Cicadas

For a poem--perhaps--I was playing with cicadas and thinking of the south of France. 'Insouciant' popped up as a way to describe my cicada, emblem of summer in the south, reproduced in pottery and pins, heroine of the fable about the ant and the cicada (both feminine nouns in French). But the English dictionary gives 'insouciant,' a word that has intimations of joy and lightness in French, a negative turn: "showing a casual lack of concern; indifferent." So it goes,large cultural differences in a little word.

Cicada in Italian (now I'm on Wikipedia): 'cicala,' a children's word for 'vagina.' In China 'to shed the golden cicada skin' means to use deception, decoys, to escape danger. In Japan a symbol of reincarnation and ephemerality...

Are poetry books (US) too long?

Is it just me or are US poetry books getting longer, poems increasingly spaced out? I'm looking at a recent book from FSG: 103 pages long...but each page only contains 16-20 lines of poetry depending on how many stanza breaks there are. Beautifully set, of course, all that white space is like velvet under gems in a jewelry shop--or so I imagine, not having spent much time in jewelry shops.

So I looked at a couple of recent Faber poetry books. They tend to have fewer pages (51 for Maurice Riordan's new book; 85 for Heaney's Human Chain) but more lines per page. They still look good though. Maybe it all works out to the same thing? Maybe if the books are fatter the price can be higher? ($24 for FSG, 13 pounds sterling for FF).

Yves Bonnefoy, Rue Traversière

I see my last post was about dishwashers--well, I'm done with Season 5 of Downton Abbey, but the dishwasher repair folk are still coming and going, and I afraid we may have to replace the dw because they can't keep making weekly visits forever, can they?

Aside from that, it's a pleasure to announce the publication of my translation of Yves Bonnefoy's collection of prose pieces (I say "pieces" because I'm not sure what other all-encompassing term--texts?--to use. A lot of these would fall into the category of prose poems, but others are more like personal essays, on dreams, on art, on travelling, on memory, on childhood, on some combination of all these things), Rue Traversière (Seagull Books). My copies arrived a week or so ago, and I have really enjoyed rereading them. Each of them, I think, has eternal value. This small book was originally published in the 70s, then YB added--as he often does--some more essays and collected it again as Rue Traversière and Other Dream Tales. I only translated the shorter, cohesive, poetic group of essays--for now--in part because I love the way it stands alone--the collection greater than the sum of its parts--as, in my view (it is unstable) a poetry collection should, a reason to admire the British way of publishing books of poetry that are sometimes only 48 pages long. 

Dishwashers come to Downton Abbey

The dishwasher repairman is here for the third time in two weeks. The dishwasher, an oldie we inherited along with the new apartment, of respectable brand, runs and runs until you turn it off and it is still bubbling with soapy water and greasy dishes. Once we turned it on a bedtime--high hopes after the first repair--and it was still running when we put the kettle on next morning. Silently, luckily.

Actually I don't mind washing dishes, since it is my husband who does them. And I do like drying and put them away, one of those tidying tasks, like ironing and sweeping up crumbs, that make the world feel like a safer place.

The third repairman is changing the computer board. Lots of pretty little colored wires and silvery appendages for innards, which make me think we will all be better off when we are robots. I'm a little nervous because he just excused himself to go and call his base. 

When he goes I get to make my fourth or fifth or sixth trip in two weeks to Ikea, ferreting out the actually-quite-pretty indispensable objects like Japanese-shaped small bowls for yoghurt (an interesting cross-cultural mix). I think I'm as hooked on Ikea as on Downton Abbey. I've watched all but the last episode of Season Five. Instead of watching the last one yesterday, I delayed and watched the second-to-last episode again, thinking: "all these soon-to-be happy couples upstairs and downstairs, what a novel! Only sad sweet Anna and Bates to keep us watching into the next season? Or will we still be watching in years to come? No, I guess not. Hard to keep Maggie Smith in the plot forever and so many happy endings waiting in the wings. What will the finale be? A wedding, the return-from-the dead of Edith's lover (no, she's going to be A Professional Woman), upstairs and downstairs meeting at--where could they credibly meet?

Cixous, Grosholz, Vines

Yesterday I finished translating Hélène Cixous's Chapitre Los.  I still have to make some corrections in the first part of the text, based on consultations with HC while I was in Paris. Then I shall leave it aside for a few weeks before I make my final run-through. When I do, I won't go back to the French text , because what I really want to see and hear is whether the text reads well in English, semantically, of course, but also musically.

Emily Grosholz, the poet and philosopher, and fellow translator of Yves Bonnefoy, has published a collection of poems called Childhood, with drawings by Lucy Vines. I was a little apprehensive when I picked up Grosholz's book, because, as a title for a book of poems, "childhood" seems a little forthright. Wrongly apprehensive, as I should have known. The poems are terrific, a mixture of intelligence and lyricism characteristic of Grosholz's poems,  which I've long admired. And Vine's drawings exist in a haunted, dreamlike mindscape of their own. They can also be seen at the Thessa Herold Gallery in Paris.

Tuesday and the sun is out

along the creek. Yesterday I walked up it, a short distance, to the railway tracks and bridge. I wanted to see El Palo Alto, an old redwood tree, so old it merits a plaque set in a granite boulder at its foot for being "a campsite for the Portola Expedition party in 1769." I don't know what the Portola Expedition was, but it shouldn't be hard to find out: ah it was the first recorded Spanish/European land entry and exploration of what is today the state of California but which was then itself-in-itself/a disputed c16 land grab by Spain (Cabrillo) and England (Drake).

There is a trickle of water, a plaque speaks of steelhead, though the creek, which runs from the hills into San Francisco Bay, is mostly dry in summer. El Palo Alto gets its top spritzed by the city and its roots (shallow) aren't happy during droughts. The creek itself is a nice bit of unprettified wilderness between two suburban towns. 

Selfie

A review of Tom Lux's Selected Poems (Bloodaxe) in The Guardian a few days ago.

And a poem of my own in the Times Literary Supplement of January 9th:

       Degas’s Bather

The orchards of the internet have rooms

for my virtual museums, and portals

to fancies I suppress—Roman revels

enhanced with sound effects, like my neighbour

this noon in his condo, earthquake water

stacked prudently on his porch,

a redwood to shade our double windows. 

Sounds like he’s surfed a porno flick. Her yelps

ring out in waves like ripples a pebble

makes, plopped into water. And here’s the jug

she’ll sluice her back with in a second

or a century: longing’s embodiment

as I polish off my chicken breast, chased

with last night’s wine, my foraged plum.

Hélène Cixous, Chapitre Los

I am getting to the end of my translation of HC's book Chapitre Los (Paris: Galilée, 2013). This is the second or third or fourth draft, I forget, and I will leave it on the back burner now for a while, then revise it once more before I send it to Polity Press. I forget what my deadline is, sometime in the Spring, I believe.

I am still going back and forth between the English translation and the French text, but when I do the final read through, I will read only the English to make sure the book is rid of translationese, that it reads like an English book, an imaginative English book, if possible. This is not so easy as you might think, because Cixous doesn't write conventional French, and so the translation must sound unconventionally, experimentally English.

This morning, on page 88 of the French, I worked on this little prose poem, which can, I think, stand alone. Some context: Los is "about" (this is shorthand, I use the word advisedly) the death of Carlos Fuentes with whom Cixous had a "relationship" in the late 60s, and all her memories of him, of them, of the period (I abbreviate, the book is short but dense). She has been informed that her letters are part of his archives:

                        Los, a Chapter 

      "Letters. Ghosts they say. What a laugh. They are so much more alive than we        poor humans, our tired beings, our perishable bodies.

     I thought they’d stopped writing one another. But they go on, writing, talking, exchanging the news. When we forget they remember. That’s why we brought them into the world, to free them from our deaths. What is it to them whether we agree or disagree?

     Where? In numbered files. In boxes filthy as those goods trucks with immigrants stashed under their tarps, after they’ve crossed the planet.

     A part of your soul that completely escapes you and is sealed: a supernatural kind of dream, kept safe, out of reach.

     Under my name another."