Sunday 13 November 2011

Simon Turner - Notes on Alice Oswald's Memorial

Pound's concept of translation is often seen as 'idiosyncratic' (this on the back of having picked up a copy of his collected translations in a charity shop, and entering into a conversation with the volunteer there regarding Ez's wayward approach to the original text), somehow flying in the face of accepted modes of translation.  My own feeling: that EP is drawing attention to the fact that every translation is making it new, is a brand new construct in the target language, which closely resembles the poem being translated, but is distinct from it.  Pound isn't destroying or blowing razzies at the discipline of translation: he's making it more honest, more self-aware.

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In the absence of a fully theorised corpus of 'civilian war poetry', poets at home who want to write about conflict have for the most part been forced into two modes of writing.  On the one hand is protest poetry, following in the tradition of Sassoon's satiric assaults on military hierarchy and the evasions of jargon; one the other, there's what we might call the Owen-ite tradition, which concerns itself less with anger than with the 'pity of war', transforming Owen's own startling assertion of his choice of subject matter into cliche in the process.  Case in point: yesterday's poem in the Guardian by our current laureate went for the Owen mode, seemingly thinking it enough to enumerate the received iconography of the trenches, clumsily welding military iconography onto the landscape (the moon is 'like a medal', naturally; frost 'winks' on the barbed wire like 'strange tinsel' - it's a poem about Christmas, remember?), and falling back on that hoary old cliche, the Christmas football match.  The poem doesn't need to do any work: all the effort's been achieved by decades of popular memory.  For all the good it does, 'The Christmas Truce' might as well be a series of boxes for the reader to tick: Barbed wire?  Check.  Tommy and Fritz?  Check.  Trenches?  Check.  Rats?  Check.  Mud?  Check.  Soldier-poets?  Check. 

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Memorial begins with a list of names: the dead of the Iliad.  It's reminiscent of Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington - austere black stone etched with the names of the Americans killed during that conflict - and doesn't feel like a reduction of the Iliad, but rather a concentration.  Oswald is forcing the poem to speak across centuries: the numbering and naming of the war-dead is as vital an act of public memorial and mourning now as it was 100, 500, 3000 years ago. 

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What characterises much anti-war protest poetry by non-combatants is an absence of witness.  The moral and aesthetic weight of the work of Sassoon and Owen, Douglas and Lewis, derives from the fact that they were witnesses to the events they describe and respond to.  John Stallworthy's brilliant 'Poem about Poems About Vietnam' dissects this problem ruthlessly, creating opposition between those poets, like Owen, whose acts of witness were achieved at a high price, and home front poets content to derive their opinions from newspaper reports on the conflicts they decry.  But in the process of lambasting the very concept of a war poetry not based on first hand experience, Stallworthy suggests that such a thing might be possible: rather than the simple minded paltitudes of protest poetry, an ethicaly and aesthetically engaged civilian war poetry might resemble Stallworthy's own poem - a poem engaged not with the actualities of frontline combat (such an engagement would be fraudulent according to the terms of Stallworthy's own argument), but with the moral and ethical questions raised by war poetry's confrontation with historical violence.  The trench lyricist might ask: what happened?  The homefront poet confronting the same topic might ask: what is the correct response?  What forms of language are appropriate? 

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Memorial differes from previous poems that have used Homer's poetry as a jumping off point - Logue's War Music and Simon Armitage's version of the Odyssey spring to mind - because its act of reduction is formal rather than narrative.  Logue strips the Iliad down to brass tacks to tell the story of Achilles' rage more readily, whilst Armitage recasts Homer in his own blokey idiom, chopping two thirds of the tale in the process.  Oswald is as ruthless in her editing, but her interests lie elsewhere: her intention, it seems to me, is to make the poem more contemporary by, paradoxically, stripping it of all but the aspects of Homer's work that precede Homer.  Writes Oswald in her preface: "This version . . . takes away its narrative, as you might lift the roof off a church in order to remember what you're worshipping.  What's left is a bipolar poem made of similes and short biographies of soldiers".  Oswald sees these two poles of the poem as deriving from distinct sources: the pastoral lyric and the formal lament, both with their roots in the oral tradition.  (Tellingly, Oswald has also released a CD of herself reading the entirety of Memorial, suggesting the poem is as much a vocal as a printed object.)  The poem itself is startling, relentless in its close focus on violence and death, like the first fifteen minutes of Saving Private Ryan spread across 80 pages.  With the narrative gone, the function of the Homeric simile - where the action pauses momentarily and we are whisked away from the combat zone into the realm of the natural world - becomes doubly important: there'd otherwise be no breathing room at all.  Oswald seems to have been aware of this, with the similes in many instances being repeated, like the chorus of a song.  The reader is literally being forced to slow down for just a moment before rushing back headlong into the afray.  It's very effective, no more so than at the poem's conclusion, which provides an epilogue of disembodied similes that might be read as collective elegies for the war dead (the similes in the body of the poem emphasise singularity; here, collectivity seems the dominant theme), or, more troublingly, images suggesting the inherent tendency of nature towards violence.  There's no easy comfort here; we're a long way from Duffy's platitudes here.                              

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