Poetry: The Road to Inver carries a subtitle, which reads "Translations, Versions, Imitations"; one can almost hear, sub-textually present, "And whatever you're having yourself".
For this is quite an anthology, in which Tom Paulin has collected his "versions" (from 1975-2003) of very many different poets - and I do mean very many. Horace, Langland, Rilke, Ponge, Baudelaire, Montale, Khazendar, Heine, Goethe, Verlaine, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Nerval, Chenier, Hugo, Rimbaud, Tsvetayeva, Mallarmé, Corbière, Brecht, Jacob, Sereni, Dach, Pushkin, Pessoa, Apollinaire, Leopardi, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Strindberg are there, as is Albert Camus.
Most poets would balk at this volume but not Tom Paulin. His poetic imagination is obsessively historical and, in spite of the rough-house treatment, his poems are determinedly rooted in a grand enlightened design, with genuinely political ambitions. Thus The Invasion Handbook, the first instalment of a multi-levelled meditation on the second World War, his study of William Hazlitt, The Day-Star of Liberty, and his many essays on poetry and the nation state.
In The Road to Inver all these different voices conflate into a version of his own. The great Italian poet Eugenio Montale's eerie 'The Coastguard Station', for instance, set in the rocky Ligurian coastline west of La Spezia, where Montale spent his summer holidays in the early decades of the last century, is relocated to Co Donegal, "as a new colony starts up all owned/ by people like us from Belfast/ who've at last laid that claggy building's ghost".
The geographical relocation is one thing; the linguistic shift, successful in many poems, ends up being overbearing and affected in others. There are lots of "ack", "wee", "jeuk", "eejits" and suchlike homely goings-on, no matter who the poem belongs to and which language it originates in.
A harmonica's "tacky girning", sheep "scumbles" and "in the yow trummle"; "two pachles this_is_a_left_sq_bracketare] both stocious" as elsewhere "the door scrakes open" and (this from the title poem) "I'm driving to Inver/ in an old beatup gunked Toyota/ I've borrowed from a mate in Belfast".
I've not heard the word "gunked" used in this way before, which means, of course, precious little were it not for the fact that, since Paulin puts so much stress on the authenticity of the vernacular, the "correct" usage becomes a contentious distraction. Thus all the "dreggy" and "claggy" and "sound" words that dunt (oops!) their way through this collection draw self-conscious attention to themselves with an obvious - if, at times, miscued - relish on the poet's part.
Crudely speaking, a version of a poem written in another language always plays with the original unstable range of meanings and nuances. Part of the ploy is to entertain and capture some of that currency. Alternatively a poet can use the original as a springboard and attempt a version close to the spirit of the original, which is used, like a song in the folk tradition, as the starting point for a freer, re-creative interpretation. There are no rules to this game.
The strange thing about The Road to Inver is that the "English" it's written in sounds itself estranged, as if it were constructed for Paulin's voice alone. When he makes the match, though, as with Palestinian Walid Khazendar's 'Belongings' or Corbière's 'Le Crapaud', the fit is, as we say, dead-on.
The Road to Inver by Tom Paulin Faber and Faber, 102pp. £12.99