Good God! There's writing on both sides of that paper!

Review of "Heida: A Shepherd at the Edge of the World" by Steinunn Sigurdardottir and Heida Asgeirsdottir, trs Philip Roughton, pub. John Murray 2019

This is a memoir of a real woman, Heida Asgeirsdottir, an Icelandic sheep farmer, written down by a novelist and poet, Steinunn Sigurdardottir. The latter admits to being influenced in her narrative methods by the books of Svetlana Alexievch, which are based on interviews with many different people. They're good too, I like them myself, but am not sure the technique works so well for reporting one person. The chapters are mainly short, some only one paragraph, and read like bits of random conversation transcribed, then cut and pasted into what sometimes feels like a fairly arbitrary order. The organisation into four seasons does help, but within that pattern, different autumns, winters etc are jumbled together; the book veers wildly between childhood and adulthood and from subject to subject. Also, the story of Heida's fight against the proposal for a huge power plant that would wreck her farm is interspersed with the life of the farm. To me, this narration is too bitty and stop-start.

Heida is interesting on the daily routine of the farm, and often very enlightening:

"If I manage to shear all the sheep on the same day I bring them in, that's a dream because they're like marshmallows, all dry and puffy. The ewes mustn't be inside for more than one night before being sheared, otherwise their wool gets spoiled and has to be marked as second-rate. It's crucial to keep the wool from becoming moist or wet, so that it doesn't start to get mouldy."

Who knew? There's a lot of this and it is fascinating. it would be more so if this book had the map it really needs – I do know roughly where's where in Iceland but needed far more detail about this district, the distances between places and the potential effect of the power plant. A map would have given all of this.

Another problem is the poems, some Heida's, some quotes from famous Icelandic poets. Since all alike come across as total rhyme-led doggerel, I suspect there is a translation problem, related to a determination to preserve the rhymes, which I have come across before in Icelandic novels that contain poems. I think a lot of epigrammatic sharpness goes missing because most prose translators do not really have the specialised expertise to translate poems.

To sum up: much interest but a terribly bitty structure.

Arising out of a Facebook post by the poet Jo Bell, which linked to a list of poems to try on people who think they hate poetry. I didn't know any of them (US poems mainly, I think) but it did inspire me to try to list the ones I have had success with in this line when doing classes and workshops. I'm thinking especially of those who say they can't get on with contemporary poetry, by which they usually mean the kind that doesn't rhyme.

1, Napoleon, by Miroslav Holub

Holub is a good poet for folk who think they hate poetry, because he's very direct and non-mystifying. He was a doctor, and that vocabulary and subject matter often informs his work, as in Casualty

2. 170 Chinese Poems, translated by Arthur Waley

The "170" was a famous anthology in my youth and I've never actually met anyone who disliked it. Waley was particularly fond of the poet Bai Ju-yi (once known as Po Chu-i) from the 8th-9th century, who specialised in very simple, direct language (which if course wasn't near as simple as it looks). "Remembering Golden Bells" was a poem about the death of his daughter.

3. "Everything Changes" by Bert Brecht.

This is quite a good way to get non-poetry-readers to see what can be done by playing around with syntax, and how it really isn't that difficult or frightening.

4. "Eden Rock" by Charles Causley.

You might say Causley is the compromise for those who can't get on with free verse, since he never abandoned rhyme and music, but "Eden Rock" is half-rhyme, unobtrusive, form used in a twentieth-century way. It's also very powerful and most folk of a certain age can relate to it. There are others on his page in the Poetry Archive.

I like adopting personae in poems, partly because I intensely dislike the notion that lyric poems are (or should be) autobiographical and From The Heart. Poems, for me, are a way of being other, of entering a different viewpoint and consciousness, and that applies to reading as well as writing, for just as there is nothing more liberating for a writer than to inhabit another skin, so there is nothing more fascinating (and, often, revealing) than watching another author do so. Below is an example of an author, already working through the mask of translation, interposing a fictional persona as well, and I'm interested in wondering to what end.

James Elroy Flecker's "The Hammam Name" has a playfulness and wildly imaginative humour that have always appealed to me. Briefly, it concerns a young man who goes to the "hammam" or public bath (the word "name" in the title is, I think, the early 20th-century equivalent of "celebrity"). This lad is so impossibly beautiful (or is imagined to be so by the narrator) that not only human beings but inanimate objects fall in love with him on sight. Soap melts with love, a window shatters, bubbles burst like breaking hearts. The hammam's personnel are no more immune: witness the swooning shampooer's priceless line about the full moon.

The poem announces itself as being a translation "from a poem by a Turkish Lady", and this is where the business of persona comes in. It is indeed a translation, and a pretty faithful one both to the poem's events and its rollicking rhythms, by accounts I've seen (I'm no scholar of Turkish, but Flecker was). But this Turkish Lady is a fiction: the original author was in fact one Mehmet Emin Beligh of Larissa, an 18th-century male Ottoman poet.

On the face of it, there's one very obvious reason why Flecker might have wanted to put the poem in a female voice – in a male persona, it's extremely homoerotic, a thing of which Edwardian England might, at least overtly, have disapproved more than 18th-century Turkey did. But I'm not sure this wholly explains the Turkish Lady. After all, the reactions of the male bath-house personnel and customers are unequivocal and in no way played down. Just as educated English audiences were used to accepting, with varying degrees of enthusiasm or reluctance, the fact that Classical Greeks and Romans had more adventurous attitudes to sex than modern Christians, so they knew also that these things were managed differently out East. If Flecker wanted to distance himself from the poem's homoeroticism, all he needed to do was flag it up as a translation from its actual author.

What the Turkish Lady does, it seems to me, is add an extra layer of distance and fictionalising. In the first place, she isn't herself a witness to any of this: she can't be. The hammam was a single-sex environment: women were not necessarily barred, but they would not go at the same times as men. The Lady sees what happens in the first few lines: her young idol walking down the street toward the hammam. From then on, her own imagination and yearning attraction supplies the rest. She projects her feelings on to objects and people who, however hopeless their desire, are at least in contact with the boy in a way that she, in a segregated society, can never be. The soap may melt and the shampooer faint, but they do at least touch him, see him in a state of undress. Bitterness is born of beauty, she says, and the final three words about the frozen water have an emotional impact I don't think they would have in a male voice. Spoken by the man who wrote it, the poem is essentially funny and playful; the boy's inaccessibility more an amusing poetic conceit than anything else. In the voice of Flecker's invented Turkish Lady, it is still playful and imaginative, but the hunger behind it speaks more powerfully and the whole thing becomes more about fictionalising and reshaping.

The Hammam Name by James Elroy Flecker
From a poem by a Turkish Lady

Winsome Torment rose from slumber, rubbed his eyes, and went his way
Down the street towards the Hammam. Goodness gracious! people say,
What a handsome countenance! The sun has risen twice to-day!
And as for the Undressing Room it quivered in dismay.
With the glory of his presence see the window panes perspire,
And the water in the basin boils and bubbles with desire.

Now his lovely cap is treated like a lover: off it goes!
Next his belt the boy unbuckles; down it falls, and at his toes
All the growing heap of garments buds and blossoms like a rose.
Last of all his shirt came flying. Ah, I tremble to disclose
How the shell came off the almond, how the lily showed its face,
How I saw a silver mirror taken flashing from its case.

He was gazed upon so hotly that his body grew too hot,
So the bathman seized the adorers and expelled them on the spot;
Then the desperate shampooer his propriety forgot,
Stumbled when he brought the pattens, fumbled when he tied a knot,
And remarked when musky towels had obscured his idol's hips,
"See Love's Plenilune, Mashallah, in a partial eclipse!"

Desperate the loofah wriggled: soap was melted instantly:
All the bubble hearts were broken. Yes, for them as well as me,
Bitterness was born of beauty; as for the shampooer, he
Fainted, till a jug of water set the Captive Reason free.
Happy bath! The baths of heaven cannot wash their spotted moon:
You are doing well with this one. Not a spot upon him soon!

Now he leaves the luckless bath for fear of setting it alight;
Seizes on a yellow towel growing yellower in fright,
Polishes the pearly surface till it burns disastrous bright,
And a bathroom window shatters in amazement at the sight.
Like the fancies of a dreamer frail and soft his garments shine
As he robes a mirror body shapely as a poet's line.

Now upon his cup of coffee see the lips of Beauty bent:
And they perfume him with incense and they sprinkle him with scent,
Call him Bey and call him Pasha, and receive with deep content
The gratuities he gives them, smiling and indifferent.
Out he goes: the mirror strains to kiss her darling; out he goes!
Since the flame is out, the water can but freeze.
The water froze.

Confusingly, I now have two websites. This came about because webs.com, which had been very easy to edit, got "improved", and of course you can guess with what result. It became very hard to edit, so I set up a new site at http://sheenagh.wix.com/sheenaghpugh.

I moved all the poetry-related stuff across, including the pages of resources for exam students. When it came to the stuff relating to novels and fan fiction articles though, I wondered if that was necessary. I don't really write either any more, so the pages at the old site were not going to need editing, which was the problem. Plus I don't trust any site builder not to go offline or just "upgrade" and make itself unusable. So I decided to keep the old site at http://sheenagh.webs.com/ as an archive site for the translations and prose-related stuff, and just in case I ever needed it again....

It's weird, because last time I moved house in real life, we kept the old house up for some years, because there was a very old cat living there who couldn't be moved...

Sue Rose's first collection of poems, From the Dark Room was published by Cinnamon Press in 2011 and I reviewed it here. Sue Rose is a professional translator who lives in Herne Bay; she has been widely published in magazines and has won prizes in several competitions.


Hard Skin

She rests her legs on mine. I massage
her bunions, rub the lump on top of her foot.
She kneads my protesting arches, the corrugated bone
of my ankle, broken years ago and prone to aches.

I slide my nail under the white crusts
of skin on her toe tips, lifting wide strips, small flakes
like dried glue, worrying at the tiny tags
around her toenails, the brittle scales on her heels.

She huffs at the length of my nails, seizes
a pair of scissors and prunes them, twisting
my feet this way and that, brusque and careful,
though we both sometimes draw blood.

On this sofa we are intimate as lovers
with the callused contours of each other's feet,
mine accruing the mottled patina of hers,
the papery instep, the armoured ball.
( interview and more poems behind cut )

Links
More of Sue's poems (including 'Caravaggio's Virgin' and 'Globe', referred to in this interview) can be found at Michelle McGrane's blog Peony Moon and others are at Poetry pf

Just put a new article on translation up on my website. Translating the Not Quite is about my efforts to translate a German poem that wasn't quite in German, since it was by the Swiss German poet Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826), who wrote in the Alemannic dialect. I've included the original and translation in an appendix; for a poem written about 200 years ago it contains some strangely contemporary end-of-the-world forebodings. The article was originally written for a university but ironically enough they said it wouldn't do because it wasn't in the dialect they favoured, namely academic-speak.

Been re-reading a little book called Five Essays on Translation (ed Katja Krebs & Christopher Meredith, pub. University of Glamorgan, ISBN 18405411202) which arose from a conference on the politics of literary translation at my uni in 2003. There's an essay in it called "Sleeping with the Enemy" by the writer and translator Grahame Davies, in which he talks both about the ethics of translating from a minority language into a majority one and about the effect bilingualism, and the act of translating, have had on his own writing.
( more behind cut )
I've never been as bilingual as Davies; I have translated mostly out of other languages into English. The influence of translation on me has always been to make me look more closely at my own language and what can be done with it by those who look at it fresh. I have done a little translation from English into German, and once while living there for a while I did actually get the length of writing a published poem in German. It was also a pastiche of the style of a particular German poet, Stefan George, and I've never been sure that this wasn't really the deciding factor that caused it to come to me in German. Never happened again though....

I translated it into English later, but it wasn't really the same poem. What's interesting is that I can still recall the German version but not the English one. Here's the original for anyone who's interested (complete with slightly archaic syntax and uncapitalised nouns because that's George's style). I'll try to hunt up the English version later and put it in, just to see what happened to it on the way.

( Rapunzels Hexe )