Baixo Contínuo Music: "A Brief Guide to William Shakespeare Without the Boring Bits" by Peter Ackroyd

People live their lives at such a faster pace these days, and all multi-threading, that it takes a real effort to consciously slow down and listen and watch to something. It's part of the joy, I suppose, at least for me. I think this problem of attention (or lack thereof) has as much to do with cultural expectations regarding how Shakespeare should be read, watched, you name it. I can listen to some “Baixo Contínuo” from the baroque period lasting for a couple of hours, but some people come and go, fall asleep, eat dinner, etc. At theatres and opera houses, boring opera or play can be wonderful to watch the world go by with. At least that’s what I hear. I quite understand that attention is context-dependent - maybe 'Baixo Contínuo music' was intended to be not listened to. Bach pieces composed for flute and harpsichord are a good example. Finding crappy books like this one is a bit like turning off love. Sometimes for the sake of the whole, one is prepared to cherish even the ragged fingernails and that odd snorting sound when she laughs, but we see the relationship is doomed from the start. A great deal of the Shakespeare books that aspire to greatness — and indeed achieve it — demand patience in our tackling of them. Is that too much to ask? In literature, I'm thinking of Rilke, Celan, Mann, and of course, Shakespeare. Onstage drama: “Measure for Measure” has hardly any plot but is full of beautiful poetry, which requires very good understanding of what’s going on — something singularly lacking in this book. When it comes to great works of fiction, does anyone really claims to have read only their lookalikes? All of Rilke, Celan, Hölderlin, the Titus Groan trilogy, several Dickens works et al, can we really read them by skipping the longer chunks and “gibberish” parts?

If you don’t like the way they talk and all the fancy words in Shakespeare, this book is for you.

NB: I bought it in a book fair, almost for nothing.

I’ve Been Rabbit-holing and I Just Came Out On the Other Side a Changed Man: “The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography” by Lois Potter and J. Paul Guimont (narrator)

Published 2013 (audio version, the one I’ve used; print edition published 2012).

Imagine yourself at the Globe to see a Shakespeare play, preferably Hamlet (my favourite…). Keep on imagining standing among the crowd, quite near the stage, on a rainy evening.  You look around and see people from all walks of life, from different countries and cultures, all mesmerized by the Bard's words...almost 400 hundred years later.   Imagine laughing so heartily with the rest of the audience, practically falling off your wooden chair. The actors are absolutely amazed and unbelieving at the rapturous applause they receive. You cheer them to the rafters. You start to have an inkling of how audiences of Shakespeare's own time must have received his plays. My reading of Shakespeare makes me “re-live” stuff like these. I feel his writing will allow me to deepen my own self-knowledge as well.

Just like water heated to 50º degrees does not increase the caloric intake, human thought peaks, in certain Men, to the highest intensity. Shakespeare, Rilke, Hölderlin, Celan, Kafka, Bach, Heine represent the 50º degrees of genius. In each century two or three undertake the ascension. From down below, we attempt the daunting task of following them. These Men climb the mountain with great difficulty, they penetrate the clouds, they vanish, and they reappear. They’re spied upon by us mere mortals.

What they do is was so very, very good at doing what they did, and they did so much of it so well that it really is quite unbelievable.  Their work is so good that many people do not believe that they were not touched by the Gods themselves. This is particularly true with Shakespeare. Some do not believe he alone wrote all the plays that are attributed to him, but the fact is that he almost certainly did do so, as hard as it can be to believe when you study Shakespeare.  Potter’s intertextual reading of his works shows that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Some creative people have been so far beyond their own time that they haven't always been completely understood during the years that they lived.  Bach, for instance, was a person like this.  His work just sounds finished in a way that other works are not. It's difficult to describe, but even people who don't know much about music recognize that there is something special about what Bach did.  You can feel it in your bones. Shakespeare works the same way.  The fact that the language has changed a good deal since Shakespeare's time makes it more difficult for me to see that at first, but with some pointers, I can clear away the confusion caused by that to recognize that his work is finished and special in that same way. Shakespeare holds up a literary mirror to the face of humanity and has forced us all to stare into its reality. That's what special about Shakespeare. For those of us who like to dabble in writing stuff, Shakespeare shows what genius can do with words and characters and situations.  His works are just overflowing with fantastic little titbits laying around to enjoy, but it does require that I know what it is that I’m looking at, and for that, sometimes I need the guidance of someone who already knows how to do it. And that’s where Potter’s glimpse into the mind of Shakespeare comes in. What a wonderful “read” it was. How fortunate I am, and how grateful, that I was able to find this book. Potter was able to open up some of the most profound thoughts and meditations on Being that have ever seen/heard recorded regarding Shakespeare. Once again, that most comforting and energising feeling that "I am not alone" when I read (or listen to) Shakespeare. Potter draws upon prior texts, genres and discourses on Shakespeare, Marlowe, Johnson that I didn’t even knew existed! In this regard, Potter’s book needs several re-readings. There are textual, intertextual, and sub-textual references aplenty that will take me more than one reading to fully understand. This meant go rabbit-holing which I did...The outputs of these wonderful adventures tapped into my understanding of Shakespeare. Go figure...

I’ve read quite a big amount of books on Shakespeare. Being able to write a biography of a figure at once so well-known and so little documented must have been a challenge.  His chapter “The Strong’st and Surest Way to Get: Histories” was quite a revelation [I’m (re-)reading the Histories at the moment) as well as Potter’s insights into the relation between Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton and Jonson. And when I thought I knew everything was there to know about Shakespeare, Potter comes along and rehashes old stuff into strikingly new ways. Oh my.

It was a pleasure to travel alongside Potter on this wonderful adventure!

Dass nur im Grab ich Frieden finden kann: "Poesias" by Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage

Published 1943.

Many eons ago, I was delighted with a book selling girl behind one of the counters in a book pavilion at the Lisbon Book Fair. Because of that I wrote a poem that I gave to her. Distant times those were. To tell you the truth, the girl did not deserve that poem, and the poem itself was not that great, well, the usual. In any case, the thing went down like this: in order to have a natter with her, I bought from her this same Bocage edition that I now got from a friend. Who would have thought that many years later I’d hold this same book in my hands? As soon as I picked it up, memories came flooding back. I still remember almost being taken from a thief as I perused books at her bookstand, touching them without really looking at them while at the same I kept looking at her eyes that could be seen from any place in the fair, as a “model like you’re…but oh sadness!”.

I can now hear some of my learned friends saying, after having read the above paragraph, “you expose yourself too much!” What they really wanted to say is, “I admire your courage.” Since I started publishing stuff on my blog, those are the kind of comments I hear more often. Who cares about what I write? No one. I’ve always believed that one shouldn’t remove the personal from the texts. That’s why I said, somewhere else, that what I write is (almost) always embedded in my own personal history. That’s what makes what I write intelligible to me.

And just because I can, below an attempt at translating the untranslatable into German of one of my favourite poems by Bocage:

“Camões, großer Camões, wie ähnlich

Ist mein Geschick dem deinen, wenn man sie vergleicht!

Der gleiche Grund ließ uns vom Tejo weggehn

Und frevelhaft dem Meer-Giganten trotzen.

Wie du am Ganges-Strome dich befandest,

Befind ich mich im Elend einer grauenhaften Not.

Ich sehne mich wie du umsonst nach eitlen Freuden

Und weine so wie du, sehnsüchtig Liebender.

Gleich dir vom harten Schicksal hintergangen,

Erflehe ich vom Himmel meinen Tod, in der Gewissheit,

Dass nur im Grab ich Frieden finden kann.

Mein Vorbild bist du, doch oh Jammer

Mag ich dir auch an bösem Schicksal gleichen,

Ich gleich dir nicht an Gaben der Natur.”

This is one of the reasons why I think German is not only the most beautiful language I learned, but it’s also the love of my life. Much more than Portuguese and English. The German language makes me organize things in my head in a way very different when compared with the Latin and English languages. There’s an enormous cognitive benefit by installing this “tool” in our brains. When installed, the doors of consciousness that open up are tremendous. I’m not only talking about the possibility of reading Rilke, Celan, Hölderlin, Goethe, Kafka in the original. The point is that what these writers put on paper are thoughts inseparable from the language itself in which they were written. No one, I repeat no one, having read Rilke in Portuguese or English has any idea what this represents in terms of the insurmountable geniality of Kafka, Celan and of course Rilke (my favourite trio of German writers). Some translations are simply ludicrous. Lately I've been on a winning streak...

Do we want to live without the real dimension of what these Men left to the world? It’s never too late. Trust me. Learn German. And now, my beloved readers are thinking, "But he just read a book of Poetry of one the most distinguished Portuguese Poets, but he's still haranguing us on the fact that we all should learn German! How can that be??" Well my friends, you should have been paying close attention to what I've been writing for almost 10 years on this very same blog, i.e., for those of you who are still with me after all are these years...

NB: "Dass nur im Grab ich Frieden finden kann." This is "Hamlet" tapping into Bocage...I won't bother explaining. Go read your "Hamlet" please.

Vasco Graça Moura's Day - 17.05.2015

What does translation involve? Is it only rendering of a text? I think not. The main thing is the negotiation between two cultures.  Poetry itself is the berth of estrangement (SF being the other branch) and translation, when it estranges by allowing the ‘foreign’ to have a palpable presence in the text, further makes it new. But does this sacrifice simplicity, transparency and readability? Poetry often asks for the servitude of the self and translation for the capitulating of one voice to another. But can this result in a poem true to its origins, without the necessary connection to the writer’s self and experience?

Vasco Graça Moura was one of the translator-poets that made me realize for the first time that translating was one of the hardest things to do. I know that from personal experience...He also showed me that translation is possible, i.e., rendering a text into a another language is like a puzzle waiting to be cracked, like a math problem. Sometimes all that is needed is inspiration.

In a certain Summer, a long time ago, I'd read so much German poetry and prose that I thought only German utterances would come out of my mouth once I tried to speak something out loud. During that Summer I was reading (and translating) more and more verse at Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian's Gardens. I lived in a perfect trance - I don't think anyone ever had such a wonderful youth as I had - of poetry. I discovered many new poets. I'd been reading Hölderlin, Rilke, Benn, Goethe, Eich, Enzensberger, Freiligrath (I still remember almost by heart his "Hamlet": "Deutschland ist Hamlet! - Ernst und stumm in seinen Toren jede Nacht..."), Gleim, Grass, Handke, Heine, Heym, Marti, Kunze, etc. Celan had not been discovered by me yet). I'd always read a great deal of German Poetry, and I was just in the right mood at the time. There were the Gulbenkian Gardens, the sound of the birds, and I was young, and I fancied myself very much in love with my future wife, and this flood of marvelous poetry washing over me was almost unbearable. I was writing in translation reams and reams of verse through it all. It was in one of those German poetry binges that I discovered Vasco Graça Moura's poetry in translation. I bought that book recently at Feira do Livro de Lisboa 2015 ("50 Poemas de Gottfried Benn/50 Poems by Gottfried Benn") and browsing it in 2015 what wonderful memories it brought me. I can still remember reading some of the poems from the book out loud...

This conference comemorating one year of VGM's passing, made me travel back in time. It was wonderful to hear stories from the panelists regarding his take on life, society, literature, etc. Pacheco Pereira's and Eduardo Lourenço's recollections about VGM were the ones I liked the most.

Shakespeare said, "But thy eternal summer shall not fade". That particular Summer will not surely fade in my mind as well...

VGM is no longer physically with us, but his poetry is for all eternity. 

Ticiano de Vasco Graça Moura

eu desespero nos museus: há sempre 

gente a mais e quadros realmente

bons a menos, mas nos melhores há sempre

uma miraculosa descoberta, passeando

no Louvre, uma vez, de mãos dadas, e a custo

atravessando magotes excitados de turistas,

disse à minha mulher que estava ali, à nossa

frente, uma prova na pintura italiana

do século XVI, a evidência de que só

o ticiano se importava com as mulheres

de maneira ostensiva e radical.

(...)

in "Poesia: 1997-2000" by Vasco Graça Moura, Quetzal, 2000

My own attempt at translating this in 2015 looks somethjng like this:

Ticiano von Vasco Graça Moura

In den Museen packt mich die Verzweiflung. Immer

gibt es zu viele Leute und zu wenig wirklich gute

Gemälde. Aber bei den besten gibt es immer tölle

Entdeckungen zu machen. Jüngst, bei einem Bummel

im Louvre, Hand in Hand, und nur mit Mühe

uns einen Weg durch viele eifrige Touristen bahnend,

sprach ich zu meiner Frau: es gebe da vor uns ein Merkmal in der Malerei der Italiener

des sechzehnten  Jahrhunderts. Offensichtlich habe sich nur Ticiano für Frauen interessiert

so richting ausgefällig radikal.

(...)

The rendering of the poem in its entirety is still in the works...

NB: SF = Speculative Fiction.

Translating at the Limits of Translatability or My Personal Journey with Celan: “Não Sabemos mesmo O Que Importa”/”Wir wissen ja nicht, was gilt”/”We Don’t Really Know What Matters” by Paul Celan, Gilda Lopes Encarnação (translator)

Published 2014

One day I got to my class and after 10 minutes without other classmates arriving, my teacher Winfried Scheulen and I agreed to talk about anything worth our fancy. Being Poetry one of my long-term interests, I asked him who his favourite poet in the German Language was. I was expecting something along the lines of Rilke, Hölderlin, Hesse, but what came out of his mouth was Paul Celan. My journey of discovery regarding Celan started that day. The next day I went out and started canvassing all the bookstores in Lisbon trying to find something with Celan written on the cover, which I did: two wonderful bilingual collections (German vs Portuguese) by one of our most distinguished Professors of German Studies: João Barrento. It was through these collections (“Sete Rosas Mais Tarde”/”Seven Roses Later” with Yvette Centeno and “A Morte É Uma Flor”/”Death is a Flower”) that Celan became instantiated in me: 

Later on I got to read many more stuff in German concerning Celan, but I’ve always been keen on understanding on what it means to translate, especially when we are talking about someone as untranslatable as Celan, and this two collections were where it all started for me.

Celan is for me synonym with Hermetism. One might say this is not a “problem” with Celan but with all Poetry in general. Celan (like Rilke and Hölderlin did before him), transformed (or were transformed by) the German Language to fit their need to explain their Weltanschauung through poetry.

To talk about Celan is to talk about “Atemwende” -, a title very difficult to translate into Portuguese; there were several attempts: “Mudança de Ar”, “Sopro, Viragem” (Barrento’s choice), “Mudança de Respiração”, “Viragem na Respiração” (Gilda Encarnação’s choice) -, which in the beginning eluded me in its difficulty at translatability. This fixation was so great that I ended up translating the all thing using, at the time, my very awful command of the German Language (and with a lot of help from several dictionaries). Incidentally this work is still up in the attic; in an Horatian mode, it’s still waiting for its maturation to see the light of day… It was only when I made the attempt at producing my own version at translating Celan’s poetry (at that time)  that I truly suffered the impact of the task. This grappling with Celan’s poetry resulted in a very impetuous, and uncontrolled approach which was the only way to deal with something that shook me to my inner core. To deal with it I had to migrate the original to my own mother-tongue. Gilda Encarnação’s version made me come back to it:

Du darfst mich getrost mit Schnee bewirten: sooft ich Schulter an Schulter mit dem Maubeerbaum schritt durch den Sommer, schrie sein jüngstes Blatt.

Podes, consolado, servir-me neve: sempre que, ombro a ombro com a amoreira, percorria o Verão, a sua folha mais recente me gritava.

(my version)

Encarnação’s version:

Du darfst mich getrost mit Schnee bewirten: sooft ich Schulter an Schulter mit dem Maubeerbaum schritt durch den Sommer, schrie sein jüngstes Blatt.

Podes sem receio Acolher-me com neve: Sempre que ombro com ombro Atravessava o Verão com a amoreira, Gritava a sua mais tenra Folha.

Comparing the two versions, my own attempt does not strike too discordant a note.

Now, on to the issues I had with Encarnação’s translation (just a few examples):

1 - "laß es wandern” = “deixa-o errar“ (page 61). “wandern” in its strictest sense means “to go for a walk” (andar, caminhar in Portuguese); upon reading Encarnação’s translation of this verse I was to lead to believe that we were talking about “making mistakes” (“errar” in Portuguese). There’s nothing in the verse that might put us on that particular instantiation of the original;

2 - “Wär ich wie du” = “Fora eu como tu” (“Were I like you”) (page 65). It’s erroneous to say the least.  I’d have used “Se eu fosse como tu” (“If I were you”);

3 - “Bei Wortschein” = “ao luar do verbo” (page 131). I’d have translated this as “à Luz da Palavra” using a very common theological expression, be it Portuguese or, for that matter, English (“at the word’s light”);

4 – “Von Ungeträumtem geätzt, wirft das schlaflos durchwanderte Brotland den Lebensberg auf.” = “Pelo insonhado corroída, a terra do pão insonemente percorrida atira o monte da vida ao ar” (page 141). Celan “wants” to express the inability to put into words some sort of violent experience that might be beyond what may be dreamed. To rightly interpret (and translate) this verse one would have to understand the keyword “Lebensberg” (a “gathering of experience” and not “a pile of life”/”um monte de vida” in Encarnação’s version). Using this as a clue I’d have translated “Von Ungeträumtem geätzt” as “corrompido pelo não-sonhado“/“corroded by the undreamed”). This way it sounds like I’m now reading Portuguese and not some kind of Ersatz-Portugiese;

5 - “Ausgeschlüfte Chitin sonnen.  Die Panzerlurche nehmen die blauen Gebetmäntel um, die sand-hörige Möwe heisst es gut, das lauernde Brandkraut geht in sich” = Sóis de quitina brotados do ovo. Os batráqueos blindados põem os paramentos azuis pelos ombros, a gaivota submissa à areia aplaude-o, a vigilante erva-fogo entra em si” (page 231). I’d have used the expression “recém-chocado”/”newly-hatched”. “Brotado do ovo” sounds weird in Portuguese.

My take on this particular stanza:

“Sóis de quitina recém-chocados. Os anfíbios blindados envolvem-se em paramentos azuis, a gaivota dependente da areia responde na afirmativa, a furtiva folha-fogo rumina.”

(“Chitin suns newly-hatched. Armoured amphibians wrap themselves up in blue liturgical vestments, the sun-dependent gull calls out in the affirmative, the furtive fire-leaf stops and thinks”). 

A common expression in German “in sich gekehrt” should have been the clue for this part of the poem…

I could have given a few more examples, but you get the gist. When translating Celan one shouldn’t go for the rhyme. Celan is not a rhyme type of poet. Celan inhabits another space-time continuum…Celan’s poetry needs a translator-poet which I’m not. I think In Portuguese only Vasco Graça Moura who translated Rilke, Gottfried Benn, Walter Benjamin, H. M. Enzensberger, etc. would have been able to render Celan’s German into Portuguese. Alas, he’s no longer among us to enlighten us as to the “details” of Celan’s poetry. We still have Barrento’s renderings into Portuguese, so all is not lost…

Bottom-line: 3 stars for Gilda Lopes Encarnação’s translation, and 4 stars for the afterword “À luz da U-topia”/”In the light of U-topia”/Im Licht der U-topie”, which gives us 3.5 stars. Not bad for an attempt on Celan’s poetry.

Ones-self: "The Unconsoled" by Kazuo Ishiguro

(Original Review, 1995-12-12)

I'm pretty respectful of other people's opinions and durable literary reputations. Reading Ulysses was bliss for me, but I have no harsh words for people who don’t like it. It is obviously something that has engaged reader’s minds, hearts, and souls, and perhaps more importantly influenced and engaged writers across generations, and I wish I could figure out why the rest of the world does not like it. As a reader one needs a little humility about one's little opinion, especially if it is “I like” or "I don't like".

Poetry has been a long uphill battle for me, and I don't think I still get very well what many folks take to be its essence. Rhyme tends to annoy me, and I can barely hear meter, read or spoken, and saying 'the accumulation of hard consonants with contrasting soft vowels throughout the line creates and effect of ....' is usually rather meaningless to me, as personal experience. I don't mind puzzling out poetry, if I can, and have learned to love poetry, but for me, in general, it just has to make sense (that’s why I love the German Romantic Poets: Rilke, Hölderlin, etc.). If I have to go to an interpretive text fine, but if I think the interpretive text finds no better, or little better, sense in it than I do, I tend to think it is time to abandon said poetry. Sometimes the interpretive text outweighs the poetry itself. I enjoyed Bettina Knapp's discussion of Stein's "Tender Buttons", but find "Tender Buttons" itself unreadable. YouTube has made spoken poetry available on an unlimited scale, but still I prefer to read it. And one can also listen while reading the text (which is often my preference).

I am shooting a little from the hip here, but my memories of Dylan Thomas poetry are that it is just incomprehensible to me, and since I personally have a hard time reading page after page of what is to me gibberish, I stopped reading it. "Milkwood" though, again from memory fumes, I remember as a grand work. I am a GREAT believer in individual sensory ratios AND that we can work on them if we choose rather than hunker down within our predispositions. I cannot tell how much reading the poetry I have read has enriched my life (a single person tipped me into it in midlife) and how making the effort to alter/overcome my own sensory/cognitive ratios/preferences, in so far as they succeeded, was very, very much worth the effort.

Shakespeare is hard to generalize about because he is so singular. Once again, earlier in life I was tipped into it by a single individual, a college professor. I find that Shakespeare is simply different on the page than in the ear. I, like many people, can watch/hear a play and both understand what is going on and appreciate the language too. But to get deeper into it, for me anyway, I have to read it. Same thing with poetry. And of course it is not an either/or choice. One can, I must, do both, but especially read. And then the next time you see it, it is all the more wonderful.

I wonder if the most adamant advocate of the ear doesn't rely on line by line reading to understand something like “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” I would bet 90% of such advocates DO perform, and rely on, such (multiple) readings.

So really it just takes me around and back to what Literature is for me. I have to try to understand it so it makes sense to me, however quirky and subjective that sense is. When I read Ishiguro's “The Unconsoled” it seemed to me to be an original and text book case of my theory of readership (which it helped immeasurably to evolve). If I could ask Ishiguro if he intended that at all, I’m sure he’d categorically say 'no'; that it was all about something else. But if I had to write a thesis about it, I would write what I still think of as its principle merit which is to have created and incarnate, in its protagonist, a conceptual double of a 'reading self', or “ones-self” as a reader. And that is how I approach literature; what would I say if I were writing a thesis on “Ode on a Grecian Urn” or “Milkwood?” And if I could write nothing because I didn't understand two words of it, then I tend to disregard it, while acknowledging there are valid approaches to 'pure abstract language' or the 'pure music of language'.

What people say about poetry, I would say about Literature: it is a way of looking at the world that should inform you about the world and in the process surprise, delight and possibly change you and the way you look at the world. In a very real sense obliqueness is the enemy of true poetry. Which is why, in part, I tend to be dismissive of genre, but keeping in mind some genre writing transcends it. Genre writing is generally not: a way of looking at the world that should inform you about the world and in the process surprise, delight and possibly change you and the way you look at the world. Some prose texts are, some aren't. It's like 'verse' versus poetry.