bird of paradise

Jane, who has the website http://haftonandkelly.com/ , is worried that I shall soon run out of animal limericks. She suggests, though knowing I hate gardening, that I turn my attention to flowers, and to that end has sent me the picture below:

 

This has the common name bird of paradise; she explains that common plant names do not take initial capitals.

Is it a bird?
Is it a plane?
A comic book hero?
No; think again:

This is a flower,
of the genus Strelizia.
(Capital ‘S’:
Flowers don’t get much ritzier.)

Anthea Bell, Translator Extraordinaire

Once at a translator's conference I attended a workshop Anthea Bell gave on the translation of Asterix books, and she told us the strict rules the publisher sets: one may not increase the size of a speech balloon, and if a joke is 'untranslatable' (and Asterix books are full of puns, the most untranslatable things of all) one must put in another joke in a nearby window (or whatever the boxes in such books are called) as close as possible. I have often recommended Asterix books in foreign languages to learners. So I was very pleased to read the following, sent to me by a fellow-writer in England:

Translator Anthea Bell awarded Cross of the Order of Merit

29 January 2015

On 29 January 2015, Ambassador Ammon presented the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany to the distinguished translator Anthea Bell at a reception at the Embassy attended by Mrs Bell's family and colleagues.

Anthea Bell has been renowned as an outstanding translator of German titles into English. For years she has taken on works by Kafka, Stefan Zweig, ETA Hoffmann, as well as Erich Kästner and Cornelia Funke.

In making these authors and their books accessible to wider readerships by the means of translation, she has made an invaluable contribution to furthering understanding between Germany and the UK.

 

She has been much acclaimed for her work, and among many other accolades she has received the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, the Schlegel Tieck Prize for Translation from German and the Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in Translation. She also won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, for which she has also been nominated a further three times. Ambassador Ammon was delighted to add another honour to the list.

Ambassador Ammon on awarding the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany to Anthea Bell

On 29 January 2015, Ambassador Peter Ammon presented the Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany to acclaimed translator Anthea Bell. This award was in recognition of Mrs Bell's services to translation and outstanding contribution to cultural understanding between Germany and the UK.

 

The Letter 'V'.

Time for another limerick:

At a poetry reading a Vulture
said “I don’t care for this culture.
when it comes to the crunch
a dead poet’s lunch —
though of course I don’t mean to insult yer.”

 

In a not very jolly taverna in Agios Konstantinos — that’s the Agios Konstantinos from which ferries and Dolphins and the Cat go to Alonnisos — in which I’ve sometimes been obliged to have dinner because there was no boat until the next day, there is, perched up high in a corner, a stuffed vulture. Guaranteed to put one off the already not very good food.

 

This vulture, to add to its unpleasantness, seems also to be a flasher.

Cameras Don't Lie; People Do.

It has been suggested — no, why this pussy-footing passive construction? — Jane has suggested — that I have short-changed you in the matter of pictures on the blog. So here today are several: first, Lenin addressing the workers: the chap on the steps to the right is, I’m pretty sure, Trotsky:

 

Now, not the same picture censored exactly, but another taken within seconds; too few seconds for comrade Leon to have got down the steps:

 

Shocking, eh? Not the sort of thing that would happen in England, of course. Here now is a picture, a famous one, of the great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel standing by the anchor chains of his magnificent but doomed ship the ‘Great Eastern’:

 

And here again is another version of that picture, deemed more suitable for schoolchildren, who must learn lying and hypocrisy early if they want to earn the respect of their elders:

 

Incidentally, the fine Greek writer Andreas Embeirikos wrote a huge pornographic novel, even longer than Proust’s ‘Remembrance of Things Past’, set on the (fictional) maiden voyage of the ‘Great Eastern’.

Sex and Drugs and Rock-and-Roll

That is a false and misleading title designed to attract readers. Jane, the only person who bothers to comment on my blog, has pointed out to me that the daily readership figures don't tell me what people like or don't like: people have to look at the blog, and so are registered as a viewer for that day, to see if they like it. My feeling that putting poems in reduces readership must be illusory, as it seems unlikely that people have poetry detectors in their web browsers, warning them not to open pages containing poems. So what the hell; here is another poem from my book 'Foreign Correspondence.' And as it is a scan, i.e. a picture of the book page, it also counts as the compulsory daily photograph:

If you can't understand this poem, then a) go away and listen to the Beethoven quartet of the title, b) reflect that poetry, operating at the borders or extremes of language, is necessarily difficult if it's any good, and c) study canine behaviour. Oh, and d), 'Understanding' is not usually what one is supposed to do with poetry anyway. Poems grab one, or not as the case may be. Failure to be grabbed by a poem may indicate a shortcoming in the poem, or it may indicate a shortcoming in the reader. Have a nice day!

The Kiss of Death

 

For a poet, it’s being appointed Poet Laureate. And for this blog, it seems, it’s putting in a poem. Daily readership went up to nearly fifty when I wrote something about the ‘Road Runner’ cartoons, and it’s dropped steadily since then; just at the moment it’s about five people a day. (Or one person five times, or one person three times and another twice, or…) So what have I got to lose? Well, those five, but anyway, here’s a poem, and one of mine to boot; in fact the title poem of a book of mine:

Foreign Correspondence

 

Don’t trust the guide-book, or the map: one notes
motorways, an airport, tower blocks;
the other talks of earthquakes, shattered rocks,
ruined houses sheltering wild goats.

 

Routinely confident, to meet the need
for first-hand information, we despatched
our two best men, resourceful and well-matched,
or so the tests and field reports agreed.

 

One returned within the week: a poor
report, laconic: ‘Nothing to see or do,
people hostile, primitive, and few.’
He left the firm; refuses to say more.

 

Three years later, now, the other writes:
useless notes of sleepless moonlit nights.

——#——

Oh, the mandatory picture: this is the cover of the book:

 

 

The Letter 'U'.

A tropical edentate quoth
‘In the jungle they call me the sloth,
but I’m in the zoo now
and known as the Unau;
two-toed and two-named: I’m both.’

On a cuteness scale of 1-10 I think I'd give this creature a 5.

Get your nose out of that papyrus and go and play football

Scientific explanation should be as simple as possible, but not more simple. I think it was Einstein who said that. Unsurprisingly, the BBC is of the ‘more simple’ persuasion. Remember that awful TV programme ‘Tomorrow’s World’? Some girl chosen more for her looks than her scientific acumen would be shown playing with some new invention. She would turn to the camera and say ‘But how does it work? Well, (pointing to a little box) it works by this little device here!’ (Lux in tenebris, exclamations of ‘Well, well, whatever next’, end of ‘explanation’.) This got sillier and sillier week by week until the BBC took it off for very shame.

So I’m a touch doubtful about the ‘explanation’ given on BBC World Service radio this morning for something very interesting indeed: a way of reading the charred remains of papyrus scrolls from the Herculaneum library, which was destroyed in the eruption of Mount Etna some 2,000 years ago. Up to now one could do nothing with the scrolls: if you tried to unroll them they crumbled of course. Nevertheless the French Bibliotheque Nationale has carefully kept some of these scrolls ever since Napoleon nicked them on a trip to Italy. (Meanwhile my local public library in England recently threw out hundreds of readable books, including the Everyman three volume Herodotus Histories, which I rescued, simply because they were ‘old’ and ‘no-one ever borrowed them.’)

So how does one read these carbonized scrolls? The BBC man mentioned a synchrotron. He didn’t say how that helped, but it was an excuse to go and visit a very big synchrotron that happens to be in France. There, what seemed to be a real scientist explained that X-ray diffraction techniques are used to examine the insides of the still rolled-up scrolls. I imagine this is where the synchrotron comes in. The ink on the papyrus deflects X-rays rather differently than inkless papyrus does, so a vast number of X-ray pictures and an amount of analysis that would be unthinkable without computers enables one to make out letters, words, even entire texts.

‘But don’t get too excited,’ our BBC man warned us: ‘The scroll they’re examining turns out to be by some philosopher who lived around the time of Julius Caesar.’

The item pictured below is not what it looks like: it is one of these burnt scrolls.

 

A randy young lady called Dinah …

O.K. you can stop guessing the rest of that one. Time for another limerick from my pure-as-the-driven-snow animal series. We have reached the letter ‘T’.

I’ve already dealt with the Toad
(See under ‘N’) — what a load
Of cheap rhymes, what a caper!
— There’s always the Tapir —
That’s quite enough, any road.

They are not the cutest of animals but here is the by now mandatory picture:

 

Oops! Sorry!

I think I had already shown you issue 5 of 'The Aloni', so here (duh) is issue 6:

Waiting to see. And waiting, and waiting...

While we're waiting to see what will happen in and to Greece, here is issue 5 of 'The Aloni':

Road Runner

Yesterday was dull, cold, and wet, and neither I nor the dog went out all day. Dull for the dog, who cannot read and only has a limited appreciation of music, but good for me: I kept the ‘practical work’ — the lunatic inventions, the endless repair jobs — to a minimum and spent much of the day alternating between computer and piano. At the computer — though I always do first drafts longhand, in a notebook in front of the screen, so it’s hard to choose a pair of glasses that allows me to focus on both, not to mention the pile of dictionaries, some coming unbound, that teeters nearby, threatening to collapse onto keyboard and notebook — I was translating a Greek text into English. At the piano I was trying to learn another of the Bach two-part inventions. I learn painfully slowly now; perhaps I always did. I’m proceeding at about a bar a day, and I notice the piece is 23 bars long. Actually, come to think of it, that’s not so bad: it means I could just about have the thing under my belt, or rather in that mysterious network of nerves and synapses between fingers and brain, in about six months.

You finally learn to play the piano, and then you die.

So quite a productive day, so when I finally went to bed I could allow myself some frivolity, and to that end I had earlier downloaded some Road Runner cartoons. You know the Road Runner cartoons? Minimalism avant la lettre. The road runner is a ridiculous chicken-like creature — I don’t know if he really exists — who tears along an otherwise empty road in a barren rocky landscape; precipices, canyons, the occasional organ-pipe cactus. He irritates hell out of the only other character, a coyote who comes up with absurdly ingenious devices to capture him, all of which backfire. The standard scene-ending  is coyote falling down a canyon so deep he dwindles to invisibility, reaching the bottom with a distant crash; all we see is a little puff of dust. As is the way of cartoons, he then peels himself up and tries a new ruse. There are no voices, never any human presence at all: just the mocking ‘Bee-beep’ of Road Runner as he hurtles past. It is very relaxing.

 

Midwinter Miscellany

Oscar Wilde Sucks

Or was it that he liked to be sucked? When Ellman was writing his biography, he announced excitedly to a friend that he had at last discovered what Wilde’s ‘perversion’ was — ‘Fellatio!’ ‘Indeed,’ said his friend; ‘But as the sucker or the sucked?’ Ellman’s face fell and he dashed off to do more research.

——#——

Poetry is Useless

or at least it ought to be: if you try to write a ‘useful’ poem, it will certainly be a bad poem. Of course, it may be that reading poetry has a positive moral effect, because it is a species of the contemplation of the beautiful. But that is quite another matter.

——#——

Poets are Useful

At the end of the Spanish Civil War the remaining Republican forces, harried by Franco’s fascists, Italy’s fascists, and Germany’s nazis, tried to get away over the border into France. The French closed the border and the trapped Republicans were slaughtered, except for those who got over the Pyrenees. These lived in constant fear of arrest as ‘illegal immigrants’, and even when allowed to stay would have been the first to be rounded up by the invading Germans now that WW II had started.

The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who had by now made a bob or two, (in those days people valued poetry), chartered or bought an old cargo ship, the ‘Winnipeg’, and himself went over to France and sought out 2,000 endangered Spanish Republican refugees. The ‘Winnipeg’ took them safely to a warm welcome in Chile, where the Spanish Republican Government in Exile gave them generous six month grants to set themselves up in their new home.

——#——

Grave Concerns

Now seems as good a time as any to repeat something I’ve mentioned before: special protective and hygienic measures have had to be taken at the graves of Oscar Wilde and Francisco Franco. In the first place because so many people kiss it, in the second because so many people spit on it.

Here is Oscar Wilde’s tomb in Père Lachaise cemetery, sculpted by Jacob Epstein:

The Greek Election

Here in this little Aegean island I am in most senses except the geographical further away from current major Greek political goings-on than I would be in England, but I’d better just say what I know or think I know.

The likely final figures will be such that Syriza (the left-wing party that is promising Greeks the earth, and most of all escape from the fierce austerity measures that are causing so much misery) has the most votes. Next will come Nea Demokratia. (The current ruling party, roughly Thatcherite.) Then the appalling ‘Golden Dawn’; out and out Nazis. Then a number of small parties such as the ‘Greek Independents’, led by the aptly named ‘Kamenos’. (It translates as ‘burnt’ and the word is a common metaphor for ‘cheated’). They are something like the English UKIP, but they too are against the austerity measures.

Syriza will not have an overall majority, so that to form a government it will have to form a coalition. Their likely (!) partners will be the party of Kamenos, as of course Golden Dawn is beyond the pale of decency. Unfortunately Golden Dawn, as the second runner-up, will get a disturbing number of seats in parliament.

That’s how I understand things to be, as far as we can see, at the moment. Now we shall just have to wait and see what happens. There is a strong possibility Greece will, to some extent, disengage itself, or be disengaged, from the European Community.

But as I say, let us WAIT AND SEE!

Hope you like the occasional 'Aloni'

The last one I put in the blog was issue number 4, so here is (duh) number 5:

If it's too small to read, click on it and then you can fiddle about to make it bigger.

The Kobo

The what? It’s an anagram of ‘Book’ and it’s what’s called an e-reader; slightly smaller than a thin paperback, electronic, with a surprisingly ink-on-paper like screen, and a capacity of, they say, 1,000 books. I imagine they’re counting on people’s books not being Proust, the King Kames Bible, Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall’, etc., but anyway it can hold a lot. ‘Oh, you mean a Kindle!’ Well, very like that, but mercifully Amazon-free. Of course, its manufacturers have a site full of e-books for sale and they’re hoping you will buy them to put in your Kobo, but they don’t hassle you to do so and I have learnt how to put in books that are available free, legitimately, on the internet, in e-reader friendly format. The best source of these is the splendid ‘Project Gutenberg’ which I very much recommend. Its thousands of out-of-copyright titles are also available in ‘text only’ and HTML formats, so that you can also download, convert to ‘Word’ for a decent typeface, and print, or, if you can tolerate it, even just read on the screen of your computer.

Anyway, my newly-acquired Kobo (they cost about £60) is the next ‘book’ on my bedside shelf. It’s early days yet and I’m still getting used to it, so in Kobo terms I haven’t put much in it: current contents are:

Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Hunting of the Snark’.
The Kobo Touch User Guide.
Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Mirror of the Sea’.
Conrad’s ‘The Secret Sharer’.
Gaston Leroux’s ‘Mystery of the Yellow Room’ in English translation.
Sacher-Masoch’s ‘Venus in Furs’ in English translation.
Thomas Martin’s ‘The Inventions etc. of Nikola Tesla’.
A selection of articles from the London Review of Books.
Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’ in English translation.
Coleridge’s ‘Biographia Literaria’.
Maugham’s ‘Of Human Bondage’.
‘Flood Songs’ (Details later when I get round to looking at it.)
Thoreau’s ‘Walden’.
Meredith’s ‘The Tragic Comedians’.

And all, as I say, in something smaller and thinner than any paperback.

Here’s a photograph of the thing, propped up on the ashtray next to my laptop:

(That glare on the screen is caused by my camera's flash; the thing itself is much clearer than that.)

The Secrets of Alchemy

That title was surely chosen by a publisher more interested in money than learning, in fact soon dictionaries will be saying ‘Publisher (n, from vb Publish): 1) One whose only interest in books is financial. 2) Term of abuse used by writers and other intellectuals, e.g. ‘You…you…Publisher you!’ ‘The Secrets of Alchemy’ will disappoint those looking for the sensational, while its title will put off the serious. But of course those with a serious interest are a minority, so let’s cheat the sensation seekers and forget the serious; there’s more money in it that way.

Anyway it’s the next book in the bedside slot, and it’s there because I read a serious article about it in the ‘Literary Review’, or perhaps a really serious one in the ‘London Review of Books’.

The author, Lawrence Principe, is, (and it’s worth giving his title in full) ‘Drew Professor of the Humanities in the Department of the History of Science and Technology and the Department of Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University’, and that title is not as misleading as his book’s. This is a serious work, whose aim is to show (I oversimplify here) that ‘Alchemy’ is just the old word for ‘Chemistry’, but around the time of the ‘Scientific Revolution’, when scientists, hitherto known as Natural Philosophers, wanted to be seen to be cleaning up their act, found it convenient to distinguish them, like the beasts in Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’: ‘Chemistry Good, Alchemy Bad’, Alchemy became, as it were, Chemistry’s scapegoat.

Even ascetic people like me (stop sniggering that girl at the back there) eagerly look for pictures when we open a new book, and some of these here are indeed sensational: Professor Principe is a proper ‘Hands on’ chemist, alchemist, chymyst: here are clear colour photographs of the results of ‘alchemical’ experiments done in his own laboratory. He hasn’t quite succeeded in turning base metal into gold, but he’s come pretty close; close enough to give alchemy back the bad name he’s trying to clear it of, were he not scrupulously honest and, in the best sense of the word, ‘scientific’. I’m only halfway through the book, and it must certainly stay in the bedside shelf until I’ve finished it.

Here are some pictures from ‘The Secrets of Alchemy’:

I'm afraid the pictures haven't come out too well here. You could try clicking on them and then fiddling about, but they look much better in the book.

 

Pablo Neruda

I have just heard that Pablo Neruda's remains are to be disturbed for the second time, following a new story that he was poisoned. We all -- those of us who care, that is -- know that in fact Neruda, already old and ill, died of a broken heart ten days after the Americans came in (on September the 11th 1973) and overthrew the democratically elected government which had been led by Neruda's friend Salvador Allende, (Allende had already 'committed suicide') and put their puppet the torturer Pinochet in charge.
If you want to know more about Neruda, look at my blog post, called 'Nine - Eleven', of last September the 11th. Here's Pablo Neruda:

Auden’s Longer Poems

The next book on the bedside shelf is W.H. Auden’s Collected Longer Poems.

Most anglophones will know at least part of at least one of Auden’s shorter poems. Even people who claim to hate poetry are likely to be familiar with the poem read at the graveside in the popular film ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’. (Incidentally I knew briefly the woman for whom the poem was written.) Poetry, for most of us including myself, means lyric poetry: individual pieces about the length of a sonnet, at any rate no longer than a page: something like a Sestina is pushing the limits of the lyric; the limits of ‘real’ poetry: poetry is the quintessence of language, and you just can’t keep it up, either reading it or writing it[i], for very long: one can drink a whole bottle of wine, but a whole bottle of whisky would make even me ill.

So ‘Long Poem’ is a contradiction: ‘Long verse’, it should be called. Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ and Vikram Seth’s ‘The Golden Gate’ are verse, not poetry. They are none the worse for that; one doesn’t criticize a Clydesdale for not being a racehorse. Even as fine a work as Tennyson’s ‘Maud’ is verse rather than poetry, and contains lines worthy of Alfred Austin, such as

            Her brother is coming home tonight,
            Breaking up my dream of delight.

(I may not have quoted exactly, but it’s something just as awful.) But ‘Maud’ also contains ‘Purple Passages’ that can be lifted out to stand alone as very beautiful lyrics, and ‘Maud’ has other, ‘non-poetic’ virtues: virtues more usually associated with the novel.

Auden’s longer poems are not so much like novels as like essays. ‘The Sea and the Mirror’, for which I specially wanted this book, is a deep examination of just what Shakespeare was up to in ‘The Tempest’. The long section ‘Caliban to the Audience’ — which is surely not even verse but prose— says more than most people want to know about a play that is often regarded as mere pantomime.

But having read or rather re-read ‘The Sea and the Mirror’ I then embarked on ‘The Age of Anxiety’, so this book must stay in the bedside slot at least until I’ve finished that.

I think, were I obliged to ‘weed’ a garden, I should probably decide nothing was a weed.

In later years Auden’s face looked, as he said himself, ‘Like a wedding-cake left out in the rain’:

 

---

[i] An exception is Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, which is not for the faint-hearted.

The Oxopetra Elegies

 

That’s the next book in the bedside slot mentioned yesterday. Probably my favourites among the poems of Oddyseas Elytis, and this is a parallel text edition; Greek original verso and David Connolly’s excellent English translation recto. I bought a copy of this edition when it was first published in 1996, the year of Elytis’s death, but it has disappeared; another case of my trusting someone who claimed to be my friend but lied to me and stole from me. When I couldn’t find it a year or so ago David kindly sent me a new copy, and I’ve been studying his translations, and what Elytis has said about translating his poetry, because just recently someone who can’t have had the slightest idea what she was asking nevertheless asked me to translate into English Elytis’s strange and difficult poem ‘Marina of the Rocks’. To my dismay I found that one is supposed to translate Elytis’s poetry almost word-for-word: a process that usually produces nonsense (just for fun, try ‘Google Translate’ on any poem) and certainly does in the case of ‘Marina of the Rocks.’

‘Supposed to…’? Well yes, really: David was privileged to discuss this personally with Elytis, and that’s what he was told, so that’s from the horse’s mouth. And it’s what David did, brilliantly, with the Oxopetra Elegies. I just can’t do that with ‘Marina of the Rocks’, though I’ve struggled for a month. Finally I had to submit what I’ve called, remembering Robert Lowell, an ‘Imitation’.

It’s done and sent off, so I can now, with relief, put the Oxopetra Elegies back in the poetry shelves. But only for a rest: like all good poetry, these are something one can come back to again and again. They bear comparison with Rilke’s Duino Elegies.