Review of The Road to Inver

I meant to distribute this today so here it is now. It's the English poet Stephen Romer's take on the Paulin book. He's generally enthusiastic, though he does say 'this is one of the rudest, most unapologetic books of translation or transposition I have ever read' and he is careful to characterise Paulin's versions as free and easy riffs on the originals. As always this kind of discussion boils down to terminology -- the objection comes from the designation of these riffs as 'translations', which plainly they ain't.


Mallarme's snotrag
Stephen Romer
03 June 2005


THE ROAD TO INVER. Translations, versions, imitations, 1975-2003. By Tom Paulin. 102pp. Faber. £12.99. - 0 571 22119 X

There is a pleasant image of Ezra Pound at work on translating Propertius: he scrutinizes the original with his eyes half-closed, in a sort of receptive trance, letting his eye play over the textures of the words, almost as if they are a kind of visual Braille. Reading through The Road to Inver, this is very much the image I have of Tom Paulin, settling down with a French or a German poem, or a Russian or a Latin one for that matter, allowing the phonetic, textural qualities of the words, the whole panoply of its music, to sink in, before any grasping after meaning. Letting his eye rest, say, on a line in French like: "La lune plaque en metal clair" to which, in the event, he responds with "moon a metal plaque", in which that pleasing word, with its plosive and occlusive so dear to the poet's ear, is preserved. This is from "Le Crapaud" by Corbiere, a master of the "hard" in French poetry. A few pages on, in a versified rendering of Max Jacob's "Love Thy Neighbour", we find another toad, this time a "wee crap-o / a toad trying / to flup across a street", Paulin turning the French word into a kind of Scots slang.
Where this toad is made to "flup", Corbiere's "flubs under some mooncold rubble".
Whether the creature "flups" or "flubs", one thing is sure: the poet delights in running the words over his tongue. Riffling through the volume at random, we find: "the fandango's yakky clatter" (Montale); "I see it stuck there - a skift a skelf a smear" (Nerval); "I'll wave my snotrag from the deck sick" (Mallarme!); "a plodder - wally - 's a lunkhead" (Rilke); and we quickly realize that these "translations, versions, imitations, 1975-2003" are in fact all transpositions into Paulinese. From his collection Liberty Tree onward, this has become a recognizable hybrid language. It is inimitable, and Paulin has made it utterly his own. Being no respecter of persons, and in keeping with his overall poetic project, in this new volume he wades in, seizes a foreign poem by the scruff, and shakes it into his own vernacular, or his version of Ulster speech.
There are none of the translator's conventional apologies here, none of the face-saving disclaimers, none of the (after all) absurd regrets that "English cannot match" the "music" of the French, or the "density" of the German, or the "fluidity" of the Italian, or whatever the standard cliche happens to be. In fact, this is one of the rudest, most unapologetic books of translation or transposition I have ever read. It is monolingual, the source poet is acknowledged curtly in a parenthesis under the title, and care is taken not to provide any kind of an index giving exact references with titles in the original language (a source of serious irritation for a reviewer). And yet, extraordinarily, one's initial outrage is softened and eventually dispelled by the sheer exhilaration and energy thrown out by these encounters with the other, with what Antoine Berman calls l'epreuve de l'etranger. In fact, such is Paulin's poetic intelligence and assurance, that he carries off, time and again, what ought to be impossible; he yanks and shoves the original into something radically different, but something incontrovertibly alive.
Only a "strong" poet in the Bloomian sense - Robert Lowell in his Imitations being the inevitable comparison - could carry this off. If these poems work, and many of them do, it is because Paulin has consistently striven to perfect an idiom, that strange, sour, laconic, monosyllabic burr, which manages at the same time to be energetic and descriptively exact. What he has done is to transpose his elected poets uncompromisingly into that idiom. At their very best, his transpositions provide a critique of the original and of the tradition it may represent: "not the gardens of mouldy chateaus / wet and glaucous in her eyes", for instance, encapsulates something of Mallarme's world and more of Nerval's.
But a major caveat is needed here. The Road to Inver, like Imitations - a book that Paulin admires - is an extreme example, in many ways a case apart. Paulin's transpositions belong firmly among the belles infideles in the sense that they invent freely, add and subtract; they are takes and riffs on the originals. Some more than others: of Montale's "La casa dei doganieri" - a poem already manhandled by Lowell - almost nothing remains in Paulin's "The Coastguard Station" but the gesture: of remembering a building and a desolate, derelict landscape. But even here it does not seem to me that Paulin is untrue to the spirit of the original.
There is at stake a question of choice and a question of trust. Put briefly, Paulin's choice is that of imitation, in Friedrich Schleiermacher's sense, which consists in conceding "that no replica of a verbal work of art can be produced in another language that would correspond exactly in its individual parts to the individual parts of the original". Imitation "submits to the irrationality of languages". Its contrary, paraphrase, "seeks to overcome the irrationality of languages, but only in a mechanical way". Nabokov's Onegin and his theoretical defence of paraphrase would, I suppose, be the opposite of Paulin's position.
Paulin submits readily to the "irrationality" of language (those half-closed eyes, that playing with pure phonetic quantity detached from instant intelligibility).
The question of trust here arises in a rather different way: it is not the usual question - are the versions "accurate"? Patently they are not, they depart from "accuracy" in the primary lexical sense at every other turn.
(Let us be clear: they could in no sense replace more conventionally "faithful" versions, especially for first-time readers of, say, Rilke or Montale.) The question here must be, do they wilfully "disfigure" the originals, do they falsify beyond recognition the tone and conviction of the originals? In nearly all cases I would affirm the contrary: Paulin's transpositions respond to the originals with empathy, and with a wonderful linguistic nervousness and alertness.
The Road to Inver contains, we are informed, Tom Paulin's "translations, versions, imitations, 1975-2003". As I have tried to suggest, it would be little to the point to argue with that catch-all description, which starts more hares than are really worth pursuing. In Paulin's case, bearing his particular idiom in mind, Schopenhauer's musical analogy of transposition, though used less gloomily than the philosopher meant it, seems appropriate.
Many of these poems were included in his previous collections, and it is frankly a pleasure to re-encounter them in this new context. They were always startling - the "Chorus" from Antigone was one of the earliest, along with Chenier's "From the Death Cell" with its arresting opening - "We live -dishonoured, in the shit. So what? It had to be. / This is the pits and yet we feed and sleep". The long, extremely ambitious "The Caravans on Luneburg Heath", very loosely based on Simon Dach, interwoven with allusions to modern German figures like Grass, Heidegger and Celan, appeared in Liberty Tree; Pushkin's political "A Nation, Yet Again" resonated in its original Northern Irish context, concluding "see, it takes me now, these hands stir / to bind the northern to the southern stars". The same poem manages to contain a highly allusive metatextual strain - we find Dante, Mallarme, Shelley and Yeats in lines like "a delicate, a tough, new style / that draws the language to the light / and purifies its tribal rites. / I'm tense now: talk of sharing power, / prophecies of civil war". Paulin's interest in the Russian poets - especially his engagement with Mandelstam, first marked in his early long poem "The Other Voice" - is taken up in the electrifying "Voronezh", based on Akhmatova, which ends:
But that tin lamp
on the poet's table
was watched last night -
Judas and the Word
are stalking each other
in this scroggy town
where every line has three stresses
and only the one word, dark.
Besides these, there are many new versions, including poems by Goethe (six), Rilke (three), Ponge (four), and three beautifully enigmatic pieces by the contemporary Palestinian poet Walid Khazendar. In what now appears, in retrospect, as a deliberate emulation of Imitations, Paulin has tackled several of the major figures in the major European languages (Spanish is a notable absentee, though there is an extremely "free" version from Pessoa's Portuguese). There is also an engaging and witty updating of Langland's "Prologue" to Piers Plowman, so the alliterative tradition of Middle English is represented as well.
His versions of Rilke reveal how Paulin manages both to create something in his own idiom and at the same time, by this trance-process of phonetic or homophonic osmosis, remain close to the sound values of the original, producing long collocations that resemble German. "The Island in the North Sea" is actually part two of a poem in three parts (this might have been indicated). In Paulin's hands one feels the place described becomes rather one of those small ports he visits in Northern Ireland, Portstewart or Portrush or even (see "The Coastguard Station") Portnoo. The sestet runs:
. . . after tea some youth might take a dander and rasp a tune on a harmonica -its tacky girning he picked it up in a foreign port some dockside bar then a sheep scumbles up a dyke a gross hirpling dopey ominouslooking sheep Stephen Cohn's more conventional rendering of the last two lines is "Upon the outer dyke a sheep appears / larger than life and almost ominous". But Paulin's verbal response to the mouthful of German in Rilke's last line - "ganz gross, fast drohend, auf dem Aussendeich" - makes more of it, in the idiom of disabused-sour-laconic that he revels in.
But the language most visited by Paulin is French, and it is here that the most remarkable things happen, partly because of the contrasting geniuses of the two languages. Yves Bonnefoy has famously resumed their difference: "the linguistic structure of French poetry is Platonic while that of Shakespeare's English is a sort of passionate Aristotelianism"; English, he says, has an immediate grasp of surface texture and phenomena (nothing could be truer of Paulin's own approach).
It is not surprising that when this passionate Aristotelian seizes upon the master of the Platonic form in language - Mallarme - a peculiar kind of violation takes place, one which leaves me queasy. The hypnotic chant-like "Brise marine" with its famous opening - "La chair est triste, helas! Et j'ai lu tous les livres. / Fuir! La-bas fuir! Je sens que des oiseaux sont ivres" - becomes a kind of blather: "It's a sad creature I'm afraid the body / all the classics -every book that stands ready / on my shelves I've read them through but only . . .". But who has ever managed to reproduce those immutable, chiselled rhymes? What Paulin does, predictably, is turn Mallarme into a purveyor of the "hard" in French poetry - that hard edge Pound discerned in Villon, Gautier, Corbiere and some others and he adds a detail, and a specificity, alien to Mallarme: "to watch stints skittering along the tideline". Of course one can recoil at the liberty; but I prefer to consider it as a fascinating collision of two radically different metaphysics (the abstract Form, the empirical Particular), and also a collision of two opposed phonetics and prosodies.
Curiously, Paulin makes Mallarme and Verlaine (another favourite) sound like Corbiere (whom John Berryman significantly praised for his verve and "bite") Conversely, Francis Ponge turns Paulin into much more of a literalist; the stern, sinuous, scrupulously turned prose sentences of the French command -somehow counter-intuitively - obeisance in a way that verse itself does not. If Paulin comes something of a wreck with Mallarme (and he also sells Montale short, especially in his over-explicit and scatological account of "l'Anguilla"), his headlong, hands-on method is most often vindicated, nowhere more so than in his response to Rimbaud's "Les Corbeaux". This is a gritty poem of close natural description and a delineation of "la realite rugueuse" of life in the sticks - both things close to Paulin's heart.
When the ground's as hard as rock
and the Angelus has gone dead
in each crushed village
Lord let the rooks
-those great clacky birds
sweep down from the clouds
onto fields and ridges
floppy crowd that bursts
into stony cries
the wind's bashing your nests!
-along yellow rivers roads
with their pitted Calvaries
over ditches and holes
you must scatter and rally!
To cite Bonnefoy again, faced with a foreign poem the translator is forced into "a kind of examination" of his own "resources". Here, as so often in this remarkable book, Tom Paulin's copious linguistic resources prove themselves up to the task in hand.