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Jenny Joseph An essay and five poems, after drawings by Jaume Prohens Images and Texts These five drawings and texts formed part of an exhibition by the Catalan artist Jaume Prohens. Drawing a Response was the second exhibition Oliver Jelf mounted at the Illustration Gallery, his new gallery in Stroud. Jelf’s experience of illustration had been mainly where the illustrator is presented with a finished text or even a remit to draw a marketing manager’s idea for a book cover. The range of relationship between illustrator and writer is wide and has something in common with that between translator and translated: from nil to being implicated as strands twisted to make a rope are. Some poets in the Stroud area were invited to look at Prohens’ drawings and write a poem to be exhibited alongside. I have enjoyed working in different ways with graphic and non-literary artists and I had suggested this very exercise of reversing the position of writer and illustrator/song-setter to an American composer who had set some of my published poems – wouldn’t it be fun, for a change, for the writer to be presented with ready-made music to write words for?
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Joseph / Prohens 69 I was enthusiastic but time (about a fortnight) was desperately short. I may react quickly but take a long time to finalize it in words sufficiently to show anyone, let alone publish and exhibit as part of another’s work. If I had a single poem to translate I would want to read as much as possible of the writer’s work; know what in his/her language that writer had been brought up on, and reckoned; read and hear something of current poetry and something of the poetic forms that language had developed inherently from its grammar and rhythms. I wanted to be able to tune in to Prohens’ drawings in the same way. All I knew was, that he was Catalan, lived in Mallorca and was prolific in painting and sculpture as well as drawing. There were the two dozen drawings in the gallery and a note he’d written for a book he did with a poet in the 1990s. Of the drawings still without a text I picked five. I put them up together on a shelf to see which one I could best do something with and found myself re-arranging them like a hand of cards into suits. Mulling over copies at home I realized a sequence was forming and I would use the five. Two had titles: Penitents (or Penitence?) on the one I put second; a Spanish saying which translated as ‘So what if we lose the button?’ on my fifth and which apparently meant ‘What does it (anything?) matter?’ I had noticed there were quite a few animals in Prohens’ pictures. Churches and priests figured. The anti-clericalism I recognized in Prohens might well have come from the satirical cartoon tradition he had absorbed rather than his personal stance, as with his portrayal of secular authority, but religion and politics were there in what he drew. You can only write something to order quickly if it somehow connects with what you’ve been turning over in your mind. For the past three years I’d been immersed in George Orwell’s writing, particularly what emerged from his and his wife Eileen’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War and the development of his position on authoritarianism. I have also for

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Jenny Joseph An essay and five poems, after drawings by Jaume Prohens

Images and Texts

These five drawings and texts formed part of an exhibition by the Catalan artist Jaume Prohens. Drawing a Response was the second exhibition Oliver Jelf mounted at the Illustration Gallery, his new gallery in Stroud. Jelf’s experience of illustration had been mainly where the illustrator is presented with a finished text or even a remit to draw a marketing manager’s idea for a book cover. The range of relationship between illustrator and writer is wide and has something in common with that between translator and translated: from nil to being implicated as strands twisted to make a rope are. Some poets in the Stroud area were invited to look at Prohens’ drawings and write a poem to be exhibited alongside. I have enjoyed working in different ways with graphic and non-literary artists and I had suggested this very exercise of reversing the position of writer and illustrator/song-setter to an American composer who had set some of my published poems – wouldn’t it be fun, for a change, for the writer to be presented with ready-made music to write words for?

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