don’t have to do the same, there are other ways of structuring it. English has shown itself capable of that. structo: So it’s bringing in both technical and cultural aspects through translation. constantine: Yes. And what’s happening – it’s regrettable, but I’m not sure whether there’s anything we can do about it – is that our own past literature is becoming increasingly foreign. Already Shakespeare is quite hard for an awful lot of school kids. That’s a pity, but not enough [of a problem] that someone determined enough couldn’t make the effort. There have been translations of Chaucer for a long time. It is actually fun going back to read Chaucer, to see what you can make of it. The idea that – and this isn’t a contradiction of what we talked about earlier – as a writer, and as a poet particularly, you’re addressing anything like unitary culture any more is a nonsense. You’re just not. If you look down the poetry lists of Bloodaxe [Books] for example, it’s blown wide open. There’s every vernacular, there’s no one to say this is canonical and this is marginal, nobody thinks like that seriously now. structo: Bloodaxe in particular seem to be very on top of that. constantine: Yes. For a start [Bloodaxe editor] Neil Astley’s got 50% men and 50% women, which is as it should be, but it’s taken so long to get to that equality of voice. There is a lot of overlapping experience, but there are areas in which men and women have radically different experiences, and that’s terribly valuable. MPT was on the whole ok because there are an awful lot of women translators. It used to be something that was felt to be fit for women, the service of the text, you know? And certainly in the 19th century, a lot of translators were women. You’d get a male author and a female translator. Odd. structo: It’s good that that is now seen as odd. constantine: It is thought to be very odd indeed now, but is still the case that there are an awful lot of absolutely excellent women translators. If you looked at MPT from the point of view of author and then point of view of translator, then we would have been doing less well in terms of author because it went right back to Homer. [Laughter] One of the embarrassing things about this Literary Agenda was that when I went for all the instances that I grew up with, then of course they’re mostly male actually, because
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