I am intending,
for a chapter entitled ‘Translation as Transformation’, to write about Caroline
Bergvall’s uses of Chaucer. (‘The Petrarch Boys’ is prefatory thinking for that
piece too.) The first time I encountered these works was at a Bergvall reading,
possibly in Southampton, and probably part of
a conference. It was a hilarious reading, pastiche rubbing shoulders with
satire. My next encounter was when I reviewed
Meddle English for
Poetry Wales. I
felt it necessary to contextualise ‘performance writing’ for the readership:
‘Caroline Bergvall,’ I wrote, ‘is a major practitioner (and theorist) of a mode
of artistic production somewhat inaccurately called “performance writing”. Yes,
performance, indeed collaboration with musicians and sound artists, is
important to her, but so is operating in space, with installations and
environments, peopled or not. (See her website
www.carolinebergvall.com.) This work,
with its roots
in language, is
sometimes called “off the page” writing but this implies that printed text is
merely a “score”.’ But I added: ‘There is a lot of poker-faced commentary on
Bergvall’s work that uses art-speak, much as I have above. This is unavoidable
if the sheer newness of the work is to be explained, but it often misses,
beyond the theoretics of language(s) – she speaks between three languages – how
funny she can be.’ And of course, in my academic book I will have to do
something similar. Like this I guess: ‘Caroline Bergvall is a trilingual writer
based in Great Britain,
known for both working across languages and across disciplines as her exquisite
website (
www.carolinebergvall.com)
illustrates well. Work, or versions of works, can exist equally as text, audio,
film, video, and visually-minimal, linguistically-maximal, installation work.
Literal aspects of translation enter her work in a piece such as ‘Crop’ which
moves (as though by interlinear gloss) between English, Norwegian and French
(Bergvall’s languages) and deals with the passage of the body through those
languages. (Bergvall 2011: 147-51) One of her best known texts, which fits
neatly into the appropriative poetics of conceptual writing, though it is
hardly her most complex, is ‘Via’ which gathers (on the page, but also for
inscription upon walls in various gallery spaces) 47 published translations
(into English) of the opening tercet of Dante’s
Inferno. (Bergvall 2005: 63-71) Both pieces play upon the
vertiginous nature of trans-linguistic possibility (including the accidents of
coincidence, whether between languages or between different translations).’
In both introductions I defer to the
website which is, I think, the best introduction to her work, however much ‘the
book may be one of the sites of
linguistic performance’.
Although
I review some of the earlier texts in the volume I am chiefly interested in its
use of Chaucer now. I wrote:
The prose essay
‘Middling English’ offers the poetics of Bergvall’s work as a Steinian
iterative exploration of four related near-homonyms: the sinking ‘midden’ of
sedimented language, compost for the return of the repressed; the ‘middling’
blanket of standard language use; the ‘middle’ of linguistic flux and
unorthodox exchange; and the ‘meddle’ of interference and transformation. … The
fluxing ‘middle’ also hints at ‘Middle English’, the melting pot mash-up that
became Modern English and in ‘Shorter Chaucer Tales’, Bergvall exploits its
‘networks and distributive modes of knowledge’. They range from the simple
‘Host Tale’, which collages every food and drink reference in Chaucer’s Tales,
and which leaves the reader feeling hilariously crapulent, through to a satire
on the Pope’s visit to Poland, where the language runs riot: there’s ‘a ban on
all licour sales while the Papa is in toun:/For goddess love, drynk moore
attemprely!’ There will be no adverts ‘for contraceptives, lingerie and
tampons./Chaast was man in paradys, certeyn,’ and we have the word of ‘the heed
of advertising for Telewizja Polska’ that ‘The body is so redy and penyble’ in
the face of ‘frivolous ads’. The heteroglossic clash of languages and registers
makes this funny, but think of Chaucer’s shady Pardoner and it suddenly seems
appropriate rather than simply appropriated.
And think of Chaucer’s shady
Pardoner I did. Over Christmas I sink into some long work to read (the year
before last it was The Iliad and The Odyssey) and last year (i.e. 2013),
I decided to read The Canterbury Tales and
did (with the exception of the ones in prose, which I felt, even through their
own ‘poker-faced commentary’, the editors of the Oxford volume were telling me
not to bother with!). It was partly research for the Bergvall but it was mostly
for its own sake. I experienced the pleasures one usually associates with the
work: the variety of character and tale, the vibrancy of the language, etc… I
experienced the pleasure of re-encountering works I read at school (‘The
Franklin’s Tale’ and ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ which I had on vinyl and dug out
for its occasion), texts which linked up with the Bergvall project; and others
I’d not read before (and now shamefully, a month later, I’ve completely
forgotten). I marvelled at the ‘unfinished’ nature of the project – ‘unfinish’
being an obsession of my poetics – and I enjoyed Chaucer’s self parody as a
hopeless (and overweight) poetaster. I particularly enjoyed ‘The Canon’s
Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale’, where the Canon and Yeoman appear out of nowhere like
The Lone Ranger and Tonto to the pilgrimage, and the Yeoman manages to escape
the thrall of the Canon (who speeds off) to tell a wonderful tale about
fraudulent alchemy (I take it that Chaucer would have believed in real
alchemy). As you can see, I enjoyed it and it was partly to escape my
Canon-like responsibilities as poet-critic and pedagogue that I undertook this
reading.
But
now I’m the other side of it and need to knuckle down to Bergvall’s Chaucer
Tales. I want to write about them as modes of translation, given that my notion
of translation is broadened (partly through the study of Hughes’ and Atkins’
Petrarch and through the Semantic Poetry Translations of Stefan Themerson, an
important missing link for me in the history of formally innovative poetry) so
that it includes all kinds of social and cultural trans-form-ation.
‘Middling English’ I described in
my review with a summarising force which quite impresses me, on reflection. I
noted, in its first part, ‘the sinking ‘midden’ of sedimented language, compost
for the return of the repressed’: or the transformative ‘tracing up of
re-emergents’ as Bergvall puts it. (9). ‘The ‘middling’ blanket of standard
language use’ is considered. Chaucer’s English privileged a Southern dialect (I
think some roguish clerks are given Northern dialect on one of the Tales) but
‘everything about Middle English was a mashup on the rise’ (13) in Bergvall’s
words. ‘Mashup’ is a nice contemporary term for the changing nature of the
language Chaucer inherited and modified, its ‘influences and confluences’.
(13). It led, of course, ‘on the rise’, to Modern English which is – in an un-nice contemporary term which Bergvall
quotes - ‘the language of interoperablity’ of international affairs and trade:
World English. (12) But Bergvall wonders: ‘The point is less whether it is a
world language than the kind of world it perpetuates.’ (12). In terms of
Chaucer’s English, the point of Bergvall’s experiments are less to do with
whether Chaucer’s English is the beginning of that World language than the kind
of world it prefigured, how it prefigured it, and how it may be made to operate
as critique of that world now (as
archaic residue, ‘re-emergent’ through her formal practice). From Southwark
Out, as it were. ‘The “middle” of linguistic flux and unorthodox exchange’ as I
called it in the review includes that mashup but also ‘writing in culture’ more
generally. (16)
Since my themes are form in the
book generally and transformation more specifically in this chapter-in-progress,
Bergvall’s contention about transposable media and mediation is important
because it is cast in formalist terms: ‘A text takes on forms that extend
language into electronics, data systems, aural proximities, means of generation
and dissemination that affect the material and temporal traffic of a nodal series
of “pages”’. (15) Aesthetic versions of these transpositions are, of course,
the formal hallmark of Bergvall’s work (again, the shorthand move is to say:
have a look at the website). New media ‘signal that the forms of exchange and
learning most widely sought today place transformative and connective value on
locationality, transport and audio-visuality.’ (15) Her own work demonstrates
how this happens in site-specific installations with sound (language and/or
music). ‘Poetic art,’ Bergvall says (she shies away from the word ‘poem’
repeatedly, probably a mistake, since I think we should transform the nature of
the ‘poem’, not leave it behind) ‘becomes an occupancy of language made
manifest through various platforms, a range of instrumental tools and skills/
and relativized forms of inscription’. (15-16). Her recourse to Chaucer seems
all the odder in this literate literary cultural futurism, her return to the
last manuscript culture before printing.
‘The “meddle” of
interference and transformation’ of Bergvall’s fourth section is addressed
quite directly: ‘My personal sense of linguistic belonging was not created by
showing for the best English I can speak or write, but the most flexible one.’
(18) Even more appropriate to the grain of the Chaucer pieces, she announces
her aim as ‘To make and irritate English at its epiderm, and at my own.’ (18)
Her final triumphant ‘New apprenticeship and transformed commitment’, (19) is
glossed earlier: ‘The apprenticeship of dialogue as encounter is necessarily a
meddling of boundary, a heightening of points of internalized resistance or
ideological differences’. (19) Although this is cast in the speculative mode of
poetics (with a hint of manifestic programme driving it beyond that), the
dialogue of Chaucer with contemporary realities is one of those encounters that
meddles (with) the boundaries of articulation. ‘To meddle with English is to be
in the flux that abounds, the large surf of one’s clouded contemporaneity.’
(18) The cloud is one of unknowing, of course, but meddle these texts do,
‘oiling creativity and artistry with critical spirit’ (18) as she puts it,
those ‘heightened points’ she refers to above.
Poetics as a speculative writerly
discourse is another of my obsessions and I have written about it a lot (in
The Necessity of Poetics particularly;
one (early) version
here) but have never quite got round to
publishing a whole book on it. There are scattered essays (including my
inaugural lecture of 2007, which I ought to distribute beyond its academic
journal publication in
New Writing) and
quite a few of the chapters of
When Bad
Times Made for Good Poetry are specifically about poetics documents, as
have been my recent posts on Geraldine Monk. An exhaustive catalogue of poetics
documents was also posted on this blog a few years ago, a number of posts in
fact, when I thought that another outtake of a book would be useful for
readers. Best to click onto 2009 on the right and find them between June and
August. Very few people have followed them up. However, in this encounter with
Bergvall’s work her poetics serves to introduce her ‘Shorter Chaucer Tales’ as
they do in
Meddle English in fact.
‘The
Host Tale’ I described in my review (as I’ve shown): it ‘collages every food
and drink reference in Chaucer’s Tales, and … leaves the reader feeling
hilariously crapulent’. Is that all? Clearly not. I have described the
technique (as does Bergvall in her note) and I’ve said a little about its woozy
effect. It is quite a feast. The types of food described are immense and accorded
some pleasure when I encountered some of these from Bergvall’s piece as I read
Chaucer’s originals. Chaucer’s father was a vintner and he was raised in the
importers’ area of London,
hence the specificity of the listings I suppose (Chaucer was also a customs
official). The text’s title ‘The Host Tale’ is not ‘The Host’s Tale’. Chaucer’s
host was probably ‘real’: ‘Henry Bailly, the Host, has the same name as
Henricus Bailly or Baillif, known to have been an innkeeper in Southwark, and a
member of Parliament from that borough’, which was also Chaucer’s dwelling
place at one point. (Note to Oxford:
3) The host in the Tales does not deliver a tale (although he would have if
Chaucer had even half completed his task). But that is not the title. It’s ‘The
Host Tale.’ The tale that hosts these quotations about the goods used by hosts,
about hospitality. (I’m thinking about ghosts and hosts and acts of
hospitality, about the very late and Levinasian thought of Derrida which I
might check out here.) Playing host in this way differentiates it from the
appropriative gestures of conceptual writing (or at least its theories), which
allow little room for hospitality: theft is the usual metaphor, the specific
practice of plagiarism. Exchange, learning and dialogue seem more prevalent in
the quotations from Bergvall’s poetics, and make of her work a more generous
encounter with its materials.
‘The
apprenticeship of dialogue as encounter is necessarily a meddling of boundary,
a heightening of points of internalized resistance or ideological differences’
both emphasises this ‘hosting’, but it also acknowledges what is going on in a
text such as ‘The Summer Tale’. (19) Obviously this alludes to ‘The Summoner’s
Tale,’ which is in turn alluded to in the text, but its subtitle (‘Deus Hic 1’),
is another quote from Chaucer (‘God is here’). It is actually the Pope who is
‘here’, i.e. in the site of the poem: my review calls it ‘a satire on the
Pope’s visit to Poland,
where the language runs riot: there’s ‘a ban on all licour sales while the Papa
is in toun:/For goddess love, drynk moore
attemprely!’ There will be no adverts ‘for contraceptives, lingerie and
tampons./Chaast was man in paradys, certeyn,’. That seems to be a true enough
account, and one can see that the use of the Pardoner’s and Summoner’s Tales
(they are both suspect ‘occupations’ towards the bottom end of the church
hierarchy, of which the Pope is the top (and was in Chaucer’s day, despite
controversies)). ‘The Franker Tale (Deus Hic 2)’ is even more outspoken as its
title suggests, and anti-clerical (as is Chaucer’s work in some ways, with
these theological parasites treated toughly in ‘The Friar’s Tale’, for example).
A feminist rebuttal of Pope John Paul II’s ‘Letter to Women’, it collages
phrases from the letter with a number of sources, including ‘The Franklin’s
Tale’, particularly excerpts from the much longer list of atrocities that have
been inflicted upon women. Dorigen at this point in the Tale feels she is
obliged to surrender her body as she promised to a lusty Clerk who she thought
would not manage to move the black rocks of the Brittany coast as she requested,
half jesting. But by necromancy and magic he does and demands her body. She
relates this catalogue of rapes and slaughters to herself and concludes: ‘Thus
pleyned Dorigen a day or tweye,/ Purposynge evere that she wolde deyee’. (142) Luckily
the Clerk has some sense of decency and, much moved by her love for her husband
and her fatal sense of loss, releases her from her obligation; after all, this
tale is a romance and its generic expectations are stronger than any plot
device of necromancy! But that doesn’t relieve her examples of their horror,
here reformed into Bergvall’s text with other materials:
Women of Bosnia!
Women of Rwanda!
Women of Afghanistan!
Women
of Bengal! Kurdish women! Women of Chetnya!
Whan
thirty tyrants, ful of cursednesse,
Hadd
slayn Phidoun in Atthenes, at feeste,
They
commanded his daughters for tareste,
And
bryngen hem biforn hem in despit,
Al
naked, to fulfille hir foule delit, their foul delight
And
in hir fadres blood their father’s blood they made them dance/
Upon
the pavement, God yeve hem meschaunce!
Kashmiri
women! Punjabi women! Women of France!
Women
of Britain!
Women of Finland!
Women of America!
They
of Mecene leete enquire and seke
Of
Lacedomye fifty maidens eke,
On
whiche they wolden doon hir lecherye;
And
foul delight.
Susters
and nieces! Mothers aunts and doghters!
Deus
Hic! God is drunk! (33-4; Chaucer quotations at 142: Oxford)
‘My personal
sense of linguistic belonging was not created by showing for the best English I
can speak or write, but the most flexible one,’ wrote Bergvall and this might
be an example of what she means. (18) It is also ‘meddling’ – a metaphor for
formal innovation – with ‘English’, which (again in Bergvall’s poetics ) ‘is to
be in the flux that abounds, the large surf of one’s clouded contemporaneity.’
(18) And clearly Latin is read in a kind of pigeon schoolgirl Latin joke at the
end. The ‘Women of Afghanistan!’
(and others listed) contrast with the equally papally-hailed ‘Women of
Britain’, but the Franklin’s minatory account of ‘foul delight’, mass rape amid
martial atrocity, is accounted for in this ‘clouded contemporaneity’, one that
is not just clouded but whose supposed supreme being is completely pissed! This
passage typifies the inter-lingual play (and the interlineal glosses) and
equates ancient rapes with contemporary oppression, quite obviously, but no
less powerfully for that. It surpasses the satire of the Pope’s dry visit to Poland with its
seriousness but the tone remains the same. Something makes me slightly uneasy
about this comic frame (and I am leaving out the presence of Francis Bacon the
painter in this text). The final linguistically doubled ‘farting/ in the hoote
hot somer summer heat heete’ may be ‘the old Papa’s/ body finally flying free/
quit of his distasteful containee’ doesn’t quite do it for me, although it
clearly foregrounds the distrust of the bodily in Catholic thinking, one of the
supposed delights of Chaucer’s writing, even allowing (or ignoring) his
supposed deathbed recanting of his baser tales. (34-35) (Despite knowing it was
there, I found a surprising amount of farting and fucking in Chaucer’s
Tales.)
Though re-reading the quoted
passage out loud (quite a pleasure with both Bergvall’s and Chaucer’s texts I
have found) the ‘God is drunk!’ feels quite sardonic and dark, so maybe I need
to re-examine it. (These postings are deliberately not trying to arrive at
‘final’ readings, though I know that a certain finish must be reached in
polished literary criticism, though even there isn’t the discourse saying, in
effect, ‘This is so, is it not?’ where there must be enough unfinish for a
response other than the absolutely affirmative? Otherwise, why read literary
criticism?)
The
longest ‘shorter tale’, ‘Fried Tale (London Zoo)’ is in four parts and a range
of new materials are introduced. The text, block-like on the page, is in some
ways the most malleable, formally speaking, because parts one and four provide the
texts for a number of broadsides that can be read separately or were displayed
as part of the ‘Middling English’ installation at the John Hansard Gallery. The
broadsides may be seen
here.
The installation may be glimpsed
here. Russell Hoban’s novel
Riddley Walker (a
post-apocalyptic novel narrated in post-nuclear holocaust patois) joins Chaucer
as a ‘flexible’ linguistic device, as does the dystopian language devised by
Anthony Burgess for
A Clockwork Orange. Just as
prominent is text-speak. They truly ‘irritate’ English, though Chaucer is low
in the mix. The first part is a dialogue between investors (or they could be
criminals; or both: ‘By St Madoff!’ one of them ‘trupts’, perhaps giving
his game away (40)), speaking a strange
intimate argot which only they possess.
Im keeping it Im keeping it all!
screachit Sir Smith,
1 publikly onurd feend of skotisk
stox.
By the spans ov green expans, wot
brilyant lyfe.
All larf n dig deepa in2 the public
kofins. (40)
Part two stays with the economic
theme (‘phynance’), being a very funny cut-up and re-casting of JK Galbraith’s Short History of Financial Euphoria with
other materials; ‘The circumstances that induce the recurrent lapses into
financial dementia have not changed in any truly operative fashion since the
Tulipomania of 1636’ is as funny as it’s unfortunately true. No Chaucer.
Formally the interest of the work lies in the transformation of materials and
the juxtaposition of the fragments, classic montage. If Rancière cries out as
he does (somewhere) for disorder to be put back into montage, then he could do
no better than to start here. Part 3 does contain some Chaucer (remember,
that’s my focus), though part four doesn’t. Part three is short and un-sweet:
‘suk the air out of this terrifying hellhole with merciful subtronic nasty
freqs liberation trail-outs’. (48) Part 4 is a bit of a surprise tonally, since
much of it consists of a scientific debate about the head on beer. We are
clearly back in ‘the Tabard’. (49) Against the jocularity of the beer-science
the figure of Dame Justice appears. Whereas financial institutions had been
satirised in earlier sections, their legal underpinnings are exposed here.
‘Dame Justice … no longer gives a smiling sod about the moral attributes or social
benefits of equitable share-out of wealth…’ Or, or, or. Here follows a long
list (‘she can be pretty longwinded’) culminating in ‘so-called transnational
trafficking bloodsuck oilsprung hyperfunded plunderprize’. (50) Even a few
borrowed motifs from Derek Jarman’s The
Last of England
can’t hold out against that: ‘Dame Justice. Who will die again be slain
again. Nobody listening nobody listening.’ (51) This is the bleakest of the
Tales, no doubt, and the one with least connection to Chaucer. (Is there a
connection between those two facts?) It might find itself not appearing in my final
account, therefore, but it’s good to account for it here, however inadequately.
There
is one other text, the shortest, ‘The Not Tale (Funeral)’. It’s not a tale
because it ironically eschews narrative while becoming a narration of
negatives: ‘nor how/ nor how’. (37) It is ‘Funeral’ because it is entirely –
Bergvall’s note – ‘a translation of a cross-section of Arcite’s extravagant and
moving funeral in “The Knight’s Tale”.’ (161) It is interesting to see Bergvall
using the word translation to describe her processes. Arcite’s funeral is
indeed as Bergvall describes it, a funeral of honour for a knight who has died
for love, in Chaucer’s highest romance. What Bergvall has noted is the curious
presence of negatives (the presence of absence, if you will) in the account of
the funeral, more specifically the building, lighting and burning of Arcite’s
pyre, the narrator rhetorically listing what he cannot describe:
Ne how that lad was homeward
Emelye;
Ne how Arcite is brent to asshen
colde;
Ne how that lyche-wake was yholde
al thilke nyght; ne how the Grekes
pleye
The wake-pleyes, ne kepe I nat to
seye. (46)
There must be a name for this in
Greek rhetoric (they are Greeks after all!), but the point here is that
Bergvall spots the opportunity to strip out the detail and leave the essential
device, the spine of mourning as it were. Out of supposed narrational
ineptitude comes a string of denials of expressive acuity, which then again are
whittled down to this strand of hypnotic (and still funereal) detail.
Nor what
nor how
nor how
nor what she spak, nor what was her
desire
Nor what jewels
when the fire
Nor how some threw their
and some their
and their
and cups full of wine and milk
and blood
into the fyr
into the fire (37)
Notice how Bergvall picks out the
detail of Emelye’s (female) speechlessness from Chaucer’s rolling waves of
denied detail:
Ne how she swowned whan men made
the fyr,
Ne what she spak, ne what was hir
desir;
Ne what jewels men in the fyrr
caste. (45)
‘The apprenticeship of dialogue as
encounter is necessarily a meddling of boundary, a heightening of points of
internalized resistance or ideological differences’ (19) Bergvall writes, and
this seems to be a fine summary of the poetics of these pieces (and I’ve quoted
it twice already). The ‘meddling’ is the formal principle of these pieces, the
interruption and interference, the intervention and the intermediatization of
the results. Exchange and dialogue, in terms of formal appropriation,
assimilation and transformation of a range of materials (including Chaucer’s
Tales!), are ultimately acts of translation. If Derek Attridge says of more
conventional translations, ‘The singular work is … not merely
available for translation but is
constituted in what may be thought of as
an unending set of translations – for each new context in which it appears
produces further transformation,’ then transformation as a process may be read
backward onto translation, particularly where the language engaged with is the
crucially important proto-hegemonic dialect Chaucer used: a world language in
waiting, waiting ultimately for the sinister ‘transnational trafficking’ of our
contemporary ‘Justice’. (Attridge 2004: 73)
(See also all the links to realted excerpts and dry-runs from and for
The Meaning of Form here)
Update September 2016: For those who can buy The Meaning of Form in Contemporary
Innovative Poetry, or order it for libraries, here are the places
