 |
| Peter McDonald: photo cred Michal Mecner |
It can’t be very common for a writer to publish two new books on the same day; at least, it hasn’t happened to me before, and I seriously doubt whether it will again. Yet here I am, with two new volumes of verse – one conventionally slim, the other more resembling its author in being (let’s say) a bit ampler than usual – and both of them making their way into the world on the last Thursday of February. I couldn’t tell you which rule in particular applies here, but I have, nevertheless, a distinct and troublesome sense that somewhere, with a scary finality, it is being transgressed. I shouldn’t be surprised to discover that I have fallen foul of a vatic taboo, and will be visited now with a plague of bad verses, and seven lifetimes of non-publication.
I suppose I can try to mitigate my guilt with the point that these are two different kindsof book. The first, Herne the Hunter, is my sixth volume of original verse (the first appeared some twenty-seven years ago, so my rate of output in that line isn’t egregiously high). The second collection, The Homeric Hymns, is a book of translations from ancient Greek, and so I can claim (with a good deal of plausibility) that it’s not exactly, or wholly, a book by me: the real author in this case is Homer – and he lived (or didn’t live, if you like) more than two-and-a-half thousand years ago. I wouldn’t dream of decking out poems of my own with a couple of hundred pages of notes, as I have done for the Hymns; even if – like a good number of my contemporaries – I probably could do so without so much as breaking a sweat. So, the heftier book has some excuse for its weight.
That said, these are both books of poems; and when I think of the labour involved in their composition, I can’t help wondering whether it’s wise to let it all issue in the dealings of a single, quickly-passing day. The poems of Herne the Hunter accumulated slowly over about four years, and were written (as most of my poems tend to be) in irregular bursts of concentration: usually, a poem takes a couple of days – when nothing much else can be going on – to take shape, and weeks (occasionally months) of tinkering after that to be finished. At some point, I noticed that I was beginning to conceive poems in pairs – not so much subject-pairs as formal ones, where one verse-form would be repeated (with variations) in another poem of matching length. Eventually, the whole volume began to organize itself into a kind of mirroring structure, so that it can be read from beginning to end – as I myself almost never manage to read new collections – or from side to side (so to speak), letting poems contrast with and change one another. The result was that Herne the Hunter became the first book of poetry for me that had a definite shape, to the extent that the shape brought pressure to bear on the process of composition itself – pressure for the better, I hope; but pressure, even so. I tend to think of the volume as I describe it here, primarily in terms of its forms and their demands; but I try not to think of it also in terms of what might be called its emotional sources and struggles, though those made their own demands, and but for them I doubt whether the poems would have come into being in the first place. At any rate, both kinds of demand made for hard work, and hard working out. If the book is merely hard work to read, of course, all of this is for nothing.
 |
| The House of Clay - Peter McDonald |
I suppose I had known for a long time that I wanted to try my hand at an extended piece of translation. I had come up with some shorter things before, which seemed to be OK: the version of a passage about bees from Virgil’s Georgics in my The House of Clay (2007) had seemed to earn its keep, and that book had a number of Greek things, too, in the general mix. It was only when I was about half-way through writing my collection Torchlight (2011) that I committed myself to having a go at something much longer, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. That poem took me well over a year, and I stuck with it, despite the rustiness of my Greek, partly because I knew it was feeding into a number of the shorter poems I was writing at that time, and I hoped it would give them a dimension other than the merely personal. But having done this, the idea of taking the Hymns further was irresistible. The Hymn to Demeter is a solemn enough affair, but actually this makes it a little unusual amongst the other Hymns: they have a lot of different registers, some light and comic, and some quite alien to the kinds of things we would expect. I knew perfectly well that the ancient Greeks did not just sit around being ‘Classical’ for our benefit when they wrote their poetry, and I wanted to bring more largeness of spirit, and more broad daylight, to the way their poetry is transmitted in modern English verse. Homer, in particular, seems to have grown especially serious and glum in contemporary poetry – which is fine if glumness is what you’re after (and heaven knows there’s plenty in the world to be glum about), but it’s not Homer. To see that, funnily enough, I think the place to start is the Hymns, which aren’t usually classed as ‘Homer’ at all, but were accepted perfectly readily as Homer’s for centuries. In places – all the way through, maybe – I’ve given Homer something of an Irish accent: I like to think of this as being not just true to my own voice, but also as a kind of prophylactic against the higher contemporary grimness, with its relentless drive towards being ‘moving’. People are far too easily moved by things that know only how to pass themselves off as ‘moving’, and we seem to be in a period when Homer is a kind of short-cut to this. I want my Homer to be surprising as well, and unpredictable, and generally strange.
 |
| Torchlight - Peter McDonald |
The Homeric Hymns did take a lot of doing. In one sense, it would have been much easier not to have done it in the way I did, and to have been altogether more casual about the business. ‘Translation’ can cover a multitude of sins, after all, including sloth. But here – oddly – the element of formal constraint in the verse composition felt more often liberating and even exhilarating, as I made my way through line after line, passage after passage of sometimes very thorny Greek, putting it into pentameters and tetrameters and longer or shorter lines, into couplet rhymes, rhyme royal, Spenserian stanzas, ottava rima, or lyric shapes of my own arranging. I felt like the kid let loose in the poetic sweetshop, while at the same time I was also learning Greek again, hearing it afresh, brooding on it, dreaming in it even. Looking back at the notebooks (which start in 2008, and go through to 2014), I am slightly surprised to see what must be evidence of sweated toil: for the longer poems, for instance, I seem to have written out all of the Greek painstakingly, line by line, before feeling my way into a translation. And the long Notes, too, cannot have written themselves. Yet I had the happiest hard work I can remember in writing this book, and am very proud of it.
It seems indecent – well, indecorous at least – to express pride in a book of one’s ‘own’ poems. In the case of Herne the Hunter, I think, such pride would anyway be quite beside the point: the most any poet can say when a new book is finished and published is, What’s done is done. The only rule is that you write the poems you have to write, and the rest of it is really none of your business. I wonder, though, about the ways in which these two books of mine are related, and about how the sadness of one might be drawing upon the high spirits of the other, and vice versa. It struck me only lately, for instance, that both books string their titles along the same letter, H: knowing how this came to be, I still have no idea whyit did. Somehow – and again, I don’t really know the reason – it seems right that they should be published together, this pair of unlike twins, and see the light of the same day. Absit omen.
The Carcanet Blog Sale
With every blogpost we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.
For the next two weeks, we're giving you 25% off Peter McDonald's Herne the Hunter and The Homeric Hymns
All books come with 10% off and and free delivery at www.carcanet.co.uk so to claim your extra discount, use the codes BLOGHERNE and BLOGHOMERIC at the checkout (case-sensitive). Happy reading!