Issue 13

Issue 13, November 2010

www.dur.ac.uk/grove

ENGLISH WRITING • EVENTS COVERAGE DURHAM BOOK FESTIVAL SPECIAL STUDENT WRITING

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THE TEAM’S PAGE So the autumn leaves are falling, and essay titles are calling, but fear not – we have an exciting new issue of The Grove to keep you entertained as the days draw in. We’re especially excited to have an extended Events’ section with a wide array of interviews with writers who featured at The Durham Book Festival. As usual, we also have English and Student Writing sections, Translations and Centrefold, where you can find a historically accurate history of the magazine…

This is also the first issue that has been produced entirely by the new exec and so I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their hard work and efforts producing the first issue of the term; this year looks set to bring great things for The Grove. I also want to thank last year’s editors for their continued support and advice, which made the process of setting up the new team run so smoothly.

Last year’s exec handed over not only a name and a concept, but a tried and tested format. We’d like to thank Steve Hopkinson, who transformed The Grove from a haphazard arrangement of poems on a side of A4 to the slick booklet design you see before you. For that, and his continued support in proofreading the journal and designing advertisements, we’d like to tell everyone he’s wonderful.

If you’re interested in submitting work to us for the next issue, don’t hesitate to write to us at: grove@dur.ac.uk.

Enjoy!

-The Grove Team

THE GROVE IS FUNDED BY

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CONTENTS ENGLISH WRITING

TRANSLATIONS

“Remembrance of an Open Wound” page 4

by Pascal Petit “To the Bridge” by Simon Armitage 4 “The Death of Isis” by Jo Shapcott 5 “Tempest Avenue” by Ian McMillan 5 “The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim” 6

by Jonathan Coe “The Outcast” by Sadie Jones 9 “Things My Mother Never Told Me” 10

by Blake Morrison

“Spinoza” by Jorge Luis Borges “The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths”

by Jorge Luis Borges “The Book of Sand” by Jorge Luis Borges “Solitude” by Pablo Neruda “Sexual Water” by Pablo Neruda “Rayuela” by Julio Cortazar “Epitaph” by Juan Gelman

“Hiroshima Haiku”

by Jan Vincent Felix “Clockwork Songs” by Lydia Knoop “Paris” by Emily Chester “Dialogues” by Avishek Parui “Birdbrain”

by Hannah Rose Felicity Warner “This is our generation”

by Ettie Holland “The Festival Spirit” by Lydia Knoop

13 14 16 18 19

38 39

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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THE GROVE TEAM ARE Editor-in-Chief: Emily Chester; Deputy Editor: Lyndsey Fineran; Acting Editor: Alex Mason; Deputy Acting Editors: Ettie Holland, Sasha Magill; Section Editors: John Clegg, Rebecca Sheppard, Kate Hutchings, Alexis Grigorieff Sub-Editors: Ella Colquhoun-Cole, Will Hanson, Astha Sharma-Pokharel, LeeMey Goh, Louis Campbell-Stievenard, Emma Charles, Jamie Baxter, Laura Mosley, Jess Sorah, Sponsorship Officers: Tom Trennery, Hannah Warner Development Officer: Maxime Dargaud-Fons

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33 33 34 35 36

EVENTS LISTINGS

CENTREFOLD “The Grove: A Journey Into The Archives” “The Voice of the Cheese-God”

by Donald Tournier

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STUDENT WRITING

EVENTS “Pascale Petit Interview”

by Thom Addinall-Biddulph “Simon Armitage Interview”

by Sohinee Sen “Jonathan Coe Interview”

by Rhiannon Bull & Poppy McPherson “Sadie Jones Interview”

by Ella Colquhoun-Cole “Blake Morrison Interview”

by Rebecca Sheppard

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ENGLISH WRITING In this issue of The Grove your English Language and Events sections have teamed up to cover the Durham Book Festival! We in English Language have selected a taster piece for each of the writers interviewed, plus some bonus works from writers not interviewed. So stay in out of the cold, miss that unnecessary lecture and indulge in the following!

PASCALE PETIT

Remembrance of an Open Wound Whenever we make love, you say it’s like fucking a crash – I bring the bus with me into the bedroom.

There’s a lull, like before the fire brigade arrives, flames licking the soles of our feet. Neither of us knows when the petrol tank will explode.

You say I’ve decorated my house to recreate the accident – my skeleton wired with fireworks, my menagerie flinging air about.

You look at me in my gold underwear – a crone of sixteen, who lost her virginity to a lightning bolt.

It’s time to pull the handrail out.

I didn’t expect love to feel like this – you holding me down with your knee, wrenching the steel rod from my charred body quickly, kindly, setting me free.

SIMON ARMITAGE

To the Bridge The same bridge, in fact, where it had occurred to him that the so-called Manic Street Preachers, for all their hyperventilation and sulphuric aftershave, were neither frenzied, credible or remotely 4

ENGLISH WRITING evangelical, just as the so-called Red Hot Chili Peppers, for all their encouraging ingredients, were actually no warmer than a baby’s bathwater and not in the least bit Diablo, whereas the Teardrop Explodes, either by blind accident or through careful purpose had kept every promise ever made.

Below him, the soupy canal acknowledged that final thought with an anointing ripple then slouched unknowingly yet profusely onwards.

JO SHAPCOTT

The Death of Isis He paces the garden, hunting in the borders where nothing’s in the right place. A shrub growing small harmoniums: that can’t be true.

And what are they doing there, those flowers with the faces of bereaved dogs and scared kittens?

Bindweed, made of paperwork and damp beer mats, is flourishing in the shadows but what’s needed now is a spot in the sunlight most of the day.

Find it, dig deep, because the picture on the packet shows it’ll look great, bloom a good part of the year; the flower is the colour her soul has traced in the eyes of those left behind, the colour in the sixth band of the rainbow She lets us glimpse every now and then.

IAN MCMILLAN

Tempest Avenue It is 5 am, and I am standing in the half light bedroom holding our son. He is finally asleep and I lay him gently in the cot, trying not to rattle the toy bear 5

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Ian McMillan

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attached to the bars. Next door Mr Lowe is having a dream about the glassworks at Stairfoot. Look: all the workers have turned to glass, what a strange dream. Across the road, Mr Ford is cycling out of his drive to the pit. He cycles during the week, takes the car at weekends, Down the street my mam is standing at the kitchen window, looking at our house, thinking ‘Our Ian will be asleep. I hope Mr Ford’s squeaky cycle doesn’t wake him up.’

And I am being careful, so careful with these words, laying them gently into this poem, turning to the door.

JONATHAN COE

Extract from The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim When I saw the Chinese woman and her daughter playing cards together at their restaurant table, the water and the lights of Sydney harbour shimmering behind them, it set me thinking about Stuart, and the reason he had to give up driving his car. I was going to say ‘my friend Stuart’, but I suppose he’s not a friend any more. I seem to have lost a number of friends in the last few years.

I don’t mean that I’ve fallen out with them, in any dramatic way. We’ve just decided not to stay in touch. And that’s what it’s been: a decision, a conscious decision, because it’s not difficult to stay in touch with people nowadays, there are so many different ways of doing it. But as you get older, I think that some friendships start to feel increasingly redundant. You just find yourself asking, ‘What’s the point?’ And then you stop.

Anyway, about Stuart and his driving. He had to stop because of the panic attacks. He was a good driver, a careful and conscientious driver, and he had never been involved in an accident. But occasionally, when he got behind the wheel of a car, he would experience these panic attacks, and after a while they 6

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started to get worse, and they started to happen more often. I can remember when he first started telling me about all this: it was lunchtime and we were in the canteen of the department store in Ealing, where we worked together for a year or two. I don’t think I can have listened very carefully, though, because Caroline was sitting at the same table, and things between us were just starting to get interesting, so the last thing I wanted to hear about was Stuart and his neuroses about driving. That must be why I never really thought about it again until years later, at the restaurant on Sydney harbour, when it all came back.

His problem, as far as I can remember, was this. Whereas most people, as they watched the coming and going of cars on a busy road, would see a normal, properly functioning traffic system, Stuart could only perceive it as an endless succession of narrowly averted accidents. He saw cars hurtling towards each other at considerable speeds, and missing each other by inches – time and time again, every few seconds, repeated constantly throughout the day. ‘All those cars,’ he said to me, ‘only just managing not to crash into each other. How can people stand it?’ In the end it became too much for him to contemplate, and he had to stop driving.

Why had this conversation just come back to me, tonight of all nights?

It was 14 February 2009. The second Saturday in February. Valentine’s Day, in case you hadn’t noticed. The water and the lights of Sydney harbour were shimmering behind me, and I was dining alone since my father had, for various weird reasons of his own, refused to come out with me, even though this was my last evening in Australia, and the only reason for me visiting Australia in the first place had been to see him and try to rebuild my relationship with him.

Right now, in fact, I was probably feeling more alone than I had ever felt in my life, and what really brought it home to me was the sight of the Chinese woman and her daughter playing cards together at their restaurant table. They looked so happy in each other’s company. There was such a connection between them.

They weren’t talking very much, and when they did talk, it was about their card game, as far as I could tell, but that didn’t matter. It was all in their eyes, their smiles, the way they kept laughing, the way they kept leaning in to each other.

By comparison, none of the diners at the other tables seemed to be having any fun. Sure, they were all laughing and talking too. But they didn’t seem to be entirely absorbed in each other, the way the Chinese woman and her daughter did. There was a couple sitting opposite me, out on a Valentine’s Day date by the looks of it: he kept checking his watch, she kept checking her mobile for text messages. Behind me there was a family of four: the two little boys were playing on their Nintendo DSs, and the husband and wife hadn’t spoken to each other for about ten minutes. To the left of me, slightly blocking my view of the waterfront, was a group of six friends: two of them were involved in this big argument which had started out as a discussion of global warming, and now seemed to have more to do with economics; neither of them was giving 7

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any ground, while the other four sat there in bored silence, looking on. An elderly couple on the other side of me had chosen to sit side by side at their table, rather than opposite each other, so that they could both look at the view instead of talking to each other. None of this depressed me, exactly. I daresay that all of these people would go home thinking that they’d had a perfectly enjoyable night out. But it was only the Chinese woman and her daughter that I really envied. It was clear that they had something precious: something that I wanted badly. Something that I wanted to share in.

How could I be sure that she was Chinese? Well, I couldn’t. But she looked Chinese, to me. She had long black hair, slightly wild and unkempt. A thin face, with prominent cheekbones. (Sorry, I am just not very good at describing people.) Bright red lipstick, which struck me as an odd touch. A lovely smile, slightly tight-lipped but all the brighter for that, somehow. She was expensively dressed, with some sort of black chiffon scarf (I am not very good at describing clothes either – are you looking forward to the next 300 pages?), held in place with a large golden brooch. So she was well-off. Elegant – that would be a good word to describe her. Very elegant.

Her daughter was well dressed too, and also had black hair (well, you don’t get many Chinese blondes), and seemed to be about eight or nine years old. She had a beautiful laugh: it started as a throaty chuckle and then bubbled up into a series of giggles which cascaded and finally died away like a stream tumbling down a hillside into a series of pools. ( Just like the ones Mum and I used to walk past whenever she took me for a walk on the Lickey Hills, all those years ago, at the back of The Rose and Crown pub, on the edge of the municipal golf course. I suppose that’s what her laugh reminded me of, and perhaps that’s another of the reasons why the Chinese girl and her mother made such an impression on me that evening.) I don’t know what was making her laugh so much: something to do with the card game, which wasn’t a really silly, childish one like snap, but didn’t seem to be very serious or grown-up either. Perhaps they were playing knock-out whist or something like that. Whatever it was, it was making the little girl laugh, and her mother was playing along with her laughter, encouraging it, joining in, surfing on its waves. It was such a pleasure to look at them, but I had to ration my glances, in case they noticed that I was looking and the Chinese woman decided that I was some kind of creep. Once or twice she had noticed me looking at her and she had held my gaze for a couple of seconds, but it wasn’t long enough, I couldn’t read any kind of invitation into it and after those couple of seconds she looked away and she and her daughter would start talking and laughing again, quickly rebuilding that wall of intimacy, that protective screen.

Right at that moment, I would have liked to text Stuart, but I didn’t have his mobile number any more. I would have liked to text him to say that I understood, now, what it was that he’d been trying to tell me about cars. Cars are like people. We mill around every day, we rush here and there, we come within inches of touching each other but very little real contact goes on. All those near misses. All those might8

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have-beens. It’s frightening, when you think about it. Probably best not to think about it at all.

SADIE JONES

Extract from The Outcast There was nobody there to meet him. He stood in line behind three other men and watched them get their things and sign the papers and walk out, and they all did it just the same way, as if you couldn’t choose how to do a thing like that after all the time you’d been waiting for it. It made the same man out of all of them. When it came to his turn there were only the clothes he’d been in when he arrived and his wallet and cut-throat razor. They made him sign for them, and for the postal order his father had sent, and he was put to get changed in a side room. His clothes didn’t fit him properly anymore; the trousers were an inch too short and the arms of the shirt didn’t cover his wrists.

He went back to the desk and put his wallet in his back pocket with the postal order inside it, and the razor in his other pocket, and waited while the doors were all unlocked again to let him through. He didn’t look at the guards, but crossed the yard to the small door in the wall to the side of the big gate. The door was unlocked, and opened, and he stepped out into the street. There was no sign of the men who’d gone before him, or of anyone at all. He kept a hold of himself and didn’t feel too much about it. He had been in a state of waiting, but the waiting wasn’t for his release, it was for his homecoming. Two years is not a long time, but maybe longer from seventeen to nineteen than at other times of your life.

It was the colours that struck him first, the colours and the very bright sunlight. His eye could see far away, down the street to where a small, pale blue car was turning a corner and disappearing. He looked up and down the street and thought that he could stand there forever in the clean air and look at the distance, and the bricks in the houses that were different shades of yellow and brown, and the bits of grass between the paving and the way there was nobody there. Then he remembered the prison at his back and wanted to get away from it. Then he thought that it was all he’d known for a long time, and he didn’t want to get away from it, but he stopped himself thinking that and walked down the street, away from the prison and towards where the pale blue car had gone.

Lewis needed to cross the river to Victoria to catch the train home. He had to get to a post office to cash the postal order and he had to get to the station, then he decided he needed to buy something to wear because he felt foolish, and going home would be hard enough without looking stupid as well.

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Sadie Jones

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Getting from one place to another and having to speak to people he didn’t know made him feel frightened and more like a convict than he had expected to, and when he got to Victoria he stood across the road from the station, trying to make himself go in.

There was no shade. He had bought two white shirts and a light-grey suit that came with an extra pair of trousers, and some cigarettes and a pack of cards and a metal lighter with a hot flame. He was wearing one set of clothes and the man in the shop had sold him a cardboard case to put the other things in, and now he put the case down, and took cigarettes from the pocket of his new trousers and lit one with his new lighter and waited to be able to go into the station. He’d never bought clothes for himself before. It was odd that he could have done the things he’d done and not know how to clothe himself. His father had sent him enough money not to come home, but he hadn’t asked him not to.

Thinking about what he’d done and what his father thought of him wasn’t helping, so he watched the people on the streets instead. The colours were still very bright.

There was a lot of blue sky and the trees on the pavements seemed marvellous and the women looked wonderful and he had to stop himself from staring at all of them.

He felt the flicker of life inside himself, looking at them, and it was a bright flame and not a dark one and there was promise in the way the women walked and the lightness of them. He tried not to stare and was dazzled and hypnotised by every woman who passed him. Trying not to stare at women, but still looking at them as much as he could was a game, and a good way to stop his head from getting away from him, and made him feel alive again. He wondered if you could get arrested for staring at women for an hour outside Victoria station, and imagined the judge putting him away again the day he got out for picturing them under their clothes, and after a while he was able to cross the street and go into the station and buy his ticket.

BLAKE MORRISON

Extract from Things My Mother Never Told Me A child can’t miss what a parent is feeling, and from the moment I saw my mother as someone separate from me, what I sensed was disappointment. I saw it in her sad, distracted eyes. She was never a “performer”, but the withdrawal into herself, the quietness: this was a kind of performance in itself.

In the postwar English provinces, anti-Irish prejudice was rife. Did my mother encounter it? If so, she never let on. By now her accent was barely discernible: no one need know, and unless asked, she didn’t say. Effacement wasn’t her only way of coping. She also told jokes against her tribe. The Irish as stupid, feckless, drunk, poverty-stricken - the thing was to get in first. In letters to my father during the war, she had gently made fun of fellow Irish doctors.

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In retirement, she kept a book of Kerryman gags by her bed (“Have you heard about the Kerryman who got a pair of water-skis for Christmas? He’s still looking round for a lake with a slope”).

Ernest, my father’s father, died in November 1958. His death was no surprise to Arthur, who had written to consultants about his father’s heart problems five years before. But he hadn’t expected to feel such grief. In the three months before he died, there had been no visits. Most unusual. And a guilt he never got over. There was a reason why my father hadn’t seen his father. He had fallen in love. In 1957, Beaty and her husband Sam arrived to run the bar at the local golf club. For the next decade, the 19th hole was where my father’s heart lay. He adored Beaty and, being the man he was, brought his family along so we could adore her, too. At quiet times, my sister and I would be allowed in the clubhouse. More often, on Sundays, we played out back among the drinks crates, a bag of crisps and a bottle of orangeade to keep us quiet. My mother sat smoking on a high stool and watched. As though she was used to this. As though, as a wife, this was what you did.

My father might not have been tall or handsome, but his smiles were winning, his energy was prodigious, and he looked much younger than his years. He wasn’t sly or predatory, but out there in the open, an innocent. Beaty had this innocence, too.

With her Marilyn blonde hair and pointy, big breasts, the golfers at the bar liked to flirt with her, but she considered herself a good Catholic - and made a point of being friendly to my mum. In time, Beaty and Sam became regular visitors at our house - or rather Beaty did, since Sam, as bar and catering manager, had few hours off.

Whether my mother really felt benign is doubtful. My memory of her on that barstool is of someone careful not to drink too much or drop her guard. She didn’t kick up a fuss - not even when my father began going out with Beaty each Monday night. She was feeling low, he said, and needed “taking out of herself ”. Their excursions became more adventurous. He began coming home in the small hours.

Soon there was gossip. A patient spotted them together at a nightclub in Bradford. It became harder still for my mother when Josephine was born. Beaty and Sam had been told that there was little chance of them having children but suddenly, miraculously, a daughter. Stranger things have happened: couples lose hope and adopt and then find themselves conceiving. Still, at some point in my teens it occurred to me that Josephine might be my half-sister. She was born at Cawder Ghyll, where my mother delivered her patients’ babies. As Beaty was a patient, she delivered her baby, too. I remember, on the day of the birth, my father taking my sister and me along, and a nurse holding up a tiny face in a blanket to show us. He doted on Josephine - as my mother, otherwise so discreet, sarcastically observed. I look at old photographs now and her resemblance to him still seems unmistakable. But if she was his, he never said so.

The harm to my mother came out as migraines. She’d had them during the war, when overworked. In 1948, in Earby, they briefly re-emerged. But it wasn’t until the 1960s that they really hurt. Later, her head brought her other problems - anxiety 11

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attacks, dizzy spells, lapses of memory and tinnitus, with its hum of melancholy and piercing whistle of despair. The demons of the cortex. But back then the demon was Beaty. And though I don’t blame Beaty for the migraines - I don’t blame Beaty for anything - for a time her existence was a blight.

Misfortune brought me closer to my mother. She was a victim, and as a teenager I thrived on victims. With my father, I was made to do things (play tennis, wash the car, mow the lawn); with her, I was permitted to sit. I listened attentively when she talked, and debated love and fashion with her. At 13, I sang alto and lacked facial hair, and my left ball had only just dropped - so it was all right to be an honorary girl.

Together we closed ranks against my father, whose bullish peremptoriness - so our silent sorority let him know - was a deep affront. Eventually, my father’s relationship with Beaty lost its heat. My mother told herself she had been right to stick it out.

She had him back, not tail between legs exactly but undivided in his loyalties. She counted her blessings, or rather he counted them for her.

It was my father’s idea that they retire at 60. Though he still got along with most of his patients, his interest in medicine, never extensive, had long since disappeared.

His new project, building a house in the paddock at the back of the Grange, reignited old passions and DIY skills. He was happy, free to do as he pleased. My mother was less happy. Left to herself, she’d have carried on working indefinitely. But he talked her into making a clean break - no more medicine, not even Cawder Ghyll.

In 2001 a woman was discovered lying next to her husband’s corpse. She’d been there for three years, and the joke was that she didn’t know the difference - the sex, the conversation, the contribution to housework were just the same. When my mother lay next to my father’s corpse, a decade earlier, it was because her life had been snuffed out with his. She got up after a day or two, for the cremation, but her heart had joined his in the fire. Had she no autonomous being, then? No identity of her own worth preserving? Of course. But what they had together was larger. He’d had his faults, to say the least, but when she was with him she felt alive. Now that she is dead, too, I’ve been thinking of all she gave up - religion, nationhood, identity in order to make a life with him in England. It’s sad that she surrendered so much.

But it’s not a tragedy, I see that now. Haven’t I too made a life elsewhere? What’s wrong with that? To give up what you’ve known is nothing, in exchange for love and freedom and work. Let me grieve for my mother, but let me not pity her. What did she say when I last saw her? “It’s been a good life.”

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EVENTS Last month saw Durham swept up in a literary frenzy as the annual Durham Book Festival returned in breathtaking style, running from 18th to 28th October. This issue presents a collaborative effort with the English Writing section to pay tribute to several authors on the line-up who paid their worthy visits to Durham. Our Events’ section brings you some exclusive, postfestival interviews from headliner Simon Armitage, as well as Jonathan Coe, Blake Morrison, Pascale Petit, Ian McMillan and Sadie Jones. An enormous thank you to all of those writers who were kind enough to spare some time to make this section happen. Enjoy-we certainly did!

THOM ADDINALL-BIDDULPH INTERVIEWS PASCALE PETIT Pascale Petit is a poet not quite like any other. With a huge mix of cultures and nationalities in her background- French, Welsh, Asian- it is perhaps not surprising that her poetry is so steeped in world cultures. What is so arresting about her poems is that she uses these cultural references to work through serious family traumas, such as her father’s rape of her mother. At the Durham Book Festival she read from her new collection, What The Water Gave Me, based on paintings by Frida Kahlo. I met her afterwards in the extremely upmarket setting of a room upstairs in Durham Town Hall.

I first ask her about the influence of mythology and how it works with modern poetry. She says she wants to ‘create a whole world in poetry’, and it is evident how much global research her poetry is supported by. For the new collection, she visited Mexico City and saw Kahlo’s Blue House, and visited the Anthropological Museum. Her award-winning collection The Zoo Father is based around Amazonian tribal mythology, amongst other South American cultures, whilst The Huntress is influenced by Aztec myths. She sees a violence in this mythology that connects to the violence in her own family- a ‘spiritual’ violence rather than a random one in the myths- and she is intrigued by the ‘why’ of it, the human condition present throughout the world and the ages. She herself, she points out, is an animist, believing everything has a life, even such things as rocks.

I next ask her if she would accept ecocritical readings of her undoubtedly ecological texts, which are full of animals and nature, linked inextricably with humans. She refers to the aforementioned animism, a major influence on her poetry, as an older version of James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, clearly very much aware of environmental issues. This stems, she says, from growing up in Wales with her grandmother around nature, leaving her with a lifelong interest in the environment; she is ‘not so interested in the urban’. However, she refutes the idea that her writing is message poetry that should be read in the light of climate change: she simply wants 13

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to display an awareness of the fragility of the earth. She also connects violence towards women with violence towards nature, a link that is never explicit but strongly present in her collections.

Speaking about theories of poetry more generally after I enquire if The Zoo Father should be taken as a poetic narrative, almost an abstruse verse novel, Petit says she wants her poems to be clear as possible and that they need a story, because ‘humans gravitate naturally to stories’. She would not, however, consider her poems to form a narrative as such- she is interested in ‘making a chant from the lines’, but with a story there as well. The nature of language is a major concern for her, one indeed that she seems to equate with life itself in poems such as Ghost Orchid and When I Talk With My Mother.

Finally, with Hallowe’en approaching, I ask about mysticism in her poem- the centrepiece of The Zoo Father, a poem entitled The Horse Mask, has raised for me the image of the Wild Hunt (which appears in many places, not least Johnny Cash’s Ghost Riders In The Sky). She says that her ‘real subject is the mystical and the strangeness of the world’. It is a subject that she handles with panache, alert to both the emotional realities of human life and the bizarre beauty and terror of nature and the supernatural. I can heartily recommend her collections.

SOHINEE SEN INTERVIEWS SIMON ARMITAGE You’ve translated works like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and adapted The Odyssey.

What attracted you to translating medieval literature?

I think as you get older it’s almost a search for identity. Being a poet in this world, you almost don’t know what you’re doing or who you are, and so to try and harmonise and link your voice with people from the past is a bit like looking for your relatives. I’ve always been interested in journeys, and both Gawain and The Odyssey are journeys within poems. Gawain is a Northern poem and there was a sense, for me, of bringing it home.

Speaking of the North, you’ve written extensively about it in All Points North. What do you think of contemporary Northern writing?

Northern writing has always been strong; something that the North has been rightly proud of. There has also been this recurring sentiment of dissent, of a voice that isn’t always metropolitan and cosmopolitan and wants to say things in its own way. In the last forty or fifty years there have been many opportunities for poets to express themselves in native tongues, which is very important. If you can’t use your 14

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own tongue, you’re not really thinking with your own brain. Also, I don’t really know any different. I’m more comfortable and at home in the North. I find it really exotic and I’ve still got a lot of exploring to do.

Do you think it’s important then to encourage a sort of regional writing?

I think it’s important not to be parochial and not to make your ambitions merely local. I think it’s important to be true to yourself and part of that truth is your vocabulary, your experience. I don’t think you should stray outside of those things just for effect. I believe you should use the strengths that you are given and with most people those strengths are your tongue and your upbringing, both of which are unique.

You’ve written both poetry and prose. Do you find that there’s a big difference in the process?

Prose is a lot longer.

Yes! There is a difference. I think first and foremost I see myself as a poet. You can’t write poetry every day. You can’t operate at that level of intensity every day. You would burn out, keel over or people wouldn’t want to know you – or they’d call a doctor!

With prose, it’s more possible to write every day. It’s quite natural for a lot of poets to turn to other forms of writing: radio, television etc. Also with prose, it’s more like having a job. With poetry you can daydream it. You have a lot of the words in your head before you sit down to write; it’s quite portable.

Is writing a strict, regimented activity for you?

Not when I’m writing poetry, but with prose it is. I am sat writing during work hours, sort of office hours, but I never write poetry then. I’ve got a little girl so I guess my working hours are when she goes to school. When she comes home, that’s the end of that!

How does a poem begin for you?

It’s usually some little daydream, and then before I know it, it’s out of control. And they kind of sneak up on you – poems. The time when they stop sneaking up on you, when you scare them away, I guess that’s when it’s time to stop.

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Jonathan Coe Interview

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RHIANNON BULL & POPPY MCPHERSON INTERVIEW JONATHAN COE Jonathan Coe’s ninth and latest novel, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, highlights the significance of isolation in contemporary society through the story of one very average man on a promotional race for a toothbrush company…

RB: While you were an undergraduate at Cambridge you wrote two books. I think of the number of societies I’m involved with, and the amount I have to pay for my course, and I just don’t know when I would sit down and write…

JC: Well, I was very shy and antisocial at university. I’m glad in retrospect that I wrote those two books while I was there, because they were books I had to write in order to get better, but I think in many ways that time would have been better spent making friends and joining societies. I just sort of hid in my room really, and did what I’d done all through my teenage years, which was to sit upstairs in my bedroom and write. And watch TV. Sounds pathetic when you put it like that! But I think that’s one of the things writers have to go through. Maybe actually life is too full for young people now. It’s much, much fuller than it was when I was growing up. I mean, the internet is a terrible distraction when I’m working on a book. It’s great because I can do so much research without leaving my desk, but the trouble is if you get stuck on a sentence or you can’t think of anything to write next, then you just start googling things at random. And the next thing you know, not only is it four hours later but your eyes are hurting and you haven’t got up from your desk.

RB: Probably one of your most widely read novels is What a Carve Up! which has the central character Michael literally isolated from society for two years. Isolation is also a big theme in Maxwell Sim; how do you see the differences between these two kinds of isolation?

JC: I think what’s happened is that I’ve come back to that theme fifteen years later. So much has changed technologically in the last fifteen or sixteen years, and in theory there’s no reason to be lonely any more, because you can have virtual relationships with people all over the place. What thinking of the story of Maxwell made me realise was that if you’re isolated anyway, these technologies just heighten that sense of loneliness; just intensify it. He finds this technology mocking him, because he just has five or six new ways of feeling lonely rather than five or six new ways of communicating with people.

PM: You said in the talk that you didn’t really consider Maxwell Sim to be a tragic emblem of mediocrity as such, rather an example of the ordinary. Would you say he possesses any heroic or redeemable qualities?

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Jonathan Coe Interview

JC: Well, I never write about heroes, in the sense of characters with heroic qualities. I don’t usually enjoy reading about heroes either; I’m more interested in anti-heroes and unexceptional people really, because I find them easier to identify with. And in an odd sort of way I feel that stories of exceptional people don’t tell you anything very interesting, because they only tell you something about that one person; they don’t tell you something about human nature in general. So that’s one of the reasons I’m attracted to ordinariness, or mediocrity of you want to call it that, because there is - particularly in Britain - a kind of comedy and a kind of bathos attached to that sort of thing, which goes back to Reginald Perrin and all these sorts of British comic archetypes.

PM: And you don’t find it sad to think about mediocrity?

JC: Well, you know…ordinary life is what we’re stuck with most of the time, and if we can’t reconcile ourselves with that then we’re going to be very unhappy. The great moments in your life, the epiphanies and the moments where everything seems to come together and life seems wonderful - they don’t happen that often.

They happen five or six times in a lifetime if you’re lucky. And it’s great to write about those moments when they come, but also I think it’s important to celebrate the ordinary or otherwise we become terminally dissatisfied with our lot.

PM: A recent article by Will Self discussed the trend in recent writing for authors to place themselves in their texts. He blames this on “the isolated, emasculated nature of the writer’s job and being excluded from male bonding rituals like commuting, Friday night binge drinking, etc”. Why did you choose to feature yourself in Maxwell Sim and do you agree with Self’s comment?

JC: Well, Will would have had his journalist hat on when he wrote that piece.

Journalists by the nature of their job deal in generalisations and screaming theories, which is fine when you’re reading the article - but my view of things is that every case is different. The reason I did it was because one of the things Maxwell Sim is about is the dichotomy between virtual relationships and real relationships. And the realisation started to creep up on me while I was writing about Maxwell’s love affair with his SatNav; that actually I was engaged in a virtual relationship with Maxwell. I had become very close to this person - I was spending all my time every day thinking about this person and writing about him. After a day’s writing I would come back to my family and I would often be very remote from them, because my closest relationship at that point was with an imaginary person.

If I did my job properly and wrote an engaging book, then the reader would be in a close relationship with an imaginary person as well. And that got me thinking 17

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about why virtual relationships in literature are fine, and why we value those, and yet virtual relationships online we’re a little bit suspicious about. So I just wanted to raise that question in the reader’s mind: the question about the nature of the relationship they’ve been in for the last 300 pages with the characters, and the nature of the relationship I’ve been in with my central character. And whether it was a good thing or not.

ELLA COLQUHOUN-COLE INTERVIEWS SADIE JONES You came from a very creative background, your father being a scriptwriter and poet. Was writing always something natural to you or did you make a definite decision to write at a certain point?

It was just something I always did while I was waiting to do something ‘proper’. I went through a misguided couple of years when I thought I was going to act but had no talent and hated it. I don’t see us as a family of writers; it wasn’t something I aspired to because when you grow up with it, it all seems very normal.

Both of your novels are set not very long after the Second World War. Many writers like Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan have had a lot of success recently returning to that era.

Why do you think it’s so relevant today?

I’m not sure, but I think times go in and out of fashion. That period is useful for telling stories about conflict, repression and tension. It has a certain attractive, nostalgic appeal so you can narrate quite horrible things within it – which works dramatically. I certainly never set out by thinking what time would be popular.

Instead, the story and the setting come mysteriously. You can use history to create your own ends, and I’m not sure the novel’s as much about the history as it is about us.

In both books the idea of the outcast is a recurring theme. Do you think it’s a reflection of yourself? Both the characters of Hal and Lewis don’t seem to fit in.

No, they don’t. I suppose all artists and writers are outsiders, or feel themselves to be outsiders to some degree. I don’t ever feel that I’m writing myself but I suppose in some ways I am. I try not to look too deeply into it because I don’t want to be autobiographical, but, having said that, I’ve always related to outsider stories and I think writers generally see themselves as looking in on the world and commenting on it. That’s what we do.

You were originally a scriptwriter. How did you find the transition to the novel form? Do you 18

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think there’s consequently more of a visual quality to your work?

I think it’s a chicken and egg thing in that my very visual imagination felt suited to scriptwriting rather than scriptwriting making my prose more visual. Which came first is interlinked. I think the prose coming last was essential to me. When I’m writing, I know that if the sentences come first I’m writing very badly because I need to be describing a previously imagined thing, rather than making something up on the page.

Small Wars seemed much more political in its message than The Outcast. When you are writing do you actively think of a message that you’re trying to put across?

Not so much a message as an exploration or a spotlight. With Lewis it was about truth and once he has truth he’s liberated. With Hal it was to do with the conscience and the denying of the conscience. You’re right, Small Wars is much more political.

It’s a much bigger, broader story. I am constantly thinking, as I write, about the story I’m trying to tell beneath the work.

You worked in Paris for fifteen years as a scriptwriter with little success. Would you have preferred to have been successful earlier in life?

No, I think I would have been rubbish if I had success at a young age. When you look back you think that was absolutely necessary. Of course, at the time it was just horrible because I couldn’t understand why this thing, the only thing that I could understand and loved doing, had no results. But then I look back and realise I didn’t have a book before my first novel, there wasn’t one to write. Only later does it all make sense.

Do you have any advice for aspiring novelists?

Keep doing it and accept that it’s really scary and difficult. I release my inhibitions thinking no one else need see it. Just think this is mine and no one need ever read it.

If you’re trying to please and imagine a crowd of people, you don’t end up pleasing anyone.

REBECCA SHEPPARD INTERVIEWS BLAKE MORRISON Although Blake Morrison is widely acknowledged to be a master of the memoir genre of writing, he appears during our interview to be interestingly most animated and enthused when instead discussing the process of compiling his seminal, 1982 anthology of contemporary British poetry with ex-Poet Laureate Andrew Motion.

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Blake Morrison Interview

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While, admittedly, his zeal may have been aided by my cursory mention that the compilation is indeed featured on this year’s Post-War Fiction and Poetry module, one really does get a sense that Blake has a genuine passion, not only for writing, but for literature.

“Andrew and I were both writing and reading poetry at the time, and we suddenly realised that there was a whole generation of poets, such as Seamus Heaney and Tony Harrison, who hadn’t been anthologised in a cheap, accessible form,” he explains.

“Twenty years before there had been Al Alvarez’s The New Poetry, but that basically took the line of including only American poets with the aim of showing the Brits how to do it!

“Even by the time we’d finished, I already thought that the anthology was a bit too narrow and tight-arsed and that I would have liked to have put about thirty other poets in, such as Michael Hofmann and Carol Ann Duffy. In the end, though, Andrew felt that the existing version was an historical document. The world of poetry is, after all, a fastmoving one, so we decided to leave it as it was with all its limitations.”

It was the commercial success of Blake’s 1993 memoir though, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, which provided him with the financial security to quit his job as literary editor of the Independent on Sunday and commit to becoming a fulltime writer.

Recounting the tale of Blake’s own father’s death, the book is autobiographical and, therefore, deeply personal. When it was recently adapted into a film in 2007 starring both Colin Firth and Jim Broadbent, surely Blake had reason to feel vulnerable or, at the very least, protective over its content?

“Even though my life was essentially being put on the big screen, so much time had passed between the book and the release of the film that I was able to hand it over and let the crew make the best of it they could in that form,” Blake assures me.

“Above all I wanted to give an honest and candid account of what dying looks like. In a sense I believe that these efforts gave me my father’s permission, since, as a doctor, he had also always been very frank about death with me. However, the book is also a study of the after-effects of death for those who live on.”

Blake’s latest novel, The Last Weekend, was released earlier this year. Although it is a definitively fictional tale and not autobiographical, one can draw a fundamental parallel between the narrator in this novel, Ian Goade, and the narrators in Blake’s earlier memoirs in that they tell their story retrospectively. Indeed, Ian frequently draws on childhood memories during the course of the novel, pointing towards 20

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how they might have warped his view of the world and his behaviour.

“Graham Greene once said that everything happens during our first twelve years, and certainly, what happens to Ian in his early life affects the rest of his existence,” Blake tells me. “I also believe that childhood is an immensely powerful and vivid time, and so I found myself naturally drawing on memories in my work. Besides, I’d rather be dealing with children than with old people!”

Blake cites his literary influences as beginning with Modernist writers such as Lawrence, Eliot and Auden, and it is not difficult to see evidence of this in his own writing, particularly with regard to his stunning 1984 collection of poems, Dark Glasses. Eliot’s The Waste Land, he says, was the first poem which excited him and made him actually think that there was something worthwhile in poetry. Though currently both Larkin and social realist fiction appear to be fuelling his creative spirit, it is Blake’s Yorkshire background which continues to imbue his writing with its idiosyncratic and affecting voice.

“Growing up in Yorkshire has enriched both me and my writing. Not only has it enabled me to make use of the local dialect and to take up northern subjects, but it has also given me a sense of place that perhaps I would not have had living in a suburb within the M25.

“I don’t think that my background has made any difference in terms of my reputation or getting on though. However, I do remember a rather amusing conversation with an editor at the Times Literary Supplement just after I had started working there. He seemed to think that because I was from the North I must be working class. When it became clear, on the other hand, that my childhood really wasn’t that deprived, he simply leaned in and said to me very anxiously, ‘But there was a mine in your village, wasn’t there?’ ”

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CENTREFOLD THE GROVE: A JOURNEY INTO THE ARCHIVES ORIGINS The Grove has existed in its current incarnation since 1972, but a magazine of that name had existed for almost forty years previously. It started out as a newsletter for the Durham University Hunt. When that society was de-ratified following the infamous boar incident, the publication quietly passed into the hands of Durham’s embryonic creative writing circle, at the time led by Simon Prunus and Elspeth Ropey. The first issue of the revitalised magazine featured outdated beat poetry by a young Matthew Griffiths and a long and cryptic piece by Burleigh Housmartin, entitled The First Durham Prophecy. This prophecy would also be the last, as Housmartin fell to his death after an altercation in the stairwell at Fabio’s. An appeal in The Grove’s second issue raised enough money to pay for a safety net, which hangs in Fabio’s to this day.

BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED : 1972 - 1988 Over the 70s, the magazine was dominated by a succession of incompetent editors. It was during this fallow period that the then Grey fresher Chris Higgins was chased out of an exec meeting for suggesting The Grove focus exclusively on radical politics (an episode described in the VC’s autobiography Having it my Way).

The publication was only kept afloat by ambitious Durham alumni including Ted Hughes, Joni Mitchell, George Alagiah and David Dickinson, who paid to submit translations, poems and reviews, thinking it could raise their profile. But what faint promise there was was lost after the unfortunate printing of a satirical parody of Evelyn Waugh (submitted anonymously, but believed to be the work of a young Anthony Stewart Head). Waugh’s cousin sued the magazine for libel, and the editor (a third-year Geography student, Victor Hutchings) foolishly decided to contest the action and represent himself. Only mayhem could ensue. The Daily Telegraph called the farcical trial that resulted ‘Durham’s Shame’, and in the aftermath The Grove was forbidden from publishing for the next hundred years.

The 80’s saw The Grove running as an underground David Bowie fanzine with increasingly low production values. When Bowie released the unlistenable Station to Station in 1985, the magazine’s readership fell through, and a pun-obsessed new editor (the Parisian Stephane Caldecott) could do little to revive it. During this period, little original writing was published, and The Grove Archives reveal the editorial team at the time actually turned down poetry from a young David Duchovny.

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A Journey Into The Archives

HIGHS AND LOWS AND HIGHS : 1989 - 2010 By 1989 the hundred-year publication ban had been forgotten; the judge had written it on a napkin, which was lost when he moved house. To celebrate, the English Department offered The Grove substantial funding, which was frittered away throughout the 90s, mainly on exquisite oil portraits of the editors. But, as a result of the wise investment of some Allen and Overy sponsorship, The Grove in 1996 was publishing daily (in morning and evening editions), employed fourteen typesetters, had a Bangkok correspondent and entered into negotiations to buy Newcastle United football club and Prontaprint. But because student writing had been largely forgotten, the funding was withdrawn to fund several important PhDs on the monkpoet Micheal O’Siadhail (in 1998). In a fit of pique, the next editorial was taken up by a frenzied four-letter rant against certain lecturers in the English Department, and once again The Grove was forbidden from publishing. Worse news was to come; the judge had rediscovered the original napkin, and The Grove was in the unenviable position of having two bans hanging over its head.

What rescued The Grove from oblivion was a combination of Maxime DargaudFons, Chris Hogg and dubious NHS Chlamydia money. Dargaud-Fons and Hogg initially planned to found a new creative writing magazine, but when disagreement arose over the name (one side preferred Fons et Origo, the other Hogg’s Head) they hit upon the solution of re-launching The Grove. Early funding issues were solved by printing the magazine on Hopkinson tissue paper, until the English Department resumed its glory by riding to the rescue once more. Under its outgoing new editor, Emily Chester, The Grove looks set to go from strength to strength. But as you enjoy your copy today, take a moment to consider its founding mothers and fathers, and the shining history gleaming from underneath like a jewel beneath a jewel.

DONALD TOURNIER

The Voice of the Cheese-God A story has been told about a presocratic philosopher. It is not clear which, but a good story must have characters, so for the sake of the story we will say it was (eenymeeny-miny-mo) Xenophanes, founder of the Elean school. On the designated day, all the citizens of Elea had left their homes to worship the god Apollo in the temple that overlooked the city. One of Xenophanes’ pupils, passing in front of his house, saw that he was not going up to worship, as all were expected to do, but had instead started a cooking fire on his doorstep, and was stirring something in a large pot, with a wooden spoon. The pupil stopped, and asked Xenophanes why he was not walking up with the other citizens to worship the god. Xenophanes merely smiled, 23

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and indicating the pot, quietly replied: “Even in there, there are gods”.

Gods! And why not? After all, how else did food become food?

Animals eat their food raw, uncooked, unprepared. It has been shown that in cooking and preparing their food, early humans reduced the energetic investment needed for digestion, which could then be redirected towards the activity of the brain. And is this not the work of a god? Does it not sound like a good myth? Rather than humans emerging from eggshaped hermaphrodite gemelli, or being sculpted from mud, or baked in a heavenly oven, could it not have happened this way: A god, occupied with feeding a band of apes, decides that they could be more sophisticated creatures, and seeing that they have discovered the warming qualities of fire, inspires one of them to use it for cooking, thereby improving on the original design?

And how else could we explain that humans, who are otherwise generally cautious creatures, wary of the unknown and easily put off, started one day eating cheese? Is it not a seductive idea that in souring and congealing, milk conceived its own tiny god, living among the porous yellow goo, between the rough crumbly crusts, and who one day declared: “I know my world is not conventionally attractive, but I also know that it is nutritious, and, once you get past the smell, rather delicious - therefore, humans, eat me!” Such a god would be both uniquely powerful - if underrated - and really quite endearing. We could build a temple for him in the likeness of a slab of hol(e)y Emmental, and revere him for the goodness he brings to pizza, pasta, ski trips and late-night sandwich binges. We could build this temple next to that of Dionysus (whose cult should be revived) and worship the twin deities of cheese and wine, so different and so complementary.

And what a pantheon we could have... The Bulgarians could hold festivals for Bacillus, god of yoghurt; the Chinese and the Japanese could have a supreme deity called Soy, and the Vietnamese could honor a decomposing fish carcass called NuocMam; in Ireland one could kneel at the foot of huge lumpy statues of the Tuber god, in Mexico those of Fava the giant bean, Italy would be dotted with the scarlet stone figure of Pomodoro, Hungary with that of Paprika...

And just think! no more religious wars, only salads; the religious authorities would be chefs, a profession among which there are relatively few senile fanatics; religious celebrations would be a pleasure rather than a painful duty; Sunday School (or whatever its gastrotheological equivalent) might not be so empty and drab!

Think of the countless children’s stories and songs in which foods take on human characteristics. Mightn’t these - adapted of course - make good scripture?

If only we had heard the voice of the cheese-god.

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TRANSLATIONS The Nobel Prize in literature having been awarded this year to the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, we thought it would be the perfect occasion to explore the works of various SouthAmerican writers, such as Jorge Luis Borges or the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. You will also get the chance to read slightly less well-known Latin-American authors, like the Argentinean writers Juan Gelman and Julio Cortázar. We are also glad to say that all the translations in this issue are the work of Durham students! ¡Que disfrutéis!

JORGE LUIS BORGES (Translated by Nick Freeman)

Spinoza The Jew’s translucent hands Polish the crystal lenses in the half-light And the dying dusk is fear and chill (The twilight hours are all alike.)

The hands and the hyacinth air That pales towards the confines of the ghetto Barely exist for the quiet man Who is dreaming up a clear labyrinth.

He is not disturbed by fame, that reflection Of dreams within the dream of another mirror, Nor by the timorous love of maidens.

Free from metaphor and myth He grinds an arduous crystal: the infinite Map of the One who is all His stars.

JORGE LUIS BORGES (Translated by Max Leventhal)

The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths The dignified men of faith recount (although Allah knows more) that in the earliest days there was a king of the Babylonian islands who brought together his architects and wise men and ordered them to build a labyrinth so perplexing and subtle that even the most prudent men would not dare to 25

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enter it, and those who did enter it would be lost. This work was a scandal, since confusion and marvel are the prerogative of God alone and not of men.

With the passage of time, an Arabian King came to his court, and the Babylonian King (in order to mock the simplicity of his guest) made him enter the maze, where he wandered confused and insulted until the end of the day. When evening came, he called for God’s help, and found the door. His lips issued no complaint, but he told the Babylonian king that in Arabia there was another, greater maze, and Allah willing, the Babylonian king would find himself there one day.

Then the Arabian king returned home, and gathered together his captains and jailors, and attacked the kingdoms of Babylonia with such fortune that they razed the castles, oppressed the peoples, and took that same Babylonian king captive. He tied him to a swift camel and took him into the desert. After having ridden for three days, he shouted out, “Oh, King of time and substance and cipher of the century, in Babylonia you wanted me to get lost in a maze of bronze with many stairs, doors and walls; now the Almighty has seen it fitting that I show you mine, where there are no stairs to go up, nor doors to open, nor tiresome corridors to retrace, nor even walls to prevent your steps.”

He then untied the bonds and abandoned him in the middle of the desert, where he died of thirst and hunger. May glory be with Him who does not die.

JORGE LUIS BORGES (Translated by Magali Cloet)

From The Book of Sand A line is made up of an infinite number of dots; a plane, of an infinite number of lines; volume, of an infinite number of planes; hypervolume, of an infinite number of volumes… No, this geometrical method is definitely not the best way to start my story. Stating their truthfulness is now a convention in all fantastic stories; mine however, is truthful.

I live alone, in the fourth floor of Belgrano street. It must have been a few months ago now, when at sunset, I heard a knock on the door. I opened it, and a stranger came in. It was a tall man with blurred features. Perhaps my short-sightedness made him so. His whole appearance was of respectable poverty. He was wearing grey and was carrying a grey suitcase in his hand. I immediately felt he was foreign. At first I thought him old, and then noticed his scant blond hair had deceived me, almost white, in the Scandinavian way.

In the course of our conversation, which would not last an hour, I learned he came from the Orkney Islands. I offered him a seat. The man took a while to talk. He exhaled melancholy, like me now.

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TRANSLATIONS – I sell bibles - he said.

Jorge Luis Borges

Not without pedantry, I answered: – In this house there are some English bibles, even the first one, that of John Wyclif. I also have that of Cipriano de Valera, that of Luther, which is literally the worst one, and a Latin copy of the Vulgate. So you see, I am not exactly lacking in bibles.

After some silence, he replied: – I do not only sell bibles. I can show you a sacred book that might interest you. I acquired it in the confines of Bikanir.

He opened the suitcase and left it on the table. It was an octagonal volume, bound in fabric. No doubt it had passed through many hands. I examined it; its unusual weight surprised me. The spine read Holy Writ and further below, Bombay.

– It would be from the 19th century - I remarked.

– I don’t know. I have never known - was the answer.

I opened it at a random page. The characters were strange to me. The pages, which I judged to be worn-out and of poor typography, were printed in two columns in the form of a bible. The text was dense and divided in verses. On the corner of the pages there were Arabic ciphers. It caught my attention that an even page wore the number (40.514 for example) and the next page; 999. I turned it; the back was numbered with eight figures. It carried a small illustration, as is usual in dictionaries: an anchor drawn with a pen, as if drawn by the clumsy hand of a child.

It was then that the stranger said to me: – Have a good look at it. You will never see it again.

There was menace in the words, but not in the voice. I observed the place and closed the volume. Immediately, I opened it. In vain I sought the figure of the anchor, page after page. To hide my bewilderment, I said: – It is a version of the Scripture in some Hindustani language, am I right?

– No - he replied.

Then he lowered his voice as if to entrust me with a secret: – I obtained it in a village of the prairie, in exchange of some rupees and the Bible. The owner did not know how to read. I suspect that he saw an amulet in the book of Books. He was from the lowest caste; people could not step on his shadow without contamination. He told me his book was called the Book of Sand, because neither the book nor the sand has a beginning or an end.

He asked me to search for the first page. I leaned my left hand over the cover and I opened it with my thumb almost glued to the cover. It was all useless; there were always various pages interposed between the cover and the hand. It was as if they emerged from the book.

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– Now search for the end.

I also failed; I barely managed to mutter with a voice that wasn’t mine: –This cannot be.

Still speaking with a low voice, the bible seller said to me: – It cannot be, but it is. The number of pages in this book is exactly infinite.

None is the first; none, the last. I don’t know why they are numbered in this arbitrary way. Perhaps to convey that the terms of an infinite series can accept any number.

Then, as if thinking aloud: – If space is infinite we are at every point in space. If time is infinite we are at every point in time.

His considerations irritated me. I asked: – You are religious, no doubt?

– Yes, I am Presbyterian. My conscience is clear. I am convinced I didn’t cheat the native when I gave him the Word of the Lord in exchange of his diabolical book.

I assured him he had no reason to reproach himself, and I asked him if he was passing by these lands. He answered that he was thinking of going back to his homeland in a few days. It was then that I learned he was Scottish, from the Orkney Islands. I told him I personally loved Scotland because of Stevenson and Hume.

– And Robbie Burns - he corrected.

While we were speaking, I continued examining the infinite book. With false indifference I asked him: – Do you intend to offer this curious specimen to the British Museum?

– No. I’ll offer it to you - he replied, and demanded a high price.

I answered, in complete honesty, that that sum was inaccessible to me but I continued thinking. Within a few minutes I had devised my plan.

– I propose an exchange - I said. You obtained this volume for a few rupees and for a Holy Scripture; I offer you the amount of my pension that I just received, and the Bible of Wiclif in gothic scripture. I inherited it from my parents.

–A black letter Wiclif! - he murmured.

I went to my bedroom and came back with the money and the book. He turned the pages and examined the cover with the fervour of a bibliophile.

– Deal - he said.

It surprised me that he didn’t haggle. Only afterwards would I understand that he had entered my house determined to sell the book. Without counting the money, he put it away. We talked about India, about the Orkneys and about the Norwegian jarls that ruled them. It was night when the man left. I have never seen him again and I don’t even know his name.

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TRANSLATIONS

Jorge Luis Borges

I thought of keeping the Book of Sand in the hole left by the Wiclif, but I ended up opting for hiding it behind one of the random volumes of One Thousand and One Nights.

I went to sleep. Around 3 or 4am I switched the light on. I took out the impossible book, and turned the pages. On one of them, I saw the image of a mask. On one of the corners, it had a number, I don’t know which one any more, raised to the power of nine.

I showed my treasure to no-one. The mere fact of owning it made me fear that someone would steal it, and I had doubts as to whether it was really infinite. Those two concerns aggravated my already old misanthropy.

I used to have friends; I stopped seeing them. A prisoner of the book, I almost never went outside. I examined the worn-out spine and the covers with a magnifying glass, and dismissed the possibility of trickery. I checked that the small illustrations were two thousand pages away from each other. I started making note of them in an alphabetic booklet, which quickly filled up. They were never repeated. At night, in the few hours of sleep that I was granted, I dreamt of the book.

Summer faded, and I realized that the book was monstrous. It was of no use to consider that I myself was no less monstrous, perceiving it with my eyes and touching it with ten fingers with nails. I felt it was a nightmare object, an obscene thing that blemished and corrupted reality. I thought of fire, but I feared that the burning of an infinite book was equally infinite and would choke the planet with smoke.

I remember having read that the best place to hide a leaf is in a wood. Before retiring I used to work in the National Library, which keeps ninety thousand books; I know that at the right side of the vestibule there is a curved staircase that descends in the basement, where the newspapers and maps are kept. I took the opportunity while the staff were distracted to lose the Book of Sand in one of the damp shelves. I tried not to remember how high or how far from the door I left it.

I felt a little bit relieved, but I do not even want to think of walking past Mexico street.

PABLO NERUDA (Translated by Mei Leng Yew)

Solitude That which didn’t happen was so sudden that I remained there forever, without knowing, without them knowing me, 29

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as if I were beneath a chair, as if I were lost in the night: Not being was like that And I stayed like that forever.

Afterwards, I asked the others, The women, the men, what they were doing with such certainty and how they learnt life: They did not actually answer, And kept dancing and living.

It is what doesn’t happen that determines the silence and I don’t want to continue talking because I am still waiting there: in that place and that day I don’t know what happened to me But already I am not the same.

PABLO NERUDA (Translated by Magali Cloet)

Sexual Water Rolling in thick drops, in drops like teeth, in dense thick drops of jam and blood, rolling in thick drops falls the water, like a sword in drops, like a piercing river of glass, it gnaws as it falls, hitting the axis of symmetry, fastening the seams of the soul, breaking the abandoned, drenching the dark.

Only a breath, wetter than a wail, a liquid, sweat, oil without name, a pungent stroke, forming, thickening, falls the water, 30

TRANSLATIONS in lingering drops, towards its sea, towards its dry ocean, towards its waterless waves.

I see the vast summer, and a rasping breath leaving a granary, wineries, grasshoppers, towns, stimuli, rooms, girls, sleeping with hands on the heart, dreaming with bandits, with fires, I see vessels, I see bone trees bristled like rabid cats, I see blood, fists and women’s tights, and hairs of men, I see beds, I see corridors where a virgin screams I see blankets and organs and hotels.

I see the stealthy dreams, I acknowledge the last days, and also the origins, and also the memories, like an eyelid atrociously lifted by force I am watching.

And then there is this sound: a red sound of bones, a clinging of the flesh, and legs, like yellow spikes, joining.

I listen between the fired kisses, I listen, shaken between breaths and cries.

I am watching, hearing, with half the soul in the sea and half the soul in the soil, and with the two halves of the soul looking at the world.

And even if I close my eyes or bury my heart entirely, I see deaf water falling, in thick drops, it is like a hurricane of gelatin, like a waterfall of sperms and jellyfish.

I see a blurry rainbow running, I see its waters flowing through the bones.

31

Pablo Neruda

Julio Cortazar

TRANSLATIONS

JULIO CORTAZAR (Translated by Ariel Villalón)

From Rayuela I touch your mouth, with a finger I touch the edge of your mouth, I’m drawing it as if it came from my hand, as if your mouth was half-opened for the first time, and I just need to close my eyes to undo everything and start again, I make the mouth I desire born every time, the mouth that my hand chooses and draws in your face, a mouth chosen by all, with sovereign freedom for me to draw it with my hand on your face, and that a chance that I don’t pretend to understand makes your mouth that smiles beneath coincide with the one that my hand is drawing.

You look at me, very closely, each time more closely and then we play the Cyclops, we look at each other even more closely and then our eyes get bigger, they get close to each other, they go on top of one another and the Cyclops look at each other, breathing confused, the mouths find themselves and fight gently, biting each other with the lips, the tongues barely touching the teeth, playing in their halls where a heavy air comes and goes with an old perfume and a silence. So my hands seek to sink in your hair, caress slowly the deepness of your hair while we kiss as if our mouths were full of flowers or fishes, of alive movements, of dark fragrance. And if we bite each other the pain is sweet, and if we suffocate in a brief and simultaneously terrible swallowing of breathing, this instantaneous death is beautiful. And there is only one saliva and just one flavour of mature fruit, and I feel you trembling against me, like a moon on the water.

JUAN GELMAN (Translated by Ying Zhou)

Epitaph A bird was living in me.

A flower travelled in my blood, My heart was a violin.

I loved, or didn’t love. But sometimes they loved me. They also made me happy: the spring, hands together, joy.

I tell you that a man must be a man!

(Here lies a bird, a flower, a violin) 32

STUDENT WRITING Hello and welcome to a new year of the Grove! We had so many wonderful submissions for this issue so thank you to all who put pen to paper. As ever, we can’t include everything but here’s a pick of the best…

Jan Vincent Felix

Hiroshima Haiku Though vivid with the fruit of men’s wildest dreams it was a godless sky.

Lydia Knoop

Clockwork Songs There is a place where people wipe the street with their clothes, fall on corners, spent like lovers and wind themselves around lampposts: confused as dogs.

There is a place where people press their hands to one and glue themselves to cold floors, make mouths and touch their tongues to alcohol: mad as fish on parched land.

There is a place where grey men in wrinkled clothes make accidental tunes with bottle bags, empty bins with the sun-empty sky, lay torch to the lining: black and hopeful and glinting.

There is a place where people sleep on walls and chairs, on books and across cups of caffeine then dance like puppets to clockwork songs and stumble the dark like nightmares.

There is a place where people forget how to speak 33

Lydia Knoop

STUDENT WRITING

confused as dogs and mad as fish; hopelessly black and blind as puppets; stumbling through the night to steal sleep; laying their mouths to rest on bottles and counting clocks like unsweetened songs where people break themselves on beds and find accidental water in their eyes, wake glued to the floor and scream for paler wrinkles where feeling dumbs down, where space opens beyond the ceiling.

EMILY CHESTER

Paris It’s you tied up in pink ribbons of some Parisian sunset.

I hated that city that year so laurelled in its own legacy so far from the dirty street corners we kissed up the walls of housing developments of a world overrun with tescos and they never built the flats anyway.

In the end it was champs-de-elysees nausea it was tubular enclosures and a shrill cry dissecting itself in the stale stale air of an underground compartment moving reforming itself until all that we did was listen, listen, for its prosthetic replay we were addicted to the sound of it a mime, a vendor or a sacre coeur and it’s not even sacred anymore anymore I ate your body and I drank your blood you said it would save me if only I would you made Paris ugly tied up in your strips of sunset ribbon tied up as you moved back 34

STUDENT WRITING vicariously through a nostalgic Russia and women who shrouded you in patchwork personality quilts and silty recollections keep finding pieces of a puzzle postcard you sent, even two years on you must fracture and splinter all over my room and always against your will.

AVISHEK PARUI

Dialogues “Say something� you throat across our table where three plates of grapes and the leftovers furl a forest between us in which something had been lost or maybe cleverly hidden like a leak...

And as the butterflies in our tablecloth begin to soak all that we had spilled sauce, juice, wine lies, grease, guilt; You stretch your strategic smile as I see the silhouettes sink... and think of the words that drop Waves. Dredge. Pills.

Bridge. Edge. Brink...

The rituals would stay the patterns will remain but this time when our eyes meet I hope to cut across to you with another strip of silence that the glass I broke after they had left 35

Emily Chester

Avishek Parui

STUDENT WRITING

wasn’t really slippery and the blood that curled my fingers thereafter was not very red...

But guess you’d stop me midway slit across the stillness I would have built and quip “I knew.”

HANNAH ROSE FELICITY WARNER

Birdbrain For Sam, after a drink or two and a lively exchange on the difficulty of early memories ‘It is not a pigeon’ you say with an earnestness that belies your tender age.

You are stricken with pride, affronted, even offended, by the ignorance of the girl with opaline eyes; inside the cake tin is, rather, a starling.

Before entering this strange and quiet grave, the starling was notable for its unnatural stillness and that was all; no blood or other sign portending brokenness. Usurpation of the Victoria Sponge by feathers was quick and, you believe, entirely painless.

Look down at the thing littering the pavement. Look up at the pewter tin with its chain of cornflowers etched about its circumference, clasped tightly in your woolen hand -- mustn’t drop it or leave fingerprints on it, it is your mother’s best after all and she is trusting you with it, what an honour, best be on your way now before you make yourself late -- you are late already but there is no choice, no malintent, honestly mama, only expedience.

Since the transgression though, there is a haughty angle to the wing, and the glorious head is squashed in slightly, and the pavement is grafittied afresh with jam and crumbs too sweet -- always she mixes in too much sugar, this cake was made with too much strawberry comfiture, too great a measure of guilt as love I now conjecture -- and lying there forgotten but solemn is a note that reads only I am sorry with a large kiss to follow smeared with red and mud and g r e y r a i n.

As you raise the lid to reveal the beautiful thing within the tin you steal the pent-up breaths of your peers fast inside yourself and wait.

36

STUDENT WRITING

Hannah Rose Felicity Warner

‘Eurgh. Why’d you bring in a dead pigeon for show-and-tell? It’s horrid.’

Ah but if only you had held yourself more open dear one. So now in this one-way conversation I wonder anew why it is I feel the need to still reprise again and again, with always the same words the same earnestness the same feeling of some small niggling thing working its way through all this the contours and what if ’s and what for’s of my messy mind as it takes up again its posture of defense between me and you and what is and is not true and all I fear is you muttering again and again stuttered prayers to the Bird-God: ‘It is not a pigeon -’ ‘-but it is dead.’

‘Yes it is and -’ ‘-Hey BIRD BRAIN, did your mother know she gave birth to a ...’

But of course you were already not listening, whetting your mind instead upon the memory of how ‘-it was lying there on the pavement and I couldn’t leave it and I thought it was-’ [...]

Heartrending isn’t it, how memory works away always to its own ends.

Yet every now and again the soft caress of Tenderness herself reaches out and rocks even the most fragile of hearthouses. And then, only then, can you hear against hurt a hollowed-out kind of voice singing softly from the quietest of corners simply this:

rain rain go away come again another day

And it is nearly our story’s undoing.

Cast out, one can do far worse than cling, cling even to the saddest things within this sad story: The mother, God rest her soul, caught the first bus into town the very next day and brought herself a brand new cake tin, defiantly yellow.

And it rained and it rained for a very long time without the slightest respite.

So all was soaking, and the sorry, ruined.

And she mistook curiosity for calculation and a refusal that was never made.

Of life that has been, and yet life still to be made.

37

Ettie Holland

STUDENT WRITING

ETTIE HOLLAND

This is our generation Let’s sing for the future Where innocents will run down the street screaming they’re hungry and laughing in the rain until they devour each other and there is no innocence and no more hunger and no more pain but it still rains although there is no-one laughing.

Let’s sing for the future Where we will march led by the insane wearing our apathy like a mask.

Let’s sing for the future Where you will sit on your windowsill smoking a cheap cigarette that tastes of mint and bitter tobacco and dreaming of cancer and sex and feeling no connection to either but knowing that both will come soon.

Let’s sing for the future Where our generation is lost but we don’t care to be found and we write write write empty words that say little and mean less but feel better knowing that we know nothing.

Let’s sing for the future Where angry angels in ripped denim and leather strip down to only their vulnerability and we watch and feel better because we know that we’re all the same.

Let’s sing for the future Where success and failure are things we all seek and resent and we are deeply dissatisfied but there are nothing but echoes to tell us why and we’re fading fast.

Let’s sing for the future Where we all love but are not loved and the angels above stand in a circle with their hands plunged into their chests holding their hearts and crying.

Let’s sing for the future Where everyone’s a genius but now only ineptitude stands out so we walk in time, an endless line of endless genius with nothing to do but giggle at the fading embers of our dreams.

Let’s sing for the future Where old men and older women revolve like baited sharks in time to music none but them can hear.

Let’s sing for the future Where you have now the life you dreamt of then and your unhappiness has no excuses and nowhere to hide.

Let’s sing for the future 38

STUDENT WRITING

Ettie Holland

Where we sit in the hospital and hear a girl retching and screaming and assume she’s drunk but really she watched her father die in a car she was driving and crashed.

Let’s sing for the future Where we measure our lives in a more technologically advanced way than with coffee spoons but the sentiment is the same as we get emotional over shitty daytime TV that we never wanted to watch but was on.

Let’s sing for the future Where we whisper that words are pointless and write reams on solipsism that we genuinely and truly believe and hope to impress our father with.

Let’s sing for the future Where we are all singing because we’ve tried laughing and we’ve tried crying and neither worked and there’s nothing left to do but sing for a future that arrived as soon as we started.

LYDIA KNOOP

The Festival Spirit - The world must be in meltdown. Everyone’s hanging out their fucking arses.

It felt like we were the only ones at work on Monday mornings. Packing our summer life into a caravan ready for x number of miles drive looking like some kind of dysfunctional family, or a train to another week of alcohol-stinking earth, punters lairy on mud and 40 year olds asking for poppers.

- Under the counter love, go on, they said you had it here We sent them on wild goose chases for some measure of justice and drank cider in opaque cups so our boss wouldn’t know. It seemed to make sense when two girls took the mirrors off our walls and started lining up powder on the counter.

- No drugs in the stall, no smoking under the tarp, do what you like after hours and be fresh in the morning. Dan – hear that Dan? FRESH! - Goodness gracious, goodness gracious. Golly gosh. Damn!

We were thrown together every summer for eight weeks of such intensity it felt like we’d never been apart. We worked seventeen hour break-less shifts amid an ongoing war between the meat-eaters and the vegetarians – vegans ruled out as some form of sub-human race. A diet of chickpeas, redbeanswhitebeansyellowbeansgreenbeans and tubes of stale smarties stolen from the back of the lorry. Dan and I had been there longest. I’d listen to his latest loves and conquests (often the same thing) and in return he’d never let me buy my own drinks, and after men left the stall he’d laugh and tell me how none of them had a chance. Phil turned up the year after we started, driving a four-by-four and wearing jeans so tight he could barely move. There were no morals in sight and it made sense that Seb refused caffeine and swearing, but 39

Lydia Knoop

STUDENT WRITING

took every drug under the sun. He got attached to a pair of pink sunglasses at the end of June and I never saw him without them again.

Summer 2010 was the summer the cat got put in a bin on youtube, and everyone got obsessed with animal hats and flower garlands we bought for pennies and sold for a tenner, and the summer that Jess came back with blonde hair and Dan realised he still loved her, and we all reached breaking point and swore we’d never come back to work shit jobs for shit pay, and within two weeks were cleaning student houses and choking on bleach and black fridges.

It was the summer we all got closer, and were more open with our loves and hates and at half two in the morning when we’d just found out all our tents had leaked, one of the new boys told me he was in love with me and I laughed at him because he was twenty six and I hadn’t washed in seven days.

We’d clock off some time after midnight and set our alarms for 6.30 the next morning, then get our hearts going on screaming rides and funhouses full of spinning hamster wheels and other traders trying to rip us off with the smallest discount you ever heard of. Sometimes it worked, flashing your wristband into VIP areas and bumping into celebrities whose faces I didn’t know but pretended otherwise. It was the filthiest, scummiest glamour imaginable. Sometimes we loved it and sometimes we hated it.

Sometimes, late at night in the awning round a flaming stake in the ground we talked about what we were going to do next and how we had passions that sometimes disappeared to nothing and left us desperately empty. Hoping things would present themselves, making vague promises to each other about the things we would do and when and how, then one of the girls bought a oneway ticket to Australia and we saw how we’d been sitting in the same circle for three years and nothing was changing.

We adorned our eyes with sparkle and when it rained our skins ran grey; we were torn between so much to amuse us and so much to drag us down; we never knew what was coming next and sometimes it was exquisitely mundane.

On the odd night the three of us would stay up just because the others weren’t. We’d huddle in the cab, drawing pictures in the condensation and drinking wine from cartons. There was coke on the dashboard and we couldn’t stop laughing. 7am in the morning we’d be propping ourselves up on the nearest object, coffee in hand, passing judgement on everyone and anyone passing the stall.

- Wasters! Look how fucking wasted that guy is!

Someone told me punter was just a nasty word for a customer and after eight weeks that’s exactly how it felt. They’d make our day too. Come in for a 60p lollipop and make us smile so much they’d walk out with half the shop for free. There were too many rules to count and none of them were kept.

Packing down among patches of yellow half-living grass we’d take cash for a hat and split the money while The Management spent 80 quid off the record.

Everything became fuzzy around the edges, and handing out glow sticks on the last Sunday of August, we were sad to find ourselves at the end of the season.

40

EVENTS LISTINGS REGULAR EVENTS Mondays, 7.30-9pm at the Big Jug: Literature Discussion Group. This year, tutor David Crane will be discussing the poetry of Ezra Pound.

2nd Monday of each month: Leonard’s Café Book Group. 6-7.30pm, free. Past reads include How to Paint a Dead Man or The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

See www.northeastbookgroups.com/durham or contact durhambookgroup@newwritingnorth.com Tuesdays, 7.30pm: Creative Writing Society. Whether it’s overcoming writer’s block or getting feedback on your work, CW can help. Contact creative.writing@dur.ac.uk to find out more. Maths building CM107 at the Science Site.

Wednesdays, 7.30pm: Poetry Society. Alternate sessions discussing poems by established poets and poems written by members. Free. Venue: a living room near you. Contact them at poetry.society@durham.ac.uk Thursdays, 7.15pm: World Film Society shows a brilliant foreign film - one of Durham’s best societies. ER141.

UPCOMING EVENTS Thursday 11th November, 7.30pm till 9.30pm: The Durham University Poetry Society plays host to one of the UK’s finest poets, Catherine Smith. Vane Tempest room in the DSU: free for members and £1 for non-members.

Friday 12th November, 8pm: Colpitts Poetry evening with Anne Stevenson and Lee Harwood. Alington House: £5/£3 concessions.

Monday 15th November, 7.30pm: Another Soup Productions presents A Doll’s House, Ibsen’s iconic story of a young nuclear family, strained by politics, social pressures and economic recession. Fountains Hall, Grey College. Contact anothersoup@gmail.com for further info on this event.

Thursday 18th November, 5.30pm: A special ‘Poetry Aloud’ session dedicated to the poetry of Philip Larkin, with guest speaker, Professor J.R. Watson. St Chad’s College.

More events at www.dur.ac.uk/whatson For regular events and societies, see our website at www.dur.ac.uk/grove

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS COVER IMAGE

EVENTS

Issue 12: Gates of Synaesthesia by Fabiana Harrington

Thom Addinnall-Biddulph, Pascale Petit interview

Issue 13: Watch for me by moonlight by Medora

Sohinee Sen, Simon Armitage interview Rhiannon Bull & Poppy McPherson, Jonathan Coe interview

ENGLISH WRITING

Ella Colquhoun, Sadie Jones interview

Pascale Petit, Remembrance of an Open Wound

Rebecca Sheppard, Blake Morrison interview

Simon Armitage, To the Bridge

A huge thank you to Olivia Mantle and New Writing North for making the interviews possible.

Jo Shapcott, The Death of Isis Ian McMillan, Tempest Avenue Jonathan Coe, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim

STUDENT WRITING Jan Vincent Felix, Hiroshima Haiku

Sadie Jones, The Outcast

Lydia Knoop, Clockwork Songs and The Festival Spirit

Blake Morrison, Things My Mother Never Told Me

Emily Chester, Paris

TRANSLATIONS

Avishek Parui, Dialogues

Jorge Luis Borges: Spinoza, The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths, and The Book of Sand

Hannah Rose Felicity Warner, Birdbrain Ettie Holland, This is our generation

Pablo Neruda, Solitude, and Sexual Water Julio Cortรกzar, Rayuela

THANKS

Juan Gelman, Epitaph

The Grove would like to thank everyone who contributed to the launch, and Stephen Regan for his continued support.

Intellectual copyright of all material in the Translations section is held by translators.

Contact: grove@dur.ac.uk without whose express permission no part may be reproduced.

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