tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-135939022024-03-07T11:13:46.550-08:00The Eastside Viewtravel, eating, reading,
theater, music; occasional political remarksCharles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.comBlogger769125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-7432942028031342142020-12-21T10:48:00.012-08:002021-01-15T15:48:52.104-08:00Charles Shere 1935 - 2020<i>Charles died quietly at home in the country on December 15, 2020, with his family around him. Obituaries have been published in:</i> <a href="https://www.sfcv.org/music-news/rip-charles-shere-bay-area-music-presence-for-six-decades" target="_blank">San Francisco Classical Voice</a> | <a href="https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/charles-shere-healdsburg-composer-music-critic-author-dies-at-85/" target="_blank">Santa Rosa Press Democrat</a> | <a href="http://www.sonomawest.com/the_healdsburg_tribune/tributes/obituaries/charles-everett-shere/article_fed6506a-4943-11eb-a3d1-af8b49747a48.html" target="_blank">Healdsburg Tribune</a> | <a href="https://www.berkeleyside.com/2021/01/04/remembering-charles-shere-who-approached-life-with-open-minded-wonder" target="_blank">Berkeleyside</a>Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-63285550347938868602020-09-20T22:14:00.000-07:002020-09-20T22:14:24.162-07:00Pessoa on death<p> A morte é a curva da estrada,</p><p>Morrer é só não ser visto.</p><p>Se escuto, eu te oiço a passada</p><p>Existir como eu existo.</p><p>A terra é feita de céu.</p><p>A mentira não tem ninho.</p><p>Nunca ninguém se perdeu.</p><p>Tudo é verdade e caminho.</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0 0 0 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">— <span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(24, 24, 24); color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; text-align: left;">23 May 1932</span></span></p></blockquote></blockquote></blockquote><p style="text-align: right;"><span style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(24, 24, 24); color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, serif; font-size: 20px; text-align: left;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: right;">Death is the curve of the road,</p><p style="text-align: right;">To die is just not to be seen.</p><p style="text-align: right;">If I listen, I hear you pass</p><p style="text-align: right;">Exist as I exist.</p><p style="text-align: right;">The earth is made of heaven.</p><p style="text-align: right;">The lie has no nest.</p><p style="text-align: right;">No one was ever lost.</p><p style="text-align: right;">All is true and path.</p>Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-5230554168062903742020-08-18T16:59:00.000-07:002020-08-18T16:59:09.784-07:00Reading Baldwin, 1<h4 style="text-align: left;"><b>James Baldwin: <i>Go Tell It On the Mountain</i> </b>(1953)<br /><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">Library of America no. 97 (ed. Toni Morrison), pp. 1-215<br /></span><b><i>Giovanni’s Room </i>(1956)<br /></b><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">op. cit., pp. 217-360<br /></span><span style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;">ISBN: 978-1-88301151</span></h4><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baldwin " target="_blank">James Baldwin</a> (1924-1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, and public intellectual particularly active from the 1950s until his death. Black, gay, and (much of the time) expatriate, his relationship to the Civil Rights Movement was complex. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI accumulated over 1800 pages of documents in his file; he met with then Attorney General Robert Kennedy; he appeared prominently at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963; but — this is my speculation — he saw observation of the social condition, let alone analysis and action, as complex and nuanced.</p><p>
I come to that conclusion rashly, not having read Baldwin’s essays. Not having read Baldwin at all, in fact, though his first two novels had appeared, to considerable discussion, before I graduated with a degree in English Literature. Baldwin had not been assigned in any of my classes, and I didn’t know of his importance.</p><p>
What with these times I’ve decided to read him, complete and chronologically, depending on the <a href="https://www.loa.org/books/118-early-novels-stories" target="_blank">Library of America</a> for my sources. After completing the primary sources I may turn to criticism and biography: his was clearly an interesting life as well as an important one.</p><p>
Baldwin took ten years to write his first novel, <i>Go Tell It On the Mountain</i>. The result is powerful, clear, and expressive in content; fascinating, balanced, and intelligent in structure. It is a bildungsroman, nearly, but stops just short of the expected final intellectual awakening of John Grimes, the central character — Baldwin leaves it to the reader to extrapolate the catastrophe that will precipitate, a year or two after the narrative’s conclusion.</p><p>
I won’t describe the plot: you’ve read the book, or if not you can find plenty of outlines on the internet. It involves a family: stern father, taken-for-granted mother, John (sired by a different father, though he may not know it), younger brother Roy, two younger sisters; and aunt Florence, the father’s older sister, who offers an outside, non-Christian view of the family’s failings.</p><p>
The father is a Pentecostal preacher to his own storefront Harlem church, and the relentless, remorseless cruelty of the Old Testament permeates the novel. “Race,” in the usual sense, is rarely an issue; the preacher has no use for whites, and John has to keep his own childhood experiences with kind white adults — teacher, librarian — to himself, not seeing a way to share them.</p><p>
The book’s narrative seems to take place in one long day, John’s fourteenth birthday, but the crushing events of the day are informed by other, similarly crushing events in the distant past — and by implications of catastrophes waiting in the future. I’m sure Baldwin must have sketched out the story chronologically, then worked on methods of incorporating flashbacks, and even flash-forwards within the flashbacks, to slow the pace, build the tension, and concentrate the power of his writing. </p><p>
It is inconceivable that Baldwin could have written <i>Go Tell It On the Mountain</i> without knowing the novels of Henry James, without knowing <i>A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</i>. I see Gertrude Stein’s novella <i>Melanctha</i> behind Baldwin, too; and wonder about his view of Faulkner — I’ll find out when I get to Baldwin’s essays. I even wonder if I shouldn’t reread Fitzgerald’s <i>This Side of Paradise</i> soon, to see what it has to say to <i>Go Tell It On the Mountain</i>. I don’t mean by this that Baldwin’s novel is derivative: it is not. It is fully achieved. The ten years were well spent.</p><p>
</p><div align="center">• • •</div><p><i>
Giovanni’s Room</i> is a completely different book. I think of Fitzgerald again, but this time of Gatsby; the book has that precision, clarity, and efficiency. And I think of Camus and <i>L’Etranger</i>: the book has that blinding moral force, that nearly physical impact.</p><p>
We are in the south of France, apparently just after the end of World War II. The central character, who narrates the action, is a fair-haired American man, clearing out his house after his fiancee’s sudden departure, no clear future in store unless it’s a final descent into the transient rootless Paris scene whose revelation precipitated his girl’s decision.</p><p>
For if <i>Go Tell It On the Mountain</i> is a novel centered on Pentecostalism, <i>Giovanni’s Room</i> centers on (male) homosexuality. If whites are nearly absent from<i> Go Tell It On the Mountain</i>, blacks are not to be found in <i>Giovanni’s Room</i>. Most of the action is in Paris, involving characters and settings Proust’s Baron de Charlus would recognize instantly, though regretting the fall of social graces between fin-de-siècle and Libération. Baldwin writes of a world of casual cruising, from which love appears to blossom. </p><p>
And if <i>Go Tell It On the Mountain</i> suggests I reread Fitzgerald, Giovanni’s Room spurs me (!) to get back to the Proust project, lapsed a year ago midpoint — precisely in Charlus’ company.</p><p>
Just as some critics have suggested that John’s religious crisis, in <i>Go Tell It On the Mountain</i>, is code for his growing awareness of his homosexuality, others see the narrator’s bisexuality in <i>Giovanni’s Room</i> as standing for the conflict between black and white (or mixed) society. (Both novels are clearly autobiographical to an extent.) </p><p>Doesn’t matter to me if some readers see and pause over this possibility, or even if someone persuades me, in future reading, that Baldwin had this in mind. Such readings reveal the riches of nuance, fed by the experiences determining the postures of such readers. Let a hundred flowers bloom. I will never be able to read Baldwin as anyone but an old straight white man: but I am reading him, so far, with great appreciation and gratitude for his knowledge, his eloquence, his artistry, and his humanity.</p><p>
</p><table><tbody><tr><td><br /></td><td></td><td></td><td></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-35769184733830164482020-07-06T16:54:00.000-07:002020-07-06T16:54:00.136-07:00From my 1975 Journal, an account of an elaborate party
(16 May)<p>
[John] Fitzgibbon had called the day I was working on the grant application for The Bride, to invite me to his Bride-based event for Bruce Nauman & Howard Fried, so of course it was necessary to go. L. had to work, so Giovanna accompanied me. A gorgeous day: we drove to Auburn, then south up behind Folsom Lake through Cool to Pilot Hill, turning west to John's. We were directed to a parking place; there we gave up the dozens of roses we'd brought & were instructed to walk down a trail, stopping at some point to take all our clothes off (I retained my hat & shoes) & lay them out to look as if they were still being worn. Clothes were hanging from trees & bushes (some times from poisonoak!), sitting, stuffed with other clothes, on logs; lying spread out on the ground. In a large hillside meadow – actually at the edge of it — we sat, getting our instructions from John; down at the bottom of the hill there was an easel; on it, a painting by ____ in homage to Duchamp’s Nudes. In time we saw the figure of a unicorn appear at the bottom of the hill, accompanied by one of John's daughters in a bridal gown; after a while we heard country string music, & then Nauman & Fried appeared, escorted by a fiddler.
<p>
They had flown to Sacramento, been met by a car, ostensibly to be driven to John's, but were let off at the lake, where the fiddler met them & accompanied them via sailboat to the bottom of our hill. While looking at the painting they were distracted by the bride & the unicorn, who proceeded slowly up the hill; as Nauman & Fried followed them, we nudes appeared on either side of their path, arcing Frisbees across it & calling out messages out of the Duchamp canon: "Water & gas on every floor!" “No solution because no problem!” etc. At the top of the hill the bride was stripped by seven bachelors, who barred the guests from aiding her; she was abducted by Death, a hideous skeleton, & was led, with the unicorn still protected by the seven, so that Nauman & Fried could not touch his horn & free the maiden, up the steep path past the clothing- dummies.
<p>
In the meantime we swift nudes were ascending through the oaks on either side of the path, so that we got to the top ahead of Death & the maiden & the guests: at a corral at the trailhead we formed a gauntlet, analogous to Nauman's green corridor, the path between the two rows strewn with rose petals — a lovely smell – & Death, maiden, unicorn, bachelors & guests passed the gauntlet into the corral, where John welcomed them, the guests were finally able to touch the unicorn horn, the maiden was freed, & the event was over to dancing & music.
<p>
The impressions — youth, of spirits above all; sunshine & oak-dappled shade; aromas of grass, flowers, roses; animal energy & beauty; speed & power, a little mystery. It all worked very well indeed.
<p>
Afterward G. & l went up to John's to thank him - on the way seeing the discarded typewriter, lying among the oaks like a rejected casting, the relic of a previous event. Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-51286407735166762492020-06-24T16:24:00.001-07:002020-10-13T08:15:01.722-07:00Memorable visuals, 3: Gardens: The Villa Garzoni<div><img alt="" id="id_3f7b_2dd3_49c5_68c" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/ZiKg8Ieq-nXD3DpqI6QF5TwDDsqaKadwM4PU_11s0tmW5_YpCBeZPfI02m1234Q" style="height: auto; width: 746px;" title="" tooltip="" />The Villa Garzoni in Collodi, near Lucca, was the first Italian hillside garden we visited. Many gardens have impressed me: Het Loo, the Alcazar, Cordoba, the Reggio in Caserta, Tivoli… But this was the first, I think, to leave a lasting impression. I’m sorry I don’t have a better photo. </div><div><br /></div><div><img id="id_88d3_def7_18b6_e4c8" src="blob:null/441e98c1-cce6-408f-9852-a2a6b04b8c9c" style="height: auto; width: 0px;" /></div><div><br /><br /><br /></div><div>A well-designed and -maintained garden is a painting in space, usually on a strong drawing. It is architecture freed of the obligation to <i>contain</i>&thinsp<i>;,</i>inviting the visitor to wander, now considering detail — color, texture, form — and now contemplating totality, the overall, changing, generally visceral rather than analytical impression of the garden’s statement as a whole. </div><div><br /></div><div>And then the mediations: between detail and totality; between totality and Place, by which I mean both site (here carved out of “wild” setting, and facing paved streets and “development”) and historical position. </div><div><br /></div><div>Much to consider, and where would you find a more tranquil spot in which to make the effort?</div> Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-4670841499771032102020-06-14T17:30:00.001-07:002020-06-14T17:30:52.447-07:00Memorable visuals, 2: Sculpture. Le Cheval majeur<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiHcwQMKk1z3kgVzDam9xD0bO_ZU1FoWS_DTQ3BRqhK-beclgBw5S4JG_d6PDZc-0rdpR432u7JRk25I9fQpn66lOzjbU7mtmPpt2klqfNH8cOO1-fiOTuqTJNmf8TntAziEHK_g/s1600/284px-GUGG_The_Horse.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiHcwQMKk1z3kgVzDam9xD0bO_ZU1FoWS_DTQ3BRqhK-beclgBw5S4JG_d6PDZc-0rdpR432u7JRk25I9fQpn66lOzjbU7mtmPpt2klqfNH8cOO1-fiOTuqTJNmf8TntAziEHK_g/s400/284px-GUGG_The_Horse.jpg" width="316" height="400" data-original-width="284" data-original-height="359" /></a><p>
<em>The Large Horse</em>, bronze, by Raymond Duchamp-Villon, one of Marcel Duchamp’s older brothers, who was destined finally to take sculpture in a straight line past Rodin — except that World War I killed him in 1918.
<p>
In fact this work is posthumous: Duchamp-Villon made a small version, in plaster, in 1914, apparently leaving instructions as to the size he wanted; Duchamp and his surviving older brother Jacques Villon had an edition of casts at the final size — 150 × 97 × 156 cm — made in 1930.
<p>
Of course it is stupid to look at a photograph of a sculpture. This one particularly: you have to walk around it, slowly, looking at the constantly changing edges, perhaps with one eye; and back away and approach, and raise your head and lower it…
<p>
I suppose if you have to classify things you’d say this is a rare example of French Futurism. I wish Duchamp-Villon hadn’t joined the army — he served in a medical corps, contracted typhoid fever in 1916, and died of it two years later, just before the Armistice. Tragic.
Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-28695504945166564342020-06-12T16:51:00.001-07:002020-06-12T16:51:59.200-07:00Memorable visuals, 1: Painting: De Melkmeid
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBYfZFZUDM5wy4ewVmC7EVD7Oqe91M58mjbyClumQPQqY2yrH5FYroCYgV86XMDe-yz9opWOCBG7yn7DzFiPuB__Pxd8T7h7Y9FC4EDCqor4GypsMzpI82pGbh4qFB5DQZAAqWPw/s1600/480px-Johannes_Vermeer_-_Het_melkmeisje_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBYfZFZUDM5wy4ewVmC7EVD7Oqe91M58mjbyClumQPQqY2yrH5FYroCYgV86XMDe-yz9opWOCBG7yn7DzFiPuB__Pxd8T7h7Y9FC4EDCqor4GypsMzpI82pGbh4qFB5DQZAAqWPw/s320/480px-Johannes_Vermeer_-_Het_melkmeisje_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" width="286" height="320" data-original-width="480" data-original-height="538" /></a><p>A Facebook friend challenged me to post a work of art a day, one I have seen in person or has greatly affected me, and incorporates the visual: painting, sculpture, theater, opera, film, dance, photography, architecture …
Vermeer’s kitchenmaid will likely not be the only Dutch painting to show up this series, even the only Vermeer. But of all the paintings in the Rijksmuseum she’s the one I’m closest to, taking every opportunity for another glance between crowds…<p>
<blockquote><em>Selected comments to the Facebook post:
</em><p>
John Whiting: A favorite of mine as well. A masterpiece of composition as well as comment.<p>
Curtis Faville: The great Dutch masters portray a world of order, clarity and stasis. <p>
Anthony Holdsworth: One of the greatest of the Dutch masters, Pieter Brueghel the Elder did not paint a world of 'order, clarity and stasis'. His later works: The Blind Leading the Blind, Hunters in the Snow, The Peasant Wedding, among others, are the most astounding depictions of the vanished peasant world in western art.<p>
Alexis Alrich:I keep wondering what that box on the floor is. It looks like an incense burner or maybe rat poison. Do you know Charles Shere? <p><p>Charles Shere: Pretty sure it’s a little charcoal burner for warming your feet. It can get cold and damp in Delft…<p><p>Alexis Alrich: oh that makes sense! Another forgotten piece of daily life. <p><p>Dan McCleary: I love the broken window pane<p><p>Martin Snapp: Vermeer is my favorite.<p>
Suzy Nelson: Did you see the movie with Scarlett Johansen....The girl with the pearl earring? I love mise en scene in that picture. Point/counterpoint to our own lives.<p><p>Daniel James Wolf: Amazing how little the bread has changed. I guess when you get it right, you stick to it.<p>
Allan Leedy: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim's_Vermeer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim's_Vermeer</a></blockquote><p>
<em>I myself think Brueghel the Elder does show order, clarity, and the same kind of stasis Vermeer does. The stasis is a held breath, an interruption in that constant motion we've known since Heraklitus. </em>Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-65746574383742043822020-05-09T14:52:00.000-07:002020-05-09T14:52:35.330-07:00LandscapeFrom <i>The Old Ways</i>, by Robert Macfarlane (Penguin Books, 2012) (many thanks to Deborah Madison):<blockquote>
‘As I watch [the world],’ wrote Nan Shepherd in 1945, ‘it arches its back, and each layer of landscape bristles.’ It is a brilliant observation about observation. Shepherd knew that ‘landscape’ is not something to be viewed and appraised from a distance, as if it were a panel in a frieze or a canvas in a frame. It is not the passive object of our gaze, but rather a volatile participant — a fellow subject which arches and bristles at us, bristles into us. Landscape is still often understood as a noun connoting fixity, scenery, an immobile painterly decorum. I prefer to think of the word as a noun containing a hidden verb: landscape scapes, it is dynamic and commotion causing, it sculpts and shapes us not only over the courses of our lives but also instant by instant, incident by incident. I prefer to take ‘landscape’ as a collective term forthe temperature and pressure of the air, the fall of light and its rebounds, the textures and surfaces of rock, soil and building, the sounds (cricket screech, bird cry, wind through trees), the scents (pine resin, hot stone, crushed thyme) and the uncountable other transitory phenomena and atmospheres that together comprise the bristling presence of a particular place at a particular moment.
<p>
Later that night, from the deeper shadows of the-pine forest, two pairs of animal eyes glowed orange and green.</blockquote>Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-57486114365321344642020-04-13T12:02:00.000-07:002020-04-13T16:03:25.261-07:00Helene Aylon<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHtOsid71cSDvkr9h8rzY8sIayp6u1jbLxZyg50akEffpnOey2SuRAx59urZwvRdH18KyI6N5Npd7UAnKJaEB8MZDIiFCbwGs-f0Qf9WXzeQJd_-o-HeJOQ163f0CD8NxCDoCY4Q/s1600/Helene_Aylon_%2528cropped%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHtOsid71cSDvkr9h8rzY8sIayp6u1jbLxZyg50akEffpnOey2SuRAx59urZwvRdH18KyI6N5Npd7UAnKJaEB8MZDIiFCbwGs-f0Qf9WXzeQJd_-o-HeJOQ163f0CD8NxCDoCY4Q/s320/Helene_Aylon_%2528cropped%2529.jpg" width="215" height="320" data-original-width="360" data-original-height="535" /></a></div><div align=right><small><em>Eastside Road, April 13, 2020</em></small></div>
<big>I</big> <small>DIDN’T KNOW</small> Helene Aylon well, but I considered her a friend. I first met her in 1975 or ’76, I think. I was working for the Oakland Tribune as the art critic, and saw an exhibition of her recent works on paper, a series called “Paintings That Change,” in which she applied oil along the top (usually, as I recall) of the paper — in time the oil moved slowly across the paper, constantly but slowly changing the painting’s appearance.
<p>I was impressed by the chance beauty of the results, and by the egoless attitude of the artist, who was content to let the medium make the image.
<p>Late in the 1970s she began a new series, “The Breakings,” similarly chance-determined but clearly feminist: she poured linseed oil onto plexiglas panels, let it form a thick skin, then tilted the panels to form a sac containing the oil. At a certain point the sac would break, allowing oil to move across the panel. The results were strong, formal, yet emotional.
<p>In the 1980s Helene turned toward a more conceptual approach, to an area even larger than feminism: pacifism. This began with an ambitious project: she gathered dirt from nuclear bases, mines, and reactors, stuffing it into pillowcases and deploying them in demonstrations at, for example, the United Nations headquarters. This project grew into an international activity, gathering dirt and other material from many sites, often incorporating material from interviews with women living in troubled areas.
<p>I never though of Helene, in those days, as having a settled residence — she would appear one day, seemingly en route from Palestine to Japan, with documentation of projects involving sacks, dirt, narratives. She was always earnest, caring, patient; she seemed resigned to the continual human tragedy.
<p><div align=center>* * *</div>
<p>At one point, probably in the 1980s, Helene asked me to appear in her defense in a court trial. Sacks of dirt she had taken from various sites had been damaged in storage: the facility’s roof had leaked, the sacks had rotted; the various earth samples, meticulously gathered, documented, and stored, had run together. The storage company was pressing her for unpaid fees; she was refusing to pay and asking damages, I think, for the ruined work.
<p>The trial hinged on one question: was her work art, or was her material simply ordinary dirt. I was asked to testify that she was an artist and that her work was significant. On the day of my appearance I was alarmed. The jury looked utterly uninterested in the proceedings. I listened to Peter Selz’s testimony for the storage unit: Helene was a minor, marginal figure, he said, in a complex galaxy of conceptual and process-oriented artists. The dirt was simply dirt. Much of his testimony was on videotape for some reason and during its presentation I saw that the judge was actually sleeping, members of the jury bored and restless.
<p>My testimony was limited to answers to direct questions from the attorneys for the two sides, and it was apparently insufficient. I finished and was dismissed. Soon enough the jury returned its verdict — against Helene.
<p>She seemed resigned, but in a way I thought her defeat confirmed the justice of her attempt. There is a quiet, Sisyphean heroism to such work. Helene persisted, turning in later decades to work even more ambitious, even more futile to my view: removing paternalism and male supremacy from orthodox Judaism.
<p>
In 1996 I spent a week or so in New York City, and she offered me her studio apartment in Westbeth. I spent almost no time with her then; she was away on one of her frequent trips. But another trip a few years later brought her to San Francisco for an exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, as I recall, and we met briefly on that occasion. She was warm, curious about my own doings, expressive. She always had a soft power, the sympathy of human concern attached to the strength of enduring persistence.
<p> Helene was not a distancer. She died of complications of Covid-19 on April 6th, in New York City. She was eighty-nine years old.Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-55607971337490479462020-04-07T16:22:00.000-07:002020-04-07T16:22:02.784-07:00Listening to the Haydn symphonies<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6CdkfLninHnlBpgym1o1aTTs7uSqtm4qDRoUhQ4LjIQCoqZSKIukpfyzHkbqvksSDdTQd9e9kF7jBx1Qy-X5GlTD1Rs56H33X6vhStrMUvJ5woLsyZo-OibRJgICRJIIK6M54Mw/s1600/Screen+Shot+2020-04-07+at+4.15.27+PM+2.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6CdkfLninHnlBpgym1o1aTTs7uSqtm4qDRoUhQ4LjIQCoqZSKIukpfyzHkbqvksSDdTQd9e9kF7jBx1Qy-X5GlTD1Rs56H33X6vhStrMUvJ5woLsyZo-OibRJgICRJIIK6M54Mw/s320/Screen+Shot+2020-04-07+at+4.15.27+PM+2.png" width="232" height="320" data-original-width="1052" data-original-height="1454" /></a></div>
<big>I</big>’<small>VE BEEN LISTENING</small> to Haydn these last few weeks, chronologically as is my absurd compulsion: at first the string quartets, up through Opus 9; more recently the symphonies. I tend to read authors and consider painters and sculptors the same way, reading where possible (and where I am interested) the complete works, beginning with the first and continuing to, ultimately, the last.
<p>I do this because I am interested in the development of the author/composer’s work, both as it evolves intrinsically, you might say, within his/her output, and as it reflects awareness of outside events, whether the work of other, contemporary creative artists or the impact of social or environmental events.
<p>This is particularly interesting when applied to Haydn’s symphonies. Though his are not the earliest in history, he is commonly thought to have defined the form, trying a number of approaches as to the number and disposition of its various movements, until he had pretty well fixed them in his last, “London” symphonies. (Where, to be honest, it seems to me he has sacrificed inventiveness to consistency.)
<p>But how determine the chronological order of Haydn’s symphonies? This is a vexing problem, and one I have settled, I’m afraid, in an absurdly uncritical and arbitrary way: by following comments found by chance, as so much is these days, on the internet — at a website called, cutely, Haydn Seek, hosted by one Gurn Blanston, a fellow about whom I know nothing other than his fondness for Haydn. Blanston writes that his presentation is in turn taken from a <a href="http://www.haydn107.com/Inhaltsseiten/Das-Projekt">German-language website</a>, www.haydn107.com. This website reflects research by Sonja Gerlach; alas, I do not read German and so have pursued the matter no farther.
<p>
Blanston offers a <a href="https://www.fjhaydn.com/my-blog/chronology-of-the-symphonies-part-1-the-morzin-symphonies.html">table</a> comparing the various number systems, beginning in 1757 with the first symphony. The commonly used numbers are taken from the Hoboken catalog, in which the symphonies are grouped in section I (that’s Roman-numeral-one). Though individual dates are generally unknowable, there’s agreement that Number One — Hob I:1, in D — is in fact the first, scored for pairs of oboes and horns and the usual string quintet.
<p>It’s thought that the first 15 or so of these symphonies were composed for the house orchestra of Karl Joseph, Count Morzin, who hired the composer, then in his late twenties, in 1758, give or take a year. (Too much is uncertain in Haydn’s early history.) Morzin must have had a good band: there are challenging parts for oboe, horns, cello, and contrabass in these pieces.
<p>My method in “studying” these symphonies — the word is too flattering — is to listen to them on YouTube, generally in a performance by Christoper Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music, while reading the score, found at IMSLP.org. What fun to be reading scores again, after years of neglect; to be singing second horn or contrabass lines, even if I do find my bass range is gone and I’m lucky to fake a low F.
<p>This all began with a chance remark by my grandson Simon, who’d gone to a Salt Lake City Symphony concert to hear something of Messiaen’s, I think it was, and The Rite of Spring, and was less than interested in the Haydn 10th (actually the 5th in the new chronology). I immediately listened to the 10th, and was surprised at the part-writing in the violins, especially in the Andante.
<p>Morzin had to let Haydn go in 1760, but recommended him to Prince Anton Esterházy, where he found an even better position. But the Morzin year, or years, saw the composition of probably fifteen symphonies, almost all for the same instrumental forces — oboes, horns, and strings, with a bassoon likely playing with contrabass — but three, all in C major, adding trumpets and drums. The thematic material ranges from country-style dance music to heartfelt slow movements, occasionally for solo violin — Haydn would likely have played those himself, as he “conducted” these pieces violin in hand.
<p>This morning I got to Number 34 (old style: in the Gerlach numbering, 29 — composed (along with five others) in 1763. D Minor is of course a very serious business, and this symphony opens with a stately, formal Adagio that lasts twelve minutes. (Hogwood’s recordings thankfully take all the repeats. Then a suddenly energetic Allegro, with slashing violin themes above a jog-trot propulsion in the lower strings. The Menuetto returns to symmetrical formality, but prominent oboe and horn parts retain the ironic energy of the Allegro; and the final Presto assai, very fast indeed, feels like an invitation to the listeners to move along out of the concert hall.
<p>Who first heard these pieces? Who did Haydn write them for? The musicians first, I think — they must have worried a bit about some of the fast passages, and maybe even — the wind players — about counting their rests. But what about an audience? Presumably the Prince and his family and guests. Austrian nobility and upper-class were musical (the Prince played baryton) and took keen interest in new music. A piece like the opening Adagio of this d minor symphony requires patience: it is as severe and symmetrical as the facade of Esterházy Castle. Attending to this music reminds us of life as it was before electricity and the gasoline engine: as difficult to imagine, for many today, as life without internet and computer. Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-80269301505609915962020-04-05T14:27:00.001-07:002020-04-05T17:44:58.187-07:00Back to the blog — via books…<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNb2iK2L13RlFdiCAuKURFCIDfEiLsYizANa5Ig1s_ILc5JgG3Zi7isKb0qH-EZeZzxebVE4PRwH1_e9xAcixEGP40HNi449syBP-tKHdX7fRlWzXpJtoQhdJ9IWmh8kJ6YrqZMQ/s1600/1F7EAE28-134E-4E48-B195-29DCB213392A.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNb2iK2L13RlFdiCAuKURFCIDfEiLsYizANa5Ig1s_ILc5JgG3Zi7isKb0qH-EZeZzxebVE4PRwH1_e9xAcixEGP40HNi449syBP-tKHdX7fRlWzXpJtoQhdJ9IWmh8kJ6YrqZMQ/s320/1F7EAE28-134E-4E48-B195-29DCB213392A.jpeg" width="240" height="320" data-original-width="480" data-original-height="640" /></a></div>Perhaps stay-in-place will revive the blog, which declined, in some cases died, in the last couple of years — perhaps the victim of increased Facebook activity largely attributable to the distractions of these Trump years.<p>Let's give it a try with a few paragraphs on reading. These strange epidemic times interfere even with that. The volume of correspondence is much increased — no complaint there; I love reading and writing letters, but it takes time. (Correspondence so far this year, sent and received, runs to nearly 70,000 words, just among friends and family!)<p>I just read Donald Hall’s <em>A Carnival of Losses</em>, sent me by a friend. Hall was poetry editor of The Paris Review; he died two years ago, nearly ninety years old; this book was his last, a collection of light first-person anecdotes and memories of interactions with poets he had known. I found Hall a little too self-congratulatory, though perhaps at his age and after his accomplishments that can be excused. <p>Until now I would have logged the successful reading of the book at the website <strong>Goodreads</strong>, and perhaps left a short “review” there. I recently learned, though, that Goodreads is yet another Amazon property, and I’ve decided to spurn it. This is unfortunate as a number of my children and grandchildren use it, and it’s pleasant to read their comments there — and to keep track of their literary interests. But I will return to <strong><a href="https://www.librarything.com">LibraryThing</a></strong>, where I note two anodyne reader reviews of <em>A Carnival of Losses</em>: I should add one of my own, I suppose.<p>I am nearly done with the first volume of Virginia Woolf’s collection of essays, most of them reviews, in <em>The Common Reader</em>, first series. I bought the book over sixty years ago, as I can tell by the style of my signature on the flyleaf. It’s a Harcourt Brace Harvest edition, paperback, published in 1953; it has held up remarkably well. I don’t remember if I read it previously; I think not. Here Librarything offers six reader reviews, and several of them are quite worth looking at. I liked, for example,<p><blockquote>The common reader is decidedly not a book to read without the mind and without the heart — both of those organs will be stimulated more than adequately as you read it — but the considerable enjoyment is still there all the same!
</blockquote>
What’s next? I’m stalled in Richard Jeffries’s <em>The Story of My Heart</em> and Marcus Aurelius’s <em>Meditations</em>, in both cases partly because I’ve been reading them as e-books, on my iPhone. A friend has just sent Robert Macfarlane’s <em>The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Landscapes)</em> with a glowing recommendation, and another is apparently sending me Roy Morris’s <em>Gertrude Stein Has Arrived</em> for which I will no doubt drop everything else temporarily. (And no doubt that will drive me back to Stein’s <em>Everybody’s Autobiography</em>.) When the weather's warmer I plan to resume and finish Proust, and I've been hearing a call from Beckett lately, his great trilogy.<p>
In pre-internet days reading a book like <em>The Common Reader</em> was slowed by trips to the encyclopedia. One wants to know more about the Mitfords, the Elizabethans, the Greeks. Wikipedia is quicker to consult, of course, but ends taking up more time, because its distractions are equally quicker. I find it more difficult to write, these days; the future is so vague it seems futile to leave yet more words scattered about. But how I appreciate those left by earlier writers; how gratifying their conversations are now we can't conduct our own with old friends and youngsters!Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-36825211919844107482019-08-28T08:49:00.000-07:002019-08-28T08:49:13.492-07:00The Generosity of Children<div align=right><em>Berkeley, August 28, 2019— </em></div>
<big><a href="http://languagehat.com/the-generosity-of-young-readers/">L</big><small>ANGUAGE</small>H<small>AT</a> TELLS ME</small> that Alexander Gavrilov, in an interview, told a Russian blogger
<blockquote>
It was at that moment that I grasped the difference between the reading of children and adults. Children are generally much more generous readers. I have the fixed idea that a book is created by its reader almost to a greater extent than by its writer. I have often heard adult readers say something like “There are no really good books left, it’s all crap, it was a lot better before.” At that point the reader is admitting that he no longer has the substance that makes all books magical in childhood.</blockquote>
<p>As usual, a lengthy stream of interesting comments follows LanguageHat's post, many of them suggesting that what happens is that as they grow older children learn critical discrimination. Perhaps that "substance" (a word LanguageHat considers carefully in his translation [from Russian] of Gavrilov's comment) is in fact innocence.
</p>
<p>This brought me back to last night's after-dinner conversation, when I was asked why I no longer care to write criticism. Criticism, well practiced, enlarges its subject — but at the expense of framing it within a construct built of the critic's accumulated experiences. And, let's face it, taste. When I write about a Mozart opera the opera Mozart composed begins to disappear behind the opera I have just seen performed, as my mind rambles from it within a landscape of other Mozart, other opera, other even further experiences that come to my mind, all of them wanting attention and needing shepherding if they're not to clutter the view entirely.
</p>
<p>And, of course, the older I get, the more experiences and memories, even if the memories come less readily to mind when wanted.
</p>
<p>I have tried always to be two people: a critic and a child. The critic thinks, reads, listens, discusses, expresses. The child looks, listens, asks questions. Too soon he becomes himself critical.
</p>
<p>So a critic's farewell to criticism is a step in the process of restoring childlike generosity, or innocence. As we prepare to go elsewhere let us efface our presence here. I don't mean entirely: I'm taking care to leave a record behind. But I'm eager to give up the active pursuit of framing reality, thus lessening it, by insisting on my own view of it. It's time, instead, to empty my mind.</p>Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-71808885510956200762019-08-17T06:15:00.001-07:002019-08-17T06:15:43.438-07:00Approach to the thirteenth heptad
<p class="p1"><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Small anx dr. Tim, L-judy rr- Cheryl, packing leave cabin.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">letter to Bhisbma re disappear ink </span></p>
<p class="p2"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s1"></span><br></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Duchamp stuff ; early mss. </span></p>
<p class="p2"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s1"></span><br></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">A dozen sevens on the dissolution of the mind </span></p>
<p class="p2"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s1"></span><br></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Cold December evening in Rovaniemi rainy morning in Amsterdam sunny afternoon at Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port etc</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s1"></span><br></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">A. T. on the floor</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s1"></span><br></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Bronze Age coprolites</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s1"></span><br></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Epicurus Mozart and Cage my guys</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s1"></span><br></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1" style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Faville on birth by helicopter over desert, and amazing comment</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span class="s1"></span><br></span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1"></span><br></p> Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-47632679710030733352019-07-30T14:21:00.001-07:002019-07-31T09:06:50.995-07:00La Finta giardiniera, In the Penal Colony in Portland<div align="right"><em>Eastside Road, July 30, 2019—</em></div>
<small>[as posted to <a href="https://www.sfcv.org/reviews/portland-opera/portland-opera-has-a-mad-weekend-with-mozart-and-philip-glass">San Francisco Classical Voice</a> today]</small>
<p><big>P</big><small>ORTLAND OPERA</small>
neatly framed the human condition with two perfectly satisfying productions over the weekend. Mozart's first great comedy, <em>La Finta giardiniera</em> (1774, at 18!), a zany exposure of human folly, and Philip Glass's <em>In the Penal Colony</em> (2000), profoundly frame the Age of Reason. Mozart, a humanist, often hilarious, celebrates with spectacular and witty vocalism; Glass, a philosopher, troubled, examines with persuasive declamation.</p>
<p><em><strong>In the Penal Colony</strong></em>, based on Steven Berkoff's play adapted from Franz Kafka’s 1914 short story, describes a neutral official visitor’s observation of preparations for the execution by a uniquely cruel torture machine of a prisoner who had failed at his guard post. The entire 80-minute opera, set on only tenor, baritone, two mute actors, and string quintet; and it proceeds unerringly and devastatingly.</p>
<p>Portland Opera produced it in the round: audience surrounding the unit set on four sides, perhaps eight rows to the side, the strings tucked into one of the four diagonal aisles. Jerry Mouad’s set beautifully suggested the bleak setting, the infernal machine — which kills, over twelve hours, by carving the prisoner’s offense into his skin.</p>
<p>Tenor Martin Bakari was clear, calm, objective, and in beautiful voice as The Visitor; baritone Ryan Thorn grew steadily and deeply into the role of the Officer. Kafka’s story is ultimately, I think, a denunciation of Faith and Authority as controllers of human society; the machine symbolizes the inadequacy of their reliance on technology, indeed of instrumentality. Thorn expressed all this with pathos and beauty, and Bakari’s witnessing was equally poignant.</p>
<p>Nicholas Fox conducted with supple support. Glass’s music is still controversial after all these years; the orchestra energizes the score with repeated rhythmic action, often on sustained harmonies occasionally shifting subtly to guide the dramatic argument. The vocal cantilena floats over this, generally following Kafka’s text, very clearly set and expressed in this production, almost not needing the effectively displayed supertitles.</p>
<em><strong>La Finta giardiniera</strong></em>
<p>The bad taste, but not perhaps one of the sources, of the Glass-Kafka contemplation was overcome, next night, by the adolescent Mozart’s marvelous view of Rationalist (European) attitudes toward love, class, and the war between the sexes. The Baroque symmetries of French classicism collide with commedia dell’arte; the mannered control of fashion and etiquette tangle with animal human drives. As I’ve written <a href="https://cshere.blogspot.com/2012/08/mozart-la-finta-giardiniera.html">elsewhere</a>, the opera is preoccupied with madness. Insanity, both feigned and temporarily real, permeates many arias and ensembles; it's remarked on by the characters; it's even reflected in some of Mozart's orchestration. (Haydn had treated the subject similarly the year before, in incidental music to his play <em>Il Distratto</em>.)</p>
<p>Chas Rader-Shieber directed the action with clear outlines on Michael Olich’s handsome three-level unit stage, the stone terraces of an 18th-century Italian garden. A lawn mower, a topiary, and four mute gardeners often carrying ridiculous garden gnomes punctuated the action, which well defined the social levels — political, military, servant. Olich’s costumes were rooted in historical accuracy yet very funny and effective.</p>
<p>The complex plot essentially rests on Count Belfiore, who has nearly murdered his beloved Violante in a fit of rage, driving her into disguise as a “feigned gardener-girl.” Now, though, he is visiting the Podestà to meet his niece Arminda, whom he is arranged to marry.
In a parallel plot, Violante’s manservant, disguised as a gardener Nardo (these names have extended resonance we can’t go into here), lusts for the Podestà’s servant Serpetta, who in turn has eyes on her boss. And behind all this, a seventh figure, Ramiro (originally set on castrato), comments on the follies and reversals of all this amatory business.</p>
<p>Mezzo Camille Sherman was affecting as this Ramiro, managing a balance of character and dramatic function with clear, accurate voice and fine presence. Soprano Helen Zhibing Huang was the pert, clear-voiced Serpetta. As Arminda, soprano Antonia Tamer, in a hilarious fat-lady get-up, alternated convincingly between pathos and fury — Pamina and Queen of Night in one.</p>
<p>Baritone Geoffrey Schellenberg was an unusually thoughtful Nardo transported with amour, perplexed at its difficulties. And tenor Thomas Ciluffo was wonderful as Belfiore, funny in his parade of national-type lovers, quick and pointed on his feet, flexible, strong, and accurate of voice.</p>
<p>Tenor Mark Thomsen, while in good voice and effective as the Don Alfonso-like Podestà (for <em>Così fan tutte</em> keeps coming to mind), seemed hampered by too often being set at the center of the large stage; even his oversized Panama brim did not amplify his pleasant voice.</p>
<p>As Sandrina-Violante, the <em>giardiniera</em>, Lindsay Ohse rightly dominates the show. Physically supple and graceful, vocally bright yet modulated, her acting convincing and affecting, she took place well in ensembles, responding well in duet, emoting persuasively in a wide range. Her mad scene closing Act II, with Ciluffo, — they become bestial Greek gods, bewildering the rest of the cast — was hilarious yet insane enough to be a little scary. Like many of the cast, she has coloratura, trill included, and beauty of tone.</p>
<p><em>In the Penal Colony</em> was given in the black-box Hampton Opera Center, serviceable in a neutral style; <em>La Finta giardiniera</em> in the 870-seat Newmark Theatre, an intimate rather luxurious downtown venue. Like the choice of repertory, production, and cast — and the thoughtful yet sumptuous program booklet — this reflects care and intelligence on the part of Portland Opera. It’s an impressive undertaking.</p>Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-53278863766537675522019-06-01T17:16:00.001-07:002019-06-01T17:16:29.230-07:00Nagano: Classical Music<div align="right"><em>Eastside Road, June 1, 2019—</em></div>
<p><small>
<table>
<tr>
<td>Kent Nagano, with Inge Kloepfer: <em>Classical Music: Expect the Unexpected</em><br>
Tr. from the German by Hans-Christian Oeser<br>
McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019 <br>
ISBN 9780773556348
pp. 248 <em>read 5/28/19</em></td>
</tr>
</table></small></p>
<p><big>M</big><small>ORRO</small> B<small>AY,</small> the early 1950s. A fishing village and farm town, relatively isolated on California's central coast, far from the nearest city. An aging Japanese immigrant is in poor health and his young son returns from Berkeley, where he has been studying architecture, to take over the family farm. With him, his wife, a promising pianist, and their infant son.
<br><br>
Another immigrant appears: a Russian, passionately musical, who has survived Stalinist terror in the 1930s and the German front in World War II. Determined to encourage music, he asks for a teaching position in an elementary school far from musical centers. He soon has young children playing in ensembles, even an orchestra, and singing in choruses.
<br><br>
This is the inspiring story of Kent Nagano's introduction to music: small town; rural surroundings; a quietly firm family; music as natural as speech, as social as play.
<br><br>
<em>Classical Music: Expect the Unexpected</em> reads like a conversation, or one side of a conversation — perhaps that's how it was written, in conversation with the German journalist Inge Kloepfer, listed as co-author. (The book appeared first, in 2014, in German, published by Piper Verlag. The subtitle is interesting: in German it was <em>Erwarten Sie Wunder!</em> In French — the book is translated by Isabelle Gabolde — <em>Sonnez, merveilles!</em>)
<br><br>
I am not writing a review of the book: a good one, written for the Montreal Gazette by Arthur Kaptainis, is <a href="https://montrealgazette.com/entertainment/books/kent-naganos-wide-ranging-book-lives-up-to-expectations">available online</a>. I want only to direct attention to the book, an unusual combination of authorial modesty and self-introduction, of cultural optimism in a critical moment. <br><br>
I met Nagano in 1980 or so, when he became assistant conductor at the Oakland Symphony Orchestra. In that position he was also conductor of the Oakland Symphony Youth Orchestra, and he offered to program an orchestral piece I'd written a dozen years earlier, <em>Nightmusic</em>. He studied the difficult score carefully, rehearsing its six instrumental units separately through the fall of 1981, premiering it at the Paramount Theater in January 1982 and releasing a recording soon afterward. (1750 Arch S1792, with Daniel Kobialka's <em>Echoes Of Secret Silence</em>, perhaps the first of Nagano's commercially released recordings.)
<br><br>
I retired from daily music criticism (in the Oakland <em>Tribune</em>) at the beginning of 1988, and Kent asked me for a new piece for him to schedule with Beethoven's Ninth on a subscription concert of the Berkeley Symphony, which he had developed out of the former Berkeley Promenade Orchestra. This turned out to be my Symphony in Three Movements, a title he gave to the work. Here too he analyzed the score carefully, and though we disagreed about tempi — he led the second movement much slower than I'd intended it — our collaboration was pleasant and businesslike.
<br><br>
(I remember a conference we had on the piece in Monaco, in the lobby of his hotel; Lindsey and I were vacationing in Nice, he was working with the Ballet de Monte Carlo, I think. Please, he said, let's not discuss anything but the score. I think he knew we had many enthusiasms in common, and his schedule never permitted distractions.)
<br><br>
Perhaps the most unusual thing Nagano ever did with my music: he borrowed the full score of my opera <em>The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even</em>, sat down with it at the piano — which instrument he plays very well — <em>and played the orchestral material only, more or less at sight</em>, recording it so that the singers would have a tape with which to learn their roles. I did not ask him to do this; I don't know whose idea it was. I was surprised when he gave me the cassette tape. He asked me never to listen to it, and I have always respected his request.
<br><br>
(He was not otherwise involved with the production, at Mills College in 1984; but he did get in touch with me years later to ask if I were interested in pursuing a production in France, I suppose at Lyon, where he was music director of the Opéra National de Lyon from 1988–1998. He did not want to retain my original choice of stage director, the dancer-choreographer (and, since, scholar) Margaret Fisher, suggesting a better-known name would be important to the venture, and what did I think of Salvador Dali? Unwisely, perhaps, I retained loyalty to Margaret, and the offer was dropped.)
<br><br>
All these experiences fall into place, in a newly understood context, after reading Nagano's book. He emerges from it as a unique mind, disciplined and focussed, sensitive to politics, literature, philosophy, and languages but overwhelmingly dedicated to — <em>consumed by</em> — music. Music fills the world, the universe he lives in. There are other important components of his life, of course; he is married to the pianist Mari Kodama and they have a daughter, also a pianist, Karin Kei Nagano; he loves fast cars (or did, when I knew him); he loves San Francisco and Paris. But all these, judging by his book and his career, are contained in a transcendent fixation on music.
<br><br>
He returns frequently, in his book, to a small number of Big Questions: Why is music so powerful? Is it not indispensable to the human experience? Is "classical music" in danger of losing all audience? Will the primacy of quantitativeness, and particularly of dollar value, displace it utterly?
<br><br>
Nagano's contemplations touch on politics, philosophy, marketing, education… he converses with a retired Chancellor of Germany, an astronaut, a basketball star, a psychologist, a neurologist (and is not shy about their disagreements with him). He discusses Bach, Messiaen, Schoenberg, Bernstein, Ives. He is realistic about the crisis "classical music" seems to confront — but optimistic that it will survive. The crisis is general, far bigger than the problems of the orchestras. What's needed, Nagano argues, is music for a world in crisis, and he believes strongly that it stands ready.</p>
Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-64291198396291561012019-04-26T16:10:00.002-07:002019-04-26T16:10:53.861-07:00Symphony in Three Movements<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXGv85vB6lsAttFKRUlvb6DknppdaKs2Rtn-bnhNbVmhjhaUfxbTs_TdFuWAyBwUX3JvFG4oigvQz6MBW6JiTPWIU957CPY4T41J05Mt9Zrwr61ktCzqksMPrkXXdiUoBAtFntbw/s1600/Screen+Shot+2019-04-26+at+2.07.21+PM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXGv85vB6lsAttFKRUlvb6DknppdaKs2Rtn-bnhNbVmhjhaUfxbTs_TdFuWAyBwUX3JvFG4oigvQz6MBW6JiTPWIU957CPY4T41J05Mt9Zrwr61ktCzqksMPrkXXdiUoBAtFntbw/s400/Screen+Shot+2019-04-26+at+2.07.21+PM.jpg" width="600" height="265" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="709" /></a></div><big>I</big> <small>HAVE UPLOADED</small> the orchestral score of my Symphony in Three Movements (1989) to <a href="http://www.shere.org/pdfs/Symphony3Movements.pdf">http://www.shere.org/pdfs/Symphony3Movements.pdf</a> .
The score is 112 pages; the file, 1.8 MB.
<p>
The score was requested by Kent Nagano and premiered by him, with the Berkeley Symphony, thirty years ago come Sunday, April 28 1989, on a program that went on, after intermission, to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Kent had advised me of this, but assured me there'd be no lack of sufficient rehearsal, and on the whole the performance went well. The concert was given in Berkeley's First Congregational Church, the usual BSO venue in those days.
<p>
I remember two reviews: a little old lady came up to me during the intermission and asked "Did you write that music?" "Yes, I did," I answered. "You can do better," she said. "Perhaps I will," I replied.
<p>
But I don't think I did until 1996, when I broke a long dry spell with my Trio for Violin, Piano, and Percussion. Why the long dry spell? In part, reaction to another review the Symphony had received:
<p>
The San Francisco <em>Chronicle</em> review took issue with my program note (appended to the score online), in which I approved Kent's commitment to "the continued virility of contemporary music." JK took "virility" to mean "chest-thumping" and complained about a macho quality he heard in the performance. I suppose I could have used "fecundity" instead, but the image in my mind was of thee male contribution to generation; the vast repertory of "classical" music in general occupying the female, receptive half.
<p>
So it goes. Gender politics and political correctness have vitiated the expressive power of rhetoric — I hope not permanently.
<p>
I have been advised more than once never to criticize a performer's execution of my music: the performer in question will be hurt and possibly resentful, and any potential future performer will justifiably wonder if he or she will be similarly criticized for playing my music. At this point in my life I'm not thinking of future performances, so I'll mention a disagreement I had with the conductor, who did not follow my tempo instructions.
<p>
As I wrote in the program note,
<blockquote>the Symphony is “about” terror, calm and compulsion. Each of the three movements is in fact a motion within one of these states, and from one state to another. Their context — the area of action, if you like — is natural in the first movement, personal in the second, social in the third. The three movements participate in a formal structure. The tempo steadily
increases. Key structural points are marked as special events. Each of the three large sections is composed of three smaller ones in turn.
The score is not free from errors, but I'm through with tweaking it for the present.</blockquote>The tempo indications were crucial to my design, but the conductor suggested I had no idea the effect of the hall's acoustics would have on the performance. In my design the three movements ran a little over six, seven, and six minutes long (6:15, 7:30; 6:15); in the performance they ran eight, <em>ten and a half</em>, and six:thirteen (8:05, 10:36, 6:13). The result was to make the first movement lag and the second ponderous, even hectoring. I think this contributed to the <em>Chronicle</em> opinion.
<p>
I gave the score to another conductor after the performance — although he lived in the area, and was a composer himself, I don't think he had heard the premiere. He kept it for a few weeks, but when I asked him what he thought, he asked, rather wistfully, why my music was always so difficult. (I could have asked, but didn't, why his, and that of other composers who wrote in similar styles, was always so simple.)
<p>
He may have been referring specifically to the passage beginning at m. 65 in the first movement, where high woodwinds are asked to play fast, rhythmically complex material. (See photo above.) The effect I have in mind is of demented birds. I think I encouraged the musicians involved to fake the passage if necessary; perfect accuracy is less important than the general effect.
<p>
Or, who knows, he may have been referring to something else. I suppose I should have asked.
<p>
You can hear the music, fairly correct in terms of tempo, here:
<p>
<table>
<tr>
<td><a href="http://www.shere.org/mp3s/Sym3M01.mp3">First movement</a></td>
<td>[6:30]</td>
<td>7.8 MB</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="http://www.shere.org/mp3s/Sym3M02.mp3">Second movement</a></td>
<td>[7:45]</td>
<td>9.3 MB</td></tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="http://www.shere.org/mp3s/Sym3M03.mp3">Third movement</a></td>
<td>[6:13]</td>
<td>7.5 MB</td>
</tr>
</table>Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-43299657280636180112018-11-11T22:28:00.001-08:002018-11-12T09:02:19.111-08:00Recently read: Lost communities<div align="right"><em>Eastside Road, November 11, 2018—</em></div>
<table align=right bgcolor=E6E6E6>
<tr>
<td><small>Doig, Ivan: <em><strong>This House of Sky</strong></em><br>
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979 <br>
ISBN 0-15-689982-5. pp 314 read 11/5/18</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><small>LeBaron, Gaye, and Bart Casey: <br><em><strong>The Wonder Seekers of Fountaingrove</strong></em><br>
Historia II, 2018 <br>
ISBN 978-0-692-17702-0. pp 204 read 11/6/18</em></td>
</tr><tr>
<td><small>Wolf, Margery: <em><strong>Coyote‘s Land: a Novel Ethnography</strong></em><br>
Indianapolis: Dog Ear Publishing, 2018 <br>
ISBN 9787-145756-430-7. pp 312 read 11/11/18</em></td>
</tr>
</table>
<big>M</big><small>ANY HAVE RECOMMENDED</small> Doig to me, but I resisted until urged by an engaging woman who sells her produce at the local farmer’s market told me she’d spent a night in his bedroom. (“It was not what it sounds like, he’s a friend of the family and lent his house while he was away.”)
<p>
The house in question is in southwestern Montana, where the author was born and raised in surely one of the last survivors of hard frontier landscape: cowboy country, sheep ranching, desperate economy. <em><strong>This House of Sky</strong></em> is a memoir centered on the author’s father — his mother died young. Like the other two books read in the last week or so are, it is nostalgic, evoking a time and place recent enough to be imaginable but irretrievably lost.
<p>
I'm old enough — older than Ivan Doig — to remember a landscape similar though less harsh than his high, bare, frequently frozen Montana: the bleak wartime northeastern Oklahoma of 1944-5, where we lived without running water, and impoverished Sonoma county farm country in the next few years, where we lived without electricity. Unlike the Doigs on their sheep ranches, we at least had society.
<p>
Doig centers his memoir on his father and on isolated ranching, but populates it also with other memorable characters: a stepmother; his grandmother; assorted dubious ranch hands; the drifters morosely drinking in a series of bars negotiating the limited available social stratas of what passes for his home town.
<p>
The book is poetic and laconic, like the best cowboy songs, and deserves the praise it's received. Doig's style is sophisticated, artful, but (except for italicized summaries to each chapter) never jarring, always related to what one presumes is the language of his subjects. Clearly the Doig line harbors — and passes along — a gift for language: the stories are so rich and at times improbable, the quotes so colorful and apt, that a reader could be forgiven for suspecting occasional authorial invention.
<p>
We need books like this, not only for their evocation of the land and society much of this country was until postwar prosperity and technological advance erased it, but also for its suggestion that the stamina and inventiveness of those times may be needed in a time still to come. In the meantime generations have grown to maturity lacking, with rare exceptions, first-hand familiarity with even the possibility of such virtues. <hr><big>T</big><small>HE NINETEENTH CENTURY</small> in this country was a time of frontier expansion, hardscrabble farming, urban development, and robber-baron capitalism. It also saw a considerable reaction to the worst qualities of those developments in a wave of idealistic communitarianism. Some of the resulting societies are fairly well known: Brook Farm, Oneida, Amana. But one of the longest-living of them has been largely overlooked: <em><strong>The Wonder Seekers of Fountaingrove</strong></em> corrects that historical neglect.
<p>
The Fountaingrove community began, as so many such attempts did, in rural New York, where Thomas Lake Harris, only one of many exhortative preachers, after running his course in one parish after another, decided his only success must be in establishing a society of his own. He was apparently a magnetic, persuasive figure, and in lectures in New York, New England, and London he attracted followers who signed on with their fortunes as well as their lives as individuals.
<p>
With their labor and their money Harris built what can only be called a cult, at first amusing his neighbors, ultimately attracting sufficient cynicism and suspicion that he found it expedient to move along. Each cycle lasted seven years: a farm at Wassaic in eastern New York, bought in 1861, a more elaborate settlement near Brocton on the Erie shoreline, in 1868; finally, in 1875, the Fountaingrove community, outside a provincial city growing up north of San Francisco.
<p>
A number of strands weave through this history: the members of the community, including a disillusioned, wealthy Englishman and a Japanese samurai; the various approaches to financing, including investments and agriculture; the relations with outsiders including the press; and of course the cult psychology and culture Harris developed.
<p>
The principal characters are fairly well and efficiently presented: apart from the enigmatic Harris, they are the wealthy Englishman Laurence Oliphant and the quietly competent Kanaye Nagasawa. Harris began as a frontier preacher subject to fits and visions; eager to return humanity to its pre-Expulsion innocence, he dictated thousand-line poems describing that state of bliss while in trance induced by deep breathing — and, one suspects, slow sexual experiences. Oliphant, the only child of an important British colonial officer, was an adventurous traveler whose books brought Central Asia and the Crimean War home to England. And Nagasawa was sent in his early adolescence from isolated Japan to Scotland, then England, to learn the methods and values of the mysterious West so that his native country might enter the modern global world.
<p>
For every man in Harris's communities there seemed to have been at least three or four women — wives, mothers, sisters, friends. Except for Oliphant's mother they never fully emerge from this narrative. Even Harris's second wife, who was significant in the Fountaingrove years, is present more as referred to by other personages than as a fully limned figure in her own right.
<p>
The same might be said of Nagasawa, whose motives and values are occasionally hypothesized but not clearly stated. The temptation to fictionalize this history has been kept successfully and, I'd bet, carefully at bay.
<p>
Who, then, is this book for? It appears at a poignant time, the first anniversary of the destruction of the locally famous Fountaingrove Round Barn, until last year the only surviving physical evidence of the community that once prospered on the northern edge of Santa Rosa. I found the book satisfying — but I should reveal that one of the authors, Gaye LeBaron, is an old friend, whose dedication to history and whose insistence on fact I can attest to.
<p>
Much of the value of <em>The Wonder Seekers of Fountaingrove</em> lies between the lines, partly in matters only hinted at — the authors are decorous — partly in questions the reader will be led to pose. Foremost — and this question <em>is</em> raised, more than once, though without being settled — was Harris merely a confidence man? or was he truly visionary and idealistic in his attempt to found a new life based on communitarianism, free from the distractions of private ownership and individual expression?<hr>
<big>T</big><small>WO OTHER VERSIONS</small> of the perfect life contend in Margery Wolf's <em><strong>Coyote's Land</strong></em>: the ancient and apparently perfected culture of the Coast Miwok, based not far from Fountaingrove in the present southern Sonoma and northern Marin counties, and the Franciscan version of Catholic Christianity as it evolved in the California missions early in the 19th century.
<p>
Wolf, who was also a personal friend, died early last year, soon after completing this book. She was an anthropologist whose career was somewhat outside the anthropological norm: her first book, <em>The House of Lim</em>, still used as a textbook in anthropology classes, was written without the virtue of a degree in the field. (She was married to an academic anthropologist at the time.)
<p>
<em>Coyote's Land</em> is an interesting and, I think, significant book for a number of reasons, one of them stated by the author at the outset. The first and longest and most evocative of its two parts is what she calls "informed fiction," fictional narrative informed by a comprehensive knowledge of both details and context. Her purpose, she writes, is to make ethnography interesting to the common reader. She is a little defensive about this, as she's been criticized by professionals in her field for straying from academic norms — but in truth it's the academic professional writers who should be criticized for forgetting, in their books, that readability and appeal are greater authorial responsibilities than convention and boredom.
<p>
If <em>Coyote's Land</em> is significant as "informed fiction," it is also important — especially at this moment! — for dwelling on the tragedy of one culture's destruction at the hands of another. And this particularly when the destruction is wrought in the name of religion. Wolf begins her novel with a series of chapters thoughtfully, pleasantly, sometimes entertainingly evoking the daily life of the pre-conquest Miwok; then turns to the inevitable end of that idyllic culture, in the early years of the 19th century, when the chain of missions reaches San Francisco Bay.
<p>
Wolf centers her narration on an improbable device, dividing the central character between two women: Charlotte, a 20th-century anthropologist eager to learn the (pre-conquest) Miwok culture, and Sekiak, a Miwok woman condemned to immortality for a transgression against the natural order. Driven by a fierce desire to make the Miwok way known to European-Americans, she renders herself and Charlotte invisible and gifted with fluency in all languages, and the two travel back and forth between the present and the pre-conquest past, enabling Charlotte to observe daily life and eavesdrop on native conversations, thereby comprehending the contexts of both Miwok and mission life.
<p>
Not usually attracted to Magic Realism or time-travel fiction, I tried to catch little failures in this narrative device, moments when anachronism of either detail or plot might break Wolf's success. I found none. I don't know if she planned it, but to me one of Wolf's greatest achievements here is her treatment of the plasticity of Time as we humans live it and in it. And this brings me to a final irony of <em>Coyote's Land</em>: a valedictory book, it often pauses to contemplate — even if only for a sentence or two — the nature of Death. Charlotte's invisibility is not dependably effective to those on the point of death.<blockquote>One old woman was tending a slow, smoky fire under a couple of racks of drying fish. She stared in Sekiak and Charlotte's direction; then blinked her eyes several times before turning her attention back to the fire.<p>
"Can she see us?" Charlotte asked uncertainly.<p>
"A little maybe. She is very old… you know old people are less attached to their time than young people… They tend to wander. We need to keep our distance. She knows she will die soon, and she is watching for the spirits of old friends who will show her the way."</blockquote>
Toward the end of the book it becomes clear, in a few lines charmingly describing the presence of a fox in the bushes near a campfire, that Charlotte's invisibility is attached to the fact of her being in an alternate time. The fox immediately brought Leoš Janáček's opera <em>Vixen Sharp-ears</em> to mind, and I saw that intrinsic to both the style and the substance of <em>Coyote's Land</em> is a haunting, affectionate, even visionary awareness of the beyond-time nature of death and dying and of truly aware living. Janáček was 70 when he completed <em>Vixen</em>; Margery Wolf was dying in her last year, while completing <em>Coyote's Land</em>.
<p>
The irony, then, is that the death of the cultures — the Coast Miwok way, which had stood for millennia; the California missions, imperfect improvements no doubt on Spanish feudalism but unable to survive Mexican independence let alone the coming of the Yankees — those deaths are as natural and inevitable as the deaths of our grandparents and our parents. Immortality — Sekiak's sentence — is what is unnatural and wrong. The manner in which one culture destroys another may be condemned, but the destruction is inevitable.
<p>
Whether intentionally or for lack of time, <em>Coyote's Land</em> seems not quite finished. The novel ends inconclusively, Charlotte apparently returned to the present but certain plot elements still tantalizingly vague. The second part of the book, the "backstory," offers a quick historical survey of the Miwok and their land; the missions, their Spanish background and their ambivalent intentions; and a foretaste of the transition the young California will soon make into the United States. This part of the book is matter-of-fact and carefully documented in the conventional bibliography.
<p>
The backmatter does not detract from the real value of the book, the "informed fiction." It is a real gift: to those of us who live in what is still Coyote's Land; to those who want to see farther than the authorities who have (temporarily) survived the Miwok <em>and</em> the mission ways; to all the living.Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-27510920820194768402018-11-08T11:21:00.001-08:002018-11-08T11:21:44.678-08:00Looking back: "Notes to a contextual ars musicae"<p><big>I</big><small>N 1964</small>, not yet (quite) thirty, I tried to work out an approach to discussing music. Writing about music, maybe talking about music, <em>thinking</em> about music.
<p>
That year I was studying music privately — composition with Robert Erickson, conducting with Gerhard Samuel. A modest gift from a wonderful woman who'd been taking lessons on the recorder from me made it possible to devote that entire year to music.
<p>
I had studied English literature at UC Berkeley, graduating in 1960, and had thought of various ways of turning that degree into a career. I tried graduate work in library science, then in secondary education, but neither graduate school nor high-school teaching appealed to me — I think without my knowing it music was shouldering everything else aside.
<p>
That year, 1964, my younger brother somehow was given editorship of the UC Graduate Student Journal, and he asked me if I had anything to contribute. I decided, I suppose, that it was time to put my thoughts down on paper. I had been reading the criticism of local concerts in the newspapers — in those days the San Francisco <em>Examiner</em> had two music critics, the <em>Chronicle</em> three, the Oakland <em>Tribune</em> one — and was not satisfied with their coverage, particularly of contemporary music.
<p>
Published music criticism, as far as I could see, knew only one kind of music: that based on the conventional tonal system reflected by composers from Bach through Mahler. The rare review dealing with 12-tone music might or might not have reflected knowledge of that "system." No critic, with the possible exception of Alfred Frankenstein in the <em>Chronicle</em>, was attentive to the avant garde.
<p>
Critical thinking had been latent in my college studies of literature, but rarely discussed directly in any of these undergraduate courses. It may be that it was only in my final weeks at Cal, in the summer session of 1960, when I was finally required to take the freshman course English 1B of all things, that the subject was discussed — I don't recall much of that class now, other than occasional conversations with the instructor, Frederic Crews, a fairly recent hire only two years older than me.
<p>
I'm not exactly sure when I wrote this essay. I do remember that it was partly written as parody of academic writing — the sort of thing I found unattractive in graduate school. Looking it over now, though, for the first time since it was written, I'm not too embarrassed. It's a bit dense and should probably have been expanded. I never went further with it — except that its process and definitions no doubt underlay my approach from then on as a music critic. I regret only that something kept me from sending it to my colleagues at the time, among whom only Robert Commanday seemed to bring a background of professional study to the work.
<p>
<a href="http://shere.org/pdfs/arsmusicae.pdf">You can read this "Notes to a Contextual <em>Ars Musicae</em>" here.</a> I've cleaned it up just a little, left the marginal headings so thoughtfully allowed by the original typesetters, and added a short afterword. I make it available with thanks to my brother Jim, who may have fuller recollection of those distant days.</p>Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-45434774045235318312018-10-03T12:18:00.001-07:002018-10-03T12:18:12.957-07:00The Pines of Rome<img style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6TYnHh2nhHDa91pDBNF2fscSwglM4lb86QuvtKjxTpTMbkHJR7PisRTXIbEtC267ZthIq3qSNBLq7r4TPqZ-cp7d2iub7yFXXYyG4XcelRDHI3QjJHTaz3lZrLuZh1Alm0sB2SA/?imgmax=1600" alt="IMG 1108" title="IMG_1108.jpeg" border="0" width="600" height="450" />
<p><div align="right"><em>Viale Trastevere, October 3, 2018—</em></div>
<p>
<big>P</big><small>INUS PINEA</small>. <br><em>The graceful stems, stripped of unnecessary lower limbs, sustain broad canopies, <br>intermediaries between our soil and the skies above.
</em>
<p>
In Rome's Pamphili park, catching evening autumnal light, their company dwarfs idlers strolling below. <br><em>The trees are rooted but they seem to dance; people beneath them appear in a trance.</em>
<p>
Rome tends her pines with care: light streams beneath them, dancing around the trunks, among the bare limbs above, supporting those cloud-canopies, intense dark greens pinning the stucco'd buildings to the streets. <img style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKZ44QJmxTsfu1JBNX2d-kQGtrwsm832iA4lrMIt-qxWt2rPt5Jv5oQKhhuen66OofoTmPSXXLKQWdIVlmRU3LvaVsx259vJ72Sgsse9lqH0A8uhIAqRcEse_hf2Uz98anUA8vIQ/?imgmax=1600" alt="IMG 1273" title="IMG_1273.jpeg" border="0" width="598" height="449" />
<p>
Some years ago I made a little book of photos casually taken of these pines — I don't have them with me, of course, and will have to post them to this blog on our return to Healdsburg. No promises.
<p>
On our return I will also have to arrange a rendez-vous with a tree man to work on our own pines. They were given to us thirty years ago and more and have grown to such maturity as to need attention. I hope to find some information about the pruning of <em>Pinus pinea</em> while we're here in Rome — sources on line and at home suggest they need no more than the removal of damaged limbs (see a video <a href="https://youtu.be/4HbUiKVb_Cc">here</a>) but I definitely want these limbed up and thinned out.</p>
<p><img style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg25s6u01D99hyphenhyphenwt0nViOPzreNlvajMmKmm28rbR_hQydCPNxAsFu7SJXdz1ImvcVifu1-_fvt3VL8Og1ptbUhJhzT65pi1C6LBHenBEyuMmZD_QBBxqRY9IqJV8P8neV_41i-Tyw/?imgmax=1600" alt="IMG 9258" title="IMG_9258.jpeg" border="0" width="600" height="450" />
<p>
Two more points: the seeds of P. pinea are the <em>pignoli</em>, "pine nuts," obligatory in making pesto, and so tasty as to justify the work of extracting them.
<p>
And those you don't harvest are harvested by blue jays and squirrels, and germinate readily: I've got to start clearing out a lot of saplings!</p>Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-86770274361361082192018-10-03T02:32:00.001-07:002018-10-03T03:12:10.619-07:00Mallarmé<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg05nOohm1xsK6Lv2zp_5XoRZ5mQU1L-cArf-9HZ4z3RfGcGD9arEovqKSKwesICdJWn0pU_i6p76RsMiqX3_2GnhAdsVw4HB4pLe4XkKGew0bIKBEKEc3xQE_-Rw2WxTf7RLq0Gg/?imgmax=1600" alt="IMG 1103" title="IMG_1103.jpeg" border="0" width="598" height="449" /><div align="right"><em>Viale Trastevere, October 3, 2018—</em></div>
<p><big>A</big> <small>RECENT EXCHANGE</small> on Facebook began with this question:<blockquote>What is it about this moment that makes so many people post poetry — and most of it translations — today on Facebook? Is this present need for poetry something good on its own terms — good people making eloquent assemblies of words — or a marker of catastrophe, present or impending, <em>vox clamantis</em> and all that? And is translation a hopeful sign of an impulse to reach across boundaries or a symptom of the ultimate hopelessness of that project?</blockquote>
<p>
Followers of this blog will have noticed an elegiac mood lately: it has been deepened by a week in Rome, eternal Rome, where the timeless grace of the pines look down on the mindlessly futile activities of humanity.
<p>
What had prompted that query was my posting a translation of Stéphane Mallarmé:</p>
<table>
<tr>
<td> </td><td><small>Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui<br>
Va-t-il nous déchirer avec un coup d’aile ivre<br>
Ce lac dur oublié que hante sous le givre<br>
Le transparent glacier des vols qui n’ont pas fui !<br><br>
<p>Un cygne d’autrefois se souvient que c’est lui<br>
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre<br>
Pour n’avoir pas chanté la région où vivre<br>
Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l’ennui.<br><br></p>
<p>Tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie<br>
Par l’espace infligée à l’oiseau qui le nie,<br>
Mais non l’horreur du sol où le plumage est pris.<br><br></p>
<p>Fantôme qu’à ce lieu son pur éclat assigne,<br>
Il s’immobilise au songe froid de mépris<br>
Que vêt parmi l’exil inutile le Cygne.</td><td> </td>
<td><small>Virginal, vivacious, beautiful new day !<br>
Will it rip us apart with its drunk wing beating <br>
This hard forgotten lake, haunted beneath its ice<br>
By a transparent glacier, frozen flights not flown !<br><br></p>
<p>A swan of former times recalls that it was he,<br>
Magnificent but hopeless, who had given up<br>
Because he had not sung of the place where he’d lived<br>
When sterile winter shone around with lassitude.<br><br></p>
<p>His feathered graceful neck shakes with white agony<br>
Inflicted on the bird by the space he denies — <br>
But not the soil’s horror, taking his plumage.<br><br></p>
<p>His pure display assigns an empty phantom here,<br>
Immobilized within a cold dream of disdain,<br>
Clothing, in his useless exile, the Swan.</td></tr></small>
</table>
<p></p>
<p>It is, of course, the famous sonnet <em>Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui</em>, famous for its resistance to both interpretation and translation. There's a good account of this resistance in <a href="https://litallover.com/2016/09/28/le-bel-aujourdhui-a-translation-walkthrough-of-mallarmes-le-cygne/">a fairly recent post</a> by Elisabeth Cook, who mentions the confusing imagery and meaning, wordplay, rhyme scheme, sound clusters, and grammatical precision of the original, all presenting major challenges to a translator.
<p>
And to any reader. My French is barely there; certainly not up to reading Mallarmé. But for sixty years I have wanted to understand this poem — not comprehend it, just begin to come to grips with it. It was only yesterday that I got down to work. Spending a couple of weeks with a foreign language put me in the mood, no doubt, though Mallarmés <em>cygne</em>, that swan that sounds like <em>signe</em>, sign or symbol, <a href="https://lyricstranslate.com/en/le-vierge-le-vivace-et-le-bel-aujourdhui-il-vergine-il-vivace-e-il-belloggi.html">resists Italian</a> almost as much as English.
<p>
And today, reflecting on all this, and on what brought the assignment to mind in the first place, I begin to comprehend a fair amount of meaning behind it all. (It's another example of what Jean Coqt discusses in the line quoted in my previous post here: <em>Mon esprit est partout. Au fur et à mesure que je vieillis, il va encore plus loin, jusqu'à ce qu'il me quitte complètement</em>. (My mind is everywhere. As I grow older, it goes even farther, until it will leave me entirely.)
<p>
I made this translation — I <em>make</em> it, I should say, as it seems to get touched up every time I look at it — in order to explore the poem, not in order to write another; I am no poet. In doing it, of course, I ran up against Elisabeth Cook's challenges. I think I've respected the grammar, allowing for the different attitude French has to past and present tenses. I haven't consciously placed phonemes for musical effect, but certain clusters have emerged on their own, as they will.
<p>
I rejected rhyme from the start. Very rarely does the attempt at rhyme fail to distort translation, and literal rhyme, respecting the original <em>scheme</em>, is even worse.
<p>
Critics agree on seeing this poem as "about," among other things, the writer's confrontation with the blank page, which itself a metaphor for one's confrontation with non-existence. The new day — <em>today</em> in the original — is Life; the frozen lake is non-existence. The swan's white plumage is the blank page; buried (the soil's horror!) and denied it is revealed as futile.
<p>
Many years ago someone asked me what I'd like to accomplish before dying. I was quite young and answered with rash (though wistful) self-confidence: I'd like to have figured things out. Perhaps this modest reading of Mallarmé is another — futile — step in that process.
<p>
In any case, Daniel, as to the final question in your post, yes, of course, translation, or at least this attempt at translation, is both an impulse to reach across boundaries and a symptom of the ultimate hopelessness.
<p>
As to your opening question: this moment — speaking as an American — is perhaps fatally depressing. Our country is lapsing into dictatorship and it seems to me nothing short of literal revolution will stop the descent. The original concept of enlightened federal democracy cannot work in so big, populous, and varied a society; certainly not without an enlightened, educated, and motivated electorate. The present page of American history is scribbled over to the point of illegibility, and we need a drunk wing's brushing — or a grove of pines — to wipe it clean.</p><hr>
<em>Postscript: I have just read — or re-read; I forget (alas!) whether I read it when it appeared, two years ago — Alex Ross's marvelous </em><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/11/stephane-mallarme-prophet-of-modernism">New Yorker piece</a> <em>on Mallarmé. It's well worth reading.</em>Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-26066732018955334062018-09-24T16:59:00.001-07:002018-09-24T16:59:37.615-07:00Miscellaneous autumn notes on the eve of another journey<div align=right><blockquote><em>…la morte deve spaventare ma non troppo. La natura che ci circonda, gli uomini e gli esseri viventi sono una cosa sola. Come non si deve offendere le persone, così non si offenda la natura. Il campo troppo sfruttato si rifiuterà di produrre e così le viti e gli alberi da frutto. Anche dagli animali non si deve pretendere troppo, perché il troppo li rovinerà.</em><p>—Paolo Jacob, <em>Chiomonte: Tradizioni, ricordi, e un po' di storia</em>, p. 153 </blockquote></div>
<p><big>S</big><small></small>EPTEMBER. The light is a little lower, the evenings more golden-colored; and not only because of the smoke in the air. The Zinfandel is nearly ripe; already birds are at the grapes, and fox-scat is full of grape seeds. I love this season, but it inevitably brings on an autumnal mood. I’ve just turned 83 and can’t expect too much more patience from that lady with the scissors, what’s her name, Atropos…
<p>
Atropos: without swerve. Most of the pagans seemed to think of fate as linear, implying that life was seen (and still is, I think, in general) as a progression from birth through lifetime to death. (And possibly beyond: that was the promise of Christianity and afterward Islam; and a hollow promise I think it is.)
<p>
But as I grow older I think otherwise. The Self no doubt is linear, which makes life necessarily tragic and possibly even futile; but I am more than my Self. I am also all those things — events, persons, awarenesses — that accumulate within my ken during my lifetime. Some years ago I read a beautiful passage in a book about tradition and local memory in an Italian valley:</p>
<blockquote>“... death must frighten but not too much. Nature, which surrounds us, humans and other living beings are all one thing. As people should not be offended, so we should not offend nature.The field too exploited will refuse to produce; likewise the vines and fruit trees. From animals, too, we should not expect too much, because too much will ruin them.” [My translation.]</blockquote>
<p>The same with time.
<blockquote>Just as a spider secretes the thread down which she climbs, so you secrete the time you need to do whatever you have to, and you proceed along this thread which is visible only behind you but usable only ahead of you. The key lies in working it out properly. If the thread is too long, it goes into loops and if it's too short, it snaps. <br>
<div align=right>Réné Daumal, <em>A Night of Serious Drinking</em>, p. 38. </divv></blockquote></p>
<p>Maxwell: <em>Ancestors</em>, 307-8: <blockquote>It is not true that the dead desert the living. They go away for a very short time, and then they come back and stay as long as they are needed. But sooner or later a time comes when they are in the way; their presence is, for one reason or another, an embarrassment; there is no place for them in the lives of those they once meant everything to. Then they go away for good. <br>
When I was in college I was wakened out of a sound sleep by my own voice, answering my mother, who had called to me from the stairs. With my heart pounding, I waited for more and there wasn't any more. Nothing like it ever happened to me before, or since. </blockquote></p>
<p>Ilya Pfeiffer:</p>
<blockquote>Emigrating is like writing a new novel whose plot you don't yet know—not its ending, nor the characters who will prove crucial to how the story continues. That's why everything I write has something tentative about it.<br><div align=right>—<em>La superba </em>, p. 91</div></blockquote>
<p>Wordsworth:</p>
<blockquote>…Ye mountains and ye lakes, <br>
And sounding cataracts, ye mists and winds <br>
That dwell among the hills where I was born, <br>
If in my youth I have been pure in heart, <br>
If, mingling with the world, I am content <br>
With my own modest pleasures, and have lived <br>
With God and Nature communing, removed <br>
From little enmities and low desires—<br>
The gift is yours. </blockquote>
<p>[Quoted in <em>Types of Scenery and their Influence on Literature</em>, by
Sir Archibald Geigke, 1898, repr.
Kennikat Press,
Port Washington, N.Y./ London]<hr>
<em>from a recent exchange on Facebook:
</em><p>
<em>Cecilia:</em> “The poet wants to drink from the well of origin; to write the poem that has not yet been written. In order to enter this level of originality, the poet must reach beyond the chorus of chattering voices that people the surface of a culture. Furthermore, the poet must reach deeper inward; go deeper than the private hoard of voices down to the root-voice. It is here that individuality has the taste of danger, vitality and vulnerability. Here the creative has the necessity of inevitability; this is the threshold where imagination engages raw, unformed experience. This is the sense you have when you read a true poem. You know it could not be other than it is. Its self and its form are one.”
[—John O’Donohue]
<p>
<em>CS:</em> Absolutely. As Jean Coqt wrote: <em>Mon esprit est partout. Au fur et à mesure que je vieillis, il va encore plus loin, jusqu'à ce qu'il me quitte complètement.
</em>
<p>
<em>Cecilia [quoting]:</em> <em>Mettez un lieu commun en place, nettoyez-le, frottez-le, éclairez-le de telle sorte qu'il frappe avec sa jeunesse et avec la même fraîcheur, le même jet qu'il avait à sa source, vous ferez œuvre de poète. Tout le reste est littérature.</em>
<p>
<em>CS:</em> Yes but Jean Coqt loathed Cocteau, who he called <em>qu'un parisien, il cause il cause c'est tout qu'il peut faire</em>, and went on to say Duchamp's pun <em>lits et ratures</em> was made with Cocteau in mind. Of course Coqt was a savoyard, and probably annoyed about the similar surnames, which must often have got him into trouble…</p>Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-14622997484124332452018-07-26T12:19:00.001-07:002018-07-26T12:21:53.858-07:00Leedy on Fate<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">(Another in the occasional postings of essays by my late friend Bhishma Xenotechnites)</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"><br></span></p><p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">ANCIENT GREEK ETYMOLOGIES OF FATE</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); min-height: 12.5px;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); min-height: 12.5px;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); min-height: 12.5px;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); min-height: 12.5px;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); min-height: 12.5px;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">M</span><span style="font-size: 9pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">OST OF OUR FORMAL</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> English words for Fate, Fortune and Destiny come from Latin</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">: “fate” is from the past participle of </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">fari</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, “to speak</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">,</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">” and was for the Romans something decreed or pronounced by the gods</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">; the root of “fortune” is </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">fors, </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">“chance”</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">; “destiny” comes from </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">destinare, </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">“to determine.” </span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">(</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">“Lot” and “luck” are obviously Anglo-Saxon.</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">)</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36px; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">For the ancient Greeks</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, however</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, happenstance (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">also Anglo-Saxon</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">) was imagined rather differently</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">: their most common verbal expressions came from words whose root sense is to distribute or parcel out. The main one of these seems to be </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">meiresthai</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, “to receive as one’s lot or portion”</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">; connected words include </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">meros</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, “part,” and</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, probably best known</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">moira</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, “fate” (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">i.e., one’s portion</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">)</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, personified as </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Moira</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, or the </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Moirai</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, the Fates one finds named in Hesiod’s </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Theogony</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, </span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">the Daughters of Night (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Nyx</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">)</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">: </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Klōthō</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">“Spinner”</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">)</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Lákhesis</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">“Apportioner”</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">) and </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Atropos</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">“Unturnable”</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">) (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">213</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, 217ff.</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">; with a different genealogy, 901ff.</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">). </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Moira</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> is one of the forces of Fate invoked in the </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Iliad</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Book 24.209</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, for example</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">). “Destiny” they also derived from this root</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, using a perfect passive participle</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, “the allotted” portion</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">heimarmenē</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">moira</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">)</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, associated later with Stoicism</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, “the bit of Fate with your name on it”</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">; a similar participle</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">peprōmenon</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, the portion “that has been bestowed</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">,” from a defective verb (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">*</span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">poro</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">) meaning “to give or bestow</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">,” came to mean “destined” or “fated.”</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36px; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">The proliferation of names for Fate in Homer is remarkable</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">: </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">kēr</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> is “the doom of death” (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Iliad</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> 9.411</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, for example</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">; Hesiod identifies the </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Kēres</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">pl.</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">)</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Theogony</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> 217</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">; the number of dismal forces named in the passage 211-32 is alarming</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">). (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">There are two sorts of </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">kēr</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> in Homer</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, it may be useful to note</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">: the preceding</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, with a rising intonation (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">kér</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">)</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, and </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">kêr</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, with a falling intonation, meaning — and cognate with — “heart.”</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">) </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Aisa</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">perhaps related to </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">aitia</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, “cause”</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">) is commonly invoked in </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Iliad</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> as “due portion” (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">1.416, for example</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">). Another verb meaning to apportion</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">daiein</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, gives us a familiar noun for a god of fate (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">among other things</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">)</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">daimon</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, later transformed through Latin into “demon.”</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36px; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">(</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Two important Greek words that have to do with allotment</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, portion or distribution that don’t carry the sense of fate or doom are </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">nemein</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, with a meaning of apportionment that extends to the pasturing of animals as well as to custom and law (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">nomos</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">)</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> And </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">klēros</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, “allotment,” or “lot,” in the sense of drawing lots</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, was a key concept of ancient Greek society and property</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">; the root and sense survive in English “clerk</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">,” “clergy.”</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">)</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36px; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Three final words</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">: yet another for Fate</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">potmos</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">; this one comes from the verb </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">piptein</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, “to fall.” And the main Greek word for (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">good</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">) fortune</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, luck</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, chance, often personified</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Tyche</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Tukhē</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">)</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, whose related verb is </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">tunkhanein</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, “to hit</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">,” “to happen (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">or chance</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">) to be.” And an unrelated but vitally important word</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">anankē</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, “necessity.” </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36px; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">The size and nature of this vocabulary of fate invite us to consider ancient Greek attitudes as compared with those of the modern era</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, in which we like to think we have some control over our own fates. The idea of </span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">“free choice” or “free will</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">,” however</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, is a relatively recent and quite Western idea that may have its origins in medieval Christian philosophy. It does not come from the Greeks</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, yet we stubbornly look for it there</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">: in the original Introduction to his celebrated 1951 translation of the </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Iliad</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, Richmond Lattimore wrote that the tragedy of Achilles</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, his early death</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, “is a result of his own choice” (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">p.48</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">). In a recent review-essay on the </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Iliad</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, its history</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, and its English translations (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">“Battle Lines</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">,” </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">The New Yorker</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, 7 November 2011</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">)</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, Daniel Mendelsohn writes (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">p.78</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">) that the hero Achilles “had been allowed to choose between a long</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, insignificant life and a brief</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, glorious one.” </span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36px; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Disrespected by Agamemnon</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, the Greeks’ commander</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, Achilles threatens to take his men and abandon the fight against Troy. He explains to his comrades the double destiny his goddess-mother Thetis has told him he carries toward his death (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">dikhthadias kēras thanatoio</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, 9.411</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">)</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, described by Mendelsohn as “a choice.” Does he himself choose whether to return home, or stay and fight</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">? Is it his choice to allow himself to be persuaded by his companion Patroclus to let him venture into the fight with the Trojans and Hector</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, in Achilles’s own armor</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, only to be killed by Hector</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">?</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36px; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Patroclus’s death (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">which we see aided by the shadowy presence of the god Apollo</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">) must be avenged by the death of Hector at the hands of Achilles</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, who is thus forced to join the fight and “choose” the briefer</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, heroic life. He acknowledges to his mother</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, come to console him over the loss of Patroclus</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, that “all these things the Olympian [</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Zeus</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">] brought to accomplishment” (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">18.79</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">)</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">; and his mother</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">: “I must lose you soon</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, my child</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, since it is decreed (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">potmos hetoimos</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">) your death must come soon after Hector’s” (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">18.95-6; all translations are Lattimore’s</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">). What are the wishes of a mortal against the force of the gods’ decrees</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">? And can even the gods themselves escape the decrees of the Fates</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">?</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36px; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">In his influential book</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">The Greeks and the Irrational</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">1951</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">; The Sather Classical Lectures at the University of California</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, Berkeley</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">), the distinguished scholar E. R. Dodds wrote</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, “To ask whether Homer’s people are determinists or libertarians [</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">advocates of free will</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">] is a fantastic anachronism</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">: the question has never occurred to them…” (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">p.7</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">)</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">; “Some have pointed out that Homer had no word for act of choice or decision. … I should rather say that Homeric man does not possess the concept of will... and therefore... not... of </span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">‘free will’</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">” (</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">p.</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">20, note 31</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">)</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">. Thus Achilles’s tragedy</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, like other famous tragedies of antiquity, was not one of free choice</span><span style="font-size: 5pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">, but a tragedy of the inexorability of Fate.</span></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36px; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); min-height: 12.5px;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36px; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); min-height: 12.5px;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify; text-indent: 36px; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); min-height: 12.5px;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"></span><br></p>
<p style="margin: 0px; text-align: justify; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 11px; line-height: normal; font-family: Georgia; -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; -webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;">Bhishma Xenotechnites<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>xii.2011</span></p><div><span style="font-size: 11pt; -webkit-font-kerning: none;"><br></span></div> Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-28210561762432086422018-06-04T10:32:00.001-07:002018-06-04T15:56:11.132-07:00Leedy and translation<div align="right"><em>Eastside Road, June 4, 2018—</em></div>
<em><big>A</big><small>NOTHER IN WHAT</small> I hope will be a series of occasional posts having to do with my late friend Douglas Leedy (Bhishma Xenotechnites), composer, musician, and scholar, whose frequent letters and telephone calls did much to extend my awareness of all sorts of subjects. First, a letter, sent soon after we had visited him at his home in Corvallis :<hr>
</em>
<div align="right"><em>3 May 2009</em></div>
Dear Charles and Lindsey,
<p>
It was lucky for me you were able to visit — not only was a very enjoyable, but it seems also to have been helpful : as you will recall, I was wondering how the grade and length of our Woodpecker walk would affect me. The next day I didn’t have any muscle pain (or the night before), but I didn’t walk much. On Sunday I found to my surprise that my walking was noticeably better than it has been recently. The next couple of days weren’t so good, but this suggests of course that I can be a bit more ambitious without undue risk. I’ll give it a try.
<p>
As I mentioned, the most memorable scene in the [Philip] Glass documentary (PBS) was his Qigong lesson, and I’ve incorporated some of what I can recall of the routine into my own daily (brief) workout. I’ve noticed some real (I think) benefit from this.
<p>
Let me have some feedback on the James Beard‘s Mother’s Raisin Bread. And I hope to hear about your Los Angeles theater etc. trip. You had, apparently, the better weather. I was hoping for a little more rain here, and it really arrived with a vengeance, up the coast from central California, with heavy winds. Portland had a big thunderstorm, power outages, at least one death (that by falling tree). Today, with sunshine and blossoms everywhere, only one disoriented bee.*
<p>
So, I’m hoping to be in touch with you by phone before you leave for the paese vecchio.
When you get around to reading Emily Watson‘s excellent essay on Anne Carson’s <em>An Oresteia</em> (<small>NATION</small> 27 April) please note two errors : on page 30, left column, <em>mnesimon</em> should read <em>mnesipemon</em> ; but the one on page 32, left column, is serious — 14 lines from the bottom, instead of “— as was Aristophanes’ <em>Frogs</em>” read “as <u>in</u> A.’s <em>Frogs</em>.” !<blockquote>Buon viaggio — or as the Germans say, Gute Fahrt!<blockquote></blockquote></blockquote>
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<p>PS – Forgot quite a few things when you were here, including the epic “Bush Family Cookbook“ with its references to the “White House Mess“, and also the story about Aeschylus‘s death by dropping tortoise. In his 1937 critical edition (Oxford) of A., Gilbert Murray includes the old/ancient “Vita” and other bios from antiquity, which all have the story. No one today gives it much credence, and M. l. West’s new critical edition of A. omits all the old, traditional biographies — unwisely, to my mind.</p>
<p>——<br>
*My therapist just got a number of beehives ( boxes) for his yard and vicinity. <hr>
<em>Next, his enclosure, a fascinating study of a few lines from Aeschylus :</em>
<p>
A LITTLE EXERCISE IN TRANSLATION FROM AESCHYLUS
<p>
Lines from the opening choral ode (or <em>parhodos</em>) of Aeschylus’s <em>Agamemnon</em>, recalled by Robert Kennedy in the eulogy for Martin Luther King Jr. only hours after King’s murder — can these be what H. J. Rose, in his <em>Commentary on the Surviving Plays of Aeschylus</em> (a formal commentary takes up critical issues in the text and its interpretation), calls “a highly poetical but obscure passage, every word of which calls for examination”?
<p>
Here is the original Greek, transliterated from Gilbert Murray’s edition of 1937/55 (lines 179–83 ; I have marked a long alpha that affects the mostly trochaic scansion) :<blockquote>
<p>
stázei d’ ant’ húpnou prò kardías<br>
mnēsipémōn pónos : kaì par’ ā-<br>
kontas êlthe sōphroneîn. <br>
daimónōn dé pou kháris bíaios<br>
sélma semnòn hēménōn. <br>
</blockquote>
The English version Kennedy (slightly incorrectly) recalled was identified as that of Edith Hamilton :<blockquote></p>
<p>Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget<br>
falls drop by drop upon the heart,<br>
until, in our own despite,<br>
against our will,<br>
comes wisdom<br>
through the awful grace of God.</blockquote></p>
<p>It is quoted here from an excellent review-essay in the 27 April 2009 issue of <small>THE NATION</small> by classics scholar Emily Watson of <em>An Oresteia</em>, a trilogy composed of the <em>Agamemnon</em>, Sophocles’s <em>Electra</em> and Euripides’s <em>Orestes</em>, all translated by the classicist and poet Anne Carson (Faber and Faber), produced recently in New York City. Carson translates :<blockquote></p>
<p>Yet there drips before my heart<br>
a griefremembering pain.<br>
Good sense comes the hard way.<br>
And the grace of the gods<br>
(I’m pretty sure)<br>
is a grace that comes by violence.
</blockquote>
Carson does justice to <em>mnēsipémōn</em>, an Aeschlyean coinage, meaning “remembering misery“ ; we recognize <em>kardías</em> and <em>daimónōn</em> ; <em>sōphroneîn</em>, a basic Greek principle, is indeed having “good sense“ or “prudence” (not really “wisdom“) ; <em>kháris</em> is familiar as “grace,“ “favor.“ <em>Akontas</em> is as Hamilton has it, “against the will.“ <em>Selma</em> is a ship’s upper decking, extended to a “rower’s bench“ as well as “seat“ or “throne,“ a location missing from the above English renditions.
<p>
Now we face some of Rose’s obscurities. <em>Ant’ húpnouo</em> means literally “instead of“ or “against sleep,“ but the text is a conjecture. <em>Pro</em> means “before, in front of,“ as Carson gives it. The verbs <em>stázei</em> (“drips“), <em>êlthe</em> (“comes“) are third-person, with subjects <em>ponos</em> (pain) and <em>sōphroneîn</em> : there is no first-person “my” or “our“ in Aeschylus's personal schema. A literal version might read :<blockquote></p>
<p>And there drips, against sleep, at the heart,<br>
remembered misery's pain ; even to the un-<br>
willing comes moderation.<br>
But of the gods, I suppose, the grace (that ?comes is) violent,<br>
(they) upon their solemn throne seated. </blockquote></p>
<p>M. L. West, in his new critical edition of Aeschylus (Teubner/de Gruyter) has instead of <em>biaios</em> (“violent“) the adverb <em>biaiōs</em> (“forcibly“), and inserts a comma after <em>kharis</em> ; the last four words now mean “occupying their solemn throne by force.“ Then for <em>pou</em> (“I suppose“) he reads (on authority yet unclear to me) <em>poû</em> (“where?“), making the sentence from <em>daimónōn</em> a question : “But where (is) the grace of the divinities, who forcibly occupy their solemn seat?“ As Gilda Radner‘s Emily Litella used to say, “Well — that’s different!“ (and perhaps more Aeschylean?).
<p>
There is another fine review of Carson's trilogy, by Gary Wills (<small>NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS</small>, 14 May 2009), where in considering her <em>Agamemnon</em> he mentions Robert Browning‘s “oddly neglected translation,“ concluding that for a disputed passage from the Watchman’s opening soliloquy, not long before our lines, “Browning gets it right.“ In the course of investigations for this essay I was fortunate to have already been put on the trail of Browning’s <em>Agamemnon</em>, published in 1877. Here is his version of the above lines, to my mind the best of the eight or so I have compared :<blockquote>
In sleep, before the heart of each,<br>
A woe-remembering travail sheds in dew<br>
Discretion, — ay, and melts the unwilling too<br>
By what, perchance, may be a graciousness<br>
Of gods, enforced no less –<br>
As they, commanders of the crew,<br>
Assume the awful seat.
</blockquote>
Unfortunately Browning himself needs some translation today ; and here, once again, is the perpetual dilemma of the translator : to decide, without resolving intentional ambiguity, what the author meant to say, and to convey that meaning, with the right tone (and for Aeschylus, do we try to imitate his often strange and by-then-old-fashioned language?), in words understandable to today’s ears and eyes — and in the case of dramatic works, to the <em>theatai</em>, spectators, but listeners, above all, for the meaning and music of the words.</p>
<p>bh.x. v.2009<p><p>
<small>APPENDIX : two further English translations</small><p>
<table>
<tr>
<td><small>Still there drips in sleep against the heart<br>
grief of memory ; against<br>
our pleasure we are temperate.<br>
From the gods who sit in grandeur<br>
grace comes somehow violent.<br><br>
Richard Lattimore (Modern Library, 1942)</small>
</td><td><small> We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart<br>
the pain of pain remembered comes again,<br>
and we resist, but ripeness comes as well.<br>
From the gods enthroned on the awesome rowing-bench<br>
there comes a violent love.<br><br>
Robert Fagles (Viking, 1975)</small></td>
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</table>Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-70610194577757756612018-06-02T16:03:00.001-07:002018-06-02T17:14:42.678-07:00Educated and translated<div align="right"><em>Eastside Road, June 2, 2018—</em></div><table align="left" style="border: 10px solid transparent">
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<td><small>•Tara Westover: <em><strong>Educated</strong></em><br>
HarperCollins, 2018 <br>
pp. 400 ISBN 978-0-399590-50-4 </td></small>
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<td><small>•Ed. Esther Allen, Sean Cotter, & Russell Scott Valentino: <br> <em><strong>The Man Between: Michael Henry Heim & a Life In Translation</strong></em><br>
Open Letter Books, 2014 <br>
pp. 313 ISBN 978-1-940953-00-7 </td></small>
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<big>A</big><small>NOTHER PAIR</small> of significant books, significant for the wider cultural implications beyond their apparent immediate concerns — memoir in the case of <em>Educated</em>, literary translation in the case of <em>The Man Between</em>.
<p>
Tara Westover's memoir, out quite recently, has come in for plenty of discussion. Much of it centers on the immediate story, which is both harrowing and hopeful enough: a girl raised with six siblings by a fundamentalist Mormon family living as far from society as possible. No schooling. Virtually no friends or relatives outside the nuclear family — survivalist parents who rely on faith in their Mormon God, rather than any kind of science or medicine or, for that matter, seat belts. Through luck, the timid pioneering of the oldest brother who had had some schooling before the family dropped completely out, and a quick and tenacious mind, she manages at 15 to enter school for the first time, quickly moving through college, then graduate work.
<p>
There are two parallel stories here: the squalid background, in a desert junkyard in Idaho, and the academic progress, at Brigham Young University, Cambridge, and Harvard. The first is the more dramatic, of course, and Westover portrays her parents, siblings, and the setting dramatically and effectively — to the extent that some online "reviewers" have questioned the authenticity of the memoir. I don't; in my childhood I saw similar families, and can well believe there are still plenty of them in this country — think of Waco, think of the Oklahoma City bomber, think of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.
<p>
Westover's father seems paranoid as well as loony, but he's not really a terrorist in the bomber sense. He's simply deeply mistrustful of Government, which he thinks is out to impose its own views of reality on those he prefers to hold. But Westover's subtle choice of title suggests that she is ultimately writing about something far beyond her own story (and that of her father): the fact that there are people who are convinced that their dedication to "faith" and magical thinking is sounder than science and theoretical education. <em>Educated</em> suggests there is a total divide between two classes: those who are educated and those who remain ignorant.
<p>
The Enlightenment is not to be taken for granted. We who have received relatively conventional educations have difficulty believing the extent to which the ignorant suspect, scorn, and reject education, for themselves and, most poignantly and damagingly, for their children. This is not directed at those who choose to home-school in some attentive manner. Nor does it excuse more or less formal alternative school "educations" that reject science and reason.
<p>
Westover's story spins almost out of control toward the end, when her parents find themselves profiting from the kitchen remedies they cook up as alternatives to medicine following a series of disastrous, nearly fatal accidents. But even here the story offers a scary premonition of the fiery catastrophe that may be needed to resolve what seems to be our biggest danger: the failure of reason in a complex moment, and the dividing of humanity into two tribes opposed over selfishness and community, fear and invention, instinct and consciousness.<hr>
<p><big>T</big><small>RANSLATORS USED TO BE</small> invisible, or try to be: there was an attitude that their work was to move a book from a foreign language into the reader's as effortlessly as possible. In the last twenty years of the 20th century that changed, as a generation of translators pushed publishers and academicians to realize that the content of a book issues from not only the author's mind, including his language, but from the cultural and societal qualities forming and influencing that mind.
<p>
To judge by <em>The Man Between</em>, one man was almost heroic in this evolution: Michael Heim, a quiet, eccentrically modest and frugal man who mastered a number of languages but who also had a gift for creative writing and an organizational turn of mind allowing him to formulate literary theory without freezing it into academic stricture.
<p>
<em>The Man Between</em> centers on this man through seventeen essays, ten of which seem to me remarkably significant as well as entertaining. Of course language and literature are fundamental to the narrative, but a bigger issue develops: the sad yet undeniable failure of the anglophone community to invite authors writing in other languages to the table. I remember such series as <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_Writing">New World Writing</a></em> and <em><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botteghe_Oscure">Botteghe Oscure</a></em>, which flourished in their marginal way in the 1950s; and Clayton Eshleman's <em>Caterpillar</em> magazine, 1967-1973, as bravely continuing Ezra Pound's Modernist imperative to extend literary conversations beyond the Culture of the Now that dominated — and continues to dominate — a society more interested in distraction and entertainment than penetration and learning. But the dynamics of marketing and technology distorted commercial publishing in the decades after, as they did the art and music businesses.
<p>
Heim, the translator at the center of this celebration, was a very attractive man, clearly both loved and respected by colleagues and students. He was energetic and activist in his dedication to his art, but apparently quite egoless — to the extent of donating a quarter of a million dollars to establish the PEN Translation Fund, which supports translating projects and their translators (many of them at the beginning of their careers) on the condition that his gift be strictly anonymous: only after his death was his name identified with it. (You may be sure he never made that kind of money translating books; not even Milan Kundera's <em>The Unbearable Lightness of Being</em>.)
<p>
What were Heim's beliefs about his art? That "A good translation will allow a person who has read a work in the original and a person who has read the work in translation to have an intelligent conversation about it."
<p>
"Principles, not rules,” he told Maureen Freely, who took over the class he was prevented, by his final illness, to have given. <blockquote>Everything he did in the classroom was obased on an assumption that there are principles you can extrapolate from your work, that you can work with material a systematic way.” His overriding principle was that “languages have a genius of their own — something that makes them different from other languages.” He encouraged his students to “characterize their nature’ and to see all other languages in terms of genius, too. The genius of English, for example, was its rich vocabulary. “You need to keep that in mind. If you don’t take advantage of it, you are losing a resource.”<p>
He elaborated his other principles as he talked me through two student translations, drawing from the examples he found on the page. Pay attention to rhythm, he said. Think about register — is it appropriate? Is it consistent? Modal auxiliary words (should, might, may, etc.) were important in relaying nuance, so it was important to get them right. Pay close attention to tense, he said. Different languages used them in different ways. Then there was punctuation, which offered different challenges for translators, because it was so important to keep the flow. “We need to make sure that our punctuation is creative, but based on certain rules. Punctuate long sentences extremely carefully. No colons unless it’s very long and complicated. Use the punctuation of the target language but at the same time, stretch its rules.” When his students drew back from that challenge, he would try to push them forward. “I tell them they can do it. If they want to, they can.”<p>
Concision was another thing to keep in mind."You're translating from a language with a certain genius and sometimes that does take more words. So balance it with concision." And not to forget logic. "Always make sure that what you're saying makes sense in English." There were also what he called “first and second tier choices” It was important to use the word that reflected how English-speakers spoke, and not the word that seems at first to be its obvious counterpart. For example, German speakers use the word <em>auch</em> a great deal more than we in English use the word <em>also</em>. If you translate every <em>auch</em> as <em>also</em>, the text might be correctly translated, but it will also sound German.<p>
Always allow space for the imagination, he said. “For the idea that comes from oneself, as the Germans say. If a student has done something really good, point it out. Tell them it’s a beautiful solution.’<p>Above all, they should understand what an important service they were providing. “I believe in translation.” It is thanks to the work done by translators that we have access to literatures from across the world. Without translators, even those of us with four or five languages would be shut off from whole continents of great literature.
"When I think of all the authors I would never have read... ,” Mike said, his voice trailing off. And then it came back again: “It’s literature that’s my passion.”
</blockquote>
Esther Allen, one of the editors of this book, notes that Heim<blockquote> neither deplored nor resented the dominance of theoretical discourse within the humanities during his lifetime and spoke with considerable admiration of a number of colleagues whose theoretical studies mattered a great deal to him, among them Mikhail Bakhtin, Roman Jakobson, Pascale Casanova, David Bellos, Barbara Cassin, Lawrence Venuti, and his dear friend Efrain Kristal. Their work bolstered the cause and, as he says of Bakhtin in <em>A Happy Babel</em>, “helped me to see things in books . . . that I would have missed otherwise”. He was grateful for that but had little interest in engaging directly in theory himself. He understood translation itself as an enactment of the issues the theorists debated in the abstract: the inherent ambiguity of language, the relationship of signifier and signified, form and content, the politics of the world republic of letters, the ownership of the translation, the question of untranslatability… Mike preferred situational particulars to generalities: his mind focused on individual words, grammatical structures, narratives, literary works, writers, languages, situations of cultural interanimation… "A translator must deal with every single word," he said.</blockquote>
Heim may not have been interested in theory, but Allen doesn't hesitate to propose a series of nine "theoretical positions" consistently underlying his forty years of work. They are:<blockquote>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">• All literary canons are fluid and must be continually renewed with new material.</div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">• Literary fiction can afford us a crucial understanding of history.</div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">• Literary translation is a primary, necessary form of literary scholarship.</div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">• Literary translators need formal training in the practice of translation itself.</div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">• Literary translators must be proactive agents of cultural mediation. </div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">• Translation is a central component of literature itself, which is revitalized by support for translation.</div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">• The publishing marketplace is not only a necessary object of study but an arena for action.</div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">• Translation into English enhances the literary and scholarly capital of all languages by allowing writers and scholars to continue to work in their first language, while still reaching a global audience.</div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">• The boundaries between disciplines and fields of knowledge are artificial constraints that must not be allowed to define or limit one's own interests and areas of endeavor.</div>
<div style="padding-left: 1em; text-indent: -1em;">• Translation enriches texts by transforming them.</blockquote>
These are more than bullet points, and Allen fleshes them out with interesting, often surprising examples drawn from specific situations. A triumph of both Heim's work and his teaching is its specifiticity, its practicality, its workmanship. I don't see how any writer, or any reader interested beyond his own back yard, could fail to be fascinated, entertained, impressed, or enlightened by this collection.</p>Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13593902.post-83393915177555927632018-05-26T12:57:00.001-07:002018-05-26T12:57:51.256-07:00Gail Chadell Nanao<table align="top">
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<td><img style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLdv9ZO3r7I7IRYDakVwA6rV4IlbI5WjRoBo50WwMSNJisz5ywb71gTDCQeprwU6-ZMa-YPfR-TMFOAPkmH5CqYi1QJnzF-_9-PCjipMzfLUwEQ0Wh2xxVDdndtA5szOypKdgAvA/?imgmax=1600" alt="IMG 9436" title="IMG_9436.jpg" border="0" width="599" height="355" /></td>
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<td><small><em>paintings by Gail Chadell Nanao, <a href="http://www.svma.org">Sonoma Valley Museum of Art</a> (my photos)</em></small></td>
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</table><div align="right"><em>Eastside Road, May 26, 2018—</em></div>
<p><table align=right border="1">
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<td><strong><small>Her View: The Bay Area Figuration<br>of Gail Chadell Nanao</strong><br>
at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, <br>
551 Broadway, Sonoma, California<br>
Wed-Sun 11-5, closing June 10, 2018</small></td>
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</table>
<big>I</big> <small>MET</small> G<small>AIL</small> C<small>HADELL</small> N<small>ANAO</small> in 2006, I think, when we were invited to the Nanao home in Berkeley for dinner. Her husband the painter Kenjilo cooked beefsteak on a hot griddle at the table; it was delicious. Five years later we met again when I visited Kenji’s studio in Oakland to discuss writing an essay for his forthcoming retrospective at the Triton Gallery in Santa Clara. A bittersweet occasion: Kenji was in his last year.
<p>
After Kenji’s death we tried to maintain acquaintance with Gail, but you know how it is: we live sixty miles away; our life is full and so is hers. (Negotiating the dispersal of Kenji’s studio must have taken all her energies: I’m always struck by the enormity of the tasks faced by painters’ survivors.)
<p>
And for some reason, admirable as her work is, it is not represented in Bay Area galleries. We had driven over to Sacramento in 2012 to see her paintings and ceramics at the B. Sagata Garo Gallery — a memorable show, I thought. But since then, nothing, until the other day, when we were in the town of Sonoma to see her first retrospective.
<p>
I suppose Gail’s resumé is that of many women of her generation. She came early to her art, studying paintings in the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; she attended the university in Buffalo where she was knocked out by an exhibition of Clyfford Still at the Albright-Knox; she continued at the ssfo Art Institute where she was moved by the community that grew up around the two poles then current, Bay Area Abstract Expressionism and Figurative, as practiced by Lobdell, Jefferson, Bischoff, Diebenkorn, and Oliveira, and Neri, Joan Brown, and Jay De Feo.
<p>
At the SFAI however she also met and soon married Kenji. Soon, in the early 1970s, they had a child. Before long she was working, full time, as a social worker. She stopped painting until 1996, when she and Kenji were awarded a stay in Norway at Ekely, Edvard Munch’s home and studio. The Norwegian master’s emotional power seems to have reawakened her own, and she resumed painting.
<img style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;padding:5px" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSj276R1zbNEG2YVvV1Dow3bIxLLZwREr0EYpxYZioTnbJi9sJikBvOH-d6cvRlznWMVOeWahH-D0sFFOdlEkVbgoNmi6xaTRGLWPTZfW1UVW8VgKEBHjff8zBBCF7NekAcFPHKg/?imgmax=1600" alt="IMG 9438" title="IMG_9438.jpg" border="0" width="600" height="450" /><p>
The career curve is worth considering: it began with the influences of Symbolists like Beckmann and Munch (though already in her childhood she was fascinated by Modigliani), caught fire through the abstract ecstasy of Still, ripened in ssfo through the influence of Oliveira and Lobdell, then slept for twenty years, then was reawakened by immersion in the work and place of Munch.
<p>
Through it all, of course, she was living with the presence of Kenji and his work — painting and printmaking which on its face seems to have little to do with the figurative emotional depth of Gail’s influences, though behind the serene surfaces of his work I would argue there’s considerable human experience. (I’ve written about Kenji’s work <a href="http://cshere.blogspot.com/2013/05/rip-kenji-nanao.html">here</a> and <a href="http://cshere.blogspot.com/2011/07/nanao.html">here</a>.)
<p>
Now, in this new age of awareness of the place of woman in the human condition, Gail Chadell Nanao provokes a renewed consideration of a female sensibility. That’s at the base, I think, of Susan Landauer’s essay in the catalog accompanying the exhibition she’s installed in the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, in which she argues for a uniquely female eye guiding Gail Nanao’s work, the emotions in her work, and her approach to the nude (especially the female nude).
<p>
<table align="right">
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<td><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxMikKmMZxt1GIx9jgK6GQt9InHR-uwdTmsM7YluWKCCybQumFRfUft1M-Dt0mzTEi7uNiSAVQuG0scCXpNobk1P5FAIfdPC5d-eLjydFgCePCMDak1rX0p3J8wj5HUohkqpRmrQ/?imgmax=1600" alt="IMG 9440" title="IMG_9440.jpg" border="0" width="313" height="400" style="float:right;padding:5px" /></td>
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<td><small><em>Of All Things Lovely, 60x50 in.; 2016</em></small></td>
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</table>Laudauer may be right. I’m not sure I agree with the idea that the painter’s eye is necessarily gendered; I think much gendering is done by onlookers. I’m more interested in how this work acknowledges its source community while maintaining its own identity. Nathan Oliveira, the early Joan Brown, and other familiar Bay Area masters clearly look on among the paintings in the Sonoma Valley Museum gallery, but Gail Nanao’s work holds its own. Her canvases are strong and beautiful and Susan Landauer is right to observe that the work expresses a uniquely individual viewpoint.
<p>
I admire the great San Francisco Bay Area work of its time for an unusual quality: strength, even power, that is somehow devoid of ego-expression. This separates it from, lifts it above the work of, for example, Clyfford Still. (Picasso is another matter, and worth contemplating.) What reassures me in Gail Nanao’s work, which goes on — the most recent painting here is from 2016 — is its evidence that this quality is not merely of that time of fifty years ago; it is a living quality, probably more valuable and needed than ever. It’s a quality undoubtedly born of the tragedy of the mid-twentieth century in the wake of World War II (and such later ones as the Kennedy assassination, which influenced one of Nanao’s early paintings, <em>Birthday Party</em>), but is transformed, in these paintings, from witness to previous tragedy to oracle of the near future.
<p>
And through it all, beauty; the beauty of acknowledgement and patience and expression and realism.
<p>
And lyricism. There are two or three watercolors on view, energetic but tender and affecting. And a number of painted ceramic pieces — vases, plates, bowls, and trays — that might easily be overlooked. Don't miss them.</p>
</p>Charles Sherehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10480432901356490235noreply@blogger.com0