Ska predecessor, Slim Smith / Influence

from You Tube Slim Smith died aged just 25 years. In his short recording career he made over 150 recordings, either as a solo artist or as a member of The Techniques or The Uniques.

One of the most soulful and accomplished singers of Jamaica's ska, rocksteady, and early reggae eras, Slim Smith found his biggest success from 1965 until his premature death at age 25 in 1973.

Although according to various reports stating he had a troubled and unstable life, Smith will best be remembered for his stunning contributions to reggae's vocal tradition.

Sweet, melancholy, just a touch dangerous with that seductive reggae beat, soon to become so pervasive and, eventually, reconciling.

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I am a day late because of late night and exhaustion. Yesterday morning the discussion on influence continued, this time by way of translation.

We are far from firm ground here (we never are quite on firm ground) and this time we drift on currents of binaries: grammatical translation versus Borgesian form and narrative trance; the power-struggle between living author and translator; the notion of an ideal or divine translation versus a faulty human version; the notion of the work and its reworking; the rewards (the international literary prizes) for the work in translation and how far credit is divided between author, without whom no translation, and translator, without whom no prize.

We move on to the idea of influence in retrospect, influence as distilled and assimilated so it no longer smells of influence. Learning here is presented as a long term process of assimilation. But borrowing, particularly of structure is permitted, even helpful. So, for example the structure and premise of Robinson Crusoe can not only buttress but give birth to a new work. So Joyce on Homer, etc. The ghost walk on a set pattern but in a different place. The literary model. Jean Rhys developing Charlotte Brontë. etc.

Translation leads on to the question of World Literature (you can have that with capital W and L or without). After all, if translated works, or even works in other languages that the writer might know, can provide structures, there must be an assumption that certain works travel. Very well - some may travel productively, some may travel unproductively, meaning they produce no borrowings. And are genres international? Are there families of the imagination? Do the terms Gothic or SciFi or Romance or Bildungsroman or Chick Lit mean something across cultures or is that simply a case of globalised culture, or even, perhaps - shudder - colonial culture? (Being a Hungarian by birth I grow slowly immune to talk of colonialism and post-colonialism. I know what these terms mean and understand the issue for countries that were formally and formerly colonies, but I rather long to grasp what lies beneath an experience that isn't identifiably mine and cannot be the only game in town).

Much the most interesting part of the morning is the quandary posed by our Japanese author, who wants to address the meaning of the recent tsunami but finds there are too many facets of the disaster. There are only fragments and missing pieces and people trying to hold life together (the doctor compiling his dialect dictionary). What to make of the old survivor who says many more eminent people than he have been lost, then weeps. And to address his bewilderment our speaker pulls out a Szymborska poem in English translation and reads it, saying how it reminds him of an ancient Japanese poem that he recites. World literature (lower case) in action. He himself had produced a reading list for potential writers collecting writings from many different languages available in Japanese translation. The equivalent of Sir John Lubbock's 100 books. The Big Book of Lists. These we have loved. Read this and learn. And of course we do learn, not just the books but their choosing and their chooser. We are that smart. We are that lost.

And lastly the translator's word on Japanese, on the enormous cultural differences in value and form, differences that seem unbridgeable but that may be bridged, because they clearly are in practice. Occasionally. Not quite as either shore might imagine, but a bridge al the same, something to stand on and even walk across, even if only part of the way, to smell the far shore and see people moving on its banks.

Under it all the question of gender runs. Under it all desire of oblivion runs. But then this is not oblivion but the world of the imagination in writing. Auditory imagination. This is it, nor, as Mephistopheles put it, are we out of it.

The metaphor that is slowly simmering in my mind is something to do with soup. We are in that too.

Sweet, gently rocking Slim Smith could see us out before he sees himself out.

A Few Days of Ska: Lip Up Fatty / Influence, a beginner's guide

From YouTube note: Fronted by Buster Bloodvessel (born Douglas Trendle), the band was formed in 1976 while the members were at school together, and among their early incarnations were known as Stoop Solo and the Sheet Starchers. None of the members had any formal musical training, not even the ability to play any instruments. They were popular during the late 1970s and early 1980s, a period when lots of similar ska bands filled the charts. Some of their hits include "My Girl Lollipop", "Lip Up Fatty", "Special Brew" and "Ne-Ne-Na-Na-Na-Na-Nu-Nu". One of the main reasons for their notoriety was because of their outlandish, larger-than-life, huge tongued & shaven-headed front man.

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At UEA New Writing Worlds conference on Influence. Or is it Imitation? Or Infection? Or patrilinear possession? Or friendship? Do we hate those who influence us? Do we look to be influenced? Do we change tradition by influencing the reading of the past through the brilliant works of our present? Are we feeling Anxious?

Three provocations given, the first by C K Williams, the second by Christopher Merrill, the tird by Joyelle McSweeney. American morning. Since it will be my task to sum up at the end I won't even start trying to form a view on the discussions. I'll just take the personal line, if only because I am unlikely to serve it up in the conference itself.

As a child in Hungary there are two books I remember among the many I apparently had. One was an illustrated edition of the 1861 verse play Imre Madách's The Tragedy of Man, a work I went on to translate over twenty years ago and which then appeared with what I think were the same illustrations by Mihály Zichy, whose work somehow ran into my early impressions of Gustave Doré. (Note the early confusion and associations, typical of 'influence'.) The other was Sándor Petöfi's magical verse yarn János Vitéz (John the Valiant in John Ridland's translation), a book I did not look upon for some thirty years until I pulled the very same edition, heart in mouth, from the shelves of our closest friends in Budapest. There was also the bilingual edition of Now We Are Six, that I probably reeceived at the age of six, the Hungarian translation by the virtuosic humorist Frigyes Karinthy.

Three building blocks laid down. Three that I remember. Then England, and very little I would call a literary influence. Kids' stuff. Boys' comics. The Eagle. Dan Dare. The Beano. Biffo the Bear. Corky the Cat. Lord Snooty and his Pals. Dennis the Menace. Minnie the Minx. Simply saying the names is ever so comfy, as Auden said of something else.

The next decisive moment,c. 1967 or 8 when I pull a thin volume of poems from the shelves of the school library. The lines: "I was not born, mister / they mixed me up in a cement mixer'. The poet, Michael Baldwin, whom I was to meet by chance on the occasion of my one reading at The Athenaeum (of which I gave an account some time back).

So things tie up and tie in. Then the period of furious book buying and equally furious reading once I started to write. Includes all the cheap Penguins and whatever looked glamorous in the library (Death's Jest Book! by Thomas Lovell Beddoes). Falling in love with Rimbaud, weaning myself off Ginsberg (though I think I am weaning myself back on again). The Leishman / Spender Rilke. The Liverpool Poets. And once at art school, the first big important friendship: Martin Bell. And the poets I first read because of him.

So Alexander Pope grew glamorous, so Wallace Stevens, so John Crowe Ransom, Laforgue (whom I had already sipped at, and Desnos and Reverdy too). Marvell and Herbert. Eliot of course, the enormous figure flashing the ruins of Europe at me. And the slow onset of Auden. There was a stage when, in a half doze, I would write clutches of weak Auden lines. And the resistances. Resistance to Larkin, to Hughes and even to Heaney, who had nothing to do with me. And to Plath, so demanding and accusing. Even so, living in Larkinland. And Elizabeth Bishop and Louis MacNeice entering as welcome full voices. And Roethke and Edward Thomas and Robert Frost. And Berryman too. Louis Simpson. Brodsky.

It is not so much influence as a blend of noises in the head, the excitement of entering and passing through force fields and echo chambers. They still enter and lodge themselves somewhere or other. Even the people I teach: they get inside, some of them making me purr with delight and envy.

And actually reaching a stage where I seem to have added up to a Collected Poems, which as everyone realises when it comes to them, is only part of a story, a story that had better remain unfinished, so the only anxiety is about it being finished, though even that anxiety is productive. Because the world as it has been is embedded in us, as is the sense that its meaning can be approached as a sequence of human echoes and forces, but you haven't got the meaning because the meaning is always slipping ahead, elsewhere. Which is, after all the nature of poetry, it being, as Bishop wrote, historical and flown in exactly the same way we are.

And the moral of all this? The gradus ad parnassum of the beginner's guide? Read and listen and sing your speech. And theirs. Over and over again. It's a mess in there but keep stirring and adding.

A few days of Ska: Gangsters / And fitba (1)

The Specials on Saturday Live, 1980

I suppose it is Ska's compressed energy in a confined space, the menacing yet joyful Caribbean-flavoured party music, the whole borne out of a kind of intensely British urban grimness, that I find so attractive. The Specials' Ghost Town is the masterpiece in this genre, though I've had that before. The link above is to a BBC commemoration of Ghost Town. I far prefer these tight spaced gigs to the big spectaculars. The bands are not superhero idols but people like those listening to them. I will close this brief series with a Specials performance that demonstrates that. The energy is close to violence but is violence contained and formed. It's not about sex as a great deal of contemporary material is: it's about streets and small front rooms and old cinemas. It is these things that make the heart beat faster, not the gigantism.

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Another United Era

For years people have been forecasting the end of an era at Manchester United. This time there is truth in it. Scholes, Neville and Van der Sar retiring, noises about Wes Brown and, possibly, John O'Shea leaving. Giggs? Who knows. At least he has the summer to think. Assuming he doesn't retire or lose form, it is the first three that matter most.

Like most people, I love attacking football but teams are built from the back - in fact from the very back. No matter how good the defence, if defenders have no confidence in the goalkeeper they are vulnerable. This was the case with Kuszczak in the last Blackpool game. Nobody knows what a shaky keeper is going to do, how much cover he'll need, where to position himself in case the keeper is in the wrong position or is liable to drop the ball. The organised defence immediately becomes disorganised. Systems fail. Great teams have great goalkeepers. They don't necessarily need to be great shot-stoppers, though that helps. They have to be decisive, firm and assuring. Every keeper will let a soft goal in now and then, but he has to control the area. Van der Sar was a great keeper in this respect. Maybe de Gea will be, if he really is coming.

Next to the goalkeeper it is the last line of defence that matters. That is taken care of in the middle for a good number of seasons. Smalling, Jones, Evans, Fabio and Raphael are young and look right.

If your centre backs have some grace and poise that's a bonus, but at least one of them has to be feared and imposing. Ferdinand has grace (but for how much longer) and Vidic is fearsome. Vidic is a good steely captain. Smalling has grace, Jones has power, Evans can recover.

The backs need timing, strength, speed and the ability to hold out against skilful wing players. Neville at his best was outstanding at that, and did more. He was a fiercely partisan footballer who annoyed the opposition wherever he went and didn't care. The backs need some fire now. Neville has been at the heart - at the furnace - of the team for fifteen years and more. The Brazilian twins are rather wonderful without quite the Manchester grit yet, but they have other qualities beyond those possessed by Gaz.

Scholes is the man though. When I first started watching him I didn't know what he was about. With Beckham, Giggs, the Neville brothers and Nicky Butt it was clear what you were getting. Scholes was like a mysterious force in the middle, cruising here and there, playing ambitious passes, occasionally crashing a spectacular goal into the top right corner. His work was partly undercover work - but regular OT fans loved him and the very greatest of his international contemporaries spoke glowingly of him. Little by little I understood his importance and his gifts, though he could be laughably clumsy in a tackle (the 'dark side' of Scholes that Wenger spoke about). As a character he was more Van de Sar than Rio, but to an extreme I haven't seen in modern football and would not expect to see in the future - a man who loathed attention.

There have, of course, been men like him, especially in England: men who hate a fuss, who say what they think but only when asked, who seem to tuck themselves away into a life so private it never registers on the tabloid scales.

Replacing Scholes? Great players are never replaced: people fashion new greatness in their own image if they have the talent and the luck. But it is interesting that United fans never took to Ronaldo or Beckham or even Giggs in quite the way they took to Scholes. The key to Ferguson's United teams lies somewhere in the area between Scholes and Cantona. 'Not arrogant, just better' say the dumb emblems. Canton was possibly both: Scholes was just the latter. 'The ginger knight', the ginga ninja' passed through games like a brilliant shadow, exploding now and then into a power no other United player had. At other times he'd just throw himself at an opponent as if he himself were an explosive. This season too he has received more yellow cards than the rest, except Vidic. Even so he had the best pass rate in the team.

But things change, and have changed, several times in Ferguson's time. Now they are changing again. I hope he hangs on to Berbatov. As everyone says, and Fergie surely knows, it is the midfield that needs reinforcement. If not Modric, then Sneijder, or...or...maybe someone from within - Pogba, Cleverley... That's beyond me. Maybe Rooney can be redeployed in that area. Fame is not the same as success. But there was a time no one had heard of Scholes, and you weren't ever going to win anything with kids.

International English as a Poetic Language

Nick and I were discussing his poetics, and naturally, we considered the nature of the language he uses. Nick is African but was educated internationally, mostly in England. His voice reflects this experience and in trying to describe that voice we found ourselves using the term International English.

We are used to thinking of specific varieties of English and - in the general effort to democratise the language of poetry and to bring Wordsworth's reaction against conventional poetic diction, in other words 'the language really used by men', up to date - we have tended to promote the regional and ethnic over what was called 'standard English' or what Fowler had as the King's (latterly the Queen's) English.

I say we promoted it but I wasn't in any position to promote it, discourage it, or even to ignore it. It was what happened. We moved particularly towards the Caribbean, to James Berry, Grace Nichols, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah, among others. It was a complex mood comprised of rejection of empire and central authority; a certain tiredness evident in 'Standard English' as owned by toffs; a yearning for fresh, unusual and exotic ways of saying; the integration of West Indian music from reggae and ska to two-tone; the potentially revolutionary excitement of the Brixton Riots; and much else.

But it wasn't just the Caribbean. Tony Harrison had pointed up the difference and tragic tension between working class Leeds and ruling class Oxbridge. The Scots revival was well under way with James Kelman, Tom Leonard and, later, Robert Crawford and W N Herbert. Bloodaxe's The New Poetry put heterogeneity at the heart of its substantial selection.

Language is constantly dying and the best poetic diction of any particular era enters the museum with it. Donald Davie's Purity of Diction in English Verse looked to locate that purity - the idea of such a purity - in particular poets but ended up primarily following the debates of the past. It might perhaps be possible to look for twentieth century purity of diction in poets like Robert Graves, Norman Cameron, Elizabeth Jennings, aspects of Larkin though certainly not all of Larkin, and, nearer our time, in Christopher Reid and Hugo Williams. But even then it might be not so much purity as chasteness of diction that we are talking about. (It was Chris Reid who once wrote in the LRB that the language of Brodsky's later poems simply wasn't English).

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I want to speak up for International English because I am, like Nick, a poet removed from his original stable culture, a poet not so much of romantic exile as of displacement. I too write a form of International English, as do a number of others.

I remember the time when people were encouraging me to use more Hungarian words in my poems. Maybe they thought I would be writing in a 'truer' voice, what they might have regarded as 'authentic' or just 'exotic'. I rejected this. I was not exotic to myself. I did not think in Hungarian and it seemed downright inauthentic to go about pretending I was more Hungarian than I felt. It was like asking me to wear a read-white-and-green rosette.

Beyond my own position there lies an interesting question about the possibility of poetry in something as unrooted and dislocated as International English. Was it unrooted and dislocated? I myself thought so. There was a 1981 book titled Airborn, by Charles Tomlinson and Octavio Paz, that I reviewed for the TLS. I wrote that the poems lacked something and suggested it was a little like reading a book in Esperanto. Students of Esperanto wrote in saying I had no idea what I was talking about and that there was a serious body of poetry in Esperanto that was not to be dismissed. They were right, of course: I really didn't know what I was talking about, I simply imagined that a constructed language must lack the depth of association - the history - to be a poetic language.

But then I think of writers in their second language - of Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov above all. One can, I think, occasionally hear the odd strange, over-correct construction in Conrad. The ironic flamboyance of Nabokov's language is well known. They too - I suppose - are writing a form of International English, in other words a language that is not really used by men. Their English may be unrooted and dislocated but it is certainly not flavourless.

But what literary language is actually used by real people? I have written elsewhere - in the Dublin Review - how Michael Donaghy once said to me that community was everything in poetry. Michael played in an Irish band called The Slip Gigolos. I did not play in a Hungarian band called the Csárdás Hercegek. I did not think I was writing for communities but for transient individual beings on trains: people in between this state of stability and another. What language did they use? What might they hear?

It may be that 'the language really used by men' is simply a reaction to outworn poetic diction and that we overvalue, even fetishize, what we take to be the language of the street, especially if it is an exciting, politically charged street. We do this while knowing we don't actually speak it. That no one does in fact. It is not the street itself but the smell of the street we want in the poems. We want to smell what's cooking out there.

The great success of Daljit Nagra's Look We Have Coming to Dover is a product of Daljit doing exactly what I refused to do, which is to produce a knowing lyrical literary pastiche out of English-language Indian speech patterns. That, of course, was possible. There are no English-language speech patterns in Hungarian.

This is a very big box to open but Nick's poems put me in mind of it, and make me wonder how interesting it might be to describe a poetics of International English. I imagine International English as a rambling and tragic-jolly kind of house, like a big run-down hotel or doss house. Some estaminet of Antwerp perhaps, to quote kindly Mr Eliot. Nick might have a room there, as might I.

A Few Days of Ska: On My Radio / And fitba (2)

The Selecter on TOTP, and the same, live:




Little to say, just driven high spirits, same social and musical source as The Specials, driving ploughs over the cut worms of racism and white supremacy. Things were better after this.

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Between seasons

In the summer, when there is no major international competition, the time is taken up by transfer rumours. Fans of every team are on tenterhooks about who will arrive and who will leave. Having formal transfer windows has only intensified the hubbub. The press have a wonderful time starting one rumour one week, another the next. Fans of rich clubs want big money signings almost as a sign of virility, to prove they can attract superstars by virtue of their status. Rich clubs might buy simply so that rivals shouldn't. Chelsea operated like this for a few years as did, notably, Real Madrid (known by United fans as 'the virus' or, for historical reasons, as 'the fascists'). It's a short term philosophy because big transfers are not happy to be sitting on the bench and their unhappiness spreads through the team. But then most business is short term, as are the enthusiasms and hatreds of most supporters.

There are two or three teams I have grown fond of over the years. One is the local team, Norwich City, who are back up in the Premier League this year, having sunk as low as the third tier. They have now been promoted two years in a row, which is wonderful but dangerous because a team that has risen on spirit - such as Blackpool last year - often finds it harder to grind out a season among better equipped teams. A good start is followed by a slump, if not the first year then the second. Norwich play attractive football and have clearly got an outstanding manager (another Scot - all the best managers seem to be Scottish). It's romantic to see a team like Norwich at the top, and all the more so when it's the local team. Impossible to get season tickets this year. All sold.

Stoke City have also found a place in my heart. That is partly through friends who are Stokies, and partly by admiring the sheer determination of the team as it rose and clung. They could not afford pretty football and were a traditional Route One team at the start, but as they established a hold in the league, have grown a little more tolerant of grace. They have earned it. They have some skilful players now, and a trademark card in Rory Delap who can throw the ball so far and so fast it seems almost unnatural.

And AFC Wimbledon, back from the dead after a remarkably fast recovery. More soft spots for Wigan, Everton, and, for my dad's sake, Tottenham. And Blackpool whose bright brief moment may have come and gone. And QPR, the nearest team when I lived in London.

Players shuffle between unglamorous teams, sometimes appearing only for two or three games before disappearing, sometimes doing the circuit of the obscure, still hanging in in their mid-thirties. No big names. Hardly names at all, just people good enough to be kicking a ball at this level, making a living.

I know these are in some ways childish things, symbolic romances, the interest itself a form of playing. But I rate play very highly. It is precisely what is beyond bare necessity that proves the spirit. Playground patches. The ball lost in the dusk as it bounces back off the brick wall. The mud churned up in the goalmouth. The heraldic colours spread across the pitch. A sub-class of poetry.

In the meantime there is cricket, but it's not the same.