May Wrapup

Poetry Department

Richard Howard/No Traveller

From 1989, one of Howard's best collections. It opens with a wonderful sequence of imagined letters, set in 1953. Two young gay men, frenemies, are in Paris and they're both writing to somebody Roderick, back home in the U.S. Ivo is gossipy and tart; his great moment is when he sees the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Edward and and Wallis Simpson. Richard is more serious; he spies the poet Wallace Stevens, and insinuates himself as Stevens' guide to Paris.  

        "To hear her talk, as she does,

about her escape from France,

you would suppose she had swum the Channel,

with her maid between her teeth!"

 

From one of Ivo's letters, this is supposed to be Wallis Simpson talking about Lady Diana Cooper. Meow!

 

Just now typing this, it occurred to me that we have Wallis and Wallace. Deliberate? Oh, probably. It's all made up--Wallace Stevens apparently never got to Paris--but so very convincing. And so very fun.

 

7 Greeks (tr. by Guy Davenport)

 

The seven are Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman, Anakreon, Herakleitos, Diogenes, and Herondas. Numbers 5 and 6 are philosophers; the others are poets. I think Davenport is a great translator, and his introduction was superb. I do have doubts about translating scraps where all that survives is one word per line. (The same applies to Anne Carson's translation of Sappho.) That's what we've got, but it feels a bit like a romantic preferring the ruins of Tintern Abbey to an actual building.

 

Here's an Archilochos poem in Davenport's translation that made it on to the blog before.

 

Karl Shapiro/Trial of a Poet

 

This is Shapiro's book of 1947. He'd been a clerk in the Army, serving in the Pacific for most of the war; his Pulitzer-prize winning book of poetry written from New Guinea, V-Letter and Other Poems, showed up on the blog earlier. This is still quite engaged with his war experience. Like a lot of American poets of that time his poetry is moving from formal to a more free verse; this is interestingly transitional.

 

And one of the poems, one that he uses for the title of the middle section, is 'The Progress of Faust':
 

He was born in Deutschland, as you would expect,

And graduated in magic from Cracow

in Fifteen Five.

 

Which brings us to:

 

 

 

Poetry Department (Faust Subdivision)

 

After reading a bunch of Goethe last summer, and traveling to Germany last fall, I'd been thinking about rereading Faust, which I've read before but not in forever. I read Part I in Kaufmann's translation and Part II in Philip Wayne's. Kaufmann only translated the first part; he says the second part isn't as good. Is that true? Well, it is true that in Philip Wayne's translation the second part isn't as good, but I remain uncertain about the German. Wayne is certainly the inferior English poet.

 

Goethe's house in Weimar from its garden

 

Christopher Marlowe/Doctor Faustus

 

But better than either as an English poet, of course, is Marlowe. I do think that Shakespeare is better at shaking a scene, but when it comes to bombasting out blank verse, Kit strikes me as fully the equal of William. One interesting bit from all the Faust/Goethe reading I've done is that Goethe (and most Germans of that era) first knew the Faust story from puppet shows, and that German puppet shows were based on Marlowe's version carried back over into Germany.

 

Literary Criticism

 

Erich Heller/The Artist's Journey Into the Interior and Other Essays

 

I was reading something about music the previous month--Peter Kalkavage's Music and the Idea of a World--and Kalkavage said one of the best books about Thomas Mann was Erich Heller's Thomas Mann: The Ironic German. My library doesn't have a circulating copy of that, but they did have this. Pretty fascinating stuff. Good on Thomas Mann (as was the Kalkavage) and also on Goethe.

Cooking

 

Clare de Boer, Jess Shadbolt, and Annie Shi/The King Cookbook

 

King is a restaurant in New York City.  I have to admit to not having cooked anything out of the book yet, but I scanned several pages before I returned it to the library... The recipe for Tunisian Chicken looks very tasty. One of the desserts is likelier to be first, though: our local farmer's market had local strawberries for the first time today, and their recipe for Eton Mess looked particularly yummy.

 

Mystery Department

 

Ovidia Yu/Aunty Lee's Delights

 

The first (2013) of a series of mysteries set in Singapore involving Aunty Lee. She's a recent widow who runs a tea shop, and has a murder on her hands to solve. Enjoyable characters, though I knew who the murderer was practically from the start. And while I would agree with Yu's politics I'm sure, they seemed a little dogmatic in a mystery novel. Still, I'm likely enough to carry on with the series.

 

At one point Aunty Lee says, explaining why she knows somebody convenient to solving the mystery, Singapore is a small town and everybody knows everybody. Pooh, I thought: I've been to Singapore; it's not that small a town. But then when I told a friend who's from Singapore I'd read the novel, she said, oh, yes, my brother went to high school with her, and that she had been a stagehand for one of Yu's plays.

 

Literary Novels

 

Four novels from Canadian publisher Biblioasis made it into this post.  The real find of those I felt was Alice Chadwick's Dark Like Under.

 

Richard Hell/Godlike

 

This takes the romance of French poets Rimbaud and Verlaine and translates it to 1970s New York City. I somehow missed it when it first came out in 2005, but it's recently been reissued by New York Review Books. I listened to a lot of Television and Voidoids back in the day.

 

Richard Hell came to Toronto's Appel Salon at the downtown library. It was a pretty good author event. Surprisingly for a seminal punk musician who took Hell for his stage name, he was a pretty genial guy. Unsurprisingly he's a bit hard of hearing. He said after his first novel had been taken as nothing more than thinly disguised biography, he decided to write about homosexual French poets for his second novel; then nobody would think this one autobiographical. Ha. He still gets told, I didn't know you were gay. (He's not.) But it is quite believable, and some of the drug-taking may have autobiographic elements, though he's supposed to have straightened up since.

 

Sent me off to read some Verlaine poetry. 

 

Comics

 

Quino/Mafalda

 

An Argentine comic strip about a little girl and her friends. The whole run (1964-1973) is being issued in an English translation by Frank Wynne in five volumes. This was the first and it came out last year; the second later will appear later this year. Quino only ended it because he felt it safer to flee the country. They're pretty great.

 

All in all a pretty good month's worth of reading. 

 

For the Commonplace Book 

 

"He [Caspar David Friedrich] was probably the first European painter to whom it happened that a picture of his was hung upside down." 

-- Erich Heller

 

"I don't see why/people can't look things up, I always do." 

-- Richard Howard's 'Love Which Alters" (voicing Proust)

 

"And yet he himself did not seem to think as a matter of free choice, but rather yielded philosophy as a cow yields milk--in helpless bondage to a dispensation of Nature." 

-- Erich Heller (of Hegel)

 

Mephistopheles: "I am the spirit that negates."

Mephistopheles: "Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint."

--Faust, Part I, l. 1338, English by Walter Kaufmann

 

Faust: I am too old to be content to play

Too young to be without desire

 

Faust: Ich bin zu alt, um nur zu spielen

Zu jung, um ohne Wunsch zu sein

-Faust, Part 1, l. 1546-7, English by Walter Kaufmann

 

Faust: A petty case of paltry legacies

-Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, Act I, sc. i, l. 27

 

(I feel like somebody needs to write a mystery novel with that as the title.) 

 

Mephistopheles: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.

-Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, Act I, sc. iii, l. 75

 

One wrong will not balance against another: to be honorable and just is our only defense agains men without honor or justice.

-Diogenes 39, English by Guy Davenport

(Why does this one seem especially relevant?)

Give up philosophy because I'm an old man? It's at the end of the race you break into a burst of speed.

-Diogenes 124, English by Guy Davenport

 

The books still around the house

 

How was your month of reading?