Writing an Epic poem in the 21st century.

I’ve been reading William G. Carpenter’s Eþandun for a review in the next issue of the Brazen Head. There’s a quote on the inside of the dust jacket that intrigues me. It describes the book as ‘A war epic in the tradition of Homer and Virgil, Eþandun (eth-an-dune) paints Western Christendom in its darkest hour.’

 

Leaving aside the inaccurate hyperbole in the second part of the sentence, I’ve been wondering if it’s possible to write ‘a war epic in the tradition of Homer and Virgil’ in the twenty first century.

 

My tentative answer is probably not, however….

 

David Jones was probably the last person to do it successfully. In Parenthesis works because Jones was describing a war that he’d fought in which his readers had either fought in or knew about and could recognise the accuracy of his descriptions. Secondly, he was able to blur the distinction between autobiography, history and fiction. And thirdly his heroes are believable men in extra-ordinary situations who are raised to the status of legendary figures by the way Jones presents them. Though his language, though his habitual blurring of the past and the present, he was able to raise the story of the historical assault on Mametz wood into the realm of legendary activity, while holding on to the historical event. 

Having said that Private Ball is hardly heroic. He crawls away from the battle field and abandons his weapon. But you can believe in Private Ball in a way you never believe in Achilles.

 

If this sets up the criteria for a successful ‘war epic in the tradition of Homer and Virgil’ then perhaps we could split the question into two parts. Firstly a war epic about a modern war, and secondly one set in the distant past. 

 

A modern war poem in the tradition of Homer or Virgil, assuming such a thing were desirable, could be written by someone who had fought in one of the many wars in the past fifty years. It would be realistic. It’s central character would be an ordinary soldier like Private Ball. It would blur the distinctions between autobiography or report. And then you’d wonder why bother? If it’s a narrative why trade the powerful effects of documentary prose for the inevitable fictive effect of poetry? How would it struggle free from all the films and books that are already issuing from these conflicts to claim the necessary seriousness an epic requires?  

 

Difficult but possible. 

 

For a story set in the past the differences between what Virgil was doing and what a modern poet could do might be too great.

 

His audience were trained in the use of weapons and accepted combat as a natural part of their lives. That might be the crucial difference between a Roman Aristocrat who has fought in the Empire’s wars listening to or reading the final combat in the Aeneid, and a modern audience reading that same passage. 

 

In a patriarchal, military society geared to colonial expansion, warfare might be a fine subject and Aeneas a role model for men. but women have walk on parts in Virgil and Homer, and they are usually dead or grieving at some stage. Today, wars are things most people hope to avoid, not a highly anticipated career opportunity for every young man.  

 

To compound the problem, sword swinging heroes have been conscripted by various fantasy genres. There is something enjoyably adolescent about them. If only your problem were so simple you could pick up a sword and belt it. If only the messy life that confuses and defeats you could be reduced to a simple binary proposition and personified in one opponent you could hack to pieces. If only beautiful members of the desired sex just threw themselves at you because of your ability to wave your phallic symbol around. It’s a nice idea for the frustrated and lonely adolescent lurking in everyone. But its hopelessly simplified and unrealistic. Moreover, familiarity with such fantasy exerts a gravitational pull on what was once meant to be taken seriously. 

 

Perhaps the idea of the hero who wins a war or changes history on his own has always been unrealistic. Even In the first century AD Roman armies were victorious because of the ruthless discipline belted into their infantry during training. But for that original audience of Homer and Virgil, the past was also a very different place to their own present: gods interacted with humans while larger than life heroes stalked about the earth. 

 

In the 21^st century we split History, which is (hopefully) evidence based and factual, from a thing called Fiction which is a culturally sanctioned form of lying. The split is very recent, certainly post-medieval. By a process of historical evolution poetry now belongs firmly in the category of fictive literature. It’s almost impossible for a modern reader not to read the Aeneid as fiction; a high-class Roman Marvel Comic with suited superheroes and bickering gods. The suspension of disbelief we’ve learnt from reading and watching fiction automatically takes over and the effect is amplified when we see the lines don’t go all the way to the right hand margin.

 

So is the essential problem that Virgil and Homer weren’t writing fiction? 

 

Today, anyone attempting a story set in the past has to assume that the poem will be treated as fictive. No matter how accurate the details, the minute King Athelstan speaks to his troops before Brunnaburgh, the story has slid into the comfortable and comforting world of make believe. 

 

No one to day has donned armour, mounted a horse and charged a line of archers. No one has stood his ground behind a line of shields while a bunch of sword whirling Britons tried to take his head off. There’s not much evidence to tell us what it was like, either. As you go back in time, first person accounts of battle become non-existent and descriptions of battle become increasingly rare until they disappear. They are almost non-existent for pre-Conquest England.  

 

If you stay this side of 1800, where there are eyewitness accounts and increasing amounts of first-hand information to draw on, than the days of the individual hero are already long gone and war is a brutal, increasingly mechanised, increasingly impersonal affair which essentially redefined heroism. 

 

So my tentative answer is I don’t know how anyone could overcome the problems inherent in the fictive nature of the enterprise. To write about a modern war in narrative poetry would fictionalise the reading experience and inevitably mute the effect. A poem telling a story set in the more distant past is inevitably an historical novel written in short lines. It might be historically accurate, but focus it on warfare, and it’s going to read like a fantasy novel.

 

Publication in Long Poem Magazine.

 http://longpoemmagazine.org.uk/issues/issue-twenty-five/

Delighted to be in this. The first chapter of the story of Vortigern and Hengist's daughter which follows on from A Presentment of Englishry. 

The second chapter is up at  https://brazen-head.org/2021/02/28/britannia-in-peril-an-extract-from-an-epic-of-britain/

The story begins with the nameless narrator being sold. His new master gives him instructions:

Come! I promise, you will not be harmed. 

Of course, he lied. Behind that door 

was something worse than many kinds of death.

But the spears for emphasis, 

so I followed him inside.

 

The door hanging fell and cut the light behind us.

A single room, walls heavy with dark tapestries,

bright embroidery flicking the firelight.

A single loom, a bed behind a curtain,

a tripod burning something fragrant.

A hag, slack-jowled and toothless

looked up from her spindle, unconcerned

and a woman, in profile by the central hearth

rose. I blinked.  Words 

acknowledging their limitations disappeared. 

 

This is my daughter. You will teach her;

British, Latin, you were a Christian, you will 

explain your god. The list had been rehearsed.

Though he spoke like a man treading a considered path,

scared as I was, his ambition seemed a little crazed. 

 

You will sing her the songs of your people.

We sail for Britain in the spring.

If you live that long, I will take you with me.

Until then you will teach my daughter. 

She will be a queen; my grandsons will be Kings.

 

Repeat what I just said.

I did but failed to reproduce his certainty. 

 

Three readings from 'A Presentment of Englishry'.

Three readings from 'A Presentment of Englishry' on youtube, courtesy of Derek Turner's Brazen Head. You can read the second chapter of the sequel at https://brazen-head.org/2021/02/28/britannia-in-peril-an-extract-from-an-epic-of-britain/

https://youtu.be/ZR8TZy2cmYI

Vortigern in London

Chapter two of my version of the story of Vortigern is up at the Brazen head (link below) 

Chapter one will appear in the next issue (#25) of  Long poem Magazine. 

The story of Vortigern follows on from where A Presentment of Englishry (2019) left off...

https://brazen-head.org/2021/02/28/britannia-in-peril-an-extract-from-an-epic-of-britain/

Review of Harry Gilonis' 'Isolated in Aber Cuawg', Oyster Catcher Press 2020

This review first appeared on the Brazen-head 

https://brazen-head.org/2021/02/22/rewriting-the-middle-ages/ 

Isolated in Aber Cuawg

Harry Gilonis, Oystercatcher press. 2020. 19 pages.

 

 ‘Claf Abercuawg’ is a Welsh poem composed perhaps in the ninth century. Claf, as a noun means a sick person, a patient or a leper[i]. Abercuawg is an area of North Wales. There is an /I/ who looks out at the landscape and speaks about it and his isolation. 

 

This pamphlet contains an English translation of thirty two, three line stanzas, a short introductory essay, placed significantly after the poem, and some textual notes. The essay is a concise, necessary  introduction to the differences between this poem and a modern English one. The pamphlet is visually attractive, robust enough to handle the rough usage its received, and overall very good value for money. 

 

The opening line announces the poem’s difference:

 

My mind’s requirement, to be sat atop a hill-.

 

In the 1970s Glyn Williams translated this as:

 

To sit high on a hill is the wish of my heart[ii]

 

Superficially, Williams sounds more natural, and perhaps immediately preferable. But the differences in word choice and order reveals the strength of GIlonis’ translation. 

 

Generally[iii], the contemporary trend seems to be to assume that the people of the Middle Ages were modern people in funny clothes, suffering from bad ideologies and severe technological deprivation. The consequences of such assumptions are numerous and they are all bad. The logic runs that because these people are us, then their stories can be presented as we think they should have been written, or would have been written if the original composers weren’t so clumsy. And because they are ‘like us’ then they should have known better. Therefore the things modern observers find reprehensible in Medieval behaviour and ideals can be easily condemned and preferably erased, because both are easier than trying to understand the essential alterity of the period. 

 

The most invidious and invisible form of this domestication is when a translator surreptitiously converts a medieval text so it operates to modern, Post-Romantic assumptions of how poems should function, and how a modern person would behave or think in that situation. 

 

Gilonis, to his credit, avoids these traps. Ironically, part of the effectiveness of this translation lies in what he hasn’t done. ‘My Mind’s requirement’ does not sound like modern English. But it’s grammatical and makes sense. He walks the fine line between respecting the alterity of the original and turning the poem into something that works in English. He does this without domesticating the original, or turning it into a museum piece. 

 

The translation, as translation, can be compared with different translations. Here’s three versions of the last verse, Gilonis’ is the third.  

 

Jenny Rowland  [iv]

 

The Leper was a squire; he was a bold warrior

In the court of the King

May God be kind to the outcast.

 

Joseph P. Clancy[v]

 

A youth was Leprous; once a bold leader

In the royal palace.

God be kind to the outcast.

 

Gilonis

 

Isolated, once a warrior, once a champion, daring

Once in the court of a king

May God be kind to the outcast.

 

 

I prefer Gilonis’ version, but the key objective difference is the disappearance of ‘Leper’. While Jenny Rowlands goes to some length to show how the speaker of the poem is indeed a leper, she’s also aware that it is not the only option (pp.191-193). The original poem would not have excluded other interpretations. As she points out, the solitary figure in a hostile landscape, well-known to readers of Old English, is as much a symbol of life on earth (with or without God) as a literal character. But translating claf as ‘leper’ would be to choose one option and for the reader of the translation to limit those other interpretations. It also throws the poem into the distance. 

 

Gilonis defends his decision not to translate claf as leper in his notes. The poem isn’t distanced from the modern British or American reader and the other possible readings of the text remain open. 

 

Obviously the idea of someone isolated due to illness has an immediate contemporary relevance. The temptation would be to push the point: the use of deliberate anachronisms being a popular technique. Gilonis writes; ‘The resonances, in 2020, don’t need ramming home’ (p10).  In 2020 ‘isolated’ was such a loaded word it should resonate without ventilators or prayers for vaccines turning up in the translation.

 

One of the strangest features of this poem is that, as in Old English poetry at this period, the speaking /I/ is an empty space anyone reading the poem can step into. It’s merely a subject position, not an historical or fictional character, nor the product of autobiography. This is emphatically not a dramatic monologue in the Browning/Tennyson tradition, nor an /I/ in the tradition of English poetry from Wyatt onwards. While some speakers in the ‘Saga poems’ of Medieval Wales are characters in a fuller story, the speaker in this one exists only in this poem. 

 

Some Early Welsh verse, like this one, simply don’t operate to the rules we assume govern modern poetry in English. There’s no clearly developed progression from an opening to an ending. There’s no ‘internal coherence’. The poems operate to their own rules, and those rules, leaving aside the complicated metrics, simply aren’t post Renaissance or Classically inflected English. There is description of landscape, but whether it’s meant to evoke the speaker’s mood or describe a place is questionable, and which ever answer you pick in one instance will be undermined in another. 

 

Description is jammed against statement: but the relation of the two seems marginal, and the statements, as in the second line below, might be gnomic wisdom or just statements of fact. Either way their relevance is never obvious.:

 

Bright are the tops of the valleys; long the small hours.

Expertise is always praised.

Am I not to be granted the sleep due to the ill?

 

Temporally the poem hops around, sometimes in the same stanza. The overall effect is that the poem is swirling, but the swirl isn’t spiralling to any conclusion, just to the last word, where the poem stops. Gwyn Williams’ only translated ten of the thirty two verse, but the ’extraction’ (his term) doesn’t seem to damage the poem in any way.

 

For general readers of English poetry,  the pragmatic value of early medieval poetry, treated honestly as it is here, lies in the challenge it makes to the learnt reading practices of the school room and the lecture hall. A poem like this one, that obviously works, but not to ‘our’ rules, is a confrontation with the limits of our reading practice, and our assumptions about what a poem is, does, and can be. 

 

This difference between what worked for a medieval Welsh audience and what a modern reader of poems expects gives the translation another level of interest. The original might have been written over a thousand years ago, but this translation wouldn’t be out of place in something like Harriet Tarlo’s  2011 anthology of ‘Radical Landscape poetry’[vi].  

 

As such, it’s a blunt reminder that any claims made by ‘Avant Garde’, ‘Experimentalist’ or ‘Postmodern’ poets in the twenty first century for the ‘innovative’ or  ‘ground breaking novelty’ of their work is undermined, if not flatly contradicted, by the history of poetry. Whatever ‘it’ is, ‘it’ has usually been done before. Knowing this renders the familiar excuse for writing abstruse nonsense; ‘But it hasn’t been done before’ obsolete, and allows readers to focus on the question ‘Is it good’. 

 

 

---

[i] http://geiriadur.ac.uk/gpc/gpc.html

[ii] Welsh Poems Sixth Century to 1600, Faber and faber 1973. p.23. 

[iii] ‘Generally’ in terms of popular culture, films, books, and public discussions. There are exceptions. 

[iv] Early Welsh Saga Poetry: a study and edition of the Englynion,  D. Brewer 1990. p. 497. This is the essential encyclopaedic text, commentary, study and translation of these poems. Rowland makes no claim for her translations as ‘literature’. 

[v] The Earliest Welsh Poetry, Macmillan 1970.  p.94 Clancy reverses the order of the last two verses so this is the penultimate in his translation. 

[vi] The Ground Aslant. An anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry, Shearsman, 2011. 

Review of Nicholas J Higham's King Arthur: the Making of the Legend.

 

My review of Nicholas Higham's King Arthur is online at The Brazen Head.

https://brazen-head.org/2020/12/15/the-once-and-un-killable-king/

Carmilla 2020 or 'The Governess was Repressed'

Carmilla 2020

 

In 1970 Hammer released a film called ‘The Vampire Lovers’. It was their version of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s iconic 19^th century vampire story, Carmilla.  It played with the narrative’s sequence, making Marcella/Carmilla’s vampiric character too obvious from the start.  While its casting was undoubtedly strange, and Carmilla is far more predatory in an indiscriminate way than she is in the story, it stuck reasonably closely to the plot and can be watched as a reading of the story. Hammer did make the obvious mistake of thinking two topless women in a room with no men was box office gold. 

 

This 2020 film version claims to be based on Le Fanu’s story, it also seems to think that two young women kissing each other is art house gold, but it has so little in common with what Le Fanu wrote that it’s difficult to see why they bothered to call it Carmilla.

 

If you know Le Fanu’s little masterpiece, a plot summary of the 2020 film is all you need. (You can use the Carmilla/Le fanu links in the side bar or below to read about both Le Fanu and Hammer's version.)

 

Laura is a disconnected fifteen year old living in a big house in a generic somewhere, with only her father, a governess who likes to strap up her arm to stop her using her left hand, and a generic (I’m guessing) west Indian maid. She is looking forward to a visit from a friend. She hears the friend is ill and can’t come. The Governess is creepy and lingers a little too closely over her charge when she’s in bed.

 

A carriage crashes. The driver is killed but a young girl is saved and brought into the house. She has lost her memory. Laura is fascinated and the two girls are physically attracted to each other. The governess interrupts them rolling passionately on the floor. 

 

The governess, having given Carmilla a good beating, convinces the local doctor that Carmilla is a Vampire. Her evidence is so flimsy it’s laughable. She found a book about vampires in the wreckage of the carriage, no one knows who the girl is and girls are getting sick . Oh and a dog barked at her….it sounds like we’ve strayed into The Turn of the Screw. Her attempts to convince the doctor includes an awkward sexual encounter, but whether this is just repression breaking loose or her way of making him take her side against Carmilla is hard to tell. Neither of them seem to be having any fun. 

 

The girls escape and drift away from the house, but not too far. The Governess, the doctor and a random estate worker easily track them down. They slam a stake through Carmilla’s heart. The father turns up and carries Laura away. He does this for a very long time. Then we see Laura standing by a pond throwing stones in the water for a very long time and that’s the end of the very long, very slow story. 

 

The film makers have stripped out everything that makes Le Fanu’s story what it is. Whatever was subtle and ambiguous has gone; it was gone from the Hammer film too, but in this film they have replaced it with close up shots of insects and pictures of Laura wandering in the grounds, or Laura running in the grounds with Carmilla. 

 

What’s most surprising is that Carmilla is not a vampire in this film. Why you’d do this to the story is baffling. In both Hammer’s version and this one, the sexual aspect is amplified at the cost of the story. More effort goes in to building sexual tension between the two girls than to telling any kind of story. And on and on. 

 

If they had called this Laura and the Stranger…or The Lovers or The Governess was Repressed it would at least have been honest and would have stood or fallen on its own merits as a story about repression and adolescent fantasy. It wouldn’t have been all that interesting or convincing. 

But as a version of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, it’s just crass.

 

It’s an art house movie without art.