Slow, slow, slow-slow, slow.

Things have been quite slow in recent weeks as I’ve been looking after my husband, Andrew, who’s recovering from surgery following his diagnosis of prostate cancer (and doing really well), plus it’s been the Easter holidays for our two teenagers, always a mixture of chaotic delightfulness, late night taxi duty, complicated sleeping arrangements and noise. In fact, typing this on Monday morning now that they’ve both left for school, what I’m most conscious of is the wall of silence I’m surrounded by, even with my writing room door wide open.

Even when there are no external distractions, I’m a slow writer. Wanting to write and being able to write are two different activities. Things I would like to write include: a full poetry collection, a novel, a collection of short stories, a radio play (written a few, one was broadcast, would like to write more) and more poetry reviews. I am working on a various number of these projects, some more successfully than others. I sit down to write every day, juggling fountain pen with keyboard, and notebooks with reams of sheet paper. I am a slow, slow accumulator of words.

But I have written a short poetry review

It isn’t that shorter pieces take less time – editing down to the required word count can itself be time-consuming – but being allocated a specific number of words gives me something to aim for, and this helps.  OPOI reviews at Sphinx Reviews (Sphinx Reviews is part of HappenStance Press) require 100 – 350 words.  OPOI stands for One Point of Interest.  They might better be described as responses (to poetry pamphlets) rather than reviews.

In my response to Victoria Kennefick’s pamphlet White Whale I’ve focussed on the title poem rather than the whole collection.  I did a similar thing in my response to Robin Houghton’s  The Great Vowel Shift when I wrote about the poem, ‘The Last’,  which appears first in the pamphlet.

I am conscious of my clumsy writing style – what I want to say, the ideas in my head, don’t always co-operate with my pen or keyboard doing the transcribing – but I *hope* to get better at writing by practising.  Isn’t that true of most activities?  I also hope that I will become a faster writer with more practice.

And I have translated four lines of poetry!

I wrote before about my enthusiasm for reading poems in translation and about the opportunities for amateurs to try our hand at translating a poem at the Modern Poetry in Translation website.

There is a new poem up on the site,  ‘Négysoros’ (Quatrain) by the Hungarian poet János Pilinszky (1921-1981) and there are already sixteen different ‘translations’ to read (as well as versions in English, there was one in Punjabi and one in Spanish when I last checked), including mine.    I’ll admit to being ignorant of this poet until now but there are helpful translation notes included on the translation page.  It was wonderful to be able to find work from him in Centres of Cataclysm, the MPT anthology I’m currently reading.

I’ve linked to my translation above but I’ll also include it here.  The original poem is

and the poem was originally translated by Ted Hughes and Csokits János (and published in their collection of Pilinzsky’s poems, The Desert of Love (Anvil, 1989)) as follows:

Quatrain