Returning (Pablo Neruda)

So many profiles of death line my face

That I cannot die

I am not capable of it

They seek me out but can't find me

And I leave with what is mine

With my poor destiny

On horseback, lost

in solitary pastures

far south of South America:
a fiery wind blows in

the trees are bent low

from as soon as they are born:

they must kiss the earth

the smooth plain

then later comes the snow

made of a thousand words

that never ends.

I have returned

from where I will go

from tomorrow, Friday

I came back

with all of my bells

and I stood waiting

searching for the meadow

kissing bitter earth

like a bent-over shrub.

Because it is our duty

to obey the winter

to let the wind grow

inside of you also

until the snow falls

until this day and every day are as one

the wind and the past

the cold falls in

finally we are alone

and finally we are silent.

Thank you.

The Flower of Evil

In his great treatises and training manuals on Noh, passed down with great secrecy for many centuries, Zeami discusses the artform in the likeness of several flowers. Indeed, his most famous text is called ‘Transmission of the Flower’. The great teacher discusses the various flowers of accomplishment, and their effects.

 

The effect of the Wondrous Flower. The effect of the Flower that Cherishes depth. The effect of the Tranquil flower. The effect of the correct flower. The effect of expansive subtlety. The effect of shallow patterns, and so on. In order to understand the flower, you should first observe a flower blooming in nature, and then understand this as a metaphor for the principle of the Flower in all things.

 

I must tell you the kind of notion I've had of what theatre was. It was a very beautiful flower. But this beautiful flower has something lurid about it. There's something weird about it. Pretty, yes, and it would be all right if it were a tulip or a rose. But it's a somewhat mysterious flower, such as the peony, or some eerie insectivorous flower, an eerie flower of the kind you find in South America, along the Amazon. That was the feeling I had.

 

If that is the case, it must have some fertilizer that nurtures it. Where does the fertilizer come from? It must be from the soil. Is there anything buried in the soil? Perhaps the horrible-looking corpse of an animal is buried in it. Or perhaps eerie corpses of insects are piled up there. Or else the corpse of a human being maybe buried there. Kajii Motojiro has an odd short story in which the protagonist says "Sure, cherry blossoms are beautiful, but whenever I see them, I feel that there must surely be corpses of countless human beings buried underneath them." That is the kind of fantasy you have about the theatre.

 

The fertilizer for the theatre is the backstage. And the backstage of the theatre is the sort of place that makes us non-actors prisoners if we get into it unthinkingly and become familiar with its way of life.

 

Soon enough you will learn about how life is backstage. You will also come to know the strange customs of theatrical society. It has a great many things that are, on the face of it, unthinkable to the modern way of thinking. It has contradictions. It has conventions. And a mountain of incomprehensible things. It has ugly things. Of course, this being human society, even if you work in the most state-of-the-art office, you'll find ugly things. So you can't say that theatre is particularly ugly, but here you have to compete with other people for more than twelve hours a day, in the same backstage space, bumping into each other all the time, taking your clothes off, putting them on, and taking them off again.

 

To put it clearly, theatre in itself is an evil. In the old days, a theater used to be called an 'akusho' - an "evil place". From the Edo period to the end of the war, theatres and brothels were alike, both being 'evil places'. Even parents had the sense that a child shouldn't be allowed to go to the theatre because it was an evil place.

 

You are right in the middle of that evil. Unless you recognize evil, theatre cannot exist.

 

There are evils, and there are evils. Power is evil. Conventions, which I have mentioned elsewhere, are evil. You may simply tell a lie or be a sycophant, and that's also evil. There is also the evil of sensuality.  Without appealing to that sensory register, theatre won't be able to convey anything to us. You can't expect anyone to understand theatre without a sensual fascination. Through that narrow path of sensory charm, theatre slides out in front of you. If you close that path, none of what lies behind it will come out. Today tehre is a tendency to overwhelm theatre with analysis and speculation, thereby closing the mouth from which that charm spurts out. 

 

Theatre is the flower that has bloomed from a solid mass of such human evils. I don't understand why the government uses people's taxes to support something like this. Except, of course, I myself get paid to work here. I don't really understand why they have built such a wonderful theater like this for this mass of evils, boasting to anyone who cares to listen that it is a cultural asset.

 

In any event, theatre is a nest of evils. Suppose you purge all such things from theatre and turn it into something morally beautiful, something clean, to make it something you can show in any part of the world without embarrassment, something beautiful that depicts human beings only the way they ought to be - now, if you want to do that, you can. But the moment you do, theatre will disappear. 

 

I know that there's something horribly murky and dark behind the flower, but I'd like to leave that dark and murky thing alone, as it is, as an important fertilizer. I feel this strongly. If it is hidden, it is the flower; if it is not hidden, it is not the flower. Of course, I do not totally deny the idea of improving theatre, but because I believe that theatre is linked to evil, the only thing I can say is, well, Sure. Go ahead. Clean it up as much as you can. But think very hard about what you might lose if you do.

 

 

An Aztec Hymn

Nezahualcoyotl (1402-1472) was a sage and poet-king in 15th century, pre-Columbian Mexico. According to some reports, he had as many as 110 children. Curiously for the time, he apparently banned human sacrifices in his jewel-encrusted temples and ziggurats, and only allowed offerings of flowers and incense. (This, of course may have been a romanticisation, designed to make his memory more honourable in the eyes of the Christian conquistadors who arrived soon after his death.)

This is my translation of a prayer/poem he wrote, committed to paper (and Spanish) by his grandson, Juan Bautista de Pomar.

WE ONLY LIVE IN YOUR BOOK OF PAINTINGS

With flowers you paint,
O Giver of Life!
With songs you give us colour,
With songs you shade
Those who will live on the earth.

Later,
You will destroy the eagles and the tigers:
We live only in Your painting
Here, on the earth.

With black ink
You will blot out
All that was -
Friendship,
Brotherhood,
Nobility.

You give shading
To those who will live on the earth.
We live only in Your book of paintings,
Here, on the earth

A Song of Love

שִׂימֵנִי כַחוֹתָם עַל-לִבֶּךָ, כַּחוֹתָם עַל-זְרוֹעֶךָ--כִּי-עַזָּה כַמָּוֶת אַהֲבָה, קָשָׁה כִשְׁאוֹל קִנְאָה: רְשָׁפֶיהָ--רִשְׁפֵּי, אֵשׁ שַׁלְהֶבֶתְיָה.
מַיִם רַבִּים, לֹא יוּכְלוּ לְכַבּוֹת אֶת-הָאַהֲבָה, וּנְהָרוֹת, לֹא יִשְׁטְפוּהָ; אִם-יִתֵּן אִישׁ אֶת-כָּל-הוֹן בֵּיתוֹ, בָּאַהֲבָה--בּוֹז, יָבוּזוּ לוֹ.

This is from the Song of Songs (8:6,7).
It's one of my favourite songs in the world - it was set to music by Bezalel Aloni and recorded by Ofra Haza on her album Shaday.

Here's my version of the lyrics, in English.

Set me as a seal on your heart,
as a seal on your arm;
since love is as strong as death,
jealousy is cruel as the grave;
its flashes are flashes of fire,
a raging flame.

Raging waters could not quench my love,
nor could the floods drown it;
if one offered for love
all the wealth of one's house,
one would be utterly condemned.

Fonts.

The font layout of the last post(s) is annoying me.

How ironic! The hardest language to use on the internet is HTML.

(*Update: 2am - it's also the most reliable. If it's not working, it's because there's a kink. Remove the kink and you remove the problem. My blog is pretty again. I'm going to sleep.)

Thoughts on Translation (I)

I found this rather charming extract from "An Essay on Verse Translation" by Wentworth Dillon, Fourth Earl of Roscommon (1630-85). He's describing what should theoretically draw a potential translator to work on a particular artist's work.

I found the piece in a blog called Brave New Words. Which is very much worth a look!

'Tis true composing is the nobler part,
But good translation is no easy art:
For tho' materials have long since been found,
Yet both your fancy and your hands are bound;
And by improving what was writ before,
Invention labours less, but judgment more.

Each poet with a different talent writes,
One praises, one instructs, another bites.
Horace did ne'er aspire to epic bays
Nor lofty Maro stoop to lyric lays.
Examine how your humour is inclin'd,
And watch the ruling passion of your mind.
Then seek a poet, who your way does bend.
And chuse an author, as you chuse a friend.
United by this sympathetic bond,
You grow familiar, intimate, and fond;
Your thoughts, your words, your stiles, your souls agree,
No longer his interpreter, but he.

Thus far...

I suppose it's only appropriate here to list, by way of introduction, the kinds of things I translate.

So, here - in no particular order - are the texts I have been working on. If it's in dark red, I'm still working on it. If it's in dark blue, it's been performed.

And any day now some of them will be published!

PLAYS:

Euripides: Medea
Euripides: Trojan Women (Two versions)
Euripides: Orestes
Euripides: The Bacchae
Aristophanes: Lysistrata
Sophocloes: The Women of Trachis

Yukio Mishima: Modern Noh Plays
(Yoroboshi, Sotoba Komachi, Dojoji, Kantan, Hanjo, The Damask Drum, The Lady Aoi, Yuya)

Iakovos Kampanellis: O Deipnos (Supper)
(Letter To Orestes, Supper, Sideroads to Thebes)

Fernando Arrabal: ...and they put handcuffs on the flowers...
Robert Thomas: Eight Women
Pierre Marivaux: The Double Inconstancy

Federico Garcia Lorca: Doña Rosita the Spinster (or, The Language of Flowers)

Mariano Pensotti: La Marea (Interior Spaces)


POETRY:

Various pieces by

Federico Garcia Lorca,
Catullus,
Jean-Jacques Goldman,
Propertius,
Juvenal,
Pablo Neruda,
Octavio Paz,
Ovid
and a variety of obscure Japanese poets.