Rough Spun to Close Weave: the cover

To be launched at the AAWP Conference in Geelong this November, and available from Ginninderra Press: http://www.ginninderrapress.com.au/

( Originally if you searched for Guilar on their website the search engine asked if you were looking for "guilt". The search will now take you to the book.) 

Final Proofs of Rough Spun to Close Weave are done.

In which the Critics In My Head review the final proofs of my New Book:

He [Winnie the Pooh] sang it like that, which is much the best way of singing it, and when he had finished, he waited for Piglet to say that, of all the outdoor hums for Snowy weather he had ever heard, this was the best. And after thinking the matter out carefully, Piglet said:

“Pooh,” he said solemnly, ”It isn’t the toes so much as the ears”.

To which BB replied quoting Briggflatts part two:

“It tastes good, garlic and salt in it,

with the half-sweet white wine of Orvieto

on scanty grass under great trees

where the ramparts cuddle Lucca.

It sounds right, spoken on the ridge

between marine olives and hillside

blue figs, under the breeze fresh

with pollen of Apennine sage.

It feels soft, weed thick in the cave

and the smooth wet riddance of Antonietta’s

bathing suit, mouth ajar for

submarine Amalfitan kisses.

It looks well on the page, but never

well enough. Something is lost

when wind, sun, sea upbraid

justly an unconvinced deserter.”

Pooh began to feel a little more comfortable, because when you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and other people look at it

New Book of Poems: Rough Spun To Close Weave

My next collection of poems, called Rough Spun To Close Weave, will be published at the end of November by Ginninderra press and will be available from their website.

http://www.ginninderrapress.com.au/

More later, when I'm not in proof-reading mode. If google didn't make it so easy,  I'd offer a prize to the first person who could identify the source of the title.  But it does, so I won't.

Bunting's Persia: Bunting's Firdosi and Davis' Ferdowsi

I’ve been comparing Bunting’s Firdosi with Davis’s Ferdowsi.  This is not about ‘accuracy ‘or ‘faithfulness’, just about differences between the two translations . I don’t read Persian.  I like both versions.  Davis’ prose is clear and when he breaks into rhyming couplets he handles them elegantly (Pope and Dryden would be proud.) But Bunting is obviously the focus of this.

The story so far. (see previous posts)

1)   We know that Pound and Bunting disagreed over the results of Bunting’s translations of the ‘Shanemeh’.

2)   It’s hard to know how much influence Pound’s highly contentious attitudes towards translation had on BB.  It is possible to infer that they were significant on the following grounds: Bunting thought Pound’s scandalous Sextus P one of the two great poems of the century.  He was not scandalised by Pound’s “mistakes” but obviously invigorated by them.  His ‘Villon’ contains one magnificent passage that is a translation of,  but in no way a formal equivalence translation, of sections of a Villon poem.  His later translations  of Horace and Hafez are noticeably ‘Poundian’.

3)    My subjective experience of reading the two versions it that while Davis’ reads like a story told about something that happened a long time ago, Bunting’s feels more like an eyewitness account.  Davis’ narrator is a mostly invisible presence whose comments on the action tend to be ‘religious’ or moral: ‘And you who murder Kings, who live in fear/Learn from these criminals whose tale you hear'.   Bunting’s sounds like someone who is retelling what he’s seen and overheard, not a participant but an observer with an opinion, sometimes impatient, sometimes baffled.  The syntax invokes a speaker, and an oral performance: “ No impression on Tur. Not gratified. Did not want peace.” Maybe I’ve just listened to too many recordings of Bunting.

My other experience of reading  is that Bunting’s telling moves more swiftly, sometimes at the expense of clarity. At times Davis’ clearly wins in the clarity stakes:

DD: ‘Feraydun was told of the envoy’s arrival and had the curtain drawn back so the horse could enter.’

BB: “Watchful sentinels told the Great King of his coming/ A dignified Chamberlain bade lift the curtain.” where ‘bade’ seems awkward.

Sometimes Davis’  prose seems preferable. When the brothers start plotting:

DD: ..The two brothers , one from China and the other from the West, met together and mingled poison with their honey, discussing how they should act

BB:  Fate was stripped stark. The brothers started/From Rome and China with honeyed poison/met, discussed policy public and private.

There’s a loss in BB’s “honeyed Poison” compared with “mingled poison with their honey”

4)  Bunting reduces: he uses three broad techniques I’ll call omission, condensation and summary and accept they are very vague terms. So roughly if you have fifty words and cut them to ten, but the ten you’re left with were in the original, you condense.  Summarising is taking that fifty words and saying what’s in them as briefly as you can.

a.     Omissions…Bunting cuts when he can, but he doesn’t alter the sequence of events. As in a medieval English poem like Lawman’s 'Brut',  the messenger is called, the message is given, the messenger rides, is received, delivers his message and we learn how the message is received.  A modern film would simply have the messenger give the message,  in a medieval  text the pattern reveals the characters of those involved. When Faridun receives his son’s abusive message, his treatment of the messenger tells us a great deal about him (to his credit).  Character is revealed by speech and action and by the comparisons such formal patterning allow. One could assume that part of Bunting’s attraction to this story is the way it fits with his own poetics of direct presentation.

b.     Condensation. Not surprisingly Bunting condenses and with the qualification noted above it usually is an improvement. After all this was the man who wrote in ‘I Suggest’: “ 6. Cut out every word you dare. 7. Do it again week later, and again”,  who said that what he most learnt from Pound was “How to chop out the rot”.  In Davis the envoy sees Feraydun’s face: “The envoy saw that Feraydun’s face filled all eyes and hearts; that he was like a cypress in stature, that his visage was like the sun’s, and his hair was like white camphor about a red rose; his lips were all smiles, his gaze was modest and welcoming , kingly words adorned his lips.”  In Bunting, “His glance lit on Faridun’s form and was held/cypress tall, ruddy face, rosy cheek, hair like the vine/smiling , modest, royally gentle voice” .

c.      Summary. This is one of the ways I think he gives his narrator his voice.

BB: Iraj saw them and ran to meet them affectionately/received them in his tent, but their talk/was nothing but Why and Wherefore..

Where the “why and wherefore” both summarises and dismisses the conversation.

5)   Bunting’s version tends towards specific visual images.

DD:  “Let neither wind nor swirling dust delay your journey as you hasten on your way”

BB: “Dont hang an arse/don’t let your own dust overtake you/nor the wind either”. The idea of the rider going so fast that his own dust can’t catch him seems to be an advance on “don’t let dust delay your journey.”

6)   As the above quote shows, Bunting’s diction tends towards what used to be euphemistically called “demotic”, and this is another way he gives his narrator his character.  Word choice suggests Judgement: The bothers are ‘ruffians’, their message is “surly”  as does his syntax: “Tur heard. Made no answer.”

7)   The poem does not show much evidence of his usual emphasis on sound. His letter to Pound (see previous posts) showed he knew this, but for a man who was adamant that poetry was sound there’s not a lot happening here . At times the terse syntax approaches epigram and ghosts a memory of Anglo-Saxon: “Fate was stripped Stark”.  But some of the lines are so flat it’s possible to see why Pound was unimpressed. Bunting had already written ‘Villon’ and ‘I am agog for Foam’. The same man who wrote the latter and ”Remember imbeciles and wits..etc’’ in ‘Villon’ was now writing: ”I am going to write with an aching heart/on the off chance it may bring you home safe and sound/for I have no life but in you”. The absence of his characteristic sound/rhythm architecture is quite dramatic.

8)   And it’s not simply a problem of narrative. Compare this to the first two Cantos of Pound’s,  which are narrative, and which swing and sing.  Whatever the virtues of Bunting’s Ferdowsi, and I obviously think there are many,  I think it’s fair to say that judged by his own standards and previous achievements,  Bunting’s translation doesn’t rise to Pound’s challenge that a translation should work as a modern poem in its own right.  Although that leaves the main question begging…how do you write a narrative poem with Bunting’s poetics?

Ezra Pound and Poetic Value #2

One of the gains of “Literary theory” over the past fifty years has been the fact that it’s now easier to talk about the contingency of literary value. This may be no more than the fact that at any given time of place the terms poet and poem can mean radically different things and the qualities that define a poet or a poem as good vary widely and wildly. This doesn’t mean that there is no value: in any given period some people do “it” better than others whatever ‘it’ is and how ever you define ‘better’.

What Ezra Pound’s career seems to prove is that value is so contingent, so little tied into anything objective, that it can be manipulated.

It’s worth pointing out that Pound would probably have disagreed with this. From his writings, the ABC, his essays, he seems to have believed that Poetic Quality was a trans historical standard which could be identified by someone like himself even if the poem was written a thousand years ago in a language he didn’t know very well. And because of this he was able to make whacky statements about the cultural value of poetry and the political and historical importance of the poet.  

Strategy.

Set yourself up as an expert. Define and then proclaim your expertise.  It helps if you are either an expert on the obscure and unknown (In Pound’s case Provencal poetry) or a generalist. If the former, you’re unlikely to have to deal with criticism, and if you do it is likely to be so specialized that no one else will understand it.  If the latter, you will always be vulnerable to the specialist, but you can respond by attacking the specialist where he or she is most vulnerable: his or her lack of wider knowledge.

Make yourself important as a an arbiter of taste and as a discoverer and promoter of new talent …It helps if you have a good track record, and Pound certainly did.

Defend yourself by attacking your critics where they are most vulnerable. So in the case of translation when the specialists say: ‘You don’t understand translation, your Latin is not good’, Pound responds with  “I say you don’t understand poetry.  I am a poet, only a poet really understands poetry and you have misunderstood Propertius”.

Write enough straightforward, good poetry to establish yourself. Then do what you want but create poems that allow for critical discussion. To the uneducated the Cantos are a sprawling mess and mostly very very tedious.  To the scholar they are a site where issues of sexuality, ideology and genre are in play but in play in such a way that’s it’s impossible to come up with a definitive description. This allows for critical disagreement.  The institutional demands of academic scholarship, the need to publish, can be fed by the cantos. And being a “Poundian” could be a badge of the elect. Anyone can fall in love with Yeats’ poems; it takes much more something to love Pound’s.  Create the possibility of a small group of cognoscenti  whose arcane religion (Your poetry) excludes lesser beings.   To the scholar the Cantos question the boundaries of poetry; to the uneducated they contain great tedious swathes of second hand prose.

It takes courage or childish naivety to say the emperor is unclothed, but attack your critics at their most vulnerable point: their fear that you really do know more than they do. Hammer your claim that you know more about poetry than anyone else, and then dare anyone to say you are not a genius. Exploit the lurking fear that the critic doesn’t understand and in condemning you he or she is parading his or her own ignorance.  Exploit this. Don’t dare them to say you are naked, tell them that you are naked and only a genius can understand the nudity you have defined on your own, invented terms.  

And if you do all this you can manipulate poetic value in your own lifetime.

If,

And perhaps only if, you can also produce poetry that people who have nothing to gain from its recognition will accept as great and interesting poetry. Anyone who thinks Pound was a charlatan is forced to confront the fact that writers like Bunting and Eliot thought he was worthy of their critical attention and respect.

And that doesn’t even begin to get at the complexity of the issue.  

Ezra Pound and Poetic value

Pound fascinates me, probably for the wrong reasons. It’s as if an outsider gate crashed the emperor’s parade, convinced a small but powerful portion of the crowd he was the real emperor, and the fact that he was naked, and knew that he was naked, and knew more about nudity than anyone else and was proud of being naked, was proof of his right to be the emperor and only those who could understood nakedness on his terms would be saved and those that didn’t or couldn't or wouldn't were simply confessing to their own stupidity.

As Author Function the sign “Ezra Pound” is unstable.  For some it equals “Genius” for others “Fraud” for others “Lunatic anti-Semitic fascist” .  But you can read the poems of Yeats or Eliot or Bunting and come to a conclusion about their abilities as a poet from their poems. Their biographies and reputations seem  irrelevant. With Pound, however,  it’s almost as if you have to decide first; genius or fraud and then read the poems in the light of that decision because it seems impossible to do it the other way round.

Which suggests something about the way the literary critical field can work that is so very disturbing it’s easier not to think about it.

The Uses of Poetry

In her readable (and impressive) 'Graven with images’ Nicola Shulman gives a biography not of Sir Thomas Wyatt, but of his poems.  She points out that his poems have survived their critical dismissal for the simple reason that they were written to be used and still can be used as they were intended.  A Wyatt poem offers the reader the shock of recognition and the possibility of appropriation: the words describe a situation, and offer the reader a vocabulary for it. As she shows, this is probably why the  poems were probably written. To be used. By people other than the poet. 

She writes:

Though it is not approved for serious readers to seek their own experience in literature, self-recognition is what most people want out of love poetry, in Wyatt they find it directly.(p.16)

I suspect for most people outside the academy, this is still the dominant use of all poetry.  I suspect the self-congratulatory myth that serious readers are above this is one of the reasons so much poetry goes unread and so many academic discussions of poetry sound so fatuous.