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...

Follow by Email

Followers

Popular posts from this blog

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

Imagining Tourists and Tourism Conference Paris

Imagining Tourists and Tourism Conference - Paris 19-21 June 2024 Aims of the Conference The conference aims to explore the links between tourism and fiction, and more precisely to consider tourism and tourists as fictions. It is part of a series of conferences organized since 2011 by researchers from the Universities of Geneva, Panthéon-Sorbonne and Berkeley to explore the links between tourism and the imaginary. The first four meetings had evoked how tourism mobilized imaginaries specific to destination countries, their landscapes, their cultures and their inhabitants. The fifth conference will focus on the imaginary that applies to tourists themselves. Imaginary tourists We will examine how the various actors of tourism, as well as the places and practices of tourism, appear in works of fiction. Literature, cinema, theater, song, advertising, etc., stage tourist configurations, which are sometimes at the very heart of these fictions.  Fictional tourists include those invent...
24 comments
Read more

The Space in Mill Bay

Millbay, Saturday 3 August 2024 Samedi. A decade has passed since Sam Ferguson published his question* on the innovative story by André Gide, called, Paludes . In English that book title could be rendered as Swamps, or, Sourpool, perhaps. Plymouth's Sourpool is recorded in 1439 when the town's boundary was fixed during its incorporation as a Devon borough. The record reads ‘between the hill called Windy Ridge – by the bank of the Sourpool – against the north all the way to the great dyke otherwise called the great ditch’.  Damp, mossy, ferny, even swampy boundaries blurred the edges of the space we call Millbay today. Paludes occupies a critical point of experimentation in the trajectory of published diary-writing […] exploring the possible relationship of the diary with the literary œuvre, and its capacity for addressing philosophical and aesthetic questions. The pertinence of this experimentation to the modern field of life-writing makes this a suitable moment for anothe...
11 comments
Read more