Douglas Dunn (#poetry)

 

Chateau d'If

Her photographs of white embrasures glow

Against impossible blue, the sea and sky

Contemptuous of how men fortify

The State's iniquity. I do not know

Exactly all we talked about or did.

I was wearing my blue jacket, my off-white

French slacks. She posed me as a blue vignette--

"Lean on these battlements, then turn your head."

I can't remember, but I can't forget

Our outing to the Chateau d'If, kept now

In these rectangles of a printed light,

Other than that she liked the day, and how

She said she'd read that book of martyrdom.

"Let's stay a while, then take the last boat home."

 

-Douglas Dunn

 

Douglas Dunn was a Scottish poet who died last Friday at the age of 83. I've featured him once before on the blog. This is from his book Elegies, which came out in 1985 and won the Whitbread Prize. The elegies were for his first wife Lesley Balfour Dunn, who died at the age of 37. She was an artist (not just photography--"infallible in art//That pleased her--water, oil, or lithograph" says another poem.)

 

Looking at an old photograph led Dunn to write this sonnet about a moment in their past. There are a number of other sonnets in the volume, though not all. Still most use some formal structure.

 

Chateau d'If is, of course, the prison/fortress in Marseilles' bay, where Edmond Dantes is sent early in The Count of Monte Cristo. Like Alcatraz, you can take a boat out to visit. 

 

 

 

It's only at the Chateau d'If moment that The Count of Monte Cristo is a book of martyrdom, but that suits the mood and the moment of the poem.

Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World (#1949Club)

"...this endless return of chains, this rebirth of shackles, this proliferation of suffering..."

Ti Noël is a slave on a plantation in Haiti twenty years before the Haitian Revolution. Due to his expertise in horses, he goes with his master to the town to select a new breeding stallion for the farm. There he sees wax heads in a barber shop representing the king and other nobility in a barber shop; next door he sees similarly garlanded wax heads of pigs at the butcher's shop. They look the same to him.

In the next chapter Ti Noël is leading the horse at the mill and his fellow slave Macandal is feeding in the sugar cane when Macandal's arm is caught between the millstones. Ti Noël stops the horse at once and cuts the traces, allowing him turn the stones back, but it's too late: there's nothing to be done but amputate.

But the symbolic violence of the first chapter and the accidental violence of the second are only precursors to real deliberate violence. Macandal leads an early and unsuccessful revolt; he is burned at the stake in 1758. Ti Noél later meets Bouckman, who brings news of the French Revolution, and who helps start what will be the successful Haitian revolution, though Bouckman himself is killed by French troops in 1791.

Alejo Carpentier was born in 1904 in Switzerland to a French father and a Russian mother, but the family moved to Cuba shortly after his birth where he was mostly raised. In 1927 he escaped Cuba after protesting the dicatorial government of the time, and settled in France. In 1939 he returned to Cuba. In 1943 he made a trip to Haiti where he saw the sites described in his novel. Again after the war he felt it safer to leave Cuba and settled in Venezuela until the Cuban Revolution when he returned once again. In 1966 Castro appointed him ambassador to France. In 1977 he won the Cervantes prize; he died in 1980.

During Carpentier's trip to Haiti, he saw what he named 'lo real maravilloso', the 'marvelous real' in the world, and encorporated it in this, his second novel. It's often considered a precursor to magical realism, and it does seem clear to me that Garcia Marquez was in fact reading Carpentier. One aspect of the marvelous real for Carpentier is voudou: we as readers don't doubt (mostly) that Macandal was burned at the stake, but we're teased, at least for a bit, with the thought that he transformed himself into something that could fly away, and this was widely believed at the time.

The Haitian Revolution was successful, resulting in the second independent country in the New World, but still maybe it was not a success. 

Ti Noël's owner flees the revolution for Cuba, but once there falls apart financially and psychologically and loses Ti Noël while gambling. Ti Noël eventually wins his freedom and decides to return to Haiti, where he is immediately re-enslaved by Henri Christophe, the black king of half of Haiti. Now an old man, Ti Noël is forced to carry bricks to a mountain top to build the Citadel Laferrière: 

 

The kingdom of Henri Christophe does not last and finally Ti Noël is free, but he does not live long himself to enjoy that freedom.

Macandal, Bouckman, Henri Christophe (I used the spellings given by Carpentier--spelling as you can imagine for the time, was not well-defined) are all historical figures. I had not realized that Pauline Bonaparte (Napoleon's younger sister) was in Haiti during their Revolution, but at the time (1802) she was the wife of Leclerc, the French general who was tasked by Napoleon with re-enslaving the Haitians. She and her husband both appear. 

The Kingdom of this World is novella lengath, and lyrically written, though still easy to read--I read it in a day in a translation by Harriet de Onís. There is apparently another later translation. The edition I read includes a useful introduction by Edwidge Danticat, the Haitian novelist and memoirist. I've read one other novel by Carpentier, The Chase, which I enjoyed, but this I thought a masterpiece. 

"In the Kingdom of Heaven there is no grandeur to be won, inasumch as there is an established hierarchy, the unknown is revealed, existence is infinite, there is no possibility of sacrifice, all is rest and joy. For this reason, bowed down by suffering and duties, beautiful in the midst of misery, capable of loving in the face of afflictions and trials, man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in the Kingdom of This World."

It's the week of the 1949 Club! Hosted by Simon and Kaggsy. I have hopes of reading a second before the end of the week. If I'm very ambitious, I might reread one of (both great!) Nelson Algren's The Man With The Golden Arm or Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails.

 

"Yikes!"...Anne Carson

According to her agent, "Yikes," was her first word on hearing she'd won the Nobel Prize. More decorous than Doris Lessing's first words on the same sort of occasion...

Autobiography of Red (1998) is a verse novel about Geryon, the red winged cattle-herder slain by Herakles as the tenth of his twelve labors. The story was alluded to in the usual places: Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book IX about Herakles, or Hesiod's Theogony, but it was retold from Geryon's point of view by the poet Stesichoros (c. 630 - c. 555 BCE) in his Geryoneis, now mostly lost. It's this version that Carson retells, expands, and adapts.

She begins with a short essay on Stesichoros. "He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet." Then come her tranlations of the fragments of Stesichoros that come from the Geryoneis:

XI. Right

Are there many little boys who think they are a

Monster? But in my case I am right said Geryon to the

Dog they were sitting on the bluffs The dog regarded him

Joyfully

 

That's already less translation than adaptation, though there is a dog Geryon is fond of in the Geryoneis.

Then a few short 'appendices' about Stesichoros, mainly his more famous (but also largely lost) poems about Helen, culminating in the Palinode.

The main story is moved from archaic times to the present. It's told in 48 episodes.  

 

In the first couple of episodes, we've already learned Geryon doesn't like going to school:

 

V. Screendoor

 

His mother stood at the ironing board lighting a cigarette and regarding Geryon. 

---

Outside the dark pink air

was already hot and live with cries. Time to go to school, she said for the third time.

Her cool voice floated

over a pile of fresh tea towels and across the shadowy kitchen to where Geryon stood at the screen door

He would remember when he was past forty the almost dusty medieval smell of the screen itself as it

pressed its grid on to his face. She was behind him now. This would be hard if you were weak

but you're not weak, she said and neatened his little red wings and pushed him out the door.

 

That was picked a bit at random as an example, though it is one of the shorter episodes. They all work that way, with a single sentence to open, followed by an anecdote.

 

Geryon becomes a troubled gay teenager. His mother is roughly sympathetic; his older brother has no patience for him. He meets Herakles, with whom he has sex. "Geryon you know we'll always be friends." Not so in the original. He and Herakles travel to South America to see a volcano: 

We are amazing beings,

Geryon is thinking. We are neighbors of fire.

And now time is rushing towards them

where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces,

night at their back.

 

That ends the main part of the story--Herakles has not killed Geryon--though there's a final interview with Stesichorus.

 

I was just writing about her later work Nox the other day and mentioned she was in the hunt for this year's Nobel Prize. I honestly didn't think she would win, but I'm pleased she did. (If I'd put a fiver on her at 33-1 I could have had a nice dinner out to celebrate...) I opined the other day that Autobiography of Red would be a good place to start with Carson, and having just reread it, I still think that's true, though she's written a lot of good books, notably Eros the Bittersweet or Nox.