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Metaphor

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Polish Poet Adam Zagajewski

Polish Poet Adam Zagajewski

Increasingly often and striking powerful chords, Eastern Europe calls to me. While I was looking for something else on my shelves, I pulled out Adam Zagajewski’s Unseen Hands and started scanning it. Here is a poem of his called “Metaphor”:

Metaphor

Every metaphor is a failure, said
the very old poet in the hotel bar,
turning to his rapt pupils.
The very old poet was in fine form
and said, with a wineglass in his hand:
It’s the fundamental problem of incarnation,
the things we love, the unseen things,
take flesh, of course, in what can
be seen and said, though never
absolutely, one to one,
so it follows that there’s always a little too much
or a little too little, the seams remain on the surface,
fingers jut, buttons, umbrellas, fingernails,
uncollected letters in azure airmail envelopes,
the sense of shortfall or excess remains,
someone is ominously silent, someone else
summons help, the ice cracks, the ambulance
arrives, too late, alas, but just wait,
thanks to this, thanks to this incongruity,
thanks to this inexplicable rupture,
we may keep chasing the chimera of metaphor,
all our lives we walk in darkness,
in a dim forest, we track the trail of simile,
imperfect, just like my
speech, just now reaching
its conclusion, although there is
no doubt much more to add,
but I fear that I’m already
growing weary and seem
to hear sleep calling.

I can just imagine the very old poet beginning to nod off, somewhat dismayed by the imperfection of language. Just as, I might add, I am beginning to nod off as my bedtime hour approaches. I like the use of the word “incarnation” to describe metaphor, an “unseen thing taking flesh.”

The Brotherhood of Silence

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Saint G. K. Chesterton?

Saint G. K. Chesterton?

G. K. Chesterton has for many years been one of my favorite writers. And now I hear there is a movement to have him canonized as a saint. That would be all right with me. In the current issue of Gilbert, the publication of the American Chesterton Society (of which I am a member), there is even a jocular article entitled “Why G. K. Chesterton Ought to be Canonized,” in which eighteen reasons which some cite against his canonization are turned around by author Peter Kreeft into reasons espousing his sainthood.

At the bottom of the second and last page of his article was this slight poem, which is typical of the man:

Love’s Trappist

There is a place where lute and lyre are broken,
Where scrolls are torn and on a wild wind go,
Where tablets stand wiped naked for a token,
Where laurels wither and the daisies grow.

Lo: I too join the brotherhood of silence,
I am Love’s Trappist and you ask in vain,
For man through Love’s gate, even as through Death’s gate,
Goeth alone and comes not back again.

Yet here I pause, look back across the threshold,
Cry to my brethren, though the world be old,
Prophets and sages, questioners and doubters,
O world, old world, the best hath ne’er been told!

I will write more about Chesterton soon. When I first started reading him, only a few of his works were in print. Now, partly thanks to the Ignatius Press’s edition of his complete works (which is slowly coming out one or two volumes a year), and to a resurgence of interest in works in the public domain, virtually all of his published books are available. Because he was a prolific journalist as well as a poet, novelist, and essayist, much of his works in newspapers and more obscure magazines has not yet been collected.

 

Things That Might Have Been

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Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges

It takes a massively creative mind to imagine not only what has been, but what has not been—though they might well have been! I love the poetry of the late Argentinean Jorge Luis Borges, who died in 1986. Blind for much of his adult life, Borges saw things few poets have seen. Although he wrote less as he aged, everything he wrote is precious.

Things That Might Have Been

I think of things that weren’t, but might have been.
The treatise on Saxon myths Bede never wrote.
The inconceivable work Dante might have had a glimpse of,
As soon as he’d corrected the Comedy’s last verse.
History without the afternoons of the Cross and the hemlock.
History without the face of Helen.
Man without the eyes that gave us the moon.
On Gettysburg’s three days, victory for the South.
The love we never shared.
The wide empire the Vikings chose not to found.
The world without the wheel or the rose.
The view John Donne held of Shakespeare.
The other horn of the Unicorn.
The fabled Irish bird that lights on two trees at once.
The child I never had.

In another of his poems, Borges imagines that Don Quixote never left his library, but imagined all his adventures based on the epics of chivalry he read there.

Read Borges, and before long you, too, will see the other horn of the unicorn.

 

Looking Backward

PICcrab

Crab

A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community. He lives in the days that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward. The brighter the light diffused around him by the progress of reason, the thicker is the darkness of antiquated barbarism, in which he buries himself like a mole, to throw up the barren hillocks of his Cimmerian labours.—Thomas Love Peacock, “The Four Ages of Poetry,” Works Vol. III

Horace Odes 1.11 in Three Languages

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Fortunetelling Cards

Fortunetelling Cards

ENGLISH (Literal Translation)

Don’t ask—it’s forbidden to know—what final fate the gods have given to me and you, Leuconoe, and don’t consult Babylonian horoscopes. How much better it is to accept whatever shall be, whether Jupiter has given many more winters or whether this is the last one, which now breaks the force of the Tuscan sea against the facing cliffs. Be wise, strain the wine, and trim distant hope within short limits. While we’re talking, grudging time will already have fled: seize the day, trusting as little as possible in tomorrow.

LATIN (Original)

Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi
finem di dederint, Leuconoe, nec Babylonios
temptaris numeros. ut melius, quicquid erit, pati,
seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam,
quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare
Tyrrhenum: sapias, vina liques, et spatio brevi
spem longam reseces. dum loquimur, fugerit invida
aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

SCOTTISH DIALECT (With Glossary)

Ne’er fash your thumb what gods decree
To be the weird o’ you or me,
Nor deal in cantrip’s kittle cunning
To speir how fast your days are running;
But patient lippen for the best,
Nor be in dowie thought opprest.
Whether we see mair winter’s come,
Than this that spits wi’ canker’d foam.
Now moisten weel your geyzen’d wa’s
Wi’ couthy friends and hearty blaws;
Ne’er let your hope o’ergang your days,
For eild and thraldom never stays;
The day looks gash, toot aff your horn,
Nor care ae strae about the morn.

ae: one, a single
blaws: blows (back-slappings?)
canker’d: gusty, stormy
cantrip: magic
couthy: agreeable, sociable
dowie: sad, melancholy
eild: age, time of life
fash: trouble, bother, fret (fash your thumb = care a rap)
gash: pale, dismal
geyzen’d: dried out
kittle: tricky
lippen: trust, have confidence
morn: tomorrow
speir: ask
strae: straw
wa’s: ? The context requires something like weasand (Scots weason) = throat, but the only definitions I can find for wa’s are walls and ways, from which I can extract no satisfactory sense. Or could it be waes = woes?
weird: fate, destiny

“No More Than Weeds or Chaff”

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Winter Landscape by Sesshu Toyo

Winter Landscape by Sesshu Toyo

Years ago, at the opening of Dartmouth College’s Hopkins Center, I saw an exhibit of Sesshu Toyo’s Long Scroll and fell in love with it and with the Chinese landscape artists it was imitating. That was the beginning of my fascination with old Chinese landscapes and poetry.

The following lines by Fu Xuan (A.D. 217-278) are as good as the best:

A gentle wind fans the calm night:
A bright moon shines on the high tower.
A voice whispers, but no one answers when I call:
A shadow stirs, but no one comes when I beckon,
The kitchen-man brings in a dish of lentils:
Wine is there, but I do not fill my cup.
Contentment with poverty is Fortune’s best gift:
Riches and Honour are the handmaids of Disaster.
Though gold and gems by the world are sought and prized,
To me they seem no more than weeds or chaff.

Perhaps this Thanksgiving, we should be like the narrator of this poem. Living in the midst of abundance, perhaps we do not need to fill our glass with wine. As the poet says, “Contentment with poverty is Fortune’s best gift.” There is something to that. Today, and always, enjoy your dish of lentils.

For Love of a Tree

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Fanning Her Insomnia with Dreams

Fanning Her Insomnia with Dreams

Poems written in other languages have a difficult passage to get to English. In the end, what we see is a mere simulacrum of the original. Still, the greatness of a poem will out. If a poem was originally written in French, Spanish, or Hungarian, I can get more of a feeling for the original; but what of the poems of the great Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), which were written in Russian? I have approached several of her translated works and loved them, or else loved the pale reflections they cast in English, such as this one:

Willow

In the young century’s cool nursery,
In its checkered silence, I was born.
Sweet to me was not the voice of man,
But the wind’s voice was understood by me.
The burdocks and the nettles fed my soul,
But I loved the silver willow best of all.
And, grateful for my love, it lived
All its life with me, and with its weeping
Branches fanned my insomnia with dreams. But
—Surprisingly enough!—I have outlived
It. Now, a stump’s out there. Under these skies,
Under these skies of ours, are other
Willows, and their alien voices rise.
And I am silent … As though I’d lost a brother.

(Translated by D. M. Thomas)

The poem becomes clearer when you understand what its author endured through her long life. I quote one paragraph from the Wikipedia entry on her:

Primary sources of information about Akhmatova’s life are relatively scant, as war, revolution and the totalitarian regime caused much of the written record to be destroyed. For long periods she was in official disfavour and many of those who were close to her died in the aftermath of the revolution. Akhmatova’s first husband, Nikolai Gumilev was executed by the Soviet secret police, and her son Lev Gumilev and her common-law husband Nikolay Punin spent many years in the Gulag, where Punin died.

Perhaps if an ogre like Stalin could take everyone you ever loved away from you, then perhaps your soul will be fed by “the burdocks and the nettles.”

 

“A Frail Jetty Facing North”

Oedipus and Antigone

Oedipus and Antigone

What is unwisdom but the lusting after
Longevity: to be old and full of days!
For the vast and unremitting tide of years
Casts up to view more sorrowful things than joyful;
And as for pleasures, once beyond our prime,
They all drift out of reach, they are washed away.
And the same gaunt bailiff calls upon us all,
Summoning into Darkness, to those wards
Where is no music, dance, or marriage hymn
That soothes or gladdens. To the tenements of Death.

Not to be born is, past all yearning, best.
And second best is, having seen the light,
To return at once to deep oblivion.
When youth has gone, and the baseless dreams of youth,
What misery does not then jostle man’s elbow,
Join him as a companion, share his bread?
Betrayal, envy, calumny and bloodshed
Move in on him, and finally Old Age—
Infirm, despised Old Age—joins in his ruin,
The crowning taunt of his indignities.

So is it with that man, not just with me.
He seems like a frail jetty facing North
Whose pilings the waves batter from all quarters;
From where the sun comes up, from where it sets,
From freezing boreal regions, from below,
A whole winter of miseries now assails him,
Thrashes his sides and breaks over his head.—Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus (Trans. Anthony Hecht)

Omigosh, What Have I Done?

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Saint George by Dosso Dossi (ca. 1515)

Saint George by Dosso Dossi (ca. 1515)

Today Martine and I drove to the Getty Center and looked at the paintings, special exhibitions, and decorative arts. What particularly interested me was a painting by the Italian Dosso Dossi (born Giovanni di Niccolò de Luteri) around 1515 of Saint George immediately after slaying the dragon. It’s not an expression of joy or celebration by any means. Almost, it seems as if the saint is asking himself, “Oh my God, what have I done?” Perhaps some ancient knowledge of the dragon’s has been conveyed to the Roman soldier, and he foresees that the world will never be the same again.

The painting is a small one, measuring 27½ x 24 inches, and by no means in a dominant location in the exhibition hall. Still, the facial expression drew my attention immediately and held it. I would have liked to photograph it (without flash, of course), but the guard in that particular hall forbade it; so I noted the name of the artist and luckily found it on the Getty Center website, which describes the oil as follows:

Dosso Dossi depicted the aftermath of Saint George’s battle with the dragon, in which he wields the creature’s bloodied head and the lance broken during the fight. Under an emerging rainbow, the victorious patron saint of Ferrara, Italy, emerges from the darkness of the battle. Dossi poignantly expressed his subject’s recent emotional turmoil in the saint’s penetrating expression. He appears weary yet resolute in his triumph.

The symbols of Saint George’s Christian faith—crosses rendered in vivid strokes of red paint as though the blood of his opponent drips down its shaft—mark the weapon. The color of the crosses echoes the blood ringing the beast’s mouth and also symbolizes the blood of Christ.

I don’t altogether agree with Saint George appearing “weary but resolute in his triumph.” I guess each work of art speaks to different people in different ways.

There is a poem by Jorge Luis Borges entitled “Limits” which, to me, conveys the spirit of this painting:

There is a line of Verlaine I shall not recall again,
There is a nearby street forbidden to my step,
There is a mirror that has seen me for the last time,
There is a door I have shut until the end of the world.
Among the books in my library (I have them before me)
There are some I shall never reopen.
This summer I complete my fiftieth year:
Death reduces me incessantly.

(Translated by Anthony Kerrigan)

Charon the Boatman

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Back and Forth Across the River Styx

Back and Forth Across the River Styx

I haven’t printed any poems lately, so I paid a visit to the work of America’s Serbian-born poet, Charles Simic.

Charon’s Cosmology
By Charles Simic

With only his dim lantern
To tell him where he is
And every time a mountain
Of fresh corpses to load up

Take them to the other side
Where there are plenty more
I’d say by now he must be confused
As to which side is which

I’d say it doesn’t matter
No one complains he’s got
Their pockets to go through
In one a crust of bread in another a sausage

Once in a long while a mirror
Or a book which he throws
Overboard into the dark river
Swift and cold and deep

Now, why, I wonder, would Charon toss books into the Styx? God knows, if I were one of his fares, I would probably have a book on me. Eternity lasts a long time, and there’s plenty of time to read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and everything else. There exists some doubt, however, that at that point it would do me any earthly good.