Going Abroad — Poet, Novelist, Translator and Editor David Constantine
David Constantine
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR DAVID CONSTANTINE was born in 1944 in Salford, Lancashire. He was a university teacher of German language and literature for thirty years. He has published several volumes of poetry, most recently Nine Fathom Deep (Bloodaxe, 2009). His Collected Poems (Bloodaxe, 2004) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and Something for the Ghosts (Bloodaxe, 2002) was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Award. As a fiction writer, his work includes a novel, Davies (Bloodaxe, 1985), and three collections of short stories, the latest being The Shieling (Comma Press, 2009). Constantine is also a translator and editor of Hölderlin, Goethe, Kleist and Brecht. His Selected Poems of Hölderlin (Bloodaxe, 1996) is a winner of the European Poetry Translation Prize, while his translation of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s Lighter Than Air (Bloodaxe, 2003) was awarded the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. A translation of Goethe’s Faust was published by Penguin in 2005-09. Other translations include editions of French poets Henri Michaux and Philippe Jaccottet, published by Bloodaxe. With his wife Helen Constantine, he edits Modern Poetry in Translation. He is a Fellow of the Queen’s College, Oxford. |
In the Footsteps of the Gods is a “travel book,” but it is unusual — something at once “off to the side” and central in its concerns. How did you come to write it? The book is a reprint, with a new title, of Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal, which I published in 1984 and which has long been out of print. That book came out of my academic work on eighteenth-century Hellenism, particularly the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin. What type of work were you doing on Hölderlin? How would you characterize Hölderlin’s significance today, for you, and perhaps for others?
I wrote my D. Phil. on him, and then a critical introduction to his life and works. I’ve been reading (and translating) him since I was a student. He is still of the greatest importance to me. He addresses a human reality we recognize as our own. We inhabit a world in which sense — religious or existential — is not given to us: we make it, the best we can. He is the poet of hope and disappointment, the more passionate the hope, the more grievous the disappointment. Like Wordsworth (they were both born in 1770), he believed, for as long as he honestly could, that the French Revolution would bring liberty, equality and fraternity into “the very world, which is the world / Of all of us, — the place where in the end / We find our happiness, or not at all.” He is a deeply religious poet, but the gods are absent. Could you provide a bird’s-eye view of the “quest” you describe in Footsteps? I spent a good deal of time in Greece and on the coast of Turkey following those travellers — in libraries too, of course, but I wanted to learn the landscapes and visit all the sites myself. I was there with my family, travelling on boats and buses, we had a great time. I wanted a close connection with the Classical past. Among the scholars/travelers you discuss, which one or two intrigue you the most, and why? Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, perhaps — chiefly a botanist, a natural scientist, with a very lively interest in the world around him and so in all traces of the Classical past (he is there in my collection Nine Fathom Deep). But I had great affection for Richard Chandler too – an Oxford scholar prepared to travel dangerously. Altogether those travellers are an amusing and sympathetic lot. |
 In the Footsteps of the Gods: Travelers to Greece and the Quest for the Hellenic Ideal  Nine Fathom Deep  The Shieling  Collected Poems |
In the Introduction to Footsteps, you touch on the question of “how shall scholarship and imagination mix?” Doesn’t the book itself become an answer to that question? And if so, what kind of answer does it provide? Most of the travellers were themselves imaginative men. But I was especially interested in what poets – Hölderlin and others – made of their accounts. Myself, I wanted to be there – knowing both the poems and the firsthand descriptions. And I have been very lucky: I was a university teacher for 31 years and most of what I taught, read and wrote about in that capacity worked in me imaginatively and contributed to the life out of which came my poems and stories. What qualities of Hölderlin, in particular, left traces in your poems and stories? Which other Hellenist poets influenced your work? I admire the luminous presence of his imagery, especially in his later poems: it is as closely substantial as late paintings by Van Gogh. And I admire the nervousness, reach and tension of his syntax — long sentences developing over many lines and, often, from stanza to stanza. Strictness of form engendering an extraordinary fluency. By continually translating him, I have begun to understand what my own English might be capable of. He is a Romantic Hellenist — a great (and eccentric) translator of Pindar and Sophocles. That whole period is very congenial to me — Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Shelley… There’s a story called “Romantic” in my next collection (to be published end of June this year). Are you a traveler yourself? To be more precise, are you a scholarly traveler? How do your scholarly (or imaginative) interests shape the way you travel? I have travelled a good deal, in Europe at least, and with the greatest pleasure on foot. The displacement is good for me, things occur. Especially walking, the rhythm of it excites and shapes the imagination. And I like to be a passer-by, people talk to you very candidly if you are passing through and they will never see you again. Do you keep a journal of such encounters? If so, do you ever discover poems in its pages? Yes, I always carry a notebook. I note things that matter and perhaps one day will matter more or differently to me. I hope I don’t collect impressions in order to make poems of them. I don’t like that predatory way of being in the world. But I note things as exactly as I can. As an editor of the journal Modern Poetry in Translation, is your intense involvement with translation an aspect of the traveler’s impulse? I believe that “going abroad,” both literally and figuratively, is very necessary for a poet. You come better into your own language — into “the free use of your own,” as Hölderlin puts it — by passing through the foreign. English is my language, but I have got better at it by studying closely how two or three other languages work, how foreign writers deploy their own native resources. Would you give a specific example of “deploying native resources”? How does such deployment in another language give you clues to deploying resources in English? See above, Hölderlin’s syntax. And Brecht’s lineation would be another: how often he ends a line with “but” or some other qualification so that you can’t rest there but must go over into a more tense and unsettling state. That, and much else, is imitable. You can learn for your own good by translating. Would you say that many of the poems in Nine Fathom Deep offer other kinds of views on the scholarship/imagination question? As I said, I have been very lucky: I never had cause to feel that scholarship and literature would not mix. Similarly, I have written a good deal of criticism, knowing it to be different from poetry but not feeling that the two kinds of writing are enemies. I don’t like binary opposites: feeling/intellect, body/spirit etc. They seem to me unreal (and dangerous) and I don’t live like that. |
There’s an extraordinary range of subjects and forms in this book. A continuum, maybe, between poems like “Photomontage” and “Owls and Foxes,” and poems like “Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Antiparos, 30 July 1700.” Is it fair to say that you travel in these poems between a here-and-now immediacy and a contemplation of the past?
Poems & Translations
- Frieze
“Poem of the Week,”The Guardian - Watching for Dolphins
- An Account of Despair
In truth, poetry only has one tense: the present. Figures from the past — Goethe, Keats, Tournefort, Sir William Hamilton — are living figures in my present. I write about them because they help me orientate myself in the here and now. Other poems, having to do with love or grief for people close to me, are more obviously “of the present”; but “The Woman in the House,” though it opens with a classical statue and draws mostly on nineteenth-century French painters and their models, is just as present to me as, say, “Elm Seeds.”
Several of your poems are meditations on visual art. They are essentially aesthetic responses to aesthetic responses. The reader gets the sense of drilling down through layers of time and perception. (I think of the title poem, “Nine Fathom Deep,” which you note is “after Doré after Coleridge.”) What is it that attracts you to this kind of subject?
See above. Some visual art has given me figures just as literature and travel-writings have. In “Nine Fathom Deep” itself I was drawn particularly to the man and woman in Doré’s engraving who lie, as it seems, embracing and asleep on the seabed, among the wrecks.
What do you think about the quality of historical consciousness in contemporary poetry?
In truth, poetry only has one tense: the present. Figures from the past — Goethe, Keats, Tournefort, Sir William Hamilton — are living figures in my present.
I worry sometimes that there is not enough of it. Myself, I need a historical consciousness every bit as much as I need consciousness of the foreign, of abroad. No poet is nowhere. It is best to try to understand where you are and to establish and profit from the connections. This question widens into one concerning readership, shared culture and tradition.
Are there other poets who display the kind of historical consciousness you’re talking about?
In English Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill… But several younger poets, women and men, are trying very seriously to locate themselves in our fraught and uneasy culture – and that entails understanding where you are from as well as where you are now.
If you can step back a moment and see the main threads in your work, how do you see yourself in relation to current “British literature”?
I feel myself to be marginal. Not eccentric, just not in the mainstream or anywhere near the centre (wherever that might be). But I have a much stronger sense of belonging, however unimportantly, to a tradition of English verse – clearest in the Romantics, Clare, Hardy, Owen, Edward Thomas, Graves … And, although very English, I owe much to many foreign poets, among them Hölderlin and Brecht.
I’m surprised by your mention of Brecht. What do you owe him, as opposed (let’s say) to Hölderlin? (Or am I in danger of succumbing to a binary?)
Brecht was a great admirer of Hölderlin. The first play he wrote and staged when he came back out of exile was a version of Hölderlin’s very diffcult translation of Antigone. They have in common a radical objection to any social order that denies its people their full humanity, reduces them to commodities, stunts and depraves them, and a passionate wish for a society, as Brecht puts it, “worthy of human beings.” I share that objection and that wish. Both are great lyric poets (Brecht an even better poet than he is a dramatist), I translate both and learn and learn.
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