Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on a fairly long review of a new anthology that I thought wasn’t very successful. This was a bit dispiriting, because I love anthologies, ancient and modern, formal and informal. There are lots of different approaches which can work well, but it’s a subtle art. The best anthologies draw on very deep wells of expertise — both of the anthologist themselves and as it were of the ‘tradition’ — though they often wear that wisdom lightly.
Happily, alongside the unsuccessful anthology I was reviewing, I’ve also read a few really excellent new anthologies in the last few weeks. The one I want to tell you a bit about today is a fascinating French anthology of contemporary English verse, published last year by Gallimard and titled: L’île rebelle. Anthologie de poésie britannique au tournant du xxie siècle (‘The Rebel Isle. Anthology of British poetry at the turn of the 21st century’).1 I think this is a fine example of depth of experience lightly worn, to the great benefit of readers.
This is a ‘mass market’ but high culture paperback of the sort the French are so good at. It runs to 550 pages but is genuinely pocket-sized, and costs €15 new (in fact, my copy cost only €11 from Gibert, a fantastic bookshop in the 5th arrondissement, because it was already slightly dog-eared).2
The book is parallel text, with the English on the left and the French on the right, and nearly all the translations are by the same person, Martine De Clercq, a huge achievement. It prints between one and three poems (or in a small number of cases, extracts) by 52 poets from England (41), Wales (3) and Scotland (8), born between 1920 (Edwin Morgan) and 1968 (Fiona Sampson).3 The 15 page introduction is itself very rewarding, and includes probably the best single paragraph summary of Geoffrey Hill’s work I’ve read anywhere — a summary which also has the modest good sense to say it’s really too soon to say for sure how successful Hill was in his projects, or what his influence will be. Inevitably, there are a few poets I wouldn’t personally have left out (like Gillian Allnutt, whose poetry I wrote about here), but overall I think it’s a very fair selection and I found it a fascinating read from several directions.
Obviously I’m not the target reader for this volume. But I was very curious to see how recent English poetry “looks” to two very well informed French readers, and what they consider representative. I think the selection they’ve made is quite different from what you’d be likely to find in the UK. For a start, it’s consciously quite conservative — in line with the cautious good sense (combined with incisive summary) of the comment on Hill, they’ve included no-one born after 1968, so they are not making any bets on anyone who is not already well established. There’s certainly no sense here of trying to be fashionable for the sake of it or to curry favour — perhaps one particular advantage of making such a selection from the distance of another country. On the other hand, the choice doesn’t feel old fashioned. Women are well represented for example (21 female vs 31 male poets).
The book has the feel of being born from long readerly experience — both editors have been editing and translating English poetry for many years and the perspective of experience really shows. Several of the poets included here, such as Philip Gross, George Szirtes and James Fenton, are poets who seem to me, at least, to have been more high-profile in the UK “poetry world” back in the 90s than they are today. Poets are all represented by between one and three poems or extracts and have been allocated in most cases between 7 and 15 pages. In a few cases, I detect perhaps a hint of editorial short shrift. Craig Raine is represented by a single medium-length poem, and the first sentence of the paragraph of introduction runs: ‘Pushing baroque to the point of extravagance, sometimes accused of voyeurism or poor taste, Craig Raine offers a vision of a destabilizing world’. The rest of the paragraph is typically concise and informative, but I sense that perhaps the editors don’t love Raine’s work. Similarly, Andrew Motion — who as a poet laureate could hardly be excluded altogether — also gets a single (albeit long) poem, ‘Veteran’, and the respectful introduction concludes ‘He lays claim to a certain kind of prosaic style, a guarantee according to him of sincerity . . .’ But overall the most noticeable thing about these introductions is how fair and helpful they are: giving a concise sense each time of the poet’s background, their place in the wider literary world, and the chief characteristics of their work. Brief expository prose of this kind is very hard to do well, especially over and over again.
The selection also has a real sense of the English poetic tradition standing behind it. The anthology begins, slightly to my surprise, with Michael Hamburger (1924-2007). The introductory note points out that he was best known as a critic and above all as a translator, which is certainly how I think of him too. In any case, I don’t think I’ve read either of the poems included here (‘January’ and ‘Muted Song’) before. ‘January’ contains a series of allusions to Hardy — though in this poem Hardy’s New Year thrush is drowned out by delivery trucks. The second poem, ‘Muted Song’, is in trimeter (three-beat) lines, the first section of which, unusually for English, mostly begin with a stressed syllable.
Darkening days of the yearBefore the solstice, AdventIn the ripped grove’s detritus.Wind from the Urals, cruel.One last campanula’s mauveBravely, silently peals,Gazania, dipping, flauntsFlame petals, African, still.
I hear the echo of Arnold’s ‘Rugby Chapel’ here (one of those poems whose rhythm, once heard, can’t be forgotten). So the anthology begins with Hamburger, a great translator born in pre-war Germany before coming to England to escape the Nazis, and with two poems which look back towards two major poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Arnold and Hardy.
The next entry, however, is for Charles Tomlinson (1927-2015), the editor of The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation — another nod to the importance of literary translation — but whose own poetry and poetic tastes looked consistently towards America, not Europe. He’s represented by three poems, two of which are set in America: ‘New Jersey-New York’ and ‘A View from the Shore’. I admired the way that these opening pages of the collection worked as a kind of introduction to the anthology as a whole, as well as to Hamburger and Tomlinson’s particular work: any serious British poet does indeed have to face up to English literary history and then to its wider context, as represented by the American poetic tradition, or the rest of Europe, or both.
Of course I don’t know the work of all the poets included here as well as each other. But where I know the work particularly well, the selections seem to me often impressively well-judged. For Philip Gross, for instance, a prolific poet who’s published regular collections since the early 1980s, the anthology offers us three poems, all from his 2009 (roughly ‘mid-career’) collection, The Water Table — ‘Betweenland I’, ‘Betweenland III’ and ‘Severn Song’. The three poems are unified by theme — in that sense, they ‘go together’ — but in form and style they are markedly different. The first is written in a thoughtful, conversational, uncertain style that isn’t truly free verse — all of these lines have four or five stresses — but is certainly metrically quite loose and discursive, with no rhyme. The third is in tightly rhymed four-line stanzas, and is indeed very singable. The second poem is a lovely single-sentence held together by a single rhyme (rain, again, vane, explain):
After rain,the farshore — close,with an almost accusingacuity,as if nothingcould ever be ignoredagain:every detail(the tick of a wind-turbine’s vaneagainst the skyline)a point it insists on:nono no, let me explain.
This very neatly points to the three main types of poetry that Gross has produced throughout this career, although with a gradual shift of emphasis over time — his earliest collections are dominated by more tightly formal pieces, while his most recent collections have tended towards more expansive and discursive verse.4 I thought this particular choice a very deft way of creating a taste of Gross which was both coherent in itself, and usefully representative of the range of poetry you’d find in his work if you followed it up. (Talking of following things up — the anthology has a fantastically useful little bibliography at the back listing for each author their main collections.)
The range of poetry here is broad, as you’d expect in an anthology purporting to introduce you to the British poetry “scene” of the last 50 years. On average, though, I think it includes a larger proportion of poems in rhyme, or with a distinct formal structure than we’d probably find in a similar UK anthology. Perhaps this is just a matter of personal taste on the part of the editors, or a reflection of what you find in contemporary French poetry (something I commented tentatively on a few months ago here). On the other hand, there’s no prose poetry at all, even though prose poems are increasingly fashionable and prominent in UK poetry journals and prize-winning collections. The modern prose poem was invented by the French, of course, and has been a significant element of the French poetry scene ever since — this is still very noticeable if you browse at random in any bookshop. Perhaps the editors felt that prose poetry is something UK poets just aren’t yet that good at (compared to us)? Though if so, they tactfully don’t say so in the introduction.
I haven’t discussed the translations themselves because I’m aware that few of my readers are French speakers. But for the most part I think these are excellent translations. I don’t mean that there aren’t things one might quibble with, of course, but on the whole I find them exemplary and intelligent examples of verse translation, rarely doggedly literal but faithful in a serious way, alert to both the tone and the form of the original, and its effects.5 In some cases features like a particular rhyme scheme are replicated or nearly-replicated, and the implicit judgements about when such features are most important to retain struck me as very sensitive. The renderings of several strictly rhymed poems, by Carol Rubens, Wendy Cope and Roger McGough for example, are very impressive. There are many different strategies of translation at work here, and any ‘parallel text’ edition like this has to err on the side of quite close translation in order to be of real use to those who are using the French to pick their way through the original, but to my inexpert ear at least, these French versions are always listening to themselves as well as to the English: seeking wherever possible to make a real poem out of the original.
But perhaps the single best thing I got from this anthology is something that’s not in it. In a footnote in the introduction the editors remark: ‘In the case of Denise Riley, we profoundly regret that the long poem in 20 sections which she dedicated in 2012 to the death of her son, “A Part Song”, certainly one of the greatest achievements of modern elegy, could not be included in our anthology.’ Somehow, I hadn’t read Riley’s poem before. If you haven’t either, I recommend that you do so straight away. You can find it here. The poem is written in a variety of styles and tones, so you should read the whole thing, but here is the brief and rather devastating fifteenth part:
The flaws in suicide are clearApart from causing botherTo those alive who hold us dearWe could miss one anotherWe might be trapped eternallyOblivious to each otherOne crying Where are you, my child
The other calling Mother.
The ‘rebel isle’ thing is a bit odd, because isn’t that phrase associated rather with Ireland? I suppose it may be an allusion to Brexit, but if so, the editors have not spelt it out.
A learned correspondent (my Parisian husband) points out that the proper name of this shop is Gibert Joseph and that it’s on the side of the Boulevard Saint-Michel which is actually in the 6th arrondissement, not the 5th. I stand corrected.
The full list of poets included is: England: Michael Hamburger, Charles Tomlinson, U. A. Fanthorpe, Elaine Feinstein, Roy Fisher, Derek Walcott, Ruth Fainlight, Geoffrey Hill, Anne Stevenson, Fleur Adcock, J. H. Prynne, Tony Harrison, Roger McCough, Tom Raworth, Hugo Williams, David Harsent, Craig Raine, Carol Rumens, Jeffrey Wainwright, Wendy Cope, Selima Hill, Peter Reading, Ruth Padel, Penelope Shuttle, George Szirtes, James Fenton, Philip Gross, Andrew Motion, Sean O’Brien, Pascale Petit, Jo Shapcott, Carol Ann Duffy, Lachlan Mackinnon, Stephen Romer, Lavinia Greenlaw, Glyn Maxwell, Simon Armitage, Michael Symmons Roberts, Daljit Nagra, Alice Oswald, Fiona Sampson. Wales: Gillian Clarke, Robert Minhinnick, Gwyneth Lewis. Scotland: Edwin Morgan, Douglas Dunn, Liz Lochead, John Burnside, Robin Robertson, Jackie Kay, Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson. It’s clear from the introduction that there were a few cases where the editors were unable to obtain permissions for work they would have liked to include. Northern Ireland is excluded because, as the editors explained, a similar French anthology of Irish poetry in English was published only ten years ago.
Earlier this year I published a review of Gross’ most recent collection which tried to view it in the context of his career as a whole.
The few mistakes I spotted mostly seemed to arise from cultural misprisions. In the translation of Daljit Nagra’s ‘In a White Town’, for instance, neither the French translation for ‘mustard oiled hair’ nor for ‘parents’ evenings’ is quite right.
Thanks, and the Riley indeed a wonder, and a welcome discovery.