I really loved this! Very honoured to have been the prompt for it. Funnily enough I was teaching some Pound just last week. You pinpoint so well how his lines here still feel like translation (sort of, as you say, translation from Greek and Anglo-Saxon at once) but have a literary quality that makes them memorable as translations mostly are not. It's a very delicate balance that he pulls off.
I'm so glad! And yes, it's a bit extraordinary what he does here, isn't it? I've always been slightly in awe of the metrical impact of the line “I dug the ell-square pitkin”. It's an impact I usually feel from classical music, not text. I don't have enough technical grasp of meter to know what it is, exactly, that's going on there, but imagine that you do!
Kelly's "Listen" reminds me of the first word in Beowulf, "Hwæt."
She's one of my favorite poets. A few years ago when I was teaching my poetry section and students were working quietly, I Googled her and saw that she had died and it was a blow to me. I was stunned. A day or two later I told my students about it.
What a painful way to find out. It was good of you not to share that directly with the students.
It was a stunning blow to me too, even though I had only talked with her during that one week or so. I think that she became a bit of an internal reference point for quality: I had the vague sense that I would know if some fiction I had written was good (if that ever happened) if it seemed good enough to send it to her as a thank-you. The words of her former students and colleagues were moving: she was clearly a generous teacher all the way through. She was interested in Kenneth Koch, by the way — was pleased at the idea of that long-ago class.
”Hwaet” — what a great connection. I hadn't thought of that, and thissent me off to read. I gather that it's cognate with ”what”, and wonder if it has the same sense of imperative as with the verbs in the other two. But it's equally strong: that sense of being grabbed by the text. Thank you!
Another wonderful post, interweaving memories of poets, poems and a poetic way of thinking about the world. On a possibly more banal note, have you read Ian McEwan's The Children Act? I did like the way Yeats's Down by the Salley Gardens was used in that.
Thank you so much! And no — will check it out, in this case. His Atonement traumatized me so much when it came out that I actually haven’t read anything he’s written since, and this one sounded also dark from the reviews, but this might be the reason to try again.
I heard him speak once, in the other Cambridge, maybe 15 years ago, give or take a few years. It was quite a good talk, but what I remember most is that he spoke about classical music and how important it was to him, and how it was almost inconceivable how others could go by rarely listening to it. I think that he said that classical music was as important to him, or almost, as words.
That interested me, because Vikram Seth had said something similar, but even stronger, at a talk I’d heard him give a few years before that. Vikram Seth had said, as I remember, that if he had to give up either music (classical music, I think, in the context) or words, he would keep the music and lose the words.
Both of those astonished me. It would go the other way, for me, without a doubt, and I just assumed that anyone who uses language as well as they both do would choose that first.
Incidentally, a student in a law and lit course a while back wanted to write about Atonement, despite my passing on that I myself had found it pretty devastating. They weren’t worried, and I figured that it would be ok — that they wouldn’t react as strongly as I had. But I think that they did, and that’s part of why I still haven’t read his later stuff…
I really loved this! Very honoured to have been the prompt for it. Funnily enough I was teaching some Pound just last week. You pinpoint so well how his lines here still feel like translation (sort of, as you say, translation from Greek and Anglo-Saxon at once) but have a literary quality that makes them memorable as translations mostly are not. It's a very delicate balance that he pulls off.
I'm so glad! And yes, it's a bit extraordinary what he does here, isn't it? I've always been slightly in awe of the metrical impact of the line “I dug the ell-square pitkin”. It's an impact I usually feel from classical music, not text. I don't have enough technical grasp of meter to know what it is, exactly, that's going on there, but imagine that you do!
Kelly's "Listen" reminds me of the first word in Beowulf, "Hwæt."
She's one of my favorite poets. A few years ago when I was teaching my poetry section and students were working quietly, I Googled her and saw that she had died and it was a blow to me. I was stunned. A day or two later I told my students about it.
What a painful way to find out. It was good of you not to share that directly with the students.
It was a stunning blow to me too, even though I had only talked with her during that one week or so. I think that she became a bit of an internal reference point for quality: I had the vague sense that I would know if some fiction I had written was good (if that ever happened) if it seemed good enough to send it to her as a thank-you. The words of her former students and colleagues were moving: she was clearly a generous teacher all the way through. She was interested in Kenneth Koch, by the way — was pleased at the idea of that long-ago class.
”Hwaet” — what a great connection. I hadn't thought of that, and thissent me off to read. I gather that it's cognate with ”what”, and wonder if it has the same sense of imperative as with the verbs in the other two. But it's equally strong: that sense of being grabbed by the text. Thank you!
(It's hard not to speculate that the “hwaet” has a sense here of “how much” or “so much” — the way that “what” can in English.)
Another wonderful post, interweaving memories of poets, poems and a poetic way of thinking about the world. On a possibly more banal note, have you read Ian McEwan's The Children Act? I did like the way Yeats's Down by the Salley Gardens was used in that.
Thank you so much! And no — will check it out, in this case. His Atonement traumatized me so much when it came out that I actually haven’t read anything he’s written since, and this one sounded also dark from the reviews, but this might be the reason to try again.
I heard him speak once, in the other Cambridge, maybe 15 years ago, give or take a few years. It was quite a good talk, but what I remember most is that he spoke about classical music and how important it was to him, and how it was almost inconceivable how others could go by rarely listening to it. I think that he said that classical music was as important to him, or almost, as words.
That interested me, because Vikram Seth had said something similar, but even stronger, at a talk I’d heard him give a few years before that. Vikram Seth had said, as I remember, that if he had to give up either music (classical music, I think, in the context) or words, he would keep the music and lose the words.
Both of those astonished me. It would go the other way, for me, without a doubt, and I just assumed that anyone who uses language as well as they both do would choose that first.
Incidentally, a student in a law and lit course a while back wanted to write about Atonement, despite my passing on that I myself had found it pretty devastating. They weren’t worried, and I figured that it would be ok — that they wouldn’t react as strongly as I had. But I think that they did, and that’s part of why I still haven’t read his later stuff…