Monk, step further off

Went to see Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Bill Manhire and Adam Zagajewski reading at the Poetry Now festival in Dún Laoghaire. Ní Dhomhnaill gave an undertstated but quietly powerful reading, which included her versions in modern Irish of the poems of Gormfhlaith (died 947), the medieval Irish woman poet to whom twenty or so poems are attributed, and even though some of them are dated after her own life, there is a strong tradition of Gormfhlaith as a poet. She was the daughter of the Uí Néill king Flann Sinna and was married to three men, all of whom she outlived: Cormac Mac Cuilenneáin the king-bishop of Cashel, Cerball mac Muireacáin and the Uí Néill king Niall Glúndubh who was killed in battle and for whom she wrote the poem below, ‘Beir a mhanaigh leat an chois’. It’s published in Osborn Bergin’s Irish Bardic Poetry and Thomas Kinsella provides a translation in The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, 1986), which I also give below. I’m not sure if Nuala’s versions have been published but I’m looking forward to reading them. What I heard in Dún Laoghaire was powerful.

Beir a mhanaigh leat an chois,
tóccaibh anos do tháobh Néill:
as rothrom chuireas tú an chré
ar an tú re luighinn féain.

Fada a mhanaigh atáoi thíar,
acc cúr na críadh ar Níall nár;
fada liom é a ccomhraidh dhuinn,
‘snach roichid a bhuinn an clár.

Mac Aodha Finnléith an óil,
ní dom dhéaon atá fa chrois;
sín ar a leabaidh an leac,
beir a mhanaigh leat an chois.

Fa Chloinn Uisnigh dob fearr clú
do bhí Deirdre mur tú anois,
a croidhe ina cliaph gur att -
beir a manaigh leat a ccois.

As me Gormlaith chumas rainn,
deaghinghean Floinn ó Dhúin Rois;
trúagh nach orom atá an leac -
beir a mhanaigh leat an ccois.

‘Monk, step further off.
Move away from Niall’s side.
You settle the clay to heavy
on him with whom I have lain.

You linger here so long
settling the clay on noble Niall:
he seems a long while in the coffin
where his soles don’t reach the boards.

‘Aed Finnliath’s son, of the drinking feasts,
under a cross – it is not my will.
Stretch the slab upon his bed.
Monk, step further off.

Over Uisnech’s famous family
Deirdre stood as I do now,
till her heart swelled in her side.
Monk, step further off.

‘I am Gormfhlaith, maker of verses,
Flann’s noble daughter from Dún Rois.
My grief that slab is not above me!
Monk, step further off.’

I love the proud imperiousness of that ‘beir a mhanaigh leat an chois’ or ‘beir do chos leat, a mhanaigh’ as Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill has it in Modern Irish (mura bhfuil dul amú orm).

The Rain and the Glass

Listeners

Listening silence in the glass
The listening rain against.
All in the silent house asleep,
The rain and the glass awake;
All night they listen for a noise
No one is there to make.

All in the silent house asleep,
The rain and the glass awake;
Listening silence in the glass
The listening rain against.
All night they listen for a noise
Their silence cannot break.

These lines were written by Robert Nye at the age of thirteen one afternoon in 1952 after he fell asleep ‘by a window in the front room of the house in an Essex resort where I was living with my parents’. The poem came to him in a dream; ‘It was after this dream that I knew what I had to do for the rest of my life’. The poem is published in The Rain and the Glass which contains all the poems Nye has written since his Collected Poems in 1995 together with his own selection from that volume, and his piece about the book is published in the January 2006 edition of Acumen. Many poets will sympathise with Nye’s sense that ‘the writing of poems is based on a trust in inspiration – it happens – tempered by mistrust for the actual poem when it has been written down.’ For Nye, the poet needs to be ‘a kind of secretary to something more than his or her own little self’.

I’ve quoted the earliest of the poems in the volume; here’s one of the latest, after a sixth century Greek neo-Platonist cited ‘mostly because I like his name':

After Simplicius

Time is a dream and all we do
Will be the same again.
I’ll sit like this and talk with you,
Between my hands this cane.
And we shall kiss again, like this,
Again, and then again.

Again, and then again, like this
We’ll sit, I’ll have this cane
Between my hands, and we shall kiss
And talk, like this, again.
Dear, what I tell you now is true:
Time is a dream and all we do
Will be the same again.

And a final word from Nye, which should also strike a chord with poets: ‘I have spent my life trying to write poems , but the poems gathered in The Rain and the Glass came mostly when I was not.

The Rain and the Glass is published by Greenwich Exchange (8 Balmoral Close, Billericay, Essex, CM11 2LL) and costs £9.95 sterling.

The Bacchae of Baghdad

How do you deal with the literature of the distant past? How do you make Greek tragedy comprehensible to a contemporary audience? How do you make the language of Greek drama performable? How distant is the distant past in any case? Is Beowulf nearer to or farther from us than Catullus? Is Homer more or less alien than Táin Bó Cuailgne or the Fiannaíocht? The sensibility shift between our slice of time and the many pasts doesn’t run in a nice vertical line, but loops and veers, sometimes intersecting with our world, sometimes sheering back and sometimes running in parallel. Other than the fact that your car might be more fuel efficient and your software more bloated, there’s no linear progression from era to era in anything that matters. Some art forms, though, don’t travel as easily as others. We might enjoy a jar in The Front Lounge with Catullus but baulk at extended conversation with the author of The Seafarer. We love Sappho now because all those intriguing fragments that constitute our version of her chime with our post-modernist fragmentary sensibility, but that doesn’t mean we’d enjoy dinner with Aeschylus or Euripides. In spite of the fact that Greek drama is regularly adapted for the contemporary stage, we don’t necessarily get it. We haven’t trooped out of Athens on a spring evening for a communal bonding ritual, we have the dimmest notion of the social, political, religious, let alone the literary or dramatic contexts of these plays. Their central concerns are, in many respects, very different from ours. We don’t inhabit the mindscape of fifth century BC Greece and have to work hard for a foothold in it. Ernst Gombrich has the great image of history as a lighted paper falling down a well shaft, and Euripides’s world is pretty far down that shaft.


True, there are fundamental human desires, fundamental ways of ordering civilisations, fundamental conflicts, but I’m not not sure how useful it is marshal contemporary events as parallels for the events in a play like The Bacchae. So what is the play about? It’s a conflict between two irreconcilable positions, neither of which holds much appeal, and neither of which, maybe, we really comprehend. Resentful Dionysus arrives in Thebes with his female Bacchantes, angered that he is not recognised as a god and that Pentheus has been installed as king. Pentheus forbids all Dionysian rites, seeing it as his duty to repel this new and barbaric Asian invasion that threatens Theban order. So, a conflict between a fanatical religious intensity and a ‘rational’ autocracy; between male and female, masculine and feminine. The play carries a heavy sexual charge. Pentheus seems to lust after Dionysus for all that he condemns and scorns him, and his desire to observe the Bacchic rites while dressed as a woman seems to imply a battery of unresolved sexual issues, as we might see it. But if Pentheus doesn’t offer much for an audience to sympathise with or get excited about, what’s so attractive about Dionysus? Licence, freedom, drink, craic, mayhem, but also murder, intolerance, mutilation, general monstrosity. We get to hear a detailed account of the Bacchic rites when the Messenger describes them to Pentheus early on in the play; at first it’s all bucolic sweetness and gushing fountains of wine, but pretty soon the blood’s up and the heifers are being dismembered with bare hands.

In Conall Morrison’s version in the Abbey, the Bacchantes are equated with suicide bombers, and Dionsyus comes on like an Islamic fanatic . Pentheus for his part is got up like an American general and we’re apparently in The Green Zone, ‘a little America embedded in the heart of Baghdad’. The publicity makes it even clearer: ‘Here set in the contemporary surrounds of Baghdad’s Green Zone, The Bacchae of Baghdad is a compelling investigation of the lethal force of political and religious fundamentalism.’ And this is where I begin to stumble. Tempting as it might be to overlay a contemporary parallel on the bones of the play, there is no sense in which either the original or this version applied any kind of analysis to the brutal succession of events presented. Things happen, and then more things happen. The royal house is destroyed, the Dionysian rage prevails. When Cadmus remonstrates with Dionysus at the end, suggesting that gods shouldn’t merely ape the destructive anger of men, Dionysus’s reply is that Zeus willed all this long ago – and that, more or less, is that. The bleak resolution is that everything was foreordained, and one kind of tyranny has supplanted another. Seen like this the play offers a nightmare vision of a world without the possibility of any escape from horror, in which human will plays no part. And that would be one way to play it. But if you’re going to namecheck Guantanamo and Baghdad, if you’re going to particularise the context to that extent, you have to have something meaningful to say about them, you have to engage with their particular realities – otherwise the contemporary reality is merely decorative, a frisson of danger to persuade the audience of the play’s relevance, or to provide something to look during the long speeches. As it is I don’t have the sense that Morrison is that interested in his own chosen context, beyond the opportunity it affords for visual spectacle. And besides, the realities of occupied Iraq are not actually transferable to the conflict between Pentheus and Bacchus. Conflicts don’t necessarily operate on the level of that kind of mythic struggle.


The difficulties of this version, though, go beyond the Iraq references.You have the sense that the bulk of the thinking has gone into the visual spectacle; into costume and choreography: how to deploy the music, how to lower Dionysus from the sky, what to do with the chorus, and so on. The words are secondary – it’s as if The Bacchae was an opera and the words a libretto half taken in. This version is ‘written and directed’ by Conall Morrison, with ‘written’ appearing to mean adapted from previously existing English translations. It would be interesting to know what exactly the relationship is, how this particular version was arrived at. It sounded like a conventional translation: stilted couplets, curiously old fashioned diction [what are you prating of?], the kind of prosaic yet simultaneously self-conscious poetry into which the classics frequently get translated. That is, you felt at all times as if you were, with all the dutifulness that that implies, watching a Greek tragedy. And yet huge chunks of the play consist of long speeches and reports of off-stage events. The language is the prime mover of the play – all the action is in the account of the action. If the language doesn’t grip us from the outset, we’re immediately distanced from the events of the play, we immediately begin to filter them through a literary haze, we become aware of the play as a reading of an ancient classic. The challenge for the adapter is to find a way to release the text from itself, to let it slip free of the long burden of its past.

As I write this I hear the radio advertise The Bacchae of Baghdad as ‘a powerful play for today’ but this is advertiser speak; if it’s to speak to us now, it needs a radical re-visioning. Its central conflict needs to made to speak to our own lives rather to our historical awareness, and dressing it in contemporary allusions isn’t the answer. The language itself needs to be reconstructed to speak to us: it needs to be vigorous, muscular, as dramatically powerful as the original was in its time, in the Tony Harrison’s adaptations of Aeschylus are. It needs, maybe, to be less faithful to the lineaments of the original since that fidelity ends up more often than not translating as piety. The staging of it needs to be re-thought. Our attention begins to wander almost from beginning, from Dionysus’ long opening speech – again, we need to be made forget that we’re watching a two thousand five hundred year old play, we need to be brought right into it before it disappears from us behind a veil of translationese and exoticism. Otherwise we end up in the drama museum.

Sailor's Home

How long is it since poetry became public property? Today, poets write with the idea of publishing in our minds, and poetry books are published with the idea of sales in the publisher’s minds (however few!). Even poetry events seem to be organised according to the numbers of tickets that can be sold. The public has become an invisible hand, playing with and controlling the standards of the poetry world, and as such has transformed it into just as dull a field as any other directly commercial endeavour.

The above is from the preface to Sailor’s Home, a miscellany of poetry by Arjen Duinker, W.N. Herbert, Uwe Kolbe, Peter Laugesen, Karine Martel and Yang Lian, published by Shearsman Books . I suppose it’s true that poets write with the idea of publishing, though I’m not sure how primary a concern that is. Most poetry publishing is pretty fugitive. The tiny numbers involved mean that the act of publication is, in a sense, symbolic rather than real, or a kind of virtual reality, and I can think of few publishers whose decisions are influenced by the likelihood of sales, since whether a book will sell eighty copies or two hundred copies is unlikely to have much bearing on the economics of the operation. And again, having organised many myself, I can’t think of any poetry events that are organised on the basis of ticket sales, and can’t see either how the dire invisible hand of the public has any effect on ‘the poetry world’. If poetry is dull it’s because poets are dull; and if it’s brilliant, exciting, captivating it’s the poets are all of those things as they write it.

Still, it’s not hard to see why poets might want to remove themselves from the public domain from time to time, even as they fool themselves into thinking they entered it in the first place. They are after all poorly socialised creatures, and sometimes it’s just plain fun to talk to other oddballs like yourself. Such, crudely summarised, is the thinking behind Sailor’s Wardrobe, which took the form of a private poetry festival held last October in London. Each of the participating poets had to respond to the title, and the results are published in the book. Again from the preface:

The poems in the book do not 'respond' to each other in a narrow sense:each poet has explored his or her own understanding of the title ‘Sailor’s Home’, and arranged their individual forms accordingly. So here there are at least six boats setting sail on different waterways, rivers, lakes – and all seven seas....

Here are two samples:

Mare Silentium
is whaur aa sowels at last dae come
whas life wiz spent upon
thi silent craft o song
tae sail away sae dumb
(Mare Silentium)
we sail awa sae dumb

Layin thi keels o phrase
or sailin skeely through the waves
that waassh ower in crazy praise
until oor time is duin
and we sail tae kingdom come
(Mare Silentium)
we sail tae kingdom come...

(from ‘Shanty of the Sailor’s Moon’ by W.N. Herbert)

Uwe Kolbe
Sailor’s Love

Mit ruhigen Schnitten löste sie
die Reste vom Kerngehäuse
aus jedem der Schnitze
des saftigen Apfels.

Ich legte mich in Ihre Hand
und legte mich in ihre Ruhe.
Ich legte mich fast
in Ihr Leben.

Dann stand sie wieder auf
und griff nach den Klinke
und ging zurück
in die Küchen der Welt.

Sailor’s Love

With calm snips she removed
remnants of the core
from every slice
of the juice-filled apple.

I laid myself down in her hand
laid myself in her calm,
laid myself more or less
in her life.

But then she arose
and reached for the doorknob
and went back out
into the world’s kitchens

(translated by Mick Standen and Joe Tudor)

The rustling of the silk

Back after a long absence with three versions of a poem from the Chinese, for our edification, followed by a moral quandary.

The first is Ezra Pound’s.

Liu Ch’e

The rustling of the silk is discontinued,
Dust drifts over the court-yard,
There is no sound of footfall, and the leaves
Scurry into heaps and lie still,
And she the rejoicer of the heart is beneath them:

A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.

Much has been written about Pound as a translator or mediator of Chinese poetry into English. He didn’t speak Chinese, so his versions don’t have scholarly pretensions. In the Cathay poems he relied on the notes that Ernest Fenollosa compiled in Tokyo, and was quite happy to use the Japanese designation Rihaku for the Chinese poet Li Po. Arthur Waley, whose own translations of Chinese poetry were hugely influential, objected to many of Pound’s versions, though it’s hard to see how his version of, say, ‘The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter’ improves on Pound’s. Pound’s great gift as a poetic mediator was his superb ear. Compare, for instance, the poem above with Waley’s version below.

Li Fu-Jen
by Arthur Waley

The sound of her silk skirt has stopped.
On the marble pavement dust grows.
Her empty room is cold and still,
Fallen leaves are piled against the doors.
Longing for that lovely lady
How can I bring my aching heart to rest?

Waley’s is undoubtedly truer to the original. It doesn’t have Pound’s imagistic addition (‘A wet leaf that clings to the threshold.’) but as a poem in English Pound’s seems to me far superior. ‘The rustling of the silk is discontinued’ is infinitely more suggestive than ‘The sound of her silk skirt has stopped.’ And it’s also stranger, less like a poem in English, less like an English-language locution, a typical canny Poundian ‘foreignisation’. Pound’s prowess as an interpreter is, though, complicated by the fact that many of his translations are less relationships with an original than with other translations. He was a pretty ruthless cannibaliser of previous translations, which he rarely acknowledged, and often went to trouble to conceal. Have a look at the poem below, by the Chinese scholar Herbert Giles, published some year’s before Pound’s version. I’ve marked up the similarities with Pound’s version:
　

Gone
by Herbert A. Giles

The sound of rustling silk is stilled,
With dust the marble courtyard filled;
No footfalls echo on the floor,
Fallen leaves in heaps block up the door...
For she, my pride, my lovely one, is lost,
And I am left, in hopeless anguish tossed.

The use of the passive construction, the lexical similarities, indicate that Pound essentially based his translation on Giles’ version. It adapts it freely and, it must be said, improves it substantially as an effective English poem. Do his methods matter then? Should we we fling the book down in disgust at his theft or applaud his resourcefulness? A very large amount of Pound’s translations contain the corpses of other translations, as any detective work will show. There’s a very good account here which shows that his celebrated ‘Seafarer’ came straight from Cook and Tinker’s Translations from Old English Poetry, published by Ginn & Co in 1902. All’s fair in love and modernism, maybe, though this kind of intertextuality isn’t usually what people have in mind. But why should the magpie plundering and pillaging which was so much part of Pound’s aesthetic and genius baulk at delicately re-arranging and re-orchestrating the work of others? To expect anything else is to expect Pound to be a different kind of poet. Everything he did proceeded from the same impulses, and whether texts are presented as originals or translations or a fusion of the two, they are all fictions, they’re all charged with the same transformative energy. The appropriative genius is all in the difference between ‘The sound of rustling silk is stilled’ and ‘The rustling of the silk is discontinued’.

Looking for Home

Liam Carney as Gerry Newman in Homeland

Maybe because the country is small Irish writers very often have a highly self-conscious relationship with it. They feel intimately bound up with the life of the state and feel it incumbent upon them to record its psycho-geography, its socio-economic shifts, its daily preoccupations – almost, at times, as if the imagination were an extension of the chat show, capable of absorbing and rapidly processing the urgent issues of the day and relating these to to how the nation sees itself, how its perception of itself might have altered, how far the nation has fallen from idealised visions of itself. . .Writers everywhere take their subjects where they find them, but somehow it works differently here; writers sometimes seem to be writing to an expectation that they be in some way representative, that their work should be a kind of ongoing Prime Time earnestly investigating the eternal state of chassis of the national soul. I was thinking this the other night as I watched Paul Mercier’s new play, Homeland, in the Abbey.

The play is advertised as a play about money, the search for home,‘a fable of modern times . . . a sweeping tale of wheeling, dealing and urban mythmaking based on the legend of Oisín and Tír na nÓg’. Everything is there: crooked property deals, drugs, immigration, prostitution, abuse, religion, the subjects seeming to multiply exponentially as the play continues. And everything happens in a hurry; the play is a fast car driven through contemporary Ireland, or Irish Times-land, Joe Duffy-land, Marian-Finucane land. The play is a succession of rapidly shifting scenes, all of them acted at the speed limit, new characters introduced and dismissed as the large cast multi-tasks, the situations and events piling up until we struggle to remember what’s at issue in this particular scene. And underneath it all, like a spluttery engine, runs the compulsory Irish myth: in this case Oisín and Tír na nÓg. In case we miss any of the parallels, or in case we haven’t looked into Agallamh na Seanórach recently, the programme serves us an eloquent essay on the subject by Irish scholar Angela Bourke.

Oisín’s father was Fionn Mac Cumhaill, and a persistent tradition. . . says that his mother was a deer. . .Outside culture from birth, but immersed in nature; partaking in animal life yet all, or almost all, human, Oisín has much in common with the heroes of other traditions: Romulus and Remus, for instance, or Oedipus. But the stories of the Fianna are unique to Gaelic tradition, and Oisín himself has been involved again and again by artists contemplating change in these regions on the edge of Europe.

So as the economy loses the run of itself, as the pockets of the venal bulge, as the service sector offers the skinny embrace of the minimum wage to the Gastarbeiter of the Tiger, as the drugs flow and the litanies of the evils prosperity are composed by the tabloid thinkers of the day, we reach for the bony hands of the Fianna, that we may know ourselves. And Oisín in 2006 is Gerry Newman, communications whizz-kid, greaser of developer’s palms, now disgraced. He’s back in Dublin for a mysterious crucial meeting in the airport, but things go wrong and he’s propelled into the under life of the city where he meets various dubious characters and is robbed by junkie prostitute Niamh in her blonde wig (Niamh Chinn Óir, Niamh of the Golden Hair). He sees the bleak housing estates for which he was partly responsible, witnesses poverty, lives ruined by drugs, murder and other mayhem in a ‘thrilling white-knuckle ride into a world forged but forgotten by the Celtic Tiger.’

The language in which all this takes place is a mix of cod myth-speak, cod communicationese, cod evangelical salvationese, and the style of the production is broadly comic, a hectic ensemble grand guignol romp. It would be daft to look for any conclusions from what is a satire of the broadest stroke, but the problem with this style of theatre is that it, for all the rich theatricality, it can seem somewhat content-poor. Stuff happens, then more stuff happens. The variety of linguistic registers, the speed of the playing, the constant multiplication of the targets, means that nothing much really can be resolved: this style doesn’t do resolution. Or engagement, beyond a kind of distanced, amused engagement as the audience marvels at the technical slickness, the timing and so on. After ninety minutes without an interval, there’s a conclusion of kinds, but by that time Oisín/Newman has begun to outstay his welcome and in spite of all the transformations he undergoes is exactly the same character (and, miraculously, not a day older) in the last minute as he was in the first. What worked for, say, Native City, doesn’t work here because the subject, if you take it on – if you first of all distil a subject from the pile of preoccupations – demands some kind of polemical engagement.


In a sense the style insulates the production from the kind of impatience I seem to be showing here. But if you take on the foibles of the Celtic Tiger (I promise never to utter this wretched phrase again), you pretty much have to end up saying something about it. Otherwise you’re left with a set of theatrical snatches, play-bites, a kind of turbo charged David McWilliams (who, indeed, features in a talk ‘about The Grown Ups and the new Irish middle class.’ in the Peacock in February). And maybe this is the intention, a quick take on the obvious manifestations of the new economy (there’s a running gag about immigrants in the workforce complete with funny voices which was getting to be a serious annoyance), a theatrical addition to the running commentary on ourselves that fills the airwaves and the papers. Maybe that's why, next Thursday (26 January, 6.30pm – 7.15pm) broadcaster and journalist Damien Kiberd responds to Homeland. You can go to that, or avoid the economics and go to the post show discussion on Wednesday 1 February.

Henry Snodden and the Coastguard Station

Below is a poem by Eugenio Montale followed by three translations. The first version is less a translation than an extended riff on a vague notion of the original, and is taken from Tom Paulin's The Road to Inver, which came out last year. Billed as presenting four decades of the poet's translations, the book does nothing of the sort. Instead, it presents a series of loose takes on original poems identified only by the appearance of the poet's name in brackets underneath the titles. Thus

Who can say to the birds
shut the fuck up
or tell the sheep in the yow trummle
not to struggle and leap?

turns out, after a deal of searching, to be Goethe's 'Unvermeidlich':

Wer kann gebieten den Vögeln
Still zu sein auf der Flur?
Und wer verbieten zu zappeln
Den Schafen unter der Schur?

Is there anything wrong with this? It's a pretty common procedure, after all, translation as 'imitation', a kind of intertextual frolic à la Pound or Lowell. What's interesting about this particular example is the lengths Paulin goes to to domesticate Montale's poem into a Northern Irish context. You won't find Henry Snodden in 'La casa dei doganieri', nor any references to the Black and Tan war, nor to Teelin, Carrick and or 'Tim Ring's hill above the harbour'. Part of Paulin's fun here is this kind of radical domestication and transformation of Montale, as if he fell asleep in Liguria and woke up in Portnoo sounding very much like, well, Tom Paulin.

The other two are close, faithful translations, the first by Jonathan Galassi and the second by William Arrowsmith. Both have a lot to recommend them, both work as poems in English and catch the dark urgent discords of the original at the same time. As always in this kind of exercise, it's fascinating to see how two versions of the same text differ; how different translation decisions get made. For instance, the phrase 'Tu non ricordi' occurs three times in the Montale poem; it's the very first element of the poem and its repetition in the third and in the final stanza hammers home the haunting absence of the addressee. Galassi translates this phrase differently on each of the three occasions:


You won’t recall the house of the customs men...

You don’t remember...

and

You don’t recall the house of this, my evening.

This seems to me less urgent than the original; it loses the force of the repetition. Arrowsmith sticks to the simple 'I don't remember'. His is maybe the nervier of the two translations, tauter, less conversational.

The Arrowsmith version is taken from The Occasions (Norton and Company, 1987), one of the best Montale translations, and Galassi's is from his monumental Collected Poems 1920-1954 (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 1998). Both are excellent examples of the translator's art.

In his Translator's Preface Arrowsmith sets out the principles behind his translation of Montale:

In general I have tried to translate according to a few rule-of-thumb derived from my sense of what accurate rendering of meaning and tone requires. I have therefore avoided prettification, embellishment, and traditional concinnities like the plague. [five euros for the first accurate definition of 'concinnity']...I have conscientiously resisted the translator's to fill in or otherwise modify Montale's constant ellipses, to accommodate my reader by providing smoother transitions. And I have done my best to honor Montale's reticence, his ironic qualifications, and evaded cadences....'

Here are the texts; you can judge for yourselves the success of the various versions.


La casa dei doganieri / Eugenio Montale

Tu non ricordi la casa dei doganieri
sul rialzo a strapiombo sulla scogliera:
desolata t’attende dalla sera
in cui v’entrò lo sciame dei tuoi pensieri
e vi sostò irrequieto.

Libeccio sferza da anni le vecchie mura
e il suono del tuo riso non è più lieto:
la bussola va impazzita all’avventura
e il calcolo dei dadi più non torna.
Tu non ricordi; altro tempo frastorna
la tua memoria; un filo s’addipana.

Ne tengo ancora un capo; ma s’allontana
la casa e in cima al tetto la banderuola
affumicata gira senza pietà.
Ne tengo un capo; ma tu resti sola
né qui respiri nell’oscurità.

Oh l’orizzonte in fuga, dove s’accende
rara la luce della petroliera!
Il varco è qui? (Ripullula il frangente
ancora sulla balza che scoscende...)
Tu non ricordi la casa di questa
mia sera. Ed io non so chi va e chi resta.

The Coastguard Station
(Montale)

Henry Snodden and me we’ve nearly forgotten
that scraggy coastguard station –
a ruin from the Black and Tan war
it stood on Tim Ring’s hill above the harbour
like an empty a crude roofless barracks
-- same as the station in Teelin or Carrick
with the usual concrete harbour
like a berm built the century before last
to make a new fishing village with a slightly daft
name – in this case Portnoo – below the head

one August we came back and instead
of that ruin there was only the grassy track
on the grassy hill and so the field’s stayed
year after year though we’re both afraid
that one day very soon that unused field
‘ll be sold as sites – then we’ll watch
as a new colony of thatched
breezeblock cottages – Irish Holiday Homes –
with green plastic oilgas tanks at the back –
as a new colony starts up all owned
by people like us from Belfast
who’ve at last laid that claggy building’s ghost
-- well I wouldn’t go as far as that

[Tom Paulin]

The House of the Customs Men

You won’t recall the house of the customs men
on the bluff that overhangs the reef:
It’s been waiting, empty, since the evening
your thoughts swarmed in
and hung there, nervously.

Sou’westers have lashed the old walls for years
and your laugh’s not careless anymore:
the compass needle wanders crazily
and the dice no longer tell the score.
You don’t remember: other times
assail your memory; a thread gets wound.

I hold one end still; but the house recedes
and the smoke-stained weathervane
spins pitiless up on the roof.
I hold on to an end; but you’re alone,
not here, not breathing in the dark.

Oh the vanishing horizon line,
where the tanker’s lights flash now and then!
Is the channel here? (The breakers
still seethe against the cliff that drops away…)
You don’t recall the house of this, my evening.
And I don’t know who’s going or who’ll stay.

(Jonathan Galassi)

The Coastguard Station

You don’t remember the coastguard house
perched at the top of the jutting height,
awaiting you still, abandoned since that night
when your thoughts came swarming in
and paused there, hovering.

Southwesters have lashed the old walls for years,
the gaiety has vanished from your laugh:
the compass swings at random, crazy,
odds can no longer be laid on the dice.
You don’t remember: a thread pays out.

I hold one end still; but the house
keeps receding, above the roof the soot-
blackened weathervane whirls, pitiless.
I hold one end: but you stay on, alone, not
here, breathing in my darkness.

Oh, the horizon keeps on receding, there, far out
where a rare tanker’s light blinks in the blackness!
Is the crossing here? (The furious breakers
climb the cliff that falls off, sheer…)
You don’t remember the house of this, my evening.
And I don’t know who’s staying, who’s leaving.

[William Arrowsmith]

See also Arrowsmith’s Translator’s Preface to The Occasions, p xxi.