Translation, rewriting and the marginal city in Geraldine Monk's Escafeld Hangings

Abstract

Geraldine Monk's 2005 poetry collection Escafeld Hangings presents the city of Sheffield via a reworking of letters and textual fragments by Mary Queen of Scots and other sources. This article explores a set of connections between Monk's approach to language and her representation of city space. Looking at the city as a site of encounter between different languages, I argue that Monk's work uses forms of translation to reconfigure relationships between place and language, addressing both constructions of nationhood and the homogenizing effects of English as a global language by focusing on locality, heterogeneity and diachronic variation. I show firstly how her interrogation of proper nouns becomes a means of questioning the structures that define the city and its relationships of class and gender, and secondly how the transpositions between texts by Mary Queen of Scots and Monk's versions of them simultaneously evoke and displace the poetic subject, presenting the city as haunted by its margins.

Keywords:

• translation and poetry
• Geraldine Monk
• UK experimental poetry
• language and minority
• language and city space

Notes

1. Michael Cronin compares the speed of exchange in finance with that in translation, commenting on a Visa advert with the slogan “It's fluent in every language”. He suggests that “[i]f the credit card is the universal means of financial exchange, then English is the universal means of linguistic exchange. The Visa version of polyglossia is a frictionless monoglossia” (Cronin 1998, 153).

2. John Seed's comment that Bill Griffiths's writing “always stands in an oblique and troubled relationship to power, to officialdom, to authority – in a word, to the state” (Seed 2007, 110) could equally apply to Monk's own work. Both writers use a range of English dialects and colloquial forms to highlight the fact that “so-called standard English is a minority dialect spoken by as little as 5% of the population. In fact it is not even worthy of the name of dialect. Rather it is a specialized primarily written language” (ibid., 117).

3. Brian McHale has noted a similar process in Heaney's bog poems and Hill's Mercian Hymns, where “[a]nachronism produces a kind of temporal double exposure, past and present occupying the same plane, like sherds exposed by erosion or a tel in which the stratification has been disturbed” (McHale 1999, 243). However, he makes a distinction between the archaeological trope used in Freudian terms, as “expressionist upwellings from the depths” in modernism, and the postmodernist approach of Armand Schwerner's Tablets, where the poetic text is a fictionalized artefact, ostensibly a scholarly edition of translations from ancient Sumerian clay tablets, that gives us instead “overlapping and interfering voices, as if dispersed over a single horizontal plane” (ibid., 251).