Winter 2021: ...and you're reading WHAT?!

Finished The Return of the Soldier, one of the incredible shits managed to turn herself around and gain some considerable compassion and the story was very moving; at the same time it's a brazen document of extreme classism, literally viewing the poor as "insect things", "repulsively furred with neglect and poverty", and not mere victims of circumstance but sour and squalid and ugly to their very marrow.

I finish SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT. Basically very good, helped by its seasonal, wintry flavour and its uncanny atmosphere. If anything the jovial last conversation between the two title characters, revealing the true identity of the lady in the castle etc, maybe undermines this and makes it less mysterious than it ought to be. The sense of sexual tension between Gawain and that lady, remarkable in such an old story, is also undermined by the assertion here that it was all a test cooked up by her and her husband, and that she's Gawain's aunt anyway (so maybe she was using magic to look young, as she was to make the Green Knight look green?).

As far as I know, Simon Armitage kept to a line by line translation so every line of his is a version of the original line. He keeps the alliteration extremely well. He sometimes uses anachronisms, which might sound a good idea, but might come out as pointlessly bathetic - 'just the job' (line 1856), 'mega-blow' (2343). But those are few. The translator also keeps stuff that a modern adaptation might get rid of, like the lament about women's tricks (page 110) and the ending, which culminates in 'AMEN' and 'HONY SOYT QUI MAL PENCE'; which I note means 'Shame on anyone who thinks bad of it', but has been left untranslated from whatever form of Middle French it was.

I recommend this book.

Oddly the Green Knight eventually gives up his real name, which is Bertilak de Hautdesert. This is oddly unclimactic as most people can't have heard of him outside this poem. His name on Google directs straight to Green Knight. Wiki says:

Etymologies
The name "Bertilak" may derive from bachlach, a Celtic word meaning "churl" (i.e. rogueish, unmannerly), or from "bresalak", meaning "contentious". The Old French word bertolais translates as "Bertilak" in the Arthurian tale Merlin from the Lancelot-Grail Cycle of Arthurian legend. Notably, the 'Bert-' prefix means 'bright', and the '-lak' can mean either 'lake' or "play, sport, fun, etc". "Hautdesert" probably comes from a mix of both Old French and Celtic words meaning "High Wasteland" or "High Hermitage". It may also have an association with desirete meaning "disinherited" (i.e. from the Round Table)

Last night I started Dante's INFERNO, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers. (Is this still the most read English version?) Her very long introduction was rather off-putting, so eventually I skipped to the poem. I found that I was able to read it.

A question arises, for me. When people say (as Sayers, and everyone, does) that Dante is sublime and wonderful, do they mean the poetry, specifically, in Medieval Italian (the eloquence of the vulgar)? But if so, most people in England can't read that (unless there's more continuity with modern Italian than I realise). Eliot said, I always recall, that he liked reading Dante in Italian even though he didn't know Italian. As though it was an instance of 'pure poetry', 'pure sound' or the like.

Or, do they mean that it's sublime in translation? In which case, presumably the translation matters? (I'm interested in Alasdair Gray's.)

Or, do they mean that the content is sublime: the journey with Virgil, Beatrice and so on? Here I'm more doubtful. I sense that how you respond to the material depends somewhat on your own predispositions.

This isn't, by the way, to suggest that 'everything is always lost in translation'. Kafka, Brecht and, a bit differently, Beckett (from French to English) are sublime in translation.

I also continued with Donald Davie's PURITY OF DICTION IN ENGLISH VERSE. A chapter on syntax suddenly arrived at hair-raising conclusions about Ezra Pound - the kind of thing that you find you've seen quoted elsewhere before, but are suddenly encountering in the original:

"the development from imagism in poetry to fascism in politics is clear and unbroken" (p.86).

Davie, a great Poundian, ought to know. But maybe the sentence is deceptive, in that it really only refers to EP, but Imagism actually involved a lot of other people, most of whom did *not* share his political trajectory. As a statement about EP, it is almost tautologically true, but as statement about Imagism as an aesthetic, it's unproven at best.

Started on the Third Ear Band book when I couldn't sleep last night. Not really looked in it before. It has a lot of released text from various sources reprinted. Magazine articles and interviews and things. Most of it pretty interesting. IT does have a new chronology that i don't think has appeared before.
& the cd that came free with the book is really good. Not sure how well it represents the tracklisting on an unreleased lp by the Electric Ear Band cos it runs pretty short. BUt it is pretty consistently good and some of it has hypnotic groove to it.

Wish there was recording o the Hydrogen Jukebox the electric band that had its gear stolen which begat the acoustic Third Ear Band . There is some later material recorded towards teh end of teh 70s under the name apparently which might be interesting in itself.

Also picked up 1491 and read about a chapter. Interesting stuff. Author starts teh main part of the book looking at the Mayflower separatists relationship to the native Americans local to where they are trying to set up a colony and what agency there is on the Native side which has been overlooked for centuries. like there were pull factors to them helping these white folks out they weren't simply being used instrumentally. Which was a portrayal they had for a couple of centuries at least, merely being pawns to white agency.

Still working away at the David Olusoga book Thew World's War about the colonial involvement in the First World War or back to it after having the last Ugly Things fulfilling the same role. Want to read some more Olusoga and would like to hear about similar roles played by colonial troops in WWII too. I think there was more recognised involvement though racist attitudes remained.I think memorial monuments etc were still as hard to come by for the non caucasian elements of the armed forces.

For reference:

Heaney translated the start of the Divine Comedy:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-05-23-bk-38605-story.html

Alasdair Gray did finish his Dante:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/24/paradise-dantes-divine-trilogy-part-three-by-alasdair-gray-review-a-fitting-finale

I'd like to read that.

Finished Commodore by Jacqueline Waters, a book sent to me as part of a thank you for a gift I made to Ugly Duckling Presse. Had never read her work before, and was quite surprised by how much I loved it. Strange, observational to the point of slipping into stand-up realm at moments, pointedly critical of certain structures of capital...nice book.

I read Clive James' translation most recently, pinefox.

have about 100 pages left in lolita and i'm well into the half of it i've never read before; it never stops being lightly comic, mostly bc humbert's small and large misfortunes are so ironic and deserved that i can't help laughing at them and at him. he's such a pretentious shithead and misanthrope. but also the second half of the book is genuinely the most horrific part, pretty much nonstop sexual abuse either alluded to or directly described (i most wanted to throw up when he forces her to give him a handjob in her CLASSROOM)

the lolita podcast i've been listening to dwells extensively on the cultural misinterpretation of the book, and reading it... it's hard to not notice that the only time dolores seems interested in humbert is when she thinks it's a game, a kind of adult performance/play that she's attracted to because she's a child who longs to be an adult and is in a frustrated purgatory between the two, but from the moment humbert first rapes dolores it is 100 percent clear she is 1) dealing with extensive ptsd 2) constantly trying to escape him. when she suggests they go on the second road trip and is suddenly sweet to him, it's clearly a manipulation meant to foster her escape (which, to some degree, her future abuser, clare quilty, is designing, which is the sad and fucked up dead end of this book, that she can only escape her abuser by running off with another pedophile, but she displays such cunning in this section of the book that it feels like she's discovering her own agency anyway)

(at least as much agency as she can possibly have in a society that routinely sexualizes her, violates her, and then discards her)

read 'the daughter of time', which is breezy and well-written and quite convincing about richard iii's innocence

otoh JT kind of showed her ass with the insistence that (a painting of) richard's face demonstrated his nobility. and her examples of famous false historical events seems to lean oddly toward the people with actual power being 'not that bad'

She does that face thing all the time. If someone has light blue eyes, dark blue eyes, oddly-set eyes or a haunting resemblance to a person or animal that you've met earlier in the story, you know they're a murderer or at least a pathological liar.

I still really like her books, esp. Brat Farrar and The Singing Sands. She also convinced me about Richard III, even though I don't trust her at all.

Brad, Kubrick's screen version doesn't end the way you seem to be expecting the book to end---don't know how the book actually ends, since I still haven't read it (see my posts upthread re last 1/3 of Kubrick's treatment, and the recent book about the supposed real-life basis of the novel).

i haven't seen the kubrick film yet but i do know that it ends differently (dolores doesn't die, for one)

but she does run off with quilty

Donald Davie, ARTICULATE ENERGY. On the question of how syntax works in English poetry and whether it's good for poems to be syntactically proper. DD tends to think so, more than many modern poets would do. It's a good bracing perspective. His chapter on Fenollosa has clarified Fenollosa a bit for me, but I'm still not sure how far I really get Fenollosa, or agree with him.

DD in his later statements can say things like 'that hideous decade, the 1960s', which go too far into indiscriminate 'conservatism' - where I suspect more care is needed.

Prynne on Davie:

Davie wanted very much to be a poet. I think he probably knew in his heart of hearts that he actually wasn’t a poet, though he cared enough about poetry to commit himself to substantial efforts to develop some way of ­expanding his own writing practice. He was part of that Movement group of poets who wrote very defensively and traditionally...

Davie always writes very highly of Prynne.

What little of Davie's poetry I have read hasn't done a huge amount for me; but then the same is true of Prynne's.

I was mostly interested in it because I knew Prynne was Davie's student, but have always found Davie's poetry to me just utterly useless.

Prynne, on the other hand...

Has anyone read E. NESBIT?

yes.

she apparently had a very interesting life. Was she a socialist like H.G.Wells and people.
Anyway heard some unexpected backstory to her possibly in a review of a biography of her in a Guardian review or something.

I consider reading a book by her called THE PHOENIX & THE CARPET. If I can find the copy I have already mislaid.

it’s v good. sequel to Five Children and It. V much of that long Victorian quasi mystical/pastoral/arts and crafts space world.

space

Fully automated luxury Victorian quasi mystical/pastoral/arts and crafts gay space comunism world.

the best world.

That feels as good a place as any to say that I finished Jarman's Modern Nature. It's a beautiful book in many ways, with the garden at Dungeness an extraordinary project to take on. But the garden becomes something closer to a figure for Jarman's fight against the entropy of his AIDS diagnosis and a refuge from the useless, flailing rage he feels at the Thatcher government. His recording of its coming into flower also allows for a flowering of memory - particularly to his painful childhood. He was always incredibly productive but the amount he continues to produce (the diary, the garden, the film work, the paintings, the cottage, which in itself functions as an installation) is staggering.

reminded me to check on the campaign to save his garden which seems to have succeeded. maybe because i’ve always been drawn to the dungeness, dymchurch, and rye landscape a single viewing of the garden back when i was a teenager created a disproportionately large imaginative imprint so that i will find myself thinking about it when i wouldn’t have said it was either particularly important or significant to me.

I've always wanted to visit that area; I keep thinking about doing a walking tour of it or something after the pandemic is over. I have a beautiful old naval map of Romney Marsh on my wall but I've never been there.

RE: E. Nesbit: The Enchanted Castle is amazing imo. The Story of the Amulet, the last book in the Five Children and It trilogy, is marred by a hideously antisemitic chapter but is otherwise brilliant. The Railway Children is pretty good but the movie adaptation from 1970 is even better.

I wrote my undergrad thesis on Nesbit, Kipling, and The Jews, ask me anything.

Finished a re-read of Daniel Davidson's brilliant 'culture,' a life-work published only after his death. Truly one of the best poets of his generation, taken too soon and at a most inopportune time, too-- before the internet could really do a good job of celebrating and archiving, but after the most active and bubbly period of little mags and so on.

Today I'm reading workshop poems from various people and a long chapbook from Jason Morris, 'Low Life.'

Lily Dale, I think I thought you were American - probably from your being such a Springsteen expert.

I am American! Just got raised on classic British children's lit.

I'm quite glad to have that piece of reality confirmed.

I picked up THE LATE AUGUSTANS ed. Donald Davie and read a couple of poets.

Thomas Gray: 'Elegy, written in a country churchyard' (1742 or later). This poem is only 6 pages long, 32 quatrains. I thought I knew it but today I'm afraid I realised I had never read it from end to end. It starts by depicting evening falling in a village; the poetic speaker looks at the graves of the poor and considers them virtuous for never having been rich, but also considers that they may have been great talents that were never known: 'mute inglorious Miltons'. What I'd not recalled was the later section where he rather self-indulgently or morbidly imagines his own death and, like Yeats in 'Under Ben Bulben', writes his own epitaph (3 stanzas, where Yeats's was only 3 lines).

I think there is one social or political ambiguity about the poem, namely: is it giving fresh attention and dignity to the lives (via the deaths) of the unknown poor? Or is naturalising their obscurity, in the lines around 'Full many a flower is born to blush unseen'? It was William Empson, perhaps in SOME VERSIONS OF PASTORAL, who made the political criticism, and I have an idea that Raymond Williams for instance later agreed.

I tried Samuel Johnson's 'The Vanity of Human Wishes' but couldn't be bothered to go far with it - so over to Oliver Goldsmith, 'The Deserted Village', a poem I've meant to read for some time due to Goldsmith's importance in Irish literary history.

Fizzles, your recommendation is welcome: I'll try to read Nesbit.

i spent the weekend mornings, the time i do most of my reading, looking through all the alternatives we've been talking about in that other thread, reading intros and pretty much rejecting them all. 5 pages on the typists involved in converting the Lady Chatterly manuscript to a copy for the printers, 5 pages on why we need another translation of War and Peace, the first chapter of Small House at Allington (which broke the 4th wall too much), intro to the Grand Meaulnes about how even the title is a pain to translate, three pages of the Three Musketeers (a page each)...

and wasn't in the mood for any of them, or anything else, but i've got a week before i need to choose.

my kobo has decided it's going to show the cover of War and Peace when i snooze it regardless of whether that's the last thing i was reading or not. maybe that's fate (cover is terrible generic penguin screen, just the title and author and a penguin logo with a thick black border)

I keep meaning to read The Magic Mountain, maybe you have already read that one?

I never read intros before I read the book.

Introductions vary tremendously in quality, length, and intended purpose. It's usually a simple matter to quickly suss out whether reading it will be an exercise in tedium, or the equivalent of being socially introduced to a remarkably talented stranger by a mutual friend.

i was careful to avoid the spoilery intros, these were more the translators notes or the 'notes on the text' about the various editions over the years. Chatterly was interesting in this respect (private italian edition with tons of errors because of language barrier, the two different paper stocks they used, the first typist who kept 'fixing things', later typists who used different punctuation conventions, the different ribbons they used!, pirate editions, expurgated editions for copyright purposes)

Another vote for E.Nesbit. Can't find my original post, but here's the one I read, my Mom's copy of Five Children and It, the Puffin edition, intro by Roger Lancelyn Green, who nails the appeal:
...The trouble with most grown-up people is that, although they may remember some of the things they did when they were children, they cannot remember what it felt like to do them, nor how they thouhgt about them at the time. The other end of the trouble though many of us can think of the most wonderful imaginary adventures, we never know then how to pick and choose and arrange our own stories, nor to write them down in such a way that they can mean to other people even one tenth of what they mean to us
He then describes the roundabout way she came to her gift: married "very young," soon had several kids and a seriously ill husband, "robbed by his partner, like the father of the Bastables." (So her sense of childhood anxieties rang the truer for grown-ups in the same boat, or too near). To support them, she threw herself into writing for grown-ups, but not very well, says Green, and the same was true when she tried children's magazines, until an editor asked her to try putting a book together, and then only near the end did a line, and image, provide a turning point.
Five Children and It has the Bastable kids mysteriously home alone in the country one summer---well, there are a few servants, and the "cottage" is pretty swanky to us proles, but they're at loose ends, wandering around with their distinct personalities and group dynamic, 'til they encounter a critter which they recognize as a fantastical breed in their books, so they pester him into reluctantly granting their wishes, which of course always have unforeseen side effects, which can get pretty wild, and I think (don't have more time to spend looking back through it) *may* incl. some flashes of xenophobia, not that unexpected in 1902.
Also read an intriguing review of a Nesbit biography, when it was published a few years ago: she became maybe the center of a salon, or those English Country weekends at least, known for her warmth, wit, and beauty (so yeah prob on xpost HG Wells' radar).

Also, Nesbit's ghost stories are fucking awesome.

Was confused because I thought you were talking about the Florodora girl Evelyn Nesbit.

Oh yeah, she did that too. Very versatile.

Had to feed the family, you know.

In THE LATE AUGUSTANS I read Oliver Goldsmith's 'The Deserted Village' (c.1770). Where Thomas Gray 20-30 years earlier talks of a local village (or even hamlet) as a quiet, unchanging place of serene repose, Goldsmith posits such a village as subject to disastrous social change. Discussing a fictional called AUBURN (he always uses capitals!), he contrasts an idyllic memory of the place as one where games were played and ale was drunk, with a recent history of economic decline and depopulation. I was quite struck by the emphasis, late in the poem, on emigration - to America? - which makes the poem seem much more likely to be referring to Ireland than England. (Or do I underestimate English rural emigration to America in the period? This is all long before the biggest Irish famines.) Here he imagines not just people but also abstract 'rural virtues' taking ship:

I see the rural virtues leave the land:
Down where yon anchoring vessel spreads the sail,
That idly waiting flaps with every gale,
Downward they move, a melancholy band,
Pass from the shore, and darken all the strand.

Goldsmith proceeds in rustic style describing the kindly parson; the knowledgeable schoolmaster, whose learning the yokels can hardly believe; and the pub where people drank nut-brown ale. What has caused the damage? Goldsmith refers to 'trade', suggesting what we might call capitalism. Perhaps this is also somewhat 'globalised'. He also seems to point to simply inequality, between luxury and poverty; rich people take up too much space and resources and starve the poor.

But times are alter'd; trade's unfeeling train
Usurp the land, and dispossess the swain;
Along the lawn, where scatter'd hamlets rose,
Unwieldy wealth, and cumbrous pomp repose.

I feel that this is a poem that asks you to consider it as a real argument, that gestures to an actual history. But I don't know enough of the real history to know how far it's more complicated than what Goldsmith says; if what he says is too simplistic or tendentious. Nonetheless it seems like the strongest work of direct social criticism I have read from the poetry of the era. I add the observation that Goldsmith seems, in this limited and specific way, a precursor to Blake.

I then started on a Penguin book marvellously called THE EARLIEST ENGLISH POEMS, ed. Michael Alexander (1966) and dedicated to ... Ezra Pound!

The book translates Old English into modern English. But it takes on the form that we often think of as old English, rather than being 'modernised' the way, eg, Simon Armitage does with GAWAIN. It's actually very close at times to Seamus Heaney, clarifying slightly for me how much he was trying to draw on this tradition. Even 'word-hoard', I now see, a favourite Heaney phrase, is a translation from Old English.

I've skipped most of the introductory material and straight into the poems, starting with a fragment called 'The Ruin'. It describes a Roman ruin, apparently perhaps Bath, as seen by an Anglo-Saxon after the Romans' departure.

Bright were the buildings, halls where springs ran,
high, horngabled, much throng-noise;
there many meadhalls men filled
with loud cheerfulness: Wierd changed that.

'Throng-noise' is precisely the kind of term Heaney uses (not just in BEOWULF). The weird-looking word 'wierd' turns out to mean 'what is, what happens, the way that thing happen, Fate, personal history, death'. That seems to cover most things.

I also read the testimony of the poet Widsith, which mostly just lists different European tribes; and 'Deor', which seeks comfort by recounting bad events then saying 'That went by; this may too'.

I used to have that Gray poem memorized. Took a quarter-long class as a junior in high school on "Politics in British Poetry" which was taught by a PhD candidate at Yale. He was an awful teacher, but I did get exposed to Marvell, Gray, and Clare, among others, at a quite early age for a USAmerican born in the early 80s.

I'd venture to say that Clare is among the most important poets for me, particularly as regards the politics of his work.