night, my old night.
Nov. 11th, 2012 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cremainsTonight I finished writing the first public reading section and began on the second, where Noah is building his boat. So much fear about falling behind, which is only the tip of an ink bottle away. Thus far my favourite part to write has been:
As has been noted by 892 billion people, "sin" is not really sin in the English sense. In my translation of The Hobbit, this is the word used when Bilbo tries to sit on the couch and misses.
Speaking of the Hebrew The Hobbit, it is really making me rethink my philosophy of translation, which has been to aim for the most natural and most understandable (often means current) speech in the target language. On the other hand, it is pretty jarring to hear the trolls call each other "piece of shit," or the Dwarves describe Bilbo as "an excitable dude." Also a puzzle is when something is called "very weird" in Hebrew when the English was "rather odd." Now when Tolkien called something rather odd, he definitely meant it was damn strange, yet I'm not sure how I feel seeing that spelt out explicitly instead of relying on the reader's own sense of judgementalism.
Lastly, after reading a flashback-inducing LJ post bywhatifoundthere on bad Canlit, some poems to clean my brain.
1. "Fragment" by Shannon Hamann. I heard this poem first read by David Cameron Mitchell at a queer lit street festival in Toronto, so it's almost Canadian, right?
Fragment
—sing in disguise because he met a nurse named May,
who was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen,
and as his leg mended he courted her, and she liked his eyes,
the glint of his teeth, and she requited his love drop for drop,
and Jack and May were married, and before they had a chance
to worry how they would live, they won the lottery,
each of them, and would never want.
They traveled and saw every beautiful thing we have,
and Jack dove and gardened, and May wrote poetry
and became famous for her sparkling images and unblinking
views on love. Her love poetry was relished in many countries
and even saved many lives. One of her best-known is called
“The Farmer, the Hog, and the Carp” and begins like this,
One day a farmer was fishing in the pond on his land
and he caught a carp, a fish that very few people are willing to eat.
The farmer loved fish so much that he brought it in
for his wife to cook nevertheless. The wife refused,
because the carp is a lowly fish who feeds on unsavory muck.
So the farmer threw the carp to the hog.
The hog contemplates the carp for several stanzas
and then takes it in its jaws and begins masticating it noisily.
The incisors sliced through her scales and flesh
and severed her spine, ripped into her stomach,
opened her heart. A row of molars shattered her ribs
to crush the long tube-like kidney and burst the swim bladder.
Her blood and urine filled the hog’s mouth,
her bones, tiny and sharp, tickled his tongue.
He snorted as the fish’s head wagged from his chewing
that made a sound like husking corn.
Later in the poem,
Her gills still heaving, a canine tooth
pierced her cornea and entered the vitreous humor.
Blood squirted from her nostrils. It is the end of eyesight.
Her brain was cleaved and stuffed into her mute throat.
It is the end of pain.
Soon all forty-four teeth snapped and ground and mixed.
The delicate and discreet became uniform—
colorful dumplings on their way to the acidy gullet.
She was delicious, the carp.
Later in the poem the hog too is slaughtered.
The poem ends with May’s most quoted couplet,
“It doesn’t matter in the least, how we become one.
We must burn all the books that do not take this position.”
Jack and May’s love and happiness only increased as the years marched on.
They raised two children who grew up wonderfully happy
and became wildly successful, and Jack and May grew very old
enjoying perfect health all the while.
Jack continued his diving and May took up painting,
and it never occurred to them, not for a moment,
that one of them would die first and leave the other
desperately sad and alone.
But that didn’t happen because they both died
one night, painlessly, in their sleep, at the exact same moment,
and they ascended to heaven, a place of unspeakable bliss
where they were met by Jesus Christ, our Lord,
who stood bathed in a gorgeous music and golden light,
stood in exquisitely tailored satin robes
on a platinum platform trimmed with ivory and encrusted with diamonds
and beamed at Jack and May with a gaze of infinite wisdom and mercy
and greeted them lovingly and said that though He loved all people,
He and God had loved them best of all,
and addressing May, Jesus said of the Almighty,
“He particularly liked how you represented Him as a farmer in some of your work.”
“And that you retold Genesis with Eve as a mackerel,” an angel chimed in.
“Carp,” Jack corrected.
“Carp, mackerel, oh Jack I am so happy,” May said,
and Jack said, “May, I love you so much.” And he turned to look into her eyes,
but her face was gone, and in its place was that of a
serpent because not even God can cont—
2. "Lines From My Grandfather's Journal" by Leonard Cohen
I am one of those who could tell every word the pin went
through. Page after page I could imagine the scar in a
thousand crowned letters
The dancing floor of the pin is bereft of angels. The
Christians no longer want to debate. Jews have forgotten
the best arguments. If I spelled out the Principles of Faith
I would be barking at the moon.
I will never be free from this old tyranny: "I believe with
a perfect faith ..."
Why make trouble? It is better to stutter than sing.
Become like the early Moses: dreamless of Pharaoh.
Become like Abram: dreamless of a longer name. Become like
a weak Rachel: be comforted, not comfortless
There was a promise to me from a rainbow, there was a
covenant with me after a flood drowned all my friends,
inundated every field: the ones we had planted with food
and the ones we had left untilled.
Who keeps promises except in business? We were not
permitted to own land in Russia. Who wants to own land
anywhere? I stare dumbfounded at the trees. Montreal
trees, New York trees, Kovno trees. I never wanted to own
one. I laugh at the scholars in real estate
Soldiers in close formation. Paratroops in a white Tel
Aviv street. Who dares disdain an answer to the ovens?
Any answer.
I did not like to see the young men stunted in the Polish
ghetto. Their curved backs were not beautiful. Forgive me,
it gives me no pleasure to see them in uniform. I do not
thrill to the sight of Jewish battalions.
But there is only one choice between ghettos and battalions,
between whips and the weariest patriotic arrogance
I wanted to keep my body free as when it woke up in
Eden. I kept it strong. There are commandments.
Erase from my flesh the marks of my own whip. Heal
the razor slashes on my arms and throat. Remove the metal
clamps from my fingers. Repair the bones I have crushed in
the door.
Do not let me lie down with spiders. Do not let me
encourage insects against my eyes. Do not let me make my
living nest with worms or apply to my stomach the comb of
iron or bind my genitals with cord.
It is strange that even now prayer is my natural
language
Night, my old night. The same in every city, beside every
lake. It ambushes a thicket of thrushes. It feeds on the
houses and fields. It consumes my journals of poems.
The black, the loss of sun: it will always frighten me. It
will always lead me to experiment. My journal is filled with
combinations. I adjust prayers like the beads of an abacus
Thou. Reach into the vineyard of arteries for my heart.
Eat the fruit of ignorance and share with me the mist and
fragrance of dying.
Thou. Your fist in my chest is heavier than any bereavement,
heavier than Eden, heavier than the Torah scroll
The language in which I was trained: spoken in despair
of priestliness.
This is not meant for any pulpit, not for men to chant or
tell their children. Not beautiful enough.
But perhaps this can suggest a passion. Perhaps this
passion could be brought to clarify, make more radiant,
the standing Law.
Let judges secretly despair of justice: their verdicts will
be more acute. Let generals secretly despair of triumph;
killing will be defamed. Let priests secretly despair of faith:
their compassion will be true. It is the tension ...
My poems and dictionaries were written at night from
my desk or from my bed. Let them cry loudly for life at your
hand. Let me be purified by their creation. Challenge me
with purity.
O break down these walls with music. Purge from my flesh
the need to sleep. Give me eyes for your darkness. Give me
legs for your mountains. Let me climb to your face with
my argument. If I am unprepared, unclean, lead me first to
deserts full of jackals and wolves where I will learn what
glory or humility the sand can teach, and from beasts the
direction of my evil.
I did not wish to dishonour the scrolls with my logic,
or David with my songs. In my work I meant to love you
but my voice dissipated somewhere before your infinite
regions. And when I gazed toward your eyes all the bristling
hills of Judaea intervened.
I played with the idea that I was the Messiah ...
I saw a man gouge out his eye,
hold it in his fist
until the nursing sky
grew round it like a vast and loving face.
With shafts of light
I saw him mine his wrist
until his blood filled out the rest of space
and settled softly on the world
like morning mist.
Who could resist such fireworks?
I wrestled hard in Galilee.
In the rubbish of pyramids
and strawless bricks
I felled my gentle enemy.
I destroyed his cloak of stars.
It was an insult to our human flesh,
worse than scars.
If we could face his work, submit it to annotation ...
You raged before them
like the dreams of their old-time God.
You smashed your body
like tablets of the Law.
You drove them from the temple counters.
Your whip on their loins
was a beginning of trouble.
Your thorns in their hearts
was an end to love.
O come back to our books.
Decorate the Law with human commentary.
Do not invoke a spectacular death.
There is so much to explain --
the miracles obscure your beauty ...
Doubting everything that I was made to write. My
dictionaries groaning with lies. Driven back to Genesis. Doubting
where every word began. What saint had shifted a
meaning to illustrate a parable. Even beyond Genesis,
until I stood outside my community, like the man who took
too many steps on Sabbath. Faced a desolation which was
unheroic, unbiblical, no dramatic beasts.
The real deserts are outside of tradition ...
The chimneys are smoking. The little wooden
synagogues are filled with men. Perhaps they will stumble on
my books of interpretation, useful to anyone but me.
The white tablecloths -- whiter when you spill the wine ...
Desolation means no angels to wrestle. I saw my brothers
dance in Poland. Before the final fire I heard them sing. I
could not put away my scholarship or my experiments with
blasphemy.
(In Prague their Golem slept.)
Desolation means no ravens, no black symbols. The
carcass of the rotting dog cannot speak for you. The ovens
have no tongue. The flames thud against the stone roofs. I
cannot claim that sound.
Desolation means no comparisons ...
"Our needs are so manifold, we dare not declare them."
It is painful to recall a past intensity, to estimate your
distance from the Belsen heap, to make your peace with
numbers. Just to get up each morning is to make a kind of
peace.
It is something to have fled several cities. I am glad that
I could run, that I could learn twelve languages, that I
escaped conscription with a trick, that borders were only
stones in an empty road, that I kept my journal.
Let me refuse solutions, refuse to be comforted ...
Tonight the sky is luminous. Roads of cloud repeat
themselves like the ribs of some vast skeleton.
The easy gulls seem to embody a doomed conception of
the sublime as they wheel and disappear into the darkness of
the mountain. They leave the heart, they abandon the heart
to the Milky Way, that drunkard's glittering line to a
physical god ...
Sometimes, when the sky is this bright, it seems that if I
could only force myself to stare hard at the black hills I
could recover the gulls. It seems that nothing is lost that is
not forsaken: The rich old treasures still glow in the sand
under the tumbled battlement; wrapped in a starry flag a
master-God floats through the firmament like a childless kite.
I will never be free from this tyranny.
A tradition composed of the exuviae of visions. I must
resist it. It is like the garbage river through a city: beautiful
by day and beautiful by night, but always unfit for bathing.
There were beautiful rules: a way to hear thunder, praise
a wise man, watch a rainbow, learn of tragedy.
All my family were priests, from Aaron to my father. It
was my honour to close the eyes of my famous teacher.
Prayer makes speech a ceremony. To observe this ritual
in the absence of arks, altars, a listening sky: this is a rich
discipline.
I stare dumbfounded at the trees. I imagine the scar in a
thousand crowned letters. Let me never speak casually.
Inscription for the family spice-box:
Make my body
a pomander for worms
and my soul
the fragrance of cloves.
Let the spoiled Sabbath
leave no scent.
Keep my mouth
from foul speech.
Lead your priest
from grave to vineyard.
Lay him down
where air is sweet.
3. "On drifting clouds and signs of separation while seeing off Cheng Shu-ch'eng" by Wei Ying Wu (translation Red Pine)
This is in no way a Canadian poem either. The day before I left for yeshivah my father handed me a paper with this poem written on it.
Before a wayfaring son says he's leaving
how do drifting clouds seem to know
they can see the signs of his journey
the pain of separation he feels
they darken the city from afar at dusk
they form strange peaks in the fall
then the North Wind blows them away
with his horse following close behind
Qain was very upset, and his face fell. God said to Qain, "Why are you mad? Why did your face fall? If you do well, you'll carry it. And if you don't do well, sin crouches at the door; it wants you, but you can control it." Qain said to his brother Hevel, " " And then it happened in the field. Qain rose against Hevel his brother, and killed him.
As has been noted by 892 billion people, "sin" is not really sin in the English sense. In my translation of The Hobbit, this is the word used when Bilbo tries to sit on the couch and misses.
Speaking of the Hebrew The Hobbit, it is really making me rethink my philosophy of translation, which has been to aim for the most natural and most understandable (often means current) speech in the target language. On the other hand, it is pretty jarring to hear the trolls call each other "piece of shit," or the Dwarves describe Bilbo as "an excitable dude." Also a puzzle is when something is called "very weird" in Hebrew when the English was "rather odd." Now when Tolkien called something rather odd, he definitely meant it was damn strange, yet I'm not sure how I feel seeing that spelt out explicitly instead of relying on the reader's own sense of judgementalism.
Lastly, after reading a flashback-inducing LJ post by
whatifoundthere on bad Canlit, some poems to clean my brain.1. "Fragment" by Shannon Hamann. I heard this poem first read by David Cameron Mitchell at a queer lit street festival in Toronto, so it's almost Canadian, right?
Fragment
—sing in disguise because he met a nurse named May,
who was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen,
and as his leg mended he courted her, and she liked his eyes,
the glint of his teeth, and she requited his love drop for drop,
and Jack and May were married, and before they had a chance
to worry how they would live, they won the lottery,
each of them, and would never want.
They traveled and saw every beautiful thing we have,
and Jack dove and gardened, and May wrote poetry
and became famous for her sparkling images and unblinking
views on love. Her love poetry was relished in many countries
and even saved many lives. One of her best-known is called
“The Farmer, the Hog, and the Carp” and begins like this,
One day a farmer was fishing in the pond on his land
and he caught a carp, a fish that very few people are willing to eat.
The farmer loved fish so much that he brought it in
for his wife to cook nevertheless. The wife refused,
because the carp is a lowly fish who feeds on unsavory muck.
So the farmer threw the carp to the hog.
The hog contemplates the carp for several stanzas
and then takes it in its jaws and begins masticating it noisily.
The incisors sliced through her scales and flesh
and severed her spine, ripped into her stomach,
opened her heart. A row of molars shattered her ribs
to crush the long tube-like kidney and burst the swim bladder.
Her blood and urine filled the hog’s mouth,
her bones, tiny and sharp, tickled his tongue.
He snorted as the fish’s head wagged from his chewing
that made a sound like husking corn.
Later in the poem,
Her gills still heaving, a canine tooth
pierced her cornea and entered the vitreous humor.
Blood squirted from her nostrils. It is the end of eyesight.
Her brain was cleaved and stuffed into her mute throat.
It is the end of pain.
Soon all forty-four teeth snapped and ground and mixed.
The delicate and discreet became uniform—
colorful dumplings on their way to the acidy gullet.
She was delicious, the carp.
Later in the poem the hog too is slaughtered.
The poem ends with May’s most quoted couplet,
“It doesn’t matter in the least, how we become one.
We must burn all the books that do not take this position.”
Jack and May’s love and happiness only increased as the years marched on.
They raised two children who grew up wonderfully happy
and became wildly successful, and Jack and May grew very old
enjoying perfect health all the while.
Jack continued his diving and May took up painting,
and it never occurred to them, not for a moment,
that one of them would die first and leave the other
desperately sad and alone.
But that didn’t happen because they both died
one night, painlessly, in their sleep, at the exact same moment,
and they ascended to heaven, a place of unspeakable bliss
where they were met by Jesus Christ, our Lord,
who stood bathed in a gorgeous music and golden light,
stood in exquisitely tailored satin robes
on a platinum platform trimmed with ivory and encrusted with diamonds
and beamed at Jack and May with a gaze of infinite wisdom and mercy
and greeted them lovingly and said that though He loved all people,
He and God had loved them best of all,
and addressing May, Jesus said of the Almighty,
“He particularly liked how you represented Him as a farmer in some of your work.”
“And that you retold Genesis with Eve as a mackerel,” an angel chimed in.
“Carp,” Jack corrected.
“Carp, mackerel, oh Jack I am so happy,” May said,
and Jack said, “May, I love you so much.” And he turned to look into her eyes,
but her face was gone, and in its place was that of a
serpent because not even God can cont—
2. "Lines From My Grandfather's Journal" by Leonard Cohen
I am one of those who could tell every word the pin went
through. Page after page I could imagine the scar in a
thousand crowned letters
The dancing floor of the pin is bereft of angels. The
Christians no longer want to debate. Jews have forgotten
the best arguments. If I spelled out the Principles of Faith
I would be barking at the moon.
I will never be free from this old tyranny: "I believe with
a perfect faith ..."
Why make trouble? It is better to stutter than sing.
Become like the early Moses: dreamless of Pharaoh.
Become like Abram: dreamless of a longer name. Become like
a weak Rachel: be comforted, not comfortless
There was a promise to me from a rainbow, there was a
covenant with me after a flood drowned all my friends,
inundated every field: the ones we had planted with food
and the ones we had left untilled.
Who keeps promises except in business? We were not
permitted to own land in Russia. Who wants to own land
anywhere? I stare dumbfounded at the trees. Montreal
trees, New York trees, Kovno trees. I never wanted to own
one. I laugh at the scholars in real estate
Soldiers in close formation. Paratroops in a white Tel
Aviv street. Who dares disdain an answer to the ovens?
Any answer.
I did not like to see the young men stunted in the Polish
ghetto. Their curved backs were not beautiful. Forgive me,
it gives me no pleasure to see them in uniform. I do not
thrill to the sight of Jewish battalions.
But there is only one choice between ghettos and battalions,
between whips and the weariest patriotic arrogance
I wanted to keep my body free as when it woke up in
Eden. I kept it strong. There are commandments.
Erase from my flesh the marks of my own whip. Heal
the razor slashes on my arms and throat. Remove the metal
clamps from my fingers. Repair the bones I have crushed in
the door.
Do not let me lie down with spiders. Do not let me
encourage insects against my eyes. Do not let me make my
living nest with worms or apply to my stomach the comb of
iron or bind my genitals with cord.
It is strange that even now prayer is my natural
language
Night, my old night. The same in every city, beside every
lake. It ambushes a thicket of thrushes. It feeds on the
houses and fields. It consumes my journals of poems.
The black, the loss of sun: it will always frighten me. It
will always lead me to experiment. My journal is filled with
combinations. I adjust prayers like the beads of an abacus
Thou. Reach into the vineyard of arteries for my heart.
Eat the fruit of ignorance and share with me the mist and
fragrance of dying.
Thou. Your fist in my chest is heavier than any bereavement,
heavier than Eden, heavier than the Torah scroll
The language in which I was trained: spoken in despair
of priestliness.
This is not meant for any pulpit, not for men to chant or
tell their children. Not beautiful enough.
But perhaps this can suggest a passion. Perhaps this
passion could be brought to clarify, make more radiant,
the standing Law.
Let judges secretly despair of justice: their verdicts will
be more acute. Let generals secretly despair of triumph;
killing will be defamed. Let priests secretly despair of faith:
their compassion will be true. It is the tension ...
My poems and dictionaries were written at night from
my desk or from my bed. Let them cry loudly for life at your
hand. Let me be purified by their creation. Challenge me
with purity.
O break down these walls with music. Purge from my flesh
the need to sleep. Give me eyes for your darkness. Give me
legs for your mountains. Let me climb to your face with
my argument. If I am unprepared, unclean, lead me first to
deserts full of jackals and wolves where I will learn what
glory or humility the sand can teach, and from beasts the
direction of my evil.
I did not wish to dishonour the scrolls with my logic,
or David with my songs. In my work I meant to love you
but my voice dissipated somewhere before your infinite
regions. And when I gazed toward your eyes all the bristling
hills of Judaea intervened.
I played with the idea that I was the Messiah ...
I saw a man gouge out his eye,
hold it in his fist
until the nursing sky
grew round it like a vast and loving face.
With shafts of light
I saw him mine his wrist
until his blood filled out the rest of space
and settled softly on the world
like morning mist.
Who could resist such fireworks?
I wrestled hard in Galilee.
In the rubbish of pyramids
and strawless bricks
I felled my gentle enemy.
I destroyed his cloak of stars.
It was an insult to our human flesh,
worse than scars.
If we could face his work, submit it to annotation ...
You raged before them
like the dreams of their old-time God.
You smashed your body
like tablets of the Law.
You drove them from the temple counters.
Your whip on their loins
was a beginning of trouble.
Your thorns in their hearts
was an end to love.
O come back to our books.
Decorate the Law with human commentary.
Do not invoke a spectacular death.
There is so much to explain --
the miracles obscure your beauty ...
Doubting everything that I was made to write. My
dictionaries groaning with lies. Driven back to Genesis. Doubting
where every word began. What saint had shifted a
meaning to illustrate a parable. Even beyond Genesis,
until I stood outside my community, like the man who took
too many steps on Sabbath. Faced a desolation which was
unheroic, unbiblical, no dramatic beasts.
The real deserts are outside of tradition ...
The chimneys are smoking. The little wooden
synagogues are filled with men. Perhaps they will stumble on
my books of interpretation, useful to anyone but me.
The white tablecloths -- whiter when you spill the wine ...
Desolation means no angels to wrestle. I saw my brothers
dance in Poland. Before the final fire I heard them sing. I
could not put away my scholarship or my experiments with
blasphemy.
(In Prague their Golem slept.)
Desolation means no ravens, no black symbols. The
carcass of the rotting dog cannot speak for you. The ovens
have no tongue. The flames thud against the stone roofs. I
cannot claim that sound.
Desolation means no comparisons ...
"Our needs are so manifold, we dare not declare them."
It is painful to recall a past intensity, to estimate your
distance from the Belsen heap, to make your peace with
numbers. Just to get up each morning is to make a kind of
peace.
It is something to have fled several cities. I am glad that
I could run, that I could learn twelve languages, that I
escaped conscription with a trick, that borders were only
stones in an empty road, that I kept my journal.
Let me refuse solutions, refuse to be comforted ...
Tonight the sky is luminous. Roads of cloud repeat
themselves like the ribs of some vast skeleton.
The easy gulls seem to embody a doomed conception of
the sublime as they wheel and disappear into the darkness of
the mountain. They leave the heart, they abandon the heart
to the Milky Way, that drunkard's glittering line to a
physical god ...
Sometimes, when the sky is this bright, it seems that if I
could only force myself to stare hard at the black hills I
could recover the gulls. It seems that nothing is lost that is
not forsaken: The rich old treasures still glow in the sand
under the tumbled battlement; wrapped in a starry flag a
master-God floats through the firmament like a childless kite.
I will never be free from this tyranny.
A tradition composed of the exuviae of visions. I must
resist it. It is like the garbage river through a city: beautiful
by day and beautiful by night, but always unfit for bathing.
There were beautiful rules: a way to hear thunder, praise
a wise man, watch a rainbow, learn of tragedy.
All my family were priests, from Aaron to my father. It
was my honour to close the eyes of my famous teacher.
Prayer makes speech a ceremony. To observe this ritual
in the absence of arks, altars, a listening sky: this is a rich
discipline.
I stare dumbfounded at the trees. I imagine the scar in a
thousand crowned letters. Let me never speak casually.
Inscription for the family spice-box:
Make my body
a pomander for worms
and my soul
the fragrance of cloves.
Let the spoiled Sabbath
leave no scent.
Keep my mouth
from foul speech.
Lead your priest
from grave to vineyard.
Lay him down
where air is sweet.
3. "On drifting clouds and signs of separation while seeing off Cheng Shu-ch'eng" by Wei Ying Wu (translation Red Pine)
This is in no way a Canadian poem either. The day before I left for yeshivah my father handed me a paper with this poem written on it.
Before a wayfaring son says he's leaving
how do drifting clouds seem to know
they can see the signs of his journey
the pain of separation he feels
they darken the city from afar at dusk
they form strange peaks in the fall
then the North Wind blows them away
with his horse following close behind
no subject
Date: 2012-11-11 11:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-11-12 09:13 pm (UTC)