The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx

"I really love this book. It hums with energy. Tara’s worked a lot on translation and you see in this book a real playful joy in exploring what it means to move from one tongue to another, what it means to rephrase something, what it means to take a life and relive it or take words and re-say them. The cover is very beautiful and it’s got something on it that I couldn’t understand, a sort of red heart-shaped thing with a hole in it. I realised, eventually, that it’s the Ouija board she mentions at the very end of the book, a Ouija board, which the Marx daughters play with. Precisely, and it struck me that there’s a great act of listening going on throughout the book, listening to that which is not said and also listening to the way in which it is not said. Bergin is, like Morrissey, a superb performer with humour and wit and self deprecation. Yes the book is about Eleanor Marx in some way but I didn’t feel for a second that I needed to research every detail of Eleanor Marx’s life. Bergin uses this figure – she was Flaubert’s first translator – to unpick the whole idea of translation as it can be applied to life. And that’s brilliant to watch. That’s part of what poetry is: a serious game, a serious play. I was interested to read in an interview , that she had been changed by the experience of performing her poems, by the pleasure and the sound of words. So again and again, even though she might be talking about, let’s say, language, she’s not doing it in a way that pushes you back to Wittgenstein; she’s doing it in a way that references the language of, say, flowers. Or she will take lines from different translations of Flaubert offered by six different people, including Eleanor Marx. They’re all translating the same sentence of Madame Bovary, and just by juxtaposing them Bergin makes you aware that the way in which you say something radically changes its meaning. And yet, they are all recognisably saying ‘the same thing’. And from this she makes a kind of song."