HEARING EYE Publications

 

PLEASURES AND PAINS
Poet for Poet by Richard McKane. Hearing Eye, Box 1, 99 Torriano Avenue, London, NW5 2RX. 223pp; £10.99

In his preface to this splendid collection, Richard McKane states his mission:

"I, as a poet, responded to some of the poets with my poems; I, as a poet and translator, wanted to honour the poets with my translations".

At the risk of being too personally delighted, much to my immediate and particular pleasure I discovered that among those honoured is Titian Tabidze, a correspondent in Pasternak's justifiably famous Letters to Georgian Friends and whose grave I sought in Tbilisi many years ago on the basis alone of the warmth of Pasternak's letters to him, as his poetry had not been translated into English.

In Poet for Poet, Richard McKane has brought that long wait to an end by enterprisingly including his translation from the Russian of Boris Pasternak's translation of the Georgian of Tabidze's "I don't write poetry". The poem continues:

... It writes me a long story
and life walks hand in hand with it
What is poetry? An avalanche of snow, that flakes down
and then moves off to die
and buries alive. That's what poetry is.

Worth waiting for, like any miracle. Although Richard McKane readily bears witness to that thought, he knows how to build on the experience, too: "For me, dead poets can be as alive as living poets. In a sense translating is giving them a new life in another language".

This is especially true of his translation - which is nothing less than a rehabilitation - of the utterly neglected 20th century Russian Poet Leonid Aranzon, who seems to exist where the worlds of Rilke and Verlaine might meet. Aranzon was only 31 when he died (suicide seems a possibility) in 1970 since when the silence has been shattering until the publication of twelve of his poems in this volume (serving as an appetizer for the just published - in Russia, the USA and Britain - of Death of a Butterfly, a big bilingual book translated by Richard McKane of all of Aranzon's poems which have been traced). Unfairly, I must choose a brief example of this poet's wonderful skills and sensitivities in this, one of Aranzon's last poems:

Oh my god, how beautiful it all is!
Every time, as never before.
There is no break in the beauty.
Shall I turn away? But where to?

The trembling wind is cool
because it comes off the river.
There's no world behind -
Everything is before me!

Looking through the Russian poets Richard McKane has included in this book (from Pushkin to Sedakova), the rare delicacy of the poems of Arseny Tarkovsky (the father of the film-maker Tarkovsky) is beautifully preserved:

I dreamed this dream and I still dream of it
and I will dream of it sometime again.
Everything repeats itself and everything will be reincarnated,
and my dreams will be your dreams.

In addition there are samples of Richard McKane's now salutary translations of Akhmatova and Mandelstam, with his selection of Akhmatova particularly intriguing, showing publicly - for the first time anywhere in my view - the secret dedication of her poems to Isaiah Berlin:

There the miracle of our meeting
shone and sang,
I did not want to go back
to anywhere from there.
Putting happiness before duty
was my bitter joy.
I talked with someone I shouldn't have.
I talked for a long time.
Let passions which demand an answer
choke those who are in love,
but we, my darling, are just souls
at the edge of the earth.

The neglected Nikolay Gumilov (Akhmatova's first husband and like her a leading member of the Acmeist school of poets) is given encouraging space commensurate with his importance in the development of modern Russian poetry. This did not prevent him from being shot by the state, however:

I came back
after so many years,
but I am an exile
and they are watching me.

Indeed, I should not lose sight of the fact that Poet for Poet has a foreword by Maris Fahri, chair of the international PEN Writers in Prison Committee, who writes: "Almost all [Richard McKane's] poems for poets are dedicated to poets, who, in their efforts to tell us that we can make our world better, have suffered untold agonies, even death".  One such was the magnificent Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, whose twelve years in prison for "incitement to Communism" resulted in some of the greatest poems written this century, including several numbingly touching poems to his wife Piraye written over consecutive days "between 9 and 10 at nights in prison":

What is she doing now, at this moment, right now?
Is she at home, or out working,
resting, or on her feet?
She might be lifting her arm,
O, my rose, that movement of your white, firm wrist
strips you so naked...

Which is not to forget Richard McKane's own poems, which get a fair showing, too. His dedications read like a very special Who's Who of the talented and memorable - but at a cost:

(from Nizametdin Akhmetov who wrote most of his poems in prison)

The pain, intense, solid for twenty years-
fifteen in camps, five in psychiatric hospital:
beatings, injections, pills sear
body, mind and soul...

...Your poems survive - you survive
to bring humanness into our lives,

The pleasure and pain of this anthology provide a priceless addition to the sum total of our understanding: and it is the very special quality of Richard McKane's talents which have made it possible.

May Poet for Poet never go out of print.

GEOFFREY GODBERT

 

INTERPRETER & POET

Richard McKane, poet, translator and author of the recently published Poet for Poet (published by Hearing Eye and reviewed below) is also on of the Medical Foudation's interpreters. Here he talks about his work both for the Foundation and as a poet.

I've been an interpreter at the Foundation since 1988, Turkish and Russian are my main interpreting and translating languages. In the '70s I worked with The Campaign Against Psychiatric Abuse, so I wasn't completely novice to the idea of torture. This, along with poetry, turned me towards the Foundation.

For me, translating poetry, especially Human Rights poetry, and interpreting, go hand in hand, giving a voice to feelings which may have been hidden for years. With the former one's giving a voice to a poet, who may even be dead, and you're making it live; with the latter your giving a voice, not only to the client but also to the doctor, caseworker or therapist. The poets have, themselves, given a voice to thousands and thousands of people. They have often been through similar deprivation, similar prison terms, similar justified fear of authority and justified fear of persecution.

"translating poetry, especially Human Rights poetry, and interpreting, go hand in hand, giving a voice to feelings which may have been hidden for years"

The people that come to us are the lucky ones, given that the main result of torture is death. They have been able to come here, deeply incapacitated, with psyches tormented to the extent that the psychological effects a re like that of a breakdown or depression. Of course the origins are very different, and so the treatment is usually different. If you or I get a headache, or a migraine, that's one thing, it may be stress induced. However, if you've been beaten heavily over the head by truncheons that's another origin for the headache and a vile origin, but an origin that you can work with. Therapy is one of the answers and its done with interpreters who are culturally able to cross the bridge, so to speak, between the culture of the client and that of the practitioner.

Richard McKane's latest book, Poet for Poet (Hearing Eye) is reviewed here by Rachel Campbell Johnston, Leader Writer for The Times

As I follow the rat-runs of a daily routine through London, one of the incidental things I always notice along the way is what books people are reading - at the bus stop, on the tube, in the queue for the post office counter. So I was unsurprised when one morning I opened a parcel and found a copy of Richard McKane's Poet for Poet inside. I recognised it. I had seen its bright yellow-dust jacket three times before, bobbing like a daffodil through dull February streets.

A book needs no better review than the fact that it is being read. Poet for Poet is not one of those cliquey collections written for insiders. It is a broad generous choice of work which draws out-siders in, folding them among the imaginations of writers and dreamers, unfurling emotions and memories and moods.

Richard McKane, who works as an interpreter at the Medical Foundation, brings his own verse, like a gift to his fellow writers. He pays homage to those he has made his friends, from the Russian Boris Pasternak, long since dead, to Ruth Padel, very much alive and kicking in London. Through sensitive translations, he introduces readers to those they might never otherwise have met, to the Turks and Russians whose language and culture McKane knows so well, to the rarer cadences of Uzbek, Azeri and Czech.

This collection is inclusive, multicultural, buzzing. And yet what most impresses is something quieter and more still. It is the voice of the individual, speaking at its most secret and most sad.

 

To order this book by post, please send your name address and postcode, including payment, to: Hearing Eye, Box 1, 99 Torriano Avenue, London, England NW5 2RX. Price is inclusive of postage and packing when ordered direct from Hearing Eye. 224pp A5 format. £10.99 (plus p&p). ISBN 1 870841 57 3

 

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