Scarcely Translated: Peter Larkin’s Ecopoetic Entanglements

• Main Author: Katharina Maria Kalinowski
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Library of Humanities 2020-05-01
• Series: Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry
• Subjects: Ecopoetics; Translation; Scarcity; Attention; Horizon; Peter Larkin
• Online Access: https://poetry.openlibhums.org/article/id/1312/

This paper explores Peter Larkin’s poetry within a framework of ecopoetics, attention, and translation. Seeking to provide an overview of the ecological intertwinements in his work, it draws on Larkin’s ‘poetics of scarcity’, which implies a precarious relation between abundance and absence. The resulting notion of being insufficiently with the givenness of the natural world finds its echo in an experimental creative-critical edge of language entangled in a philosophical, theological, and poetical discourse. Resisting economic consumption, Larkin’s alienated poetic register resonates with an ecopoetic decentring of language that pushes against its human limitedness. His poems thus require an increased attention, which, in line with an ecological approach to attention, can stretch towards a horizoning ethical attention to endangered external landscapes. Emerging notions of transformation, interrelatedness, and moving beyond borders are subsequently reinforced by an expanded framework of translation with reference to Larkin’s collection ‘Spirit of the Trees’. As romanticised poems are recomposed in a new environment during a forceful, yet creative act, an-other layer of alienation is revealed with regard to the ecopoetic context of Larkin’s work. Translation is ultimately seen as motion, relation-making, and approximation, which can be extended to the insufficiency of poetry and language itself: From a scarce position, the entanglements in Larkin’s poetry respond to the manifold entanglements of the natural world, their uncanny poetic resistance pointing towards a horizon where a necessarily existential human scarcity opens up spaces for reparative attention.