varia

Virginia Woolf (born 25 January, 1882; died 28 March, 1941) and Robert Bridges (1844-1930), as photographed in June, 1926 by Ottoline Morrell

‘Let us now crawl,’ said Bernard, ‘under the canopy of the currant leaves, and tell stories.  Let us inhabit the underworld.  Let us take possession of our secret territory, which is lit by pendant currants like candelabra, shining red on one side, black on the other.  Here, Jinny, if we curl up close, we can sit under the canopy of the currant leaves and watch the censers swing.  This is our universe.  The others pass down the carriage-drive.  The skirts of Miss Hudson and Miss Curry sweep by like candle extinguishers.  Those are Susan’s white socks.  Those are Louis’ neat sand-shoes firmly printing the gravel.  Here come warm gusts of decomposing leaves, of rotting vegetation.  We are in a swamp now; in a malarial jungle.  There is an elephant white with maggots, killed by an arrow shot dead in its eye.  The bright eyes of hopping birds—eagles, vultures—are apparent.  They take us for fallen trees.  They pick at a worm—that is a hooded cobra—and leave it with a festering brown scar to be mauled by lions.  This is our world, lit with crescents and stars of light; and great petals half transparent block the openings like purple windows.  Everything is strange.  Things are huge and very small.  The stalks of flowers are thick as oak trees.  Leaves are high as the domes of vast cathedrals.  We are giants, lying here, who can make forests quiver.’

‘This is here,’ said Jinny, ‘this is now.  But soon we shall go. Soon Miss Curry will blow her whistle.  We shall walk.  We shall part.  You will go to school.  You will have masters wearing crosses with white ties.  I shall have a mistress in a school on the East Coast who sits under a portrait of Queen Alexandra.  That is where I am going, and Susan and Rhoda.  This is only here; this is only now.  Now we lie under the currant bushes and every time the breeze stirs we are mottled all over.  My hand is like a snake’s skin.  My knees are pink floating islands.  Your face is like an apple tree netted under.’

‘The heat is going,’ said Bernard, ‘from the Jungle.  The leaves flap black wings over us.  Miss Curry has blown her whistle on the terrace.  We must creep out from the awning of the currant leaves and stand upright.  There are twigs in your hair, Jinny.  There is a green caterpillar on your neck.  We must form, two by two.  Miss Curry is taking us for a brisk walk, while Miss Hudson sits at her desk settling her accounts.’

‘It is dull,’ said Jinny, ‘walking along the high road with no windows to look at, with no bleared eyes of blue glass let into the pavement.’

‘We must form into pairs,’ said Susan, ‘and walk in order, not shuffling our feet, not lagging, with Louis going first to lead us, because Louis is alert and not a wool-gatherer.’

—from The Waves (1931)

Kitahara Hakushū (pen-name of Kitahara Ryūkichi, born 25 January, 1885; died 2 November, 1942), pictured above in a photograph from the 1930s

The Water Surface

At evening the falling flowers of the willow
Make a twilight, and through it
The water surface appears,
Reflecting the eyes of the daughter of the house.

While I felt myself caressed in your heart,
Your face singularly pale,
Suddenly one of the ripples changed its color
And showed the eyes of an imaginary ogre.

When I, frightened, stared at it,
It turned silvery like a tiny minnow,
Changed into a harmonica, into an oar,
And back into the eyes of the girl.

The willow flowers are falling on
A dragon-fly-hunter by the gutter of the eaves,
And my mind, tired, alone,
Is softly caressed at the surface of the water.

(translated from the Japanese; translator unknown; first published in Poetry in 1956)

Inger Christensen (born 16 January, 1935; died 2 January, 2009), pictured above in a photograph made, I believe, in the early to middle 1970s

From Light

I always thought reality
was something you became
when you grew up.

In the square stands Fata Morgana
looking tired, shouting
Morning paper—morning paper.

(translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied; published originally in Poetry, 2009)

Jules Supervielle (born 16 January, 1884; died 17 May, 1960), pictured above, circa 1941, in a photograph, taken in Supervielle’s native Uruguay, by Gisèle Freund

Haute Mer

a Maurice Guillaume

Parmi les oiseaux et les lunes
Qui hantent le dessous des mers
Et qu’on devine à la surface
Aux folles phrases de l’écume,

Parmi l’aveugle témoignage
Et les sillages sous -marins
Des mille poissons sans visage
Qui cachent en eux leurs chemins,

Le noyé cherche la chanson
Où s’était formé son jeune âge,
Ecoute en vain les coquillages
Et les fait choir au sombre fond.

Deep Sea

Among the birds and moons that haunt
the sea depths
            
              presences
              evinced at the surface by
              strange gestures of foam

              blindly witnessed among their
underwater wakes by a thousand
faceless fishes, their
ongoing roads concealed in water,

the drowned man seeks for that song
his youth took form in,
listens in vain to shells
and lets them
drop to the
dark sea-floor

(translated by Denise Levertov)

Ghost Red Wire, a 1967 painting by Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart) (born 15 January, 1941; died 17 December, 2010)

In January, the gardener examines the ice flowers blooming on his windows, in a drawing by Josef Čapek (1887-1945), for The Gardener’s Year, by Karel Čapek (born 9 January, 1890; died 25 December, 1938)

In the following excerpt from The Gardener’s Year, the gardener attempts to heed the advice of the gardening manuals as to what ought to be done in January:

‘So, “not even January is a time of inactivity for the gardener,” as the gardening manuals — certainly only as a consolation — insist.  In particular, it is apparently possible to work the soil, insofar as the frost apparently makes it crumble.  Bang on New Year’s Day, therefore, the gardener rushes out into his garden to work the soil.  He sets to work on it with a spade.  After lengthy exertions, he manages to break his spade against the soil, which is as hard as corundum.  He tries with a hoe; if he persists, he breaks its handle in two.  He even grabs a pick and manages at least to dig up a Tulip bulb which he had planted in the autumn.  The only expedient is to work the soil with a chisel and hammer, except that this is a slow process which soon becomes tiring.  Perhaps the soil could be loosened with dynamite, but this is not something which the gardener usually has.  Fine, let us leave it to the thaw.
 
And lo, the thaw arrives and the gardener rushes into the garden to work the soil.  After a while, he brings everything that has thawed on the surface into the house, stuck to his boots.  Nevertheless, he wears a blissful expression and insists that the ground is opening up.  Meanwhile, there is nothing left to do but to “do various preparatory jobs for the approaching season.”  “If you have a dry spot in the cellar, prepare some potting soil, thoroughly mixing leafmould, compost, rotten cow dung and a little sand.”  Excellent!  Except that there are coke and coal in the cellar.  These women spread everywhere with their daft, domestic necessities.  Well then, there ought to be enough space in the bedroom for a nice little heap of humus —

“Use the wintertime to repair your pergola, arbour or summerhouse.”  Well and good, except that I do not happen to have a pergola, arbour or summerhouse.  “Even in January it is possible to lay turf.”  If only I knew where.  Perhaps in the hallways or in the attic.  “Above all, keep watch on the temperature in the greenhouse.”  Well, I would gladly keep watch, but I have not got a greenhouse.  These gardening manual do not tell you much.’

(1929; translated from the Czech by Geoffrey Newsome)

Juan Goytisolo (born 6 January, 1931), in a photograph made in the late 1970s

‘You had been asleep and as soon as you opened your eyes you sat up.  The clock showed ten minutes to seven.  On the marble table there was a bottle of wine and on the porch you could hear the first notes of Mozart’s Requiem, majestic and grave.  You looked for Dolores, but Dolores was not there.  You could have drunk some Fefinanes, cool and yellow, just the right thing to moisten your lips and you did not decide.  The clouds had gone away while you were asleep and the sun was burning up the late sky.  Leaning on the railing you contemplated the domesticated hills girded with vines and carob trees, the birds splitting the thin transparency of the air, the distant sea with muffled waves, softened and embellished by the distance.  All you had to do was turn your head and take in with one glance the slim cypresses in the garden, the conclave of sparrows perched on the boughs of the cedar tree, the toys forgotten by Dolores’s nieces and nephews when they went off after some new and absurd distraction.  (You remembered their winged appearance the night before, solemnly dressed up in two chasubles they had got from the chapel when the servant girl had been careless for a moment, delicate and agile, slightly sacrilegious, with dissipated and smiling faces that had filled you with rapture.)’

—from Marks of Identity (first published in 1966; translated from the Spanish in 1969 by Gregory Rabassa)

Friedrich Dürrenmatt (born 5 January, 1921; died 14 December, 1990), pictured above in a 1963 photograph by Monique Jacot

Only Nothingness Stands

Furious and wet
         I slid out of my mother’s body
    without ever knowing why
or on whose order
     I later blinked in the light
                   and became distrustful
so I am still
      satisfied with myself; the world
outside
      is uncertain.  It doesn’t belong to me.
It’s an incomprehensible mercy
   or
an evil curse.  Who
                                               knows
To be prepared for anything.
           That’s why I collect the bottles of wine
smoke the dried brown
                   leaves
Transience
             only nothingness
        stands.

—translated from the German by Daniele Pantano

Gao Xingjian (born 4 January, 1940) pictured above in a photograph by Olivier Roller

‘I have long tired of the struggles of the human world.  In all the fine-sounding discussions, controversies and debates, I have invariably been made the topic, subjected to criticism, made to listen to instructions, made to wait for a verdict, and then waited in vain for some kindly divinity to intervene, to turn Heaven and Earth and get me out of my predicament.  This divinity eventually emerged but wasn’t sympathetic and just looked somewhere else.

​Everyone wants to be my teacher, my leader, my judge, my good doctor, my advisor, my referee, my elder, my minister, my critic, my guide, my acknowledged leader.  Whether I need it or not, people want to be my saviour, my hit man (that is to say my hit-my-hand man), or else grandly represent my country for me when I don’t know what is country or whether or not I have a country.  Others invariably represent me.  And my friends, those who argue for me, that is to say are willing to argue in my defence, have all been reduced to circumstances similar to my own.  Such is my fate.

​I can’t play the tragic role of the defeated hero who fights against fate but I greatly revere those dauntless heroes who can charge into danger and when badly injured will still fight on. I can only silently extend my respect and grief to them.’

—from Soul Mountain (2000; translated from the Chinese by Mabel Lee)​