Scarcely Translated : Peter Larkin ’ s Ecopoetic Entanglements

This paper explores Peter Larkin’s poetry within a framework of ecopoetics, attention, and translation. Seeking to provide an overview of the ecological intertwinements in his work, it draws on Larkin’s ‘poetics of scarcity’, which implies a precarious relation between abundance and absence. The resulting notion of being insufficiently with the givenness of the natural world finds its echo in an experimental creative-critical edge of language entangled in a philosophical, theological, and poetical discourse. Resisting economic consumption, Larkin’s alienated poetic register resonates with an ecopoetic decentring of language that pushes against its human limitedness. His poems thus require an increased attention, which, in line with an ecological approach to attention, can stretch towards a horizoning ethical attention to endangered external landscapes. Emerging notions of transformation, interrelatedness, and moving beyond borders are subsequently reinforced by an expanded framework of translation with reference to Larkin’s collection ‘Spirit of the Trees’. As romanticised poems are recomposed in a new environment during a forceful, yet creative act, an-other layer of alienation is revealed with regard to the ecopoetic context of Larkin’s work. Translation is ultimately seen as motion, relation-making, and approximation, which can be extended to the insufficiency of poetry and language itself: From a scarce position, the entanglements in Larkin’s poetry respond to the manifold entanglements of the natural world, their uncanny poetic resistance pointing towards a horizon where a necessarily existential human scarcity opens up spaces for reparative attention.

and moral questions concerning the systemic exploitation of human and natural resources concomitant with global inequality in a yet ever globally dominating growth-oriented consumerist economy. In line with a stronger interdisciplinary and intersectoral approach, ecopoetics forms an open field 'where different disciplines can meet and complicate one another' to critically engage with (more-than-)human/ nature/language issues. 1 As it embodies the manifold entanglements making up the 'mesh' of the twenty-first century, ecopoetics approaches local/global, human/animal, self/other dichotomies from a multi-artistic perspective and generates itself as a self-reflective poetic inquiry. 2 It is in this vein that I attend to Peter Larkin's poetry; not in an attempt to categorise his work, but rather to seek out ecological concerns across his poetry and make sense of his cellular, 'protoplasmic, vacuolar' language in an ecopoetic environment. 3 Challenging and uncannily confusing as his poems may be, I argue that the resistances his poetics of scarcity sets up at an interconnected micro-and macro-level align to a radical ecopoetic resituating that can translate into a horizoning ecological attention, to language and beyond.
The first part of this paper outlines the existing research landscape around Larkin and provides general insights into his poetics of scarcity. As 'philosophical (and theological) companion and critique', a topological focus on tree-lives arguably likens it to ecological, decentred modes with a strong reliance on interconnectedness. 4 With regard to a necessary ecopoetic 'radical resituating of poetics' in the face of a global environmental crisis, an ethical attentional resistance will be discussed in line with Yves Citton's The Ecology of Attention. 5 Following this, I aim to sketch a horizon of attention with the possibility to propel attention in Larkin's eco-philosophical poetry forward into a more active stance towards the natural world. Formally and textually estranged, a poetics of scarcity echoes the ecopoetic concern of language itself being limited by the human skin, thus inherently insufficient to bridge the gap between language and the world. 6 Based on this, the second part discusses a process where language is most bare, most pressured, and most variable: the process of translation. Focusing on Larkin's less discussed collection 'Spirit of the Trees' from Terrain Seed Scarcity, his septimal poetic technique will be investigated in tandem with translation theories by Walter Benjamin and Federico Montanari. 7 As Larkin's collection draws on classic Nature poems as source texts, their re-composition in an ecopoetic context involves mutual transformation. Translation is subsequently expanded in its interlingual linguistic framework and linked to a wider ecological process of motion, interrelation, and attention. In line with the inevitable shortcomings of language, poems can arguably be regarded as translations as well, never fully sounding out the source, yet new entities with their own creative value. From a resistance to a sufficiency of language thus emerges the poem-translation as an approximation to the sheer existence of the natural world, leaving space for a horizon of attention that shimmers between lesser and fuller presences with the earth.

Ecopoetics: How to Stretch the Falling Short of a Tree?
While in 2013 Sophie Seita noted a lack of attention to Peter Larkin's writing, his substantial body of work has inspired a number of critical and creative responses since, including the symposium that led to the publication of this special issue. 8 Descending from a tradition of loco-descriptive poetry and Romantic pastoral naturalism, his poetic 'thicket' includes woods, plantations, fields, trees, branches, and their transition into other forms of existence. 9 Although a sense and knowledge of place is especially present in collections inspired by specific landscapes of the English Midlands, Larkin's writing mode is less descriptive than 'loco-speculative', generating landscape as a 'process', in which broader socio-political and economic issues are mediated by a projective opening of the field. 10  Larkin's much discussed 'scarcity of relation' moves from an economic and ecological context to an existential condition of scarcity that situates human life between rarity and plenitude. 12 Countering excess and 'modernity's sense of permanent climax', scarcity characterises a precarious relation to absence and abundance, since the unconditional gift is 'ill-received' under a condition of loss that evokes immanent desire: The argument for the poetics of scarcity will be that the ethical yearning for a good and secure life amid nature, together with a hunger for the numinous presencing and co-presencing of non-human communities and earth-spaces, are not forms of indiscrete or emulative desire. 13 Scarcity, not so much a concept as a 'sourceful form of poetic thinking' for Larkin thus underpins his idiosyncratic poetics, grounding an 'unnegotiable bond between human and nature, one in which the unevenness and instability of the relation make room for human self-dedication to nature'. 14  The page, the language, each word becomes the site of attention, desiring to 'stretch' across the blank spaces towards that which cannot be fetched -within the metaphysical idea of scarcity the wholly given; metaphorically, the language to articulate it. Ecologically, the event of the falling stretches beyond the single tree to be connected to its greater implications, unleashed in a paratactic relational field powered by acceleration foreboding 'post-extinction'. 26 In line with an ecopoetic resistance against economic expectations of language to convey information, it has to be noted how difficult it is to provide a summary of this poem or of its respective collection. 27 What can be retrieved is the engagement with and attention to tree-lives, their existence within a landscape of woods, fields, cities, their anatomy from the inflection point of branches 'until a root is lens by surround' to the tips of praying firs.
Prompted to ground Larkin's unusual vocabulary intra-and intertextually, the reader is taken through the intricate fragile root-network of a tree: 'grow down the tree into long right root: at the end of any root it uncramps its vertical haul'. While the compression of the short-lined free-verse stanza reinforces the imperative's prompt to become tree-root, the tree itself stops such a human identification as 'it' gets in the way. Its release of the 'haul' -bringing to mind exploitative excess -is subsequently followed by a formal widening into justified blocks of text with tree as its subject: 'tree optimal cover at the deceleration, recompose natural verticals for its own root rate an unwinding route, how the patch at net steers towards the vertical no longer spooling it'. Net, together with ' crest' in the following section, can be led back to fit the associative realm of 'haul' in the fishing industry, against which the tree works as a natural homeostatic ecosystem at its own rate. 28 Setting up an ecological orientation against habitual ways of reading and perceiving language as an effective communication tool, Larkin's poems offer scientifically descriptive close investigations of trees whilst implying an allegorical dimension.
They do so by means of a range of registers that only gain their scarce value in relation to one another. As Robert P. Baird notes, this may result in a grammatical understanding of a phrase without grasping any of its meaning (and even grammatical expectations are often subverted, as will be outlined below): 'The sentence sounds like it means something, it should mean something, but even on a careful reading it's nearly impossible to figure out what that something is'. 29 This evokes a mode of what Larkin calls 'vigilant counteranthropocentrism', a poetics subsuming all presumed familiarity with language into its speculative arboreality, avoiding Romantic praise of, or mimetic attempts to speak for nature to an extent it almost feels inhuman. 30 The disjointed perspective adds to the estrangement; if one encounters one of the rarely used pronouns, they often evade attention as they revolve around deep concepts or distancing abstractions hindering emotional identification: 'we stand on the threshold of a post-scarcity remit as the city expands faster than its own needlessness of site'. 31 'We' -potentially we humans -encounter again the foreboding of a greater urgency, referring back to the ecological, spiritual, and economic ramifications of the introductory question of this section: 'How to stretch the falling short of a tree?' Writing can stretch, but writing falls short, language falls short, humans fall short, humans have fallen -spiritually from Paradise after the attempt to become like God.
And since that fall, 'we' are confronted with a state of the earth that no longer resembles the preceding wholeness of its givenness, but one that is shaped by human will.
The Anthropocene, in that sense, was already set off at that point, three thousand years ago in the Genesis narrative when subsequent events such as the great flood technically only affected a segment of the earth, yet reached cosmic dimensions.
With each word containing multiple buried meanings, and in the absence of a unified governing perspective or narrative, the sections of this poem seem to be organised by an opacity of language itself. Each line stretches to resolve its inexplicability in the next one but never fully does, keeping the reader alert to its echoes, to every space, every 'root wing' in relation to the finite wholeness of the tree as a potent offering of infinity: ' every cast bud taking its spare tree-chance'. 32 Evelyn Reilly frames ecopoetics as ' dissolv[ing] the self into the gene pool', thereby abandoning 'the idea of center for a position in an infinitely extensive net of relations'. 33 In line with this, Larkin's procedural scarcity practice leads the self through an abstracted gathering of material from ' all sorts of fragmentary discourses glimpsed via Google and other databases', thus a myriad of other selves. 34 On a textual level, it further challenges basic assumptions about morphological hierarchies: verbs, nouns are not given but fluidly created and can often be read as either: 'Horizon that unconditional fold enveloping time'. 35 The resulting uncertainty not only creates doubts concerning human control over language but further embeds ambiguous grammatical functions in a co-dependent transformative textual system, in which even commonly repeated words are not the same. While the reader's attention moves between small plant-plasma particles and a broader horizon of forest degradation, post-scarcity, and post-extinction, their level of complexity remains equal. A form of fractal poetics emerges from their intertwinement, one that seeks the reader's engagement with an unfamiliar 'poorly endowed patina on any convertible placing', as it refracts questions and multiple layers. 36 Going back to the falling short of the tree, plenty can be excavated at word-level already, but how does the question work as a whole, or first, what does it mean for trees to fall short? Do they fall short in their ability to enclose a field? In their inability to draw attention to their unconditional offering; their inability to make humans recognise their involvement in environmental destruction as they become 'pencil-phobes by|natural graphic scratch|scarce at a stretch'? 37 Or simply in their vertical shortcoming since they fail to reach the sky and make full contact with a sacral space that connects them to a presence on earth? The question branches out into adjacent meanings that support one another, guided by root-words such as scarcity, tree, or city, which evoke multiple potential relations rather than being definite centres themselves. What constitutes the smallest unit in Larkin's arboreal explorations? The single word, occasionally italicised, thus drawing attention to its unfamiliar, multi-layered usage? The possibility of other words as substitutes, indicated by brackets as ' adjacent crater (cluster) of branch cage but well forsworn of root'? The deictic syllables in 'time-for', 'givento' that stretch towards a horizon of relation? The spaces, line breaks, or slashes?
The slippage when misreading words that echo similarly sounding words as 'scars' of the omnipresent scarce? 38 I would argue that it is their entanglement in attention to similarly entangled more-than-human things itself. The meaning of clearly distinguished terms in the linguistic framework of the English language is no longer given but displaced and mingles uncannily with new surroundings. Supported by an underground network of etymological possibilities resounding a Zukofskyan mode, an infinity of relations emerges from his poetry, in which 'heath and wood|can wrestle their|paper-thin recalcitrance'. 39 As 'urban tendrils' sprout across cities, forests, fields, and 'urban woods', they refute a prior production of landscape in any pastoral sense. Trees, roots, branches, horizons are not only written into being across one poem but across collections, encircled by yet different naturally immediate and linguistically distant environments hinging on a poetics of scarcity. 40 The emerging kaleidoscopic focus on their processes of transformation, their renewal, and their fragility pays an ecopoetic tribute to a cyclical natural world not set apart from human interventions but immanent, if scarcely so. 41 If centre and periphery are flattened by interconnections between vacuoles of extended attentiveness, language simultaneously pushes against linearity. In an attempt to engage with the textual multiplicity, a form of ecological reading is encouraged, which is not so much goal-oriented but resembles a dynamic process chorus, the poem stretches towards a wider interdependent ecosystem whose makings are echoed and re-echoed across its composition. Within this wider cultural context, the term ecopoetics as a critical reflection on the implications of its own poetic makings prompts a review of a 'radical re-situating of poetics called for in the face of an ongoing disappearance of trees and ecosystems (and peoples, along with their houses and cities)'. 42 The earlier question comes to mind again, this time as whole: 'How to stretch the falling short of a tree?' If falling short is inevitable, if the tree always falls short and implies a desire, how can it be stretched towards a ' desirable horizon of an existence that has the potential to blossom'? 43 Accompanying one of his key terms ' desire', the idea of stretching reoccurs in Larkin's poetry, and it includes the etymological roots of another essential component. Attention, literally a physical 'stretching toward' (from Latin ad + tendere), has been discussed alongside with scarcity, horizon, and gift as one of the central notions in Larkin's poetry. 44 Instead of examining its aesthetic implications, I want to take a step back here to approach attention in its broader relational structure and cultural context. In its most rudimentary form, it is an initial interaction with someone or something, encompassing the active element of stretching. It is also, in the current consumerist culture of excess where the time to click and like and retweet is a scarce good, turning into a commodity itself: 'If a product is free, then the real product is you! More precisely: your attention'. 45 More complex than a quantifiable instrument, Yves Citton counters an economic view with an ecology of attention to illuminate its polyphonic dynamics and relationality with reference to Arne Naess's ecosophy: ' attention is a certain kind of connection between that which I am, that which surrounds me, and that which may result from the relation that unites these interested parties'. 46 In a state of constant movement, attention, as embodied orientation in everyday-life, cannot be accumulated but is momentarily situated, though reliant on attentional echoes of the past. As a multi-layered effort and thought-structure, attention exists in a correlative continuum and is not only passively steered but can elicit necessary questions in an ethical reorientation: 'whose needs and whose voice are we taking into consideration?' 47 Mapping out the environments of attentional behaviours and their inherently co-dependent structuring, attention thus yields an agency itself, foundational to notions of respect, tolerance, and care. If the eco-sophical kinship furthers in its suffix a relation to actions, then attention theorised in ecological terms must press the question how to redirect it in actively meaningful ways; how to counter consumerist growth and be more attentive, that is respectful, considerate, and responsive to life in its many forms: 'To grow sustenance about scarcity's lane of offering unhampered by outspread: the spurn in fruition quietens the gatherable'. 48 While I would argue that reading and engaging with poetry itself -which is often 'Trans-facial the contractions go, to which horizon isn't distance but unthreadable implantation journeyed to the barrier's fluting, lightly stunned at duct'. 54 Against what feels like a denaturalised language resistant to reading spans the unavoidable human presence with the heaviness of constructed scientific terms. The poetics of scarcity orients the inability to escape a human perspective around a horizon structure that signals presence and absence as it situates things in relation to a 'more of' or 'less than'. Acknowledging the human limits of language, ecopoetics is thus placed between material and spiritual notions before a horizon of dedication that enand discloses the givenness of the natural world from a vulnerable state of scarcity. 55 Spatially and perceptually outside and beyond a human eye's length, a 'horizon' was initially an attempt to divide the world, and is embedded in arguably very humancentred geographical, phenomenological, and hermeneutic theories. 56

Translating the Spirit of Trees
The Across the collection, the general approach to nature is largely at discord with a critically informed biocentric stance in ecopoetics. Corresponding to traits of Nature or classic landscape poetry, trees are anthropomorphised, used as a projection zone for human emotions, or praised through a romantic lens. Since the texts were composed before any consequences of an off-set global climate catastrophe were known on a wider socio-political scale, the occasionally addressed demolition of a tree is mainly regarded as a singular phenomenon and lamented as personal loss rather than linked to greater ecological implications -which is notably at odds with the actual political background of the anthology. A pastoral nostalgia is omnipresent, which produces Nature as a safe haven from civilisation and links it to a spiritual realm beyond the human sphere of influence: Here for the Greeks the authentic Nymph might dwell With floody cloud-pale hair and lucent eyes Hermit might dream back into Paradise. 62 Larkin's collection borrows its poetic technique from Peter Riley's Small Square Plots and arranges 44 poems from the source book into seven-line poems with seven syl-lables to a line respectively. 63 The new poems are exclusively made up of words of the initial poem (although slight variations do occur), but they do not necessarily employ them in their initial linear appearance. They are also free in their use of punctuation.
Except where the source poem is exceptionally short as well, this constraint naturally involves a drastic textual condensing, often resulting in unusual recombination, while concomitantly fostering an increased use of enjambments, often at word level: 'poplar lies screened, song's colonn-|ade its haste in cooler stead'. 64 It further adds to an increased use of colons to gather longer parts under one key aspect, and although Larkin's compositions do not conform to a fixed rhyme scheme, the rhythmic symmetry of the sources seems to be reflected by a notable amount of assonances and alliterations: […], with first light lives with aspects of appropriation, autonomy, and transformation, and I argue that an expanded framework of translation offers useful responses. These may further add to an increased attention stretching beyond an inevitable falling short before the natural world.
Before it was narrowed down to a primarily linguistic context, translation referred to a multitude of activities that fundamentally anchored wider notions of (physical) displacement, motion, and change. Since the cultural turn in Translation Studies in particular, its frame of reference was augmented yet again, and the interdisciplinary interest in translation as a metaphorical travelling concept grew to such an extent that a 'translational turn' was coined by Doris Bachmann-Medick. 67 Key ideas of its expanded use include its embedment in as well as its ability to conceptually disclose global regimes of power and hegemony, hospitality towards the Other, and relations to creativity, ownership, and attention. While the wide range of its application can feed back into a renewed linguistic understanding of interlingual translation as less of an invisible activity and more of a crucial process in a connected world, it simultaneously calls for a differentiation in use. My intention in linking it to the relation of the two 'Spirit of the Trees' texts builds on insights into the bond between source and target text in literary translation particularly. 68 Grounded in a double ontology as the latter is at once dependent on its source yet an independent new creation in a different linguistic, cultural, and historical context, motion is a central aspect.
While a new text emerges, the source text does not remain unchanged either -its realm of existence is disrupted. One individual reading of it now reflects back on it in translation, extending its scope and altering its trajectory, thus securing its 'success' and ' afterlife', in Walter Benjamin's terms. 69  Let them pierce keenly, subtly shrill, The slow blue rumour of the hill; Let the grass cry with an anguish of evening gold, And the great sky be mute. 70 The variants of English used by Wordsworth, Huxley, or Hopkins differ not only greatly among themselves but naturally in comparison to Larkin as well. Language boundaries are, in fact language itself is, not at all clearly defined, and the notion of translation as a 'study of language' foregrounds this fuzziness. 71 Sensitive not only to the differences in languages across national but also across temporal borders, it prompts a focus on the relation between different individual poetic dictions.
Within the porous boundaries of the dynamic linguistic entity English, which is constantly shifting and evolving, the source text is reassembled in a new poetic context, revealing a process that is necessarily violent. 72  where private words enter the public and might suddenly sound unfamiliar to the speaker. It thus prompts looking further into the process of its changes rather than arresting it in a right/wrong notion that may easily deem a translation as having missed its target. Assuming more than one direction, a source/mouth notion suggests a reciprocal transformation that takes place within a wider environment. Even when previously appropriated and spoken through the mouth of someone else, once articulated, our own words can appear strange to us. The source feeds the mouth, but a change in the mouth of a river has impacts on the entire layout of the riverbed: In language familiar and alien to both. A translation is an inherently invasive or even violent process, but simultaneously associated with a widening of horizon anchoring a heightened mode of imagination, attention, and textual intimacy that informs its expanded ecological poetics. 82 As constant movement, it is part of a continuum and intertextual exchange, confronted with constant thresholds. As relation-making, it is in conversation across time and space, fostering attentive modes of interaction with others, including the interaction of reading. As interdependency, it facilitates mutual transformation as creative approximation, unable to fully exploit the source.
In this vein, a poem itself can be conceived of as translation, a beginning rather than an end, a carrying over into the falling short of language where it finds estranged scarce mouth-words for that which can be neither fully received nor fully articulated. 83 Inevitably emerging from a deficient human perspective, language can be seen as an approximation, activated through scarcity as it seeks to give existence to the manifold gift of the natural world. Fundamentally permeated by the precariousness of insufficiently being with an abundance of life that cannot be described but more and more attended to under a condition of lessening, Larkin's poetry asymptotically approaches this relation, his poetic interconnections themselves forming an infinite strange rhizomatic mouth-text. Although it will never be possible to stretch the 'falling short of a tree', ecologically, spiritually, or poetically, the multiple connections among resistant poetic coordinates may offer orientation towards a horizon of attention.
In its uncanny particularity, Peter Larkin's poetry reveals intricate entanglements with ecopoetic ideas related to decentred interconnectedness. to be activated. 84 Translation not only emphasises the intertextual embedment, but acknowledges the liminality of a precariously inhabited scarcity that signals abundance and absence and that is accelerated by existential desires of humans whose presence on earth gets overshadowed by Anthropocenic debris. At the cost of an inevitable invasiveness, translation involves moving into unfamiliar realms whilst eliciting change centrifugally and centripetally; at micro-and macro-level. It shares with ecopoetics a reflection on the condition of its makings, on language and on the self, thus fostering an ongoing 'investigation into how language can be renovated or expanded as part of the effort to change the way we think, write, and thus act in regards to the world we share with other living things'. 85 In