Ian Dury and a film about Ian Dury (1)

There is Ian Dury (with Blockheads) and there is the film. This time just Dury.

Ian Dury
Dury is interesting on two counts. He was a very inventive lyricist working with a terrific band, without whom he would have been much less; and he was a rare example of a man whose vast energy fed on his disability. The lyrics could be sexy, aggressive, and grotesque, as well as tender, sentimental and nostalgic, the rhymes part of a persona that was as theatrical as the Joel Grey character in Cabaret: Joel Grey crossed with King Kong. At the same time it carried a lot of British echoes: echoes of Kipling and Bill Sykes and Noddy Holder. I say British, but I mean English-British really. I couldn't see Dury as Scottish or Welsh or Irish.

Dury was never quite punk. Punk felt to me like an intellectual gesture, a feeling that was a thought. It immediately spawned writing and theory. In that sense - in the sense that it was theoretical - it wasn't fully English, not, at any rate, as I think of English. Dury, though an educated man - Royal College of Art, and clear references to reading - was more belly-wit and in many ways more troubling than punk. Punk aggression was a fully articulated conscious gesture. Dury's demon worked its way through the body into word, heavy blurty body-words that needed an agile body music like jazz funk.

I liked the struggle, the way the demon got smart without losing its energy. The struggle was with the chains of the body. The struggle gave him energy, and the energy gave him wit. Struggle, energy and wit made for exhilaration. The best songs - and there are probably not that many of the best ones - I find enormously exhilarating. How much of that is down to Chas Jankel and the Blockheads? A great deal.

So what is the troubling part? Is it that slight air of self-satisfaction? The brutality? Something of the wrestling ring, something of the circus, something of the institution?

Sunday Night is.... Borrah Minevitch and His Harmonica Rascals

1942 performance by Borrah Minevitch and gang.

The harmonica was dad's instrument. As I sit here one of his last two harmonicas is before me on the desk. He played the harmonica to his fellow labour campers in the Ukraine during the war, and he taught it to us. We had a harmonica each.

His set piece piece was the Brahms Hungarian Dance no 5. He performed round the camp fire of the ex-boy scouts reunion in Budapest, the year we accompanied him. He played it at his last birthday too.

Not my Best Side

I know we intelligentsia (actually, I'm an art school oick) are supposed to leap to the defence of any work of contemporary art under potential attack. We guard the gate against the ignorant, retrograde, reactionary, lumpenproletariat as well as against the smug, jobsworth, petit bourgeois in the name of the cultured, the cool, and the cutting edge. We are for the challenging, the edgy, for the art that asks questions, for anything the lumpenproletariat and petit bourgeois are sure to hate.

And, actually, I am, I truly am (you don't know how desperate I am for you to believe this!) a considerable admirer of Kapoor - his sculpture rather than his reasons for it, his sheer excess of size and colour, his voluptuary sweetness and savagery... but this looks (lean closer, I must whisper it) 'a mess'.

You want a comparison? Of course you do! It's hard. Shall I say 'tangled telephone wires'? 'A stethoscope'? 'The Eiffel Tower after Godzilla has been through with it?' (Yes, I know people didn't like the Eiffel Tower at the time, those damn reactionary bourgeois! Please, please, please don't mistake me for one of those!)

Damn! You heard! I'll never live this down. Keep it to yourself. Unless, of course, I revise my opinion.

ps The clouds are pretty good, if a touch formalist. I'm also looking forward to the first man who climbs it.

Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it infamy!

Sounds good coming from a German pope.* How they suffer, these poor popes!

*I know it is not he who said it, but his personal preacher, quoting 'a Jewish friend'. That's twice removed. But it's on the front page of the Vatican Sun! That's OK then. Some of my best friends are popes.

Cloud Talk 6: Cloud passage, Dante, Herbert, Batchelor

Photograph by Mark Granier

This is the last part of the Cloud Talk series on translation.


...Let me take the winner then. Here we are back to Dante and terza rima, back in fact to one of the best known and most loved passages in the Inferno, Canto V, about the tragic affair of Paolo and Francesca. Here is the original passage:

Inferno: Canto V, lines 121–38

E quella a me: “Nessun maggior dolore
che ricordarsi del tempo felice
ne la miseria; e ciò sa ’l tuo dottore.

Ma s’a conoscer la prima radice
del nostro amor tu hai cotanto affetto,
dirò come colui che piange e dice.

Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto
di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse;
soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto.

Per più fïate li occhi ci sospinse
quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso;
ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse.

Quando leggemmo il disïato riso
esser basciato da cotanto amante,
questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,

la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante.
Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse:
quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante”.

Dante Alighieri

And here is the winning translation by Paul Batchelor:

The Damned
After Dante

The bitterest
sorrow is not regret,
though that is part of what we suffer –
the bitterest sorrow lies in happiness rehearsed,
as when I speak of how
our fate took root.

It was a poem:
the ballad of Sir Lancelot
whom love enslaved – old fashioned stuff,
pure nonsense really, so where was the danger if
from time to time our eyes met –
where was the harm?

We read on
until we reached the line
about a kiss both looked-for and unbidden –
a kiss so long desired and yet so lightly taken –
that line was our undoing:
a sidelong

glance – another –
into each other’s eyes, and we,
who since that day have never been apart,
we latecomers to everything within our hearts,
we put the book away
and read no further.

Translated from the Italian by Paul Batchelor

There is, in fact, an interesting mid-point of reference between the original and is translation, or rather, its ‘after Dante’. It is George Herbert’s Easter Wings:

Easter Wings

Lord, Who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poore:

With Thee
O let me rise,
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day Thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.


My tender age in sorrow did beginne;
And still with sicknesses and shame
Thou didst so punish sinne,
That I became
Most thinne.

With Thee
Let me combine,
And feel this day Thy victorie;
For, if I imp my wing on Thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

Herbert’s poem is a wonderful sally at breathing and heart-beating through a set of emotions. In each half of the Easter Wings the lungs empty half way through, growing ‘most poore’ and ‘most thinne’, then picking up the breath and filling the lungs out again by the end of each verse, so the soul may fly. To read the poem aloud is to give bodily expression to a spiritual condition, an exercise in deprivation and ecstasy.

Herbert’s feeling is directed to the Christian God: Batchelor’s to the god of desire and regret. The translation therefore draws a parallel between the two kinds of love, the sacred and profane. Like the Herbert, the Batchelor version employs breath to make the heart beat. In Dante, the episode is part of the general progress of the whole, not isolated, and I don’t think Batchelor is proposing that Dante should be entirely re-interpreted via Herbert, but is drawing upon a possibility in English verse to respond to something in the Italian.

In this particular cloud of Dante, in other words, he sees the beating heart of Herbert and takes the brief journey into the heart of that cloud to produce his own.

I am perfectly aware that what I have been discussing is not the normal business of professional translators, certainly not of translators of fiction – it is not how I translate fiction, nor, most of the time poetry. With poetry that is translated for the first time, from a little spoken or read language, there is, as I have said, a kind of personal obligation to produce a kind of inspired imitation – to produce a cloud, if you like, whose form may lend itself to weasel or camel or whale, in much the same way as the original poem does. In which the thoughts may follow in an order that is not altogether different from the original, in which the poet might possibly recognise himself or herself the way one might do in an old fogged mirror.

With poets whose work is well-enough known – Baudelaire and Dante - I think there may be more scope. What I wanted to offer was some sort of insight into the act itself, an act that is itself a form of composing, that is not a forgery, but the possibility of offering a kind of formalism as a background noise against which to hear the noise of the text itself, of the new text – the music within cloud, within which we seek a face that tries to free itself and lodge itself in action, as in a discarded part of the poem,

The Translators

This face. This one right here. This solid
mobile face looking into time,
the lost face, the loved face, the dim,
vulnerable, ageing, suffering, pallid

imitation that face knows itself to be,
knows without language, by gesture
and grimace, by posture and imposture,
by the way it tries to tear itself free.

*

This is where the lecture ended. It was cut to half-hour length, from about forty-five. One of the interesting omissions is the reference to James Hogg, and the strange cloud in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. That is so extraordinary I will put it up as a post on its own.

Competitions: the patriarchy 3 / (the golden arena)

What is a competition if not a 'golden arena / Of dedicated action'?

The 'traditional' areas of women's poetry have been regarded as the home, family, and love. Add to this the more recent 'the condition of being a woman' (viz. UAF). According to the stereotypes described in the previous posts, we might find this traditional area presented as an' impossible junction'. We don't necessarily expect the men's poetry to be about motorboats and yachting, gardening, landscapes near Parma, or indeed, The Double Vortex. But it might be. Would the women's then be about that 'impossible junction'? Might we, on the stereotypical basis, expect men's and women's poems to be distinguishable by subject matter? And, if so, would one automatically estimate an average poem about the double vortex to be better than an average poem about being a woman?

There is a passage in Rimbaud's correspondence that I give first in French, then in Oliver Bernard's English translation:

Ces poëtes seront! Quand sea brisé l'infini servage de la femme, quand elle vivra pour elle et par elle, l'homme, - jusqu'ici abominable, - lui ayant donné son renvoi, elle sera poëte, ell aussi! La femme trouvera de l'iconnu! Ses mondes d'idées différont-ils des nôtres? - Elle trouvera des choses étrange, insondables, repoussantes, delicieuses; nour les prendons, nous les comprendons.

Poets like this will exist! When the unending servitude of women is broken, when she lives by and for herself, when man - hitherto abominable - has given her her freedom, she too will be a poet! Woman will discover part of the unknown! Will her world of ideas be different from ours? She will discover things strange and unfathomable, repulsive and delicious. We shall take them unto ourselves, we shall understand them.

Ringing words, no? He wrote this to Paul Demeny on 15 May 1871 when he was just sixteen. It is the time of the Paris Commune, but he is in Charleville.

A strong romantic impulse carries the boy to the imagining of a specifically female understanding, not so much of herself, as of the 'world of ideas'.

The world of ideas isn't highlights from the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the Readers Digest of Great Thinkers. The ideas Rimbaud means, are, I assume, embedded, visceral, embodied, emerging out of the mind-body. That world is the opposite of the common-place. He expresses great enthusiasm for it, for the strange, unfathomabe, repulsive and delicious.

I think I would too. I would in so far as it was the truth, or felt like the truth, not like a proposition but a sense of being-in-the-world. I suspect it already exists in the best poems, whether by men or women, and that artists are neither stereotypical male nor stereotypical female.

There is in the best poems a kind of hidden largeness beyond the self or the self-image, a sense, if you like, of the world bursting through language: the unknown. Poetry is nothing if not the unknown. It may be, of course, that the unknown works through the sense of self, through that stereotypical kindly, intelligent, female magazine face, through it as through a landscape that emerges onto a different, larger, unknown landscape.

Maybe this unknown landscape is what both men and women competition judges look for in poems. And they find it in Alice Oswald and in Kathleen Jamie and in Jo Shapcott and in Jen Hadfield. They don't tend to find it in stereotypical men's poems about gardening, motorboats and yachting, landscapes near Parma or the Double Helix. Maybe this looked-for thing is a non-stereotypical thing. Maybe more men are likely to be obsessive, ludicrous and vainglorious enough to set out for such places and look very foolish in failing. Maybe the cavey-breeder dreaming of glory is obsessed enough to the point of breeding a prize-winning guinea pig in the golden arena of dedicated action.

Maybe it is only that. Germaine Greer once pointed out that the average woman is brighter and copes better than the average man. This may well be true - I couldn't possibly comment - but she notes the men at the extremes. One end of the extreme is dire, the other is oddly brilliant. The majority of the better poems in any competition may be by women. It may be that the best and the worst are by men.

Maybe it is that. Maybe it is something else. I don't know. The fact is I don't think about it. I think Rimbaud's notion is exciting (and more than a touch boyish - wow! bang! whizz!). I also think that the details of everyday, non-bang, whizz, wow life are infinitely precious, that ordinary, dull Wednesdays are as miraculous as life on Saturn.

So I don't prefer poems about Saturn to poems about dull Wednesdays. What I want is the sense, in Wednesday, that Saturn exists and that we acknowledge its existence. Without that sense there can be no golden arena, however dedicated the action.

That, by the way, is why I so admired Helen Mort's winning poem in Cafewriters.

Competitions: the patriarchy (2)

It is sometimes assumed that stereotypes are the opposite of the truth if only by virtue of the fact that we know innumerable exceptions. But there is further than that. Furthermore, we might add, they are mechanics of oppression because they insist on not just whole classes of people, but every individual comprising that class, being defined by stereotype.

It may, however, be possible to think that they contain potentially problematic, over-confining truths. Let me see. There are certain truths in the Fanthorpe poem, as I can immediately verify by looking along the magazine shelves of my local One-Stop Shop. UAF wrote the poem before 1978 and it seems little has changed. The specialist magazines are as they are, as they were. What I notice about the women's magazines is that every one of them has the face of a woman on it. That hasn't changed either. It is an attractive, intelligent looking face, but that is what it is: the face of a woman. It is not the face of the reader: it is, I would guess, the idealised location of those 'impossible junctions / Of being a woman'. It just happens to look like a face.

UAF's poem does not offer a critique of that face, it simply states the existence of the unexamined magazines. She doesn't even look at them. She doesn't note that they are, each of them represented by a face - and, what is more, a troublingly similar face in most cases - she ignores it as an object. It is the location that matters.

She does, however, offer a critique of the men's specialist magazines. They present, through their titles, and through her comments on them, an image of men as slightly ludicrous, obsessive and vainglorious ("the impossible triumphs... before he has even bought his magazine, / Let alone a guinea-pig.". (We will find the same kind in Carol Ann Duffy's Feminine Gospels).

The "golden arena / Of dedicated action" remains ambiguous, and I want to return to that. It seems important to me. There is, I note, less ambiguity about "the single track". Dimwits. Children.

The stereotypical truth offered here (as evidenced by the magazines) is that men are specialists, dreamers and obsessives; whereas women inhabit a holistic world, but one which is, at the same time, impossible.

Amis says much the same in fact, though his phrase, the "ladies' choice", looks not only dated but patronising, even in its ironic bluffness. Amis ends the poem with the image of the male poet trying desperately hard to write a love poem and failing, while his female counterpart finds it easy. Amis criticises the pompousness of the male poets but his deeper beef is with the women who find love 'easy' to write. - That is, in effect, an accusation of shallowness.

If Amis were to look at the ranks of women's magazines along the shelf, he would, I imagine, murmur something like: 'Infinite self-obsession!' under his breath. If he were truly a contemporary he might modify that to 'infinite self-image obsession', and that, he would argue, was the chief of the impossible junctions in UAF's poem.

Amis is an old male fart, of course, but an old male fart is not necessarily a fool. He would need to be convinced that those "impossible junctions" were not innate or self-made, but were the product of... well, a lot of things. Maybe the woman too is a "cavey-breeder" at heart. Maybe she would be as happy in "the bastard trench" as a man, were it not for... well, a lot of things.

I say, "well.. a lot of things", because I know no more than anyone else about them in any authoritative way, and that is where the sharper debates still lie. I wouldn't want to go into that corner unarmed and I don't feel like heavy-duty fighting.

All I want to say for now, very lightly armed, is that good poems are rarely written by stereotypical men or women. I wouldn't say U.A. Fanthorpe was a stereotypical woman, but then neither are Carol Ann Duffy, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Alice Oswald, or indeed any female poet. But no male poet (or indeed competition judge) is a stereotype either, unless you want to set them up as such.

So, one more post on this topic, before slotting in the final Cloud Talk excerpt.