The poet Seamus Heaney died today in Dublin, Ireland. My books are in even greater disarray than usual so the only thing by him I could find this evening was his famous translation of Beowulf, the earliest surviving great work of English-language poetry. In the excerpt below, for king, prince, lord, read artist, poet, man.
Then the Geat people began to construct
a mound on a headland, high and imposing,
a marker that sailors could see from far away,
and in ten days they had done the work.
It was their hero's memorial; what remained from the fire
they housed inside it, behind a wall
as worthy of him as their workmanship could make it.
And they buried torques in the barrow, and jewels
and a trove of such things as trespassing men
had once dared to drag from the hoard.
They let the ground keep that ancestral treasure,
gold under gravel, gone to earth,
as useless to men now as it ever was.
Then twelve warriors rode around the tomb,
chieftain's sons, champions in battle,
all of them distraught, chanting in dirges,
mourning his loss as a man and a king.
They extolled his heroic nature and exploits
and gave thanks for his greatness; which was the proper thing,
for a man should praise a prince whom he holds dear
and cherish his memory when that moment comes
when he has to be convoyed from his bodily home.
So the Geat people, his hearth companions,
sorrowed for the lord who had been laid low.
They said that of all the kings upon the earth
he was the man most gracious and fair-minded,
kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.
translated by Seamus Heaney
13 April 1939 - 30 August 2013
30 August 2013
27 August 2013
fun stuff I may or may not get to: September 2013
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| A respectable San Francisco matron heads off to the after-party, having endured the official opening of the opera or, possibly, the symphony, how is she to know which |
At the Ashby Stage, First Person Singular and Shotgun Cabaret present Stealing the Leads: Women Read Glengarry Glen Ross, which sounds potentially awesome (sorry, I have to use a form of that word twice in two paragraphs). Unfortunately it's only for two nights; the 2 September performance is sold out but there are still tickets available for the added performance on 9 September. Both performances start at 8:00, which ironically makes them inconveniently timed for anyone who actually has to work in an office.
Old First Concerts has several evenings of interest to fans of contemporary music: the Aleron Trio premieres Shahab Paranj's Piano Trio No. 1, "A Bitter Letter" along with piano trios by Beethoven and Dvorak, on 13 September; sfSound presents an Elliott Carter memorial concert, with works dating from 1939 to 2011, on 20 September; and contemporary chamber ensemble Wild Rumpus lets the wild rumpus begin on 27 September. It's too bad that Old First Concerts are usually Fridays at 8:00, which I think might be the worst concert time possible for working people, but I may try to ignore reality (my reality, that is) and make it to some of these.
To add to your new music enjoyment this month, head to the Conservatory of Music on 6 September to hear works from six alumni composers: Frank Wallace, Kevin Villalta, Mark Ackerley, Mario Godoy, Joseph Stillwell, and Ian Dicke.
At Berkeley Rep, Christopher Durang's Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, which won the 2013 Tony for Best Play, opens 20 September and runs until 20 October. As the title might tell you, it is a contemporary twist on some themes from Chekhov. Richard E.T. White is the director.
The New Century Chamber Orchestra opens its season with a concert celebrating this season's featured composer, Michael Daugherty. I don't know a whole lot about his music, but he certainly has a knack for naming; the program includes pieces called Viva, Strut, Viola Zombie, Regrets Only, and Elvis Everywhere. The evening includes one non-Daugherty piece, Josef Suk's Serenade for string orchestra. That's 26 - 29 September in their usual variety of venues, only this year, since Herbst is closed, the San Francisco venue is the Yerba Buena Center.
San Francisco Opera opens its fall season with two interesting works: first is Boito's Mefistofele (which the Opera very helpfully refers to as Mephistopheles, because otherwise you couldn't figure that out, and though of course you'd balk at buying a ticket to something with a weird foreign name like Mefistofele, you're A-OK with Mephistopheles), in the lively production last seen here in 1994, with Nicola Luisotti conducting and Ildar Abdrazakov, Patricia Racette, and Ramon Vargas singing (check here for specific dates, though if you're actually interested in, you know, music and theater, skip opening night, 6 September); and second is the world premiere of Tobias Picker's Dolores Claiborne, which as of yesterday afternoon, when Dolora Zajick officially dropped out for health reasons, stars the Unsinkable Pat Racette (soprano) for the first four performances and the always appealing Catherine Cook (mezzo-soprano) for the remaining two (check here for specific dates). I liked Picker's American Tragedy quite a bit, so there's that going for it, at least in my opinion.
By the way, in case you're already wondering what the Merola folks will be performing in summer 2014, it's Don Giovanni and A Streetcar Named Desire (which of course had its premiere here in 1998). See what you learn from scanning the ads in Opera News?
If you're looking for more opera, West Edge Opera will perform a semi-staged production of Barber's Vanessa. This time they will be at Berkeley Rep's thrust stage instead of up in El Cerritto; 21 - 22 September.
The San Francisco Symphony has a fine assortment of concerts, but nothing really jumps out at me, though I might easily have a different reaction another day, since I always enjoy An American in Paris and Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev and the Mahler 9. There's also the magnificent Audra McDonald, but she's being wasted on the opening night party. Check out the full month here, but keep in mind that often the most interesting items on the symphony's programs are kept out of sight, tucked a mouse-click away under the standards.
26 August 2013
Poem of the Week 2013/35
As the summer ends:
The Oven Bird
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
Robert Frost
The Oven Bird consists of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter: a sonnet. But though it does rhyme, it doesn't rhyme the way sonnets usually do; there are two main rhyme schemes for sonnets, and one (English or Shakespearean) tends to break into three quatrains and a concluding couplet, and the second (Italian or Petrarchean) tends to break into an octave and a sestet. This poem is all couplets, often broken by intervening lines; it doesn't build the way sonnets usually do. It actually seems to meander a bit, but as the poem sinks in, you can see Frost building his argument.
The oven bird, though undoubtedly attractive enough, is not a particularly special bird; the Cornell Lab of Ornithology describes it as a small, inconspicuous bird with a loud voice. The first line of the poem insists on the bird's ordinariness ("everyone has heard" it) and the poem goes on from there to emphasize that this particular warbler is nothing particularly special: it's a creature of the middle, of mid-summer and mid-wood. The solidity of the tree trunks makes the forest (not just the leaves) seem old and even stodgy, and the bird's loud song echoes repetitiously. It's not a grand, rapturous bird, like Tennyson's Eagle or Keats's Nightingale. It elicits homespun remarks like "mid-summer is to spring as one to ten" (I take the numbers to be moving backwards, as in a countdown; in any case, the lovely flowers are mostly gone by this time).
The mention of flowers brings back the memory of the glorious springtime evanescence of flowering pear and cherry trees, now present only in their absence: they "went down in showers" during the gentle "early petal-fall" that ends their brief existence. and if you've seen these trees then you've seen the petals shower down at the slightest breeze. But Frost's use of "showers" also brings to mind spring rains. Again, everything is sort of fair to middling: the bird is ordinary and loud, the flowers are gone and the leaves have that tired late-August look; even sunny days have their overcast moments, all leading up to the cold months of the year, when the birds have gone away to someplace warmer and the green things give up, temporarily. "That other fall we name the fall": is it just the strong identification of Frost with a certain type of hard-scrabble New England mind that brings to mind the Fall of Man when we hear this doubled emphasis on "fall"? To top it all off, "the highway dust is over all": this isn't even a virgin forest, it's encroached upon by ordinary traffic and human commotion and pollution.
Frost has conjured up a natural world, but contrary to what many poems tell us, there's nothing healing, serene, sublime, or striking about it. It's all ordinary and a bit tattered and rundown in that late summer way. It's not even far away; it's right off the highway. Then Frost makes this very ordinariness into exactly what makes the bird special: it would "be as other birds" if it were singing just a pretty song – it "knows in singing not to sing"; that is, the bird is insistently telling us something too harsh for the normal loveliness of bird song. "Knows" implies that the bird is very consciously telling us something, something difficult and challenging, and everything about the bird ("he frames [it] in all but words") is asking us this one thing: what to make of a diminished thing. We may have our wishes, and our poetic ideals, and our fantasies of what life should be like, but real life and natural cycles and human society impinge on us in different ways each day, even out in the woods with the birds, and each day is one less day we get to try to make it all work, as our future dwindles away and turns into the lost, confused, ultimately forgotten past: a diminished thing.
So we see that all along Frost has been stealthily but steadily moving towards the final line. The first ten lines create the atmosphere of ordinariness around the oven bird and its song (so different from what we might expect from a poem about a bird), then the next three lines step us back and move us towards wondering why this ordinary bird is yet so distinctive, and why it insists on telling us things both depressing and commonplace; and then the fourteenth and final line caps the poem and flashes backwards through the preceding thirteen lines with an illuminating flash of philosophic lightning. I sometimes wonder if the oven bird's song haunted Frost until he figured out what its late-summer cry connoted to him, or if the last line sprang into his head and he had to build a poem backward that would justify it, because it was too good to lose.
I took this from the Library of America edition of Frost's Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays.
The Oven Bird
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
Robert Frost
The Oven Bird consists of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter: a sonnet. But though it does rhyme, it doesn't rhyme the way sonnets usually do; there are two main rhyme schemes for sonnets, and one (English or Shakespearean) tends to break into three quatrains and a concluding couplet, and the second (Italian or Petrarchean) tends to break into an octave and a sestet. This poem is all couplets, often broken by intervening lines; it doesn't build the way sonnets usually do. It actually seems to meander a bit, but as the poem sinks in, you can see Frost building his argument.
The oven bird, though undoubtedly attractive enough, is not a particularly special bird; the Cornell Lab of Ornithology describes it as a small, inconspicuous bird with a loud voice. The first line of the poem insists on the bird's ordinariness ("everyone has heard" it) and the poem goes on from there to emphasize that this particular warbler is nothing particularly special: it's a creature of the middle, of mid-summer and mid-wood. The solidity of the tree trunks makes the forest (not just the leaves) seem old and even stodgy, and the bird's loud song echoes repetitiously. It's not a grand, rapturous bird, like Tennyson's Eagle or Keats's Nightingale. It elicits homespun remarks like "mid-summer is to spring as one to ten" (I take the numbers to be moving backwards, as in a countdown; in any case, the lovely flowers are mostly gone by this time).
The mention of flowers brings back the memory of the glorious springtime evanescence of flowering pear and cherry trees, now present only in their absence: they "went down in showers" during the gentle "early petal-fall" that ends their brief existence. and if you've seen these trees then you've seen the petals shower down at the slightest breeze. But Frost's use of "showers" also brings to mind spring rains. Again, everything is sort of fair to middling: the bird is ordinary and loud, the flowers are gone and the leaves have that tired late-August look; even sunny days have their overcast moments, all leading up to the cold months of the year, when the birds have gone away to someplace warmer and the green things give up, temporarily. "That other fall we name the fall": is it just the strong identification of Frost with a certain type of hard-scrabble New England mind that brings to mind the Fall of Man when we hear this doubled emphasis on "fall"? To top it all off, "the highway dust is over all": this isn't even a virgin forest, it's encroached upon by ordinary traffic and human commotion and pollution.
Frost has conjured up a natural world, but contrary to what many poems tell us, there's nothing healing, serene, sublime, or striking about it. It's all ordinary and a bit tattered and rundown in that late summer way. It's not even far away; it's right off the highway. Then Frost makes this very ordinariness into exactly what makes the bird special: it would "be as other birds" if it were singing just a pretty song – it "knows in singing not to sing"; that is, the bird is insistently telling us something too harsh for the normal loveliness of bird song. "Knows" implies that the bird is very consciously telling us something, something difficult and challenging, and everything about the bird ("he frames [it] in all but words") is asking us this one thing: what to make of a diminished thing. We may have our wishes, and our poetic ideals, and our fantasies of what life should be like, but real life and natural cycles and human society impinge on us in different ways each day, even out in the woods with the birds, and each day is one less day we get to try to make it all work, as our future dwindles away and turns into the lost, confused, ultimately forgotten past: a diminished thing.
So we see that all along Frost has been stealthily but steadily moving towards the final line. The first ten lines create the atmosphere of ordinariness around the oven bird and its song (so different from what we might expect from a poem about a bird), then the next three lines step us back and move us towards wondering why this ordinary bird is yet so distinctive, and why it insists on telling us things both depressing and commonplace; and then the fourteenth and final line caps the poem and flashes backwards through the preceding thirteen lines with an illuminating flash of philosophic lightning. I sometimes wonder if the oven bird's song haunted Frost until he figured out what its late-summer cry connoted to him, or if the last line sprang into his head and he had to build a poem backward that would justify it, because it was too good to lose.
I took this from the Library of America edition of Frost's Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays.
23 August 2013
Alice Guy-Blache: finding and funding
To answer the question asked in this kickstarter campaign, yes, I have heard of Alice Guy-Blache, and I have even seen some of her films, in Kino Lorber's second set of Gaumont Treasures. But I can't say I know a whole lot about her, and would really love to see the documentary that Pamela Green and Jarik van Sluijs are trying to make. So if you are so minded and have the cash to spare, you have until midnight (Pacific time) on Monday 26 August (coming right up!) to give way to your Medici impulses and help them out. Here's the link again, now that you're persuaded.
20 August 2013
for John Hollander
The poet John Hollander died last Saturday. In memoriam Knopf Doubleday sent out to its Poetry Month e-mail list the following poem, from Hollander's most recent collection, A Draft of Light, published in 2008. It feels like a poem written with a lifetime's experience, dealing lightly with deep things.
Some Playthings
A trembling brown bird
standing in the high grass turns
out to be a blown
oakleaf after all.
Was the leaf playing bird, or
was it "just" the wind
playing with the leaf?
Was my very noticing
itself at play with
an irregular
frail patch of brown in the cold
April afternoon?
These questions that hang
motionless in the now-stilled
air: what of their
frailty, in the light
of even the most fragile
of problematic
substances like all
these momentary playthings
of recognition?
Questions that are asked
of questions: no less weighty
and lingeringly
dark than the riddles
posed by any apparent
bird or leaf or breath
of wind, instruments
probing what we feel we know
for some kind of truth.
John Hollander
28 October 1929 - 17 August 2013
Some Playthings
A trembling brown bird
standing in the high grass turns
out to be a blown
oakleaf after all.
Was the leaf playing bird, or
was it "just" the wind
playing with the leaf?
Was my very noticing
itself at play with
an irregular
frail patch of brown in the cold
April afternoon?
These questions that hang
motionless in the now-stilled
air: what of their
frailty, in the light
of even the most fragile
of problematic
substances like all
these momentary playthings
of recognition?
Questions that are asked
of questions: no less weighty
and lingeringly
dark than the riddles
posed by any apparent
bird or leaf or breath
of wind, instruments
probing what we feel we know
for some kind of truth.
John Hollander
28 October 1929 - 17 August 2013
19 August 2013
Poem of the Week 2013/34
Hail holy light, offspring of Heav'n first-born,
Or of th'eternal Coeternal beam
May I express thee unblam'd? since God is light,
And never but in unapproached light
Dwelt from Eternity, dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate.
Or hear'st thou rather pure Ethereal stream,
Whose Fountain who shall tell? before the Sun,
Before the Heavens thou wert, and at the voice
Of God, as with a Mantle didst invest
The rising world of waters dark and deep,
Won from the void and formless infinite.
Thee I re-visit now with bolder wing,
Escap't the Stygian Pool, though long detain'd
In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight
Through utter and through middle darkness borne
With other notes than to th'Orphean Lyre
I sung of Chaos and Eternal Night,
Taught by the Heav'nly Muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to reascend,
Though hard and rare: thee I revisit safe,
And feel thy sovran vital Lamp; but thou
Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quencht their Orbs,
Or dim suffusion veiled.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book III, ll 1-26
In classic epic style, Paradise Lost opens in media res, so that after the general opening (the statement of purpose and the invocation of the muse: again, all in classic style) we find ourselves in Hell with the fallen angels. After two books in which we see Satan gather his forces and plot his revenge, the third book brings us up to Heaven at last (three: a mystic number, the number of the Trinity). The book begins with a rhapsodic invocation of light that immediately turns into a probing series of questions about its essential nature: God's first manifestation ("offspring of Heav'n first-born")? Or actually equivalent to God ("of th'eternal Coeternal beam")? Or possibly, referring back to the division of the waters above and below Heaven on the second day of Creation (Genesis 1, 6-8), light is some sort of ethereal liquid ("pure Ethereal stream"), though again Milton raises the question about the ultimate source and identity of light: "whose Fountain who shall tell?" Just as we consider light both wave and particle, Milton finds this primal substance to be of simultaneous multiple natures (making it an apt symbol for the Trinitarian God). It is typical of Milton that rhapsodic praise is not only not separate from probing intellectual inquiry, they are consubstantial; he has no use for unexamined faith.
There is a constant dialogue in Milton's poem between the great classical epics and myths and what he saw as the manifestation of truth in Christian revelation. Although Orpheus in classical legend descended to the Underworld, Milton cannot copy "th"Orphean Lyre" for his own descent into the grimness (and to some extent the grandeur) of the true Hell, bordered by Chaos, a place of Eternal Night, so he considers and rejects Orpheus as a model. As the poet begins the difficult task of describing the heavenly ineffable to his fallible and fallen readers (how much easier to help us appreciate Hell!), he again invokes the Muse, but the Heavenly Muse of divine (Biblical) inspiration, rather than the classical Muses. This passage ends with a reference to the poet's blindness; he goes on, in the lines after these, to compare his situation to that of the blind poets and seers of ancient Greece.
This reference to his blindness and the suffering it causes him (" . . . but not to me returns / Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn, / Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summer's Rose, / Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine; / But cloud instead, and ever-during Dark. . . ") is not only a personal lamentation; it connects to the very basic purpose of his poem, which is to "justify the ways of God to men" (Book I, line 26). Milton's flexible syntax implies both that he will justify to men the ways of God, and also that he will justify the ways of God to men, that is, how God treats us: what did Milton do that warranted the affliction of blindness? Did he not go blind defending liberty (in the shape of Cromwell's Commonwealth) against a suspiciously Catholic-friendly Stuart king? It's also typical of Milton that he feels God not only can but needs to be justified to humanity.
Milton has much that is still of interest to say about theology and politics, but I wonder how many still read him for those reasons? No doubt they are outnumbered by those who read him for the poetry, which is endlessly astonishing and powerful. It's amazing that anyone, much less a blind man of limited means living (after the restoration of the monarchy) under state suspicion as a dangerous subversive, could compose a work of such sustained magnificence, sublime in its intellectual and aesthetic achievement. There was recent talk of a Hollywood 3-D version of Paradise Lost, starring Bradley Cooper as Satan, which is such a deliriously stupid idea I was planning to overcome my aversion to movie theaters and see it on its opening weekend. I assume the film-makers were attracted by the special-effects potential of the battle in Heaven (Book VI), but lines like "in his right hand / grasping ten thousand thunders" depend for their power on the reader's imagination and ear; if you turn that into a cinematic spectacular, all you're really doing is cranking the Dolby up to 11, which is ridiculous. Alas! the project was abandoned for lack of funds. Read over lines like "the rising world of waters dark and deep / Won from the void and formless infinite" and you know how seductive Milton can be, regardless of what you share or don't share of his beliefs. Yet the lines don't just sound good – they convey very specific details connecting the description to the religious and scientific beliefs of his time.
"Increate" in line 6 means uncreated; and in the next line, "Or hear'st thou rather" means "would you rather hear yourself called."
There are many editions of Paradise Lost; the one I usually carry around is the Signet Classic, edited and with notes by Christopher Ricks. I see the edition has changed its cover again. I'm on my third copy.
Or of th'eternal Coeternal beam
May I express thee unblam'd? since God is light,
And never but in unapproached light
Dwelt from Eternity, dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate.
Or hear'st thou rather pure Ethereal stream,
Whose Fountain who shall tell? before the Sun,
Before the Heavens thou wert, and at the voice
Of God, as with a Mantle didst invest
The rising world of waters dark and deep,
Won from the void and formless infinite.
Thee I re-visit now with bolder wing,
Escap't the Stygian Pool, though long detain'd
In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight
Through utter and through middle darkness borne
With other notes than to th'Orphean Lyre
I sung of Chaos and Eternal Night,
Taught by the Heav'nly Muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to reascend,
Though hard and rare: thee I revisit safe,
And feel thy sovran vital Lamp; but thou
Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quencht their Orbs,
Or dim suffusion veiled.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book III, ll 1-26
In classic epic style, Paradise Lost opens in media res, so that after the general opening (the statement of purpose and the invocation of the muse: again, all in classic style) we find ourselves in Hell with the fallen angels. After two books in which we see Satan gather his forces and plot his revenge, the third book brings us up to Heaven at last (three: a mystic number, the number of the Trinity). The book begins with a rhapsodic invocation of light that immediately turns into a probing series of questions about its essential nature: God's first manifestation ("offspring of Heav'n first-born")? Or actually equivalent to God ("of th'eternal Coeternal beam")? Or possibly, referring back to the division of the waters above and below Heaven on the second day of Creation (Genesis 1, 6-8), light is some sort of ethereal liquid ("pure Ethereal stream"), though again Milton raises the question about the ultimate source and identity of light: "whose Fountain who shall tell?" Just as we consider light both wave and particle, Milton finds this primal substance to be of simultaneous multiple natures (making it an apt symbol for the Trinitarian God). It is typical of Milton that rhapsodic praise is not only not separate from probing intellectual inquiry, they are consubstantial; he has no use for unexamined faith.
There is a constant dialogue in Milton's poem between the great classical epics and myths and what he saw as the manifestation of truth in Christian revelation. Although Orpheus in classical legend descended to the Underworld, Milton cannot copy "th"Orphean Lyre" for his own descent into the grimness (and to some extent the grandeur) of the true Hell, bordered by Chaos, a place of Eternal Night, so he considers and rejects Orpheus as a model. As the poet begins the difficult task of describing the heavenly ineffable to his fallible and fallen readers (how much easier to help us appreciate Hell!), he again invokes the Muse, but the Heavenly Muse of divine (Biblical) inspiration, rather than the classical Muses. This passage ends with a reference to the poet's blindness; he goes on, in the lines after these, to compare his situation to that of the blind poets and seers of ancient Greece.
This reference to his blindness and the suffering it causes him (" . . . but not to me returns / Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn, / Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summer's Rose, / Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine; / But cloud instead, and ever-during Dark. . . ") is not only a personal lamentation; it connects to the very basic purpose of his poem, which is to "justify the ways of God to men" (Book I, line 26). Milton's flexible syntax implies both that he will justify to men the ways of God, and also that he will justify the ways of God to men, that is, how God treats us: what did Milton do that warranted the affliction of blindness? Did he not go blind defending liberty (in the shape of Cromwell's Commonwealth) against a suspiciously Catholic-friendly Stuart king? It's also typical of Milton that he feels God not only can but needs to be justified to humanity.
Milton has much that is still of interest to say about theology and politics, but I wonder how many still read him for those reasons? No doubt they are outnumbered by those who read him for the poetry, which is endlessly astonishing and powerful. It's amazing that anyone, much less a blind man of limited means living (after the restoration of the monarchy) under state suspicion as a dangerous subversive, could compose a work of such sustained magnificence, sublime in its intellectual and aesthetic achievement. There was recent talk of a Hollywood 3-D version of Paradise Lost, starring Bradley Cooper as Satan, which is such a deliriously stupid idea I was planning to overcome my aversion to movie theaters and see it on its opening weekend. I assume the film-makers were attracted by the special-effects potential of the battle in Heaven (Book VI), but lines like "in his right hand / grasping ten thousand thunders" depend for their power on the reader's imagination and ear; if you turn that into a cinematic spectacular, all you're really doing is cranking the Dolby up to 11, which is ridiculous. Alas! the project was abandoned for lack of funds. Read over lines like "the rising world of waters dark and deep / Won from the void and formless infinite" and you know how seductive Milton can be, regardless of what you share or don't share of his beliefs. Yet the lines don't just sound good – they convey very specific details connecting the description to the religious and scientific beliefs of his time.
"Increate" in line 6 means uncreated; and in the next line, "Or hear'st thou rather" means "would you rather hear yourself called."
There are many editions of Paradise Lost; the one I usually carry around is the Signet Classic, edited and with notes by Christopher Ricks. I see the edition has changed its cover again. I'm on my third copy.
12 August 2013
Poem of the Week 2013/33
Arachne Gives Thanks to Athena
It is no punishment. They are mistaken –
The brothers, the father. My prayers were answered.
I was all fingertips. Nothing was perfect:
What I had woven, the moths will have eaten;
At the end of my rope was a noose's knot.
Now it's no longer the thing, but the pattern,
And that will endure, even though webs be broken.
I, if not beautiful, am beauty's maker.
Old age cannot rob me, nor cowardly lovers.
The moon once pulled blood from me. Now I pull silver.
Here are the lines I pulled from my own belly –
Hang them with rainbows, ice, dewdrops, darkness.
AE Stallings
In case you've forgotten the myth Stallings is playing off of here: Arachne was a mortal renowned for her weaving, and she wasn't modest about it either – she boasted repeatedly that her art was greater than that of Athena herself. The goddess, angered by this presumption, appeared in the shape of an old woman and cautioned the girl to show proper respect to the gods. Arachne declined to do so. The insulted goddess then assumed her immortal form and the stage was set for a weave-off. Arachne not only used every resource of her considerable art, she provocatively chose to picture in her tapestry various stories in which the gods had wronged innocent people. As both goddess and woman were nearing completion, Athena noticed not only the type of story Arachne had chosen, but the peerless quality of her workmanship. In a rage the goddess tore Arachne's work to pieces and turned the arrogant girl into a shriveled little spider, so she might weave perpetually. It's an interesting myth; Athena is usually wise, good, and just (isn't she everyone's favorite goddess?), but she doesn't come across too well this time.
In this poem Arachne is still arrogant, but it's the calm arrogance, more of an assurance, of an artist; what concerned her before her transformation was not so much showing up a rival as creating something perfect and permanent, both qualities beyond human reach. (Nice wordplay at the end of the first stanza: "at the end of my rope" is literal in her case, but also carries with it the idiomatic meaning of being at the furthest end of frustration; and "knot" carries the pun "not"; the noose's knot bring Death, the big "not.")
The second stanza is just two key lines, balanced between the five lines of both first and final stanzas. Arachne's viewpoint has become that of an immortal: individual webs will break, but the underlying structures – the pattern – will endure.
In the third stanza she continues her statement of her power as an artist; in this case, specifically as a woman artist (I think a male speaker would be more likely to talk about his loss of strength rather than of beauty, and faithless rather than cowardly lovers). She puts aside what most people would conventionally value in her (personal beauty, youth, fertility and marriageability) in favor of the shining beauty she spins from her gut. She was fairly youthful when Athena transformed her (if, as she puts it, the moon was pulling blood from her, then old age is a potential worry, not a current reality), but she is serene about her shriveled ugly immortality – contrast her attitude with the suffering of Tennyson's Tithonus; but then Arachne is an artist and he was only a lover. Referring to the webs as "lines" is both accurate description and a reminder that the poet too is pulling her own lines out in the form of this poem. It all ends in darkness. (The initial d sound in darkness nicely picks up the two ds in dewdrops, the repeated d - d - d closing out the poem with the soft finality of a muffled drum.)
Arachne is sincere in what she says here, but it's impossible not to sense beneath the sincerity the possibility that she's taking one last hubristic fling at Athena: the vengeful goddess inadvertently gave her exactly what she wanted ("my prayers were answered"). Her art, embedded now in Nature itself, will outlive the not so immortal gods; in their ultimate contest, she has defeated Athena.
AE Stallings is a contemporary American poet and classicist (Penguin has published her translation of The Nature of Things by Lucretius). This poem is from her collection Archaic Smile.
It is no punishment. They are mistaken –
The brothers, the father. My prayers were answered.
I was all fingertips. Nothing was perfect:
What I had woven, the moths will have eaten;
At the end of my rope was a noose's knot.
Now it's no longer the thing, but the pattern,
And that will endure, even though webs be broken.
I, if not beautiful, am beauty's maker.
Old age cannot rob me, nor cowardly lovers.
The moon once pulled blood from me. Now I pull silver.
Here are the lines I pulled from my own belly –
Hang them with rainbows, ice, dewdrops, darkness.
AE Stallings
In case you've forgotten the myth Stallings is playing off of here: Arachne was a mortal renowned for her weaving, and she wasn't modest about it either – she boasted repeatedly that her art was greater than that of Athena herself. The goddess, angered by this presumption, appeared in the shape of an old woman and cautioned the girl to show proper respect to the gods. Arachne declined to do so. The insulted goddess then assumed her immortal form and the stage was set for a weave-off. Arachne not only used every resource of her considerable art, she provocatively chose to picture in her tapestry various stories in which the gods had wronged innocent people. As both goddess and woman were nearing completion, Athena noticed not only the type of story Arachne had chosen, but the peerless quality of her workmanship. In a rage the goddess tore Arachne's work to pieces and turned the arrogant girl into a shriveled little spider, so she might weave perpetually. It's an interesting myth; Athena is usually wise, good, and just (isn't she everyone's favorite goddess?), but she doesn't come across too well this time.
In this poem Arachne is still arrogant, but it's the calm arrogance, more of an assurance, of an artist; what concerned her before her transformation was not so much showing up a rival as creating something perfect and permanent, both qualities beyond human reach. (Nice wordplay at the end of the first stanza: "at the end of my rope" is literal in her case, but also carries with it the idiomatic meaning of being at the furthest end of frustration; and "knot" carries the pun "not"; the noose's knot bring Death, the big "not.")
The second stanza is just two key lines, balanced between the five lines of both first and final stanzas. Arachne's viewpoint has become that of an immortal: individual webs will break, but the underlying structures – the pattern – will endure.
In the third stanza she continues her statement of her power as an artist; in this case, specifically as a woman artist (I think a male speaker would be more likely to talk about his loss of strength rather than of beauty, and faithless rather than cowardly lovers). She puts aside what most people would conventionally value in her (personal beauty, youth, fertility and marriageability) in favor of the shining beauty she spins from her gut. She was fairly youthful when Athena transformed her (if, as she puts it, the moon was pulling blood from her, then old age is a potential worry, not a current reality), but she is serene about her shriveled ugly immortality – contrast her attitude with the suffering of Tennyson's Tithonus; but then Arachne is an artist and he was only a lover. Referring to the webs as "lines" is both accurate description and a reminder that the poet too is pulling her own lines out in the form of this poem. It all ends in darkness. (The initial d sound in darkness nicely picks up the two ds in dewdrops, the repeated d - d - d closing out the poem with the soft finality of a muffled drum.)
Arachne is sincere in what she says here, but it's impossible not to sense beneath the sincerity the possibility that she's taking one last hubristic fling at Athena: the vengeful goddess inadvertently gave her exactly what she wanted ("my prayers were answered"). Her art, embedded now in Nature itself, will outlive the not so immortal gods; in their ultimate contest, she has defeated Athena.
AE Stallings is a contemporary American poet and classicist (Penguin has published her translation of The Nature of Things by Lucretius). This poem is from her collection Archaic Smile.
05 August 2013
Poem of the Week 2013/32
Marina
Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?
What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter.
Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning
Death
Those who glitter with the glory of the humming-bird, meaning
Death
Those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning
Death
Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning
Death
Are become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind,
A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog
By this grace dissolved in place
What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger –
Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye
Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep, where all the waters meet.
Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.
I made this, I have forgotten
And remember.
The rigging weak and the canvas rotten
Between one June and another September.
Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.
The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.
What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers
And woodthrush calling through the fog
My daughter.
T S Eliot
The narrator of this poem is usually taken to be Shakespeare's Pericles, slowly coming out of his long stupor of mourning when he realizes his beloved daughter Marina (so named because she was born at sea, during a terrible storm) is not in fact dead; fate and circuitous circumstances have returned her to him, and she stands before him, recalling his life to him.
The Latin tag means "What place is this, what region, what area of the world?" and comes from Seneca's tragedy Hercules Furens (The Mad Hercules); Hercules speaks the line as he comes out of the trance-like madness induced by Hera, during which he has killed his wife and children. Both Pericles and Hercules are emerging from a thick psychological fog towards knowledge of their offspring: Hercules, tragically, that he has killed them; Pericles, happily, that his daughter still lives. The use of apropos Latin tags, particularly from Ovid or Seneca, was frequent among Elizabethan/Jacobean dramatists, so Eliot's use of the device helps connect his poem to its source material.
As the poem opens, the world around the speaker is both specific and disembodied; he sees the waters and land and rocks around him, but doesn't know where exactly they are; it is not pine trees but their scent that comes to him, and not the woodthrush but its song, and even that comes through a fog.
In the second stanza the worldly, courtier-like concerns (glittering like hummingbirds, greedy and vicious like dogs, bestial, smug, and unthinking) emerge in his memory, along with the realization of their sterility and futility (the echoing line-ending refrain of "meaning / Death") are blown away in the third stanza (wind, breath, fog) into a purer realization of what is most important in this man's life; as we move into the fourth stanza, Eliot uses rhyme to link Pericles's growing awareness of his newly blessed consciousness (grace) and his surroundings (place) to something beautifully human and beloved (her face), which moves in and out of focus, both unbearably far and unbearably near – this separate young human he helped create.
Then comes one of those really Eliot-sounding couplets, with ambiguous moments of small daily intimacies recalled from the deepest levels of consciousness – the deepest sleep, where transhuman spirits dwell; the primal waters, the womb-like sea, flow through this whole poem.
The speaker suddenly comes to a vivid awareness of his immediate surroundings: the becalmed ship he built, now badly in need of repair. The "garboard strakes" that are leaking are "the first range of planks adjacent to the keel"; in addition the sails and rigging are rotting. The poem balances the earlier refrain of Death with an appropriately less regular answer of Life: "this life / living to live"; "my life for this life." Although Pericles is re-awakening to life through the return of his lost daughter, he is also aware that his age must inevitably give way to her youth; the ship he built, now holding him as it slowly decays, is like his aging body, the vessel of his spirit. He is reconciling himself to the ultimate loss of his daughter; she will live "in a world of time beyond me" and he resigns his life for her life. There will be new ships, and someone else's hope, directed towards the lasting shores and islands. The poem's closing lines echo and subtly alter the opening, and Pericles's exclamation/question O my daughter gives way to My daughter, which thanks to flexible syntax might be a further, more intimate address to her but could also function as the direct object of "calling" in the second line of that stanza: the seas, the shores, the islands and ships and the woodthrush, could now all be calling the next generation, in the person of Marina, towards their own adventures, until they too give way to the next wave.
I took this poem from The Complete Poems and Plays by TS Eliot.
Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?
What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter.
Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning
Death
Those who glitter with the glory of the humming-bird, meaning
Death
Those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning
Death
Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning
Death
Are become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind,
A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog
By this grace dissolved in place
What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger –
Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye
Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep, where all the waters meet.
Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.
I made this, I have forgotten
And remember.
The rigging weak and the canvas rotten
Between one June and another September.
Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.
The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.
What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers
And woodthrush calling through the fog
My daughter.
T S Eliot
The narrator of this poem is usually taken to be Shakespeare's Pericles, slowly coming out of his long stupor of mourning when he realizes his beloved daughter Marina (so named because she was born at sea, during a terrible storm) is not in fact dead; fate and circuitous circumstances have returned her to him, and she stands before him, recalling his life to him.
The Latin tag means "What place is this, what region, what area of the world?" and comes from Seneca's tragedy Hercules Furens (The Mad Hercules); Hercules speaks the line as he comes out of the trance-like madness induced by Hera, during which he has killed his wife and children. Both Pericles and Hercules are emerging from a thick psychological fog towards knowledge of their offspring: Hercules, tragically, that he has killed them; Pericles, happily, that his daughter still lives. The use of apropos Latin tags, particularly from Ovid or Seneca, was frequent among Elizabethan/Jacobean dramatists, so Eliot's use of the device helps connect his poem to its source material.
As the poem opens, the world around the speaker is both specific and disembodied; he sees the waters and land and rocks around him, but doesn't know where exactly they are; it is not pine trees but their scent that comes to him, and not the woodthrush but its song, and even that comes through a fog.
In the second stanza the worldly, courtier-like concerns (glittering like hummingbirds, greedy and vicious like dogs, bestial, smug, and unthinking) emerge in his memory, along with the realization of their sterility and futility (the echoing line-ending refrain of "meaning / Death") are blown away in the third stanza (wind, breath, fog) into a purer realization of what is most important in this man's life; as we move into the fourth stanza, Eliot uses rhyme to link Pericles's growing awareness of his newly blessed consciousness (grace) and his surroundings (place) to something beautifully human and beloved (her face), which moves in and out of focus, both unbearably far and unbearably near – this separate young human he helped create.
Then comes one of those really Eliot-sounding couplets, with ambiguous moments of small daily intimacies recalled from the deepest levels of consciousness – the deepest sleep, where transhuman spirits dwell; the primal waters, the womb-like sea, flow through this whole poem.
The speaker suddenly comes to a vivid awareness of his immediate surroundings: the becalmed ship he built, now badly in need of repair. The "garboard strakes" that are leaking are "the first range of planks adjacent to the keel"; in addition the sails and rigging are rotting. The poem balances the earlier refrain of Death with an appropriately less regular answer of Life: "this life / living to live"; "my life for this life." Although Pericles is re-awakening to life through the return of his lost daughter, he is also aware that his age must inevitably give way to her youth; the ship he built, now holding him as it slowly decays, is like his aging body, the vessel of his spirit. He is reconciling himself to the ultimate loss of his daughter; she will live "in a world of time beyond me" and he resigns his life for her life. There will be new ships, and someone else's hope, directed towards the lasting shores and islands. The poem's closing lines echo and subtly alter the opening, and Pericles's exclamation/question O my daughter gives way to My daughter, which thanks to flexible syntax might be a further, more intimate address to her but could also function as the direct object of "calling" in the second line of that stanza: the seas, the shores, the islands and ships and the woodthrush, could now all be calling the next generation, in the person of Marina, towards their own adventures, until they too give way to the next wave.
I took this poem from The Complete Poems and Plays by TS Eliot.
30 July 2013
fun stuff I may or may not get to: August 2013
The usual performance season heats up in September of course, as does the Bay Area weather, but if you want to escape the melancholy of late summer (I don't mean the usual end-of-summer "as the sun set, a bit earlier than usual, I felt a sudden oncoming chill" sort of thing, but a listless, grinding sense to the days – am I the only one who always feels this?), you can't go wrong with these possibilities; though I also don't discount the appeal of just relaxing for a while. Every summer my concert calendar dwindles to what most people would consider normal (that is, almost nothing), and I always think I'm going to get caught up on all sorts of things, but I somehow don't. I've been staring out at my yard, and thinking of the beautiful lacy plants (officially "weeds") that suddenly appeared last spring, and how I decided they were so attractive I wouldn't pull them up; and now, in the dead of summer, their delicate white flowers have turned into horrible little beige burrs that stick remorselessly on anything that brushes them however lightly. I walk out to water my heirloom tomatoes and I return with my shoelaces, pants, shirt, and cap covered with these things; they even cling to my body hair, and brushing them off with a bare hand means tiny prickly stingers annoy your flesh the rest of the day (brushing them off also means you're spreading the seeds for a thicker onslaught next spring, so I can't fault the ingenious evolutionary adaptation there). They quite literally won't come out in the wash, either. It seems like some sort of allegory (as by some aesthete John Bunyan) for the punishments waiting those who heedlessly and whimsically surrender to fanciful beauty, careless of the painful consequences. Anyway, enjoy! Next spring those plants will be uprooted remorselessly. Who's laughing now, O Evolutionary forces?
Sarah Cahill plays music by Henry Cowell, Samuel Carl Adams, Ann Southam, John Kennedy, and Shinji Eshima (the premiere of Delta 88, with the composer in attendance) at Old First Concerts on 2 August.
The Merola Opera program presents its second opera this summer, Le Nozze di Figaro, at the Everett Middle School Auditorium, 1 and 3 August; their grand finale takes place at the Opera House, 17 August at 7:30, during which the Merolini will sing such a wide range of selections that the concert sounds as if it will be practically a history of opera in kaleidoscopic survey form.
At the Ashby Stage, the Shotgun Players have extended the run of Josh Kornbluth's Sea of Reeds until 18 August; I highly recommend it – just putting that out there in case I don't get a chance to write it up while it's still running. There's other stuff going on in that space as well: Shotgun Cabaret and First Person Singular present Love in the Dark: Pauline Kael at the Movies, adapted from Kael's work and directed by Joe Christiano, with Mary Baird as Kael, for two nights only: 5 August is sold out, but the added performance on 6 August still has seats available. And at the end of the month, Shotgun Players presents Bonnie and Clyde, written by Adam Peck and directed by Mark Jackson, 27 August to 29 September.
Also at the end of the month Aurora Theater kicks off its 22nd season with After the Revolution by Amy Herzog, directed by Joy Carlin; 30 August to 29 September.
Enjoy some diva glamness at the Symphony on 9 August as Jessye Norman sings "the American songbook" (you know – American lieder), accompanied by Mark Markham on piano. The Symphony has had some really interesting summer programs this year, which I usually found out about after they had happened, which is my fault for assuming their summer series would all be pops-type stuff that I wasn't much interested in – I particularly regret missing Cameron Carpenter on organ accompanying a showing of Battleship Potemkin. Damn!
The Lamplighters revive the delightful Iolanthe for most weekends in August, but in different locations; check here for details.
Cal Peformances kicks off early with the Goat Rodeo Sessions, featuring Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, Chris Thile, and guest Aoife O'Donovan, up at the Greek Theater on 24 August.
TheatreFIRST in its new home at the Live Oak Theatre in Berkeley opens its season with Sarah Ruhl's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, directed by Domenique Lozano, 15 August to 15 September. I re-read the novel in anticipation of probably going to see this, but . . . maybe that was a mistake, since it only reinforced my feeling that Orlando doesn't really lend itself to adaptation: you read the book for the richly beautiful prose, for the quicksilver wit and intelligence, the passing reflections on time and memory, and the clever capsule history of literature and the literary life in England from the Elizabethans up to 1928, when the novel was written (though, as is often the case with Woolf, you are also likely to wince several times at her casual racism and fatuous snobbery). Those are mostly things that come from the narrative voice, and will mostly be lost when you turn the story into live-action-with-dialogue. Several years ago I did see the movie version (Tilda Swinton was in it, and I think Billy Zane as well, though I can't remember what he played, and was Quentin Crisp Queen Elizabeth I? that at least was clever), and found it mildly amusing and mostly forgettable and not at all up to the novel. So on the one hand I'm curious to see what Ruhl has done with it; on the other, I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe she's concentrated on what you might call the gender stuff, which may well have been fresh and provocative in 1928 but which this time around struck me as the least interesting part of the book; I just feel those leftovers have been reheated and served forth way too many times already. Well, perhaps I shall take a chance; all theater is experimental, and you don't know unless you show up and pay attention.
Sarah Cahill plays music by Henry Cowell, Samuel Carl Adams, Ann Southam, John Kennedy, and Shinji Eshima (the premiere of Delta 88, with the composer in attendance) at Old First Concerts on 2 August.
The Merola Opera program presents its second opera this summer, Le Nozze di Figaro, at the Everett Middle School Auditorium, 1 and 3 August; their grand finale takes place at the Opera House, 17 August at 7:30, during which the Merolini will sing such a wide range of selections that the concert sounds as if it will be practically a history of opera in kaleidoscopic survey form.
At the Ashby Stage, the Shotgun Players have extended the run of Josh Kornbluth's Sea of Reeds until 18 August; I highly recommend it – just putting that out there in case I don't get a chance to write it up while it's still running. There's other stuff going on in that space as well: Shotgun Cabaret and First Person Singular present Love in the Dark: Pauline Kael at the Movies, adapted from Kael's work and directed by Joe Christiano, with Mary Baird as Kael, for two nights only: 5 August is sold out, but the added performance on 6 August still has seats available. And at the end of the month, Shotgun Players presents Bonnie and Clyde, written by Adam Peck and directed by Mark Jackson, 27 August to 29 September.
Also at the end of the month Aurora Theater kicks off its 22nd season with After the Revolution by Amy Herzog, directed by Joy Carlin; 30 August to 29 September.
Enjoy some diva glamness at the Symphony on 9 August as Jessye Norman sings "the American songbook" (you know – American lieder), accompanied by Mark Markham on piano. The Symphony has had some really interesting summer programs this year, which I usually found out about after they had happened, which is my fault for assuming their summer series would all be pops-type stuff that I wasn't much interested in – I particularly regret missing Cameron Carpenter on organ accompanying a showing of Battleship Potemkin. Damn!
The Lamplighters revive the delightful Iolanthe for most weekends in August, but in different locations; check here for details.
Cal Peformances kicks off early with the Goat Rodeo Sessions, featuring Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, Chris Thile, and guest Aoife O'Donovan, up at the Greek Theater on 24 August.
TheatreFIRST in its new home at the Live Oak Theatre in Berkeley opens its season with Sarah Ruhl's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, directed by Domenique Lozano, 15 August to 15 September. I re-read the novel in anticipation of probably going to see this, but . . . maybe that was a mistake, since it only reinforced my feeling that Orlando doesn't really lend itself to adaptation: you read the book for the richly beautiful prose, for the quicksilver wit and intelligence, the passing reflections on time and memory, and the clever capsule history of literature and the literary life in England from the Elizabethans up to 1928, when the novel was written (though, as is often the case with Woolf, you are also likely to wince several times at her casual racism and fatuous snobbery). Those are mostly things that come from the narrative voice, and will mostly be lost when you turn the story into live-action-with-dialogue. Several years ago I did see the movie version (Tilda Swinton was in it, and I think Billy Zane as well, though I can't remember what he played, and was Quentin Crisp Queen Elizabeth I? that at least was clever), and found it mildly amusing and mostly forgettable and not at all up to the novel. So on the one hand I'm curious to see what Ruhl has done with it; on the other, I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe she's concentrated on what you might call the gender stuff, which may well have been fresh and provocative in 1928 but which this time around struck me as the least interesting part of the book; I just feel those leftovers have been reheated and served forth way too many times already. Well, perhaps I shall take a chance; all theater is experimental, and you don't know unless you show up and pay attention.
29 July 2013
Poem of the Week 2013/31
Ch'ang Kan
When the hair of your Unworthy One first began to cover her forehead,
She picked flowers and played in front of the door.
Then you, my Lover, came riding a bamboo horse.
We ran round and round the bed, and tossed about the sweetmeats of green plums.
We both lived in the village of Ch'ang Kan.
We were both very young, and knew neither jealousy nor suspicion.
At fourteen, I became the wife of my Lord.
I could not yet lay aside my face of shame;
I hung my head, facing the dark wall;
You might call me a thousand times, not once would I turn round.
At fifteen, I stopped frowning.
I wanted to be with you, as dust with its ashes.
I often thought that you were the faithful man who clung to the bridge-post,
That I should never be obliged to ascend to the Looking-for-Husband ledge.
When I was sixteen, my Lord went far away,
To the Ch'u T'ang Chasm and the Whirling Water Rock of the Yu River
Which, during the Fifth Month, must not be collided with;
Where the wailing of the gibbons seems to come from the sky.
Your departing footprints are still before the door where I bade you good-bye,
In each has sprung up green moss.
The moss is thick, it cannot be swept away.
The leaves are falling, it is early for the Autumn wind to blow.
It is the Eighth Month, the butterflies are yellow,
Two are flying among the plants in the West garden;
Seeing them, my heart is bitter with grief, they wound the heart of the Unworthy One.
The bloom of my face has faded, sitting with my sorrow.
From early morning until late in the evening, you descend the Three Serpent River.
Prepare me first with a letter, bringing me the news of when you will reach home.
I will not go far on the road to meet you,
I will go straight until I reach the Long Wind Sands.
Li T'ai-Po, translated by Amy Lowell
If this translation by Amy Lowell sounds vaguely familiar, it might be because there is another famous translation into English of this same poem, known as The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter, by Lowell's friend and compatriot Ezra Pound. Neither American poet worked from the original Chinese of Li Po.* It's interesting to compare the two versions as English poems (I am unfortunately not qualified to speak of them as translations from the Chinese). But Pound and Lowell were very interested in Chinese poetry and published collections of their renditions; both were also modernists, interested in re-making poetic language for the twentieth century, and one way of doing that was opening American poetry to a different, non-European tradition.
Lowell's version nicely preserves a sense of the poem's foreignness, but sometimes I think it's at the cost of sounding sort of quaintly exotic; Pound is more direct and simple. For example, she says "the Eighth Month" and he says "August"; she notes without explanation that during "the Fifth Month" the Whirling Water Rock of the Yu River must not be collided with (is collision OK during the other months?) and he omits the part about avoiding collision and merely refers to "the river of swirling eddies." He will sometimes keep the Chinese place names, which perhaps oddly makes them sound less exotic in English: the river Kiang instead of Three Serpent River and Cho-fu-Sa instead of Long Wind Sands; "the look out" instead of Looking-for-Husband ledge. I especially like Pound's simplicity and directness in what are for me (in his version) perhaps the most haunting lines in the poem; here is Lowell's version again:
. . . my heart is bitter with grief, they wound the heart of the Unworthy One.
The bloom of my face has faded, sitting with my sorrow.
Here is Pound's version:
They hurt me.
I grow older.
Lowell's speaker seems more of a piece; with Pound's speaker I have a sense of a very reticent woman whose longing for her absent husband forces her at times to break out with unusual directness. As with Othello's "the pity of it, Iago, the pity of it" or Cordelia's "Love, and be silent," it's the simplicity within the complicated emotional context that makes these short straightforward lines so powerful. But perhaps familiarity plays some part in how I'm receiving these two poems, since I've only read the Lowell recently and I've known the Pound version for a very long time (longer than the age of the wife in the poem). Lowell's version has its own power and integrity, even compared with Pound's still contemporary-sounding rendition.
This is from Amy Lowell: Selected Poems, edited by Honor Moore, in the Library of America's American Poets Project series.
* Lowell's translation calls him Li T'ai-Po, and Pound's Rihaku, which is a transcription of the Japanese version of the name; he is usually known in English as Li Po or, more currently, Li Bai. I need to look through my books of Chinese poetry to see if I can find a current translation of this poem.
When the hair of your Unworthy One first began to cover her forehead,
She picked flowers and played in front of the door.
Then you, my Lover, came riding a bamboo horse.
We ran round and round the bed, and tossed about the sweetmeats of green plums.
We both lived in the village of Ch'ang Kan.
We were both very young, and knew neither jealousy nor suspicion.
At fourteen, I became the wife of my Lord.
I could not yet lay aside my face of shame;
I hung my head, facing the dark wall;
You might call me a thousand times, not once would I turn round.
At fifteen, I stopped frowning.
I wanted to be with you, as dust with its ashes.
I often thought that you were the faithful man who clung to the bridge-post,
That I should never be obliged to ascend to the Looking-for-Husband ledge.
When I was sixteen, my Lord went far away,
To the Ch'u T'ang Chasm and the Whirling Water Rock of the Yu River
Which, during the Fifth Month, must not be collided with;
Where the wailing of the gibbons seems to come from the sky.
Your departing footprints are still before the door where I bade you good-bye,
In each has sprung up green moss.
The moss is thick, it cannot be swept away.
The leaves are falling, it is early for the Autumn wind to blow.
It is the Eighth Month, the butterflies are yellow,
Two are flying among the plants in the West garden;
Seeing them, my heart is bitter with grief, they wound the heart of the Unworthy One.
The bloom of my face has faded, sitting with my sorrow.
From early morning until late in the evening, you descend the Three Serpent River.
Prepare me first with a letter, bringing me the news of when you will reach home.
I will not go far on the road to meet you,
I will go straight until I reach the Long Wind Sands.
Li T'ai-Po, translated by Amy Lowell
If this translation by Amy Lowell sounds vaguely familiar, it might be because there is another famous translation into English of this same poem, known as The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter, by Lowell's friend and compatriot Ezra Pound. Neither American poet worked from the original Chinese of Li Po.* It's interesting to compare the two versions as English poems (I am unfortunately not qualified to speak of them as translations from the Chinese). But Pound and Lowell were very interested in Chinese poetry and published collections of their renditions; both were also modernists, interested in re-making poetic language for the twentieth century, and one way of doing that was opening American poetry to a different, non-European tradition.
Lowell's version nicely preserves a sense of the poem's foreignness, but sometimes I think it's at the cost of sounding sort of quaintly exotic; Pound is more direct and simple. For example, she says "the Eighth Month" and he says "August"; she notes without explanation that during "the Fifth Month" the Whirling Water Rock of the Yu River must not be collided with (is collision OK during the other months?) and he omits the part about avoiding collision and merely refers to "the river of swirling eddies." He will sometimes keep the Chinese place names, which perhaps oddly makes them sound less exotic in English: the river Kiang instead of Three Serpent River and Cho-fu-Sa instead of Long Wind Sands; "the look out" instead of Looking-for-Husband ledge. I especially like Pound's simplicity and directness in what are for me (in his version) perhaps the most haunting lines in the poem; here is Lowell's version again:
. . . my heart is bitter with grief, they wound the heart of the Unworthy One.
The bloom of my face has faded, sitting with my sorrow.
Here is Pound's version:
They hurt me.
I grow older.
Lowell's speaker seems more of a piece; with Pound's speaker I have a sense of a very reticent woman whose longing for her absent husband forces her at times to break out with unusual directness. As with Othello's "the pity of it, Iago, the pity of it" or Cordelia's "Love, and be silent," it's the simplicity within the complicated emotional context that makes these short straightforward lines so powerful. But perhaps familiarity plays some part in how I'm receiving these two poems, since I've only read the Lowell recently and I've known the Pound version for a very long time (longer than the age of the wife in the poem). Lowell's version has its own power and integrity, even compared with Pound's still contemporary-sounding rendition.
This is from Amy Lowell: Selected Poems, edited by Honor Moore, in the Library of America's American Poets Project series.
* Lowell's translation calls him Li T'ai-Po, and Pound's Rihaku, which is a transcription of the Japanese version of the name; he is usually known in English as Li Po or, more currently, Li Bai. I need to look through my books of Chinese poetry to see if I can find a current translation of this poem.
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