This item is taken from PN Review 199, Volume 37 Number 5, May - June 2011.
Letters: from John McAuliffe, J.G. Nichols
The Hot Web
Sir:
Seamus Heaney's Human Chain does indeed mention a pen whose 'spatulate, thin // pump action lever / the shopkeeper / demonstrated', 'turf built trig and tight', and a grave 'spade-marked / clean-cut inside of a dug-out / meant for calves'. Jason Guriel singles out these lines as 'misguided' and suggests that Heaney is unconsciously 'plagiarising' himself rather than seeing these lines and the book as, among other things, a circling, augmenting and, occasionally, troubling of existing poems that most twenty-first-century readers of poetry know like the backs of their hands.
Guriel's is an unlikely argument, made in bad faith, and further weakened by his mention of Google, Wes Anderson, Angelina Jolie, 'extra credit', a 'greatest hits', 'top of the charts' and even 'the recent economic crisis' by way of appealing to 'the reader of 2010'. Guriel needs to get out more in 2011, and away from the web (or 'the true human chain', as he calls it).
JOHN MCAULIFFE
Manchester
In a Dark Wood
Sir:
Your review in P.N. Review 198 of my translation of Inferno is based on a faulty copy. Your reviewer's bewilderment at the misplacing of commas and colons is understandable, therefore, but gives a wrong impression of my book. May I emphasise that the copies now available do not contain these errors.
J.G. NICHOLS
Wallasey
Sir:
Seamus Heaney's Human Chain does indeed mention a pen whose 'spatulate, thin // pump action lever / the shopkeeper / demonstrated', 'turf built trig and tight', and a grave 'spade-marked / clean-cut inside of a dug-out / meant for calves'. Jason Guriel singles out these lines as 'misguided' and suggests that Heaney is unconsciously 'plagiarising' himself rather than seeing these lines and the book as, among other things, a circling, augmenting and, occasionally, troubling of existing poems that most twenty-first-century readers of poetry know like the backs of their hands.
Guriel's is an unlikely argument, made in bad faith, and further weakened by his mention of Google, Wes Anderson, Angelina Jolie, 'extra credit', a 'greatest hits', 'top of the charts' and even 'the recent economic crisis' by way of appealing to 'the reader of 2010'. Guriel needs to get out more in 2011, and away from the web (or 'the true human chain', as he calls it).
JOHN MCAULIFFE
Manchester
In a Dark Wood
Sir:
Your review in P.N. Review 198 of my translation of Inferno is based on a faulty copy. Your reviewer's bewilderment at the misplacing of commas and colons is understandable, therefore, but gives a wrong impression of my book. May I emphasise that the copies now available do not contain these errors.
J.G. NICHOLS
Wallasey
This item is taken from PN Review 199, Volume 37 Number 5, May - June 2011.
