Eine Klage-Welt

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Serenity

With my eyes empty, my sight extinguished,
I will sink into my country,
I will walk barefoot through the snow,
torn with longing for an old white field.

I will stare at the edge of the field
blind, not speaking a word.
With black sheep behind me,
burdened by a sorrow without borders,

I will cross the field of snow, my chin nodding against my chest.
I will disappear, humble and silent,
a beggar on the side of the road.
Through ancient towns, through empty villages,
I will walk with my eyes in tears.

Sky blue, sky as red as a tear,
you go dark slowly, so slowly….


Nichita Danilov
from Second-Hand Souls
Translated from Romanian by Sean Cotter

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“Language speaks…. To reflect on language thus demands that we enter into the speaking of language in order to take up our stay with language, i.e., within its speaking, not within our own. Only in that way do we arrive at the region within which it may happen—or also fail to happen—that language will call to us from there and grant us its nature.”

--Martin Heidegger, “Language”

Languages translate each other, not only in the sense of carrying meaning across, but they are mirrors in other ways, the contour of likeness and unlikeness in their ways of re-presenting the world, of pre-senting themselves.

I have been thinking about the “th” --- about how different this is in English and French, for example.

In modern English orthography the digraph “th” erases the distinction between the Anglo-Saxon letters eth and thorn, the voiced and voiceless dental fricatives that persist in speech but are no longer marked in writing. “Then” and “thin,” “path” and “paths.” A forgetting of history, a history of forgetting, oblivion of the origin, a Derridean privilege granted to the written.

In French, it is the other way. A word like “théorie,” where the “th” has long since ceased to sound a "theta," still preserves its history in writing, a trace of its origin in Greece.

The words “thé” and “tea” do something similar, though the history is different, here. Both words are adoptions of the Malay teh, but English makes an approximation of the spoken word and dispenses ruthlessly with any sense of its history. In French, the “h” has metathesized from the end of the word to make what looks like the digraph, though it never was pronounced like the ancient “th” of “théorie.” Still, “thé” preserves history, the marker of its originary movement from language to language.

This principle holds true for most words in the two languages. English “th” erases; French “th” preserves.

Small details, of course, and useless for grammar textbooks. Maybe more useful for poets --- but it is still hard to answer quickly if one asks, “So what?” Hard to answer quickly, but perhaps essential to answer slowly --- someday --- It is material for contemplation…. in suspense now….

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I've been tagged by Sorlil to post "a phrase: a few lines from a poem, a song, or an overheard sentence that rings important inside you."

The below is sort of long, but it is hard to excerpt, and it's still only one section of a longer poem. It is mostly the last three lines that ring inside me, a definition of art, or at least a definition of poetry.

from "The Bouquet" by Wallace Stevens

Section III

The rose, the delphinium, the red, the blue,
Are questions of the looks they get. The bouquet,
Regarded by the meta-men, is quirked

And queered by the lavishings of their will to see.
It stands a sovereign of souvenirs
Neither remembered nor forgotten, nor old,

Nor new, nor in the sense of memory.
It is a symbol, a sovereign of symbols
In its interpretations voluble,

Embellished by the quicknesses of sight,
When in a way of seeing seen, an extreme,
A sovereign, a souvenir, a sign,

Of today, of this morning, of this afternoon,
Not yesterday, nor tomorrow, an appanage
Of indolent summer not quite physical

And yet of summer, the petty tones
Its colors make, the migratory daze,
The doubling second things, not mystical,

The infinite of the actual perceived,
A freedom revealed, a realization touched,
A real made more acute by an unreal.

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Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus (1900)
John William Waterhouse

She on the left troubles the afternoon’s repose. That she opens herself to the moment and inclines toward the object of attention, and the soft, girlish rondeur of arms and shoulders and thighs, the one leg tucked casually under the other. I like her better. She lingers in the mind.

But the two are, of course, one nymph. Waterhouse economizes by painting the same model twice, the same who is a naiad at the top of this page, the same whom he painted seven times in Hylas and the Nymphs, and in many other places. She was Waterhouse’s professional nymph. (Though she probably is not Muriel Foster, as so many irresponsible people on the Internet long for her to be, and there is no real evidence that she and Waterhouse ever had any “romantic” relationship. --- She is Eurydice, though, in all her poses, in a thousand women, Eurydice broken and disjecta.) ---(An addendum, later: Peter Trippi, in his Phaidon book on Waterhouse, says there are actually two models in Hylas and the Nymphs, but they sure are similar....)


This relationship between the two nymphs is the basic structural principle of the image, as attested in early studies for the painting, where details change, but the essential is carried through, the motif of similarity within difference.

This is an allegory of poetics. The two nymphs mirror each other in a musical notation of theme and variation. They translate each other. The two are as if one (and the one is as if two, but that is an abyss…). Here, before the still singing head of Orpheus, they bracket the primal chiasmus of simile, the exchange, the give and take of the like, which is a shiver of pleasure within the frame of the unlike.

It is the ground of poetry. It is also the ground of eroticism, this
dis-covery of similarity within difference. Poetics is an erotics of the word. The erotic is a poetics of the encounter (as many have written). J.W. Waterhouse --- so often treated as just another banal Victorian decorator --- is a great Dichter of this stroke of the logos in the darkness.

And to end, these lines from Michel Deguy (translated as well as one can by Wilson Baldridge):

La comparison entretient l’incomparable
La distinction des choses entre elles
Poésie interdit l’identification
Pour la douceur du comme rigoureuse

Commun? Comme-un
C’est tout comme
Faire comme si
C’était comme-un

Comparison looks after the incomparable
The distinction of things among themselves
Poetry forbids identification
For the sweetness, rigorous, of the like

Community? Comme-unity
Amounts to the same
To act as though
It were a comme-unity

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Lindisfarne

A limited freedom in this secured space like a soldier’s hand in a wired gauntlet. I walk from room to room and wait. For something.

Every Thursday morning the garbage trucks maunder past like a military maneuver, those devourers, and every afternoon my daughter trudges back from school, smiling --- a bit distracted, it seems --- at the dogs restrained by the neighbors’ fences, at the drifts of snow,

her mind somewhere else, though the little cage of her supple bones comes home.

I wanted for years to translate Alcuin’s elegy on the destruction of the monastery at Lindisfarne but there was no way to capture its sorrow and poise, Alcuin’s balanced sense of the tragic. I think this poem is about that failure,

as much as it is about the daughter.

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One who is dear to me writes of the kneeling girl in Brancusi’s La sagesse de la terre: “it is that kind of innate wisdom, intuitive understanding of the right measure, the right way, the way a child sits still with her hands in her lap and nature is at work in her, that quiet life-sustaining energy.”

Sitting alone, the daughter sways slightly on the surge of a rhythm I can’t hear, her eyes closed, focused. When she moves, it is the motion of a young doe across a lighted space in the woods. Such an old image, but she renews it.

The monks gathered without breakfast from their meditations and sang their last matins as the outside walls burned, their song punctuated by the thuds of the rams, screams from the servants’ quarters (I imagine it),

and they saw, Alcuin says, the altar, the goldleaf illuminations, defiled by the dextra ethnica, the “ethnic right hand,” of the Danes.

In Iraq, the soldiers stood by and looters took apart the National Museum. That’s the way to kill history --- Sumerian golden bulls peddled for “culture,” or melted somewhere in the world to cheap wedding rings and bangles for leather bracelets. So little left.

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That the daughter will live in this world, which worries her less than it worries me. That her natural kindness is one term of this chiasmus, her crossing of herself with the world.

No artificial closure for these fragments.

We started out early in the morning and drove along the small, empty roads for a long time, under the sheets of early light hanging from the branches of high trees, past the cows and the pairs of horses that turned toward us, to the ruins,

where the walls were still crumbling,

and the daughter’s face brightened as she reached out to touch the broken stone.

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