Category Archives: Translations

Poems, Publications, Translations

New prints & books from The Caseroom Press

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Some new publications from The Caseroom Press, designed and printed by Barrie Tullett.

There are two prints of individual poems, both published but uncollected.

I wrote ‘Hands’ in 2014, when I was working for the first time in care homes; it’s based partly on what residents told me they’d used their hands for, and partly on my own experiences and memories.

‘Close’ dates from 1996; it’s a poem I put aside, but I rediscovered it when I used it for a poetry walk a few years ago, and now I’m very fond of it. It’s a moment that’s long passed – my daughter has grown up, the ‘newspapermen’ have gone and buses no longer run along that stretch of the Mile – so in it’s way it’s become a historical document.

There are also two books – a single-poem artist’s book, and a little Edinburgh anthology.

Позже / Später / Later features a single poem by Wassily Kandinsky from his 1913 book Klänge. It’s the second in an ongoing series from The Caseroom Press – the first was Гимн / Hymnus / Hymn, published in 2022. This post from the time shows that book, and gives some background about Kandinsky’s book and the current project.

Wale comprises my selection of quotes about Edinburgh from over the centuries. The title is from Robert Fergusson – ‘Auld Reikie, wale o ika toun / That Scotland kens beneath the moon!’, ‘wale’ meaning the choice, the pick, the best. The cover image shows a detail from the paving outside the Scottish parliament building.

If you’d like copies of any of these, please get in touch via the Contact page.

‘Hands’, A3, £10
‘Close’, A4, £5
Wale, 107x107mm, £5
Позже / Später / Later, 220x220mm, £20
P&P will be added to the above prices.

Poems, Translations

Blubber (after La Fontaine)

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I recently wrote a poem for the Goethe institut Glasgow to an unusual brief.

This year is the Goethe-Institut Glasgow’s 50th anniversary, and they have organised a poetry trail of poems by German, French and Scottish poets (they share their splendid building in Park Circus with the Alliance Française, itself 40 years here). The trail runs through the building itself into the garden and through the gardens outside.

The idea was that every poet (there are 12 involved, four from each country) provides an idiom from their own language, explaining both the literal as well as the idiomatic meaning, and this was then passed on to a poet writing in a different language. The commission was write a poem responding to or re-imagining that idiom.

I was given the French idiom ‘être Gros-Jean comme devant’, which came with these comments: “it’s quite archaic, and means to have had high hopes and yet to find yourself back in the same position as before. ‘Gros-Jean’ gets used to mean a common man, a boor, and literally the expression means ‘to be a common man like before’ (and of course in the French it rhymes!).”

A little online searching showed it concludes one of La Fontaine’s Fables, ‘La Laitière et le Pot au lait’, or ‘The Milkmaid and her Pail’, which also includes the memorable line about building castles in Spain. The fable – poetry, not prose – is in two parts, the first a narrative describing the milkmaid and her increasingly extravagant visions of success before she drops the milk she was going to sell and ends up with nothing, while the second part is a reflection on the narrative. I ended up writing a very loose (and expanded, 19 lines to the original 14) translation of that second part. The opening couplet,

Quel esprit ne bat la campagne?
Qui ne fait chasteaux en Espagne?

Englished as

Many this fond delusion share
And build such castles in the air… (trans. Thomson, 1884)

and

For, who never dreams of riches like rain,
Who never builds castles in Spain? (trans. Ponsot, 1957)

becomes

Aren’t we all a little unhinged? Who hasn’t
heard themself banging on about buying
a little place in the country, or dreaming of
louche retirement on some shady sunsoaked Costa?

And the last line, where Gros-Jean lumbers in, becomes

the same sack of blubber and bone I always was.

When I went to the Goethe Institut for the 50th anniversary celebrations it was displayed on the railings outside the gallery, where the photo above was taken, and I think it’ll remain in place for the rest of November.

My thanks to Annie Rutherford and Susanne Graaf of the Goethe Institut, and here’s to the next fifty years of a cultured German presence in Scotland.

(It was just getting dark as I arrived and took the photo…)

Edinburgh Poetry Tours, Poems, Publications, Translations, Walks

Edinburgh (2nd edition)

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Almost 18 months ago Barie Tullet’s Caseroom Press published the pamphlet Edinburgh: poems and translations. The first edition – hand-sewn, with covers in a wide range of colours – is now sold out, and last month a second edition appeared, with staples and a uniform cover. The contents remain the same – poems about the city written in 1996-97 and 2016, plus translations from Victor Hugo, Theodor Fontane and the 17th century Latin of Arthur Johnston.

The first sales were at last month’s Artists Book Fair at the Fruitmarket Gallery. Also on sale there were two new pamphlets, both featuring poems that would have made the cut for Edinburgh: poems and translations had they been written a little sooner.

They were commissioned by the first Push the Boat Out festival in autumn 2021, and again refer to sites in Edinburgh’s Old Town: ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ beneath the railways bridge at the junction of Calton Road and New Street, and ‘The Ballad of William Knox’ at the poet’s memorial stone in the New Calton Burial Ground, not far from the Stevenson vault, where Robert Louis’s grandfather, father, and uncle are all buried. (There are some photos of his memorial in an earlier blog, part of An Edinburgh Alphabet – scroll down to ‘K’.)

Edinburgh: poems & translations
ISBN 978-1-905821-35-8
210 x 125mm, 16 pages, soft covers

Jacob’s Ladder
No ISBN
282 x 99mm, 4pp, grey endpapers

The Ballad of William Knox
No ISBN
282 x 99mm, 4pp, blue endpapers

Artists, Poems, Publications, Translations, Visual Arts

Kandinsky’s Hymn (1913 / 2022)

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In June I was contacted by my friend Barrie Tullett. His wife Jantze had “an idea to illustrate a poem (or three) by Wassily Kandinsky, from his book Klänge, which was published in 1913”. I was asked to translate the eight-line poem from the German, which I did, and recently they sent me a copy of the finished article, a book featuring one line of the poem (in Russian, German and English), with illustrations, on each page-spread. You can read more about it here.

Apparently Kandinsky originally wrote the texts in Russian, but then found a German publisher, so translated them himself. The idea was that after the German edition, they’d make a Russian one – but the German edition didn’t sell, so it never happened.

This is the complete eight-line poem in German, followed by my translation (in which I’ve prioritised the rhythm, and to a lesser extent the rhymes):

Innen wiegt die blaue Woge.
Das zerrissne rote Tuch
Rote Fetzen. Blaue Wellen.
Das verschlossne alte Buch.
Schauen schweigend in die Ferne.
Dunkles Irren in den Wald.
Tiefer werden blaue Wellen.
Rotes Tuch versinkt nun bald.

Within the breaker blue is swaying.
Cloth that’s red is ripped and torn.
Red is shredded. Blue is wavey.
Padlocked shut the book that’s old.
Silent look into the distance.
Err in darkness in the woods.
Deeper darkens blue that’s wavey.
Cloth that’s red will sink down soon.

You can see the pages of the original if you search for ‘Klänge’ here.

There is a recent edition of the woodcuts available on issuu.

And if you want a bit of background, there is always wikipedia.

Publications, Translations, Visual Arts

F L Y

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F L Y is a new large-format book book published by the municipal gallery in Delmenhorst, Lower Saxony. In it Arne Rautenberg pairs some of his own poems with selected works from the gallery’s collection of contemporary art. Some of the poems were written specially for the project, others are from his earlier collections.

Edited by Dr Annett Reckert, the book is based on an exhibition that ran from March until September. In a year when so much has been postponed and cancelled, or at best moved online, it’s a delight to realise that some real-life projects were still possible.

I’ve translated Arne’s works for many years now, and for the book contributed a translation of his poem ‘gebirgsbach irr’. In English it became ‘hill stream will’, as a way of catching the internal ryhme of the title, as well as the play of meaning around ‘… irr / lichternd’; at one level the phrase refers to the flitting movement of the ‘irr [i.e. the stream], while also suggesting ‘irrlicht’, the will o’the wisp.

I’m just sorry I wasn’t able to travel to see the show. Maybe next year such trips will be possible again.

F L Y (Städtische Galerie Delmenhorst & Muthesius Kunsthochschule, 2020), 284pp. ISBN 978-3-944683-31-7

Poems, Schools, Translations, Visual Arts

the plastic debris of the oceans

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Cramond foreshore 1I recently ran some secondary school workshops for the StAnza poetry festival.

This year’s StAnza artist-in-residence, Astrid Jaekel, chose two poems I’m very familiar with for her festival exhibition, Plastik (Kunst). One is by the German poet and artist Arne Rautenberg, which I’d translated as ‘i declare the plastic debris of the oceans’. The other is George Mackay Brown’s ‘Beachcomber’, a poem I’ve used many times in workshops. Astrid’s lasercuts of the poem can be seen along Rose Street in Edinburgh.

  • Before the school sessions, I combed beaches on either side of the Firth of Forth, gathering plastic debris. I also prepared a set of of about 80 cards featuring single words relating to the Scottish coast and beaches (pebble, pool, blue, grey, gull, seaweed, boat, wave and so on), and various ‘rules’ for writing a poem using three of these words, such as
  • write a poem in which the three words appear in alphabetical order
  • write a poem using one of the three words as the title of the poem, one as the first word, and one the last
  • write a three-line poem, with each line containing one of the three words; the first line should be about the sea, the second about the land, and the third about the air

In class pupils were dealt a ‘hand’ of three cards, plus a rule, and asked to write a poem or poems. They then wrote their poems on luggage-labels and tied these to pieces of jetsam. (Between sessions, the class and their teacher at Waid Academy, Anstruther, went out and gathered their own plastic debris.)

These poems+objects were exhibited during StAnza, upstairs in J.G. Innes, the bookshop and stationer’s on South Street.

StAnza 2020 display 2StAnza 2020 display 4StAnza 2020 display 1

My thanks to all involved at Madras Academy, Waid Academy and St Leonard’s School, and at StAnza.

Translations

Translation as Conversation

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“I like the elements of ‘serious play’ in Arne’s work. ‘gingko leaf fairy tale’ links the Brothers Grimm and Hiroshima to suggest, touchingly, both a loss of innocence and a reconciliation with the past… ‘the forgotten dream’ makes succinct comedy from inarticulacy.”

“The conversation with Christine has been, like her readings, measured and occasional. Her work deals in nuance, glimpse, intuition, and part of its appeal for me is that I don’t always understand it entirely.”

Extending the Possibilities: Translation as Conversation is a piece I’ve written for the Year of Conversation website. It outlines my reflections on translating the work of Arne Rautenberg and Christine Marendon, over many years.

DSCF4965
Arne Rautenberg & Ken Cockburn, St Andrews, 2019

I was lucky enough to read with Arne at this year’s StAnza festival, and to hear Christine read at the Portico Library in Manchester.

Mail Attachment-1
Christine Marendon, Portico Library, May 2019

“A Year of Conversation 2019 is about us all celebrating, initiating and exploring conversation in our lives. There will be some events involving many people at places you might expect – festivals for example. But there will be many conversation events that are smaller and more intimate too. What is a ‘conversation event’? It’s simply something that’s been planned – that you might have planned – in which conversation plays a significant part or which gives rise to conversation. So it may be a performance of some kind or it may be a group of people (you have) chosen for a special reason to share a meal. There will be information about events on the website, but there will also be space for you to reflect on your own experiences of conversation.” Tom Pow, Creative Director, A Year of Conversation 2019

Publications, Translations

Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize

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I’m delighted that Heroines from Abroad is one of 8 books on the shortlist for this year’s Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize. The prize is for book-length literary translations into English from any living European language. The winner will be announced at the prizegiving and dinner at St Anne’s College, Oxford on Saturday 15 June 2019.

Heroines from Abroad was published last summer by Carcanet. It’s a first collection of poems by Christine Marendon, with her poems in the original German alongside my translations.

HfA front hires

Publications, Translations, Travels

Zbigniew Herbert in Scotland, 1963

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Herbert Collected Holy Iona

In Zbigniew Herbert’s Collected Poems 1956–1998 I came across a single reference to Scotland, in the poem ‘The Prayer of the Traveler Mr. Cogito’ or, to give it its Polish title, ‘Modlitwa Pana Cogito – podróżnika’. Here is the relevant section in the Polish original, followed by Alissa Valles’s translation from Collected Poems.

a także Miss Helen z mglistej wysepki Mull na Hebrydach za to że przyjęła mnie po grecku i prosiła żeby w nocy zostawić w oknie wychodzącym na Holy Iona zapaloną lampę aby światła ziemi pozdrawiały się

and Miss Helen of the foggy island of Mull in the Hebrides for offering Greek hospitality and asking me to leave a lamp lit at night in the window facing Holy Iona so that the lights of earth would greet each other

The poem is taken from Herbert’s 1983 collection Raport z oblężonego Miasta / Report from a Besieged City. I was curious to know more about the time he spent in Scotland, which was in fact twenty years before this collection appeared, in autumn 1963. According to Andrzej Franaszek’s 2018 biography of Herbert, using public transport Herbert travelled north from London, stopping in Leeds, York and Durham before arriving in Scotland, where he visited Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Inverness, Oban, Mull and Glasgow, before returning via Carlisle to London.

Franaszek quotes from a postcard Herbert sent from Edinburgh on 18 October:

Wdrapałem się na górę koło Edynburga i oczywiście spadłem trochę (niegroźnie). Tak trzeba. Ziemio ty moja szkocka ukochana! Jutro jadę, ale dobrze nie wiem dokąd. Dziś w nocy narada sztabu z mapą. Jestem bardzo szczęśliwy, żeście mnie wypchnęli w świat. (…) Przede mną góry i skały, kozice i georginie. Naprzód! Hej!!!

I scrambled my way onto a mountain near Edinburgh and I fell down a little (not dangerously). Maybe a good thing. My beloved Scottish earth! I am leaving tomorrow, even though I’m not sure where I’m going. Tonight there will be a conference of the High Command over the map. I’m very glad that you pushed me out into the world. (…) Ahead of me mountains and cliffs, mountain goats and dahlias. Onwards! Hey!!!

In another postcard, sent from Inverness, he described his mixed feelings about the country: he was ‘exhausted but happy, head over heels in love with Scotland; its beauty exhilarates the tourist. But life without sex… one has to go back.’

He returned via the west coast and, finding himself in Oban, decided to cross to the nearby Isle of Mull and from cross there to Iona or, as he consistently called it, using the English adjective, Holy Iona. ‘Holy Iona, czyli kartka z podróży’ (‘Holy Iona, or a page of travel’) was written in 1966 for the West German radio station WDR, and published posthumously in the collection Mistrz z Delft (2008). Of his perspective of islands, he wrote:

Wyspy nie należą do krajobrazu mego dzieciństwa. Urodziłem się w środkowej Europie, w połowie drogi między Morzem Bałtyckim a Czarnym. Pejzaż mojej młodości to podlwowskie okolice: jary i łagodne pagórki porośnięte sosną, na której najpiękniej kwitnie pierwszy sypki śnieg. Morze było tam czymś niewyobrażalnym, a wyspy miały posmak baśni.

Islands were not part of the landscape of my childhood. I was born in Central Europe, halfway between the Baltic and the Black Sea. The landscape of my youth was the area near Lwów, crevices and gentles hills covered in pine on which the first dry snow bloomed beautifully. The sea was something unimaginable there, and islands had a scent of fairytales.

The crossing to Iona had something otherwordly about it. It was 29 October, his birthday, and the ferry was no longer sailing. The landlady of his B&B at Fionnphort phoned a local fisherman, who agreed to take Herbert on the short crossing. In his radio talk he described their meeting-place:

Zimny, wilgotny, siwy ranek. Stoję w pobliżu jetty, która jest po prostu betonową ścieżką wchodzącą w morze. Ocean jest wzburzony, wysokie fale rozbijają się na skałach urwistego brzegu. Nagle z mgły wyłania się mała łódka rybacka płynąca w moim kierunku. Było to jak podanie ręki marzeniu.

A cold, damp, gray morning. I am standing near a jetty, which is just a concrete path going into the sea… which was stormy, high waves crashing against a rocky coast. A small open boat appeared from out of the mist; it was like extending your hand to a dream.

Once on Iona, Herbert explored the recently rebuilt abbey complex. He was particularly struck by his encounter with a sculpture, Descent of the Spirit’, by the Lithuanian-born Jewish sculptor Jacques (Jacob) Lipschitz (1891–1973), who fled France for the USA in 1940.

williammarnochionaabbey2008
Photo: William Marnoch, Iona Abbey, 2008

Its inscription, in French, reads:

Jacob Lipchitz juif fidéle à la fonde ses ancêtres a fait cette vierge pour la bonne entente des hommes sur la terre afin que l’esprit régne

Jacob Lipschitz a Jew faithful to the heritage of his ancestors made this virgin for the accord of men on earth so the spirit might reign

Herbert, who had witnessed the destruction of Polish Jewry during the Second World War, appreciated the paradox of recovering signs of community in this, to him, remote place. He expressed gratitude to ‘the Jewish artist who had heard so many words of hatred and responded by reaching for the words of reconciliation’.

Herbert returned to Mull, and the Fionnphort B&B, that same day. The evening brought him the image of light which he later incorporated into the ‘Prayer’:

Po kolacji gospodyni prosiła mnie, abym postawił małą lampkę w oknie wychodzącym na Holy Iona. Taki jest zwyczaj. Nocą światła obu wysp rozmawiają ze sobą. (…) Nie wiadomo, co przyniesie przyszłość i jak długo trwać będzie rozdarcie świata. Ale dopóki w jedną bodaj noc roku światła tej ziemi będą się pozdrawiały, niecała chyba nadzieja jest pogrzebana.

After supper the landlady asked me to put a small lamp in the window overlooking Holy Iona. That is the custom. At night the lights of both islands talk to each other. (…) It is not known what the future will bring and how long it might be until the world is torn apart, but as long as one night of the year, the lights of this land will offer greetings, hope is not buried.’

 

My thanks to Robin Connelly, Grażyna Fremi, Michał Kuźmiński, Basia Macmillan and Robert Macmillan for their help in sourcing and translating material on Herbert’s trip. As well as the books mentioned above, online there is, in Polish, a useful article from 2007 by Piotr Toczynski about Herbert and Iona, and a recording of Herbert talking about Scotland (scroll down to the heading ‘Szkocja’).

Publications, Readings & Talks, Translations

Heroines from Abroad

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HfA front hires   HfA back

Heroines from Abroad, newly published by Carcanet, is a bilingual (German / English) edition of poems by Christine Marendon, alongside my translations.

Heroines-from-abroad

Christine will be in Scotland this summer, and we are launching the book on 13 July at 8pm at Lighthouse in Edinburgh.

I discovered Christine’s poems via a mutual friend, the poet Arne Rautenberg. Christine had been invited to a festival in Slovenia, and needed English versions of six poems – could I make the translations? I enjoyed their enigmatic imagery and shifts in tone, and made the translations, helped by a correspondence with her.

Several years elapsed, when I always had in the back of my mind that I’d like to return to her work. I came across poems online, and have been translating her slowly but steadily since 2011; translations have appeared in Shearsman, Modern Poetry in Translation, New Books in German, and online at www.no-mans-land.org.

We met for the first time in March 2014, in Hamburg where she lives; shortly afterwards we were invited to read together in London by Sasha Dugdale, then the editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, and it was a pleasure to hear her measured reading voice.

From Bavaria, she grew up speaking both German and Italian, and only began writing in her poetry in her thirties, after attending a reading by the poet Hilde Domin (1909–2006). In Germany her work is published online, and in magazines and anthologies, but she still awaits a first collection. As a translator, she has made German versions of poems by James Wright.

‘Marendon’s work may bridge for English-language readers the perceived chasm between avant-garde and mainstream poetry. It’s not obscure, it’s not banally ‘accessible’. The voice and the language of Cockburn’s translations feel freshly rinsed.’ Carol Rumens