From the diary of a writer-publisher: 27

16 January 2024

Friedrich Hölderlin, c. 1792, by Franz Carl Hiemer

I translated a few poems as a teenager and student (Rilke, Brecht, Hölderlin, Pushkin, Tiutchev, Mayakovsky, Yevtushenko, Brodsky), but bothered to see only a couple published. The fact was, I didn’t take verse translation very seriously. I had no desire to translate a series, or all, of a poet’s works. It was a purely experimental activity: I was seized by certain poems and felt an unstoppable urge to ‘write them in my own language’, learning a lot about metre, rhyme, register etc in the process. The original poem was the thing, not the occupation of translating poetry. Gradually the whole activity lapsed. I even came to believe no poem could be adequately created in another language, and that Henry Vaughan was right when he wrote: ‘Those that lack the genius of verse, fall to translating.’

O fallacem hominum spem! From time to time in the last eight years or so, the opening lines of a poem written by Hölderlin in his ‘Madness’ (1807-43) have spoken themselves over in my mind and I’ve gone to the whole poem and read it. There’s nothing particularly strange about this, as I take lots of poets down off my shelves and dip into them, nearly every day. This poem, however, is written by Hölderlin as though it is his lover ‘Diotima’ (Susette Gontard) speaking. It is ‘voiced’, as they say these days, for Susette, who had died at least five years earlier. She is speaking from a kind of Platonic paradise and breaks off in line 3 of verse 13. Very weirdly, I was reading the poem a few months ago when I suddenly ‘heard’ what Susette was going on to say to Hölderlin, and completed the poem (in German, and it fitted the Alcaic metre). This has never happened to me before.

So now the poem, and Susette’s voice, have taken me over and I am ‘translating’ it; writing it in English. The Alcaic (i.e. classical Greek) metre, which Hölderlin was very fond of, isn’t easy and produces weird vocal bendings in English, but that goes very well with the ethereal beauty of the poem, its leaps of syntax, sense and (some might say) sanity. The first two verses came more or less straight out in English, the rest are proceeding at about one every four days… I’m sorry I can’t give a sample, but WordPress finds it too difficult to produce the layout that is necessary to present Hölderlin’s Alcaic stanzas correctly.

I never remotely expected to be translating this poem — or any others for that matter. After working on it a few days, I begin to feel that what draws me to the challenge is that the whole poem is a tender monologue addressed to Hölderlin by someone dead, it is a supremely convincing female voice (presumably echoing how he knew Susette spoke), but the whole thing seems a dialogue between them, and yet was written by one person, Hölderlin himself — in other words there are, as it were, two utterances occupying the same space. That, I see now, is what Susette’s final words, that just came to me in German, are trying to tell him: that she may be ‘dead’ but they live together in the logosphere (Äther der Worte). I will post an image of my translation at some point…if I complete it!

20 January
Lieutenant-General Jürgen-Joachim von Sandrart, the German commander of NATO’s Multinational Corps Northeast, i.e. guarding Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, has given a long interview about the risk of Russia swiftly occupying these countries ‘a few years after a break in the fighting for Ukraine’ (today’s Times, p. 38). In my view, this could happen either after a ‘successful’ (for Putin) conclusion in Ukraine or an ‘unsuccessful’ one, as in the latter case a Blitzkrieg annexation of the Baltic states could be the price for Putin staying in power. Two years ago, I suggested NATO should always have been ready to deter an invasion of Ukraine by positioning a seriously threatening force in the Suwalki Gap (leading to the Baltic states between Russian Kaliningrad and Belarus) and another in Poland opposite Brest in Belarus. Horrifyingly, General von Sandrart confirms that NATO still is not coordinated enough to do this at the critical Suwalki Gap.

One of the most interesting parts of his interview, though, was when he said:

There is a growing realisation that deterring an attack on NATO soil is not just a job for soldiers, but a task for the whole of society. It’s not a thing we can outsource to the armed forces or the military so that the rest of society can sit back and say ‘they’re already on the case’. Quite the contrary. How resilient are our societies? Are we prepared to fight? I think we need to accept in our societies that we are fighting for our right to argue with each other.

He is absolutely right. Most people in Britain are mentally not remotely prepared for such a war. It reminds me of Churchill after the Munich Agreement coming out on the night streets of London seething with people enjoying themselves, and saying: ‘Those poor people! They little know what they will have to face.’

23 January
We have been on two long train journeys. I had forgotten how maddening the constantly repeated security message is: If you see something that doesn’t look right, speak to staff or text British Transport Police on 61016. We’ll sort it. See it, say it, sorted. The last eight words fall again and again like ball-peen hammer blows on your head. Slowly it dawns that it is effective because it is so maddening and the voice so in yer ear. The only problem is, the speaker does not dentalise the d in the last word, he glottalises it, and he thins the preceding e sound to a dull i, so that the word sounds like an imperative: See it, say it, sorti[t]. In other words, the message seems to be concluding with ‘sort it yourself’ — which is not what we want to hear, and the very opposite of the message’s intended meaning, I would have thought.

In 2019 and 2021 Hexham in Northumberland was voted on Rightmove the happiest place to live in Britain. Having just visited it, I can actually believe this. Everyone whom we had anything to do with was nice, polite, welcoming, their own person, unstressed and unintrusively conversive. Such a contrast, I felt, to the earnest ideological self-consciousness of Cambridge’s chattering classes. Perhaps it has something to do with Hexham’s smallness (about 13,000 people), the presence of deep history, its proximity to the rural way of life. The people somehow felt all at ease with it, and that was catching.

This calm sense was palpable in the Abbey, founded by St Wilfrid in 674; as present wandering around it and being helped by volunteers as at an evening Eucharist with about twenty in the congregation. The Abbey contains artefacts from the whole range of its history — and earlier. This is an image of the Flavinus Stone, nearly two thousand years old, which you see as you go in, before (I seem to recall) any Christian imagery:

Click the image to enlarge.

It’s a memorial nearly nine feet high to a Roman Standard bearer, with the inscription To the Venerated Departed: Here Lies Flavinus A Horse Rider of the Cavalry Regiment of Petriana Standard Bearer of the Troop of Candidus Aged 25, of 7 Years’ Service. Probably it had been used by St Wilfrid’s builders as part of the foundations. I won’t present the arithmetic, but Flavinus could have been born within a decade of Christ’s crucifixion. It was somehow very moving to see this young man commemorated — as it were included — in a great church of the Christian era.

30 January
With bitterness and frustration, Sam 1 (Russia) and I have decided we cannot, after all, have a Sam&Sam stall at this year’s British Association of Slavists and East European Specialists (BASEES) conference in Cambridge. We were booked for the 2020 one but that was cancelled by Covid, and for the 2022 one but that was cancelled by the invasion. This year the conference itself has not been cancelled, but we have had to pull out for a tangle of reasons. Our Russian books would (we have this on good authority) be boycotted by a hard core of Ukrainophile and Russophobe delegates. This could mushroom into an ‘incident’ which, if it got into the media, could cause Sam1 problems in Russia. In any case, he and I accept that quite apart from the active boycotters the stall would probably be regarded as in bad taste by far more delegates, and avoided, so we would hardly sell any books. We agreed in three brief emails that ‘people now look upon anything Russian with disgust. It’s a catastrophe for genuine Russian culture’. The Sam&Sam stall has been ready to go since 2020. We must simply pack it all up again and wait for peace. Some BASEES officers are more optimistic about this than I am. In the meantime, we can only hope that an advertisement in the conference literature might lead to us selling us some books online.

3 February
People ask me what my ‘frightening realism’ about Russia is based on. Well, I did live there for two and a half years under Communism; I have been reading Russian literature in the original since the age of nineteen; as a professional requirement I have had to study the whole of Russia’s history. But, essentially, I have tried to confront the full zhut’ that I objectively know the country is capable of. Just as there is hardly a concept in English to express vran’e (pathological self-deceiving mendacity), so zhut’ cannot be adequately expressed in English: it’s a combination of extreme, casual, mindless violence and treating human beings as literally things, not flinching at robbing, raping, torturing, destroying them. Understanding Russian claustrophobia and paranoia also helps.

Today I decided to post on Calderonia next time my very old (1977) Cambridge tale ‘Stone’s Story’. I was never going to, as it attracted criticism from friends at the time and I recognise it’s not a strong story, but it was specifically written to try to convey to Brits how irrational and simply deadly Russian life can be (the fact that it is set in Brezhnev’s Russia is irrelevant). There are, I promise, no more Very Old Cambridge Tales after this…

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.