GLASFRYN, LLANGATTOCK, POWYS NP8 1PH
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Three from Rolf Dieter Brinkmann
‘again the poems I’d like to translate’
John James
After Shakespeare
The hand of winter falls
and lies in the garden, where now
a wooden frame has been
erected. Dusky summer
fallen as the hand.
Your head is frozen.
The autumn with its
dead fish on the
riverbed is
like the stall with aged
woman, who sits and reads
the daily paper, till anybody
comes, buys one of the cold
legs of chicken which lie
in the fat-splattered glass
container. The passer-by
pays, eats, slings the bone
after the invisible angel.
And spring comes, scatters
the car headlights through
tinny leafage in the evening
which with the wooden frame
sinks down in the stream.
Mourning on the Line in January
A bit of line spans
curved between two
leafless trees, the
papers soon driven
again, early morning
freshly washed
black stockings
hang there, from
the entangled
long legs the water
drips in the broad,
early daylight on the stone.
Poem
Ruined landscape with
tin cans, house entrance
empty, what’s in there? I came here
one afternoon by train,
two jars in the travelling bag
tightly fastened. Now I’m also
awoken from dreams, blown over
an intersection. And dust,
dismembered pavane, out of dead
neon, papers and railway lines
today, what do I get now,
another day deeper and dead?
Who said, that’s what living
is? I’m going into
another blue.
NOTE: The three translations sequenced here are from Rolf Dieter Brinkman, Westwärts 1 & 2: Gedichte (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1975): ‘Nach Shakespeare’, p. 175, ‘Trauer auf dem Wäschedraht im Januar’, p. 28, and ‘Gedicht’, p. 41.
Clear as Daylight
‘The dancers, faces oblivious & grave,—
testing testing
the dancers face oblivion and the grave.’
Geoffrey Hill, ‘After Reading Children of Albion (1969)’
Reading in an early dawn—
you’re distracted glancing over
edges of slim volume pages
and words, too fathomable words
cross patios, backyards,
outliving children of Albion
who face death now, as best they can,
while the first birds sing.
To identify with where we live
I read us into every thing,
like the cut of some salt-crusted brickwork …
though, try as I might,
dripping tap and leaky cistern
gall me to the quick,
like one swan biting at another’s neck—
as if we’d never learn.
But even the things I’m reading
strayed among wild rhubarb
are moving over surfaces
of cloud types, sun- and storm-light,
that heat has flaked to pieces
and they’re sublimed, resentment-free,
like purgatories in others’ verses,
to skies filled with activity.
NOTE: The epigraph cites the last three lines of ‘After Reading Children of Albion (1969)’ in Geoffrey Hill, A Treatise of Civil Power (Penguin Books, 2007), p. 23, which in turn alludes to John James, ‘Bathampton Morrismen at the Rose & Crown’, Children of Albion: Poetry of the ‘Underground’ in Britain ed. Michael Horowitz (Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 160-1. ‘Clear as Daylight’ has recently been reissued in the second edition of English Nettles and Other Poems with artwork by Sally Castle (Two Rivers Press, 2022). Reprinted with permission.
PETER ROBINSON is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Reading and poetry editor for Two Rivers Press. In the mid-1970s he was involved with the Cambridge Poetry Society and the Cambridge International Poetry Festival, in which capacity he hosted a number of readings by John James, while as an editor of Perfect Bound he first published James’s ‘After Christopher Wood’ in June 1976. They read together in a Salt Publishing event on 25 March 2004 in Trinity College, Cambridge. His essay ‘John James and The White Stones p. 71: Music, Rhyme, and Home’ and the review ‘John James: Romsey Town’ have recently been collected in The Personal Art: Essays, Reviews & Memoirs (Shearsman Books, 2021).
GLASFRYN, LLANGATTOCK, POWYS NP8 1PH
+44(0)1873 810456 | LYN@GLASFRYNPROJECT.ORG.UK