Norman Jope (Ed.), Paul Scott Derrick (Ed.) & Catherine E. Byfield (Ed.)

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Biographical note:  

Biographical note:  PAUL SCOTT DERRICK is a Senior Lecturer in American literature at the University of Valencia. His main fields of interest are Romanticism and American Transcendentalism and their manifestations in subsequent American literature and art. He has published two collections of essays in English and has co-authored a number of bilingual, critical editions of works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson and Henry Adams. He is co-editor of Modernism Revisited: Transgressing Boundaries and Strategies of Renewal in American Poetry (Rodopi, 2007). His most recent book-length publication is La tierra de los abetos puntiagudos (Biblioteca Javier Coy, 2008), a translation and critical study of Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs. He has published translations into English of poems by Jorge Luis Borges, Luis Cernuda and Pablo Neruda and, with Miguel Teruel, co-translations of Richard Berengarten's poems into Spanish (Las manos y la luz, Valencia, 2008).

Biographical note:  Born in Ohio, USA, CATHERINE E. BYFIELD has spent the majority of her life in the UK. She read Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge; publications include a study of the Pedeir Keinc y Mobinogi, and Welsh translations of the Ioca Monachorum (co-authored with Martha J. Bayless). She is currently preparing studies of four Middle Welsh texts, and is also working on her first novel. She works as an administrator for graduate studies in the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717521
ISBN:  9781844717521
Author:  Norman Jope
Title:  The Salt Companion to Richard Berengarten
Series:  Salt Companions to Poetry
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DSBH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Mar-11
Extent:  460pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  26 mm
Weight:  690 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 24.99
Price:  USD 27.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Richard Berengarten has been a crucial presence in contemporary poetry for over forty years and his poetry has been translated into more than ninety languages. The range of poetic canons to which Berengarten's oeuvre responds is reflected both in the book’s large number of contributors and their diverse cultural backgrounds.

Main description:  This book, which accompanies the volumes published in the Salt Selected Writings series, guides readers through the many-faceted poetic output of Richard Berengarten (formerly Burns). Berengarten has been a crucial presence in contemporary poetry for over forty years – not only as poet but also as translator, critic and driving force behind the legendary Cambridge Poetry Festival – and his poetry has been translated into more than ninety languages. With thirty-four contributors from over a dozen nationalities, the book is a testimony to the recognition of his poetry by fellow writers and critics across cultural, linguistic and geographical boundaries and frontiers. The range of poetic canons to which Berengarten's oeuvre responds enables him to put down ‘multiple roots’ in a number of literary traditions, and this is reflected in the book’s diversity. It sets out not only to be of use to readers and scholars already acquainted with Berengarten’s poetry, but as a guide to those who are encountering his work for the first time. It is divided into three main sections, the first of which approaches the work thematically and the second chronologically, while the third focuses on his ‘Balkan trilogy’ (The Blue Butterfly, In A Time Of Drought and Under Balkan Light). The book also contains an appendix of essays on Berengarten's ancillary roles as literary activist, EFL teacher/entrepreneur and teacher of poetry to children, as well as a detailed bibliography.

Table of contents:
Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
NORMAN JOPE – Introduction: Everywhere Centre

PART I

PAUL SCOTT DERRICKA – Poet for a Time of Need
SIMON JENNER Janus – Masks: on the Many Facets of Richard Berengarten’s Work
MARIO NICOLAO – The Ghost of the Mediterranean
TESSA RANSFORD – Love’s Integument: The Poetry of Richard Berengarten
RAZVAN VONCU – A Poet Like a Tree: Some Comments on the Poetry of Richard Berengarten
JEREMY HOOKER – Richard Berengarten’s Art of Transformation
ANTONETTE MOSES – From Silence to Song: Richard Berengarten – speaking for the dead
PHILIP KUHN – “Tis Death is dead, not he” or Reading Richard Reading Richard Reading

PART II

NELI MOODY – A Syntax of Stones: Pre-Text, Edifice, and the Sacred Space in Richard Berengarten’s ‘Avebury’
P.S. SRI – Richard Berengarten’s The Rose of Sharon’: ‘… by any other name…’
JOHN GERY – Explicit and Implicit: Ezra Pound’s Influence on Richard Berengarten’s ‘Angels’
STEFANO MARIA CASELLA – Roots and Rings: Under the Shade of Richard Berengarten’s ‘Tree’
NASOS VAYENAS – The Black Light of the Poets
PASCHALIS NIKOLAOU – In Light of Hellas: experiences of Greekness, versions of memory and roles for translation in Richard Berengarten’s poetry
MARIA FILIPPAKOPOULOU – Foreign in Our Own Country
DIDAC LLORENS CUBEDO – All Art Ever Meant: Richard Berengarten’s ‘Against the Day’ and Johannes Vermeer’s The Guitar Player
CRAIG WOELFEL – The Descent through Croft Woods
ANGUS CALDER – A Spectacular Variety of Registers
MANANA GELASHVILI & TEMUR KOBAKHIDZE – The Manager: Tradition and the Individual Talent
PATRICK QUERY – Form and Redemption in The Manager
MARK PIRIE – A Reading of Book With No Back Cover
CHEE LAY TAN – Cross-cultural Numerology and Translingual Poetics: Chinese Influences on the Poetry of Richard Berengarten

PART III

FRANCIS R. JONES – In a Balkan Light: Richard Berengarten and the South Slav Cultural Space
SVETOZAR IGNJACEVIC – Wonderland Through a Cracked Mirror: An English Poet in Yugoslavia
SLOBODAN RAKITIC – Poet in the Power of the Butterfly: An English Poet in the Balkans
JOHN LUCAS – Richard Berengarten: the Lyrical and the Political
ANDREW FRISARDI – Black Suns on the Scales: on Richard Berengarten’s Blue Butterfly
ALEKSANDAR PETROV – The Blue Butterfly Effect
STEPHEN WILSON – Hath Not a Jew Hands?
ANDRIJA MATIC – ‘Do vidjenja Danitse’: the beauty of complexity

PART IV

MICK GOWAR – Richard Berengarten and the Cambridge Poetry Festival: a Vision of Community
ZDENEK KRIVSKY – Language Teaching and Poetry through the Iron Curtain: Richard Berengarten in Czechoslovakia / The Czech Republic
MARGARET SETCHELL – Richard Berengarten in School: a Teacher’s Perspective

Richard Berengarten: A Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index

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Excerpt from book:  

from Introduction: Everywhere Centre

By Norman Jope

This Companion aims to guide readers through the many-faceted poetic output of Richard Berengarten (formerly Burns): an output that has appeared, over the past five decades, in a wide variety of places and contexts but which nonetheless is perhaps only now achieving the degree of attention it deserves in the UK. The fact that thirty-three contributors can each approach that work from a slightly different angle is in itself a testimony to the breadth of Berengarten’s output. And since more than a third of these contributors have a first language other than English, and with over a dozen nationalities represented in this volume, it is also a testimony to the recognition of his work by fellow writers and critics across cultural, linguistic and geographical boundaries and frontiers. The sheer range of poetic canons to which Berengarten’s oeuvre responds – and whose influence, as I shall discuss later in this introduction, has enabled him to put down ‘multiple roots’ in a number of literary traditions – may even have served to hamper his reception in the UK as a poet of stature. However, the collections recently re-published in the Salt Selected Writings series will surely help to redress this state of affairs. For some readers, this Companion will accompany those editions, although its target readership also includes those who might not have encountered Berengarten’s work at all or have done so in snatches and fragments. None of the essays in it, therefore, assumes a detailed knowledge of Berengarten’s poems and extensive quotation seeks to encourage readers to delve further.

Like Berengarten’s work itself, this Companion also seeks to be readable – indeed, hospitable – to anyone with a working knowledge of literary issues and concepts. Hospitality is a key poetic virtue for Berengarten: he writes:

Ancient laws of reciprocity, hospitality and magnanimity are necessary to the poetry of this time and this place too. Anything else or less is not good enough and will not serve adequately. A poet without such qualities can only be second-rate, however clever, skilled and cunning. (ALF, RB online)

How do these virtues translate into poetry, and Berengarten’s poetry in particular? They relate above all to his openness to past and present poetic practice across cultural, linguistic and geographical boundaries. That openness is traceable not only in Berengarten’s poems, but in his related activities as translator, pedagogue, cultural ambassador and poetry activist. He is the least confined of writers and this in itself sets him apart from the constructors and aficionados of cliques and coteries.

Berengarten has lived and worked outside the UK (mainly in Italy, Greece, former Yugoslavia and the USA) for much of his adult life: distanced, literally, from the rifts and schisms of the contemporary British poetry scene. Moreover, if the common British distinction between the two competing camps of the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘avant-garde’ can be applied, it is certainly hard to fit Berengarten into either one. Although his openness to modernist poetries in other European languages is arguably more often associated in the UK with the oppositional avant-garde (in opposition, that is, to the ‘little-England’ tendencies of the Movement and its successors), his use of traditional form and rhetoric, often derived from pre-20th century sources in English literature, makes it equally difficult to relate his work to that of so-called ‘linguistically innovative’ writers. Rather, Berengarten’s most characteristic work almost always involves an engagement with the manifold legacies of the past, as if from an intention to produce something that might turn out (who knows?) to be of value to succeeding generations. This process of hosting-and-guesting is defined, by Berengarten, as follows: 

Whenever the guest arrives, the host is reciprocally hosted. The particular interior that encompasses both guest and host is the anterior timespace that itself first gave welcome to the host. Poetry, being itself a gift, flourishes in that generous presence of arrivals, meetings and gift-givings (ALF, RB online).

Since the range of accessible canons has become, potentially, international, the traditions of English and North American literature are no longer hegemonic for any adventurous writer. This widening of options can help such a writer to avoid the tropes of the ‘received’ canon in his or her language of expression and to encourage fresh and distinctive blends. The newness in Berengarten’s work, therefore, derives not from disjuncture but from synthesis.

* * *

As already indicated, the number and range of contributions in this volume reflects not only the breadth of Berengarten’s output and his appeal, but the multiplicity of critical approaches that his work sustains. Furthermore, it has been impossible to arrange these contributions into tidy, self-contained sections. Essays about particular pieces inevitably cover wider themes; essays on wider themes draw their evidence, as they must, from particular pieces; and coverage of Berengarten’s ancillary activities sheds light upon the core of his work. As he puts it himself, in the final section of ‘Avebury’: ‘now every / where centre’ (FL 50); and this is eminently true of this volume. Clearly, a collection such as this requires a running order, even if readers are, as ever, at liberty to wander back and forth as if each essay existed in parallel to the others. However, chronological patterning has also informed its arrangement and, in particular, readers who approach the essays in the second section in sequence will acquire some sense of Berengarten’s development.

Whether considered separately or together, the first eight essays offer an overview by ranging across the entire span of Berengarten’s published oeuvre to date. They cover such diverse themes as Berengarten’s Jewish heritage and influences (Moses and Kuhn); his Mediterranean affinities (Nicolao and Voncu); his deep and long-lasting interest in symbol, myth and Jungian psychology (Hooker and Ransford); the multiplicity of voices he adopts and masters (Jenner); and the relationship that exists, in his work, between mortality and the poetic impulse (Derrick). But this is to simplify matters almost to vanishing point. Each of these essays ranges widely in its own right, drawing together sources and influences and suggesting points of departure for further reading and scholarship. Taken as a whole, they present a sophisticated analysis of where this poet has come from, what he has accomplished so far and the comparative measure of his achievement. Here, in particular, one also gets a sense of the empowerment (rather than Bloomian anxiety) of influence in Berengarten’s oeuvre. These pieces reveal him as a poet who has always been willing to tap into multiple canons and diverse heritages; who is open, in the words of Octavio Paz, to the “wind from all compass points” (Paz 1991: 258-269)  that is available to refresh and inspire all writers of ambition and curiosity. This first group of essays, then, throws down a challenge to all notions of exclusivity and the closure of borders, in the spheres of both poetry and life as a whole.

The second group of essays covers specific works and is arranged in the chronological order of those works’ completion. With the exception of Berengarten’s ‘Balkan Trilogy’, they cover Berengarten’s major poetic achievements. Of the fourteen pieces in this section, three consider ‘Black Light(Filippakopoulou, Nikolaou and Vayenas) and three, The Manager (Calder, Gelashvili and Kobakhidze, and Query). In the view of the editors, this emphasis happens to mirror the comparative importance of these sequences. The other works discussed in this section are ‘Avebury’ (Moody); ‘The Rose of Sharon’ (Sri); ‘Angels’ (Gery); ‘Tree’ (Casella); ‘Against The Day’ (Llorens Cubedo); ‘Croft Woods’ (Woelfel); and Book With No Back Cover (Pirie and Tan).

The three pieces on ‘Black Light’are all written by Greeks, including Nasos Vayenas, one of Greece’s most respected contemporary poets. Taken together, these essays present an informed examination of the Hellenic influence on Berengarten, in particular that of the poetry of George Seferis. Indeed, these critics locate ‘Black Light’ within a living context, constructed both out of life-experience in Greece and from Greek literary models, that is in large part recognisable ‘as being Greek’ to Greeks themselves. This parallels the readings of four Serbian critics later in the volume (Matic´, Rakitic´, Petrov and Ignjacevic´), which not only locate ‘The Balkan Trilogy’ within the geopolitical zone of former Yugoslavia, but confirm it as an accurate depiction of Balkan life-experience and culture. Such responses not only embed Berengarten’s work in literary traditions other than that of English: they also suggest a wider, ‘European’ importance for his work, as well as the establishment of literary canons that transcend geographical, linguistic and cultural boundaries.

Most of the pieces in the second section are concerned with issues of form and subject their texts to close analysis. Among other things, this highlights the fact that Berengarten’s oeuvre contains some startlingly ‘traditional’ poems – startling, that is, to anyone who believes that the old forms are discredited. However, these pieces also indicate clearly that Berengarten makes these forms work, because he has the sophistication and skill required to do so – and that, in skilled hands such as his, their resonance remains undiminished. And, no less, these contributions show that it would be inaccurate to portray his approach to form, in its entirety, as solely concerned with salvage and renewal. Formal innovation is at the heart of his poetry and expresses itself in a multiplicity of ways, from the tight rhyme-schemes of ‘The Rose of Sharon’ (FL 91-96) and the villanelles that form ‘The Death of Children’ (BB 17-25) through to the jagged open forms of ‘Avebury’ (FL 23-50), the verse-paragraphs of The Manager, and the expansive long lines of ‘Flight of the Imago’ (BB 73-101). Other key themes are explored in this part of the book too, such as myth and spirituality (Moody, Sri, Casella and Woelfel); Chinese cultural traditions, particularly the I Ching (Tan); visual art (Llorens Cubedo and Woelfel); typography and book design (Pirie); the influence of ‘Sarf-Eastern’ colloquial parlance (Calder); postmodernism (Query); and Berengarten’s relationships with Pound and Eliot (Gery, and Gelashvili and Kobakhidze). Once more, however, it might be argued that a summary of this kind risks simplifying and even trivialising the complex concerns with which these essays engage.

The third section consists of eight essays which focus entirely on the ‘Balkan Trilogy’: The Blue Butterfly, In a Time of Drought and Under Balkan Light.  Although placing these essays together does not necessarily amount to a claim, on our part, that this trilogy represents the apex of Berengarten’s poetic achievement to date, it certainly reflects the comparative enthusiasm that contributors have displayed for it (bearing in mind, also, the extensive references to the trilogy contained in the first section). Readers will also note that there is a considerable degree of overlap within this section, particularly among three of the four Serbian writers (Rakitic´, Petrov and Ignjacevic´). However, the angles and areas of concurrence this uncovers leads, in our view, to a deeper reading of the trilogy. The other pieces in this third section are written by Anglophone critics (Jones, Lucas, Frisardi and Wilson), all of whom approach the trilogy from unique perspectives. Jones draws upon his own extensive knowledge of the languages, history, culture and literature of the former Yugoslavia; Lucas focuses on the political and historical dimensions of the work; Frisardi highlights the influence of the post-Jungian writer and thinker, James Hillman; and Wilson, by approaching The Blue Butterfly from Jewish perspectives, complements the earlier contributions of Moses and Kuhn by emphasising specifically Jewish currents and associations within Berengarten’s work. Finally, this section also contains an in-depth study of a particular piece, ‘Do vidjenja Danitsé’, by the fourth Serbian writer (Matic), which, in its close textual attention, relates to some of the essays in the second section. Together, these pieces not only build up a composite picture of this particular area of Berengarten’s work, but also illustrate how a poetry of ambition and risk can elicit different, yet complementary responses from critical readers.

The final section, containing three essays, hints at the range of Berengarten’s ancillary roles: as literary activist (Gowar), TEFL/TESOL teacher/entrepreneur (Krivský) and teacher of poetry to children (Setchell). This section, regrettably, is incomplete in coverage despite our best efforts to expand it; for example, there is nothing about Berengarten’s work as a translator (although the bibliography at the end of this volume includes some basic information), or about his literary and art criticism and other prose writing, or his role as a teacher to adults. However, in highlighting some of the other ‘hats’ that Berengarten has worn (to allude to the ‘Hatman’ persona that he has adopted, at times, in his pedagogical activities with children), this section suggests the range and consistency of his concerns. Around the inner core of his life’s work – the poems themselves – there is an outer ring of diverse, yet compatible concerns and activities, and a record of achievement in all of them. These activities have also influenced much of the writing; after all, if Berengarten had not gone to Serbia to earn a living, then his ‘Balkan Trilogy’ would have either not existed at all or taken a very different form.

Unpublished endorsement:  In every generation of poets there are hidden treasures. One such is Richard Berengarten, a poet before and ahead of his time. This ambitious and scholarly collection of essays – aimed at existing and new readers – explores the multiple facets and layers of his large body of work. The matrix of Berengarten’s poems is found not in the ‘malady of the quotidian’ (Stevens) but in the mythos the poet lives by, with beacons such as the I Ching, Blake, Shelley, Rilke, Jung, Stevens, Seferis, Paz and Lali&ć lighting his way.

Anthony Rudolf

Unpublished endorsement:  By exploring the numerous aspects of Richard Berengarten's poetry, by demonstrationg the amplitude of its concerns and testifying to its power, this series of essays earns its place among the major revaluations of our time.

George Szirtes

Unpublished endorsement:  These essays and reflections offer a comprehensive and fascinating insight into the life and work of one of the most vital and humane poets working in Europe over the last several decades. This wonderful Critical Companion will not only be required reading for those already familiar with Richard Berengarten's work, but will, I hope, bring new readers to the poetry.

John Burnside

Unpublished endorsement:  This book of essays, written by distinguished international poets and critics, explores many aspects of Richard Berengarten's writings: his lifelong interest in Jung and in myth, his Jewish heritage, his formal inventiveness, the daring of The Manager – a poem which remains as fresh as when it was first written – and the achievement of his poems set in the Balkans and Greece. SALT is to be congratulated in publishing such an important book.

Elaine Feinstein

Unpublished endorsement:  These essays testify to a poet’s visionary quest, partly undertaken, partly circumstanced by a world often on the brink of collapse. In a multi-faceted career, Richard Berengarten has pursued Hölderlin’s question “what are poets for,” with a rare genius and tenacity, and with the utmost skill as both witness and craftsman.

Michael Heller