Brighton Poem-A-Thon Raises £30K For Refugees

Sarah Howe at the Brighton Poem-A-Thon, December 2016


On Sunday 11 December, poets performed at a ten-hour Poem-A-Thom in Brighton to raise money for refugee support organisations, including the Refugee Council and The School Bus Project. Similar events have taken place around the UK in the past year.

I went down to Brighton for the day (not to read, just to attend). It was my first time back in Brighton in nearly 20 years - my first and only visit was also during my first trip to England. After wandering on the seaside and the pier for a few hours on an incredibly beautiful, calm and sunny day, I headed for the Komedia club where the event was taking place. Some of the readers during my time at the event were Ruth Valentine, Camilla Lambert, Sarah Hesketh, Sasha Dugdale, Edin Suljic, Sarah Howe and Grace Nichols. There were many others throughout the day. The poets read a bit of everything, from their own work to Vasko Popa, Nikola Madzirov, Mary Oliver (an exceptionally popular choice) and Louis MacNeice. There were also a silent auction and poetry book sale, and a warmly supportive atmosphere.

In the end, through fundraising by the readers and donations on the day, over £30,000 was raised - an amazing total. You can still donate here, though I believe the fundraiser is closing soon and you'll have to be quick: https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Sasha-Dugdale-Modern-Poetry-in-Translation 

Alice Oswald: Falling Awake

Leaf by daBinsi. Used under Creative Commons license


A couple of weeks ago I went to the launch of Alice Oswald's new collection, Falling Awake, at Southbank. A collection of mostly nature poems, it is also a book of high-level anxiety, with a tick tick tick of paranoia throughout. "It's as if the whole book is a kind of parking meter," said Oswald, noting that all of the poems are in some way about time. The reading, as always with her appearances, was not actually a reading, but a hypnotised/hypnotic recital.

Nature poetry can be really dull - well, this applies to any subject for poetry, but perhaps it has been my misfortune to read a lot of really dull nature poetry. Alice Oswald is never dull, not just because of the paranoia (which I have also noticed in her earlier work), but because her work partakes of a kind of super-perception. In April I went to an event celebrating Christopher Logue's War Music, a version of Homer's Iliad. Along with classicist Bettany Hughes, Alice Oswald was one of the speakers, on the basis of her own Memorial, which is another groundbreaking version of the Iliad. In the course of the discussion, Oswald mentioned that when she read the Iliad in the original ancient Greek, there was a sense that she was not just reading a powerful description of a river, or a battle, or a leaf - but that she was actually seeing these things directly, through a kind of periscope into another time and another mode of perception. I would describe her own work in a similar way; this super-perception makes me think of the title of Wallace Stevens' poem 'Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself.' It is also like the moment when out of the corner of your eye, you see a face in the crowd of someone you thought you had lost - in a way which is more than imagination, a physical shock strikes you, and then you realise it wasn't them, after all.

Reaching this level of intensity through the power of the written word is unusual even in poetry - amongst the poets I love who succeed, I would name Oswald, Paul Celan and Vasko Popa, and the latter two I can read only in translation. There are others, but even with the greatest of writers, I think this is rare. I think it helps enormously to be a writer who can recall the extraordinary intensity of childhood experience (not all writers can), and through a combination of effort and unconscious reach, perceive adult experience in this way, as well.

Here are a few poems from Falling Awake:

BODY
FLIES
ASIDE

50 Years of Modern Poetry In Translation

Founded in 1965 by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weissbort, Modern Poetry in Translation has led the way in bringing the poetry of non-English-language cultures to readers of English, and in fostering connections and collaborations between poets, translators and readers from different countries.

When I started seriously reading poetry in translation a few years ago - and even translating a little myself - I realised that it was a much broader field than I'd imagined; not just in terms of languages and styles explored, but in terms of starting points, end results and journeys. Poets can (in the traditional way) translate directly from the chosen poet/language. They can also create a poem from a literal translation (without knowing the original language). They can translate alone, in groups, with or without the original poet. They can translate closely, striving to maintain accuracy and form, or they can create loose "versions" which are more like completely new poems taking inspiration from the originals. They can also delve into film-poems and other multimedia. Of course, there can be controversy over these varying methods, but they all have their validity, and this diversity means that any poet, translator or reader can find their place. I also feel strongly that they should find a place, even if it's just an occasional corner; the frequent lack of interest about international poetry and poetry in translation in English-speaking literary circles is sometimes depressing.

This kind of diversity has also been reflected in the various events and projects organised by Modern Poetry in Translation for their anniversary. They have released Centres of Cataclysm (Bloodaxe, 2016), an anthology of work from across MPT's history, edited by current editor Sasha Dugdale and previous editors David and Helen Constantine. They also held launches and events in various places, including the London launch of the anthology on 5 May at King's College Chapel, and two 'study days' in Cambridge and Oxford.

I was fortunate enough to attend the King's College launch, and the Oxford study day on 14 May. At the King's College launch, readers and those present included Carol Hughes (Ted Hughes' widow), actor David Bradley (who read Hughes' translation of 'The Boy Changed Into a Stag Cries Out at the Gate of Secrets' by Ferenc Juhasz), Malawian poet Jack Mapanje, Ingeborg Bachmann's brother Heinz Bachmann, Ruth Padel, Frances Leviston, and many others. The moment that hit me particularly hard was Helen Constantine reading Ingeborg Bachmann's 'Days in White' (translated by Daniel Huws):


There on the horizon,
brilliant in its destruction,
I'm aware of my fabulous continent
that dismissed me
in a shroud.


The Oxford study day on 14 May, at Queen's College, was a feast. I was able to catch up with some new and old poetry friends during the many tea and coffee breaks. We started the day with a couple of workshops, having been given a few to choose from. My first workshop was about translating from German, with German poet Ulrike Almut Sandig and translator/scholar Karen Leeder. Ulrike Almut Sandig's poems were fascinating - we watched a film-poem of her collaboration with New Zealand poet Hinemoana Baker, and heard/watched her perform her poem 'The fairy tale of Schlauraffenland', a weird, beguiling, disturbing game-show-set work about contemporary Germany and the refugee crisis. My own problem with trying to translate from a literal translation was that, although I don't speak German, I do have an inkling of it, and thus I felt a bit over-tied to the original without it being really useful (if that makes any sense at all...) Ulrike Almut Sandig and Karen Leeder spoke about the visual dimension of poetry, how 'mistakes' in translation can be part of the aesthetic (or, in the film-poem, geographical mistakes on an inflatable globe of the world), and how orientation in the poem and in translation involves both gathering and losing (like the inflatable globes being chased and taken by the wind...) When confronted with very culturally specific idioms or concepts, the poet may need to find an equivalent in their own culture, or go for the meaning, or go for the sound. Translating is so often about choice and compromise.

The French workshop with Stephen Romer was of the greatest interest to me because I actually can translate directly from French. He explored the different types of writing in French poetry and their difficulty or ease of translation into English. For example, the poetry of Verlaine, Hugo and Baudelaire tends to have a smooth, orchestrated, soft sound which translates with difficulty (although anything is possible...) Poets such as Gautier and Corbière featured a more staccato sound with more to "grab on to" in order to "English" the poem. These were invaluable tips and suggestions for finding poems which will translate well. We then worked to translate poems by writers such as Jean Follain and Valérie Rouzeau, and I made some discoveries both in terms of approaches and in wanting to look more deeply into these wonderful writers.

Lunch was in a magnificent hall in the college, in good company, and then there was a launch and discussion of Centres of Cataclysm and translation. The readers and speakers included Sasha Dugdale, David and Helen Constantine, Karen Leeder, Nikola Madzirov, Pascale Petit and Ulrike Almut Sandig. Pascale Petit read her fascinating response 'At the Gate of Secrets' to 'The Boy Changed Into a Stag Cries Out at the Gate of Secrets', while Ulrike Almut Sandig's poem about the Holocaust and the translation by Karen Leeder were particularly moving for everyone, including the readers themselves. This was followed by a session on Playing Brecht, where David Constantine and Tom Kuhn discussed the translation of Bertolt Brecht. Composer Dominic Muldowney, actor Claire Brown and director Di Trevis ran us through a fascinating rehearsal/staging of a Brecht song.

The final session was a launch of the new microsite dedicated to the first issue of MPT. This is an elegantly presented resource featuring extraordinary poems by the likes of Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Vasko Popa, Miroslav Holub and Yehuda Amichai. Karen Leeder spoke about Ingeborg Bachmann, who appeared in MPT 3 (there were no women poets in the first two issues) and the importance of highly literal translations in the earlier editions. Macedonian poet Nikola Madzirov read a wonderful poem written in tribute to Vasko Popa, which was a particularly awesome moment for me as Madzirov and Popa are two of my favourite poets. Vasko Popa, a Serbian, was a Yugoslavian poet because of the times he lived in, while Madzirov was coming of age when Yugoslavia was coming apart; thus, he said, there was a distance between them, but "there was something that brought us closer - it was the darkness" and the way Popa's use of mythology and symbolism was like "looking through the darkness and seeing the shapes of souls and objects." Madzirov, while (to me) a more tender and less potentially frightening poet than Popa, is a worthy successor. Ulrike Almut Sandig spoke about refugee movements and their parallels/reflections in changes of language, also reading a tribute to German-Icelandic writer Helga Maria Novak.

This was a really rich, warm occasion which I was delighted to be part of. I didn't get many great photos, but here are a few:

Ulrike Almut Sandig and Karen Leeder

David Constantine

Nikola Madzirov

Wojciech Bonowicz, Polish Poetry and the Secret Agent

Wojciech Bonowicz, 2013. Used under Creative Commons license


A little while ago I came across sixteen extraordinary short poems by the Polish poet Wojciech Bonowicz, on the Jacket2 website. You can read them here: https://jacket2.org/poems/sixteen-poems-wojciech-bonowicz-b-1967

I met Wojciech Bonowicz a few years ago at a launch event for a new issue of Modern Poetry In Translation which had a focus on Polish poetry. After the event I was talking to Sasha Dugdale (MPT's editor), Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese (translator of contemporary Polish poetry) and Bonowicz. I was having a slightly embarrassing self-disclosure moment and decided to share my personal difficulty with Central and Eastern European poetry. The conversation went something like this:

Me: I love Polish poetry, I really love it, and poetry from other parts of Central and Eastern Europe too. But sometimes I feel like I can never truly understand it, you know? Even as compared to poetry from other parts of the world, Polish poetry seems particularly "coded" to me and it almost seems as though because I'm not from that background, I didn't grow up with those particular references and that historical frame of reference, it's just not possible to understand that code, besides the extra layer of difficulties imposed by not speaking the language and therefore only being able to access it in translation. Can I ever really understand it??? 

Poets and translators: (looking faintly amused) Oh, well, you know, you're here, and you appreciate the poetry. So basically, you're doing fine.

Me: Oh. Well, okay then.

When I told this story to some friends later, rather as a bit of a laugh against myself, one of them suggested that this was a slightly evasive answer. It might have been, but I think it's more likely that they didn't want to discourage me. When a new face shows up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at a poetry-in-translation event and confesses that poetry from a certain part of the world poses a particular challenge for her, you probably don't want to say "yes, you're right - you are never going to understand poetry from this cultural milieu." I have actually found that the organisations, journals and individuals who work with poetry translation are a particularly welcoming bunch. Poetry is already a niche area in the English-speaking world, and translated poetry is a niche within a niche. If you just show up and act polite and interested, they will embrace you. 

What is interesting, though, is that late last year I read this post on the blog of Hungarian-British poet George Szirtes, on the poetry of Eastern Europe: http://georgeszirtes.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/the-poetry-of-eastern-europe-talk-at.html

It was based on a lecture he had given on Eastern European poetry, rather more on great figures of the 20th century such as Zbigniew Herbert, Vasko Popa and Miroslav Holub than on contemporary poets. The poets and poems mentioned are obviously very much worth checking out, but there are also some really interesting comments, especially in light of my own conclusions about poetry from this part of the world. I found this particularly interesting: 

'As to differences, the nations of Eastern Europe did not suffer from post-colonial guilt though they had (and have) yet to deal with war guilt. The first years after the war the pressure of officially approved socialist realism - often traditional in form - meant that 'unofficial' art and poetry was best expressed through modernism: no formal prosody, no rhyme, disposable punctuation or capitalism, no ornate metaphors, no declamatory first-person singular. The freedoms offered by surrealism also offered complex ways of addressing politics. This encouraged a belief in codes, in secret complicities, in a common energy.' (George Szirtes)

I should mention at this point that as far as I can tell - and not surprisingly - contemporary Polish poets are generally quite careful to point out that as great as these figures are, poetry has moved on from Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Wisława Szymborska, Adam Zagajewski and the other poets who usually come to mind when Polish poetry is mentioned. As far as I can tell, reading only in translation, there is also an astonishing variety of poetic voices from Poland. It's a little too easy even for those with a keen interest in international poetry to make sweeping statements about 'Polish poetry' or 'Arabic poetry' or whatever it might be. 

The sixteen poems which I linked to by Wojciech Bonowicz, above, were actually published as part of a feature on the poet Tadeusz Różewicz and his legacy. They are small, intimate poems without pretentiousness, with a keen awareness of life's spiritual dimension, and with a sense of universality rather than the often limited perspective of the English lyric poem's 'I'. I hope that description isn't too facile, because it has something to do with why my brain lights up so much when I read much international poetry in translation. I can feel it happening. It seems somehow to encompass more than what I so often find in English-language poetry - and that's even with the codes and the surrealism. In an editorial for that issue of MPT, Wojciech Bonowicz wrote the following, which I love: 

'The presented four poets have one more feature in common: they favour conciseness, the construction of elliptical poems similar to maths equations with multiple unknown quantities. In recent Polish poetry being elliptical means being credible. Being elliptical counteracts the dominant culture of the obvious; it subverts well-rounded sentences falsifying reality by alleviating its conflicts and pushing beyond its circumference that which is dark and mysterious. The poet - from this vantage point - is one who opposes the fossilization of language, one who attends to its fissures. In this way the poet remains a secret agent of elusive sense.' (Wojciech Bonowicz)

Here are two more very interesting articles about modern Polish poetry in translation: 

http://www.cprw.com/some-problems-with-modern-polish-poetry-in-translation

http://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2014/01/14/milobedzka-bonowicz-poetry/

Vasko Popa: "A Universe Passing Through a Universe"

Plaque at Vasko Popa's house in Belgrade.


I started reading Serbian poet Vasko Popa's poems late last year, and my rather unacademic commentary on his work is that it has absolutely blown my mind. I may have encountered him before, particularly since his poem 'Belgrade' ("White bone among the clouds/Bone of our bones") has appeared in recent years as one of London's Poems on the Underground. He was largely new to me, though, and I was swept into a world of Serbian folk mythology and historical archetypes, surreal and disturbing parables and games, and sardonic, funny commentaries on human nature.

Ted Hughes was a huge fan of Popa, and in a famous introduction to Popa's work, he commented: "It is the Universal Language behind language, and when the poetic texture of the verbal code has been cancelled (as it must be in translation, though throughout this volume [Anne Pennington's] translations seem to me extraordinary in poetic rightness and freshness) we are left with solid hieroglyphic objects and events, meaningful in a direct way, simultaneously earthen and spiritual, plain-statement and visionary." This is a very good point of entry into Popa's work, and it says much about why I'm becoming so obsessed with Eastern European poetry; the way in which it can be both corporeal and spiritual, prosaic and mystic, is absolutely remarkable to me.

Vasko Popa's most famous translator is Serbian-American poet Charles Simić, but so far I've mostly read Anne Pennington's highly regarded translations. You can read her translation of 'The Little Box' here:


THE LITTLE BOX (Vasko Popa, translated by Anne Pennington)


And here you can listen to Popa reading his poem 'Poetry Reading for the Gastarbeiters' in the original Serbian, although you will need to track down the English translation elsewhere - perhaps in the collection published by Anvil Press Poetry.