On Saturday June 15 Nathan Shepherdson launched ‘Samuel Beckett - ④Poems’ book by Ian Brinton, Ian Friend & Richard Humphreys at the exhibition opening of Ian Friend / Anton Heyboer.
By Nathan Shepherdson
to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow -
from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself
by way of neither
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Samuel Beckett – Neither i
That fragment, from Samuel Beckett’s 1977 poem Neither post-dates the ④Poems in the Friend/Brinton/Humphreys project in splits of 30 and 40 years respectively. At 16 lines, Neither was quite expansive for Beckett as he moved into his later period. He pursued the wholesale contraction of words via his thinking. Beckett - as a striking, angular figure, a heron in half-light on the banks of an unnamed stream, reducing language where possible, waiting for it to move, to tread itself to the sigh-point, where intent concedes that all is perhaps beyond resolution. Beckett created supreme failures with original ideas around language. In fact, two languages. With virtuosic fluency, he wrote and translated in both English and French, double-steering customised to the one car, allowed him equidistant journeys from alternate directions between their primary and secondary forms. As an older man, he’d taught himself to balance either language as a boulder on the bookend pronouns of ‘I’ and ‘us’. He came up for air in either language, (or neither), channel crossing if you like, writing himself into one, to translate himself into the other. Yet, in translation the facing pages never quite meet, held up, apart, two mirrors that speak to each other in silence.
Is silence a concept or a fact? Perhaps only death offers pure silence? Our collective and existential desire for silence amounts to a relative silence, a relative of silence - deserted beach, dawn chorus, single breath, distant eagle circling blue. At Ian’s invitation to ‘say a few words’, about the ④Poems, the linkage of silence between Ian’s art and Beckett’s writing was an obvious nexus. In attempting to ‘read’ Ian’s work, I often see it as a series of contour maps for memory. We float down, it floats up. We become suspended in its surface, subject to its distillation. Portraits of time on time. Portraits of time in time. Once absorbed, we can close our eyes and see what’s there.
Big ideas offer up their best in small corners. With ④Poems, Ian has carefully placed ink clots and smudged graphite into the gelatinous windows, Shore I to Shore IV, to accompany the four Beckett poems. This is not the painter’s foray into the visual version of ekphrasis. It’s philosophical juxtaposition as companionship. Each painting is added to and subtracted from each poem, two small bodies, paired, with skin pierced, swirl transparent tides through perception. We suspect these shores swim between each other when our backs are turned. Are these the interchangeable shores from the languages Beckett used? Intimate wave-echoes that somehow manage to put pebbles on the headstones of unknown occupants buried in washed-up remnants of forgotten speech. To me, the four Shores with their microchip scale have a faint Michaux-whiff of a postcard about them. They pass the test, would fit comfortably into Beckett’s pocket-sense of reduction. Items to tape over the lips on a wall near a writing desk. At a pinch, the four Shores could also function as set design for a performance without an audience, for anonymous actors who function as thoughts without bodies.
In recent years, Ian Friend found a trapdoor in his birth certificate to rediscover and rethink the ④Poems written before he was born. His year, 1951, heralded the Festival of Britain, a new suit for art, science, and industry, finally ready to wear, six years after the war. To symbolise the shift, the white, concrete icing on the modernist cake appears as Barbara Hepworth’s revolving sculpture Turning Forms, a 213 cm abstract, a beach-eroded bone coughed up from a new British heart, slow-dancing its illusion for the eye in two-minute cycles. Ian’s initial training was as a sculptor, and whether three or two dimensional, his works seem to revolve at a similar pace.
In ④Poems, Richard Humphreys in his finely rendered essay curves observation, just as Ian curves his lines, finding nodules and brace-points, joining the dots in a personal and a physical manner, just as the dots in Ian’s works teem and coagulate in ink, hoping to turn their jostled forms into an alliance of aesthetic molecules. Humphreys states in a matter-of-fact way that, “Life is an unending sequence of inescapable repetitions and rituals.” Through vigilance and process, these are the repetitions Ian has no desire to escape. To bury the line, to determine the behaviour of the mark, to sleep within his oval, to create the speculative cinema as the bleed in colour, films itself onto paper.
The greatest risk in the Poems project was for the translator Ian Brinton. He ended up with the floor warden’s job of assessing the stability and dangers in Beckett’s language, in touching Beckett’s language, in laying out the choices he makes as his own, as self-deputised translator.
Remembering, that Beckett had already cut two keys to two doors, to two languages, at top-floor level. This is unusual. Humphrey’s cites Paul Auster’s view that Beckett wrote his works twice, veering from specific translation, pouring them in a mobius action from one beaker to another. Ian Brinton shows us a third door he made from the other two. This requires a split level be installed in his take on literary bravery, to invite, convince, insist, and no doubt question phrases and words, to alter their position on the field, or sign a redrafted lease for new housing. He anchors the score with decisions either weighed or played with latitude. The pianist’s feet move across different tongues as pedals. Poem 2 provides a possible mantra for Brinton’s approach to this task, as if he was,
[...] living a door’s years as it opens
before it closes again
When you unlock this new door, this time as a reader, fingerprint callisthenics gently press on the startled eyeball in each word.
As its basis, the translation of poetry hands over a set of practical keys, kink and quirk to the lock, which should at least enable us access, to see where the windows are. The translation of poetry at its best, will allow us to look through those windows, unhindered in our own side-to- side translation of what we read in real time. What survives wood-stains the silence, leads us to a polished oak shoot behind the hidden panel, through which we slide back to the original verse.
Put simply, → you will see four shores, through four windows, through ④Poems.
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Please join me in congratulating Ian, Richard, and Ian, in launching this fresh translation of Samuel Beckett’s ④Poems.
Nathan Shepherdson 09.06.2024
i This poem was written for use by Morton Feldman for his opera/non-opera Neither.
Books available for purchase at Jan Manton Gallery
Top Image: Shore IV (After Samuel Beckett) 2020
Indian ink, Zecchi ink and graphite on Khadi paper 44 x 48 cm (framed)