From Irish Fairytales, by James Stephens. A young boy, Fionn, finds the poet Finegas fishing by the river, and upon enquiring why, they agree on a most excellent opinion.
“A prophecy was made to me,” Finegas began. “A man of knowledge foretold that I should catch the Salmon of Knowledge in the Boyne Water.”
“And then?” said Fionn eagerly.
“Then I would have All Knowledge.”
“And after that?” the boy insisted.
“What should there be after that?” the poet retorted.
“I mean, what would you do with All Knowledge?”
“A weighty question,” said Finegas smilingly. “I could answer it if I had All Knowledge, but not until then. What would you do, my dear?”
“I would make a poem,” Fionn cried.
“I think too,” said the poet, “that that is what would be done.”
This story is a nice tangent to the metaphor of the "world as a book." Dante uses it to great effect in the last canto of Paradiso, when he gazes on the beautiful light that is God:
'Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna,
legato con amore in un volume,
ciò che per l'universo si squaderna:'
'In its depths I saw,
bound with love in a single volume,
what is scattered through the universe.'
(my translation)
And Donne echoes this in the meditation whose 'For whom the bell tolls' passage, beautiful as it is, has sadly overshadowed the rest:
'[...] all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another;'
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I have been exploring troubadour poetry this week, and came across a delightful poem by Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, who was from modern-day Vaucluse. The poet is sulking that his love has abandoned him, 'Per qu'ieu fauc dezacordar/Los motz e.ls sos e.ls lenguatges,' -'Which is why I'm stirring up a war/of words and sounds and languages.' In six verses he races virtuosically through Provençal, Italian, French, Gascon and Galician to express his displeasure. It's a fun read. According to William and Frances Paden's nice compilation of troubadour poetry, de Vaqueiras was something of a specialist in multilingual verse.
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I watched La Bohème for the first time last week, and while the entire opera was one of the best I've seen, the little aria from poor Colline, pawning his tattered overcoat to buy medicine for his dying friend, was particularly touching, and the image about his books particularly memorable.
The Sacred Mountain refers to a part of the city known for pawn-shops.
Italian | English (my translation) |
Vecchia zimarra, senti, io resto al pian, tu ascendere il sacro monte or devi. Le mie grazie ricevi. Mai non curvasti il logoro dorso ai ricchi ed ai potenti. Passâr nelle tue tasche come in antri tranquilli filosofi e poeti. Ora che i giorni lieti fuggîr, ti dico: addio, fedele amico mio. Addio, addio.. | Listen up, old coat, I’m staying down here; It’s now up to the Sacred Mountain with you. Accept my humble thanks:. Your tatty back never curved to the rich and powerful; Poets and philosophers passed through your pockets as through tranquil caves.
Now that our happy days are over, Goodbye, faithful old friend. Goodbye, goodbye.
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I was reading Simone Weil's La pesanteur et la grâce (the title gains some fortuitous alliteration in English: Grace and Gravity), and was happy to come across frequent references to both Bach and Gregorian chants. Her point about inconclusive attentiveness as opposed to egotistic imposition is, I think, important, and would be echoed to beautiful effect by her reader Philippe Jaccottet.
French | English (my translation) |
Quand on écoute du Bach ou une mélodie grégorienne, toutes les facultés de l'âme se tendent et se taisent, pour appréhender cette chose parfaitement belle, chacune à sa façon. L'intelligence entre autres : elle n'y trouve rien à affirmer et à nier, mais elle s'en nourrit. La foi ne doit-elle pas être une adhésion de cette espèce ? On dégrade les mystères de la foi en en faisant un objet d'affirmation ou de négation, alors qu'ils doivent être un objet de contemplation. | When we listen to Bach or a Gregorian chant, all the faculties of the soul fall silent and strain, each in its own way, to grasp this perfectly beautiful thing. Intelligence among them ; it finds nothing there to affirm or deny, but it is nourished. Does faith not have to be this kind of adherence? We degrade the mysteries of faith in making them an object of affirmation or negation, while they should be an object of contemplation. |
Le regard et l'attente, c'est l'attitude qui correspond au beau. Tant qu'on peut concevoir, vouloir, souhaiter, le beau n'apparaît pas. C'est pourquoi, dans toute beauté, il y a contradiction, amertume, absence irréductibles. | Gazing and waiting- such is the attitude which corresponds to beauty. As long as we can conceive, want, wish, beauty does not appear. It’s why, in all beauty, there is contradiction, bitterness, irreducible absences. |
This ties quite perfectly with the words of Oscar Wilde from The Critic as Artist (included in perhaps the greatest collection of essays ever written, Intentions).
'[M]usic is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret.'
'[T]here is in us a beauty-sense, separate from the other senses and above them, separate from the reason and of nobler import, separate from the soul and of equal value--a sense that leads some to create, and others, the finer spirits as I think, to contemplate merely.’
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French Baroque is back in vogue for me, which, inter alia, means looping Lully's Passacaille until my ears beg for mercy, and translating the lyrics of Les plaisirs ont choisi pour asile.
French | English (my translation) |
Les plaisirs ont choisi pour asile ce séjour agréable et tranquille, que ces lieux sont charmants pour les heureux amants!
C'est l'amour qui retient dans ses chaînes mille oiseaux qu'en nos bois nuit et jour on entend. Si l'amour ne causait que des peines, les oiseaux amoureux ne chanteraient pas tant.
Jeunes cœurs, tout vous est favorable, profitez d'un bonheur peu durable. Dans l'hiver de nos ans l'Amour ne règne plus, les beaux jours que l'on perd sont pour jamais perdus | The pleasures have chosen as their refuge This serene and lovely abode. How charming these places are For young lovers!
It’s love which keeps in its shackles The thousand birds we hear in our woods night and day. If love brought only pain, Lovestruck birds wouldn’t sing so.
Young hearts, everything is in your favour; Bask in your brief happiness. In the winter of our years Love no longer rules; The beautiful days we lose are forever lost.
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The beautiful second stanza reminds me of one of my favourite cantos from Tennyson's In Memoriam (Canto LXXXVI), written after the death of his friend Arthur Hallam. The sense of helplessness in the last stanza is deeply moving.
'Wild bird, whose warble, liquid sweet,
Rings Eden through the budded quicks,
O tell me where the senses mix,
O tell me where the passions meet,
Whence radiate: fierce extremes employ
Thy spirits in the dusking leaf,
And in the midmost heart of grief
Thy passion clasps a secret joy:
And I—my harp would prelude woe—
I cannot all command the strings;
The glory of the sum of things
Will flash along the chords and go.'
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The most heartbreaking passage from Hardy's The Woodlanders. Giles Winterborne is loved by both Grace and Marty, but only returns the love of the former, considering the latter a close friend, and yet, after Giles's death:
Grace was abased when, by degrees, she found that she had never understood Giles as Marty had done. Marty South alone, of all the women in Hintock and the world, had approximated to Winterborne’s level of intelligent intercourse with nature. In that respect she had formed the complement to him in the other sex, had lived as his counterpart, had subjoined her thought to his as a corollary.
The casual glimpses which the ordinary population bestowed upon that wondrous world of sap and leaves called the Hintock woods had been with these two, Giles and Marty, a clear gaze. They had been possessed of its finer mysteries as of commonplace knowledge; had been able to read its hieroglyphs as ordinary writing; to them the sights and sounds of night, winter, wind, storm, amid those dense boughs, which had to Grace a touch of the uncanny, and even the supernatural, were simple occurrences whose origin, continuance, and laws they foreknew. They had planted together, and together they had felled; together they had, with the run of the years, mentally collected those remoter signs and symbols which, seen in few, were of runic obscurity, but all together made an alphabet. From the light lashing of the twigs upon their faces, when brushing through them in the dark, they could pronounce upon the species of the tree whence they stretched; from the quality of the wind’s murmur through a bough they could in like manner name its sort afar off. They knew by a glance at a trunk if its heart were sound, or tainted with incipient decay, and by the state of its upper twigs, the stratum that had been reached by its roots. The artifices of the seasons were seen by them from the conjuror’s own point of view, and not from that of the spectator’s.