About not doing and driving

I can't get myself into what I want to do.
When I was translating, I was consumed by it, ran from my bed to the computer every morning, forgot to eat.
I have several things on the go right now, besides the neglected garden, which will remain neglected because it is last on the list.
I have to finish the form to renew my driver licence - realised after 30 years in this country that the local name is driver licence, not drivers' licence. A licence to drive, it is mine, but the name means that the fact that it is mine is not the point. Maybe it should be called a driving licence.

I want to :

translate from German an anti-Semitic sentence which was carefully painted in Gothic script on the wall of a house in Bavaria in 1934, richly illustrated, full colour.

WRITE.


painstakingly insert corrections into a translation and publish it.

translate more stuff.

Instead, I have spent the last hour or so reading Bodil Malmsten's website, translating from Swedish with Google translate, a muddled affair. I almost wrote 'with the help of Google Translate', but sometimes I feel it is 'in spite of'. I mustn't, because without GT, I couldn't read her at all. Only a little of her work is translated to English, just the wonderful The Price of Water in Finistere. Very sad.

Thought for the day

I prefer blogs when bloggers don't write about their personal feelings and actions too much. ("No milk in the fridge, sigh").

Bodil Malmsten often includes among the Swedish - which I don't understand - quotes in English and links to English websites.

She recently posted this, by Bob Dylan:

You gotta serve somebody

You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls.

But you´re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You´re gonna have to serve somebody.
It may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you´re gonna have to serve somebody.
......

You may be a state trooper, you might be a young turk
You may be the head of some big TV network
You may be rich or poor, you may be blind or lame
You may be living in another country under another name.

But you´re gonna have to serve somebody, yes
..........

You may be a construction worker working on a home
You may be living in a mansion or you might live in a dome
You might own guns and you might even own tanks
You might be somebody´s landlord you might even own banks.

But you´re gonna have to serve somebody, yes
.......

I found a fuzzy video of him performing it in 1984 on Youtube. And an interview with him, which reveals mainly that he does not like being interviewed very much.

Borges

The Paekakariki gig went well, lots of friendly people, the rehearsing paid off, a smooth presentation, everyone comfortable with the mike, thank you Hinemoana, (that's her on the photo, introducing us. You can visit her website on http://www.hinemoana.co.nz/, and find out more about her - hear her sing !)

It seemed to me that the audience didn't always get the point of the more complex works that were presented. Discussed it via email with Elizabeth Smither, my mentor, and she wrote back among other things:

"...the problem with listening to poetry, especially in its more complex forms, is that the poem moves on while the listener in the audience is still absorbing the last image which has passed..."

Elizabeth suggests making the written version available on broadsheets, so that people can take them home and pin them up. I like that idea. But someone else said that not all her poems were ready for print. So there you go, no easy answers.

~ ~ ~

Serendipity plays its role: the book by Borges which I took from the library is not his poetry. The title was hidden by that bar-code sticker that is always in the way of either the title, the author's name, or the overall design of the cover (Why the scanning system could not be designed with the bar code in a different place is beyond me. Philistines are alive and well.)

Second thoughts: the actual title is This Craft of Verse (Mihailescu, C.-A., ed. (2000) Harvard University Press) - I wouldn't have noticed it wasn't verse even if I had been able to read the title.

The book consists of six lectures which he gave in English (he had an English grandmother) at Harvard in 1967, about poetry. They were taped and forgotten about, then rediscovered - when enough dust had gathered, to paraphrase the editor C.-A. Mihailescu.

It's lovely to know that one is reading the poet's own words. There is a chapter about metaphor, another about translation, another about the music of poetry...

All written in a style which is charmingly modest, a modesty which must be at least partly an assumed stance. Mihailescu himself says

"One cannot quite take at face value Borges' claim that he is "groping" his way along, that he is a "timid thinker rather than a daring one", and that his cultural background is "a series of unfortunate miscellanies"..."

I wonder what the Americans made of that, modesty not being a muscle that is flexed very often in their world.

Haven't finished it yet, reading slowly and enjoying it heaps. Shall buy it as a gift for someone.

~~~

Petri Liukkonen is a mysterious Finn, a librarian in the town of Kirjasto, Finland. He or she has become famous on the Net for creating an award-winning website entitled Books and Writers where he/she posts the biographies of famous writers in slightly accented English. I wrote playfully to Petri the first time, having noticed that both Bodil Malmsten and Per Pettersen - both well-known Scandinavian writers - were missing, and received a serious, considered email back. They are now apparently on the waiting list. Realising recently that Elizabeth Bishop was also absent, wrote to him and have just received a courteous email back - Elizabeth's bio will be posted soon, Petri has just returned from holidays.

And for those who might like to know: Katherine Mansfield is listed, as are Janet Frame and Keri Hulme.

~ ~ ~

And now back to work.

More Bodil

I went back to the writing bits in The Price of Water - the main protagonist, a Bodil clone, argues with her French friend Madame C about writing and happiness:

Madame C says: "Please taisez-vous [shut up, but more politely] and write. Write your happiness, shut up and write."
They then have a huge argument where the Bodil character says that it is impossible to write happiness:
"Writing your happiness turns into platitudes. Happiness writes white."
"Write it," she says. Curt and hard as a diamond.
[...]
"Simile, Madame C., simile is the death of everything, a rose fresh as the dew is a rose fresh as the dew. Everything written is fabricated, wrecked. Only what is, is."

That last sentence is Zen-like and therefore irrefutable-seeming.

Madame C was right: she did write her happiness into the book.

Back to Bodil

A bit of a gap since last writing -Passover is a demanding time. Much cooking and eating.

Have dived back into Bodil Malmsten's The Price of Water in Finistere, (2001, translated from Swedish) to rescue myself. It's like talking to a friend. This is my second reading of it, in only about three months, a pleasure.

I pay attention to what she writes about writing, full of hope.

Am working on a sonnet. In praise of Whitireia. Seriously, it has changed my life.

Have read a New Zealand poet, a Bulgarian woman. She arrived here as a young refugee, after passing through many countries, including France. Her name is Kapka Kassabova, it is called Someone else's life (2003, Auckland University Press). (See www.auckland.ac.nz) I had read a poem of hers in The Listener and been impressed.

I miss the luminous clarity of Waslawa Szymborska's poems. I thought I missed them because I understood them, but I realise that I often do not fully understand them either - there are hints in various directions which raise further questions. Also she writes with tenderness and humour.

I had better get to bed and start afresh early tomorrow.

Reviewing Larkin

Have produced 400 words on Larkin's poem This Be The Verse, talked about it with Peter, who said about the title, subjunctive, slightly archaic, and that fits nicely with other things, like the missing Chapter of Chapter and Verse, the bit in the third stanza - Man hands on misery to man, and all the way through the poem, he leavens some of the ghastliness with winks and nudges, absolving some of the blame, and at the end returning to the almost conversational tone of the beginning , with double entendre - Get out as early as you can, / And don't have any kids yourself.

The poem is in Andrew Thwaite's 1988 Philip Larkin; Collected poems, The Marvell Press and faber and faber, p. 180.

Not much extra reading, apart from beginning to re-read The Price of Water in Finistere, by Bodil Malmsten. My recent education helps me look at it differently, I appreciate her writing all the more, I can see the poetry in it.