To honor the late John Tranter, one of Australia’s finest ever poets, I thought I would share some of my favorite poems of his over the coming weeks. “Christopher Brennan” encapsulates much of what makes Tranter so special. The poem most obviously showcases his mastery of form, which fulfills the demands of the sestina so nonchalantly it seems to be at the same time a perfect representation of the form and a highly exaggerated parody. The voice: casual, ironic, conversational but detached, as if the speaker is partially distracted or worse, the poem is uninterested in itself. The poem is ostensibly a biographical sketch of the Australian poet Chirstopher Brennan, but within this portrait Tranter deals with a number of themes that occupied him over the course of his life, most notably the value of poetry (Tranter once mentioned in an interview that every eleven years or so he developed a strong distaste of poetry and questioned its worth) and how to locate Australian modernism within an international context.
Christopher Brennan was an Australian poet born in 1870. Heavily influenced by German Romanticism, he is probably best known for his 14 part cycle “The Wanderer.” Brennan was also an early enthusiast of the French Symbolists, in particular Mallarmé, to whom he sent his first collection and received back a note of praise. The poet John Hawke has written that at the turn of the 20th century there was “a stronger interest in Mallarmé’s poetic philosophy in Australia than virtually anywhere else in the English-speaking world.” Brennan was at the avant-garde of this movement. In 1897, the same year Un Coup de dés arrived on Australia’s shores, Brennan produced a handwritten facsimile of Mallarmé’s masterpiece, a parody called Prose-Verse-Poster-Algebraic- Symbolico-Riddle Musicopoematographoscope & Pocket Musicopoematographoscope. Years later, Tranter would continue this tradition by producing his own mistranslation of Un Coup de dés, “Desmond’s Coupe.”
You can read Tranter’s thoughts on Brennan’s parody here.
Christopher Brennan
He spoke German,
Fluently, and French.
One he got by study,
the other from an inclination to drink
absinthe, like the poets who were always writing
among the cafes and the bottles and the crowds of women.
How do they do it? He liked women,
though they seemed a little too German,
at times, invading the domain of writing
and buggering up his whispered amatory French
the way that a few too many drinks
would ginger up but addle the study
of his volumes of foreign verse. In the study
he worked at a huge monument to women
for an hour or two, then had a drink.
Phew! Like a good German
he had a method for everything, and like the French
he wasted it on writing
poems about feelings like writing
all through the night. His study
lamp glowed out across the Quad. Famous French
poets wrote to him, once or twice. Women
from one end of Europe to the other admired his German
manners. Ah, Heidelberg! Must be time for a drink.
Back to the heatstruck colonies. God, a drink
would go down well, eh? Those oafs writing
gibberish and hoping for a pass in German
Romantic literature, look at them, as though study
were enough! What about inspiration? The women
of Sydney are not really suited to modern French
poetry. And now Mallarme’s gone loony — too French,
if that were possible. One last drink.
In a sheep-farming province, young women
who wish to develop the discipline of writing
should take up the study
of German…
He yearned to dream in French, but all he heard was German.
He inclined to drink, and trudged through a torrent of study
And when he reached for women, they became his writing.
Go to Source
Author: Thomas Moody
