Durham E-Theses The Eastern European Context of Poetry in English after 1950 CLEGG, JOHN,RICHARD How to cite: CLEGG, JOHN,RICHARD (2014) The Eastern European Context of Poetry in English after 1950, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/9507/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk Abstract This thesis investigates some developments in English poetry brought about by the rapid influx of translated work from Eastern and Central Europe (especially Poland, Hungary and former Yugoslavia) in the period following the Second World War. As well as providing models for many English poets at the level of technique and motif, this work served as catalyst in wider poetical and political debates, especially concerning literalism in translation, issues of persona arising from psuedo-translation, and propriety of response when dealing with atrocity. ‘How dare we now be anything but numb?’, asks Donald Davie in his ‘Rejoinder to a Critic’; examples from Eastern European poetry in translation have been one of the means through which certain modern poets have negotiated a tentative response to that question. The individual chapters of this thesis offer close readings of poets including Ted Hughes, Charles Simic, Tom Paulin, Donald Davie, and Patrick McGuinness, as well as in-depth analyses of two long poems, Ken Smith's Fox Running and Richard Berengarten's In a Time of Drought. The work of each poet is contextualised, drawing out latent Eastern European connotations and connections. Each close reading illuminates a particular broader issue: the turn to folklore and myth (in Smith and Berengarten), contested definitions of the surreal (in Simic), and the ‘right to speak’ on behalf of (or in the voice of) certain groups or on certain occasions (in Davie). Propriety of response and poetic responsibility are examined in a discussion of several English poets' treatment of the Bosnian war, while the chapter on Hughes explores literal translation and the mechanics of influence. Considering these poems in this context expands our sense of the period and of the poems themselves, as well as allowing us to posit a common source for several distinct features of postwar poetry. The Eastern European Context of Poetry in English after 1950 John Clegg Ph.D. Thesis Submitted for Examination Department of English Studies Durham University 2013 Statement of Copyright The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the author's prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. Contents Acknowledgements ii Introduction The Eastern European Translation Market 1 Chapter 1 ‘Cold wind still blowing’: Ted Hughes and János Pilinszky 21 Chapter 2 ‘Another pair of eyes’: Charles Simic and the ‘inward light’ of Vasko Popa and Alexsandr Ristović 42 Chapter 3 ‘Invisible reference’: Tom Paulin, Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson and the Eastern Europeans 61 Chapter 4 ‘Translating’ Folklore: Richard Berengarten’s In a Time of Drought 84 Chapter 5 Poet as Trickster: Ken Smith, Fox Running, and the Eastern Europeans 108 Chapter 6 Licking over wounds: English-language poetry in response to the Bosnian War 130 Chapter 7 Witness Protection: Donald Davie, Christopher Reid and the anxiety of responsibility in Eastern European translation 155 Conclusion 178 Bibliography 199 i Acknowledgments I would like to thank: My supervisor Gareth Reeves, for the continuing inspiration, sharp criticism and insight he has offered at every stage of this thesis; and for originally sparking my interest in many of the poems and poets I discuss, through his Modern Poetry MA seminar group and in conversation. Annabel Haynes, Jack Baker, Matthew Griffiths, Serena Gosden-Hood and Maxime Dargaud-Fons for lively conversation, criticism, recommendations. All at John Snow College, where much of this thesis was written, for pleasant environs and friendliness. Stella Halkyard from the Carcanet Archives at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, staff at the Cambridge University Library, and staff at the Durham University Library (especially Gareth Abrahams), for helpfulness and persistence. Alice Mullen, for borrowed books, green tea, kindness. Marie Caygill, Margaret Greenhalgh, and the support staff in the Department for English Studies, for their continual assistance, tolerance and good humour. Bill and Sarah Clegg, for support and welcome distractions. Helga Bories-Sawala and Rolf Sawala for their support and encouragement. Annick Sawala, for everything. Annick Sawala assisted with German translations. Maxime Dargaud-Fons provided translations from French and Serbo-Croat. Agnes Lehoczky provided translations from Hungarian. As a token of thanks for her enthusiasm, thoughtfulness and unflagging moral support throughout, this thesis is dedicated to my mother, Jo Clegg. ii John Clegg Introduction: The Eastern European Translation Market Eastern European poetry arrived into English over a startlingly short period of time. In 1972, the poet Peter Porter revised one of Martial’s epigrams on the follies of poetic fashion: …nor am I yet well-fledged in the Eastern European Translation Market, whose bloody fables tickle liberal tongues; despite this I make my claim to be a poet.1 The rush of translations Porter was satirising had been a phenomenon for a decade or so when this poem was written. Before that, the ‘Eastern European Translation Market’ did exist, but on a vastly reduced scale, and its survey of Eastern and Central European poetry was cursory at best. As Adam Czerniawski notes, ‘as late as the sixth decade of the twentieth century, writing about Polish poetry in English translation would have been an easy task: the subject could have been dismissed in a sentence, stating that the few translations available, mainly in obscure publications, had deservedly passed unnoticed.’2 The earliest anthology of Polish poetry in English was edited and translated in 1827 by Sir John Bowring. In the Preface, Bowring identifies a new era of internationalism in literature: ‘One fact is singularly illustrative of the improvement of our age…it is, that our sympathies have broken through the narrow walls in which they had been so long imprisoned.’3 The first Polish anthology published in the USA was Paul Soboleski’s 1881 Poets and Poetry of Poland, which used Bowring’s existing translations where available: it also provided a brief overview of later Polish romanticism, including poems by Mickiewicz and Słowacki translated by the American politician Thomas Dunn 1 From Peter Porter ‘After Martial: II.lxxxvi’, in Collected Poems 1961-1981 Volume 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999. p242. Bohn’s literal translation of the same passage runs: ‘because nowhere in my writings, as in those of the Greeks, are to be found echoing verses, and the handsome Attis does not dictate to me a soft and enervated Galliambic strain; I am not on that account, Classicus, so very bad a poet.’ (Martial: Epigrams Book II, Bohn’s Classical Library 1897). 2 Adam Czerniawski, ‘Polish Poetry’, The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, ed. Peter France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 206. 3 John Bowring (ed. and trans.), Specimens of the Polish Poets: with notes and observations on the literature of Poland (London: Rowland Hunter, 1827), p. 19. 1 John Clegg English (author of the ballad ‘Don’t you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt’).4 There was also a small-press 1944 anthology of Polish poetry, perhaps intended as catering for the pre-war influx of Polish refugees learning English, which in any case does not seem to have reached a wide market.5 These three volumes, all published under relatively small imprints, were the only anthologies of Polish verse in English translation available up to the early 1960s. Out of the ‘Three Bards’ of Polish romanticism (Adam Mickiewicz, Zygmunt Krasiński, and Juliusz Słowacki), only Mickiewicz (1798-1855) had been published in a single volume in English by 1950. A 1911 selection was sold in both the UK and the USA,6 and in both countries there were several translations of individual long poems and sequences.7 A 1923 selection of Mickiewicz, translated by Frank H. Fortey, declares on its title page that it has been ‘Published under the auspices of the Polish government’, and seems to have been part of a propaganda campaign on behalf of the newly created Polish state.8 Even after these publications, Mickiewicz was not widely known among English readers: in the preface to an Eliza Orzeszko novel, C.S. De Soissons writes: …who has ever heard, in Great Britain, of Adam Michiewicz the great Polish poet, who, critics declare, can be placed in the same category with Homer, Virgil, Dante, Tasso, Klopstock, Camoens, and Milton?9 Other than Mickiewicz, almost no Polish poets were translated in individual volumes. Juliusz Przyiemski, whose reputation has not survived in Poland or England, had a long dramatic poem translated in 1863 by the anonymous ‘A.M.M.’, but the great (and unclassifiable) Cyprian Norwid remained untranslated until the second half of the twentieth century.10 4 Poets and Poetry of Poland, ed. Paul Soboleskl (Chicago: Knight & Leonard, 1881).