Rainbow at the end of the year

I'm looking forward to 2011 more than feeling in the mood to celebrate the year soon to be behind us. And one thing I'm really looking forward to is the centenary, in February, of Elizabeth Bishop.

Among the many celebrations will be the publication by F.S.G. of two new editions of her work. I've blogged before about Bishop as an unsung master of prose, and readers will be able to judge this for themselves in Lloyd Schwartz's new collection of her stories, essays, and reviews, called.... Prose. Saskia Hamilton (who previously co-edited Bishop's correspondence with Lowell - and who was recently celebrated in, of all things, a music video by Ben Folds and Nick Hornby) has edited the new companion edition of Bishop's poems called - in similarly dignified fashion - Poems.

Now, most of this work has been collected already in the wonderful Library of America volume dedicated to E.B., but these attractive new volumes will no doubt reach even more readers (and, for Bishop fanatics like me, will include a few things not previously published, e.g., her annotated draft of the Time-Life volume on Brazil that she later repudiated - and the complete extant correspondence between her and Anne Stevenson, who wrote the first book-length study of Bishop's work). Also, E.B. was light years ahead of us in her interest in Clarice Lispector, whom she translated; the prose volume contains Bishop's translations of three stories.

Among the many things to treasure about Bishop's work are a clutch of dazzling translations of Max Jacob.

Here's one.

*

Rainbow

It was the hour when night makes the mountains lament
And the crags creak under the footsteps of animals,
The birds flew away from the countryside like poison
To get to the sea, to get to a better horizon.
Pursuing a poet then the devil went.
The poet stared at the sea as if he were dead,
For there the sea powdered the edge of a bay
And covered the skin of the giant rocks with scales.
But Jesus, with fire shining behind his head,
Came to climb up the black crags, bearing the cross.
The poet stretched out his arms towards the Savior
And everything vanished: the somber night and the beasts.
The poet followed God for his happiness.

*

May you all find happiness in the New Year!

Pictured: Renee Descartes' sketch of how a rainbow is formed.

A question of upbringing: on innies and outies

Did you know that the University of Chicago Press gives away e-books each month?

They recently offered free copies of the indispensable Chicago Manual of Style. This month, it's Anthony Powell's A Question of Upbringing, which I devoured over X-mas - book one of Powell's perennially best-selling epic, A Dance to the Music of Time.

What a fun book it is! And in every walk of life, there are folks like the narrator's mysteriously hapless Uncle Giles, who ("wrinkling the dry, reddish skin at the sides of his nostrils, under which a web of small grey veins etched on his nose seemed to imply preliminary outlines for a game of noughts-and-crosses") chafes at his own failures by blaming those he believes to have secured an unfair advantage; for Giles, people who run things are therefore one and all abhorrent:

As a result of this creed he was unconquerably opposed to all established institutions on the grounds that they were entirely - and therefore incapably - administered by persons whose sole claim to consideration was that they could command influence. His own phrase for describing briefly this approach to all social, political and economic questions was "being a bit of a radical:" a standpoint he was at pains to make abundantly clear to all with whom he came in contact.

If only he'd lived long enough to be a blogger!

Cheers to the U. of C. Press for being one of this reader's favorite institutions.

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Modernism, with its implied critique of society, depends both philosophically and financially on sustaining the notion of an inside and an outside. Art simultaneously must provoke the confusion or disapproval of outsiders while flattering insiders who (at least claim to) "get" it. An insider thereby finds fellowship in a theoretically innumerable self-selected community of like-minded cognoscenti, which in principle can include anyone. Insiders become custodians for posterity, owning, caring for, appreciating art that others will reject but will eventually admire. [...] It must, or at least must appear to, be fluid, embracing different classes and backgrounds, while ultimately requiring a certain aesthetic and behavioral conformity.

-- Michael Kimmelman, NYRB

The pot is a God. The winnowing
fan is a God. The stone in the
street is a God. The comb is a
God. The bowstring is also a
God. The bushel is a God and the
spouted cup is a God.

Gods, gods, there are so many
there's no place left
for a foot.
There is only
one God. He is our Lord
of the Meeting Rivers.

-- Basvanna (12th century), translated by A.K. Ramanujan

The Acknowledged Legislators of the World

Alfred Corn writes in to say -

"Don, it might interest you to know that your translation of Miguel Hernández's "Lullaby of the Onion" was read by the Spanish ambassador to the U.K. last night at Europe House in Smith Square, as part of the celebration opening the new HQ of the European Commission in London."

See also George Szirtes's blog post about the event.

Holiday stress got you down? Here's a poetry cure.

Allen Ginsberg in his pajamas doing Tai Chi and being generally... mindful.

End o' year lists and PoBiz: Life is very strange, and the universe is very small.

In Tom Pickard's new mini-memoir, More Pricks Than Prizes (just out from Pressed Wafer), he tells the story of how even as a garlanded poet, he was poor enough to have gotten rather desperately mixed up with some drug importers years ago. He narrates a tale dark and comic enough to come straight from Dickens in which at one point, the drug dealers have to find several hundred kilos of dead weight to fill out a swapped shipment that would be labeled "personal goods" on a customs form. In place of the original plan to fill dope-emptied crates with hand-carved African dolls ("too incongruous to serve that description"), poet Pickard suggested books. And so he sold them all the volumes he had of Strand Magazine (which only occupied ten kilos), an incomplete set of the 9th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and a set of the Times History of World War I.

More ballast was required, so off the conspirators went to a second-hand bookshop in Marylebone, where they purchased three dozen bound volumes of Punch and ten volumes of Boys Own. Not enough still. They proceeded to another shop in Farringdon Road where they bought more sets of the Times History and some works about religion. Alas, 250 more kilos had to be made up. And so, much to the bliss of an ancient bookseller, they acquired - in Tom's inimitable description:

... space wasting dust gathering, back breaking, spirit deadening unread and unreadable religious and military texts; all those pounds of printed pages by puffing parsons, anaemic academics, bloated bishops, geriatric generals, corpulent combatants and high ranking haemorrhoidal heroes. All that catechistic cataplasm, that militarist mucus, that pedantic pus from festering farts. The engaging entrails of emetic ambassadors, pestiferous papers by prudish pedagogues. I struggled to the wagon with arms full of books...

- and still more was needed -

... so I purchased conquering chronicles by conceited commanders, acned abortions by abstemious abstractors, asphyxiating articles by arthritic archbishops, bromicidal broadsides by bumptious broadcasters, asthmatic excretions by abject aesthetes, moralising morsels from mealy mouthed manufacturers, windy waffle from former centre forwards, bird brained banter by juiced-up journos, celebrity cackle from coked-up cacky-crammed crack heads, pontificating prime-time poseurs promoting puffed-up personalities, mendacious manuals by manic muff munching mullahs, post-modern pancakes flipped from non-stick pans stuck to the threadbare ceiling of their own gravity defying gravitas. And it still wasn't enough so I bought the works of talk show hosts, canting sofa cunts coughing up chintzy chunder, bloated volumes by toady poets who sit in circles blowing prizes up each others arseholes with straws - until we'd filled the crates.

Sounds like all those best-of-year lists, no?

At his subsequent trial, former Wing Commander Basil Bunting would testify in his favor. He was acquitted.

*

No, PoBiz has never been easy!

Life is very strange, and the universe is very small...

as Apollinaire wrote to his beloved Madeleine in 1915. Stationed in the trenches during WWI, he was surprised to hear from a correspondent in Spain that "it would seem that there is more interest in French poetry in Germany than here [in France];" as the Spaniard reported:

"I have read an article in a Spanish paper which mentions Paul Fort, you, and Romain Rolland as writers to whom much attention is being paid in Germany at the moment. Apparently German reviews have even been publishing old things of yours."

About this Apollinaire mused in a letter to Madeleine dated 18 July that when it was all over, it would

"... become clear that the preservation of French literature during the war was the work of the other side. [...] But those devils are well placed to be art lovers. They hardly had any before the war, and the German avant-garde poets spent the last year of peace paraphrasing 'Zone,' the first poem in Alcools: they even produced a very handsome edition of the poem (in translation of course), complete with a very nice-looking illustrated cover, printed up 15,000 copies, sent me 5 and sold the remainder in a week at 75 centimes a copy, never having bothered to ask my permission to publish and never even offering to buy the rights from me and turning a deaf ear to all my claims for remuneration. There you have another example of what great lovers of Art the Germans are. When they are not burning down some French cathedral they turn to stealing from French poets."

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation, as Burns would have said; plus ça change, as a bad editor I once knew inevitably put it...

Whoso list to hunt?

Are there more end-of-year poetry lists than ever this season? I guess that's good, though a lot of them seem to include the list-maker's friends, editors, and publishers - and one list by a rather well-known poet even features a couple of her own books! And I've stumbled upon at least two lists of book covers. AmPo folks sure like listing things.

Well, this year I, too, will have a best-poetry kind of list. It will have precisely one book on it, and my choice will appear over at the Poetry Foundation website, whose editors solicited it. And though my choice was published this year, its author is not living and is someone with whom I never had any personal connection. Stay tuned for that implicative bit of rectitude.

Meanwhile, since I'm not burdened with listing this way or that, I thought I'd mention two books I've been reading lately that have not been listed or even mentioned anywhere, as far as I'm aware. Both are published by a fascinating press, in fact, one of the most exciting literary presses presently in operation. It's Seagull Press in India, operated by the Seagull Foundation for the Arts. Their books are both astoundingly beautiful and exceptionally important. I mean, here's a press that has published previously unseen work by, among others, Max Frisch, Judith Butler, Peter Handke, Roland Barthes, Edward Lucie-Smith, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Edward Said, Thomas Bernhard, Slavenka Drakulic, Jean-Paul Sartre, Tzvetan Todorov, Aime Césaire, Antonin Artaud, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Theodor Adorno, Michel Leiris, Georges Bataille, and much else. They've been around for twenty-eight years, and hardly anyone I know of says a word about them: amazing.

Anyway, two of their most recent books have me especially enthralled.

One is the first English translation (by Wieland Hoban) of the correspondence between Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, something I should think would be a real event, especially in this, the year of Celan's 90th birthday. Here's a sample from this trove:

‘In Egypt’
For Ingeborg

Thou shalt say to the strange woman’s eye: be the water!
Thou shalt seek in the stranger’s eye those whom thou knowest to be in the water.
Thou shalt call them from the water: Ruth! Noemi! Miriam!
Thou shalt adorn them when thou liest with the stranger.
Thou shalt adorn them with the cloud-hair of the stranger.
Thou shalt say to Ruth, to Miriam and Noemi:
behold, I sleep next to her!
Thou shalt adorn the stranger next to thee most beautiful of all.
Thou shalt adorn her with the pain over Ruth, over Miriam and Noemi.
Thou shalt say to the stranger:
Behold, I slept next to her!
Vienna, 23 May 1948
To the meticulous one,
22 years after her birthday,
From the unmeticulous one

-

Paris, 31 October 1957

Today. The day with the letter.

Destruction, Ingeborg? No, certainly not. rather: the truth. For this, here too, is surely the opposite principle: because it is the basic principle.

Passing over many things:

I will be coming to Munich in late November, around the 26th.

Returning to what was passed over:

I do not know what all this means, I do not know what I should call it—destiny perhaps, fate and calling; searching for names is pointless, I know that is how it is, forever.

It is the same for me as for you: being allowed to speak and write down your name without struggling with the shudder that comes over me—for me, in spite of everything, that is joy.

You also know: when I met you, you were both for me: the sensual and the spiritual. The two can never separate, Ingeborg.

Think of ‘In Ägypten’. every time I read it, I see you step into this poem: you are the reason for living, not least because you are, and will remain, the justification for my speaking. (and I suppose this is what I was referring to that time in Hamburg, without quite realizing how true my words were.)

But that alone, my speaking, is not even the point; I wanted to be silent with you too.

A different area in the dark:

Waiting: I considered that too. But would that not also mean waiting for life to accommodate us in some way?

Life is not going to accommodate us, Ingeborg; waiting for that would
surely be the most unfitting way for us to be.

Be—yes, we can and are allowed to do so. To be—be there for another.

Even if it is only a few words, alla breve, one letter, once a month: the heart will know how to live.

Do you know that I can speak (and write) again now?

Oh, there is still so much I have to tell you, some of them things that even you would barely suspect.

Write to me.
Paul

P. S. Strangely enough, I had to buy the Frankfurter Zeitung on the way to the national library. and stumble across the poem you had sent me together with Die Gestundete Zeit, written on a strip of paper, by hand. I had always interpreted it for myself, and now I found it greeting me again—in such a context!

Forgive me, Ingeborg, forgive my stupid postscript of yesterday—perhaps I must never think or speak in such a way again.

Oh, I was so unjust towards you all these years, and the postscript was probably a relapse that was supposed to come to my aid in my helplessness. Is ‘Köln, Am Hof ’ not a beautiful poem? Höllerer, whom I recently gave it to print in Akzente (was I allowed to?), called it one of my most beautiful ones.

Through you, Ingeborg, through you. Would it ever have happened if you had not spoken of the ‘dreamt ones’? a single word from you—and I can live. And to think that I now have your voice in my ear again!

*

The other Seagull book I'm almost literally swooning over is Guillaume Apollinaire's Letters to Madeleine, a collection of never-before translated letters and poems the poet wrote in the trenches during the First World War to Madeleine Pagès, a women he met on the train shipping out. Now, this book is really a revelation because it has been so easy to romanticize Apollinaire's war experiences. Though you have to get over his frequently addressing Madeleine as his "little fairy," the details of his life as a Parisian poet who suddenly became an artilleryman are amazing. Experiencing much terror and privation, Apollinaire nevertheless writes Madeleine with great ardor - and even makes metal rings for her from bomb casings ("if you would be so kind as to send me the measurement of your ring finger, in two or three days I shall make you one like those the others make—that is, if you would like me to. These are not fine jewellery of course, but they are rather nice, rather poignant, and they make amusing war souvenirs."), and a pen holder from the shells of bullets. He also wrote a poem for her on the bark of a tree, which he asked her to burn to make the poem more palpable -



The book is valuable because you'll find many poems here that were later polished up and published in different form. And of course, the man knew how to write a love letter, a love poem, and so his entreaties to far-off Madeleine are as dramatic as a novel. I won't tell you how it ends. Edited by Laurence Campa and translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, it's essential for anyone interested in Apollinaire.

Here's part of a letter dated 25 May 1915:

I write you with the confidence of a man writing to a girl whose mind he respects infinitely, and whom he therefore trusts to see no vainglory or bluster in what he says. Nothing could be farther from my nature, and I would never dream of passing myself off as a great warrior. I am simply describing a sensation, or rather the absence of a sensation. Bravery consists as its etymology suggests in braving a danger and there is no bravery in my case, and it is indeed quite possible that I might turn out to be a coward when it comes to bayonets or hand-to-hand combat or even the defense of a casement under bombardment. I simply do not know. At all events, after I left the wood as the bombardment shifted its direction away from me, I headed straight for our trenches, for I found myself exposed to fire from the heights occupied by the Germans and saw masses of greenish smoke rolling along; it did not seem about to reach me at all, but after a moment my vision clouded over, and I staggered about with the impression that the ground was in violent motion, continually twisting back and forth, and then amidst the sanfoin in flower I trod on a soft body which thoroughly terrified me by rearing up and giving vent to a cry like that of a Punch doll when you press on its belly, and at the same moment two partridges took wing with the sound they make when startled. This brought me back to myself and my earlier simple state of mind, except for a continuing feeling of heaviness and a dizziness which I attributed to the sun, but which was experienced with like intensity as I later learnt in villages much farther away, so it was clearly bromine...

This is a poem called "Aiming," (which "belongs to you Madeleine") from a slightly later letter:

Horses almost cherry red Zeelanders
Gold machine-guns croaking out legends.
I love you Liberty watching over the hypogaea
Silver-stringed harp oh rain oh my music
The invisible enemy a silver wound in the sun
And the hidden future that the flare elucidates
Listen to the Word swimming subtle fish
The towns one by one become keys
Mask blue like the sky God dons
Peaceful war ascesis metaphysical solitude
Child with severed hands amidst the pink banners.

These two books and other Seagull titles are distributed in the US by the University of Chicago Press, who deserve great praise for bringing them to American readers!

Now back to my hunt for good books to read, but not list!

Pictured: Listmakers in a feeding frenzy. I mean gulls.

Who is the Philip Guston of poetry?

In a new collection of Philip Guston's writings, lectures, and interviews (edited by Clark Coolidge), Guston quotes Picasso as saying that he, Léger, and Braque were more interested in painting than cubism, while Gleizes and Ozenfant were more interested in cubism than in painting.

The passage moves David Shapiro to comment:

Apply this to dogmatic poetics for the last thirty-five years or so. Who is the Guston of poetry -- believing in poetry more than dogmas about poetry?

*
A few PG quotes:

What bores me is to see an illustration of my thought. That would bore me. I want to make something I never saw before and be changed by it.

-

If someone bursts out laughing in front of my painting, that is exactly what I want and expect.

-

You know, talking about the sublime, I can read the advertising but I'm not a customer. I don't have to be sold.

-

Nobody chooses to be in a period.