And the Winners Are ...

Mick Imlah, Kathryn Simmonds and Don Paterson. No real surprise on the main Forward prize and possibly not an enormous surprise on the best poem prize, but Kathyrn Simmonds's win in the best first collection category seems to have been unexpected. To be honest, I can't really comment, not having read any of the winners (for the nth year running!), so I'll leave the commenting to my fellow poetry bloggers. So far, of those I follow, Rob A Mackenzie and Matt Merritt (who was at the award ceremony and has a poem in the Forward anthology), Colin Will and Todd Swift have commented. As others pitch in, I'll update this post and continue to extend the list. There will probably be some discussion of the merits/demerits of the choices on this Poets on Fire thread.

What is Scottish Poetry?

Rob Mackenzie has gone and got himself interviewed by Yang-May Ooi of FusionView. Part 1 of the piece is here. I was intrigued by the two following questions and answers:

Is being Scottish a strong part of your identity? What does being Scottish mean to you?

I’m not particularly nationalistic, until someone criticises Scotland. I am Scottish and Im sure thats shaped me in all kinds of indefinable ways. Its not something Ive explored all that much. Maybe I should. That might well be a future project.

Is your poetry Scottish poetry? (as opposed to English poetry/ Welsh poetry or just plain old “poetry”)

I feel its just plain old poetry. I dont write in Scots or Gaelic and while I've written a few poems about Scottish identity, its not a theme Ive majored on. I know some of my poet-colleagues here are far more interested in doing this than I am and are influenced mainly by other Scottish poets. I like several Scottish poets John Burnside, Edwin Morgan, Norman MacCaig, Don Paterson, Roddy Lumsden they are excellent writers. But my influences come from all over Rilke (Germany), Roy Fisher (England), Simic (USA), Miroslav Holub (Czech Republic), and many others.

One wonders, first of all, what exactly the second question means. It's a fair question in it's own way, but how does one define "Scottish poetry" aside from the obvious and banal poetry written in Scotland and/or by Scots? More to the point, what does Yang-May Ooi have in mind when she asks the question and what concept does it evoke in Rob's mind as he answers it?

However, what caught my eye most was the discussion of influence. Whether or not this his intention, there is an implication in the way Rob phrases his reply to the second of those questions that his international set of influences makes him a less Scottish poet than those who "are influenced mainly by other Scottish poets". It's an implication I'd contest. There is and long has been an internationalist bent to Scottish thought and culture. By that account, those whose influences are more narrowly Scottish could actually be regarded as less Scottish than Rob with his literary internationalism.

I have to say, I'd love him to name names: not only the names of the poets whose influences are "mainly Scottish" but of the poets who influence them. It would be fascinating to see how many of those Scottish influences are good Scots internationalists. After all, to pick two of the prominent Scottish poets Rob mentions, Edwin Morgan is certainly international in outlook--witness his volume of Collected Translations, for example--and John Burnside not only looks considerably to American writers and musicians but is interested in Scandinavia.

Perhaps Rob might comment ... Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to reading the second half of the interview.

Temples in our Hearing

Rilke has been a significant figure for me for a while, although there's much of his work I've yet to read. When I lived in Berlin in the early 1990s, a friend gave me his collected poems in German for Chirstmas. The same friend later gave me the Letters to a Young Poet (in English, although I got my hands on a secondhand German edition a few years after that) and, last Christmas, sent me a CD of the Sonnette an Orpheus. So I was delighted to see a "Responding to Rilke" event on the Scottish Poetry Library events programme for Wednesday past.

The SPL's mezzanine floor was pretty packed to hear Don Paterson deliver excerpts from his new book Orpheus (an English version--i.e., not a straight translation--of the Sonnette an Orpheus) and Jo Shapcott read from Tender Taxes, her 2002 collection of responses to and versions of some of Rilke's poems in French. Quite a reading. The narcotic spirit of Rilke was firmly present in Paterson's versions. To judge by the reading, he has managed find a voice that is distinctly his but still recognisably Rilke in a convincing contemporary English. I'm looking forward tremendously to sitting down and digesting the originals and the new version side by side.

In Shapcott's work, the spirit of Rilke was somewhat less direct. I remember hearing her read some of the work in Tender Taxes about eight or nine ago. My French not being much good, I can't really comment on Shapcott's poems as responses and versions, but Tender Taxes looks and sounds like an strong and stimulating book. She calls it "a reader's book", that is, a continuation of the conversation she has with Rilke as a reader of his French poetry.

Some people get prissy about translating v versioning. Personally, I'm quite relaxed about it. Like Don Paterson, I feel both can be legitimate and illuminating exercises. In reality, there are and can be few if any one-to-one correspondences in the translation of poetry, even between closely related languages. This means that a translation is always a version to some extent. The most important factor is whether the translation/version works as a poem in the target language. This is surely part of the reason why each generation revisits great texts of other languages that have already been translated time and again.

After the reading, I wound up in the pub with some folk from the MLitt in creative writing at St Andrews. Ended up missing the train I'd intended to catch, and the next one. It was worth it though.