Mark McGuinness reviews the PBS selections for Spring 2004
As this quarter’s PBS books started to arrive I was reminded of the selection pack of sweets I used to wake up to Christmas morning – the same feeling of being spoilt for choice, plus the novelty of trying things I wouldn’t normally pick, but which turned out to be surprisingly good. And I’m pleased to report that there was nothing in this selection like the unchewable toffee that hung around for weeks because no-one would eat it.
The PBS Choice is a new offering from an established favourite, Snow Water by Michael Longley (Cape). Following on from the acclaimed collections that marked his re-emergence as a major figure in the 1990s, Snow Water represents a continuation of their themes rather than a radical new departure. Those who have been previously entranced by the subtleties of Longley’s lyrical voice will find plenty to admire in this new collection, in poems where the human and natural worlds intertwine in ways at once commonplace and beautiful (“I am describing to you on the phone / Stonechats backlit by an October sunset”). Impressive as the individual pieces are, Snow Water’s resonance is achieved through repetition and restatement – of phrases, images, place names, themes and forms. For example the title phrase “snow water”, carrying associations of both purity and transformation, runs like a clear current through the book, surfacing in various poems as “holy water”, river water, and a “crock of snow water” for brewing tea.
Snow water also pours from a well-head under the walls of Troy, where Hector hunts down Achilles:
they both accelerate away from town
Along a cart-track as far as double well-heads
That gush into the eddying Scamander, in one
Warm water steaming like smoke from a bonfire
The other running cold as hailstones, snow water…
(War and Peace)
War and peace, the hot and cold streams in human nature, are central themes in Longley’s work as a whole. He has frequently used the Trojan War to draw parallels with the World Wars of the twentieth century or the conflict in Northern Ireland. In Snow Water killings in Northern Ireland have thankfully receded into the background of the poetic landscape, so that the hot stream of
war is represented by a series of poems about World War I, in which Longley’s father fought. On the page facing War and Peace, The Front blurs the boundaries between past and present, father and son, in a nightmarish vision where the speaker is “marching up to the Front to die” and meets “the family face” returning from death. Edward Thomas’s Poem encapsulates the reluctance and aspiration of the lyric poet confronted with the horrors of war, and the closing couplet could be applied to Longley as well as Thomas:
The nature poet turned into a war poet, as if
He could cure death with the rub of a dock leaf.
Death is not confined to the battlefield in Snow Water, which includes numerous elegies and imagined funerals, including the poet’s own. My personal favourite is White Water, in memory of the poet James Simmons, which combines regret with gentle humour:
We should have been fat jolly poets
In some oriental print who float
Cups of warm saké to one another
On the river, and launch in paper boats
Their poems.
This charming vignette suggests an exemplary role for the elder poet, in which playfulness, celebration and generosity have overcome the sorrow of loss. After reading a collection like Snow Water it is hard not to think of Longley’s work in these terms.
After Snow Water it seems natural to turn to Matthew Hollis’s debut collection, Ground Water (Bloodaxe), as the first PBS Recommendation. Although Hollis does not yet have the sustained intensity, richness and subtlety of Longley, there are enough passages of brilliant writing in the book to make it a good read. If
Longley is partial to snow water, Hollis prefers rain – rivers and seas as well, but mostly rain. Images of rainfall, flooding and water seeping through from outside pervade the collection, occasionally seeming repetitive but coalescing beautifully in It Rains During
the Night:
But sometimes I wake in a nightroom
after you’ve gone, to a perfume of salt,
seawater beading the boards; listening to the lap
of out-things getting in – which surely would stop
if ever I would venture to open the door
and step out on the might-be of water.
Walking on water is the subject of another poem, Isostasy, an amusing conceit which “proves” that it is possible to “run across the rooftops of the sea”. These poems succeed through a fine balance of image and thought, although this is not maintained smoothly throughout the collection; sometimes the ideas and images seem a little obvious, the rhymes a little insistent, and the rhythms start to plod:
What I see in you is me:
an image of myself complete, as one,
more real than I could ever be.
What I see in you I cannot live to,
too much the perfect picture of myself.
(In you more than you)
Turning from this to the sequence One Man Went to Mow is like reading a different poet, a much more assured and convincing writer. It is difficult to do justice to this superb sequence by quoting it, since its effectiveness depends on the cumulative impact of the narrative. The story revolves around the brutal economics of hired farm labour in a rural past, and is told in a matter-of-fact tone, without any straining after effects. The descriptions of mowing with scythes recall similar scenes in Hardy or Tolstoy, and their vividness is all the more surprising coming from a writer who has just turned thirty and works as an editor in 21st century literary London. If One Man Went to Mow were by Hardy or even Heaney it would have been written from memory, but from Hollis I can only assume it is imagination, which makes it all the more impressive. Ground Water concludes with another successful sequence, in memory of the poet’s father, suggesting that Hollis’s talent may be best suited to extended
forms.
Kate Clanchy’s Newborn (Picador) is a story of transformation, of the birth and early months of a first child. A strong theme such as this can be a mixed blessing for a collection: on the one hand it can enlarge the scope of individual poems so that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts; on the other, the theme can mask pieces that do not stand up to scrutiny in isolation. In the case of Newborn the theme itself presents a further difficulty – of avoiding sentimentality, so that the book does not become the literary equivalent of a baby photo album. And the blurb does not help, describing the book as “essential reading for all parents and parents-to-be”.
Perhaps Clanchy is anticipating a polarised response to the book in The Other Woman, where she imagines meeting her younger self, “the girl who lives on her own”, and trying to explain to her the difference made by the birth:
You don’t understand.
What happens is someone slips from your side, someone
full-sized. Will she yawn, get her bag, start tucking
her fags in when I get out his photo…?
Thankfully Clanchy is too sharp a writer to make us yawn, although readers familiar with her first two collections will detect a shift in tone, away from the spiky wit of Slattern and Samarkand, and towards a more pared-down, even naïve voice. There are admittedly ironies and metaphorical ingenuities in Newborn, but for me the book really comes alive in a handful of poems where the domestic opens onto a visionary, almost mystical dimension. Like the short poem Rejoice in the Lamb, which translates the title of Christopher
Smart’s Jubilate Agno, (written while Smart was confined for insanity) and crackles with the “electrical fire” of Smart’s God:
At night, in your shift, fine hair upright,
you are my tiny Bedlamite,
admonishing the laughing crowd
with your pale, magisterial hands,
or roaring out like poor Kit Smart
how blessed, electric, all things are.
The nursery-rhyme qualities of this delightful piece ensured that I memorised it without trying, finding new echoes and meanings with each repetition. Such as the way “mite” tucks into “Bedlamite”, making a disturbing association between childhood innocence and madness. The tetrameter form, plus the juxtaposition of child, lamb, madness and religious vision also conjure the spirit of Blake, adding a further unsettling dimension to a poem that is far more than merely charming.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this mystical quality is most apparent nearer the beginning of the book, in poems about the child’s gestation and earliest days. As the book progresses and the little boy starts to grow up, the poems become less memorable, if still well-crafted. But it would be unfair to complain about this – all the mystics agree there’s very little to say about the Vision, so we should be grateful that some poets can write about it at all.
Although The Strange Hours Travellers Keep (Faber) is August Kleinzahler’s tenth book of poetry, he was a new discovery for me and an unexpected treat. Of all the poets in this PBS selection Kleinzahler has the greatest range, in terms of both subject-matter and tone. The book begins with a meditation on stock markets and takes us on an exhilarating and perplexing journey via a poet’s deathbed, amateur brainsurgery, a bearded woman, a runaway ostrich in Las Vegas, an Art Farm and a cinema in the afterlife, and ends with Tartar hordes at the gates of Christendom. The scenes are narrated in a variety of registers, often skipping from the ridiculous to the sublime within the space of a few lines, as in the opening of An Englishman Abroad:
The talk-radio host is trying to shake the wacko
with only a minute left
to get in the finance and boner-pill spots
before signing off,
the morning news team already at the door
and dairy vans streaming
from the gates of WholesomeBest, fanning out
across the vast plateau.
Fair skies, high cumulous cloud –
the birds are in full throat as dawn ignites
in the east, rinsing the heavens with a coral pink.
Kleinzahler clearly relishes the comic detail of “the finance and boner-pill spots” as well as the brand-name WholesomeBest, then moves effortlessly onto the lyrical description of the dawn as if it were the most natural progression in the world. The result is an engaging mixture of humour and radiance, and perhaps also of compassion for the human beings going about their trivial business while oblivious to the transcendent beauty around them. An Englishman Abroad has a cinematic quality, moving from the opening shot of the radio studio to the dairy vans setting out across the plateau, and then on to the poem’s hero lying in his hotel bed. Elsewhere Kleinzahler makes more explicit use of cinematic technique, as in The Hereafter, where the speaker is ushered into a cinema to watch a “20-million-dollar home movie” of his life:
You know what these things are like:
the outlandish hairdos, pastel bathroom fixtures.
The editing is out of this world,
the whole shebang in under an hour:
the air-raid drill on Wednesday morning;
1957, when Tito wet his pants;
there I am, beside myself with laughter,
Like a good film director, Kleinzahler has the gift of entertaining without trivialising. His omnivorous imagination seems capable of devouring the most trivial or embarrassing detail and transforming it into poetry – often quirky, funny poetry, but none the less serious or valuable for that.
My initial reactions to the PBS Pamphlet, James Sheard’s Hotel Mastboch (Mews Press, Sheffield Hallam University), were similar to my first responses to Geoffrey Hill – reservations about a portentous tone, apparently deliberate obscurity and a pretentious-looking sprinkling of foreign words. As Sean O’Brien says in the Prefatory Note, Sheard is certainly not “in thrall to ‘accessibility’”. Yet as I reread the poems at intervals I found myself warming to them, and was won over by similar attractions to those I discovered in Hill: a fastidious handling of words, a delicate and effective interplay of syntax and lineation, an awareness of history informing the present, and some beautiful lyric moments. Highlights for me were the atmospheric title poem, the mingled aspiration and regret of
At Konstanz, the elegaic tone (which survives a flash of schoolboy humour) of High tide, Bosham, and the evocative Islamic imagery of Studying Santiago and Calls to Prayer.
Like the Magic Theatre in Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Hotel Mastbosch is perhaps ‘Not for Everyone’, but those with the inclination to tease out its subtleties will find their patience well rewarded. As a way into the poems, O’Brien enjoins us to read them aloud. You might also like to check out Sheard’s own readings of some of them, available on his website www.audiotexture.com
“The Hungarian language is isolated, the Hungarian language means certain death in world literature” wrote Agnes Nemes Nagy in the introduction to her 1980 Selected Poems. So we owe George Szirtes a debt of gratitude for bringing her poetry to life in English, in the PBS Translation, The Night of Akhenaton – Selected Poems
(Bloodaxe). Having lived through the Second World War, the Stalinist takeover of Hungary and the 1956 Uprising, it is hardly surprising that Nemes Nagy describes war as “the fundamental experience of my generation”. Sometimes this experience is addressed explicitly, as in this powerful passage from The Night of Akhenaton:
And the tanks were already coming.
The street ran along
its stone bed before mountainous waves of metal
and soft bodies ran between stone and metal
still trailing a few balloons behind them.
Yet the suffering of war is usually treated more obliquely, in the stoicism that pervades Nemes Nagy’s poems about nature and mythology. Scientific imagery also contributes to the vision of a world stripped down to bare essentials:
Because the head of every object glows,
trees glisten like arctic circles. In long rows
all 92 elements stand, frozen in endless white,
each wearing its own curious cap of light,
on each one’s brow its likeness and reflection –
so body, I trust, shall rise at resurrection.
(Above the Object)
Like much of Nemes Nagy’s verse these lines are eerie and forbidding, yet compelling and coldly beautiful. It is as if they have reached a kind of poetic absolute zero, where death gives way to “trust” and “resurrection”.
I am always suspicious of translations that read too well, as they make me wonder how close they are to the sound and sense of the original, and Szirtes’ versions of Nemes Nagy read very well indeed. Looking again at Above the Object, it clearly fits Szirtes’ description of the original Hungarian verse – “metrical, rhyming… epigrammatic, gnomic, almost absolute” and it is a marvellously taut poem in its own right. But the one thing I missed from Szirtes’ introduction was a detailed consideration of how closely the versification of his translations mirrors that of the originals. In Nemes Nagy’s own Introduction (reprinted at the back of this volume) she gives a tantalising glimpse of Hungarian as a language blessed with “assonantal riches” and in which it is “possible for three rhythmic systems to live side by side”. I find it slightly frustrating to have to read these translations with little idea of how these riches were exploited by Nemes Nagy in the original verse. On the other hand this frustration is a compliment to Szirtes’ achievement in The Night of Akhenaton, as it stems from a nagging feeling that these translations are simply too good to be true.
The PBS Choice is a new offering from an established favourite, Snow Water by Michael Longley (Cape). Following on from the acclaimed collections that marked his re-emergence as a major figure in the 1990s, Snow Water represents a continuation of their themes rather than a radical new departure. Those who have been previously entranced by the subtleties of Longley’s lyrical voice will find plenty to admire in this new collection, in poems where the human and natural worlds intertwine in ways at once commonplace and beautiful (“I am describing to you on the phone / Stonechats backlit by an October sunset”). Impressive as the individual pieces are, Snow Water’s resonance is achieved through repetition and restatement – of phrases, images, place names, themes and forms. For example the title phrase “snow water”, carrying associations of both purity and transformation, runs like a clear current through the book, surfacing in various poems as “holy water”, river water, and a “crock of snow water” for brewing tea.
Snow water also pours from a well-head under the walls of Troy, where Hector hunts down Achilles:
they both accelerate away from town
Along a cart-track as far as double well-heads
That gush into the eddying Scamander, in one
Warm water steaming like smoke from a bonfire
The other running cold as hailstones, snow water…
(War and Peace)
War and peace, the hot and cold streams in human nature, are central themes in Longley’s work as a whole. He has frequently used the Trojan War to draw parallels with the World Wars of the twentieth century or the conflict in Northern Ireland. In Snow Water killings in Northern Ireland have thankfully receded into the background of the poetic landscape, so that the hot stream of
war is represented by a series of poems about World War I, in which Longley’s father fought. On the page facing War and Peace, The Front blurs the boundaries between past and present, father and son, in a nightmarish vision where the speaker is “marching up to the Front to die” and meets “the family face” returning from death. Edward Thomas’s Poem encapsulates the reluctance and aspiration of the lyric poet confronted with the horrors of war, and the closing couplet could be applied to Longley as well as Thomas:
The nature poet turned into a war poet, as if
He could cure death with the rub of a dock leaf.
Death is not confined to the battlefield in Snow Water, which includes numerous elegies and imagined funerals, including the poet’s own. My personal favourite is White Water, in memory of the poet James Simmons, which combines regret with gentle humour:
We should have been fat jolly poets
In some oriental print who float
Cups of warm saké to one another
On the river, and launch in paper boats
Their poems.
This charming vignette suggests an exemplary role for the elder poet, in which playfulness, celebration and generosity have overcome the sorrow of loss. After reading a collection like Snow Water it is hard not to think of Longley’s work in these terms.
After Snow Water it seems natural to turn to Matthew Hollis’s debut collection, Ground Water (Bloodaxe), as the first PBS Recommendation. Although Hollis does not yet have the sustained intensity, richness and subtlety of Longley, there are enough passages of brilliant writing in the book to make it a good read. If
Longley is partial to snow water, Hollis prefers rain – rivers and seas as well, but mostly rain. Images of rainfall, flooding and water seeping through from outside pervade the collection, occasionally seeming repetitive but coalescing beautifully in It Rains During
the Night:
But sometimes I wake in a nightroom
after you’ve gone, to a perfume of salt,
seawater beading the boards; listening to the lap
of out-things getting in – which surely would stop
if ever I would venture to open the door
and step out on the might-be of water.
Walking on water is the subject of another poem, Isostasy, an amusing conceit which “proves” that it is possible to “run across the rooftops of the sea”. These poems succeed through a fine balance of image and thought, although this is not maintained smoothly throughout the collection; sometimes the ideas and images seem a little obvious, the rhymes a little insistent, and the rhythms start to plod:
What I see in you is me:
an image of myself complete, as one,
more real than I could ever be.
What I see in you I cannot live to,
too much the perfect picture of myself.
(In you more than you)
Turning from this to the sequence One Man Went to Mow is like reading a different poet, a much more assured and convincing writer. It is difficult to do justice to this superb sequence by quoting it, since its effectiveness depends on the cumulative impact of the narrative. The story revolves around the brutal economics of hired farm labour in a rural past, and is told in a matter-of-fact tone, without any straining after effects. The descriptions of mowing with scythes recall similar scenes in Hardy or Tolstoy, and their vividness is all the more surprising coming from a writer who has just turned thirty and works as an editor in 21st century literary London. If One Man Went to Mow were by Hardy or even Heaney it would have been written from memory, but from Hollis I can only assume it is imagination, which makes it all the more impressive. Ground Water concludes with another successful sequence, in memory of the poet’s father, suggesting that Hollis’s talent may be best suited to extended
forms.
Kate Clanchy’s Newborn (Picador) is a story of transformation, of the birth and early months of a first child. A strong theme such as this can be a mixed blessing for a collection: on the one hand it can enlarge the scope of individual poems so that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts; on the other, the theme can mask pieces that do not stand up to scrutiny in isolation. In the case of Newborn the theme itself presents a further difficulty – of avoiding sentimentality, so that the book does not become the literary equivalent of a baby photo album. And the blurb does not help, describing the book as “essential reading for all parents and parents-to-be”.
Perhaps Clanchy is anticipating a polarised response to the book in The Other Woman, where she imagines meeting her younger self, “the girl who lives on her own”, and trying to explain to her the difference made by the birth:
You don’t understand.
What happens is someone slips from your side, someone
full-sized. Will she yawn, get her bag, start tucking
her fags in when I get out his photo…?
Thankfully Clanchy is too sharp a writer to make us yawn, although readers familiar with her first two collections will detect a shift in tone, away from the spiky wit of Slattern and Samarkand, and towards a more pared-down, even naïve voice. There are admittedly ironies and metaphorical ingenuities in Newborn, but for me the book really comes alive in a handful of poems where the domestic opens onto a visionary, almost mystical dimension. Like the short poem Rejoice in the Lamb, which translates the title of Christopher
Smart’s Jubilate Agno, (written while Smart was confined for insanity) and crackles with the “electrical fire” of Smart’s God:
At night, in your shift, fine hair upright,
you are my tiny Bedlamite,
admonishing the laughing crowd
with your pale, magisterial hands,
or roaring out like poor Kit Smart
how blessed, electric, all things are.
The nursery-rhyme qualities of this delightful piece ensured that I memorised it without trying, finding new echoes and meanings with each repetition. Such as the way “mite” tucks into “Bedlamite”, making a disturbing association between childhood innocence and madness. The tetrameter form, plus the juxtaposition of child, lamb, madness and religious vision also conjure the spirit of Blake, adding a further unsettling dimension to a poem that is far more than merely charming.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this mystical quality is most apparent nearer the beginning of the book, in poems about the child’s gestation and earliest days. As the book progresses and the little boy starts to grow up, the poems become less memorable, if still well-crafted. But it would be unfair to complain about this – all the mystics agree there’s very little to say about the Vision, so we should be grateful that some poets can write about it at all.
Although The Strange Hours Travellers Keep (Faber) is August Kleinzahler’s tenth book of poetry, he was a new discovery for me and an unexpected treat. Of all the poets in this PBS selection Kleinzahler has the greatest range, in terms of both subject-matter and tone. The book begins with a meditation on stock markets and takes us on an exhilarating and perplexing journey via a poet’s deathbed, amateur brainsurgery, a bearded woman, a runaway ostrich in Las Vegas, an Art Farm and a cinema in the afterlife, and ends with Tartar hordes at the gates of Christendom. The scenes are narrated in a variety of registers, often skipping from the ridiculous to the sublime within the space of a few lines, as in the opening of An Englishman Abroad:
The talk-radio host is trying to shake the wacko
with only a minute left
to get in the finance and boner-pill spots
before signing off,
the morning news team already at the door
and dairy vans streaming
from the gates of WholesomeBest, fanning out
across the vast plateau.
Fair skies, high cumulous cloud –
the birds are in full throat as dawn ignites
in the east, rinsing the heavens with a coral pink.
Kleinzahler clearly relishes the comic detail of “the finance and boner-pill spots” as well as the brand-name WholesomeBest, then moves effortlessly onto the lyrical description of the dawn as if it were the most natural progression in the world. The result is an engaging mixture of humour and radiance, and perhaps also of compassion for the human beings going about their trivial business while oblivious to the transcendent beauty around them. An Englishman Abroad has a cinematic quality, moving from the opening shot of the radio studio to the dairy vans setting out across the plateau, and then on to the poem’s hero lying in his hotel bed. Elsewhere Kleinzahler makes more explicit use of cinematic technique, as in The Hereafter, where the speaker is ushered into a cinema to watch a “20-million-dollar home movie” of his life:
You know what these things are like:
the outlandish hairdos, pastel bathroom fixtures.
The editing is out of this world,
the whole shebang in under an hour:
the air-raid drill on Wednesday morning;
1957, when Tito wet his pants;
there I am, beside myself with laughter,
Like a good film director, Kleinzahler has the gift of entertaining without trivialising. His omnivorous imagination seems capable of devouring the most trivial or embarrassing detail and transforming it into poetry – often quirky, funny poetry, but none the less serious or valuable for that.
My initial reactions to the PBS Pamphlet, James Sheard’s Hotel Mastboch (Mews Press, Sheffield Hallam University), were similar to my first responses to Geoffrey Hill – reservations about a portentous tone, apparently deliberate obscurity and a pretentious-looking sprinkling of foreign words. As Sean O’Brien says in the Prefatory Note, Sheard is certainly not “in thrall to ‘accessibility’”. Yet as I reread the poems at intervals I found myself warming to them, and was won over by similar attractions to those I discovered in Hill: a fastidious handling of words, a delicate and effective interplay of syntax and lineation, an awareness of history informing the present, and some beautiful lyric moments. Highlights for me were the atmospheric title poem, the mingled aspiration and regret of
At Konstanz, the elegaic tone (which survives a flash of schoolboy humour) of High tide, Bosham, and the evocative Islamic imagery of Studying Santiago and Calls to Prayer.
Like the Magic Theatre in Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Hotel Mastbosch is perhaps ‘Not for Everyone’, but those with the inclination to tease out its subtleties will find their patience well rewarded. As a way into the poems, O’Brien enjoins us to read them aloud. You might also like to check out Sheard’s own readings of some of them, available on his website www.audiotexture.com
“The Hungarian language is isolated, the Hungarian language means certain death in world literature” wrote Agnes Nemes Nagy in the introduction to her 1980 Selected Poems. So we owe George Szirtes a debt of gratitude for bringing her poetry to life in English, in the PBS Translation, The Night of Akhenaton – Selected Poems
(Bloodaxe). Having lived through the Second World War, the Stalinist takeover of Hungary and the 1956 Uprising, it is hardly surprising that Nemes Nagy describes war as “the fundamental experience of my generation”. Sometimes this experience is addressed explicitly, as in this powerful passage from The Night of Akhenaton:
And the tanks were already coming.
The street ran along
its stone bed before mountainous waves of metal
and soft bodies ran between stone and metal
still trailing a few balloons behind them.
Yet the suffering of war is usually treated more obliquely, in the stoicism that pervades Nemes Nagy’s poems about nature and mythology. Scientific imagery also contributes to the vision of a world stripped down to bare essentials:
Because the head of every object glows,
trees glisten like arctic circles. In long rows
all 92 elements stand, frozen in endless white,
each wearing its own curious cap of light,
on each one’s brow its likeness and reflection –
so body, I trust, shall rise at resurrection.
(Above the Object)
Like much of Nemes Nagy’s verse these lines are eerie and forbidding, yet compelling and coldly beautiful. It is as if they have reached a kind of poetic absolute zero, where death gives way to “trust” and “resurrection”.
I am always suspicious of translations that read too well, as they make me wonder how close they are to the sound and sense of the original, and Szirtes’ versions of Nemes Nagy read very well indeed. Looking again at Above the Object, it clearly fits Szirtes’ description of the original Hungarian verse – “metrical, rhyming… epigrammatic, gnomic, almost absolute” and it is a marvellously taut poem in its own right. But the one thing I missed from Szirtes’ introduction was a detailed consideration of how closely the versification of his translations mirrors that of the originals. In Nemes Nagy’s own Introduction (reprinted at the back of this volume) she gives a tantalising glimpse of Hungarian as a language blessed with “assonantal riches” and in which it is “possible for three rhythmic systems to live side by side”. I find it slightly frustrating to have to read these translations with little idea of how these riches were exploited by Nemes Nagy in the original verse. On the other hand this frustration is a compliment to Szirtes’ achievement in The Night of Akhenaton, as it stems from a nagging feeling that these translations are simply too good to be true.
Page(s) 67-71
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