‘black river’ or ‘fiume nero’: exploring how meaning and sensation move across the boundaries of geography with poet and translator Piero Toto – who translated poems from ‘bird of winter’ for ‘Atelier’.

‘black river’ or ‘fiume nero’ : the Arno by night.

Studying Italian at school in England, I never dared dream that I’d write poems that would be re-created in the language of Dante and Fiorucci, Italo Svevo and cappuccino – by the distinguished poet and professional translator Piero Toto. I speak to him here about the larger project of travelling curiously between cultures. We also explore how meaning and sensation can move from word to experience across the boundaries of geography. 

River Arno by day.

Writers, clothes, food, Pompeii from my school textbooks, films with people riding fast through Roma on scooters – as a teenager during the late Seventies, for me Italy was the land of gritty glamour. Somewhere I longed to visit. A language I wanted to grow up into.  I got my wish the summer I turned sixteen, when I spent two months in Florence. After running away from my family of origin, I funded my trip by working in London as a cashier in a supermarket by day, and then a nightclub-come-restaurant by night. By July, I could afford to travel to Firenze on a hot, jolting sleeper train, pleasurably full of rucksacks and backpackers. 

Leda and the Swan at the Bargello Museum, Florence.

Florence in the hot summer of 1980 was not today’s tourist Airbnb honeypot which I revisited in 2019 to take these photos. Aged just sixteen, I found a shadowy city where men wolf-whistled me me on dark streets, followed me on hot summer nights, propositioned me, invited me into their cars.  But it was also the city of blazing, luminous sunshine, the city of train stations. I met a girl from Catania in Sicily, working as a secretary. She took me travelling on weekends. We came to share a room, drank our morning cappuccino standing up at the bar together. With her beside me, I was beginning to find myself in a body that had known sexual abuse in childhood, but was now coming to feminity, coming to maturity – as poems like ‘imprint of a young woman’,  translated for Atelier by Piero Toto as ‘impronta di una giovane donna’, record. Because I grew up between French and English, and then added Italian into the mix, I understand something of the challenges of translation, which made more valuable the gift of being able to discuss them with Piero.

Firenze dopo la pioggia / Florence after rain.

ah: Thank you so much for translating my poems from bird of winter, Piero.   It was a huge honour to be translated so beautifully by another poet into his mother tongue. I feel I am meeting my work with new eyes, new senses. Can I begin our conversation by asking you to say a few words about Atelier, for readers who may not know its work?  When did it begin? What’s its mission? Who are the team behind it? 

PT: First of all, thank you for accepting my invitation to be published in Atelier. Like I said in our recent pre-translation chat over Zoom, I knew we had to do something together the moment I saw you perform at the Forward Prizes back in 2021. Luckily the opportunity to collaborate came with my involvement as translator for Atelier, one of Italy’s most prominent poetry magazines. It is produced by Giuliano Ladolfi Editore in two different formats, online and in print. It was founded back in 1996 to bring attention to the new generations of poets, but also to feature critical contributions on 20th century poets and poetry in translation. Throughout the years, Ladolfi Editore has also published monographs, conference proceedings and other publications dedicated to contemporary poetry, critical essays on poetry and new voices in the European poetry scene. The current Atelier team is made up of poets, critics and writers who all contribute pro bono to both the online version of the magazine and its print sister. I am part of the online editorial team.

ah: It sounds like a hugely important and necessary space of cultural transmission. I know you have been collaborating with Atelier to showcase contemporary English-language poetry in translation. You have translated Andrew McMillan, Peter Scalpello, Anthony Anaxagorou, André Naffis-Sahely and Golnoosh Nour so far, with more poets lined up for 2023. How did this come about and did you have any particular criteria for the poets you chose to translate? I noticed that a number of the poets you have chosen identify as queer poets, as I do myself. 

Bacchus by Caravaggio, the Uffizi Gallery Florence.

PT: The main criterion I follow is to include poets that are little known or completely unknown to Italian-speaking audiences. The process for choosing them is very easy: does their poetry speak to me? Does their poetics or collection introduce something new for the Italian poetry scene (in terms of form, content, language, imagery, etc.)? UK and American poetry are very different from Italian poetry, which tends to be slightly more ‘lyrical’ compared to the more prosaic tendency of English language poetry (with exceptions of course). The other question I ask myself is: in my current position of privilege, can I use my voice to amplify (other) marginalised voices? Especially as a queer poet, I feel that it is my duty to make sure that I can support other queer poets’ work by offering them a platform – if I do not do it, who will?

In the early selection stages, a deciding factor behind the inclusion of a poet was whether or not I knew the poet personally, as this would speed things up: as a matter of fact the first two poets I published are poets I am close to and whose work I deeply admire. The later selections were based on whether the poets were known to Italian-speaking audiences or whether they had an upcoming collection. Apart from the poets’ own bios, I hardly introduce the poets or their work, so as not to influence our readers. When we decide to include a note or a short explanatory introduction (as I did for Peter Scalpello or with your own poems) it is because we feel that it is 100% integral to the poetry itself.

Luminous with young, female possibility – Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ or ‘Spring’ in the Uffizi.

ah: I was very grateful that you should have translated my note about living beyond grooming and childhood sexual abuse with the poems from bird of winter. Bringing words to this space where there has historically been so much silence is integral to my creative project. You bring to your translations both your academic background as Senior Lecturer in Translation at London Metropolitan University, and your creative process as a poet who writes in both English and Italian. Could I ask you how you set about translating poetry, as opposed to other materials? 

PT: I have been working as a translator for almost 20 years, dealing with a variety of materials, genres and clients. Compared to commercial translation, where most of the time it is the target audience’s needs that must be kept in mind when translating (depending of course on your clients’ instructions), with poetry I constantly try and remind myself of honouring the original poet’s voice, their lived experience, and this is probably more prominent in my case because I am a poet myself and I have been translated too, so I know first-hand how it feels to undergo the process of translation, and once again I felt that if I am in a position to be able to lend my services to introduce new voices on the current poetry scene, then I must do that. Other poetry translators will probably say differently, but for me this is my main mantra when translating. That is why I tend to approach contemporary, living poets with whom I can have a chat beforehand or whatever, feed off their energy and intuition, and then try and channel that in my translations. Basically, though, I just keep my fingers crossed and hope that everything goes well!! [joking of course]

Piero Toto, translator, academic & poet.

ah: In my own case, I found that your translations brought out beautiful textures and subtleties that the English could not deliver in the same way, being a terser language. From ‘imprint of a young woman’ translating “the husk of your voice/ musked my being” to “il graffio della tua voce/ muschiava la mia essenza” laid the lingering sensuality of that encounter down onto the page through Italian’s long vowel sounds, and whispering, sibilant consonants. It was a true gift. Following on from this, what was your own route into translation, and how did you decide on this as part of your career path?

PT: I believe I can be described as a xenophile and a citizen of the world rather than belonging to a specific nationality, so my need to explore different cultures and different countries as well as being able to put my language skills to good use, to be of service, are at the core of everything I do. This has motivated most of my personal and professional choices. 

Inspirational mysterious Etruscan female figure alive with power for my teenage self from the Etruscan Museum.

ah: You are not alone in feeling that way, Piero. In an interview in the current issue of The Paris Review, [243], poet Rita Dove looks back on beginning to learn German as a teenager in Akron, and thinks of it relative to the process of coming to understand poetry.  Dove was a Fullbright Scholar in Germany, and is a fluent German speaker, married for many years to German writer Fred Viehbahn. She speaks as someone used to moving between languages: 

At that time I also started learning German – Akron had a sizeable German population, so our teacher was a native speaker. I realized that figuring out how to talk about poetry was, in some ways, similar to speaking in another language – with practice it was something I could master but, ultimately, true understanding of a poem happened on a level beyond words. It was untranslatable. 

Would you care to comment on Dove’s insights, both as a poet, and as a translator?

PT: We often hear the traduttore traditore [translator traitor] expression in translation circles, meaning that there will always be a level of imprecision in our translations and ineffability in the original pieces of work which make the act of translation seemingly redundant. I would tend to agree with Dove: the superficial symbols (the language) that we use to write poetry can merely represent what has been revealed to us, what has emerged out of our experience of the world. It is in the interstices of those symbols that we need to seek meaning: it takes only one vibrational deflection from language to reveal its limits (its untranslatability) and at the same time its power beyond these limits. Meanwhile, though, we must make do with the instruments at our disposal (i.e., translation) to get by. Because, what is the option otherwise? 

ah: I couldn’t agree more with you.  I love your formulation of ‘vibrational deflection’, and the idea of meaning occurring at the ‘interstices of symbols’. Thank you for those Piero. As I mention in my preface to this interview, I learnt Italian for three years at school as a teenager, and lived alone for two months in Florence the summer I turned sixteen. Before that, I had grown up speaking French to my French grandmother from my earliest childhood. In both cases, I understood without consciously articulating it that I thought differently when I was expressing myself in a different language. In French you say J’ai peur, j’ai faim, literally translated as I have cold, I have hunger. It is if these sensations come bodily to inhabit you, rather than define you, as they do in English. Developing this idea, I loved the way the lines of my poems were transformed as well as translated in your transmission of them into Italian. I wondered if you might say something about how this came about?

Hills beyond Firenze

PT: Firstly I think it is important to acknowledge some of the basic structural differences between languages, and in our particular case Italian and English, in terms of grammar, sentence structure, etc. Having said this, poetry is probably the one ‘language’ that allows us to deconstruct those very same differences and take some liberties in order to honour the poets’ voice. When translating extracts from bird of winter, I considered the ‘mood’ of the collection and the vivid imagery contained within it. For example, when translating the first verse of the poem elegy for an eight year old, where the English opens with the subject “she” followed by a verb in the present form + an adjective to describe how the protagonist is sitting, I turned that into a past participle [seduta dritta] instead to create a vivid snapshot of the little girl and to put even more distance between the reader and the initial scene, which for me sets the tone of the whole poem. In this way, the reader is slowly shown the image described in the opening verses, as if it were a slo-mo camera approaching the eight-year-old girl. It also introduces the repetitions of “d’s” and “t’s” to enhance the soundscape. Compensating with other rhetorical/stylistic devices for what is lost in translation is an essential part of poetry translation, or at least for my own practice. In this case, however, I do not see it as a loss. 

ah: I read ‘elegia per una bambina di otto anni’ as both a miracle of subtle empathy, and a truly generous gift. In her recent memoir, Dandelions, writer and translator Thea Lenarduzzi reminds her readers of the weft of indigenous languages across Italy, from Sardinian and Neapolitan in the South, to Friulian in the North, that underlie and co-exist with ‘standard’ Italian. Do you feel that growing up in a country where the construct of language is in and of itself so diverse, and at times also so politically charged, helped shape your own relationship to communication as a space of nuance, opening and possibility, rather than fixed meaning? I know you co-edited Gender Approaches in the Translation Classroom: Training the Doers, which published in 2019 by Palgrave Macmillan. 

PT: I guess you could say that. When growing up, especially in the heel of Italy – which is where I am from – you are exposed to dialects, which are languages in themselves, with their own grammar and lexis. They are imbued in the fabric of society and carry a lot of history within them: my own dialect comes from Latin but has strong French, Spanish, Greek and Arabic influences, for example. So code-switching (almost without realising) is a thing!

Etruscan woman in terracotta from the Etruscan Museum in Florence – one of Italy’s many cultural inheritances.

ah: And indeed genre switching. After so much generous support of the work of other poets, could we close with a few words on your own career as a poet writing in English and Italian. You published tempo 4/4 in 2021 with Transeuropa Edizioni, and have published many wonderful individual poems in Italian, German and English periodicals and magazines from La Repubblica to Queerlings and harana poetry. For readers who would like to read more, would you like to say something about the themes which your own work is drawn to explore, and where you see your career taking you next creatively? 

Il Duomo, Firenze.

PT: I recently completed my first poetry collection in English, which I hope will find a good home soon. I am attracted to the value and meaning of human relationships, of existence per se, and the way our experiences forge our vision of life. In particular, exploring sexual identity and incommunicability. Constantly shifting between languages, harmonies, sounds and meanings can be a rather messy business… as I said on another occasion, I navigate through multiple cultural and linguistic identities inhabiting the world on its margins. I am not sure where I will be creatively in the near future, given the many hats that I wear (as a bilingual poet, as a translation scholar, as a poetry translator…) but poetry-wise I intend to look at the overlaps between poetry and the visual arts, specifically poetry-music and its digital fruition. For those interested in my work, you can check out my linktree.

ah: Thank you again Piero. I will be first in the line to buy your collection. It can’t come too soon. And thank you also for your generosity in conversation and in translation.

If anyone would like to join me in an online, hands on workshop exploring bringing our bodies into creative practice, I will be facilitating one for Tsaa with Roma on 22 June at 14 00 BST. There are free places available for those facing financial hardship.

Chaired by Jennifer Lee Tsai, I will also be performing live and online with Padraig Regan to explore ‘Form as Radical Midwife: Queering the Page’ at the Ledbury Festival on Sunday 2 July, 14. 00 BST, 2023.

The link to Piero Toto’s translations of ‘black river’, ‘elegy for an eight year old’ and ‘imprint of a young woman’ for Atelier is here.

You can find bird of winter here.

The ‘fiume nero’ of the Arno seen from the bridge at night.

Marking the Spaces of our Silences : alice hiller on art as activism in the aftermaths of trauma.

Trigger warning: references to sexual abuse in childhood.

In common with others who were sexually abused in childhood, I have been haunted by the awareness that millions of children round the world are potentially being locked in with sexual predators, as a consequence of measures necessary to limit the spread of COVID 19. I am also deeply concerned for the psychological health of adults living with their memories of having been subjected to this crime, without the normal range of social interactions and support, which would usually help them to cope and hold the past at bay.

While art and activism can be awkward bedfellows, the current crisis has made me think how I can use the body of work I am making around my own history of being groomed and then sexually abused as a child, to bring awareness of this crime to a wider audience. My intention is part of an ongoing project aimed at finding ways to counter the devastating impacts when children are sexually abused.  I also want to make the subject more comprehensible to those whose lives it has not touched directly, in order that we may work collectively for change.

One of the first challenges I faced in writing about sexual abuse was how to find a form of language which respects the inarticulacy of the child’s experience. This arises from the dissociative pressures of shock and shame, in combination with the intimidation and concealment perpetrated by the adult abuser. In her brilliant study, Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong cites the poet Myung Mi Kim telling her that “attention to silence is in itself an interrogation” [p139]. This chimes both with my own practice, and that of my late father-in-law, the sculptor Oscar Nemon, whose work has been part of my life since I was sixteen.

Together with millions of Europeans of Jewish heritage, Nemon and his sister Bella lost almost their entire family to the Holocaust. In their case, the twenty-three murdered relatives included their mother, brother and grandmother. Like many who suffer loss on this scale, aside from one interview at the end of his life, Nemon does not seem to have been able to speak out loud about this tragedy, not even to his children, nor to his close friends.

Better known for his portraits from life of Sigmund Freud and Winston Churchill, Nemon did however respond to the Shoah in his art, which also addresses wider questions of the impacts of genocide on surviving communities. Titled Humanity, his memorial to those killed was unveiled in 1965 in his home town of Osijek, now in Croatia (see below). Emerging from on sketches stretching back to the second world war, the composition shows a mother lifting her child to the future in defiance of annihilation.

Heredity in park

While there is no direct allusion to genocide, it is a composition of the utmost vulnerability. Reaching out and up, neither mother nor child have any form of protection, silently reminding us of the undefendedness of the millions of civilians whose lives were taken both in the concentration camps, and en route for them. The model for the baby was Nemon’s son Falcon, born in 1941 as Yugoslavia was invaded, signalling the likely end of Nemon’s family of origin. Falcon later became my husband.

Nemon only completed two Shoah sculptures, but from 1945 onwards he made sketches exploring living in the aftermath of this loss. They often feature groups of mourning figures, standing together in solidarity, or holding one another. I first discovered them within his papers after Falcon died in 2002. Nemon had previously died in 1985. Recently bereaved, they moved me deeply. When I look through these drawings now, I am additionally struck by their relationships to silences, and silencings, and how they build bodies of gestural language from not speaking. Below is the rapidly drawn Don’t Forget, whose title and injunction come from the page of the memo pad on which it was executed in black felt tip pen.

Don't Forget

Turned away from the viewer, the two figures hold each other, and possibly a child each, in a wordless enactment of grief. They make their loss palpable, but decline to let us into their closed circle, which is a place we can imagine, but not know. By existing, Don’t Forget gives witness, and forms a concrete place of testimony to a crime whose perpetrators attempted to deny it, and to destroy all evidence of what was done. This witnessing is an ambition I also have for the body of work I am making, as I hope to show in the discussion which follows of five poems published since the start of the pandemic in the Cambridge Literary Review and One Hand Clapping.

As a reviewer, and former features journalist, my intention is to use the additional resource of my prose to open up the context of these poems during these uniquely difficult times, to support children and adults with experiences of sexual abuse, whether current or historic. With funding for programmes to heal the aftermaths of this crime  being cut, I also wanted to throw light on the nature of what happens when a child is sexually abused, to make it easier to understand why the damage, though often invisible, can be so profound.

‘twice told’ and ‘quadrant’, the first two poems I will discuss, were published in the full UK lockdown within the ‘script as identity’ issue of the Cambridge Literary Review. There is a clip of me reading them for the online launch available here. Looking back to the autumn of 1977, ‘twice told’ documents the immediate aftermath of the sexual abuse when I was just thirteen. At this point, the physical element had been stopped, but I had no means or opportunity of saying what had been done to me.

Set in a hospital room, the poem remembers the tone of the many conversations I had with Ann Dally, the psychiatrist who admitted me. I weighed 4 and a half stone, and had stopped eating in order to be able to die, but anorexia was still largely regarded as the disease of over-ambitious, perfectionist middle class girls. While Ann Dally rapidly became aware that my relationship with my abuser was not what it should be, it never occurred to her to ask about the possibility of sexual abuse.

‘twice told’ lies in a lozenge on the page, forming the shape of one the many sedating pills I was given. It alternates the psychiatrist’s questions with the child patient’s thoughts about a chaffinch she sees, who is neither able to sing nor fly. Working through the image of a flightless bird, with a grotesquely swollen beak, the poem catches both the impossibility of speaking, and the resulting weight of not being able to do to so.

Photo 05-08-2020, 15 11 29

‘quadrant’, moves beyond this to register the silences surrounding sexual abuse being being enforced, endured, and finally negotiated. It suggests that we may not have to remain in a place of injury forever. The word quadrant initially meant a quarter of a day, or six hours. This led to the name being given to an instrument, shaped like a quarter circle, used to measure altitudes in astronomy and navigation.

The poem is built from four quadrants. The first imagines a little girl’s words as “soft pink kissing” spread onto “iced cakes” and then fed back into her own mouth. The “steel hooves” of ‘intimidation’ follow, and lead to the exile of ‘exclusion’ when “lies puff out on/ washing lines” and “because/ she will not wear them/ the young woman must/ walk out naked.” This image to calls to mind the unprotected state of the adolescent who has suffered sexual abuse, and her vulnerability in the aftermath of the crime when she is trying to reclaim herself.

‘quadrant’ ends in a place of ‘redemption’, however. Finally, “open sky and water/ wind-blink a clear pool of June silver – washing/ her skin with spangled/ rings of joy.” Swimming, and particularly swimming in open air municipal pools in summer, has always been one of the most restorative areas of my life. I honour the transformative gift water represents for so many of us with histories of trauma, and the ways it may enable us to reclaim our bodies.

Photo 05-08-2020, 15 12 28

The three poems published in One Hand Clapping engage with different aspects of living with and in the aftermath of sexual abuse in childhood. ‘embedded’ is already available on this blog in the poems section. It was a poem that came alive for me again during the first phase of the full UK lockdown. The isolation I was experiencing through living alone, combined with the lack of social contact that many of us rely upon to manage our mental health, caused me to re-somatise the injury the poem responds to.

At the time of the poem, I was a pupil in a small village primary in Wiltshire. I worked among other children on shared tables, with papier maché animal masks looking down on us from the walls. Writing ‘embedded’, the soreness of those childhood mornings seemed to materialise within the roughness of the sacking tacked to the underside of my bed, the splinteriness of the wood, the sharpness of the rusty nails – in the same way that water vapour may be precipitated onto a cold surface. The word ‘backdoor’ is embedded centrally in the poem as an act of witness.

Photo 05-08-2020, 15 39 21

One Hand Clapping is also publishing two new poems of mine. They respond to how traumatic memories persist, but also how they may be represented and to some extent transformed. I first experienced penetrative abuse aged eight and a half, in December 1972. Ever since, that month has been difficult for me. Whenever I can afford to, I travel. It helps to be in a different light to that in England, and to open myself to new experiences, rather than being pulled backwards by the ghosts which return each year to claim me.

‘performance’ came out of a late December trip to Sicily in 2017. I wanted to see the island’s landscapes, and understand more of its multi-stranded history. A few days short of the end of the year, I was standing in the ruins of an almost vanished Roman amphitheatre at Eraclea within sight of the sea. Two thousand years ago there would have been crowds, and blood, and gladiators, and wild animals. Now broken rows of stones emerged from the dry grasses to mark where the benches would have stood. More or less the whole town had been carried away over the centuries to build houses nearby – as is the case with many classical ruins.

IMG-3515

My own vanished, but present, past was within my thoughts as I walked around, trying to figure out the layout of the site from the notices and my guidebook, and imagine how everything had been. In their liminality, and near erasure, the ghosted forms of the seating and stage suggested the presences of memory, but also the way time erodes and changes. I was struck by how, although it was impossible, without additional information, to read the site fully, you could not ignore that something had once stood there.

A salt breeze was blowing in off the sea, like it had on the clifftop by my French grandmother’s house in Normandy. This was always my place of safety as a child, where I was usually more protected from my abuser. Feeling it on my face, the phrase “amphitheatres are carved from bones and stagger into stone” slipped into my consciousness. Then I heard “have traps in their floors troughs to drain blood.”

Those two phrases, arriving on the wind, turned my eight year old body into the amphitheatre, and stage for my own attack. Like a looping echo, as I thought about the gladiators forced to fight each other, and the animals they killed for public amusement, I also held somewhere in my mind my own powerlessness to resist my abuser, and the sense of unwitting complicity that the sexually abused child experiences. But, in the historical fact of the “troughs to drain blood”, the imagery also offered the possibility of some form of easing or relief, through draining away. As the poem took shape, I understood it could give a measure of moving beyond the eternal recurrence of what was done to me night after night in the dark, because refusing the silence that my abuser had required and enforced through my childhood and well into adult life, as is the case for many of us with this history.

performance

amphitheatres carved from
bone stagger into stone

traps in floors
troughs to drain blood

bars protect the watchers
from the creature

when attacked
leaves marks

as rain drunk
by growing grass

‘performance’ stayed short – only six more lines came. Sexual abuse is not something that can be fully communicated. Reticence is moreover a retrospective form of redress – clothing the child in a measure of dignity that was denied to her while the abuse was ongoing, and gifting the reader the option to engage only insofar as is safe and comfortable for them. As I worked on the poem, I understood that it needed to be tiny, and tight, and partly folded in on itself like a child’s body – but with a mysterious, felt possibility of growth and healing. The blood at the end is also just rain, in the same way that when we speak the difficult things that happen to us, they may be in some measure transfigured by the act of documenting.

The title was the last element to arrive. For a long time I called the poem ‘evidence’. Then I realised that it was more than that, because not static, but moving. ‘performance’ holds for me how, when we make works of art, whatever their starting point or destination, we construct them in such a way that they enact themselves within the viewer’s or reader’s mind, and then fold away again at the end, like the curtain going down on a stage. In that retelling, and closing down, we also exert our agency as the co-creators of our own life experiences, and give a degree of creative agency to our audience. Together – as artists and audiences, as past and present selves – we may discover the power to see and relate in new ways, as we move forwards through time, and gain different understandings of our own histories, and those of others.

‘papyri’, the final poem appearing in One Hand Clapping, responds to the difficulties inherent to making aesthetic performances from charged materials, and more generally to opening up traumatic memories to allow their energies to be present within a creative work. The starting point was my own reading about the ancient city of Herculaneum, which, like nearby Pompeii, was overwhelmed when Vesuvius erupted. Rather than ash, however, Herculaneum was covered with a hardened shroud of volcanic stone, up to 40 metres thick in places. This has not yet been fully excavated, and may never be, as the modern town of Ercolano stands above much of the ancient city.

Digging down along narrow, vertical shafts, the early excavators discovered among other finds the complex of a magnificent villa, complete with extraordinary mosaics and statues. There was also an area containing blackened, contorted log-like objects. These were originally disregarded as rubbish, or burnt to keep warm – until it was realised that they were in fact tightly rolled papyrus scrolls from the villa’s library. They had been carbonised and crushed during the eruption, and are the only surviving examples of this kind.

Even when the papyri were recognised for what they were, they remained almost impossible to unroll or decipher. The writing is black on black, and the carbonised sheets crumble entirely to dust unless treated with the utmost care. Many techniques were tried for deciphering them, including fixing to a silk background and unrolling by fractional amounts each day. The breakthrough only came in recent years, however, when medical diagnostic technology was brought into play. It was realised the papyri could be read through a combination of using a CT scanner to unroll them virtually, and an infrared scanner to distinguish the letters from the paper.

A CT scanner is of course more usually used to see inside the human body without surgical intervention. For those of us whose bodies have been attacked or invaded, the ability to see within their closed surfaces, to discover the evidence of what took place, is at once an impossible dream, and a potential nightmare. My poem ‘conjugation’, also on this blog, explores this idea, in the context of an MRI scan which I was given in 2014 to assess internal damage following cancer surgery.

While ‘conjugation’ speaks directly to my abuser, ‘papyri’ asks the reader to become a form of CT scanner, calling upon the magical powers of an empathetic imagination in bringing the processes of art into play. Because the sexual abuse of a child very often entails a measure of societal or familial complicity, I wanted to build the poem from phrases already in the public domain to enact a wider engagement. For this reason, the poem uses only ‘found language’ taken from an academic article published by the University of Kentucky about using CT scanners to read two unopened Herculaneum scrolls.

The borrowed and rearranged phrases request the scanner/reader to “distinguish bodily tissue/ detail a human’s organs/ reveal internal surfaces.” The poem accepts, sorrowfully, but also respectfully, “the task immensely difficult/ the scrolls so tightly/ wound and creased”. It allows the resistance to opening and disambiguating of such materials. But it also suggests that when you are able to “unwrap sections/ flatten them” they may gift you the ability to “see clearly” the constituent elements of “papyrus/ fibres/ sand” contained within the seemingly incomprehensible scrolls.

In the context of ‘papyri’, the final word, “sand”, is the saddest, and the most hopeful. It embodies the grit, and abrasion, caught between the soft surfaces of the historic Herculaneum papyri before carbonisation. Through this it looks back to the soreness of ‘embedded’. But it also honours the persistence of selfhood even under the most extreme adversity and fragmentation. Sand is made from minute particles of rock – most commonly granite, quartz or mica, or marine life forms – which still retain their original identities. In the same way, children subjected to sexual abuse retain their original selves, however dissipated and broken up by the trauma to which they have been subjected, as ‘two unopened scrolls’ asks the reader/scanner to recognise:

Photo 05-08-2020, 15 38 53

My late father-in-law, Oscar Nemon, also has a sketch which works with and transforms ‘found’ materials. It is a tender, grieving group, composed of three visible figures. More are implied behind them, completing the circle. With their backs to the viewer, refusing to speak directly out of the frame of the page, the figures cluster together and hold each other close. Their bodies, which form a trunk-like column, are made up of vertical, striped lines, like the striped clothes that the prisoners in the Lagers were required to wear, and which the world saw on newsreels of the liberation of the camps. The base on which they stand is a crosshatch of vertical and horizontal lines – echoing the barbed wire which contained the prisoners, and prevented their escape, also visible in contemporary news reportage.

Mourning group stripes

But extraordinarily, and almost unbelievably, while the figures’ heads bow in sorrow, as grapes on a vine, awaiting harvest, their holding arms form two victory ‘V’s. This was another archetypal image of the second world war, implying resilience, and determination to resist. An additional V has been added below them, in a different pen, at a later date. The resulting shape, made by the interlocking Vs, calls to mind both a diamond – an emblem of light – and an open mouth at the heart of the composition. Made from the raw horror of war, the untitled sketch forms an act of articulation. Loss is made manifest through unflinching, empathetic, witness – without surrendering its final unspeakability. I hope my own poems will be able to work in this way for the global community of those of us living with, and making our lives and arts in the aftermath of, sexual abuse in childhood.

Falcon & Oscar & bust
Oscar Nemon with his baby son Falcon in 1941

One Hand Clapping can be found here.

The Cambridge Literary Review can be found here.