*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

In Winter

after the German of Georg Trakl “Im Winter”

 

This field now glows, so cold, so white.

The sky, so vastly lonely, stark

as hunters return from the woods’ deep dark

and jackdaws dart by the pond’s blue light.

 

The forests seem to keep their silence,

glimpsed fires flecking woodlanders’ huts.

You hear a sleigh, off in the distance,

as that grey moon first starts to cut

 

above where a deer now bleeds to death

and ravens share their dirty joke.

Reeds tremble. All else must hold its breath.

A footstep. First all is frost. Then smoke.

Cliff reads "Available Light" on Poetry Archive Worldview 2024.

Click on the link below. There are two further videos of Cliff reading poems here.

Available Light by Cliff Forshaw - YouTube

Lyrebird by Cliff Forshaw (youtube.com)

Loop by Cliff Forshaw (youtube.com)

 

*

Available Light

(any source of light not explicitly supplied by the photographer)

“Où sont les neiges d’Antan?”(Where are the snows of yesteryear?) François Villon (1431-63)

“Not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” Bob Dylan

*

When snow falls blue against the dying light,

then maybe what you see and what you get’s

both somehow wrong, yet somehow oddly right.

Ashamed that you kept on hedging all your bets,

but finally the light begins to fade.

It’s getting late. I’d say, it’s almost night.

 

And now? — These past few years lived in the shade

of all that busy stuff that went before.

Who knows quite when or why (and how much longer?)

all that history you can’t quite remember.

The blue is darkening, and now the snow,

and yet… and yet… And God knows why, despite,

or perhaps because of all that blue, you know,

that you can only shoot through available light.

 

 

 

 

A few of my recent life drawings, along with others by colleagues, are in this exhibition at Juice in Hull.

For more life studies, please see the relevant portfolio pages.

 

 

 

 

****

It's some time since I posted anything on the blog. Winter called for hibernation this year. I gave up my Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at the end of last academic year, and have been busy writing over the winter. Funny how the seasons affect what we work on and and how much. This year I've done no painting and little drawing. There are, however, a few new literary things in the pipeline which I hope to be able to mention in the next few days. Meanwhile, here's a photo I recently took during a fine holiday in Copenhagen.

My poem "Toad" was Carol Rumens's choice for a recent Guardian Poem of the Week (16th October 2023). The poem is a version of a French poem by Tristan Corbière (1845-75), and appeared in my most recent collection French Leave: versions and perversions (Broken Sleep, 2023). Click on the link for the poem and Carol's discussion.

Poem of the week: Toad by Cliff Forshaw Poetry The Guardian

The latest in a series of podcasts "Why I Write" recently appeared on the Royal Literary Fund website. You can access it through this link, where is also a text PDF .

Cliff Forshaw - The Royal Literary Fund (rlf.org.uk)

There are various other podcasts and short articles of mine, as well as many more by other RLF fellows, on the website. For access to all of my podcasts and articles up to date:

You searched for Cliff Forshaw - The Royal Literary Fund (rlf.org.uk)

My podcast about working variations on Ovid's Metamorphoses for my collection Trans has just appeared on the Royal Literary Fund website. Click on the link for both audio and text versions.

Cliff Forshaw - The Royal Literary Fund (rlf.org.uk)

I've just come back from a very fine holiday in the Baltic republics: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. At another time I might have continued up the coast to St Petersburg, but I think Russia is best left out of bounds at the moment. It's a pity as I've been translating a number of early twentieth-century Russian poets: Yesenin, Akhmatova, Pasternak and Khodasevich, and would have enjoyed practising my Russian, which over the last few years has been largely limited to Duolingo. I'm hoping the Russian poems will form part of a new collection of versions and perversions, joining poems from Spanish, Italian, German and Portuguese and maybe one or two from Latin and Greek.

I've always thought that recasting poems from different languages and periods was important. My first degree was in comparative literature and much of it centred around Dante and Petrarch and the Italian influence on the English Renaissance sonneteers. An interest in French nineteenth century poetry led, eventually, to my most recent collections, RE:VERB and French Leave.

There were a couple of anthologies in particular that sparked my imagination about the possibilities of translation. Poem into Poem edited by Georges Steiner, and The Poem Itself, edited by Stanley Burnshaw. These are pretty venerable now and probably out of print, but well worth picking up second-hand. I remember Georges Steiner giving a lecture at Warwick. I think he managed to quote from French, German, Italian, Latin and Greek in the original in the first ten or so minutes. At least that's what I think he was doing. If, at the time, it wasn't quite all Greek to me a lot of it was. His book After Babel has a discussion on the difficulties of translating Lewis Carol into French. Mad but interestingly so.

On the other side of the coin, Christopher Logue didn't trouble to learn Greek before turning the Iliad into War Music and subsequent versions. Working from Pope and other translations, he recast the epic as something rather interestingly movie-like, an ancient Western perhaps.