The Fishwife's Tale

For me, the possibility of a new poem is more often suggested by a word, or words, rather than experience or the world. Words are generated by other words, books by other books, poems by other poems. It is for others to translate the world into literature. Perhaps for me the world is words, which is probably not how it should be. However, seeing the word 'fishwife' this week immediately set off that rare alarm call that there was the next poem.
I'm not convinced about the last line. 'Herbs' are a vestige of the scruffy notes I made as I tried to find a way in, where they were going to be a rhyme for 'verbs' once the parallel between language and fish recipes had been arrived at. It can stay like that and go into the 'uncollected poems' folder for later amendment if necessary. It takes a while to look back on these things and decide if it's really worthwhile.

The Fishwife’s Tale

Beyond the Gentility Principle

I say it was fresh yesterday and sell

them for what I can get, their shine tarnished,

their bored eyes staring back at me without

reproach but their perfume becomes my own.

The Market Square goes home with me, hanging

about me like a curse, while my turbot

and halibut that servants had been sent to fetch

are laid on china plates for those whose taste

in poetry’s not likely to mean mine.

I know what they say about me in posh

houses with chandeliers and dogs who know

their pedigree. My language doesn’t show

up in their delicate capriccios

being, for the love of God, in rude health

and vigorous. My nouns are (like life) short

and brutish and my verbs intransitive

and as unpalatable as my fish

would be without the lemon or parsley

or carefully prepared sauce made from herbs.

Loquebantur

Loquebantur, Music from the Baldwin Partbooks, The Marian Consort, Rory McCleery, Rose Consort of Viols (Delphian)

I've probably bought fewer records this year than in most recent years so I was due some when this and a new Tallis Scholars disc were released a few weeks ago. But I thought how much of this music I already have and demurred. Then last week Radio 3's The Choir played a piece from this and, for the love of God, it was soon being ordered.
George Baldwin was a lay clerk at Windsor in 1575...and the so-called 'Baldwin Partbooks', held at Christ Church, Oxford, were his creation'.
So this is a similar collection to, but later than, the Eton Choirbook. 

The consort of viols punctuate the stellar vocal pieces with more terrestrial interludes but the highlights are in the singing, the sopranos Emma Walshe and Gwendolen Martin and countertenors Daniel Collins and Rory McCleary stretching effortlessly, or easily enough, into the acoustic of Merton College Chapel. After the Tallis Loquebantur variis linguis has uwrapped and explained itself in gathering celebration, its parts prefiguring the style of trad jazz by 400 years as each leads off from another, we can soon see how William Byrd learnt from the master in O salutaris hostia, with words by Thomas Aquinas that don't convince the C21st atheist of their copper-bottomed wisdom,
O sacrifice that brings salvation,
That opens the gate of heaven.

More earthbound in sentiment but persuasive in its soprano top line is Dum transisset Sabbatum by Christian Hollander (1510-1568/9) in which Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Jmes and Salome bring spices to anoint Jesus.
I dare say the instrumental pieces are put in to break up the succession of pure vocal elaborations. I'd generally prefer a disc of voices and another disc of viol music but in this case, it is about a selection from the book and so here is John Taverner diverting into chamber music with Quaemadmodum, not the Taverner we get from the Tallis Scholars but thought to have been originally a setting of Psalm 42.
I suspect the William Mundy Adhaesit pavimento and John Sheppard Ave Maris Stella with which the Marian Consort finish are the most ambitious, grandest compositions saved for the end, the finale surely the outstandingly stately and monastic item on the programme. In between these comes Baldwin's own off-beat appearance in Coockow as I me walked  that Steeleye Span might like to discover one day. But we are left at our profoundest with Sheppard returning us strictly to a Vespers hymn and an appropriately devotional place to end.
As an habitual purchaser of records like this, I can't say that anything on it has recommended itself as a candidate for the ultimate shortlist of greatest things of the age and maybe the Eton Choirbook is ahead of Baldwin, which is not to say it's anything less than a fine disc but if you live in paradise then routine gloriousness happens all the time and one can begin to take it for granted.
 

The Saturday Nap

Beast of Burden is not only my favourite Rolling Stones song but a staying novice chaser of considerable promise. Some of my money was unseated along with Paul Townend when he was otherwise all over the winner at Chepstow on his first outing over fences. I should be recouping those particular losses (out of the accumulating losses I've been compiling recently) tomorrow at Newbury in a classy Grade 2 Novice Chase. But I won't be. I'm distracted by the early money for the Skelton's Value at Risk (Newbury 2.10). Such distractions can be a bad thing when sticking to one's guns can sometimes be the answer in adversity. But I've thought and thought again and will stop there, without thinking any more.
I can't see Wicklow Brave being the right choice for the Fighting Fifth hurdle on Saturday with in-form Irving and the quite interesting Beltor in opposition. The Hennessy is not my sort of race since not backing Denman having tipped him all week at 5/1 a few years ago. And so it's a Thursday nap this week in the belief that the slide towards penury will be halted one day. I will finish the year in front but it may no longer be by a personal best margin, and it would be better to finish with a healthy amount in the account to take into 2016. Recent setbacks were paid for in advance by a marvellous low-key summer jumping season but now the fruits of those lazy, hazy days have been surrendered. So now would be a good time for the naps to start leading the way back with green shoots of economic recovery, fiscal well-being, spend to grow, prudence, entrepreneurial adventure, investing in the future and all the other buzzword phrases that the great Chancellors of the Exchequer of recent years have coined to justify their own guesswork and ill-informed gambles.
At least I back my own with my own money and not that entrusted to me by the nation.

Up the Creek

One ongoing series of photographs I never quite got round to taking was of Baffins Pond, Portsmouth, near where I used to live, seeing it and the birds that lived there through the year in different light and all weathers. The latest is Hilsea Creek, the stretch of water that gives Portsmouth a genuine reason for its island identity, the highlight of my new walk to and from work.
Pictures of the creek in daylight will be fine but the series of pictures would only have the contrast I intend for it if included some in twilight and darkness, the lights from the motorway reflected on the water as well as the difference between the tide coming in to fill it with choppy, windblown waves and the desolate strip of dirty, disconsolate stream it becomes at low tide revealing its collection of bollards and detritus on mud banks as unpicturesque as any on the coast of Britain. It is an immediately forgettable picture made interesting only by its commentary on what it's like to be nowhere in particular but caught in the mist, the dusk or with artificial light shining on it, it is capable of atmosphere.
Here is a picture from the internet. Unremarkable, isn't it. And thus, a good place for poetry, or something like it, to come from. Stephen Fry has been among those descrying the state of contemporary poetry perhaps for its inward-looking nature, the way in which it no longer aspires to the heroic or compare with memorable great poetry of the past. But I'm not so sure it doesn't, at its best. In whatever age one lived, thee must have been plenty of poetry written that wasn't very good, it's just that there is a lot of poetry now whereas much of the lots of poetry written in previous periods has, quite understandably, not been preserved.
Even admirers of Larkin seem able to accept that Larkin is a 'great, minor poet' and I think I've heard Anthony Thwaite say so. But I don't think I'd even agree with that in all its implications. We would look ridiculous now if we wrote like Byron and we make adjustments of our own when reading Romantic poetry. It might not have been entirely beneficial for poetry to have been annexed by academics and Creative Writing and made into the slightly too commodified industry it has become but that is not to say that adjusting from an art form of national interest and Tennysonian grandeur to something more recherche or simply less obvious is a bad thing.  It has retreated to the outskirts of our culture, being just words on a page and then read from that page, but that's not such a bad place to be. It will attract its share of cranks and careerists who will try it on for size and make a little name for themselves but only in the same proportion as any other part of the arts or sports community or business enterprise does.
Some poets are like Hilsea Creek and look unprepossessing at first but they can do much more than that given due attention.
 

Transtromer Translation

I don't believe in Poetry in Translation. Of the many and various definitions or aphorisms that attempt to say what poetry is, Robert Frost's that it is 'what gets lost in translation' is one of the more useful.
'Poetry in translation' is a contradiction in terms if poetry depends on the music of the words and is the product of sound and meaning coming together. The sound only exists in the original language and can only thus be appreciated by one fluent in it. As soon as it is translated, we are in receipt of something like a painting re-ordered into a topographical representation with its colours seen through tinted glass.
A translator can provide a literal version of what the words mean or a new poem in the other language but the new poem is the translator's poetry, not the poet's. They can faithfully reproduce the form or rhyme scheme at further risk of sacrificing a close rendering of the original, straining for rhymes (which is not as easy in English as in some languages) and having to use words that are further from the most appropriate than one might like. And they can try to recreate the feeling or atmosphere but again, languages tend to have their own idiosyncracies and when a joke, wordplay or ambiguity occurs in a translation, one can't be sure it worked like that in the poem itself.
I have compared Baudelaire to translations of Baudelaire and know that's not quite what it said; I have taken Sean O'Brien's word for Dante's; I have read versions of Ovid, Horace, Juvenal, Catullus and all but personally prefer working on my own versions of Ovid, conflating various interpretations. It's never satisfactory and I never believe one hears the poem as a native user of its original language would. All of that is a great pity because it restricts poetry, even more than the novel, to a monoglot, or not very many-glot, audience when music and painting are far more able to move freely across such boundaries. Mozart and Shostakovich sound the same to British listeners as they do to Austrians and Russians, one assumes, and Bach's cantatas succeed in making German sound beautiful. Vermeer, Rothko and Francis Bacon look the same in Dutch, American, Russian and English and will readily be described by each with their own appropriate words. But I can't believe that a translation of Larkin into French, Akhmatova into English or Horace into Japanese gives a proper sense of the poem. And I won't even mention the English haiku industry.
But we mustn't give up. Poetry doesn't stop when you reach Dover or Heathrow. We would be the poorer if we didn't at least try to understand what poetry from other languages is doing and we would be more than usually moribund if we assumed that only English poetry was worth reading. I know that Eng Lit courses in our most respected universities used to prefer to study old sagas from Iceland, Old English and Chaucer in preference to C20th English poets- maybe that has changed- but Eng Lit owes a debt to Italian as well as other cultures from which it borrowed at significant times.
So, when I heard, only in passing, from a respected source that they had been reading Tomas Transtromer and were impressed, I took the hint. It's difficult to know what to read when the names one thinks one ought to like turn out to be disappontments (William Empson) and yet some you might never try could be just your thing. There is this list of European poets - including Mandelstam, Holderlin, Celan, Herbert, Montale - that might be read dutifully but I don't read dutifully these days. Even if Wislawa Symborska made a big impression in the 1990's, I didn't go as far as learning Polish to get a better grasp.
I hadn't realized that Transtromer had died earlier this year, having suffered a stroke in 1990 that left him unable to communicate in speech for all that time since. The Nobel Prize is a good tipster (Heaney, Symborska, but not Hughes) and I found soundbite assessments of his poetry describing it as 'pure, cold', economical and 'unobtrusively unforgettable'.
Robin Fulton's translations in the Bloodaxe New Collected Poems provide plenty of evidence those being the right things to say. These are versions in which Fulton's words replace Transtromer's Swedish and I will never know quite how accurately they say what the Swedish words say or if they attempt to imitate any linguistic effects but time and again one is left with a sense of the whole poem, an idea of the Transtromer original which is something transcending its ordinary circumstances, as in, for example,

From July 1990

It was a funeral
and I felt like the dead man
was reading my thoughts
better than I could.

The organ was silent, the birds sang.
The grave out in the sunshine.
My friend's voice belonged
on the far side of the minutes.

I  drove home seen-through
by the glitter of the summer day
by rain and quietness
seen-through by the moon.

But if it's that good in translation, how good is it in Swedish.

The Bloodaxe book ends with some autobiographical essays about school and childhood. They are compelling, suggesting that his early life was at times as traumatic as his last years but the character, calm and so perceptive and trustworthy, that forms his poems overcome all of that. And I always think that a poet that writes less rather than more is one that writes when something matters rather than for writing's sake and Transtromer's New Collected is not a big Collected by anybody's standards.
And so I'm glad of poetry in translation when it can provide such a valuable account of a poet who was otherwise not accessible to all those whose Swedish is not as good as it could be. Those autobiographical pieces are from a memoir called Memories Look at Me, which is sadly only 64 pages long but, on the other hand, not expensive to acquire. It is only one click away and so should be here next week.
   

      

The Saturday Nap

Sprinter Sacre made it all worthwhile last week, looking like his old self in demolishing a good quality field at Cheltenham. There was no money involved for me but it was one of those rare moments in professional sport when the occasion was for its own sake and not just the latest episode in the pursuit of cash. He was, I reckon, the best horse I've ever seen before his setback two years ago and he might not be expected to achieve quite the same level on the comeback trail but it was good to see at least that much.
Meanwhile, back in the world of filthy lucre, I'm on the slide and need to arrest the rate of decay of this year's profit. There might not be any better chance on Saturday than that of Francis of Assisi (Haydock 1.55) tomorrow and so that's the recommendation. He was brought home in his own time once beaten in the good hurdle at Wincanton last week having been thought worth a go in such company so the return to a novice race could see him back winning again. 

Oh Babe, What Would You Say

Since the announcement of my shortlists for the Best Poetry of 2015 last week I have been taking my responsibilities very seriously. The Isserlis/BSO Shostakovich was immediately supplemented to the Best Event shortlist and wouldn't have been were it not a very serious contender. The Best Poem category has been pretty much a forgone conclusion for months. But the Best Collection decision is a very difficult one to make.
It is my usual practice to read the shortlist again to make sure of my choice so on Sunday night I collected the four titles together to keep them by the bedside for ongoing consideration. The Don Paterson and Kate Bingham books were there already so I just had to add the O'Brien and O'Reilly. They were not by the bedside so must be downstairs. Not by the computer, not on the table, not in the executive attache case I take to poetry redings or meetings. So, they must have been upstairs. Move the bed, no, they haven't fallen down the side, no, not here, not in the drawers. Back downstairs, emptying the bookcase which is double stacked with poetry books, from time to time realigning the Derek Mahons together, putting Lachlan MacKinnon back next to Wendy Cope, re-uniting the Muldoons. Systematically taking out handfuls of books and replacing them in a different order each time. No sign of the two fugitive volumes. Upstairs again, then downstairs again. Sunday night is gradually deepening towards late but by now I know I won't sleep if I don't find them. I sit down and think.
Oh, yes, that spare shelf on the big bookcase between the Larkin shelf and the Gunn shelf. I 'tidied up' by moving a pile of miscellaneous books and put them on there. And there they were.
But, having found them hasn't yet helped me towards a decision. Usually, a few bits of re-reading arrives one at a decision without the need of defining what 'Best' means but this year it's so close that I am having to decide how to decide.
They all have some excellent poems in them but merely counting or measuring their greatness isn't satisfactory. How much is it to the detriment of a book if it contains some less good pieces. Does one rate technical excellence above personal preference. Is there one aspect of any book that really should put it ahead of the others. No approach provides an obvious answer and the decision could conceivably still go any one of four ways. This year, Muldoon and Lumsden didn't make the shortlist but that hasn't made it much easier. It is the closest heat of this underwhelmingly disregarded award since its inauguration, and there have been some very competitive years. I imagine the offices of the LRB are lively with debate on the issue. However, it will be decided by finally closing the books and meditating for a while on which book is the most memorable for the overall impression it leaves of its attitude, world view but, mainly, of course, its words.
The winners will be announced in mid December.
--
Meanwhile, Romola has been embarked upon in this, my year of George Eliot, which will mean I'll have read all bar the already-read Middlemarch this year. It wasn't a promising start with its 'proem' and first chapter but then began telling its story and we were back in the wonderful land of George Eliot prose. The atmosphere of C15th Florence and references back to classical culture with some outrageous scholarship in evidence give her the office to indulge in even more gilded fine prose than ever and one can see common themes surfacing that make this less of an outlying curio among her stories than it first seemed to be. It's early days but the sheet I insert into each novel to make notes as I go is already filling up, and my biggest worry is how, when I come to trying to compile some sort of essay on the novels, I am going to see them all at once when each has supplanted the last in the memory and it is now thus a while since Scenes from Clerical Life made such a promising debut.
It is one thing that has impressed me with academics, how they can apparently retain so many books to talk about at any given time, if indeed they all can. But, in a pre-academic age, George divides the creative artists from the commentators in words given to Bardo,
'It is enough to overlay human hope and enterprise with an eternal frost to think that the ground which was trodden by phiolosophers and poets is crawled over by those insect-swarms of besotted fanatics or howling hypocrites.'  
and you wonder whose review of which of her books prompted her to write that.
--
I could never have been an academic. It seems in the end a dreary world and I inhabited an equally dreary one for what has been most of my paid employment except for how hilarity and absurdity cheered it up. However I was very tempted by a notice in Betfred's window yesterday to consider seeing out my last few years in a bookmaker's. I have weighed the options very seriously, which include the advantage of not having to take Cheltenham Festival week off because it will be on at work. But I've got this far by taking few risks and, even in these difficult times, it might be best to stick with that tried and so far successful policy. I can see how living in a bookies these days might not be all about horse racing but about servicing the clientele who are more or less paying your wages via their unfortunate habit. I feel more Methodist about it than I thought I would but I'll keep the idea in mind.