First off, a bit of housekeeping. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we’re off on holiday this weekend and I won’t be working for most of August. During this period, subscribers will receive some lightly updated pieces from the first few months of Horace & friends last year, when I had only a few readers — these will be new to most of you, but apologies if you were a very early subscriber and therefore receive pieces you may have read before.
At the moment the Horace & friends archive of over 50 essays is all freely available, so do explore. As there’s a lot of material up here by this point — about a book’s worth — and I am now entirely freelance, from the autumn I will be restricting access to the archive to paying subscribers. Free subscribers will still receive the weekly piece as usual, without a paywall — you just won’t be able to read the whole of older pieces on line. Eventually I may also publish some pieces that are paywalled from the start, but I don’t plan to do that yet.
Last week the Forward Prizes for Poetry announced their various shortlists (you can view them here), and a conversation with a friend about them made me reflect on surrealism, or strangeness, and its relationship to other types of comparison. There’s a certain kind of “light” surrealism — a hint of the surreal — that is very common in contemporary English poetry, perhaps especially the sort of poems that are most highly praised in public (winning prizes, appearing on shortlists and so on). It’s as if an element of surrealism (though not too much of it) has become, in this context, a kind of generic marker, part of the way that you indicate that what you are writing is a poem. I’m thinking of examples like these ones, both from poems on the Forward Best Single Poem shortlist (announced last week), and both coincidentally concerned with blue:
Sometimes you hold
a stone so bruisable the evening
lake cannot believe its own blue.
(from Derek Chan, ‘A Craft Talk on the Praxis of an August Evening’)
The gorse declares
its shrivelled buds alive
this Wednesday afternoon
so blue it should be out,
it should be dancing.
(from Vasiliki Albedo, ‘On hearing the seismologist say there could be an 8.5R earthquake near Athens’)
This kind of trope obviously has something in common with both simile and metaphor. Like those devices it is suggesting — and inviting us to recognise — a similarity or connection between two things that might not have occurred to us, and which could cast both in a new light. Some comparisons are so well-worn as to be not just inactive in a poem, but even deadening — clichés. But comparisons can fail in the other direction, too, because a comparison that seems too random or unearned — perhaps especially a string of such motifs — can leave a reader feeling impatient. A lot of the brief “surrealist-lite” comparisons in contemporary poetry feel unearned to me in this way, a bit tacked on. Since I enjoy literary comparison of all kinds, relish even the most baroque reaches of extended simile in Proust or Pindar, and also love the French surrealist poets of the first half of the twentieth century, I thought this was worth exploring a bit more.
We probably tend to think of the formal simile as the most conservative version of this sort of device, far removed from surrealism. But some of Homer’s epic similes make very surprising comparisons: between soldiers marching out to war and flies around a pail of milk (Iliad 2.469ff); Gorgythion as he collapses on the battlefield is like a poppy weighed down by rain (Iliad 8.306ff); an arrow that bounces off Menelaus’ armour is like peas or beans on the threshing floor (Iliad 13.588ff); or here Menelaus, bleeding from a wound, is like a cheek-piece for a horse, crafted by women (Iliad 4.141ff):
Just as when some woman of Meonia or Caria
stains white ivory with purple dye, making a cheek piece
for a horse, and leaves it in her room—an object
many riders covet for themselves, a king’s treasure
with double value—horse’s ornament and rider’s glory—
that’s how, Menelaus, your strong thighs, shins, and ankles
were stained with your own blood below the wound.1
The ‘scene’ of the simile often, as here, takes on a sort of life of its own, and the similes taken together have a larger coherence because all of them, across the whole of the Iliad or Odyssey (there are many more in the Iliad) are drawn from broadly the same realm of everyday domestic activity and the natural world — the ‘ordinary’ life to which soldiers and the besieged alike yearn to return. They are a kind of parallel poem. A more startling, thorough-going and literal kind of ‘parallel’ poem is created in Sanskrit literature by feats of shlesha, a Sanskrit literary term referring to doubleness of meaning. Sanskrit poems often contain whole phrases, verses, in some cases cantos or even poems the entirety of which can be read in two completely different ways.2
Epic similes and shlesha are both rather radical and sustained types of literary comparison: they produce very different effects from calling a stone “bruisable” and then moving on. They are disorienting in the sense that they constantly require us to move between settings, from one “place” (or story) to another, within the same work, but those settings — the world of the epic similes; the parallel narrative of the shlesha — are sustained and coherent in themselves. By contrast, we think of the brief, unexplained and unexpected comparison or juxtaposition of the “bruisable stone” sort as surreal. The disappointingly thin OED definition of ‘surreal’ is “having the qualities of surrealist art; bizarre, dreamlike”. In origin, though, “surreal” means not “unreal” (as “dreamlike” tends to suggest) but “more-than-real”, “super-” (sur in French) real, even if in ordinary English we tend to use the word to mean, as the OED suggests, something like ‘strange’ or ‘disorienting’.
Surrealism as a literary movement arose in the context of the First World War and its immediate aftermath — the word was coined by the French poet Apollinaire in 1917, and the concept was influenced in particular by the idea that the unconscious mind, left to free associate, might produce images or combinations which reveal how (in some sense) things truly are. (What’s in the unconscious depends on what’s being repressed, of course, and we might reasonably feel that in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, a lot of people were repressing quite a lot. Indeed André Breton, one of the key figures in the movement, worked during the war in a psychiatric hospital for soldiers suffering from shell shock.)
Other prominent poets in this movement include Paul Éluard, Pierre Reverdy, Robert Desnos (whom I wrote about here) and Louis Aragon (mentioned last week for his unusual version of a ghazal). I love all these poets and have translated bits and pieces from most of them. Here is the beginning of one of Apollinaire’s First World War poems, ‘Zone’:
A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien
Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin
Tu en as assez de vivre dans l’antiquité grecque et romaine
Ici même les automobiles ont l’air d’être anciennes
La religion seule est restée toute neuve la religion
Est restée simple comme les hangars de Port-Aviation[. . .]
And here it is in Beverley Brie Brahic’s translation from her excellent edition of Apollinaire’s First World War poetry3:
In the end you’re tired of this old world
Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower your herd of bridges is bleating this morning
You’ve had enough of living with Greek and Roman antiques
Here even the automobiles look like relics
Only religion is still brand new religion
Remains as simple as the hangars at Port-Aviation
This is a long poem (six full pages) and I think most readers would be pretty comfortable calling it ‘surreal’ — that opening image of the Eiffel Tower as a shepherdess gathering the bridges of Paris like sheep is only the first of many very surprising and genuinely disorienting comparisons. (Christ as an aeroplane is a highlight.)
On the other hand the poem has deep roots that give us a framework for the surrealist elements. That first line is an alexandrine, the classical French 12-syllable version of the hexameter; the very first phrase perhaps also alludes to one of the best-known and most impressive odes of Malherbe, widely acknowledged as the poet who made French verse “classical”.4 Even the surreal specificity of the second line has many traditional associations. Epic similes in Homer are very often about shepherding — in Iliad 4 the Trojans are like thousands of ewes, constantly bleating as they hear their lambs call — and the image of the good shepherd has obvious Christian connotations which link with the religious imagery and concerns of the poem. An invocation or dedication at the start of a long poem is also highly traditional. There’s always going to be something a bit ironic about starting a (long) poem with “At the end”, but it’s clear even from these first few lines that the poem is about lateness, about a tradition that feels exhausted, confused or unequal to the times.
Some of Apollinaire’s war poems are in traditional forms — as in fact are many French surrealist poems — but most of them are, like this one, in what the French called vers libre: not free verse in the modern (especially the modern American) sense but a poetry audibly haunted by traditional forms and cadences. These poems typically using rhyme, both end-rhyme and internal rhyme, though sporadically and not in a set pattern. (In English, the obvious parallel is the poetry of T. S. Eliot, whose forms were derived mainly from French poetry.) I think it is partly the combination of the freshness of surrealism with features like these — an audible sense of literary history, even as it is broken with — that make the best surrealist poetry so powerful.
The French surrealists belong mainly to the 1920s-1940s (several of them died in the Second World War), but I can think of several contemporary poets whose surrealism is integral to their style: I mean that juxtapositions and wordplay of a surrealist kind seem central to how their poetry works. A new discovery for me is the poetry of the French poet Valérie Rouzeau (recommended to be online by the poet Pascale Petit, for which I’m very grateful). She is a master of what we might call the ‘domestic surreal’ — many of her poems feature things like fridges and washing machines. Here she tackles social media:
On m’a encore gougueulisée
Une gargouille au trombinoscope
Du social roseau bien pensé
Grenouille ascendant verre de terre
Je trace comme un réseau de lignes
Entres lesquelles tu peux filer
Lecteur ceci n’est pas une toile
Électronique ou d’araignée
Juste un dizain pour te saluer
Lecteur qui es souvent lectrice.5
Attempting to translate this poem feels like a true hostage to fortune because it contains lots of puns but for reference it means something like:
They’ve googled me again
A gargoyle in the trombinoscope [a web page where you can see pictures of e.g. your classmates or students]
Of the well-thought-of social reed [pun on social network]
Frog climbing earthworm
I draw like a network of lines
Between which you can slip through
Reader, this is not a web
Either electronic or of a spider
Just a ten-liner to say hello to you
Reader who is often a reader-ess.
There’s a lot going on here but I think the key points are that, alongside the disorientating strangeness and wordplay, the poem is funny, delicious to say and composed in fact in a traditional form. It also ends by alluding to Baudelaire’s address to the hypocrite lecteur — mon semblable, — mon frère.
But there are many different ways of doing contemporary surrealism well. For contrast, let’s go back to English and probably my favourite living UK poet, Gillian Allnutt. This is from her 2013 Bloodaxe collection indwelling:
her dwelling
After La Femme au Chapelet by Cézanne
soul-poor, the sill
as conscience clear, the well
between sabot and star the hovel where
ever, in kindle
the river
the stone-pine with its roughened shadow, dour
Sainte-Victoire with its one good shoulder.
Allnutt’s poems are demanding and strange in the dense oddity of their juxtapositions and comparisons. But they are also very beautiful, highly musical, memorable, spare and — like Rouzeau, though so differently — deeply rooted and allusive. Surreal in the fullest and most rewarding sense of the word: charged with the grandeur of the more-than-real. Neither very short poems nor very long ones tend to win single-poem prizes, however, so the canny poet with their eye on a shortlist would be well advised to avoid writing like Allnutt, Rouzeau or indeed Apollinaire.6
This is from the Ian Johnston translation.
There are endless smaller scale examples of this, since it is a feature of courtly Sanskrit verse in general. My favourite extended example is the Bhattikāvya, a seventh-century poem which is, at once, both a retelling of the adventures of Rāma and a commentary on the grammar of Pānini. There is a fantastic book on extended shlesha in Sanskrit by Yigal Bronner, called Extreme Poetry.
Taken from her translation of Apollinaire’s First World War poems, The Little Auto (CB editions, 2012). This is a lovely little edition in parallel text. Beverley gave me a copy herself for which I am very grateful. I see it won the 2014 Scott Moncrieff prize for translation, and I am not surprised. Highly recommended!
‘À Monseigneur le Duc de Bellegarde, Grand Écuyer de France’, dating from around 1608, a poem I discussed briefly in this post about Malherbe. The opening line is ‘A la fin, c’est trop de silence’. I have read and translated a lot of French poetry in the last couple of years but I think this is still my favourite French poem of all. This first line is also a bit of a running joke in our house (there’s not much silence to be had with three children around, and “too much silence” almost always means something extremely naughty is happening just out of sight).
This is from Sens Averse (Répétitions) (La Table Ronde, 2018). As well as her own poetry, Rouzeau has also published many translations from English, including of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
To be fair, Rouzeau has won quite a few prizes, including, appropriately enough, the Prix Guillaume-Apollinaire in 2012. Gillian Allnutt was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2016.
A minor point: Bhattikavya is not an example of shlesha. It is a re-telling of the Ramayana that uses exceptional and unfamiliar forms set out in Panini's grammar that one is unlikely to encounter elsewhere. It does not function as a commentary on Panini's grammar; it is meant to be read along with a commentary as Bhatti himself mentions in the work. A genuine example of extended shlesha is Raghavapandaviya which simultaneously narrates the Ramayana and Mahabharata in 13 cantos. There are also other works that simultaneously have 6 meanings (shat-sandhana-kavya). I am in the process of editing a text which consists of just one verse of 32 syllables, which in turn yields 64 verses when its syllables are shifted cyclically (clockwise and counterclockwise). These 64 verses tell the story of the Ramayana.
I've never been sure if I think that Eliot's evening 'like a patient etherised upon a table' should be described as surrealist, but it certainly has the force of shock that the Surrealists sought with their conjunctions. The Apollinaire simile here is in some ways milder by comparison: there's arguably a Dresden shepherdess-y shape to the Eiffel Tower, and the bleating of the bridges could presumably be explained as traffic noise etc. What about this run of similes from the draft of The Waste Land, though?
In the evening people hang upon the bridge rail
Like onions under the eaves.
In the square they lean against each other, like sheaves
Or walk like fingers on a table