Experiments in translation 1

DARK ENERGY

As black-on-black of stellar crows
chase by treetop high earth,
they leave it reeling.

Their monstrous battles
are sunbursts, supernova.

When they mate our times tense,
pressured;
the incubation of the egg our doldrums.

The hatching egg
moves our achievements onwards.

Feeding the newborn,
are our periods of acquisition;

when the fledgling flies we feel its wrench, 
its absence

                        like the loss of a god.

There is no knowing
they will ever fly our way again.

ÉNERGIE NOIRE

Comme noir sur noir des corbeaux stellaires
chasser par la cime des arbres haute terre,
ils le laissent chancelant.

Leurs batailles monstrueuses
sont des coups de soleil, supernova.

Quand ils s’accouplent nos temps tendus,
sous pression;

l’incubation de l’oeuf notre marasme.
L’éclosion
fait avancer les réalisations.

Nourrir le nouveau-né,
sont nos périodes d’acquisition ;

quand l’oisillon vole on sent sa déchirure,
son absence

                         comme la perte d’un dieu.
Il n’y a pas de savoir
ils voleront à nouveau vers nous.

ENERGIA OSCURA

Come nero su nero di corvi stellari
inseguire sulla terra alta delle cime degli alberi,
lo lasciano vacillare.

Le loro battaglie mostruose
sono raggi solari, supernova.

Quando si accoppiano i nostri tempi tesi,
sotto pressione;

l’incubazione dell’uovo la nostra stasi.
La schiusa
fa avanzare le conquiste.

Nutrire il neonato,
sono i nostri periodi di acquisizione;

quando la neonata vola sentiamo la sua stretta,
la sua assenza

                         come la perdita di un dio.

Non c’è sapere
non voleranno mai più per la nostra strada.

ENERGÍA OSCURA

Como negro sobre negro de cuervos estelares
persecución por la copa de los árboles de la tierra alta,
lo dejan tambaleándose.

Sus monstruosas batallas
son rayos de sol, supernova.

Cuando se aparean nuestros tiempos tensos,
presionado;

la incubación del huevo nuestro estancamiento.
la eclosión
mueve los logros de nuestro tiempo hacia adelante.

Alimentando al recién nacido,
son nuestros períodos de adquisición;

cuando el pichón vuela sentimos su tirón,
su ausencia

                         como la pérdida de un dios.

no hay saber
volverán a volar en nuestro camino.

Catalogue d’oiseaux by Olivier Messiaen

I bought this collection two or three years ago. I find listening to the them deeply enjoyable. They have come to mean a great deal to me.

J’ai acheté cette collection il y a deux ou trois ans. Je trouve leur écoute profondément agréable. Ils sont devenus très importants pour moi.

Ho comprato questa collezione due o tre anni fa. Trovo ascoltarli profondamente piacevole. Sono diventati molto importanti per me.

Olivier Messiaen écrit

Each piece is written in honour of a French province. It bears the title of the bird-type of the chosen region. It is not alone: the habitat neighbours surround it and also sing (-)… its landscape, the hours of day and night that also change this landscape, are also present, with their colours, their temperatures, the magic of their perfumes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalogue_d%27oiseaux

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivier_Messiaen#Birdsong_and_the_1960s

Diébédo Francis Kéré: The first African to win architecture’s top award

His elegant, minimalist and wholly practical solutions need to be widely appreciated.
This is a start.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-60764585

Janet Frame, 1924–2004

It’s good to see American director, Jane Campion, back in the news.

We just happened to catch one of her earlier films a few weeks back, An Angel At My Table, based on the autobiographies of New Zealand writer Janet Frame.

It was great to watch the film again; I got more out of it this time around, too:  Kerry Fox is really very good in the main role.

And so I went to the autobiographies.
To the Is-Land (1982); An Angel at My Table (1984); The Envoy from Mirror-City (1985)

There are so many surprises and enlightening episodes and events. Her writing is very even-handed, even though she had every reason to not be so. She casts no blame, partly because her life, like everyone’s is a steady revelation of meaning, realisation. And also, I suspect, because of the counselling she received.

One of the first things surprised me was the difference between the South and North island of New Zealand. Following eight years of hospital treatment she travelled to Auckland, to stay with her married youngest sister and family. The air, she found, seemed more temperate, the flora more lush, almost tropical, brighter colours, different flowers, plants.
Away from the snow melt of the Lord-of-the-Rings mountains of South island, and also being that little bit nearer to the equator, made a lot of difference.
We only meet one Australian in the books, and then only in passing, as passenger on the sea journey to England.

The family background is intriguing, as well as tragic. Her mother had cleaned for the writer Katherine Mansfield’s family. 
Of the five children, the eldest, ‘Bruddie’, developed epilepsy; the next, Myrtle, drowned in the local swimming pool; Janet went through eight years of mental health hospitals; lively, vibrant Isabel developed heart trouble and also drowned… only the youngest, June, came through relatively unscathed.

It was suggested that ‘Bruddie’ be taken to Seacliffe, the mental health hospital – that is how epilepsy was seen and treated in those years. Her mother swore no child of hers would go there. She cared for him at home.

When Janet was to be taken to Seacliffe, her mother signed the papers. 
How is one to take this, she asked, in the autobiography.

The diagnosis was schizophrenia. 
There’s a new electrical treatment, she heard at one point. It was ECT; she went through about two hundred of these ‘treatments’.

Later, another new treatment came forward: Leucotomy, or as we now know it lobotomy. And she was on the list.
It was only by winning a prize for her short stories The Lagoon and other stories, and mentioned in the newspaper review, that she was saved that fate, and later released.
One associate, Nola, had not such luck. Janet Frame wrote to her often, and she was in and out of hospitals all her life.
It’s the dependency upon other’s judgements, decisions, that is so disabling, reducing, negating. This is especially so for women, the never-ending centuries of subjection 

Her mother died: Her life was awful, she said, and her sister agreed. She had no life of her own, or the one she did have she sank into her Christadelphian beliefs.
She wrote The well-meaning consideration of my family served to emphasise and increase the separation I felt from them.

‘You are the unmarried daughter. Your duty is to look after your father now.’
Other’s expectations… even one’s own expectations… can be destructive.

It was in Auckland that she met Frank Sargeson, a successful New Zealand writer, living in his little isolated island of art. She stayed there… eighteen months? Writing her first book, Owls Do Cry; and it was accepted for publication, and published in New Zealand.
Frank’s own books were out of print by then, a horrible fate for a living writer.

Coming out of the mental health system, where the emphasis was on non-communication between staff and in-patients, no newspapers, no stimulation, and observation of rules, order, regulated time. It was an experience she described as a steady diminishment of one’s personality. 

With Frank Sargeson she then found herself in a caring, considerate environment.
The problem there was, as nurturing as he was, his interest was other men, and constantly disparaged her woman’s body. From one area of negation, to another.

He did have connections, though. 

On the strength of her novel she applied for a travel grant ‘to broaden one’s life experience’, and was awarded what was then a reasonable amount of money: three hundred pounds sterling.
She travelled to England, by boat: she was not a good sailor. 
She was determined to go to Spain – Ibiza was the place to live cheaply, so she stayed there about eighteen months. 

Poverty was a trap; there was no way out for the local people, except tourism, a hate-relationship but necessary. She identified more readily with the poor, that was her background, her experience.
Aged thirty-two, and then her first love affair! And a pregnancy. Money was running out, and so Andorra was recommended, the exchange rate more amenable. And almost trapped into marriage with a local smuggler. Then losing the baby.

Back in London she was to fall into another redundant relationship: poor, dull, unimaginative, and thinking he was looking out for her – but he was forcing her into corners.
She had to look for work, and her situation became untenable.
A previous medic recommended her contact the Maudsley Hospital when in London. She did, and they took her in observation. ‘You never had schizophrenia.’ they said. ‘What you are going through now is the result of eight years of hospitalisations.’

She loved London, though: the early nineteen sixties, all the new life, the French New Wave writers, the American Beat writers, West Indian literature appearing. She witnessed the growth of CND, the Aldermaston Marches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldermaston_Marches

She loved being anonymous but a part of the multitudinous life.
She wrote, and published. One review wrote This must be the worst book, whilst another said of the same book, This book could well be a work of genius.
What do you do with that disparity? 
You have to come to some accommodation, and it has to be one’s own.

She was healing, she was growing stronger.
She changed her name to Nene Janet Paterson Clutha …in part to recognise Māori leader Tamati Waka Nene, whom she admired (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Frame).
This is the only Maori reference I am aware of.

And then her father died. And she returned to New Zealand, still a bad sailor. 

But the legacy had to be sorted, the meagre belongings.
She loved London, but was glad to return to New Zealand.
Beware, the London doctor said, They might not accept our diagnosis.

Her appreciation of the neglect of women’s lives comes through in the autobiographies. 

She could spot desperation in all its forms, it was something that affects everyone, but especially women denied prospects, lives, education. 

We may think that is all being solved now but, well, it isn’t, and there’s nothing to stop any improvements being turned around tomorrow. 

We are so vulnerable – to economic constraints, to market forces, to prices shooting up beyond control: heating, basic foodstuffs, energy, petrol. And the ones who bear the brunt of this are the poor and women, because they have no protection in society.
The poor are always with us, and especially the ones who cannot, do not know how to, fend for themselves.

I would love to know what happened next; how she lived. Her New Zealand celebrity status protected her somewhat, but could also ensnare.

But take a look at the prizes she had won in her lifetime!

1951: Hubert Church Prose Award (The Lagoon and other Stories)

·      1956: New Zealand Literary Fund Grant

·      1958: New Zealand Literary Fund Award for Achievement (Owls Do Cry)

·      1964: Hubert Church Prose Award (Scented Gardens for the Blind); New Zealand Literary Fund Scholarship in Letters.

·      1965: Robert Burns Fellowship, University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ

·      1967: “Buckland Literary Award.” (The Reservoir and Other Stories/A State of Siege)

·      1969: New Zealand Literary Fund Award (The Pocket Mirror: Poems)

·      1971: Buckland Literary Award (Intensive Care); Hubert Church Prose Award. (Intensive Care)

·      1972: President of Honour: P.E.N. International New Zealand Centre, Wellington, NZ

·      1973: James Wattie Book of the Year Award (Daughter Buffalo)

·      1974: Hubert Church Prose Award (Daughter Buffalo); Winn-Manson Menton Fellowship.

·      1978: Honorary Doctor of Literature (D.Litt. Honoris Causa) University of Otago, Dunedin, NZ

·      1979: Buckland Literary Award (Living in the Maniototo)

·      1980: New Zealand Book Award for Fiction (Living in the Maniototo)

·      1983: Buckland Literary Award; Sir James Wattie Book of the Year Award (To the Is-Land); C.B.E. (Commander, Order of the British Empire)

·      1984: Frank Sargeson Fellowship, University of Auckland, NZ

·      1984: New Zealand Book Award for Non-Fiction (An Angel at My Table); Sir James Wattie Book of the Year Award (An Angel at My Table); Turnovsky Prize for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts

·      1985: Sir James Wattie Book of the Year Award (The Envoy from Mirror City)

·      1986: New Zealand Book Award for Non-Fiction (The Envoy from Mirror City); Honorary Foreign Member: The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters

·      1989: Ansett New Zealand Book Award for Fiction; Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book (The Carpathians)

·      1990: O.N.Z. (Member, Order of New Zealand)

·      1992: Honorary Doctor of Literature (D.Litt.), University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ

·      1994: Massey University Medal, Massey University, Palmerston North, NZ

·      2003: Arts Foundation of New Zealand Icon Award; New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement^[77]

·      2007: Montana Book Award for Poetry (The Goose Bath)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Frame

One of her family homes on South Island was bought and restored by a group of supporters, and it is now open for visitors, a tourist spot:

https://jfestrust.org.nz

Janet Frame House

Next, of course, is to read the books.

-off line –

Off-line for a week! One whole week.

We’d been with our server for about twenty years, but now its prices are going sky-high.
We’d found a package elsewhere, that cost a third of the price; and so being at the end of one contract took our thirty-days’ leave notice.

Ours is an inclusive package: internet, TV, and landline.

So, their Sales Team got in touch and dangled cheaper packages for us. I said Send us the details.
They didn’t, but being Sales people took that as a Yes, and so cancelled our leave and signed us on for another eighteen months.
Didn’t tell us.
We happened to look at our billing page, and found the contract.

So we had to ring them. It took about three hours of waiting, and then increasingly confusing conversations. A lot of their customers it appears, were also trying to cancel, or re-negotiate. We were trapped in that queue.

And so we restated our leaving commitment: thirty days. Yes we were already set up with another provider.

And they did it again, cancelled our leaving and put us on another contract.
We rang again, We did not authorise this. Someone in your company is deciding for us. That is illegal.

And they did it again.
We rang again. Your details with us are very confused, they said.
Purposely so, we thought.
– Look through it, at no point do we ever say to another contract. Thirty days, we said, Then phht.
We’ve got you down for for leaving on 10^thof March. 
– No, 23red of February.
We can do 25^th.
– OK, ok. You get the impression: frazzled, stressed. That’s what they wanted, so they could string us out further, agree (You have to say a robust No to the Sales team, they said. So everything but a robust No, is a Yes?).

The message boards for this company have plenty more stories very similar to this.

The day before switch off, we checked the billing page, and… they’d done it again!
We rang again.
Next day they Did switch us off.

And so our new provider said, You need a line putting in. 
– Your van has been round, checked availability, posted us a letter by hand.
The engineer put us a line in the same day as out switch off.

– Nothing follows through, does it! –

Router? We asked. Your site says Same day online.

Because you’ve not had a line for a long time, we have to check viability.
They did.

The router’ll be with you tomorrow, only… we can’t set up your package until Friday. And then it’ll need time to get up to speed.
– How long?
A few weeks, possibly a month. 
– A month?
You’ll be able to use basic functions before then, of course.

It was overnight.

Apart from the fall-out of stress from the leave-farrago, and the sign-on-to-the-new charade I have to admit it has been very peaceful without it.
We’ve been able to catch up with reading, and, what’s more surprising and something we don’t realise we have lost: time to Think.

How much of the day is wasted frittering and flitting about online and getting almost nothing back from doing it.

Then Crash! into the craziness of the Ukraine situation. To process what most other people have already had to confront and process. 

The first call on out new landline? A phone-scam centre.
Oh, and the label sent for us to return the equipment to the old provider, does not scan at the designated hub, nor does it accept the alphanumerical provided.

But this new provider, a smaller company, does seem to be commendable.

Book Review: THE FLOATING CASTLE, by Karen Margolis

The Pretoria Castle

This ebook is a must.

I invite all to spend time with the wonderful, warm Litinsky family.
A modern Jewish family relocates from their early life in South Africa to London. It was the beginning of the 1960s: This country is no place to bring up children… after Sharpeville.
And already we see the bigger picture, the extra dimensions: we do not live our lives in isolation. Ever.

The book begins with the young family moving from Cape Town to the Transvaal. It ends with the family arriving in Portsmouth, and moving onto London.
They start new lives each time, with all the wrenching upheaval, the breaking away from years laid down in the memory, and to learn new ways of living, speaking, thinking even, this entails.
But more, the books begins and ends with the gathered family remembering itself and  celebrating the Passover ceremony in each new home. Who remains? Who has gone?

And what is the main prayer of the Passover? Next year, in Jerusalem.
One has to learn to fit in, integrate, yet all the time some part keeps one separate – we witness the attitudes of the new Church of England school in London belittling the Jewish holiday traditions, where a holiday  is indeed a holy day.
But there are also the challenges of new ideas and ideals as left wing politics, feminism, find homes in the hearts and minds of the growing children.

I would like to invite you  to meet, spend time with, Isaac and Verena Litinsky, their twin daughters Davida and Sarah, younger siblings spoilt Raphael, and Alicia. But then, of course, there are the extended families of both mother and father’s side, their own experiences of a shocking century.

The family unit is a wide and internationally based web of relationships.
The family unit touches the people they live among, with, beside. In the Transvaal there are the black Africans working in the household: Susan, the nanny, who cooks the specifically Jewish food, and lives by choice apart. Her wedding…. No, you must read for yourself.

Father Isaac flew to London earlier to find work and look for accommodation. The family followed later, by boat.
Here we see where book title, The Floating Castle, begins to throw wider and wider shadows and shapes on the canvas of our reading.
We see how the family arranges itself into at times autocratic, at times capitalist and democratic relationships; we see how other cultures, the travelling companions, the ship-board relationships, impinge, threaten the stability of the family unit: is Verena really taken with that other man? What of Davida’s developing relationships outside the family unit?

At times the Jewish ceremony can seem as strange to the children as the others around them. They visit a Christian Church in Johannesburg with their nanny. Sarah concludes that it’s bunk, if the messiah had really come then they would all be in paradise by now, and they are plainly not.
We see the characters from the inside, through unreliable narration like this. It gives us insights, it provokes empathy. The tone of voice is caught seemingly effortlessly

The background stories fill in, and we see the sense in madness, the folly in sense, as ordered and disordered lives worked themselves out to unforeseeable conclusions. Human, all so human.

The book shifts locale and time giving us the later stories of the character’s lives, and their earlier experiences. And how they reflect in each other.
It gives us, for instance: What does it cost to borrow a ride on a bike? Enough to say, Nanny Susan saved dignity, and the day.
We read into this how one learns bargaining; how the body can be a bargaining counter. Here is the beginning of gender politics, body consciousness; it shows how natural curiosity can devolve into objectification, given a background of gender inequality.

‘Faith’, we say easily, and yet we discern in this story, how the word goes deeper. We discern here how it can permeate every part of one’s being, one’s experiences, one’s interactions with the world. It can colour one’s whole view:
The London Jews… They’re not real Jews, not in the way we understand.’ was Isaac’s verdict.
But we also see Isaac’s Jewishness held up for examination, where the holes show through, and the patches.
We should have gone to Israel, he said, we have lost something staying too long in London, We have stretched the thread of tradition too far.
But Israel, itself, volatile, threatened, and threatening: was that a place for the children? We see Aunt Masha after her parent’s died, living perpetually alone. She was a constant fount of vitality, but duty and  tradition tied her heart, hand and foot.

And on the other hand there’s Molly. She was a member of the Black Sash Movement in South Africa, a fighter for black rights. Molly is a splendid character; she is full of the contradictions of her place and time: comfortable and white interloper fighting for the impoverished and black indigenous peoples. She is passionate, brave, puts herself on the line constantly.

The book is strong and yet flexible, the characters all well realised, warmly depicted, and all so likeable. For all their faults, short-comings. The writing is finely nuanced, crafted; a joy to read.

I have really enjoyed my time with the Litinsky family.

I really must go back and re-read from the beginning.

On Charles of Orleans/Charles d’Orléans

Charles of Orleans, due to twenty-five years in captivity in England, mastered the language and idioms to write the most accomplished lyric poetry in English of the time.
And yet, even now, acceptance has been slow to accept him into the canon.

1

Charles, son of the Duke of Orleans, and Italian mother, Valentina Visconti, daughter of the duke of Milan, was born in 1394. He died in 1465.

As a child of the nobility marriage was a game of influence. His first marriage, aged sixteen ended very sadly as his wife, Isabella of Valois (and widow of English king Richard II) died in childbirth. His second wife, Bonne of Armagnac, died whilst he was hostage.
He married a third time, on his return to France to Marie of Cleves. One son became Louis XII of France.

One story has it that he was discovered – luckily, we might add – still alive and uninjured, under a number bodies, on the field at Agincourt. He was thought a good ransom, and held in England. 
There are stories of people drowning in others’ blood under similar circumstances. 
His imprisonment, along with his younger brother Jean d’Angoulême, was relatively ‘open’, mostly held among people of their own rank, and allowed escorted outside access.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles,_Duke_of_Orléans

He was eventually released, and allowed to return to his inherited Burgundy estates on condition of a sworn oath to not avenge the killers of his father. Wiki says:
Finally freed on 3 November 1440 by the efforts of his former enemies, Philip the Good and Isabella of Portugal, the Duke and Duchess of Burgundy, he set foot on French soil again after 25 years, by now a middle aged man at 46 and “speaking better English than French,” according to the English chronicler Raphael Holinshed.

2

He wrote some five hundred plus lyrics in English, and later, again in French. They are of exemplary quality. 
He was writing in that period between the death of Chaucer, the latter years of John Gower and Thomas Hoccleve, of John Skelton, and the resurgence of writing using Italian models under Sir Thomas Wyatt et al.

His earlier French contemporaries mark the ending of a rather prolific period, with the deaths early in Charles’ career, of the honoured writer Alain Chartier, and the phenomenal Christine de Pizan. 

–      It is not easy at the present to obtain affordable collections of the poems of Charles de Orleans. One I did get hold of was a collection of French poets of the period, is Formal Spring, French Renaissance Poets, by R N Currey (published 1950).
The book lists his immediate contemporaries as Guillaume de Marchault, Eustace Deschamps, Joachim du Bellay, Louise Labé, Marie Stuart (yep, Mary pre-Queen of Scots).

The author certainly has his favourites – Charles de Orleans is dismissed as ‘bourgeois’; Christine de Pizan is represented by one poem, the later Louise Labé is called a follower of Christine de Pizan. His favourite, the one with the largest poem contribution, is Francois Villon. Enough said.

His writing strides between past and future modes of literature, his earlier work continuing the debate form of Alain Chartier (The Curialetc), with his Le Débat Des Hérauts D’armes De France Et D’angleterre: Suivi De The Debate Between The Heralds Of England And France, and then the middle and later work looking onward to the Italian sonnet and lyric form of later English writers.

3

What has been the problem with his acceptance?
Again, Wiki tells us:
Unfortunately, his acceptance in the English canon has been slow. A. E. B. Coldiron has argued that the problem relates to his “approach to the erotic, his use of puns, wordplay, and rhetorical devices, his formal complexity and experimentation, his stance or voice: all these place him well outside the fifteenth-century literary milieu in which he found himself in England.^[4]

Against the sententious background of John Lydgate, the wilder satires of John Skelton, the assured style and accomplished imagery of the poems of Charles of Orleans stand out like bright jewels in a muddy light.

Take, for instance, 

The year has changed his mantle cold                mantle: mateau – coat
of wind, of rain, of bitter air;
and he goes clad in cloth of gold,
of laughing suns and seasons fair;
no bird or beast of wood or wold                                  
but doth with cry or song declare
this year lays down its mantle cold.
All founts, all rivers, seaward rolled,
the pleasant summer livery wear,
with silver studs on livery vair;                                vair: common fur in heraldry
the world puts off its raiment old,
the year lays down its mantle cold.

His use of roundels, dance forms, song formats, I suspect some view as frivolous. I would certainly argue against that, there is an atmosphere of lightness here but the poems are always so in order to counteract/interact with his own exile and imprisonment. Each poem is shadowed:
My very gentle Valentine,
Alas, for me you were born too soon,
As I was born too late for you!
May God forgive my jailor
Who has kept me from you this entire year.
I am sick without your love, my dear,

My very gentle Valentine.

And here is a particularly joyful one – compare this with the rather staid verse of his contemporaries :

Young lovers
Greeting the spring
Fling themselves downhill,
Making cobblestones ring
With their wild leaps and arcs,
Like ecstatic sparks
Struck from coal.

What is their brazen goal?

They grab at whatever passes,
So we can hardly hazard guesses.
But they rear like prancing steeds
Raked by brilliant spurs of need,
Young lovers.
It is the surprisingly fresh and contemporary imagery that catches our attention first. There is also a sophistication of emotive expression, that further persuades us to ‘partake of the poem’. 
Although coal was in use by then, its domestic use was rare. As a noble, though, he would have been familiar enough with its properties.

4
There is a very interesting article on Charles of Orleans, by Mary-Jo Arn: Poetic Form as a Mirror of Meaning (Philological Quarterly, 1999, Number 1, Volume 69)
that argues for an overall structure to the collection of his poetry. ‘Charles of Orleans,’ she writes, ‘following Continental convention, composed in Middle English a type of work that no English poet had yet attempted.’

His various poetic forms: roundels, ballads, narrative verse, relate fictional/autobiographical adventures in the Court of Love.

He tells how the supposed author enters the service of the God of Love, and therewith love for a Lady to whom he addresses ballads. This is followed by the death of the Lady, at which the author retires from service and enters the Castle of No Care, supposedly for the rest of his life, to lament the loss. Here he writes nearly one hundred roundels. His heart does not allow him peace, and he wanders, physically and emotionally; he encounters Venus, then Fortune, and once again becomes enamoured. He then writes further of amour. 

‘He’, I write, but there is ‘the poet,’ and ‘the lover’, and both are distinct persons. Mary-Jo Arn calls this form pseudo-biography.

The collection opens with an allegorical section, followed by Part One of eighty-four ballades; section two of nearly one hundred roundels; section three of thirty-seven ballades.

The structure presents the reader with three differing accounts of love. The first section and retirement section produce two very different versions of the same experience, and the last section again a very different approach, to a different set of experiences, presented with comedy, and non-courtly responses from the lady. Courtly idealised love – love of love itself? – is contrasted with the real thing: love of a real woman.

There are some commentators who are not convinced the last section are authentic poems of Charles of Orleans, but suspect that they are copies made of other’s work, and incorporated here, or tacked-on by later compilers. The problem is the change in tone of the last section.
Mary-Jo Arn argues convincingly for overall authorship.

5 
A Selection of Poems

Your smiling mouth and laughing eyes, bright grey,
Your ample breasts and slender arms twin chains,
Your hands so smooth, each finger straight and plain,
Your little feet – please, what more can I say?

It is my fetish when you are far away
To muse on these and thus to ease my pain –
Your smiling mouth and laughing eyes, bright grey,
Your ample breasts and slender arms twin chains.

So I would beg you, if I only may,
To see such sights as before I have seen,
Because my fetish pleases me. Obscene?
I’ll be obsessed until my dying day
By your smiling mouth and laughing eyes, bright grey,
Your ample breasts and slender arms twin chains!

My ghostly father, I confess
First to God and then to you,
That at a window watched by few
I stole a sweet and gentle kiss;
I did this out of avidness –
Now it’s done, what can I do?

My ghostly father, I confess
First to God and then to you:
I shall restore the kiss doubtless 
And give my lover back her due!

And thus to God I make my vow
While always seeking forgiveness.
My ghostly, I confess,
First to God and then to you.

Can we also consider this an early sonnet, I wonder?

Ballade

One day I asked my heart
In confidence, if he
Had put by any part
Out of our property
When serving Love. Freely
He promised me a true
Account as soon as he
Had looked his papers through.

He promised me this, this heart,
And took his leave of me;
And soon I saw him start 
To rummage freely
Amongst the note books he
Keeps in his desk. I knew
He’d speak immediately
He’d looked his papers through.

I waited, and my heart,
Returning presently
Showed me the books he’d brought,
And I was glad to see
That he had carefully
Entered the facts – so now
I’d know as soon as he
Had looked his papers through.

Such clerical exactitude! The development of the scientific, analytical attitude.
A praise for double-entry bookkeeping?

And so, what do we make of this:

Stephen Le Gout, in the nominative,
Quite recently tried in the optative
Mood to proceed to the copulative,
But failed when it came to the genitive.

Six ducats he placed in the dative
To bring him his love in the vocative –
Stephen Le Gout in the nominative.

He came up against an accusative
Who made of his robe a mere ablative;
From a window whose height was superlative
He jumped, taking blows in the passive: 
Stephen Le Gout, in the nominative.

In his last years he was instrumental in fostering the careers of many writers. In 1455 he attended a performance of Complainte d’Hectorby Georges Chastellain, thereby consolidating the position of the aspiring writer and Burgundian chronicler in literary circles.

·      Works by or about Charles d’Orléans at Internet Archive

Cabaret

Corduroy talks as you walk
and raincoats sing
as arms swing; the shush
soft-brush snares of wet shoes
swiping through evening slush.

Yes, and hear your breathing hold
and release, and the steady bass
in your throat on the up-hill
hell
you’re all jazz tonight!

Let it play; and how the spray
of oxygen in your blood floods
and energises carburretor
piston and crank.

Uphill is a tango, between 
unused muscles, and excitement.

You are the evening cabaret.

Book Review: fair helen, by Andrew Grieg

fair helen, by Andrew Grieg. Published Quercus, 2013.
https://andrew-greig.weebly.com

This is an immersive book. It is also an impressive book.

Spoiler warning. Also, there is a very upsetting scene later in the book for those wishing to read – a scene outwith the deaths of several, and, you guessed it, Helen herself.

The story line is the telling the story of one of the last of the Border Ballads, Fair Helen of Kirkconel.
It’s one song that has stuck in my head, too: I English those hook-lines as Oh would I be where where Helen lies/Night and day on me she cries/ O that I were where Helen lies/ On fair Kirkconnel Lea….
Shivers for me.

The novel uses the framework of writing the real story of the ballad, by Helen’s cousin Harry Langton, under protection of William Drummond of Hawthornden.
We spend much time in Harry’s head as he relives the times.
And the times are one main theme of the book.
It is set in and around 1597, in (Embro) Edinburgh, but most especially the West March of the Scottish Borders.
Anyone who knows their Borders history will instantly pick up on that: the West March was sometimes referred to as The Debateable Lands. It was the haunt of the likes of Johnnie Armstrong, Kinmont Willie, Jock o the Side… and those huge characters still dominated the landscape.
Early in the story Harry is present at an Armstrong wedding in tower and main house. We see through his eyes all the key players from higher levels of society, Border power-base families, as well as those there through family obligations.
This is a masterful piece of writing, bringing us in amongst the clashing egos, as well as opening up to us living conditions, the harsh lives so dependent on good harvests, a well-guarded farm stock.
And we get to ‘see’ inside a peel tower. See https://gilnockietower.co.uk

It was the dying years of the reivers’s long rule over people’s lives and livelihoods.
There is one revealing episode where Harry is conducted through ruined and enemy Border country:
‘I saw burned-out cottages, wooden shacks and empty, untended fields. In the villages, folk lurked, disappeared at out approach. I felt starved eyes staring into my back as we rode on. Suspicion and hunger hung like haar in the air, dank and chilling.’
Note the alliteration, the searching-out rhythm of the piece.

The story is that Harry grew up alongside his cousin Helen, before his family moved to Edinburgh.
As a student there later he roomed with fellow Borderer Adam Fleming, Helen’s lover.

And Helen? Harry describes her life as ‘twenty-one years by five miles.‘
This is one small river valley: Kirtle Water, in Annandale, Dumfriesshire
And that is the length of the Kirtle Water their lives were bounded by. Upstream was Nether Albi, Adam’s home; then down river Blackett House, where Rob Bell, Helen’s other lover lived; and then Bonshaw Tower, Helen’s home: five miles. Eight miles, though, he says at one point in the story: who am I to quibble.
Oh, there is a handy map at the front of the book.

One other main theme of the book is the shifting loyalties of Border families. It all had repercussions higher up into society and in the court of James the Sixth, soon to be James the First of England.

The schemings of the titled families to dominate the doings of others; the untitled family groups, and their dependents’ own shifting loyalties, plus the fates of villagers, were all tied into complex relationships. Their strongest tethers were the blood-feuds between families, that went back a hundred years and more.

Harry Langton was a good vehicle for bringing us into this close-knit and volatile mix, as an outsider with fresh eyes, yet who has acceptance through family ties to the region.

Another example of outstanding writing and realisation, is in the description of the gathering of families and dependent tenants to bring back sheep and cattle stolen overnight – from the Warden of the West March, no less. Many Wardens instigated raids they were meant to stop.
These two chapters of the book cover so many levels. We have Adam Fleming, already fearful for his life after three attempts, out in the open among enemies, like Rob Bell, under the one ‘flag’ of loyalty to the Warden. We see the obligated tenants, those fearful for their lives: not all will return; and those fired-up by the ‘adventure’.
Harry notes for us the shocked and appalled voices of reivers who have been themselves raided. ‘You lot!’ he says at one point, in exasperation.

And at the end of it all is a meeting of the top men, of new loyalties forged, and old feuds buried; shifting of allegiances.
Many outsiders would indeed kill to have the inside knowledge of these.

For the Border families loyalties were to their own families, not the Crown, of South or North. The Borders was/is a whole region in itself, not a line on a map.

How to break this centuries’ old bloodshed? That is another theme behind the book: the power-broking of top-movers.
Harry’s loyalty is claimed by a ‘patron’. He cannot move in Edinburgh without his say-so; and in the borders must report regularly and truthfully on all developments. This strains his loyalty to family friends, to Adam’s family who he stays with. It also puts his life at risk.

And Helen?
I cannot hear her voice, here.
She has attitude, yes; knows full well the curse of being born ‘fair’ in such a restricted world as the Kirtle Water. Of being a woman: ‘to breed’, she scorns. At times, though, she is fully immersed in the earthy love of the Borderers.
Harry is at pains to point out that the ‘chaste’ Helen of the ballad was not the real Helen. But then, was his own judgement of that not a reflection of the Calvinism he took such pains to disavow?

And what of Adam and Helen’s love? It comes to us as infatuation, passion, in the language of the recently dead John Knox, ‘lust’.
We do not get to know Adam, beyond the deliberate front he puts on after his mother’s rushed re-marriage. His father’s death on a raid, we find to have been suspicious indeed. He missed being family ‘heidsman’ by this marriage. What, then, was his standing? Very Hamlet.

There are three levels of woman’s ‘power’ in the novel, all along that five miles of river.
We have Helen, constricted by birth, standing, honourable name, financial and family security. Her role, to make a good marriage, but in reality to have it made for her. But to love aside from that.

We have Janet Fleming, Adam’s mother, widowed and married to her husband’s brother – happily, we are led to believe.
It was put upon Harry to get them to change their family loyalty to the new power on the rise. But she makes plain to Harry that they will not. She was indeed a full partner in the power-base of the all-important family group.

And then there is Elenora Jarvis, owner of the Fortune Rigg, the inn at the centre of all doings in the valley. Not yet thirty and yet a widow (did he fall, or was he pushed?) but sole owner of the most important tavern of the area. And Harry’s lover, and source of information.
Information is power; but it can also kill.
Her tavern had stood while all was ravaged around her. That took some delicate handling, indeed.
She used her earnings to buy stock, and to trade through Edinburgh to Europe.
And yet when the big men came through, and stopped at her tavern, she had to acquiesce to whatever they required. I can handle this one, she said, but left unsaid that the other, more powerful, she could not.

The old Ballads, though – Harry comments at one point that the ballad-makers had a lot to answer for. The Raid of Reidsmere, he notes, for example, ‘was not in Reidsmere, and it is was not a raid.’
But Fair Helen of Kirkconnel, to me, speaks of that kind of love people would die for. In the book, love is something else, more earthy, more of the body only.
It could well be that, keeping to the mind-set of the time, Harry had no language for that other kind of love.
It is in the Ballads, though. We get hints of such emotional heights as the story-line screws tensions to their denouement.

There are odd omissions in the book.
At one point Harry rues the loss of major Scottish writer, Robert Henrysoun, and yet there is no mention of the great William Dunbar, beyond a chapter heading: Timor Mortis Conturbat Me (from his Lament for the Makars).
There is mention of Ben Jonson, even a signed copy of his book, of Edmund Spencer, even Christopher Marlowe…. But no Shakespeare – except by implication. There are echoes aplenty of Adam as Hamlet, of Adam and Helen as Romeo and Juliet, maybe Coriolanus in the shifting loyalties and betrayals. But that’s it.
No David Lindsey or his Three Estaites, or Gavin Douglas.
He does incorporate a couple of lines from a poem by old buddy, Norman MacCaig!
No, Harry’s main literary interests are Montaigne’s Essaies, and Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura.
(Shame he could not find room for Rabelais.)

‘And that’s it,’ I wrote about Shakespeare. But is it?
Who were the players Harry Langton fell in with one drunken night on a stop-over in London, while on the run to Europe? And that play draft in his pocket next morning, hung-over, aboard ship:'loves Labours Won‘ – the famous lost play.

The story moves from line to line, page to page and does not falter. It sets a good pace, is a page-turner, and nicely balanced.
It does not have the overcooked, stifling, feel of a workshopped book that we meet a lot at present.
It moves with good pace, and deepens its concerns and levels of thought as the story is developed.

For all the scheming, Harry notes ‘for Lucretius the energy that drives us is quite impersonal, yet not mechanical. For on account of the swerve, nothing is predictable, and … may take a new, unguessable turn.’
The swerve – that was Lucretius’ acquiesce to free will, to accident, and chance.
This is how ‘the best laid plans o mice and men, do often gang astray,’ as Robbie Burns wrote much later.

And there we have it.

Holocaust Memorial Day 2022

https://www.hmd.org.uk/take-part-in-holocaust-memorial-day/ukhmd/

https://www.hmd.org.uk

I’d set WordPress to post this up first thing this morning!
Last time I’ll be using that.

One Day: A new Virtual Tour to mark Holocaust Memorial Day