‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Earlier Western writers used to make the claim that for a poem to be a ‘true poem’ it must admit the possibility of death.
You find this in the writing of Spanish Poet Federico Garcia Lorca, and a great many British and European poets of the 20th Century.

There are many points here that need clarification, here. The main two are – 
 -what is a ‘true poem’?

– what does ‘the possibility of death’ mean in reference to poetry?

These are both ways of valuing, of giving relevance. They are ways of putting a poem into a system of importance, immediacy. This in turn reflects a temporal need for engaging with contemporary political and cultural concerns, and for pressured expression.
Not many lived up to the injunction, of course, but the point is that it was an aspirational claim.

A ‘true poem’ was a poem that worked wholly as a competent and professional piece, as well as having the emotional and psychological impact of its subject and its parts. It was a poem that could stand by itself, beyond autobiography. What is implied here, also, that it is a poem that would have wide cultural relevance. How wide that is/was is another matter. This was still the period of Western cultural hegemony.

The ‘possibility of death’ was a way of saying that the poem addressed and also expressed wholly contemporary fears and dreads. Its competence was its ability to transcend, to go beyond, these fears and dreads, into a possibility of redemption or even calm.

– The Norse skald Egill Skallagrimsson, in Egill’s Saga, wrote a series of what he termed ‘neck verses’. (see Ian Crockatt’s The Song Weigher: complete poems of Egill Skallagrimsson, tenth century Viking and Skald (Arc, 2017).

In an earlier skirmish he had killed Erik Bloodaxe’s son. He later found himself forced to seek shelter and sanctuary with the family.
His wife demanded his death. What saved his life, so the saga goes, was his renown as a professional skald, and as such his work was highly valued. He was able to write a series of new-form verses for the occaision.
This, of course, could well be a bragging, a fiction engrandising his abilities and person.
But we read hear the valuing of the work, of putting it into a greater system of relevance than personal expression. 

Earlier generations of writers to this, called on the valuation of God, that a poem had to be worthy of addressing God. Of course, very few were, and so that failure to do so reflected the failure of mankind to live up to religion’s demands, and instead to address our basic humanity as the true one, and the calling on God or valuation through reference to God as aspirational and ultimately beyond human competence.

But this valuing concentrates expression, energises content, and captures the relationships between competence and aspiration.
Both of these are found in the Sonnets from the Portuguese.

1
The first point to be made about the Sonnets from the Portuguese, is that they were not… from the Portuguese. Nor were they translations from other literatures.
Wiki tells us:
Browning proposed that she claim their source was Portuguese, probably because of her admiration for Camões and Robert’s nickname for her: “my little Portuguese”. The title is also a reference to Les Lettres Portugaises 

The title was suggested, strongly, by Robert Browning as a publication title. He had learned bitterly from his own experience. His first published book, Pauline, an emotional autobiography, had been savaged.
This is not the same as the ‘telling it slant’, of Emily Dickinson, but of deflection.

The Sonnets from the Portuguese were autobiographical. They were originally written as personal responses, private, and yet with professional competence and skill.
The title eschewed personal claims, however, and put them in the realm of public expression. As far as the chosen form, language tropes of the period, and spheres of reference allowed, thy were recognisable and accessible, of their time. They went beyond the abilities of the accepted codes and modes of expression, however, and owned their own place in the canon of majorly male writers

The series charts a growth in awareness, from a state of apparent utter dejection, spiritual or/and existential, to one of uplift, fullness, emotional renewal.

The form used is that of the Italian/Petrachan sonnet: ABBA ABBA CDCDCD.
This falls into an octave followed by sextet. If we look at Sonnet 32 we can see how this works:

The first time that the sun rose on thine oath
To love me, I looked forward to the moon
To slacken all these bonds that seemed too soon
And quickly tied to make a lasting troth.
Quick-loving hearts, I thought, may quickly loathe;
And, looking on myself, I seemed not one
For such man’s love! – more like an out of tune
Worn viol, a good singer would be wroth
To spoil his song with, and which, snatched in haste,
Is laid down at the first ill-sounding note.
I did not wrong myself so, but I placed
A wrong note on thee. For perfect strains may float
‘Neath master-hands, from instruments defaced, –
And great souls, at one stroke, may do and dote.

The change-over from octet to sextet is seamless. The ‘turn’ takes the tone of a critique of itself, it answers objections, off-sets contrary arguments. What it does is state the case for the legitimacy of the state of mind/being, and of its depicted working-through to a place of resolution.

It may not be comfortable reading at time, especially for our own sensibilities, but the sonnets demand to be taken on their own terms.

We can read the sonnets as they are in themselves, but we wrong them not to read them as personalised expression, as autobiographical.
The self-doubt, for instance, and then the self-defamation. Why so? Are they over-stated, as a device for exploring responses to the experience?
At the time of writing, 1845-6, she was aged thirty-nine to forty, unmarried, and long an invalid, cut off from ‘society’ and shut in with few though devoted friends, an over-protective very Victorian father, and her books. Not forgetting her devoted maid. Her pet dog, Flush (who cleaned up after him?).

Her age, as well as her long illness, weighed heavily against her as a woman in the marriage mart of society. Self-doubt melded with self-blame (her favourite brother she had begged to visit her by the sea in convalesce, had drowned on his visit. For which she blamed herself).
The tone of her writing was becoming very sombre; after the hugely prolific writing phase of 1841 to 44 she was bound to hit a rocky time.
Stalled, and ill, when out of the blue came this younger writer to her door. He had not the acclaim of readers that she had just gained; he had been publishing as long, but the public did not warm to his works very readily.

And yet this lack of self-esteem in her writing was one aspect of the required ‘demure demeanour’ required of women of the period, especially women of standing. Her father was on the wealthy side of the very strict social divide.

What I am asking here, is how we now read the extremes of emotion she portrays here, in the sequence as a whole, and in this poem.
This is one of the great strengths of the writing, that she can, indeed, express that range of emotion.
It is this interiority, the closetted atmosphere, that gives authenticity, and raises the sonnets above facility, above experiments in form, language, and ‘playing the writing game’ .

The self she portrays in her writing is how she envisaged her real self. We, as outsiders, would probably see a very different person. But that vulnerable opening, admittance, to the inner self these sonnets allow, was a huge act of revelation from one so closed off, and shut away.
The self she saw was the image through which this sequence of sonnets came.

Sonnet 7

The face of all the world is changed, I think
Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul
Move still, oh, still, beside me, as they stole
Betwixt me and the dreadful outer brink
Of obvious death, where I, who thought to sink,
Was caught up into love, and taught the whole
Of life in a new rhythm. The cup of dole
God gave for baptism, I am fain to drink,
And praise its sweetness, Sweet, with thee anear.
The names of country, heaven, are changed away
For where thou art, or shalt be, there or here;
And this … this lute and song … loved yesterday
(The singing angels know) are only dear,
Because thy name moves right in what they say.

Two long sentences, joined together by the shorter central one, lines second half of seven, through to line nine. She expresses the effects of the emotions, and also discriminates between them.
Throughout the series she is constantly being overtaken by the emotions of the courtship, and also reigning herself in. She denies – not the power of the love, but her own deserving.

All her writing charts this growing into herself as a person in her writing: we hear her distinctive tones and moods through the conventions of the accepted tone, range, and subject matter, of Victorian women’s writing.

These conventions constitute an attempt to gloss over the very distinctive voices that were becoming heard in women’s writing of the period. And that glossing is itself an attitude of publishers and reviewers, part of their assumed role of tutors in sensibility, morality.
And then here was the strong current of women’s writing stirring up the calm waters of the Empire’s (sluggish?) seas.

She wrote many other sonnets around this period.
What followed was a whirlwind of emotion, and, as we see in the sonnets above, her strong hand handling the reins, of courtship, marriage, elopement, Italy, and motherhood.

Then came the great poems: Casa Guidi Windows; Aurora Leigh.

There is the question of whether we can approve psychopathology for the sake of the work. It follows a very fine line.
The character of Aurora Leigh was not an invalid as her author, but a woman exploring and using her power and position as a woman to gain self-determination. She struggled to support herself, and was willing to struggle.
The romantic gain at the end… I was unhappy with. Was it a kindness to her reader’s expectation of a kind of happy ending, a la Jane Eyre?
Is the argument that the spirit was allowed to emerge from the maimed man, when earlier the physicality of his aggressive masculinity was blinding him to his true nature?
As the generous introduction to the Wordsworth edition of Collected Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, by Dr Sally Minogue (2015), draws to our attention Elizabeth Barrett Brownings’ used explicit breastfeeding imagery within Aurora Leigh.
She had not the Victorian physical fastidiousness that we have come to expect of the era.

She ended her sequence:

Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers,
Plucked in the garden, all the summer through
And winter, and it seemed as if they grew
In this close room, nor missed the sun and showers.
So, in the like name of that love of ours,
Take back these thoughts which here unfolded too,
And which on warm and cold days I withdrew
From my heart’s ground. Indeed, those beds and bowers
Be overgrown with bitter weeds and rue,
And wait thy weeding; yet there’s eglantine,
Here’s ivy! – take them, as I used to do
Thy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine.
Instruct thine eyes to keep their colours true,
And tell thy soul, their roots are left in mine.

The self-doubt is still there, but meliorated by the certainty of being wholly loved.
I admit to being rather taken with all the flowers. The two named, her own, are eglantine/honeysuckle, and Ivy. In Victorian flower language we have: ‘generous and devoted affection’, and ‘Fidelity. Marriage’ (see https://fiveminutehistory.com/the-language-of-flowers-the-secret-victorian-code-of-love/).

Her own shaded and shadowy self, combined with the physically blinded, aggressive male of Aurora Leigh: all failed people? Yet these were the characters also of Robert Brownings ‘dramas’. These can be read as attempts to round out the empire-builders and hugely successful characters of Victorian expansionism. The reality behind the images; the ugly inside of the statues.
The great foundations of Western thought are found wanting in Robert Browning’s poems. If not ‘found wanting’, then too capable of abuse. The casuistry of his characters shows a great wasting of talents, of knowledge, education, for a selfishness, a littleness of mind.

Without the aspiration, the struggle for expression, for wholeness, the poems would appear sentimental, vapid, an example of a facility with language.
Did she really mean death when she wrote of it?
There are many kinds of death; I think we can safely say she felt she was dying inside. To dismiss that as a personal crisis-experience would be a terrible arrogance.

To come back to the Sonnets: the discovery of oneself as loved by another, though, not out of duty, but romantically, in the body, and wholly, is all expressed in this sequence.
It is no small thing.
For that the sonnets won fame, were revered highly, and deserve our appreciation still.

Casa Guidi Windows, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Casa Guidi Windows, A Poem in Two Parts. By Elizabeth Barrett Browning. ISBN: 9781517563943
https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9781517563943

We may now, and at long last, be arriving at the time for the proper appraisal and appreciation of the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

She was a phenomenal writer, astute, very knowledgable, and very much her own person. The writing is consummate. At one point she was under consideration as the new Poet Laureate, upon the death of William Wordsworth.

1

The Casa Guidi Windows is a long two-part poem, set in Florence in 1848/9 to 50, at the time of the Risorgimento.
The work begins with hearing a child’s voice singing outside her window.
What does he sing, because it would have to be a he?
He sings O bella liberta. O bella!
And instantly the writer is caught up in the tumulus moment of the outpouring of hope and enthusiasm for the future that spread through Florence and parts of Italy at the time.
The writer is transported by the reunification spirit, and takes the reader on a reeling ride through the passionate cause and its expressions, the carnival atmosphere.

It continues ‘...on notes he went in search
So high for, you concluded the upspringing
Of such a nimble bird...’
Firstly we have here the little child fore-fronting the work, figuring the innocent rightness of the cause. There is also the deeper image of a that of a choir boy here, innocent and yet fervent.

I wrote above, it would have to be a he. But not necessarily. Conventions of the time would make the figure male – and so when Robert Browning published Pippa Passes (1841) he was indeed breaking the mould. Here was another child, singing beneath windows. And this child’s innocence revealed the iniquities of time and place as she passed from dwelling to dwelling on New Year’s Day.
(What also is interesting here is that this poem was set in Asolo, Veneta. This is where their son Edward. ‘Pen’, later retired to, and was buried.)

There is also in this child under the windows the Rousseau-esque child of nature.
And also the traditional image of the skylark rising into the sky, its passion and song transporting it into higher realms. Is this Shelley’s Blithe Spirit?

It is as though this great movement of the people was ‘ordained’, or if not that, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning had far too much respect for intelligence to fall for that, it was that a spirit was moving the people beyond and out i.e. they are transported, of their ordinary lives.
The abstractions of ‘liberty,’ ‘freedom’, though, how realisable in human terms were they then?
Are they now?

Then comes the writer’s martialling of Florence’s luminaries, from Dante, Petrarch, Machiavelli, to Renaissance painters, sculptors, thinkers, writers, the Medici down to Savonarola, to Galileo and on.

If you search out her apartment at the time: Casa Guide, in Florence – and I urge that you do so –
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Casa+Guidi+Firenze/@43.7649241,11.2456479,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x132a51546a37a4eb:0x300cb57880079df2!8m2!3d43.7649241!4d11.2478366

you will see her first floor apartment is at a meeting of ways: Piazza de’ Pitti, Via Maggio, Via Mazzetta, Via Romana. And how very narrow all those roads and streets are!
She writes of both herself and Robert Browning watching the marches from their window, the banners, the ordered processions.
If you do use the map, the Casa Guidi is not as shown, but in the Piazza S Felice, next door to Mesticheria Ferramenta Casalinghi: the domed doorway with their names over the top.

So let’s look at that term Risorgimento. The whole work is suffused with references, both old and contemporary. And very few of them are now part of our general knowledge. At her time, how informed her readership was!
No internet, no social media, TV, radio, records… just journals and news paper reports. And schooling.
And here is one area of interest with both Robert and Elizabeth Moulton-Barret (her full unmarried name): both were tutor-taught. That, and with their own voracious reading. That reading could be wayward at times, but it was wide, and deep into character and subject.
We read here, in mid 1800s, a revealed thirst for psychological knowledge, for the conditions and means of what it is and demands, being human in their time.

There is a huge area of knowledge she references here that few readers of our time could possibly access. We are in need of a good research, and notes to the poems. We, with Google at our finger-tips.
What? You mean it is not infallible?
The earlier Wordsworth edition (1994) of the Collected Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning does seem a fuller, more complete collection, and includes the Casa Guidi Windows. The latter, 2015 edition, with introduction by Dr Sally Minogue, does not; though it does does carry notes to the poems, and has a good and useful Introduction.

So, where were we with the poem? Part One is full of the enthusiasm of the events, refracted through meditations on happenings, characters, and assessments of their qualities.
Historically it was the period that Pope Pius’ constitution for the Papal States added to the weakened position of the French King Louis Phillipe. In the poem we see and hear the great crowds, orders of society, pass the windows to cheer his eminence, Pope Pius.

In Part Two she deals with the failure of the movement, for an Italy still only part free of Austrian claim. In Part Two we come to her contemporary Duke of Tuscany, Grand Duke Leopold: the buck stopped there, and with King Louis Phillipe. Even Pope Pius is under scrutiny; he was no longer the reformer, and his concerns for his flock found wanting.

2

The great strength in the piece, I find, is her ability to express that hope and enthusiasm as fully as her position allowed: invalid, foreigner, comparatively affluent, educated, but also a mother, with newborn baby.
And also to be able to examine and also express the feelings of loss in its failure.
To explore that hope and the ramifications of the hope for Italy of the time, and then also to take on the failure of the venture, the failure of those hopes. To express that, also – the passion and the sorrow.
Do not get me wrong, this is not a heart-wrench work, it is considered, factual at times, meditative, enthusiastic… it ranges over so many emotions and states of mind.

It is also a very literary piece.
Many contemporaries will find this not to their taste. It is not written for the voice, but for the silent reading. This allows its language greater scope.
The whole poem is structured carefully in iambic pentameter, with all the iambic licences of catalepsis etc. The poem is rigorously rhymed, but this does not read as external ornament because she positions her end rhymes just so that the rhymes express the salient terms used to rhyme.
Writing this way entails occasional juggling of line structure; and the period’s writing mores allow the ‘thee’s’ and ‘thou’s’, archaisms we now draw a breath at. The writing structure entails concentrated expression; at times it requires re-reading to get the meaning.
For myself, I love the slight changing of writing positions this produces. It gives a greater richness to the writing. It appears many-facetted.

It is end-rhymed throughout, ABABACDCDCD etc. Writing for rhyme like this allows the writer to tweak a line, a thought, and so we find that instead of following through descriptions we explore qualities.

She writes of,
… all images
Men set between themselves and the actual wrong,
To catch the weight of pity, meet the stress
Of conscience, – since ‘t is easier to gaze long
On sad masks and mournful effigies
Than on real, live, weak creatures crushed by strong.

In a TV interview Seamus Heaney commented on his own rhyme-use, saying that writing to rhyme ‘develops the thought‘.

So, what really went wrong with the great surge of the Risorgimento? She writes:

Record that gain, Mazzini – Yes, but first
Set down thy people’s faults; set down the want
Of soul-conviction; set down aims dispersed.
And incoherent means, and valour scant
Because of scanty faith, and schisms accursed
That wrench the brother-hearts from covenant
With freedom and each other.

This might just as well be every political cause.
The People.
Yes, but the Leaders never really know what The People want, because what they want is so diverse (witness the reasoning of the gilet jaunes, for one), and what the Leaders want so narrow that none can live there.
Some have called this a Political Poem, with all the dubious connotations of that description. But it is more than that, and she aimed for more than that.
She aimed for a poem about humanity.

3

In her Advertisement To The First Edition, she wrote that she, the writer, takes shame upon herself for having believed, like a woman, some royal oaths, and lost sight of the probable consequences of some obvious popular defects.
To be fallible, get things wrong sometimes, to not be afraid to show one’s vulnerabilities, is to be human, complex, inconsistent-but-hoping-for-consistency, is to aspire to wholeness.

The like a woman is there to disarm, and as such is a considered proto-marketing device. She was wholly aware of her readership.

Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Barrett_Browning) writes:

In the correspondence Barrett Browning kept with the Reverend William Merry from 1843 to 1844 on predestination and salvation by works, she identifies herself as a Congregationalist: “I am not a Baptist — but a Congregational Christian, — in the holding of my private opinions.” 

The Congretationalists of her time held very interesting views on self improvement:

the picture of the philistine Dissenters drawn by the poet and critic Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1869) contains a measure of truth, it underestimates the zeal for self-improvement and the desire for a richer life that existed in Victorian Congregationalism.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Congregationalism

That ‘richer life‘ is written out here in Casa Guidi Windows, in the developments of her thoughts and ideas.

In her publication history the Casa Guidi Windows follows her Sonnets From The Portuguese, and is followed by the masterpiece, monumental, Aurora Leigh.

And yet, reading the Sonnets From The Portuguese, now, we get a sense, especially in those early sonnets, that she had come to some kind of dark place with no way out: leaning on her gravestone, waiting; could see no future.
The meeting with Robert Browning stirred her, helped break the dead-lock.
She was a woman of great integrity.

Read generously, I say; read to appreciate, explore, understand.
Read slowly; savour her language, her sensibility.
Read to tune-in to the writing, to her concerns, the emotional and intellectual landscapes she opens to us.
Meet with her here, in her work.

That is really the best gift she has for us, and we, in our turn and time, for her.

You may also like:
Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, by Fiona Sampson. Publisher : Profile Books; Main edition.
ISBN-10 : 1788162072

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie voted best Women’s Prize for Fiction winner

HUGE congratulations to Chimananda Ngozi Adichie

The prize is given for the global success of, and acclaim for, her novel Half of a Yellow Sun, published 2006, by Knopf/Anchor.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-54915487

Combray

On the church steeple of Saint-Hilare, Combray:
And in the evening, when I was coming home from a walk…it was… so soft, in the close of day, that it looked as if it had been set down and crushed like a cushion of brown velvet against the pale sky which had yielded under its pressure, hollowing slightly to give it room and flowing back over its edges; and the cries of the birds that wheeled around it seemed to increase its silence, lift its spire to a greater height and endow it with something ineffable.

And later:

A little tap against the window-pane, as though something had struck it, followed by a copious light spill, as of grains of sand dropping from a window above, then the spill extending, growing, regular, finding a rhythm, turning fluid, resonant, musical, immeasurable, universal: it was the rain.

Yes, I’m spending my late evenings in Combray.
At last I’ve got around to reading Proust., In Search of Lost Time, rather than the older Remembrance of Things Past.
This is a newish translation: Lydia Davis, for Penguin Modern Classics. And instead of the evocative Swann’s Way, she translates Volume 1 as The Way by Swann’s.

Different weightings of a phrase tell so much of a time period, the dynamics of the time. This, I was tempted to write conjugating of the phrase, denotes our moment in time as one of reappraisal, sitting back and looking around at what is, what we have carried with us, as opposed to a time of movement. That itself is revealing; we may think this is a moment of change, and yet what we actually do suggests one of reappraisal.

The contrasts of image in that second passage: sand – fluid; close-by – far away; immediate moments – immeasurable, universal.
And the similar images, developed from one another: window pane – window above; rhythm – musical; copious (light) spill – extending (sound); a little tap – resonant.

There are also the uses of polysyllabic set within monosyllabic structures, skilfully deployed.

What fine writing, though. It is solace for these testing times.

But then the writer followed that up with a ludicrously stretched joke on the difference of the Saturday routine at Combray.
Then Francois chased around and messily slaughtered a chicken for their meal.
Ok, time to skip-read, perhaps.

Festive Fun: Medieval Jests and Riddles

The Demaundes Joyous
The lightness of these, when measured against the Old English Riddles, makes them seem mere bagatelles. Quite a lot of those Old English Riddles are light and jokey also; it is just the labour of translation makes them seem less. But for ease of reading, and sheer fun, we  have these.
Did I mention translation? Yes, well, these are also translations – but not from the heavy?, stodgy? Anglo-Saxon – no, they are from the Romance of northern French.

The Demaundes Joyous

1 Who was Adam’s moder?

2 What space is from the hyest space of the se to the depest?

3 How many calves tayles behoveth to reche from the erthe to the skye?

4 Which parte of a sergeaunte love ye best toward you?

5 Which is the moost profitable beest, and that men eteth leest of?

6 Which is the broadest water and leest jeopardye to passe over?

7 What beest is it that hath her tayle between her eyen?

8 Wherefore set they upon churche steples more a cocke than a henne?

9  Why doth an ox or a cowe lye?

10 Which was first, the henne or the egge?

11 Which tyme in the yere bereth a gose moost feders?

 

– It is always best to have a ‘flavour’ of the kind of answer expected. So, here is the answer to Question 3:
No more but one if it be long ynough.

If you want to try and answer these… then let’s say you must do so in the curious English of their period.

The source of these Demaundes Joyous is Wynkyn de Worde, 1511.
The collection contains about fifty such riddles – I have skipped the more church-orientated, and so maybe a little obscure now eg Why come dogges so often to the churche? etc.
My source says the collection here is based partly on an early sixteenth-century French collection, Demandes joyeuses en maniere de quolibets.

There are some old crocks here: Which came first, egg or hen? But there is no Why did the chicken cross the road? Maybe that is in the other forty, not included.
Some are a little… indelicate? Some just crazy. All have the flavour of their period.

Enjoy.

Happy Festive Season!

Homer’s Visual World

I was just flipping through excerpts from Homer’s Iliad – as we all do in those idle moments, of which we are inundated – and I noticed just how effective the imagery was. And also, apologies, just how unintentionally and grimly funny some of it was.

Maybe, I thought, it is the translation/translator’s unconscious input to ‘image the English’ this way. And so I tried several translations. You will have guessed by now I have not even a little Latin, and certainly less than no Greek, to quote Robert Greene on Shakespeare.

Take, for instance, one of the later dreadful moments before the gates of Troy. Hector is outside, all the other Trojans having just been chased in by the Greeks. King Priam sees Achilles racing across to challenge his son, Hector, who is below.

Robert Fagles gives us:

And old King Priam was the first to see him coming,
surging over the plain, blazing like the star
that rears at harvest, flaming up in its brilliance –
……………………………………
that star called Orion’s Dog – brightest of all
………………………………………
So the bronze flared on his chest as on he raced –

Robert Fitzgerald’s version:

And ageing Priam was the first to see him
sparkling on that plain, bright as that star
in autumn rising, whose unclouded rays
shine out ………………………..
the one they call Orion’s dog, most brilliant
……………………………………..
……………….. So pure and bright
the bronze gear blazed upon him as he ran.

And we see it.

The immediacy is in the imagery, its tactile and visual appeals; Priam’s shock and dread provides a platform for what is being visualised so clearly. There are literary tropes and elements in profusion, of course, as we know from Hesiod, but the translators here both resort to the same cognitive palate. Was this ‘Homer’s’ cognitive palate, too?

There is something about this imagery I recognised from exercises in visualisation, in art, and especially in ‘drawing from the right side of the brain’. The imagery here in the above passages is focused on the subject, and yet relaxed sufficiently for extraneous detail to be noted. Visualisation techniques, in their early stages, foreground their subject, and relegate all other detail to background. The effect is of creating, say, a huge central figure/image. Much as Achilles is presented in the whole passage.

I have seen similar effects in sleep experiments, where REM dreaming creates a further distorting effect. And more importantly, we have all done it – not just every night we go to sleep, but as kids in staring games: the fixed eyes exaggerate their focus, the other’s face distorts, a well-known face becomes unrecognisable.
I have watched this in action as Alzheimers affected cognitive function: ‘That is not your face.’

Ok, that is somewhat different – the point I am making here is that the cognitive appeals in the above passages denote an internal visualisation of the scene, that is then held in the mind’s eye, whilst it is described/written down.
No easy task.

On another scale there is how Gaelic poets composed – by lying, in subdued light, quiet – isolated – with a stone/small rock held against the stomach.
I can appreciate the need for this: the stone/rock centres the attention, provides tactile input, becomes the prompt to the act of composition. Why was this method noteworthy? It helped in their manipulation of strict forms, of intertexuality; of a hundred and one rules, appeals, concerns, to be addressed. It was the calm, timeless quality of the setting, of the quality of enduring stone/rock, that provided the context for the frame of mind, of being, that the poetic composition demanded. The rock connected one to one’s time, to the world, to earth; it provided a point of contact between inner visualising/mentation, and outside demand/input. It grounded the imagery.

Grim humour?

Well, I couldn’t help but notice, later on in this passage…

(Priam pleading with Hector to come indoors)
 ……………….. Ah for a young man
all looks fine and noble if he goes down in war
…………………………………………………
……………………………………………………
…………………….When an old man’s killed
… the dogs go at the grey head and the grey beard
and mutilate the genitals -………….

Or, as Robert Fitzgerald has it:

………………………….Everything done
to a young man killed in war becomes his glory
…………………………………………………
………………………………………………..
………………. But when an old man falls ,
the dogs disfigure his grey head and cheek
and genitals…………………

And if that wasn’t enough:

And his mother wailed now…………
………………………loosing her robes with one hand
and holding out her bare breast with the other……………
…………………………………………………………………..

……………………………. – have some respect for this! (sic)

 

How Well Do You Know Your Tables? Ted Hughes, Shakespeare, and Memory.

 

The writer Ted Hughes had a long engagement with Shakespeare.
Story goes, in the early 1950s, just as he was to go up to Cambridge – working-class boy makes good – he was called-up, as all were in those days, to do his National Service. He said he spent those two years in various look-out posts, reading all of Shakespeare’s works. It went on from there.

The culmination of this long engagement came first in his 1971 book, A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse, published by Faber and Faber. His argument there was – ever the controversialist –  that we can appreciate Shakespeare’s poetic art as well in excerpts from the plays, as in sticking solely with the published poems.
His argument is more than borne out by the samples he gives. This is indeed an excellent book.

The part relevant to my argument here, is the postscript. This is a long essay on what Ted Hughes saw as the evolution of Shakespeare’s craft, and forms the heart of what became his next big attempt on Shakespeare: Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. He came to blame the writing of this as a betrayal of his/the muse, and resulting in his last illness.

In these works he came up with what he called ‘the tragic equation ’ of Shakespeare’s writing. This was all to do with the evolution of Shakespeare’s craft, its psychic properties, and engagement with history.

For this blog I am just looking at a detail of that postscript, beguilingly called ‘Note,’ in A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse.

In the ‘Note’ he discusses how Shakespeare’s craft and art underwent a ‘quantum leap.’ It was a ‘quantum’ leap because it worked on the level of a new weighting of language and language use rather than big themes. He writes of how Shakespeare’s mature style used a ‘high’ word ie a usage from a lexicon outside the normal language of the audience, that was paired with a ‘low’ word, to qualify a third. He writes ‘… the new, unfamiliar, word from the ‘high’ language is balanced, interpreted and translated by an old word (or words, or image made up of old words) from then ‘low.’ In practice, this becomes usually a combination of one word of classical derivation with another of native… derivation.’

He goes on to call this a ‘masterful democritisation’ of language, for ‘welding the audience into a single thing.’ He dates this change in resource of language from All’s Well That Ends Well onwards.

Here he brings in another conceptual avenue: ‘If other evidence is valid and he used a Brunoesque mnemonic system…’ Ted Hughes was hedging his bets with that  ‘If’, but it is evident he has been reading A study of Love’s Labour’s Lost (1936), Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), The Art of Memory (1966) by Frances Yates. All, but certainly one or two of the above.

What is it about this causes Ted Hughes to make this claim? How, he seems to ask, could Shakespeare have memorised all these new words? His answer, by using a memory system, a mnemonic. And then tying this in with the newly available books by Frances Yates on The School of Night, Giordano Bruno et al. He ties this to Shakespeares’ quoted use of tables: ‘set it down in ‘…‘tables’, or notebook…’. (p187, 1991 edition). There are a number of such references to ‘tables’ used in this way.

He gives the example from All’s Well That End Well of a line from a speech:
On the catastrophe and heel of pastime
He reads the use of catastrophe as one of Shakespeare’s new words; how is it used with the term heel, then? By reading catastrophe as  down-turn… heel then becomes, of the foot, but more, it becomes in context the image of Achilles’ heel.
Ted Hughes writes:
‘By regarding the line as a slightly modified ‘New Word’ entry in his ‘tables’, where the word to be mastered is matched with its translation and ‘fixed’ with its mnemonic image….‘
(page 186/7).

What do you think?

There is, of course, another explanation for that word ‘tables’, other than implying a mnemonic system of tables.

Roger Chartier, in Inscription and Erasure, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), writes of how between 1577 and 1628 a certain London bookbinders sold what were called Tables. Many examples survive, complete with bookbinder’s name and London address.
A direct reference to these can be found in Hamlet Act 1, Scene 5, lines 107-11.
They are notebooks with the added ability of being able to be wiped clean.
In effect they were the wax tablets as used in medieval times. As we see from Roger Chartier, they were still in use in Shakespeare’s time. He describes them as part of the materiality of the text.
They were small: hand-sized, and rectangular: wooden trays, usually in pairs, strapped together with leather, so they could be closed face to face to save what had been imprinted from smudging. These trays were filled with bees wax, to be marked on, written on, with a metal stylus. They could be erased with a wet cloth, allowed to dry, and used again.
Roger Chartier writes how an eleventh-century priest-poet, Baudri de Bourgueil, wrote in detail about his tablets/tables. The wax in time would become old, blackened, full of grit.
Being wax, they would also be vulnerable to temperature: cold, draughty cloisters and scriptoria  probably held ideal conditions.

By Shakespeare’s time, we read, the medium had been changed from wax to a mixture of plaster, glue and varnish (page 23, Inscription and Erasure). The ‘tables’ of this period also included in their package printed almanacs, tables, weights and measures, calendars… much like our own notebooks.

So what, then, of memory systems? You need to go back to the Hamlet reference, above. Just before that speech, comes the phrase, table of my memory.
We read in Roger Chartier, how many such Tables could be collected, and stored. Their contents were not erased, but kept for transcription onto parchment, vellum in the future. They were, in effect, stored writings: libraries.

Cicero’s Rhetorica ad Herennium was one of the main sources for describing a memory system (though many found the descriptions confusing, incomplete). By Chaucer’s time Geoffrey de Vinsauf had dispensed with this as far too outlandish.
By Shakespeare’s time the Tables would be used for storing quotations, improving phrases, then jottings, recipes, tittle-tattle. They became known as ‘writing tables,’ or ‘table books.’
And memory systems, as part of what might be considered ‘occult’, were very much forced underground after the fall from favour of Dr John Dee, and especially in Jacobean times.

We have here, though,  the act of writing as an act of memorising. Any student will know this: the physical act of writing notes on paper aids to remembering in revision.
And yes, I did keep a straight face when I wrote that – though only just.

Behind this memory–writing equation is maybe an episode from Plato’s Phaedrus. Here, Theuth (Thoth), the Egyptian god, had invented the art of writing: using visual, drawn, images, to convey spoken words. He presented his invention to the king of all Egypt, Thamus. He refused the gift, on the grounds that it would make people lazy, not having to remember everything.

I do not know the book by Plato, and cannot tell what was made of this anecdote by Socrates. It certainly would not be left to stand alone, that is for certain.
Topic for another day.

Roger Chartier is one of the chief writers of the histoire des mentalities school of cultural history.
He writes in French, but many of his books are available in translation.
Inscription and Erasure is a book full of riches. I would recommend it very highly.

 

 

Book Review: THE EVENINGS, by Gerard Reve

THE EVENINGS, by Gerard Reve, 1947.
Published by the excellent Pushkin Press, in its first English translation, by Sam Garrett, 2016

I am currently reading The Evenings, by Gerard Reve (Gerard Kornelius van het Reve, 1923 to 2006).

This is an early, outsider-novel, and a classic:
– ‘a cornerstone… of modern European literature…’  (Tim Parks)
– ‘The funniest, most exhilarating book about boredom ever written….’ (Herman Koch)

And that last comment captures my problem.
The novel is set in 1946, presumably in Amsterdam. There is no TV, no record player or records; there is  a radio, yes, that plays classical, a bit of jazz, some Latin American.
Of course no internet, iphones….
And everyone is bored out their heads.

Note that, ye critics of today’s youth.

And so the chief character, 26 year old Frits van Egters, entertains himself by needling everybody. This ‘entertainment’ takes over, to increasing degrees.
At first I had the distinct impressions of Billy Liar, by Alan Sillitoe, but no.

And so I am struggling with it; struggling to keep up the interest.
Because…. ‘I have seen the best minds of my generation…’.
Exactly.
The date, see: 1946.
The best minds of the generation before were still numbed by years of Nazi occupation, the round-ups, the transports. The best engineers, mechanics, workers, had been trucked off for the German war effort. They returned home morally ruined, physically malnourished, spiritually dead.

And Frit’s generation were beginning to stir, wake, shake themselves, look around. And what did they see?
‘He looked at her’ (his mother), ‘:  the thin face, the grey hair, the slight growth of hair around the mouth and chin, the arms that never stopped moving. “Help us,” he thought.

 – Is it me, or is it always the woman is the easy target? That she must maintain a static, constant, role, appearance, demeanor, for the narrator/character.
Woman as a distant, uncomprehended being; woman as an inhabitant of the same world, also – but surely she cannot feel what we chaps feel, how we feel. She goes on doing that house stuff as though nothing else mattered, or had happened.
Only, Frits wakes one night, to sounds in his parent’s room. He entered, to find his mother shaking and sobbing. His father, isolated in his own wrecked existence, excuses it as one her nervous attacks.
There is an unwritten novel in that, certainly. In her side of the story.

Frits looked around his world, and saw people holding onto the known and trusted traditions, but they now seemed little more than threadbare habits:
‘”Who’d like a pickled herring?…”, “”No, please, no.” But he does.
‘“… there’s a real Middenweg wind blowing…” , “…Please don’t use terms unfamiliar to the uninitiated.”

The book starts off well, with a sly, dry, ironic humour as Frits woke early one Sunday morning. Early: good, despite the bad dreams, but time to make something of the day. Then we see him every few minutes clock-checking, and the opportunities flounder, die, as the day wears on.

The story is set in late December. Even the Winter was a disappointment: the ice on the canal melted early; there was no real snow; plenty of drizzle, yes, but nothing with any energy or excitement to it.
The intention was there, but it is as though the life had been drained out of people, the world, even; the spark to ignite a creative fire, dampened.

‘“Tom ta tom tom, tom ta tom,” Frits sang to himself, “nothing ‘s good, but everything’s fine.”’
– There’s definitely a modernist technique at work here. There is certainly an echo of Doblin’s ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz’, in the use of vernacular, in the internal monologues, thesinging.

*

The novel is structured on ten evenings, of increasing frustration with a fruitless life, and world. Each chapter charts the route taken by the tacking and manouvering of a clumsy, mostly empty, boat.

No, the novel is a not a ‘Ulysses’; it may share some of the self-absorption of Joyce’s classic, but the scale and scaffolding are pointedly small-scale.
After the previous period’s vacuous claims to new world orders, new worlds, great futures, this is a pointedly and purposely humdrum conception of humanity.
When you build, you must build from proper materials: people as they are – and not cloud cities, a reich, built from vacuous guff shored up with people’s real blood, guts, lives.

We see Frits attend the school re-union; his peers were trying to adopt the old role of getting on, making something of themselves. Frits, perversely, does not.  It is not as definite as that, or as a much a stance. His life has no heroic gestures, statements, no focussed disavowal of old values. No, he rumbles on in a diffuse scepticism.

And it is here where the book’s strength lies.
It does not succumb to cliche, or stereotype. Frits is disagreeable, but not hateful. The story charts  the hinterland that is his life: he does not veer far from the main path, and certainly not off into the dubious byways, side roads, the district beyond the tracks.

The immediately pre-War writers grouped under the banner of Forum, were preoccupied with the relationship of man to society. The War changed all that; the War brought the Nazi regime’s Kultuurkamer and its prescription of everything other than National Socialist writing.
Reve’s book was the first one of impact to be published in that aftermath.

Reinder P Meijer, in his’ Literature of the Low Countries’ (Stanley Thornes (Publishers) Ltd, 1978) writes, ‘The dreariness of the subject matter recalls the work of the nineteenth-century naturalists, of whom Van de Reve may be regarded as a descendant.’
The directness of Gerard Reve’s depiction, though, is the main factor: ‘Van het Reve offers no explanations, no comments, no psychological key.’ (: Reinder P Meijer).
Gerard Reve also employs ornate speech – the interactions between Frits and older brother Joop, and associates, reads – as his response to the use of vernacular, above, shows – as an arch, ornate, edging-towards-parody of earlier high-flown literary styles.

It is not Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ the book shares kinship with, but perhaps Sartre’s ‘La Nausee’. They both explore the ennui. Sartre’s book has the definite stance, raison, backstory even, in the opus of Being and Nothingness. Reve eschews those grand gestures, definitions, concepts, in favour of the individual vision.
Where Sartre argues for the individualistic response, Reve gives it.

*

Gerard Reve hit the headlines again with his 1970’s quartet of books ‘Dear Boys,’ ‘Sweet Life,’ ‘I Loved Him,’ and ‘A Circus Boy,’ where he explores gay sex, with a brutal edge. It is the style, also, that grabbed attention. The books are written with a blend of fact and fiction, in the form of written letters, and fantasy, but not the standard epistolary format.  Reinders P Meije again: the books stand out because of their ‘firm structure and … skillful way(s) of preserving a precarious balance between reality and the fairy-tale elements… introduced in his later novels…’.

But I’m still stuck.

Book Review: NEGATIVE ENERGY

Negative Energy, by Richard Livermore.
24 Essays and Blogs. Elefantasia Press, 2016

ISBN: 976-1911357-17-9                  Price £.7.99 (Postage free in the UK)

The book can be purchased from:
Richard Livermore, 6/1 Jamaica Mews, Edinburgh, EH3 6HN, Scotland, UK.
livermore.chanticleer.richard@gmail.com

 

Richard Livermore should be better known.
He founded and edited Chantecleer Magazine, and its later online form Ol Chanty:

http://www.chanticleer-press.com/

He has been active in the literary and poetry worlds for many years. He is a seasoned campaigner for wider dissemination, deeper understanding, for the neglected and the deserving of better readership.
But he never shies away from the difficult questions, the tricky areas.

Aficionados of literature, poetry, film, philosophy, culture will feel very at home in the world of this book.Why? Because

This Is The Book For You!

 

2016 marks the five-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.
I mention this in this context because my favourite essay so far in this collection contains a wham-bang essay on Shakespeare. He opens by questioning Why he was never given a place in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey.

What he gives us in response is SHAKESPEARE AND THE QUESTION OF LEGITIMATE POWER.
In this mere eight pages he takes us through the pungency of Shakespeare’s response to power as he found it in London under Elizabeth 1, and earlier claimants. He shows how Shakespeare ran the gamut of realisations from Timon of Athens, to the big three of Hamlet, MacBeth and King Lear. This he argues persuasively was a zeroing-in on the subject of the nature of power itself. Timon, he writes was about money as power; no, the real kick came when Shakespeare found a way around censorship via history, other cultures, to look at, pull apart, expose the gaining, use and abuse of political power.
This is why Shakespeare was difficult to domesticate. He had to be ‘bowdlerised’ as one term has it; he had also to be rendered benign through academic study modules.
That is why it takes an essay like this, outside of the academy, to reveal just how much Shakespeare pushed perceptions; how he threw it out into the open, to the populace, to people outside privilege and court circles.

I wrote above that essay was my favourite ‘so far’. Admit it, our likes, our desires, change. They grow develop. Or do they? Is the pack just reshuffled after a time? Time, yes. Time is the problem. What happens to us over time?
Some have attempted road maps (of the soul) for us. Whether they are religions, philosophies, politics or ethical systems, the intent is similar: how do we navigate our combined lives through time, in our shared space?
These essays and blogs take us through these invented landscapes searching all the time for that thing that makes our lives. He has his own particular criteria.

A close second on the Shakespeare essay/blog is EPIC PERSPECTIVES.
Being challenged can be one of our greatest pleasures, as well as spurs to learning, to knowing. In this piece Richard Livermore brings us to that body of writing I have long wanted to dive into and swim, The Mahabharata. In this instance it is Carole Satyamurti’s version. His love for the work is obvious on every page, and it illuminates the text.
The Mahabharata is, of course, another way of navigating time and space. This time it does not follow on the Greek/Classical rationalism method, but uses an older means, that of story. It is an unfolding story, series of stories, though, and this is important: it is not a static, rendered-into-text, finished product. The stories went out into the villages, were added onto, changed, re-valued. What we have here is one-off screen-shot of The Mahabharata’s vast complex of stories.

Think Game of Thrones has twists and turns, and conniving and general skullduggery? Try The Mahabharata. The difference is that The Mahabharata has Dharma, it has a through-line of purpose, intent, that is responsive to current and contemporary situations. G R R Martin certainly knows his predecessors.

On the topic of time, duration, and identity, Richard Livermore takes us through the book  Difference and Repetition, by Giles Deleuze, in his essay DELEUZENARY STATES
It is necessary for any thought-traveller to have some grounding in Deleuze (and Gatari), and this essay is an excellent place to begin. We encounter Kant as a major contributor. Kant occurs throughout the essays and blogs: his contribution to modern thought is given due recognition.

What do you think of democracy? That sacred cow of the enlightened Western world: Do not touch; do not question; just accept it as the best we have to offer.
Well, is it?
Richard Livermore writes: ‘Personally, I would  extend the notion of democracy and limit it at the same time.’ You see, it is possible to think further, think round corners, look at democracy from other sides, angles, and not just the big sell part. In our small worlds of personal interactions, equality and diversity etc, it has proved invaluable. On the big stage it can take on an appearance as lumbering, out-dated.  ‘A means to an end, and not an end in itself.’ he writes. Once an idea, a political ideal, becomes realised it is limited by its success, its existence, even. We sit back: the work is done. It is never done, though, is it. Democracy is just a station on your way, to quote Leonard Cohen.

So what does he mean by Negative Energy? It is part of an equation with positivity. Positivity denotes creating, building up, aspiration and achievement of promise. Negative Energy is not its opposite – that way of thinking, of universals, logical oppositions, contradictories etc is not helpful. Negative Energy is the energy released from the break-down, break-up, of ossified structures and systems. Sound familiar? Sound like someplace you know? The energy can be just as creative, just as vitalizing. The best of our works, our books, plays, symphonies we value as such because they give us the struggle of the breaking out and rebuilding.
It is quite a whoosh when you realise that!

The book is in no ‘particular order – chronological or otherwise’ Richard Livermore writes in his Preface. I see that as a strength, it gives the book a jewel box quality, full of surprises and sparkles, some dark, some glittering, some challenging our icons, some valuing them.
That is not to say there are no through-threads, themes, obsessions, even. There certainly are, and it provides us with a pleasure to find topics occurring in unexpected places.

We glimpse a very human heart and mind at work here behind the essays and blogs on film, opera, novels, plays, poetry, philosophy, science.
Here are our cultural nodes and political moods, explored and unraveled for us. For us to carry on the work.

GIFTS OF RINGS AND GOLD

 

Whoo-hoo!

Now available on Kindle!

Kindle book ready and waiting!
Roll up! Roll up!

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01IRPODPW