Human Facts

Our search for the human takes us too far, too “deep,” we seek it in the clouds or the mysteries, whereas it is waiting for us, besieging us on all sides. We will not find it in myths-although human facts carry with them a long and magnificent procession of legends, tales and songs, poems and dances. All we need to do is simply open our eyes, to leave the dark world of metaphysics behind and the false depths of the 'inner life' behind, and we will discover the immense human wealth that the humblest facts of everyday life contain. “The familiar is not necessarily the known,” said Hegel. Let us go farther and say that it is in the most familiar things that the unknown---not the mysterious---is at its richets, and this rich content of life is still beyond our empty, darkling consciousness, inhabited as it is by imposters and gorged with the forms of Pure Reason, and myths and their illusory poetry.
Henri Lefebvre. Critique of Everyday Life (1947, tr. 1991)

No Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire didn't make it to the finals of the Booker Prize. Hmmm. However, both Colm Toibin with The Master, and Alan Hollinghurst with The Line of Beauty did. Others: Achmat Dangor Bitter Fruit (the excerpt on the Bookerprize web page is intriquing), Sarah Hall. The Electric Michelangelo (ditto), David Mitchell. Cloud Atlas (nice title), and Gerard Woodward. I'll go to bed at Noon.

Cathay

Looking for translations of Li Po I came upon several on this website which included three by EP with the following qualification: "Versions by Ezra Pound, which are (to put it as politely as possible) questionable translations but vintage Pound." I can't find my way to any page of this website which includes the name of the author of the above statement, but the URL is: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Poetry/Li_Po/ Must be someone at the University of Michigan. I hope it is a student. The statement above is wildly not true. Ezra Pound's translations are actually far better than anyone elses (of almost anything). Now, I don't know Chinese, this is true, but comparing Pound's poems to others, including Sam Hamill's which are used on the website without patronizing comment, Pound wins out every day. Sam Hamill's are awful poems, for instance the following Li Po poem:

You said good-bye to that Yellow Crane Pavilion
and sailed west, down the valley
through the flowers and mists of spring
until your lonely sail vanished
in the blue sky's horizon,
and I was left watching the river
flowing gently into heaven.

Now, Ezra Pound was never responsible for anything this bad in English. Phew, you can't get much duller Flowers of mists and spring" " lonely sail" "flowing gently in to heaven." The Poem in Chinese may or may not say all those things, but in fact Hamill's poem seems to be no "closer" to the "original" than any of the ten others collected on this website: http://www.chinapage.com/poem/libai/libai-trs.html

See for yourself. The one I like best is this:

my old friend leaves Yellow Crane Pavilion
he is going to the west

sailing to yangzhou in march
while blossoms curl like smoke on the river

how far away the lone sail
fading into the clear blue sky

only the yangtze river remains
it is flowing at the edge of the world.

The translators are John Knoepfle and Wang Shouyi. This is a much, much more interesting poem in English, "lone sail" vastly preferably to a "lonely sail." As to which poem is more Chinese, I dont' know, but here are some comparisons of certain aspects of the fourteen poems on the website: http://www.chinapage.org/poem/libai/libai-trs.html.

in the last line, its either "edge of the sky" (7 versions use sky in one way or another), or "Heaven" (used in five versions, including Amy Lowell's) or "world" or "horizon" (1 version). Only Knoepfle/Shouyi use "world" which does seem to be so much more appropriate. As to whether the original Chinese word is heaven, sky or world, who knows? I would like to, but I still think that "world" is a better word to use for the earthy, straightforward poet I usually take Li Po to be. I like the fact that Knoepfle/Shouyi don't use caps and present the form in couplets (these things also seem to resonate with my idea of Li Po, anyway, as does the simple straighforward "clear blue sky" in the third couplet. Other translations, by the way include "blue empty," "blue-green void," "blue sky," "blue emptiness,"blue sky's horizon," "emerald-green air," "blue horizon," "blue sky," "emerald Isle,"! "blue emptiness," "jade colored distance," "azure sky," and "green mountains." Now as far as I know both the mountains and the sky may be in the poem, but most everyone leaves the mountains out if they are. Hamill's version "blue sky horizon" is just weird really. I do like those who have made the sky green like David Hinton and Amy Lowell, even if the sky is blue in the Chinese (maybe it is a combination of green mountains and blue sky). Well, in any case, all of these poems seem to have gotten the 'idea' of the poem, but very few of them are good English poems (only 4 or 5 of the fourteen aren't just banal). To assume that there is an exact English equivalent for every Chinese character is of course wrong headed and Imperial. Ezra Pound might have been both of those things some of the times, but his Chinese translations, especially the magnificent Cathay, are spectacular. To patronize his "accuracy" is picking at nits, cats looking at kings, ants crawling on mountains. Ah well.

abbo, gabbo, babbo: more notes on Dante

"Dante begins his journey in doubt, loss and despair his mind having wandered into a psychological dark forest of such.

As Robert Hollander has it in his most accessible translation:

"Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost.
Ah, how hard it is to tell
the nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh --
the very thought of it renews my fear!

It is so bitter death is hardly more so.
But to set forth the good I found
I will recount the other things I saw."

&

So bitter is it, death is little more;
(Mandelbaum)

So bitter-death is hardly more severe!
(Longfellow)

It is bitter almost as death itself is bitter. (Seamus Heaney)


But, he is saved, he meets the “shade” of his hero Virgil, who helps him out on his way, and in the Inferno showing Dante the character through hell. Virgil's Aeneid provides a source or a jumping off place for Dante in his hike through hell, a guided tour from a virtual Virgil (since he is a shade after all). The two develop quite a friendship. And this friendship and the curious humanity of it is a major part of the Inferno.

The trip to Hell is of course also a research project, the Character Dante acting like an investigative reporter among the dead, trying to find out exactly why each one is there and who they are/were. He is often telling them he will write about them and make them famous if they tell their story. In many ways Dante the narrator is one of the most fascinating of all literary creations. This from Osip Mandelstam: “One would have to be a blind mole not to notice throughout the Divina Commedia Dante dos not know how to behave, does not know how to act, what to say, how to bow.”

Most of all, The Inferno is an adventure and it's also most importantly an adventure in language, no matter who translates it, from Longfellow to Dorothy Sayers to Allen Mandelbaum to Robert Pinsky to Sharon Olds. I should mention that as far as I can research, Dorothy Sayers is the only woman to translate the complete Divine Comedy, all three books. however in the Daniel Helpern edited volume Dante's Inferno: translations by 20 COntemporary Poets (Ecco Press, 1993), poets Cynthia MacDonald, Amy Clampitt, Jorie Graham, Sharon Olds, Deborath Digges and Susan Mitchell all translate a couple of Cantos each, and to my mind, they are more gracefully readable than most of the men in the same volume.

Anyway, I digress. The amazing colorful, varied, down low/up high Language is the reason it survives, and we read it, now 700 years later. Though in fact, I should also digress to mention digressions, of which there are many in the Inferno. Like Tristram Shandy, sometimes the digressions are the best part. As in Canto XXI where the building of a ship in a winter shipyard in Venice is described in noisy detail.

There is a lot of curious use of language, dense textural language that helps make The Inferno so interesting. Allen Mandelbaum in his analysis of a passage in Canto 32 notes the following words/sounds create "a scherzo" studying the degeneration of speech:

'abbo, gabbo babbo
Tebe, plebe, zebe, converrebbe
osteric tambernic, cric'

These are the rhyme words in one passage and of course don't all appear one after the other, but nevertheless, its a fascinating way to knit things together.

The giant Nimrod, from Canto XXXIII is made to say in a Unknown language:

"Raphel mai amecche zabi almi,"

and Canto VII begins with the demon Plutus chanting:

Pape Satan, Pape Satin, Aleppe

which has been glossed in a number of ways.

These are just some of the more far out inventive uses of language in the Inferno.

The Death Mask of Robespierre

I will probably abandon David Markson's Vanishing Point (2004) half way. It seemed like a fascinating idea: essentially reproducing the index cards a supposed writer had developed as notes for a novel. The pieces of information that Markson displays are some of them fascinating, and most of them fairly obscure pieces of knowlege, or information (perhaps some of them are also false, I don't know). Many of the notecards, each usually one or two sentences long, are concerned with the death of certain authors and where (Antwerp, Rubens died in).
Antwerp being the piece of information that could presumably be worked up into a larger part of a novel? About Rubens? A couple of other examples:

"Before his death Rabbi Zusay said, In the ocming world, they will not ask me: why were you not Moses? They will ask me: Why were you not Zusya? Says a Hasidic tale."

"Freud once attended a lecture by Mark Twain"

"Madame Tussaud began a death mask of Robespierre only instants after his severed head was handed down from the guillotine."

I imagine this will somehow all end up with the "Author" dying, since he seems obsessed with death. Somehow, its not quite enough to go on. Perhaps the book should have been published on cards? In fact, William Gaddis' The Recognitions is a fuller, more flushed out version of this, with characters, plot line and a great deal of confusing, yet eventual coherence.

de Kooning at Gagosian

In the recent (September, 2004) issue of the venerable and glossy Artforum, there are at least three interesting, provocative pieces. First, Harry Cooper's piece on the current de Kooning shows in Manhattan really is about serious questions of authenticity and individuality. It is of course, also about the power of commerce. Cooper, a curator at the Fogg does not come down on the side of the now infamous paintings of (at least) 1987 and 1988, some (ten) of which are on view in the wildly pretentious and nevertheless sometimes wonderful Gagosian space. Three paintings illustrate the article, one from 1987, one from 1988 and one from 1961. The painting from 1961 is magnificent, powerful and appealing. The other two look like pale sketches, illuminations of the fading of power and skill (they are like children's drawings without innocence). I do believe that De Kooning did these paintings and not his assistants. The question becomes of course, why are they on exhibit now? I won't go so far to say that they are up for looks just for commercial reasons, but I would say that Gagosian's display comes close to that. On the other hand, it is amazingly and sadly provocative and weirdly reassuring to see that a great artist is not always great. As Cooper says: “They also demonstrate, perhaps inadvertently, that there is a big difference between de Kooning's greatest works and his latest ones. In the latter, the strokes seem painted; in the former, they seem to be painting. If it's a choice of illusions I'll take the one where the impulse of painting is so strong that the artist virtually disappears, ground into the present tense of pigment moving across canvas.” The article and the show raise some ethical murmurings with me, though I am not entirely sure what they are. Something like, well, a gallery can never be like a Museum or a book, it never makes judgments, everything is good whether it is or not, because they want to sell it. Nevertheless, it is good in that it raises these questions. Motivations, of course, are hard to discern---Gagosian, de Kooning, assistants, estate, etc. My own responses are somehow weirdly muddled.
[The other articles of some note were Michael Fried on Jeff Wall and Frances Richard on one Michal Rovner. Well, also Glenn Ligon's piece. More later] I had promised myself this blog would not adopt a personal tone to things, but it appears to be unavoidable.

Reading List

What I am reading now:

Jill Johnston. Jasper Johns: Privileged Information (196)
Edwin Morgan. Collected Poems (1990)
Lawrence Block. The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian (1983)
Orhan Pamuk. Snow (2004)
Leslie Marmon Silko. The Almanach of the Dead (1990)
Daniel Kane. All Poets Welcome: the poetry scene in the Lower East Side...(2003)
Best American Poetry, edited by Lyn Hejinian (2004).