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T.S. Eliot in Translations

I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought[1].

As his old persona Gerontion acknowledged in 1920, T. S. Eliot did not fight in World War I which at its outbreak found him stranded in London, nor would he later fight in World War II because he was too old to be enlisted. As an American citizen at the time of the first war, he nevertheless tried – in vain – to enlist in the US Navy in the months leading to the Armistice despite his poor physical condition, which “had made active service impossible, though he felt sure that he had something to offer military intelligence[2]”.

He did not use his poetry either as a language weapon against the enemy or as a patriotic enhancement, or as a vector of hope as the French poets of the Résistance did during the years of Occupation in World War II,[3] and made his case about not doing so in “Poetry and Wartime.[4]” In this short piece broadcast on BBC Sweden in July 1942 as a reply to those who were wondering about the silence of “war poets,” Eliot first distinguishes between “patriotic poetry, poetry which expresses and stimulates pride in the military virtues of a people [and] asking poets to write poetry arising out of their experience of war.” About the former he reminds readers, “very little first-rate poetry of this kind there is in any language and how little of that has ever been written in the middle of a great war”. For that matter, he exemplifies Homer’s Iliad which was not written during the Trojan war and where the Greeks “appear rather more unpleasant than the Trojans.” And when “poetry of patriotic intensity can be inspired by the awareness of a foreign threat to native liberty or by sorrow at defeat or by indignation at oppression,” as in Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” he remarks that “there is no first rate poem about the victory over the Armada or the Battle of Trafalgar.”

About the latter, that is, the poets expected to poetize their war experience, Eliot suggests that such an experience cannot be understood “with the kind of understanding needed for writing poetry (…) while you are in the midst of it, (…) and after it is likely to bear fruit in something very different from what during time of war people call ‘war poetry’.” That stated, Eliot distinguishes between the duty of the poet as a man and as a poet, the former being that of any citizen towards his country, the latter being “towards his native language, to preserve and to develop that language […] And the artist who will do the most in this way for his own people, will be the artist great enough, like Shakespeare, to give something precious not only to his own country but to the whole of Europe.[5]” The same could hold to the other side of the medal. In Eliot’s aesthetics, poetry isn’t an ‘art of peace’ either. One could even reverse his quip on “where are the war poets”: if the question has eventually vanished, it might be, Eliot suspects, “that those who asked [it] were not the sort of people who take an intelligent interest in poetry in time of peace.” And vice-versa, for very few people have ever wondered where the ‘peace poets’ are.

If there are poems by Eliot that encapsulate his reasoning, “Gerontion” would be one of them, with the poet suggesting “the impossibility of heroism[6]”, siding with those who were too old, feeble, wretched or disowned to take part in the violence and who mostly couldn’t but endure it. The Waste Land, whose 100th anniversary was celebrated last year, would certainly pertain to all three points made by the poet as far as “war poetry” is concerned: not written in the midst of the war, not dealing with patriotic emotion, nor with the war as such, but certainly reaching at preserving and developing his native language, and beyond, by giving ‘something precious not only to his own country but to the whole of Europe’: a dramatic, polyphonic, ironic, aching verbal picture of a fractured conscience, a dismantled continent and a ruined culture. The same could be said of Four Quartets, Eliot’s poetic testament in the form of a long and ample meditation on language and the use of poetry, dealing incidentally with World War II.

Deeply embedded in his verse, from his visible foreign quotes in ‘’The Waste Land” to his hidden ones in the four “Quartets”, and in his philologic struggle with language throughout his poetic career, lies Eliot’s interest in having his poems translated in foreign languages. Or, to paraphrase and quote Walter Benjamin, it would rather be Eliot’s poems that are calling for translation:

“Translation is a mode. In order to grasp it as such, we have to go back to the original. For in it lies translation’s law, decreed as the original’s translatability. […] if translation is a mode, then translatability must be essential to certain works. […] Translations that are more than transmissions of a message are produced when a work, in its continuing life, has reached the age of its fame. (…) In them the original’s life achieves its constantly renewed, latest and most comprehensive unfolding[7].”

And maybe Eliot would have intuitively agreed with Benjamin:

“Poetry is a constant reminder of all the things that can only be said in one language and are untranslatable. […] But I have also found sometimes that a piece of poetry, which I could not translate, containing many words unfamiliar to me, and sentences which I could not construe, conveyed something immediate and vivid, which was unique, different from anything in English – something which I could not put into words and yet felt that I understood. […] So in poetry you can, now and then, penetrate into another country, so to speak, before your passport has been issued or your ticket taken[8].”

Thus, it is to this voyage – passports and tickets free – into T. S. Eliot’s language and its translations in other tribes’ idioms, that we invite Arts of War and Peace readers by means of this collection of essays originally prompted by an International Conference held in Paris in October 13-14th, 2022, as part of the “The Waste Land” anniversary celebrations, to assess whether Eliot’s poetic œuvre has “reached the stage of their continuing life [Fortleben]”[9].

“Gerontion” is also the starting point of Chloé Thomas’ quadrilingual exploration of the afterleben of what has now become an elotian famous trope – the ‘wilderness of mirrors,’ as a feature of the modernist Western fractured conscience, which she tracks down from Swiss writer Max Frisch’s Gatenbein to American James J. Angleton’s use of modernist poetry in his work as chief of counter-intelligence for the CIA during the Cold War, crossing to “The Waste Land”, via Matthew’s desertum, Chateaubriand’s American “desert”, Curtius’ wüste Land  and Dino Buzzati’s Il Deserto dei Tartari, reminding us incidentally of the acquaintance between poetry and investigation, Eliot being, besides the world renowned poet, dramatist and critic, a detective stories fan and a regular of “The Baker Street Irregulars” – A Sherlock Holmes’ London dining club – “Every writer owes something to Holmes[10]”, he famously said while reviewing The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories for The Criterion. Every translator “looking for the right balance between the hackneyed and the hapax, [is] as ever […] walking in forest dark” echoes Thomas.

Translations are hardly disconnected from the ethos of the translators and from the historical backdrop against which they were worked and reworked. The context in which poetic pieces are translated brings insights into the reception of the poet by the cultural and linguistic area to which it is transferred. This is what Natalia Carbajosa Palmero and Dídac Llorens-Cubedo demonstrate by showing how the censors of Franco’s regime approached Eliot’s plays and how translators have designed authorial strategies to dodge the regime’s censorship. Dean Slavic adopts a similar approach, paralleling the various translations of “The Waste Land” with Croatia history, from the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to its newly regained full independence. This process of contextualization becomes all the more interesting when set in a post-colonial framework as César E. Jumpa Sanchez explores “The Waste Land” translations beyond the surface of Latin-American modernismo and seemingly beyond the various ‘castellano’, the variations of castillan spoken in Hispanic America, in which the poem has been translated. Another post-colonial reading of “The Waste Land” is Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec’s study of Monique Lojkine-Morelec’s new translation [https://artswarandpeace.univ-paris-diderot.fr/2023/03/27/t-s-eliot-terre-en-desherence-the-waste-land-1922/]  (the first one in French by a woman), insofar as gendered and intersectional approaches are part of a general and wider process of decolonization of (white male) Western culture – and as such T. S. Eliot becomes a gigantic monument to deconstruct.

However, despite Eliot’s fondness for France and the deep effect its poetry had on his own, there is only one – very incomplete – collection of his poems dating back from the late forties though regularly revised through 1969 by its translator Pierre Leyris[11].  Whereas, there are as many as fifteen translations of “The Waste Land” in Italian – a patent homage of Dante’s country to a poetry that owes so much to its miglior fabbro – which allows Stefano Maria Casella to make a thorough comparison of the main ones, showing their “improvements” decade after decade.

Translation isn’t only about linguistic languages. And though Eliot was rather reluctant to have his poetry translated into visual forms, visuals artists did find visionary inspiration in his poems, adding to the ongoing question of losses and gains in translation whether linguistic or medial. Steve Dixon went as far as translating “The Waste Land” not only into a movie but into a pedagogical tool to introduce his Asian students to the epitome of European culture, and in the process building bridges with their own culture.  Mohit Abrol and Norbert Gacek, both study graphists attempts to transfer Eliot’s poems into comic or graphic books. Abrol explores how Martin Rowson’s “Wasteland “(1990) and Julian Peters’ “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (2018) revisit “the emotional articulateness and inarticulateness present in Eliot’s poetry and focuses on how they both foster an active sensory connection between the reader and the book considered as a material object rich with visual, tactile, audible, and even olfactive and gustative stimulations[12],” Gacek first uncovers Neil Gaiman’s references to “The Waste Land” in his graphic novel titled “The Sandman,” and then demonstrates how the artist commented on and interacted with these references with a transformative effect as he turns the poet’s “handful of dust” into “a regenerative, promise-bearing handful of grain and later of yarn[13],” bearing on the solar side of the poem.

For all his melancholy, Eliot himself had a solar side, writing so-called “light verse” – The Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats – that were eventually turned into Cats, one of the bestselling musicals ever, and which maybe exemplify and anticipate best his long lasting quest for a style of “writing [that] may eventually become popular. From one point of view, the poet aspires to the condition of the music-hall comedian[14]”. Similarly, translation may be a solitary, lumbering, low-profile task, but it has also a solar side which Ester Díaz Morillo explores in showing how Spanish-speaking translators tap funnily into Hispanic pop culture (such as José Escobar’s comics, Zipi y Zape) to achieve their cultural (re)creations of Eliot’s cat characters.

Pascale-Marie Deschamps*

Notes

[1] T. S. Eliot, « Gerontion » I 3-6, The poems of T.S. Eliot, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, London: Faber & Faber, 2015-2016, p. 31-33.

[2] Matthew Hollis, The Waste Land. A Biography of a Poem, London: Faber & Faber, 2022, p. 19.

[3] Pierre Seghers, La Résistance et ses poètes, 2 volumes, Paris, Éditions Seghers, 2022.

[4]T. S. Eliot, “Poetry and Wartime”, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, Volume 6: The War Years, 1940-1946, ed. David E. Chinitz and Ronald Schuchard, The Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber Ltd, 2015, p. 326-328.

[5] Ibid., p. 327. Eliot will develop this idea in “The Social Function of Poetry” (1943), reprinted in On Poetry and Poets, 1957, CP6, p. 436-446.

[6] Mervyn W. Williamson, “T. S. Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’: A Study in Thematic Repetition and Development”, Texas Studies in English, 1957, Vol. 36 (1957), p. 112.

[7] Walter Benjamin, “The Translator’s Task” (1923), trans. Steven Rendall, in TTR : traduction, terminologie, rédaction, vol. 10, n° 2, 1997 (151-165), p. 152 and 154.

[8] T. S. Eliot, “The Social Function of Poetry,” in CP6, op. cit. p. 444.

[9] Walter Benjamin, op. cit., p. 153.

[10] The Criterion, VIII, 32 (April 1929) in T. S. Eliot, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, Volume 3: Literature, Politics, Belief, 1927-1929, ed. Frances Dickey, Jennifer Formichelli, Ronald Schuchard, The Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber Ltd., 2015, p. 605. See also Priscilla Preston, “A Note on T. S. Eliot and Sherlock Holmes,” The Modern Language Review, vol. 54, No. 3 (July 1959), p. 397-399.

[11] Premiers poèmes, éd. bilingue, trad. Pierre Leyris, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1976. There are also two translations of  “The Waste Land” published in a literary review: « La Terre vague », traduction et présentation de Michel Vinaver, Po&sie, 1984, n°31 ; « The Waste Land, suivi des notes de l’auteur », traduction de Benoît Tadié, Po&sie, 2020, vol. 4, n°174, p. 119-138. Le Seuil has also published two collections of essays by T. S. Eliot and his major plays, all translated by Henri Fluchère.

[12] Lise Chenal, « T.S. Eliot in Translations: Exploring T.S. Eliot’s Afterlives », Transatlantica, 2, 2022, p. 3.

[13]  Lise Chenal, ibid.

[14] T. S. Eliot, “Lecture I, Introduction,” inThe Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, Volume 4: English Lion, 1930-1933, ed. Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard, The Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber Ltd., 2015. p. 590.

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CONTENTS

 

ROUNDTABLE

By way of a foreword, we are pleased to present the recording of a roundtable with prominent translators of “The Waste” Land in French (Benoît Tadié), Italian (Carmen Gallo), Spanish (Andreu Jaume) and German (Norbert Hummelt) who offer a masterclass in the workings of their craft. The session closes with a multilingual reading of the beginning of part V of the poem “What the Thunder Said”, including Polish (Magda Heydel), Croatian (Dean Slavic), Flemish (Ruth Alison Clemens), and Peruvian (César Jumpa Sanchez).

 

ARTICLES

Chloé Thomas
‘A Wilderness of Mirrors’: Eliot, Max Frisch and the CIA

Natalia Carbajosa Palmero and Dídac Llorens-Cubedo
Few and far between: Translations of T. S. Eliot’s Drama in Spanish

Dean Slavic
“The Waste Land” in Croatia

César E. Jumpa Sanchez
“The Waste Land” retranslated: a Hispano-American Way of Assimilation

Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec
Hidden translation and Intersectionality: Monique Lojkine-Morelec’s translation of “The Waste Land.”

Stefano Maria Casella
‘Hypocrites traducteurs:’ on some aspects of Italian translations of “The Waste Land”

Steve Dixon
Ontological conundrums: translating The Waste Land into a film

Mohit Abrol
Exploring Eliot’s lyric personae, their traumatic encounters and transmedial afterlives

Norbert Gacek
Hope in a handful of stories. T. S. Eliot’s « The Waste Land » and Neil Gaiman’s « The Sandman »

Ester Díaz Morillo
Ad-Dressing the Playful Translation of Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats”

OTHER FEATURES

A Conversation with Pierre-Yves Macé and Joris Lacoste, by Pascale-Marie Deschamps on their translation of “The Waste Land” in concrete music and French (with an excerpt of their concert-installation shown in London, Paris, and Toulouse for the 100th anniversary of T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece).

REVIEW

Pascale-Marie Deschamps
What is in a title? ‘The Waste Land”, A biography of a Poem, by Matthew Hollis

 

* Pascale-Marie Deschamps is a PhD student at LARCA, Université Paris Cité. Her dissertation supervised par Pr. Antoine Cazé deals with the problematic reception of T. S. Eliot in France. She organized the « T. S. Eliot in Translations » Conference from which stems this special issue of Arts of War and Peace.

 

Home page illustration : T.S. Eliot, UK Royal mail stamp, 2006 (reproduction of a painting by Patrick Heron (1949), the National Portrait Gallery, London)

Modernist Reconstructions

This chess set (photo © Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec), produced by Henriot in Quimper during the 1930s, was designed by Jeanne Malivel (1895-1926) and Pierre Abadie-Landel (1896-1972). Jeanne Malivel’s crucial role in creating the Ar Seiz Breur  (the Seven Brothers) arts movement in Brittany is  celebrated this spring at the Bibliothèque Forney in Paris, in an exhibition devoted to her brilliant but short-lived artistic career of approximately one decade. Her early works feature testimonial sketches of wounded soldiers that she helped to reconstruct—and heal—as a volunteer nurse during World War I.  In addition to being an accomplished painter with watercolors and oils, from her studio in Loudéac she also created  modernist reconstructions of traditional Breton folk arts through diverse techniques, including engravings, embroidery, ceramics, and Breton Art-Deco furniture design—even  to such fine detail as hinges, locks, and keys. Many of these works figured in the room she actively promoted and designed  for the Brittany Pavillon, Ty Breiz, at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925. 

Most of the articles in this number refer to writers active from the time of World War I to the period of high modernism in the 1920s, but the wars discussed range across the twentieth century, through the Cold War, and  including the first Gulf War (1991).  The thematic idea for this number, as well as a number of contributions, originated at the SAES 2017 in Reims. The Société d’anglicistes de l’enseignement supérieur had chosen as its theme  “(re)construction(s)” and,  conjugated by the Société d’études modernistes for its first SAES workshop, the notion of  “Modernist Reconstructions” emerged.  Some of those who participated in the workshop were delighted to discover the stylish architecture of modernist reconstructions that Reims offers, as well as the stained-glass Chagall windows in the Cathedral, with their hue of medieval  blue. Readers unfamiliar with the SEM, which co-sponsors this seventh number of Arts of War and Peace, may discover more about the association, founded in 2013,  at https://sem-france.org

Hélène Aji contributed a piece suggesting that the obscenity of World War I unfolds as a kind of psychosis in Ezra Pound’s mind, becoming visible in his poetry as early as 1917, and resulting in a fascist reconstruction within his works. Noëlle Cuny‘s paper focuses on the friendship between H.D. and D.H. Lawrence during the years 1915-1917,  her influence on Lawrence’s writing, and the attraction of classical Greek culture for both poets. Nathaniel Davis offers an exploration of language registers and foreign accents as reconstructed in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Alexandre Ferrere parses the representations of nuclear war in a poem by Gregory Corso and then Allen Ginsberg’s experiences with sound poetry in a pacifist protest poem composed from 1971 to 1991.  Margaret Gillespie‘s paper examines works by Rebecca West and Djuna Barnes, and their portrayals of gender identity, as a counter to more stereotyped representations of women during the period of World War I and the period that followed. Both West and Barnes put forward “a powerful denunciation of the perversion and inhumanity of warfare.” Olivier Hercend turns to Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, showing how they were appalled by violence and how their texts promote introspection about the war and the public discourse and ideology that enabled it. Pauline Macadré examines several novels of Virginia Woolf, finding remnants of violence as a way of re-enacting the reality of war and warn about propaganda, while evoking also Woolf’s own “waste land”.

Two reviews offer other perspectives. Olivier Hercend gives insights for  Modernist Objects (2020), edited by Noëlle Cuny and Xavier Kalck.  Mathieu Duplay reviews the first performance of Nixon in China at Opéra Bastille in Paris.

There are also  new poems by Ron Smith whose collection That Beauty in the Trees will appear in April 2023.  Monique Lojkine-Morelec brings  a new French translation of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land  that  will be appreciated by students and critics alike.  Eliot’s original notes  were apparently a kind of farcical addendum to the poem, ensuring in 1922 that the work contained enough pages to be published in an individual volume, and here Lojkine’s detailed notes offer considerable clarity and insight.

In jest, let it also be mentioned that the centennial celebrations for the poem The Waste Land almost coincide with the first decade of Arts of War and Peace. Sylvain-Karl Gosselet, Mark Meigs and I, together with all the contributors for this number,  wish you excellent reading.

Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec

 

ARTICLES

Olivier Hercend
Deconstructing consent: education, ideology and conflict in Jacob’s Room and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Pauline Macadré
The reconstruction of meaning amid “shells, bones and silence”: Woolf’s retrieving of reality among the relics of war

Noëlle Cuny
H.D. and D.H Lawrence, eros and the war

Hélène Aji
Obscene Modernity: Ezra Pound against the Great War

Nathaniel Davis
“That was thinking in Spanish”: Translated Style and Interlingual Strangeness in Hemingway

Margaret Gillespie
Gender and war: modernist reconfigurations in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918) and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936)

Alexandre Ferrere
Bombs, Shapes and Sounds: A joint analysis of Gregory Corso’s “Bomb” and Allen Ginsberg’s “Hum Bom!”

 

REVIEWS

Olivier Hercend
Modernist Objects, edited by Noëlle Cuny and Xavier Kalck

Mathieu Duplay
“From Vision to inheritance”: Nixon in China at the Opéra Bastille 

 

CREATION

Ron Smith
Three Poems

 

TRANSLATION

Monique Lojkine-Morelec
T.S. Eliot, Terre en déshérence / The Waste Land (1922)

 

 

 

Women’s War Writing

Introduction

The world as we knew it has greatly changed since November 2015 when the ERIBIA[1] seminar that inspired this number took place. At the Université de Caen Normandie, we gathered to correlate issues regarding gender and war writing genres, questioning if there are specific “female” narrative strategies when it comes to writing about the war and also what women’s war writings reveal about their role in these conflicts. We wondered if differences in narrative strategies emerge between prose, poetry, and creative non-fiction genres within war writing genres. And finally, we asked an important question still relevant today: can women be war heroines in Anglophone literature?

At that time, we were looking back upon women’s writings of World War I, World War II, and the Iraqi Wars. We could not know that women would also confront the Coronavirus global pandemic in 2020 and 2021, being present on a different, yet equally mortal, front. Studies indicate that women bore the brunt of the epidemic with additional household chores, financial and economic stressors, expectations of absorbing “care” tasks with a further increased mental load, rises in domestic violence, and managing work from home and child care simultaneously.[2] Not to mention, many women are front-line and essential workers—according to 2020 United Nations data, 70% of health workers and first responders are women at the global level.[3] If the pandemic has drawn our attention to these numerous gender inequities through a new perspective, only time will tell if societies will work to create better gender economic and domestic balance. 

As the world watched Russian forces inch closer to Ukraine, the invasion officially began on February 24, 2022, following the Donbas War of 2014. Within the first 10 days of conflict, 1.5 million Ukrainians, most of whom were women and children, fled the country.[4] For those that remain behind, the Kremlin’s violation of international humanitarian laws means that women are in constant mortal danger as civilians as well as victims of increased sexual violence. Some women are directly engaged in the fighting, or they are taking up support roles. While we have access to more images and information regarding this war, we do not know how, when, or if, this conflict will end. Conceding that in 2015 we were asking ourselves why we should interest ourselves in women’s war writing and testing the question if gender is really that relevant, these two historic moments make it clear that the question of women’s war writing is still all too pertinent.

In this number, women’s war writing is considered to be texts of different genres by women that address concepts and consequences of war. Sometimes, women’s war writing shows up where we least expect it. One of the English-language’s all-time favorite fiction writers, Agatha Christie, was herself a woman writing about war. The Mysterious Affair at Styles(1920) originated from Ms. Christie’s time on her hands working at the dispensary. Her war work equally prepared her with a knowledge of medicine, and more importantly for her future writing, poisons. Here is where we see the influence of World War I on her work, and the writer speaks even more candidly about World War II in Taken by the Flood (1949). In this Hercules Poirot novel, Christie portrays a young woman, Lynn Marchmont, who has returned from the war, having worked as a WREN (Women’s Royal Naval Service). Her war experience does more than provide a background for the story: it gives readers a young heroine with a war story nearly comparable do that of Jake Barnes’s in The Sun Also Rises (1926). Unsettled at home, she refuses to pursue her marriage, and her war experience sets her off on another type of adventure.

What is striking here is that while we expect a good mystery from Agatha Christie, we do not usually turn to Poirot or Miss Marple for women’s war writing. Yet here it is: although Christie herself was not on the front of either World Wars, she manages to capture the female experience of a young woman who has seen too much of the world to settle down happily in Warmsley Vale. Lynn’s interior struggle becomes the subplot of the novel. When taking Christie’s examples into consideration, we realize that women were affected by both World Wars and that women’s presence in war conditions has had an effect on social progress.

This collection of essays, critical translations, film reviews, and a short memoir of the Normandy liberation, aims to offer a range of exemplars on how women’s war experiences, put into writing or film, reflect or solicit social progress regarding women’s rights and equality in American and European societies throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Working chronologically, we begin with Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec‘s analysis of women poets writing of World War I, notably how these poems plead for peace.  Kilgore-Caradec takes us through issues of canonized “war poetry” and the efforts to collect women poet’s WWI experiences into anthologies, placing Teresa Hooley, Carola Oman, May Weddenburn Cannan, and numerous others on our reading radars. In her contribution, Jennifer Shelton focuses more precisely on the nursing stories of Mary Borden, questioning the gender of war and its representation in Borden’s collection The Forbidden Zone (1929). Angelika Schober turns our attention to Edith Stein, again questioning the link between gender and war writing. Canonized as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Stein’s autobiography, Life in a Jewish Family, bears witness to what Jewish life was like in Germany before 1933, focusing on daily life experiences, particularly those of women. To round out the study of women’s writing of WWI, Sarah Montin has translated three poems from Mary Borden, Edith Sitwell, and Eavan Boland, in an effort to open up this women’s war writing to a Francophone audience. Anne Mounic (1955-2022) also makes Katherine Mansfield’s “Indiscreet Journey” and “The Fly” accessible in French through her translations. We offer this posthumous publication as an homage to Anne’s career and poetic legacy. Clementine Tholas has reviewed two period short films, Love and Duty (1916) and A.W.O.L (1919), to demonstrate women’s role in the context of the United States’ intervention in WWI.

As regards to WWII, Amy D. Wells has translated Thérèse Touzeau-Lemarchand‘s short memoire of the liberation of Caen and its surrounding villages. Mme Touzeau’s testimony yet again brings to the forefront the daily experience of women in a war zone: where do women sleep among the ruins, what do they eat, and what they want more than anything—to be reunited with their families.

Transitioning to the 21st century, Aude Pivin offers French translations of contemporary American poet Rosanna Warren’s conflict-inspired texts “The Twelth Day” (2009) and “Fire” (2011). Amy D. Wells returns with her article focusing on the long war with Iraq and Afghanistan, analyzing how American female soldiers are represented in the three different genres of memoir, journalism, and fiction with sources dating from 2003-2015. To wrap up this number, Emilie Cheyroux studies how women leaders are portrayed regarding gender boundaries in the films Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Sicario (2015).

Returning to one of our initial questions—can women be war heroines in Anglophone literature—we hope readers will find an answer for themselves as they discover these analyses, poems, and the memoir. As the international situations of the COVID pandemic and the Russian war on Ukraine demonstrate, women’s writings about war and their experiences therewithin, are still pertinent in 2022. This number gives voice to women of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and we invite you to listen to what that have to say in regards to their own artistic expressions and necessary social changes for better gender balance in the public and private spheres.

Amy D. Wells

Université de Caen Normandie
ERIBIA

19 July 2022

 

[1] Équipe de recherche interdisciplinaire sur la Grande-Bretagne, l’Irlande et l’Amérique du Nord, Université de Caen Normandie, https://eribia.unicaen.fr/

[2] UN Women, “UN Women surveys reveal that women are bearing the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic”, unwomen.org, 23 July 2020, https://data.unwomen.org/news/un-women-surveys-reveal-women-are-bearing-brunt-covid-19-pandemic.
Moira Wyton, “How Women Will Bear the Brunt of This Pandemic”, TheTyee.ca,19 Mar 2020, https://thetyee.ca/News/2020/03/19/Women-To-Lose-Most-From-Coronavirus-Fallout/.
Pallavi Gogoi, “Stuck-At-Home Moms: The Pandemic’s Devastating Toll On Women”, npr.org, 28 October, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/10/28/928253674/stuck-at-home-moms-the-pandemics-devastating-toll-on-women?t=1658218970290.

[3] UN Women, “COVID-19 and its economic toll on women: The story behind the numbers”, unwomen.org, 16 september 2020, https://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2020/9/feature-covid-19-economic-impacts-on-women.

[4] Ionela Ciolan, “Putin’s war on Ukrainian women”, epc.eu, 8 March 2022, https://www.epc.eu/en/Publications/Putins-war-on-Ukrainian-women~468c8c.

_______________

 

ARTICLES

Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec
Women Writing World War I in Poetry: The Long Angle Towards Peace

Jen Shelton
Mary Borden: Women’s Work and War Writing

Angelika Schober
Ecrire la guerre au féminin ? Edith Stein et la Première Guerre mondiale

Anne Mounic
Continuité pastorale contre rupture tragique : ‘Voyage indiscret’ et ‘La Mouche’ de Katherine Mansfield.

Amy D. Wells
Between Myth and Memoir: American Female Soldiers’ Writing of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

NEW WORKS

Thérèse Touzeau-Lemarchand, translated by Amy Wells
‘Mon Histoire du débarquement’

TRANSLATION

Sarah Montin
Poems of War: Mary Borden, Edith Sitwell, Eavan Boland

Anne Mounic
« Voyage indiscret » (« An Indiscreet Journey, » May 1915) et

« La Mouche » (« The Fly ») de Katherine Mansfield

Aude Pivin
« Le douzième jour » et « Feu » de Rosanna Warren.

REVIEWS

Clementine Tholas
Film Review: Fearing empowered Womanhood during World War One? Love and Duty (1916) and A.W.O.L. (1919)

Emilie Cheyroux
Film Review: Women Leaders in War Movies: Zero Dark Thirty, Sicario, and gender boundaries

Migrant from green fields: Wilfred Owen in France

Introduction

England one by one had fled to France, 
Not many elsewhere now, save under France 
“Smile, Smile, Smile”, ll. 21-3

Wilfred Owen could not anticipate that he too would be among the many who, having “fled” their country to go to war, would find their last resting place under France. Thus he lies in the cemetery at Ors (French commune graced by the construction of the Maison Forestière Owen in 2011), eternally exiled in “some corner of a foreign field”. The 2018 conference “Wilfred Owen and/in France”, organized at the university of Valenciennes with Brigitte Friant-Kessler and in conjunction with the Oxford Center for Life-Writing, wished to celebrate Owen’s French trajectory by offering both a centennial commemoration of his life and a reconsideration of the role France had on his growth as a man and as a poet. 

Already familiar with Brittany through childhood trips with his father, Owen arrived in Bordeaux with “good schoolroom French” (Kerr, 258) in 1913 to teach English at the Berlitz school. From there, he explored the south of France and stayed notably in Bagnères-de-Bigorre in the Pyrenees, only to return in January 1917, this time to northern France and the Somme battlefields. Owen had thus first-hand emotional, linguistic and artistic knowledge of France, something most of his fellow war poets lacked, Sassoon and Graves included. Owen’s undeniable French connections have however never been studied extensively before, outside of punctual references to symbolist and decadent literary influences in his canonical scholarship. This anniversary issue aims to highlight whatever “Frenchness” animated “Monsieur Owen” and if and how this influenced his career as a poet. It also attempts to compensate the relative dearth of French scholarship on Wilfred Owen who, despite being officially memorialized and inscribed in France’s national “Chemins de la mémoire”, has garnered rather scant academic scrutiny and  public recognition over the years to the point where one could say he has not yet been properly received in France. 

This issue of The War and Peace Review thus aims to reconsider the links between Wilfred Owen and France and, conversely, between France and Wilfred Owen. What did France represent to a young Georgian poet who ― unlike his modernist counterparts  quick to adopt France as their literary homeland ― was not enamored with French literature and fought, above all, “to perpetuate the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote” (CL, 300)? What recognition and posterity does he have in France? Can one speak of a French Owen as there is a French Joyce and even a French Eliot and if not, why? 

The first section of this issue attempts to map the contours of France’s influence over Owen’s poetic trajectory and the maturation of his form and style. Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec’s paper ventures into overlooked sources in her study of Laurent Tailhade’s influence on Owen’s budding poetic vocation, as well as the young poet’s exposure to Francophone novelists and poets such as Barbusse, Duhamel, Péguy, Verhaeren, Flaubert, Mallarmé, Apollinaire and Hugo. Through an extensive analysis of “Spring Offensive”, Laure-Hélène Anthony Gerroldt studies Owen’s representations of the French landscape, perpetually caught in a dialogue with the poet’s British heritage. This paper is completed by Thomas Vuong’s own analysis of Owen’s ambivalent Franco-British imaginary, qualifying the importance of French influence in his work through a study of his landscapes, his use of French words and his sonnet rhyming schemes. Finally, Jérome Hennebert’s paper examines how Wilfred Owen’s lyricism became “objective” partly under Keats’s aegis and that of the 19th century symbolist poets Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine, decentering the lyric subject in a manner which announces the modernist movement. 

 A second section focuses on Owen’s reception in France. What exactly is Owen’s critical and popular posterity in France, and by whom is he read? Sarah Montin’s paper explores the ambiguities of the poet’s reception in France, from the 1920’s to 2020, through the lens of academic and intellectual criticism, creative appropriation and translation. The following papers act as companion pieces, giving a voice to two important “passeurs” of Wilfred Owen in France; poet, translator and publisher Emmanuel Malherbet and Belgian novelist and translator Xavier Hanotte

The third section covers biographical questions, allowing for fresh insights into Owen’s formative years in France. Gilles Couderc’s in-depth exploration of his time in Bordeaux and the Pyrenees between 1913 and 1915 sheds new light on understudied parts of Owen’s poems, language, life and correspondence while Roland Bouyssou’s paper offers a broader overview of the poet’s trajectory in France. Paul Elsam’s aural-accentual study opens new lines of inquiry such as the manner in which speaking French shaped not only Owen’s personality but also the manner in which he spoke. Finally, Neil McLennan’s paper discusses Owenian aspects of the “Auld Alliance”, offering an analysis of Owen’s Franco-Scottish influences and Owen’s little-discussed meetings with Albertina Marie Dauthieu, a Frenchwoman living in Scotland, whose interactions with Owen provide new glimpses into his life.              

To conclude, the fourth section of this issue is meant to be read as a tribute, an artistic homage to Wilfred Owen with poems by Damian Grant and the first pages of Paul Elsam’s screenplay Wilfred in Love (2018). This is completed by an assortment of translations by Emmanuel Malherbet, Roland Bouyssou and Sarah Montin, from variations on classics such as “Anthem for Doomed Youth” to other less famous poems, as yet untranslated into French. 

Edited by Elise Brault-Dreux & Sarah Montin

ARTICLES

« FRENCH POEMS » AND FRENCH INFLUENCES

Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec
The French Poetry of Wilfred Owen’s Modernism

Laure-Hélène Anthony-Gerroldt
Over “the last hill” : Wilfred Owen’s “Spring Offensive

Thomas Vuong
“England one by one had fled to France”: French and British imaginaries in Wilfred Owen’s poems

Jérôme Hennebert
Dire la compassion: le lyrisme de Wilfred Owen

RECEPTION AND TRANSLATION IN FRANCE

Sarah Montin
“Journey from obscurity?”: Wilfred Owen’s reception and posterity in France

Emmanuel Malherbet, poet and translator of Owen
« Donner un sens aux brimborions » (propos recueillis par Sarah Montin)

Xavier Hanotte, poet and translator of Owen
Wilfred Owen ou la parole survivante

LIFE IN FRANCE

Gilles Couderc
Monsieur Owen en Aquitaine

Roland Bouyssou
Wilfred Owen: A War Poet’s Progress in France

Paul Elsam
“Mending my Speech”: How France helped Owen Reinvent Himself

Neil McLennan
“La Fleur et le chardon”: Wilfred Owen’s Franco-Scottish influences

AROUND WILFRED OWEN: ARTISTIC CONTRIBUTIONS

Damian Grant
Poems: “Wilfred Owen at Ors

Paul Elsam
From the screenplay Wilfred in Love (2018)

Emmanuel Malherbet
« À la jeunesse sacrifiée, une prière », « Conscience », « Inspection », « Les Appels » (poèmes traduits)

Roland Bouyssou
« Hymne pour une jeunesse au funeste destin », « Étrange rencontre », « Fête des adieux » (poèmes traduits)

Sarah Montin
« Les Aliénés » (poème traduit)

Comparative Views of World War I and World War II

Introduction

In 2011 Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec a specialist of poetry, especially war poetry, brought the project of Arts of War and Peace to LARCA at Paris Diderot. She was welcomed to LARCA by Robert Mankin who directed the Équipe d’accueil at the time. Mark Meigs, as a specialist of World War One and the cultural effects of war took on the task with Jennifer of making Arts of war and Peace a reality: an on line review dedicated to the notion that in the study of war can be found the seeds of peace and in a vigilant examination of peace agreements, negotiations and movements can be found the warnings of future wars. The two are inseparable.

Two numbers brought to the review by Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec were published in 2013 and another, edited by Mark Meigs which was the result of a conference on war photography, organized by François Brunet who succeeded Robert Mankin as director of LARCA (Le Laboratoire de recherches sur les cultures anglophones UMR 8225) , came out in 2016. Now we bring out a fourth number based on work largely collected by Clair Bowen as long ago as 2007, where articles compare aspects of the two World Wars of the 20th Century. It is as if even as our subject moves ahead in leaps and bounds bringing different  kinds of war into being with their different representations of those wars that in turn bring about different reactions and different political and cultural challenges—cyber war, weaponized news—we go backwards, looking again at the familiar tropes of European loss in the 20th Century and reaction to that loss.

Nothing could be more an expression  of an old highbrow Europe coming to grips with the destructive tragedies of World Wars than Gilles Couderc’s article on the operas and oratorios of Arthur Bliss, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten. The composers use of old forms and ancient texts with  modern forms of poetry and the studied dissonance of modern music lets us hear a shared cultural herritage bravely surviving machine guns and atom bombs. The fascinating personal connections between the composers, their mentors and contemporaries,  friends or lovers sometimes lost to war, defy war and even death in the form of music that traces its origins into the history of orchestras, courts and choirs. Then we encounter the popular music of the wars in the work of John Mullen and the costs to Europe are driven home to us. Maybe Benjamin Britten could hold so much culture together in his work in the face of destruction, but who listened or listens? It is work to perform, understand or even find a performance of Britten’s work to listen to live. Meanwhile the popular music, full of nostalgia and humor and pathos that slipped so easily from radios and phonographs into ears and lives of listeners at the time, is maybe even further from us than the work Couderc wrote of. The popular music is quaint now, a scratchy memory of the warbling voice of a particular crooner or song bird accompanied by a style of orchestration and popular dancing rhythms now dated in a way that formal music, preserved by classical rules and traditions, resists.

Our fronticepiece, is a photograph taken by Jean-Yves Caradec during a  visit corresponding to the hundredth anniversary of the armistice ending the hostilities of of World War I on the Western Front in November 2018. We see the entryway to the memorial Chapel at Belleau Wood Cemetery, one of many cemeteries maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission around the world. Caradec has focused on a detail that  bears some resemblance to the music of Benjamin Britten, Aurthur Bliss and Ralph Vaughan Williams. The sculpture is an attempt to understand the catastrophe of World War I and yet contain it in old European cultural forms. Cram and Ferguson, architects of the memorial, a chapel that is also a strong fortress tower, were part of a neo-Gothic trend in American church and academic architecture that lasted through the 1920s and beyond. Nothing represented an imagined European cultural unity better than the great cathedrals built across the continent from the 12th to the 15th Centuries. Americans could join that unity by building in a similar style. Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City is an early example of this, St. John the Divine, unfinished, is likely to be the last. The unity and strength of European culture should be celebrated and defended, the chapel fortress memorial says.  A medieval  sculptor of the capitals of these multiple columns supporting the portals of a tower, would have included a unifying, Christian symbology, but sometimes, such sculptors added profane imagery from everyday life and demons as well. The message was that Christian  religion instructs followers to look towards heaven and follow Christ, while not forgeting that our nature is very much earthbound and subject to grossness and temptation. Here, in work of the mid-1920s, the sculptor, Alfred Bottiau, shows American soldiers in their typical rolled leg coverings, shooting with guns, stabbing with bayonets, crouched and cramped as if sheltering in trenches. Can such means defend a peaceful and shared culture? What is being memorialized? Is it the shared doctrine of the Prince of Peace that cannot survive without the violence of war? Or has peace come, relegating the violence of war to  cramped space high on columns? In any case, war and peace are inextricable in this peaceful memorial space. It is that tension we all share and that we must face to get from a state of war to a state of peace and to recognize and learn to avoid in peaceful activities, the possible provocations of war.

It is interesting to note that on November 10, 2018 when President Donald Trump was scheduled to visit this monument he skipped the appointment. From his hotel room, Trump saw other dignitaries on television that day, among them Angela Merkel and Justin Trudeau. They were visiting the monuments to their countries’ dead of World War I. This motivated Trump to visit another American Battle Monuments Commission site the next day, this one at Suresne, just outside Paris. Trump was able to give a speech with the Eiffel Tower over his left shoulder, thus winning a media image battle with the leaders of Nato allies whose burial places didn’t include such a view, while snubbing his French host, Emmanuel Macron whose scheduled meeting he skipped that day. To think in terms of winning and losing in a very short term context, without  an awareness that winning may imply the use of behavior that may be a provocation for future retaliation by the loser, is exactly what the complicated design of that arch at Belleau Wood warns against. It is that relation between war and peace that our review wishes to examine. Needless to say, President Trump ignored The Peace Forum that took place the afternoon of 11 November after his performance at Suresne, again snubbing his peers, with the exception of Vladimir Putin. But who can win a Peace Forum?

In the age of Gothic architecture, Christianity held out the promise of a unifying force for Western Civilization, in the age of Trump, it is social media that holds out this promise but also provides a field for abuse. Here, the article by Cécille Vallée might be seen as the visual counterpart to John Mullen’s on popular music, moving away from highbrow realms. The images of propaganda surround us now as they surrounded participants and witnesses of the two World Wars of the 20th Century. Is this our shared culture? Vallée has concentrated mostly on British, but the same themes vilifying or mocking the enemy can be found in propaganda of other places. The ubiquity of these images and the violence of the struggle for our attention and understanding have not gone away. Any single image may be dated, but this struggle is continuous. Our awareness and ability to analyse must be continuous too. A trip to the past of gothic revival or war propaganda needn’t leave us in the past at all.

That message is underlined here by Mary Robertson’s article, “Remembrance and Imagination,” about the different destinies of the John McCrae poem of 1915, “In Flanders Fields.” The sad poem recalling the duty of the living to remember their debt to the struggles of the dead by continuing those struggles, has often been recited on Canadian Remembrance Day and memorized by school children. But it can also be quoted on Canadian banknotes printed with present value and future money exchanges in mind. Does this use of the emotional capital created by the poem for present debts, completely distort the past or carry it forward? The poem also appears on the wall of an National Hockey League team’s locker room inspiring future victories divorced from any regret about the past. In that use, memory has become as fungible as cash, which of course, unlike memory, we only carry thinking of our future needs.

The last article by Elizabeth de Cacqueray explores oral histories of women who lived through World War II  in Brighton. The author attches her work to a theory and structure of memory of war that either compose or de-compose meaning as the survivor of war progresses through life. In memories recounted by actual witnesses, rather than reconstructed from the objects of high or low culture, be they phonograph records, posters, orchestral music  or poems, war seems to have become the culture itself. “The war is our reference point still,” says one of these interviewees, after decades of peace. “Everything was authentic because we did it ‘devant la mort.’” In these memories recounted with almost no cultural references beyond the shared fears, freedoms, opportunities for women and their limits brought on by war, we cannot escape the centrality of war to people’s understanding of themselves unless we can imagine a whole generation at peace.

Technologically, Arts of War and Peace has not gone backwards either. We are able to attach links to the music and to short bits of film. And of course, our readers on line, can find their own way to recordings and films too. We hope that looking back into that rich European heritage in our own troubled times will give us a way forward. How will we understand what is going on around us without the tropes of high and low culture to compare and without the tropes of forms adopting and surviving great loss.

We have had some losses of our own. The entirely unexpected deaths of Robert Mankin (1952-2017) and François Brunet (1960-2018), both supporters of this project and both with visions of how it might work inside LARCA and be useful in larger contexts as well, have left us more determined than ever to find our way into the present of war but also the future of peace.

Edited by Mark Meigs

ARTICLES

Gilles Couderc
Bliss, Vaughan Williams, Britten: Three Great War Poets

John Mullen
Popular song in Britain during the two world wars

Cécile Vallée
 From ‘Hun’ to ‘Jerry’ : The German Enemy in British Propaganda Posters during the Two World Wars

Megan Robertson
Remembrance and Imagination: In Flanders Fields as a Cultural Tool of Collective Memory

Theresa Kaminski
Sentimental Imperialists: Ethel Thomas Herold and the Philippines

Elizabeth de Cacqueray
In Brighton Looking back – Women’s Memories of World War Two

NEW WORKS

Ron Smith
I Always Thought I’d Die

TRANSLATION

Sarah Montin
Isaac Rosenberg: poèmes de guerre (1914-1918)

REVIEWS

Cathy Parc
‘At the visionary edge’:  A Review of John Greening, To the War Poets

Thibaud Hesry
Chernow’s Grant

Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec
Wilfred Owen, or ‘1914’ in Scouse; a review of ‘Wilfred Owen in/and France’

War Images

The uncanny image of green soldiers checking their radio equipment and nightvision goggles was taken by Staff Sgt. Ryan Campbell at Fort Drum, New York on May 18, 2016 and is one of hundreds of pictures offered at any time in an ever changing gallery on the site of the United States Department of Defense (http://www.defense.gov/). It will never be an iconic image in the sense defined and elaborated by several of the articles that follow. There are too many of these photographs and they are chosen for the routine inconsequence of the moments they record. The Department of Defense presents photographs, often of remarkable aesthetic appeal, of heavily equipped soldiers doing peaceful things: sharing food with civilian populations where they are stationed, admiring sunrises and sunsets, repairing things, training, taking selfies in exotic places sometimes with exotic people grinning in the same frame. The weight of the soldier equipment seems more burden than menace in such images that embody the adage of military duty from Roman times: Si vis pacem, para bellum (To make peace prepare for war). The soldier is there and equipped. Peace seems to have arrived. But because it has been chosen for a purpose once by the Department of Defense, and now again, for a further purpose, this picture begins to share some characteristics with more famous photographs discussed in some of these articles.

The manipulation and deployment of photographic images to the point that they move beyond their paper and chemical origins to have a life as icon or memory with healing or wounding power are the subject of this issue of Arts and War of Peace Review. The changes to that process brought about by digital photography are important to several articles as well. This photograph, that probably has never existed on paper, has passed from Sgt. Campbells’s camera that gave it its porthole shape and its deliberate green tinge (easier for the human eye to see with less need for electronic enhancement), to the computers of the Defense department to my computer and now to yours. The activity it represents is peaceful in upstate New York where there is no war. There are no identifiable weapons in the picture. But the activity of perfecting night vision and the communications system that will transmit that vision can be menacing. Here the night imaging has given the soldiers pale green auras making them ghostlike or superhuman: the extent of their power is enhanced by their equipment just as the energy of their bodies seems to flow beyond their uniforms. Will this power make peace or war or bring about peace through war? Is the photograph a celebration of remarkable technology during a short night in May, or is it a threat? In previous issues, Arts of War and Peace has addressed war poetry examining and appreciating poets who by insisting on accurately and honestly recalled details and emotions have created sympathy for pacific causes. The limits of sympathy aroused by poetic depictions of the brutality of war inside the symbolic system of war have also been examined. In this issue we have war images. What could leave a more relentlessly accurate record of details and brutality than images capturing light off specific events? Photographs have been important to undertaking war as intelligence and record-keeping from early on. They have been instrumental in establishing traces of destruction and suffering as a basis for memorials, as a call for revenge or in a parallel to much modern war poetry, as a call for an end to war. They have been used in propaganda of all sorts.

Today it is a common place to say that the digital revolution has increased exponentially both the number of potential war photographers (does any soldier not carry a camera phone?) and the number of outlets, forums or sites for viewing. The contrast with poetry is interesting because iconic photographs, like the handful of well-known images from the Civil Rights era or the war in Vietnam, all credited with political as well as cultural impact, are no longer possible we learn in our articles, because of this proliferation. It is hard to imagine poetry, with comparatively fewer authors and more rarified outlets, suffering the same fate. The ubiquity of images coupled with their emotional appeal requires ever more elaborate explanation and an elaborate literacy to be of use. Sometimes they need digital manipulation by the viewer to reveal what they in fact hide. Like the green aura around the soldiers in the picture above, we sometimes see what was never there. There was comfort even in the harshest clarity of poetry. There is an urgency to learning with and from the new noniconic photosphere

Edited by Mark Meigs, May 2016.

François Brunet
Introduction

Camille Rouquet
Creation and Afterlife of the Iconic Photographs of the Vietnam War

Angeliki Tseti
Photo-textuality, Witnessing, and the Convergence of Trauma Memories in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz

Wilco Versteeg
War Beyond Photography: Digitally Embellished Imaging and Contemporary Conflicts

Gwennaëlle Cariou
For All the World to See: Memorializing the Images of the Civil Rights Movement

William Gleeson
Enhance, Engage, Reinforce, Connect: Classroom Uses of Civil War Photographs

REVIEWS

Wilco Versteeg
Timely Reflections: War Photography at Tate Modern

Gaël Schmidt-Cléach
Pop Culture for Hire: Mercenaries in the Expendables Series

INTERVIEW

Peter King on Catholic Worker Pacifism
Conducted by Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec

Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec
Note: The Pacifism and Poetics of Dorothy Day

Can Literature and the Arts Be Irenic?

“We go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.”  —Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry.

Citation  Arts of War and Peace 1.2. (November 2013)  Can Literature and the Arts Be Irenic?  http://www.awpreview.univ-paris-diderot.fr

Can literature and the arts be irenic?  How are the arts a unique vehicle for promoting peace?  How do they enhance memory?  How do the arts play a role in the formation of public opinion?  What possible effects could they have in policymaking?  How might literature and the arts be a vehicle of resistance to tyranny? While the role of epic poetry has often been to present the heroic grandeur of wars past, providing a type of justification for wars future, some poets have endeavored to depict the horrors of war in such a way that the cost of human suffering penetrates the reader’s consciousness. This issue examines and theorizes the role of literature and the visual arts in search for “positive” peace (the elimination of causes of violence and the avoidance of conflict) and the creation of a peace culture, by drawing attention to the writer or artist’s method and form, circumstantial motivation, use of memory and language as counter-propaganda, as well as reception by the public.

The importance of literary and artistic contributions to the obtaining and preservation of peace has been recognized by awards such as the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize (awarded to Mahmoud Darwish in 2003), and others, often lesser known, such as the Leeds Peace Poetry Award or the Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award. Although the connection between the arts and the search for and preservation of peace is instinctively acknowledged, its exact nature is imprecise. This issue opens considerations that should be further explored.

The word “peace” itself may be considered problematic.  Is it merely the absence of war?  Thesaurus and dictionary listings for the noun and adjectival forms of the word include the following synonyms that inspired some of the authors of this issue:  Peace, peaceful, peacefulness, concord, harmony, harmoniousness, friendship, cordiality, amity, amicableness, goodwill, accord, agreement, pacification, conciliation, truce, neutrality, ceasefire, armistice, nonaggression, nonviolence, calm, calmness, tranquility, serenity, restfulness, repose, quiet, quietness, silence, hush, still, stillness, placidity, composure, repose, relaxation, rest, restfulness, serenity, pacific, pacifist, peace-loving, unwarlike, nonviolent, nonaggressive, non-belligerent, non-combative, mild, easygoing, gentle, amiable, amicable, friendly, good-natured,  peacemaking, placid, even-tempered, irenic, dovish, conciliatory, placatory, inoffensive, pacification, peaceful, quiet, restful, serene, tranquil, undisturbed, restful, balmy, harmonious, cordial, friendly, strife-free, peaceable.

The papers offered in Arts of War and Peace 1.2 result in part from a conference held in Caen (November 2010), co-hosted with Claire Bowen, as well as several articles originally planned for a projected issue of LISA e-journal, called “Poetry of War / Poetry for Peace.”  In many ways AWP has grown out of LISA and the encouragements of Renée Dickason, who is deeply thanked for allowing several earlier papers to be printed here.

In addition the issue of Arts of War inaugurates publication of original translations. Poems by the German poet Ernest Stadler are translated into French by Julien Collonges and into English by Richard Sheppard : the expressionist “Awakening,” written in 1913, may now be read as prophetic. For readers of Stadler, other translations exist in French by Philippe Abry, Eugène Guillevic, and Lionel Richard and in English by Michael Hamburger. Closing the issus are new poems by Owen Lowery, some of which suggest memory’s role in building a desire for peace.

Edited by Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec, 8 November 2013.

Michael Rotenberg-Schwartz
The Limits of Gore and Sympathy in Pacific Poetry: Southey and Hunt against an Augustan Tradition_8nov2013

Katharine Peddie
Auden’s Revisions and the Responsibility of the Poet

Cathy Parc
A Poet Laureate’s Front-Line(s): How to Wage a War of Words for Peaceful Purposes

Claire Bowen
War Pictures for Peace: Ernst Friedrich’s War Against War

Agnès Blandeau
The irenic effect of the Middle Ages on wartime England through film: the example of A Canterbury Tale by Powell and Pressburger (1944)

Adrian Grafe
Your sort of poet’s task: Tony Harrison’s ‘A Cold Coming’

Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec
Overlord vs. the Din: Writing Poetry to Promote Peace Now

Mary Kate Azcuy
Louise Glück’s Irenic Poems, “Crater Lake” and “Averno”

Anne Mounic
The Poetic Voice and the Paradox of Plenitude

TRANSLATIONS

Deux poèmes d’Ernst Stadler traduits par Julien Collonges

“The Awakening” translated by Richard Sheppard

NEW WORKS

Poems by Owen Lowery

The Fallen & the Unfallen

The title of this inaugural issue, The Fallen & the Unfallen, is drawn, by way of homage, from Geoffrey Hill’s first collection of poems, For The Unfallen (1959).  The cover illustration is a photograph of the memorial stone for poets of World War I found in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey (unveiled November 11, 1985). The list of names is framed by a quotation from Wilfred Owen, “My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.”

Some of the papers presented in this issue result from workshops held at the University of Caen that examined poetry from First World War poets, and works inspired by them.  While the shift from the poetry of World War I to poetry about the Vietnam War may seem a bit abrupt, in fact it was soldiers’ shell shock that motivated many of Freud’s studies, leading to his theories about trauma during and immediately following World War I. Trauma theories have played a significant role in our perception of the Vietnam War.  Furthermore, it was during the Vietnam War period that war poetry from World War I came into general public appreciation.  Jon Silkin fostered a renewed appreciation of World War I Poetry in Britain, with an influence extending to other English speaking countries, by way of his periodical Stand, which in 2012 celebrated its 60th anniversary.

I would like to thank Rosanna Warren for the candor of her interview, Jon Glover, Stephen Romer and Jeffrey Wainwright for their poetry, and the contributors who have submitted state-of-the-art articles and generously offered reviews for this inaugural issue. My heartfelt thanks is also due to Michael Taugis who provided assistance and editorial footwork.

It is particularly moving for me that the inaugural issue presents work by Thomas Christopher D’Arcy and Dominic Hibberd. The former has written about war poetry and has had the personal experience of being a soldier.  The latter regrettably passed away this past August. Dominic Hibberd was a groundbreaking scholar who ensured that Wilfred Owen and Harold Monro would be of interest to future generations. He was also endowed with a pleasant spirit. It was my privilege to show him a small part of Caen and its University when he attended a workshop there in 2005.

Edited by Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec, March 2013.

Dominic Hibberd
A note on the origins of 1914-1918 ‘‘war poetry’’

Gilles Couderc
The War Requiem: Britten’s Wilfred Owen opera

Marie-Noelle Provost Vallet
Ghosts in Craiglockhart: Sassoon’s textual presence in Pat Barker’s Regeneration

Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec
Resisting the Rhetoric: Memory in the Poetry of Ivor Gurney

Roland Bouyssou
In Parenthesis: A War Liturgy

Thomas Christopher D’Arcy
War Trauma, Recovery Narration, and the Need for Resistance: The Case of D. F. Brown’s Vietnam War Poetry

Jon Glover
Truth, Introspection and Extrospection

ENCYCLOPEDIA

Jean-Michel Panoff
The Biological Targets of Chemical Weapons

REVIEWS

Antoine Capet reviews “The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World” (Tate Britain, 2011)

Monique Lojkine Morelec reviews Antoine Choplin, Le héron de Guernica (2011)

Beatrice Pire reviews Jonathan Franzen, Freedom: A Novel (2010)

Carole Birkan-Berz reviews Geoffrey Hill, Clavics (2011)

INTERVIEW

And about the Mud… Rosanna Warren

NEW WORKS

A poem by Jon Glover

Two poems by Stephen Romer

Two poems by Jeffrey Wainwright