Burgess's oath to poetry.(Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems)(Book Review)

Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems, by Anthony Burgess, edited by Kevin Jackson; Carcanet, 2002, about $30.

HAVING KILLED the poet Enderby in one novel, Anthony Burgess proceeded to write Enderby's Dark Lady or No End to Enderby (1984) in which the poet is alive again. In the prefatory note to that novella Burgess expounds the view that "fictional characters, though they sometimes may have to die, are curiously immune to death". Enderby, Burgess explains, was born of a delirious bout of sandfly fever in North Borneo in early 1959, when, Burgess writes in the same prefatory note,

 
   I opened the door of the bathroom in my 
   bungalow and was not altogether surprised to 
   see a middle-aged man seated on the toilet writing 
   what appeared to be poetry. The febrile vision 
   lasted less than a second, but the impossible 
   personage stayed with me, and demanded the 
   writing of a novel about him. 

Further on Burgess gives a telling summation of his alter-ego poet, when he writes:

 
   A reviewer in Punch said, of the first novel or 
   half-novel, "It would be helpful if Mr Burgess 
   could indicate somewhere whether these poems 
   are meant to be good or bad," a fine instance of 
   critical paralysis. T.S. Eliot liked at least three of 
   the poems, but posterity is beginning to find his 
   taste unsure, especially since he too, like Enderby, 
   became the librettist for a Broadway musical. I 
   have no opinion about either Enderby's poems or 
   Enderby himself. I do not know whether I like or 
   dislike him; I only know that, for me, he exists. I 
   fear that he may probably go on existing. 

Of the 112 pages of poetry and verse in Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems, only a third or so were ever ascribed to F.X. Enderby; the remainder of the collection gives a good sample of the surprising range of Anthony Burgess's verse output. This includes extracts from the plays and operas translated by Burgess; a selection from the book-length narrative poem Moses; and a selection of sonnets admirably translated from the nineteenth-century Roman dialect of Giuseppe Giocchino Belli.

The five sonnets from Belli, culled from the seventy or so that Burgess translated, show Burgess at his best. Written in a dense Romanesco--"dialect" does not do justice to the cadence and mannerism of Roman speech, it is a tongue on fire with irreverence and obscenity--the sonnets capture that wonderful mix of common street-wise jocular expressions with an inimitable lyricism. Belli's 2279 sonnets were written to strict Petrarchan form, with a rhyme scheme abba abba for the two quatrains, followed by the cdcdcd sestet. Burgess, with typical ingenuity, incorporated his translations into the short novel Abba Abba that features Keats alongside Belli.