| Summary: | <p>This doctoral thesis explores how, from the mid-1960s, the influx of Eastern European poetry in translation galvanised specific developments in the Anglophone lyric and literary criticism of late modernism. Its emphasis falls on the British literary landscape, while the time frame in which I set my discussion extends from the Thaw of 1956 (the period characterised by lessening Soviet censorship and limited political and cultural liberalisation following Joseph Stalin’s death) to the mid-1970s. On many occasions, critics have noted that the mid-1960s saw the first explicit and intensified interest in poetry from beyond the Iron Curtain, but little attempt has been made to detect how this specific type of resonance manifested itself in the action, collaborations, and new initiatives characteristic of this time of stark political divisions and the impact these divisions had on the perception of Eastern Europe as cultural periphery. Drawing on archival research and using tools borrowed from translation studies, I argue that the boom of translations from Eastern Europe coincided with and contributed to changes in the printing market, while what used to be known as literary ‘influence’ begun to happen beyond the written page. Against the backdrop of the Cold War, the role of poets and critics started to change and this period saw an exceptional number of collaborative efforts, such as the establishment of new magazines; small presses; producing broadcasts; the commissioning of translations for new anthologies, and the organisation of the
first international literary festivals. All of these initiatives had a transformative effect on post-war British poetry. Drawing connections between otherwise scattered points on the map of literary history, I trace the affinities which English-speaking authors felt towards writing from Eastern Europe and explore the role and function (often abstract and symbolic) that the region, too often presented as homogenous entity, played or was hoped to play or was hoped to play in the formation of the new poetic and critical idiom that – as critic, impresario and editor Al Alvarez put it – would offer a ‘new kind of seriousness’ and galvanise British poetry to go beyond ‘the gentility principle’. This type of inquiry is as much about literary history as it is about the methodology of discussing literary resonance, global modernisms, and comparative criticism. It is important to highlight that cultural transfer, circulation, and mediation can often be indirect, vague, and imprecise. I therefore approach my materials and the commentaries of English-speaking critics and poets on Eastern Europe as narratives constructed in a given time and responding to specific needs, rather than as comprehensive introductions or reliable sources. It, therefore, important to highlight that excerpts from literary criticism from the 1960s are not endorsements of the visions critics projected on Eastern Europe in the past, but the very subject of my analysis and curiosity. This upfront clarification is crucial as throughout this thesis I will show that despite whilst the early
reception of newly translated poets was immensely enthusiastic, it has left the English-speaking audience with a ‘flattened’ image of Eastern Europe. </p>
<p>The first chapter explores matters such as resonance, circulation, and imagining in early commentaries on Eastern Europe, sketching out the general background and seeking patterns in the representation of Eastern Europe in the 1960s. The second chapter looks at the role of Modern Poetry in Translation magazine (MPT), ideas of ‘translatability’ in the Cold War era, and the time-specific, little discussed issue of striving for ‘literalness’ as a mode of translation that would allow a deeper emotional connection with the historical drama of post-war Europe. The third chapter moves on to examine proxy-witnessing and nuclear criticism in Sylvia Plath’s poetry, linking her fascination with the impossibility of voicing to survivalist narratives and characteristic of the 1960s’ interest in Holocaust poetry. The last chapter focuses on editorial fluidity, brokenness, and the fascination with translation in the absence of a source text in Ted Hughes’ Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow cycle. The selection and contextualisation of the poets and critics in my corpus centres around Alvarez, Daniel Weissbort, and Hughes and clearly does not exhaust the subject. Rather, it invites us to examine broader literary-historical issues such as brokenness, deconstruction, the ethics of speech and silence, and revision, all of which can be seen in the nexus of transcultural connections and reflected in creative works that evince shared sensitivities. By asking what happened in the world of mid-1960s English poetry that meant that the translation of unfamiliar lyric from Eastern Europe could suddenly be expected to fill the gap of seriousness, this thesis hopes to enlarge our understanding of the dialogue between the divided halves of Europe in the mid-1960s; the limits of language and translatability; and the paradoxically reintegrative return of the modernist, broken, and ‘literal’ idiom.</p>
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