Skip to main content

Europa

 Europa



  City

  So this is city, is it?

  Dug earth, its water fired to air.

  Rust rocks smoothed to steel,

  Shouldering elm,

  And sand for eyes.

                     Mansfield 2006 ‘City’ Europa

After long travels, the final arrival in the city is always worth celebrating in writing.  The Anglo-Saxon poem, ‘The Ruin’ in the Exeter Book here in Devon does just that; the writer unfamiliar with the great urban works of the Romans arrives in one of their British cities 300 or 400 years after they have left.  Ruin expresses the poet's understanding of the deserted urban space.  In ‘City’ from my collection Europa, I try to convey the wonder of a traveller who has never seen a European city and its buildings.  The travel writer makes sense of the scene using only the elements of nature, bricks are not in the writer’s word hoard, so they appear as clay dug out of the ground, dried and baked.

I collected these poems to celebrate Britain becoming European on 1 January 1973 and the declaration of shared European citizenship for British subjects in Maastricht in 1992. Let’s finish the post with the French translation from Europa of those opening lines:     

  La grande ville

  C'est la ville, n'est-ce pas ?

  La terre creusée, son eau tirée à l'air.

  Les rocs de rouille lissés à l'acier,

  L'orme endossant,

  Et pour les yeux, on a le sable.

                        Mansfield 2006 ‘City’ Europa

 

Reference

Mansfield, Charlie (2006) Europa : le vers anglais à l’aube du troisième millénaire avec les traductions parallèles en français, Paris, Éditions Thélès.  ISBN 2847767606.   http://www.theles.fr/livre/charlie-mansfield_europa

 

 


Labels:

Comments

  1. Linda Lappin14 September 2022 at 07:07

    Hi Charlie, my email to your old Plymouth address bounced. What are you up to? Loved your Proust post -- brilliant.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dr C Mansfield15 September 2022 at 07:12

      Thank you for adding Comments, Linda. Much appreciated. I have changed to a gmail address now, which I'll send you. But you can always message me through ResearchGate from the About page of this blog. Or follow this link
      https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Charlie-Mansfield

      Delete
  2. Linda Lappin14 September 2022 at 07:10

    Didn't realize you were also a poet! Bravo.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Dr C Mansfield15 September 2022 at 07:13

      Thank you, yes, it was an inspired collection I completed back then.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Thank you. Please do a SHARE too...

Followers

Popular posts from this blog

Call for chapters

  Call for chapters   Sustainable Narratives and Technologies in Tourism   What will tourism look like in the 2030s? Tourism destination development will take sustainability as a given. Social media and emerging technologies will be integrated in the stories of co-created visitor experience. Are you working in these converging areas?     Following the success of our research monograph with Routledge and its teaching companion, we are looking for contributors for a new collection.   Click to view   Download free eBook   Chapters of up to 8000 words, including references. Each chapter to explore a tourism or hospitality development as a case study with details of underpinning theory. Provide example questions and answers for students, and PowerPoint® slides for lecturers to use your chapter in their modules.     Download and Submit in WORD Document Timeline for Chapter...
5 comments
Read more

AI Detector

I've been looking at AI Detectors that are now stable and easy to use. The first one to write about is from a company based in Montreal, and so, as you would expect from that bilingual city, it works on English and French texts. It's called Winston AI. The AI detector tells you if written copy is generated by a human or an Artificial Intelligence text generator robot. It uses a graphic sliding scale. The software also detects plagiarism and presents a thorough list of any copied content it has found. As a user of Winston AI you just paste text into the quick scan option. You can upload bigger documents in the following formats: .docx, .pdf, .png and .jpg for the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) system to convert to electronic text from scanned documents or pictures. This also works on handwriting like Google Lens and the other handwritten text readers and convertors do. The Winston AI Detector works in projects, this lets you label or title pieces you are examining for plagi...
Post a Comment
Read more

PhD in Contemporary Travel Writing

 PhD in Contemporary Travel Writing Syddansk Universitet Writing Travel in the Twenty-First Century: Mobility and Authenticity in the Planetary Emergency Travel is older than human civilization itself. Migration, trade, tourism and pilgrimage, all are forms of human movement that have existed for millennia. Yet travel is no longer what it used to be. Slow travel, flight shame, sustainable travel, eco- and anti-tourism, staycation and microadventures are but some of many recent terms testifying to a growing awareness that mobility has become inextricably intertwined with planetary concerns, regardless of whether it is the short distance of a commute to work, or that of long-distance globetrotting. With 2024 likely proving to be the hottest year on record and tourists evacuated by boat from uncontrollable forest fires on Rhodes in 2023, all the while tech billionaires promise us trips to Mars and hotels on the moon (while others perish trying to reach the Titanic), we are also told t...
1 comment
Read more