Category Archives: Books

Now You Shall Know the Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology

Posted on 29 December 2013 | Leave a comment

Dennis Haskell and Jean Kent (editors), Now You Shall Know: Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2013 (Hunter Writers Centre, October 2013)

1nysk The Newcastle Poetry Prize is described on its website as ‘the richest and most prestigious stand-alone poetry competition’ in Australia. It has existed for more than three decades under one name or another, and for some years now the Hunter Writers Centre has published an anthology comprising the winner and a selection of other entries. This year’s anthology, named for Jennifer Compton’s winning poem, contains 27 poems and runs to 140 pages, so it’s distinguished from other annual anthologies by including mainly longer poems.

The book is a feast, and even though it owes its existence to a poetry competition it’s a beautiful demonstration of the silliness of pitting poems and poets against each other so that one must emerge as The Best. Not that I challenge the judges’ decisions: all the prize winners and commended poems deserve to win. But so do almost all the others.

Among many pleasures, there’s a strong element of place in the collection. Jennifer Compton’s ‘Now You Shall Know’ kicks things off with a brilliant evocation of the non-place of a passenger plane in mid-flight. Of the two other prize winners, Karina Quinn’s ‘Always Going Home (a domestic cycle)’ has a section named ‘A nowhere place’, which refers to a very specific not-quite-room in the family home, and among other things the poem is about the power exerted on the speaker by the place that is home; and Mark Tredinnick is in full Blue-Mountains-bardic flight in ‘Two or Three Days with Claude Debussy in Late October’. In Kathryn Lomer’s ‘Vapour Trails over Sassafras’ the speaker visits the Tasmanian landscape of her childhood. The dialogue in Ron Pretty’s ‘Picnicking on the Safety Ramp’ creates a gloriously recognisable rural masculinity; Christopher Kelen’s ‘The Shed’ is a location where a similar masculinity finds solitude; the title of Rachael Mead’s ‘Lake Eyre Cycle’ doesn’t mislead.

Two pieces resonated strongly for me as a north Queenslander.  B R Dionysius’ ‘Unicorns Cross Here’  is a sonnet sequence that tours the north, beginning with the giant statue of James Cook in Cairns and visiting the Daintree and the Atherton Tableland. Here are the opening lines of the third sonnet, describing the environment of my childhood:

Through the silk thin mist, sugarcane fields stand as Roman armies
At the end of empire. Forlorn, thirsty, they occupy the flat ground,
Blades held stiff as they form up, row upon green row in perfect
Drilled unison. A thousand years of domesticating iron has tamed
the wilderness. Axes bite deeper than words, saw teeth whisper in
Death’s white noise. On the hills behind them, the rainforest seethes
In undisciplined chaos; disordered ranks thrown back in confusion.

Where Dionysius is a visitor to cane country, the speaker in Victoria McGrath’s ‘Cane Smoking’  comes from there:

I was cradled deep within the blackened root of something
rank and rich in déjà vu, and my curves and crannies,
like so many cinerary urns, claimed without question
the confetti-ash that drifted inevitably to earth.

Carmel Macdonald Grahame’s ‘Wishful Thinking’ isn’t particularly a place poem, unless you count a certain kind of Catholic childhood as a place. From its first lines

You grew up learning not to say
things you were told you should not think

you know exactly where you are. The poem does what I would have thought impossible – it deals with child sexual abuse and keeps its head, even managing moments of playful wit:

it was never the cat that got your tongue,
it was the catechism.

There’s much more, as they say in the ads. Andy Jackson’s ‘Marfan Lives’, Ian Crittenden’s ‘The Red Soil Elegies’, … Really, it’s a wonderful collection.

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Jordie Albiston’s Book of Ethel

Posted on 24 December 2013 | Leave a comment

Jordie Albiston, The Book of Ethel (Puncher & Wattmann Poetry 2013)

1boI bought my secondhand copy of this small miracle of a book in Sappho’s, lovingly inscribed by the author to a couple of evidently ungrateful friends. Well, Jordie, it’s my copy now and I’m definitely keeping it.

The Ethel of the title was the poet’s great-grandmother. Born in Cornwall in the 1870s, she emigrated to Australia as a child, married a minister, raised six children, and died in the 1940s. That broad outline of her life emerges from these poems, though the story is not told in a straightforward narrative. This isn’t a verse novel. It’s a series of 60 short poems, each capturing a moment of the life, with little if any narrative flow from one to the next. A note up the back tells us who Ethel was, and leaves us to surmise that Albiston has drawn on archival sources – letters and diaries, perhaps, and a small book mentioned in passing, Parsonage Peeps. Google confirms that the book really existed, published in the 1930s, and I’d be astonished to learn that other writings by Ethel aren’t used, sometimes verbatim.

This found material is integrated into extraordinarily lively poetry, all in Ethel’s voice and held in a tight form. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the form to start with. I just went along for the ride with Ethel, aware that the text isn’t generally structured according to ordinary prose conventions, and is peppered with eccentric exclamation marks, italics and spaces. I don’t mean that the poems are obscure or annoyingly mannered; on the contrary, while the precise meaning of a phrase may not always be obvious, the sense of a living, complex mind in action is strong and very attractive. But perhaps inevitably somewhere along the line I paused to figure out what’s going on.

Anyhow, here’s the first poem (the word in bold here is in italics in the original – I can’t make WordPress give me non-italics in a quote):

so Life!__we meet once more__you
& I__in concert__concord
happy agreement to do
until done__my act__your stage
make__lie in it__this! my bit-
part__play__World__with me aboard
a Speck!__then__gigantic

It’s a great opening that sets the reader’s mind racing in a number of directions at once. Who is speaking? What is the theatrical imagery doing? Is there an echo of ‘You’ve made your bed, now lie in it’ in line 5, and if so what does it mean? And how about that fabulous change of perspective in the last line?

But what is going on in the poem’s form? Are the line breaks arbitrary? Are those rhymes incidental? Is the punctuation just eccentric, or hip in some poetic way that’s obscure to unsavvy readers? Such questions multiply, and intensify, as you get further into the book.

(A word of warning: sensible readers of this blog might want to skip the next bit as it’s all poetry-geeky without being all that poetry-educated. It may be that the form here is quite common, not invented by Jordie Albiston as I imagine.)

It turns out that every poem in the book uses the same stanza form as the one quoted above, though the number of stanzas varies – most poems have just one, but there’s one with four and a number with two or three. Each stanza has 7 lines, of which the first and third lines rhyme, and the second and sixth – if you allow ‘rhyme’ to include such pairings as kindly/Queenie or Lizzie/tiny. More significantly, though, each line has 7 syllables, with none of the regular patterning based on emphasis that is usual in English verse. It’s what Wikipedia calls syllabic verse. There may be other rules – certainly there’s always a lot of internal rhyme, alliteration and so on. But the point is that every word in the book is held in a tight, mathematically dictated structure.

The form, the structuring principle, doesn’t give any indication of how the poem is to be spoken – yet from that opening exclamation this is verse that cries out to be heard as well as seen. So the whole book is animated by a tension between Ethel who is speaking to us and the tight restrictions of the form in which she is allowed to speak. It may be stretching it a bit, but it feels to me as an enactment of the way Ethel could flourish as a human being within the extraordinary limitations placed on her by the society of her time.

The result is just wonderful, and I am in total awe of Jordie Albiston’s ability to pull it off.

(End of nerdy bit.)

If you’re interested in reading a response to the book from someone much less ignorant than I am, I recommend the review by A J Carruthers in Rabbit No 10.

awwbadge_2013This is another title in my Australian Women Writers Challenge for 2013.

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Two Launches (with pic added later)

Posted on 18 December 2013 | Leave a comment

I’ve been sick with a cold since last Monday, and going stir crazy. Perhaps unwisely, I’ve struggled out of the house two nights this week to go to book launches.

rabbit10The first, on Monday night, 1XIII-Poemswas a double launch at Gleebooks – of the tenth issue of Rabbit, a Melbourne-based ‘quarterly journal of non-fiction poetry’, and XIII Poems by Jordie Albiston, the first in a series of booklets to be published by the journal. Both books are beautiful to look at and to hold, and I’m looking forward to reading the copies I bought on the night. Among other tempting morsels, the Rabbit offers poems by Julie Chevalier, Jordie Albiston, B R Dionysus, Lachlan Brown (to name the poets whose work I know), photographs, an essay, an interview and reviews, including one by A J Carruthers of two books I’ve loved, Jordie Albiston’s Book of Ethel (blog post coming soon) and Pam Brown’s Home by Dark (blog post here). And I’m fast becoming a Jordie Albiston fan, so I’m looking forward to reading what she calls orphan poems.

There were 17 people in the upstairs room at Gleebooks for the launch, of whom 8 spoke or read, all interestingly, and one or two others were part of the team who had flown up from Melbourne for the occasion. Jessica Wilkinson, Rabbit‘s founding Editor-in-Chief, graciously described it as an intimate affair, and urged us to take some grapes or cheese home in our pockets since the modest catering was clearly far in excess to requirements.

Whatever the cause for the poor turn-out, the launch was convivial, with plenty of humour about poets becoming members of the Warren, etc, and much joy in language used with precision and passion. I was glad I’d struggled up from my sickbed to put a bum on a seat and at least half a mind into the room.

As a segue, I’ll mention that at least one of the speakers mentioned their students, and one poet explained that she wasn’t reading her poem from the Rabbit because it was too much a ‘page poem’.

1lcThe next night’s launch was a completely different affair. The Last Conversation is an anthology of poems that have been read at the Bankstown Poetry Slam – that is, a collection of spoken word pieces attempting the transition to page poems under the guidance of slam co-founder and anthology editor Ahmad Al Rady.

The monthly Bankstown Poetry Slam has grown in the year of its existence into the biggest slam in Australia. I’ve never managed to get there, and if last night’s event is any indication of the nature of the experience, I’m missing out on something excellent. Ahmad Al Rady and his co-founder Sara Mansour were fabulous MCs – charming, witty, self deprecating and lavish in their appreciation of others. As many as 10 poets performed: a militant hymn to Gandhi and Mandela (timely, though obviously the poem was first performed when Mandela was still alive); cries from the heart from young men against violence against women; a disturbing piece about cutting into flesh after which the poet reassured us that she was not a serial killer or self-harmer but a surgeon; a passionate piece about the detention of asylum seekers; two sisters mining the rich field of sibling rivalry and sibling support.

The theatre at Bankstown Arts Centre was full to capacity,mainly with young people dressed in their best, as if for graduation. The audience whooped, cheered and (during the readings) clicked. It was a huge, enthusiastic celebration not just of the slam and each other, it seemed to me, but of what can happen when language is unleashed. At the start of the evening, Sara Mansour described how the Bankstown slam had started. It was laziness. She and Ahmad were tired of driving all the way into the city for poetry slams. Bankstown needs its own slam, they thought, and hunted around until Tim Carroll, the generous and welcoming CEO of BYDS (Bankstown Youth Development Services) gave them a home. At the end of their first year, she said, she realises they were wrong on two fronts: running a slam in Bankstown was a lot more work than driving into the city once a month; and Bankstown didn’t need a poetry slam – poetry needed Bankstown.

(By way of full disclosure: I played a small consultative role in the editing of the anthology.)

Added later: This snap I took with my phone at the end of the evening shows something of the mood. These are the poets who read plus some others who are in the book.

last conversation

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Gitta Sereny’s German Trauma

Posted on 10 December 2013 | 2 comments

Gitta Sereny, The German Trauma (Allen Lane 2000)

1gtGitta Sereny (1921–2012) was one of the great non-fiction writers of the 20th century. Holocaust denier David Irving described her as a shrivelled Nazi hunter, but though she may well have worn the insult as a badge of honour it wasn’t accurate. She said of herself: ‘I am interested above all in how individual human beings succumb to, or resist, evil.’ In Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (1995), and Cries Unheard: The Story of Mary Bell (1998) she digs with empathy and rigour into the minds of one of Hitler’s closest henchmen and a child murderer respectively, and sheds light on very dark places.

This book, retitled optimistically for the US market as The Healing Wound, was her last. It’s a collection of essays and newspaper pieces spanning 30 years, revised and with new interstitial pieces so that something of a coherent narrative emerges, beginning with the Austrian-born Sereny’s childhood and adolescent experience of Nazism (she accidentally attended a Nuremberg rally as an 11 year old schoolgirl and was enraptured; at 15 she shouted at an SS officer who was humiliating some Jews in Vienna soon after the Anschluss), and tracing her engagement with the meaning and legacies of that time up to the turn of the century.

It’s not pretty. She takes us with her just after World War Two on the extraordinarily distressing task of tracking down East European children stolen from their parents years before, and abetting their being torn from home for a second time – she was in the employ of the UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, where she might have rubbed shoulders with Edith Campbell Berry if the latter hadn’t been a figment of Frank Moorhouse’s imagination. We encounter Franz Stangl, who was commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp (I haven’t read Sereny’s 1974 book, Into That Darkness, which expanded the Daily Telegraph article included here, though I may one day have the stomach for it) and Albert Speer (in an essay that doesn’t add a lot to her magnificent book, but is well worth reading). We are introduced to children of Nazis who find strength in each other to face the horrors perpetrated by their parents. We follow Sereny’s dealings with a number of odd individuals who are dedicated collectors of Nazi documents and memorabilia. We gain some understanding of the US’s dubious dealings over decades with the question of justice for Nazi criminals. We meet an elderly woman who was one of Hitler’s secretaries, to whom he was always kind and thoughtful.

And through it all Gitta Sereny’s gaze doesn’t flinch. The book is saved from being a catalogue of horrors by the pervasive sense that she is driven by a need to understand. Perhaps the most impressive moment in the book is her response to David Irving’s book claiming that Hitler knew nothing of the ‘final solution’: rather than dismissing it out of hand as incompatible with her own understanding, she was intrigued, and began her fact-checking exercise, which was to turn into a devastatibg debunking, almost hoping Irving was right.

I learned a lot from this book. The Jewish Holocaust was a towering piece of evil, a calculated attempt to kill a whole people that succeeded in killing a full third of them – something way beyond genocide. But the Nazi murderousness wasn’t restricted to Jews. They killed something like 15 million people – homosexual men and women, political opponents, Romany people, eastern Europeans, people with disabilities – not as war crimes but as murders committed under the shadow of war, some with industrial efficiency in the extermination camps, some a bullet in the back of one head at a time, some with hideous callousness and mind-boggling disrespect for the dead. The US’s ‘denazification’ barely scratched the surface, leaving the German courts to prosecute Nazi crimes for at least 30 more years. While most Germans tried to forget and move on with their lives, Sereny says, a small elite made up of writers, artists and lawyers pursued the incredibly difficult task of coming to terms with what was generally known as ‘the recent past’ until well into the 1980s. Next time I hear an Australian shock jock or rabid columnist condemning ‘inner city elites’ or a combatant in our renewing history wars use. Dismissive phrase such as ‘black armband history’, I’ll remember Sereny and gird my loins for battle.

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Linda Jaivin’s Found in Translation

Posted on 6 December 2013 | 5 comments

Linda Jaivin, Found in Translation: In praise of a plural world (Quarterly Essay N° 52)

QE52Every now and then the Quarterly Essay series leaves aside the world of party politics and the headlines. The last time it did that was in N°41, David Malouf’s The Happy Life. In this one, Linda Jaivin, professional translator from Chinese to English, entertains, informs and advocates on a number of fronts, all to do with her profession, which is also clearly a major passion.

I’ve been interested to the point of fascination in reading about translation ever since Brother Gerard, my high school Latin teacher, explained that when he said my unseen exercise was a very good attempt he was offering high praise, because all one could ever do was attempt to translate, the thing itself being impossible. And I remember how thrilling it was in first year university when our lecturer spent a good ten minutes exploring the nuances of a single word (it was ‘serratum’) in a passage of Virgil. This essay feeds that fascination beautifully, with a wealth of personal anecdotes and snippets from the public record that range from hilarious to frankly chilling. It also has an urgent, cogent point to make about the importance of learning languages other than English as a significant and necessary counter to domination of politically weaker cultures by the stronger.

Having recently re-read Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate and been sent back by it to a translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, and of course inspired to my own dabbling with the Onegin stanza, I loved reading about a chain of creations and translations involving the Seth novel:

Stirred by Seth’s brilliant homage, the Israeli writer Maya Arad read Pushkin in the original Russian and then wrote her own verse novel in Hebrew in 2003, translated into English by Adriana Jacobs as Another Place, Another City. … David Bellos marvels at how ‘the very diluted version of the Onegin stanza in Adriana Jacob’s translation of Maya Arad’s imitation of Vikram Seth’s imitation of Charles Johnson’s verse translation of Pushkin resurrects something of the lightness and joy of Onegin’s youth.’ Babel can never be recovered; it never existed. Yet translation allows the construction of great towers, in which each brick may be laid by someone speaking a different language but sharing a common vision.

And up the back is an excellent selection of correspondence on QE51, David Marr’s The Prince, which dealt with Cardinal George Pell’s response to clerical child abuse. I particularly appreciated the responses from four Catholics: Geraldine Doogue, Michael Cooney, Frank Bongiorno and Paul Collins.

awwbadge_2013This is another title in my Australian Women Writers Challenge for 2013.

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Jennifer Maiden: A Rare Object

Posted on 3 December 2013 | Leave a comment

Jennifer Maiden, The Violence of Waiting (Vagabond Press Rare Objects Series No 95, 2013)

1vwAs Vagabond Press’s beautifully crafted Rare Objects series of chapbooks approaches its hundredth and final title, Jennifer Maiden makes her debut at Nº 95. There are just six poems in the book, mostly in modes established in Maiden’s recent books:

  • Nº 15 of the George Jeffreys series, which finds George and Clare Collins in a purgatorial Western Suburbs Poker Machine Palace
  • Nº 10 of the Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt dialogues – this time with a little Lady Diana thrown in
  • A Lady Diana–Mother Teresa dialogue – this may be the second time they’ve appeared together in a Jennifer Maiden poem, the first time being shortly after they both died
  • a ‘Uses of’ diary poem, about cosiness and Sylvia Plath among other things
  • A Kevin Rudd–Dietrich Bonhoeffer dialogue
  • ‘Maps in the Mind’, a lyric that invokes successive Australian governments’ treatment of asylum seekers a little in the manner of ‘My Heart Has an Embassy’, which referred to Julian Assange

As I was starting this blog post, my Feedly reader presented me with ‘The poetic spirit of Rare Objects’, an excellent review by Jessica L Wilkinson of the four Rare Objects launched in Melbourne last weekend. Having read that review, which originated on the Overland site, I find it hard to think of anything else I want to say, so I recommend that you click on the link. For those who don’t click, here’s her final sentence, which captures the mood of the book beautifully:

This collection is quietly yet resolutely political, and leaves us considering our own strengths and vulnerabilities, and who we may imagine clinging to for guidance through tough decisions.

awwbadge_2013I nearly forgot and perhaps I should have as it’s such a small book, but this is another title in my Australian Women Writers Challenge for 2013.

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Colleen Z Burke’s Splicing Air (and Sonnet 13)

Posted on 29 November 2013 | 1 comment

Colleen Z Burke, Splicing Air (Feakle Press, 2013)

1sa

More than 20 years ago in a pub in Glebe I heard Colleen Burke (I don’t think the Z had yet become part of her working title) read poems from which I still remember lines that move me, from what she presented as straightforward records of conversations with her children.

Many of the poems in Splicing Air capture moments with her grandchildren, and the conversations still smuggle killer lines into the poetry. Many others, in what I think of as her signature style, are short, impressionistic pieces about landscape or, especially, skyscape in and over Newtown and surrounds, or bushland. There are a number of pieces observing the social life of Newtown, past and present, and a handful of longer pieces. And some snapshots from New Zealand

Four of the longer pieces draw on the history of discovery and settlement of New South Wales: an narrative-essay on James and Elizabeth Cook, journal entries by the surgeon and an officer from the First Fleet, a biographical sketch of the early Australian poet Frank Macnamara. They lack obvious poetic embellishment, but in each of them the effect is unsettling and revelatory. There are straightforward accounts of the lives of two nineteenth-century women – ‘The publican’s daughter’ being the poet’s great grandmother, and ‘The fossil hunter – Mary Anning’ (which accounts for roughly a fifth of the book) an extraordinary Dorset woman who might easily have been lost to history because of her class and gender.

The sense of place is strong here as in all Colleen Z Burke’s work: I think of her as the poet of Newtown. Earlier books have included a number of pieces set in Camperdown Cemetery, and this book has two beauties set there too: ‘Kangaroo grasslands and my 20 month old grandson’ and the wicked ‘Another take on recycling’.

It’s November, so a sonnet is obligatory. This one draws on the last couple of times I laid eyes on the poet, and occasions when her work has featured large in the urban landscape, as illuminated posters that were part of the Sydney Festival some years ago, and more recently on the Newtown Art Seat. (there are six different links there, all to this site)

Sonnet 13: Colleen Z Burke
She reads to us beside a Whiteley –
her landscapes quiet, his lewd and loud.
I’ve seen her sunset words shine nightly,
tall amid a milling crowd.
Her tiny poems tread light, illumine;
‘the details of decay are human’
as she bids a friend farewell.
Human too what she can tell
of autumn air and Maralinga,
clouds, trees, coprolites, cats, birds,
muskets, trinkets, children’s words.
This poetry’s a pointing finger,
self-effacing, yet with grace
it helps to root us in this place.

Full disclosure: I published one or two of these poems in The School Magazine in my past life, and may have rejected one or two others A significant event in my mother-in-law’s pre-dementia life was a creative writing class taught by Colleen Burke.

awwbadge_2013

I think this is the 11th book I’ve read as part of the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2013.

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David Denholm’s Colonial Australians and 14 rhyming lines

Posted on 7 November 2013 | 8 comments

David Denholm, The Colonial Australians (Penguin Books 1979)

ImageDavid Denholm (1924–1997) wrote fiction as David Forrest. One of the ‘living Australian authors’ profiled in John Hetherington’s 1962 collection, Forty-Two Faces, he is remembered mostly for two novels and a number of short stories. Under his own name, he had a second career as a historian, which, though productive in other ways, produced just this one book and a pamphlet on land use in New South Wales.

It’s a strange book, not – as the title might suggest – a survey of the population of the Australian colonies, but a series of enquiries into what Denholm describes as ‘odd trifles’ to see what general light they might shed on the those people. Many of the trifling questions are conveniently summarised in the Introduction:

How long would it have taken to reload a musket? What on earth possessed surveyors to divide up much of Australia with little regard for the shape of the land and its resources? Why does this brick wall not look like that brick wall? In a land of cheap horses, why did not everybody ride a horse? Why do some Presbyterian churches have steeples? Why is the Monaro in ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s ballads not the real Monaro? Why did some people stack their plates while others had them taken away one at a time?

He does indeed go on in great detail about how to load a musket, about three different bricklaying patterns, and about surveying practices, in each case using them as evidence for persuasive argument against received versions of our history. He also paints an idiosyncratic version of the kind of religion (ie, of Christianity) that dominated the first century and a half of settlement, what he calls determinism as opposed to free-will based orthodoxy – it’s idiosyncratic but rings true and has quite a bit of explanatory power when applied to the Pell and Jensen phenomena. He turns a bit of a blowtorch on romantic versions of ‘the bush’ and writes interestingly about what happened to the idea of a gentry – ‘an historically based manner in which power was projected upon society’ by a class of people possessed of wealth, education and leisure (hint: it was destroyed but lives on).

The chapter ‘Men Bearing Arms’ – about the ‘mutual impotence’ of Aboriginal Australians and their invaders, whose slow loading muskets were  far from making them invulnerable – is a revelation, especially in its discussion of the extent of ‘fraternisation and appeasement’ between the two populations, so that all too often brutal murders and massacres had an element of personal betrayal.

But it’s November, so I have to lapse into rhyme:

Sonnet 3: On reading David Denholm’s The Colonial Australians
How can we know what really happened
a week ago, two hundred years?
Vile things are misnamed on the map, and
victors’ tales besiege our ears.
Historians must play detective,
sniff ash trays, challenge the selective
versions, shift perspectives, ask
what hid behind the public mask.
We want to honour our ancestors:
with courage, ingenuity and toil
they named the land and turned the soil.
But there’s another truth that festers:
a brutal war of conquest here,
sword and musket, club and spear.

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Fry’s Falen’s Pushkin’s Onegin

Posted on 29 October 2013 | Leave a comment

Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (1833, translated by James E Falen 1990, narrated by Stephen Fry 2013, Digital October Publishing House)

1eoThis audio book is sheer delight. James E Falen’s verse is fluid, witty, full of charm. Stephen Fry’s reading is superb – unfolding the pleasures of the language with the same infectious relish he brings to his role of BBC game-show host.

Vladimir Nabokov said it was impossible to translate Eugene Onegin into verse that kept the rhyme scheme or the  ‘bloom’ of the original. I know about 3 words of Russian, so I’m in no position to argue, but I’m going to assume that Falen’s attempt approaches the impossible, and  that the poem I’ve just had read to me is essentially Pushkin’s. I now agree with the quasi-mother-in-law who told me in my 20s that reading Pushkin was one of life’s great joys.

I mainly listened to it while driving around the city, which means that for the first couple of hours of it I was negotiating traffic with a slack-jawed grin. Incredibly, the cheerful, witty urbanity of the first parts – where the death of a rich uncle, the ennui of endless Moscow balls, a dilettante’s reading habits, and the passion of a young man who today would be called an emerging poet are all subjects of light, ironic banter – gradually yields to a more serious tone. By the end, the sprightly ‘Onegin stanza’ – shorter lines than Shakespeare, lots of feminine rhymes – has proved suitable for telling of calamity, betrayal and despair. It’s a much smaller story than Anna Karenina, but I’ve got no doubt that Tolstoy knew it well and expected his readers to have read it, and I bet scholarly papers have been written about the relationship between the two works.

I’ve done a tiny bit of research about the translation: Stephen Saperstein Frug’s blog, Eugene Onegin in English Translation, quotes 10 versions of the first stanza, including the one from Charles H. Johnston’s 1977 translation, which inspired Vikram Seth to write The Golden Gate. I’m very glad to have met Onegin in James E Falen’s version, but I recommend Frug’s site if you’re planning to read the poem and shopping around among Englishings. (Nabokov’s version of the first stanza, which ostentatiously avoids trying to sound like verse, manages not to read like English either.)

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What Maisie and the Book Group Knew

Posted on 24 October 2013 | Leave a comment

What Maisie Knew, Henry James (1897, this Kindle edition based on Echo Library Large Print Edition 2006)

1_wmkBefore the meeting: When I read Henry James at university (Portrait of a Lady in first year and What Maisie Knew some time later), quite a bit of it went right over my head. I loved the prose, but the worlds of his novels were a long way from the North Queensland pragmatism and Catholic piety that I had been brought up with. Perhaps now, more than forty years of secular urban life under my belt, I’d have more luck. After all, Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s movie adaptation just about tore my heart out a few weeks ago, and Kate Lilley’s poem ‘Maisily’ moved me simply by listing the adverbs from the book.

The Kindle edition gets right down to business – cover, title page, table of contents, and then, without so much as a chapter heading:

The litigation seemed interminable and had in fact been complicated; but by the decision on the appeal the judgement of the divorce-court was confirmed as to the assignment of the child. The father, who, though bespattered from head to foot, had made good his case, was, in pursuance of this triumph, appointed to keep her: it was not so much that the mother’s character had been more absolutely damaged as that the brilliancy of a lady’s complexion (and this lady’s, in court, was immensely remarked) might be more regarded as showing the spots.

We’re thrown right into the middle of a story, everything in plain sight, embedded in metaphor and sarcasm. This can’t be read fast, and once you know that by this stage of his life James dictated his novels, it can’t be read without the mental image of a portly gentleman pacing the room enjoying the sound of the sentences as they roll out from his mouth.

And it continues as it has begun: rich, sonorous, intricate sentences that tell a story of child neglect from the point of view of the child, but with no attempt to tell it as a child would: instead, we are asked to explore the great complexity of this little girl’s perceptions of the adult world and her strategies for dealing with it, in language that is at times as baffling to the reader as that world is to her.

I enjoyed the book, but I can’t pretend that I always understood what was going on in that adult world. Specifically, in the last movement Maisie – now well past the age of six that she remains in the movie – has to make a decision about her living arrangements in a context where the adults clearly share an understanding of the issues and believe incorrectly that Maisie does too. James seems to expect his readers to have the insider’s view as well. But times have changed, and the reference point of the culture have shifted so much that I at least could only follow the broadest outlines of what F R Leavis calls the ‘moral squalor’ of the adult world. The governess Mrs Wix, who is possibly meant to be a kind of moral centre of gravity (and who is not there in the movie) wins out in the end, and I think we’re meant to see this as a triumph of good over evil, but I completely couldn’t see why Maisie’s rejection of Mrs Beale, who has always defended and loved her, should be seen as a good thing (though who can tell when the air is so thick with irony?).

By telling the story from Maisie’s point of view, the novel throws into question the whole concept of moral squalor, if that refers primarily to sexual behaviour: what Maisie doesn’t get is all the sexual stuff, so being a kept man or a loose woman or a gold-digger or someone who pays for sex, as various characters appear to be, matters not at all, whereas loyalty, patience, kindness, generosity and their absence are what count.

F R Leavis thought very highly of this novel, which is probably why it was set for us to study at Sydney University in the 1970s. I don’t know that it’s a book I’ll be in a hurry to reread, though many of James’s sentences merit many re-readings.

After the meeting: Words like ‘loathing’ kept cropping in emails leading up to last night’s dinner. However, it was hard to feel loathing for anything much, as we sat outside eating barbecued chicken and sausages on a balmy, mosquito-free Sydney spring evening, as darkness brought an end to a day that had been predicted to be full of bushfire horror but had instead been one where the volunteer rural fire service could be justifiably proud of having averted disaster by strategic backburning the day before.

There were six of us. A couple had been travelling, and shared travellers’ tales. One had been living in Darwin and told spectacular yarns of Territory life. Some of us had been to the theatre and had stories to tell from there as well – one involving a smart phone that played Beatles tunes as background to the drama until an actor politely asked the blithely unaware owner of said phone to turn it off. It was a warm, convivial evening.

We did talk about the book, happily and with minimal rancour. Only one of us – me – had read the whole thing. Only one of the others said he planned to finish it. I may have been the only one who found the sentences fascinating rather than perversely complex. As we were going home, we clapped eyes on the paperback that one chap was holding, and several of us had difficulty reconciling the slimness of the paperback with the size of the book we felt we had read on our various electronic devices.

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