Sideways Station

Uruku Tumi Gushiku

2010-07-16T18:51:22+02:00

This piece is from the album "Jin Jin / Firefly" by Takashi Hirayasu and Bob Brozman. It always makes me smile. It is also good to listen to when you need to get up and deal with a task you have been putting off for a while.

The Heart of Chinese Poetry

2010-06-28T19:14:03+02:00

I remember clearly the first time I managed to understand a poem in classical Chinese. It was like seeing someone perform an unexpected conjuring trick, shaking out a piece of rope and then tossing it up into the air to make it stand stiffly like a stick . Then back again.

There was certainly some kind of alternation between states which I couldn't quite understand. How could twenty simple syllables also produce some kind of shimmering complexity. Where was this chemical reaction taking place?

Another way I think of these poems is as of magic seeds. Hold them in your hands and you see a whole tree, press them tight and they are simple seeds again.

All poetry has an effect of incantation. This is why (like music, and unlike prose) the spell becomes stronger every time you repeat it. But it is an effect which seems to me to be particularly strong in classical Chinese poetry, perhaps because those syllables all have weight and length. It really does seem like you have to read them out all with equal power to make the magic work and open up the poem's door.

When you try and translate one of these poems into English you have to add in all the unstressed syllables and unweighted words which we use and the result is that you water the poem down to an unrecognisable degree. Try and drag out its meanings and it is like taking a watch to pieces. It doesn't tick. Try and portray its shape and you end up with something like a stuffed bird. Something stiff which can no longer fly. Most translations of Chinese poetry are like that.

A few people have produced wonderful poems in English by attempting to translate from the Chinese. One such case is Ezra Pound. To quote an outstanding translator of poetry, Elliot Weinberger, these poems were "written by an American who knew no Chinese, working from the notes of an American (Ernest Fenollosa) who knew no Chinese, who was taking dictation from Japanese simultaneous intepreters who were translating the comments of Japanese professors". Pound actually thought the name of the poet he was translating was "Rihaku", which is the Japanese rendering of Li Bai (or Li Po), generally considered China's greatest poet, together with Du Fu (or Tu Fu). And yet despite all his misunderstandings and the Japanese-sounding place names he comes up with, Pound not only produces some beautiful poems but actually manages to sound like Li Bai:

The River-Merchant's Wife

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

Another translator who has produced some beautiful modern English poems from the Chinese is David Hinton. Here is one based on a poem by Du Fu which I like a lot.

Full Moon

Above the tower -- a lone, twice-sized moon.
On the cold river passing night-filled homes,
It scatters restless gold across the waves.
On mats, it shines richer than silken gauze.

Empty peaks, silence: among sparse stars,
Not yet flawed, it drifts. Pine and cinnamon
Spreading in my old garden . . . All light,
All ten thousand miles at once in its light!

These are both wonderful achievements but they still don't show you the insides of a Chinese poem. I think that you can get an idea of that in a wonderful book I came across by chance in a bookshop in New York many years ago, thanks to the fact that I still haven't learnt to tie up my shoe-laces properly. It was behind a door about six inches from the floor and if I hadn't been looking for the most out-of-the-way place to get down on one knee and make a better knot I would probably never have read it. The book is "The Heart of Chinese Poetry" by Greg Whincup.

What Whincup does in this book is provide a standard English translation, together with a phonetic rendering, the Chinese characters, a word-for-word translation and an illuminating explanation, not just of the poems, but of the lives of the poets, the history of China and how the language works. Here are a few examples. This is the very first poem he includes (click to enlarge the pages):

And here, to restore the balance between Li Bai and Du Fu, is one by Du Fu:

Whincup uses the Yale system of transliteration, which may seem a little strange, now that Pinyin is so widely used, but it doesn't take long to get used to it.

I know of some other excellent books which use a similar approach to explain Chinese poetry, for example Wai Lim Yip's Chinese Poetry and François Cheng's L'écriture poétique chinoise, but they can seem a little intimidating to people who know nothing about Chinese. I always give people Whincup's book as an introduction to Li Po, Du Fu, Meng Hao Ran, Wang Wei, Su Shi, Du Mu, Tao Qian, Jia Dao and all the other wonderful poets I would have liked to show examples of. Whincup's book looks slim and looks simple. It seems to say "Let me show you this little garden" and then it leads you through a forest.

The Businessman's Kit

2010-05-26T13:34:08+02:00

This is something which I picked up in India once while interpreting for a rather unpleasant group of people. Luckily we had a very cheerful driver whose mood remained bright and sunny despite the black clouds which continued to settle inside his car.

I can't remember his name, but I have come to think of him as Mr. Chatterjee, a name which conjures up his bubbling personality to me.

Once he turned up ten minutes late and the head of the delegation told me, "Ask him why the %$*! he's late". At which I said, "Mr. Chatterjee, is there any special reason why you are late?"

And Mr Chatterjee, wiggling his fingers and twinkling his head, with seeming glee, loudly exlaimed, "Oh! Communication Breakdown! Information Gap!", a formula which I have taken to using myself as an excuse for almost anything.

I would like to ask you to stop a moment and consider what might be inside a Businessman's Kit. In order to allow you enough time to come up with some plausible suggestions, we now have a musical interval. I was unable to find a song called "Businessman's Kit", so I have opted for some generic Indian music. (Actually it is not generic at all, it is really good). Play it and think.

Debashish Bhatticharya

At this point you can compare your answers with the solution:

The Businessman's Kit contains:

4 pins
2 paper clips (one metal, one plastic-coated)
2 rubber bands

Being one of the least businessmanlike people I know, I find it difficult to understand in what way this is a "Businessman's Kit". The only thing I can think of is that it is a kind of starter kit. Someone with real business potential would rent out the pins, use the paper clips and the elastic band to fix a discarded engine found on a rubbish tip which they would then sell and after two weeks would be well on the way to Murdochdom.

When searching for "Businessman's Kit" the only referenceI was able to find on the Internet was Celestial Enterprises (India) - Manufacturers of Guest Amenities for Luxury Hotels, who also produce "For Your Care Kits".

Perhaps I could write to them and ask for instructions. Or else I could send in my Businessman's Kit and ask to swap it for something more in line with my abilities: a Daydreamer's Kit for example.

I wonder what they would put in that.

Chiflador (re-post)

2010-05-12T13:57:40+02:00

Listen to the poem

Gringos don't know how to whistle,
the bus driver tells me on the way
to Puebla.
Once in North Carolina,
I whistled at a dog,
the owner told me off. He said
“It's got a name, that dog,
you oughtta call it Chuck”.
But we in Mexico, we have
forty-eight ways, or more,
of whistling.
There's one to say hello,
one which sounds like a teasing joke,
one which will set a man reaching for his knife,
there's one to say I'm turning left,
and one to say I'm turning right-
and here he swerves a little,
for he gets excited,
because, he says,
then there's one whistle which
is mine alone
just for when I get home.

The parrot answers,
the tortoise suddenly wakes up,
the children all come running out
and my wife whispers "Mi amor".

Phillip Hill 2003

(This poem is included in my book The Observation Car which is available at http://www.lulu.com/content/2588218)

Africa, slowly, from the sky

2010-05-04T15:59:30+02:00

The April 19 issue of the New Yorker had an interesting article by Lauren Collins on the American photographer George Steinmetz. His speciality is taking pictures from a motorised paraglider which he flies low and slow (27 mph is the one speed it has). With it he can get the angles which he wants, whereas "trying to get a pilot to put a plane exactly where you want it is like trying to get someone else to scratch an itch".

The picture above is of a salt-making site at the village of Teguidda-n-Tessoumt in northern Niger.

My favourite photograph in the article was one of Beni Isguen, one of the five walled villages in the M'zab region of Algeria, which seen from above looked like the inside of a multi-coloured electronic device. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find it on the Internet. However, you can see a number of other wonderful photographs which he has taken of Africa in this video.

George Steinmetz - African Air from George Steinmetz on Vimeo.

There is another video about the Arabian desert here

And you can find more photographs at http://www.georgesteinmetz.com/. It took me a while to find out how to see all the photographs so here's what you need to do: under Images, you will find a drop-down menu of projects. If you select one of them a photo will appear, but each project has a dozen or so others which can be seen if you click on "View Story" at the bottom right of the screen.

The future as it was

2010-04-29T20:51:37+02:00

When I was a small boy I had a book about science which ended with a few pages tof illustrations of how life would be in the 21st Century.

I am pretty sure that it told me that we would farm the sea. (I think there was some kind of marine combine harvester in action). Nuclear power would be a perfect solution to our energy needs, so safe that we all might have miniature power plants underneath our kitchen sinks.

As in all such predictions there would be flying cars which would transport individuals down the city's canyons and land them safely on the roofs.

There wasn't much else I could remember and one night I thought I would try and see whether I could re-locate them on the Internet. Of course, if I had thought about it for a few more seconds I would have never tried. I couldn't remember the title of the book or the title of the section. One day, I predict, we will be able to search for things which we can't remember at all. We will also be able to key in a number and recall what we were thinking at 10.35 am on a Tuesday forty years earlier. But I didn't come up with a complete blank because I came across a website called Paleo-future from which I have lifted most of the pictures in this post.

The picture above is from Collier's Weekly, January 12, 1901 and provides a glimpse into the way the future would be in 2001. Flying machines, as I said, are always present. Luckily this prediction hasn't come true. Since I imagine myself as a pedestrian in any case I am terrified by the idea of all the shadows these flitting vehicles would cast, the noise they would make and the danger they would pose when they came in low to land.

I would much prefer the following system.

Airships, though slower, have always seemed a more civilised way of traveling to me. This is a prediction of how the world would be in 2000 from Hildebrandt's German Chocolate.

Here is a more daring prediction, this time from France 1910.

You will have noticed that there doesn't seem to be much of an attempt to predict changes in attire in the year 2000. I suppose that this is because of the fact that most predictions are extrapolations and it is hard to extrapolate fashion. When people do bother to depict future clothes nine time out of ten it is a copy of the basic Flash Gordon model.

One attempt was made by Vanity Fair in 1939. The text says: Gilbert Rhode banishes buttons, pockets, collars, ties. The man of the next century will revolt against shaving and wear a beautiful beard, says the designer of boilers, pianos, clocks, and metal furniture. His hat will be an an antennae - snatching radio out of the ether. His socks disposable, his suit minus tie collar and buttons.

The clothes aren't quite right, but the beard and the antenna hat are pretty close. I mean, who in their right mind could have predicted designer stubble and surely the antenna is basically the same idea as being permanently connected through your iPhone.

As I said, most predictions are based on extrapolation and ,since history does not usually follow that pattern, the safest prediction you can make is that predictions are going to be wrong and that any ones we make are going to look as funny to people in a hundred years time and these ones look to us.

One of my favourites, again from the Hildebrants Deutscher Kakao and Deutsche Schokolade enterprise is one called the Wasserspaziergang, or Water Walk, though perhaps Water Promenade reflects the tone more effectively. I wonder whether prolonged exposure to chocolate fumes could have had anything to do with this vision. Anyway this is how we were going to spend our Sunday morning.

I think that the balloon pressure would have to be set very accurately. Any deviation from the exact value and the spazierganger would have started to float upwards or sink into the water. I also think that walking, say, on the Rhine might not have been a good idea, since the current would probably have carried you down to Holland, making you miss your Sunday lunch.

One thing which must have seemed a certainty was a moving sidewalk. Here is one complete with travelling benches, although shorter skirts might have made the thing a bit safer.

There is actually an interesting film of a prototype presented at the Paris Expo in 1900. On one of the versions I saw someone commented that it was interesting to see that boys were just as obnoxious then as they are today. Strange, because the comment which came into my mind was that guards were just as obnoxious then as they are today. (See the one who gives the boy a clout round the head).

To see all the other things we missed having, visit www.paleofuture.com

More Ko Un

2010-04-26T22:33:10+02:00

Today I showed some poems by the Korean poet Ko Un to a friend, who agreed that he is a genius. Therefore I am resuming my personal campaign to get him the Nobel Prize for Literature. If things keep up I estimate that I should be able to get this done around the year 2520. Here are some more poems:

The Ox

As the ox of one of our neighbors,
the family of Yu t'ae and Pong t'ae
plods along
pulling their oxcart full to overflowing,
if it feels like a shit
in front of some respectable house,
a spot where it doesn't know it should act respectfully,
it lifts its tail and lets go, splish, splash,
all the time hauling its load.
The farm-help with the withered hand
that lives all the time with that ox,
drunk on cheap hooch
and feeling groggy,
calls out:
"Let's rest here a while."
He stops the ox
and pours a stream of piss
into the roadside grass,
no matter if girls are around,
or women,
or old folks, or anyone.
High in the air
swallows about to migrate are warming up.
Man, the sky's so blue, it makes you crazy.

Nam-sun

Nam-sun from Saemal
skips 100 times, 200.
All the kids have gathered,
all the grown-ups have gathered,
all the people from the upper village,
the middle, the lower village have gathered,
all the birds and weeds have gathered.
First she skips with eyes open,
then she skps with eyes closed,
skips 100 times, 200
more, 250 times.

She'll kill herself.
She'll kill herself.

Chae-suk

Chae-suk, the girl from the house by the well,
a brimming crock of water perched on her head,
gazes into the far-off distance as she walks along.
The early autumn road lies clear ahead.
Next year
Chae-suk will be leaving here.
Chae-suk's heart swells in expectation.
Chae-suk, so like the darkness left after the moon's gone down.

Echo

To mountains at dark:
What are you?

What are you are you...

A Drunkard

I've never been an individual entity.
Sixty trillion cells!
I'm a living collection
staggering zigzag along.
Sixty trillion cells! All drunk.

More about Ko Un here.

The Observation Car in a bookshop somewhere

2010-04-22T23:57:12+02:00

If you are in Rome and would like to buy my book The Observation Car you can now get copies at The Almost Corner Bookshop, via del Moro 45, 00153 (Trastevere).

The many ways a minaret might be

2010-03-28T23:44:16+02:00

T The other day I came across an article in Le Monde about the political situation in Vorarlberg, a region of Austria. Together with Carinthia, Vorarlberg has adopted a law to prevent buildings being erected which aren't "ortsüblich". The best way I have found to render ortsüblich in this case is "typically local".

And the aim of the provision was to make sure no one thought of puncturing the local skies with a minaret. So far, this seems to be just another of the many depressing stories you hear about nowadays. But now comes the interesting part: in the Vorarlberg town of Hohenems there is a small Jewish museum. The director is called Hanno Loewy and in response to the provision he organised not one but two conferences on "How to build a typically local minaret" (September 2008 and June 2009).

Are far as I am concerned this single move places Mr. Loewy in the genius category.

The museum also organised an interesting exhibition on Jewish Kitsch, which included kosher food for dogs. I wonder which breed of dog would cope best with a yarmulka.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to locate the proceedings of these conferences, but I have been thinking about what typically local minarets might look like.

For example, in England you might have Mock Tudor or thatched ones. Windmill minarets could blend in in Holland. And what could be more Parisian than this shape?

Could this be a typically Italian minaret ?

A Canadian one ?

When Switzerland gets round to lifting its current ban on minarets, it might think of using a design used by one of its many laconically named big companies, the re-insurance company Swiss Re, for its building in London.

Surely this would look nice dotted around the Swiss landscape.

And as for Austria itself, perhaps something like this:

You can read the Le Monde article here. And if you like this story as much as I do you can sign up to the fanpage of the Hohenems Jewish Museum on Facebook. I did and I discovered these two beautiful songs in yiddish.

Rhyme's Reason - The Repetitions Build the Villanelle- Villanelles by Auden and Bishop (re-post)

2010-03-24T10:51:24+01:00

John Hollander - Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse (Yale Nota Bene)

I love poetry but I have never found it easy to get excited about spondees, trochees and anapests. It would probably be of great benefit to me if I could, however there is something about books that discuss metre and prosody that clamps down on my brain. Perhaps I have never got used to the idea that verses can have feet, but more likely I find it depressing that people can write about the most exciting and adventurous way of writing - poetry - in prose which is pinch-faced with lumbago. There are exceptions to everything and one of the most pleasant I have found is John Hollander's book Rhyme's Reason. The secret in the book is not just that Hollander is a poet and is interested in what poetry does and not just the rules which try to govern it, but that he uses his own verse examples to explain metre and form. He uses tercets to describe tercets, quatrains to describe quatrains. Various kinds of sonnets tell us how the various kinds of sonnets work. Here he tells us how couplets and caesura work and then illustrates the difference between end-stopped lines and enjambment:

In couplets, one line often makes a point
Which hinges on its bending, like a joint;
The sentence makes that line break into two.
Here's a caesura: see what it can do.
(And here's a gentler one, whose pause, more slight,
Waves its two hands, and makes what's left sound right.)

A line can be end-stopped, just like this one,
Or it can show enjambment, just like this
One, where the sense straddles two lines: you feel
As if from shore you'd stepped into a boat;

And here is how Hollander describes how the fiendishly difficult villanelle is written by using a villanelle. Quite a feat, a bit like a trapeze artist giving a running commentary on what they are doing while turning in the air.

This form with two refrains in parallel?
(Just watch the opening and the third line.)
The repetitions build the villanelle.

The subject thus established, it can swell
Across the poet-architect's design:
This form with two refrains in parallel

Must never make them jingle like a bell,
Tuneful but empty, boring and benign;
The repetitions build the villanelle

By moving out beyond the tercet's cell
(Though having two lone rhyme-sounds can confine
This form). With two refrains in parallel

A poem can find its way into a hell
Of ingenuity to redesign
The repetitions. Build the villanelle

Till it has told the tale it has to tell;
Then two refrains will finally intertwine.
This form with two refrains in parallel
The repetitions build: The Villanelle.

Listen

Here are two of the most famous villanelles of the 20th Century. The first one sticks to the rules described by Hollander, the second gives the refrains some slight variations :

Villanelle

Time can say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you, I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time can say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you, I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time can say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you, I would let you know.

Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away?
Time can say nothing but I told you so.
If I could tell you, I would let you know.

WH Auden

Listen

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

by Elizabeth Bishop

Listen