Constant effort to keep to a routine. This morning, starting early, but already I can see my day unravelling , in terms of what I want to do. Higher priorities.
Reading Ondaatje: one book I've read is Running in the family, autobiographical and prose. I always want to know the background of writers I have to review, though did not find anything much about Szymborska when I reviewed View with a Grain of Salt.
Which reminds me: to my pleasure, one of her poems was read out at the Holocaust Memorial ceremony last night, a beautiful one entitled 'Could have'
It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later
Nearer. Farther off.
It happened, but not to you.
You were saved because you were the first.
You were saved because you were the last.
Alone. With others,
On the right. The left.
Because it was raining. Because of the shade.
Because the day was sunny.
You were in luck - there was a forest.
You were in luck - there were no trees.
You were in luck - a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake.
A jamb, a turn, a quarter-inch, an instant...
So you're here? Still dizzy from
another dodge, close shave, reprieve?
One hole in the net and you slipped through?
I couldn't be more shocked or
speechless.
Listen,
how your heart pounds inside me.
When I interviewed Dorah, who survived WWII in Holland working courageously for the underground, that was the refrain: I was lucky, just as Szymborska writes at the heart of this poem.
Time's up.
Showing posts with label Szymborska. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Szymborska. Show all posts
Friday, 2 May 2008
Thursday, 27 March 2008
Acte de Presence
A busy day, worked on the poem about Mason's Bay and posted it on the blackboard at Whitireia (this is for the short Year 1 course). No time to work on WS, but had a good read about her yesterday, including her recommendations to poets, which are ironic without being scathing . Apparently people could send her their poems and she would respond.
I am keen to read her book of reviews of non-literary books. She apparently reads widely in all subjects. Also found out she knows no English, though she does know a bit of French. Her speech at the Nobel banquet was in French, not very good. Poetry is what she does best, and that she does excellently.
Still reading Sir Vidia's Shadow before going to sleep, the book is working towards a break between the two men, Naipaul and Theroux, I am dreading it.
The title of today's entry reflects my concerns: I am over-committed at the moment and this writing started off just being a dutiful entry without having much to say, just doing my duty is I suppose a way of putting it, but the French expression says 'acting as if present', acting presently, and that is all , not being fully there.
I don't think there is an equivalent expression in English, which brings me to one of the points I want to make about WS's poetry in English, that the translation is so superb, that there is no trace of an accent, by which I mean use of language in ways that are un-English, as far as I can see.
More tomorrow. Two of my guests are leaving. Colette will be visiting someone else over the week-end and someone else again next week.
Good night, it is late.
I am keen to read her book of reviews of non-literary books. She apparently reads widely in all subjects. Also found out she knows no English, though she does know a bit of French. Her speech at the Nobel banquet was in French, not very good. Poetry is what she does best, and that she does excellently.
Still reading Sir Vidia's Shadow before going to sleep, the book is working towards a break between the two men, Naipaul and Theroux, I am dreading it.
The title of today's entry reflects my concerns: I am over-committed at the moment and this writing started off just being a dutiful entry without having much to say, just doing my duty is I suppose a way of putting it, but the French expression says 'acting as if present', acting presently, and that is all , not being fully there.
I don't think there is an equivalent expression in English, which brings me to one of the points I want to make about WS's poetry in English, that the translation is so superb, that there is no trace of an accent, by which I mean use of language in ways that are un-English, as far as I can see.
More tomorrow. Two of my guests are leaving. Colette will be visiting someone else over the week-end and someone else again next week.
Good night, it is late.
Sunday, 9 March 2008
One idea per poem
Sunday morning - Finished reading Waslawa Szymborska yesterday, something happened and her poetry became suddenly much more accessible, re-read some of the early ones and found I understood them better, in fact could not understand why I had not understood them before. She sometimes tells you in the first line what the poem is about, or maybe in the second line.
I think I should write a review of this book, prepare it for later. So here is what I've got in addition to what I've written up to now: this book is a collection of works she has written over the years, starting in 1957, the latest ones being from a book called The End and the Beginning, published in 93, which includes the war poem of the same title which is the one Maxine Hong Kingston read out, with the lines:
Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.
And later:
No sound bites, no photo opportunities,
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.
I was glad to find that poem there, I would like to learn it by heart.
Have read only this morning about an attack in a yeshiva in Jerusalem, 8 dead. I read the names. The youngest was 15. It happened on Friday. I didn't see it reported in the DomPost, and I must have missed it on the BBC. More Palestinians will be killed in retaliation and the situation will become worse. The cameras will be there then. More rage, more fear.
Back to Szymborska. Each poem encapsulates one idea, strictly. I noticed that because of one exception: a sweet poem about her sister, where she deviates ever so slightly, and in that context, it jarred. The poem starts from Szymborska's POV, saying how wonderful it is that no one in her sister's family writes poems - her sister, her sister's father and mother, her sister's husband - she explains why - and then there is a slight switch to a more universal tone and she really writes about her sister, and describes her as good at talking
she has tackled oral prose with some success
and writing postcards from her holidays:
when she gets back, she'll have
so much
much
much to tell.
It seems to me that the switch from the first part, about the family, which she relates back to the sister, is in reality about herself, and the description of the sister as a talkative person is a portrait and different in tone. So the two bits don't quite fit as well as they might. The only reason I noticed it, I believe, is that all the other poems are so beautifully of one piece.
They are often - always? - about abstract notions.
The sister poem is more whimsy-ish.
Apart from that, have greedily started Paul Theroux, Sir Vidia's Shadow, (1998, Hamish Hamilton), got it from the library, and the first 70 pages are already so thought-provoking about many things, Africa, the Indian caste system, the notion of elites of various kinds, and on every page, about writing, Theroux's and Naipaul's (sorry forgot to mention, the Vidia is VS Naipaul and it is the biography of the friendship between the two writers.) I must ration myself, too much prose.
I think I should write a review of this book, prepare it for later. So here is what I've got in addition to what I've written up to now: this book is a collection of works she has written over the years, starting in 1957, the latest ones being from a book called The End and the Beginning, published in 93, which includes the war poem of the same title which is the one Maxine Hong Kingston read out, with the lines:
Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.
And later:
No sound bites, no photo opportunities,
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.
I was glad to find that poem there, I would like to learn it by heart.
Have read only this morning about an attack in a yeshiva in Jerusalem, 8 dead. I read the names. The youngest was 15. It happened on Friday. I didn't see it reported in the DomPost, and I must have missed it on the BBC. More Palestinians will be killed in retaliation and the situation will become worse. The cameras will be there then. More rage, more fear.
Back to Szymborska. Each poem encapsulates one idea, strictly. I noticed that because of one exception: a sweet poem about her sister, where she deviates ever so slightly, and in that context, it jarred. The poem starts from Szymborska's POV, saying how wonderful it is that no one in her sister's family writes poems - her sister, her sister's father and mother, her sister's husband - she explains why - and then there is a slight switch to a more universal tone and she really writes about her sister, and describes her as good at talking
she has tackled oral prose with some success
and writing postcards from her holidays:
when she gets back, she'll have
so much
much
much to tell.
It seems to me that the switch from the first part, about the family, which she relates back to the sister, is in reality about herself, and the description of the sister as a talkative person is a portrait and different in tone. So the two bits don't quite fit as well as they might. The only reason I noticed it, I believe, is that all the other poems are so beautifully of one piece.
They are often - always? - about abstract notions.
The sister poem is more whimsy-ish.
Apart from that, have greedily started Paul Theroux, Sir Vidia's Shadow, (1998, Hamish Hamilton), got it from the library, and the first 70 pages are already so thought-provoking about many things, Africa, the Indian caste system, the notion of elites of various kinds, and on every page, about writing, Theroux's and Naipaul's (sorry forgot to mention, the Vidia is VS Naipaul and it is the biography of the friendship between the two writers.) I must ration myself, too much prose.
Friday, 7 March 2008
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.
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.
Monday, 3 March 2008
Foreign poets
It's just 8:30 am,the blog has to be a part of morning routine or it does not get done. Now I've got to write my first monthly report based on it. That gives it more of a purpose.
Hard fight to keep the writing time intact. Gusti said Would I please visit her, she's never asked before, so must go. She looks smaller than ever.
Took out several yummy looking books on poetry from the library, including the unpronounceable Polish Nobel Prize winner. Shall get them from my bedside.
Wislawa Szymborska. The book is called View with a grain of sand, Selected poems, (Harcourt Brace and Co, translated by S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh, 1993). I read among others Conversation with a stone, which repeats:
I knock at the stone's front door
"It's only me, let me come in".
Her language is simple. The poetry is in the originality of her imagery. I recognise the feeling of knocking on the door of a stone who won't let anyone in, can't let anyone in, a person or a group, for the stone also says: "You lack the sense of taking part", writers are mostly observers rather than joiners in.
Also took out Akhmatova, since reading about her elsewhere. (Poems of Akhmatova, selected, translated and introduced by S. Kunitz with M. Hayward, Collins and Harvill Press, 1974). The first one I read is called Reading Hamlet and I don't know why she wrote it. Shall ask someone who understands Hamlet better than I do. The one called Pushkin - again, it leaves me cold. It's about him, A swarthy youth rambled... maybe the translation is too old, it reads Victorian-ly. Akhmatova was not Victorian. The next one was just as bad - "I wrung my hands...", (their quotation marks, not mine.) It's about a lover's quarrel:
He smiled at me - oh so calmly, terribly -
and said "Why don't you get out of the rain?".
I cannot like it.
I do love Amichai, maybe because I know the original language.
From Quick and bitter:
Slow and sweet were the nights
when my hands did not touch one another in despair
but in the love of your body
which came between them.
The book is entitled Poems of Jerusalem and Love Poems, A Bilingual Edition, The Sheep Meadow Press, New York, 1981.
Lovely, but nevertheless this is all wrong for my purpose, this foreign-ness. I need poems by women whose original language is English.
There is more to say, more has been read, but enough for today.
Hard fight to keep the writing time intact. Gusti said Would I please visit her, she's never asked before, so must go. She looks smaller than ever.
Took out several yummy looking books on poetry from the library, including the unpronounceable Polish Nobel Prize winner. Shall get them from my bedside.
Wislawa Szymborska. The book is called View with a grain of sand, Selected poems, (Harcourt Brace and Co, translated by S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh, 1993). I read among others Conversation with a stone, which repeats:
I knock at the stone's front door
"It's only me, let me come in".
Her language is simple. The poetry is in the originality of her imagery. I recognise the feeling of knocking on the door of a stone who won't let anyone in, can't let anyone in, a person or a group, for the stone also says: "You lack the sense of taking part", writers are mostly observers rather than joiners in.
Also took out Akhmatova, since reading about her elsewhere. (Poems of Akhmatova, selected, translated and introduced by S. Kunitz with M. Hayward, Collins and Harvill Press, 1974). The first one I read is called Reading Hamlet and I don't know why she wrote it. Shall ask someone who understands Hamlet better than I do. The one called Pushkin - again, it leaves me cold. It's about him, A swarthy youth rambled... maybe the translation is too old, it reads Victorian-ly. Akhmatova was not Victorian. The next one was just as bad - "I wrung my hands...", (their quotation marks, not mine.) It's about a lover's quarrel:
He smiled at me - oh so calmly, terribly -
and said "Why don't you get out of the rain?".
I cannot like it.
I do love Amichai, maybe because I know the original language.
From Quick and bitter:
Slow and sweet were the nights
when my hands did not touch one another in despair
but in the love of your body
which came between them.
The book is entitled Poems of Jerusalem and Love Poems, A Bilingual Edition, The Sheep Meadow Press, New York, 1981.
Lovely, but nevertheless this is all wrong for my purpose, this foreign-ness. I need poems by women whose original language is English.
There is more to say, more has been read, but enough for today.
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