Iain Galbraith The Slow Evolution of a Poem into Translation
Iain Galbraith
The Slow Evolution of a Poem in Translation
A short while ago I attended the setting of a friend’s gravestone at a Berlin cemetery. My contribution to the ceremony of music and memoirs was to read out Edwin Morgan’s ‘Clydegrad’, from his Sonnets from Scotland. It was a fine autumnal Friday afternoon, accents of vermilion, russet and sunny lemon barely flickering in the branches above the little group who had gathered in expectant remembrance around the year-old grave. The headstone was a slab of Caithness flag, a durable, fine-grained Middle Devonian siltstone, laid down some 370 million years ago. I had expected a rough dark grey, but on this stone saw instead a pattern of fawn silt nodules or algal stromatolites on a mud-green ground, with – where the heart might be – an ochre or ferrous stain.
Caithness flagstone paves Glasgow’s streets, and Morgan’s sonnet, also set in Glasgow, contains the line: ‘The long broad streets shone strongly after rain’. The stone is cut from a sedimentary formation, and palaeontologists, with a far-sighted view of our early ancestry, have been known to persuade the City Council to re-excavate flags that host the fossils of Devonian fish. With the deceased, a lovely man called Martin Chalmers, I share ‘Clydegrad’ as a place of birth, and while reading the poem I felt an urge to draw our little party more closely around the stone, to follow the words down to the shared ground of Morgan’s streets – as Martin himself, a literary translator and historian by training, might have done.
In finding the place where paving stones really do shine after rain, translators often need to be historians or archaeologists or palaeontologists. They must be aficionados of bric-à-brac and tiny animals, too, of mirrors, dyes and tadpoles, if only for a day. It is often said that a good translation will give you a particularly close reading, but if that is so, then the translation must go beyond the constraints of vocabulary equivalence, seeking to re-enact or re-textualize the sensations and associations that are part and pattern of the reading experience. The shape gradually inscribed by the emerging translation will be aware of itself as a reader’s construct, a topology of signalling nodes, sensory puzzlers like the stromatolites on the surface of a flagstone.
The translation brings about a moment of connectivity that has been long in the making, leading everything to conjunction in a space where ‘the very ground seems on fire with tongues of running time’ (Edwin Morgan, ‘The Welcome’). No word can afford to relax, except as enacted relaxation; each earns its place by association alone, and the whole becomes more than its sum of tiny decisions. Moving again and again through the complex couplings activated by rhyme and stress and sound pattern, the translator writes his or her reading experience into the marrow of the rising text.
In memory of Martin
11 November 1948 – 22 October 2014
Stone Setting on October 30, 2015
Photo (c) Yves Noir
(Cosmo)politan
On October 21, the day before Martin died, the weather turned. After days of still, warm sunshine a cool wind rose, and the yard was filled with the rainlike rustle and whisper of falling leaves. Dusk fell, and rain set in. Katharina came to visit, as so often during the most difficult times of Martin’s illness. Martin wanted to listen to music, Katharina suggested Satie, played by the accordeonist Teodore Anzellotti. We listened, we talked. About music, about Scotland. The last book Martin had read – with mixed feelings – was And the Land Lay Still, by James Robertson. Philip came, as almost every day, to see if he could help. In his weakness Martin kept sliding down the pillows and cushions which were meant to prop him up, and Philip assembled an improvised support from spare shelf boards and a blanket. Martin’s feet would come up against it and he wouldn’t slide any further. Martin nodded, approved: success. It was dark now, there was wind and rain outside. We lit some candles as Martin liked it, and we had tea and cake. Martin didn’t want to eat. Leaning against his pillows, he looked so frail. Then he said slowly: “Last night when I couldn’t sleep, I was thinking of the next piece I want to write.” For the first time in months Martin talked of an intention, a plan. Of something in the future. A sudden, incongruous spark of hope. I offered to write down what he dictated, now, anytime. “No, no, I can’t work like that”, Martin said. “The title will be… Cosmopolitan…” His voice trailed off as he raised his hands, moving them in semi circles up and down. He was looking for a word he had forgotten. Then he remembered: “Brackets. In brackets: Cosmo, and then – politan: (Cosmo)-politan.”
Later in the evening, I read to Martin. We were half way through Kim by Kipling. Martin sometimes interrupted me to talk about things we had seen in India three years before, or to explain some detail of which he knew I wouldn’t understand it for lack of historical knowledge. I read for almost an hour, then Martin wanted to sleep. He asked me to stay in the room. I sat with Martin while he was falling asleep. It was quiet, almost peaceful, just the sound of wind and rain.
Photo (c) Yves Noir
From “Wreaths”, Martin’s collection of urban prose:
Dumbarton Road
The route the no 16 bus took to Temple was quite the long way round. And on Saturdays in autumn or winter, when we came back from town in the late afternoon or early evening, teatime or a little later, it was already dark, or as good as. After Argyll St., the 16 bus continued down Dumbarton Rd., a long, long street of tenements and shops, that began at the Kelvin Hall and ran, for long stretches without a bend or a curve, through Partick, Whiteinch, Scotstoun, Garscadden and Yoker, by which point the street numbers had passed 1000, to Clydebank, where it became the Glasgow Rd., before turning into Dumbarton Rd. again at Singer, where the big sewing machine factory used to be and where my mother had her first job after coming to Glasgow, and then on through Dalmuir. Eventually, below the Old Kilpatrick Hills, where the River Clyde is already broadening into the Firth of Clyde, it joined the Great Western Rd., which would indeed, after several more name changes, take one on to Dumbarton .
All that distance, running east to west, or more precisely, south east to north west, the road was parallel to and a few hundred yards from the river, which in those days was lined by shipyards, wharves, warehouses and silos. The no 16 bus, however, didn’t follow the river all the way to Clydebank, but turned north at Whiteinch, past Victoria Park, through the respectable inner suburbs, before reaching Anniesland and Temple. And along Dumbarton Rd. as far as Whiteinch, and beyond it, there were not only shops on the ground floor of the tenements – grocers, hairdressers, newsagents, haberdashers, drapers, as well as a library (Partick), dance halls and cinemas – there were pubs.
I remember that there were more pubs on the south side of Dumbarton Rd. than on the north side, but that may be because on those evenings when we came back from town, the bus went along the south side and I always liked to sit next to the window, downstairs, looking out, with my mother or grandmother beside me, hoping that the bus would not fill up, because then my mother would whisper to me to stand up and offer my seat to the lady or the gentleman. Or maybe it was so, because the southern, left-hand side of the road was closer to the poorer streets leading down to the docks and shipyards and the south side was nearer for the workers when they came off their shifts. The pubs had names like The Partick Tavern, the Lismore, the Victory, the Hayburn Vaults (at the corner of Hayburn St.), the Ettrick, the Stirling Castle. There was one every few yards, it seemed to me, and as I sat on the pavement side of the bus, which was slowly moving from stop to traffic lights to stop, the pub doors would open, swing open, a customer would enter or leave. And perhaps I was already at the High School and wearing the belted brown gaberdine raincoat and the two-tone brown cap with the school badge at the front, which could only be bought at the school office and then had to be sewn on, consisting of the arms of the City of Glasgow together with the school motto sursum semper – ever upwards.
The doors of the pub bars opened directly onto the street, the entrances to the lounges where ladies were allowed to sit, though even then often only if ‘accompanied’, were more secluded. And when a door opened or swung open and shut, the light shone out of the pub on the damp or wet slippery pavement, the damp or wet cobble stones of the road, the gleaming metal of the tram lines. And, briefly, framed by the door, sometimes interrupted by the swinging of the door leaf, I would see the bar itself, with its brass footrail (no carpets, dark scrubbed floorboards). And along the bar, it was early evening, early Saturday evening and there was a palpable anticipation, of meeting friends, or at least getting into a conversation, of going on to the dance hall or to the pictures and then the dance hall, a row of men, each with a glass, or two glasses, a larger and a small one, in front of him, looking straight ahead, one foot on the rail, or reading the evening paper, the pink or green Saturday sports edition, the City Final (?), of the Evening Times or the Evening Citizen, the football results already printed, which had been bought on the way and folded or rolled up in a jacket or coat pocket.
Each man, so it seemed to me, at a distance from his neighbours and somehow mysterious and admirable in his self-contained manhood. And then the door shut again, stopped swinging to and fro, cutting off the light, and red changed to amber then green and the bus moved forward.
I saw something similar decades later and that again is decades ago now, in Wattenscheid in the Ruhr, a few years before the last coal mines and iron and steel works in the city centres were shut down. I had got on the single decker tram in front of Bochum railway station, and now the tram was making its way down another of those long main roads that run through 19th century industrial towns and cities, joining what had once been rural villages and pit villages with an endless double row of buildings and shops. The frontages of the tenements and houses were not as uniform as those along Dumbarton Rd. had been. Here there were three and four storey buildings, old cottages, flat roofed workshops, but it was night or dark at any rate, evening, and the tram was continually starting and stopping before shoogling and rocking along at speed again. And every so often there was a bar, a pub, and this time it was summer and the bar doors were simply left open, and men stood at the bar, each man for himself, staring ahead and drinking or smoking or reading the newspaper or involved in one of those conversations which men sitting or standing at a bar conduct, each at a distance from the others, by way of the barmaid or landlord, without looking to right or left.
Walking with Opa in the night, by Joey, September 2015
The Stone
Martin is buried in the soft soil of Berlin. Berlin was the home of Martin’s choice, and he always liked to comment on this band of sandy soil with its lakes and pine forests, stretching from west of Berlin to the home of his maternal family in eastern Poland (“Ostpreußen”), and beyond. Throughout the years of his illness, though, Scotland, and especially Glasgow, were increasingly on his mind.Martin’s grave in Berlin-Schöneberg would need a headstone from the place where he grew up. It took me a long time to find someone who would help. Stone from the area around Glasgow is too soft for the purpose, I learned. But Glasgow streets are paved with stone from Caithness, and it was a slab of Caithness stone in a yard in Balfron in the Campsie Fells which was waiting to be cut into a headstone for Martin. I went to look at it, together with Martin’s cousins Elspeth and Iain, on a rainy, windy day at the end of July.
It was the first thing that felt right since Martin’s death: Going to Glasgow, meeting the family Martin had not been allowed to be part of since childhood, driving out to Balfron with Elspeth and Iain, choosing the stone in their company, and commissioning it from Callum Gray who embraced the project with more care, empathy and commitment than I could have ever imagined.
The (cosmo)politan stone marks an end, but also a beginning: Getting to know Martin’s long lost paternal family. Editing Martin’s body of writings, preparing texts for publication. Martin’s first book.
The second year.
Iain Galbraith reading:
Edwin Morgan
Clydegrad
It was so fine we lingered there for hours.
The long broad streets shone strongly after rain.
Sunset blinded the tremble of the crane
we watched from, dazed the heliport towers.
The mile-high buildings flashed, flushed, greyed, went dark,
greyed, flushed, flashed, chameleons under flak
of cloud and sun. The last far-thunder sack
ripped and spilled its grumble. Ziggurat-stark,
a power-house reflected in the lead
of the old twilight river leapt alive
lit up at every window, and a boat
of students rowed past, slid from black to red
into the blaze. But where will they arrive
with all, boat, city, earth, like them, afloat?
Diese Passage erinnert mich sehr an das Memoir von Richard Hoggart, dem Begründer des CCCS, an den Frauenhaushalt, in dem er aufgewachsen ist, und in dem auch ich groß geworden bin. Und sie erinnert mich an Hoggarts fast schon zorniger Erwiderung auf den häufig vorgetragenen Anwurf, er habe eine nostalgische Weltsicht: „Some intellectuals“, so Hoggart, „find it hard to take praise of good feeling, the celebration of where some people have got things emotionally right – and that when they meet this almost instinctively reach for the label ‚sentimental’“. Martin und ich war nicht nur im herkömmlichen Sinne befreundet, wir hatten auch viel in common, und dazu gehörte nicht zuletzt die Erfahrung, in einem Frauenhaushalt groß geworden zu sein. Wir waren, um es einmal betont altmodisch auszudrücken, „seelenverwandt“ und wir hatten eine gemeinsame Seelenlandschaft, das Ruhrgebiet, die Landschaft der Schwerindustrie und des Bergbaus. Was uns daran anzog, war wohl nicht zuletzt die Haltung der Menschen, ihr Ethos, wie ich es einmal ein wenig großspurig genannt habe, nämlich kein Gedöns von sich zu machen, nicht rumzutönen, wie gesagt wird, sich aufspielen, wie es im Thesaurus heißt, sich aufplustern und sich wie der große Zampano aufzuführen. Es war eine Welt, und man muss heute wohl in der Vergangenheitsform sprechen, in der zählte, was man tat, nicht was man sagte. Das hatte natürlich seine eigenen ideologischen Fallstricke, die exemplarisch im Direktor zur Geltung kamen, der deswegen von der Belegschaft geschätzt wurde, weil er zupacken konnte.
Martin war alles andere als ein Töner, was ihn in unserer Selbstdarstellungsgesellschaft wohl das eine oder andere Mal um die verdiente Anerkennung brachte. Wer, außer seinen Freunden, wusste schon, welch exzellenter Berlin-Kenner Martin war? Martin hat sein Wissen gerne geteilt, zum Beispiel mit mir, der ich manchmal fassungslos dastand, wenn er sein Füllhorn über mich ausschüttete. Martin war freigiebig und auch das hatte er mit dem alten Ruhrgebietsethos gemein. Helfen wir mit, dass er seine Anerkennung auch in der Öffentlichkeit findet.