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…)