Still Learning

Got back into my reading of the chunky Lowell Collected this weekend after a bit of a lay-off, and am particularly glad I did so.

Two reasons for this, the first being that I got to read two variant versions of his early poem, The Drunken Fisherman, the 'official' version of which featured in Lowell's 1946 collection Lord Weary's Castle. As I read the variant in the appendices I thought I recognised the poem from somewhere with some delight since it sounded so good. I had to do a bit of toing and froing to figure out where I'd met it before but this was worth it as I ended up reading it a few times, and it just got better, as poems sometimes do - the special ones. In the notes at the back of the volume the editors provide a much earlier, and very different version of the poem from RL's time as an undergraduate. Very accomplished for a very young writer, but not a patch on the 1946 version, which bears out Lowell's frequent claim that he was more of a re-writer than a writer. (I'm writing that without a direct reference in view, but I'm pretty sure he said something like that.)   

The second reason for my general gladness is that after the section with The Drunken Fisherman there's a whole segment of the appendices devoted to RL's translations of poems by Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, the great Russian writers from the Stalin era. For some reason these came as a bit of a relief from the typical themes of the Collected, and pretty much every poem I've read so far has really hit the spot for me. In fact, I've found myself happily forced to do a bit of reading-up on the two Russians and realised there is a terrible hole in my knowledge of 20th century literature. This isn't to say that I'd not heard of them before or had a sense of just how admired and important they are, but now I feel I've been forced into a genuine engagement with work of enormous importance.

Exactly how I've managed to avoid any real engagement with them until my grand old age I really don't know. And this makes me feel really stupid. But usefully so. One of the pleasures of reading. Oh, and since I'm harping on about learning new things here's a link to an informatively appreciative account of Anna Akhmatova's work and importance by the excellent Clive James, from which I learnt a great deal.