Yes, it gets interesting when this entity "direct delineation of
personal experience" turns out to be something different in different
hands rather than an experiential given, and when northern Irish
university poets need eccentric Catalan and French poets to motivate
them in this direction -- especially when they already have Patrick
Kavanagh behind them! -- the greatest of them all.
Ferrater's earlier poems are, judging by the translations, very
prosaic, maybe less so in the Catalan (which, yes, is included in the
Arc book) but later in his (short) career when there was more
figuration. I can't see a trace of the "traditional forms" this
prosaic matter is said to be pressed into. His longest poem begins,
"When the war began I was fourteen and three months" and goes on like
that for ten pages, obviously asking to be read as prose, i.e., with
the reader's reward postponed, whereas poetry is instant.
The introductions don't answer the questions of why. Heaney plays the
civil war ticket.
It's an interesting book and I do kind of believe in the (diversified)
value of DDofPE as a ground, I think it's something we need to keep to
hand, though you do sometimes wonder why you are being told all this
("three months"?)
Pr
On 14 Sep 2011, at 09:13, ian davidson wrote:
Thanks for this Peter.
I know nothing of the specifics of the event but like the idea that
direct delineation of personal expereince might be filtered through
poetic forms from another language and culture.
Ian
> Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 20:53:24 +0100
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Ferrater
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> I've come across a strange thread which starts from the Catalan poet
> Gabriel Ferrater (1922-1972). It is that at Queens University Belfast
> in the 1960s, the then Professor of Spanish Arthur Terry was
> translating Ferrater, and Seamus Heaney and others took a great
> interest in the results and possibly they, and Terry himself, were
> important factors in establishing the direction of those Northern
> Irish poets who became so successful. Terry's translations of Raymond
> Queneau are also said to come into this. The point would be some kind
> of breaking away from modernistic poeticism into a plainer, unloaded
> manner and direct delineation of personal experience, within
> traditional formalities. Ferrater declared himself opposed to
> "obscurantism".
>
> Has anyone else come across this story? The trouble with it seems to
> me to be that whatever Ferrater is like Queneau's way of writing is
> several thousand miles away from Heaney's.
>
> The only other poet I've noticed heavily influenced by Ferrater is
the
> Belgian William Cliff, whose earlier work (all I know) I found very
> readable. He is several thousand miles away from Heaney in another
> direction.
>
> There are a few Ferrater poems readable on-line which seem engaging,
> and in no way plain-speaking but with a lot of the symbolistic and
> image-laden writing you expect in the Hispanic world. There is a book
> translated by Terry published by Arc, (introduction by Heaney)
which I
> don't think includes the texts in Catalan, making me reluctant to
> purchase it.
>
> PR
