Between February 2024 and March 2025, the poet Peter Sirr (PS) and I (COR) engaged in a series of written interviews about Peter’s work. The conversation below concerns his 2016 collection, Sway.

~

COR: How does one go about learning Old Occitan nowadays – the language spoken by the troubadours of Southern Europe through the twelfth and fourteenth centuries? And for the quizzically minded: why would someone do such a thing?

PS: The same way you go about learning any language, really. Dictionaries, grammars. Patience. Puzzling my way through the texts of the poems, listening to the sung versions to get a sense of the language at work. My bible was An Introduction to Old Occitan by William D. Paden, and it was really just a question of slowly working towards enough competence to be able to read and understand the originals. That was my basic method. Everything I translated I worked through first in the original. And of course that was one of the great pleasures of the enterprise. 

As to the why, well I suppose I’d say, why not? It’s a beautiful language full of stunning poems. Dead languages are easier, in a way; you only have yourself and the page to deal with, you don’t have to have complicated conversations with anyone one or phone up a plumber to get a ballcock fixed. If you stumble no one will notice. Also, with Old Occitan, plenty of people have there before, Pound not least, or the excellent Paul Blackburn. And there are a lot of translations online, so I could double-check my own translations and make sure there were no terrible howlers. One of the reasons I wanted to do it is I found a lot of the existing versions quite archaising, so that maybe something of the freshness of the original voices had been lost. 

COR: “How poor the man who’d love / and not increase by it. No / one, no one’s richer  than I”, sings Bernart de Ventadorn; on the other hand there’s a crooning robber-baron like Bertran de Born, who declares, “My heart is full: it’s time at last / to put an end to peace.” For all the dazzle and merriment involved, it’s a world where love and war, art and violence are very much present. Is this merely a quirk of the original tradition, do you think, or are there implications for the way we think about lyric poetry in general? I should say, I found Bernart and friends very likeable throughout, for all the mayhem of the history surrounding them

PS: This was a feudal society, some of these poets were aristocrats or associated with the ruling classes, others relied on them for patronage. We don’t really know a huge amount about their lives; there are the vidas, the prose accounts of their lives and careers but these are mostly fiction. Bernart de Ventadorn, the greatest of the troubadours – fourteen of whose melodies and forty-five of whose poems have survived – was, if those accounts can be believed, the son of a baker in the castle of Ventadorn. Or else he was the son of a servant, or his father was a soldier. Bertran de Born on the other hand was a baron from Limousin. He did write love poems but we know him best for the political poems. He was involved in military revolts and ended his life as a monk. So it’s no surprise that a lot of his work is militaristic, especially the one you quote. And the man who effectively starts off the tradition, Guilhèm de Peitieus or Guilhem de Poitou, was the Duke of Aquitaine and Gascony and Count of Poitou. His is the poem that starts the book, with its bold declaration, Farai un vers de dreyt rien (“I’m going to write a poem about nothing at all”), which sounds as if it was written yesterday, and it was the poem that started it all off for me. There’s great variety in the tradition, and very different approaches in the subjects and style. 

COR: My impression is that, in your preparations, even as you were reading widely – gathering all you could from the history and scholarship surrounding the troubadours – your approach to the poems mixed appreciation with a healthy irreverence. In your own words: “I played fast and loose with form and image; I left out large chunks of poems in order to get at the essence... I included poems of my own inspired by the tradition, as if a trobador had gone to sleep and woken in the mountains of Cork or Kerry.” Your justification for this rip-roaring behaviour seems to be that, from the little we know of them, the troubadours themselves would have done no different: you were being true to the troubadour spirit.

PS: I hope I was being true to their spirit. As always when you make a translation, unless your intention is to make a bald, literal replication, you want it to work as a poem in English. If I’m translating from a living poet – or from Irish to English, for example – I might allow myself a certain amount of latitude, but I try to stick as closely as I can to the original. In the case of the troubadours the existence of previous translations means that I feel less pressure. But in spite of the freedom I afforded myself I was very intent on staying as close to the spirit of the originals as I could, to write something these poets might actually recognise if they were to rise up again and find themselves fluent in English or at least in my peculiar branch of the language. So it wasn’t just a case of modernising them or sticking them into a readymade vernacular idiom but more to find forms and articulations that paid their respects to their artfulness and delicacy. This wasn’t so much a thought-out thing as a back-of-the-mind predisposition; the translation-making itself was pretty instinctual, much like making a poem.  

COR: I’m conscious that many of the poems you were working with while writing this collection would have been sung aloud originally and composed for that purpose. In an earlier exchange, you mentioned your love of music. Do songs and song-lyrics hold a similar appeal? I notice that in your later poem, ʽBruegel: The Wedding in the Barnʼ, you stitch the lyrics from The Chieftainsʼ jig, The Frost is All Over, into its fabric (you also suggest in the same piece, however, that “hell is a furious music”). Other poems from your back-catalogue – like ‘The Capsuleʼ, or ʽSome say...ʼ – seem quite song-like in the way they’re shaped and arranged on the page.

PS: I’m actually pretty obsessed with song and music, and with finding connections between poetry and music. I have lots of poems with the word ‘song’ in the title even if they’re not strictly songs. But maybe I’m after a certain kind of intimate appeal or intimate articulation. I’m very interested in various folk musics, for instance, where the composers and singers are often anonymous, and the nature of the voice is one of the big attractions; the sense of individual voices speaking out of particular situations but at the same time the sense that a whole tradition is speaking. I’m currently writing a whole set of poems that are a kind of songbook, an assemblage of voices that issue from one unnamed individual who is also a speaker on behalf of those anonymous traditions. It’s bound to cause confusion... but I think you’re always trying to find ways to avoid yourself, of being stuck to your one single self, and so you try slide into other selves, other experiences and perspectives. I should also say I’m very interested in the orality of poetry, the poem as physical, sonic artifact, something that needs to be read out loud as well as exist on the page. The musical aspect of poetry, which isn’t always attended to. But it seems to me that we forget it at our peril; there’s a lot of chopped up prose out there.

COR: Relatedly, I know that you’ve penned a number of radio plays. Radio Carla, for example, revolves around a mysterious cassette-tape that arrives out of the past – and onto the doorstep of a slightly bewildered addressee. Another piece, Oblivion, tunes in to a lively chorus of forgotten Greek poets as they chatter away, narrating their shared fate in the darkness. Might these works be considered extensions of your poetry, or did you feel that you had crossed over from one genre to another when you wrote them? (Incidentally, while re-reading your poem, ʽAudience with BBʼ, in preparation for our last exchange, I thought it could work well as an audio-drama.)

PS: I was talking about trying to shift away from the self, and of course voice is the way of doing that, so yes, absolutely I agree. I loved doing the radio plays for that reason, playing with different voices. Like poetry, radio drama is an intimate form; the transition from poetry feels natural enough. The other great advantage of doing something on radio is that you get to deal with a producer and with actors, so you feel like a real writer. And my producer was Aidan Mathews, also a poet as well as a talented playwright, short story writer and novelist, so I couldn’t have asked for better guidance or a more sympathetic ear. Voice is always complicated in poetry, it’s what carries the poem but particularly if it’s a first-person voice people tend to assume you’re writing strict autobiography, they can miss the drama of it, the fictive positioning that’s part of what any poem does. All of this has been said much better before, of course – “Je est un autre”, and all that. I like your suggestion about the Brecht poem, though I doubt I’ll try to do a radio version. But I love the dramatic possibilities of poetry, even in the quietest seeming lyric.