The roads to the new moon blocked

From an early poem by Pablo Neruda

¡El Liceo, el Liceo! Toda mi pobre vida
en una jaula triste, ¡mi juventud perdida!
Pero no importa, ¡vamos! pues mañana o pasado
seré burgués lo mismo que cualquier abogado,
que cualquier doctorcito que usa lentes
y lleva cerrados los caminos hacia la luna nueva…
!Qué diablos, y en la vida, como en una revista,
un poeta se tiene que graduar de dentista!


The Lyceum, the Lyceum! All my poor life
In a sad cage, my lost youth!
But it doesn't matter, come on! for tomorrow or the next day
I'll be as bourgeois as any attorney,
or any little bespectacled doctor
and has blocked off the roads to the new moon ...
What the hell, and in life, as in a magazine,
a poet must graduate as a dentist!

Icarus and the fatal man

Golding's Ovid gives us the classical lesson of Icarus:

Wee also lerne by Icarus how good it is to bee
In meane estate and not to clymb too hygh

Thomas Wyatt's 'Stand, whoso list, upon the slipper wheel of high estate' comes to mind: "let me here rejoice, and use my life in quietness".

But there's Lermontov's Demon - his effort to get to the clouds "Стремясь достать до облаков" ... a Romantic "fatal man" cursed by his immortality ... Печальный Демон, дух изгнанья ... A sorrowful demon, spirit of exile ... he sees Tamara at her wedding dance, destroys his rival. When he kisses her there is a direct echo of Icarus in the imagery, the days hot sun melting white wax ...

Она противиться не смела,
Слабела, таяла, горела
От неизвестного огня,
Как белый воск от взоров дня.

She dared not resist,
She weakened, melted, burned
In the unknown fire
Like white wax in the gaze of day.

He destroys her. This links to the romantic fatality of Oscar Wilde:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Cervantes' Siri

The recently launched iPhone 4S is getting plenty of publicity for its voice-recognizing assistant Siri feature that "understands what you say and knows what you mean". It reminds me somewhat of Don Antonio's enchanted brazen head in Don Quixote, although the talking head is actually a trick.

Various friends of Don Antonio ask the head questions, sometimes receiving surprisingly accurate answers, sometimes getting the obvious or tautological. Sancho, for example asks if he will ever escape the hard life of a squire and get back to see his wife and children, to which the less-helpful-than-hoped-for response comes that if he returns to his house he will see his family, and that on ceasing to serve he will cease to be a squire.

On the other hand, Don Antonio's wife asks if she will have many years of enjoyment of her good husband, to which the nice reply is "Thou shalt, for his vigour and his temperate habits promise many years of life, which by their intemperance others so often cut short." - "Sí gozarás, porque su salud y su templanza en el vivir prometen muchos años de vida, la cual muchos suelen acortar por su destemplanza." Ah, that destemplanza! - da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo.

Bitter cold world

Lines by Josef Weinheber - the man honoured by Auden and despite having been a member of the Nazi party famously replied to Goebbels' query about what the Germans could do to enrich Viennese culture replied "in Ruah lossen" (leave us alone) - these are from his short poem 'Forest Paths':

Ach, wie ist die Welt so bitterkalt !
Immer weht derselbe böse Wind

Oh, how the world is so bitter-cold!
Ever blows the same evil wind

Could it have been from her girls' library?

In an earlier post I quoted Flaubert's sentence which provides the key to Emma Bovary's narrative - "Et Emma cherchait à savoir ce que l’on entendait au juste dans la vie par les mots de félicité, de passion et d’ivresse, qui lui avaient paru si beaux dans les livres" - and mentioned how, like Dante before him with the "quando leggemmo" of Paolo and Francesca, the blame for all the trouble is attributed to books.

Dostoevsky plays the same theme. In Part I, Section IV of The Idiot, we learn of how Totsky set up Nastasya Filippovna, in the village of Отрадное ("pleasing" or "comforting", Pevear and Volokhonsky translate it as "Delight") ... В доме нашлись музыкальные инструменты, изящная девичья библиотека, картины, эстампы, карандаши, кисти, краски, удивительная левретка, ... "There were musical instruments in the house, an elegant library for girls, paintings, prints, pencils, brushes, paints, a wonderful greyhound ... " (Pevear and Volokhonsky use "astonishing greyhound" ... "amazing greyhound" would also be good).

And then when Nastasya Filippovna takes it upon herself to go to St Petersburg and cause trouble for Totsky we read:

Эта новая женщина, оказалось, во-первых, необыкновенно много знала и понимала, -- так много, что надо было глубоко удивляться, откуда могла она приобрести такие сведения, выработать в себе такие точные понятия. (Неужели из своей девичьей библиотеки?).

This new woman, it turned out, first of all knew and understood an extraordinary amount - so much that it was a cause of profound wonder where she could have acquired such information, could have developed such precise notions in herself. (Could it have been from her girls' library?)

But it is not only Nastasya Filippovna that has learned too much from books.

When the Epanchin girls are introduced, we read "С ужасом говорилось о том, сколько книг они прочитали" ... "with horror it was told how many books they had read".

A little later, in section VII, Mrs Epanchin, the "generalsha", lashes out at her "learned" (ученых) daughters: with their "умом и многословием" .. "brains and verbosity" ...

Во-первых, от ученых дочек -- отрезала генеральша -- а так как этого и одного довольно, то об остальном нечего и распространяться. Довольно многословия было. Посмотрим, как-то вы обе (я Аглаю не считаю) с вашим умом и многословием вывернетесь, и будете ли вы, многоуважаемая Александра Ивановна, счастливы с вашим почтенным господином?

"First of all, about my learned daughters," Mrs Epanchin snapped, "and since that is enough in itself, there's no point in expatiating on the rest. There's been enough verbosity. We'll see how the two of you (I don't count Aglaya) with your brains and verbosity are going to find your way, and whether you, my much esteemed Alexandra Ivanovna, will be happy with your honourable gentleman."

Typo brides and unacceptable downtown

Peter Porter's poem 'Brides come to the poet's window' presents the serendipitous typo; the first lines are:

Birds it should have been, but pleasure quickens
As the white and peregrine performers land -

Glancing at a recent paper called 'FISMA Compliance and Cloud Computing' I came across the following sentence ...

If the cloud goes down then organizations will have unacceptable downtown that their IT departments can not control causing a stop to the critical services that the organization uses to conduct its daily operations.

'Downtown' instead of 'downtime' suggests the malign influence of spellcheck. Nevertheless there is something poetic, in a sort of robotic or aleatoric way, in this language with its talk of clouds going down and downtowns that IT departments are unable to control.

Time's pupils

One of Berlioz's most famous quotes comes from a letter: "Le temps est un grand maître, dit-on; le malheur est qu'il soit un maître inhumain qui tue ses élèves." - Time is a great teacher, they say, the misfortune is that it is an inhuman teacher who kills his pupils.

I remember seeing a note from Berlioz in the Chopin museum, Warsaw, which began with the playful and punning "Chopinetto, mio".

Chopinetto mio, si fa una villégiatura da noi, à Montmartre rue St. Denis No 10; spero che Hiller, Liszt e Devigny seront accompagnés de Chopin. Enorme Bêtise Tant pis. H.B.

"Choupinette" is a term of endearment, like "sweetie", I guess it's a form of "choupette" which is also used as a pet-name for loved ones, and refers - I think - to a ribbon tied in a girl's hair to make a tuft of hair? - but it is also reminiscent of the pet-name "chou" - which literlally is not one presumes the cabbage, but rather the delicious knobbly sweet bun that is cut in half and stuffed with cream - the chou à la crème; with food like that no wonder there are terms of endearment such as "mon petit chou" and "mon gros"! Perhaps "honeybun" is a good translation of "choupinette".

It seems that the Chopin Museum has been relaunched as an up-to-date museum - which will no doubt attract many more visitors - but I remember fondly the very old-world style of the place - very cheap entry, a few rooms of exhibits under glass cases, watched over by elderly attendants. Although I see that some things in Poland don't change so quickly ... the "regulamin" or "rules" of the museum are posted on its new website, in that splendid Polish-for-contracts with the standard notariusz-approved translation into weird English. Hopefully Warsaw's Muzeum Marii Skłodowskiej-Curie still retains its dull old-world charm.