Certain images conjured up by poets stay with you for a lifetime.
Borges, in a wonderful essay, quite rightly singles out as 'perfectly wrought' this work of the Uruguayan poet Fernán Silva Valdés. The disarmingly simple language, the warmth of the direct address (drawing us easily into the scene), and the songlike use of repetition and rhyme* all work beautifully together to serve the stunning subject (the detail of the 'masked' man is a nice touch to underscore the sense of the fantastic). Six years after Borges introduced me to it, the poem, thanks to both technique and subject, remains engraved in my memory. I found myself thinking that this scene would have made a fine Georges Méliès movie.
*you miss the rhyme in Levine's translation, which is lovely nevertheless.
Spanish | English (translated Suzanne Jill Levine) |
Qué lindo, vengan a ver qué lindo: en medio de la calle ha caído una estrella; y un hombre enmascarado por ver qué tiene adentro se está quemando en ella... Vengan a ver qué lindo: en medio de la calle ha caído una estrella; y la gente, asombrada, le ha formado una rueda para verla morir entre sus deslumbrantes boqueadas celestes. Estoy frente a un prodigio - a ver quien me lo niega - en medio de la calle ha caído una estrella. | How lovely, come see how lovely; in the street a star has fallen: and a masked man to see what inside her is burning… Come see how lovely: in the street a star has fallen, and the people, astonished, have formed a circle to watch her die amid dazzling celestial gasps. I am before a miracle -who dares deny it- in the middle of the street a star has fallen. |
Friday would have been the 98th birthday of the great Swiss poet Philippe Jaccottet. His extraordinarily pure, limpid poetry, constantly marvelling at the natural world and its invisible forces, has been admired plenty of times on this blog, so I will instead pay tribute by giving you some haikus, a genre of poetry much loved by Jaccottet. Reading a collection of haikus translated by Peter Beilenson, this week, I came across this absolute masterpiece:
'My two plum trees are
so gracious….
See, they flower
one now, one later.’'
-Buson (tr. Peter Beilenson)
This is possibly the most beautiful lesson against greed, arguing in favour of patient distribution and equilibrium, that I have ever come across.
Another haiku, this time by Shiki, reminded me of a wonderful letter Wilde wrote to a reader of The Picture of Dorian Gray:
'Men are disgusting.
They argue over
The price of orchids.’
-Shiki (tr. Alex Kerr)
' [...] A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse. All this is I fear very obscure. But the subject is a long one.
Truly yours,
Oscar Wilde'
The Schubert D960 is one of those pieces which you really need to hear live after gaining a thorough acquaintance with the piece. Wunder's 2016 London performance was more or less wasted on me, who had known the piece a few days (though the second movement still gave me chills), and so it was in enlightened spirits that I went off to hear Piemontesi play it last week. I can safely say that only the Emperor's slow movement has had this effect on me when heard live for the first time. The spiritual odyssey needs to be experienced in immediacy, in a silent hall, and you should know the arc of the journey - through the ice and fire of the first, the achingly austere second, and the joyous conclusion. Piemontesi, on the whole, put in a fine, unpretentious and sensitive performance, though my disappointment, he dampened the ethereal climax of the first movement by skipping the repeat, and didn't fully lean into the agitated fortissimo in the same movement.
Reading a poem by Andrew Motion earlier this week, I kept anticipating one of my favourite lines of poetry, and when it did not come I realised I had confused the work with a similar one by Robert Hayden. Both poems describe strikingly similar scenes, speaking warmly of a father who rises early to tend to the fire, and who is in some way mistakenly feared by his son. The approaches are, however, different. Hayden opts for a brutal succinctness, driving straight to the heart of the bleak matter. Note the wealth of sad detail added by the single 'too' in the first line. It is Hayden's last two lines, so beautifully wrought (that repetition which suggests the voice breaking!), so desperately sad, which I kept mistakenly anticipating in the Motion.
Motion, as is his wont, is more expansively meditative, letting a mood of quiet observation swell. The detail of the political cartoon is a nice touch, subconsciously offering a "zoom-in" of perspective; I'm also fond of the detail of the child skating over the floor in his socks, for its relatability and immediate evocation of peaceful domesticity. The latter contributes to the overall more optimistic mood of the Motion compared to Hayden. Motion's father-son relationship is more two-sided, tender, with the child showing appreciation of the father, as opposed to the painful injustice of the Hayden.
Andrew Motion, Laying the Fire | Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays |
I am downstairs early
looking for something to do
when I find my father on his knees
at the fireplace in the sitting-room
sweeping ash
from around and beneath the grate
with the soft brown hand-brush
he keeps especially for this.
Has he been here all night
waiting to catch me out?
So far as I can tell
I have done nothing wrong.
I think so again
when he calls my name
without turning round;
he must have seen me
with the eyes in the back of his head.
‘What’s the matter old boy?
Couldn’t sleep?’
His voice is kinder than I expect,
as though he knows
we have in common a sadness
I do not feel yet.
I skate towards him in my grey socks
over the polished boards of the sitting-room,
negotiating the rugs
with their patterns of almost-dragons.
He still does not turn round.
He is concentrating now
on arranging a stack of kindling
on crumpled newspaper in the fire basket,
pressing small lumps of coal
carefully between the sticks
as though he is decorating a cake.
Then he spurts a match,
and chucks it on any old how,
before spreading a fresh sheet of newspaper
over the whole mouth of the fireplace
to make the flames take hold.
Why this fresh sheet
does not also catch alight
I cannot think.
The flames are very close.
I can see them
and hear them raging
through yesterday’s cartoon of President Kennedy
and President Khrushchev
racing towards each other in their motorcars
both shouting
I’m sure he’s going to stop first!
But there’s no need to worry.
Everything
is just as my father wants it to be,
and in due time,
when the fire is burning nicely,
he whisks the newspaper clear,
folds it under his arm,
and picks up the dustpan
with the debris of the night before.
Has he just spoken to me again?
I do not think so. I
do not know.
I was thinking how neat he is.
I was asking myself:
will I be like this? How will I manage?
After that he chooses a log
from the wicker wood-basket
to balance on the coals,
and admires his handiwork.
When the time comes to follow him,
glide, glide over the polished floor,
he leads the way to the dustbins.
A breath of ash
pours continuously over his shoulder
from the pan he carries before him
like a man bearing a gift
in a picture of a man bearing a gift.
| Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices? |
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