Wildes Licht / Wild Light

[Dieter Riemenschneider: Wildes Licht (2010)]

It's weird seeing yourself in a foreign language. Last night I was at the booklaunch of Wildes Licht: Poems / Gedichte aus Aotearoa Neuseeland, a bilingual English / German anthology of New Zealand poetry, translated and edited by Dieter Riemenschneider, and available from Tranzlit publishers (or from a bookseller near you).

The title comes from Michele Leggott's poem "Wild Light", and you'll find a really fascinating assortment of poems old and new in there. Why I'm in there is a little harder to say (you'll have to ask Dieter), but I have to say that I certainly value the opportunity to see my words through the transverse lense of his careful translation:

Situations ii: CBD

Auckland nach dem Regen

NO VACANCIES
at the “City of Sails” motel.
It’s hard to convey how strange that is:
dark, skid-marked streets; day after day
of grey …
Who the fuck’s there?

Two loonies
standing by the road
(blue parka, beige kagoul)
not waiting for anything
– just waiting.
By a roundabout.

It’s ten at night.


Rain-slick streets are cool.

has become:

Ortsverhalte ii: CBD

Auckland nach dem Regen

BELEGT
das “City of Sails” Motel.
's ist schwer zu sagen wie merkwürdig das ist:
dunkle Schleuderspurenstraßen; tagelanges
Grau …
Wer verdammt ist da?

Zwei Verrückte
stehen am Straßenrand
(blauer Parka, beiger Anorak)
warten auf nichts
– warten nur.
An einem Verkehrskreisel.

’s ist zehn am Abend.


Die regenglatten Straßen sind kühl.

The title (in the unlikely event you hadn't noticed) makes reference to Max Ernst's apocalyptic "Europe after the Rain" paintings from the 1940s - which seemed very appropriate to me in 1998, when this poem was written, as the whole city was blacked-out and diesel generators were chugging away in every shop door in the CBD.

[Max Ernst: Europa nach dem Regen II (1940-42)]

Beyond that, I particularly like the way that my loonies have become Zwei Verrückte [two crazies], and my "Who the fuck’s there?" has been transformed into the equally-heartfelt: Wer verdammt ist da?

Oh, there are joys innumerable to be found in this anthology. You owe it to yourself to read Allen Curnow's "Das Skelett des Großen Moa in Canterburymuseum, Christchurch":

Nicht ich, ein Kind kommt wunderbar zur Welt
und lernt den Trick, wie man sich aufrecht stellt.

(Pretty clever, getting it to rhyme as well), or Hone Tuwhare's "Keine gewöhnliche Sonne" [No Ordinary Sun], or Apirana Taylor's "Trauriger Witz auf einem Marae" [Sad Joke on a Marae] ...

Why is it so appealing to see these familiar poems in such a new guise? I have to say that I hope this is the first of many such anthologies. There was a bilingual French selection of New Zealand poets included in the journal Europe a few years ago: No 931 (Novembre 2006) – Écrivains de Nouvelle-Zélande, but that doesn't really compare with the epic breadth of Dieter's fascinatingly various sampling of historic and contemporary New Zealand poetry to date.

Anyway, check it out if you get the chance. The initial booklaunch in Auckland will be followed by a road-trip during which Dieter and Jan will launch the book at various venues in Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. I'll put up more exact dates and details as soon as they come to hand.

In the meantime, though, I'll leave you with some lines from one of my favourite Curnow poems, "Man wird es wissen wenn man dort ist" [You Will Know When You Get There]:

Hinab geht mann allein, so spät, in den wogenschwarzen Bodenriss.

Down you go alone, so late, into the surge-black fissure.

Isn't that word wogenschwarzen wonderful? "Fissure" still wins out over Bodenriss, though, I think: such a weight of implication in just the sound of those last few words ...

Stokes Point

[Stokes Point, Northcote]

I'm co-editing a book on Auckland for our Massey University monograph series. The working title is A Super City: Views of Auckland, and it will consist of a series of essays by members of the School of Social and Cultural Studies, where I work, on various aspects of the city seen through the lenses of our diverse disciplines. You can find further details here.

Since our school happens to include Anthropologists, Historians, Linguists, Literary & Media specialists, Political Scientists and Sociologists, we're hoping the results will be pretty interesting. It's intended for a general audience as well as the students in our "Auckland: A Social and Cultural Study" summer-school course.

My co-editor Grant Duncan has already posted the abstract for his essay online, and you can request a draft of the whole piece from him here.

[Felton Mathews: Map of the Harbour of Waitemata (1841)]

My own essay is about Stokes Point, in Northcote (originally called Pt. Rough), which is the little reserve right under the Harbour Bridge, the spit of land from which it launches itself out towards the city. The particular angle I take on it might be seen as somewhat controversial, so I won't say any more about that here except to say that the working title is "The Stokes Point Pillars." If you want to know more, you'll have to read the book (due out in October).

What I thought I'd post here instead is a kind of suite of views of Stokes Point, from my visit there last Saturday with Bronwyn's digital camera.

•

[The View from the Shore]

[The Avenue of Pillars]

[Pohutukawas in Plastic]

[Car Park]

[Barriers]

[War of the Worlds]

[Plaque]

[Signage]

[Graffiti]

[Karnak]

[The Convergence of the Twain]

Strange Coincidences

[Jan Potocki: The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. 1989.
Trans. Ian Maclean. 1995 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1996)]

Yesterday I went into town to return a few library books and meet up with some literary cronies. The bus was a bit late, though, so I had time to duck into the local Opportunity Shop. If you've read the post below, you'll understand how surprised I was to find this book, which cost me all of two dollars.

Yes, there it is, Goya's Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (though I notice that the translation on the back cover gives it as the "dream" of reason - an equally valid translation).

But there was something else waiting for me in that op shop - this:

[Jack Ross: Requiem. Hutchinson (London: Random House, 2008)]

I know I've made rather a song and dance in the past about doubles and doppelgängers and other such appurtenances of the Gothic (in fact, you may not have noticed, but in the sidebar to this blog I've got a little collection of "Jack Rosses": the Aboriginal Artist, the Alabama Treasurer, the Bearded Muser, the Brooklyn Copperhead, the Chartered Accountant, the Footballer, the Spoonerist, the Thriller Writer, and the Australian WW1 Veteran ...). This one was the Scottish thriller-writer.

So far so good. That's not the end of it, though. You see, I have a bit of a history with this Manuscript found at Saragossa novel. The reason I didn't already have a copy of this - very handsome - Penguin edition was that I bought the book in French when it first appeared in 1989, on the strength of a long and laudatory review in the TLS, which made it sound like the literary discovery of the decade.

[Jean Potocki: Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse. Ed. René Radrizzani (Paris: José Corti, 1989)]

It's hard to separate fact from legend where this bizarre book is concerned, but it appears to have been written in French by the Polish Nobleman Count Jan Potocki sometime between the years 1805 and 1815 (when he committed suicide, allegedly with a silver bullet which he'd had blessed by his parish priest in advance). He published a few extracts from it in his lifetime - first in Saint Petersburg, in Russian, and then in Paris, in the original French. The complete manuscript is, however, lost, and while four-fifths of the text survives in something approaching Potocki's final text, the other portions had to be retranslated into French from a Polish translation made in 1847). This is probably what delayed the first complete edition of his book until 1989.

I bought my copy in Brussels, hot off the press, and promptly started to read it (I guess what attracted me was the pattern of nested stories within a complex frame, so like the Oulipo-ian fictions of Georges Perec, whose Life, A User's Manual (1978) I'd also recently discovered). There was, however, an error in my copy - a missing line (or lines) on p.403.

I had to wait till the second edition of the French text, in 1991, before I was able to fill it in. It turned out to consist of just one word: "parts".

[Potocki: Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse (1989): 403]

The passage (spoken by the Wandering Jew, one of the innumerable storytellers in the book) translates more or less as follows:

At this time, the Essenes had already formed their bizarre association. They had no wives, and their goods were held in common: on all sides, one could see nothing but new religions, mixtures of Judaism and Zoroastrianism, mixtures of Sabianism and Platonism, and above all lots of astrology. The ancient religions built themselves up with pieces from everywhere.

The missing word comes on p.403 of a book written almost two centuries before the appearance of its first edition. Four and three make seven (just that weekend I'd been discussing the mystic associations of the number seven with a group of students, à propos of the seven gates of the Underworld traversed by the goddess Ishtar).

The passage comes from the 36th day of a story which extends over 66 days (allegedly written down by its narrator, Alphonse van Worden, in 1769, thirty years after the events described, and then sealed in an iron box form which it is extracted by a French soldier at the siege of Saragossa in 1809). 3 and 6 make nine, another number of mystic efficacy (three trinities, etc. etc.)

Hard to say what it all means (if anything), but suffice it to say that mysteries are all around us ... I hope all these omens promise good fortune and not bad. Not for nothing did I put down my religion as "irrational superstition" in the last census!