Cirrus@Austlit

'Translation theorist Laurence Venuti has written how a translator, in “a Romantic transcendence” can lose “his national self through a strong identification with a cultural other.” TS Reader, 20) Australian twentieth-century poet James McAuley’s reading and translation of the early twentieth-century Austrian poet Georg Trakl presents a significant literary encounter. Cosmopolitan by nature, McAuley, as a young poet, had been drawn to, and translated, the German language lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). Few of McAuley’s translations of Trakl are included in his Collected Poems(1971 and 1994); they appear in a separate posthumous collection (1982) and in his essay “The Poetry of Georg Trakl” (1975). This article offers a literary appreciation of McAuley’s translations and his commentary on Trakl’s imagery, prosody, symbolism and world view which McAuley described, borrowing Baudelaire’s term, as “a landscape of the soul.” It considers the hypothesis of translation as travel. Drawing on Harold Bloom’s theory of influence it examines McAuley’s encounter with Trakl in his late work, translations and poetic dedication (“Trakl: Salzburg,” 1976) written after visiting Salzburg in 1973. A comparatist approach traces Trakl’s influence, the discovery of affinities or parallel paths with the earlier poet who might be considered, in Bloomian terms, to be McAuley’s “gnostic double.” ' (Publication abstract)    

'In his postmodern novel Homesickness (1980), Australian novelist Murray Bail depicts a group of Australian tourists on a package tour through diverse countries—including an unnamed African country, the UK and Ecuador—and cities of London, New York and Moscow. In addressing the archetype of the tourist, for which the mobile Australian is judged suitably representative, Bail explores the various perspectives of his diverse group in their picaresque encounters with unfamiliar, Other landscapes and people. In particular he focusses on the nature of their descriptions of such encounters in an increasingly virtual or curated world of global tourism (its museums, guides, exhibitions). This is seen in the dialogic, arguably appropriating, acts of naming, identifying, epistolary accounts (notably in postcards) and also photography, including by the group’s tellingly blind photographer. From a postcolonial perspective, Bail’s tourist group can be considered akin to the settler, albeit in a global situation in which places visited and their people are viewed as Other. This article primarily addresses Bail’s examination of the nature of human apprehension of unfamiliar and familiar worlds through the binaries of distance/closeness, as well as though ratiocinative, visual, classifying, collecting impulses as distinct from a more chaotic, random indeterminate acceptance. A central anchoring, comparative reference point is the familiar (the Australian home, landscape, vegetation and its various stereotypes including in unfamiliar places) and the alternative counter viewpoints of non-travellers. Consideration is given to themes concerning consciousness and the visual, including perspectives of philosopher Maurice Blanchot and postmodern theorist Ihab Hassan.'

Source: Abstract.

'Western mythology traditionally offered sparse, negative readings of things related to earth, as a prison-like entity guarded by the god Hades (Cirlot, Grillet). This paper traces motifs of dirt and soil in several early poems by James McAuley (1917-76). “Envoi” (1938), an inland landscape from McAuley’s stay in Bungendore, rural NSW, attributes to the “soil, the season and the shifting airs” the “faint sterility that disheartens and derides.” Similarly, “The Tomb of Heracles” (1947-49) reiterates motifs of aridity and sterility in imagery of dry landscape: “Blind light, dry rock, a tree that does not bear.” Nonetheless, a differentiation occurs in “Envoi,” in introducing the motif of suppressed fertility and “good chance” in the “artesian heart,” in which earth is reluctantly recognised as the eventual, vital water bearer.

'This paper traces the important formative influence of T.S. Eliot, notably “The Waste Land” and Australia’s own agency of modernism the Jindyworobak movement, with its original environmental manifesto (1937) and celebration of Australia’s dry interiors and indigenous values. It traces other, desolate encounters with earth in McAuley’s war-time reading of early Portuguese chronicles of voyage reflected in his explorer poem “Henry the Navigator” (1944)— “These roots of stunted bushes scrabble earth/Like withered birds […].” The poem adverts to later European “discovery” of Australia’s reportedly arid coasts. 

'The paper also identifies the return to a more accepting reading of motifs of dry earth-scapes “Harsh, dry, abrasive, spikey, rough” in  McAuley’s later poems depicting the Coles Bay nature reserve in eastern Tasmania: “By no stretch [..] a locus amoenus” (Bush Scene”, 1974).'  (Publication abstract)

'This paper addresses the search for an Australian authenticity and differentiation in the work of the South Australian-based Jindyworobak group of poets who, in the late 1930s, sought to escape from the “intellectual colonialism of modernism.” Influenced by D.H. Lawrence’s “spirit of place” they promoted, through their 1938 Manifesto and influential annual Jindyworobak Anthology (1938-1953), local and environmental values drawing on topoi from inland Australian landscapes and motifs from imagined indigenous life and language, largely unknown to most Australian settlers. While their experiment was mainly unsuccessful, the paper shows how Jindyworobak sympathies for “a neglected people” foreshadow the return to indigenous themes and forms in settler writing from the 1980s, notably by Les Murray, David Malouf and Alex Miller. The paper underlines, nonetheless, the sensitivities surrounding writing about the Other. It points to Malouf’s interest, as a writer of non-English language descent, in the loss of language, a variant of “homelessness,” recurring in contemporary settler and migrant writing, and central to the work of Aboriginal writer Kim Scott.'

Source: Abstract.

'It is not so common these days to come across what Bill Ashcroft might call a "white settler" account of growing up in the Australian bush. In Taciturn Man and Other Tales of Australia Geoffrey Gibson, a pre Baby-Boomer, of the same generation and rural provenance as Les Murray, writes of growing up in the 1940s in rural New South Wales, and also, the earlier rural life of his father Alexander (1905-1965). Alexander Gibson, the "taciturn" man of this tribute by memoir published by the Ann Arbor-based Modern History Press, was born in Somerset, and one of a number of English who migrated to Australia sometime after WWI. (D. H. Lawrence had also considered migrating but only stopped for six weeks to gather material for and write, or help write, two novels.)' (Publication abstract)