The ‘Death Café’ Again…...Connections…..Snow!
by Bernie Bell - 07:58 on 16 January 2023
The ‘Death Café’ Again….
I was thinking about the ‘Death Café’ again…. http://www.spanglefish.com/berniesblog/blog.asp?blogid=16088
I was thinking of how the local midwife often also ‘laid out’ the dead – saw them in and saw them out. Or, the family did the dead that service – remembering a poem by Seamus Heaney….
The Butts
His suits hung in the wardrobe, broad
And short
And slightly bandy-sleeved,
Flattened back
Against themselves,
A bit stand-offish.
Stale smoke and oxter-sweat
Came at you in a stirred-up brew
When you reached in,
A whole rake of thornproof and blue serge
Swung heavily
Like waterweed disturbed. I sniffed
Tonic unfreshness,
Then delved past flap and lining
For the forbidden handfuls.
But a kind of empty-handedness
Transpired…..Out of suit-cloth
Pressed against my face,
Out of those layered stuffs
That surged and gave,
Out of the cold smooth pocket-lining
Nothing but chaff cocoons,
A paperiness not known again
Until the last day came
And we must learn to reach well in beneath
Each meagre arm-pit
To lift and sponge him,
One on either side,
Feeling his lightness,
Having to dab and work
Closer than anybody liked
But having, for all that,
To keep working.
By Seamus Heaney
Which I quoted in this article… https://theorkneynews.scot/2022/02/26/when-suits-were-for-best/
Thinking of other old traditions such as having a ‘wake’ - not just the uproarious ‘Tim Finnigan’ kind… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRXWWZ74Qe8 , but also when folk would sit up with a dead person on their first night, so they wouldn’t be lonesome. My sister and I, and my niece, sat with my Dad through his first night, talking and looking at the names in the family bible, while Dad lay there in his coffin, in his own Living Room – where he’d often sat, spinning the yarn. That sister has also now gone.
It’s a strong memory to have – that niece is also my God-daughter – family connections made stronger.
I had a friend, Mick (past tense, as he’s now ‘dead’ too’), who knew someone who, as he’d wished to be, was laid out in a small boat, set on fire and floated down a river – I think it was illegal - but they didn’t get caught.
When Mick died, his friends shot his ashes into the air in a home-made rocket over the North York Moors, where he had loved to walk.
In fact, we describe Mick as having ‘done a Tim Finnegan’ – he was a builder who “fell off a ladder and broke his skull” and was dead on arrival at the hospital.
I was also thinking that the Death Café might help folk to think seriously about writing a Will. Writing a Will matters, and, for that matter, updating it matters too!
It first occurred to me to make a Will nearly 40 years ago when my brother died. He had made a cast-iron Will – he didn’t have much, but what he had, he had made sure would work in the best way possible for his widow and young daughter.
I didn’t have much either, but I realised that even something like some bits of jewellery might be worth thinking about – not valuable – but my God-daughter might like to have them. And so I decided that, though I didn’t have much money to spend on doing so, I should make a Will which would make clear what my wishes were, if I died.
I hadn’t even thought about the possibility of dying young, until my brother did so.
So, I made a Will. Then as my circumstances changed, I would change it. I got divorced, changed my Will. Re-married, changed my Will. And so on and so on.
Recently I realised that I should change a couple of things as both of my remaining sisters have now passed from this life and so I am the last of my immediate family, which could cause confusion with some of the bequests.
Also, the place where I requested to have my ‘seeing off’ do is being sold, so – that could cause confusion.
The main idea is to make everything as clear as possible, so that those left behind don’t have extra things to trouble them. My Will now represents my wishes for when I’m gone, so I’ll ‘let sleeping Wills lie’ until next time I need to change it.
It is important to make a Will, and to update your Will as your circumstances change. And – I keep copies of all correspondence relating to my Will, and the changes made. Years of office work comes in handy sometimes.
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Connections…..
Kamran Alam Khan… http://en.gravatar.com/kamran12341 ‘liked’ a comment I posted on Bartholomew Barker’s blog… https://bartbarkerpoet.com/
So, I looked at his blog and saw his piece about translation, and sent him the following exchange with friend Fred…. http://frederickturnerpoet.com/
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On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 Bernie Bell wrote:
“I'm presently reading 'Of Water and Spirit - Ritual, magic, and initiation In the life of an African Shaman' by Malidoma Patrice Some.
In the introduction, he says.....
"Although I have made great strides in orally communicating in that language, it was still very difficult to write this book. One of my greatest problems was that the things I talk about here did not happen in English; they happened in a language that has a very different mind-set about reality. There is usually a significant violence done to anything being translated from one culture to another. Modern American English, which seems to me better suited for quick fixes and the thrill of consumer culture, seems to falter when asked to communicate another person's world view. From the time I began to jot down my first thoughts until the last word, I found myself on the bumpy road of mediumship, trying to ferry meanings from one language to another, and from one reality to another - a process that denaturalizes and confuses them."
This got me thinking..........
Let's say there is a group of people living - anywhere really - but let's say on Orkney, 5,000 years ago. They have a particular mind-set and view of LIFE and therefore a particular language which is best fitted of that mind-set, and also material forms of expression which are best fitted for expressing that language, and that mind-set. Hence the carvings and paintings.
Step forward, 5,000 years later, and another group of people with a different mind-set and a different language with which to express it, and a different set of markings with which to communicate that language and mind-set.
They find traces and examples of the culture left by the former group of people. How can they make sense of these markings, structures, and artifacts? That isn't a rhetorical question. It's a question - how can they do so? Except, possibly, by using ........intuition, as well as deduction. Cup and ring marks, aren't just pleasing little round shapes.
Malidoma Patrice Some sees his purpose to be to remind the world of today of the ways of being and seeing of his own tribespeople when he was growing up in Burkina Faso. These people saw, and still see, 'the world' in a very different way to the way which is becoming dominant in, particularly the Western World today. He, and his ancestors, feel that the world is losing its way, and needs to be reminded of a different way of viewing how humans can live. I won't go on about that, it's best to read the book!
I'm hoping to make two points, really.............
One is:- a certain mind-set needs a certain way of being communicated, orally, and materially. That communication can then be very difficult for folk with a different mind-set to grasp.
The second is............when wondering why so much is being uncovered in relatively recent times ( I don't just mean that the Ness of Brodgar, I mean many places, many inscriptions, many artifacts), I can't help wondering if we're meant to pay attention, to try to look at how these peoples viewed LIFE and the world around them.
Malidoma Patrice Some and his ancestors are trying to get us to pay attention - maybe some other 'ancestors' are trying to do so, too?
I don't know. These are thoughts, prompted by reading that small extract in his book.
Different mind-sets finding it hard to connect with each other but needing to if at all possible - to learn, before we lose our way, too much.
That's it, I think.”
And Fred answered……
“I think it may be a mistake to blame language. Modern American English, as its great poets--Eliot, Pound, Frost, Stevens, Plath--show, is capable of extraordinary feats of empathy with other cultures and ancient worlds. I've pasted below my introduction to a collection of Hungarian poems in English translation that I and my co-translator, Zsuzsanna Ozsvath (a Holocaust survivor, by the way) published several years ago. The poet we translated, Miklos Radnoti, was shot as a Jew by the Nazis. The essay is about the process of translation.
The Journey of Orpheus: On Translation
Frederick Turner
The cast of the ghostly and beautiful mythic drama in which we, the translators, have become involved, includes as the hero Radnoti himself, his twin brother who died as he was born, his mother who also died in childbirth, his wife, for whom he lived, and ourselves. Zsuzsanna Ozsvath is a native speaker of Hungarian who, rescued by a series of miracles from the Holocaust in Budapest, shared some of Radnoti's experiences; I am a English/American poet with no knowledge of Hungarian but with a devotion to the ancient forms and meters of poetry which resembles Radnoti's.1
In the course of translating Radnoti we have made what we believe to be some valuable discoveries, both about poetry and about the art of translation.
Our actual method of translating is as follows. Each week Zsuzsanna Ozsvath selects a poem to translate, a selection based partly on its thematic connections to the ongoing discussion of Radnoti which continually accompanies our work together. At a weekly meeting, between three and four hours long, she and I go over the poem in three stages. The first stage is constituted by two readings of the poem in Magyar by Zsuzsanna Ozsvath, one as she would read it at a poetry reading, the other giving greater emphasis to the verseform. From these readings I am able to ascertain the meter, tone, cadence, and often the emotional color of the original. The rhyme-scheme is established, and any internal rhymes, assonances, alliteration, etcetera, are noted. If the verseform is a classical one, either in the Hungarian tradition or in some other tradition, such as the German, the Latin, or the French, or is for instance in Magyar folk-ballad meter, the implications for the tone and mood of the poem are discussed.
The second stage is a word by word oral translation of the poem by Dr. Ozsvath, which I write down. Here the first priority is the word order and idiom of the original, even when they make very strange sentences in English. Only later does she clarify the grammar, if that is necessary.
The third stage is an exhaustive analysis of the connotations, derivations, cognates, and synonyms of the words of the poem, together with an analysis of its lexical and syntactical peculiarities--archaisms, neologisms, compound words, slang, folk-language, dialect, and foreign words. Significant facts about references in the poem, its date relative to political and biographical events and to the composition of other Radnoti poems, and other relevant matters, are raised now if they have not been already. I frequently quote analogues from English, American, Latin, and European poetry, ranging from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton to Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Hopkins, and Yeats, from Dickinson to Stevens and Eliot, and from Virgil to Baudelaire and Pasternak; and Zsuzsanna responds by pointing out the similarities and differences of tone, and with quotations from her own favorite German, French, or Hungarian poets. There is a continuous interaction between my own poetic work and the work of translation, so that a poem of mine will sometimes gloss or anticipate a poem of Radnoti's. Dr. Ozsvath points out certain special moments in the original and guides me through their feeling; it is like the way Helen Keller's tutor guided her pupil through the reality of language. Such moments include the "great cold ferns, that slowly stir and bow" of "Letter To My Wife," the prune marmalade of "Forced March," the "somber-gonging tongue" of "Skin and Bone and Pain," the loony rhymes of "In the Gibbering Palm Tree," the simplicity of "world is but wormeatenness" in "Root," the "fuzzy-wuzzy" green stems of the poppies in "Steep Road," and the cluster of "au" sounds in "October" (in "Calendar"):
'All is golden-yellow, where
yellow corn does not yet dare
pawn the cornsilk gonfalon:
so it flaunts its golden awn.'
This process is a highly interactive one, and there are often differences of interpretation between the two translators, which must be fully resolved or, better still, incorporated as tensions in the translation. For instance, in "Root," "Like Death," and "Two Fragments," one of us felt more strongly a flavor of darkness and horror, the other the mysterious power of poetry which flourishes even in those realms of darkness. The translations reflect this ambivalence.
At this point I work with the several pages of translation and notes to produce by word processor a tentative verse translation, which I read to my co-translator some time during the following week (usually on the phone). If the tone and music sound right, the result is polished according to her advice and printed up. Some time during the next few weeks, after both translators have lived with the poem for a while, we take a look at it again and correct any problems that remain. We correspond with Mrs. Radnoti, the poet's widow, and her very perceptive suggestions and criticisms also result in changes in the text.
What is significant about this method is, we believe, a combination of three factors. One is the highly oral nature of the process; the poem never feels like just words on a page, but like a living communication between persons. This applies even before the translation process begins; Zsuzsanna knows most of the poems by heart, in part or whole. As for me, I first encounter each poem simply as a set of verbal/musical sounds. The second factor is related to the first: the process is highly interactive, with a feedback of understanding taking place between the two translators and our dead master. The third factor is the role of interpretation: we are interpreting the poem from the moment we begin, even before one of us has a literal understanding of it. This could only occur through the lingua franca of meter.
Radnoti's own metaphor for the process of translation was the myth of Orpheus. Though he himself left tacit some of the ramifications of that metaphor, we believe that an exploration of them may be valuable in this time; valuable not only for the reader but also for other translators who may find themselves in the dark wood of the translator's task and feel the need, as we did, for a guide.
Radnoti died in a strange lonely place, a sort of marshy delta-land where one of the Danube's tributaries, the Rabca, winds under leaning willows and high circling birds to join the great river. When we went there, and later when Fanni Radnoti put into our hands the notebook containing her husband's last poems, exhumed with his body from their mass grave, we felt as many did who knew him: that there must be some reason, some solid historical account, some humanly-comprehensible explanation of his death. But the more we sought it among his friends and among various literary, religious, and political survivors, the more it fled away before us, or diverged into contradictory accounts, like a river losing itself in the tangled web of its distributaries.
Yet his own work contains a triumphant and tragic myth of his death, which, if we followed it carefully, pointed to an entirely different kind of meaning than that of the various political and religious worldviews--Hungarian Nationalist, Christian, Communist, Jewish, Modernist, Socialist--that can claim him. But to follow that myth was to follow him into the land of shades, the underworld of roots and burial where he himself had his great adventure. A myth is a clue given us by a wise witch to find our way out of a labyrinth; a severe but trustworthy guide; or perhaps also the hope and promise of Mercy Herself, that there is a way back up into the light.
These are not just metaphors. The problem with translation is that, on the everyday surface level, there is no equivalent at all in another language for the words of a poem. The words of another language do not know the words of a Hungarian poem, and they are as incapable of understanding them as is someone who knows no Hungarian, or as rocks and trees and animals are. If translation is a matter of finding equivalents in a horizontal, one-to-one way--idioms in English that map the Hungarian idioms, grammatical ingenuities that preserve the ambiguities of the original, parallel puns, and so on--then perhaps translation should not even be attempted. Radnoti would remain dead to us and to the English-speaking world--and the metaphors that Hungarians persistently use to describe the isolation of their language are of being buried, imprisoned, on an island, cut off from the mainstream: the mainstream being English.
But Radnoti believed that translation could not only reproduce the life of the "original," but even improve on it. In his memoir Under Gemini--and we will return later to the related myth of the Dioscuri--he tells of a conversation with a scandalized friend in which he makes the deadpan claim that his translation of some lines of Tibullus is better than the Latin. "Better" can only mean that it is closer to something that both Radnoti and Tibullus are trying to reach. If this can be true, then our whole model of the relationship between languages--of language itself--needs to be transformed. The myth is the alchemical process by which this can be done.
In the myth of Orpheus the poet sang such melodies that the very beasts and trees and rocks listened to his song. One day his wife Eurydice, a wood-nymph, stepped on a snake and died of its bite. Orpheus followed her down into the underworld and played so sweetly before king Hades and Queen Persephone that they agreed to release her and let her return with Orpheus to the land of the living, on condition that he not look back at her until they had passed the gates of the underworld. But he did look back and she was lost forever. Later, as a priest of Apollo, he censured the orgiastic rites of the Dionysian mysteries, and was torn to pieces by the Maenads, the frenzied female votaries of Dionysus. Still singing, his head and his lyre drifted down the river Hebrus and came to Lesbos, the island of poets, where the head became an oracle, while Apollo placed the lyre among the stars. Strangely enough, he was regarded by the devotees of the Orphic mysteries as a true avatar of Dionysus.
Many poets have consciously or unconsciously followed this myth: the poet of Gilgamesh, whose hero seeks his dead friend in the land of the ever-living; Homer, who takes his Odysseus down into the land of shades; Virgil, whose Aeneas follows Odysseus in Book VI of the Aeneid; Dante, for whom Virgil himself became a guide in the Inferno; and so on. A female muse or sibyl or angel often protects the poet in his terrifying journey; for Dante, most eloquently, it is Beatrice. The land of shades is often imagined as a place of reeds and wandering rivers, and the soul is often imagined as a bird.
In the related myth of the Dioscuri, Castor, the mortal twin, was killed in battle, but Pollux, the immortal, begged to share his brother's fate. As a result they live alternately one day in heaven and one day on earth.
Many of these themes can be found again and again in Radnoti's poetry: the sense of debt to his dead twin in "Twenty-Eight Years" and other poems; the angelic guardian saint almost throughout, variously identified with Radnoti's dead mother, his living wife, his fate, and the dawning of a new age of freedom (but also, more darkly, with his own debt of death); the strange delta-land of such poems as "Twenty-Nine Years" and "Song;" the underworld of "Root" and many others; the winged soul and poetic apotheosis in "The Fourth Eclogue," "Twenty-Nine Years," and "Hexameters in Late October;" the sense that death will not stop his song ("In a Troubled Hour," "Neither Memory Nor Magic"); perhaps even the persistent sense that the poet brings sentient life to all of the animate and inanimate creation. We may even find the snake that poisoned Eurydice in such poems as "Twenty-Eight Years" and "While Writing." In the second of the "Razglednicas" the tiny shepherdess stepping into the lake catches in one image that peculiar combination of the pastoral and the Hadean that informs this theme of poetic death-transcendence. And Radnoti's prophetic fury against the blood-orgies of his persecutors in "Fragment" and "The Eighth Eclogue" recalls the reason for the dismemberment of Orpheus.
For the translator the myth holds special gifts. In order to recover the life of the dead poet the translator must follow him into the land of the dead, must go underground with him and be reborn with him in his apotheosis. Our work as translators is, as it were, to find Radnoti's unburied body and give it fit burial where, like those of the dead helmsmen Baios and Palinurus, he will become a beneficent genius loci. To translate is to die to one's own language as the dead poet died to his, and to go back to their common source. The poet, as in "Root," lives underground, nourishing the branches of the flowering tree. Every poem is a flowering branch; to translate is to retrace the source of that branch's vitality down to where the other language branches off from the common root and to follow it up into a new bough of blossom. The tree of life is the tree of tongues; and under every poem's words are an ur-language in which it was spoken before the poet himself translated it into Magyar or Latin or English. The "original" has never been written down, and every poem is an approximation to that orphic song which comes from the land of the dead, of the ever-living. Translation is not between leaf and leaf, flower and flower, but a descent through the fractal cascades of the twigs, the forked branches, to the root where the original poem issues, and then, by the power of song, to reascend along another branch.
By the "ur-language" we do not mean some actual prehistoric language, like Indo-European. One of the emphatic features of Hungarian is that it has no linguistic relationship to the Indo-European languages. The ur-language is the deep language that we share to some extent with other higher animals, the language of childhood, the words we sometimes speak in dream and which dissolve when, having awoken, we try to remember them. The world itself speaks a sort of objective poetry, formed out of the harmonious relations of all registerings, sensations, and perceptions of it; and this poetry is the scaffolding of its next leap of growth. It is that poetry which poets hear, and which is the inner melody of their poems. The history of the evolution of perception and finally of esthetic perception is the history of the evolution of the universe into concreteness and time, and into that densest and deepest kind of time we call eternity. The reason the rocks, trees, and beasts come to listen to Orpheus is because they want to hear how their own story comes out; for the ur-language that they speak is unconscious of itself and does not know its own meaning. The poet is the womb of that meaning, and needs the historical language of his or her culture to embody it.
To translate Radnoti is only possible because he never cut himself off from the living tradition of poets and prophets. Like Dante and Blake and Rilke and Yeats he conversed on equal terms with the spirits of the dead from the past, and the angels of the unborn future; and the piety that enabled him to do that also renders him available for conversation with other poets, even though the earth of the grave divides us. In the Eighth Eclogue he speaks with Nahum; and Nahum's home is not just ancient Israel but the primeval dustcloud out of which the Universe evolved.
To be a part of that tradition is to have mastered, and to have kept the faith with, certain ancient magics, one of the greatest of which is metrical form. In "O Ancient Prisons," a perfect sonnet, we see that faith and mastery. The poet teaches how to know; and he does this only by speaking in measure and in form. Perhaps the deepest element of the conversation between the translator and the dead poet is mediated by the struggle to resurrect the meter of the original. In "A la Recherche," which, as its title implies, is itself an attempt to resurrect the dead poets who were the friends of his youth, Radnoti describes the adjectives as dancing on the froth and comb of the meter; in other words, images come alive only when embedded in a metrical cadence that holds them in the correct, vital position with relation to each other. Images are like the bases of an enzyme, that are effective in their work of cutting, joining, and catalysing only if the molecular structure--or verse form--of the enzyme presents them at the right angle so as to form an "active site." Radnoti can only remember and preserve his dead friends when he remembers the measure of their poetry; and for him the pressure of their hands in their last handclasp is the same thing as their characteristic "hand" or handwriting in meter. In his great elegy for Mihaly Babits, again it is the Measure (capitalized as in Radnoti's poem to suggest Babits' initial) that preserves the inner life of the poet.
The struggle to resurrect Radnoti's meter in another language results in a terrifying revelation, and demands an absolute faith. The revelation is of Radnoti's almost inhuman, his Mozartian virtuosity with meter. Consider, for instance, the meter of "Twenty-Nine Years"--which even Radnoti himself confesses, in the poem, to have found horribly difficult--with its regular pattern of tetrameters and pentameters, its "nines and twenties" as he punningly puts it, its fiendish system of feminine rhymes. Every poem he wrote is metrically unique, and he was in his brief time (again like Mozart) divinely prolific. (Like Mozart too his artistic joy seems to rise to an angelic shriek the grimmer his existence becomes and the closer he gets to death; Radnoti's friends were scandalized by the fact that he found the activities of Herr Hitler and company of secondary interest to the sweet wrestle with poetic form. But Radnoti was right. One day Hitler will be known as a tyrant who lived during the time of the poet Radnoti.) To render Radnoti's delicate interference between a meticulous and complex verseform, and an infinitely various cadence, seems simply impossible; a blank wall.
But there is also the faith; for after all the cadence of poetry is already prior to and in common between all languages. One of the unnoticed peculiarities of the Orpheus myth is that though Orpheus is described as a poet rather than as a musician, it is the sweetness of his song, of his lyre, of his music that persuades the masters of the Underworld to release Eurydice. We think the problem can be resolved by interpreting music in the myth as poetic meter: Minos and Rhadamanthos might not understand the surface language of a particular national lexicon and syntax, but recognize, as the root recognizes the sap, the ur-language of measure and cadence. So if the translator has faith in the ur-language--one might almost say, if he does not once look behind to check whether the "literal" sense is following--he may yet lead the redeemed meaning up into the light. In other words, since English is descended from the same deep root as Magyar, any music of which Magyar is capable exists also in English. To recover it is like, as Michelangelo put it, cutting away the stone to reveal the statue; the statue is waiting in the stone, if one has faith that it is.
Translating metrically one must be prepared to give up everything, to sacrifice everything to the meter. Only after that kenosis, that descent and submission, is everything miraculously restored, not always where it was lost, and sometimes in a form which is not at once recognizable--in the connotation of another word, or in a grammatical ambiguity enforced by the meter--but without loss. Of course some Radnoti lines simply write themselves in English:
'And in the brilliance, bold calligraphy
Is idly, glitteringly, written by
a boastful, diamond-budded dragonfly.'
("Calendar:" "June")
But elsewhere, as in the tiny "Ikon" of Mary, the meter will not allow enough room and the pillows on which the doves rest in the original have to be sacrificed.
'Look at her hands! they're a flower
slain by the snow. In her hair,
loosening, nestles a dove.'
But the pillows return in the word "nestles," and as the dove now nestles in her hair, it has become her bosom, and so the pillows both of the infant Jesus and of the lover have reappeared in another form, as the doves themselves, but chastened by being in the singular--another shift demanded by the meter. In "A Pink Unveils," faith to the meter demands a straining of the language, so that the cicadas "flirt their hips;" but this usage might well be the discovery of an English or American poet: the poet that Radnoti might have been if his mother tongue were English. (Radnoti sometimes jokingly referred to himself as the English poet Eaton Darr, a phonetic reversal of his own name.) The same recovery of the original intensity of the image, through faith in the measure, can be found in the line about the "pales of grey" in "Paris," and throughout such poems as "Floral Song," "In Your Arms," and "Dreamscape;" and the Hopkinsian wordleaps that occur in our translation of "Hexameters in Late October" were forced on us by the rigors of the hexameter.
Now these observations about the recovery of the original are not the translatorial self-congratulation that they may appear. The point is that these things happen through the force of Radnoti's own genius, given the deep affinities between all languages, and the blind faith of the translators that the original cadence lies buried in English, just as it did in the Hungarian. This faith is absolutely essential; the translator must reject every half-way acceptable rhyme or metrical solution, until the right words are found. Those words are at the same time utterly unforced (though they may sound very strange, expanding the very notion of what is "natural" in English) and utterly in the spirit of the original. Without that faith one would not know that one had not yet reached the answer, because one would not believe that the answer existed.
This faith requires the translator to jettison many old and new superstitions about what is metrically possible in a given language. Such superstitions include the belief that English does not take kindly to feet that begin with a strong stress (the dactyl or trochee, for instance); that feet with two light syllables (dactyls, anapests, amphibrachs) necessarily result in an unpleasant gallop in English verse; and that lines longer than the pentameter--especially the hexameter--will not work in English. All these problems are matters of technique. Chiefly the answer lies in a consideration of the length as well as the stress of the English syllables. Few poets who work in English meter pay the conscious attention they should to syllabic length, though if they have good ears they will generally opt unconsciously for a safely pleasant pattern of syllable lengths. If the heavy and light stresses in the English hexameter are patterned against a harmonious counterpoint of syllables of greater and lesser duration, many of the problems of this long line disappear. Another recourse is alliteration, which wonderfully ties the line together. In all of these matters Radnoti was our teacher, as he himself was a faithful servant of the classics whom he translated. Our experience with Radnoti encourages us to believe that even tonal meters, like those of classical Chinese poetry, could be made to work in English, even though tone is used grammatically in English rather than lexically, as it is in Chinese. Magyar, we feel, once possessed a systematic lexical/tonal element, which still surfaces sometimes in poetry.
The uniqueness of each of Radnoti's poems has much to do with the different mood and mindset that is generated by a given meter, and to which the imagery, wordplay, logic, and degrees of grammatical licence and semantic ambiguity are tuned. In "Hymn to the Nile," for instance, the short lines and heavy rhymes are tuned to the repetition of words and whole lines to produce an incantatory or invocatory effect. This in turn contrasts with the exotic subject and the compounded neologisms to create a strange ritual chant, the aural equivalent of Egyptian hieroglyphics; while the light dancing energy of the rhythm makes the poem into a celebration. Meanwhile the playful paradoxes, expressionistic diction, and grammatical freedom set the poem loosely within the symbolist movement and thus suggest a more immediate relevance. Take the meter out of this complex system, and the meaning of the poem disappears, like the colors of a tropical fish when it is left to gasp in the bottom of a boat. "In Your Arms" is an even more telling example. It would be quite lifeless without the lullaby meter. More subtly, the epic/pastoral hexameters of the first and eighth eclogues are fundamental to their meanings, recalling the power of Homer, the moral complexity of Virgil, and that strange Hadean combination of the arcadian with the heroic that we associate with the descent to the land of the dead.
The chief superstition that we found we must give up was the superstition that "free verse" is an adequate or acceptable way of translating a metered original. And our experience with translation confirmed our growing suspicion that by abandoning metered verse the modernists were abandoning the very heart of poetry itself. In translating Radnoti we hope that his spirit will be released into the English language, released from that marshy delta-land beside the Rabca and into the freedom which Radnoti always envisioned beyond the dreadful foreshortening of his own life and fate. The poetic stagnation which has occurred since the second world war, partly as a result of the terrible events of that war and partly because of the modernist mistake of giving up poetic meter, may thus give way to a new freshening and opening of poetry, so that the spiritual Nile may once more flow unimpeded:
'All hail, thou greenglowing!
O Nilus, sweetsmelling,
thy cisterns thou breakest,
thy pastures sunglowing
thou floodest with growing,
thou, overflowing!'
Note
1. The following poem conveys one dimension of my personal relationship as a poet with Radnoti:
On the Pains of Translating Miklos Radnoti
And now I too must wrestle with a brother
Whose dead limbs cumber me within the womb,
Whose grief I pity, but whose cord of nurture
Glides dreadful and unseen in this blind gloom.
That angel, who is Michael in my language,
Knew how to die, knew how to share a grave;
Sometimes he almost overcrows my spirit,
His great feathered wings beating in the cave--
My elder brother died as I first opened
My lips in speech instead of in a scream;
Now he returns to claim the voice I borrowed,
Now he returns, the hero of my dream.
How can I share the lifeblood of our mother?
How can I let his dead voice steal my breath?
But how indeed could I deny my brother
Who, reckless, bought my birthright with his death?
For all alone among that generation
He kept the faith that I have made my name,
That ancient grace, that hard emancipation,
The love of form that touches us like flame.
What can I do but open to his service
The pulse and wordstream of the mother tongue?
Thus I subdue myself and hear him singing
Out of the land of shades where none have sung.
Could I, the western democrat, professor,
Father, essayist, of middle age,
Be given any greater gift than this is,
To share the passion of his vassalage?”
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Then I thought I’d post it here, for if other folk might be interested. I think making connections is A GOOD THING.
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Snow!
Today....snow on the ground….stove lit…..
Just before Christmas 2015 we had a small multi-fuel stove installed. We'd been meaning to do this for years, but each time we'd saved up for it something would turn up which gobbled up the money. We finally had saved up enough, and nothing else turned up – so we got a stove and had it installed.
We love it, for many reasons, but one big reason is.........it's a real thing. It's solid, iron. It works by moving some knobs about. There's a knob to 'riddle' the ashes so they drop into the tray. There's a knob to open the flue to the chimney, there's another knob to regulate the flow of air through to the fire itself. It doesn't rely on batteries or electricity. And....we have to use our senses, and our minds to make it work. We don't just flick a switch, and get instant heat, light, etc. The stove means that a person has to pay attention, set the fire properly, regulate the flow of air, keep an eye on it.
In a world of ever-increasing gadgets which mean that folk don't need to use their minds or their senses because everything is done for them, this little stove makes you work a bit for what you want. If you want heat from it, if you want it to work, you have to pay attention and work with it. It's great.
On the decorative side - the chimney reflects things, it reflects light, either artificial or sunlight, and reflects the things on the wall behind it. The whole thing, looks cosy even when it's not lit.
The hearth is made of local stone, smoothed and oiled, and when the sun shines on it, you can still see the patterns in the stone.
Our stove - a real thing in an increasingly un-real world.
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Here’s one I made earlier….. https://theorkneynews.scot/2020/05/03/i-discover-isaac-asimov/
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