Etienne Jodelle's I Love the Laurel Green (tr. Charles Causley)

I Love The Laurel Green

I love the laurel green, whose verdant flame

Burns its bright victory on the winter day,

Calls to eternity its happy name,

And neither death nor time shall wear away.

I love the holly tree with branches keen,

Each leaflet fringed with daggers sharp and small,

I love the ivy, too, winding its green,

Its ardent stem about the oak, the wall.

I love these three, whose living green and true

Is as unfailing as my love for you

Always by night and day whom I adore.

Yet the green wound that stays with me more

Is ever greener than these three shall be:

Laurel and ivy and the holly tree.

-Etienne Jodelle (tr. Charles Causley)

 

Well, it's not winter yet, but we've reached that time when most of the greens have changed to red and yellow and are fast disappearing; all the green that's left are those three.

 

Étienne Jodelle (1532-1573) was a French poet and dramatist, one of the members of that group of poets known as La Pléiade. Joachim du Bellay, the founder of La Pléiade, showed up on the blog in a translation by Richard Wilbur. This lovely translation is by Charles Causley and is from his book Secret Destinations. 

 

I looked up the French, just because...

J'aime le verd laurier

J'aime le verd laurier, dont l'hyver ny la glace

N'effacent la verdeur en tout victorieuse,

Monstrant l'eternité à jamais bien heureuse

Que le temps, ny la mort ne change ny efface.

J'aime du hous aussi la toujours verte face

Les poignons eguillons de sa fueille espineuse:

J'aime la lierre aussi, et sa branche amoureuse

Qui le chesne ou le mur estroitement embrasse.

J'aime bien tous ces trois, qui toujours verds ressemblent

Aux pensers immorteles, qui dedans moy s'assemblent,

De toy que nuict et jour idolatre, j'adore:

Mais ma playe, et poincture, et le Noeu qui me serre,

Est plus verte, et poignante, et plus estroit encore

Que n'est le verd laurier, ny le hous, ny le lierre.

-Étienne Jodelle

It's archaic now, of course, but it didn't actually seem that difficult, at least once I learned the words for ivy and holly...

Kurban Said, Lev Nussimbaum, and Tom Reiss

A while back I read the first novel Ali and Nino by Kurban Said and found it delightful. Time for a book bender! My library delivered.

The Girl From The Golden Horn

The second (and last completed) novel by Kurban Said is The Girl from the Golden Horn. It came out in German in 1938 and was translated into English by Jenia Gramm in 2001. 

Achmed-Pasha Anbari with his daughter Asiadeh have left Constantinople for Berlin. He was a higher-up in the Ottoman administration and with the fall of the Ottoman monarchy at the end of World War I, he no longer feels welcome in Atatürk's Turkey. He does what he can in Berlin to scrape up enough money so his daughter can get an education; she's studying Comparative Turkish philology at university. She's the Girl from the Golden Horn.

While there still was an Ottoman empire, Asiadeh was promised to an Ottoman prince before she was of age. But what are the Ottomans now? Where even is her prince? She sends a letter to the Turkish consulate to forward on to the prince, asking him to either claim her or relinquish her. He chooses to relinquish.

That's fine because in the meantime she had a cold and met the university's doctor, Alex Hassa. She's in love, and Hassa, an unhappy divorcé, loves her back and needs her. They marry, go on a honeymoon, and settle in Vienna where Dr. Hassa starts a practice.

Then the prince shows up and now he wants to marry her. 

In Ali and Nino before politics intervened, the difficulties between the two were cultural: he was Muslim and she was Christian. This novel turns on similar lines except she's the Muslim and he's Christian. She doesn't wear the veil now. Does she miss it? Do girls really need to be educated? Hassa as it turns out is short for Hassanovič, that is the son of Hussein, and Dr. Hassa's family before they converted were Muslim. Does that help?

I don't think the novel was quite as wonderful as Ali and Nino, but still it was good. Asiadeh has to figure out what she wants and how to get there with her dignity intact. She does.

The Orientalist

In that post on Ali and Nino  I discussed the mystery of Kurban Said a bit. It's a pseudonym, but for whom? The likeliest candidate was Lev Nussimbaum, born in 1905. He was a Jew, and grew up in Baku, Azerbaijan. Tom Reiss wrote an article for The New Yorker on Nussimbaum, and then expanded it into a book in 2005.

Lev's father was Abraham, a well-to-do oilman in Baku; his mother died when Lev was 6, likely a suicide because she'd been detected in revolutionary politics. During World War I, Lev and his father fled to Persia when there was violence in Baku; later they return to the short-lived Republic of Azerbaijan, but are forced to flee again when the Bolsheviks arrive, this time through Georgia and then Constantinople. They finally pitch up in Berlin, where Lev attends a high school for Russian emigres. (With the sisters of Boris Pasternak and Vladimir Nabokov! Lydia and Elena, respectively. Elena is considered quite the beauty.)

And somewhere along the way, Lev Nussimbaum converts to Islam and changes his name to Essad Bey. 

As Essad Bey he becomes a best-selling writer of non-fiction in the 20s and the first half of the 30s, writing close to a book a year as well as becoming the Eastern Europe and Middle East expert for the magazine Die Literarische Welt, which also published Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, and Alfred Döblin. (Think New York Review of Books, Reiss says.) Busy, but they needed the money, especially after it became clear that the Bolsheviks weren't going away, and any claims Abraham had still in Azerbaijan were going to be valueless.

Nussimbaum got married, to a Bata shoe heiress, and divorced. The divorce was covered by gossip papers on both sides of the Atlantic.

He was a controversial figure: Was he Jewish, was he Muslim, where was he really from? Nussimbaum claimed he was born on a train between Zurich and Baku, but he was given to romanticizing, so who knows? With a background like that it's unsurprising he was a staunch anti-Bolshevik. His anti-Communism and his conversion to Islam helped after the Nazis came to power for a while; his books still could be published in Germany until 1935. But he was on a lecture tour in 1933 and doesn't return to Germany, but stays in Austria. When Anschluss looks likely he wangles a contract to write a biography of Mussolini and moves there. (That biography never materialized.) By then his health is poor; he has a severe case of Reynaud's syndrome, which leads to gangrene and the amputation of his toes. To deal with the pain he's become addicted to morphine. He dies in Positano, Italy, in 1942.

And did he write those Kurban Said books? The evidence Reiss offers is pretty strong and Reiss thinks they were entirely Nussimbaum's work. But Nussimbaum was willing to co-author and I think it's impossible to rule it out. The books were copyrighted under the name of Baroness von Ehrenfels of Austria. Did she help write or did she just help by being the front person for German publication? I don't suspect we'll ever know for sure.

Nussimbaum is a fascinating figure and Reiss has got a hold of a good topic. I do think the expansion to a book shows signs of haste: Reiss writes about the Freikorps and Walter Rathenau; interesting topics, but they don't have a whole lot to do with Nussimbaum. He writes about G. S. Viereck, the American Nazi sympathizer, who was an acquaintance of Nussimbaum,  but he kind of repeats himself. Still, a good read. And now I want to find Essad Bey's Blood and Oil in the Orient. It was the story of the Nussimbaum's escape from Baku when the Bolsheviks marched in. It was marketed as non-fiction when it came out; Reiss says it's half-fiction, but it still sounds pretty thrilling.

Reiss later went on to write The Black Count, about Alexandre Dumas' military father, which got pretty good press when it came out. I was interested in it at the time, but didn't read it, but that may change.

Both these books march around Europe, so pick a country. "The ideas you have!" said Hassa. "Nobody ever goes to Belgrade on their honeymoon." Serbia's tempting, but I'll go with Bosnia, which that honeymoon also included. A crucial scene takes place in Sarajevo, where Dr. Hassa's family is from. When Dr. Hassa and Asiadeh first meet:

"There was an Anbari who was the governor of Bosnia."

"Yes," said the girl. "That was my grandfather."

For The Orientalist, I'll say Turkey, since I've already used Azerbaijan for Ali and Nino. It was Constantinople was where Lev Nussimbaum became Essad Bey.

Charles Causley's 'The Dancers' (#poetry)

The Dancers

To a clearing

in the foyer

at the Gallery

of Art,

and a chatter

of spectators

waiting for the show

to start,

five young men, black,

naked, dotted

white, and daddy-long-

legs thin

out of forty

thousand years of 

dreamtime came lightfoot-

ing in.

    Ssss! hissed the dancers from Arnhem Land.

 

And a primal

stillness fell as

when arose the earl-

iest sun,

each dancer an

emblem painted

on rockface, or scored

in stone.

With an unpre-

meditated 

seemliness they took 

the floor,

staring sightless

as is lightning

through a bronze by Hen-

ry Moore.

    Ssss! hissed the dancers from Arnhem Land.

    

To an insect

buzz of music,

snap of sticks, high nas-

al whine,

touched with brown and 

saffron ochre,

and their teeth a yell-

ow shine,

five young men came

barefoot, dancing--

the sun halting in

its climb--

effortlessly,

forwards, backwards

through the littoral

of time.

    Ssss! hissed the dancers from Arnhem Land.

 

Beaded and in 

feather bracelets

to the hoarse-voiced didge-

ridoo,

they were emu

and echidna,

swirling snake and kang-

aroo;

razoring this and

that way sharply,

swifter than the bush-

fire flame,

each a demon,

each an angel,

each a god without

a name.

    Ssss! hissed the dancers from Arnhem Land.

 

Suddenly the 

dance was ended,

clocks took back the Mel-

bourne day,

and it was as

if the dancers

melted like a mist

away.

In the restaur-

ant I saw them,

serious, and at smil-

ing ease:

five young men in

T-shirts, jeans, with

pavlovas and five

white teas.

    Ssss! hissed the dancers from Arnhem Land.

 

-Charles Causley

 

One of a series of poems in the volume about traveling in Australia.

Charles Causley was a British poet from Cornwall who died at the age of 86 in 2003.

 

 

Arnhem Land is an area in the north of Australia near Darwin with a majority aboriginal population. I lifted this picture from Wikipedia, though the individual (Timmy Burrarwanga) in the picture isn't quite 'daddy-long-legs thin'.

The Winner Is... (Classics Club Spin #39)

 

This spin's winning number was 3.

Which means for me, it's the Thebaid, Statius' Latin epic about Thebes, Odysseus, Eteocles, Polynices, Ismene, and Antigone. It's in twelve books (like the Aeneid) which is about 350 pages in my edition, translated by Jane Wilson Joyce.

I read Joyce's introduction (very good) to get started. Not much is known about Publius Papinius Statius. He was born between 40 and 50 A.D. in Naples and probably died before 96 A.D. His father was also a poet, though in Greek, and taught Greek and rhetoric. One of the father's pupils was Domitian, the future emperor. The younger Statius in addition to the Thebaid, wrote occasional poems collected as the Silvae, and had started an epic about Achilles when he died.

Statius was more read in the Middle Ages than he was in classical times (or now, I suspect,...😉). Dante was a fan, and Statius is an important character in the Purgatorio section of the Divine Comedy. Joyce's introduction was enthusiastic and I'm feeling fired up.

And so I'll be reading this by the 18th of December.

Did you spin? Did you get something fun?

Gwendolyn Brooks' Family Pictures (#1970Club)

 

Speech to the Young

Say to them,

say to the down-keepers,

the sun-slappers,

the self-soilers,

the harmony-hushers,

"Even if you are not ready for day,

it cannot always be night."

You will be right.

For that is the hard home-run.

Live not for battles won.

Live not for the end-of-the-song.

Live in the along.

-Gwendolyn Brooks

Paul Robeson

That time,

we all heard it,

cool and clear,

cutting across the hot grit of the day.

The major Voice,

the adult Voice,

forgoing Rolling River,

forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge

and other symptoms of an old despond.

Warning, in music words

devout and large,

that we are each other's

harvest:

we are each other's

business:

we are each other's

magnitude and bond.

-Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks' short volume of poetry Family Pictures came out in 1970. Two years earlier she had been appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois, a title she held until her death in 2000. She was also the Poet Laureate of the U.S. for the 1985-6 term. She was a lifelong resident of Chicago. Gwendolyn Brooks has always been a favorite of mine.

I'm not sure exactly which song of Paul Robeson's she's thinking of--by 1970 Paul Robeson's health was poor and he wasn't performing anymore. The poem suggests he's moved on from Ol' Man River, and it's true that Paul Robeson became much more political. (Not always in admirable ways.) So here's Paul Robeson singing "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill," the union organizing song:

Philip K. Dick's Our Friends From Frolix 8 (#1970Club)

    "You're married, too, you have a wife, and you have two children. Is your respon--" Again his tongue failed to function properly. "Where's your first loyalty? To them? Or to political action?"

    "Toward men in general."

In the year 2135, Nick Appleton works at a lower class job, as a tire-regroover. On this future earth, your status is set by a supposedly meritocratic exam you take as a young teen. But when his boy Bobby, whom Nick knows is bright, fails the exam, Nick begins to question the whole system.

What is the system? There's a world dictator, picked from one of two parties, the New Men and the Unusuals. Willis Gram, an Unusual, is the current world dictator. New Men are those that have tested brilliant; Unusuals have uncommon powers: they're precogs, telepaths, telekinetic. (Gram is a telepath.) Ordinary people are known as Old Men. There's a rebel movement, known as the Undermen. And we learn, on the fifth page of our story, that yes indeed, those supposedly meritocratic tests are rigged.

Some years ago, Thors Provoni flew off into space to find a powerful alien to help him overthrow this corrupt system and now he's on his way back. With an alien? So he claims. Should your loyalty be to your wife, child, that pretty girl you just met, your party, the corrupt but functioning system, the oppressed, the human race (maybe) under attack by aliens?

Now this novel isn't, as far as I can see, on anybody's list of best Philip K. Dick novels, and well, it shouldn't be... 😉 But I was surprised how good it was. It does come from the middle of a major period for Dick. The flawed or corrupt characters represent most of those choices about loyalty, and even the worst choices are somehow given space to feel true for a moment. It's true, though, that Dick's prose rarely rises above functional, and in this one, maybe not at all. The ending is a little rushed. Still, a pretty fun read.

Yesterday's Macanudo strip. Timely!

Sure it may all take place in 2135, but in its heart of hearts, it's a 1970 novel. Drug dealers, souped-up cars, and is that Bob Dylan guy really any good?

J. G. Farrell's Troubles (#1970Club)

"In those days the Majestic was still standing in Kilnalough at the very end of a slim peninsula covered with dead pines leaning here and there at odd angles." [5]

The opening of J. G. Farrell's Troubles. Those days are 1919, and the Majestic is a grand old hotel in Ireland, by then fairly dilapidated. The hotel was bought by the Protestant widower Edward Spencer some years before; the vendor told him the hotel attracted a regular clientele, but what he didn't tell Edward was that very few of that clientele had money to pay their bills.

Edward has four children, the oldest Angela, a son Ripon, and teenage twin terrors, Faith and Charity. Angela has her Major, who arrives in Kilnalough at the start of the novel.

"In the summer of 1919, not long before the great Victory Parade marched up Whitehall, the Major left hostpital and went to Ireland to claim his bride, Angela Spencer. At least he fancied that the claiming of a bride might come into it. But nothing definite had been settled." [7]

Major Brendan Archer had met Angela in Brighton when on health leave in 1916. They'd kissed once, he'd returned to the trenches, and ever after he was receiving letters from "your loving fiancée, Angela."

Brendan is particularly hapless at the business of romance:

"Until now, incredible though it may seem, the Major had never considered that love, like war, is best conducted with experience of tactics." [253]

When the Major gets to Kilnalough, Angela avoids him. She was tubercular the whole time. ("I thought you knew.") 

There was another prospect, but the Major hadn't even realized: she writes that he hoped he didn't mind, but after waiting, she eventually married someone else. "She oppressed him, though, by the intensity of her feeling for him, and that was the principal thing he now remembered about her. She had had a tendency to hug him violently, squeezing the air out of his lungs--it's distressing to be squeezed very hard if you are not trying to squeeze the other person back. One feels trapped." [255]

And there's a third girl he's attracted to: Sarah, but she's Catholic. After Angela dies he allows himself to fall completely in love, but just like with Angela, the Major barely talks to Sarah. After a year of aimless loitering, he bumbles out a proposal: 

    "Look here, I want you to be my wife."  He could say no more. He could not move. He stood there waiting like a pillar of salt. He could see, though, that it was no go...

    She said crossly, "Oh, I know you do, Brendan." [349]

Hapless!

All the while Brendan Archer is loitering in Ireland, and not getting married, the Majestic continues to fall down or is pulled down by desperate or angry Catholics; its owner, Edward Spencer is going mad in his attempt to hold up some sort of Protestant Irish standard. Major Archer, Edward Spencer, the Majestic hotel--almost a character in itself--are all of a piece: decaying, under attack, committed to vanishing and misguided standards, Anglo-Irish, ineffectual. If you're a symbol-spotting kind of person, the Majestic hotel is definitely a stand-in for the last years of the Protestant Irish Ascendancy.

The book ends with the arrival of the Irish Free State in 1922; the Protestants flee and the Majestic burns to the ground.

The book has a blurb on the back from The Guardian: "Sad, tragic, also very funny." Sad and very funny both are abundantly true; the tragic, though, is a bit more of question: it depends on whether you think they're so hapless, they deserve what's coming to them. And they might! 😉

J. G. Farrell wrote three novels in the 70s--this was the first--called the Empire trilogy, The remaining two are The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and The Singapore Grip (1978). Troubles won the Lost Booker for those novels that came out in 1970 and due to a rules change weren't eligible for any Booker Prize. The Siege of Krishnapur won the Booker for its year as well. All three are great. All three focus entirely on representative members of the Empire; the subject populations--Irish, Indian, Malay or Chinese, respectively--are anonymous, nearly invisible. Did Farrell not want to appropriate the stories of the oppressed? Did he simply not know those people as well? (Farrell was born in Liverpool, but came from a Protestant Irish family of colonial administrators.) Or did the stories of hapless English in colonial settings just seem funnier? I suspect the last myself.

John Banville in a well-done introduction calls this Farrell's masterpiece. Could be, though I'd plump for The Siege of Krishnapur myself. Funny as this is, Siege is even funnier. It's also shorter and would make a better introduction if you haven't read any of them. But they're all three great and I suspect I'm going on to reread the other two as well.

It's the week of the 1970 Club, hosted by Simon & Kaggsy! Isn't that a cool logo?

My organizing post for this fall's club is here, with links to a few books from 1970 already on the blog. (Tony Hillerman, Brian Moore, Shirley Hazzard.)

Also:

"...how incrediby Irish it all is..." [24]

This is my trip to Ireland for this year's European Reading Challenge.

 

Page numbers are from the New York Review of Books edition shown above.

I'm hoping to get a couple more in this week. Are you reading something for the 1970 Club? Any favorites from that year?

Classics Club Spin #39

It's time for another spin! The rules are here. Mine's an all-over-the-map kind of list, and the only organization is chronological:

1.) Apollonius Rhodius/Argonautica (3rd century BC)

2.) Lucan/On the Civil War (Pharsalia) (65 AD)

3.) Statius/Thebaid (90s AD)

4.) Luiz Vaz de Camões/The Lusiads (1572)

5.) John Ruskin/Unto This Last (1860) 

6.) Elizabeth Gaskell/Wives and Daughters (1864-1866)

7.) Robert Louis Stevenson/An Inland Voyage (1878)

8.) Machado de Assis/Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881)

9.) Benito Pérez Galdós/That Bringas Woman (1884)

10.) Knut Hamsun/Hunger (1890)

11.) R. Austin Freeman/The Red Thumb Mark (1907)

12.) E. Philips Oppenheim/The Great Impersonation (1920)

13.) Andrei Bely/Petersburg (1922)

14.) Mikhail Bulgakov/Heart of a Dog (1925)

15.) Dawn Powell/A Time to be Born (1942)

16.) Eudora Welty/Delta Wedding (1946)

17.) Halldor Laxness/The Fish Can Sing (1957)

18.) Harry Mark Petrakis/A Dream of Kings (1966)

19.) Ismail Kadare/The Siege (1970)

20.) Robert Pirsig/Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

 

I'm kind of keen on 1, 4, or 19 at the moment, but really I expect any of them to be a good read--I didn't put anything terribly challenging on the list. (I think?) Next month there's a Norwegian literature event so 10 would work, too.

Which have you read? Which look good to you?

Upcoming! #1970Club Prospects

The beginning of October means it's time to start on Simon and Kaggsy's 1970 Club.

I've piled up some candidates:

Will I manage to read them all? Of course not! That's (from right to left):

Studs Terkel's Hard Times

My copy of Terkel's interview history of the Great Depression dates from 1970. As with most of his books, it's a series of short interviews with people both famous and not. I will have read some of it before, but not, I think, all of it.

Philip K. Dick's Our Friends from Frolix 8

One of the lesser-read from Philip Dick that I've never read. It could be time!

Robertson Davies' Fifth Business

The first in Davies' Deptford Trilogy, which is definitely his masterpiece.  It's set in the fictional small town of Deptford somewhere in southwest Ontario.

Ngaio Marsh's When In Rome

A late Roderick Alleyn entry from Marsh, which I haven't read. It's actually set in Italy.

Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave

The first of Mary Stewart's books about Merlin and Arthur. I will have read this some time in the 70s, but not since. But it was pretty fun as I remember.

J. G. Farrell's Troubles

Troubles is Farrell's great novel about Ireland in the immediate aftermath of WWI, (1919 and following). I read it twenty years ago, but I've lately been thinking it's time to reread Farrell's whole Empire trilogy about British imperialism. (This, The Siege of Krishnapur, and The Singapore Grip--all great). It won the Lost Booker for 1970.

and... 

John D. MacDonald's The Long Lavender Look

Another book I haven't read since the 1970s. Despite the Pink Panther's enthusiasm, this one is probably the least likely. It's from the middle of MacDonald's Travis McGee series--I've been idly thinking I should reread the series from the start...

There's three books already on the blog from 1970:

The Blessing Way. Tony Hillerman's first detective novel, set in the Four Corners area and featuring his Navajo detective Joe Leaphorn. It's a great start to the series.

Fergus. Brian Moore's novel of 1970 about a scriptwriter in LA who sees ghosts. Or something. I read it in 2021 for Brian Moore at 100 readalong. Not my favorite Moore, but a good one.

 

The Bay of Noon. Shirley Hazzard's novel is set in Naples in the post-World War II period. Jenny, needing to get away from home, takes a job as a secretary for the United Nations. A romantic quadrangle among diplomats and artists. It was short-listed for the Lost Booker that year.
 

 

 

 

Which look good to you? As of today, I think Troubles is likely candidate number 1, but the club runs from the 14th to the 20th. That's almost two weeks away yet! I can't think that far in advance...😉