From Canto IV of Dante's "Inferno," tr. Ciaran Carson

I just had occasion to type this in for George Szirtes, who was asking on Facebook for an English version of Dante's Inferno in terza rima. This is Ciaran Carson's translation, published by Granta Books in 2002.

IV

Shattering the deep sleep in my head,
a peal of thunder rang, so I awoke
confused, like someone shaken out of bed;

and coming to, and getting up, I looked
about with rested eyes to ascertain
where I might be. O such an awful nook!

this was, in truth, the dread Abyss of Pain
whose brink I stood upon, from which there rolled
collective groanings, endlessly sustained.

Dark as a thundercloud was that enormous hole;
so deep, the eye could get no fix on where
it ended; nor could I see any foothold.

'Down into the blind world we must fare,'
began the poet, whiter than a sheet;
'I first, then you, we'll make a goodly pair.'

And I, who'd marked the pallor of his cheek,
said: 'Go? When you, who, when I was in doubt,
was wont to be my strength, appear as weak?'

And he: 'It's when I hear the awful shouts
of those below, that pity drains my face
of color; not cold feet, as you make out.

Onward! a long road lies ahead of us.'

The Pen Friend

... a cheap modern cartridge pen by Parker or Sheaffer will last you for years, and write unhesitatingly with a consistent line every time you pick it up.

Ciaran Carson, The Pen Friend

Ciaran Carson's The Pen Friend is an epistolary novel whose narrator, Gabriel, is a collector of vintage fountain pens. Each letter contains a discussion of the pen or pens he uses to write the letter, and the book gradually becomes a celebration of fine writing—meaning fine handwriting, and the tools used to produce it. So it was with great pleasure that I read Gabriel's admission, late in the book, that the beautiful pens he loves so are actually not very good tools for writing. In fact, he admits, cheap modern pens are much better tools than his collection of older, more elegant pens. The modern ones may be boring, but they write better.

Fortunately, Carson's reflective novel is anything but boring. As with his Fishing for Amber, the novel becomes a reflective essay on all kinds of subjects, while also spinning out variations on his wonderful verse novel For All We Know: Gabriel and his correspondent Nina are the two characters from that book—or at least versions of them. Each of Gabriel's letters is a response to a cryptic postcard from his former lover Nina, and the pictures on the postcards introduce new chapters, as do pictures of the pens Gabriel uses to write each letter. My favorite picture is the Vermeer:

Fishing for Amber

Ciarán Carson's Fishing for Amber contains several passages that indirectly describe how the book works. Here's one:

For one thing leads to another, as it does in Holland. The cities, by means of canals, communicate with the sea; canals run from town to town, and from them to villages, which are themselves bound together with these watery ways, and are connected even to the houses scattered all over the country; smaller canals surround the fields, meadows, pastures and kitchen-gardens, serving at once as boundary wall, hedge and roadway; every house is a little port, in which you might hear stories from the seven seas. One can drift from any place to anywhere. (152-153)

While reading Fishing for Amber, I kept thinking of W. G. Sebald's books, so I was pleased to come across a reference to St. Sebald in Carson's Shamrock Tea (which I read immediately after reading Fishing for Amber). But when I was done with both these Carson books, I no longer thought of Shamrock Tea as being "Sebaldesque"; it ends up being quite different than anything Sebald wrote (except perhaps Austerlitz, which, like Shamrock Tea, is held together by a continuous narrative more than any of Sebald's other books, or than Fishing for Amber).

Instead, it is Fishing for Amber that actually feels Sebaldesque, with one significant difference: Sebald's work is very melancholy, even pessimistic, while Fishing for Amber uses similar associative techniques (encapsulated in the quotation above) but takes a much different kind of pleasure in those techniques, not the pleasure of melancholy that pervades Sebald but a pleasure in how full of wonders the world is. There is darkness in Carson as well (otherwise, the books would not be interesting), but the experience is of pleasure most of all, while in Sebald, the darkness is foregrounded, and the joy of reading his work comes in spite of the darkness, as it were.

In both Fishing for Amber and Shamrock Tea, Carson repeatedly contemplates paintings, especially Dutch paintings (the Arnolfini Double portrait by Jan van Eyck plays a crucial role in Shamrock Tea). But it was his description of a Vermeer painting in Fishing for Amber that struck me most, in part because I had just read another description of the same painting in Michael Donhauser's Nahe der Neige. Here's Carson on the painting:

... one of the essentials of comfort for a Dutch lady was the vuur stoof, a square box open on one side to admit an earthen pan filled with embers of turf, and perforated to allow the heat to ascend and warm the feet; it served as a footstool, and was concealed under the dress. The use of it was rarely dispensed with, whatever the season, indoors or out—the citizen's wife had it carried after her by her servant to church or at the theatre.

This, indeed, is the object depicted in the lower right corner of Vermeer's Woman Pouring Milk ... She's pouring white milk from a red earthenware jug into a brown glazed bowl and there's a loaf of bread in a wicker basket on the table and a lidded pitcher and other bits of broken bread on the tablecloth. (99-100)

What struck me was Carson's emphasis on the "vuur stoof" in his description of the painting, in contrast to his merely passing mention of the bread on the table. Donhauser emphasizes the bread, and mentions the stove only in passing:

Der Raum, worin das geschieht, ist ein Neben- oder Zwischenraum, der nicht wirklich als Küche erkennbar ist—es hängen da ein Korb und ein Messingbehälter, ein Stövchen steht auf dem Boden ... die Magd, die schaut nicht auf, sie bereitet ein Gericht namens Wentelteefje, wofür Brot gebrochen wurde und wofür die Magd nun Milch in eine Schüssel schenkt; das Brot wird dann etwa eine Stunde in der Milch eingeweicht werden ... (19-20)

I don't have anything to add to these two descriptions; I just enjoyed the (Sebaldesque?) coincidence of reading them both within a few days of each other, as well as how each author emphasized one thing while only barely mentioning the other, so that the two descriptions end up wonderfully complementing each other.

On the Night Watch

Here are three poems by Ciaran Carson from his collection On the Night Watch, which has just come out in North America with Wake Forest University Press (and which was first published in Ireland by Gallery Press). It's another winner from Carson, a radical change in approach and tone that is completely successful. (Just as an aside: of his many compelling works, I find his verse novel For All We Know to be the most compelling of all; I wrote about it here.)

Ciaran Carson's Dante

Ciaran Carson's translation of Dante's Inferno was such a rush to read that I was still buzzing from it a day after finishing it. It's chock full of quotable passages, but I was particularly pleased to find a fantastic bit of trash talking between two sinners in Canto XXX:

"Though I'm kept back,"
he quipped, from moving by my watery weight,
I have this arm that's well-prepared to smack."

The other said: "You weren't so free with it
the time they put you to the fire; the alloy
that you'd coined with it had sealed your fate."

The dropsied one: "You speak the truth, old boy;
but not so truthful were you, truth to tell,
when you were asked to tell the truth at Troy."

"If I spoke false, your coin spoke false as well,"
said Sinon. "I'm here for a single falsehood;
you, for more than any fiend in hell."

"Remember, perjurer, the horse of wood,"
replied the Paunch, "and may it torture you
to know the whole world knows that you're no good!"

"With thirsty tongue may you be tortured, too,"
the Greek shot back, "and with the dropsied piss
that swells your gut to keep the world from view!"

The forger then: "Your filthy orifice
spews out the usual ravings of your brain;
and if my thirst has bloated me, your sickness

makes you burn, and gives your head a pain;
and were Narcissus' mirror conjured here
for you to lick, I don't think you'd abstain."

Virgil threatens to chew Dante out for lingering too long—and as I noted when I read the Aeneid last year, Virgil was just as good at representing trash talking as Dante himself!

*

And this passage from Canto VII seems like a nice comment on our contemporary financial crisis (Virgil is commenting on the avaricious):

My son, see how the wheel of fortune whirls!
Observe them, as they dance to money's tune,
in money wars eternally ensnarled!

Not all the gold that lies beneath the mon,
or ever did, could buy a moment's rest
for even one of these misguided fools.

*

The other verse Inferno I have read is Robert Pinsky's, which I read with delight back in 1998. But while that delight was made possible by Pinsky's translation (I don't know Italian), its source was, I now realize, Dante's magnificent work itself. In contrast, Carson's translation crackles with a ferocious energy that had me gasping at times, I was so impressed, and often had me laughing out loud (as with the trash talking). For comparison, here's Pinsky's version of the same passage from Canto VII:

"Now you can see, my son, how ludicrous
And brief are all the goods in Fortune's ken,
Which humankind contend for: you see from this

How all the gold there is beneath the moon,
Or that there ever was, could not relieve
One of these weary souls."

Pinsky's Virgil: majestic, sonorous, oratorical. Carson's Virgil: temperamental, impatient, aggressive. At least in this reader's experience, that stands for the difference between the two, and it explains why Pinsky's book is a good read, while Carson's is a great one.

Verse Novels / Versromane

I've started a blog for my course on "Contemporary Verse Novels / Zeitgenössiche Versromane". The students and I will all write posts for it. Feel free to drop by and comment if you like!

The books in question:

Ciaran Carson, For All We Know
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Durs Grünbein, Vom Schnee, oder Descartes in Deutschland
Christoph Ransmayr, Der fliegende Berg

This is a bilingual blog. The first post is already in German (my first set of notes on Ransmayr).

For All We Know

The maitre'd was looking at us in a funny way
as if he caught the drift I sought between the lines you spoke.

For one word never came across as just itself, but you
would put it over as insinuating something else.

Then slowly, slowly we would draw in on one another
until everything was implicated like wool spooled

from my yawning hands as you wound the yarn into a ball.

(Ciaran Carson, "Second Time Around," For All We Know, 15)

You speak; I seek to understand what you say; I read the expression of the maitre'd. I think he looks as if he understands; if he understands your subtexts, that means that there are subtexts to be understood. My conditional reading of his expression is a sign of my desire for there to be a subtext, a "drift" to catch.

The source of ambiguity is fourfold: it comes from my desire for it; it comes from the attempt by the maitre'd to interpret something unfamiliar; it comes from you and your manner of speaking; it comes from language itself.

But perhaps one should say "implication" rather than "ambiguity." Your words have implications (you "insinuate something else"); they imply more than themselves. But I do not "imply"; I infer, and it seems to me as if the maitre'd also infers.

Ambiguity, implication, insinuation, inference: all this may imply that communication is not happening, that I am not "catching your drift," that something is wrong. But "slowly, slowly," you and I do communicate at this implicit level at which "everything is implicated" (whereby this verb, like "insinuate," has a sinister "drift" that "imply" does not), even if the simile of the winding of the yarn is not simple. What is being implied (insinuated, implicated) does not become explicit, but the feeling, the sensation, of communication ("we would draw in on one another") is generated, how it is when one is in love and words always have a surplus of meaning.

In the yarn simile, I hold up the wool while you wind it into a ball. As "yarn" can also mean "tale" or "story" (with the added implication that the tale might be "tall"), it is appropriate that you, the one telling the story, the one "insinuating something else," the one who has a drift to catch, should be one "winding the yarn." But the simile puts the listener in an unusual, surprising position: I do not unwind the yarn as you tell your tale; I hold the unwound wool up for you to wind.

So the listener here does not just receive the tale from the storyteller; I am not a passive receptacle for your "yarn." "Catching the drift" and understanding "insinuations" are activities I engage in in response to your story, but "everything is implicated" only because I provide a foundation for your storytelling. For the story to have its full effect, the listener must offer not only attention but something that the passage does not name, something prior to attention, something whose drift is caught only in the ambiguous image of "my yawning hands."

[I just noticed that I had forgotten that my original review of For All We Know begins with these same lines.]

Whisky, by Ciaran Carson

Sometimes literature can make you thirsty. The late fifties and early sixties novels of Marguerite Duras (such as Les petits chevaux de Tarquinia) all made me want to get drunk on whatever the characters were drinking, even before I found out Duras was an alcoholic.

I don't recall ever reading something that made me want to get stoned or do other illegal counterfactuals. (Not that I was unable to find other reasons ...)

This one from Ciaran Carson's 1996 collection Opera Et Cetera made me want to drink some whisky, among other things (it also made me want to try to interpret it, but I'll leave it at typing it again to see how the lines feel under my fingers):

Whisky

Of how the life of water is distilled to liquid gold; how the water of
The Liffey becomes Guinness; how explosive cocktails take the name of Molotov;

How the wild mountain thyme blows around the blooming heather, and the perfumed smoke
Of poteen rises high into the azure sky; how turf is the conducive agent, and not coke;

How coke is crack, not heroin, nor smack; how marijuana is La Cucaracha,
Maryjane, or blow; how many States of mind there are in Appalachia;

How you turn into an insect overnight, or after-hours, from eating
Magic mushrooms; how the psilocybin got your brain and led to some 'Strange Meeting';

How the tongue gets twisted, how 'barbarian' is everyone who is not Greek;
How things are named by any other name except themselves, thereof I meant to speak.

While I was typing, the associations began to flow:

The wild mountain thyme brought to mind Penelope Houston, whose punky folk I loved so much in the early to mid nineties (shortly before I read this book for the first time, in September 96): she did a burning cover of that song.

Poteen made me think of Brian Friel's Translations, which I played a small part in and co-directed in Saarbrücken in 1994.

Turf made me thirsty for Laphroaig.

The Appalachian States of mind made me think of Brad Mehldau playing "New York State of Mind" as solo jazz piano. Far-fetched? I don't care!

Turning into an insect overnight? You know what I thought when I read that; you thought the same thing after all.

But after-hours made me think of the movie "After Hours", whose basic idea I would like to steal for my long unwritten tale "The Clerk," which started being pondered in the main Basel Post Office years ago.

For me, Strange Meeting is a tune by Bill Frisell I once began to write some words for.

barbarian is everyone who is not Greek: this idea always reminds me of Adorno's claim about lyric poetry after Auschwitz being "barbaric"—"not Greek"?

Perhaps this is all free association; perhaps this is "naming things by any other name except themselves."

The Fourth Daily Poem Project, Week 11 results

THE FOURTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK ELEVEN RESULTS

The winner of week eleven of my fourth Daily Poem Project is Horizontally, I Moved, by Lisa Williams, which received 5 votes out of 14 cast. Two poems tied for second with three votes: Pas de Deux, by Ciaran Carson, and Slept, by Jennifer Chang. (For more on Carson's book, see my post here.)

My thanks to everyone who voted. I'll be posting the call for votes for week twelve in a few minutes.

Winner of week one: Alison Brackenbury's "Edward Thomas's daughter"
Winner of week two: Martha Zweig's "Overturn"
Winner of week three: B. T. Shaw's "We End, Like Galileo"
Winner of week four: Damian Walford Davies's "Plague"
Winner of week five: Mary Jo Salter's "Point of View"
Winner of week six: Bill Zavatsky's "Ode to the Maker of Odes"
Winner of week seven: Marie Howe's "The Star Market"
Winner of week eight: Adam Zagajewski's "In a Little Apartment," (tr. Clare Cavanagh)
Co-winner of week nine: John Rybicki's "Her Body Like a Lantern Next to Me"
Co-winner of week nine: Sidney Wade's "Siamo a la Frutta"
Winner of week ten: Elaine Sexton's "Night. Fire"

The Fourth Daily Poem Project, Week 11 call for votes

THE FOURTH DAILY POEM PROJECT, WEEK ELEVEN

Here are the poems to vote for in week eleven of my fourth Daily Poem Project (the poems on Poetry Daily from Monday, April 28, to Sunday, May 4):

71. Question About an Old Question, by John Hollander
72. Pas de Deux, by Ciaran Carson (vote only on the first poem)
73. Belief System, by Jorie Graham
74. Slept, by Jennifer Chang
75. Shopping Urban, by Jane Shore
76. Horizontally, I Moved, by Lisa Williams
77. Sleepless in the cold dark, by Reginald Gibbons

This is the eleventh week of twelve weeks, at the end of which all the winners will be put together for a final vote.

HOW TO VOTE: Please vote for only ONE poem. You can send your vote to me by email or as a comment on the blog. If you want to vote by commenting but do not want your vote to appear on the blog, you just have to say so in your comment (I moderate all comments). (If you read this on Facebook, please vote on my blog and not as a comment on Facebook.) I will post comments as they come in (unless you tell me not to post the comment, of course).

You may vote by the title, the author's name, or the number of the poem in the list above. Please make a final decision and vote for only one poem (although it is always interesting to see people's lists).

Please VOTE BY SUNDAY, May 11! But I will still accept votes as long as I have not posted the final results, which I will do on May 12. If you would like to receive an email announcing the posting of the results, make sure to get me your email address somehow (if it is not available through your blogger profile or the like, say).

The winner of week 1 was Alison Brackenbury's "Edward Thomas's daughter."
The winner of week 2 was Martha Zweig's "Overturn."
The winner of week 3 was B. T. Shaw's "We End, Like Galileo."
The winner of week 4 was Damian Walford Davies's "Plague."
The winner of week 5 was Mary Jo Salter's "Point of View."
The winner of week 6 was Bill Zavatsky's "Ode to the Maker of Odes."
The winner of week 7 was Marie Howe's "The Star Market."
The winner of week 8 was Adam Zagajewski's "In a Little Apartment," translated by Clare Cavanagh
The co-winners of week 9 were Sidney Wade's Siamo a la Frutta and John Rybicki's Her Body Like a Lantern Next to Me.
The winner of week 10 was Elaine Sexton's Night. Fire.

For All We Know

The maitre d’ was looking at us in a funny way
as if he caught the drift I sought between the lines you spoke.

Here, in "Second Time Around," the first poem in Ciaran Carson's For All We Know (a perfect example of a verse novel, but one the author has not called that himself), Carson's narrator pursues various ways in which meaning can be elsewhere (anywhere but here, that is): "between the lines you spoke" (a traditional example of meaning being elsewhere), but "the drift I sought" there (trying to find the meaning in what another person says), while the waiter seems to have "caught [that] drift" (trying to find the meaning in a conversation one overhears).

Carson continues with words "insinuating something else," again embedded in the dialogue between the speaker and his conversation partner:

For one word never came across as just itself, but you
would put it over as insinuating something else.

The particular "insinuations" of this couple's conversations are the issue here, not the general philosophical-literary-linguistic problem of slippery language. This is made even clearer in the image that follows:

Then slowly, slowly we would draw in on one another
until everything was implicated like wool spooled

from my yawning hands as you wound the yarn into a ball.

This "drawing in on one another" complicates the previous image of "you" talking and "me" listening, in the process rendering another cliché vivid: after "between the lines," the idea of a story as a "yarn" is suddenly much more complex, involving wool, hands, and the winding of a ball of yarn.

This imagery begins a story that is "told slant," to echo Emily Dickinson. The central event is the couple's first meeting, which does not get presented until halfway through the first section of the book, in "Fall," where they have just "exchanged names" when "the bomb went off at the end of the block":

... and drowned all

conversation. All the more difficult to find the words
for what things have been disrupted by aftershock and shock,

a fall of glass still toppling from the astonished windows,
difficult to ponder how we met, if it was for this.

The line about the "fall of glass" took my breath away while I was reading and was my initial reason to quote this passage, but of course it also plays into the theme of uncertain, ambiguous meaning that opens the book.

Shortly thereafter, "Birthright" explores the identities one tries to establish for oneself and the identity that one is finally unable to abandon:

For all that you assumed a sevenfold identity
the mark of your people's people blazes on your forehead.

The malleability of meanings ends up running into the immutable identity one receives at birth: being Irish, being Catholic or Protestant. Still, "whatever happens to you next is nothing personal."

When you begin Part Two of For All We Know, something will seem familiar: the title of the first poem, which is again called "Second Time Around." In fact, the poems in the second part of the book have the same titles as those in the first, in the same sequence. This doubling allows Carson to explore what is "between the lines" further, as the second poem always reflects (if often only indirectly) back on the first.

That does not keep the individual poems from standing out on their own terms. In the second poem called "Treaty," for example, the poem's "you" tells the narrator about growing up "between languages": "My mother spoke one tongue to me, my father another." This resonates with me, though not because of my own upbringing—my wife and I are raising bilingual children. And the resonance is increased when the speaker later adds: "When I learned to write, that was another language again." My children learn English and German at home, and Basel German dialect at day care, then learn to write in German at school, so their layering is similar to that of the speaker's experience here.

The doublings of the poems through the repetitions of the titles is most explicit in the pair of poems called "The Shadow." Echoing a scene from the beginning of the film "The Lives of Others," in which Ulrich Mühe is lecturing to future Stasi officers, the first poem begins:

You know how you know when someone's telling lies? you said. They
get their story right every time, down to the last word.

Whereas when they tell the truth, it's never the same twice. They
reformulate.

The poem later refers to Herman Hesse's The Glass-Bead Game, which becomes the central topic of the longer, second poem called "The Shadow":

It's like this, you said. Those who play the Glass Bead Game don't know
there's a war on they're so wrapped up in themselves and their game.

I've discussed this book at some length in order to more than simply say "get this, it's brilliant." But that's what I want to say in a nutshell. Like his namesake Anne Carson in Autobiography of Red, Ciaran Carson has used the narrative form to channel his playful, explosive side into a shape whose power only increases as one continues reading. In the past, I have always been impressed by C. Carson's work, but not moved. This book is deeply moving, and it concludes with an allusion to a deeply moving film that is just as elusive, Hiroshima mon amour:

You woke up one morning and said, I must go to Nevers.

All that's left after this second poem called "Je reviens" is the concluding poem, "Zugzwang," built, like the first "Zugzwang," around a long, Dante-esque simile. Six times the speaker begins couplets with "as" before concluding:

so I return to the question of those staggered repeats
as my memories of you recede into the future.

*

For All We Know is the Poetry Book Society Choice for Spring 2008. I've read the recommendations already, too:

Jen Hadfield, Nigh-No-Name
Julie O'Callaghan, Tell Me This Is Normal
Stephen Romer, The Yellow Studio
Kathryn Simmonds, Sunday at the Skin Launderette

Hadfield's book (the first one I read) struck me as quite flat, except for two excellent cat poems at the end. That was a disappointing start, but things got better through the rest of the Recommendations and then Carson's book.

Stephen Romer is another expat, an English poet who is a professor in Tours. His Yellow Studio is a book full of excellent details, along with a goodly number of strong individual poems. There's a fullness to his writing that makes it resonant even with the poems that are not as strong individually.

there were tears, along with tequilas ... ("Recognition")

He requires a definition // and all we can give him are instances... ("A Bridgehead of Sorts")

O'Callaghan's book is a "New and Selected," so it would have been quite startling to have the book seem as flat Hadfield's collection; after all, you should have a certain degree of quality to reach the stage of a "selected poems"! And her book is quite strong. The poems are often quite humorous: "Life is way too short / for blasé colours" ("Spring Robe"). Or a description of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing, in "Saturday Afternoon in Dublin":

Dietrich, meanwhile, has moved on to a beautiful, sad,
song with harps—I'm glad I don't know any German—
it's even sadder hearing words sung
that make no sense.
He says, "Ja, ja," better than anyone.

O'Callaghan was born and raised in Chicago, but lives in Ireland, so it's no surprise, I guess, that she has some expatriate poems that move this expatriate (born in Detroit, living in Switzerland), such as "Home," which you can read all of here (scroll down a bit). The reverse of being an expat is the experience of being back where you raised and finding things different, if only in the slightest ways, as in the poem "Sipper Lids," where O'Callaghan describes not having known what to do with the sipper lid on her hot cup of coffee to go!

In her debut Sunday at the Skin Launderette, Kathryn Simmonds demonstrates that she is a great lister—in fact, though her lists are always convincing and interesting, she demonstrates her skill with lists a tad too often. Still, when her lists are not the whole poem, but are fully embedded in scenes, then the poems work exceedingly well, as in "The Men I Wish I'd Kissed," or even more so in "The Woman Who Worries Herself to Death" and "Handbag Thief." And "Tate Modern" is a memorable poem about contemporary art, as the speaker discovers at the end of the poem that the installation she had liked best (with its abandoned coffee cup, stepladder, and tools, among other things) was a room that was "out of use," that is, closed for renovation.

All in all, not a bad set of Choice and Recommendations: a superb Choice (Carson), two very strong collections (O'Callaghan's and Romer's), one promising debut (Simmonds), and only one book that left me flat (Hadfield's).

(One thing I've noticed: write about a collection by an American poet, and you're bound to find lots of on-line poems to link to. British and Irish poets do not publish as many poems in advance, so many fewer end up on-line as possible links for a blog review!)