A shelf came down last night – surprisingly little was broken, but sadly this cup was.
All posts by Ken Cockburn
florist flowris schene
Gavin Douglas wrote the lines below about a May morning 500 years ago, as part of his Prologue to Book XI of Eneados, his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid.
I read it beneath a cedar in Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens at the weekend, as part of the ‘Spring Blossoms’ walks.
But it also seems a good match to this picture of me at Stonefield Castle, near Tarbert in Kintyre, taken by ~in the fields while I was visiting them there last week (even if rhododendrons hadn’t yet reached Scotland in 1513).
Dame naturis menstralis, on that other part,
Thayr blyssfull bay entonyng euery art,
To beyt thar amouris of thar nychtis baill,
The merll, the mavys, and the nychtingale,
[…]
And al small fowlys singis on the spray :
Welcum the lord of lycht, and lamp of day,
Welcum fostyr of tendir herbys grene,
Welcum quyknar of florist flowris schene,
Welcum support of euery rute and vane,
Welcum confort of alkynd fruyt and grane,
Welcum the byrdis beyld apon the breyr,
Welcum maister and rewlar of the yeyr,
Welcum weilfar of husbandis at the plewis,
Welcum reparar of woddis, treis, and bewis,
Welcum depayntar of the blomyt medis,
Welcum the lyfe of euery thing that spredis,
Welcum stourour of alkynd bestiall,
Welcum be thi brycht bemys, glading all,
Welcum celestiall myrrour and aspy,
Attechyng all that hantis sluggardy!
Arne Rautenberg
The German poet and artist Arne Rautenberg visited me in Edinburgh recently. We read together at the Goethe Institut Glasgow, and at the Edinburgh Bookshop – along with Peter Manson, presenting his fine Mallarmé translations – so thanks to everyone who came on those evenings.
I made some new translations for the readings, of poems from Arne’s most recent book, Mundfauler Staub (Taciturn Dust). This is a translation of ‘abspann’.
Credits
the man: my grandfather
the woman: my grandmother
the child: my mother
war
the man: my father
the woman: my mother
the child: me
reconstruction
the man: me
the woman: my wife
the child: my daughter
happiness
Arne and I, accompanied by Angus Reid, also walked part of the Fife Coastal Path, between Kirkcaldy and Aberdour.
Spring Shoots – Readings in April & May
After a long hibernation, the days are getting longer and several events in the diary are getting closer.
First up is a launch event for Out of Books, with Alec Finlay, on Thursday 11 April at 6.30pm, at the Scottish Poetry Library, and a second event as part of the Boswell Book Festival at Auchinleck, Ayrshire, on Sunday 19 May. Out of Books is collaborative project inspired by Boswell and Johnson’s 1773 journey across the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Taking their texts as their guides, we’ll set out to revisit particular landscapes and recover particular views. Over the summer and along the route we will host a series of events inspired by their antecedents’ famous journey, with further events in and around Inverness, on the Isles of Skye, Coll and Mull, and in Inveraray.
Barrie ‘Caseroom’ Tullett is visiting Edinburgh for the Fruitmarket Gallery Book Fair on Saturday 20 April. I’ll do a stint on the table as well, and read something from Snapdragon about 12.30.
Arne Rautenberg is visiting Scotland later in the month, and we’re doing two readings together – at the Goethe Institut in Glasgow on Tuesday 23 April at 6.30pm, and at the Edinburgh Bookshop the following day at 7.30pm (this is the Facebook page about it).
In May, I’m leading two poetry walks in the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, on Saturday 11 and Sunday 12, both at 2.00pm. Content still to be decided, but certainly some Chinese classics, haiku, maybe Burns in rural-floral mode, something from The Road North…
And finally, a reading with Pierre Joris and Lila Matsumoto at Little Sparta on Sunday 26 May at 5.00pm, linked to the University of Glasgow’s Assembling Identities conference. Tickets are available here.
Perhaps the snow will have melted from the Pentlands by then.
Autumn leaves
Autumn seems to be the time translations appear – a smaller crop than last year’s, but there are two publications to mention. No Man’s Land, the online journal for German writing in English, has published my translations of Arne Rautenberg – several haiku, and ‘gingko leaf fairy tale’, about coming across a pressed leaf in a copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Those poems, and many more, are included in Snapdragon.
The recent issue (3:18) of Modern Poetry in Translation is on the theme of Transitions. It’s the last to be edited by David and Helen Constantine, who share this issue with their successor, Sasha Dugdale. I’ll be sad to see them go – they have consistently published work of interest from a generous range of poets and translators, and have been very supportive of my work, taking versions of Thomas Brasch, Thomas Rosenlöcher and Heiner Müller. This issue features translations of three poems by Heinz Czechowski (1935–2009), a writer I’ve just discovered this year, and who skillfully interweaves his private and public selves, the historical and the contemporary, the literary and the mundane. You can read one of the poems here.
Beside them are other translations of Czechowski by Ian Hilton, a former professor of Germany at Bangor University, who has known his work for much longer than I have, and who many years ago met the poet on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall.
Letterpress & Typewriters
I spent Saturday at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh. They were running their annual bookfair, By Leaves We Live, and it must have been one of the best attended ever. I was mostly at The Caseroom Press table with Barrie Tullett, who brought a small selection from his typewriter collection to display, and be used. They were joined by Edwin Morgan’s Blue Bell (part of his archive held by the SPL), and a red Olivetti Valentine, which Angus Reid had bought for his daughter in a Stockbridge charity shop for a tenner, but which drew admiring and even covetous looks from those that know about typewriters.
Barrie recently drew on the old Pepsi advert to write a text about LETTERPRESSIN’, which he letterpressed as a poster, and asked if I’d contribute something similar about POETRY. I obliged, and the result is above. It’s in an edition of 25, at £25.00 each, and copies are still available from the SPL.
A good day of conversations, rounded off with a party for Hamish Whyte’s Mariscat Press, now thirty years young and still going strong.
Mine, Mayfield, Midlothian
Mine was a recent commission from Melville Housing Association for a new housing development at Langlaw Road, Mayfield, Midlothian. I worked on it with sculptor Susheila Jamieson, and P7 pupils from Lawfield Primary School. (This is a new building – the housing development is on the site of the old school.) The work was to be on the theme of mining, once the main industry in the area, and back in May Susheila and I visited the Scottish Mining Museum at nearby Newtongrange with the pupils.
Back at school we worked with the kids on drawings and texts, based on what they’d seen at the museum, especially some of the big pieces of equipment.
For the works, Susheila settled on five works in stone featuring texts I’d written, along with details from the drawings.
The texts were based either on work by the pupils, or on historical sources. Four of these were made using Caithness flagstone; three of these are laid flat on the ground, and one is a letter-day standing stone. ‘The wisp’ was a piece of lit straw, which at one time was the simplest way of letting those down below know their shift was over.
The fifth uses a boulder found on site, the top of which has been smoothed flat. It sits in an as yet unfinished playpark, with views across the estate to the Pentland Hills in the distance.
Susheila also made large metal panels to be hung on walls either side of the main entrance, and smaller panels for walls inside the estate, based on drawings of machine parts the kids had made at the museum.
Mine was opened on Tuesday 18 September by Margaret Burgess MSP, Minister for Housing and Welfare.
Snapdragon
Snapdragon is a newly published collection of my translations of poems by the German writer Arne Rautenberg, made over the past decade. Arne lives in Kiel, where I’ve visited him on several occasions, and he has been to Scotland twice, in 2003 and 2007.
As all books are, it is a collaborative effort. I was introduced to Arne by Alec Finlay, who has written the cover blurb above; Stewart Conn heard Arne and me read in Edinburgh and 2003, and his poem ‘Translations’ describing that occasion is included; the book is designed and laid out by Barrie Tullett, with whom I’ve worked on many projects over the years; and the cover was designed by Jantze Tullett, Barrie’s wife.
The ladybird
On the hibiscus flower
In the ashtray
(Haiku)
The poems are fomally varied: monologues, lists and fairy tales – haiku, double haiku and football haiku – one-word poems, nudges and inversions. They are presented as parallel text, German on the left and English on the right.
Between turbulence
And the monstrous rivets
A beckoning home.
His gaze deep in the
Rear wheel of a juggernaut
Thundering on by.
(from ‘Kiel After Rain’)
I mention my choice of title in the Afterword: “I settled on Snapdragon as it seemed to sum up much of Arne’s work: a flower-name, so a word that’s rooted in the real, something delicate and beautiful; yet also with outlandish and unsettling associations.”
The formal details are:
published by The Caseroom Press, 180 x 125 mm, 64 pages, ISBN 978-1-905821-21-1, cover price £5.00.
A review by Lesley Harrison has appeared in Northwords Now, no.22 (if you download the pdf, it’s on p.22). “I don’t speak German, but the English versions conjured very clearly a city-world still recovering from war, and Cockburn’s clipped, wry translations seem to be a perfect window to it, both clever and compelling.”
~in the fields
After our collaboration on Ink, I’ve had the pleasure of working again with ~in the fields, and written texts for two works in their current show at New Media Scotland, Inspace, part of the Edinburgh Art Festival 2012.
Yen To See Distant Places features ‘3D’ images – images literally made up of three layers, that is background, middleground and foreground, or ‘The Sublime’, ‘The Beautiful’ and ‘The Picturesque’. There are fifteen of each, so 45 in total, presented in the gallery on stands, and they can be physically moved. When three are placed in a particular spot on the floor, they are ‘read’ by sensors, which create on a screen a three-part composite image.
groves deep and high—
an air of majesty and dejection
*****
from gloomy raptures, to
the lonely down—
sepulchral yew
Each ‘ground’ also has its own associated line of text, and beneath the composite image a composite three-line text appears. Just as the ‘grounds’ are adapted from 19th century engravings drawn mainly from Sir Walter Scott’s ‘Provincial Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland’, so the lines are drawn from 19th century texts, especially Scott’s. I think of these little three-liners as ‘Romantic haiku’. The composite images (though not, sadly, the texts) are then transmitted to St. Andrew Square where they can be viewed through a telescope located by the Edinburgh Art Festival pavilion.
Drifts Through Debris is a modern take on the 16th century book wheel of Agostino Ramelli. Ramelli’s wheel was made to allow comparisons to be made between different texts – you could have several books open at a time, and by turning the wheel you could compare and contrast their contents.
This wheel features video screens, and draws attention to the growing problem of oceanic plastic pollution. Footage includes archive material from the 1940s extolling the virtues of plastic as a way of utilising what would otherwise be waste products, and responses by two dancers – Sue Hawksley and Tony Mills – to images of sea-creatures constrained in various ways by plastic debris.
I wrote texts to the same images, and extracts from these are presented as part of the soundtrack to the video loops. The wheel is made of steel, with spaces at the hub for small projectors – a clever piece of contemporary design – but you turn it by pulling on handles made of driftwood, so it also has a nice tactile element to it.
The third work in the show is A Diagram of Floating Stones – in tall, thin aquariums, lace-knit wrapped stones from Shetland beaches are given buoyancy by plastic found on the same beaches.
I think it’s a great show – conceptually and visually strong, a fascinating mesh of old and new technologies, and acknowledging the gallery visitor as active participant rather than passive consumer. There are pictures of the opening, and of the works, here.
Sixteens
Sixteens: for Isobel is a project featuring simple, formal arrangements of related found objects, made for Northlight Dunbar 2012, and presented at the Beach Hut, Dunbar Harbour.
I developed the practice of making Fourteens in summer 2010 as part of The Road North. On my daughter’s fourteenth birthday I was on Skye while she was in Edinburgh, so to mark the occasion I picked, arranged and photographed fourteen yellow ragwort heads, and e-mailed her the image. This soon became a way of enabling Alec Finlay and myself to focus on things we came across – including berries, flowers and mushrooms.
Two years on, and I’ll be with my daughter on her birthday. But I’ve been making Sixteens anyway, sixteen related found objects arranged as a four by four grid, and photographed in situ. I’ve made sixteen such arrangements and photographs, retaining one item from each, which is displayed in the beach hut alongside the photos. The items compose a seventeenth Sixteen, derived from its predecessors (just as in a ‘crown of sonnets’ the fifteenth sonnet is composed of one line from each of the previous fourteen).
I made eleven Sixteens before my week in Dunbar, on recent trips to Moray and Orkney, and the remaining five were made on a walk along the John Muir Way east from Dunbar towards Torness power station.
With thanks to Angus Reid and Lorna Irvine for their contributions.
