Basho

 

Whenever winds blow

the butterfly finds a new place

on the willow tree

 

A Dutchman arrives

to view cherry blossoms

from his saddle

 

A lovely spring night

suddenly vanished while we

viewed cherry blossoms

 

Nothing in the cry

of cicadas suggests they

are about to die

 

With no umbrella

in cold, early winter rain--

ah, well! So be it! 

Being useless,

my daydreams are disturbed

by noisy warblers

 

-Matsuo Bashō (tr. Sam Hamill)

 

Bashō (1644-1694) was a Japanese poet and travel writer, famous in his own day. (Write me a poem, Matsuo Bashō, and he frequently did.) I recently finished this collection--very good! A mix of poems and travel writing. I was a bit surprised how his travels felt quite like a modern tourist, off to see temple complexes or areas of great natural beauty. Of course the one time I got to see something in Japan, I went and saw a temple complex.

 

These are just a random few of the haiku in the volume, ones that appealed to me. You'll notice that in Hamill's translation they're not particularly rigorous about the 5-7-5 syllable system, but the introduction suggests that Bashō himself wasn't particularly rigorous either. They do show the typical haiku structure: an observation of a natural setting with a turn in the third line.  

 

 

It's Number 18 and that means... (#CCSpin)

 The Autobiography by W. E. B. Du Bois:

It's subtitled "A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of its First Century' and he wrote it when he was ninety. He died in 1963 at the age of ninety-five, and the book first appeared in English in 1968 for what would have been his hundredth birthday.

 Du Bois was first African-American to earn a Ph. D. from Harvard (in Sociology) and did post-doctoral work in Germany, where he impressed (and was impressed by) Max Weber. He was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples, and edited their house magazine The Crisis. His most famous early book is The Souls of Black Folks. He eventually, though, gave up on the U.S. as unfixable, and died in Ghana. 

Should be a fascinating read. Did you know him or the book? Did you get something good? 

Othello

 

Othello, Act V, Sc. ii, l. 337 ff.

Othello:  

Soft you; a word or two before you go.

I have done the state some service, and they know't;

No more of that. I pray you, in your letters

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice; then, must you speak

Of one that loved not wisely but too well;

Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,

Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,

Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdu'd eyes

Albeit unused to the melting mood,

Drop tears as fast the Arabian trees

Their med'cinable gum. Set you down this:

And say besides, that in Aleppo once,

Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk

Beat a Venetian and traduc'd the state,

I took by throat the circumcised dog,

And smote him thus.

 

-William Shakespeare

 

Othello has just learned that he has been bamboozled by Iago; he'd killed Desdemona, who had been perfectly true to him, and had attempted to have Cassio, his lieutenant, killed for sleeping with Desdemona, a thing that never happened. With 'And smote him thus' he stabs himself in place of the Turk, and dies two lines later. Iago has just murdered his wife Emilia, in front of magistrates and the audience, and is about to be hauled off to jail, torture, "the censure of this hellish villain."

 

We saw Othello on Tuesday at the Stratford (Ontario) festival in a very good production. Evan Bullung as Iago and André Sills as Othello (both 12 year Stratford veterans) were superb, and did a convincing job of the tricky scene (Act III, sc. iii) where the insinuating Iago turns Othello from trusting, infatuated husband to victim of the green-eyed monster (also a line from this play...)

 

I like to reread a Shakespeare play before seeing it on stage and did this time, too. It's not like I've ruined the suspense--and I find it helps to have the language in my head when I hear it played. 

 

Don't worry--it wasn't all tragedy. We also saw the musical Something Rotten while there...