Violence and Exquisite Beauty – The Aesthetics of Roy Campbell

In her introduction to Campbell's translations of the poems of St John of the Cross, Campbell's wife, Mary states:

'…The violent side of his character was used as a cloak for a vulnerable, contemplative soul. The tough soldier, the crack shot, the jouster, the convivial story-teller were all so many masks covering the retiring, gentle, creative spirit from a too brutal contact with everyday life.'

This claim is in some way confirmed by a close look at Campbell's poetry and translations, rather than by reading any of the available biographies. In his own poetry, Campbell creates a rich and delightfully sensual world and then presents its specifics in startling detail:

I dropped my sail and dried my dripping seines
Where the white quay is chequered by cool planes
In whose great branches, always out of sight,
The nightingales are singing day and night.
Though all was grey beneath the moon's grey beam,
My boat in her new paint shone like a bride,
And silver in my baskets shone the bream:
My arms were tired and I was heavy-eyed,
But when with food and drink, at morning-light,
The children met me at the water-side,
Never was wine so red or bread so white.

Mass at Dawn
Roy Campbell

This seemingly effortless creation and evocation of an exotic landscape and the accompanying modes of life and customs of its inhabitants, is one of Campbell's many strengths as a poet. His eye for detail, in particular, colored detail, gives his poems a great deal of imaginative depth. The "dripping seines"; "the white quay"; the landscape, "grey beneath the moon"s grey beam'; the "boat in her new paint"; "the bream", shining "silver in my baskets"; the "morning-light"; the "wine so red" and the "bread so white", all contribute to loading the poem to capacity with sensory and sensual detail.

As this essay is primarily concerned with analyzing Campbell's work for the type of aesthetic method used to present images of such delicacy as the poems contain, there is not adequate space to analyze the plethora of linguistic riches and semantic delights that are to be found in Campbell's poetry - of which the final line of Mass at Dawn: "Never was wine so red or bread so white" is just one example.

Mary Campbell also claims that "Roy Campbell [is] a poet of action, and in some ways a violent poet." This claim, which refers not to the man, but specifically to the poet, is crucial for an understanding of Campbell's poetry. As "a poet of action and… a violent poet", Campbell is able to create and capture moments from the natural world with close-up, convincing, violent and sensual detail:

From the dark woods that breathe of fallen showers,
Harnessed with level rays in golden reins,
The zebras draw the dawn across the plains
Wading knee-deep among the scarlet flowers.
The sunlight, zithering their flanks with fire,
Flashes between the shadows as they pass
Barred with electric tremors through the grass
Like wind along the gold strings of a lyre.

Into the flushed air snorting rosy plumes
That smoulder round their feet in drifting fumes,
With dove-like voices call the distant fillies,
While round the herd the stallion wheels his flight.
Engine of beauty volted with delight
To roll his mare among the trampled lilies.

The Zebras
Roy Campbell

Again, the attention to colored detail provides the poem with its power and beauty. The "dark woods"; the "scarlet flowers"; the "gold strings"; the "rosy plumes" and "the trampled lilies" all work on the mind's visual sense, while the verbal pyrotechnics of "golden reins"; "draw the dawn"; "zithering"; "electric tremors"; and "Engine of beauty volted with delight", provide a sophisticated linguistic framework, within which modern mechanical terms are juxtaposed with words and images from nature. The frisson that this technique creates is what makes the poem successful. Campbell's aesthetic technique of yoking together such disparate elements - the natural and the mechanical, the violent and the sensually beautiful, can clearly be seen at work in this poem.

Campbell's claim that "translations, (like wives) are seldom faithful if they are in the least attractive", would suggest that Campbell's translations would bear no resemblance to their source material. This is not the case. Instead, Campbell utilises a poetic sensibility and sensitivity finely tuned to the specific needs of the rhetoric of each of the poems he translates. In his versions of Baudelaire's poems from Les Fleurs du Mal, the poems retain Baudelaire's metres, and also manage to keep all of the tone and meanings of the originals:

Come, my fine cat, against my loving heart;
Sheath your sharp claws, and settle.
And let my eyes into your pupils dart
Where agate sparks with metal.