Nathaniel Tarn

My interview with poet Nathaniel Tarn in StarMag today:

If anyone can lay claim to the title “world citizen” it should surely be poet Nathaniel Tarn: his biodata lists his ethnicity simply as “Earth”, and with good reason. Born in France and educated at major universities in Britain, France and the United States, he became an anthropologist and travelled to many parts of the world including Guatemala and Burma, becoming a specialist in South-East Asia.

He says that he has fallen in love with this part of the world all over again after a trip to Bali, Java and the Philippines last year, and is looking forward to travelling in Sarawak. He was in Kuala Lumpur recently and invited to read from his work at an event sponsored by Pusaka at Maya Gallery in Bangsar.

After a distinguished career in anthropology, Tarn eventually gave it up to concentrate on his poetry because he found it too difficult to “keep both scholarship and literature in one head”. Tarn became a professor of comparative literature at Rutgers University in New Jersey and is probably best known for his translations of Pablo Neruda’s work.

He also spent a brief spell in publishing: he teamed with Jonathan Cape to produce Cape Editions, an influential series of paperbacks which covered a wide variety of subjects and introduced a variety of new writers (including Neruda) to the reading public.

Poetry is vitally important to society, Tarn believes. “It defends against cancer of the language and encourages precise intelligible expressive language without which none of us get far at all.” He believes too that poets have a duty to tackle bigger themes rather than the purely personal and anecdotal. Tarn is pessimistic about the state of the world and sees the human race as “severely menaced at this point”. The care of the earth and all its inhabitants is a huge task and poets have an important role to play in bringing issues to public awareness.

He quotes Shelley saying that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world” and says that the poet needs to be political in the word’s widest sense, which has to do with the workings of the state on every level.

The status of poets also concerns Tarn. In Britain and America poets tend not to be regarded very highly by society. At particularly low point in his career he wrote “now I believe our average poet, if it can survive, is lucky to be something like a liver fluke progressing through the guts of sheep.”

He rails against the overproduction of writing and the underproduction of readers turned out by academic creative writing courses in the US, and believes that writers “should live a life,” rather than attend courses.

Tarn is himself a voracious reader and the basement of his Santa Fe home is filled with many thousands of volumes. He tries to keep abreast of developments in at least twelve academic fields including ecology, history of religion, psychology, Russian Studies and aviation history. His first impulse when he knew that he was coming to Malaysia was to rush out buy some fifty to sixty books on this area. But he adds wistfully, “When you get to a certain age you cannot keep on top of things: you can’t read several hundred books simultaneously”.

Tarn has written numerous critically acclaimed volumes of poetry comprising both shorter and longer pieces. (He collaborated with his wife, poet Janet Rodney, on three of the works.) His poetry was described by one times Literary Supplement reviewer as being “a very original mixture of the high and the low, the deliberately elevated and the humorously familiar”. And of course Tarn’s anthropological background and myriad academic concerns feed into his poetry.

Tarn read from his Selected Poems 1950-2000 on Saturday night, opening with Before the Snake which he describes as a totem poem describing the landscape in terms of Eden before the fall. He and read an extract from his first long poem, The Beautiful Contradictions about a Mayan village in Guatemala; and several more recent pieces including an extract from his The Architextures, about Persephone, the goddess of lyric poetry. An extract about St. Petersburg from Three Letters from the City was read first by Tarn and then read in a Malay translation by Eddin Khoo.

Khoo announced that a collection of Tarn’s poetry in Malay is underway and should be published next year. And Tarn has to come back to Malaysia, joked Khoo, since he has “seen a lot of the world, but he hasn’t yet seen Kelantan.”

On the internet you can read the whole of Tarn and Rodney’s poem Alashka at http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/rodtarn and his beautiful Bartok in Udaipur can be found at http://www.aisna.org/rsajournal2/Tarn.html.

Felt tremendously privileged to have this opportunity to talk to Tarn. I knew him only as the translator of some of Neruda's work but the reading so whetted my appetite that I have his Collected Poems on order. Felt he was someone I'd loved to have spent many hours talking to: he radiates enthusiasm for life, love of learning and tremendous compassion. And maybe poetry keeps you young, because he looked a good decade or so younger than his 77 years - very physically robust.

I was most impressed to hear that he had written some of his poetry with his wife. His long poem Alashka was written while they were on the road in an old Dodge van - who wrote which part is a closely guarded secret. Seems to me to be a particularly loving thing to do, to share your work in this way. Sehati sejiwa, hey?

Look forward to seeing him when he passes this was again, hopefully next year. So glad that Eddin Khoo is translating his work.