are not in Caddel’s edition. Richard Burton published at least one previously unpublished piece in his recent biography, A Strong Song Tows Us (2014). The complete Persian poems, as recently published separately by Don Share, Bunting’s Persia (2013), will hopefully be included. There’s always the possibility of drafts, which could be enlightening to those of us interested in ‘how he did it’. 

But there’s also the danger of dredging up pieces that do the poet’s reputation no favors.  I think there’s a good reason why Eliot turned down some of the Persian translations. And Ode 11 in the First Book of Odes ‘Narciss, my numerous cancellations prefer’ expressed Bunting’s strong opinions on the subject, in response, To a Poet who advised me to preserve/my fragments and false starts.

In Part two, the problem of Annotations.

New poem in this month's Rotary Dial.

Another month, another poem in this month's Rotary Dial. Clicking on the link will take you to the journal......April Rotary Dial

The Easter Uprising, Dublin 1916

Between the Lines: a Family Myth*

‘My Grandfather refused to choose

between the Crown and the Republic,

too busy dreaming horseflesh

to care who claimed the soil.

His brothers cared.

One marched behind the Union Jack

to squalid terror on the Somme.

The other shot that hated rag to shreds

in Dublin’s Easter rising.

When visiting they’d set up camp

in separate rooms and send my Grandad

scurrying with messages: to mother

or muted brotherly defiance.

This was his freedom and his punishment:

the right to move between the lines,

the curse of not belonging

in the place that he’d called home.

I have to say I see my Grandad’s point.

The bitter brother hating war

didn’t stop the endless rain

or sell a horse for two bob more:

but then again, I see his brothers’ too

I know their songs, their stories,

know their heroes’ names

and stand, struck numb,

before the things they had to do in France.

So I shuttle like my Grandfather

between contending propositions

knowing that my place will be

between the lines:

remembering it was

Grandad’s house

both sides blew to rubble’.

* please note the inverted commas. I am relaying the story as I was told it. First published in 'I'll Howl Before You Bury Me'/