A thousand words

Colette arrived yesterday, Thursday. I have to say the day because the blog is on the wrong date and I haven't got time to sort it out, I have given myself 20 min a day to write this blog, why do I think that Hinemoana would say, Far too long, do it in less. And I probably could too, so shall try.

Reading the Polish poet, still can't remember her name, looking at the adjectives - not many - and the comparisons, and more than anything marvelling at the depths she achieves in her writing. A poem that resonated with me, called Home, 11 lines, 2 adjectives, one of which is a number ( seven walls). The words are all simple - an eight year old would understand them, they belong to Elef milim.

One thousand (elef) words (milim) is the number of words taught a new immigrant upon their arrival in Israel, with which he or she can talk to anyone about matters of every day life.

Wislawa Szymborska (I ran to the bedroom to get the book from beside my bed) - Wislawa uses elef milim words in preference to others, except for three in this poem: 'homeostasis' and 'megagalactic cosmonautics'. The poem is about home and the mundane - she writes about an astrophysicist who "For now [...] has curled up and gone to sleep."

My favourite reading remains prose writer Julian Green, comparing the craft of writing a novel to watch-making, the problem being that you cannot explain a novel by taking it apart:

"A good novel is a living organism and when you take a living organism apart and put it back together again, all you have is something dead."

Taking only one sentence from the paragraph does not do his writing justice.

It's from The Apprentice Writer, Essays, published in 1987 by Marion Boyars (London & NY), and it is a translation. No translator's name, so I imagine that he translated it himself. Who better. He was still alive in '87. Shall check him up on Wikipedia.


Wislawa's book is View with a grain of sand. (A grain of salt?) . I've mentioned the bibliographic details earlier.

Jeanette Winterson

Read her book Oranges are not the only fruit, which I did not like. I'd bought it at The Ferret together with another one of hers entitled Art and Lies.
Well!
I am being stretched, her writing contains so much, both the thinking/feeling underlying it and the style, that I'm left a little breathless, as if I was walking with someone whose legs are longer than mine. She makes no concessions. Writing about the library in Alexandria, she puts in a half-page paragraph quoting Pliny the Younger in Latin. It doesn't feel as if she's showing off.

I haven't understood the shape of that book yet - its' subtitle is A piece for three voices and a Bawd, published by Vintage in 1995. The table of contents reveals that the three voices are Handel, Picasso and Sappho in alternation, but from reading up to page 39, I know that most likely the Handel and Picasso and Sappho are not the well-known ones. The Bawd has already appeared, called Doll. She is taking shape slowly.
All Winterson's prose is a kind of poetry.

I am also reading a translation of Julian Green's The Apprentice Writer, the title was irresistible, and I was in the section of the library that deals with translated literature. All wrong, I should be looking among the English poets. Next time.
In the mean time am enjoying Green who wrote in the 20s in France. I remember people talking about him, I wondered about the English name since he wrote in French. I read him before going to sleep.