This week we launched Transit of Venus | Venustransit at the Royal Society. One of the poets involved, Chris Price, has written about her approach to writing poetry for this unique project.
An unlikely but
marvelous conjunction: three New Zealand and three German poets, a bunch of
high-flying scientists and the Tolaga Bay Area School and its community, all of
us staring at the sun through our various lenses and filters. When Bill Manhire outlined the parameters of
this project with the local poets, he suggested that we might like to write
about ‘first contact’. My version of
that entailed bringing a rather fuzzy historical understanding into focus, as
well as trying to acquire at least a basic grasp of the science of the Transit
observations. I turned to Anne Salmond’s
Between Worlds (Allen Lane) as my
first historical source, where, predictably perhaps, I was drawn to the languages
of the colonial and scientific enterprise, and what happened when they met the
indigenous language. Alison Jones and
Kuni Jenkins’ beautiful book Words
Between Us – He Kōrero: First Māori-Pākehā conversations on paper (Huia
Publishers) arrived just in time to provide a more fine-grained account.
Hindsight and
historians tell us that it all ended badly for the local contingent in so many
ways, but at the point of first contact nothing was fixed or settled, everything
was open, all of it was surprising. Of
course good intentions proved wholly inadequate to the actualities of
cross-cultural encounter back then, and while those intentions have had a few
centuries to become more nuanced, I was interested in the sometimes uneasily
prescriptive tone in which they are still voiced today. As well as the one
found poem that made its way into the book, there was another reworking the
Earl of Morton’s instructions on how to behave towards indigenous people, and a
third that cut up the mission statement of the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology,
where the poets performed. The ‘circle of least confusion’ is a phrase early
Transit observers used to describe what they hoped to see in order to make
precise drawings of the first contact between Venus and the circumference of
the sun, but it had and has applications on the ground as well as in the
sky.
My own good
intentions about not writing ‘history poems’ quickly foundered on the
fascinations of research. What I wasn’t
prepared for, though, was the positive-spirited ways in which the present-day
community of Uawa /Tolaga Bay owned and expressed their part in the long
experiment in biculturalism that began in 1769, which had the effect – as if
Paul Callaghan, who was behind the Transit of Venus Forum, had somehow managed
to engineer a momentary shift in the laws of cultural physics – of clearing a
space in which the best available version of New Zealand could shine for a day,
in the same way that the clouds parted at Tolaga Bay just in time to see the
2012 Transit. Maybe we all went back to
being our unreconstructed selves next morning, but boy, it sure did generate a
blast of hopefulness.
Of course
attention wandered to the peripheries.
The poets’ visit to the Dark Sky
exhibition at the Adam Art Gallery provided the raw data for both a solo
mash-up (‘Venera: Fictions at an exhibition’), and a collaborative cadavre exquis poem-on-postcards that
became ‘Dear Venus’. I sneakily initiated the poem with the opening lines of
‘Poedua’, which I’d already written, to find out where it might end up with two
navigators at the helm rather than one: an experiment in giving up control of
the story, at least in part. Elements
of that exhibition found their way into other poets’ work as well. A front-of-house and behind-the-scenes visit
to Te Papa yielded a response to John Webber’s painting of Tahitian princess Poedua.
Somewhere between the Pacific and Webber’s Greenwich studio she acquired a
rather English face and demeanour. It
could be said that I have now matched that English face with an English voice
by putting words in her mouth. The difficult
negotiations continue.
The poems were to
be translated in Berlin and performed at the reopening, in Hamburg, of the Ngāti
Tarawhai (Te Arawa) meeting house Rauru.
A little digging – the excellent Otago University Press book Rauru provides superb images and
insightful commentary – revealed that Rauru has a sister house, Hinemihi, that
stands not far from where I spent my early infancy in England. It was brought there by a governor whose name
graces the Wellington street in which I now live. At the suggestion of Ngāti
Huia (a Ngāti Raukawa sub-tribe), Lord Onslow’s New-Zealand-born son was
christened Huia – although I rather like the resonances of an earlier proposal
that he be called Taihoa (hold on! no hurry!), because it sounded like
Onslow. Huia was adopted as a chief, and
his
father was subsequently
responsible for promoting Buller’s belated legislation to protect native birds.
Although the
Onslow family returned to England when Huia was a small child, he revisited New
Zealand and was ceremonially received by his Ngāti Raukawa
whanau when he was
fourteen. He became a passionate
scientist who conducted research from his bed after an accident on a climbing expedition
left him paralysed from the neck down at the age of 21. He died at 32, and
there’s an (as yet) unfinished piece of writing for Huia Onslow that haunts
this selection.
I hadn’t expected
to find myself engaging with personal issues of (un)belonging as a result of my
own Transit observations. It was both
enlarging and unsettling – and being an observer-participant in the version of
New Zealand culture showcased at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where the poets
performed in an appropriately starry New Zealand pavilion, only extended the
lines of questioning.
Reading the poems
in Germany proved a cross-cultural challenge, too. So much historical and
scientific information that our audience would not have to help them make sense
of the work. So much explaining to do, three
languages, six poets, so little time. Mostly we had to just put the poems out there
and hope they’d jump the language/culture barrier. But working with the three German poets, and
in particular with my ‘partner’ Brigitte Oleschinski and our interlinear
translator Catherine Hales was challenge as pure delight. All of us quite different, and yet in a way we
all spoke dialects of the same language. Translation was an intensely pleasurable
activity, especially with the support of the literaturwerkstatt’s sociable ‘VERSchmuggel
/ reVERSible’ process. None of this
would have been possible without the complex interactions and efforts of the
many organisations and individuals mentioned in the Acknowledgements of this
book. Kia ora, a toast, and Prost to
them all. Wunderbar.
Chris Price
Transit of Venus | Venustransit is available for purchase at good bookstores and through VUP's website
Watch It wasn't me || und du warst es auch nicht, a short film with Hinemoana Baker and Ulrike Ulmut Sandig from the Transit of Venus poetry project.
Watch It wasn't me || und du warst es auch nicht, a short film with Hinemoana Baker and Ulrike Ulmut Sandig from the Transit of Venus poetry project.
