Essays on James Clarence Mangan

The Man in the Cloak

S. Sturgeon

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137273376
• eBook ISBN: 9781137273383
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is the first collection of essays to focus on the extraordinary literary achievement of James Clarence Mangan (1803-1849), increasingly recognized as one of the most important Irish writers of the nineteenth century. It features contributions by acclaimed contemporary writers including Paul Muldoon and Ciaran Carson.

1

Crossing Over

On Mangan’s ‘Spirits Everywhere’

David Lloyd

A transition between the two moments of spirit, the ghost is just passing through

Jacques Derrida.¹

Writing on James Clarence Mangan in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was often overtaken by a sense of haunting, of possession, perhaps. Despite my frequent misgivings about the achievement of the poetry I was reading, misgivings amplified by the widespread assumption that few of Mangan’s poems were worth critical consideration any more, the work refused to let me go. It was as if, from beyond the grave, the poet compelled attention. Fantastical as this confession may sound, and I do not know if the sensation is one shared by other readers of Mangan, it remains the case that in a very precise sense, Mangan’s work is itself the scene of hauntings, and by no means unaware of itself as such. I think not only of the poet’s lifelong interest in ghosts and ghost-seers, manifest most notably in his essay ‘Chapters on Ghostcraft’, based extensively on the work of the German poet and spiritualist Justinus Kerner (CW6, pp. 71–92), but also of the ways in which Mangan’s work – as, indeed, I came to argue in my book on him – is itself a tissue of hauntings of various kinds. It constantly invokes the ghosts of other works, reminding us of the close relation between the work of citation and the force of the summons: to quote another work always risks summoning up not merely a brief and aphoristic fragment whose meaning is absorbed into the text that cites it, but the shadow of the whole other text whose appropriate limits as context can never finally be established. There lies always ‘within the lowest deep a lower deep’, as Mangan reminds us in his autobiography (CW6, p. 233), citing Milton’s Paradise Lost, a work whose narrative of satanic rebellion haunted his own Gothic self-presentation as a kind of poète maudit avant la lettre.² Above all, however, it is the practice of translation – the mode in which the vast majority of Mangan’s writing appeared – that invokes the presence of haunting in the very structure of the work. Certainly any translation must be haunted by the spectre of the original whose place it seeks to take, haunted both by a sense of inevitable inadequacy or failure with regard to its transmission of its urtext – a kind of debt or guilt [Schuld] towards it – and by a sense of betrayal that may amount to a killing of the spirit of the original. Translation theory itself, and particularly in Mangan’s own time, is possessed by this metaphor of spirit, by the notion that in some sense the translation must transmit the ‘spirit of the original’ if that work is to live again, be resurrected or have an afterlife in the language of the translation. This was peculiarly so for nationalist traditions of translation, for which the pure transmission of the ‘spirit of the nation’ through translation was an essential concern, but the metaphor of the spirit of a work, not unlike the spirit or ‘genius’ of a place, pervades Romantic notions of creativity and interpretation, making of each work the body in which the spirit has its life or afterlife. For Walter Benjamin, working much later in the German tradition that produced so much of nineteenth-century translation theory, it is largely in translation that a work has its afterlife:

Just as the manifestations of life are intimately connected with the phenomenon of life without being of importance to it, a translation issues from the original – not so much from its life as from its afterlife. For a translation comes later than the original, and since the important works of world literature never find their chosen translator at the time of their origin, their translation marks their stage of continued life. The idea of life and afterlife in works of art should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity.³

The notion of the afterlife of the work slips almost unobtrusively here from being a property of the original work to being an effect of translation. Benjamin’s remark suggests to us, then, that it is not only the work that haunts the translation, but that the work itself is no less haunted by its translations, by the various afterlives in which its spirit lives on, fragmentarily or mutilated as it may be, occupying the material form of another language than its own.

It is perhaps for this reason that I have been haunted again, and for some time now, by a seemingly insignificant poem of Mangan’s, entitled ‘Spirits Everywhere’ (CW2, p. 245). The poem was published initially in the Dublin University Magazine series ‘Anthologia Germanica’ that was for many years Mangan’s staple mode of publication, along with the ‘Literæ Orientales’ in the same journal, the translations that he claimed to make from various West Asian languages. It was reprinted in John Mitchel’s New York edition of the poems, but not in D. J. O’Donoghue’s canon-establishing centenary edition of the Poems. Nor is it included in Sean Ryder’s excellent Selected Works. The poem is a translation of one by the German poet Ludwig Uhland, entitled ‘Auf der Überfahrt’, which could be literally translated as ‘On the Crossing Over’ or, more loosely, ‘On the Ferry’.⁴ Uhland was in Mangan’s time a still highly respected German writer of ballads and songs, compared by some even to Goethe and Schiller, though the former expressed some notorious contempt for the putative school of Schwabian poets of which Uhland was the major representative. Having been appropriated, despite his avowed and oppositional liberalism, and on account of a handful of nationalist ballads, by conservative and even Nazi critics, Uhland’s reputation declined in the post-war period.⁵ For Mangan, writing in Ireland in the 1840s, he may have represented an important figure on account of his engagement with politics, as a liberal nationalist and, briefly, political representative, as well as a scholar of German medieval literature. Now, however, the poems may both seem like minor productions of minor poets. Be that as it may, ‘Spirits Everywhere’ may yet have something to tell us about the characteristics of Mangan’s work as a translator, and even about translation in general.

Mangan’s title already signals the fact that this is by no means a literal translation, even if his version follows more or less accurately the development of the situation in Uhland’s poem: the phrase ‘Spirits Everywhere’ is certainly far from a literal translation of ‘Auf der Überfahrt’. Indeed, the ‘unforced error’ of this translation, its gratuitousness, where a more literal translation would have been both adequate and colloquial, is what continues to perplex and to haunt me. How does one get from ‘Auf der Überfahrt’ to ‘Spirits Everywhere’? By what logic can the substitution of a general dissemination of spirit for an actual voyage across seem appropriate as an act of translation? This question becomes all the more pertinent in the light of Mangan’s often-stressed awareness of the German term for translation, Übersetzung, which he frequently invokes in his denomination of his German translations as ‘Oversettings from the German’. With an ironic gesture typical of Mangan’s hints to the reader, the apparent felicity of his inter-lingual neologism actually disguises a misalignment. Where Übersetzung is the standard German term for translation, and nicely renders the primary meaning in the Latin root of a lateral movement (as in the translation of a bishop), its [mis]translation into a somewhat uncolloquial English as ‘oversetting’ introduces to the field of its possible meanings the spectre of an overlay, even as it retains the sense of movement, of movement from one side, or shore, to another. In the latter case, it activates the deep connection between translation and transferre, transfer or ferrying across, or, one might say, between translation and metaphor, metaforein, the Greek term that also means to carry something across. Translation, like metaphor, establishes an identity across differences, if only by laying in abeyance the non-identical elements that it cannot subsume. At the same time, however, ‘oversetting’ conveys – to remain with the connotations of transport – the sense of an elaboration, of an accretion of ornament or superfluous decoration that gilds or drapes the literal meaning of the original. Its ambiguity in this respect is like that of the German word that Mangan occasionally adopted as a pen-name, Drechsler, turner (in the sense of a wood turner), but also elaborator, ornamenter.

As I have argued before, it is often the case in Mangan’s translations that we are dealing with a very deliberate elaboration, one close to the etymological sense of that word as a ‘working out’: even where they are in one or other sense parodic of their originals, his translations deliberately extend or project the logic of their originals in such a way as to draw out their inner logic, often in order to overturn (or overset) it. In the case of ‘Spirits Everywhere’, we are dealing with the translation of a poem whose original title denotes indeed a process of Übersetzung, the carrying across or transfer of passengers from one shore to another.⁶ That is, of course, the situation of the original poem: Uhland returns to a river that he has crossed many years before in the company of two companions, since deceased, and is reminded of them in his crossing over for the second time. These two companions, who had crossed the Neckar together with Uhland near Münster, were his maternal uncle, the priest Christian Eberhard Hoser, and the friend of his youth, Friedrich Harprecht, whose poems Uhland published posthumously. Both died in 1813, ten years before the date of the poem.⁷ Thus, even before we come to his reflections on the spiritual [geistig] meaning of that repetition, the situation is already of itself a repetition that is figurative: the second crossing provokes a reflection that allows for its relation to the first to become an allegory of the spirit. Or, one might say, the repetition allows for the spiritualization of the first instance. What was in that first instance a mere material event becomes in the second a sublimation into meaning, and a meaning that is the presence of the spirit:

Geistig waren jene Stunden,

Geistern bin ich noch verbunden.

For Uhland, the relation that persists between his present self and the now dead companions that once crossed the same river with him is thus purely spiritual, in the sense that their afterlife with him lies in the act of memorial that is the poem’s own process of sublimation into meaning and remembrance. The spiritual is a function of a repetition that mobilizes a metaphor: the death of his friends effects the transformation of the quotidian ferryman into Charon and the river into Lethe against whose work of oblivion the poem stands. In its final stanza, the poet makes this explicit in paying the ferryman not only his own fare, but offering two coins more for the spirits of the erstwhile companions whose physical absence is converted by memory into spiritual presence:

Nimm nur, Fährmann, nimm die Miete

Die ich gerne dreifach biete!

Zween, die mit mir überfuhren,

Waren geistige Naturen.

Playing on the complex set of meanings that the German Geist retains, which embraces a range of shades from simply mind or wit to spirit, both in the sense of expressions like esprit de corps or spirit of the nation and in that of ghost, or evil spirit, Uhland transforms spirited companions into metaphorical ghostly presences. Having recalled the one as a quietly working ‘father figure’ [vatergleicher] and the other as a young and stormy [brausend] warrior, as if they represented two tendencies of his own spiritual being, Uhland nonetheless affirms their pastness: “Zween, die mit mir überfuhren, / Waren geistige Naturen”. The poem reckons the cost of its own sublimating metaphor in the deaths that made it possible.

Mangan’s translation, in a fashion not unfamiliar to attentive readers of his work, elaborates the moment of wish fulfilment that persists even in Uhland’s self-conscious metaphor of spiritual bonds, and does so through a kind of mischievous literalization. Uhland’s two geistige Naturen become suddenly present in the ferry, not as metaphors but as phantoms:

For, though thou seest them not, there stand

Anear me Two from the Phantom-land! (CW2, p. 246)

The appearance of these phantoms – a term whose root is simply that, appearance, phantasma – is prepared for by Mangan’s translation of Uhland’s quite sober fourth stanza into a scenario of magic and fanciful dream, a Gothicizing movement that is common to his renderings of German romantic verse and part of a pattern of deliberate derealization that is sufficiently consistent to suggest critique rather than personal idiosyncracy.⁸ The stanza reads:

Yet still, when Memory’s necromancy

Robes the Past in the hues of Fancy,

Medreameth I hear and see the Twain

With talk and smiles at my side again! (CW2, p. 245)

Necromancy, that art of summoning dead spirits, creates the illusion of an actual restoration to presence of the dear companions whom, as a more literal rendering of Uhland would have put it, Death had...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• A Night on the Tiles with J. C. Mangan
• Foreword
• Introduction: James Clarence Mangan: The Man in the Cloak
• 1 Crossing Over: On Mangan’s ‘Spirits Everywhere’
• 2 ‘Fully able / to write in any language – I’m a Babel’: James Clarence Mangan and the Task of the Translator
• 3 ‘Antiquity and Futurity’ in the Writings of James Clarence Mangan
• 4 Cosmopolitan Form: Mangan’s Anthologies and the Critique of Weltliteratur
• 5 Night Singer: Mangan Among the Birds
• 6 ‘The last of the bardic poets’: Joyce’s Multiple Mangans
• 7 ‘[M]y mind is destroying me’: Consciousness, ‘Psychological Narrative’, and Supernaturalist Modes in Mangan’s Fiction
• 8 The Spiritual ‘Vastation’ of James Clarence Mangan: Magic, Technology, and Identity
• 9 Unauthorized Mangan
• 10 Mangan in England
• Afterword: Shades of Mangan
• Bibliography
• Index