Afterbabbel: All Ears

Published on January 14, 2014

The Poetry Round

Be­cause we love what po­etry does, as well as what hap­pens in trans­la­tion, Af­terbabbel takes the form of re­views in di­a­logue. First we read the book, a col­lec­tion of po­etry from any­where in the world, trans­lated into Eng­lish, then we meet over a cup of cof­fee, some­times over Skype, al­ways in dif­fer­ent lo­ca­tions. Then we babbel.

Book: All Ears by Lud­wig Stein­herr

Trans­la­tor: Paul-Henry Camp­bell

The gist of it: play­ful philo­soph­i­cal poems with sur­pris­ing ex­tended metaphors. Lots of ex­cla­ma­tion marks.

A favourite quote: ‘Stars are sober crea­tures, but the paper nap­kins are dream­ers.’

Dis­cussed at: Look­ing Glass Books, Ed­in­burgh

Jes­sica: Are there re­li­gious poems in All Ears, do you think?

Annie: I think there are philo­soph­i­cal poems. It de­pends how you deal with things like ‘the body of Jesus’. Take Philip Pull­man’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. I would say that’s not re­li­gious, al­though it’s a re­li­gious theme.

J: That’s true. Pull­man’s novel is part of the Canon­gate myth se­ries, so he ba­si­cally treats the Chris­t­ian story as one of many, many myths. I feel that this is the case with Stein­herr’s po­etry as well. After I’d read the whole col­lec­tion I found my­self writ­ing a list of all the char­ac­ters that were in there. There are loads of them – his­tor­i­cal fig­ures like Nero, as well as gods and god­desses from Greek mythol­ogy. And then there’s Jesus. Stein­herr uses all of these com­mu­nal sto­ries as ves­sels for what hap­pens in the poems.

A: He doesn’t treat Chris­t­ian con­cepts much dif­fer­ently to ideas from clas­si­cal mythol­ogy. And al­though clas­si­cal mythol­ogy was a re­li­gion, you’d no longer de­scribe it as “re­li­gious”.

J: Yes, you talk about Greek mythol­ogy as sto­ries – that’s myth. What Philip Pull­man does, and what Lud­wig Stein­herr does, is to put Chris­t­ian sym­bols and nar­ra­tives on the same level as those sto­ries and treat them as myth.

J: What do you think about ex­cla­ma­tion marks?

A: I got so an­noyed with the ex­cla­ma­tion marks! That was one of the rea­sons I wanted to see a Ger­man copy, to see whether they’re matched by ex­cla­ma­tion marks in the Ger­man orig­i­nal, or whether they sim­ply work in the orig­i­nal. There’s an overuse of ex­cla­ma­tion marks – they made points which were good points seem trite.

J: I agree. When I started see­ing them, I just thought, Oh God, please stop. There are a few poems in which I think it works. ‘The Sud­den Jolt of Au­tumn’ is made up of four sen­tences all end­ing in ex­cla­ma­tion marks. That makes sense be­cause it’s at the heart of the whole poem. It’s very short and it’s about shout­ing. Yet in some poems, say ‘The Senusu­ous the Ut­most Ab­stract­ness’, I thought, ‘Why are you shout­ing at me?’ I think the best poems in the book are the qui­etest ones.

A: My favourite part of the book is the one line poems in the for­tune cook­ies chap­ter at the end. I loved ‘Every tri­an­gle is lone­some and kisses its own elbow.’

J: Yes, I’m def­i­nitely going to read those again. I wanted to write those down and put them around the house. ‘Lis­ten to your um­brella, it is versed in the lan­guage of shad­ows.’

A: I loved ‘The short­est dis­tance be­tween two points is God,’ which I sup­pose is re­li­gious; it ab­solutely cap­tures the way faith bridges gaps.

J: The for­tune cook­ies say a lot about the rest of the po­etry.

A: Yes, they feel like con­densed ver­sions of the other poems.

J: They work so well when they’re just sin­gle lines. That was some­thing I found dif­fi­cult with parts of the book. You find your­self ask­ing, why is this a poem? There are so many im­ages which are al­most in­de­pen­dent, if that makes sense.

A: It does. ‘The Sud­den Jolt of Au­tumn’ was one of my favourite of the longer poems, and it shows what Stein­herr does won­der­fully: this jux­ta­po­si­tion, the ex­tended metaphors of two im­ages which are ab­solutely stay to­gether.

J: Are welded to­gether, even.

A: Yes, and that gets lost when the poems bring too many im­ages in.

J: I like this poem, ‘Maybe Gold’. It’s just lovely. And it doesn’t have any ex­cla­ma­tion marks! Was there any­thing that an­noyed you about the poems, other than the ex­cla­ma­tion marks?

A: I some­times felt they didn’t need to be so ex­plic­itly philo­soph­i­cal. I like the philo­soph­i­cal in them – but you don’t need to put the word ‘meta­phys­i­cal’ in there for us to un­der­stand that it’s meta­phys­i­cal. That can have a bit of a dis­tanc­ing ef­fect.

J: Whereas poems like ‘Maybe Gold’ work so much bet­ter. You see the im­ages, in­stead of read­ing ‘the meta­phys­i­cal shone through the bark’.

A: I do re­ally like the first poem, which imag­ines fur­ni­ture com­ing to life. It’s a very play­ful, philo­soph­i­cal poem and that works.

J: Maybe it’s to do with hu­mour.

A: I think quite often the philo­soph­i­cal in the poems is hu­mor­ous but some­times the hu­mor­ous isn’t quite strong enough. Maybe that’s a trans­la­tion thing, per­haps it comes across bet­ter in Ger­man.

J: Yes, it might be.

A: There were a cou­ple of things where I would have liked to see the orig­i­nal: ‘in’ and ‘into’ seemed to be mud­dled up for ex­am­ple, and in Ger­man the dif­fer­ence is shown through dif­fer­ent cases, not dif­fer­ent words. There was also one point where some­thing was in the con­tin­u­ous past tense and it felt odd. Ger­man doesn’t have the con­tin­u­ous past tense, so I won­der if there was a par­tic­u­lar word that prompted that trans­la­tion?

J: Yes, that’s in­ter­est­ing – the way you can feel that kind of thing in trans­la­tion. Do you know, there’s this one chap­ter title, ‘Schneewen­del­treppe’. [Al­though the book is en­tirely in Eng­lish, the chap­ter ti­tles are also given in Ger­man - ed.] That’s much, much bet­ter than ‘Spi­ral Stair­case of Snow’. Why don’t we have com­posed words in Eng­lish?

A: What do you think Stein­herr would look at, what would he no­tice in Look­ing Glass Books?

J: I think he’d men­tion the writ­ing on the win­dow.

A: The fact that it’s not writ­ing on the wall, per­haps?

J: It’s like writ­ing on the wall. But trans­par­ent – or some­thing.

A: What’s trans­par­ent? Knowl­edge? Com­mu­ni­ca­tion?

J: Lan­guage.

A: Which is ac­tu­ally a won­der­ful metaphor for trans­la­tion.