My poems are sometimes allusive and often include quotations and references. I have only included these in the notes which follow when it seemed to me that the reader’s understanding would be otherwise restricted, or when I felt an acknowledgement was required. C.W.
p. 6 The Invalid Storyteller. An extract from a narrative sequence now discarded. It is spoken by a group of people who, as children, paid regular visits to an aged invalid, who told them tragic stories. At the end of the sequence the invalid dies.
p. 20 In Malignant Times. Inspired by some seventeenth-century epitaphs in the Priory Church of St Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield. One of them is for James Rivers, who died in 1641, the year before the outbreak of the Civil War:
Within this hollow vault here rests the frame
Of that high soul wch late inform’d the same
Torn from the service of the state in’s prime
By a Disease malignant as the time
Who’s life and death designd no other end
Than to serve God his Country & his friend
Who when Ambytyon Tyrany & Pride
Conquer’d the Age, Conquer’d Hymself & dyd
The German epigraph is from Martin Luther’s hymn, ‘A safe stronghold our Lord is still’, a paraphrase of Psalm 46.
p. 22 Sanctuary. When the Huns and the Lombards invaded Northern Italy, the Veneti sought refuge on the islands of the lagoon. One of these islands, Torcello, was their commercial centre until it was superseded by the city of Venice. The islands were vulnerable to attack, both from the Lombards on the mainland and from Barbary pirates at sea. The poem is indebted to the ‘Torcello’ chapter of John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice.
p. 23 The Disenchanted. John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836–1893) was a painter of atmospheric urban scenes. Liverpool Quay by Moonlight is in Tate Britain, London.
p. 25 Saxon Buckle. The Anglo-Saxon hoard known as the Sutton Hoo treasure dates from the seventh century. Excavated in Suffolk in 1939, it is now in the British Museum, London. The belt buckle is in the form of an endless knot of gold interlace. The gold is further decorated with abstract bestial heads, carved and with niello inlay. Looked at overall, the buckle resembles the head of a horned animal, with its three rivets suggesting eyes and nose. The treasure was buried with an Anglian ruler, probably Rædwald, King of East Anglia.
p. 32 On the Demolition of the ‘Kite’ District. The Kite was a modest residential district of central Cambridge, which suffered for several years from planning blight. Much of it was finally demolished in the spring of 1980.
p. 41 On the Devil’s Dyke. The dyke is a large earthwork, about 7½ miles in length, near the Cambridgeshire–Suffolk border. It is thought to have been built to defend the kingdom of East Anglia against incursions along the Icknield Way.
p. 47 The Natural History of the Rook. This poem includes quotations from Charles Waterton’s Essays on Natural History. Waterton (1772–1865) turned his estate at Walton Hall, Yorkshire, into what can now be regarded as the world’s first wildlife sanctuary.
p. 49 Home. A fairly free translation from the Italian poet and novelist, Cesare Pavese (1908–50).
p. 50 Homecoming. This sequence pursues a theme through three German-language poets of the twentieth century: the German Georg Heym (1887–1912), the Austrian Georg Trakl (1887–1914) and the Romanian Paul Celan (1920–70). The translations are not faithful.
p. 51 For the Fly-Leaf of a King James Bible. The epigraph is quoted from Friedrich Hölderlin’s ‘Brot und Wein’ [Bread and Wine]. Reflecting on the absence of the gods from the modern world, Hölderlin asks: ‘What use are poets in a needy time?’
p. 52 Antiphonal Sonnets. John Taverner (c.1495–1545) was a composer of polyphonic church music. After his conversion to Protestantism, he seems to have renounced musical activity and was employed by Thomas Cromwell in the spoliation of the monasteries. The first of these sonnets refers to his motet Dum transisset sabbatum, a setting of Mark 16.1–2. The second alludes to a letter from Taverner to Cromwell: ‘according to your Lordship’s commandment the Rood was burned the seventh day’.
p. 54 To Nicholas Hawksmoor. All the buildings named in the poem were designed or include work by the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661–1736). All Souls is the Oxford College, but Christ Church is the parish church of Spitalfields in the East End of London.
p. 58 The Peaceable Kingdom. In the Golden Age, wrote Fulke Greville, ‘The laws were inward that did rule the heart’ (Caelica XLIV).
p. 61 Prayer for my Children. This is loosely based on the sixth-century Evening Hymn ‘Te lucis ante terminum’, part of which is quoted in Canto VIII of Dante’s Purgatorio.
pp. 67 Invocation. The Venerable Bede, in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, tells the story of the poet Caedmon, who was a herdsman and lay brother at the Abbey of Whitby in the seventh century. According to Bede, Caedmon would slip out of hall after dinner to avoid being called upon to sing to the harp at table. One night when he was sleeping with the cattle, an angel appeared to him in a dream and told him to sing of how God made the world. This is the origin, Bede tells us, of the nine-line poem known as Caedmon’s Hymn, the earliest poem by a known author in any dialect of English.
p. 68 Three Brueghel Paintings. In the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
p. 70 The San Damiano Crucifix. In St Bonaventura’s Life of St Francis we learn how the Saint embarked on his ministry. As he knelt in prayer in the ruined church of San Damiano, he heard a voice from the painted crucifix over the altar. ‘Francis,’ it said, ‘go and repair my house, which, as you can see, is falling into utter ruin.’ Soon afterwards St Francis began the task of rebuilding what Bonaventura calls ‘the material church’.
p. 74 The Infinite Variety. The Moghul Emperor Shah Jahan (1592–1666) was a patron of miniature painting.
p. 81 Post-war Childhoods. Simone Weil (1909–1943) was a French mystic, philosopher and social activist. Working in England for the French Resistance, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She died after refusing special treatment and restricting her diet to what she believed available to people in occupied France. La Pesanteur et la grâce is a posthumous collection of her austerely beautiful aphorisms.
‘Fireweed’ is a popular name for rosebay willowherb, which grows freely on land affected by fires.
p. 89 Work. A tribute to two great thinkers about art and literature, who both wrote about stone carving: Donald Davie, to whom it is dedicated, and John Ruskin. The carving described in part 2 is to be found in the Chapter House of Southwell Minster, Nottinghamshire. The carvings of leaves in that room represent the highest achievement of English Gothic sculpture in the thirteenth century. Davie’s poem ‘To a Brother in the Mystery’ was inspired by them.
p. 91 The Law of the House. Canto XLV from The Cantos of Ezra Pound begins with the lines ‘With Usura / Hath no man a house of good stone’.
p. 93 At the Grave of William Morris. Morris’s grave was designed by his friend, the architect Philip Webb, in imitation of an Icelandic tomb. It is shaped like a gabled roof. Morris, incidentally, was an atheist.
p. 94 Fonte Branda in Siena. The large rectangular basin of this fountain is sheltered by a Gothic roof, which keeps the water cool. In Inferno XXX, Dante meets Adamo da Brescia, an unrepentant forger of false coin. He is one of a series of damned souls who are guilty of what Ezra Pound calls ‘economic crime’ – of crime, that is, against the common weal. Adamo is suffering from eternal thirst, but asserts that, if he could see his enemies similarly punished, he would forgo the sight of Fonte Branda. The passage is alluded to in the closing paragraph of Ruskin’s last book, his autobiography Praeterita, concluded in 1889. Despite the fact that it was composed in the lucid intervals between mental breakdowns, Praeterita is mostly serene in tone.
p. 108 In the Greenwood. In August 1987, a 27-year-old gun-collector named Michael Ryan shot a young woman dead in Savernake Forest. There was no obvious motive. That same day he killed fifteen other people, including his mother, in the nearby town of Hungerford. He ended by committing suicide.
pp. 113–15 Caedmon of Whitby. This was written for musical setting. The text is based on the translation of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History by Thomas Stapleton (1565). See note for ‘Invocation’ above, p. 289.
p. 121 Lindisfarne Sacked. The Northumbrian abbey of Lindisfarne on Holy Island was sacked by Viking raiders in 793. The magnificent Lindisfarne Gospels, made in the abbey in the previous century, were spirited away to the mainland and so preserved. Other manuscripts of the same school must have perished in the flames.
p. 126 Kaspar Hauser. In 1828, a youth of about sixteen was found wandering in the streets of Nuremberg. Unable to speak, he bore a note which said: ‘I want to be a horseman like my father.’ When the local pastor taught him a little language, it emerged that he had been kept in a dark room – possibly a stable – for as long as he could remember and had never encountered human society before. In 1833 he died a violent death; it is assumed that he was murdered, though he may have committed suicide.
p. 133 Letter to J.A. Cuddon. J.A. Cuddon (1928–96), known to his friends as Charles, was a writer, traveller and schoolmaster. His publications include five novels, two dictionaries and two travel books: The Owl’s Watchsong: A Study of Istanbul (1957) and The Companion Guide to Jugoslavia (1968). Passionately interested in the theatre, he directed a production of Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter at Emanuel School, Wandsworth, in 1962. His schoolboy actors were the dramatist Steve Gooch and myself.
p. 144 The Heron. This is loosely based on a poem by the Spanish poet Juan del Encina (1468–1529/30).
pp. 145–6 Vacations and To Pyrrha. Both these poems are based on poems by Horace (Odes 1.9 and 1.5). ‘Vacations’ is too free to be called a translation.
p. 153 Fernando Pessoa’s Lisbon. See the note on Pessoa below, p. 296.
p. 155 A Baroque Concerto. Edgar Bowers (1924–2000) was, for me, one of the great poets of modern times. My sonnet refers to two groups of poems by him: the poems in his first book The Form of Loss (1956), which draw on his experiences as an American soldier in Germany at the end of the Second World War, and ‘Thirteen Views of Santa Barbara’, a sequence of poems he wrote in the 1980s about civic order and the natural environment in Southern California, the region where he spent most of his professional life. His Collected Poems was published by Knopf in 1997.
p. 156 Casa Natal de Borges. Written after visiting the birthplace of Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires.
p. 157 The Translator’s Apology. The first line of this poem is based on a line of Ezra Pound’s, which itself parodies the refrain of a poem by Ernest Dowson. My poem was sparked off when the poet Patrick McGuinness jokingly quoted Pound’s line at a conference on translation
p. 166 The Ruin. Andrei Rublyov (or Rublev) (c.1360–1427/30) was the greatest of all Russian ikon painters. His ikon of Christ, The Saviour, is the only surviving panel of a lost ikonostasis and now hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. For Miklós Radnóti, see below, p. 293.
p. 167 Much Ado about Nothing. John Kerrigan, in his edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets, calls ‘nothing’ a ‘very Shakespearean quantity’. This poem consists almost entirely of quotations, most of them instances of that Shakespearean obsession. The two Middle English quotations are from the fourteenth-century treatise on contemplation, The Cloud of Unknowing, the second of them interwoven with a line from ‘The Snow Man’ by Wallace Stevens.
p. 168 The Holy of Holies. The Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans under Titus in AD 70. This poem borrows from the account of that disaster by the Romano-Jewish historian Josephus, who witnessed it himself.
pp. 171–2 The Ladder. Lines 12-15 borrow from a passage in Dante’s Vita Nuova, as translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti: ‘I have spoken of Love as though it were a thing outward and visible: not only [as] a spiritual essence, but as a bodily substance also. The which thing, in absolute truth, is a fallacy…’
pp. 175–6 Chutney and The Apple Trees. For Lyubomir Nikolov, see below, p. 296.
p. 182 W.S. Graham Reading. This recalls Graham’s reading at the Cambridge Poetry Festival in 1981.
p. 183 The Falls. Written after a visit to the Finger Lakes and Niagara Falls in upstate New York. I had recently visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where I saw Jackson Pollock’s One, perhaps the greatest of his ‘drip paintings’. This poem makes extensive use of quotation and allusion. It borrows notably from Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ruskin, Dante, Henry Vaughan and St Paul.
p. 190 Stigmata. The Stigmata are the five wounds of Christ. This sequence also refers to two saints who are said to have received the Stigmata in their own bodies: St Francis of Assisi and, in the twentieth century, the Capuchin friar Padre Pio.
p. 190 The Visit to La Verna. The Franciscan monastery on Mount La Verna in Tuscany includes the place where, according to tradition, St Francis received the Stigmata. A year later the Saint died. Various relics associated with him can be seen in the monastery; these include his sackcloth habit. In a cave under the monastery there is an oblong grid, where the saint is thought to have slept.
p. 191 A Quotation. The italicised line is quoted from my poem ‘Two Journals’, p. 102.
pp. 196–8 Piero’s ‘Resurrection’. The fresco of the Resurrection by Piero della Francesca (c.1419/21–1492) was painted in the Palazzo Comunale of the artist’s home town, Sansepolcro in Tuscany. Kenneth Clark found the painting to be more pagan than Christian.
p. 200 The Need for Angels. The story of Dante drawing an angel is from the Vita Nuova. ‘Teresa’ is both St Teresa of Ávila (1515–82), who had a vision of an angel plunging a spear into her heart, and Thérèse Neumann (1898–1962), another modern stigmatic. The cinema referred to is purely circumstantial.
p. 217 Shakespeare. This poem is in memory of the schoolteacher who, when I was eight, encouraged me to read Shakespeare. Her name, Eleanor E. Inkpen, provoked some hilarity, but there have been few people in my life to whom I owe more.
p. 217 Brook’s ‘Lear’. Peter Brook’s production of King Lear, with Paul Scofield in the title role, was first performed at Stratford in 1962. It transferred to London for the winter season, and I saw it there as a sixth-former. Brook cut two or three small but significant details from the play. One was the removal of Edmund after his death, which meant that the body stayed on stage till the end of the play.
p. 220 Civitas. The title is Latin for ‘civilisation’. ‘Martlet’: either a house martin or, in heraldry, a small songbird. ALF: Animal Liberation Front.
p. 225 A Valedictory Ode. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a period when women were denied formal education, six Cambridge colleges were founded by women.
Line 13: ‘whose connections’. Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, was founded in 1596 by Frances, Countess of Sussex. The Countess was aunt to Sir Philip Sidney and his sister, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, joint authors of The Sidney Psalter. Mary’s sons, William and Philip, were patrons of Shakespeare and his company, and the family was distantly related to that of George Herbert, whose mother Lady Magdalen Herbert was a friend and patron of John Donne’s.
p. 231 Jenő Dsida (1907–38) was the outstanding Hungarian poet from Transylvania during the interwar period. He lived most of his life in Kolozsvár, where he worked as a journalist. His best poetry shows the influence of Expressionism. There are four of his poems in the anthology The Colonnade of Teeth, eds. George Gömöri and George Szirtes (Bloodaxe, 1996).
pp. 231–45 Miklós Radnóti (1910–44) is one of Hungary’s outstanding poets. Of Jewish origin, he became an ethical Socialist and a Roman Catholic. Though influenced by Romantic and Modernist writing, he shows in his mature poetry a dedication to European classicism. For most of the Second World War he was interned in labour camps in Serbia. In 1944 he and his fellow internees were force-marched back into Hungary, where most of them were shot by firing-squad and buried in a mass grave. Radnóti’s body was subsequently identified by a notebook of poems in his greatcoat pocket. See Forced March: Selected Poems, translated by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri (Enitharmon Press, 2003).
p. 231 Garden on Istenhegy. Istenhegy is a hill on the steep Buda side of Budapest.
p. 233 First Eclogue. The first of a cycle of eight Eclogues composed between 1938 and 1944. The epigraph is from the Georgics of Virgil: ‘For right and wrong are inverted here: there are so many wars that overrun the world, so many shapes of wickedness.’
The poem refers to the final stage of the Spanish Civil War, when the Republican forces were driven north into the Pyrenees. ‘Federico’ is the great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, who was shot by Nationalists in 1936. Radnóti identified with Lorca and anticipated a similar fate for himself.
‘[O]ur beloved Attila’ is Attila József, the modern Hungarian poet most admired by Radnóti. (‘Attila’ is stressed on the first syllable.) A persistent critic of ‘the present state’ – i.e. the right-wing regime of Admiral Horthy – József committed suicide in 1937.
p. 235 Written in a Copy of ‘Steep Path’. A collection of Radnóti’s poems, published in 1938. The execution of Lorca stands behind this poem too.
p. 241 Eighth Eclogue. Written in 1944, shortly before German troops evacuated the Serbian camps where Radnóti was interned. Some of the Prophet’s lines are taken more or less verbatim from prophetic books in the Bible: see in particular Nahum 1 and 3, Habbakkuk 2 and Isaiah 6. I have used the King James Bible where Radnóti used that of Gáspár Károli (1590).
p. 243 Forced March. Written on the march which the poem seeks to evoke. ‘Fanni’ was Radnóti’s wife.
p. 244 Postcards. Also written on the forced march. The poems follow the route of the marchers from Serbia through Hungary and towards the German border. The last of them was written nine days before Radnóti was shot by firing squad.
‘Der springt noch auf’: ‘That one can still get up’ – presumably the words of a German guard. In the event, the poet was executed by Hungarians.
p. 245 István Vas (1910–91) was a friend of Radnóti’s. His work, very much associated with urbanity and the city of Budapest, is strongly affected by the identification of many metropolitan Hungarians with Western European culture, in particular that of France and Britain. As a celebrated translator of Shakespeare, Keats and T.S. Eliot, Vas was very much of the Anglophile tendency. See Through the Smoke: Selected Poems, ed. Miklós Vajda (Corvina, 1989).
Romanus Sum – ‘I am a Roman’. The Roman chronicler Livy tells many legends of the heroic early days of Republican Rome. One of these concerns a young Roman known to history as Mucius Scaevola. When the Etruscan king Lars Porsenna gave orders for Mucius to be burnt alive, Mucius thrust his own hand into the flames, giving no sign of pain. Impressed by the young man’s courage, Porsenna freed him. Vas uses the story as a parable of Hungarian politics in the post-war period.
pp. 246–50 János Pilinszky (1921–81) served with the Hungarian army in World War II. His second book, Harmadnapon (On the Third Day, 1959), established him as a courageous witness to the horrors of mid-twentieth-century Europe. It also registered the presence of an austerely economical poet with the outlook of a Christian Existentialist. See Selected Poems, translated by Ted Hughes and János Csokits (Carcanet, 1976), and a pamphlet, Passio: Thirteen Poems, translated by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri (Worple, 2011).
pp. 250–52 György (George) Gömöri was born in Budapest in 1934, and is passionately attached to his native city. In 1956, however, he was obliged to flee to Britain because of his active role in the failed Hungarian uprising of that year. For many years he taught Polish and Hungarian literature at Cambridge, retiring in 2001. He has been a key figure in the translation and dissemination of Hungarian poetry in English since the late 1960s. See Polishing October: Selected Poems, translated by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri (Shoestring Press, 2008).
pp. 252–3 Domokos Szilágyi (1938–76) was a Hungarian poet from Transylvania who lived both in Bucharest and in Kolozsvár. His work combines the traditions of Hungarian poetry with the formal innovations of the avant-garde. There are three of his poems in the anthology The Colonnade of Teeth, eds. George Gömöri and George Szirtes (Bloodaxe, 1996).
Ivan Meštrović (1883–1962) was a Croatian sculptor of mainly religious subjects.
pp. 254–61 György Petri (1943–2000) is the most striking poet of the postModernist era in Hungary. A person of anarchistic temperament, he was the fiercest of the literary dissidents who attacked the Communist regime in its last phase – the era of liberal ‘goulash’ Communism. Contemporary European literature has few satirists to equal him for the savagery of his criticism and the resourcefulness of his imagination. See Eternal Monday: Selected Poems, translated by Clive Wilmer and George Gömöri (Bloodaxe, 1999).
p. 257 To Imre Nagy. Nagy was Prime Minister of Hungary from October to November 1956. His was the reformist government that briefly attempted to resist Soviet power in Hungary. The poem alludes to the evening before the Soviet invasion when Nagy, on the point of taking office, sought unsuccessfully to calm his supporters in the street outside Parliament. In 1958 he was tried in camera and hanged in a prison yard on the outskirts of Budapest.
p. 258 Daydreams. Sors bona nihil aliud: a Latin motto well-known in Hungary. It means roughly: ‘Good fortune is all you need’.
p. 259 A Recognition. Written on the fall of Communism in 1989.
pp. 261–5 Anna T. Szabó (born 1972) is a Hungarian poet and translator of Transylvanian origin. She has published five books of poetry and several books of translations, including my own Végtelen változatok [The Infinite Variety] (Szeged, 2002), translated with George Gömöri. She writes with acute sensitivity about the joys and sorrows of a woman’s life. English translations of her poems are included in the anthology New Order, ed. George Szirtes (Arc Publishers, 2009).
pp. 274–8 Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) was a Portuguese writer of verse and prose – one of the greatest European poets of the twentieth century. Pessoa’s theme is identity, its fissiparousness and the various modes of escape from it. This is reflected in his adoption of different personalities, such that the authorship of his poetry is divided between ‘Fernando Pessoa’ and three heteronyms – Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos. Caeiro and Reis, unlike ‘Pessoa’, are both neo-pagans, though they have little else in common. Caeiro is an uneducated peasant, Reis a sophisticated doctor with classical tastes.
pp. 280–83 Lyubomir Nikolov (born 1954) is a Bulgarian poet who now lives in the United States. His poetry, which has an almost oriental compactness, springs from an intense attachment to the landscapes and customs of his homeland and the remains that have been found there. It conveys an acute sense of transience at the same time as a feeling for the past’s enduring presence in daily life. See Pagan, translated by Roland Flint and Viara Tcholakova (Carnegie Mellon, 1992) and Unreal Estate, translated by Miroslav Nikolov (Carnegie Mellon, 2009).
p. 283 Hagia Sophia. The great fourth-century basilica in Constantinople. The name means ‘Holy Wisdom’ and is pronounced ‘Aya Sofía’. For Diana and her temple, see the story of St Paul at Ephesus in Acts 19.