Alan Trist  (USA)

A Letter to Richard Berengarten at Eighty

Dear Richard,

I wish I could be with you at your celebration! It’s a gift to the world to celebrate making it to 80, already ten years past the Biblical three score and ten, and now looking to update even that – we’re saying: live long, live on and write more poems! I can’t thank you enough for your continuous outpouring of keenly observed poetry over so many years.

We first met at the Pembroke matriculation dinner in 1961, sitting opposite on the long dining tables in Hall. As I remember, we walked out together afterwards and have always been in touch since, though I‘d moved to California by the end of the sixties. I met your son Gully, when you came to the Bay Area on a reading tour some years ago; what a pleasure to hang out with you both in a redwood grove, and remember your great broadside poem, Tree, that probably still inhabits the inside of a closet door in some old digs of mine. Most recently, you helped me edit, in your exacting style, an essay of mine for the book of reflections on your masterwork, Changing. This work has been a wonderful connection, setting our long relationship in stone, or at least in print. 

But to those early days at Cambridge. What was the name of that courtyard pub we’d go to with Peter Mansfield? What bohemian hangouts did we manufacture? You sent me once a photo of us all dressed up in tails for a May ball; I fell into the Cam from a punt! Does Fitzbillies bakery still make the world’s best sausage rolls? In the long vacations, some of us began travelling to Paris, and Greece on the Orient Express. Byronesque? Certainly, the classical education we were privileged to enjoy suggested it. But as would-be adventurers, poets and bon-vivant scholar-bohemians, the real journeys to the Mediterranean and our imaginations were later – when we began living there.

Richard, you secured a job with the British Council in Athens and were there for a year, I think, towards the end of the 1960’s, and also in Thebes, (and later, of course, the Balkans where the Blue Butterfly lived). Meanwhile, I was living on the Cycladian island of Paros for that same year, where our mutual friend and poet, Alexis Lykiard, also stayed for a while. There was visiting back and forth as we islanders ferried into the city for supplies and the retsina conviviality of metropolis. There, you were friendly with Kimon Friar, the translator of Kazantzakis’ The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel. I remember that we sat on his terrace discussing Cavafy and Seferis – we young literati in the presence of giants, and a mentor.

Those days were long ago, in another century, and now you have students of your own, who come back to you, and translations, and a body of published work that came into being, I suspect, in no small measure from the stimulation of those early voices and places.

I believe I’ve talked myself into being with you, Richard, on the occasion of your four score years. Onward!

Alan

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