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Time, Place, Language and Translation: Ciaran Carson’s The Inferno and The Táin

Conor Mccarthy

in The Middle Ages in the Modern World: Twenty-first century perspectives

Ciaran Carson’s translations of two major medieval texts, The Inferno (2002) and The Táin(2007), are part of a broader body of translation within his work. Appearing during a decade when a number of ... More

Ciaran Carson’s translations of two major medieval texts, The Inferno (2002) and The Táin(2007), are part of a broader body of translation within his work. Appearing during a decade when a number of English-language poets turned their attention to the Middle Ages, Carson’s translations are in tune with other recent approaches in seeing affinities between his own circumstances and those of the medieval texts he translates. Carson’s approach is notable for a commitment to the formal qualities of the source texts. But these translations are also informed by Carson’s practice elsewhere, and both texts intersect with an interest in the themes of time, place, language, and translation across Carson’s broader body of work.Less

Babel-babble: Language and Translation

in Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing

This chapter examines the bilingual or multilingual basis for much of Ciaran Carson's work and his longstanding engagements with translation. It suggests that translation permeates Carson's works ... More

This chapter examines the bilingual or multilingual basis for much of Ciaran Carson's work and his longstanding engagements with translation. It suggests that translation permeates Carson's works texts more generally in the form of a concern with the ways in which other words, languages and cultures imply and project other worlds. It also contends that the border dialogues that Carson's translations facilitate highlight the condition of ‘ambilocation’ or ‘hyphenation’ that has become a common feature of his more recent works.Less

Spatial Stories: Narrative and Representation

in Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing

This chapter examines Ciaran Carson's interests in and experiments with narrative, particularly his adaptations of procedures and formulas employed in traditional Irish storytelling. It suggests that ... More

This chapter examines Ciaran Carson's interests in and experiments with narrative, particularly his adaptations of procedures and formulas employed in traditional Irish storytelling. It suggests that narrative appeals to Carson because it provides a means of shaping or patterning the chaos of experience, though he recognizes its limited capacity to impose any singular and exclusive interpretation of events. This chapter also considers the antithetical principles of connection and disconnection in Carson's poem Dresden.Less

Introduction

in Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about the representation of place and space in the works of Irish author Ciaran Carson. This volume provides a comprehensive ... More

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume which is about the representation of place and space in the works of Irish author Ciaran Carson. This volume provides a comprehensive analysis of all of Carson's work to date including poetry, prose, and translation, with the objective of identifying the recurrent themes manifested across his oeuvre and in the different genres in which he writes. It also considers the irreducible particularity and eccentricity of his individual texts.Less

‘I know this labyrinth so well’: Narrative Mappings in the Poetry of Ciaran Carson

Daniel Weston

in Poetry & Geography: Space & Place in Post-war Poetry

Ciaran Carson is increasingly recognised as a poet of place, of the city, and specifically of Belfast. However, Carson's work is also permeated by the Northern Irish Troubles in thoroughgoing ways. ... More

Ciaran Carson is increasingly recognised as a poet of place, of the city, and specifically of Belfast. However, Carson's work is also permeated by the Northern Irish Troubles in thoroughgoing ways. This essay elucidates the ways in which his poetry of place and his spatial poetics have developed in response to a particular set of historical circumstances and sectarian geographies. In contradistinction to the landscape of checkpoints and the static identities they enforce upon Belfast's inhabitants, Carson interrogates mapping processes to reveal the multitude of perspectives present in what is, for him, a polyvalent and indeterminate city. If the authority of the map is discredited in Ciaran Carson's poetry – particularly in The Irish for No (1987) and Belfast Confetti (1989) – the labyrinth is offered as an alternative model for a dynamic, open rendering of space.Less

Imaginative Geographies: The Politics and Poetics of Space

in Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing

This chapter discusses a critical framework and recent paradigms for the study of space and place advanced in the fields of geography and cultural theory that will be used in the analysis of Ciaran ... More

This chapter discusses a critical framework and recent paradigms for the study of space and place advanced in the fields of geography and cultural theory that will be used in the analysis of Ciaran Carson's works. It considers the fluid critical formulations for literary geography and suggests that the singularity of Carson's writing rests upon his far-reaching imaginative engagements with ideas of space and place, and particularly urban spatiality in an Irish context. It also mentions that Carson's creative re-imagination of the cultural materials the city provides is exemplified in his poem Belfast.Less

Mapping Belfast: Urban Cartographies

in Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing

This chapter analyses the mapping of urban space, particularly Belfast, in the works of Ciaran Carson. It highlights the recurrent appearance of maps in Carson's representations of Belfast which are ... More

This chapter analyses the mapping of urban space, particularly Belfast, in the works of Ciaran Carson. It highlights the recurrent appearance of maps in Carson's representations of Belfast which are often considered with suspicions because of their complicity with the territorial prescriptions of vested interests. It discusses the dialectic functions of maps and mapping in Carson's work and argues that his self-conscious meta-cartography represents an attempt to the ‘deterritorialisation’ and ‘reterritorialisation’ of Belfast.Less

Deviations from the Known Route: Reading, Writing, Walking

in Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing

This chapter examines the politics and poetics implied by bodies moving through space in the works of Ciaran Carson. It suggests that Carson considers walking in the city as something that implies ... More

This chapter examines the politics and poetics implied by bodies moving through space in the works of Ciaran Carson. It suggests that Carson considers walking in the city as something that implies utopian spatial politics through which resistance to various forms of socio-spatial regulation might be both imagined and effected. It discusses the surveillance and policing of movements in Belfast and argues that Carson also uses the trope of walking in the city as a resistant spatial practice entailing the mobile and often subversive circulation of citizens within the regulated precincts of urban space.Less

Unanswered Questions: Ciaran Carson

Conor McCarthy

in Outlaws and Spies: Legal Exclusion in Law and Literature

This chapter examines themes of surveillance, uncertainty, identity, and political violence in the work of Ciaran Carson. If Carson's Belfast poems, written during the Northern Ireland Troubles, have ... More

This chapter examines themes of surveillance, uncertainty, identity, and political violence in the work of Ciaran Carson. If Carson's Belfast poems, written during the Northern Ireland Troubles, have something of a journalistic aspect, they also contain the motifs of surveillance and interrogation paired with uncertainty and doubt. Carson revisits some of these themes in three post-Troubles works. The mirroring sonnet sequences of For All We Know play with the archetypes of spy narrative. The poems are full of dressing up, disguising, cross-dressing, but when you take on a false identity, these poems ask, who are you then? What does uncertainty mean in the aftermath of conflict, when so many unanswered questions remain? And in the context of so many false witnesses, where might truth, or justice, be found? In The Pen Friend, both the realities and possibilities of collusion between security forces and paramilitaries during the Northern Ireland Troubles find an echo in the explosion at the heart of Carson’s novel. Finally, Exchange Place gives us a fantastical take on surveillance, uncertainty, and questions of identity, with a whiff of espionage, in a novel that leaves us, again, with unanswered questions.Less

Revised Versions: Place and Memory

in Ciaran Carson: Space, Place, Writing

This chapter analyzes the role of place and memory in the works of Ciaran Carson. It suggests that Carson uses memory as a mode of consolation and it also serves as an organ of retrieval and ... More

This chapter analyzes the role of place and memory in the works of Ciaran Carson. It suggests that Carson uses memory as a mode of consolation and it also serves as an organ of retrieval and reclamation that implicitly upbraids the procedures of official historiography. It explains that through this process, Belfast emerges as a palimpsest of memories elaborated in time and space in the works of Carson.Less

The Roots of Translatorly Metaphors

Matthew Reynolds

in The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer & Petrarch to Homer & Logue

The metaphors adopted by poetic translators often turn out to have a root in the poem that is being translated: Pound thinks of himself as bringing Propertius ‘to life’ because the Propertius poems ... More

The metaphors adopted by poetic translators often turn out to have a root in the poem that is being translated: Pound thinks of himself as bringing Propertius ‘to life’ because the Propertius poems he translates have to do with life after death; Pope thinks of translation as the preservation of ‘fire’ because there is much fire, both literal and metaphorical, in the Iliad. Dryden thinks of himself as ‘opening’ Virgil through translation because he sees the Aeneid as showing how fate is opened into history. I give examples from contemporary poem‐translations by Ciaran Carson and Michael Hofmann. This interactive relationship between source and translation can sometimes happen with prose and drama (I give examples from Natasha Randall and Tony Harrison) but, it flourishes best in poetry. It creates the ‘poetry of translation’—an art form in which translation continues and reflects upon the imaginative activity of the source.Less

Adaptations in the Age of the Arbitrary

David-Antoine Williams

in The Life of Words: Etymology and Modern Poetry

This chapter begins by noting with Saussure that the rupture structural linguistics makes between sound image and referent would appear to make etymology theoretically vacant. How one might continue ... More

This chapter begins by noting with Saussure that the rupture structural linguistics makes between sound image and referent would appear to make etymology theoretically vacant. How one might continue to ‘believe’ in the truth of etymologies in the face of this occupies the rest of the discussion, beginning with the problems and possibilities of phenomenological ‘unveiling’ (Martin Heidegger, Anne Carson, Jan Zwicky, and Anne Waldman are discussed) and deconstructive etymological word play (Jean Paulhan, Nancy Streuver, Derek Attridge, Paula Blank). Play, or work, with etymology then frames a comparative reading of poems by G. M. Hopkins and Ciaran Carson, which explores questions of poetic assertion, belief, and irony. After sketching a taxonomy of etymological tropes in modern poetry, the chapter concludes by following the etymological development and redeployment of central metapoetic metaphors, which imagine the work of poetry as that of maker, weaver, singer, and ploughman.Less

Ireland, Literature, and the Coastal Imaginary

Nicholas Allen

in Coastal Works: Cultures of the Atlantic Edge

The idea of the coast as a significant cultural space has been understudied in literary criticism as it relates to Ireland. The dynamics of Irish nationalism have marginalized liminal forms of ... More

The idea of the coast as a significant cultural space has been understudied in literary criticism as it relates to Ireland. The dynamics of Irish nationalism have marginalized liminal forms of historical affiliation, a tendency that has obscured those geographical zones that sit in the middle distance between land and sea. This chapter reads recent prose by Kevin Barry, Ciaran Carson, and Glenn Patterson in the context of imperial and maritime history. It explores the intimacy between the literary representation of the island and cultural forms of self-governance, which take particular charge in a culture that, like Ireland, has experienced the long receding wave of empire as violence, partition, and persisting disputes over identity. The flotsam and jetsam of the old empire washed up on an island that turned its back on the sea. Carson, Patterson, and Barry have taken these fragmentary forms to mould new literary works.Less

The Roar of the Solway

Fiona Stafford

in Coastal Works: Cultures of the Atlantic Edge

This chapter considers the places where rivers meet the sea, and the imaginative, anthropomorphic impulses evident in the language of confluence. In particular, it focuses on the Solway Firth, and ... More

This chapter considers the places where rivers meet the sea, and the imaginative, anthropomorphic impulses evident in the language of confluence. In particular, it focuses on the Solway Firth, and its peculiar situation as a border between England and Scotland, opening towards the Isle of Man, Ireland, Wales, and the rest of the world. The purpose of the regional focus is to show the constant interaction of history and geography and the associated shifts in understanding the coast. Taking its cue from John Ruskin’s claim for the international importance of the Solway, the chapter explores Ruskin’s own attachment to the area, magnified as it was by Scott, Burns, and Wordsworth. It goes on to consider Ciaran Carson’s thoughtful response to Ruskin’s description in Praeterita, when Carson imagines Ruskin crossing the Irish Sea to encounter modern Belfast.Less