How to finish (a blogpost about finishing) a book part 3
There are words I have to be physically restrained from overusing. Polish – like Greek (which I’ll come back to in a minute) – carries many diminutives. Admittedly some are saccharine euphemisms employed when being coy about a subject like money say, though that’s less usual. Sometimes they are humorous, ironic, like a favourite of mine “depresyjka” (little depression). Often they are tender. They suggest too the miniature world of the supernatural (as a parallel I think of the Little People in Irish culture) and of children. I’ve had to accept that you can’t say “little” in poems in English without sounding sentimental. But “small’, also with a joyously double letter in it, is irresistible to me.
Nevertheless I did wonder about using “small” in the title of my new book. My hesitation was to do with the way that women’s experiences – and the experiences of marginalised people – are minimised or trivialised. But at the same time I wanted to include the so called ‘minor’, the everyday, the countless borders we cross, journeys we make, those things which aren’t considered heroic. And to beg the question of what is and is not considered ‘major’.
The first word of Homer’s Odyssey in the original Greek text is “andra”, which means “man.” So for a woman to use the word “odyssey” as a title seemed a good idea. “Oddysey” itself has come to mean a long or epic journey, full of adventures, changes in fortune, where many things happen. All poetry books could be called oddyseys in fact…There’s debate among scholars as to the origins of the meaning of Oddyseus’ name, but there are suggestions of anger or lamentation, perhaps even of perishing or being lost. That worked for me!
Titles are very, very important. Sometimes we know what they will be straight away. Other times they are a last-minute panic. We go over and over our manuscript, racking our brains. I have to thank Moniza Alvi, that wonderful and generous poet, for nudging me towards the choice of mine fairly early on in the writing of this book. Even then, I did have some last minute panics…A title can serve many functions, as summary when it does what it says on the tin, as illumination when it draws our attention to a detail or phrase within a book highlighting it to shift and deepen our understanding, or as broadening of perspective, when it takes us further outside the parameters of a book, at a tangent or onto a different scale, another context. The title of my new book is Small Odysseys. I will have to leave it to readers to decide whether or how the title works.
But have I managed to finish this mini-series of blogposts about finishing the writing of a book? Reader, I’m just not sure…
Photograph of tulips in Warsaw with thanks to Jola Scicińska
Moniza Alvi’s most recent book is Blackbird, Bye Bye from Bloodaxe
Small Odysseys is forthcoming from Waterloo Press
