The Oceanic Feeling (2021)

Cover image: Katharina Jaeger (by courtesy of the artist) /
Cover design: William Bardebes (2020)

The Oceanic Feeling. Drawings by Katharina Jaeger. Afterword by Bronwyn Lloyd. ISBN 978-0-473-55801-7. Auckland: Salt & Greyboy Press, 2021. 72 pp.

Contents:

1. The Oceanic Feeling (7/1-18/10/17)

Family Plot


2. Lone pine (14/1-5/12/14)
3. Family plot (26/6-12/8/15)
4. When you’re the only one (30/9-19/11/17)
5. Oh br/other! (6/1/16-13/7/17)
6. This morning Sylvie (16/1/16-7/5/17)
7. Zero is lying down today (18/1/16-22/10/17)
8. What to do till the sentinels come (11-23/4/18)
9. Rituals (9/1/16-7/5/17)
10. My Uncle Tommy (15-23/4/18)
11. 1942 (17/9-4/12/16)
12. Very superstitious (4/1-21/8/16)
13. Playing the long game (29/1-29/10/16)
14. Are Kiwi women (30/1-29/10/16)
15. Rather a shock (15/1/16-7/5/17)
16. Family skeletons (10/1/16-7/5/17)
17. Self-analysis (11/1/16-7/5/17)
18. Checking into Facebook (31/1-5/12/16)
19. A borrowed life (30/9-2/10/17)
20. Psych 101 (7/1/16-4/1/17)
21. What do you want? (8/9-13/10/18)

Ice Road Trucker


22. Ice Road Trucker (7/2-30/3/15)
23. Two Fords (17/7-12/8/15)
24. Stranded Polar Bear (21/11-14/12/19)
25. Indexing Poetry NZ (5/1-29/8/16)
26. Turning at the doorstep (21/1/16-19/10/17)
27. The perils of public art (8/1/16-7/5/17)
28. Communications committee (14/1-4/12/16)
29. Oral exam, 1990 (1/1-21/8/16)
30. Everything ages too fast (27/1/16-7/5/17)
31. Restructuring (20/2-12/3/20)
32. Kissing the Blarney Stone (23/4-29/8/16)
33. Skins, 1981 (22/2-14/4/19)
34. Snorkelling the Great Barrier Reef (17-19/11/17)
35. Mark (21/6-12/8/15)
36. Reindeer games (27/12/17)
37. The Mysterious Island (18-26/4/15)
38. Antigone (29/5/14; 18/4-13/6/15)
39. Shorts:
    • Birds of Passage (12/11/14-7/2/15)
    • Auckland Anthem (30/3-15/4/12)
    • Hunting in Palmerston (after Su Shi) (6/9-17/10/13)

Translations


40. On Early Trains (after Boris Pasternak) (26/1-7/2/15)
41. Bangalore 2002 (after Boris Pasternak) (30/12/14-7/2/15)
42. 1913 (after Apollinaire) (21/6-12/8/15)

Blurb:

Jack Ross’s latest collection combines poems about ‘families – and how to survive them’ (in John Cleese’s phrase) with darkly humorous reflections on Academia and various other aspects of modern life. It concludes with some translations from Boris Pasternak and Guillaume Apollinaire.

The book also includes a suite of drawings by Swiss-New Zealand Artist Katharina Jaeger, ably explicated in an Afterword by Art Writer Bronwyn Lloyd.

'… picture yourself on a Gold Coast beach, the wind idly leafing through the pages of a much-annotated copy of Benjamin’s Arcades Project on your lap; as ‘Baudelaire’ flashes by in your peripheral vision, you disinterestedly observe a sleek conferential shark feeding – though far from frenziedly – on a smorgasbord of swimmers, whose names end with unstressed vowels and whose togs are at least a size too small. The water is the colour of an $8 bottle of rosé. I find reading Ross – to borrow his victims’ parlance – kind of like that.'

- Robert McLean, Landfall Review Online

•

Born in Zurich in 1964, Katharina Jaeger studied art at Kunstgewerbeschule Zurich before emigrating to New Zealand in 1986. She has a Bachelor of Design from Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology (now Ara Institute of Canterbury), where she currently teaches in the Visual Arts Programme. Katharina has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally for over two decades. She was a finalist for the Parkin Drawing Prize in 2017 and her most recent solo exhibition, Billow, was held at PG Gallery 192 in September 2019.

Bronwyn Lloyd is a freelance art writer and textile artist who lives in Mairangi Bay. She completed a PhD on Rita Angus’s Goddess paintings at the University of Auckland in 2010. Since 1999 Bronwyn has been publishing articles and catalogue essays on New Zealand painting, applied art and design, as well as fiction: her first book of short stories, The Second Location, was published in 2011 by Titus Books. Her series of needlepoint amulets, Under the Protection, was exhibited at Masterworks Gallery in November 2020.

Jack Ross has published five poetry collections, three novels, three novellas, and three books of short fiction, most recently Ghost Stories (2019). He was managing editor of Poetry New Zealand from 2014-2019, and has edited numerous other books, anthologies, and literary journals. He lives in Mairangi Bay on Auckland’s North Shore and teaches creative writing at Massey University. You can find further information on his blog, The Imaginary Museum, at http://mairangibay.blogspot.com/.

Sources & Acknowledgments:

Warmest thanks to publishers (and designers) William Bardebes and Emma Smith, of Salt & Greyboy Press.

I’d also like to thank Katharina Jaeger for her generosity in allowing me to use some of the beautiful ink on paper drawings from her ‘Prunings’ sequence. Also Tony Bond for his fine photographs of these images.

I remain very much in debt to Bronwyn Lloyd, Thérèse Lloyd, Tracey Slaughter, and Michael Steven for valuable editorial advice, and Bronwyn in particular for her insightful afterword to the collection.

Many of the pieces included here have been previously published, some in different forms. Thanks again to the editors and publishers of all those anthologies, websites and journals for permission to reproduce them here. For further details, please visit https://bit.ly/3qzZJoT.

Crissi Blair: Salt & Greyboy Press (2019)

Abstract:

In a 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud, French writer Romain Rolland coined the term "the oceanic feeling" as a way of referring to that "sensation of ‘eternity’," of "being one with the external world as a whole," which underlies all religious belief (but does not necessarily depend on it). In his reply, Freud described this as a simple characterisation of the feeling an infant has before it learns there are any other people in the world.

Those of us living in the midst of the world's largest ocean, the mighty Pacific, may have our own understanding of this 'Oceanic feeling.' At any rate, those are some of the ideas underlying this, my sixth full-length poetry collection.

Many of the 44 poems included have been published previously in periodicals or online (a complete list of these is available here). The book also features reproductions of ten ink-on-paper drawings - titled collectively 'Prunings' - by Swiss/NZ artist Katharina Jaeger, together with an Afterword by Art Writer Bronwyn Lloyd.

The poems are grouped in two sections. The first, 'Family Plot', discusses some of the stresses and strains associated with my - I suspect fairly typical - family history. Dementia, filial discord, madness, suicide ... need I say more?

The second, 'Ice Road Trucker', named after a North American Reality TV show, examines the compromises and vexations of contemporary life, in and out of the Academy. Again, I hope these themes and events are sufficiently representative to strike a chord with readers.

The book concludes with some versions of poems by Russian poet Boris Pasternak and French-Romanian poet Guillaume Apollinaire.

Available:

Salt & Greyboy Press

RRP: $NZ 20.00 (+ postage)

William Bardebes: 'Printing' (8/2/21)

Reviews & Comments:

1. Tracey Slaughter, Launch speech for The Oceanic Feeling (March 11, 2021):
   

   
   It is one of the miracles of poetry that a scant handful of words arranged on a page can build around us a cathedral, the spatial ache and echo of unsayable feelings somehow cast aloft from a thin imprint of sounds.



2. Paula Green, "Poetry Shelf review: Jack Ross’s The Oceanic Feeling." NZ Poetry Shelf (August 19, 2021):
   

   
   The poetry seeks perspective in the corrugations and felicities of the everyday. In the little and larger events that shape and have shaped life. That nurture love, that spark a sense of humour, that trigger contemplation. The poems occupy the present but they also recuperate the past. I am moved by this.



3. Tim Saunders, "Finding Shelter in Time and Space: The Death of Music Journalism by Simon Sweetman (The Cuba Press, 2020), 90pp., $25; Shelter by Kirsten Le Harivel (The Cuba Press, 2021), 84pp., $25; The Oceanic Feeling by Jack Ross (Salt & Greyboy Press, 2021), 72pp., $20." Landfall Review Online (October 4, 2021):
   

   
   Jack Ross’ poems are at times dark but sprinkled with humour and sequestered in time and place. There are skeletons here, scattered through every page. An impression of finding shelter in isolation. A sensation of limitlessness. An oceanic feeling.



4. Mark Prisco, "Review of The Oceanic Feeling by Jack Ross (Salt & Greyboy Press, 2021), 72pp., $38.99." Poetry NZ Yearbook 2022 (March 14, 2022): 341-43.
   

   
   You've got to feel for him.



5. Jeremy Roberts, "Coffee and Poems." Facebook (April 10, 2023)
   

   
   I've been digging 'The Oceanic Feeling' by Jack Ross. He's shaped these poems with one sharp, humorous, little blade. Family, working life, history, and much else to feed on. Cool drawings by Katharina Jaeger, too. Recommended!

Jeremy Roberts - Poet

•


Paula Green: NZ Poetry Shelf (2013- )

Complete Review:

Paula Green. "Poetry Shelf review: Jack Ross’s The Oceanic Feeling." NZ Poetry Shelf (August 19, 2021):

Here I go reviewing a book again with the subterranean feeling I experienced last March, barely articulated, drenched in uncertainty, fearing for the well being of Aotearoa, fearing for the well being of our frontline workers, fearing for our understaffed hospitals, fearing that supermarkets will deal with aggressive behaviour from some shoppers, yet full of gratitude for our Government’s swift response, for everyone choosing to stay at home and wear a mask. The subterranean Covid effect saw me drifting around the house yesterday with Jack Ross’s new poetry collection, The Oceanic Feeling, in my hand. Not writing a word. Word-drifitng in and out of countless books. Worrying about Afghanistan. Listening to Reb Fountain. Worrying about Haiti. Sydney. All the people living alone. The homeless.

The title is so fitting. The oceanic feeling.

Layer it up. Stand by the ocean and get an intake of ocean beauty. Sit at my kitchen table looking onto the tail end of the Waitākere ranges and my potential for worry is oceanic. Below the surface in my blood and bones. Above the surface in those intruding thoughts that I try not to let settle at the station.

I love this title. This beautifully produced book with its white cover and striking image holds an ocean of feeling. Add in the white space, the unsaid. Add in the physical, the images that glint and hold your attention.

The cover drawing is by Swiss-New Zealand artist Katharina Jaeger, and is part of the suite of images included in the collection. Bronwyn Lloyd’s afterword explores the connections between the drawings and the poetry. Katharina was inspired by her father’s manic pruning, and rather than use the the pile of clippings as prunings, drew them instead. Bronwyn makes a vital link between prunings and the skeletons in the artist’s closets, in the poet’s closet, and by extension in our closets.

Poetry is both pruning and planting and, at times, opening the closet door is to shine a light on the tough, the difficult, the surprising.

Jack’s terrific new collection does just this. The poetry seeks perspective in the corrugations and felicities of the everyday. In the little and larger events that shape and have shaped life. That nurture love, that spark a sense of humour, that trigger contemplation. The poems occupy the present but they also recuperate the past. I am moved by this.

The book is essentially in two sections, like two halves of a heart, with ‘Family Plot’ alongside ‘Ice Road Trucker’. Family poems alongside poems that consider the academy, poetry journals, travel, public art, reading, thinking. There is also a tiny cluster of small poems and of translations.

The poetry peers into the mist, and swivels to embrace the clearly sighted.

A sublime example is ‘What to do till the sentinels come’. The poet’s mother (I am making this assumption) has forgotten to feed Zero the cat when they are away. The cat hides in the garden shed, unfed. Here is the mist and the close at hand. The poem as the pruned twig.

it’s not that my mother
neglected her task
on purpose
she’d written in her diary

FEED THE CAT!
it’s just that her mind
now fills in blanks
with certainties

not doubts
there was a slight pause
before that “fine”
all I know is our cat

left alone
in the storm
my mother alone
in the fog of her brain

In the opening poem, ‘Lone Pine’, a tree crew are pruning the pines. The physical scene unfolds, and in reaching the visual impact of the tallest tree with its branches stripped bare, the loss doubles back. This is the pruned branch laid on the page: ‘standing bare / just like my father at the end’.

2021 is the season of memoirs. Long form and all revealing.

And yes, The Oceanic Feeling is a form of memoir. Fragmented. Selective. Revealing. It is also a form of engagement with both ideas and feelings. Poetry as a way of discovering chords between here and there, this and that, now and then. So many layers. So many connections. ‘Family skeletons’ does this. The sister with her suicidal thoughts, witnessed throwing a rope over a tree, who later succeeds with pills, is both presence and absence. Again I am picking up a branch laid upon the page and I am feeling it deeply.

Ah, I am moving in so many directions, as I read Jack’s collection, from the cars loved and then replaced, to bookshelves and superstitions, to wrangling over the colours of a graduation hood, to a university department lovingly built up over time, to be faced with cutbacks.

What makes this book resonate so deeply with me is movement. Physical and emotional movement. Not on a grand over-the-top flare of sentimentality but in small measured steps that favour contiguity. I relish the shift between what is easily witnessed in the everyday and what is much harder to fathom, what is retrieved in glimmers and shards across time. it is a collection that warrants a prolonged sojourn. Glorious.

I am going to leave you with ‘What do you want?’. The poet is in a Feilding library, having driven down for a function. The poem swerves and I am utterly affected.

What do you want?

said the librarian
in Friendly Feilding
to come in from the cold
was my reply

we’re closing an hour early
for a function
the function I’d driven down for
I walked away

he’s crying
but he doesn’t know
why he’s crying
said my sister

to the primer one teacher
who wanted to know why
I guess I do too
I guess I do

I was small and afraid
of a brand-new place
so many people
but what remains

is kindness
my sister
trying to help
unavailingly

Jack Ross

Jack Ross works as a senior lecturer in creative writing at Massey University. He is the author of five poetry collections and eight works of fiction, most recently Ghost Stories (Lasavia Publishing, 2019) and The Oceanic Feeling (Salt & Greyboy Press, 2021). He blogs here

Jack reads from The Oceanic Feeling

Notes to The Oceanic Feeling

Jack reads and comments on ‘1942’

.

Paula Green

•

Celanie (2012)

[cover design: Ellen Portch / Cover image: Emma Smith]

Celanie: Poems & Drawings after Paul Celan. Poems by Jack Ross & Drawings by Emma Smith. Introduction by Jack Ross. Afterword by Bronwyn Lloyd. ISBN: 978-0-473-22484-4. Pania Samplers, 3. Auckland: Pania Press, 2012. 168 pp.

Contents:

• Introduction:
  The Twenty-year Masterclass
  (Jack Ross)


• I: STEHEN [1952-1965]:
  
  
  
  1. *Maïa[7/1/52]
  2. The Sun’s[1952]
  3. I heard[Autumn 1952]
  4. *Already[30/3/54]
  5. *Islandward[22/6/54]
  6. The Beach at Toulinget[Autumn ’54]
  7. You[20/11/54]
  8. So[7/4/55]
  9. *Matter of Britain[13/8/57]
  10. The word[5/3/59 – 21/11/65]
  11. *Heart (for René Char)[6/1/60]
  12. Hard[15/12/60]
  13. A Thieves’ and Beggars’ Ballad[2/61]
  14. The bright[5/11/61]
  15. The buzzard’s[21/10/62 – 19/3/63]
  16. This[3/11/62]
  17. Thinking[24/10/63]
  18. Hourglass[4/6/64]
  19. Those[January 1965]
  20. & our son[6/5/65]
  21. A roar[7/5/65]
  22. Souvenir of D.[10/5/65]
  23. Give the Word[14/5/65]
  24. Bowls[9/5/65]
  25. Banners[4/8/65]
  26. Rest[18/8/65]
  27. Come[7/9/65]
  28. Chance[24/9/65]
  29. The ounce[25/10/65]
  30. Noisy[26/10/65]


• Drawing Portfolio 1
  (Emma Smith)


• II: IMMER [1966]:
  
  
  
  1. Depths[25/2-2/3/66]
  2. Molten gold[28/2/66]
  3. Hewed stone[17/3/66]
  4. Suffocating[20/3/66]
  5. Spiky[21/3/66]
  6. Underrun[26/3/66]
  7. Shame[26/3/66]
  8. Above our heads[28/3/66]
  9. Are[28/3/66]
  10. Dauntless[29/3/66]
  11. After abandoning[30/3/66]
  12. Irruption[31/3/66]
  13. True as a scar[26/3/66]
  14. Thoughtless[4/4/66]
  15. Rope[6/4 – 17/4/66]
  16. By ice fire[7/4/66]
  17. Forced to come down[7/4/66]
  18. & if[8/4/66]
  19. Torchsong[9/4/66]
  20. Mit uns[16/4/66]
  21. Wilderness[22/4/66]
  22. I'm writing down[23/4/66]
  23. Sacrificial troughs[27/4/66]
  24. Devastations?[1/5/66]
  25. Whistled up[2/5/66]
  26. My Dear[2/5/66]
  27. Bouts of sleep[13/6/66]


• Drawing Portfolio 2
  (Emma Smith)


• III: LE PONT DES ANNÉES [1967-1969]:
  
  
  
  1. Arrow-sister[24/5/67]
  2. Paired, by the Brâncuşi[4/8/67]
  3. Tow-barge[3/12/67]
  4. Lilac air[23/12/67]
  5. Gravediggers[25/12/67]
  6. Year opening[2/1/68]
  7. This world’s[5/1/68]
  8. *What’s stitched[10/1/68]
  9. [Black Toll]:
     • [i] Relics of hearing[9/6/67]
     • [ii] Night rode him[9-10-11/6-10/9/67]
     • [iii] Shoals of mussels[14/6/67]
     • [iv] Weighed[15/6/67]
     • [v] Studded[16/6/67]
     • [vi] Gone[20/6/67]
     • [vii] Already we lay[24/6/67]
     • [viii] Mines[27-28/6/67]
     • [ix] Who[1/7/67]
     • [x] Loaded[5/7/67]
     • [xi] Green light[8/7/67]
     • [xii] Beacon-[8/7/67]
     • [xiii] Adjusted[17/7/67]
     • [xiv] That[17/7/67]
  10. Creeping weed[25/2/69]
  11. Hateful moons[21/3/69]
  12. In[29/3/69]
  13. *Kew Gardens[6/4/69]
  14. Gold[12/4/69]
  15. The world[21/4/69]
  16. I see you[4-5/5/69]
  17. Above[9/5/69]
  18. There[13/12/69]


• Poser [1967]:
  
  
  
  1. *Leave[24/6/67]


• Afterword:
  A Figure of Polished Desolation
  (Bronwyn Lloyd)

[* = previously published]

Blurb:

The word

goes deep
we read it
the yearswords since
Still that

You knowthat space is infinite
you knowyou don't have to fly
you knowwhat's written in your eye
goes deep enough for me

When artist Emma Smith and poet Jack Ross came up with the idea for this book: an amalgam of images and poems, “translated” from their understanding of the work of German poet Paul Celan (1920-1970), it was the word Celanie, the description Celan himself used for the little set of Parisian streets and suburbs which constituted the heart of his world-in-exile, that inspired them.

Ross’s choice of texts has its origins in the correspondence between Celan and his wife, French artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, and – specifically – in the poems, often enriched with glossaries and occasionally even complete dual-text versions, which he so frequently included in his letters to her.

The decisions that lie behind the choice of subject-matter for Emma Smith’s pictures are expounded further in Bronwyn Lloyd’s Afterword, “A Figure of Polished Desolation,” especially written for this volume.


Pania Press: ISBN 978-0-473-22484-4

Abstract:

Lire ces lettres doublées de poèmes, c'est aussi mesurer l'espace ou Celan pratique habituellement sa langue et qu'il appelait parfois, non sans humour, sa «Celanie»: la rue des Ecoles, la rue de Lota, la rue de Montevideo, la rue de Longchamp, la rue d’Ulm, la rue Cabanis (Clinique de la Faculté, Sainte-Anne), la rue Tournefort et l’avenue Emile Zola. Autour de cet espace en existe un autre, a peine plus vaste, incluant Moisville, Epinay-sur-Seine, Le Vésinet, Suresnes et Epinay-sur-Orge. Celan a choisi de faire figurer presque tous ces noms de lieu sur les manuscrits de ses poèmes, comme des prolongements de leur premières version datée et «inaltérée», ainsi que sur nombre de ses livres annotés, les annexant de la sorte a son écriture.

- Bertrand Badiou, "Introduction." In Paul Celan & Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. Correspondance (1951-1970), avec un choix de letters de Paul Celan à son fils Eric. Ed. Bertrand Badiou & Eric Celan. 2 vols. La Librairie du XXIe siècle (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001): 2, 10.

[Reading these letters doubled with poems is also to delimit the space where Celan habitually deployed his language, and which he referred to – not entirely seriously – as his “Celanie”: the Rue des Ecoles, the Rue de Lota, the Rue de Montevideo, the Rue de Longchamp, the Rue d’Ulm, the Rue Cabanis (Faculty Clinic, Saint-Anne), the Rue Tournefort and Emile Zola Avenue. Around this space exists another one, not much larger, which included the towns of Moisville, Epinay-sur-Seine, Le Vésinet, Suresnes and Epinay-sur-Orge. Celan chose to include almost all of these place-names on the manuscripts of his poems, like guarantees on their first dated and “unalterable” versions, as well as on quite a number of his own annotated books, thus – in a sense – annexing them to the world of his writing.]

“Read! Just keep reading. Understanding comes of itself,” was Celan’s answer to those critics who found his work excessively obscure or “hermetisch” [hermetic] during his lifetime. But how was his Francophone wife Gisèle to “keep reading” if her linguistic skills weren’t even up to parsing Goethe or Heine, let alone their far more difficult heir?

From an early stage, almost from the beginning of their twenty-year relationship, Celan would include drafts of poems in his letters. Crucially, though, he was careful to accompany them with little mini-lexicons and vocabulary lists – often with complete literal French translations.

The fact that all of the 90-odd poems included in their published correspondence are in German, with non-poetic, verbatim French translations supplied by Celan implies that for him poetry could only exist in one language, his mother tongue, despite his great fluency in and love for a number of others.

The way in which he annotates and “explains” the poems included in these letters – with linguistic precision but no other general or thematic aids to meaning – also tells us a good deal about how he meant readers of other languages to approach his poetry: through the detail, rather than metaphoric conveniences such as context and atmosphere – a poet’s poems, rather than a survivor’s.

Ninety poems is only a fraction of his work as a whole, of course, but it’s hard to imagine how any future translator can overlook these authorised literal versions when considering even such major poems as “Matière de Bretagne.”

The couple only corresponded while they were apart, which leads to certain distortions of chronology: but Celan’s increasingly frequent visits to Germany each sparked a number of letters.

Nor did their increasing estrangement, as a result of his violent breakdowns and hospitalisations in the 1960s, cut off the supply of poems. If anything, it made them more crucial to him as a means of communication. Long sequences continued to be sent to Gisèle (mostly, admittedly, for collaborative artistic projects), but also as if he hoped that by understanding them she could somehow get to the core of her husband, and thus, in some sense – who knows? – help to heal him. Or perhaps it was even more basic than that: a hand reaching out in the darkness.

- from Jack Ross's Introduction to Celanie, "The Twenty-Year Masterclass."


•

We gratefully acknowledge the generous contribution of Massey University’s School of English and Media Studies to this publication, and, in particular, would like to thank HOS Dr John Muirhead for his vital support of the project.

Online Textual Notes:

Papyri

Samples:

Emma Smith

Mosehouse Studio (1)

Mosehouse Studio (2)

nzepc

Pania Press

The Imaginary Museum

Tin Grew

Available:

Pania Press

2/5 Hastings Rd
Mairangi Bay
North Shore City 0630
Auckland
New Zealand
paniapress.blogspot.com

Reviews & Comments:

1. Dr Marco Sonzogni, Director, New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation (May 16, 2012):
   

   
   [T]his rich collection is a powerful and persuasive testimony to the art of poetry translation. And a slap in the face to those who share Robert Frost’s famous warning that poetry is what gets lost in translation. In fact, this book is a persuasive demonstration that poetry is indeed what comes through in translation. Ross is a writer whose ear and voice are particularly receptive of the poetic frequencies of other poets. Over the years Ross has authored and edited many translations and versions, showcasing his ability to tune into the spirit of poetry and capture its music into the score of his mother tongue, English.



2. Michele Leggott, Launch speech for Celanie (November 25, 2012):
   

   
   This is what I hear: in the apparently simple fragments that track complex ideas, these poems remind me of Louis Zukofsky’s short poems which condense worlds into matchboxes. And which Robert Creeley picked up and made into his own version of stripped down verse in the mid to late 1960s. Small masterpieces of language hooked up to lives. And I think this is what I’m hearing in Jack's rendition of the poems in the letters written to Gisèle Celan-Lestrange.



3. Jennifer Little, "Massey writer translates German poet Paul Celan." Massey News (November 27, 2012):
   

   
   Translating work by acclaimed German poet Paul Celan – famous for his Holocaust poem “Death Fugue” and generally considered one of the greatest post-war European poets – has been a 10-year literary mission for Albany-based Massey University English lecturer, editor and poet Dr Jack Ross.
   
   His project has culminated in the launch of Celanie: Poems & Drawings after Paul Celan, which contains 90 “gem-like” poems by the Romanian-born Jewish poet and World War II Nazi labour-camp survivor, translated from German and French into English. The book of poems includes two portfolios of drawings by Auckland artist Emma Smith. It was the word ‘Celanie’, the description Celan himself used for the little set of Parisian streets and suburbs which constituted the heart of his world-in-exile, that inspired them.



4. Scott Hamilton, "From Masada to Matakaoa: three notes on Paul Celan and Vaughan Rapatahana." Reading the Maps (December 18, 2012):
   

   
   During her talk at the recent launch of Celanie, a volume of Jack Ross' translations of poems by Paul Celan, Michele Leggott praised Ross and his publisher, Pania Press, for 'airlifting' Celan to New Zealand.
   
   Leggott's metaphor can be interpreted in at least two ways. We airlift personnel and supplies to disaster zones - to villages surrounded by floodwaters, for instance, or to listing ships. But we also airlift people and precious objects out of disaster zones - we helicopter fishermen off wrecks, and sacred icons out of besieged cities.
   
   Michele Leggott didn't explain whether Celan was a precious piece of literary equipment, being flown to a New Zealand in need, or whether his poetry was being evacuated from Europe to this end of the world. What her image of an airlift undeniably evoked, though, was a sense of distance. Whether New Zealand is a place of safety or a zone of distress, it is, the image insists, remote from Europe, and from the world of Celan's poetry.
   
   Paul Celan was raised in a German-speaking household in Bukovina, before the Shoah killed his parents and destroyed the region's Jewish community. He settled in Paris in 1948, and lived there until his suicide in 1970. Celan was a polyglot, but he always wrote his poetry in the German language, despite or because of the terrible events of the 1940s.
   
   Celan's poems evoke not only the Shoah but the wider history of Europe. They allude to other great European writers, like Osip Mandelstam and Rainer Maria Rilke. It is natural, given all this, that Celan might seem like a writer whose concerns are remote from us here in the South Pacific. The subject matter and texture of Celan's writing might seem to exacerbate the sense of his remoteness from us, and indeed from all his readers. Because his works deal with such extreme events, and use such fragmented, intense language, many literary critics, and a few philosophers as well, have avoided treating him as anything so commonplace as a poet. Charles Bernstein has warned of the consequences of secluding Celan in this way:
   
   

   Perhaps the greatest risk for the reading of Celan in our time...is that we have venerated him, in the process of removing him not only from his own time and place, but also from our own poetic horizon. . . . [A] crippling exceptionalism has made his work a symbol of his fate rather than an active matrix for an ongoing poetic practice.

   
   ...
   
   In the 46th issue of the New Zealand literary journal brief, which was launched at the same time as Celanie, guest editor Bronwyn Lloyd has placed a poem by Vaughan Rapatahana directly before an essay by Jack Ross called 'Interpreting Paul Celan'. In 'he whatinga', which translated roughly as 'an escape', Rapatahana attacks the English language which his ancestors were obliged to learn during the colonisation of their rohe. Rapatahana calls English a 'hybrid bastard' tongue, which is incapable of expressing his thoughts and feelings:
   
   ...
   
   In the essay that follows Rapatahana's poem Jack Ross discusses the difficulties that Paul Celan had in expressing himself in the German language. After the Shoah, Celan once said, language seemed like the only part of his heritage which was unbroken. It was a link to the extinguished world of pre-war Bukovina, and to the poet's beloved mother and father. But German had also been the language of the men who had killed Celan's parents, and deported Bukovina's Jews.
   
   The famous obscurity of Celan's poems comes partly from his mistrust of the language in which they were written. Celan had a fuming desire to write, and perhaps hoped by writing to make some sort of sense of the traumas of his youth. At the same time, he feared that by setting down words and lines and stanzas in a contaminated language he was falsifying or dishonouring his experiences, and the experiences of his people. Celan was like a man lost in a desert who came across a pool of filthy water. He had to drink, but feared that the deep, desperate draughts he took might kill him. To read the poems in Celanie, with their gnomic images, oxymoronic maxims, strange neologisms, and dizzyingly sudden line-breaks, is to see Celan both slaking his thirst and sickening himself:
   
   

   If one of these stones could
   let us know
   what keeps it silent
   here
   near the old man’s Zimmer-frame
   it would open like a wound
   into which one dives
   alone
   far from my voice
   from all our redrafts
   white
   
   ['Paired, by the Brâncuşi']

   ...



5. Jen Crawford, "Review of Celanie: Poems and Drawings after Paul Celan." brief 47 - The Mid City Arcade Project (2013): 130-31:
   

   
   The book is completed by Ross’s Introduction and an attentive, thought-provoking Afterword on Smith’s paintings by Bronwyn Lloyd. As a whole it is one of the most gratifying works of poetry translation I’ve seen, and promises years of layered enjoyments.



6. Andrew Paul Wood, "Picked-Up Stones." Landfall Review Online

(July, 2013):

The book Celanie: Poems & Drawings after Paul Celan is a collaboration between academic /poet Jack Ross and artist Emma Smith – images and poems ‘translated’ from poems in the correspondence of Celan to his wife, French artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange. The word ‘Celanie’ was a coining by Celan for the Parisian neighbourhoods where lived in exile. I must confess that my first reaction to it was ‘why bother?’ Celan has already been widely translated (if one can translate something alien even in its native language) into English by poets as illustrious as John Felstiner, Pierre Joris, Ian Fairle [sic], and Michael Hamburger. But then, Ross’ contributions aren’t translations per se, they are ‘versions’ after.

The originals, composed in German and first translated into verbatim prosaic French by Celan, complete with glossaries and contextual notes, are merely the point of departure for Ross’s decade-long project. ... what we have are more the product of a poet than a translator – new poems that can’t really be relied on too closely to get a real sense of Celan at home in his own language. That is not to say that Ross‘ aren’t good poems – they are, sinuous and elegant – but my mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun ...

Smith’s illustrations — variations on the motif of a horse’s skull — are an exquisite accompaniment.

Alistair Paterson, "Books and magazines in brief: Celanie: Poems & Drawings after Paul Celan, poems by Jack Ross, drawings by Emma Smith, afterword by Bronwyn Lloyd (Pania Press, 2/5 Hastings Road, Mairangi Bay, Auckland 0630; 168pp, $30).” Poetry NZ 47 (2013): 106:

[Celan's] letters to his wife contained 90 poems in German (his preferred mode of writing) with notes and comments in French for his wife as she wasn't strong in the former language. It's these poems Ross has reworked in English and presented to the reader – poems he has shaped with the mastery, subtlety and skill that only an exceptionally able translator and poet can demonstrate. The translations themselves allow readers to experience as close to first hand as is possible the subtlety of Celan's work, the slightly surrealistic style it's written in, and his inability to escape his deep concerns with death and separation. The element of obscurity in the poems is another matter, but in a strange and arresting way enhances and draws the reader more deeply into what they're saying and doing. Jack Ross lets us see this and allows us to recognise Celan as the major 20th century European poet he is now known to have been. Emma Smith's black and white drawings complement the poems and help us find our way into understanding them more than might otherwise be possible and to appreciate the spirit and quality of Celan's life and work.

Richard Millington, "The limits of light: Celanie: Poems & Drawings after Paul Celan, Jack Ross (poems), Emma Smith (drawings), Pania Press, $30, ISBN 9780473224844.” NZ Books: a quarterly review 104 (Vol. 23, No. 4) (Summer 2013): 17.

... Michael Hamburger, John Felstiner and Pierre Joris, among others, have each brought years of study to the task of anglicising the cryptic, allusive, neologistic German of Celan’s verse. These new versions by Auckland-based poet Jack Ross contained in Celanie, accompanied by two portfolios of drawings by artist Emma Smith (20 dark and abstract variations on the theme of a horse’s skull), continue this tradition of scholarly devotion to a body of work embodying the trauma of Holocaust survival through a desperate probing of the limits of poetic meaning. ... The title echoes Celan’s own term for the Parisian streets that became the centre of his life from the late 1940s until his drowning in the Seine, but Ross consciously shifts the emphasis from the physical to the imaginative space of Celan’s world, a place, he tell us, “which, once visited, can never be forgotten”.

Complete Essay:

Jen Crawford. "Review of Celanie." brief 47 (2013): 130-31:

Celanie: Poems and Drawings after Paul Celan
Jack Ross and Emma Smith
Pania Press, Auckland, 2012.
168 pp, $30

Jack Ross and Emma Smith’s Celanie is, at 168 pages, a substantial achievement for artisan book-makers Pania Press. The volume contains around 90 of Ross’s translations of Paul Celan’s poems, as written over ten years, and 20 plates of artist Emma Smith’s hauntingly elegant Celan-inspired paintings. The book’s readers will no doubt include the established audiences of Celan, Ross, Smith and Pania Press, for whom it will be an essential treasure. It should find a broader readership too, though, for in catching the best vitality, originality and skill of each of these artists, the resonance between them becomes quite unforgettable. Celan’s poems sound notes of the human experience that are not heard anywhere else beyond the privacy of the heart, and the book carries these into the world beautifully.

A translation project of this scale by a New Zealander is in itself unusual, and the translations (the focus of this review), are graceful indeed. They offer a lucidity and rhythmic resilience that has at times eluded the most well-known translators of Celan. For a concise example one can compare Ross’s “Paired, by the Brancusi” to Michael Hamburger’s “At Brancusi’s, The Two of Us”. From the German “Wenn dieser Steine einer / verlauten ließe, / was ihn verschweigt” Ross derives “If one of these stones could / let us know / what keeps it silent” (102), while Hamburger has “If one of these stones / were to give away / what it is that keeps silent about it” (299). Or read Ross’s “Gravediggers” against Pierre Joris’s “Well-Graves”. Celan writes “es wird einer die Bratsche spielen, tagabwärts, in Krug, / es wird einer kopfstehn im Wort Genug, / es wird einer kreuzbeinig hängen im Tor, bei der Winde”. Ross renders this as “One’s playing his viola arms akimbo in the jug / One’s standing on his head in the word Enough / One’s hanging in the doorway by the windlass” (105), while Joris has “someone will play the viola, day downward, in the ale house, / someone will stand on his head in the word Enough, / someone will hang crosslegged in the gateway, next to the winch” (130).

Ross manages his effects without sacrificing the strangeness or multiplicity of the poems, an achievement which speaks in part to his linguistic facility, but also to the affinities between his own poetic project and Celan’s. It’s gratifying though not surprising to see Ross matching Celan’s emotional openness and the scope of his existential concerns. More surprising is how much warmth is woken up in Celan by the touches of supple humour and comfortable contemporaneity that Ross has long developed in his own work. Thus what Hamburger translates as “limping-stick” is a “Zimmerframe” in Ross, a selection with more of the semiotic playfulness one hears in Celan’s word, “Humpelstock”. The familiarity that Ross welcomes in here also extends to the poems’ sense of place: mentions of “gorse” and “marram” (as opposed to common alternatives “furze” and “wheatgrass”) engage the particulars of the antipodean imagination without forcing relocation on the poems. These choices seem absolutely in keeping with the idea of a “Celanie”: both a translation of and a tribute to the locality of Celan’s poems, as known and actual places, and as a “particular region of the imagination” (Ross, Introduction p.12).

Ross’s own poetic strengths also make a unique and valuable contribution to the volume through the careful attention he pays to narrative framing. The decision to begin with a translation of material from a letter of Celan’s to his wife, Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, is one example of Ross’s multiple contextualizing moves; it’s an unobtrusive but powerful way to touch on the history both of the poems’ writing and of their translation (aided as it was by Celan’s letters to Gisèle in French). This framing also happens through the choice to date individual poems, and through the inclusion of Celan’s marginalia to Gisele, which accentuates the intimate epistolary tones in many of the pieces. These framing elements remain evocative, rather than evolving into the elaborate metatextual apparatus through which Ross adeptly scaffolds his own work. But it’s hard to imagine a writer better equipped to give context through paratext than Ross, for whom form and format are always expressive. It’s a delight to see his talents in this area applied to the work of translation, where they nimbly provide atmosphere and information that is usually either absent or found only through more laborious paths.

The book is completed by Ross’s Introduction and an attentive, thought-provoking Afterword on Smith’s paintings by Bronwyn Lloyd. As a whole it is one of the most gratifying works of poetry translation I’ve seen, and promises years of layered enjoyments.

• Celan, Paul. Selected Poems. Trans. Michael Hamburger. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996.
• Celan, Paul. Selections. Ed. Pierre Joris. Trans. Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg. Poets for the Millennium, 3. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

brief 47 - The Mid City Arcade Project

•

Fallen Empire (2012)

Fallen Empire: Maui in the Underworld, Kupe & the Fountain of Youth, Hatupatu & the Nile-monster: Three Play-Fragments from the Literary Remains of The Society of Inner Light. Attributed to Bertolt Wegener. Edited with an introduction by Jack Ross. Museum of True History in Collaboration with Karl Chitham and Jack Ross (20 June – 21 July 2012). Dunedin: Blue Oyster Art Project Space, 2012. 46 pp.

Maui in the Underworld

Kupe & the Fountain of Youth

Hatupatu & the Nile-monster:

Three Play-Fragments
from the literary remains of
The Society of Inner Light

Attributed to
Bertolt Wegener

Edited with an introduction
by Jack Ross

Contents:

Introduction, by Jack Ross


Maui in the Underworld

Opening Chorus: Tell me Muses
Scene 1: Calypso’s Isle
Scene 2: The Seashore in New Zealand
Scene 3: Tartarus
Scene 4: The Whare in Hawaiki
Final Chorus: You can’t strike

[Karl Chitham: Calypso (2012)]

Kupe and the Fountain of Youth

Opening Chorus: He who sailed the deep
Scene 1: The Seashore at Kapiti
Scene 2: Kapiti
Scene 3: The Pool of the Taniwha
Scene 4: The Seashore at Kapiti
Final Chorus: My friend I held so dear

[Karl Chitham: Kupe (2012)]

Hatupatu and the Nile-monster

Opening Chorus: Hatupatu
Scene 1: The Pa at Taupo
Scene 2: The Pa at Taupo
Scene 3: Lake Taupo
Scene 4: The Pa at Taupo
Final Chorus: May he cross

[Karl Chitham: Isis (2012)]

Notes & Sources

MOTH

This publication was created by the Museum of True History's archives department as a permanent record of the Society of Inner Light Collections related specifically to the work of Bertolt Wegener. While not all of the materials donated to MOTH are able to be documented in this small reader the Director and Senior Curator see this as an opportunity to bring this intriguing group's work into focus so that further research can be undertaken in the future.

MOTH would like to thank all of those involved in putting this exhibition and publication together, particularly the amazingly detailed reconstructive talents of Karl Chitham and the dedication and perseverance of Dr Jack Ross whose significant academic investment in this project has given the previously untold story of the Society of Inner Light new life. MOTH would also like to take this opportunity to thank Alan Deare of AREA Design and Blue Oyster Art Project Space for their belief in this project.

This limited edition publication was
produced on the occasion of the exhibition:

Fallen Empire at Blue Oyster
Art Project Space, Dunedin
20 June - 21 July 2012

...... /30

•

Cover image: Karl Chitham

Blurb:

For Blue Oyster the Museum of True History [MOTH] has invited artist Karl Chitham along with writer Dr Jack Ross to explore the collections of the little known Society of Inner Light.

Although few relics of this reclusive group of esoterics and mystics survive, a small, fragmentary collection of plays was found in the back of a Raetihi storehouse in 2010. These plays represent what may be the only existing examples of pseudo-religious works that aspired to combine classical mythology with Maori legends. The three plays that exist in any substance are titled "Maui in the Underworld," "Hatupatu and the Nile-monster" and "Kupe and the Fountain of Youth."

“Fallen Empire” features works recreated by Karl Chitham, including a paper theatre used by Society of Inner Light member Bertolt Wegener to compose his works, a moving image work interpreting some of the recovered scenes and a small collection of costume sketches. Also accompanying the exhibition is a limited edition MOTH publication with excerpts from the manuscripts alongside interpretation by Dr Jack Ross and Karl Chitham.

Karl Chitham has a Masters in Sculpture from Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland and is currently the Art Collections Curator for the University of Waikato. He has collaborated with the Museum of True History since early 2010 and is also a member of MOTH’s programming advisory committee.

Dr Jack Ross is an academic and author who has written and edited more than twenty books to date. He has a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Edinburgh, and currently lectures in English and Creative Writing at Massey University.

Online Texts:

Papyri

Samples:

Blue Oyster

Mosehouse Studio

The Imaginary Museum

Available:

MOTH [Museum of True History]
c/o Blue Oyster Gallery
PO Box 5903
Dunedin 9058
New Zealand

Reviews & Comments:

1. Scott Hamilton, "New Zealand, old Lemuria." Reading the Maps (21 August 2012):
   

   
   I've been writing a review of Jack Ross' book Fallen Empire for the forthcoming 46th issue of the Kiwi literary journal brief. Fallen Empire was produced to accompany a recent exhibition by sculptor and draughtsman Karl Chitham, ... of the Museum of True History ...
   
   Jack's book collects fragments of three plays that initiates of a mystical sect called the Society of Inner Light supposedly performed in a private theater above a rundown storehouse in the small North Island town of Raetihi last century. In his introduction to Fallen Empire Ross sketches the ideology and history of the imaginary Society:
   

   There's a lot about Atlantis and Lemuria in their surviving writings. They held some very revisionist ideas about the accepted chronology of world history...Polynesian culture was, to them, primary and almost inconceivably ancient. The emissaries of civilisation (for them) emanated originally from the Pacific - specifically from the lost continent of Mu, which now survives only in the form of scattered islands of the Oceanic archipelago...The main body of members came to New Zealand after WWI...The last one standing turned out the lights, leaving everything in situ, sometime around 1973...







2. Natalie Poland, "Postcards: Dunedin." Art News New Zealand, vol.32, no.3 (Spring 2012): 56.
   
   
   
   
   

   
   A recent exhibition at the Blue Oyster Gallery came about through a collaboration between Waikato-based artist Karl Chitham and Massey-based creative writing lecturer Dr Jack Ross. It delved into the habits of the Society of Inner Light, a reclusive and little known group of New Zealand mystics which flourished in the 1920s. For this exhibition, titled Fallen Empire, Chitham and Ross researched the archival remnants of the sect, whose members were interested in magical rituals and astral instructions conveyed to them by spiritual advisors based in the Andes. Chitham and Ross focussed on a small, fragmentary collection of plays by the sect, which were found in Raetihi. Ross reconstructed three of these play fragments, which combine classical and Pacific mythology, and published them in a catalogue accompanying the show. Chitham's contribution to Fallen Empire comprised a cardboard model of the Paper Theatre, used by the sect's members to inspire the creation of plays, and a series of fictitious costume designs. His ethereal silhouettes, made from collaged pieces of watercolour, depict principal characters from each of the three plays, including Calypso from Maui in the Underworld, Kupe from Kupe and the Fountain of Youth, and Isis from Hatupatu and the Nile-monster.





3. Scott Hamilton, "Sects, secrets and lies: four notes on Jack Ross’ Fallen Empire." brief 46 - The Survival Issue (November 2012): 142-48.
   
   
   
   
   

   
   By locating his sect in Raetihi, a small, economically distressed town on the volcanic plateau of the North Island, Jack Ross might seem to be emphasising its marginality. The geographical isolation of Raetihi can be seen, surely, as a metaphor for the apparent intellectual isolation of the Society of Light from mainstream New Zealand, and the stagnation of the town seems to parallel the stagnation of the Society, which failed to maintain its membership in the decades after World War Two.
   
   Ross' Raetihi setting might also be an attempt to play on some of the associations that small towns have in the minds of big city Kiwis. We like to condemn provincial New Zealand as dully conservative, but half-suspect that it is really a hotbed of sin. We want to believe that the small-town RSA turns into swinger's club on Friday nights, and that the local vicar grows pot out the back of his manse. The rise of 'Kiwi Gothic' genre, with its love of mixing the grotesque and the provincial, reflects the way urban New Zealanders see their rural and small town kin.

•

Campana to Montale (2010)

[cover design: Gennaro Fusco]

Kendrick Smithyman. Campana to Montale: Versions from Italian. 2004. Edited by Jack Ross & Marco Sonzogni. Introduction by Marco Sonzogni. Essay by Jack Ross. ISBN-13: 978-88-7536-264-5. Transference Series. Ed Erminia Passannanti. Novi Ligure: Edizioni Joker, 2010. 244 pp.

Contents:

• Introduction
  Making the List: Last but not Least
  (Marco Sonzogni)


• Essay
  The Poem Within: Kendrick Smithyman the Poet-Translator
  (Jack Ross)

Poets:
[For a full list of the poems included, consult the 2004 edition]

1. Dino Campana
   (20 August, 1885 – 1 March, 1932)
   

   
   Born in 1885, near Faenza; died of septicaemia at Castel Pulci in 1932. Before being committed in 1918 to the mental hospital where he died, Campana’s life was characterised by compulsive wandering, tormented love affairs, and extreme disdain for the literary establishment. Major works: Canti Orfici (1914); Canti orfici e altre liriche (1928). A great deal of his work appeared posthumously: Inediti (1942), Taccuino (1949); Canti orfici e altre scritti (1952); Lettere (1958); Taccuinetto fiorentino (1960); Opere e contributi (1972).



2. Sandro Penna
   (June 12, 1906 – January 21, 1977)
   

   
   Born in Perugia in 1906; died in Rome in 1977. A somewhat isolated figure in modern Italian poetry, Penna is generally described as the one working-class poet among the intellectuals of the Hermetic school. Major works: Una strana gioia di vivere (1956); Croce e delizia (1958); Un po' di febbre (1973); Tutte le poesie (1970); Stranezze (1976); Il viaggiatore insonne (1977); Confuso sogno (1980).



3. Nelo Risi
   (April 21, 1920- )
   

   
   Born in Milan in 1920. A qualified doctor, but writer by vocation, he spent most of World War II in Russia, and was subsequently interned in Switzerland. His work concerns itself mainly with “the dilemma of the individual in an age of mass-consciousness.” Major works: L'opere e i giorni (1941); L’esperienza (1948); Polso teso (1956); Pensieri elementari (1961); Dentro la sostanza (1966); Amica mia nemica (1976); Poesie scelte 1943-1975 (1977); I fabbricanti del 'bello' (1982); Le risonanze (1987); Mutazioni (1991); Il mondo in una mano (1994); Altro da dire (2000); Ruggine (2004); Di certe cose. Poesie 1953-2005 (2006); Né il giorno né l'ora (2008).



4. Giuseppe Ungaretti
   (February 8, 1888 – June 2, 1970)
   

   
   Born in Egypt, at Alexandria, in 1888; died in Milan in 1970. He served as an infantryman in World War I, an experience which confirmed him in his vocation as a poet. With Montale and Quasimodo, one of the “big three” of twentieth-century Italian poetry. Major works: Il porto sepolto (1917); Allegria di naufragi (1919); L'allegria (1931); Sentimento del tempo (1933); Il dolore (1947); La terra promessa (1950); Il taccuino del vecchio (1960); Vita d’un uomo (1969).



5. Leonardo Sinisgalli
   (March 9, 1908 – January 31, 1981)
   

   
   Born in Montemurro in 1908; died in Rome in 1981. His background in physics and graphic design led him to formulate a poetry of detached understatement, in opposition to the frenzied aesthetics of his contemporaries. Major works: Cuore (1927); Ritratti di macchine (1935); Quaderno di geometria (1935); Vidi le muse (1943); Fiori pari, fiori dispari (1945); Belliboschi (1948); La vigna vecchia (1952); L'età della luna (1962): Poesie di ieri (1966); Mosche in bottiglia (1975); Dimenticatoio (1978).



6. Alfonso Gatto
   (July 17, 1909 – March 6, 1976)
   

   
   Born in Salerno in 1909; died in a road accident near Orbetello in 1976. He was imprisoned in Milan in 1934 for opposition to the Fascist regime, and was active in the Resistance during World War II, experiences which informed much of his later poetry. Major works: Isola (1932); Poesie (1941); La spiaggia dei poveri (1944); Nuove poesie (1949); La forza degli occhi (1954); La madre e la morte (1960); Rime di viaggio per la terra dipinta (1969); Desinenze (1977); Poesie (1998); Tutte le poesie (2005).



7. Vittorio Sereni
   (July 27, 1913 – February 10, 1983)
   

   
   Born in Luino, Lago Maggiore, in 1913; died in Milan in 1983. Fought as an infantry officer in Greece and Sicily, where he was taken prisoner. His initial adherence to Hermeticism was succeeded by a more realistic approach to war and post-war austerity. Major works: Frontiera (1941); Diario d’Algeria (1947); Un polvere d'anni di Milano (1954); Gli strumenti umani (1965); Poesie scelte 1935-1965 (1973); Stella variabile (1981); Tutte le poesie (1986); Il grande amico. Poesie 1935-1981 (1990); Poesie (1995).



8. Camillo Sbarbaro
   (January 12, 1888 – October 31, 1967)
   

   
   Born in Santa Margherita, Liguria, in 1888; died at Spoleto in 1967. Generally seen as an adherent of the turn-of-the-century Crepuscular school, Sbarbaro’s melancholic self-absorption in fact has more in common with later poets of disillusionment such as Montale or T. S. Eliot. Major works: Resine (1911); Pianissimo (1914); Truccioli (1920); Liquidazione (1928); Rimanenze (1956); Primizie (1958).



9. Luciano Erba
   (September 18, 1922 - August 3, 2010)
   

   
   Born in Milan in 1922; died in Milan in 2010. Scholar, translator and critic, Erba’s elaborately ironic undercutting of traditional poetic language and attitudes helped him to build up a biting commentary on post-war Italian values. Major works: Linea K (1951); Il bel paese (1955); Il prete di Ratanà (1959); Il male minore (1960); Il prato più verde (1970); Il nastro di Moebius (1980); Il cerchio aperto (1983); Il tranviere metafisico (1987); L'ippopotamo (1989); Il variar del verde (1993); L'ipoteci circense (1995); Negli spazi intermedi (1998); Nella terra di mezzo (2000); Poesie 1951-2001 (2002); Si passano le stagioni (2003); Un po' di Repubblica (2005); Remi in barca (2006).



10. Mario Luzi
    (October 20, 1914 – February 28, 2005)
    

    
    Born in Castello, Tuscany, in 1914; died in Florence in 2005, shortly after being elected Italian Senator-for-life. An early exponent of the hermetic movement, whose motto “letteratura come vita” (literature as life) dominated Italian literature in the 1930’s, his later work is less liable to assume the capacity of poetry to palliate suffering. Major works: La barca (1935); Avvento notturno (1940); Quaderno gotico (1947); Onore del vero (1957): Il gusto della vita (1960); Tutte le poesie (1979); Per il battesimo dei nostri frammenti (1985); Viaggio terrestre e celeste di Simone Martini (1994); Dottrina dell'estremo principiante (2004).



11. Giorgio Orelli
    (May 25, 1921 - )
    

    
    Born in Airolo in 1921. He studied Italian literature with Gianfranco Contini at Fribourg, then went to teach in Bellinzona, where he has been living since 1945. He is considered by many the greatest poet of Italian Switzerland. Major works: Né bianco né viola (1944); Poesie (1953); Nel cerchio familiare (1960); L'ora del tempo (1962); Sinopie (1977); Spiracoli (1989) Rückspiel-partita di ritorno (1998); Il collo d'anitra (2001); Sagt es den Anseln-Ditelo ai merli (2008).



12. Elio Pagliarani
    (May 25, 1927 - )
    

    
    Born in Viserba, near Rimini, in 1927. Teacher, editor, journalist, Pagliarini’s poetry attempts to replace the conventions of the Romantic lyric with a neo-realist but linguistically complex presentation of the lives of ordinary people. Major works: Cronache e altre poesie (1954); La ragazza Carla e altre poesie (1962); Lezione di fisica e Fecaloro (1968); Rosso Corpo Lingua oro pope-papa scienza-Doppio trittico di Nandi (1977); Esercizi platonici (1985); La ballata di Rudi (1995).



13. Lucio Piccolo
    (October 27, 1901 - May 26, 1969)
    

    
    Born 1903 in Palermo. Died in 1969 at his Sicilian property at Capo d’Orlando. Like his more famous cousin Tomasi di Lampedusa, lived out of the mainstream of Italian cultural life. Major works: Canti barocchi (1956); Gioco a nascondere (1960); Plumelia (1967).



14. Eugenio Montale
    (October 12, 1896 - September 12, 1981)
    

    
    Born in Genoa in 1896; died in Milan in 1981. His poetry, perhaps the most influential in twentieth-century Italian literature, constantly circles back to his childhood on the coast of Liguria. Largely self-educated, he lost his job as an editor in 1938 as a result of anti-fascist opinions, and supported himself afterwards with occasional journalism and translation. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975. Major works: Ossi di seppia (1925); Le occasioni (1939); La bufera ed altro (1956); Satura (1971); Diario del '71 e del '72 (1973); Quaderno di quattro anni (1977); Altri versi (1980); L'opera in versi (1980).



15. Salvatore Quasimodo
    (August 20, 1901 - June 14, 1968)




Born in Modica in 1901; died in Milan in 1968. His Nobel prize for literature in 1959 was awarded mainly for the wartime poems collected in Giorno dopo giorno [Day after day] (1943-46), an advance on the austere Hermeticism of much of his early work. The life of the Sicilian countryside and the classical Mediterranean past are two interests which constantly resurface in his poetry. Major works: Acque e terre (1930); Òboe sommerso (1932); Erato e Apòllion (1938); Ed è subito sera (1943); Giorno dopo giorno (1947); La vita non è sogno (1949); Il falso e vero verde (1954); La terra impareggiabile (1958): Tutte le poesie (1960); Dare e avere (1966).

Blurb:

Kendrick Smithyman's Campana to Montale. Versions from Italian – an impressive anthology of Italian Modernist poetry in English translation – is not only a celebration of poetry translation but also of poetry itself. Smithyman's translations – or, rather, versions, as he defined them – keep company with those penned by virtuosi of the word like Samuel Beckett and T.S. Eliot; Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon; Charles Wright and John Updike; Billy Collins and Bill Manhire; and, of course, the godfather of poetry translation, Robert Lowell. Campana to Montale. Versions from Italian is an essential part in the jigsaw puzzle - Atua Wera, Last Poems, Imperial Vistas Family Fictions, and now the magnificent online edition of Collected Poems 1943-1995 - which is gradually revealing to us the true extent of the lifework of one of New Zealand's greatest poets.

Kendrick Smithyman, poet and critic, was born in Te Kopuru, in the far north of New Zealand, on October 9th, 1922. He attended school and teachers college in Auckland before wartime service in first the Artillery, then the RNZAF, from 1941 to 1945. His first poems were published in the 1940s, and he came to be regarded as one of the country's most complex yet prolific poets. He was also the author of the first full-length critical book on New Zealand poetry, A Way of Saying (1965). In 1963 he joined the Auckland University English Department, and he worked there as a Senior Tutor until his retirement in 1987. He won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry with his 1985 book Stories About Wooden Keyboards. In 1986 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Auckland, and in 1990 he received an OBE. He died on December 28th, 1995.

Jack Ross, poet and literary translator, is Lecturer in English at the School of Social and Cultural Studies, Massey University (Albany Campus).

Marco Sonzogni, poet and literary translator, is Senior Lecturer in Italian at the School of Languages and Cultures, Victoria University of Wellington.

ISBN: 88-7536-264-5

Є20.00 £17.50 $28.00

Abstract:

For the most part, this re-issue of my 2004 edition of this set of translations from the Italian Modernists by NZ poet Kendrick Smithyman reproduces the text of the original publication. However this second edition, co-edited with Dr Marco Sonzogni of Victoria University, includes corrections to the text of the poems, as well as a greatly expanded, 5,000-word version of my original introduction, entitled “The Poem Within: Kendrick Smithyman the Poet-Translator”. It also includes an essay by Italian scholar Sonzogni, comparing (favourably) Smithyman’s abilities as a translator with some of the others in the field.

The original edition of this book got a very favourable critical reception in New Zealand from (among others) C. K. Stead (“I know what I’ll be reading this summer.” Sunday Star-Times (5/12/04): C8). It was thanks to Dr. Sonzogni’s contacts in his home country, Italy, that we were able to issue it in this new form, in a series devoted to literary translation and foreign-language poetry.

Online Text:

Joker Edizioni

Samples:

The Imaginary Museum

Available:

Edizioni Joker
via Crosa della Maccarina 28/B
15067 Novi Ligure (AL)-ITALIA
Tel/Fax 0143.322383
www.edizionijoker.com
info@edizionjoker.com

Reviews & Comments:

1. Alistair Paterson. "Campana to Montale: Versions from Italian." Books and Magazines in Brief. Poetry NZ 42 (2011): 108.
   

   
   This is a relatively large collection of poems not so much translated as restructured by the author from the work of 15 Italian poets who were writing and publishing throughout a large part of the twentieth century. The collection was complete in 1993 when Smithyman submitted it unsuccessfully to Auckland University Press and then Carcanet in Manchester. AUP and Carcanet's loss was a distinctive gain for the Writers Group, which should congratulate itself on acquiring and publishing such a fine set of adaptations from the work of very important Italian poets. Jack Ross has done a wonderful job of putting the poems together and thus offering us a truly impressive book.



2. Anna Forsyth. "Book Review: Campana to Montale by Kendrick Smithyman." Best Light Communications (4/5/11):
   

   
   I must say straight away, that the depth of thought and care which has been given to this book is touching. When you can feel the love, you can’t help but linger for just a bit longer, out of respect for the author and editors if nothing else.
   
   I don’t speak any Italian, and aside from in the introduction, there is not too much for me to have to grapple with. Having the original language alongside would have been nice, but reading the English versions of the poems places the poem in a new context.
   
   Ross makes the point that ‘translating poetry is, strictly speaking, impossible.’ It is more of an envisioning and a fresh context that invites the reader into the world of the original.
   ...
   A great insight into an important school of poetry that deserves access.



3. David Herkt. "Summer's Last Cicada." Landfall Review Online (1/7/11):
   

   
   Campana To Montale is a substantial and noteworthy addition to the corpus of Italian poetry in English. It is focused, yet comprehensive within those bounds. It gives a clear insight into more than half a century of writing. It is not the work of a dilettante. But Smithyman’s texts also produce far more questions than have been answered, even in the excellent essays by Ross and Marco Sonzogni that introduce and accompany the Edizione Joker edition.
   
   Was such a labour really the product of a casually caused reaction? Was Smithyman’s involvement with Italian modernist poetry and poetics merely a matter of chance? Was it sustained purely by a hunt-and-peck exercise in dictionary translation much like doing a cryptic crossword in two languages? No matter how beguiling these questions might be, currently we have no real answers beyond the body of work. And such questions also avoid an obvious observation: these poems are some of Smithyman’s finest work.



4. Farrell Cleary. "A Kiwi voice for Italian poetry." Società Dante Alighieri di Auckland Newsletter (Ottobre / October, 2011) 7:
   

   
   While some may look askance at the prospect of reading 200 pages of Italian poetry “Englished” by someone who knew no Italian, Marco Sonzogni provides convincing reassurance that Smithyman’s versions can hold their own as translations with anything previously published.
   
   He draws our attention to Smithyman’s transformation of Eugenio Montale’s L’anguilla/The Eel, where “flogging through the deeps”, “from creek to stream” and “a buried stump” could be describing eeling expeditions near Dargaville. In fact, Smithyman’s painstaking work with dictionaries and other earlier translations produces surprisingly accurate English versions.



5. David Groves. "The Italian job." New Zealand Books: A Quarterly Review vol. 21, no. 3, issue 95 (Spring 2011) 27:
   

   
   It seems a useful working hypothesis that the extraordinary flowering of Smithyman's third period – with the domestic Imperial Vistas Family Fictions and the regional (but not national or provincial) Atua Wera – is directly related to the loosening up of discourse and the crossing of temporal, spatial and cultural boundaries that he practised imaginatively in his translations. In addition, Montale's switch from the dense imagistic mode of his earlier epiphanies to his later sardonic manner, and the shift of Quasimodo from his earlier intricate and allusive compression to the more relaxed style and social themes of his later work, may have exercised a particular influence on Smithyman's own development. If so, this book is an important contribution to the study of one of our finest poets.



6. Richard Taylor. "From Campana to Montale." Richard, You MUST try to be more focused - (12/2/14):
   

   
   From Campana to Montale: Versions from the Italian is an excellent addition to the library of anyone interested in Smithyman or contemporary (and other) Italian poetry, which has a long and rich tradition: longer than that of the English or many other nations. It is wonderful that a great New Zealand, and indeed world, poet, has made this huge effort to translate these varied and often mysterious poets. I thank Margaret Edgecumbe, Smithyman himself, Jack Ross and Sonzogi for this production.

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