by Rahul Bery, Translator in Residence at the British Library for 2018-19. The British Library’s Translator in Residence scheme, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), offers a translator the opportunity to become part of the British Library’s multilingual community of staff, readers and visitors for one year. The exhibition, P.G. Wodehouse: The Man and His Work, runs until February 24th. 

One thing I feel not sufficiently covered by the BL’s otherwise wonderful mini-exhibition on the life and works of P.G. Wodehouse, currently running in the treasures gallery, is his appeal beyond the Anglo-American world, both in English and in translation. Wodehouse’s popularity in India is well-known: a childhood friend of my father’s – and an avowed superfan of Jeeves and Wooster, Blandings & co – once recalled the sage advice given them by the English teacher at their Himalayan boarding school: “Want to write good English? Read P.G. Wodehouse!” But far less has been written about his appeal beyond the Anglosphere.

Initial research on Google revealed, among other things, a thesis by one Petronella Stille which was quite rightly concerned with the question of how Wodehouse’s Japanese translator, Morimura Tamaki, had  “adapted such…expressions such as Right ho’, ‘By Jove’, ‘Tinkerty Tonk’, ‘Dash it’ or ‘What ho’?”  Well, in case you are curious, the answer for the first example is ‘Yoshikita’. She also handily highlights some of the unique features of Wodehousian prose that make it so enchanting and absurd, and also difficult to translate, including my personal favourite, the ‘transferred epithet’, that is, the ‘strained forkful of salmon’, the ‘astonished cigarette’ falling from Bertie Wooster’s lips. Overall, she acknowledges both the heroic attempts of the translator whilst exploring in depth just what it is about this brand of humour that is so hard to recreate.

Inspired by this, I moved on to the BL catalogue to find out what translations there were in the collections, if any. Starting with a pre-1973 physical catalogue, I found a smattering of translations into Esperanto (La Princo kaj Betty), Italian (Jim di Piccadilly) Polish (Wielce zobowia̢zany Jeeves), and –in keeping with the Indian theme- Marathi, before finally finding some in a language I could understand, Portuguese.

The front cover of Edmundo Paula Rosa's Portuguese translation of Leave it to Psmith (1938)

Isso é comigo! is the title of Edmundo Paula Rosa’s 1938 translation of Leave it to Psmith, originally published in 1923. From what I could tell, Rosa’s translation is fluid, and he seems to have had the skills to match not only the liveliness of the dialogue, but also the convoluted wit of Wodehouse’s descriptive prose. When translating Portuguese writing myself I often find myself marvelling at how the sentences can just go on and on, before then cursing the writer as I find myself torturously unpicking and reconstructing the sentences back into equally convoluted English. Perhaps, then, Portuguese is an equal match for Wodehouse’s opening, single-sentence paragraph:

“At the open window of the great library of Blandings castle, drooping like a wet sock, as was his habit when he had nothing to prop his spine against, the Earl of Emsworth, that amiable and boneheaded peer, stood gazing out over his domain.”

Rosa tackles this sentence admirably, adapting the wet sock simile, but preserving the structure of the sentence. But he leaves out ‘boneheaded’ entirely! And the quintessentially Wodehousian ‘Right ho!’ is paraphrased out of existence, leaving us with ‘Nesse caso, esta bem’ (“In that case, fine” or less literally, something like ‘As you see fit’). The meaning of ‘Right ho!’ in this context is more or less captured, but precious little else is. Rather interestingly, ‘your lordship’ is translated not into a Portuguese equivalent but into another English word, ‘milord’. One can only assume that for whatever the latter would have been more recognisable than the former to the Portuguese reader of 80 years ago.

There is, I’m sure, far more work to be done on this. But don’t believe people when they claim that Finnegans wake  or a similar tome is ‘untranslatable’. I suspect that even Joyce himself would have been flummoxed by ‘tinkerty tonk’!

A guest blog by artist and designer Leslie Gerry. To coincide with the forthcoming evening Artists’ Books Now: América Latina, Gerry talks about his fascination with architecture, urban spaces and street life. He charts these interests into his artist book Havana, which was made by a process of painting and printing digitally. Read more about Leslie Gerry's work here. A copy of Havana is held at pressmark HS.74/2301 and can be consulted in the British Library Reading Rooms.

Arriving at Havana in the dark, we made our way from the airport through dimly lit streets to a hotel overlooking Central Park. The following morning, I emerged, with cameras, sketchbook and map in hand, into a bright sunlit chaotic street full of vintage American cars spewing out clouds of fumes and bicycle taxis shouting out for business.

 

The first hurdle was coming to terms with the city, the topography, getting my bearings. It was daunting. I just started walking, trying to take it all in, gradually absorbing the atmosphere. The narrow streets of La Habana Vieja, the Old Town, colourful, vivacious, with crumbling tenements, colonial edifices and faded grandeur. A city with an earthy authenticity, full of contradictions. Cuban music would spill out onto the pavements from the many bars and cafes.

I generally limit my trips to a new city from 2-3 weeks, as that first exposure to a place is so intense; with fresh eyes and heightened senses, you see things locals are often unaware of and that you will not notice on subsequent visits. I try to capture this intensity in my paintings. Walking an average of 14 miles a day, I use my camera to “take notes”, recording the colours, light, shadows and patterns of Havana for future reference, often revisiting many of the streets or buildings several times in a day to view the changing light and shade.

Gradually a narrative of the city develops; subjects and compositions begin to form in my mind: a book starts to take shape. At this point I can relax a little and even start sketching in the open, although I find this increasingly difficult with the attention it invites.

At the end of my stay I felt totally exhausted, having absorbed as much as possible, and could only look forward to returning home with memories in tow.

Back in my studio, a long process of going through my photographic notes and sketches, then a year of painting begins. With a stylus and Wacom tablet, I paint on the computer in Illustrator.  Working only with flat areas of colour and no tone, I “cut out” the shapes with the stylus, arranging them on different layers, creating a collage. In fact, I first began working this way years ago by cutting out sheets of coloured paper with scissors, similar to the way Matisse created his paper collages. Starting by sketching a composition in blocks of colour as I would have done painting in oils and using photos as reference only, I gradually build up the painting with darker areas first and then lighter shades. The paintings end up as digital files; vector images which can be reduced or enlarged to any size and are then printed with a flat bed UV ink jet printer on a hand or mould-made paper.

 

All three images reproduced with the kind permission of Leslie Gerry

by Barry Taylor, Curator of Romance Studies. You can read more about the Library's holdings related to Brighton Rock here. 

Students of Brighton Rock in the BL can read, in addition to the original novel, the French, Polish and Finnish translations, and consult the draft script of Terence Rattigan’s screenplay.

The novel tells the seamy tale of Pinkie Brown, murderous teenage micro-gangster, his marriage to the innocent waitress Rose in order to prevent her testifying against him, and his pursuit by good-time girl Ida.

You might expect the chief alimentary image in Brighton Rock to be Brighton rock itself:

    [Rose to Ida:] ‘People change,’she said.

    ‘Oh, no they don’t.  Look at me.  I’ve never changed.  It’s like those sticks of rock: bite it all the way down, you’ll still read     Brighton.  That’s human nature.’  (200)

But a more persistent food image which escaped me when I first read the novel, but which haunted me on a recent second reading is that of the sausage roll. The criminals live in a guest house (Frank’s), where Pinkie’s bedsit, which he inherited from his predecessor, is the common room.

Here is an anthology (page references are from the 1998 Penguin paperback edition (BL H.98/1446))

    'The Boy went to his bed and swept off the crumbs of Cubitt’s sausage roll.  ‘What’s this,’ he said, ‘a meeting?’ (54)

    The Boy got up.  A few crumbs stuck to his wet suit.  (55)

    ‘That’s right, Pinkie,  He’s [Colleoni] running the business in a big way.’  A big way – it was like an accusation, a reminder     of the brass bedstead at Frank’s, the crumbs on the mattress.  (58)

    Don Colleoni is a big-time gangster who stays at the swell Cosmopolitan Hotel.  Brass bedsteads also have a traumatic     sexual charge for Pinkie as they remind him of sharing a room with his parents.

    The Boy lay on the bed. A cup of coffee went cold on the washstand, and the bed was sprinkled with flakes of pastry.  (61)

    His sleep was functional.  When Dallow opened the door he woke at once.  ‘Well?’ he said, lying there without moving, fully     dressed among the pastry crumbs.  (62)

    Ida to Rose: ‘I suppose you talked to him [Spicer]?’

    ‘I didn’t talk to him.  I was rushed.  I just fetched him a Bass and a sausage roll, and I never saw him again.’  (76)

    When he [Spicer] got to Frank’s there was no one there.  He creaked his tortured way up the stairs, past the rotten banister,     to Pinkie’s room: the door stood open, vacancy stared in the swing mirror: no message, crumbs on the floor …   He moved     away: flakes of pastry under his foot  (83-84)

    [Pinkie is rebuffed by Colleoni:] The gold cigar-lighter, the grey double-breasted waistcoat, the feeling of a racket     luxuriously successful for a moment dominated him: the brass bedstead upstairs, the little pot of violet ink on the     washstand, the flakes of sausage roll.  (99)

    [Pinkie consults with Cubitt and Dallow:] Life was a series of complicated tactical exercises, as complicated as the     alignments at Waterloo, thought out on a brass bedstead among the crumbs of sausage roll.  (113)

    The Boy led the way into the bed-sitting-room and turned on the single globe.  He thought of Colleoni’s room in the     Cosmopolitan.  But you had to begin somewhere.  He said [to Cubitt], ‘You’ve been eating on my bed again.’

    ‘It wasn’t me, Pinkie.  It was Dallow…’  (116)

These were the hours – when the races were not on, when there was no one to see on business – that he [Pinkie] spent stretched on the bed at Frank’s.  He’d eat a packet of chocolate or a sausage roll … (177)

The sausage roll isn’t mentioned again: the novel extends to page 250 but the milieu of Frank’s is well established by this point.

As an author famed for his Catholicism, Greene could of course have chosen the sausage roll as another image of original sin, the meaty soul enwrapped in the pastry body of degradation.

But his interest is as much social as theological.  John Carey notes how snobbish writers of Greene’s generation defined their social inferiors by their food.  No cooking goes on at Frank’s, as the residents subsist on takeaways. When Rose moves in she goes to light the stove first thing and meets Dallow:

    She said: ‘I thought maybe I’d better light the stove.’

    ‘What for?’

    ‘Breakfast.’

    … He went to a dresser and pulled open a drawer.  ‘Why,’ he said, ‘what’s got you?  You don’t want a stove.  There’s plenty     here.’  Inside the drawer were stacks of tins: sardines, herrings. 

    She said: ‘But tea.’

    He looked at her oddly.  ‘Anyone’d think you wanted work.  No one here wants any tea.  Why take the trouble?  There’s beer     in the cupboard, and Pinkie drinks the milk out of the bottle.’  (193)

In more recent times, we must remember the ‘pasty tax’ of 2012, seen by some as an act of class war.  Greene is often said to have been fascinated and repelled by popular culture: the novel refers to Woolworths, Warwick Deeping, seances, corned beef tins, tinned salmon (on which see Carey, p. 21, with reference to Greene), buns in paper bags, beer breath, slot machines, , the twopenny library, Film Fun, ‘Guinness Is Good For You’.

His unease, to my mind, is made concrete in the cold, congealed fat of the working man’s food.

REFERENCES

Terence Rattigan’s film treatment and outline for Brighton Rock (Add MS 74316)

The third shooting script for Rattigan’s Brighton Rock film (Add MS 74317)

Brighton Rock, 1st edn (London: Heinemann, 1938) Cup.410.f.384.

John Carey, The intellectuals and the masses : pride and prejudice among the literary intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (London: Faber, 1992) YC.1992.a.2014

Today we launch a Harold Pinter retrospective in our Second Floor Gallery as part of the wider anniversary season of events marking ten years since his death. Focusing on Pinter’s creative process, this free display of manuscript reproductions from his Archive offers glimpses of some of his most famous plays at various stages in their development.

Antonia Fraser and 'The Pres and an Officer', the Pinter sketch about a trigger-happy US president which she discovered in 2017. ‘The Pres and an Officer’ is © Fraser52 Limited.

In his Nobel Prize speech of 2005 Pinter noted that ‘most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word, or an image’. It was usually, in fact, a word or phrase – ‘What have you done with the scissors?’ in the case of The Homecoming - that was the starting point, closely followed by an image, typically of a configuration of characters in a room. Inspiration having struck, Pinter would put pen to paper in pursuit of the fleeting figures, working out who they were through the circuitous evasions and revelations of quotidian dialogue though always resisting too deep a probe into their backstories. These adventures on paper are what is on show in this new display.

Seeing Pinter’s large, energetic handwriting filling the pages of his yellow legal pads transports us back to the moment of creation. There are intriguing false starts and changes of mind in evidence, such as a deliberation over where to set the opening scene of Betrayal (a tea shop, flat or a pub) and a diagram suggesting a third presence in the enigmatic two-hander Landscape. The naming of characters (always a secondary act for Pinter) is revealed on the page as initially anonymous As and Bs are christened in later annotations. And there are, of course, many pauses peppering the manuscript pages, always denoted by a lower case ‘p’. According to Pinter in his 1962 speech to the National Student Drama Festival it was in these silences that his characters became most evident to him.

Taking the structure of Pinter’s great play Betrayal as a model, the display offers a selective reverse chronology of Pinter’s playwriting career, taking in the last lines of his final stage play Celebration (written in 1999) as well as early prose pieces that influenced his theatre writing. For those who’ve seen any of the ongoing Pinter at the Pinter season by the Jamie Lloyd Company there are numerous resonances with our selections: we have reproduced the notecard on which Pinter scribbled the threatening lines from One For The Road, performed so memorably by Anthony Sher in the recent 'Pinter One', as well as a number of other drafts which will be familiar to fans of the season. My favourite inclusions, though, are perhaps the early prose pieces which contain the seeds of Pinter’s playwriting career. The pieces in question are a 1955 short story called ‘The Examination’ in which the menacing figure ‘Kullus’ can be seen as a prototype of the threatening interlopers of later plays, and a first draft of Pinter’s biographical novel of competitive male friendship The Dwarfs begun in 1952. Both offer crucial clues to the dramatist that Pinter became and both deserve to be better known.

Although it has been ten years since Pinter’s death on Christmas Eve 2008, his plays continue to speak to us about today’s world, sometimes in astonishingly prescient ways. Pictured above is Antonia Fraser who came to the Library this week for a preview of the exhibition. She stands alongside a dramatic sketch she discovered in 2017 when turning the page of one of Pinter’s old legal pads kept by the phone for messages. There to her astonishment was ‘The Pres and an Officer’, a short piece in which a trigger-happy President of the United States is eager to ‘nuke London’. Donald Trump was entirely unknown to Pinter, but now we know what Pinter would have made of him, so to speak. It seemed fitting to include ‘The Pres’ in our display as a ‘first last look’ (to quote Samuel Beckett’s words about Betrayal) among the other drafts and photographs now on show.

Harold Pinter: A Line, A Word, An Image is on display in the British Library Second Floor Gallery until 17 March 2019.

Join Antonia Fraser and Michael Billington in conversation for Remembering Harold Pinter on Monday 4 March 2019.

A guest blog by Susan Connolly, whose poetry pamphlet, The Sun-Artist, was published by Shearsman Books in 2013, and was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets. The Sun-Artist will be on display in the Treasures Gallery until the end of February as part of an exhibition which celebrates the 10 year anniversary of the Michael Marks Awards.

Sunlight, a big window, ruler, pencil, compass and tracing paper were the tools I used to write my first visual poems on sheets of white A4 paper – cutting and pasting, not on the computer, but with scissors and Prittstick. Written in 2005, these were freehand word-drawings of poems called ‘Mirrors’, ‘Many Selves’ and ‘Like Leaves on a Tree’.

Some of these early visual poems were published in Shearsman magazine in 2008. In early 2009 Shearsman Books published Forest Music, my second full-length collection of poetry. The collection is in two sections: Forest Music and Walking the Seawall. Walking the Seawall contains twenty-three visual poems.

In October 2009 a friend showed me the Olympia portable typewriter which she had bought in a charity shop. I looked at this object and a whole range of possibilities opened up in my mind. I borrowed her typewriter and set to work. The first poem I typed was ‘The Sun-Artist’. It required a huge amount of concentration not to make a mistake and have to start all over again. Later I copied ‘The Sun-Artist’ onto my computer.

The idea for this poem came from a visit to the Cross of Muiredach in Monasterboice, near Drogheda, one July evening in 2009. This is an elaborately carved High Cross made of sandstone, dating to the 10^th century. Its sides are covered with panels of interlace reminiscent of the Book of Kells. The interlace usually looks faded, but the way the sun shone on it that evening made it look new again. I wanted to depict this interlace in a poem. I wrote the line ‘deepshadowed sunset renews fading patterns’. Then I used these words re-creating how the interlace appeared,  renewed by the evening sun.  

My poetry moved increasingly from word-drawings to poetry which could be made on the typewriter and copied from there to computer. The best font for my work is Courier New, a font which gives equal space to each letter of the alphabet, just like the typewriter. I also realised that there were other possibilities on the computer: changing the size of the letters, line spacing, colour. Nowadays I use only the computer. However, my visual poems have been greatly influenced by my earlier engagement with the typewriter.               

In 2013 Tony Frazer of Shearsman Books asked me if I had enough visual poems for a chapbook. I had and so I concentrated on gathering individual poems into a collection. The Sun-Artist was the title I gave to the chapbook. Several poems had already been published in poetry journals, which was great, but sometimes they were printed too small so that the reader could barely see the letters. The chapbook was my chance to put things right, to have the poems on the page exactly as I wanted them. I made a mock-up of the book and went in search of the right order for the eighteen poems I had chosen.

The manuscript became proofs which were emailed back and forth until everything had settled into place. The cover image is from a poem which was originally in red and black. About six weeks later the first copies of The Sun-Artist arrived in the post. It was an incredible feeling to turn the pages of this very slim book and read the poems again.

 

 

Cover page of The Sun-Artist.

With thanks to Susan Connolly for permission to use this image.

The Sun-Artist eventually led to the publication in 2016 of a full-length collection of visual poetry; eighty pages complete with introduction and notes. The main dilemma for me when approaching my third collection was whether it should contain visual poetry only or whether it should also include lyric poems many of which had been published in poetry journals. In the end I decided that Bridge of the Ford would consist entirely of visual poetry.

Bridge of the Ford has thirty-three visual poems. The book is in a larger than usual format to give the poems plenty of space. There are two sections: Bridge of the Ford and The Dream-Clock. The poems in the first part are arranged so that the reader can imagine drifting down the river Boyne in a boat, past the Neolithic tumulus of Dowth, past the mediaeval town of Drogheda (Droichead Átha / bridge of the ford) and out towards the sea. These sites are in my blood as I grew up and still live in this area.

And what happened to those lyric poems? Shearsman Books published them separately in a chapbook called The Orchard Keeper in 2017.

By Imogen Durant, PhD Placement Student working on the library’s contemporary British poetry pamphlets and artists’ books.

On Tuesday 11th December the British Library hosted the 10th Awards Ceremony of the Michael Marks Awards.

Luke Thompson of Guillemot Press won the Michael Marks Publishers Award. Andrew Forster, who introduced the award, highlighted the meticulous craftsmanship and innovate design of Guillemot’s publications, which particularly impressed the judges.

 

Luke Thompson giving his acceptance speech for the Publisher’s Award

Thompson highlighted the multisensory nature of the pamphlets that he produces when he explained that in addition to the unique look and rich texture, several of his pamphlets also have a distinctive smell, as their covers are made from the spent grain from a brewery.

 
Of And, by Keith Waldrop, and O. At the Edge of the Gorge, by Martyn Crucefix, both published by Luke Thompson at Guillemot Press

PR won the illustration award for her artwork in Zi-Zi Taah Taah Taah: The Song of the Willow Tit, published by Wild West Press, with poems by Steve Ely. The illustration award was introduced and presented by Sir Nicholas Penny, who gave a convincing imitation of a willow tit when announcing the pamphlet’s title.

Carol Rumens won the Poetry Award for her pamphlet Bezdelki, published by The Emma Press. The poetry award was introduced by Sasha Dugdale, one of this year’s judges.
 

Carol Rumens giving her acceptance speech for the Poetry Award

Bezdelki contains a series of elegies for Rumens’ late partner, Yuri Drobyshev. Rumens said that the pamphlet provided her with means of remembering Yuri, and allowed her to explore her own identity after his death.

In a poem entitled ‘Vidua’ (on p. 19), she says:

I wasn’t a bride
I wasn’t a wife.
I’m not a widow.

Rumens explained that the size of the pamphlet form provided a vehicle for her to capture the ‘Bezdelki’, or ‘small things’, such as a hat and an overcoat, which appear in these poems. Dugdale highlighted the strength of Rumens’ imagination and the breadth of the allusions in her poems, which Rumens demonstrates in this pamphlet by including poems inspired by Osip Mandelstam and one which is narrated in the voice of the Nubian Pharaoh Taharqa.
 

Bezdelki by Carol Rumens

The awards were presented by Lady Marks, who gave a warm personal introduction to the evening. She outlined the Michael Marks Charitable Trust’s aims of preserving art and the environment in the UK, and emphasized her belief in the poetry pamphlet as being vital form in the creative force of the country. Lady Marks also began the evening’s readings with some sonnets by her late husband, Lord Marks of Broughton, the founder of the Michael Marks Charitable Trust. 
Congratulations to Luke Thompson, Carol Rumens and PR, and to all of those shortlisted for the 10th Michael Marks Awards.

by Rahul Bery, Translator in Residence at the British Library for 2018-19. The British Library’s Translator in Residence scheme, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), offers a translator the opportunity to become part of the British Library’s multilingual community of staff, readers and visitors for one year.

Earlier this year, I found myself vigorously agreeing with a Guardian Long Read article which effectively argued that the English language was not so much a liberating lingua franca as a highly successful virus, an invasive species; the linguistic equivalent of a grey squirrel or cane toad. Around the same time, I was reading Olga Tocarczuk’s Booker-winning Flights, and reacted even more strongly to this passage:

“There are countries out there where people speak English…It’s hard to imagine, but English is their real language. Oftentimes, their only language…How lost they must feel in the world, where all instructions…all the menus, all the excruciating pamphlets and brochures ­– even the buttons in the lift! – are in their private language. They may be understood by anyone at any moment, whenever they open their mouths. They must have to write things down in special codes. Wherever they are, people have unlimited access to them…I heard there are plans in the works to get them some little language of their own…so that for once they can have something just for themselves.”

This is something I’d been feeling for a while, but I’d never seen it expressed so clearly before.  It encompassed so many of my frustrations: the experience (probably shared by many first language English speakers who speak another language) of being spoken back to in English when abroad, even when you’ve clearly demonstrated your competency or fluency; having to convince writers whose work you’re translating that, however good their English is, your choice of words *is* the best one; even my occasional sense of doubt that literary translation into English is something I should be doing. After all, does the world really need more English?

And yet, I’ve spent the vast majority of life in the UK, speaking English. I love the way the language looks and sounds, its idiosyncrasies, the way it sounds in Cardiff, Derbyshire, Birmingham, not to mention the wider Anglophone world. Given its status as an international language, as Tocarczuk suggests, it is easy to forget that English is just another West Germanic language, and the (only) private language of hundreds of millions of people. As translator-in-residence here at the BL, I’m interested in exploring not only linguistic diversity in general, but diversity within languages, especially as spoken in different areas of modern Britain. Additionally, my selfish desire to have a truly private language has got me wondering about forms of English that cannot be easily understood by non-natives, or even other English speakers.

So I was delighted to read first line in Liz Berry’s poem ‘Birmingham Roller’, written in Black Country dialect - ‘Wench, yorwm the colour of ower town’ – or a line in another of her poems simply listing words: ‘bibble, fettle, tay, wum’. I had a similar feeling looking at the first line of Hugh McDiarmid’s Braid Scots epic A drunk man looks at the thistle: ‘I amna fou' sae muckle as tired - deid dune.’

 

Before I start getting complaints, I’m aware that Scots is not so much a version of English as a sister West Germanic language, which evolved alongside, rather than from, its southern neighbour. All the same, it comes as a relief to know that there are utterances that look and sound like English, but which the Polish narrator of Flights—with their privileged access into the private lives of hundreds of millions of Anglophones—would struggle to comprehend. In fact, many native speakers may struggle to comprehend them; think of initial reactions to Trainspotting or the Gallagher brothers having to be subtitled on US TV. The BL’s Head of Contemporary British Collections and Scottish Poet, Richard Price, recommended another great example of this kind of writing to me. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Glasgow Beasts an a Burd, as well as being a beautiful artefact, with papercut images by John Picking and Pete McGinn (due to its small print run I also had to make my first trip into the Rare Books Reading Room to see it), is a gloriously irreverent journey written in a tongue that is certainly not the international language of airports and lift instructions. It documents the poet’s transmogrification into various animal forms, all the while retaining a strong grasp of Glaswegian:

syne

ah wis a midgie

neist a stank

foon that kin o

thankless

I love not only the sounds, but also the spellings he uses, like ‘Didjye’, which could be Somali word, or ‘hail simmer’, which could be so many things (in this instance, it’s ‘whole summer’).

English has become dominant partly due to its incredible ability to evolve over time, and absorb the syntax and vocabulary of the languages it supplants, from Welsh to Urdu. Maybe those of us who wish to regain some sense of ‘privacy’ in our speech will have to harness this power and create new Englishes, at least until some other language replaces it on the international stage, and we can go back to merely being speakers of an obscure West Germanic tongue.

by Imogen Durant, PhD Placement Student working on the Library’s Contemporary British collections of poetry pamphlets and artists’ books. The Library will be holding a poetry reading on the 10^th December in celebration of the 10 year anniversary of the awards.  Poets include Christine de Luca, Omikemi Natacha Bryan, Charlotte Gann, Richard Scott and Phoebe Stuckes. You can read more about the event here.

The judging panel for the 2018 Michael Marks Awards have shortlisted five pamphlets and four publishers for the 10^th anniversary of the awards. The judges were:

• Sasha Dugdale, poet, translator and editor
• Rachel Foss, head of Contemporary Archives and Manuscripts at the British Library
• Declan Ryan, poet and critic
• Sir Nicholas Penny, art historian

Pamphlets shortlisted for the 2018 Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets

The judges commented on the diversity of the submissions they received, and shortlisted the following pamphlets:

• Gina Wilson, It Was and It Wasn’t (Mariscat Press)
• Rakhshan Rizwan, Paisley (The Emma Press)
• Ian Parks, If Possible (Cavafy Poems) (Calder Valley Poetry)
• Liz Berry, The Republic of Motherhood (Chatto & Windus)
• Carol Rumens, Bezdelki (The Emma Press)

The judges highlighted the calibre of this year’s shortlist, praising Wilson’s “dry wit”, Rizwan’s “tonal sharpness” and Parks’ “musicality”. They felt that Berry’s poems had an “electric charge”, and commended Rumens’ “savage and wild but beautifully cadenced” work.

 Four publishers were also shortlisted for this year’s publishing award:

• Bad Betty Press – Amy Acre
• The Emma Press – Emma Wright
• Guillemot Press – Luke Thompson
• Tapsalteerie – Duncan Lockerbie

This shortlist includes both new publishers, such as Bad Betty Press, which was founded last year, and more established publishers, such as The Emma Press, which won the award in 2016.

Luke Thompson’s Guillemot Press is an example of a publisher which plays with the possibilities of the pamphlet form, while Duncan Lockerbie’s Tapsalteerie Press shows a commitment to eclecticism, highlighting the crucial space the pamphlet offers to new and emerging writers.

The winners of the poetry, publisher and illustration prizes will be announced at the awards ceremony at the British Library on 11^th December. The winning poet and publisher will each receive £5000, and the winning illustrator will receive £1000.

The winning poet will also be invited on a residency at the Harvard Centre for Hellenic Studies in Greece in the spring of 2019.

The Contemporary British Publications team at the British Library have created a new pamphlet to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of the Michael Marks Awards.This pamphlet features poems from each of the previous winners of the award, many of which were written during the poet’s residency in Greece. The winners of the illustration award have produced artwork in response to three of the poems in this pamphlet.The Michael Marks Charitable Trust and The Eccles Centre for American Studies have generously supported the production of this pamphlet.

Please join us in what promises to be an exciting evening of poetry and reflections on the success of the first 10 years of the Michael Marks Awards.