Now playing

Beautiful singing by Laura Polverelli:

Amor, hai vinto. Ecco il mio seno
da tuo bel stral trafitto. Or chi sostieni
l'alma mia dal dolore abbandonata!
Gelido in ogni vena
scorrer mi sento il sangue,
e sol mi serba in vita affanni e pene.
.
.
.
Se a me rivolge il ciglio
l'amato mio tesoro
non sento piu martoro
ma torno e respirar.
Non teme piu periglio
non sente affanno e pena,
l'alma, e si rasserena
come la calma in mar.

Insomnia reading

Two rather contrasting poems (from The Penguin Book of American Verse") that were solace during coffee-induced insomnia last night:

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

Edna St Vincent Millay

and, by Anonymous,

I sometimes think I'd rather crow
And be a rooster than to roost
And be a crow. But I dunno.

A rooster he can roost also,
Which don't seem fair when crows can't crow.
Which may help some. Still I dunno.

Crows should be glad of one thing though;
Nobody thinks of eating crow,
While roosters they are good enough
For anyone unless they're tough.

There’re lots of tough old roosters though,
And anyway a crow can't crow,
So mebby roosters stand more show.
It looks that way. But I dunno.

One of Josef Albers

Wenn die Luft
getönt mit Blumen
duftend Vogelsang

dann muss ich zurück
mich sehnen
weiss nur nicht - wohin

(or, as I read it)

When the days are
tinted with flowers
and scented with song

then I am longing
to return
but wonder - where to go

More Festival

Today - Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Mapplethorpe

Festival City

The riches of the Edinburgh Festival! This afternoon I saw exhibitons of:
Marijke van Warmerdam (remarkable video of milk being poured into a glass of water and sending out filaments of white in fantastic patterns);
Toulouse-Lautrec and his contemporaries' posters;
the Scottish twentieth-century artist Anne Redpath;
Ron Mueck's remarkable sculptures of human figures, super-realistic except totally out of scale;
and almost all of Elsheimer's paintings.
All of this within about 400 yards of the station at which I arrived.

Now playing - The silver Swanne

The silver Swanne, who living had no Note
When death approacht unlockt her silent throat,
Leaning her breast against the reedie shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more,
Farewell all ioyes,
O death come close mine eyes,
More Geese than Swannes now live,
more fooles than wise.

Orlando Gibbons

and now,

The dark is my delight;
So 'tis the nightingale's.
My music's in the night;
So 'tis the nightingale's.
My body is but little;
So 'tis the nightingale's.
I love to sleep against the prickle;
So doth the nightingale.

text: John Marston
music: anon

It rained today (pedestrians beware!)

The special quality of light after rain (which is lost when you photograph it)

Now playing (in competition with torrential rain)

"We can compare Bach's chorales and arias to the rose windows of cathedrals, in which reflections continually change from brilliant major to somber minor. These rose windows arethe soul of the cathedrals and they speak to the innermost part of human beings. So too do Bach's chorales and arias. They constitute the romantic element of his innermost output and they speak to us like no other romanticism." [Walter Rummel, 1950]

A chain of connections in my mind

Hilda's comment on my earlier post (The Translation Problem Solved) leads me to remember one of e.e. cummings

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

brings to mind the words (from the Song of Songs)

Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death;

so I remember the Prom last year at which I heard for the first time Messiaen's ecstatic Trois Petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine

and now as I write this I'm playing a record of Walton's rapt setting of these words, and listening to one Oxford College choir and remembering others completes the loop by connecting with Hilda's blog.

St Martin's Lane, 8pm on a cool summer evening

Favourite writers

Thinking about how my reading tastes have evolved.

First: Enid Blyton and Captain W.E. Johns
Then Agatha Christie
As a teenager, Wodehouse, Saki and Stephen Leacock (all still comfort reading)
Waugh and Huxley, C.P. Snow
Camus and Kafka
John Fowles
Shusaku Endo
(Five years ago) Paul Auster
Now the authors whose new books I rush out to buy (metaphorically: I don't buy books any more) are Haruki Murakami and Russell Hoban.

Curiously, I remember what I read as a teenager and in my early twenties, but since then, my recollection is vague and there are huge gaps.

Does this show some intellectual development (or decline) or are my tastes random? Or am I just a dedicated follower of literary fashion?

The Translation Problem Solved

A une Damoyselle Malade

Ma mignonne,
Je vous donne
Le bon jour;
Le séjour
C’est prison.
Guérison
Recouvrez,
Puis ouvrez
Votre porte
Et qu’on sorte
Vitement,
Car Clément
Le vous mande.
Va, friande
De ta bouche,
Qui se couche
En danger
Pour manger
Confitures;
Si tu dures
Trop malade,
Couleur fade
Tu prendras,
Et perdras
L’embonpoint.
Dieu te doint
Santé bonne,
Ma mignonne.

This poem by Clément Marot, written in 1537, is used by Douglas Hofstadter in Le ton beau de Marot as an example of the difficulties facing the translator. Given a poem with such specific form and structure, and the virtual impossibility of retaining all of these while matching the tone and preserving the meaning and ambiguities in another language, what are the priorities in a translation? There have been very many translations of this poem (I made one myself once) but now, with the wonderful Babelfish at http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/babelfish/, there's no longer any need to worry about such things, because translation is simply a matter of clicking a button. Here's Babelfish's English version of Ma Mignonne:

My nice, I give you the good day; The stay It is prison. Cure Cover, Then open Your door And that one left Vitement, Car Clement you mande. Goes, fond of delicacies Of your mouth, Which lies down In danger to eat Confitures; If you hard Too sick, insipid Couleur You will take, And lose the plumpness. God you doint good Health, My nice.

And for my Spanish-speaking readership, here it is:

Mi agradable, les doy el buen día; La estancia es prisión. Curación cubren, luego abren Su puerta y que se sacó Vitement, ya que Clemente ustedes m. Va, aficionada de tu boca, Que durmió en peligro para comer Mermeladas; Si ti duras demasiado enfermo, Color insípido tomará, y perderá la gordura. Dios ti doint Salud buena, Mi agradable.

For English-speaking readers who don't have Spanish, here's Babelfish's English translation of its own Spanish version:

My pleasant one, I give them good day; The stay is prison. Treatment covers, soon they open Its door and that removed Vitement, since Merciful you m. Va, fan of your mouth, That slept in danger to eat Jams; If too ill you hard, insipid Color it will take, and lose the obesity. God you doint good Health, My pleasant one.

So farewell to human translators. Babelfish removes the need for people to spend time producing translations like those that I quote now.

This first one I've posted before, but Tom Leonard's translation of a poem into a different context is so wonderful that I can't resist doing it again. For non-Scots, just read it aloud: "Special" is Scottish beer.

Jist ti Let Yi No
from the American of Carlos Williams

ahv drank
thi speshlz
that wurrin
thi frij

n thit
yiwurr probbli
hodn back
furthi pahrti

awright
they wur great
thaht stroang
thaht cawld

And here are two translations by Sidney Goodsir Smith (1915-75), known as "The Auk". ("Howff" and "snug" are both pubs or taverns.)

Sappho
For Edith Sitwell

deduke men a selanna

Dwynit is the mune awa
And the Pleiades, the nicht
Is at her mid, the hours flee, and I
- My lane I ligg.

Another Version
For Hector MacIver

The howffs are shut langsyne,
The late snugs tae;
The whures are all abed
- And the Auk his lane ...
........................Pissed, of course!

This morning

René Magritte, Hegel's Holiday

As anyone who has shared a breakfast table with me, or indeed who has had the misfortune to attend one of my 9am lectures, will know, regardless of when I get up, I am not fully awake before 10am. So it's quite unusual for me to find myself laughing out loud on first sight of the morning's newspaper, but it happened this morning when this image appeared at the top of the front page of the Independent.

Abandoned

A sad sight on my way to work.

New Arrival

Painting by Alison Cross, not yet hung to her satisfaction.

Now Playing - The Singing Apes

The Singing Apes of Khao Yai by Jan Sandstrom

ah vava va va vava va vava
haha haha han! han!
ah vava ah haha han han vava han!
vava han! vava han!
…………………
ah ha! ah ha ah haha ah ha
ah ha ah hahaha
a-ä! a-ä! a-ä! a-äh!
…………………
ah vava vava ah ah han han
ha ah haah haah.

[Note: thanks to astvinr for telling me how to create an a with an umlaut. I've edited this since the comment!]

This comes from a wonderful CD by Orphei Dränger called The Singing Apes and Other Songs of Love and War. This one was commissioned by the (all-male) choir, who the booklet suggests were perhaps slightly disconcerted when they were told the title of their commission.

The composer was watching a television programme in whcih a male gibbon sang "and it was among the most beautiful things that I have heard". I'm afraid the text doesn't give the full effect of this remarkable composition.

Now playing - Dylan Thomas settings

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead mean naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

I'm listening to a choral setting by Kenneth Jennings of "And death shall have no dominion". It brings a memory of myself at seventeen, reciting this poem in the school verse-speaking competition, I'm sure very badly. The Jennings setting is quite different from my conception of the poem: fast where I read it slowly, quiet where I would be impassioned. A very different reading, but a powerful one (brilliantly performed, it seems to a non-singer like me, by the group Cantus).

Coming up now is Samuel Barber's setting of Hopkins "Heaven-Haven". I stop to listen to it.

Heaven—Haven (A nun takes the veil)

I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.

Private Eye's cover today

In my garden

Hope for the future