Near the Mergellina station, in a small park, are the tombs of Virgil and of Leopardi. I lived long years with Virgil and almost completed a doctoral thesis on him before making a deliberate, defiant decision to abandon it. One reason was that I didn’t want to be an academic and do poetry in my spare time. Poetry had to be the whole venture of my life. The other reason was that I began to have huge misgivings about Virgil’s Aeneid. He was in a way the first laureate poet in history, and his epic reeks of the compromises he made. I began, like Shelley, to prefer Lucan and his lament for the Roman republic in the Pharsalia.
The Thomas May whose ejection from Westminster Abbey I mentioned earlier addresses Virgil and compares him to Lucan:
Thou gott’st Augustus loue, he Nero’s hate;
But ’twas an act more great, and high to moue
A Princes envy, then a Princes loue.
Robert Graves wrote: ‘Few poets have brought such discredit as Virgil on their sacred calling.’ Elsewhere he says why: ‘Why Virgil’s poems have for the last two thousand years exercised so great an influence on our Western culture is, paradoxically, because he was a renegade to the true Muse. His pliability; his subservience; his narrowness; his denial of that stubborn imaginative freedom which the true poets who had preceded him had prized; his perfect lack of originality, courage, humour, or even animal spirits; these were the negative qualities which first commended him to government circles and have kept him in favour ever since.’
Next to Virgil is Leopardi, Italy’s greatest Romantic poet, and I always read his poem ‘La ginestra’ (1836). I get myself a seat in a café in Mergellina, where I have a direct view of Vesuvius, and order a bottle of chilled volcanic wine, Falanghina or Fino di Avellino or Greco di Tufo or Lacrima Christi. I have already written a poem about walking to the summit of the volcano in The Grilling, where I use it to represent the unexpected and horrific, fiery, mostly manmade dangers of our times. What Leopardi’s poem does is to focus not on the vines of the Martial poem that Thomas May and I translated, but on the bright yellow broom (la ginestra) that still now covers the slopes of Vesuvius, ‘sterminator Vesevo’ (exterminator Vesuvius). La ginestra is bright yellow, and Leopardi insists it doesn’t grovel to any superior power, man or god. It simply burns brightly. It’s partly a metaphor for the poet. It is like Luther’s apple tree planted on the eve of the Apocalypse. It doesn’t have humanity’s delusions of immortality. No religion makes it bow its head. Its defiance is its burning brightly, beautifully and conspicuously on the slopes of extinction.
On the other side of the Piazza Sannazaro, nearer to the sea, is the church, Santa Maria del Parto, in which if you go behind the altar you will find a bust and monument to Jacopo Sannazaro (1456/8–1530), after whom the square where we eat and drink our chilled volcanic wine is named. You have a good view of the fishermen of Mergellina selling their clams and squid and all the ingredients you’re likely to taste in the dishes at Pasqualino’s or Ciro’s or any of the nearby restaurants. I was intrigued by Sannazaro long before I went to Napoli. He transferred the pastoral with the shepherds of Virgil and Theocritus to the sixteenth-century fishermen of Mergellina. These were Piscatorial Eclogues.
The monument almost hidden behind the altar has a bust of Sannazaro which, if the altar and front of the church were not there, would be directing its unswerving gaze at Vesuvius. As if to confirm this association, there is behind Sannazaro, above his marble head, a painting with Muses bearing a laurel wreath to crown his bust with, and behind them the winged Pegasus alighting not on Helicon to create Hippocrene, the fountain of inspiration from which poets drink, but Vesuvius. Inspiration from your own locale but from the most fearful source. Perhaps more a scalding geyser than a fountain. The open eye of the poet has to keep the volcano in his gaze. And even go nearer.
There is a great poem by Primo Levi, who went nearer and deeper into the destructive fire of our times than most, about the elder Pliny urging his boatmen to take him nearer to the erupting Vesuvius in AD 79:
Don’t hold me back, friends, let me set out.
I won’t go far, just to the other shore.
I want to observe at close hand that dark cloud,
Shaped like a pine tree, rising above Vesuvius,
And find the source of this strange light.
Nephew, you don’t want to come along?
Fine, stay here and study.
Recopy the notes I gave you yesterday.
[…]
Sailors, obey me: launch the boat into the sea.
But many poets can make no journeys.
Some countries give their poets a corner of their own in a prison cell. One such poet in a Myanmar/Burmese poets’ corner is Zargana, which is the pen name of Maung Thura, who has recently been condemned to thirty-five years in prison. When he was in solitary confinement he had to scratch his poems with a pot fragment on the floor of his cell, then commit them to memory. I would like in all humility and solidarity to offer the International PEN/Pinter Prize to him, Maung Thura (Zargana). May all those poets I have summoned up today make him at this moment the centre of their gaze and honour the prisoner-poet for his still defiant poetic gift. He has a poem called ‘Poetic Gift’ which begins with an image of trees, but it is not ‘silent about injustice’.
From the tree of my feelings
Sprang exquisite leaves,
Tendrils, branches
Which awoke my senses
And entwined my thoughts.
And from the lines
Composed in mind,
Came these verses
Written in blood,
On blank pages,
With invisible ink.
(trans. Vicky Bowman)
Once I had copied my notes for this reluctant address from my notebook, where I write with a fountain pen, into my laptop, I was aware that I needed to hurry to finish it and print it out. As each page came out of the printer, the big bold type still glisteningly wet, I realised that my shuffling through the pages was giving me the same inky digit I remember on my Uncle Harry’s dictionary-raiding hand. This inky digit will always mean I have cast my vote in favour of the dumb or the silenced being given a voice, of totally free speech and the freedom of poetry and poets.
That said, I have also to add that these particular defiant digits become their most indelibly stained when I pick the ripe, juicy mulberries from the trees I’d like the peace and quiet to celebrate in poetry.
The Label Trail to Strasbourg
* * *
2011
All my writing life I have used the same notebooks, like this one. Old-fashioned they may appear now in our digital age, but for me poetry is still rooted in the physicality of writing with my hand, with a body in which the heart beats and the blood throbs, and whose rhythms help earth what I write, whose rhythms remind me I am still alive even though my mind wants often to confront the most despairing of events. This is probably why all my work is in verse, often the iambic metre of Shakespeare. ‘Le coeur bat l’iambe,’ said the great French actor Jean-Louis Barrault, speaking of Racine. ‘The heartbeat that journeys through tragedy.’ All the work that is in these hundreds of notebooks is poetry. Poetry. For me the computer screen is too abstract to accommodate my poetry, although I make fair copies on mine and do final edits of long works like plays or film poems.
But when I cut and paste I use real scissors and real glue! There are scissors and glue in all my workrooms. But I have to make these fair copies on computer because after a day or two I can’t read my own handwriting. I have a feeling that this illegibility is an almost conscious and deliberate strategy to make me rethink the scrawled and scribbled fountain-pen originals. I use Waterman fountain pens made in Paris. But scholars and researchers are beginning to study these many hundreds of notebooks all containing poetry.
Whether for the page, the stage, the opera house or the screen, it is all poetry, and all of it is written in this same kind of notebook that I have used for almost fifty years
. These hundreds of notebooks contain drafts of poems, dramas, libretti, film verse, first in Waterman fountain-pen ink and then typed out, with each variation, sometimes many, glued over the last on the edge of the page so that all versions are quickly accessible. Sometimes the pages have up to ten layers of versions. The notebooks bulge with what is glued into them. They grow almost double or treble in thickness! The scholars who have studied various notebooks have also remarked that the poet has pasted into them newspaper cuttings, pictures, research notes, drawings and, what I think it is apposite to remark on here, wine labels detached from the bottle I’d quaffed and enjoyed and glued into the notebook opposite the page, stage or film poetry. There is a doctoral thesis waiting to be written on the wine labels glued into my hundreds of notebooks.
Although the archive of these hundreds of notebooks is either already placed in or destined for the Brotherton Library of the University of Leeds, the facts I will reveal may suggest that certain pages of them would be equally at home here in Strasbourg.
To give you an example: I recently picked up at random the fourth notebook of a set of four devoted to my translation of Sabina’s Czech libretto for Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, which I did for the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1978 for the director John Dexter, with whom I’d collaborated at the National Theatre in London, in 1973, on Le Misanthrope of Molière, which we set in the Paris of de Gaulle, and, in 1976, on Racine’s Phèdre, set in India in the early days of the British Raj. The wine labels in Notebook 4 of The Bartered Bride, dating from 1978, are on page 815. A set of notebooks devoted to a theatrical project may contain thousands of pages. The twelve notebooks for my most recent play, Fram, add up to 3,204 pages. So on page 815 of Notebook 4 for The Bartered Bride the scholar will find glued a Schlumberger Gewürztraminer 1974 from Guebwiller, Alsace. It was purchased, as a smaller label reveals, at the 67 Wine and Spirits’ merchants on 67th and Columbus Avenue, diagonally across from the Lincoln Center. I must have enjoyed the bottle, as on page 817 of the notebook there is another Schlumberger Gewürztraminer 1974 label! On page 828 there is another label and yet another Alsatian Gewürztraminer 1974, but one produced by A. Willm at Barr, in the Vosges mountains of Alsace. After some drafts of part of a duet between Mařenka, the heroine, and the marriage broker Kecal, page 836 has another wine from A. Willm, a 1975 Cordon d’Alsace, Brut. Then after another hundred pages or so of operatic aria, duets and chorus drafts there is on page 948 the label of a Gewürztraminer, Kuehn from Ammerschwihr.
My work with John Dexter at the Metropolitan Opera led to the Met commissioning an original libretto for a collaboration with the New York composer Jacob Druckman. I finished the libretto. It was called Medea: A Sex-War Opera. Druckman sadly died before his score was completed and the opera was never performed, except as a theatre piece without music by a young radical theatre group, Volcano, and in that form it toured Europe. Though the opera had a sad conclusion, it had started auspiciously, as inside the front cover of a notebook, one of the six devoted to the opera, there is the label of a Schlumberger Gewürztraminer 1978 from Guebwiller. Page 1 of the Medea is dated September 1980. Composers and Alsatian wine seem to have been a constant in my poetic life.
The notebooks of 1986 are for many poems and a very ambitious theatrical project, The Common Chorus, which was intended to be a trilogy for the National Theatre in London consisting of the Lysistrata of Aristophanes and The Trojan Women of Euripides and, as the conclusion of the trilogy, a new play by myself about the origins of chemical weapons. It was to be imagined as if played by a group of women who were surrounding the US nuclear missile base at Greenham Common in Britain. I had conceived the project on one of my many visits to Delphi in Greece, where I have directed three of my theatre pieces, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, The Labourers of Herakles and Hecuba with Vanessa Redgrave. So, as you might expect, there are the occasional retsina and ouzo labels, but what do I find on page 486 of Volume 3 but a label for a Gewürztraminer from Martin Schaetzel, like M. Kuehn also of Ammerschwihr. I don’t know if there was any connection between this particular Gewürztraminer from Ammerschwihr and these plays of war, but in the notebook ‘Poems 1989–90’ I find another Gewürztraminer Kuehn from Ammerschwihr in the pages next to my much-anthologised and translated poems on the first Iraq war, ‘A Cold Coming’ and ‘Initial Illumination’, both of which appeared in the news section of the Guardian in March 1991. It was because of these poems that I was later sent by the Guardian with my helmet and flak jacket to write poems from Bosnia during the war and the siege of Sarajevo in 1995.
But sadly the project of the three war plays, after years of work, never saw the light of day, though the third play became Square Rounds, which I wrote and directed at the NT in 1992 and recently directed again in Russian translation at the Taganka Theatre in Moscow. The composer for Square Rounds was Dominic Muldowney, and opposite a programme for a world premiere of one of his compositions was the label from the bottle we shared when we met to discuss a joint project for BBC Television: one of my films called The Big H, about Herod’s massacre of the innocents, set in a Leeds classroom. The wine which initiated this valued collaboration was a Gewürztraminer Hugel from Riquewihr.
I had first worked with Muldowney when he was a young assistant to the composer Harrison Birtwistle, when we collaborated on a piece of Meyerholdian music theatre called Bow Down. In the notebook for Bow Down on page 700 there is a label from another Gewürztraminer Hugel of Riquewihr 1974. A much more noted collaboration of mine with Harrison Birtwistle was on the Oresteia of Aeschylus exactly thirty years ago at the National Theatre. There are at least a dozen notebooks for this work, and to take a random example, Oresteia, Notebook 6, page 1,213 there is a label for a Cuvée des Comtes de Eguisheim Gewürztraminer 1975 from Leon Beyer of Eguisheim.
A wine merchant who was a friend of Harrison Birtwistle asked me, after the Oresteia, if there were some good wine poems in ancient Greek which I could translate for his 1984 wine catalogue. I offered him versions of Hermippus, Anacreon, Theognis, Antipater of Sidon, Antipater of Thessalonika, Diodoros Zonas, Alcaeus and Amphis. The page of this wine merchant’s catalogue listing wines from Charles Schleret of Turckheim, in Alsace, is followed by one of the poems of Theognis, who flourished around 544 BC. My payment from the wine merchant for these translations of ancient Greek was some bottles of Muscat d’Alsace of Charles Schleret of Turckheim and some Gewürztraminer from the same grower, as well as a ‘Réserve Personnelle’ Gewürztraminer from Louis Sipp of Ribeauville 1976. The following page in the notebook that has this wine label contains notes for a poem in my sonnet sequence ‘Art and Extinction’.
And in my notebook labelled ‘Poems 1991–93’ there is yet another Gewürztraminer label, from Gustave Lorenz of Bergheim, opposite drafts of my Republican poem ‘Deathwatch Danceathon’ (translated by Cécile Marshall in the volume FUK).
In Notebook 3, page 727 for The Mysteries, my version of the medieval biblical plays for the NT, which first played in 1977 and then in a complete cycle in the 1980s, and revived in 2000, and about to be performed again at Shakespeare’s Globe this summer, and what I was working on now on the train to Strasbourg, there is a label from a Louis Sipp Gewürztraminer from Ribeauville. And also a note which is the first idea for a play I wrote for Salts Mill in Saltaire, Poetry or Bust, about John Nicholson, the Airedale poet.
I wanted to check on the locations of these various Alsatian wine villages I found celebrated among my poetic manuscripts, which range over forty years from poems to plays to operas to films, and out of the map fell a price list of 1983 from the same Louis Sipp of Ribeauville. I had been in Alsace for the New Year and remember buying (though I haven’t yet tracked the label in my notebooks!) a quite expensive bottle of Eau-de-vie de baies de houx. It was not simply that I had not heard of an eau-de-vie made from hollyberries, but – it is the poet in me – it was the sheer wonder of the sound: Eau-de-vie de baies de houx! Eau-devie de baies de houx! I couldn’t stop saying
it. It happens to me in Greece and I can never resist ordering rabbit with cinnamon (kouneli me kanella!) or have a dessert in the winter called meela me meli ke kanella (apples with honey and cinnamon). The taster of words and the taster of good things combine when I choose these dishes, and when I selected Eau-de-vie de baies de houx from the list of M. Sipp in Ribeauville in 1983. From the same Ribeauville there is on the final page of the three volumes of notebooks devoted to my republican version of Victor Hugo’s Le Roi s’amuse – that is, page 965 – what must have been my reward for the completion of my version for the National Theatre, which opened on 18 April 1996. It is the golden label from a bottle of Gewürztraminer from Trimbach of Ribeauville, a Cuvée des Seigneurs de Ribeaupierre. Though to prove that my consumption was not entrirely alchoholic there along this wine label a label from an Eau d’Alsace Ribeauville! Also on page 98 of US Martial, a small collection I did of the Roman poet Martial which I translated while living in New York, is the label from a Marc d’Alsace de Gewürztraminer from M. Gisselbrecht of Ribeauville. My splendid translator Cécile Marshall, when she came to Newcastle to talk about the poems she was translating for this occasion, brought a Marc de Gewürztraminer no doubt to put me in a co-operative mood. She probably got her clue from studying my notebooks when she did her doctoral dissertation on my work. Those scholars of the future who will study the hundreds of notebooks will have continually to associate my poems, plays, films and translations to the labels of Alsatian wine, and work out the connection. I have given you a random sample, but what they are to me are the good omens of a trail which has led me here to Strasbourg today to receive your generous award of the European Prize for Literature, which I accept with great gratitude.
On page 102 of the same US Martial notebook there is pasted in a photo of Ribeauville, dated December–January 1984, and on the very next page is the manuscript translation, scrawled almost illegibly with my Waterman pen, of a very short poem by the fourth century BC Greek poet Amphis, which will be my conclusion:
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 38