Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

At a recent day-long British Council seminar in London, “Writers, Readers and the State”, which brought together writers from South Eastern Europe (former Yugoslavia and Albania) and several British writers, translators and literary activists, the observation was made that it now seemed virtually impossible to interest the media, the quality newspapers and journals, for instance, in precisely the kind of activity that was taking place in the Poetry Library, on the 5th floor of the Festival Hall. It was regretted, too, that, while some books were no longer reviewed at all, others were reviewed over and over again. A case in point, perhaps, would be the recent novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. Shortage of space is, of course, exacerbated by the fact – a fact of life! – that visual images seem to be almost as important as the words of reviews; thus, over two-columns’ width of a six-column, two-third page length review of, yes, Ishiguro’s recent novel, in the Guardian, was taken up by a photograph of the author. Some of us at the seminar, I suspect, thought we could remember times when it seemed easier to get books of limited circulation noticed, or at least when one might buy several Sunday papers, because different books were reviewed in each. On the other hand, it was pointed out that people tend to stick to a particular paper and want to be able to read there about trends, personalities and books of the moment. The circularity of such arguments is painfully apparent.

Apart from this, though, I was impressed by the discussions and the fact that visitors and Britons alike were so well informed and free of political or other illusions. One would not, I think, have been able to count on such sophistication a decade or two ago. In that sense, perhaps, the media had not done such a bad job? However, I suggested that since so many of us in the room were writers, who contributed to publications such as, for instance, The London Review of Books and who understood the ways of the media, we might collectively be able to influence what we all seemed to agree was an unsatisfactory situation. Perhaps there were “more of us” than we suspected, I opined.

This pragmatic (as I thought) remark, that of an aging idealist, was politely received, with a few vague nods, but hardly applauded. I had rather surprised myself by uttering it, since I am often rather pessimistic in company. I feel certain, for instance, that Anthony Rudolf, poet, translator, biographer, editor, literary and social critic, and last but not least, director of the Menard Press, would not have come out with anything so beamish. Nevertheless, after 30 years he is still giving much of his time and energy to Menard, which he founded as a successor to The Journals of Pierre Menard, edited by him and Peter Hoy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It still surprises me, I have to confess, that Menard, with its startling track record, can publish six noteworthy books on the occasion of the Press’s 30th birthday and attract, as far as I know, not a single notice. It is not coincidental, I suspect, that the press is known for its dedication to translation, especially of poetry, and that five of the six anniversary books are indeed translations . . .

Oddly, although literary translation is still regarded with suspicion
or as a marginal, almost sub-literary activity, it is also more visible these days (“the flavour of the millennium”, Michael Schmidt called it). The award of the Whitbread Prize to two translations (Ted Hughes’s version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and, this year, Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf) has much to do with it, of course, although the TV panellists, at least when Beowulf was selected, expressed concern at the Whitbread going to what was, after all, “only a translation”. I am told by Peter Bush, who also participated in the British Council Seminar, that (after years of persuasion)translation is now taken into account when academic promotion is being considered. This does not mean, though, that our media will give space to cross-cultural events or to publications of international interest, involving or dependent on the difficult art of literary translation . . .

However, even though I would love to indulge myself in speculation, to draw a distinction between élitism and a proper concern for culture, even in its less popular aspects, I shall refrain and instead simply mention the six Menard books in question.

The non-translation among them is the late Gillian Rose’s moving
sketch towards a book, Paradiso, written by her shortly before her death. This is the sort of text that Menard has always been open to, an awkward length, a prime and absorbing example of writing in the process of being made. Another typical (if one can call it that) Menard book is Octavio Paz’s intellectual autobiography, Itinerary, here expertly translated with notes and an afterword by Professor Jason Wilson, and with a Foreword by Paz’s friend, fellow poet and sometime translator, Charles Tomlinson. It beats me that the English appearance of so important a text should have been surrounded by utter silence. The collection is in three parts: ‘How and why I wrote The Labyrinth of Solitude’; the title essay ‘Itinerary’, and an Appendix, ‘Imaginary Gardens: A Memoir’. It is essential reading for all followers of Paz’s brilliant international career as an homme-de-lettres of the highest distinction, and most certainly as the presiding genius of twentieth-century Mexican literature.

Found in Translation: One Hundred Years of Modern Hebrew Poetry, translated by the late Robert Friend, edited and introduced by his friend the poet and translator Gabriel Levin, was selected as a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation. Robert Friend, one of the principal and earliest advocates of Modern Hebrew poetry, has been celebrated before in our journal, most recently in Palestinian and Israeli Poets, MPT 14 (in this anthology/issue Friend’s co-translations from Arabic are also represented). As Gabriel Levin notes, the Menard selection of Friend’s best work amounts in fact to a representative, though not of course comprehensive, anthology of the best of Hebrew poetry written in the last hundred years. Friend, like all good translators who have focused on a particular literature, was a natural anthologist. He has helped to create the image of Hebrew poetry that those who are interested in such matters have received. This is not a scholar’s but a practitioner’s anthology, even if assembled for him by another. Much water has flowed under the bridge since Friend began and it is fascinating to compare his versions of, say, Amichai, thirteen of whose poems are included, with those by other translators of this much translated major poet.

Parenthetically, I should like to draw attention to another of Mr Rudolf’s virtues: he publishes not just writings but writers. One
remembers his loyalty to the work of the late great translator, Jonathan Griffin, whose own poems Menard published. The press have also published Robert Friend’s accomplished, lucid, sparely sensuous poetry, as well as collections of his translations, such as those of Leah Goldberg and Ra’hel.

Duino Elegies of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated and introduced by Patrick Bridgwater (bilingual) presents Rilke’s masterwork in a fully annotated new translation. Again, one notes Rudolf’s attention to writers/translators as well as to writings/translations. The poet and Germanist Patrick Bridgwater was the subject of The Journals of Pierre Menard No. 3, July 1969. This entire issue of a publication which appeared not long after the first issue of Modern Poetry in Translation (Menard and MPT belong, I suppose, to the second generation of post-World War Two literary explorers or discoverers, the first generation including such notables as the late Miron Grindea of Adam International and internationally inclined writers like Stephen Spender) was dedicated to Patrick Bridgwater’s translations of First World War German poets (his German Poets of the First World War was published as a book in 1985). The Menard issue was the first such anthology to be published in England, fifty years after the end of the Great War.

For me the two most interesting books in a wonderful bunch, are:
William Stone’s translation (presented bilingually) of Gérard de Nerval’s Les Chimères, with accompanying texts by Anne Beresford, Michael Hamburger, Norma Rinsler and William Stone; and With All Five Senses, poems by Hans W Cohn, translated from the German by his brother Frederick G Cohn, with an Introduction by Michael Hamburger.

Les Chimères is another classic Menard book, in that it not only offers these translations but invites two informed readers to respond, as well as allowing the translator to talk at some length about his translation. We are, thus, admitted into a dialogue or conversation. This sense of a creative community (usually associated with periodicals) is, I think, intrinsic to Menard, as it is to no other publisher I know. I am not, like Norma Rinsler, a Nerval expert, but Will Stone (whose translations of the German of Georg Trakl can be found in the present issue of MPT) has produced versions that are more than usually at home in the disputed territory between languages, that no-man’s land that translators at their best cultivate. Stone neither foreignizes nor domesticates but is open to and takes full advantage of the possibilities offered by English today. He does what gifted translators are best fitted to do, producing something new, not just because it originates in another culture but because the host(target) language is legitimately changed by it. I was much taken, for instance, with his argument in favour of bilingual presentation, far more persuasive now, I think, than it was thirty-five years ago, when Ted Hughes and I began MPT. I will quote this passage, an exemplary statement of a translator’s aspirations, both humble and proud:

“Naturally one should, if one is able to, read the French original above my translation [. . .] It [the translation] stands alone, a sandy hummock in the lee of a granite mountain, liable to be eroded away to nothing at any time, but an awareness of its own impermanence gives it a certain daring and propensity for risk which the original has forgotten. It is this that the original needs to maintain its power. [. . .] Only the translation can keep revealing a work’s concealed essence in new ways, and as layers of language slowly settle over its time-worn root, the translation accepts a truly mammoth responsibility which falls harder at the feet of each successive translator.”

With All Five Senses, poems by Hans W Cohn, on the other hand, is presented monolingually in translations from the German by the author’s younger brother. That this is, in a way, a “special” case, a brother translating a brother, a family affair, makes me want to hear something from the translator himself. I would have been curious to see some of the source texts, although it may well be that Hans W Cohn’s work is eminently “translatable”, as, say, Tadeusz Rozewicz’s or Reiner Kunze’s is, their language so spare and precise as to hold the translator on the tightest of reins. There is, however, a most interesting and informative introduction by Michael Hamburger, an edited and revised version of his foreword to the original German edition of this book, here translated by Stephen Cang.

Hans W Cohn, born in 1916, studied medicine in Prague, from where he managed to escape to England after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. He trained as a psychotherapist, his doctoral dissertation being on psychological aspects of the work of the German-Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler. The present Menard publication is a complete translation of a book, published in Germany in 1994, of poems written in the seventies, after which Cohn withdrew from poetry. Michael Hamburger quotes from a short notice of Cohn’s Poems (1964), in the TLS, written by himself. Here he compared Cohn’s poems to “certain short prose-parables by Kafka”. He quotes one of the poems, a fitting note, I think, on which to end the present piece:

Two mirrors sit
opposite each other
and look at each other.
Then they get up
and go their own way.
And both are thinking:
how good it is
to be in touch
with someone.

The Menard Press Anniversary Catalogue can be obtained from: 8, The Oaks, Woodside Avenue, London N12 8AR