This is a short extract from the first of the two Zoom interviews I held with Ruth Padel in March 2021, the transcript of which is published in The North issue 66. Both interviews can be found on my Youtube channel
Yvonne Green
Poems platform questions and leave space for reader’s answers, at the same time claiming the territory of the page. Your work vivifies characters, be they Crete’s Jews, Darwin, Beethoven, and even death beds, like in ‘Nursing Wing’ in your collection Emerald.
Ruth Padel
That book had an interesting genesis; I was interested in what humans value, why we sometimes value bits of green stone, more than gold. The first emeralds were discovered in Colombia – their history’s extraordinary: Spanish and Portuguese ships carried them to India where they were cut and worked on in Delhi. The city of Jaipur, founded in the 18th century, became the great Mecca of emerald workers. I went to Columbia and talked emeralds to people; the gems are found in carbonic rock – a hot, black mineral – so the idea of green emeralds as emblems of luck and renewal is counter-intuitive.
And while I was researching into all of that – emeralds, alchemy, and other things – my mother started dying. She was 97. She was rushed to hospital. And that hijacked the book. And the book’s really about her dying. She spent a few months in the nursing home where she died very peacefully, with her five children around her. ‘Nursing Wing’ is about that.
Yvonne Green
So here you have this life, in the soil of family, relationships, experiences, feelings. But then you’ve got a parallel life, the writing life. And you’ve got these biographies in which you vivify the lives of their subjects but where the poetic “I” isn’t you …
Ruth Padel
It may be an aspect of you, it doesn’t matter. You’re crafting the persona of the speaker, which may be based on you, but if it isn’t – say when you’ve got a little poem, 14 lines long – the “I” spoken of belongs to the poem. It’s the speaker in the poem.
Yvonne Green
Things can happen in the poem that have absolutely nothing to do with the person who’s moving the pen. And this is something people get very confused about: they read as though they were looking for information, write as though they’re conveying it, instead of being receptive to, or reaching to let themselves produce something which is about sound, image …
Ruth Padel
It’s about the relationships between words. The two biographies are very different, because for one thing Beethoven wrote in German, and for another thing his words, when quoted (in translation), aren’t his main medium of expression. Whereas Darwin was a good writer. He took a lot of care about his writing, what he published, his letters, he wants to express himself, go forward to new ideas all the time. Beethoven’s so anguished. He wants to be a good man, but he also gets terribly cross with people. And of course, his main medium of expression is the music.
So they were very different, but I got very excited, particularly in Beethoven’s life, after he had that sort of great explosion of emotion about saying goodbye to his immortal beloved in 1812. And he went off to his brother’s house in Linz, and things were very bad with his brother whom he tried to persuade not to marry the housekeeper he was living with. They were having rows, they even came to blows at some point. But he was also very interested in the local music. And there was a local music master, and he would hear the local town’s performances, trombone quartets. And finally, he wrote three trombone quartets for All Soul’s Night, November 2nd. They’re extraordinary pieces, they’re not much known about now, they don’t have an opus number. And I thought, these are his real farewell. A funeral for All Soul’s Night, it’s funeral music, and this is his funeral of love. He didn’t fall in love with anybody else after his immortal beloved, and I thought, oh my goodness, that’s what’s happening in him – he’s not saying it in words so he’s saying it in the music.