Poems of the Day

Two I liked. Both about man's dread of nature.

The first is by Connecticut poet (and NEA/Guggenheim Grant recipient) Russell Edson, who specializes in the kind of surreal dark humor you see here:

The Difficulty with a Tree by Russell Edson

 

A woman was fighting a tree. The tree had come to rage at the woman’s attack, breaking free from its earth it waddled at her with its great root feet.
         Goddamn these sentiencies, roared the tree with birds shrieking in its branches.
         Look out, you’ll fall on me, you bastard, screamed the woman as she hit at the tree.
         The tree whisked and whisked with its leafy branches.
         The woman kicked and bit screaming, kill me kill me or I’ll kill you!

         Her husband seeing the commotion came running crying, what tree has lost patience?
         The ax the ax, damnfool, the ax, she screamed.
         Oh no, roared the tree dragging its long roots rhythmically limping like a sea lion towards her husband.
         But oughtn’t we to talk about this? cried her husband.
         But oughtn’t we to talk about this, mimicked his wife.
         But what is this all about? he cried.
         When you see me killing something you should reason that it will want to kill me back, she screamed.

         But before her husband could decide what next action to perform the tree had killed both the wife and her husband.
         Before the woman died she screamed, now do you see?
         He said, what...? And then he died.

 

Should I be rooting for the tree? This is all J.R.R. Tolkien's doing.

 

The second one is by Jane Hirschfield, who is also an essayist and translator of Japanese poetry. It says she was a graduate of Princeton's first class to include women in 1973. (wait-1973? Apparently, yes. They first admitted women in 1969. Jive Ivy League motherfuckers.) Anyways, no humor here but there is a still a dread of nature.

 

Tree by Jane Hirshfield

 

It is foolish

to let a young redwood   

grow next to a house.

Even in this   

one lifetime,

you will have to choose.

That great calm being,

this clutter of soup pots and books—

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.   

Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

First and last for A Nail Through the Heart

First:

Moon and river. House and trees.

Last:

At the end of the path of light, the man and the woman bend toward each other until their foreheads touch. Their eyes are closed.

Great line from A Nail in the Heart

So, I've been reading this mystery by an American PR exec about Thailand, A Nail in the Heart based on a recommendation from Fantastic Fiction. I've been a little obssessed about Thailand since Bangkok 8. Alas, maybe I'd like this book better if I hadn't read Burdett's book first. The characters are a little wooden, although I do like Poke's cop friend Arthit. I like how the main character isn't too annoyingly righteous: he leaves a child porn-producing Australian's murderer unpunished and sells a woman who was a torturer for the Khmer Rouge to her victims. I didn't dislike Poke's girlfriend, former bar girl Rose who is trying to go legit with a maid business, and his would-be adopted daughter and former street orphan Miaow but I didn't feel like I really knew them so I just found them vaguely pleasant. I did like the tidbit about how Rose tore a tiny hole in her cigarette pack to worm her smokes out. It's a habit she learned in the bars so other people wouldn't hit her up for cigarettes. It's the small details that tip the balance.

Most of the writing is competent, if not that memorable. I did like this sequence near the end, a conversation between the American-born Poke and Arthit:

"You know what a cynic is?"

"Yes, Arthit. A cynic is a disappointed romantic."

"A cynic is somone who's been on the train too long."

"The train," Rafferty says, and waits for it.

"I've always wondered why people travel by train," Arthit says. "Trains invariably pass through the shabbiest, most wretched parts of cities. To someone who lived his entire life on a train, the world would seem to be long stretches of emptiness occasionally interrupted by patches of ugliness. Once in a while, you need to get off the train and see what the world's really like."

....

"All right, Arthit. You don't have to hammer it into my skull."

"Oh, I don't know." he slaps Rafferty's empty bottle against his palm. "Westerners seem to have difficulty with metaphors. I've often wondered whether it has something to do with the frontal lobe. your heads are shaped so oddly."

"Tell it to Isaac Newton."

There are two separate child porn plots in the story which was a lot of human nastiness to digest. But, it's a reality of Southeast Asia. I had a lot of trouble swallowing the denouement between Poke and the second kid he takes in, Superman, who was a friend of Miaow's when they were both street kids. Superman starts to trust him and then runs away because he finds explicit pictures of himself on a cd in Poke's laptop. Let me back up here:  In the course of looking for the missing Australian pervert, Poke finds a tower of CD's full of pictures he has taken of children. Bad pictures. And Superman is in the collection. Poke takes them home and puts them in his safe. He is in contact with an adoption agent who thinks he has found a school that will take Superman in but the agent wants some of the pictures to show them as..I dunno, evidence he has been abused? Why would anyone legitimately NEED to see those? And, even if I possessed such pictures and bought all of the above, I certainly wouldn't email them to someone. How would you ever explain that if the law came knocking? Especially in Southeast Asia where the judicial system can be questionable, let's say, and the prisons are the worst places on earth. And, really, gross.

Then again, Hallinan has lived in Thailand for years so he knows more than I do. But I do not buy this plot point which causes Superman (who comes home and goes to play Tetris and finds the CD still in the drive and rightly freaks out) to trash Poke's house and run off. Now he is convinced he must save his friend Miaow from him. Set up for the next book I suppose.

What I did like was the Buddhist ceremony to release Madame Wing's spirit at the end of the book, easily my favorite scene. It makes me curious to read two Western authors now speak in Thai Buddhist terms about hungry ghosts, aura and karmas. Do they get seduced or convinced by that world philosophy by living there or does it just make for good literary tropes?

W.S. Merwin-speaking of poetry

W.S. Merwin is the current Poet Laureate of these United States. Here is an interview he did with the great Bill Moyers in 2009.

He did an interview for the Poetry Off the Shelf podcast (by the National Poetry Foundation) about how to make our culture value poetry more. He gave Latin America as an example of a culture that doesn't view poetry as alienating (definitely he should add the Middle East to that list and Russia I would guess.) His first book of poetry was praised by no less than W.H. Auden.

In the course of the interview, he read his poem "Vixen" which is gorgeous. As with some of the best nature poems, the poem is more about how nature changes the observer. Then it turns into a profoundly melancholic rumination on how to remember and honor this moment as the natural world shrinks.

Anyways, here is a link to Merwin reading it which is great to experience while reading the poem. And here is the poem:
 

Vixen

By W. S. Merwin b. 1927

Comet of stillness princess of what is over

       high note held without trembling without voice without sound

aura of complete darkness keeper of the kept secrets

       of the destroyed stories the escaped dreams the sentences

never caught in words warden of where the river went

       touch of its surface sibyl of the extinguished

window onto the hidden place and the other time

       at the foot of the wall by the road patient without waiting

in the full moonlight of autumn at the hour when I was born

       you no longer go out like a flame at the sight of me

you are still warmer than the moonlight gleaming on you

       even now you are unharmed even now perfect

as you have always been now when your light paws are running

       on the breathless night on the bridge with one end I remember you

when I have heard you the soles of my feet have made answer

       when I have seen you I have waked and slipped from the calendars

from the creeds of difference and the contradictions

       that were my life and all the crumbling fabrications

as long as it lasted until something that we were

       had ended when you are no longer anything

let me catch sight of you again going over the wall

       and before the garden is extinct and the woods are figures

guttering on a screen let my words find their own

      places in the silence after the animals

Poem of the Day-Amy Uyematsu

From the National Poetry Foundation, as usual.

Amy Uyematsu was a math teacher prior to her retirement. She based this poem on photos of rural Japan.

Why I like it: once again, the visuals suck me in. Especially the image of the sleeping flower. The lotus has special significance in buddhism (and in hinduism.) And I can hear the sound the crispy daikon makes when it's eaten.

Inside

By Amy Uyematsu b. 1947 

                      based on photographs from Rural Japan:
                      Radiance of the Ordinary

/ afloat

two boats with no riders

still moving on water

the hulls barely touching

each with a single oar

safely propped

so it won’t fall

/ lotus leaves

close into themselves

at night

on their wide folded backs

water beads

inside, their sleeping

flowers

/ inside

do the carp

just below the water’s stillness

see the pines

/ fall daikon

just pulled from the soil

these pungent roots

hang from bamboo poles

their white tubed bodies

bend as if slightly aroused

each ripe radish will

be drenched

in salt

then eaten raw

all winter

/ lone pine

ancient tree

with so many tongues

how long this throated stem

this stillness before rain

Epistemophilia: why translation matters

For book club this month, we picked a translation of a French novel, The Gods Will Have Blood which, in addition to being one frakking awesome title, was a great book. The correct translation to read of this is by Frederick Davies for Penguin. Fortunately, there aren't a cornucopia of translations available to get confused by but avoid the previous one called "The Gods are Athirst" (a more literal translation of the French title, "Les Dieux Ont Soif.")

The quality of translation is of course essential to the experience and it's not uncommon for someone to look at an old translation and decide it was inadequate, regardless of how successful it was when it was published. I was listening to PRI's World Books podcast and they interviewed Ross Benjamin who has written a new translation of Job by Joseph Roth (1894-1939.) There is a story about it here.The novel is about the lives of Jews in Eastern Europe in the early 20th century. Roth himself was from Galicia (now part of the Ukraine), only a few miles from the Russian border.

The story takes an interesting turn due to the back story of the original translation by Dorothy Thompson which was a sold very well when it was published here back in 1931. Dorothy Thompson herself was an interesting lady. She was a journalist who was thrown out of Nazi Germany in 1934 for filing unflattering stories about Hitler. She was also the wife of Sinclair Lewis. She was considered very influential in her day.

As far as the need for re-translation goes, Benjamin said there is a discrepancy in the translation community over whether the poetry of the original text can be recreated in another language. He feels it should but other translators take a more practical approach. He also disagreed with some choices Thompson made in her word choices. Interestingly, she refers to the ghetto at one point as "the streets of the Jews" which implies it was a larger area than it really was. Benjamin said the correct translation should be "the street of the Jews" which changes the meaning considerably.

Epistemophilia: the world's biggest Jesus

PRI's Geo Quiz did a story about the world's largest Jesus statue. No, it's not in Brazil. Or Bolivia. It's in Poland. Specifically, in Swiebodzin near the German border. As Poland is a poor country, the cost has been somewhat controversial. As has the height. I guess the South Americans are a little miffed. Apparently without the crown, the Bolivian Jesus is still bigger though.

The Guardian did a story about the statue and what was interesting is that despite Poland still being overwhelmingly Catholic, some locals find the statue something of an embarrassing eyesore. Particularly the younger generation who are growing more agnostic like in the rest of Europe.

Poland needs the money so I hope it does bring tourists there. However, I'd shudder to have tacky giant Jesus casting a shadow over my backyard.