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!

Gesang ist Dasein: "Rilkeana" by Ana Hatherly

Published 1999.

In the past I’ve bought this book two times. Last week I bought it again, for the third and last time. I lent the other two, but for the life of me I cannot remember to whom they went. The one I’ve just bought won’t leave home…

Every time I read this book (I’ve read it several times) I always come back to Rilke (no surprise there…). But more than coming back to Rilke, I always wonder what Poesy does for me that Prose doesn’t. What does it represent, i.e., what kind of world does it depict, and what kind of operational forms does it use to transform our everyday experience into something esthetic pleasing, and so forth. I’ve looked for the answer everywhere (and I mean really everywhere: poets, in the poesy itself, interviews with poets, etc.) After this “quest”, I came back to Rilke, i.e., I decided to drop anchor. I’ve re-read Rilke several times, in several languages (in German most and foremost, but also in English, and in Portuguese). Reading Rilke, Trakl, Heine fell into disuse. Not to me. They’re not “fast food” poesy-wise. Their digestion is difficult and they don’t leave us at rest with the world. When I read them I’m not exactly looking for Daseinsfreude, the joy of the days to come. What I find in Rilke is a poet who traverses the ruins and debris to find the sublime greatness of the human soul. They are the poets of misery, sadness, impotence, terror, anguish, and darkness. We all have a few of those within ourselves…

In Portugal Rilke has always been a major influence: Sophia de Mello Breyner e Andresen, António Ramos Rosa, Herberto Helder, Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão, and Fernando Guimarães to name just a few. For a People worshipping Fado, that’s to be expected.

In the Elegies we have those ethereal beings we call angels. In our western tradition they represent the redemption of Man. They save us, they pick up our debris and what's left of us. And yet, these angels, who are the mediators between life and death, the invisible (transcendence) and the visible (Earth), are also terrible beings because they carry within themselves an intrinsic darkness. Rilke's angels celebrate existence and language through the only way available to them: the singing ("Gesang ist Dasein"). In Rilke Singing and Being are merged. This merging is what allows me to find a door into Rilke's poesy. The language of Poesy should be nothing but mystic in its essence. Why? We can only be "saved" through the use of poetic language, aiming at the wholesomeness of our nature, i.e., at an absolute and redeeming utterance-ness of being.

Hatherly was able to produce echoes of Rilke in Portuguese in a way I haven’t seen done before. In a very Rilkean way, she uses the beginnings of the 10 Elegies to sort of deviate, but not really doing it in the end.

Rilke’s 10 line beginnings that Hatherly uses to “deviate from/recreate” his poesy:

-          Wer, wenn ich schriee (I)

-          Jeder Engel ist schrecklich (II)

-          Eines ist, die Geliebte zu singen

-          O Bäume lebens

-          Wer aber sind sie, sag mir, die Fahrenden

-          Feigebaum, seit wir lange schon ists mir bedeutend

-          Werbung nicht mehr, nicht Werbung, entwachsene Stimme

-          Mit alle Augen sieht die Kreatur das Offene

-          Warum, wenn es angeht, also die Frist des Daseins

-          Dass ich dereinst, an dem Ausgang der grimmigen Einsicht

She also translates into Portuguese “Die Engel/The Angels/Os Anjos” (from the book “Das Buch der Bilde/o Livro das Imagens”):

Todos têm uma boca lassa

E as claras almas sem limites.

E em seus sonhos por vezes perpassa

Uma saudade (talvez de pecado).

Quase todos parecidos uns com os outros

Nos jardins de Deus estão calados

Como se fossem inúmeros intervalos

Em sua força e sua melodia.

Mas quando desdobram suas asas

Despertam uma tal vibração

Como se Deus com sua vasta criadora mão

Folheasse o obscuro Livro do Início.

The original written by Rilke is much prettier:

(

Sie haben alle müde Münde

und helle Seelen ohne Saum.

Und eine Sehnsucht (wie nach Sünde)

geht ihnen manchmal durch den Traum.

Fast gleichen sie einander alle;

in Gottes Gärten schweigen sie,

wie viele, viele Intervalle

in seiner Macht und Melodie.

Nur wenn sie ihre Flügel breiten,

sind sie die Wecker eines Winds:

als ginge Gott mit seinen weiten

Bildhauerhänden durch die Seiten

im dunklen Buch des Anbeginns.

)

My attempt at translating directly from German into English for the benefit of my English-speaking friends:

The Angels

They all have tired mouths

And bright, boundless souls.

And a longing (as if for sin)

Sometimes goes through their dream.

They all nearly look alike;

In God’s Garden they are quiet,

Like many, many intervals

In his strength and melody.

Only when they spread their wings

Are they wind awakeners:

As if God with his wide sculptor’s hands

were browsing through the pages

of the dark book of beginnings.

Can it get any better than this?

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.

"Die Gedichte" by Bertold Brech

5:07 pm 5 April 2014

"Die Gedichte by Brecht". It has finally arrived!

After ordering it almost a month ago, it's arrived!

My favourite "Stückeschreiber".

Along with Heine, Brecht used "Gebrauchslyrik" do draw attention both to the aesthetic and to the utilitarian function of poetry.

1647 pages of poetry in a tiny typeface... Good grief! Price to pay fo