Stupid by conviction

I spent the day in London, dashing between Kingston University in Surbiton and Bush House for BBC World Service.

I'll write on the substance of the conference tomorrow as well as the radio discussion, because both were fascinating (even though I missed half of the conference because of my dashings to and fro).

In The Times today, a short article by Nicola Woodcock about research claims that 'Girls as young as four believe that they are cleverer and more hard-working than boys.' And, she adds, 'they also manage to convince male classmates of their apparent superiority by the age of eight.'

The article goes on:

From the first year of primary school they [girls] think they are more intelligent and better behaved than boys. Although boys in the first years of school try to stick up for themselves, by the age of eight they are resigned to thinking of themselves as naughtier, less able to focus and not as good at their schoolwork.

'Adults endorse this stereotype,' think the female researchers, considering that, '[t]here are signs that these expectations have the potential to become self-fulfilling'.

Of course it may be so: maybe boys are more stupid, and maybe everyone thinking so and expecting them to be is proof that they are. And maybe there is history to this. But there used to be a certain redemption for them even through their disability or, as it may be, unwillingness, to conform, and to perform the acts that schools and parents deem to be the only signs of intelligence. They might have deployed their own peculiar intelligence in refusal and rebellion. They might, for example, have fiddled in a bored and alienated sort of way with miscellaneous parts of their environment and become excited by possibilities. They might have devised things, or invented things, or turned over ideas in that fixed-attention sort of way they have when they finally do get interested in something, and some of these things might have been bad or even wicked, but others might have been clever and even wonderful.

And maybe the world, in its heart of hearts, knew this, and understood that this was how the world had come to be as it was. That this was why the world had plumbing and clean water and public transport and complex instruments and strange but fascinating games; that it was why they had medicine and astrophysics and the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, as well as gangsters, murderers, weapons of mass destruction and the whole range of political systems including the very best and the very worst. So, knowing this capacity, and recognising that it wasn't primarily to do with being well behaved in primary school, or paying proper attention to the things the lady teacher was expecting them to do (because they are practically all lady teachers), that is to say things, and ways of doing things, that they were frankly not very interested in but which were the official values with which they were presented, and by which they themselves were evaluated, the unofficial world might have thought, yes, but they might become worthwhile and oddly dynamic in some other way, and allowed for that possibility.

And it is also possible that by not allowing for that possibility, by regarding boys simply as stupid wastes of space with no talent and no application, and as nothing but that, the world might find that boys conclude that it is only the violent, criminal and vicious alternatives that remain to them as acts of non-conformity; after all, by eight they are convinced they are too stupid to be anything else but misfits, and that they are potentially criminal anyway.

On the other hand that may not be a bright prospect for anyone, including the smug little eight year old girls.

From Tom's in London

Kitchen at Tom's in West London, after a day of talking and mentoring. Tomorrow to Kingston and to the BBC. Much warmed. This is just brief on Tom's computer.

More late tomorrow.

Hailstorm, Sunday afternoon, 29 August 2010

The rain was heavy, grew heavier, then the thunder started in and, within a few moments, the hail began to fall, rather big hailstones, very big ones, dense, breaking, pounding on the skylights. The top photograph shows the street outside running like a shallow river with an ice floe shattered into a mobile mosaic drifting down the middle.

The whole thing lasted about half an hour then started to clear and within an hour it was sunny again. But cold. It is August after all. I am sure there must be some ancient weather saw for this, such as:

When in August falls the hail
Closely following on rain
To beat in fury on the pane..

Prepare to bring out spade and pail
Let Dick the Shepherd blow his nail.
Let all the weather forecasts fail.
Let traffic crawl as slow as snail.
Let stores prepare a Christmas Sale...

etc etc ad inf

Reading translation - Hey, Big Spender

Read, chosen and posted my long list for the Stephen Spender to organiser Robina, who will then inform all four judges of everyone else's list. Then a jolly day in London to thrash things out.

There are three categories: 14 and under; 18 and under; and Open.

Naturally I don't want to give any clues to my own list at this stage so just to note: last year La Fontaine was leading the junior brackets, this year its Catullus. (What's the world coming to, I ask you?) In fact Catullus is this year's poet of choice with some thirty poems across all ages. Rilkes are doing well as are Verlaines, Rimbauds and Baudelaires. Goethes are down this year, Neruda hangs in there, Ovids are steady. Having won the World Cup the Spanish are coming strong. The usual suspects. Dante has been playing for Italy a long time now and looks likely to go on but gets strong, if melancholy, support from Leopardi and Pavese. Good as ever to see the Dutch and the Polish. But there's Portuguese, Arabic, Kurdish, Afrikaans, modern Greek, Yiddish, Serbian, Hungarian, Chinese, Japanese, Welsh, Russian, Turkish, Old Norse, Danish, Gaelic, Irish, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Anglo-Saxon and even Romansh. Sapphos are on the rise in the Ancient Greek market.

There is some rather brilliant work in there and poets I have never come across.

I read and read then one or other piece of work leaps up and slaps me right across the face. Tomorrow night to London for Wednesday at Kingston University for this.

and a quick trip to BBC World Service at lunch time to record this (to be broadcast Sunday and on BBCi, links to be provided),

Sunday Night is... A hail storm and a wonderful life

In the second break today - lunch break - it started raining ever more heavily, then the thunder broke in great groans and blusters, and soon the noise of the rain on the various skylights (three in the house) increased and, behold! it was hail, big hailstones in August, crushing the street, turning white, a soft petalled mosaic of ice oozing through the street, the whole flood rushing past us. Not quite like this, but close:




Now the sun is out, the weather being temperamentvoll, but the wind remains a touch frantic, a little over-insistent. And so this Sunday I wanted to turn to Fred and Ginger, but found Sinatra, then Billie, then Judy Garland, then this, not quite music pure, but rather literally off-beat, where all ends gloriously well.



And so to dive back into the the translators' own pool - the Big Spender.

Some questions: indulge me...

I didn't post yesterday as I am madly reading through the Stephen Spender competition entries - 347 translations of poems from various languages. Life can be hectic at times chez Szirtes and the competition got squeezed into a week or so. Besides one can only read poems for a few hours before the instruments go blunt. In the first break from reading I received a small group of questions from a student (not one of mine, and not local) by email. They were so intelligent and to the point that I took my break by answering them. I post the questions and replies because it is useful for me to remember what I said about these things and the blog is a way of remembering. Then I'll write another post. So:

How do you decide on the form a poem is going to take? At what stage in the creative process are things like rhyme, rhythm and structure (or the lack of any of the three) decided? Do you deliberately choose them, at the outset, or do they evolve as you write?

It depends. When I am writing a sonnet I know the form before, as I do with a number of other forms, like the canzone, which I tried because a friend (the poet Marilyn Hacker) drew my attention to it. A sonnet has fourteen lines, a canzone has sixty-five. A canzone is more demanding because the line-ending pattern is set to high-intensity repetition, while there are various forms of sonnet and one can move the versions around so what you do still registers as part of the sonnet family. There are standard forms, including terza rima, sestina, rondeau, villanelle, the Villonesque ballade (as in The Grand Testament), the acrostic, the mirror form, the Easter Wings form in which there are clear rules, some of which, in some cases, may be modifiable. Personally I like it when the form is not too four-square and steady - I prefer it rocking a little, even on the edge of breaking up but still holding together.

There are other verse forms that I have improvised or even possibly invented, as by chance, usually, in the case of a new poem or subject, when there is no direct precedent in what I have already done, that is related, In these cases I genuinely don't know what the form is going to be before the third or fourth line is done. Sometimes even then, the poem goes quite another way - for example, an unexpected short line might appear that looks right, and then the form moves on to something else, possibly a song form.

The proper answer then is that sometimes there is a decision (if you write a sequence of sonnets, then each part has to be a sonnet of some description), other times it evolves, but generally by the fourth or fifth line I know what the eventual shape will be.

Furthermore, when you constuct a rhyme scheme, does it come naturally or do you have to plan ahead?

I never plan ahead. Planning doesn't work for me. I improvise and accept or reject my improvisations. I don't mind beating up sonnets: they can stand it. Terza rima is more demanding, but all I have to do even then is just to think a little ahead and feel the narrative shape developing. That is an instinctual reaction - by instinct I suspect I mean an internalised form of learning, the way a pianist will hit a chord, not because he thinks about it as a separate and distinct act, but because his fingers are aware of certain possibilites. There isn't a distinct conscious thought to decide the fingering. If he is an improvising kind of pianist, he wants to be surprised. And so do I. Surprise makes things new. In fact I firmly believe that a poem has to surprise the writer, that the true poet cannot know quite what he is doing but discovers it. Where the form is ornate, say in the canzone, I make the decisions as I go, but consider, as I choose my end words, whether I might or might not be able to live with them to the end. The key to writing is listening. I mean listening to the poem as it forms and responding to it.

Do you ever write with a particular political or cultural aim in mind? To make a point, as it were (as opposed to personally exploring an idea)?

I go with Keats who hated poetry that had a palpable design on the reader. I don't mind versifying - in fact I enjoy it - but my inner ghost is always whispering to me that life is more complicated than a versified slogan or anthem, and that it is my duty to be faithful to that complexity while articulating it as simply as possible, even while improvising and discovering it. I don't write to tell people what I know or think I know (my suspicion is that I 'know' very little), but to find out how the subject sings. People have asked me to write for particular public occasions - wars, commemorations, etc - and I have tried to oblige without betraying my core instinct. I am not there to cheer on or to demand executions. Except, just possibly, as dramatic gestures. Dramatic gestures are interesting in themselves. But beyond that the general principle is that if it is action that is required, then act, don't bleat on like a sheep hoping to attract other sheep.

Who or what would you say have been the greatest influences on your writing, both in terms of style and subject?

There have been various poets that have hit me hard over the years and, like all poets I imagine, I carry the bruises. Some have faded, some don't. First great hero was the French poet Arthur Rimbaud (who I read only in English translation), then it was Eliot, then it was Auden and Brodsky, but these were only the heavy punchers. Then there are the Hungarians from whom I have learned by translation. I would say Rilke, Wallace Stephens, but also John Crowe Ransom and Elizabeth Bishop among the moderns, and Marvell, Herbert, Pope and Byron (the comic Byron) among the historical. As you can see, that's a lot of nice bruises and I haven't mentioned a quarter of them yet.

One of the reasons I think I am drawn to your work is that my grandparents are East European immigrants; how do you think exile and the dilemmas posed by assimilation have affected your writing, if at all?

I do increasingly think so, yes, though it has rarely been a direct 'subject' of my work. I imagine it is a kind of inner predisposition to find things balancing up in a particular way. Assimilation was distinctly an issue for my parents and, in the 70s and 80s was a poetic issue for me, but, again, not as a subject, more as a way of trying to 'speak English' and all that means. I do believe that historical consciousness is a considerable value in the best poetry, but I don't mean by that a set of specific subjects or even allusions, just a sense of the world as a force behind you and a terrain in front of you.

I've particularly enjoyed some of your poems about both Budapest and London; do you feel a particular attraction to metropolises?

Yes, I am at home in urban spaces. I was born in Budapest and my early psycho-geography is the streets, walls, sounds and spaces of the city. I like fields and hills and what people consider natural places, but in some ways the city is my natural space, the rest an excursion.

Equally, you often include depictions of war scenes; do you think being born only three years after the end of the Second World War and living through the Hungarian Uprising left an indelible mark on your writing?

The war scenes were the actual walls and broken statues of Budapest as I saw them in the mid-Eighties. The walls were covered in bullet and shell scars. The statues had lost limbs and heads. It was as if history was engraved on the skin of the place. Those walls fed through into the notional pianist's fingers. I instinctively think history is like those walls. Since 1989 the scars have been covered and tidied in most places, but it's too late - I know they were there.

Finally, I've recently finished reading Auto Da Fe, having only ever heard of it because of 'The Burning of the Books', and I thought it was wonderful. Can you recommend any other East European translations, or similar books, that I might enjoy as well?

Yes, there are others, if by others we are talking novels. Bruno Schulz's 'The Street of Crocodiles', Joseph Roth's 'The Radetzky March'; Antal Szerb's 'Journey by Moonlight', W.G. Sebald's 'Austerlitz', Thomas Walzer's 'The Walk'. And there are those I myself translated of which these three are perhaps the most magnificent: László Krasznahorkai's 'The Melancholy of Resistance' (Krasznahorkai is a living author), Gyula Krúdy's 'The Adventures of Sindbad' and Sándor Márai's 'The Rebels'. Like Canetti, all these authors perceive life and stories in terms of a kind of underlying poetry.

It is a little self-indulgent putting this here - as though anyone was interested! But it is equally false to think people are not interested. And, dammit, I'm interested to see what I say when I open my mouth. Those are the books I first thought of in the last question - no doubt I have missed many others.

Book Beauty

For a while C and I ran a press together. It was called The Starwheel Press and it produced portfolios of etchings and poems, none of the poems by me, but rather by invited poets - five of them - together with etchings by five artists, of whom C and I were two. The editions were small - fifty-five copies - and were sold by subscription. There were unpublished signed poems by people like Craig Raine, Anne Stephenson, Peter Porter, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Wendy Cope, etc. We sold them at about £15 per portfolio of five: they go for about £200 now (though not from us). There were other one-off publications of which more later, heaven knows when. The portfolios would have been a good investment at the time

The technique required an etching press (the eponymous Edwardian starwheel press), a monotype press (a heavy Golding Jobber, powered by a 1hp motor) a supply of monotype trays, acid baths, and plates of zinc or copper. The etching took place in the cellar, the letterpress in the outhouse. What we sold we ploughed back into the next production, of which there were one a year. We paid ourselves nothing. It was a whole summer's work each time.

It was simple and limited. We weren't perfectionists and we didn't invent anything. Meanwhile, out in the world extraordinary books were being produced. Books like this:





from Bluebeard's Castle






from Anansi Company




Log Book - Termite Grid


These are some of the products of Ronald King's Circle Press. But there are books involving mirrors, books with blind embossing (amongst them a gorgeous one about babies by Willow Legge, around a poem by Penelope Shuttle), books six foot high, and books in the form of cases, and books that spill or project out and books with removable pieces. And also books produced at Circle Press by people who passed through as assistants and fellow workers.

This is not an advertisement but an act of homage, primarily to Ron and all that he has generated. The point is not that these books are pretty or decorative, more that that they are savagely playful and are an earnest of what book-as-object can be. Because there are wilder shores still than these: hairy books, books that wear clothes, books in shoes, books in bits that assemble and reassemble. Books as sculpture, books as concepts.

But there is, originally, the book, that is usually a vehicle for text, or text and picture, or just picture; the essentially functional book where you turn the pages almost unaware of the book as substance, because it is the words or images that perform for you.

Even so, even among the cheap paperbacks, even among the ephemera, there are books that feel and look better than others. 'Books do furnish a room' as Anthony Powell has it somewhere. I know what he means as most of our walls carry wall-furniture of just that sort. 'Cheap insulation,' as someone else once said.

Cheap and solemn, or cheap and cheerful. Most of our books are of that second-hand company. But it's good to think of proud, joyful and ingenious books strutting around like peacocks, or screaming like children, or singing through wood, each with its own form of sense.