Reflections on A Translated Man (set list)

 

Last night I read at the last reading of the year for The Other Room in Manchester. (The other readers were Rachel Smith and Sandeep Parmar.) It was also the end of what I’ve called The DeKoninck Tour, launching my book A Translated Man, which is available from Shearsman Books and purports to the be the work of the bilingual Belgian poet René Van Valckenborch. Read about him here. Buy the book here. Or here. See that last reading of the tour here: http://otherroom.org/tag/robert-sheppard/

 Last night I read from his supposedly Flemish poems; at other readings I’ve usually mixed the sides a little. At the North Wales Poetry Festival I only read from the Walloon side. I was also billed as Van Valckenborch alongside a range of REAL poets from Austria and Iceland and elsewhere. This poster shows Rene there (bottom lefat hand corner).

 

I also read alongside Allen Fisher at Edge Hill, and for Shearsman (with Patricia Farrell and Rupert Loydell).

In the summer I launched the book privately and also read the poems of Gurkan Arnavut (which I co-wrote with Zoe Skoulding), one of the European Union of Imaginary Authors (EUOIA) invented by Van Valckenborch. (You’d think he’d know better, making up poets of his own!).

The only gig that went wrong was the collaboration with Robert Hampson, ‘Liverpool Hugs and Kisses’, a brief holiday away from my Belgium of the mind. My foot went again but I couldn’t walk, as it were. Sorry about that, Robert, and Steven Fowler too. I know I missed a wonderful gig.

I’m being interviewed by the very astute Chris Maddon for The Wolf and his final question about A Translated Man asked me what I’d say to Van Valckenborch if I met him. I wondered what he’d ask me! (I’ve been interviewed by Ana Maria Seranno for a new online journal in Ireland called Colony and she too had searching questions about this project.) It is odd that I’ve never quite thought of him as a character, more of an ‘author-function’. 

I’ve enjoyed the company of his book, but I’m keen to move on. There are a number of projects. The Given/ Arrival/ When, the autrebiographies., are due out 2014. There is a manuscript called Unfinish waiting for my attention.

What of René? Well, one of my possible projects involves completing his EUOIA project for him. That would mean inventing 27 fictional authors (one of whom is myself, by the way).

 And, although I have no readings lined up (and quite like that fact) I’d like to read work other than Van Valckenborch’s. As I said last night, If you are seeing me for the first time, then you won’t know that I don’t write like this. But, then, of course I do now. Then there’s the question of whether I could be influenced by him, write my own ‘twitterodes’ or my own explorations of the spatial imagination. But that’s the irony: they are mine. (For the record, I’ve never denied that they are.)

Thank you to everybody who has published, listened to, put on readings by, Van Valckenborch this year.

 

Robert

 

 and Rene

 

Rene Van Valckenborch links

Links to the fictional poems of Rene Van Valckenborch by Robert Sheppard

The ‘whole’ oeuvre of René Van Valckenborch is surrounded by mystery, perhaps of his own making. Published in fugitive publications in places as far apart as Cape Town and Montreal over the last decade, the poems of this Belgian are composed in Flemish and Walloon, and the stylistic divide between the two sets seems to reflect the societal and linguistic divide of his troubled nation (although he never refers to this fact). The two translators, Annemie Dupuis and Martin Krol, worked independently of one another at first. Their subsequent meeting, marriage and removal to Brussels form such an incredible tale that they have occasionally been accused of manufacturing the controversy of Mr Van Valckenborch’s discovery, of fabricating their translations and of inventing their author. But in fact they are ‘fictional poems’, a category defined by Gerald L. Bruns. ‘To speak strictly, a fictional poem would be a poem held in place less by literary history than by one of the categories that the logical world keeps in supply: conceptual models, possible worlds, speculative systems, hypothetical constructions in all their infinite variation – or maybe just whatever finds itself caught between quotation marks, as (what we call) “reality” often is.’

Read Eric Canderlinck’s introduction here:

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/introducing-rene-vanvalckenborch.html


Read early poems (both in Walloon and Flemish) here:

http://www.theadirondackreview.com/VanValckenborch.html


Watch Patricia Farrell and I perform part of ‘Background Pleasures’, one of VanValckenborch’s poems from the Walloon:

http://vimeo.com/13739658

More Walloon poems, this time from Van Valckenborch's versions of Ovid:

http://holdfirepress.wordpress.com


Read and listen to the Walloon ‘Cow’ poems, his final Walloon poems, perhaps written in the same spirit as Magritte, when he entered and quickly departed, his ‘Periode Vache’ (see an example at the top of this. Isn't he adorable?):

http://theclaudiusapp.com/3-sheppard.html

text

http://theclaudiusapp.com/3-amp.html

audiofile


Read a piece of Van Valckenborch’s critical prose (not to be included in the collected Van Valckenborch project), an account of the cinema of forgotten Belgian film-maker Paul Coppens:


http://lyndondavies.co.uk/w/655/robert-sheppard-frozen-cuts-of-light-the-scratch-cinema-of-paul-coppens/


Turning to the poems supposedly in Flemish, read ‘Van Valckenborch’s Cube’:

http://ekleksographia.ahadadabooks.com/issuethree/authors/sheppard.pdf


Read his Twitter feed at

http://twitter.com/VanValckenborch

or read all 100 collected together and then some separately with photographs (after the link to his ‘Cube’) here on Pages at

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2010_12_01_archive.html


See some of the collaborative prints made with Pete Clarke using poems from the Van Valckenborch project at

http://scottishpoetrylibrary.wordpress.com/2011/05/13/events-in-may-june/manifest/

and, more clearly, at

http://www.poetrybeyondtext.org/clarke-sheppard.html


Read Dylan Harris’ account of a close encounter with the enigma himself:

http://dylanharris.org/prose/poetry/rvv.shtml


Other texts have appeared in print in Tears in the Fence AND, Sunfish, Roundyhouse, VLAK, Form & Fontanelles and Poetry Wales. The whole project is intended for publication in 2013.

The whole thing may be bought as A Translated Man here:

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Robert-Sheppard-A-Translated-Man-p102839130

Then came Twitters for a Lark

https://www.shearsman.com/store/Robert-Sheppard-ed-Twitters-for-a-Lark-p102839129

Twitterode 83

■ 83 thru’ marble arch tarpaulin on which Magritte’s curtain-building is opening on flat summer skies (behind which dreams the renovating palace)