Facing Tables with W. S. Graham

Across the many fragmented chapters of This Little Art, Kate Briggs compiles a playful and affectionate portrait of the literary translator as ‘would-be writer’ – in other words, a reader so powerfully swayed by a given text that they feel impelled to write it all over again, only this time in a different language. Briggs embraces this identity on her own account, having devoted great care to the translation from French to English of two of Roland Barthes’s late lecture courses at the Collège de France, How to Live Together and The Preparation of the Novel. More surprising, perhaps, though no less persuasive, is her case for Barthes as a would-be writer in turn, caught up in translation almost despite himself. Barthes (Briggs reminds us) admitted struggling to recognise the humanity of translated poetry, except when it came to the Japanese haiku he dearly loved. Ostensibly for the benefit of his students, but also, one suspects, for his own private delectation, he went so far as to produce his own French versions of a handful of haiku based on existing English versions by R. H. Blyth. ‘His claim on them: my haiku. This assertion: ohwowwowwow it touches me, and is – therefore? – human.’¹

Lately I’ve found myself wondering if Briggs’s ‘ohwowwowwow’, as well as ventriloquising Barthes, might be a kind of clin d’œil in the direction of W. S. Graham. Not that the Greenock man has a monopoly on wow, of course – but the more one has seen it splashed exuberantly throughout his letters and even occasional poems, the trickier it becomes not to imagine it in his voice. Two things, at least, we can affirm with confidence: wow is more of a Grahamatical than a Barthesian word, and Kate Briggs has read Graham.² In a letter to Fraser Steel from March 1977 (when Barthes’s course on How to Live Together was in full flow), Graham provided his friend from the BBC with a helpful gloss on his use of the expression: ‘WOW WOW is only to signify I feel I’ve said too little in too many words.’³ This distillation of language’s inadequacy into a repeated monosyllable mirrors the awestruck ‘That, that’ of the seventeenth-century haikuist Teishitsu as he gazed at the flowers on Mount Yoshino, which Barthes, in Kate Briggs’s translation, quotes approvingly: ‘Saying that you can’t say: the whole haiku tends toward this – toward “that”.’⁴ Whether or not Briggs has ever actually had this nexus in mind – and to be honest, I’m not sure it really matters – it’s pleasing to think of ‘That, that’ and ‘WOW WOW’ as dots on a map tracing a transhistorical poetic route from Mount Yoshino in Japan to Zennor Hill in Cornwall (via the Rue des Écoles in Paris), and to hear ‘ohwowwowwow’ as the result of Briggs channelling W. S. Graham, deliberately or otherwise, in order to translate Roland Barthes’s haiku-inspired emotion, what (s)he calls ‘the “That’s it” (the bell) of haiku’.⁵

Yet whereas what stirred Barthes when he read translated haiku was their humanity, Graham’s wow wow could also carry canine echoes. Another 1977 letter, this one to the Canadian writer Elizabeth Smart, contains a verse (perhaps I should say a pack) of companionable doggerel:

Wow wow, wow wow across the dark
Shires and hills and lake and fen.
Wow wow, wow wow. The dogs do bark.
The Barkers are at the Poetry again.⁶

The all-too-human Barkers in question included Elizabeth’s partner George and the couple’s son Sebastian, to whom Graham had written a separate letter that same day to congratulate him on his first book of poems. Within a decade of that chorus of wows, the Barkers were at the Poetry once more: in 1986, Sebastian edited the anthology Portraits of Poets, featuring his older brother Christopher’s photographs of English-language poets born before the Second World War, among them both of their parents – and, indeed, W. S. Graham, who, along with Elizabeth Smart, died in the early weeks of the year. Sebastian Barker’s preface to the volume announces its goal of ‘present[ing] the human face of an art sometimes obscured from general enjoyment and even intelligent appreciation by wilful mystification and academic tariff-barriers’; accordingly, there are no dogs to be seen, although Michael Hamburger’s photograph and accompanying poem focus on his cat.⁷

The presentation of Hamburger is also unusual for Portraits of Poets in combining text and image on a single page. His photograph is formatted horizontally and sits atop his poem, whose columns have become the squat legs of a two-dimensional table. Graham, however, despite writing about – and appearing with – an actual table, is given the full two-page treatment typical of most of the poets included in the Barkers’ book. On the left is his poem, ‘Untidy Dreadful Table’, taken from his 1977 collection Implements in Their Places; on the facing page, Graham scowls at the reader across the eponymous table that is artfully strewn with papers and correspondence, his white hair swept back, his left eyebrow out-Hemmingsing David Hemmings. He hunches forwards with both elbows on the table, his right hand a fist poised on his typewriter; you would almost say he was clutching a phantom pint, except that the poem describes a more forceful gesture, more pow than wow:

I sit here late and I hammer myself
On to the other side of the paper.
There I jump through all surprises.
The reader and I are making faces.⁸

What is a facing page, anyway? We use the term when more than one page is involved, the implication being, I suppose, that the two pages of an open book face each other somehow. But it’s a misleading image. Strictly speaking, a book’s pages only ever come face to face if the book is shut. When the book lies flat, the plane of each page is turned up towards the reader. In short, every page must be a facing page – and hence a faced page – if it is to be legible. With his poetry’s frequent ‘thematization of the face to face encounter’ (as David Nowell Smith puts it), W. S. Graham seems to have grasped this fact more fully than most.⁹ Nor did he require his editors to underscore the point for him. The published collection of his letters reproduces a page proof of ‘Untidy Dreadful Table’ with a twirly decoration inserted below the title; Graham wrote rather crossly to Charles Monteith at Faber, advising that ‘the moustache between the title and the first line of the poem should surely be taken out’.¹⁰

Facing pages, in the more conventional sense, are also spaces often inhabited by translation, especially when it comes to bilingual editions of poetry. Portraits of Poets contains only one bilingual text, a poem by Sorley MacLean printed on the left-hand page in two columns of English and Scottish Gaelic, respectively. Nevertheless, Graham’s ‘Untidy Dreadful Table’, a poem that pictures itself doubled and mutated on the other side of the page (‘Of course I see you backwards covered / With words backwards from the other side’), could likewise be said to traffic in a form of translation.¹¹ David Nowell Smith characterises a series of Graham’s manuscripts inspired by the paintings of Kandinsky as ‘translation across media’ and ‘ekphrastic translation’; in Portraits of Poets, the two-page layout of ‘Untidy Dreadful Table’ allows us to visualise the ekphrastic relationship backwards, as if the portrait of Graham had ‘jumped through all surprises’ to become just such a transmedial version of the original poem.¹²

We oughtn’t to forget, though, that the ‘original’ poem is already a translation of Graham’s ‘real’ untidy dreadful table that we can see in Christopher Barker’s photograph. These two pages are not just faces; they are tables, too, or maybe the leaves of a fold-up ping-pong table between which the reader is sent endlessly bouncing back and forth. ‘If a translation is like a table,’ writes Kate Briggs, ‘then it is either, or can be alternately, the thing itself and the configuration of persons and relations around it.’¹³ This particular configuration finds us peering back at Graham across the table(s) he has set before us, making faces, drawn into the translation game. 

W. S. Graham and the Faces of Translation would make for a fascinating monograph, so much so that I rather suspect it’s already in preparation somewhere. If not, let this be a call for a detailed study of Graham as a reader and interpreter of translated works from Nansen to Rimbaud, as a poet whose own work continues to find its way into other languages, and as an extraordinarily suggestive imaginer of translation in various guises.¹⁴ One such guise pops up early in Implements in Their Places, when the ‘other side of the paper’ onto which the poet of ‘Untidy Dreadful Table’ hammers himself turns out, intriguingly, to feature the poem ‘A Note to the Difficult One’:

I stand in my vocabulary looking out
Through my window of fine water ready
To translate natural occurrences
Into something beyond any idea
Of pleasure.¹⁵

On the literal level, meanwhile, there is at least one documented instance of Graham having participated in the work of translation, though he went uncredited at the time, and the nature and extent of his involvement remain unclear. According to Michael and Margaret Snow, the editors of his selected letters, in 1942 Graham helped his friend the painter Jankel Adler to translate the latter’s article, ‘Memories of Paul Klee’, from German to English for the magazine Horizon.¹⁶ Some of the article’s phrasings contain uncanny anticipations – if not the germinative seeds – of images that would emerge more than thirty years later in ‘A Note to the Difficult One’ (‘Perhaps he was trying to decipher the language of the branches across his windows’) and ‘Untidy Dreadful Table’ (‘Sometimes it would seem that his pictures extend to the other side of the canvas’), not to mention a querying of language’s very capacity which I daresay will ring a bell: ‘His face was that of a man who knows about day and night, sky and sea and air. He did not speak about these things. He had no tongue to tell of them. Our language is too little to say these things.’¹⁷ Ohwowwowwow…

*

My first face-to-face encounter with W. S. Graham’s actual table, if I can put like that, came in June 2023, in the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh where it is available for public use. To my delight, I saw that the gentleman sitting in the opposite corner of the room was reading a Penguin Classics copy of Rimbaud, with English translations by Oliver Bernard (who, by the way, has his own two-page spread in Portraits of Poets). It isn’t a facing-page edition; rather, the French text occupies roughly the upper three fifths of each page, with Bernard’s prose translations in smaller typeface relegated to the space usually reserved for footnotes. The book’s cover, meanwhile, achieves a curious top-heavy effect of its own. Henri Fantin-Latour’s famous 1872 painting Un coin de table (The Corner of the Table) shows a black-cloaked Rimbaud sitting alongside several other poets, left elbow on the table and chin in hand; the detail printed on the cover of the Penguin Collected Poems not only isolates Rimbaud from the poets on either side, but also crops the image above the white tablecloth, leaving a disembodied face and hand floating in shadow. I’m tempted to see it as an illustration of a line from Une saison en enfer: ‘Je suis caché et je ne le suis pas’ (‘I am hidden and I am not hidden’).¹⁸

When I went back to the Poetry Library on a bright morning in March of this year, there was no one else in the corner room. I’d long been looking forward to my return visit, yet for some reason – whether it was awed excitement, surprise at the momentary solitude, lingering jetlag, or a combination thereof, I couldn’t say – I felt a bit unsettled. It occurred to me to copy out a new draft of the French translation of ‘Untidy Dreadful Table’ that I’d been tweaking for some time. Despite my hand trembling slightly, I managed to write a legible page, which I then photographed amid the marvellous clusters of scratch marks and cigarette burns on the table’s wooden surface.

There are still plenty of things I haven’t got quite right in my translation. The title itself, for one: part of me wants to laugh at ‘Table insupportable’, while the other part finds it clumsy and glaringly obvious. (Kate Briggs: ‘If a translation is like a table, then it consists of a flat slab-like top braced by legs or other (normally, but not always, visible) supports.’)¹⁹ French’s need to invert English’s modifier-noun word order poses a further difficulty at the conclusion of the sixth and final stanza:

I must tackle my dreadful table
And go on the hide and seeking hill.²⁰

‘Hide and seeking’ is devilishly tricky to translate. The French for ‘hide-and-seek’ is ‘cache-cache’, a double-barrelled ‘hide’ with no mention of seeking; besides, Graham’s second stanza finishes similarly with ‘hide and seeking streets’, and even if one were to find a cache-all translation of the pun, it would be a shame to plonk the repetition at the end of the line. 

Until I think better of it, anyway, I’ve chosen to render ‘go on the hide and seeking hill’ as ‘remonter la cache-colline’. There still isn’t any seeking involved, but I’m hopeful that the consonantal alliteration will suffice to evoke ‘cache-cache’. ‘Cache-colline’ (‘hide-hill’) is also a neologistic twist on ‘cache-col’, a kind of scarf (literally ‘hide-neck’), and ‘remonter’ is a stretchable verb. ‘Remonter la cache-colline’ could suggest going up a hill, but also pulling something up like a garment – covering oneself so as to leave only a face exposed.

1. Kate Briggs, This Little Art (Fitzcarraldo, 2017), p. 161.
2. See Briggs’s conversation with Sam Buchan-Watts from the Hotel magazine website.
3. The Nightfisherman: Selected Letters of W. S. Graham, ed. by Michael & Margaret Snow (Carcanet, 1999), p. 319.
4. Roland Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France (1978-1979 and 1979-1980), trans. Kate Briggs (Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 80.
5. Ibid., p. 80.
6. Graham, The Nightfisherman, p. 338.
7. Sebastian Barker, ‘Preface’ in Christopher Barker, Portraits of Poets, ed. Sebastian Barker (Carcanet, 1986), p. 5. 
8. W. S. Graham, ‘Untidy Dreadful Table’, in Implements in Their Places (Faber & Faber, 1977), p. 19.
9. David Nowell Smith, W. S. Graham: The Poem as Art Object (Oxford University Press, 2022), p. 170.
10. Graham, The Nightfisherman, p. 323.
11. Graham, ‘Untidy Dreadful Table’, p. 19.
12. Smith, W. S. Graham, pp. 177–78.
13. Briggs, This Little Art, p. 303.
14. The University of Glasgow’s BOSLIT catalogue has made an encouraging start in documenting translations of Graham’s work, though it wants an update (beginning with the spelling of his middle name!).
15. Graham, ‘A Note to the Difficult One’, in Implements in Their Places, p. 20.
16. See The Nightfisherman, p. 9. It’s worth noting that Damion Searls has recently embarked on a series of ‘translations into verse’ of Klee’s works. See the selection published in Asymptote.
17. Jankel Adler, ‘Memories of Paul Klee’, in Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art, 6.34 (October 1942), pp. 265–66.
18. Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Nuit de l’enfer’, in Collected Poems, trans. Oliver Bernard (Penguin Books, 1997), p. 317.
19. Briggs, This Little Art, p. 298.
20. Graham, ‘Untidy Dreadful Table’, p. 19.