didn’t know the words or couldn’t do any better. Hölderlin seems to have almost thought – you know when things refract in water – it’s almost as though he thought there was a calculable angle of poetic language from the original. That in your own practice you would try to arrive at something which parted company from whatever everyday speech is; that it would be at an angle to ordinary domestic practice. Robert Graves talked about the language of poetry as ‘otherwhereish’ and that’s quite a good image of it really because it’s using words that are at the free disposal of anybody, it is using them in a way which is odd. structo: Does your background as a translator affect your own original writing? There seems to be a definite ‘Englishness’ there. constantine: Yeah, I think I’m very English, but I could quite easily indicate what I’ve learned from Hölderlin particularly, and Brecht. Well, the politics of both were sympathetic to me, at least at the start – he was born in 1770, the same as Wordsworth, and he’s full of that revolutionary hope, until it all goes to the bad. And Brecht, I’m a great admirer of his politics as well. But more than that, in this particular poetological sense, what I got from Hölderlin particularly is just how much you can ask of the reading mind. He has sentences which go on for 18 lines, and because in German subordinate clauses the verb goes towards the end, the German reading mind is used to waiting for sense to be completed. There’s an extraordinary tension. Any German speaker will do it, and it won’t feel particularly tense, but Hölderlin makes a great virtue of this deferral of sense and therefore an increasing tension. The musical equivalent would be – I’m not a musician in the least – the point of resolution in a passage of music. Well, it’s a bit like waiting for that. An almost physical relief. English doesn’t have the same possibilities, but it does have kindred possibilities. You can ask more of the reading mind. And this thing that Phil Davis is asking is what happens to the brain. Different areas of the brain light up. If you’re expecting a verb and a verb turns up used as a noun, then for a minute nanosecond the brain is flummoxed. The brain works predictively, it’s like lip reading, so it’s always waiting for things to fall into place in a way to which it’s accustomed, because that’s how you function. Whereas poetic language continually thwarts that, and that’s very productive, because it alerts you, it keeps you agile, and it doesn’t allow the world just to drop into the shape you’re familiar with. Some kinds of syntax are more likely to disturb that predictive apprehension of the world, which is very necessary, it’s a pragmatically necessary ability of the brain, but it has to be subverted by poetry otherwise you’re
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