Vor dem Sturm
by Theodor Fontane
“The German War and Peace"
(apparently)
I picked it up in Edinburgh
& was immediately
beguiled
the heroine seemed real
Renate von Vitzewitz
stagey action
understated
like real life
her tragic early death
a psychic blow
The Pioneers
by James Fenimore Cooper
I had a plan to read them all
The Leatherstocking Novels
dutifully ploughed through
the first few
but this one
The drifting snow
of its opening pages
the meeting on the road
the little town
in the Big Woods
It all seemed true
or if not true
infinitely desirable
but why?
Then John Meade Falkner,
The Nebuly Coat
not one of his
most celebrated works
(Moonfleet
The Lost Stradivarius)
but this one had
the atmosphere
of strange but vital friendships
formed in musty towns
deep conversations
a world one longed to enter
Three times it's happened
– 3 obscure books –
I've never dared reread them
Would it happen again?
Do I want it to?
I wonder
It was comforting, entrancing, mystical
like waking on your ownin the blue room
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Before the Storm
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
Hooked on Classics
Recently I was invited to a poetry gathering up north where I read out some of my versions from Sappho. Afterwards a rather indignant-looking elderly lady came up to me, introducing herself as a former Latin teacher:
“What you read – that was all right, that wasn’t too bad … but some of those poets are just filthy, complete degenerates. Catullus, for instance. In one of his poems he actually encourages another man to go to bed with his girlfriend! Three of them, all together! It’s depraved …”
I agreed that he was a bit of a one (actually I was secretly relieved that she wasn’t intent on criticising some of my more daring translation choices), whilst congratulating myself inwardly that I hadn’t chosen anything raunchy from Ovid or Anakreon or any of the less respectable Greek or Latin poets.
Eventually I managed to escape without committing myself to any too quotable opinions about the morals of the ancient world.
It got me thinking, though. What is it with the Classics? "Reams of ancient filth," as my father used to put it (apparently the editions of Latin authors they used at school had all the "adult" bits taken out and printed at the back in an appendix for scholarly reference; I think you can guess which parts of the book were most thumbed and dog-eared ...)
Anyway, the latest issue of Ka Mate Ka Ora includes some more of my reflections on the subject in the form of a review-essay of Ted Jenner's recent Titus Books collection Writers in Residence ...
Ted Jenner is perhaps unusual among modern writers in being a Greek scholar as well as a poet. Most other venturers into the field of classical translation nowadays (myself included) seem content with a Loeb dual-text and a lot of - possibly unmerited - self-confidence.
You don't really learn anything new that way, though. What's fascinating about Ted's work is the precision and finesse with which he reconstructs these fragments of the past, some of them literally combed out of the rubbish-dumps of Egypt (it's amazing how long papyrus can survive in a really dry climate).
Obviously I have a good deal more to say about that in my piece over at the nzepc. For the moment, however, here's a brief listing of Ted's publications to date (I've also included a few illustrations so you can appreciate what beautiful pieces of bookmaking many of them are):
- A Memorial Brass. Eastbourne, Wellington: Hawk Press, 1980.
- Dedications. Auckland: Omphalos Press, 1991.
- The Love-Songs of Ibykos: 22 Fragments. Auckland: Holloway Press, 1997.
- Sappho Triptych. Auckland: Puriri Press, 2007.
- Writers in Residence and Other Captive Fauna. Auckland: Titus Books, 2009.
You can hear more of Ted's own views in the online interview with Brett Cross and Scott Hamilton available here.
And if your curiosity extends even beyond that, why not have a look at the pages on Anne Carson and Michael Harlow which I'm gradually building up for our new Massey MA course Contemporary New Zealand Writers in an International Context?
Carson is herself a very considerable scholar (witness her fascinating 1999 book Economy of the Unlost, which daringly juxtaposes the poetry of Paul Celan with the surviving lyric fragments of Simonides of Ceos) ...
But that's more than enough self-advertising from me for the moment. Do check out the new (James K. Baxter-themed) issue of Ka Mate Ka Ora if you have a moment, though.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Fakery
The epic battle against recidivism at the Dargaville Museum outlined in a series of recent posts on Reading the Maps (and rather amusingly replied to on Art, Life, TV, etc.) has got me to thinking about the whole subject of fakes and fakery in general.
Why is it I'm so instinctively drawn to books of pseudo-history and ridiculously unlikely theories propounded by ignoramuses?
Did you know, for instance, that the "appearance of mu" in the word "Pounamu" defines it "as a religious relic from Lemurian times"? I bet you didn't. And yet it must be so, because I read it in a book, a most entertaining and interesting volume entitled The Atlantis Encyclopedia, by Joseph Frank (Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books, 2005), pp.228-29. Frank's book contains a foreword by Brad Steiger, a veteran in the field, and author of the celebrated Atlantis Rising (1973), among many other volumes. Atlantis Rising has a most intriguing passage in it which he considers the possibility that Atlantis may be all around us even as we speak!
As far-fetched as it may seem, for one moment consider that the incredible technology of Atlantis was able to step up the individual frequency of every man, woman, and child, every rock, flower, tree, and the very earth of their island continent and translate them into the fourth dimension.
Atlantis did not sink below the earth in a single day of an antediluvian cataclysm: Atlantis trembled for twenty-four hours as incredible machines raised its vibratory rate until it could materialise in another spectrum of tangibility and establish itself in another space-time continuum.
Atlantis may be all around us and may be entered through certain window areas of dimensional interpenetration.
Don’t be in a hurry to find such an ultra dimensional door, however; a single day in Atlantis may be equal to a month, a year, a decade in our own space-time continuum.
[Brad Steiger, Atlantis Rising. 1973 (London: Sphere Books, 1977): 136-37]
Rather a lot of "mays" and "mights" and other uses of the conditional tense in that extract, don't you think? Why might a day in Atlantis be equal to a month, a year or a decade in our own "space-time continuum"? Because that's what happens in the Narnia books? Or just because it's kind of fun to imagine it? (You never know, maybe future film-rights might be based on the idea ...)
Steiger has his tongue firmly in his cheek, I suspect, unlike his acolyte Joseph Frank, whose solemn, po-faced entries on such subjects as "Wai-ta-hanui" ["New Zealand's oldest known tribe, said to have arrived more than 2,000 years ago ... The Waitahanui were supposed to have been prodigious mariners who navigated the world in ocean-going sailing ships, and raised colossal stone structures, of which the Kaimanawa wall is the last surviving example." (p.287)] or "Mu" ["Atlantis and Mu engaged in some cultural interchange, but the peaceful Lemurians mostly regarded imperialist Atlanteans with a veiled mixture of dread and contempt." (p.188)] would be guaranteed to raise the hackles of Maps and all his PC archaeological buddies.
Why the hell do people write this kind of drivel?, I ask myself as I leaf through my little library of Atlantiana & Lemuriosity. I know why they publish it - because it sells. Which must mean that people enjoy reading it. Do they believe it? Not all of them can be postmodernist game-players addicted to the spurious and kitschy (which I suppose is my melancholy motivation for collecting it), but I doubt they're all credulous Trekkies and star-children, either. it's a kind of region of speculative semi-fiction, I suppose. Nice to read about and indulge in as a kind of "what-if."
Fundamentally, though, I think its appeal is based on mistrust. We don't really feel we can rely on "experts" any more. Too many cases of intellectual fraud and self-interest in the academic and scientific establishment have left them (or us) with about as much street-cred as so many used-car salesmen (or politicians, to take it down a couple of rungs). "Who pays your salary?" is - unfortunately - the only relevant question to ask of most "authorities": in court, in the lecture room, in print, or anywhere else for that matter.
At least cranks' motivations tend to be fairly easily discoverable - when they're not already firmly emblazoned on their sleeves. Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that I take a sympathetic interest in the views of neo-Nazis or Holocaust-deniers (or neo-Colonialists, for that matter) - but that's not because they're ill-informed idiots, it's because of the sheer horror of the crimes they're attempting to palliate. I'd say the same for apologists for Stalin or Mao, for that matter. Or any other gloomy old tyrant or mass-murderer. Sorry Mr Dolan, but I'm not too impressed by the morals of Genghis Khan, either ...
People who read books about Atlantis and the Martian pyramid and NASA's great Moon-landing hoax are not necessarily idiots (or if they are, then I'm one too - which might not be too much of a stretch for regular readers of this blog). They read them because they're halfway convinced already that everything told them by officialdom is a lie if not the result of a conspiracy. What else are they to think when big US companies have started paying their executives billion-dollar bonuses again before the ink is even dry on the blank cheques paid over to them by Congress? That we can trust our Lords and masters? That they have our best interests at heart?
Anybody who'd like to investigate further the relationship between literary fakes and the standard tropes of postmodernism could do worse than read Ken Ruthven's fascinating and provocative Faking Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), where he goes through all the various scandals where allegedly "indigenous" writers ('B. Wongar', Helen 'Demidenko' [Darville]) have been praised to the skies for their sensitive and nunanced portrayals of alternate world-views, then "caught out" and denounced for their clumsy impostures a few months later.
The books hadn't changed. They still had the same fixed arrangements of white space and black letters as before. The only thing that had changed was the shitheads composing the reviews. So much did they hate being exposed as credulous dupes and tone-deaf critics, that they had to react with swift disproportionate rage to avoid exposing the whole nonsensical ramp of "established artistic reputations" altogether.
Funnily enough, I found Ruthven's book, virtually brand-new, on the chuck-out pile at Auckland Central Library, priced at one dollar, so maybe somebody inside that august institution felt a little queasy about its implications. Call me paranoid, but ...
No, seriously, the subject is clearly a complex one. But you can't go on teaching people to distrust fixed ideas and commonplaces, to test out ideas for themselves, and then expect them to except all the ideas you're trying to peddle to them. You know you're right - that your ideas are sound, well-researched, academically respectable. But why should they accept it on your say-so? It may be worrying to watch people reading books about Celtic NZ and the Chinese influence on the Italian Renaissance instead of "sound" historical research - I find it extremely irritating seeing people reading Jeffery Archer instead of trying to penetrate my own portentous and labyrinthine tomes - but you can't really blame them sometimes.
Why are they doing it? What do they find in these books? Those, I think, are the questions we should be asking instead.
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