Wednesday poem

Diving into the Deep Element

 Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) was an American poet, essayist
and feminist, considered one of the most influential
American poets of the 20th century. She was a prominent
anti-war activist and an open lesbian in her later years.

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.

Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone. There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment. I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin. First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element. And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here. I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters. This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body. We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15228#sthash.OIUJph5S.dpuf

First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone. There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment. I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin. First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element. And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here. I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters. This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body. We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15228#sthash.OIUJph5S.dpuf

First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone. There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment. I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin. First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element. And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here. I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters. This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body. We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15228#sthash.OIUJph5S.dpuf

Wednesday poem

"The night, the pharmacy, the street..." 

 

The night, the pharmacy, the street,
The pointless lamp post in the mist.
A quarter century recedes –
There’s no escape. It all persists.

You’ll die – and you’ll begin anew,
As in the past, all will repeat:
The icy channel flowing through,
The lamp, the pharmacy, the street.

-- Alexander Blok (1912)
 translated by Andrei Kneller

"Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека..."

Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека,
Бессмысленный и тусклый свет.
Живи еще хоть четверть века—
Все будет так. Исхода нет.

Умрешь—начнешь опять сначала
И повторится все, как встарь:
Ночь, ледяная рябь канала,
Аптека, улица, фонарь.





Alexander Blok (1880 - 1921) was one of Russia's leading Symbolist poets.

Tips on translation

An excerpt from an interview with translator Kit Schluter via The Paris Review:

You compared translation to photography in one of your poems.

Translation and photography have mechanics that, to me, are analogous, in that you have a source—an image, a totality—and the difficulty is bringing that totality into another medium, as well as you can possibly do it. And the printed image of the text, for me, becomes especially important during translation. In order to translate a poem or a story, that is, you need to have all of the material “visible”—in other words, to keep it all in mind—in order to ensure that there aren’t inconsistencies in vocabulary, and that the tone remains consistent throughout. An original text is to translation as physical reality is to a photograph of that reality, in that the translation will never be equal to the original. It will invoke the original, in a sense.

But then again, that’s sort of a tragic way to think of translation, and a simplification. It would drive a translator crazy to believe that a translation will never achieve independence, or autonomy from the original work. In translating, then, what you hope to do—aside from help spread a work into another language’s reading culture—is make a text that will evoke an equivalent emotional resonance, an equivalent visual resonance, within the social spaces of the target language. It’s sort of an art of equivalences, but the equivalent is never exact. It’s the art of fudging equivalences, to make it seem right.

Wednesday poem

Child

Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new
Whose name you meditate —
April snowdrop, Indian pipe,
Little

Stalk without wrinkle,
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical
Not this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star.


Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963)

Book Notes: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Originally published in France in 2006 as
L'Élégance du hérisson.

In recent weeks I've come to realize that I suffer from a severe case of Reading ADD. No matter how great the book I'm reading at the time, my attention soon inevitably drifts to another title, and then to another one, and another, until my nightstand fills up with a pile of half-finished books, all equally great and equally neglected.

So reading, which is supposed to be a pleasurable escape into my own private world, has become yet another source of guilt and stress. How do I expect to finish life's grand projects if I can't even finish a book? Why can't I commit to one title and give it my full attention? My scattered reading habits have got me worried that I might be a generally fickle individual with a serious shortage of patience, attention and faith. After all, in life and in love, just as in reading, these are important qualities to have.

That's why I was happy to  find a book that kept my attention from the first page to the last. It's called The Elegance of the Hedgehog, and it's a wonderful tale of a secretly erudite French concierge whose life transforms through small encounters with the residents of her Parisian apartment building. The author, Muriel Barbery, is a philosophy professor, and her scholarly training comes through in her poignant ruminations on the purpose of literature, music and art. This adds a welcome dose of enlightenment for those like me, who feel they're indulging in a guilty pleasure whenever they read a novel instead of an educational text. The book is a little too smart at times, but it left me with new vocabulary in my pocket--hubris or incunabulum, anyone?--and introduced me to a wide range of works, from 17th century Dutch still lives to Japanese films.

It was also made into a movie--which, I'll admit I watched first--that makes a wonderful companion to the book.




I love it when a book gives you the urge to learn things, to write things down. Here are some of the gems hidden inside...

Wednesday poem

Traveling through the dark

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason--
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all--my only swerving--
then pushed her over the edge into the river.


William Stafford (1914-1993)

A day with the Pre-Raphaelites

Ophelia, by John Everett Millais, is the artist's vision of the drowned dame who was rejected by Hamlet.

The founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were the first bad boys of modern Britain.

Beginning as a pact between young classically-trained art students in the heat of the Industrial Revolution, the Brotherhood grew into an art movement that rejected the mechanical aesthetics of the time and made its goal to reform art through a naturalistic and spiritual approach. The three founding members--John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt--believed in particular that the exaggerated Mannerist style that succeeded the High Renaissance art of Raphael and Michelangelo had a corrupting influence on the development of art, and sought to restore it to its "pre-Raphaelite" form.

The Pre-Raphaelites would eventually become known as the first avant-garde movement in Britain. A gorgeous new exhibit of their work, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design, 1848-1900, docked recently at the National Gallery of Art after making its way from London's Tate Gallery (in June, it will head to Moscow's Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts). It features around 130 paintings, including Millais' infamous Ophelia, and stunning examples of decorative arts for which the pre-Raphaelites are less known, including rich textiles with designs of native British plants and flowers, finely carved book plates, and stained glass techniques that the Pre-Raphaelites revived from the Middle Ages.

Pre-Raphaelite textile design.

A good exhibit should have good accompanying information, and the NGA outdid itself in this regard. Brief and informative texts illuminate the significance of each work, tracing its origins in the Pre-Raphaelites' fascination with Gothic and medieval settings, Shakespearean subject matter, early English poetry (especially Tennyson, Chaucer, Milton, Byron and Pope), and the notions of chivalrous love. The lush landscapes that round off the exhibit--another often-overlooked part of the Pre-Raphaelites' repertoire--display the group's earnest dedication to John Ruskin's idea of direct and realistic transcription of nature. This "directness of vision" becomes almost blinding in their intense portrayal of sunlit fields and lush, verdant forests.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, self portrait (1847).

Having been mostly unimpressed with the Pre-Raphaelite art that I've seen in books or on the computer screen, I was stunned by its appeal in real life: the brilliant colors, with the translucency of a butterfly wing, the meticulously detailed background scenes, the nymph-like women. It's all luxurious, poetic, and terribly romantic. The men of the Brotherhood (and one woman, Elizabeth Siddall, the artists' muse and love interest who died at age 32) have a mysterious appeal of their own. Perhaps it stems from the futility of what they were trying to do in throwing themselves against the spokes of the industrial revolution in hopes of halting the destruction of a more beautiful, naive way of life. And it doesn't hurt that Dante Gabriel Rossetti, widely seen as the group's leader, was by all accounts a total babe.

Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1866-68), with a verse from Goethe's Faust as translated by Shelley attached to the frame:

 "Beware of her fair hair, for she excells
All women in the magic of her locks,
And when she twines them round a young man's neck, she will not ever set him free again."

Beata Beatrix by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1870), evoking a heroine from Dante Alighieri's poem, La Vita Nuova.

Mariana by John Everett Millais (1851), from am 1830 Tennyson poem of the same name:

She only said, 'My life is dreary,
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!'

Monna Vanna by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1866).

April Love by Arthur Hughes (1855).

Vanity by Frank Cadogan Cowper (1907).

Aspargus Island by William Homan Hunt.

The Light of the World by William Holman Hunt.

And here's a cool promo video of the exhibit, courtesy of the Tate:

Wednesday Poem

Wislawa Szymborska (1923 - 2012)

The End and the Beginning

 

After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won't pick
themselves up, after all.

 

Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.

 

Someone has to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags.

 

Someone has to lug the post
to prop the wall,
someone has to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.

 

No sound bites, no photo opportunities,
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.

 

The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirtsleeves will be rolled
to shreds.

 

Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone else listens, nodding
his unshattered head.

 

But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who'll find all that
a little boring.

 

From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.

 

Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less than nothing.

 

Someone has to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.

 

 

 

Wislawa Szymborska was a Polish poet, essayist and translator, and the recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. She lived most of her life in Krakow, Poland. She died in February 2012.

Wednesday poem

E. E. Cummings (1894 - 1962)

 

In The Rain-

 

in the rain-
darkness,     the sunset
being sheathed i sit and
think of you

the holy
city which is your face
your little cheeks the streets
of smiles

your eyes half-
thrush
half-angel and your drowsy
lips where float flowers of kiss

and
there is the sweet shy pirouette
your hair
and then

your dancesong
soul.     rarely-beloved
a single star is
uttered,and i

think
       of you

 

 

New Russian poets

While looking for contemporary female Russian writers to include in the Summer 2013 issue of Chtenia, which I'll be guest-curating in June, I came across one of the best poets I've read in a while: Polina Barskova. Originally from St. Petersburg, she lives and works in the United States, as a professor of Russian literature at Hampshire College.

She calls St. Petersburg "the home that I have left, the home that is absolutely impossible to leave." I like that a lot. It's how I feel about Moscow. She also studied abroad in Prague as a graduate student at Berkeley (she talks about her experience here). I like that too, for reasons everyone who knows me, knows.

Barskova has been publishing poetry since she was nine, and is acknowledged as one of the best contemporary Russian poet under the age of 40. Many of her works appear in English translation, but the best, in my opinion, remain untapped by the English audience. I hope to change that just a little with the upcoming issue.

For now, I'll share a video of Barskova reading a Russian poem by Vsevolod Zelchenko, another young(ish) poet of incredible talent. It's called "Ballada," or "Ballad," and in it the astute listener will hear allusions to many of my favorite works: to Bob Dylan's winding songs, to T.S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and even the first line of Nabokov's autobiography.

Just listening to her read the poem is an experience in itself. She's not merely reading the words; she's savoring them out loud. I'm starting to think that the best way to learn how to read poetry is to listen to another poet do it.

The enigma of Anna Karenina

All average books are alike; each great book is great in its own way.

Anna Karenina, the crowning jewel of Leo Tolstoy's work, is without a doubt one of the great books of our time. Spanning well over 800 pages, it is great not only in size but in the scope of its moral and intellectual reaches. It has been described as a "flawless" work of art by Dostoevsky and by the notoriously dismissive Nabokov. Faulkner called it the "best ever written." In a 2007 Time magazine poll of leading contemporary authors, Anna Karenina was declared the greatest novel of all time.

Keira Knightley as Anna Karenina in the 2012 British adaptation.

What is it about this book that has conquered continents and generations of readers? Hundreds of critics have been unable to pin it down. To me, it's precisely the elusiveness of that something that has made this book so great. And that elusiveness flows from Anna herself. She is the queen, the namesake of the novel; we feel her presence in every scene, regardless of whether she is there. "He stepped down, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun. But he saw her, like the sun, even without looking."

By his own accounts, Tolstoy set out to write a moralistic novel about a ravishing woman who has everything she wants in life but who knowingly brings about her own downfall by renouncing the societal conventions of her time. As the novel developed, however, he found that his attitude toward the sinful heroine was changing; just as she was gradually winning over the other characters in the book, Anna was simultaneously putting a spell on Tolstoy. Eventually, as the translator Richard Pevear writes in his introduction, Tolstoy "lost sight of her...as he drew closer to her, and finally became one with her." The mystery and force of Anna's character, so bewitching to those who encounter her within the novel, also defies the preconceived notions of the reader and the moral convictions of the author himself. She was borne of Tolstoy, but escaped his grasp, fluttering out of life before he could understand her completely. The need to understand her--the mystery inside an enigma that is Anna--is what keeps readers returning to the novel time and time again.

Other adaptations:

Greta Garbo in a 1935 American adaptation.

Vivien Leigh, 1948.

Tatiana Samoilova in the 1967 Soviet adaption.

Anna Karenina has been brought to life  in more than 10 film adaptations, from the 1935 American version starring Greta Garbo, to the faithful 1967 Soviet version (my personal favorite, with the actress's dark coiffure and exotic eyes), to the 2012 rendition by a divine Keira Knightley. But despite these well-executed roles, it's the invisible Anna in the novel who remains the most memorable, the most alive.

French actress Sophie Marceau in the first American version filmed entirely in Russia, 1997.

 
When it comes to this book, there is no substitute for reading, and re-reading, its luxurious words. A Russian acquaintance of mine who is well into her 60s recently told me she's read the book seven times. I myself am currently on my second reading, marveling at all the ways the novel--or is it me?--has changed since the time I first picked it up. It is a book that keeps developing with you. You don't just read it; you live with it for several weeks. This is what a great book should be.

As a preview, you can listen to an in-depth discussion of Anna Karenina on the Slate Audio Book Club podcast here.