Fear of the other side of the coin

This is refreshing! From The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956; p. 245.

*

Beckett's attitude to literary prizes is a little more difficult to define. What he dreads above all, in the very unlikely event of his receiving a prize, is the publicity which would then be directed, not only at his name and his work, but at the man himself. He judges, rightly, or wrongly, that it is impossible for the prizewinner, without serious discourtesy, to refuse to go in for the posturings required by these occasions: warm words for his supporters, interviews, photos, etc., etc. And as he feels wholly incapable of this sort of behaviour, he prefers not to expose himself to the risk of being forced into it by entering the competition. Perhaps he has an exaggerated sense of the prizewinner's duties. But if, as prizewinner, he could without unacceptable rudeness stay out of it all, he would see no objection to being one. You see, it is not an aversion of principle, but simply the fear of the other side of the coin.

-- Suzanne Dumesnil, for Samuel Beckett, to Jerome Lindon, Editions de Minuit, 19 April 1951

Degrees of badness

To celebrate #empsonweek on Twitter, I'm reprising a few posts in WE's honor; Empson is a great hero for me, and I never tire of quoting him, viz - "The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own."  This I believe!

Here's a nugget from pre attack-of-the-difficult-poem times...

Now, greatness in poetry, as we know, has been abolished. Badness, too, therefore! There remain only those who fear the new, and those who fear the old.

I imagine, all this notwithstanding, that there may still linger a wistful nostalgia for some imaginary good - if not actually great - old days. And so, to accompany these deep autumn days, I thought I'd occasionally dig up a cool odd buried chestnut or two from a bygone era. Here's the first little chill pill I found!  It's from a review by William Empson of Cleanth Brooks's Modern Poetry and the Tradition, from the December 1939 issue of Poetry:

Perhaps the best single crack is the remark that it is not the obscure poet but the unwilling public who escapes into an Ivory Tower. A short review of such a book had best look round for the points of disagreement, but the main body of it seems to me true and convincingly argued.But whom is it meant to convince? I suppose people who already read poetry, but bad poetry. They might be told more about the degrees of badness. It seems clear that Propaganda poetry ("I want you to feel like I do about this," or what Collingwood recently called the magical use of art, more of a social function) is not in itself Sentimental poetry (keeping to a limited range of feelings, to let them run riot), and Uplift poetry is different again. Assuming they are all bad, there is a question what poetry is used for - what kind of threshold ought to be crossed before you spill over into it from normal life? Is it better to have second-rate poetry in your life than not? And what sort of effort is required to produce or enjoy the virtues Mr. Brooks praises? Do you want to be cool or nearly crazy? Oddly enough, you seem to want one extreme or the other.

A Null Dust

What is [nihilism]? We have our choice of a variety of definitions. For Nietzsche, nihilism signifies the abolition of all hitherto accepted measures and fundamental values. But that may be too broad to be useful. More to the point is the assertion that nihilism denies the existence of any distinct substantial self. This lack of self-substance makes all persons nugatory or insignificant. If we are insignificant, what does it matter what becomes of us? Still, those who are killed need not accept their definition from their killers or have their humanity taken from them as well as their lives. The burden of valuation is on the killer whose ground is nihilistic.

Let the country that committed the crimes bear the blame for them. The slain were not invited into Nothingness, they had it thrust upon them. We are free to withdraw (to withdraw our minds where we cannot withdraw our bodies) from situations in which our humanity or lack of it is defined for us. It was the judgment of the slayers that slaughter was permitted, that the slain had at best a trivial claim to existence based on an untenable fiction of inviolate selfhood. Theorists of euthanasia had long ago consented to the destruction of the unfit. Even mild vegetarian Fabians like G.B. Shaw (there were others) agreed that measures should be taken by a progressive society to rid itself of defective types. These socially and historically “progressive” reforms were applied in Central Europe by the Nazis with programmatic rigidity and also a kind of purgatorial irony to the Jews and other peoples judged superfluous. This is what causes me to speak of nihilism.

It would be a mistake on modern grounds to set aside as unimportant the age-long inclination of connecting the spiritual order in the universe with our own lives. In our pragmatic attitude toward the social order we leave no room for the influence of general beliefs on our own particular views of morality. In his recent short book Death of the Soul, the philosopher William Barrett offers a useful discussion of the consequences of the disappearance (the destruction, in fact) of the self. He examines critically Heidegger’s treatment of the human being. How, in Heidegger’s view, are we in the world? We ask of Heidegger, “Who is the being who is undergoing all these various modes of being? (Or, in more traditional language: Who is the subject, the I, that underlies or persists through all these various modes of our being?) And here Heidegger evades us.” “We are nothing,” he says, “but an aggregate of modes of being, and any organizing or unifying center we profess to find there is something we ourselves have forged or contrived.”

Thus there is a gaping hole at the center of our human being—at least as Heidegger describes this being. Consequently, we have in the end to acknowledge a certain desolate and empty quality about his thought, however we may admire the originality and novelty of its construction.

And Barrett asks, “How could a being without a center be really ethical?” He concludes:

[Heidegger] cannot be dismissed: that desolate and empty picture of being he gives us may be just the sense of being that is at work in our whole culture, and we are in his debt for having brought it to the surface. To get beyond him we shall have to live through that sense of being in order to reach the other side.

To this I should like to add that questions that can be closed by philosophic argument often remain open for art, and it is therefore a mistake for writers to accept the preeminence of the philosophers, and write poems, novels, and plays to illustrate, to confirm, to work out in their art and in human detail, the thoughts given to us abstractly by distinguished (and also by undistinguished) thinkers. (Cartesians, Kantians, Hegelians, Bergsonians, Marxians, Freudians, Existentialists, Heideggerians, etc.) Neither the philosopher nor the scientist can tell the artist conclusively, definitively, what it is to be human.

* * *


For writers in the West and particularly in the US, it is almost too late to resolve the difficulties described above. Hardly anyone now is conscious of them. Writers seldom give any sign that they are aware of the degree of freedom they enjoy here. Their privilege is to be unrestrained in their destructiveness. They show by this that our giant America does not own them. They are very prickly about not being owned. But then nobody takes them very seriously either. To state the matter more clearly, they are not held to account for their opinions. These opinions are a null dust—weightless
.
What does this mean? Can it be said that in our dizziness we are annihilating even nihilism?


-- Saul Bellow, in The New York Review of Books

Pictured: A dust storm

Any explanation of a poem is, I think absurd.

It is my belief that in the Greek light there is a kind of process of humanization; I think of Aeschylus not as the Titan or the Cyclops that people sometimes want us to see him as, but as a man feeling and expressing himself close beside us, accepting or reacting to the natural elements just as we all do. I think of the mechanism of justice which he sets before us, this alternation of Hubris and Ate, which one will not find to be simply a moral law unless it is also a law of nature. A hundred years before him Anaximander of Miletus believed that “things” pay by deterioration for the “injustice” they have committed by going beyond the order of time. And later Heraclitus will declare: “The sun will not overstep his measures; if he does, the Erinyes, the handmaids of Justice, will find him out.”

The Erinyes will hunt down the sun, just as they hunted down Orestes; just think of these cords which unite man with the elements of nature, this tragedy that is in nature and in man at the same time, this intimacy. Suppose the light were suddenly to become Orestes? It is so easy, just think: if the light of the day and the blood of man were one and the same thing? How far can one stretch this feeling? “Just anthropomorphism,” people say, and they pass on. I do not think it is as simple as that. If anthropomorphism created the Odyssey, how far can one look into the Odyssey?

We could go very far; but I shall stop here. We arrived at the light. And the light cannot be explained; it can only be seen. The rest of this scenario may be filled in by the reader—after all, he has to do something too; but let me first recall the last words of Anticleia to her son:

The soul, like a dream, flutters away and is gone.
But quickly turn your desire to the light
And keep all this in your mind.

[Odyssey XI, 222-224]

*


Any explanation of a poem is, I think absurd. Everyone who has the slightest idea of how an artist works knows this. He may have lived long, he may have acquired much learning, he may have been trained as an acrobat. When, however, the time comes for him to create, the mariner’s compass that directs him is the sure instinct that knows, above all, how to bring to light or to sink in the twilight of his consciousness the things (or, as I should prefer to say, the tones) that are necessary, that are unnecessary or that are just sufficient for the creation of this something: the poem. He does not think of these materials; he fingers them, he weighs them, he feels their pulse. When this instinct is not mature enough to show the way, the most fiery sentiment may become disastrous and useless, like frozen ratiocination; it will be able to do nothing but stammer.


-- George Seferis, via Poetry International Web; translated by Rex Warner and Th. D. Frangopoulos in On the Greek Style.  Pictured: The Furies

Transtromer translation troubles

 Some poetry translation trouble has been brewing lately, viz -

The process of translating poetry from a language of which the poet has skimpy knowledge has a respectable history. Correspondents in the TLS exchange have mentioned Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell; Christopher Logue, whose accounts of the Iliad have enthralled readers for over forty years, knows no Greek. Still, the subject continues to vex some people. The April issue of the Chicago magazine Poetry is dedicated to translation. [sic - this past year it was in June]  It offers versions of a variety of works by twenty-five modern poets, together with an explanation of the translator’s approach. Of the twenty-five, more than half have acquaintance with the original language, including J. M. Coetzee from Afrikaans, John Peck from Chinese, D. H. Tracy from Swahili, as well as those charged with Russian, French, Serbian and Hebrew. The minority group are quick to admit their shortcomings: “As a lowland Scot, I don’t speak Gaelic”, Kathleen Jamie writes (a non sequitur, but let it pass), adding that it felt “a bit fraudulent” setting out to “translate” a poem from that language. Being Kathleen Jamie, she comes up with something good in itself -the accepted validation of the poet translating from a language he or she “does not understand”. Like Ms Jamie, Franz Wright (Belarusian), Peter Campion (Korean) and Clive Wilmer (Hungarian) work with rough objects which, as practised versifiers, they strive to sand and varnish. Another is Robin Robertson, who attempts an English version of Pablo Neruda’s “Oda a un gran atun en el mercado” (“Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market”). Discussing his approach to Neruda’s Spanish (with “a good dictionary”), Mr Robertson refers to “a recent collection I made of some free versions of poems by Tomas Transtromer” which attracted “spluttering fire from certain quarters”. As he sees it, “the anxiety seems to centre on the term ‘version’ . . . and it is baffling that a process that has been going on for over half a century seems to have been overlooked”. He then invokes Lowell and Logue. However, in our understanding of Fulton’s complaint, his “anxiety” is not over “the term ‘version’”, but over the resemblances between Robertson’s versions -or whichever term you fancy -and his own. It may be an unjust claim; if so, it seems “baffling” to let it go unchallenged.

 Read the full megilla in the TLS.

Pictured: An extremely famous mistranslation: Michelangelo's Moses - with horns.

Elsewhere

Blogging elsewhere, viz -

* Poetry Day(s)

* On Kate Kilalea's "Henneker's Ditch" and the Work of Reading a Poem; see also this response

Pictured: Obligatory hunting of snark.

RIP Taha Muhammad Ali

Dear Friends,

It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of Taha Muhammad Ali, poet and person of exceptional powers. Taha was born July 27, 1931 in the village of Saffuriyya, Palestine, and died October 2, 2011, in Nazareth, Israel. He will be sorely missed.

As all who encountered the man and his work know, Taha's imagination was expansive, and several years back he had, as it happens, already conjured his final hours as he'd liked them to have been. This is one of his later poems, from So What: New & Selected Poems, 1971-2005, translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin, and published by Copper Canyon Press in 2006.

                                                            Yours,

                                                            Peter Cole and Adina Hoffman

Tea and Sleep

If, over this world, there's a ruler

who holds in his hand bestowal and seizure,

at whose command seeds are sewn,

as with his will the harvest ripens,

I turn in prayer, asking him

to decree for the hour of my demise,

when my days draw to an end,

that I'll be sitting and taking a sip

of weak tea with a little sugar

from my favorite glass

in the gentlest shade of the late afternoon

during the summer.

And if not tea and afternoon,

then let it be the hour

of my sweet sleep just after dawn.

*

And may my compensation be-

if in fact I see compensation-

I who during my time in this world

didn't split open an ant's belly,

and never deprived an orphan of money,

didn't cheat on measures of oil

or violate a swallow's veil;

who always lit a lamp

at the shrine of our lord, Shihab a-Din,

on Friday evenings,

and never sought to beat my friends

or neighbors at games,

or even those I simply knew;

I who stole neither wheat nor grain

and did not pilfer tools

would ask-

that now, for me, it be ordained

that once a month,

or every other,

I be allowed to see

the one my vision has been denied-

since that day I parted

from her when we were young.

*

But as for the pleasures of the world to come,

all I'll ask

of them will be-

the bliss of sleep, and tea.

Taha Muhammad Ali (with Peter Cole) from Neil Astley on Vimeo.