I will not go into how I feel

From Jorge Luis Borges' great story 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius':

Some days before, he had received from Brazil a stamped, registered package. It was a book, an octavo volume. Ashe left it in the bar where, months later, I found it. I began to leaf through it and felt a sudden curious lightheadedness, which I will not go into, since this is the story, not of my particular emotions, but of Uqbar and Tlön and Orbis Tertius.

There's a lesson here for beginning writers, who on the whole always do stop and go into their or their characters' emotions instead of remaining disciplined and focused on the story they have chosen. Except that Borges, in his brazen way, goes on in the very next sentence:

In the Islamic world, there is one night, called the Night of Nights, on which the secret gates of the sky open wide and the water in the water jugs tastes sweeter; if those gates were to open, I would not feel what I felt that afternoon.

You can break any rule, even one you've just put forward, if you do it well...

Edward Lear, il miglior fabbro

My favourite Edward Lear poem:

The Akond of Swat

Who, or why, or which, or what,
Is the Akond of SWAT?

Is he tall or short, or dark or fair?
Does he sit on a stool or a sofa or a chair,
–––or SQUAT,
The Akond of Swat?

Is he wise or foolish, young or old?
Does he drink his soup and his coffee cold,
–––or HOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he sing or whistle, jabber or talk,
And when riding abroad does he gallop or walk
–––or TROT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he wear a turban, a fez, or a hat?
Does he sleep on a mattress, a bed, or a mat,
–––or COT,
The Akond of Swat?

When he writes a copy in round-hand size,
Does he cross his T's and finish his I's
–––with a DOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Can he write a letter concisely clear
Without a speck or a smudge or smear
–––or BLOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Do his people like him extremely well?
Or do they, whenever they can, rebel,
–––or PLOT,
At the Akond of Swat?

If he catches them then, either old or young,
Does he have them chopped in pieces or hung,
–––or SHOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Do his people prig in the lanes or park?
Or even at times, when days are dark,
–––GAROTTE,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he study the wants of his own dominion?
Or doesn't he care for public opinion
–––a JOT,
The Akond of Swat?

To amuse his mind do his people show him
Pictures, or any one's last new poem,
–––or WHAT,
For the Akond of Swat?

At night if he suddenly screams and wakes,
Do they bring him only a few small cakes,
–––or a LOT,
For the Akond of Swat?

Does he live on turnips, tea, or tripe?
Does he like his shawl to be marked with a stripe,
–––or a DOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he like to lie on his back in a boat
Like the lady who lived in that isle remote,
–––SHALLOTT,
The Akond of Swat?

Is he quiet, or always making a fuss?
Is his steward a Swiss or a Swede or Russ,
–––or a SCOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does like to sit by the calm blue wave?
Or to sleep and snore in a dark green cave,
–––or a GROTT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he drink small beer from a silver jug?
Or a bowl? or a glass? or a cup? or a mug?
–––or a POT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he beat his wife with a gold-topped pipe,
When she let the gooseberries grow too ripe,
–––or ROT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he wear a white tie when he dines with friends,
And tie it neat in a bow with ends,
–––or a KNOT.
The Akond of Swat?

Does he like new cream, and hate mince-pies?
When he looks at the sun does he wink his eyes,
–––or NOT,
The Akond of Swat?

Does he teach his subjects to roast and bake?
Does he sail about on an inland lake
–––in a YACHT,
The Akond of Swat?

Some one, or nobody, knows I wot
Who or which or why or what
Is the Akond of Swat?

[Lear's] Note: For the existence of this potentate see Indian newspapers, passim. The proper way to read the verses is to make an immense emphasis on the monosyllabic rhymes, which indeed ought to be shouted out by a chorus.

The poem's orientalism (the mysterious Akond's luxury and despotism don't indicate that he might really have been a Muslim saint) and casual wife-beating mark it as very much late-Victorian nonsense. But that's OK – sanitised nonsense starts to approach dull old sense. And it shows how even nonsense can be read for the values of the culture it is part of.

Lear's delight in formal play is evident with the outrageous stanza shape – a rhymed couplet of metrically varied tetrameter followed by a rhymed couplet consisting of a monometer followed by a dimeter. Here its comic potential is mined, but I wonder if it could also be turned to non-nonsensical uses. The formality would always be ostentatious, but the way the rhymes fall over one another, with that insistent repetition in the last line, is strange and interesting. Lear wasn't just goofing around.

Bennett again

Following my eulogistic post on Arnold Bennett a while back I should probably say that I'm halfway through Hilda Lessways, the second novel in the Clayhanger trilogy, and it's, er, fairly rubbish. Is it that Bennett can't write from a woman's perspective? Possibly. But I also notice that while Clayhanger looked at the world from an architectural and public perspective, Hilda Lessways focuses on personal (usually abstract) emotions and domestic matters.

Maybe this is a deliberate strategy, the marrying of form to content. But Bennett's strength is his settings, the depiction of the social world. Focusing on Hilda's (fairly submissive) inner life is not only disenfranchising and dull, it also removes the main beauty of his novels, the relations of his characters, not with each other, but with the wider world.

I'm aware that this short post misses lots of critical nuance; and it's not so bad a novel as I have implied. But the more I think about it the more complex a subject this becomes, and I haven't the time to think about it properly. Heigh ho. You'll have to read the books and, as Kierkegaard recommends, Judge For Yourselves!

Going private

In The Triggering Town Richard Hugo writes:

Please don't take this too seriously, but for purposes of discussion we can consider two kinds of poets, public and private. Let's use as examples Auden and Hopkins. The distinction (not a valid one, I know, but good enough for us right now) doesn't lie in the subject matter. That is, a public poet doesn't necessarily write on public themes and the private poet on private or personal ones. The distinction lies in the relation of the poet to the language. With the public poet the intellectual and emotional contents of the words are the same for the reader as for the writer. With the private poet, and most good poets of the last century or so [Hugo is writing in 1979] have been private poets, the words, at least certain key words, mean something to the poet they don't mean to the reader. A sensitive reader perceives this relation of poet to word and in a way that relation – the strange way the poet emotionally possesses his vocabulary – is one of the mysteries and preservative forces of the art.

Hugo's caveat indicates that it would be foolish, however tempting, to apply this dichotomy systematically in criticising contemporary poets. But I am inclined to say that the poets I have spent most time thinking about in the last few years have been public poets; and that on the whole I have been a public poet rather than a private one. In fact this dichotomy, crude as it is, helps illuminate for me the stage of development my work is going through. For the last six months or so I have been working on some poems in a new vein, on a subject which is peculiarly personal to me (Hugo's 'triggering subject' – almost literally a 'triggering town' in this instance). It isn't, as Hugo says, the subject matter which matters, but my relation to it. 'Your obsessions lead you to your vocabulary', and since the vocabulary is being used obsessively and, strictly speaking, incorrectly, the language becomes private.

So now I see that in a sense I have been trying to move from being a public poet to a private one. Of course, the dichotomy being a crude and provisional one, I shouldn't hang too much on it. But it is useful to find a way of thinking and speaking about this difficult hurdle in my writing development. It isn't just a new project or subject; it's also a fairly fundamental shift, or extension, in my way of writing. Because the language shifts from lucidity to magicality (it is no longer being used easily, but impossibly), the technique that uses it needs overhauling; it isn't adequate to the new task.

Seeing this, I'm faced with a choice – do I persevere with the development, or do I pull back from it and find a new direction which consolidates my writing's existing strengths? Feeling greedy, I',m inclined to do both, quietly continuing to write poems in the old manner while simultaneously pursuing the new one in the writing of the main project. But is it possible to serve two masters?

Animated poems

Andrew Shields led me to a series of animated poems produced by the Poetry Foundation. They're pretty good – uncomplicated and accessible, and on the whole they add to the poems rather than getting in the way. I like the one by Geoffrey Brock that Andrew links to, but this one, of James Tate's poem 'In Search of Lost Lives', is excellent: the reading and the animation really dramatise the poem's imaginative flight: 

The Goncourt Journal part II

Well, I wasn't going to do this, quoting away merrily just for the fun of it, but it's been a few days since I posted and I can't lay my hands on the book I'm looking for (and haven't got round to writing the reviews I'm planning). So here's the latest gem from the Goncourt Journal:

Monday 22 October 1866

This evening at Magny's, the conversation started at an exalted level with the question of other worlds and hypotheses as to whether or not the planets were inhabited. Like a half-filled balloon, it touched upon infinity. From infinity, it was naturally led to God. Definitions of the Deity rained upon the table. Against us who, with our plastic imagination, could picture God, is He existed at all, only as a person, a figurative creature, a kindly bearded deity in the Michelangelo manner, Taine and Renan ad Berthelot countered with Hegelian definitions, showing him as a vast, vague diffusion whose worlds were just so many globules or crab-lice. And launching out into a respectful description of a living whole, Renan ended up by comparing God, his particular God, with all possible piety and seriousness, to an oyster. At this comparison, an enormous gust of laughter swept the table, in which Renan himself eventually joined.

I don not know whether it was on account of this Homeric laughter or not, but in any case wee went on to talk about Homer. And straight away all these destroyers of faith, all these critics of God burst into the most disgusting song of praise: these partisans of progress proclaimed that there was a time and a country, at the beginning of humanity, when a work as written in which everything was divine, above all discussion and even all examination. They began to swoon with admiration over individual phrases.

'The long-tailed birds!' Taine cried out enthusiastically.

'The unharvestable sea!' exclaimed Sainte-Beuve, raising his little voice. 'A sea where there are no grapes! What could be more beautiful than that?'

'An unharvestable sea doesn't make sense', said Renan. 'But there's a German society which has found another meaning for the words.'

'And what is it?' asked Sainte-Beuve.

'I can't remember', replied Renan. 'But it's wonderful.'

The Goncourt Journal

I'm reading Pages from the Goncourt Journal. It's wonderful stuff – racy, prurient, snobbish, vindictive, funny, profound, etc etc. The range of tone and purpose is breathtaking. I want to quote at length – there's a beautiful passage early on in which the brothers comfort their cousin, who is in unrequited love, while looking after a vomiting prostitute in a hotel room at 4am – but the whole book, which is already a selection by the translator Robert Baldick, is worth quoting, and all I have time for now is these two nuggets on Napoleon, which manage to be both inane and deadly serious:

Charpentier told me today that according to Constant Napoleon was in the habit of rolling his excrement into balls between his fingers: a habit which bears a curious and horrifying resemblance to the similar cases, symptomatic of insanity, noted by Dr. Trelat.

Sainte-Beuve saw the first Emperor once: it was at Boulogne and he was urinating. It is, so to speak, in that posture that he has seen and judged all great men ever since.

'A powerful and passionate syntax'

Last night I was reading Seamus Heaney's essay on Christopher Marlowe (in The Redress of Poetry, the collection of his Oxford lectures). Heaney makes a good case for the brilliance of 'Hero and Leander', reiterating Pound's argument that Marlowe's technique anticipates pretty much all of the technique of the eighteenth-century satirists. It's quite convincing – not just the use of heroic couplets but their deft comic handling and understated gravitas. Heaney quotes a section of 'Hero and Leander', then comments that 'the verse here is like a thick cable being paid out wittily by an intelligence that is nevertheless the very opposite of thick-witted.' (That sentence is a great example of how Heaney's critical prose can be simultaneously lucid and cramp-inducing, as the brain tries to resolve the syntax and sense of a claim that has already seduced it.) Here's the bit he quotes:

It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is overruled by fate.
When two are stripped, long ere the course begin
We wish that one should lose, the other win.
And one especially do we affect
Of two gold ingots like in each respect.
The reason no man knows; let it suffice
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight:
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?

Heaney goes on to discuss the poem's virtues in some detail. And because the verse is comic and the tone (apparently) light, those virtues might not be obvious, so I'm glad to have them elucidated. And yet I can't help preferring, still, the macho, bulldozing blank verse of the plays. This is the passage from Tamburlaine that Heaney quotes:

The thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown,
That caused the eldest son of heavenly Ops
To thrust his doting father from his chair,
And place himself in the imperial heaven,
Moved me to manage arms against thy state.
What better precedent than mighty Jove?
Nature, that framed us of four elements
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world
And measure every wandering planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Will us to wear ourselves and never rest,
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.

Poetry and Translation journal issue

I've guest-edited an issue of the academic journal Working Papers on the Web, on the subject of 'Poetry and Translation'. There are excellent articles on dialect as translation in the work of Luigi Meneghello; early modern women writers and translation; and the ethics of translation in late 20th-century American poetry. There's also an article of mine on (un)translation in Michael Hofmann’s poetry.