TOCSIN

I hope that [Other Men's Flowers] may continue to give some pleasure and afford some help in these difficult days. I have a great belief in the inspiration of poetry towards courage and vision and in its driving power. And we want all the courage and vision at our command, in days of crisis when our future prosperity and greatness hangs in the balance.

- A. P. Wavell, April 1947 introduction to Other Men's Flowers, originally published March 1944.

I've been wondering what the uses of literacy will be, in the coming global environmental catastrophe, and I suspect we will see a return to poetry, song, the story, the fable, myth - those creations which are portable, condensed, and above all, can be transmitted orally. I've always said that when it comes to books you need to be ready to burn them for fuel if you have to, and indeed, we may have to.

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

The Puir Family [La famijja poverella]

Wheesht nou, my darling bairnies, bide ye quaet:
yir faither's comin suin, jist bide a wee.
Oh Virgin of the greitin, please help me,
Virgin of waymenting, ye that can dae't.

My hairts, I wuss that ye cuid ken hou great
my luve is! Dinna greet, or I sall dee.
He'll bring us something hame wi him, you'll see,
and we will get some breid, and ye will eat...

Whit's that ye're sayin, Joe? jist a wee while,
my son, ye dinnae like the dark ava.
Whit can I dae fir ye, if there's nae yle?
Puir Lalla, whit's the maitter? Oh ma bairn,
ye're cauld? But dinnae staund agin the waa:
come and I'll warm ye on yir mammy's airm.

Hesperus Press, who published the excellent Words Are Stones, have begun a new line, Oneworld Classics. As with their main imprint, I'm a little underwhelmed by some of their choices - do we need another edition of Wuthering Heights? - and I guess we'll be seeing more translations by J.G. Nichols, whose writing has left me cold, so far. These are minor cavils though, and blown away by the genuine delight of discovering Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli's sonnets, translated into energetic, earthy, vulgar English by Mike Stocks - and finding at the back, incredibly, twelve translations into Scots by none other than Edinburgh's own Robert Garioch.

Such a surprise. It brings it closer still, even as a non-Scots speaker. You're sitting there reading Stock's version, admiring, enjoying, sometimes charmed, sometimes disgusted - and then it's as if Belli has disappeared off the page, metamorphosed into an Edinburgh street person, and is standing right behind you, breathing down your neck.

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...Belli was the great master of the [Roman] dialect and a scholarly recorder of the filth and blasphemy. [p. 242]

There were a lot of these sonnets - 2,279 - in three fat volumes, and I sometimes thought of dedicating my life to their translation. It would have been a useless venture, for who in the Anglophone world would care about an obscure dialect poet? There were some, not all Romans, who believed Belli to be the greatest poet of the nineteenth century, but his greatness rested on the use of a dialect difficult to translate. Robert Penn Warren, on one of his regular visits to Rome, gave it as his opinion that the nineteenth century greatness had to be shared between Belli and John Keats. [p. 327]

High praise indeed. From You've Had Your Time by Anthony Burgess.

CONCRETE POETRY

Been after the full context of the following quote for some time, as it's mentioned by Heaney and Hughes in essays. Found it in the introduction to Penguin edition collected Milosz poems:

The work of human thought should withstand the test of brutal, naked reality. If it cannot, it is worthless... A man is lying under machine-gun fire on a street in an embattled city. He looks at the pavement and sees a very amusing sight: the cobblestones are standing upright like the quills of a porcupine. The bullets hitting against their edges tilt and displace them. Such moments in the consciousness of a man judge all poets and philosophers. Let us suppose, too, that a certain poet was the hero of literary cafés, and wherever he went was regarded with curiosity and awe. Yet his poems, recalled in such a moment, seem diseased and highbrow. The vision of the cobblestones is unquestionably real; and poetry based on an equally naked experience could survive triumphantly that judgment day of man’s illusions. In the intellectuals who lived through the atrocities of war in Eastern Europe there took place what one might call the elimination of emotional luxuries. Psychoanalytic novels incite them to laughter. They consider the literature of erotic complications, still popular in the West, as trash. Imitation abstract painting bores them. They are hungry - but they want bread, not hors d’oeuvres.

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Found this site on Scottish lullabies. Warms me to see they're operating out of my home area.

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Won't be doing a lot of posting for a while. Baby daughter born 14th May at 12.22 am. Good lungs, feeds and sleeps a lot. Parents less so. Her older brother is, blissfully, attentive and (so far) not jealous.

MORE FROM HERRICK, HUCK

I'm really beginning to enjoy Herrick. He doesn't seem to my under-educated poetic ear and eye to be polished, not for the most part, and some of the poems are no more than doggerel, but he's bawdy, rich, fulsome. I like the way he grabs hold of life:

Come, let us go while we are in our prime,
And take the harmless folly of the time.
We shall grow old apace, and die
Before we know our liberty.
Our life is short, and our days run
As fast away as does the sun,
And, as a vapour or a drop of rain,
Once lost can ne'er be found again:
So when you or I are made
A fable song, or fleeting shade,
All love, all liking, all delight
Lies drowned with us in endless night.
Then, when time serves, and we are but decaying,
Come, my Corinna, come: let's go a-maying.

[From "Corinna's Going a-Maying"]

Here he is in praise of contrasts, or indeed, lingerie:

So, though you're white as swan, or snow,
And have the power to move
A world of men to love:
Yet, when your lawns and silks shall flow,
And that white cloud divide
Into a doubtful twilight, then,
Then will your hidden pride
Raise greater fires in men.

[From "The Lily in a Crystal"]

And on giving up wine (for Lent?):

Let others drink thee freely, and desire
Thee and their lips espoused, while I admire
And love thee - but not taste thee. Let my Muse
Fail of thy former helps, and only use
Her inadulterate strength: what's done by me
Hereafter shall smell of the lamp, not thee.

[From "His Farewell to Sack"]

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This last poem is right for me. Last month I realised that my continually-referred-to "recent" bout of detox took place ten years ago, and so, for the next couple of months, I hope, I'm cutting out caffeine and fast sugar, and strictly regulating my alcohol consumption. The last time I did this I felt physically lighter and more energetic quite quickly, and saw just how powerful these stimulants are. So today, one coffee (I'm breaking myself in slowly, giving myself a week or two before I cut it out totally); no buns, cakes or biscuits; one whisky after supper, purely for medishinal purposes. I read somewhere once that a large malt, preferably well-peated, is good for the blood.

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50 pages to go before I finish Huckleberry Finn. I'm really not enjoying it that much, partly I suspect because I went into it with certain expectations or preconceptions which have, of course, been disappointed. Nevertheless, I keep finding myself wanting to roll my sleeves up, dismantle the narrative and take it in the direction I think it should be going. Partly it's Clemens' writing, which I find believable (especially his dialogue) but not charming, not artful, not exciting, with the exception of one line: "And he wanted to know all about it right off; because it was a grand adventure, and mysterious, and so it hit him where he lived."

Partly it's a question of tone and structure: the novel starts off being one thing, a sequel to Tom Sawyer, then turns into another. That's fair enough - The Lord of the Rings does the same thing, but Tolkien had the huge backdrop of the First Age of Middle-Earth to draw on, and went back and revised his text several times. Clemens may have done the same, but the novel was put aside for years halfway through, and the gap between the two halves doesn't feel as if it's been well-bridged. Although this development, as it's called, is praised as a sign of the work maturing as it goes on, there's a significant difference in tone, including depiction of character, which I find fatal.

One can have an episodic novel, like a picaresque, in which one has no development of character, and no plot, but the vitality of the scenes and language keeps you going; one can have plot and narrative tension featuring characters who are no more than ciphers; one can have beautiful, descriptive prose without much happening at all (I'm thinking of The Leopard) - but you need something to hang onto, and I'm just not finding it.

There are scenes, moments, throwaway lines which provide an insight into the brutality, ignorance and crudity of life in the South, and they are fascinating, and shocking - men standing around with nothing to enjoy, save when they pour kerosene on a stray dog and set light to it, or tie a pan to its tail and watch it run itself to death - the description of mud in the main street of a small town - the casual way in which "nigger" families are broken up, some sent north, some south - which is fascinating, but it's by the way, it doesn't feel as if that's what the novel's concerned with. It's merely one of the ingredients, and hasn't been well-blended with the others.

In short it is nowhere near as good - and I really am sorry to keep banging on about this all the time - as Edgar Pangborn's Davy, which Damon Knight compared to Huck Finn. Fairly, I think: it's possible, probable maybe, that Davy would not exist without the model or template of the older book to draw on, but Pangborn does so much more with it, in terms of weight, tone, language, insight and depth of character. I read it again for the third time last year (1st reading 1986 age 14; 2nd in 2001 age 29) and yes, it is a masterpiece and deserves a place in the Fantasy or SF Masterworks series without a doubt. On this reading I found one weak line in it, a repetition of a gag he'd used two pages earlier, and that was it. I admit it's love, not an uncommon reaction for those who admire Pangborn's writing.

Huckleberry Finn will not stop me reading other things by Clemens, though I think I'll go for non-fiction the next time. I'm pleased to see that Tom Sawyer draws much of his appetite for romance and adventure from the likes of Casanova, Cellini and Dumas, however confusedly. He's better-read than I am.