The super-talented Ellis Avery is the author of The Teahouse Fire, (Riverhead 2006), which won three awards and was translated into five languages, and The Smoke Week (Gival Press 2003) an award-winning personal account of life in lower Manhattan after 9/11. Her critically acclaimed new novel The Last Nude, centering on the relationship between Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka and her muse, Rafaela, was released in January this year. Before her reading from The Last Nude last week at KGB bar, Ellis and I sat down to chat about Paris, artistic ambition, historical fiction, and painting classes with naked models.

Congratulations on the release of The Last Nude! There’s a big tradition of Americans going off to Paris and writing there; I’m thinking of writers like Henry James, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, and Earnest Hemmingway. Do you think Paris still holds a certain fascination for American writers, and if so, why?

Paris was the epicenter of Anglophone modernist literature in the twenties and thirties.  Americans went there and it set them on fire. Paris has always been a small, dense city, and the idea of being there when you could have just happened to run into pioneers in literature, art, music, dance, and fashion must have been incredibly seductive.

I first encountered world of Anglophone Jazz Age literary Paris when I was 16, very close in age to my narrator, Rafaela, the young woman who modeled for the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka’s most famous works. I lived in Paris the summer between high school and college, and attended the American University in Paris. I took a class called Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties with Noel Riley-Fitch, the author of  Sylvia Beach and The Lost Generation.  Sylvia Beach was the founder of Shakespeare and Company, which was the center of the Anglophone literary world in Paris, and she was also the publisher of Ulysses.

Sylvia Beach was the first famous woman I ever encountered who had a woman lover. Beach’s partner Adrienne Monnier owned the bookstore across the street, which was the center of the French avant-garde literary movement. Both women were at the center of this world, and I was on the verge of coming out myself, so their story spoke to me both personally and on a literary level.

Although the centerpiece of Dr. Riley-Fitch’s class was her meticulous biography of Sylvia Beach, we also read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Stein, T. S. Eliot, Pound, Beckett, Robert McAlmon, and Djuna Barnes: what a feast!  Reading all of these things that were created in Paris—while living in Paris!—was a seductive and mind-blowing experience.  Paris changed me and I knew I had to write about it one day.

In the years that followed, I’d see books come out from time to time about literary Paris and particularly lesbian literary Paris, and I would think, oh, I meant to go back to that world.  Still, what really put me over the edge was seeing Tamara de Lempicka’s 1927 painting Beautiful Rafaela at de Lempicka’s Royal Academy of London show in 2004.  The painting is gorgeous all by itself, but what startled me was the caption, which said de Lempicka met the model in the Bois de Boulogne in 1927, drove her back to the studio, and the girl became her lover and her model: their relationship yielded six paintings.  That painting—and that caption—was the spark that lit up all the Paris material I’d been gathering and storing in my mind over the years.  The Last Nude imagines and maps the collisions and overlaps between Tamara de Lempicka’s world and Sylvia Beach’s.

Is there an element of exploitation in creating art? Do you think art in a sense impedes relationships; the artist is often observing, rather than feeling, or living?

After I finished writing The Last Nude, I realized I had been coming to a kind of shadow-articulation of my values by writing about their opposites. I value honesty, and I wrote about a liar. I value loyalty, and I wrote a novel about betrayal.

Moreover, I wrote a novel called The Last Nude, and I found out that I value modesty. Not modesty as in what one wears—I love clothes!—but in two other senses. First, I mean the kind of reticence that allows you not to engage sexually with everyone you’re attracted to, but rather allows you to form one kind of bond with your spouse and a clearly different kind of bond with your friends. But in The Last Nude, what sex means is contested and confused, and when it comes to her model, Rafaela, Tamara de Lempicka really exploits that confusion.

Second, I mean a modesty of ambition. I believe in towering ambition when it’s you alone with your work, but out in the world, I don’t think being a good artist is more important than being a good person. Tamara de Lempicka would disagree, and so would James Joyce, who figures peripherally in the novel. But Rafaela comes to believe otherwise.

Last of all, to come back to this articulation of values, it really hit home for me how much I value reciprocity. I wrote a novel about a love affair between a painter and a model in which the model thinks what she has with Tamara is a reciprocal relationship, while Tamara, despite feeling real passion for Rafaela, also assumes that sex is her prerogative as a painter. There’s an extent to which any model, any warm body, would do. And there’s a moment when Rafaela finally realizes this. So this is how you loved me, she thinks. And she says: I loved you differently.

At the same time, however, that I show Tamara exploiting Rafaela, and regretting it to the end of her days, I also give her—and the choices she made, to put art before love—the last word: I wouldn’t need to figure out for myself whether I thought it was more important to be a good artist or a good person if it weren’t a real question, and I want to give serious weight to both sides.

Obviously The Last Nude deals with the recreation of real personalities. Was it constraining to write about a real person, or sort of liberating, because you had some real material, imagery and ideas to work with/play with?

My biggest source of inhibition as a writer is wondering if anyone will care what I have to say.  Research– and writing historical fiction– helps me overcome that block: obviously someone– the scholar or biographer I’m reading– thought it was worth writing down the first time, so it seems less crazy to think someone– the reader of my novel– will think it was worth writing down a second time.  The historical facts I work with are the stepping stones that let me get across the river of the novel, or the vines that let me brachiate from branch to branch above it.

People often ask me, “How much of The Last Nude is true?”  Anything that sounds like the product of an overheated imagination– Tamara picking up Rafaela in a public park, the sex with sailors in shacks by the Seine, Tamara eating oysters off the body of a young girl at a party, the cocaine, the absinthe, and so on– all that is documented in Laura Claridge’s biography of de Lempicka and de Lempicka’s daughter Kizette’s biography of her mother.  I see that as one kind of work that historical fiction writers do, a kind of DJ work, bringing together samples and laying them side by side: you could see The Last Nude as a mashup of my Lempicka research and my Sylvia Beach/Earnest Hemingway reading.

A second kind of work historical fiction writers do involves engaging with gaps in the historical record, making things up wholecloth.  In the case of The Last Nude, we don’t know anything about the actual Rafaela: not her nationality, language, or religion, not her last name, not even if her first name was really Rafaela.  (Tamara might have chosen the name in homage to Ingres, her favorite painter, and to his erotically-charged paintings of Raphael and his curvy brunette model/mistress.)  But that’s where I get to step in and say whatever I want.  Some of my choices I made for the sake of expedience: I promised myself that after a novel set in 19th-century Japan I wasn’t going to write another novel full of translated dialogue, so I made Rafaela American.  But some of my choices I could make for thematic reasons, because I wasn’t just painting-by-biographical-numbers: more on that later.

A third kind of work that historical novelists do is counterfactual.  Everyone knows the real Ernest Hemingway lost all his work in 1922: it was stolen when his wife left it on a train.  The real Hemingway never forgave his wife, but he got over the loss of his work and went on to become, well, Ernest Hemingway.  My Hemingway figure, Anson Hall (Anson was the first name of one of Hemingway’s grandfathers, Hall was the last name of the other), is the one who never gets over the loss of that work: he becomes a kinder person than Hemingway, but a sadder one, too.

So why was I doing these three kinds of work in the same novel?  When I began telling myself the story that became The Last Nude, I had just published a first novel that did well, and I was nervous about Sophomore Slump: what if I was a one-book writer?   I began thinking more broadly about creative failure, and how grateful I am to artists in every discipline who keep working despite the many obstacles they face.

In order to let me (and, I hope, readers) think about what keeps artists going, The Last Nude focuses on three artists, each of whom loses his or her way.  One is destroyed by surfeit.  After getting everything she wants– money, a title—Tamara de Lempicka, the Art Deco painter whose affair with her model Rafaela is the cornerstone of The Last Nude, loses the hunger that made it possible for her to work.  Another of these artists is destroyed by loss.  My Hemingway character, Rafaela’s friend Anson Hall, loses all of his manuscripts, and never really picks himself up again.  My third artist, Tamara’s model Rafaela, finds success, albeit in an under-the-radar medium, the trivialized and demoted art of fashion.  But history is not on her side.

Now in the case of Rafaela, nobody’s going to feel the loss of her work in the world, because she’s fictional.  And in the case of Tamara de Lempicka, so few people have heard of her that I’d have to do too much explaining if I tried to mourn the counterfactual, fictional loss of her work.  So I based my third artist character, Anson, on the single-most-read American of 1920s literary Paris, Ernest Hemingway, because I wanted readers to really feel the absence of Hemingway’s work. I myself would be so much the poorer if Hemingway had never managed to write A Moveable Feast.

So to wrap up a very long answer to your question, I guess I use fact, counteract, and wholecloth fabrication all to the same end: to tell, I hope, a good story, in the richest possible way.

• Hilary Berseth, installation view, Eleven Rivington, December 2011

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• Hilary Berseth, installation view, Eleven Rivington, December 2011

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• Hilary Berseth, installation view, Eleven Rivington, December 2011

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• Window (Studio), 2008, graphite on paper, 61 x45 cm.

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• Prison, 2007, graphite on paper, 61 x45 cm.

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• Hilary Berseth, installation view, Eleven Rivington, December 2011

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• Hilary Berseth, installation view, Eleven Rivington, December 2011

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• Hilary Berseth, installation view, Eleven Rivington, December 2011

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• Hole in the Wall, 2007-08, graphite on paper, 61 x45 cm.

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All images courtesy of Eleven Rivington Gallery

Hilary Berseth (SOA’ 2001) impressed with his first show at Eleven Rivington Gallery in 2008. He seamlessly blended nature with human agency; his honeycomb sculptures combined his own wood and wire armatures with wax and honey structures built by bee colonies. His manipulation of natural processes resulted in beautiful, subtle effects. The sculptures were cacti-like formations, with soft curvatures and elegant flowing lines; the poetic manifestation of mathematical formulas embedded in the natural world. Critic Karen Rosenberg, writing for The New York Times, described Berseth’s work as “a novel twist on process art.”

Berseth’s most recent show, at Eleven Rivington through February 5, 2012, is a slight departure. His graphite drawings feature some natural elements, such as plant life and clouds, but this time they are captured on a paper. The use of graphite lends the drawings an ethereal lightness, while the images, (juxtaposing a tree inside a room, or an eyeball with what look like vines or veins), masterfully blend the real and the surreal. Recurring themes are decay and impermanence; one particular drawing shows a room that could be a scene of either a demolition or a cataclysm. The floor is littered with wood pieces, and an entire wall has been ripped away, revealing a dark interior. The use of half-opened doors as an entrance into the composition suggests a psychoanalytic preoccupation, while the drawing of the eyeball references the technique of optical illusion.

Optical illusion is taken further in one of the paper sculptures, in which paper discs are conjoined to simulate a growing branch, and delicate buds are drawn onto the structure. The sculpture’s base features delicately drawn shadings, simulating shadows. The resulting effect evokes the play of light-and-shadow in a newly rigorous, artificial way. Other sculptures are pure geometric forms, more loosely referencing spirals and perforations, previously present in the honeycombs.

Berseth’s work was included in the 2011 Wax – Sensation in Contemporary Sculpture exhibition in Copenhagen, Denmark, featuring Vanessa Beecroft and Maurizio Cattelan, among others. He lives and works in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

• Viking Mars

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• David Akore, Agbogbloshie Market, Accra, Ghana 2010

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• Pentax Calendar 1980

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• Kate Moss, Golden Beach,FL

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• Nuit de Noa

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• Mercredi 9 novembre

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• Woman at a counter smoking, N.Y.C.

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  199-277, 4/11/03, 2:08 PM, 16G, 4504x4430 (415+812), 88%, Gowin Glossy, 1/100 s, R65.1, G50.0, B74.1

Every year, photohysteria descends on Paris in the form of the world’s leading photography fair, Paris Photo. This November, the Grand Palais off the Champs Elysees played host. I wandered in to take on the works of 117 international galleries, and to find out what the buzz was about.

My starting point was Magnum, the legendary agency co-founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson. The fair’s theme, Africa, was represented by Ian Berry’s harrowing images of South African apartheid, and George Rodger’ 1950s study of the Nuba tribe in South Sudan. Hitler’s ex-protégé Leni Riefenstahl was so struck by Rodger’s naked warriors that she asked Rodgers where to find them, and photographed them to great acclaim. I was similarly impressed.

At the Stevenson Gallery, Viviane Sassen showed why she featured on the Paris Photo poster this year, and why she works successfully in high fashion. Neon-yellow butterflies in mud, a sleeping boy in fishing nets, overexposed flowers at night – there was an idiosyncratic dreaminess hinting at a vision of African photography that is both contemporary and versatile.

The Africa theme did not dominate this year’s fair – there was too much else on. In the mass of works, before my eyes glazed over, I was particularly struck by Vincent Stoker’s large-scale pictures of dramatically decaying buildings (outstanding despite the now familiar subject). Paul Graham’s end of age youths, and Richard Mosse’s strangely beautiful canyon pits also caught my eye, proving that large-scale formats were a definite trend this year.

I also noticed a renaissance of the great 20^th century American photographers. Or did they ever go away? Several galleries showed Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, (also on display in the Tuileries Gardens), and William Egglestone (who showed up for a frenzied book signing).

The fair’s curator Julien Frydman explained the diversity of the material on display saying, “We have to be able to highlight photography’s rightful place in art history, and to be able to move seamlessly from a discussion of Dubuffet to one of Brassaï’s graffiti pictures.”

Paris Photo highlighted the photograph’s infinitely flexible nature between documentation and creation. Still, do the pictures taken for the street fashion website “The Sartorialist” really qualify as art? What about a nude Kate Moss, or shots of protestors?

The 50,000 visitors did not seem to care, and many were busier taking their own pictures. The whole thing felt strangely circular.  The market also seemed indifferent to such questions. Andy Warhol’s polaroids of Mick Jagger and Blondie, for example, sold well at $15,000 each. And Munich’s Daniel Blau gallery unearthed what was probably my favourite this year: a set of 1960s images of the lunar surface, taken by an unmanned NASA spacecraft. “The most expensive photographs ever taken” include a unique 3-D collage of negative strips, previously unwanted by galleries or collectors.

Brad Feuerhelm, director of the Daniel Blau London explained:  “Everything comes to the market at some point. It’s just a matter of whether it’s appreciated before it’s scrapped.”

The next Paris Photo will take place in the Grand Palais between the 15th to the 18th of November 2012.

Tomek Jetski is a lawyer by day and a cultural blogger by night.

$500 prizes in each genre: fiction, nonfiction, and poetry
Plus publication in our landmark 50th issue.

[JUDGES]

Nonfiction
Anne Fadiman
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
National Book Critics Circle Award 1997

Fiction
Dinaw Mengestu
How to Read the Air
The New Yorker “20 Under 40” 2010

Poetry:
Eileen Myles
Inferno: a poet’s novel
Lambda Literary Award 2010

Runners-up will be considered for publication on our website.
Entry fee is $14 and includes a copy of Journal 50.

Deadline: February 1, 2012.

Submit your work via our submission manager.
Please note: after your file is uploaded, you will be automatically directed to our payment portal, which will allow you to buy a virtual “ticket” to the contest ($13 plus 75? processing fee).

• The Forgiveness of blood

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• The Forgiveness of blood

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• Adeus

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• Adeus

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• Adeus

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• Oslo, August 31

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• Oslo, August 31

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The 35^th Mostra Internacional de Cinema ran from October 21^st to November 3^rd, 2011. Among the films presented I saw some notable gems, well worth seeking out.

Oslo, August 31, by Norwegian film director Joachim Trier, is an intimate, anguished portrait of a young man, Anders, who leaves a drug rehabilitation center and wanders through his native Oslo. Through flashbacks, we are shown Anders’ struggles with drug withdrawal. Actor Anders Danielson Lie, whose gaunt, boyish looks underscore his character’s vulnerability, delivers a strong performance—a mix of abrasive cockiness and debilitating self-doubt. Oslo’s streets and parks are linked to childhood memories in accompanying voiceovers. The comforting voices try, but ultimately fail to revive Anders’s will to live. In spite of its weighted theme, the movie avoids sentimentality, thanks to the taut, self-mocking dialogue and episodic structure.

Mohammad Rasoulof, a young Iranian filmmaker who won the Un Certain Regard award in Cannes, also delivers an intimate portrait with his film, Adeus (Good Bye). Adeus tells the story of a young woman activist, Noura, who attempts to flee Teheran. On the advice of her lawyer, she has become pregnant; if she gives birth abroad she will have a better chance at a legal migration. We do not know where Noura is headed. “Anywhere but here” is her oft-repeated motto. There is something wrong with Noura’s baby and her husband, a former journalist for a banned newspaper, is absent. We watch as Noura’s world shrinks, and the pressures upon her mount. Noura, played by Lelya Zareh, wears a stoic mask, as if she knows that to express anger, would be pointless.

Adeus rewards its viewers with a rare glimpse at the human drama of contemporary Iran, and with this film, life has tragically imitated art; Rasoulof, the filmmaker has been prevented from leaving Iran, and sentenced to 1 year in jail. While vague, the charges against him include endangering Iran’s national security. In the end, the Noura’s powerlessness, and the painful knowledge that her creator is sharing some of the fate of his character, makes this film simmer with slow-burning rage.

The third film, Forgiveness of Blood, transports us to Albania, a Balkan country partly bordering with Greece. Directed by American filmmaker Joshua Marston, the movie is set against luscious groves, scraggly hills, and the Adriatic Sea. Two family clans have been feuding over a piece of land whose ownership goes back for generations. When Mark murders a member of a rival family who forbids him to cross a common road, a tragedy is set in motion. Under an ancient customary law, Mark’s older son, Nik, may be killed in revenge. Nik comes up with a desperate gamble: to end the blood feud, he will surrender his person into his enemy’s hands.

Beautifully acted by non-professional actors, with carefully drawn characters, and a fine sense of storytelling, Forgiveness is Marston’s third feature. Like his first, Maria Full of Grace, which won this festival’s Grand Jury Prize in 2004, it is based on a true story. Similarly to Adeus, Forgiveness draws our attention to the history behind political and social conflict. Through the lens of these filmmakers, we see everyday life being restricted by these ancient rifts. The contrast with Oslo, in which modern life and modern freedoms are taken for granted, is both sharp and unsettling.

I was very excited to review Jeffrey Eugenides’s new novel The Marriage Plot.  I loved Eugenides’s previous works, The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex. These works fully engaged the reader; the characters had great depth. The voices were new and the stories stayed with you long after you closed the book.

The Marriage Plot centers on three young adults – Madeleine, Mitchell and Leonard – who have just graduated from Brown (Eugenides is also an alumni) in the early 1980s. Eugenides follows the trio, who are trying to find their way in the world after living somewhat secluded lives during college.

Madeleine falls in love with Leonard and moves in with him post graduation. Meanwhile, Mitchell has never quite gotten over his love for Maddy, and sets off on a spiritual quest. The title of Eugenides’s novel comes from Maddy’s thesis, which examines the path of typical romance in Victorian novels.

Whilst well written, The Marriage Plot falls short of the hype surrounding its release. The incessant name-dropping of various authors, pop culture references and literary theories clutters the first part of the book. It makes the novel feel self-absorbed.

Mary Karr, writing in New York Magazine of David Foster Wallace, said Wallace was ‘showing off,’ writing fiction that pointed to all that he had read, rather than stirring feeling in the reader.  Jonathan Franzen agreed, suggesting Wallace was favoring the in-crowd at the expense of the broader audience.

For me, The Marriage Plot suffered from a similar failure.  There was a dearth of sincere attempts to emotionally connect with the reader, and far too much self referential cleverness.

Perhaps this authorial choice made identification with the characters so difficult.  Lines like “…most semiotic theorists had been unpopular as children, often bullied or overlooked, and so had directed their lingering rage on literature. They wanted to demote the author. They wanted a book, that hard-won, transcendent thing,” in addition to repeated talk of Eco and Derrida weighed down the story. Michiko Kakutani, writing in the New York Times,  described the novel as feeling “claustrophobic.”

Whilst Eugenides successfully paints pictures of the attitudes carried by those who have yet to enter the “real world,” the characters above all come off as flat. Mitchell is the most fully developed.  Post-graduation, his travels in India fail to work out the way he had hoped.

Meanwhile, Maddy’s relationship with Leonard evolves and sours.  The plot of a good girl going for the troubled/bad boy whom she thinks she can save rings overly familiar.

A line from the book reads, “…It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.”

It’s true that none of the three main characters got what they wanted in the end. Unfortunately, for me, the book remained unremarkable.

Jaime R. Herndon is an M.F.A student at Columbia University studying creative non-fiction.

Oliver Stone believes Salvador wasn’t a box office success because of the “South American curse.” The film was welcomed by the critics and nominated for two Academy Awards, but Americans don’t care about “what happens in the back kitchen,” he said at the New York Film Festival’s screening of Salvador, his film on El Salvador’s civil war.

It’s a shame.

Salvador deserves the kind of praise heaped on Platoon, an opus on the Vietnam War that established Stone as a director back in 1986,only months after Salvador was released. Platoon was a bloody meditation on Stone’s personal experience in Vietnam.

Salvador revisits the civil war theme. However this time Stone employs the eyes of his friend, journalist Richard Boyle. Boyle witnessed the worst of the Salvadorian military repression, and his notes from the field inspired the film’s plot.

The film denounces the United States’ involvement to fund the Salvadorian government against the communist guerrilla.The repeated massacre of Salvadorians contrasts dramatically with the in-house politics of the US  embassy, where the decision to fund the government’s repression against the revolutionaries is eventually made. The message is clear: in 1980s America, bloodshed was preferable than communism. “Salvador was another Vietnam,” Stone said at the New York Film Festival. He discussed the film with his main actor, James Woods, who played Richard Boyle in the film.

Salvador is a messy movie. The 2 million dollar budget barely covered expenses, so production was done on the cheap. The transitions between scenes are jolting: many times, Stone could only film one take and go with whatever he got out of it. His off-the-cuff approach resulted in some highly unlikely moments, such as Boyle’s misplaced confession, right before the start of a mass.  This would never have taken place in a real Catholic setting, as Woods likes to point out.

Still, part of the joy of the film lies in its imperfections.  Plotlines oscillate between humor and horror, reflecting the strange blend of cynicism and empathy governing a war reporter’s life. The film is also honest about Boyle’s not-so-heroic personality – Stone portrays him as a drug addict with one woman in each country and a tendency towards opportunism.

Despite its pro-guerrilla stance,Salvador strives to be even-handed in its description of the civil war: the army is violent, but guerrilleros are shown to be brutal too, although Stone said he regretted this part of the story (there was never proof that the guerrilla murdered soldiers en masse.)

Most of all, it’s an astonishingly ambitious project for a brand new director. When Salvador was shot, Stone was only “the guy who’d written Scarface,” as Woods put it. Still, Stone wasn’t afraid to tackle a two-hour-long history of the Salvadorian conflict. “I used to think I could do big things,” Stone said. Now Hollywood “doesn’t treat history well anymore”, and even he “limits” himself.

When Stone was filming Salvador, money seemed to be his only limitation. Stone was convinced Salvador would be his last movie, both because of financial and production difficulties. He directed in a fog of rage and despair. The team was expelled from Mexico, where part of the film was shot, “because of all the rules we’d broken.” Stone kept fighting with Woods –at one point, Woods even pointed a blank loaded gun at Stone. The cast was on edge. Yet according to Woods, if anything, all of those difficulties made the movie more compelling: “Working with Oliver is like good sex: the sweatier, the dirtier, the more agony you go through…  the better.”

This “good sex” vibe permeates the film. Salvador was shot 25 years ago, but hasn’t aged – it’s still young, passionate – hot, even. It is strange then, that Salvador remains one of Stone’s most under-appreciated works, 25 years on.

Time to get over that South American curse.

Daphnee Denis contributes to Slate France and MSN, and is currently a master’s student at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Part One: Translation

Writing poetry in Irish forces you to think about translation, for practical reasons as well as  artistic ones. For one thing, because I write in a minority language my poems are more often published with a translation than not.  The majority of readers, who do not have Irish, will only ever read the translation.  Even those who do read Irish will usually read the translation and compare it to the original.

However much I might yearn for the ideal Irish reader, the English translation is an inescapable part of the experience of reading my poems and the aesthetic impact of any given poem comes from a sort of negotiation between the original and the translation.This is kind of irksome to me but it is also apt.  All poetry, and certainly all the poetry that I am interested in, is in part a negotiation between tradition and the individual poet, between a notional authenticity and a living artefact, between fidelity and assertiveness, origins and originality.

Some poets have addressed the problem of the translation creatively and have formed active artistic partnerships with their translators.  Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s work with Paul Muldoon (whose connection to this city as poetry editor of The New Yorker is worth mentioning) have forged a very fruitful poetic team.  Their joint work, poem and translation in friendly apposition rather than jostling for position on the page, may be seen as an artistic collaboration between two highly accomplished poets.  The poetry resides not simply in the original poem, nor can it be located in the translation.  It exists between them in a kind of dynamic tension between the source poem and its English version, in the gaps, historical and linguistic, between the Irish way of expressing an idea conceived in Irish and in that ideas translated equivalent.  Ní Dhomhnaill and Muldoon have made a virtue out of an artistic necessity and a new poetry out of an old problem.

For me, as a non-native speaker of Irish, translation is also an immediate part of the artistic process.  I am constantly aware that I come to the language, although it my literary home, as something of a tourist.  I find the language, for all its familiarity, full of exotic delights.  Turns of phrase strike me wonderfully rich and suggestive although I am sure they seem commonplace to a native speaker.  I cannot afford to be ashamed of my status as a linguistic tourist.  I comfort myself that Nabokov, Conrad, and the native Irish speaker Flann O’Brien all brought the outsider’s playful appreciation to their adoptive English and all are remarkable for their prose style and for the things that they did with the English language.

Some of the questions facing a poet in Irish are the same as those which confront any poet: what is the point of doing it at all?  There is no money in it, and very little glory.  Shelley might have been able to claim that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but Shelley was writing before the proliferation of television and the widespread availability of the Internet to working writers.

And if poets writing in English can feel aggrieved that the clout they have enjoyed historically has been usurped by boy bands and bloggers, the fall in status of the Irish-language poet has been dramatically greater.  If English poets could be considered influential it was through insidious back-door means: as playwrights or courtiers or formers of opinion among the ruling classes, later as romantic visionaries or prototypical rock stars.  The important point of Shelley’s observation is not that they were legislators but that they were unacknowledged.  Irish poets by contrast had a uniquely high social status as poets.

In the bardic period of Irish poetry, poets held an exalted position in Irish society.  They had a status, which combined the political the social and the artistic.  Their patrons were chieftains who valued them highly. The verse forms that comprise such a huge part of the Irish bardic tradition were developed in a context where poets were professional, important and extremely technically accomplished.  Very few poets working in the Irish language today could claim to be any of these things, and in fairness very few would presume to.

What all this means, though, is that to a poet who attempts to engage with the bardic tradition, all poetry contains an element of translation (as perhaps, if all language is metaphorical, all poetry does anyway).  When I write with an awareness of the forms that make up the tradition, I am forced to engage with formal problems posed by a cultural context that no longer exists.  I am trying, in a broad sense, to translate the historical tradition into modern Irish, for purposes that are anachronistically egotistical, and into a modern literary world that might seem absurd to the historical bard.

Everything is translation, from thought to word, from image to phrase, from one linguistic register to another and from tradition to modernity.  If I can act as a translator for the language of my forebears into a vibrant living version of their Irish then I will have served them, and my own poetic concerns.

Part of the problem of writing in Irish is the very basic one of vocabulary. The Irish language is, like all modern languages, deluged with English.  Those cranks who set out to protect the language (and I am one of them) are forced to reckon not just with the contagion of English in the everyday life of native Irish speakers but with the constantly developing lexicon of modern life.  Irish was in steep decline even before the Industrial Revolution (which has still to reach Ireland).  We have no native word for a spinning jenny, never mind a jet engine or a flash drive.

The poverty of technical vocabulary makes it difficult to write a contemporary urban poem in good Irish.  That difficulty, however, is not necessarily a bad thing.  Peter Porter famously wrote that poetry “is a form of refrigeration that stops language from going bad” but poetry in Irish is forced to be more than just a linguistic cryogenics lab.  The writing of poetry in Irish is an act of reinvention of the language.  The description of twenty-first century life absolutely necessitates the finding of words with no historical precedent in the linguistic tradition.  This may seem somehow presumptuous, and it is, but it is worth considering that just as metaphor is the basis of poetry, so it is the basis of all language.

All poetry operates by analogy, in the slipperiness of words and in the shifting similarities between images.  Lexicographers in Irish have a more active role in the forging of the language than their counterparts in English.  It is almost a creative role, even a poetic one.  The word for spam, for example is turscar, which translates as something like “driftwood”, the stuff that gets washed up on the shore.  To my mind that wilful renewing of the language at the most basic level of vocabulary is an act of poetry.

All language develops at least partly by this poetic process of analogy.  (It’s obvious when you think about it: a mouse is not really a mouse, a Blackberry is not really a blackberry, a spinning jenny is not some sort of rotating donkey.)  This means that words have a history which is metaphorical and poetic.  The word for plagiarism in Irish, for instance, is bradaíl which is linked to bó bhradach, a stray cow.  It makes the word rich in suggestion, connotation and poetic possibilities which are almost impossible to translate.  The only example I can think of of a word for a lost cow straying into other areas of vocabulary in English is “maverick” which, richly suggestive though it is, is not really equivalent at all.

Since Irish depends for its continued existence on government patronage and the efforts of cultural activists, all Irish poetry is political to a certain extent, even if it doesn’t want to be.  It is an assertion of pride, an appeal for identity, a staking out of cultural territory.  And that is before you have even written a word.  Admittedly the stakes for an Irish poet working now are not as high as for a classical bard – I am probably unlikely to have my tongue cut out for writing a satire, as did the sixteenth century poet Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn.  On balance this is probably for the best, but it would be nice to think that somebody cared enough about my poetry to be driven to such extremes.

What is at stake is the language itself, which is something most people do not care about.  It is, in spite of heroic and ongoing attempts to revive it, a dead language.  But it is also, as Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill famously put it in an article for the New York Times Book Review “the corpse that sits up and talks back.”

However, much as I love the language, I am a reluctant ambassador for it.  Every poem I write becomes, quite without my permission, a sort of apologia for the language and its continued funding by the government.  Writing in Irish places me in the category of Irish-language poets, and Irish-language poets are generally regarded by English-language poets much as you sort of suspect the Special Olympics athletes are thought of by certain “true” Olympians.  It is true that when there are so few of us that it is relatively easy to get published, and indeed to establish a reputation.  However I am always aware that I am a medium-sized fish in an impossibly small pond.  The small enclosed nature of the Irish literary scene also makes for astonishingly bitter infighting and backstabbing, the “rabid egotistical daisy chain” that Heaney prescribes as hell for poets.

Still, to ask me why I write in Irish is to ask why I write at all.  My love for the language is rooted in my love for my family, my ineradicable identity with my country, my own problematic self.  It is in my blood and bone and that’s about as deeply as I can answer.  All poetry is about language at some level, though, and like most poets, if I could properly articulate why I need to write poetry, I would probably not need to do it.