In Search of Coherence

Here's my dilemma, poetry-wise. I'd like to publish a fourth collection, but I'm not sure who with. I have ideas about that, but am not ready to act on them at the moment.
That's problem number one.

Problem number two is that I don't actually have a book of poems to show to anyone right now. My last full-length book was Camper Van Blues (Salt Publishing 2008). That's four years ago, and I really ought to have another book's worth of poems ready to publish. But I don't, because I've been mostly writing prose fiction since then. And the rest of the time I've been working on various short translations - mainly Anglo-Saxon poetry - and of course my biggest project since CVB, which has been my version of the Middle English poem Gawain and the Green Knight.

I now have about 15 pages of Gawain, cobbled together in a vaguely finished state, and think another hundred and fifty lines should bring it to a close. But finding the time to write those lines isn't as easy as it sounds. You don't just write something like that in your lunch break. It's about finding a rhythm and a feel for the original that can be translated into the version I'm writing, to make a coherent and powerful whole, and that takes time. Well, it takes me time.

So Gawain has to sit on the back boiler until I can find time to re-read the original and get back into the rhythm and mood that inspired me in the first place.

Beside Gawain on that back boiler sit various translations from the AS, plus a gaggle of self-conscious stand-alone lyrics that might or might not be publishable on their own merits, and some rough ideas on how to fit them all together, none of which have any coherence right now.

I also have my long poem On Warwick, which was published by the lovely Nine Arches Press in pamphlet form in 2008, but which I'd like to see as part of a collection.

Basically I can't decide if Gawain should be published alone - it's very short though, even for a chapbook - or in book form.

If it goes into a book, along with On Warwick, then I have a full collection ready to show. But if it doesn't, then I don't have enough for a book.

What needs to happen now is for me to finish Gawain, write more stand-alone lyric poems, polish up my Anglo-Saxon translations, and get the shape of this fourth book right. I have a list of possible victims publishers, places which might take my career further forward and help me with poetic direction. But will any of them have me?

I suppose that question is academic until I've done the actual work. Perhaps I need a poetry retreat?

The Dream of the Rood

Franks Casket (7th Century)

Many of you will know of my long-standing obsession with Anglo-Saxon and that I have already published various translations of Old English poetry.

Yesterday, I decided, quite out of the blue, that I would translate the Old English poem The Dream of the Rood into a modern English poem.

The Dream is one of the oldest poems in Old English in existence, possibly dating from around or before the 7th century.

I say 'out of the blue', but actually I have been considering it for some years. Over a decade, in fact. And lately the idea has been slipping in and out of my head more frequently. But not with any real seriousness until late yesterday evening, when I leapt off the sofa, snatched up a copy of the Anglo-Saxon text from the bookshelf, and started making notes in the margins.

I have often found, throughout my writing life, that spontaneous, bolt-from-the-blue decisions like this are highly propitious and nearly always end in a finished, successful publication.

This translation may take several months. The Dream of the Rood is longer than my previous OE translation, The Wanderer, which took about 6-8 weeks in all.

First, I translate the poem myself.

Then I look at other translations and compare them with my own and each other.

Then I begin to write my own version in poem-form.

(Version, please note, rather than translation, because I believe only a prose version of a poem can be called a translation. Once you attempt poetry in a second language, it can never be considered a straight translation, but only a version; however close you come to the original, the new poem will always try to assert itself over the old one, in one way or another.)

I tend to work very slowly with these versions from the Old English, writing only a few lines of the poem per day, feeling my way through it.

Wish me luck. I'll let you know how it's progressing. At least the initial own-translation shouldn't take too long, as I first translated the poem in 1998. But my OE is a trifle rusty!

For those interested in poetic translations, my rather controversial version of The Wanderer appears in my latest poetry collection, Camper Van Blues, newly available in paperback from Salt.

Oft him anhaga ...

I was deeply flattered a few weeks ago when an old acquaintance and fellow lover of Anglo-Saxon poetry, Chris Jones, who lectures in the School of English at the University of St. Andrews, contacted me about my versions from that antique tongue. Chris was in the final throes of an academic article on modern poets who use or are inspired by Old English in their poetry, and wanted to include references to my various translations and other bits and pieces on OE.

His request is the kind of thing which reminds me why I became a poet. The thought of people out there reading about your work, and maybe going on to buy a book or two of it, or at least look you up on the net, is a very satisfying thing. I certainly didn't become a poet so my work could go unread. So any article which might flag me up to people with similar tastes and interests is excellent, by my reckoning.

If all this has whet your appetite for some Anglo-Saxon poetry, there are some odd pieces by me scattered about in various places on OE topics, but by far the largest example is my version of The Wanderer, a very famous Old English poem about a warrior adrift without a fixed abode, which can be found in my Salt collection, Camper Van Blues.

My version caused controversy when first published because the original was written in the voice of a man - or possibly several men - but I changed the narrator's gender to female, to match my own. But what are new versions for if not to test the ability of a poem to endure and reflect society's changes?

It took me well over a month to write that translation of The Wanderer, managing just 4 lines a day on average. But it was a highly complex piece of writing, and I wanted to try and reproduce at least some of the rhythms and alliterative sounds of OE verse - not just write a translation or even a version, in other words, but a poem which would work in its own right.

Anyway, I was very flattered to be included in Chris' article and hope it will lead other writers in the future to write their own versions, keeping OE verse firmly alive in the twenty-first century.

Review of The Wanderer on the Happenstance site

I just found a groovy short review of my Heaventree-published pamphlet translation of the Anglo-Saxon classic, The Wanderer, on the Happenstance website.

Thanks to Matt Merritt for that. Not sure how long it's been there, but it's a great review and much appreciated. All those rather painful months of work on The Wanderer ... and now I can be sure at least one person enjoyed it!

P.S: Yet More Reviews, Summer 2009
There's also a charming review of Camper Van Blues (reviewed by Sarah Maskill) and a highly complimentary review of The Lament of the Wanderer (reviewed by David Morley) both in this quarter's issue of Poetry Review, which is entitled "Cosmopolis" and can be bought online or via most good bookshops.

Winners of the Stephen Spender Prize 2008

My apologies for not blogging this past week. I have the best excuse in the world; I was writing. Eight poems in the last seven days, to be precise. Which is particularly pleasing, given that poetry had slowed to a trickle for me in recent months (following the somewhat apocryphal deluge of the summer).

The sudden outpouring is due to a new sequence, of course. Sequences always get me writing with more ease and fluidity. More on that later, since though I've rushed in with the first few poems, the overall structure is still in the process of being shaped in my mind.

So, back to the Stephen Spender Prize 2008.

Joint Winners of the 14s-and-under prize:
Paula Alonso-Lalanda - 'Let's go to the Market!' by Gloria Fuertes (Spanish)
Scarlett Koller - 'Roundelay' by Charles d'Orleans (French)

Winners of the 18-and-under category:
Daniel Galbraith (FIRST) - Amores I.V. by Ovid (Latin)
Iwona Luszowicz (SECOND) - 'In Remembrance of Marie A.' by Bertolt Brecht (German)
Rupert Mercer (THIRD) - Catullus VIII (Latin)

Winners of the Open Category:
Imogen Halstead (FIRST) - Amores 1.1. by Ovid (Latin)
Jane Draycott (SECOND) - an extract from Pearl (Middle English)
JOINT THIRD PLACE:
Emily Jeremiah - 'Theorem' by Eeva-Liisa Manner (Finnish)
Timothy Allen - 'Broken Heart, New Lament' by Nguyen Du (Vietnamese)

The winner of the Open category, Imogen Halstead, is currently in China and couldn't make the award ceremony. So Andrew Motion, Poet Laureate, agreed to read the poem in her place. To make her win even more astounding, Imogen is actually 18, and was the original winner in the 18-and-under category. However, the judges decided that her presence there was so powerful as to be unfair to the other poems entered, so she was 'bumped up', in the words of one judge, to win the adult category instead.

For me though, the most powerful and mesmerising poems of the evening undoubtedly came from Daniel Galbraith and Rupert Mercer, talented young writers in the 18-and-under category with two highly idiosyncratic translations from the Latin, and Jane Draycott, whose extract from 'Pearl' was beautifully and sparingly written.

After the readings, we mingled. The awards were being held at the Venezuelan Embassy in central London, a packed hall with tiered seating and a generous raised platform for the performers. Some extraordinarily tasty red wine was served, and a selection of canapés. Lady Spender was there, along with a smattering of other Spenders, Valerie Eliot (the widow of T.S. Eliot), and other luminaries of the poetry world, including Josephine Balmer, one of the judges and herself a fine poet and classicist.

I spoke at length to Matthew Spender, founder of the new 14-and-under category, whose speech had strongly criticised the government as 'not sympathetic to the idea of studying foreign languages in schools'. He considers these prizes for younger translators a 'reproach' to the government for their apathy, and I have to agree with him.

Heaventree Press founding editor Jon Morley, who published my 'Lament of the Wanderer' translation earlier this year, was also there that night, along with Susan Bassnett, a pro-vice-chancellor at the University of Warwick. Susan was one of the Stephen Spender Prize judges, and is herself an expert in a number of languages, including an old favourite of mine, Anglo-Saxon.

Taking the train back to the Midlands together, the party atmosphere continued for another hour, with an enthusiastic discussion of translations, 'poets we have known', and what each of us is currently working on.

Home just before midnight, I then had to hurriedly dash off a Middle English translation for a class the next morning. It was Chaucer, the wonderfully obscene Miller's Tale. From the sublime to the ridiculous!

Lament of the Wanderer - available now!

The Lament of the Wanderer - my version of the Anglo-Saxon poem with facing text Old English, plus a brief introduction to both the poem and Old English in general - has now been published by Heaventree Press.

The Heaventree website has not yet been updated to include my pamphlet. However, you can still get a copy from them by writing to the address below or emailing/telephoning them direct.

Alternatively, for a signed copy, you can email me at j.holland442@btinternet.com and I'll give you an address so you can send a cheque for £4.00 (£3.50 for the pamphlet, plus 50p towards P&P).

It's only a small pamphlet, hence the excellent price!

I'll be reading from The Lament of the Wanderer on the evening of Saturday July 5th in Coventry, at the War Memorial Gardens, as part of the international Godiva Festival. If you're planning to come along, the poetry part of the event should kick off sometime after 8.30pm. Maybe a little later.

To contact the publisher direct:
The Heaventree Press
Koco Building, The Arches
Spon End, Coventry
CV1 3JQ

Phone No.+44 247 6713555
Email: admin@heaventreepress.com

Lament of the Wanderer

Newsflash: I have a new chapbook out this weekend, to be launched at the Positive Images Festival in Coventry city centre (in the covered area at the Godiva statue, for those in the vicinity).

It's a single poem pamphlet, published by Heaventree Press, containing my new version of The Wanderer with facing page Anglo-Saxon text, plus a short introduction to the poem aimed primarily at those not familiar with either Old English or medieval elegiac poems.

I'll be reading from The Wanderer (both my own version and a short extract from the Old English text) roughly from 1 - 1.30pm on Saturday 14th June. Anyone who can find their way to the Godiva statue, which is quite close to the Cathedral, can listen for free.

I'll also be reading from The Wanderer in a few weeks' time at the international Godiva Festival on July 5th, which takes place at the War Memorial Gardens in Coventry, alongside poets Mario Petrucci and Richard Grant (aka Dreadlockalien), amongst others. Coventry band The Enemy will also be performing at the Festival that weekend, which has impressed my teenage daughter no end ... though she desperately resents my coolness at appearing on the same bill as one of her favourite bands.

Once the chapbook is out, I'll post up the cover image here, plus details of how to buy it online (or from me, if you'd like a signed copy).

Rain and Ruin: a critique of my Wife's Lament

Many thanks to David Lumsden who has posted up an excellent critique of my 'compressed' version of The Wife's Lament on his blog, Sparks from Stones.

Bone Dreams

I'm very excited to be off to the Bone Dreams Conference in Oxford tomorrow, which will look at connections between Anglo-Saxon culture, language and literature and the 'modern imagination' - encompassing films, novels, poetry and even comic-books.

To honour this occasion, and because it saves me having to write some well thought-out blog piece for Raw Light, I'm leaving you with this little poem from my last poetry collection, Boudicca & Co (Salt, 2006). It's a version from the Anglo-Saxon poem known to us as The Wife's Lament - though 'wif' in Old English means woman as much as wife, so that title may be a little misleading.

The original poem is far longer than my version, and far more complicated in terms of narrative structure and point of view. That's why this is a version rather than a truncated translation. It's 'inspired by' the original, to be accurate, though some of these lines and images do come directly from the Anglo-Saxon text.

Note: The line at the break, 'Wherever he is', should actually be indented, with no stanza break, the capital W falling just past the end of the sentence above. But it's a bit of a faff, doing the HTML formatting, so I'll just leave it to your imagination to see the line properly.


The Wife's Lament
a version from the Anglo-Saxon

I don’t belong here, alone in the dark
under these cruel hills. Briars pull
at my clothes where I lie
under an oak all night long, and still
he does not come. Light
burns my feet, so I walk, walk,
walk under this oak, through these caves
of earth, older than grief.

Wherever he is,
on the other side of the world perhaps,
lost in ruins under the rain,
he may be calling my name too. Light
falls more sharply where he is.
My lord, my prince, here I must sit
all summer long under this oak,
deep in the earth, rocking with grief.
My sweet, I know you would come
if you could. They broke us apart;
that’s why, under this dark hood, I weep.

Binsey Poplars: Gerard Manley Hopkins

I was leafing through some of Gerard Manley Hopkins' journal entries tonight and felt a little stab of nostalgia at one point, where he describes walking 'at S. Hinksey' on the outskirts of Oxford, when he was an undergraduate at Balliol. This is South Hinksey, a village not far from where I used to live in North Hinksey, on the far western outskirts of Oxford.

Hinksey is a flood-plain area, a fact which keeps it green and quietly wooded, in spite of its proximity to the A34 Ring Road; while a resident, I spent many happy hours walking the damp fields and scrubby hills there with my crazy dog. "The Name Hinksey is Anglo-Saxon, dating from the thirteenth century. It probably derives from Hengestesieg meaning Hengist’s Island or Stallion’s Island," the local website tells me.

My eye then fell on the following poem, Binsey Poplars, one of Hopkins' most famous ecological pieces and particularly relevant in this century as we struggle to undo past - and ongoing - damage to nature before it's too late.

Binsey is another village on the north-western boundary of Oxford, not far from where I lived back in 2000. The name, I discover, possibly derives from 'Byni's island', in the nearby Thames. The land there first belonged to St Frideswide's Priory and later Christ Church (whose meadow Hopkins also mentions in his diary).

I can't reproduce the beautiful left-hand margin insets without great difficulty, but hopefully the words will be enough on their own.


Binsey Poplars
(Felled 1879)

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled ,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
Áll félled, félled, are áll félled;
Of a fresh & following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew —
Hack & rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To tóuch, her béing só slénder,
That, like this sleek & seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Strange Likeness

A short period of illness can be useful for a writer, forming a firebreak between stretches of intense mental activity; not so much scorched earth as a fertile space where new ideas can spring up, free from other influences.

So my brief spell in bed most of Easter and into this week has been useful for that reason, and also as physical downtime, good for recharging the batteries, or refilling the well, however you want to see it.

Filled with new energy, I took myself into Oxford today and renewed my Bodleian card in order to read this book, which I couldn't afford to buy and which is simply not available through the usual library channels.

It was a worthwhile trip. Not only did I manage some research into the impact of Old English on modern poetry - my pet project this spring - but a few phrases in Chris Jones' magnificent Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth-Century Poetry struck hard, in particular when touching on Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns, and left me far more sure of my direction as I begin work on my own extended poem/poem sequence inspired by Warwick Castle:

The present book's title comes from the twenty-ninth of Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns, a sequence of poems that dissolves historical linearity to superimpose glimpsed shards of the reign of Offa ... with fragmentary images of the twentieth-century Midlands, a mosaic of the familiar and the unfamiliar which prompts the speaker in the hymn to comment: 'Not strangeness, but strange likeness.'

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Now playing: Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark - Souvenir
via FoxyTunes

The Controversial Art of Translation

As I'm currently translating The Wanderer, a tightly-constructed poem in Anglo-Saxon of some 120 lines, I turned to Don Paterson's 'Orpheus' this weekend for some inspiration, as the last few pages of 'Orpheus', his free version of Rilke's famous sonnet sequence, are taken up with notes on the difference between translating and versioning.

At first I was impressed, almost mesmerised, by his highly intelligent and persuasive prose. But as I began to see how his opinions were negatively impacting on my confidence as a poet-translator, I became annoyed. Paterson freely admits that his argument is almost wholly a defence of those who - like himself - 'translate' poetry without a strong understanding of the original language. But that doesn't prevent him from becoming overly-rigid and dogmatic about the issue.

Paterson believes that you must either translate a poem - which is ultimately pointless in verse because it's almost impossible to get the sense and the spirit of the thing down in poetry - or write your own version of it - i.e. essentially a new poem - without bothering too much about being true to the original.

'If, through naivety or over-ambition, both translation and version are attempted simultaneously,' Paterson writes, 'the result is foredoomed.' (p. 81, Orpheus, Faber 2006)

This is over-simplifying the translation issue to the point of nonsense. Anyone who has ever attempted to translate a poem into verse knows that it's impossible to do so without making your own choices along the way, some of which will not be a straight translation but must necessarily be your own invention - or reinterpretation - of the original. The only way to translate a poem without independent choices of that kind - i.e. poetic acts of re-reading - is to translate into prose.

And even the wildest version must, at some point, pay homage to the original sense, otherwise why bother choosing that poem at all?

Influenced by his thoughts, I quickly realised that my own version-in-progress of The Wanderer was part-translation, part-version, and therefore, in Paterson's view, 'foredoomed'. I started tinkering with it, first to bring it back to a straight translation, then - frustrated by the resulting woodenness of the lines - to shift it more boldly into a version, abandoning all pretence of honouring the original.

Having done that, I have found - not surprisingly - that I've completely lost my bearings. I am no longer writing with that strong, sure-footed certainty with which my translation began. The poem feels like a chore to be finished, in whatever faltering voice I can manage to dredge up from the depths of my lost confidence. As the poem itself exclaims: 'All that joy has perished!'

I shall now have to put The Wanderer aside for a few days, and see if I can write something else in the interim, to get my focus and my confidence back - before I continue with my 'foredoomed' translation-version.

Anglo-Saxon Reconstruction Village at West Stow

Back in the summer, after a violent altercation with some over-zealous home school blog-ring folks, I set my home school blog to Private. That means only my family - and any interested friends - can catch up with what we've been doing recently on the home education front. However, the drawback of that decision is that people searching for photos and other information on various of my blog entries - such as the following one on the Anglo-Saxon Village at West Stow - are no longer able to access the information.

So, since I'm steeped in poetry revisions and not yet ready to blog about Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, I'm reposting it here for the world to see. Apologies for those who only want to read about writing on this blog, but normal service should be resumed once I've finished tinkering with the latest draft of my third collection.


REPOSTED FROM OUR HOME SCHOOL BLOG: A trip to West Stow in 2006



Last month we took a two-day trip from the Midlands across Cambridgeshire into Norfolk and Suffolk. One of the best places we visited in this brief trip was the Anglo-Saxon Reconstruction Village at West Stow. This is a small portion of an Anglo-Saxon village reconstructed on an original site where many artefacts have already been found. The work was supervised and carried out by archaeologists and other experts using traditional methods and trying to get the reconstructed 'village' as close as possible to how they think the Anglo-Saxons might have lived.

The kids absolutely loved their trip. We bought some handcrafted kids' swords and bows and arrows in the shop, for messing about with afterwards in nearby Thetford forest, plus some books on runes and Old English. Here are some photos from our day at the centre:



The village consists of five or six buildings in a loose cluster: individual huts for living and sleeping in, such as the one pictured above, a larger meeting house, and several crafts buildings such as a hut for spinning and weaving wool on looms, a hut for firing pots and woodworking, for grinding corn, and also some covered or open areas where animals could be kept.



The kids enjoyed pretending to cook around this open hearth. People used to think there would be a hole in the thatch, rather like a chimney, for smoke to escape, but this is now considered unlikely. I presume smoke would simply have drifted up and slowly out through the thatched roof. Those Saxon huts must have been very smoky places on a windless day!



The huts are mainly constructed of wood, with the typical thatched roof you can see in the picture. Some are different styles, constructed as experiments to see which style of housing would be most practical and provide the most likely explanations for some difficult questions the archaeologists wanted to answer.



One of their main problems was the existence of a mysterious pit excavated underneath each original Anglo-Saxon hut on the site. Various explanations for its use were considered, but in the end, the archaeologists have decided to remain open to ideas on that score, as it's hard to prove definitively what the pit was used for.

Here's a lovely atmospheric shot of M. lurking behind a hanging pot on one of the raised 'sleeping' areas. As you can see, it's very dark inside these little huts, especially with the fire unlit and the door pulled to.



The roof beams were probably used for hanging dried food on (for smoking, perhaps, over the fire) and also for general storage of equipment, such as nets, household goods and cooking utensils.



Still, I'm sure that with the fire crackling nicely on those long dark evenings, and an enclosed bed of rushes and perhaps even furs to retire to after the last chores had been done, and perhaps a little poetry had been listened to, an Anglo-Saxon hut would have felt like quite a cosy place, even in our British winters.



The wool-crafting, woodworking, corn grinding and pot-firing workshops would have been built apart from the living quarters, as they are now at West Stow. There were also areas set aside for corn and other crops to be grown and for animals to graze, with probably a small pig-sty of some description on the site. Chickens would have had the run of the place, and some of the more vulnerable animals may possibly have spent the worst of the winter indoors with the villagers!



The Anglo-Saxons used a Runic Alphabet for some of their writing, particularly when commemorating something important or when writing on a sacred object.

This is a Rune on the doorpost of one of the reconstructed houses. It represents the letter 'h', as you should be able to guess, and would have been engraved on stone monuments, weapons and armour. This runic writing system is called the furthorc, after the first few letters, just as our alphabet comes from the first two letters of the Greek writing system, alpha and beta (α & β).



It was a fantastic day out and, if you're a history hound, I can thoroughly recommend the trip. Take boots for the mud on wet days though, and a picnic if it's fine weather! There is a cafe there but eating al fresco under the trees, surrounded by new oaks, is a lovely experience after visiting the Saxon village. And if you go into the nearby forest areas, be prepared for some Blair Witch Project scenes in the woods afterwards. That's a wooden broadsword my son is wielding there, by the way!

Find some more text and pictures about the West Stow Anglo-Saxon Reconstruction Village at 'Experimental Archaeology'.

And, since this particular post is now attracting so many visitors every month, here's another link, this time to the Friends of West Stow Village: more photographs, opening times, and other useful information.