Richard Luckett on separating the love twins

'That mysterious laVAr, by which books of Similar intent make their entry into the world

■ Inopportunely together, continues to hold good. Their genesis, one presumes, is super

cially as independent as the calving of the Iceberg from the glacier and the construction of the Titanic in the 'dockyard; their coming together lacks the majesty of the catastrophe, and often resembles most of all the squabbling Of two twins, precociously aware of the significance of primogeniture. The Penguin Book of Love Poetry and the Faber Book of Love Poems* are as near identical as any two books have a right to be. They are of the same dimensions, they contain almost exactly the same number of pages and a fair proportion of the same poems, their editors are both e, xperienced anthologists and practising poets tri, their own right, and their concerns are so similar that they even cite the same authority on medieval love lyrics (Peter Dronke) in their Prefaces. Both books cost the same amount. Since it is unlikely that, except in special circumstances, anyone will want two anthologies of this kind, the reviewer has a clear duty to indicate a preference, and to separate the squalling contestants. The first thing to be decided is why one should want an 'anthology of love poems at all.

. The utility of books is not sufficiently considered. For every book that is purchased to be read in a constructive way, how many are bought for talismanic purposes (if I buy the book I obtain some of its virtue by an obscure and yet to be defined osmosis), to impress, or as ,a form of self-blackmail (1 spent five Pounds on it, so I must read it)?'The object of buying an anthology of this kind is presuma

bly to give it away, for the loveless and the lovelorn would only add to their sufferings by reading it, while those who were satisfac-'

torily in love would be free of any impulse to buy it for themselves. At this point the special

circumstances in which a man (or woman) might require two copies become clear: one for the wife (husband) and another for the mistress (lover). But even such a man, the complications of whose domestic arrangements have produced a comparative simplicity in the matter of purchasing anthologies, has to decide whether it is Mr Grigson's or Mr Stallworthy's selection that !)est meets the requirements of a formal or informal relationship. At first sight Mr Stallworthy is the less conventional anthologist; he offers us Yehuda Amichai, Nikos Stangos and Andrei Voznesensky, as well as Hafiz, Hedylos and the Lady Heguri. He also includes a number of contemporary poets from the United States, and a sprinkling of the new British school. In Part he can do this because he prints rather More poems than Mr Grigson, though they tend, on average, to be shorter. Certainly Mr Grigson offers us no such exotics as Mr

Stallworthy, whose collection has at times a decidedly international flavour. Yet, in making it so, he has in fact echoed an orthodoxy of our time, an orthodoxy amply attested by Penguin's own series of poets in translation, and discernible at once from a glance along the poetry shelves of even the more modest bookshops. Mr Grigson knows all about this, and has eschewed it deliberately: "What I have not included — we have too much of it now for the health of our taste in poetry — is the unmeasured, thin-rolled short crust of translation (Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Russian, and so on), useful, but now so easily accepted in itself as verse." It is a phenomenon that deserves attention: such translations offer, on the one hand, a guarantee (emanating from the very fact that they have been translated) that here is the stuff of poetry, and, on the other, a facility and smoothness that makes them particularly effortless to read, a facility that is a direct product of the fact that they are not poetry. They place the editor in the position of being the dupe of the translators; how is he to know that what he prints comes anywhere near representing the best, or even the most characteristic poems from the language in which it was originally written? How does he know that it comes near to representing the original at all?

It is only fair to say that those translations which Mr Stallworthy prints are pleasant enough, and dime by reputable hands, but it remains true that they lack bite, and that, though no poem in his anthology is wholly a failure, some seem to be representative rather than acellent. Amongst those poets whom Mr Stallworthy includes and Mr Grigson omits are Auden, Byron, Dryden, Pope and Shelley. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that though Mr Stallworthy is more modish, he is simultaneously ' safer ' in his selection; in other words, he is more concerned to represent what he supposes to be a proper taste for the times, than continually to exert his individual judgement. Since the Penguin anthology will inevitably go into paperback, and will inevitably attain mass sales, his decision is understandable, though not lauda ble. In any case, such poems are in a comparative minority; both editors have had too much good material to choose from, rather than too little, and their selections are never weighed down by idiosyncrasy for long.

Moreover, Mr Stallworthy is quite capable of displaying an individuality of taste that can both surprise, and run counter to any modern

orthodoxy; his inclusion of Roy Campbell's marvellous poem The Sisters is a case in point:

Far out on the grey silence of the flood They watch the dawn in smoulderang gyres expand Beyond them: and the day burns through their blood Like a white candle through a shuttered hand.

Mr Grigson, as the passage that I have quoted indicates, has no time for watered

down translations, and those that he prints are remarkable for their interest, particularly Allen Tate's version of the Pervigilium • Veneris. What he does do, however, is to give French poems in the original. There are, for instance, seven pieces by Ronsard, and anyone who has read Mr Grigson's Notes from an Odd Country where he has written so well of him, will at once understand why. It is less easy to account for the inclusion of de Nerval's Fantaisie, which opens with lines that I cannot be alone in considering excruciating ("II est un air pour qui je donnerais/Tout Rossini, tout Mozart et tout Weber/Un air tres vieux, languissant et funebre "). The sudden intrusion of French poems has a piquancy of its own, and Mr Grigson is to be congratulated for his enterprise. But it would not have been unduly condescending to have

included literal translations, and it would have helped the readers for whom the French poems are going to be the most valuable — those who need an incentive to come back to the' language after having been conditioned to hate it at school.

The presence of undiluted French poems indicates the difference between Mr Grigson's selection and Mr Stallworthy's. Grigson relies rather more on his personal taste, and he prefers sharper fruit. He has more Wyatt, more Sidney, more Christina Rossetti, and a great deal more Anon. From Synge Stallworthy chooses Dread, which ends: "Now by this window, where there's none can see,/The Lord God's jealous of yourself and me.", Grigson takes three poems, amongst them In Kerry, which concludes, in contrast, with: "Yet knew no more than knew these merry sins/Had built this stick of thighbones, jaws .and shins." It is a note echoed more often in the Faber collection than in the Penguin anthology. At the same time Mr Stallworthy does not respond with such enthusiasm to purely lyric qualities, and it is Grigson who is strongest on the Elizabethans. Significantly, if we can attend to the sense through the tune of the words, we will often find a certain tartness there as well.

What we are left with is a choice between two fine anthologies, both strong on Donne, Hardy and Graves, the accepted masters, both offering a balance of the familiar and the unfamiliar, and both, sensibly, short on extracts from long works. The one really reprehensible omission, common to both anthologies, is Skelton; the need to extract from longer works may account for this. The poet most hard done by is Tennyson, who is teased a little by both Grigson and Stallworthy: Grigson juxtaposes his exuberant Marriage Morning (from the Sullivan songcycle The Window) with a deflationary quatrain by Coventry Patmore (" And on my marriage-morn I slept/A soft sleep, undisturb'd by love "), whilst Stallworthy prints In the Valley of Cauteretz, in which Tennyson remembers a holiday with Hallam, and by so doing raises the question both of the distinction between love and friendship, and of the whole nature of Tennyson's feelinp for Hallam

Neither of these anthologies can be recommended for its aphrodisiac qualities, nor castigated as.destructive in tendency. Mr Stallworthy is a little more conscientious and a little less lively; Mr Grigson, displays a more individual — and more interesting — taste. The Faber book has the advantage of being better printed and bound, though there are some errors in the index and a couple of misprints. Presumably anybody buying both will send the Penguin volume to the wife or husband, and the Faber volume elsewhere. Those disinclined to carry comparative criticism to such lengths have a harder decision to make; in preferring Grigson I hand the apple to Athene and wisdom — a solution that, in other circumstances, is on record as causing a little local difficulty.