constantine: It is intrinsically a radical act. If taken seriously, it’s a radical act of opposition. And that’s a negative way of doing it, because if you’re in opposition then there’s this thing there to which you’re always paying regard, more or less consciously. But it’s almost unimaginable to us, a society in which it were taken for granted that this all matters. There have been societies, there probably still are, but England isn’t one of them. structo: And the same is true for fiction? constantine: Yes. structo: You’re in a good position to comment on this as you write fiction, short stories and novels, as well as poetry. Do they come from the same wellspring? constantine: I can’t do both at the same time, so in that sense they’re rather different, but the kind of short stories I write are the kind of short stories people would write if they mainly wrote poetry. But the same applies, that it’s through fictions that we get even near the truth nowadays. It’s very sad, but you don’t really expect [politicians] to be telling you the truth any more. And it is quite sad, because it just breeds a whole deeply sceptical, not to say cynical, electorate who are not even going to want to vote if it always ends up as just liars chopping the place up for their own advantage. There are other societies where it’s heaps worse of course, here corruption on the whole gets found out and is thought not to be tolerable, but I honestly think that the making of stories – although not the same as scientific fact – is another way of inducing people to think truthfully about the world they live in and about their place in it, through fiction. structo: When you have a spark of an idea, do you know what form it’s eventually going to take? constantine: There have been three or four occasions when I’ve done both, not at the same time, but I’ve written a story or a poem first and then I’ve felt that there’s enough [for both]. They both start in the same way, that is to say that they come about as images, as very concrete situations, and for the stories, and to a certain extent the poems, as a tone of voice. If it’s quite obvious at the outset that it’s going to be something quite large, which will need speaking voices, then it [becomes a story]. structo: Coming back to the translations for a little while: how do you
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