Collected Poems by Anthony Burgess (best e ink reader for manga txt) 📕

most of Burgess’s own books. These were also inspected, and a few poems were found in inserted notes or on flyleaves. The present book is the first time Burgess manuscript material from the Austin and Manchester archives have been combined into a single substantive poetry collection.

Collected Poems has been an assuredly difficult work to compile. The multitude of manuscripts and published variants – mainly resulting from Burgess’s sometimes revisionist approach to writing poetry – has presented significant editorial challenges. Where possible, the edition has drawn directly on material from the archive collections, and/or from first editions of novels, generally favouring earlier drafts. Sometimes, this has purely been for sanity’s sake. Frequently, the level of difference is only slight, and perhaps results from Burgess typing later versions from memory. For example, the first line of the short poem spoken by Sir Benjamin in The Eve of St Venus (written c. 1951, published 1964) begins ‘Heroes are dead to them’. In Burgess’s Banbury diary (1954), the poem begins ‘Heroes are dead to us’. In this case, the earlier version not only works better as a self-contained stanza, but also seems more generalizable. Complexities concerning which version to use are especially present in the poems that were eventually reused in Byrne (such as ‘The Music of the Spheres’), but which have differing words and punctuation. Here, earlier forms have been used. A multiplicity of these sorts of decisions have been made, and the endnotes provide brief accounts where appropriate.

Collected Poems features a long sequence of bawdy and mainly biblical sonnets from a manuscript titled ‘Belli’s Blasphemous Bible’. Burgess also called this ‘Belli’s Bible for Blasphemers’; there are two main manuscripts of these translations, and both titles are used. (I have opted for the former title, preferring its brevity.) Most of these are translations of the nineteenth-century Roman poet G. G. Belli: five of the sonnets were published in Times Literary Supplement on 23 January 1976 and the complete sequence in ABBA ABBA (1977), a novel about a theoretical meeting between John Keats and Belli. Drafts of these sonnets were handwritten in a 1974 diary, and then worked up into intermediate typewritten drafts. Although the diary shows that Burgess may have translated them in the order that is used in ABBA ABBA, the present edition follows the order of the heavily corrected typescript. This order does not greatly deviate from the sequence as it appeared in ABBA ABBA, but the endnotes provide guidance where there are variations. As Paul Howard notes5 the translation methods Burgess adopted meant that they each existed in numerous versions before their appearance in the Times Literary Supplement and the subsequent novel ABBA ABBA (1977). Given that these translations of Belli’s Romanesco sonnets were built up through layers of redrafts, it follows that the versions used in Collected Poems should be based on the far more developed sonnets that appeared in TLS and ABBA ABBA. The present sequence draws on these original manuscripts.

As well as some slight lexical variations, these intermediate drafts have different titles to those that appeared in ABBA ABBA. A full account of these differences is provided in the endnotes. The manuscript can in many respects be read as proof of Burgess’s growing confidence in his translations, since there seem to be – on the whole – fewer handwritten corrections added as the manuscript sequence develops. Moreover, Burgess seemingly worked out his line indentation system only around halfway through the ‘Bible’. Accordingly, readers will note that the shape of the sonnets visibly changes; it was decided to maintain these non-standard indentations as they help us learn more about Burgess’s poetics of space. Another striking feature of the manuscript transcriptions is that the word-choices show no particular regard for editorial conservatism. Sometimes, the rude language was amplified for the ‘final’ ABBA ABBA version. Conversely, in other places, the lexis is more conservative in the published book. The pen-corrected sequence of drafts also demonstrates that Burgess’s intentions were chiefly auditory. A peculiar example can be seen in the last sonnet in the ABBA ABBA sequence (‘The Last Judgment’). On the last line of this sonnet, ‘Er-phwoo’ – the sound of a candle being blown out – was originally written as ‘Phwoo’, and then corrected by hand. Even wind effects were subject to careful sonic reassessment; as well as a poet, Burgess was a musician.

In addition to the source manuscripts used in this edition, a large number of early handwritten translations of the Belli sonnets are held at the Harry Ransom Center archive in Austin, Texas. Additionally, early drafts can be inspected in the Burgess Foundation archive in Manchester. While many of these fragments seem quite different from the versions that were eventually published in ABBA ABBA, none of them offer a particularly elegant array of words upon the page; there are gaps in the lines and rhymes are often still to be worked out. Many sonnets have indeterminately re-worked words and phrases, and to display them here would not make for smooth reading. Hence, the later drafts were used. The sequence, then, draws on a single set of manuscripts, which presumably formed the basis for ABBA ABBA. Four other completed sonnets that are Burgess originals are included in the sequence, just as they are in ABBA ABBA (‘The Bet’, ‘Two Uses for Ashes’, ‘Privy Matters’ and ‘The orchidaceous catalogue begins’). The previously published versions of these sonnets are substantially the same as the later drafts that are held at the archive in Texas, with one exception. The poem beginning ‘The orchidaceous catalogue begins’ does not go as far as spelling out that the name in question is that of the critic Geoffrey Grigson, whereas the archive version does. The full name is restored in the present version.

There are notable exceptions to the overall sequential logic of the Belli translations. Three previously unpublished sonnets (‘Spaniards’, ‘Work’ and ‘Local Industry’) have simply been added at the end of the ‘Bible’, just before Burgess’s own sonnets from the novel. ‘Local Industry’ was