Covid Diary: 'Winter Pears'

Tuesday 5 January 2021, in the Vaucluse

Sun this morning and snow and fog and the hills to the south layered like a Japanese or Chinese landscape. Hard to catch, but here is a view out the window, and a corner of my attic workspace, the vantage point for my poem ‘Winter Pears’ from my 2018 book The Hotel Eden.

Winter Pears

On the road that descends into La Roque,

After the picnic table

And high-perched cemetery, a pear tree gnarls

Up from a farmyard, hoarding its pears.

A sin to let these fat pears go to waste,

This abundance my fingers ache to pick

(Rotting fruit already litters the ground):

I knock at the farmhouse and ask,

Do they belong to the pears and may we pick some?

But the woman drying her hands on a tea towel

Smiles no, not her pears,

They belong – she points farther down –

The house we stopped at yesterday to read

The handwritten warning tacked to the gate

mon chien court les 200m en 10 secondes

si tu cours moins vite

restes au portail et sonnes!

my dog covers 200m in 10 seconds

if you don’t run that fast

stay at the gate and ring!

We ring, the dog comes belting,

I snatch my hand back

And wait for the lady of the house

In plaid felt slippers

Who is just fine with us picking some pears.

Don’t you eat them? I ask.

A few, she hedges,

Adding, They’re winter pears, they’re hard,

Good only for cooking.

This morning, breakfast done, I lift the pears

From the top of the fridge, and I sort them –

The unblemished

And the windfalls. I take the black-handled,

Paper-thin knife that has been in the kitchen

For maybe a hundred years

The knife that brings to my mind

The black-handled knives that Chardin

Places slantwise across his surfaces,

Utensils

That give his paintings their illusion of depth;

And I carve out the bruises, the fine-bore

Tunnels of worms.

I slice the fruit thinly, until the white flesh

Is almost translucent,

I arrange the slices in the new pot from Ikea

(I burned the old one),

Add a trickle of water

And leave them to simmer.

COVID Diary, view from the attic window

Sunday 3 January 2021

We came down here by train a couple weeks before Christmas, and plan to stay through the expected winter Covid surge, grateful that this time (unlike during the spring lockdown), we can go biking. Last spring we weren’t allowed out for more than an hour and no further than a kilometre from home. The rule was enforced with fines. We were stopped and scolded twice.

This time we’ve decided to see if we can survive without renting a car, depending instead on weekly grocery deliveries from the nearby market town and the tiny village everything shop (café, groceries, bakery, post office, newstand), and in emergencies, by borrowing my husband’s brother’s car.

The épi (épicerie)-café changed management over the summer. The new managers are a young couple, who planned to make most of their money on the café side, since under normal circumstances, most villagers would shop for most of their groceries in bigger towns. They’ve managed to survive under Covid, in part by making really great, takeout pizza several evenings a week. In fact, their pizzas have been such a success some evenings they turn away customers. The wife had a baby a couple of months ago—she was back at the cash register a week later, baby in a basket.

Not having a car means we stay within walking/biking distance of home: no long drives to Sault and the north side of the Mont Ventoux with its easy (well, easier) bike route up the Ventoux, and its wonderful honey, lavender and sausage shops. No trips to Carpentras to Jouvaud, the patisserie. No newspapers (the young couple hope to start carrying the local and national press, but for the moment they don’t), except online. No Ikea on the road to Avignon, but with Covid I wouldn’t want to be milling in those crowds anyway. But I really can’t think of anything else we’d miss. My husband has his flute, we have our nice and not-so-nice neighbors (the 100-year-feud and the recent one), local family members, the ever-changing winter weather, and lots of books. Nothing to complain about, yet.

Giacomo Leopardi (Italy, 1798-1837)

For the last couple of years I have been translating the very great Italian poet, Giacomo Leopardi. I think I first became interested in Leopardi while I was translating the French poet Yves Bonnefoy. Before that I think I’d probably only ever read Leopardi’s ‘To Silvia.’ Bonnefoy admired Leopardi (as lots of poets do) and wrote at least one poem in homage to him.

Some months ago I felt that the first stanza of Leopardi’s long, semi-philosophical poem ‘Broom,’ set on Mount Vesuvius, might be ‘done’ and I sent it to Michael Schmidt, the editor of PNReview, where it has just appeared. There is a paywall, so I am going to print a photograph of the page on which it appears below, because Leopardi is not very well known in the anglophone world and because he is such a very great figure in European poetry. It is true that he is a pessimist; it is also true that he paints his native region, its poorer inhabitants, and the surrounding countryside with the sensuousness of a Poussin, or a Corot or, dare I say, a Constable.

I was saying to someone—well, not actually saying—this was in an email, that working an hour or two every day for months, on translating Leopardi’s Canti is a lot like standing in the Louvre day after day for months, as artists used to (still?) do copying some monument of painting—a Rembrandt, let’s say—and trying to get it right. I’m not trying to impose my own vision on this poem; I just want to reproduce it as faithfully as possible—accurately!—but that of course isn’t just a semantic problem; it includes reproducing all the intangibles that few people consider when they think of translation: the music, the rhythm, the lighting, the total effect on the reader-viewer. (My mother could never get her head around the difficulties of translation; she thought it should be semi-automatic, like transcribing shorthand or typing from a dictaphone, and that it should go very fast, one word after another…).

And now I must go a do three more lines, a sentence, a stanza, of Leopardi’s Canto XXV: ‘Saturday in the Village,’ with its sunset and peasants returning from their fields, its carpenter working late, its young people dancing.

Paris Diary

24 November 2020

Well, here I am again, after a hiatus—everything seemed so repetitive I could no longer get out and chronic about the weather, the empty streets, which are again empty, though our November lockdown is, it seems, to be somewhat eased.

I like the empty streets, I like being able to walk straight down the middle of the rue de Vaugirard, though, I admit with a wary eye for the occasional driver enjoying the chance for speed. A bus trip to an appointment Place de l’Alma takes 10 minutes, as the bus driver rattles along with a little smile on his face. In our neighbourhood the powers that govern us have decided it is roadworks season. First intersecting coloured lines on the roads and sidewalks like a stripped-down metro map; then some portacabins, under our windows, actually, and a WC. Then teams of workers tearing up the sidewalks and carefully stockpiling Ikea-type bags but bigger full of granite paving stones and cobbles. The work starts not long after 6 when the workmen arrive and socialise, loudly. Seems churlish to complain, since they’ve probably trekked in from afar, and it would be understandable if they thought little of the privileged hoping for another hour of quilted sleep.

But I’ve licked all the windows (lecher les vitrines = window shop), and though more shops are open than in the spring lockdown and we can walk (one hour, no further from home than 1 km, carrying a certificate on our honour about why we have ventured outside) to the butcher, the baker, the greengrocer, the fishmonger and even the chocolateer and the most marvelous of hardwares, we would love to be able to go biking, or failing that walking up hills, in the country.

PARIS DIARY

Monday 13 July 2020

A few days ago we had a rehearsal for the Bastille Day flyover looping back to their airfields from the Place de la Concorde. I guess that means we’ll have good seats for the real thing tomorrow.

Life in Paris feels almost normal, absent the tourists. Yesterday the temperature was cool, but the sun was out, and we took a walk along the Right Bank Quai, from the Louvre almost to the Arsenal, and returned via the Iles St Louis and de la Cité, where there was an outdoor flea market on the bridge linking the two islands. The quai was busy with walkers, bikers, scooters, joggers etc. Lots of kids, music, outdoor cafés, sun bathers. We stopped for an ice cream at Berthillon on the Ile St Louis, managed to get a table inside (masks, gel, windows, doors open, half the tables blocked). The line to get in was short, so we waited.

If there are tourists they are mostly invisible and French-, or occasionally Italian-speaking. Café terraces are full, shops are probably emptier than usual, but there are people inside, especially since the sales are on. Most shops won’t let shoppers in without masks, at least around us, and people seem to know and comply without any trouble, unlike what we hear about the situation in the US, which is, frankly, difficult to believe.

PARIS DIARY

Sunday 28th June

Sunday morning and the church across the street is bleating out hymns. They need to up the tempo. On the other hand it may be suited to the world at the moment. 

Street noise most of the night: car doors slamming, people screaming. I listened to an audio production of Medea yesterday and some of the screams sounded like the climax of the play. But I couldn’t bring myself to close the window: the cool air after three days of 90/30+ heat was soothing.

Cool air and breezes. One knocked my insect—bird?—kite off the window where it does double duty as ornament and curtain (there are neighbours right across the courtyard). I lay it on the bed, then I stepped on the pushpin that held the kite and had popped off. Tried to push it back into the wood with my thumb, too hard; the hammer was in a cupboard in a toolbox and I was feeling lazy. My eye fell on the long, smooth, black, flat-on-one-side stone I beachcombed somewhere (Vancouver? Brittany?) that I use as a paperweight I thought of my stone age forebears and used the stone. Bang, bang. Perfect! The kite is back up.

PARIS DIARY

Tuesday 23 June 2020

Life seems to return to normal. Yesterday all kindergarten, primary and middle school pupils went back to school for the last two weeks of the school year; social distancing, from what I read, has been somewhat relaxed in the classroom, and it is expected that 90% of pupils will be present. Families around us returned from the country, and when I asked two pre-teens in our building how school was today late this afternoon, they said, ‘Très bien, merci Madame.’

I ran grocery errands in the covered market, then we took today’s Le Monde to the park and read it. The usual boulles, chess and checker players; the children’s playground newly open and full of small children and their parents or grandparents or minders. Everything looked very green with out fresh eyes, the chestnut trees taller, the delphinium bluer…

It is hotter tonight. We ordered a mobile AC unit, but it isn’t being delivered till next Monday, when perhaps we won’t need it any more. Tomorrow I’m doing a shift at the Soupe. We were said to be one of the few soup kitchens open, and had almost twice the usual number of eaters, but perhaps the city’s other kitchens are also reopening?

PARIS DIARY

Sunday 21 June 2020

Paris begins to feel like life as usual. Aperitif with neighbours last night; we all (four) arrived with masks, which no one wore. I window-shopped the sales. On the other hand, there was a long line on the sidewalk to gain access to the Bon Marché department store, which may or may not have started its sales; the hotel around the corner, behind the church, is apparently on the verge of bankruptcy, perhaps helped by a small encampment of homeless people nearby; I had a package delivered from India via DHL by a young man on a bicycle who could have been my son--not the usual delivery profile--maybe a student with a summer job--but not your usual middle class (whatever that means) student summer job; the number of bag lunches being handed out at the Soupe Populaire, where I worked a shift on Thursday, is almost double the number of lunches the Soupe was serving before the lockdown.