23 May 2025

Gabriel García Márquez and the Alchemy of Translation Liz McSkeane

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In these days of software programmes and search engine language applications, it may be tempting to think of translation as a semi-mechanical, quasi-scientific task that can be quite adequately achieved with the help of technology – or at least with a good dictionary, a grammar-book and a lot of patience.  But experience in the real world tells us that language does not bend so easily to a straightforward mapping of words and phrases and sentences from one language, onto words and phrases and sentences in another. The great Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges, pointed out that, even for a simple greeting such as “buenos días,” this literal approach to translation simply will not work. No English speaker would ever say “good days.”[1] It simply sounds wrong. Worse, to the native English-speaking ear, the meaning is far from clear. To sound right – and to make sense – a transformation is needed, small, but one that makes the difference between sense and nonsense: so – “good day.”     

This slight transmutation introduces a few of the ingredients found in the vastly more complex process of recasting an entire work of literature in another language. Literal translation, perhaps supported by technology, might help with this; but it cannot do the job the way it needs to be done. The following reflections on the English translation of the work of Gabriel García Márquez explore the alchemy of translation as a multi-layered process that transforms base metals – the nuts and bolts of words and syntax and punctuation, seasoned with elements of the  socio-cultural and historical contexts – into something that transcends words: that is, into meaning. Not science then, but magic.

 

In the few years since his death in April, 2014 García Márquez has been eulogised and honoured as one of the greatest writers in the Spanish language since Cervantes. For more than three decades, since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1982, his contribution to world literature has been undisputed. Likewise, his status as one of the giants of the Latin American literary Boom of the 1970s and 80s, and especially as the inventor of the particular brand of magical realism he launched in 1967 with Cien años de soledad. In the thirty seven years since One Hundred Years of Solitude first dazzled the English-speaking world, it seems only fair to give a nod of appreciation to the translators whose endeavours offered us an Open Sesame into his work. More than this, reflecting on the processes by which Gabo’s work is recreated in English can offer a window onto the creative process itself – the translation of reality into art.

 

English-speaking readers owe their knowledge of the writings of García Márquez to two translators: Gregory Rabassa, who gave us One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1976) and Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1982); and Edith Grossman, who translated Gabo from the late 1980s onwards, including Love in the Time of Cholera (1988) and The General in his Labyrinth (1990). Both Rabassa and Grossman emphasise the complexity and depth of vision they bring to the process.  According to Grossman:

 

“A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable.” [2]

The aim of translation, she insists, is “fidelity” to the intention of the author, to the original meaning and in order to penetrate that for the readers of another language the translator often has to abandon the literal meaning or precise structure of the original. It is easier to show how this works than simply to describe it, and so the next few reflections home in on specific examples of key phrases and their translations, as well as some of the suggested alternatives and challenges.

 

For this is very definitely contested ground. Once the translator decides to approach the task as an art rather than a science, and choices are open to judgement and interpretation, the field is wide open to challenge. And although Gregory Rabassa’s work on García Márquez has been greatly acclaimed, he has also attracted his fair share of criticism:

 

“I dread the day when the translation police will haul me out of bed and put me to torture.”[3]

 

Yet within this contested space, the creative process, both of the translator and the original writer, comes into focus. In fact, the “translation police,” assisted by their informer “Professor Horroroso”- Rabassa’s collective name for his most diligent nit-pickers – have had quite a lot to say about his work.

 

The title of García Márquez’s most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which tells the epic tale of the rise and fall of the Buendía dynasty and the town they founded, would be a good place to start. Immediately it turns out that finding a way to express the phrase cien años de soledad in English is less straightforward than it might seem. This is because “cien,” in Spanish, can mean two different things:  “a” hundred, or “one” hundred. Which of the two options best captures the flavour of the original is open to debate. Rabassa justifies his choice of “one hundred” from his reading of the text. The internal dynamic suggests to him not just any hundred years, but a specific period, a particular epoch which encompasses the founding, flourishing and decay of Macondo. This may seem like a small point and indeed, it is not unusual to hear the book referred to as “A Hundred Years of Solitude”. However, these options give one example of how vocabulary and syntax can work in different ways in different languages, and also illustrate some of the ambiguities and uncertainties which the translator must resolve.

A more general criticism which some commentators have made of Rabassa’s work concerns the tone. Sometimes, the register of his English, they say, is much loftier and more elevated than García Márquez’s Spanish, which in fact is quite direct and simple. Spanish is a Latin language so it is not surprising that many ordinary words in common use are Latin in origin. This is not the case in English, though, which is a mainly Germanic language with many Latinate borrowings, of course, and the liberal use of words of Latin origin tends to create a rather elevated, abstract tone. In relation to the title, Rabassa himself explained his choice of “solitude” for “soledad” as being the closest in meaning but English does offer other, non-Latinate possibilities, such as  “aloneness,” “loneliness” or “being alone.” His choice for the title probably is the correct one, yet it is still interesting to wonder whether the overall register of the English text could be brought down a notch or two and take on a more down-to-earth gloss closer to the tone of the Spanish original, if some of the Latinate vocabulary were replaced by earthier, more concrete Saxon alternatives. That said, it is worth mentioning that whatever Professor Horroroso had to say on the subject, Gabo himself did not object and even declared that his work did so well in English because the translation was better than the original.

The openings of iconic works always attract a lot of attention and some critics did object to various elements of Rabassa’s translation of the first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which introduces us to the epic rise and fall of Macondo and the Buendía dynasty:

“Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.”[4] [my italics]

 

This rather complex and mysterious introduction immediately seizes the reader’s attention by posing a raft of questions which will be answered only much later in the novel. Many years after what? Where and when is the action located? Who is Aureliano Buendía and why has he been executed? (This last question, something of a trick which Gabo plays on the reader.)

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”[5] [my italics]

Most elements of Rabassa’s translation of this sentence have come under the microscope of the “translation police” and a fair amount of nit-picking has ensued. The particular nit which is of interest here is Rabassa’s choice of the verb “discover” to convey “conocer” in the original. In Spanish, “conocer” means to “know,” in the sense of to be, or become acquainted with someone or something; as opposed to “saber,” which refers to knowledge of a fact, or the ability to do something. Colonel Aureliano Buendía is remembering the very first time he saw ice, how he came to understand its qualities, its essence, to touch it and feel its coldness: therefore, “conocer.” Given that the verb “to know” in English has various synonyms that can convey many shades of meaning, why does Rabassa select a completely different word which has connotations which are significantly wider and deeper than either factual knowledge or acquaintance? 

Perhaps it is enough to say that most of the obvious options available – such as “to know ice” or “be introduced to ice” or “meet ice” – although they technically could pass muster as perfectly good equivalents, in this context, simply do not sound right. This is a question of feeling, of how pleasing or jarring the phrase is to the native ear. Perhaps it is enough, then, that “to discover ice” simply feels, and sounds, better.

However, there is another, crucial rationale: fidelity to the society and culture represented, to the world which the novel creates. The memory which Colonel Aureliano Buendía conjures up as he faces the firing squad is just one in a jumble of many, many other days when the travelling gypsies and their leader, and later the ghost, Melquíades, introduced his father and the townspeople of Macondo to the many fabulous inventions they had gathered on their travels: potions for various ailments and diseases, an alchemist’s laboratory, magnets, daguerreotypes, telescopes and flying carpets and yes, ice, with no boundaries drawn between the magical and the mundane. Later generations of Macondians, accustomed to the sight of flying carpets of former times whizzing past their windows, are unimpressed by new-fangled trains and decline to use them. 

Thus, it is only in the gradual unfolding of the rise and eventual decay of Macondo, as its characters, their experiences and their lives are variously called into being, then assigned to oblivion, that the core position of discovery in the narrative gradually takes shape. Scientific and technological innovations are recounted in exactly the same dead-pan, objective voice as the most magical and fantastic of phenomena, unquestioned internally by the characters and, therefore, equally accepted  by the readers. So when Aureliano Buendía first sees and touches ice as a young boy, this is one more enchantment unfolding, amongst many others. That is why “discover” is an inspired choice: not only because it sounds and feels better, but because it is faithful to the world the novel creates; and it reflects that world more truly than any of the more literal possibilities.

That said, the world of the work of art itself may not be the only space that the translator-magus has to negotiate. At times, the social and cultural situation within which the translated work appears, and its position and status within that context, may encroach on the work. Such demands do not always come into play and it is questionable whether they should influence the shape of the translated artefact, but when they do materialise, they can make interesting waves. Rabassa speaks very amusingly about the editorial panic he observed in The New Yorker when his translation of The Autumn of the Patriarch, García Márquez’s 1975 portrait of a dictator and life under his reign, was translated for serialisation at the end of 1976. This most darkly dazzling exploration of the psychopathology of tyranny, an amalgam of the characters and actions of the most unpleasant dictators from a continent which has known too many of them, is liberally seasoned with references to “mierda”- shit. It may be difficult to believe now, but in those days, The New Yorker simply did not use such language and the blatant references to “shit” would normally be considered a grave breach of etiquette. Rabassa, however, insisted that what the text refers to, and says – many, many times – is actual “mierda” and not some more decorous equivalent; and that in English, no other word would do but “shit.” Cue a flurry of high-level editorial meetings to determine how to handle the shit-crisis. Eventually, Rabassa’s view and, no doubt, the literary status which García Márquez already occupied even in the mid-1970s, won the day. “Gabo,” Rabassa twinkles mischievously, “broke the shit-barrier at The New Yorker.”[6]

The paragraph hurdle, however, was another matter. On this, The New Yorker editors stood firm and faithful to their own house style. A glance at the original Spanish edition of El otoño del patriarca [7]shows that García Márquez has chosen the rather unusual, and very arresting device of flooding the reader with wave upon wave of unrelenting, continuous prose, uninterrupted by paragraph line breaks, that spew out the life and atrocities of the patriarch and the sufferings of the people who lived under his tyranny. Because it is so beautifully woven together, linguistically it is in fact not so difficult to read, although the reader may be simultaneously overwhelmed and dazzled by the dark sorcery which enabled the tyrant to wield his powers for generations. Clearly, the absence of paragraphs was a deliberate decision of style on the part of the writer to reinforce the trance-like state that such tyranny can induce in its subjects.[8]

For the editors at The New Yorker, however, this was a step too far: “shit” they could live with, just. But no paragraphs? No chance. So the editors, Rabassa says,

“…combed Gabo’s hair and straightened his tie with commas and paragraphs…I drew the line at semi-colons.”[9]

The editorial intervention did not stop there. One of the narrative techniques which García Márquez borrows from his hero, Faulkner, is shape-shifting, sometimes time-travelling, points-of-view that slip from one character to another, or between past and present, or between reality, memory and fantasy, sometimes within the same sentence. This demands attentive reading, to say the least. The editors at The New Yorker helpfully flagged some of these narrative twists and turns with changes in type-face.[10]

Should translators, or people who commission translations, be congratulated, or vilified, for dipping into this box of tricks in ways untapped by the original writer? A purist might consider such intervention an impertinence; an editor might see it as expanding the accessibility of the text using the resources commonly used in the target language. And it is true that different languages have different conventions of paragraphing, layout and also, punctuation, which mean that a translator may need to use devices that differ from the original, in order to create a similar effect for readers in another language. The New Yorker’s response, however, sounds like something different: more like an editorial decision to tweak the text, the better to meet their readers’ expectations – or the idea of those expectations. It smacks suspiciously of the translator/editor sprinkling a little fairy dust on the translated version to make it gleam a bit more brightly than the original.

In spite of García Márquez’s extravagant declaration that his works did so well in English because the translation was better than his Spanish, Rabassa himself is quite emphatic that exercising their art to try to improve on the text is a temptation which translators must resist. Fidelity to the original, warts and all, is the goal, and

                              “translators should not be in the silk purse business.”[11]

Of course, most of the time we do not have access to the author’s opinion about the translation of his/her work into other languages, if indeed the writer even knows the target language well enough to be in a position to comment with any authority. That said, the attitude of The New Yorker towards the use of certain words, punctuation and layout is proof, if proof were needed, of the spell which socially-constructed expectations can cast on both the process of translation, and on the final artefact. The alchemy of translation melds not only language and meaning, and the linguistic expectations of potential readers, but their social and cultural expectations, too.

These same ingredients are at the core of the creative process itself, the alchemy which creates a bridge between reality and art. García Márquez was a journalist as well as a novelist and might be expected to have brought a different type of process to those different types of writing. Not so. In fact, he maintained that there is very little difference between writing fiction and writing journalism, one of the few differences being the relative status in the text of facts that are invented and of those that happen in the world:

“In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.”[12]

Much of the charm of magical realism in García Márquez’s world is the mundanity of the magical, which often embellishes supernatural happenings with the kind of trivial detail, sometimes physical, that is usually used to describe ordinary, everyday events, thus weaving an illusion of objectivity which persuades the reader to suspend disbelief. Yet for Gabo, the magical, incredible elements of magical realism only seem that way to people who do not know the life of the Caribbean. For those who were born there, the world view of exaggeration and fable does not stand for reality – it is reality. In The Autumn of the Patriarch, a dictator sells the sea, the Caribbean, to the US and the nation is for evermore in thrall to the interests of big business, bankrupted by the local vultures picking over its bones. In One Hundred Years of Solitude a drop of blood flows purposefully from the body of a man who has just shot himself, coming to rest at the feet of the dead man’s mother. Thus the terrible reality of the death of a son is announced, clothed in the stories of ghosts, omens, portents and supernatural happenings which Gabo heard at his grandmother’s knee: tales that tell a truth which here, is tragedy. 

But there is comedy, too. The bodily assumption of Remedios the Beauty into heaven happens one day at four o’clock when she is hanging out the washing. The fantastic extravagance of this and other events in the world of Macondo might appear to locate Cien años somewhere in the realm of the fairy story; that is, until we remember that in November 1950, when Gabo was a young man of twenty three, Pope Pius XII declared ex cathedra his infallible judgement of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven. For all Gabo’s poker face, and perhaps because of it, it is tempting to view some of the more outlandish elements of magical realism as a colossal send-up.

García Márquez’s ultimate intention, though, is deadly serious, as the central event at the heart of One Hundred Years of Solitude eloquently proclaims. In García Márquez’s evocation of these tragic events, and especially their aftermath, the “magic” side of the magical realism coin is very definitely enlisted in the service of what is real; this is where his main purpose is found. This climactic section of the novel gives an account of “the events that would deal Macondo its fatal blow” and deserves special attention here, partly because a very small part of Rabassa’s translation of that section – just one word, in fact – has been challenged in great detail. In fact, one expert has written a whole article about it.[13] As a process of in-depth analysis, that critique illustrates the potential power of a single word to illuminate or to obscure meaning on many different levels. It also offers a fascinating insight into the various layers of communication that the writer conjures up and to which the reader may respond, consciously or unconsciously, in interpreting the text, certainly in the original and perhaps in the translation as well, provided it succeeds in capturing those nuances.

The witness to the tragic events that mark the beginning of the end of Macondo is José Arcadio Segundo, one of the third generation of Macondo’s founding dynasty, the Buendía family, and a great-nephew of the same Colonel Aureliano Buendía who faced the firing squad many decades before. This “fatal blow” to the town takes place during a strike when the workers of the all-powerful multinational banana company, led by José Arcadio Segundo, are fighting to get humane working conditions, payment in real money instead of credit notes that can only be spent on overpriced goods in company shops and freedom from a feudal relationship with the company that borders on slavery. On this day, the strikers and their families gather in the main town square at the railway station. It is a festive occasion, as the workers and their wives and children have been summoned by the authorities and are expecting to be addressed by their civil and military leaders about their rather modest demands. Instead, they are confronted by machine guns bristling on the roof-tops and a “many-headed dragon” of three regiments of soldiers who, after a brief stand-off, fire into the crowd. Many people die. The injured try to flee but most are trapped and killed by the dragon. José Arcadio Segundo rescues and holds aloft a small boy whose witness statement many years later takes up the narrative thread of the end of that terrible day:

“the colossal troops wiped out the empty space, the kneeling woman, the light of the high, drought-stricken sky and the whorish world…”[14] [my italics.]

The debate about Rabassa’s translation of this description focuses on one single word: his choice of “whorish” world to convey the “puto mundo” of the original Spanish. This is a crucial moment in the novel when the cool, detached mask of the narrator slips to unleash an anguished cry of despair at the fate of his town and its people. The pivotal significance of this moment in the novel is one reason given to justify taking the scalpel to Rabassa’s choice of this single word – “whorish” for “puto.” Although that may seem like over-zealous attention from “Professor Horroroso,” and something of an exaggeration to place such a burden of meaning and impact on just one word, the critique delves into many of the layers of the alchemy of translation, including its social and cultural dimensions, and provide a fascinating insight into how these diverse elements can interact to produce meaning and impact on the reader – or not.

The gist of the argument is as follows: technically, the choice of “whorish” for “puto” could be quite acceptable. A “puta” is a whore and as “puto” is the adjective made from that noun, “whorish” seems like a reasonable expression of the same idea in English. However, the issue here is not one of linguistic accuracy; it is something far less tangible, and perhaps all the more significant. Through a combination of tone, register and atmosphere, the original Spanish evokes a sudden intrusion of the narrator’s emotional reaction to the events he witnesses. This effect, the critic argues, is absent in the sanitised, somewhat clinical English phrase used to translate “puto mundo”.

It is true that in English, “whorish” has a rather elevated, poetic ring to it, detached and lofty, almost like a line from the King James version of the Bible. The equivalent word used in Spanish, though, is much more colloquial, even vulgar.  “Este puto diente me está matando,” might come out in English as, “this damned tooth is killing me,” or this “bloody” tooth, but most probably, this “fucking” tooth.  According to the critics, “este puto mundo” – “this fucking world” – signals a complete break from the narrator’s customary cool, dead-pan delivery, revealing his emotional involvement and despair at the events unfolding as he bears witness to them. In Spanish, that single word is a literary slap in the face to the reader, a red flag that proclaims, “look, wake up, this is real.”

Except there is something else that is even more real: the cover-up, the denial that what happened actually happened. In the aftermath of the strike the authorities declare that there weren’t any dead. There weren’t even any workers, because, technically, the company had no actual employees, only casual labour. Nothing happened, nothing ever happens in Macondo, the happy non-workers left the square and returned home in peaceful groups, the truth is magicked out of existence with no talisman other than the power of words. But language is the most powerful talisman of all, and in Macondo it is enlisted in the service of the black arts that distort, transform and deny reality until the truth, like the dead, vanishes in a puff of smoke.

Yet José Arcadio Segundo knows that hundreds, thousands of people were massacred on that day, were transported on a death train that sped towards the sea, where they were dumped, for he woke up on that train himself surrounded by their bodies. But then, the townspeople who are left have their hands full surviving the torrential rains that last four years, eleven months and two days, conjured up by the bosses of the multi-national banana company which, decades earlier, had invaded Macondo, taken over the town, bloated its economy, colonised it with foreign oligarchs and their families, ruined the environment, and enslaved the people. The rains provide cover for the company to abandon the country and they also wipe out any lingering  memory of the terrible events, the destruction and the loss of vitality that accelerate Macondo’s decline and final decay. Here, García Márquez’s magical realism peers out on a world in thrall to evil and beguiled by lies, with the collusion, conscious and unconscious, of those who ought to have been its witnesses.

This is not fiction. Or at least, it is not only fiction.  On December 6th, 1928, a year after García Márquez’s birth, striking workers employed by the United Fruit Company, a US multi-national, were gunned down in the town square of Ciénaga in the north of Gabo’s home country of Colombia while waiting to be addressed by the governor after Sunday Mass. The general who gave the order claimed to be acting on the instructions of the United Fruit Company itself, to avert an American invasion by US warships waiting in the bay, ready to protect American interests. The number of casualties of the Banana Massacre, as it is called, is not known for certain even today. All that exists are estimates, which range from a total of forty seven fatalities to two thousand, depending on the source[15].

So, it turns out that novelists are not the only people who can do what they want, as long as they make people believe in it. Politicians, governments, newspapers, are also adepts at the alchemy of translating reality, rewriting it, making the illusory real, and vice versa: what today we might call propaganda. Or spin.

It is ironic that the accounts of real-life events created by these self-proclaimed truth-tellers can so readily be transmuted to a web of lies; and that the tales told by writers, including the fictions and fantasies of magical realism, can illuminate truths. The Peruvian novelist and Nobel Laureate Mario Vargas Llosa sums this up in the introduction to his critical analysis of twentieth century fiction, La verdad de las mentiras [The Truth About Lies]. Writers tell lies – create fiction – in order to expose the truth, and although there is a difference between truth in literature and truth in the real world, in history:

“…even though literature is riddled with lies – or rather, because of it – literature tells the  historical truths that historians cannot tell…Because the tricks, the sleights-of-hand, the exaggerations which narrative literature uses, serve to express profound, disturbing truths that only in this oblique way can ever come to light.”[16][my translation.]

A novel may be an invention, but a good novel translates reality into art in order to tell the truth. The fiction of Gabriel García Márquez shines a light on oppression and bears witness to its consequences, thus revealing reality more truly than the history books or the newspapers. His magic is in the service of reality.

Although many of the reflections made here on the translations of García Márquez’s work have focused on objections and challenges to specific elements of the English texts, it important to emphasise the hugely significant service which the work of Rabassa and Grossman has made to millions of English-speaking readers in giving us access to the greatest writer in Spanish since Cervantes. Some critics would go much further and credit the creation of the Latin American Literary Boom, which includes Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa and others, to translation – thus, creation and transformation on a world scale.

So far, at the time of writing, about three and a half years after García Márquez’s death, the work of Rabassa and Gossman are the only authoritative translations of his work into English. This might be a good time to wonder whether these are the definitive translations or if, indeed, such as thing as a definitive translation really exists. Is the creative translation touched by a magic which lasts forever? Or is this an inherently transient art, carrying within it the seeds of its obsolescence, doomed one day to fade and vanish from sight? Language and its uses shift, gather new connotations which distort old meanings. Expressions of register and tone lose, and gain, formality. Even the traditional linear reading of a book from left to right, from beginning to end, has already splintered, offering alternative universes of hypertext, searches and an interactive, co-creating reader – inventions that are already old hat to some writers and readers, and as new and exciting to others as the discovery of ice to Colonel Aureliano Buendía as a young boy. Thus, according to Gregory Rabassa:

“While the original endures and remains eternally young, the translation ages and must be replaced.”[17]

Happily for Gabo’s readers and for his translators of the future, the creative work of translation, though touched by magic, is not carved in stone. Alchemy, yes – but not the elixir of eternal youth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

Bolaños Cuéllar, Sergio (2011) Gregory Rabassa’s Views on Translation. www.scielo.org.co/pdf/fyf/v24n1/v24n1a06.pdf  

Grossman, Edith (2003) Speech delivered at the 2003 PEN tribute to Gabriel García Márquez, New York City, November 5th, 2003 : www.themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_PEN_grossman.html

Hoeksema, Thomas (1978) “An interview with Gregory Rabassa”, in Translation Review, Vol 1, 1978. http://translation.utdallas.edu/Interviews/Rabassaby_Hoeksema.html, Accessed October 6th, 2014.

Jasso, Damon (2004) Historical Backgrounds: the United Fruit Massacre and Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude http://www.class.uh.edu/courses/engl3322/djasso/, Accessed October 6th, 2014.

McCutcheon, Dr. James, (2009) “A key word in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude,” in Translation Journal, Vol 13 No 3, July, 2009. http://translationjournal.net/journal//49garciamarquez.htm

Rabassa, Gregory (2005) If this be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents: a Memoir

 p 102. Extract accessible at http://books.google.es/books?id=gOrPqFzNN-IC&pg=PA102&lpg=PA102&dq=gabo+shit+barrier&source=bl&ots=R3nmnTARB7&sig=ZRezYIrx7IKjp-GRKnefT2URcbw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6XcyVLbVKJGM7AaAwICQDg&ved=0CDQQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=gabo%20shit%20barrier&f=false, Accessed October 6th, 2014

Salisbury, Maria Cecila (1993) “The making of a translator: an interview with Edith Grossman,” in Translation Review, Vol 41, 1993. http://translation.utdallas.edu/Interviews/EdithGrossmanTR_41.html, Accessed October 6th, 2014.

Stone, Peter H. (1981) “Interviews: Gabriel García Márquez, The Art of Fiction No 69,” Winter 1981, No 82. http://www.the+paris+review+garcia+marquez&form=PRSAMS&pc=MASMJS&mkt=en-ie&pq=the+paris+review+garcia+marquez&sc=0-17&sp=-1&qs=n&sk

Vargas Llosa, Mario (2002) La Verdad de las Mentiras Madrid: Santillana Ediciones Generales.

Newspaper articles and blogs consulted

Borges, Jorge Luis (1969) “El oficio de traducir IV: del prólogo de su selección de Hojas de hierba, de Walt Whitman,” Buenos Aires: Ed. Lumen, 1969, Consulted on Blog de Club de Traductores Literarios de Buenos Aires: http://clubdetraductoresliterariosdebaires.blogspot.ie/2009/09/el-oficio-de-traducir-iv.html

Kennedy, William (October 31st, 1976) “A Stunning Portrait of a Monstrous Caribbean Tyrant,” The New York Times Books. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/reviews/marque-autumn.html Accessed October 9th, 2014.

Parini, Jay (March 8th, 2007) “The greatness of Gabriel García Márquez,” The Guardian Books Blog. http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/mar/08/thegreatnessofgabrielgarci. Accessed October 9th, 2014.

The Literary Man (May 2, 2012) “Gabriel García Márquez: a Tale of Two Translators.” http://literaryman.com/2012/05/02/gabriel-garcia-marquez-a-tale-of-two-translators/  Accessed October 9th, 2014.

Vox, Thursday September 4th, 2014, “He’s universal: a eulogy for Gabriel García Márquez, from his translator.” http://www.vox.com/2014/4/20/5628860/hes-universal-a-eulogy-for-gabriel-garcia-marquez-from-his-translator. Accessed October 9th, 2014.

 

Main works of García Márquez consulted

Gabriel García Márquez (1967) Cien años de soledad, Digital Edition: Random House March 2012.

Gabriel García Márquez (1978) One Hundred Years of Solitude, London: Pan/Picador Books. Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa, 1970.

Gabriel García Márquez (1981) Crónica de una muerta anunciada, New York: Vintage Espanol.

Gabriel García Márquez (1983) Chronicle of a Death Foretold, New York: Knopf.

Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa.

Gabriel García Márquez (1975)  El otoño del patriarca, Barcelona: Random House.

Gabriel García Márquez (1976) The Autumn of the Patriarch, Digital Edition: Penguin Books, 2014.

Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa, 1970.

[1] Jorge Luis Borges (1969) “El oficio de traducir IV: del prólogo de su selección de Hojas de hierba, de Walt Whitman,” Buenos Aires: Ed. Lumen, 1969, Consulted on Blog de Club de Traductores Literarios de Buenos Aires: http://clubdetraductoresliterariosdebaires.blogspot.ie/2009/09/el-oficio-de-traducir-iv.html Accessed October 9th, 2014.

[2] Grossman, Edith (2003) “Speech delivered at the 2003 PEN tribute to Gabriel García Márquez, New York City, November 5th, 2003:” www.themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_PEN_grossman.html, Accessed October 6th, 2014.

 

[3] Hoeksema, Thomas (1978) “An interview with Gregory Rabassa,” in Translation Review, Vol 1, 1978, http://translation.utdallas.edu/Interviews/Rabassaby_Hoeksema.html, Accessed October 6th, 2014.

 

[4] Gabriel García Márquez (1967) Cien años de soledad, Digital Edition: Random House March 2012, p. 4.

[5] Gabriel García Márquez (1978) One Hundred Years of Solitude, London: Pan/Picador Books. Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa, 1970, p. 9.

 

[6] Gregory Rabassa (2005) If this be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents: a Memoir, New York: New Directions, p 102, extract accessible at http://books.google.es/books?id=gOrPqFzNN-IC&pg=PA102&lpg=PA102&dq=gabo+shit+barrier&source=bl&ots=R3nmnTARB7&sig=ZRezYIrx7IKjp-GRKnefT2URcbw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6XcyVLbVKJGM7AaAwICQDg&ved=0CDQQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=gabo%20shit%20barrier&f=false, Accessed October 6th, 2014.

[7] Gabriel García Márquez (1975)  El otoño del patriarca, Barcelona: Random House.

 

[8] For a downloadable version of the book in Spanish, go to: http://www.educando.edu.do/files/3214/0932/5519/GarciaMarquez-Elotoniodelpatriarca.pdf.

[9] Hoeksema, Thomas (1978), op. cit.

[10] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1976/09/27/the-autumn-of-the-patriarch.

[11] Hoeksema, Thomas (1978), op. cit.

[12] Stone, Peter H. (1981) Interviews: Gabriel García Márquez, The Art of Fiction No 69, Winter 1981, No 82. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3196/the-art-of-fiction-no-69-gabriel-garcia-marquez, Accessed October 6th, 2014.

[13] McCutcheon, Dr. James, (2009) A key word in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in Translation Journal, Vol 13 No 3, July, 2009. http://translationjournal.net/journal//49garciamarquez.htm 

[14] Gabriel García Márquez/Gregory Rabassa (1978) op. cit., p.249.

[15] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_massacre, Accessed October 6th, 2014; The History Channel (nd) This Day in History, December 6th, 1928 http://www.historychannel.com.au/classroom/day-in-history/987/banana-massacre, Accessed October 6th, 2014; Jasso, Damon (2004) Historical Backgrounds: the United Fruit Massacre and Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude http://www.class.uh.edu/courses/engl3322/djasso/, Accessed October 6th, 2014.

[16] Vargas Llosa, Mario (2002) La Verdad de las Mentiras, Madrid: Santillana Ediciones Generales, p. 24.

[17] Hoeksema, Thomas (1978), op. cit.

30 May 2024

Launch introduction of Damien Donnelly’s ‘Back From Away’ by Liz McSkeane

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Back From Away is the second full collection from the force of nature that is Damien B. Donnelly.  He is the award-winning author of the poetry pamphlet Eat the Storms, a Stickleback publication and the conversational pamphlet In the Jitterfritz of Neon, co-written by Eilín de Paor, all published by Hedgehog Poetry Press. Many of you know him as the host and producer of the poetry podcast Eat the Storms, and editor-in-chief of The Storms, a printed journal of poetry, prose and visual art. His first full collection Enough! was published by Hedgehog Press in August 2022 Damien has received several awards, from the Arts Council and Fingal Arts and others. Back from Away is his second full collection.

Reading the poems in Damien’s exuberant collection felt akin to being immersed in a kaleidoscope of many sensations, places, people, culture, languages, as the poet delves into a multitude of experiences derived from his many travels – starting with his home town of Dublin, continuing on to Paris, Amsterdam, Shanhai, Korea- and also, a journey from the past, landscapes of North Co Dublin, evoked with great affection  to the present and looping back to reflect on memories, and on the nature of memory itself.

See p 29 Book of Memories first stanza

In less accomplished hand, such a rich and riotous journey could feel chaotic  for the reader, but is  not – rather, the reverse. I think this is because there is the spine of a structure that is familiar to so many of us – the adventure of leaving our home, be that country or hearth – wandering in foreign parts, meeting new people, leaving them – and returning, with all the enrichment, changes and even losses that such a journey brings. Although Damien’s experiences are specific and his own, they speak to us on a universal level, because of the added dimension of the physical travels being a journey into and towards the self.

See p 72 To Capture Each Other,Together

Some of these poems have a light touch and are peppered with casual references to places in Madrid and Paris and Amsterdam that place us in the mind of a flaneur, whose streets are the streets of the world; whereas others take us on a journey through memory, early life, questioning of origins, a wistfulness for connections and intimacies left behind.

Although I think you will fund some of these poems witty and amusing –  there is a poignancy underlying the voyage itself, where some experiences are fleeting yet leave an indelible mark and others, people the poet returns to. Reading such poems  is all the more affecting for the mingling of change and renewal accumulated while away, alongside the coming back – returning home to an enriched self.

Damien, let us accompany you.  

30 May 2024

Launch Introduction by Liz McSkeane of Emma McKervey’s ‘Highland Boundary Fault’

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It’s almost 7 years to the day since Turas Press published its first book: on May 5th, 2017, we stood in this room to celebrate my own collection. Since then, it has been a rollercoaster of activity, supported by so many people, including you, booksellers, publications, Irish Writers Centre and of course, 13 – now 15 writers who have put their trust in Turas Press in the publication of a total of now 26 titles. I am grateful to you all and honoured that you have put your confidence in this endeavour.

Emma McKervey is an award-winning poet from Holywood in County Down. In 2015 she was the winner of the Poetry NI/Translink Poetry Competition. Her work has been shortlisted and Highly Commended in many competitions, including the Seamus Heaney Prize, the Northern Ireland Poetry Competition and the Bord Gáis Iris Book Awards Poem of the Year. She is a professionally trained musician in cello and saxophone and has engaged in many musical ventures that include collaborations with composers, dancers and theatre. Emma is a member of Women Aloud. Her first collection The Rag Tree speaks, was published by Doire Press in 2021. Highland Boundary Fault is her second collection.

Given the title, you won’t be surprised to learn that the collection is set in Scotland. Although I am from Scotland myself, I had never heard the term Highland Boundary Fault. It refers to a tectonic plate between the Minch and the Atlantic, a literal terrestrial boundary between the lowland, and the highlands of Scotland, including the Hebrides – where Emma’s great grandmother hails from, and, coincidentally, my own grandmother as well. Highland Boundary Fault could be summed up – if it’s possible to sum up this rich, magical tapestry – tell of how these divided parts of the world are unified  – through a family story, a love story that takes us from the Hebrides to the Clyde estuary; and also, magically, through the evocation of landscape, history and myth. These poems are inhabited by flesh and blood people navigating the social mores of their time, and also by mythic characters recognisable from the stories not just of the Celtic world, but Norse, Greek, Indian and more.

The very first poem captures the flavour and the voice will be very familiar to Irish readers – its Cailleach, the hag – who opens this magical work with a declaration of ownership, a creation myth – powerful, and terrifying. P 11 lies 1 – 4

 From here on, the human story of the almost star-crossed lovers, Dan from the Isle of Lewis and his sweetheart Lizzy from Greenock, is interspersed with interruptions from – who? Their ancestors – Persephone,  Blodewedd, Odysseus and many more. Ours, too, maybe, For these are archetypes that tap into our deepest, mythic memory.

But these are flesh and blood creatures, too, and rooted in the social mores of their time. Telling, and reassuring, to see how the women of the island, in the face of patriarchal shift that forbids them from wearing bright colours, subvert the attempt to suppression in their colourful petticoats and undergarments. Vanity p 43 last stanza

There is such a wealth of erudition here, very lightly worn, that it is almost impossible to describe it, distill it. Luckily, I don’t have to, because the poet is here, the marvellous Emma McKervey, the architect of this magical construction, to share it with us.

Emma, transport us…

23 May 2023

I’ll Begin This Letter With Your Name Keith Burke         Single Review Liz McSkeane

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Words, music and vocals Keith Burke, single release date: September 9th

This week I had the privilege of hearing a single from Keith Burke’s new album, his fourth since he emerged onto the music scene with his 2004 album, The Dancer Who Stole Your Shoes, a Hot Press ‘pick of the fortnight’. Burke, who hails from Skerries in North County Dublin, is one of Ireland’s most versatile musicians, having released three previous albums and toured the third, Those Boys, on three continents during 2016.

This new album, produced by Anthony Gibney, has fourteen songs, all words and music penned by singer-songwriter Burke himself. It had a complicated, prolonged, genesis. Production began in Milan in 2019 and was scheduled for completion in Dublin in 2020 but got derailed for two-and-a-half-years because of you-know-what.  Work was finally completed in Dublin and Kildare earlier this year and this single will be released on September 9th.

From the opening bars, I’ll Begin this Letter With Your Name invites us into an emotional landscape that is both familiar and mysterious, an enticing paradox evoked in both the words and the music. The smoky harmonica and bluesy, Dylan-esque vibe of the introduction sets a tone that is melancholy yet somehow uplifting, as the rhythm and instrumentals veer between acoustic intimacy and a gathering intensity. The beautifully wrought lyrics muse on past mistakes, missed opportunities, yearnings for what might have been, all to be summed up in this letter. Is it a letter of apology, regret, hope or all of the above? The mystery is satisfyingly allusive, as the instrumentals fade to an acoustic, folky mood that reveal the mellow tones of Burke’s voice, just a man with a guitar like the singer-songwriters of old, until the hint of bass and the drums thrum their insistent heartbeat and the surprise crescendo allows an effortless display of Burke’s impressive vocal range, drums, bass, piano returning to sustain the heart pulse of the song. I’ll Begin This Letter With Your Name ends on a tone of restrained yearning backed with a complex yet gentle instrumental that finally yields to the strains of that gorgeous, moody harmonica. This is an elegy to love, or loves, gone wrong, the whys and hows we do not know, for there is a mystery at its heart, as there is in all the best love songs. Listen to it.

Liz McSkeane

September 9th, 2022

 

I’ll Begin This Letter With Your Name

Words and music: Keith Burke

Vocals, guitar, harmonica: Keith Burke

Bass: Dave Mooney

Drums: Paul Byrne

Organs: Scott Flannigan

Piano: Salvatore Urbano

Produced by Anthony Gibney

Mastered by Simon Francis

20 Apr 2023

Launch introduction to Julie-Ann Rowell’s ‘Inside Out’ Liz McSkeane

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ISBN print: 9781913598433   Format:  Paperback  92 pages  Price: €13/£12

When I first read a selection of new poems from Julie-Ann which, she explained, dealt with her experience of living with a chronic illness, FND, I was both greatly impressed by the power and resonance of the poems, and intrigued, as this was a condition I had never heard of. I learned that Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) is a disorder of the nervous system which manifests through a variety of physical, sensory and cognitive symptoms such as seizures, dizziness, chronic pain, speech impairment, paralysis.

I immediately found those first few poems to be compelling, both in the subtle craft which straightaway engaged and sustained this reader’s unwavering attention, and in their poignant descriptions of navigating life while grappling with symptoms of an illness that is often little understood.

            Even so, when Julie-Ann told me that she had almost completed a full collection dedicated to her experience of being diagnosed with FND, followed by hospitalisation, treatment and discharge, I admit that I was a little unsure. Would readers warm to an entire collection that dealt with such a daunting subject?  And could a poet produce a sustained and varied body of work about living with chronic illness that would reach out beyond her own, very specific, experiences?  

But that was before I had read the book in its entirety, when I finally understood the nuanced, multi-layered, sometimes wry, wisdom which the poet brings to this challenging topic. The poems in the first, longest of three sections, called IN, describe a period of hospitalisation, and the many ways in which individual identity is stripped away: handing over personal belongings, taking meals in an institutional setting, the ritual of medication administered at regular times, group activities under the watchful eye of a supervisor.

Within this clinical environment, the narrator’s world is people by a cast of characters ‒ staff and other patients ‒ who variously enhance or diminish her well-being. One fellow patient provides a sense of solidarity:

A new patient arrives, Gina,

first admitted twenty years ago to this same hospital.

            ‘We were called fakers then,’ she says.

Others, such as the man who roams naked through the corridors during the night, are unpredictable or frightening. The cold dismissiveness of the Unit Manager reminds her of Nurse Rached, the cruel nurse in the novel and the film ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’.

            Through these and many other accounts of interactions, the poems of Inside Out grapple not only with the physical challenges of chronic illness, but the emotional and social struggles as well. This comes to the fore most starkly in a distressing episode described in the short second section, OUT, after she has been discharged:

            I venture into town on my own,

            a short way in among the shoppers

            when Woman stops and turns,

            her eyes dark pith, ‘You’re drunk!’

as the narrator struggles in vain to find her leaflet that explains the symptoms of FND, to show that she is not drunk, but recovering from a serious illness.

            Although the poems in Inside Out recount an intense reflection on navigating a world which does not always respond with understanding or kindness to people who do not conform to normative social expectations, this is not a purely individual experience.  Most of us, if not all, are confronted at some time in our lives with illness, our own or that of other people, with the frustrations and, if we are lucky, compassion, from other people or institutions that ensue.

            Yet despite the seriousness of the subject matter, this is a collection that uplifts the spirits. This is due in part to the nuggets of sly humour which pepper the text, the narrator very far from being a passive onlooker, but rather an insightful commentator on the behaviour and motivations of those around her. The beautifully crafted poems of Inside Out, tell a story ‒ of illness, yes. But also of resilience and the survival of the spirit in difficult times. It is a joy to read.        

 

 

 

15 Oct 2018

‘bind’ by Christine Murray – An Introduction by Peter O’Neill

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Writing is a system of belief – scripture! People often tend to overlook this simple fact. And, its most fervent practitioners, like so many other believers, live with it every day. This belief system of theirs is their way of trying to make a way in the world. Somehow, through their script, their inscriptions made, on whatever material is at hand, a formal trace of their lives will remain perhaps long after their physical remains are gone. This alone, no doubt, is one of the most fundamental reasons perhaps why writers, and particularly poets, do what it is they do, in order to, and in the words of one of the system’s most powerful and so representative voices; leave a stain. 

I was up in Kilmainham recently, walking among the graves in the smaller graveyard there opposite Bully’s Field, trying to decipher whatever was left of the inscriptions that were made on the now great and blackened slabs of stone, and I thought of Chris. For Christine Murray is a stone-cutter by trade. One day she told me the most extraordinary thing. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing a living writer, or poet, ever told me. She told me that as a stone-cutter you were used to inscribing letters and words on monuments, and in many cases to the dead. So, she told me that in her writing, this was a quality that she tried to bring to her work – this ‘monumental’ vision.

Imagine the time and effort that is required to first prepare the stone to receive the first chip of the chisel?

a granite stylus

a grave bed

green sea-bed of flowering heads.

 

shatter of tree hacked-through/

windmills beside an sruthán geal

gold coins  in – stream- glitter out to me[1]

 

Symphonic tonal variations on paper-stone/ Variations of symphonic tones on stone paper. Whatever way you will attempt to define them, this is what I love about the poetry of Christine Murray, it is her artful delight and the playfulness in which she chips away at the words, the way she lets them bleed into one another like perhaps the vein lines in a stone. Writing being a very physical act for her. For instance, her very deliberate choice of verbs or nouns(?) There is a very specific lexicon to Murray’s work. Listen!

 

     silica  caul  rivulet  and skein                          ( nouns )

ribbon    sear   quill  and embed                  ( verbs )

 

They are taken from the worlds of masonry and haberdashery, just two of which Murray effortlessly channels into her work. One overtly masculine, the other so decidedly feminine, but such binary concepts have no place in Murray’s universe, for Murray writing is an act of transgression; all borders must come down. Transgendered, be aware! With such words, Murray carves out constellations of sound, out from the graphemes lying there so apparently idle on the page hooking them up to stories, myth, legend, the stuff of folk-lore and sheer fantasy. Indeed, the worlds she creates in her books interconnect, which for the reader of her work is but a further reason to enjoy reading her books. For example, in this her latest bind , the first of her books to be published in her native country ( for this Liz McSkeane at Turas Press is heartily to be congratulated) all too familiar motifs such as birds, trees and leaves appear, as indeed they did in  She ( Oneiros Books, UK, 2014), and Cycles ( Lapwing, Belfast, 2013).

But let us first go to the title – bind , of this her latest work with its rather curious subsidiary title a waking book. What does this mean? Do other books sleep, and so dream? If one turns the page we come across the following quote, taken from one of the poems towards the end of the collection.

a leaf fallen

is always a poem

 

It signals autumnal decay, and reverie. In French, curiously, rever is the verb to dream while réveil is to awaken, so with just the slightest nuance in pronunciation we are in completely alternative states of consciousness. Feathers, birds, trees and leaves are some of the key signs  Murray peoples the psychic horizon, rather like the way signs do people the psychic world of the iconic French psychoanalytical thinker Jacques Lacan. So, the world of the subconscious very much being a deep well which Murray exploits at will. This is one of the key features which make her work so original, I believe, for she is one of the few contemporary poets in the English- speaking world, at least, who uses the symbolic power of words so advantageously, creating these astonishingly clear dreamscapes which we, the readers, are lucky enough to be able to inhabit in our reading/waking state.

When Chris told me that the new title of her latest book was bind, I remember smiling. Was it the verb or the noun, I thought? And this is the second feature to her work which I believe it is important to further highlight. As Murray has a deeply physical relationship to language. For like all truly great poets her understanding does not only encompass a deeply metaphoric resonance, which is crucial, but her deep appreciation of symbolism is also allied to her very clear understanding of the onomatopoeia of all language. This double distinction, coupled with her multifaceted interests in phenomenon at large in the world, give Murray’s work a particular edge over a lot of writing which is produced today.   

Christine told me in an email, and I will quote her directly, “ It is elegiac.” It meaning bind. “It is about not being limited by physicality but being bound by our inability to transcend certain rules – hence the double-bind. The Gordian knot.”

 

if there are birds here.

they are made of stone. [2]

 

Before passing you over to Christine herself, there are just three extracts from some of the poems that I wish to highlight here, to give you a little flavour of the miracle which she brings. The first is a rather playful paraphrasing of the all too familiar dictum of Heraclitus about never being able to step into the same river twice, due to the eternal flux of material things-Life. In the first poem cycle of the book, in which the main ideas are introduced, the poem narcissus figures. It is at once a nod to the classic figure of Greek mythology, complete with echo contemplating him in the wings, evoking all of the psychic resonance of the archetypal pair, while at the same time being just a wonderful tonal composition evoking nature’s splendour. Generosity is another hallmark of great art, and it is by such twin-fold bounty that Murray’s generosity comes.

 

not step twice into, not

step back from stream.

 

its nets are storm-blackened,

 

Nets figure again and again in bind –  appearing in the very first title poem ‘ her nets of dust, fire’ in relation to the wonderfully phrased ‘draughts of birds’ to the ‘chlorophyll nets’ which ‘patch the grass’ in the closing poem of the first cycle. Along with the ‘corridors’ which also figure, a whole poem being given over to them, the nets act as an architextural device to further consolidate the overall theme of bondage which the book treats, of human bondage to quote Somerset Maugham. And, yes, there are strong sado-masochistic undertones seeping through the text, yet another layer Murray, the book’s Architext inserts; no doubt too  out of sheer mischief. For Christine Murray belongs to a longstanding tradition of Gothic writers, and such is where bind, just like She and The Blind ( Oneiros Books, UK, 2013)  before it, needs to be placed, alongside the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Marianne Moore, in the modernist tradition, but also alongside Emily Dickinson, Karen Blixen and Mary Shelley.

it is voice brings us alive

 

So Murray reminds us in the poem stalk the open ring, again a poem taken from the first poem cycle in the collection, and again relating to the figure of Narcissus. In Lacan’s universe, the mirror stage is a pivotal moment in the child’s engagement with the world around them, as it is the first time they fully perceive visually that they are a body in the world which they perceive for the first time, like Narcissus in the Greek myth. It is a traumatic experience, according to Lacan, or at least it can be depending how the child handles the vision of themselves in the world. Murray seems to be evoking this Lacanian world yet very much with her own slant, the voice too entering consciousness to either startle the Other into wakefulness in order to ‘dream’ together, or Not!

 

it is an unearthing of voice,

brings us alive.

 

his hands bound by feathers, his

red wings, a difficult birthing.

 

the gash

female-d.

mauve,

her silks are.

 

her integuments retain,

prevent his voice from out-birthing.

 

Not, it would appear being very much the case, hence the elegiac register. But, to invoke Heraclitus and Lacan once again, is not such stifling, such repression, not the true Mid-Wife of all Art? Such conflict being the mother of all unique invention?

Finally,

 

bound to

& bound

  1. is

the very

point

of

tissue(d) skin.

 

For a poet so obsessive of form such matter does not pass unnoticed, being bound, all puns intended, to both the physical and mental content. Acceptance being key; freedom is a cage. Embrace the bars! Murray seems to be telling.

 

it is dawn

In Beckettian parenthesis…

 

the nodding daisies mourn.

 

 

Peter O’Neill

Irish Writer’s Centre

8/10/2018

 

 

  

[1] Glendalough, at Iseult Gonne’s Grave, Cycles, Lapwing, Belfast, 2013.

[2] Taken from bind –  opening poem.

23 Jul 2018

Kate Camp (2017) ‘The Internet of Things’ Review Liz McSkeane

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Kate Camp (2017) “The Internet of Things,” Wellington: Victoria University Press, ISBN 9781776561063

Kate Camp is an award-winning New Zealand poet whose fifth collection, “The Internet of things” is an arresting fusion of the everyday and the numinous. The title is mischievous, for the internet we encounter in Camp’s realm is not the world wide web of search engines and social media, but the interconnections of memories, desires and regret, murmured to the reader as though speaking quietly to an intimate friend. And the ‘things’ are not the high-tech appliances that will soon fill our smart homes – robots to clean the windows, fridges to monitor our diet. Rather, they are the artefacts of a simpler time and place, evoked in the cover photograph of John Lennon’s family kitchen, stacked with old oven and enamel pots and pans of a familiar, comforting past.

 

The title poem sets the scene with its evocation of a beloved time that is gone: “working ports/rust and containers/ the way unwieldy ships move across the water.” This opening sonnet glides effortlessly through a remembered visit to the family home of the Beatles, in particular John Lennon’s aunt Mimi, “that difficult woman/unfolding her camp bed in the dining room.” There are yearnings here and regret at the tendency of humans “always to wish for the wrong thing.” We are stumbling through a fairy tale, not quite blindly but perhaps mesmerised, as in the later poems, resigned to the boredom of bad choices made, when “You fall into disaster with the dull familiarity of the snake.” The collection at the outset creates a sense of predictability, where making “bad choices” is not only inevitable but “exceptionally boring.”

 

One aspect of Kate Camp’s gift is to make the familiar strange, melding the mundane and the mythic.  A gathering of friends, ephemeral yet caught in memory, recalls the trick a friend played at the end of a game of badminton with four shuttlecocks “all at once/they flew from the racquet as magician’s doves/to the net where they hung, white in the dusk;” A poached egg at breakfast “for disappointed hopes and poached eggs/go hand in hand;” and yes, a new-fangled item, an electric car which startles the reader as much as it seems to bemuse the writer, along with the “surprisingly large swans.” And the joy of recognition in a Rembrandt “And there they are!” is not for the sublime alchemy of the masters “cross-hatched lines /of shade” or the “world of depth/of leaves and branches” that they evoke but for “The slippers of St. Jerome/like those white towelling freebies from a hotel.” In the poet’s idiosyncratic vision, the most eye-catching feature of the saint’s companion lion is his “two or three sweet whiskers.” Though in the next poem, which ventures an interpretation of the same painting, she wonders “what would stop him turning from his post/and taking Jerome in his mouth like a joint of meat…” The everyday, the familiar, may be comfortable and comforting, but it still has the power to devour you.

 

The sense of resignation that opens the book does not last. Instead, it gives way to wry musings on the uncertainties that lurk under the surface of the web of what-might-have-beens: “This would be cherry blossom time/if there were any cherry trees here/if there were any blossoms.” And the internet we readers know, the one we use to do searches and shopping, is not completely absent. It is “out there somewhere/full of abandoned carts.” A glorious image of forsaken supermarket trolleys, clattering around in cyberspace.

 

In the final poem, Antimony, the predictable and the uncertain are fused: the poet is a woman on the prow of a ship, finally rooted in the “reckoning point” of an eternal present, where she sees “everything in front of me/and everything behind me,” an  eternal present. It is a satisfying ending to the ebb and flow of memory and feeling. The tension of this simultaneous backward and forward movement is conveyed in the poet’s subtle craft: lines long and stately, interspersed with staccato phrases and rhythm; assonance, rhyme and half-rhyme an invisible scaffold, holding the spider’s web of this internet of things together in quiet, slow-burning harmony.  

 

24 May 2018

Launch Introduction by Anne Tannam – Ross Hattaway’s ‘How to Sleep With Strangers’

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When Ross asked me to launch his third poetry collection How To Sleep with Strangers  I was faced with a dilemma. His two earlier self-help books, The Gentle Art of Rotting  and Pretending to be Dead had failed to deliver on their promise to help me rot with dignity, or fake my own death.

I was reminded of that great man for all seasons, Homer Simpson who said: “Books are useless! I only ever read one book, ‘To Kill A Mockingbird,’ and it gave me absolutely no insight on how to kill mockingbirds! Sure it taught me not to judge a man by the color of his skin… but what good does that do me?”
So it was with some reluctance I agreed to read “How To Sleep With Strangers” and judge for myself if there was anything worth learning contained within its covers.

Let’s start with the cover. The lettering in bold red, announcing the title to the world. The image, from a painting by Ross’ brother Paul, abstract (or is it a mosquito?) unsettling, hinting at uncomfortable intimacies that refuse to be kept at arm’s length. On the back, further warnings from Iggy McGovern & Elizabeth Knox. “Minefield of human relations…” “…something terribly sad and shocking.” Even before opening it or reading a single poem we know this book may, in the words of Heaney “catch the heart off guard and blow it open.”

The book is dedicated to Sarah Lundberg. Many here remember Sarah and the tireless work she did within the artistic community. Her presence and absence stay with us. Her company 7Towers published 23 books in eight years, and Ross was one of those privileged to have her creative support and encouragement. She was his mentor and she was his friend. She is everywhere in the collection.

There are 44 poems in here, all very Ross-like. What do I mean by Ross-like? Well, there are puns and word play and tankas galore. Lines are typically very short, and there’s no messing about with superfluous descriptions, though he does like a bit of repetition evey now and then. But it’s always to the point. Ross always keeps to the point.

The poems cover a wide range of subjects, from a compost heap-
(‘..the endless love gifts
of peeled skin:
potato and parsnip,
carrot and banana
and apple and orange.
All the fossils of caring.’)

… to the inside of the poet’s eyes-
(‘..Sometimes I see
naked women
behind my eyelids,….
….There are many rooms
in the house of my eyelids.’)

….from an abandoned coalmine at Arigna-
(‘The best time
to go to a coalmine
is in the winter.
Just to see
how it was
to do this job
by hand
in the dark
in the cold…’)

…to speculative physics (that one’s five pages of Ross letting a knitting pun lose the run of itself. It’s a ripping yarn.)

…from shopping for poetry ingredients,
(‘..value pack clichès
…one litre pathos, sugar free’)

…to an amazing cluster or colony of tanka poems that all riff on Paua as power. A paua is a large shellfish that is very popular in NZ, both as food and as decoration. So we have “At the Paua table,” “The Paua of Love” and “The Paua and the Glory”, to name but a few. There are eight in all. Those of you now throwing your eyes up to heaven or panicking at the thought of Ross losing the pun of himself, I feel your pain, but fear not. The sequnce is quite brilliant and can handle the pun.

There are also two poems tucked into the collection that display a disturbing lack of respect for the national treasure that is WB Yeats. Tsk.Tsk.

And then there are the poems about love, life, and loss; those scary, arkward, intimate themes that demand and hold our attention, ultimately giving this collection its beating heart, its unique resonance and timbre.

(‘This is not about
mortality ¾
that’s a rational fact,
as well to fear the sky.
This is grief,
pure and clear.
I can’t put it away
and bring it out for Christmas’)

So what would Homer Simpson have made of ‘How To Sleep With Strangers’? What insight would he have learned?

Well, nothing and everything. If he were looking for tips on how to score at Copperface Jacks, he would need to head to another section of the book shop. But if he dared to see the stranger as himself, see that no matter how intimately he thinks he knows himself (“You wake up to realise/ there is someone in the bed/ who you don’t know, /no matter how long they have been there”) this book will shed light on the art of learning how to live with a self that is both familiar and strange, both intimate and distant, both grieving for what is lost, and embracing what has been given.

(‘… But something now
is calling us back,
with no need
to fear need,
no known advantage.
Too late
for regret
and too hard
to refuse.
This tumbledown communion
calling us home.’)

Thank you Ross for the privilege of launching your wonderful collection, and a huge shout out to Liz McSkeane and Turas Press. It takes courage to write a book, and it takes courage to publish one too.

I’ll leave one of my favourite poems in the collection to have the last word: “All The Things That Stay.”

 

1 Nov 2017

Review by Liz McSkeane of Eamonn Lynskey’s ‘It’s Time’

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Eamonn Lynskey (2017) It’s Time  ISBN 978-1-910669-86-0 published by Salmon Poetry, Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare. 

The title of Eamonn Lynskey’s third collection – It’s Time, from Salmon Poetry – hints at the many layers of meaning woven into this ambitious and disconcerting book. Fifty-two delicately-wrought yet muscular poems confront themes that are personal and political, an unflinching meditation on some of the challenges of contemporary life and the many, many mistakes of history repeating itself. Lynskeys ’s vision has an ethnographic quality that imbues simple objects – a stone-age knife,  objects in museum, the lustre of talismans, giving a window on to the lives of people of other times, never forgetting their everyday uses

In one sense, the phrase “It’s Time,” is commonplace, almost a cliché,  reminding us that of how little there is of it to accomplish our life’s work, whatever that may be. In the beautiful elegy “A Connaught Man’s Ramble”, the poet urges us to take stock of

          “…the narrow span

          between the spark and its extinguishing.”

But this collection offers more than a meditation – it is also a call to action in that ‘it’s time’ we did something about this, ‘this’ as environmental degradation in “Down to Africa” and “Lament,” the latter a panygeric to the lost and disappearing life of the Great Barrier Reef; or ‘this’ the horror of conflict and wars, past and present, the execution of Anne Bolyen, a Neolithic warrior probably dead in battle, the bodies of the disappeared, buried just a few decades ago, victims of the warring factions of our own times, or found in our own  the shade of mortality, obliquely – that “Thief” in the night is not just coming for your valuables…

 

More than anything, It’s Time urges us to remember the individual humanity of nameless thousands, buried in unmarked graves, remembered here (“Lists”) in the poignant detail of their daily lives.

 “They caught him on his morning round

delivering bread and left him bleeding…”

Some of the brutality is visceral, handed down through generations and questions which of us would manage to keep our hands clean, given the right circumstances “Listening to my Elders.” The “Warriors” of pre-history, the “Neandertals” pre-homo sapiens the imagined interior lives of Neandertals, the Other

                                                    “loved their kids,

and hoped for happiness. And then we came along.”

Not so different from us except, it is hinted in being less bloodthirsty and therefore now extinct. There is an unspoken question, might it be too late after all “The Canals on Mars”

                              “Might have had another chance to prove

                              we could be human and humane for once.”

But as a counterbalance which insists, with Beckett, the determination to go on,  family, the birth of a child, survival as a patient emerges from the anaesthetic to realise

          “…the universe continues to pursue

          Its great Agenda, all creation moving…”

 There is wonder in the fact of the “Concerning the Concept of the Unoverse as an Accident Waiting to Happen” – seriously, what are the chances? There is nature on a spring day in the suburbs, poetry wrought from dead leaves and wheelie where the title poem dazzles

“There’s something sharp

about the sunlight blinds the eye this morning”

A small grammatical quirk that may bring some readers up short, the omission of the relative pronoun, this takes a bit of getting used to but once accustomed to it, gives a stately tone to the skilfully paced rhythm that entwines with imagery to create skilful poetic coherence. And hovering over it all, the shadow of mortality – that “Thief” in the night isn’t after your valuables…                      

 

 

Lynskey is at his best when vignettes of shared humanity are sketched, framed by a photograph or a window on to…allows readers the space and freedom to make connections, draw their own conclusions. Most of the time.  Very occasionally the poem succumbs to the temptation to draw conclusions on our behalf – This Photograph, My Song is Simple, overexplain meaning, slip into didacticism.

But these lapses are few. It is a book that disconcerts, not least in tenderness not only for our neighbour, but for the Other, such as

          “two English boys who disembark

To angry streets at Eastertime”

 

It’s Time like the photographer Catching a moment in time – the photographer on O’Connell St in 1960s snapped passers-by

imbued with great passion and compassion that smoulders, slow-burning, in the mind of the reader long after the “Final Notice” has been given.