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READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
That's odd -- I can hardly remember the last time I knew where you were
or had any contact
and yet
I feel your far-off presence by my side
a chuckle when I make a joke
that doesn't quite come off
and glad to
listen to the twisted theories
and share a pipe
and grin
and I remember
when we used to talk about
what would come
and little did we know of course
I hear your name sometimes
and wonder
what's become.
posted evening of October 8th, 2013: Respond ➳ More posts about Poetry
(with thanks to Leilani for the lovely restatement of Machado's theme)
Wanderer, these your steps
make up the path, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no path:
you make the path by walking.
By walking you make the path,
and turning back your gaze you see
the trail you'll tread upon no more.
Wanderer, there is no path:
just wake upon the sea.
I've had this poem on my mind quite a bit recently. I thought I would spend a little time writing about it — I'd like to examine its face-value meaning, the metaphor of the poem, and the value of the metaphor, how it speaks to me; and incidentally I'd like to put a little effort into defending my translation, which is fairly different from the standard translation of Betty Jean Craige, in Selected Poems of Antonio Machado, 1979. I think (obviously I think) it is an improvement on Craige's translation; it seems worthwhile to elaborate on why I think that way — how my translation speaks more clearly than Craige's. But that should be a secondary point really; what I really want to talk about is how it is that I find this poem to speak to me so clearly. It is nice as well to get a chance to quote a couple of poems that I've translated and written over the past few years. I think it will make worthwhile reading, see what you think.
Let's reread Machado's first lines. Your steps make up the path, and nothing more. (The "path" dang it, not the road — roads are engineered and built by crews of men over the years, not "made by walking". And a wanderer is hardly confined to the roadways.) A path is a most personal thing. And what Machado's metaphor here is, is the path of one's life: it's not mapped out before one but made up of one's footsteps, the trail one leaves through life. Which one will tread upon no more. The obvious question here to ask is, "But isn't that pretty obviously true?" and yes, of course it is, and has been pointed out before; but an obvious truth that seems perennially to need restatement — one that comes to me at least as a revelation every time I hear it expressed, and doubly so when it is expressed so elegantly as Machado puts it here.
I came to this poem pretty early in life. I can't remember what group it was but I seem to recall its having had an anthemic quality in some vaguely lefty/artistic circles I had some contact with in my teen years — possibly I remember it from Peace Camp, though in what context is not quite clear.* It has an elemental feel to it, something so clearly correct and valuable that it is hard to know where to begin. (And this quality is, obviously, so strong that it shines through a slight roughness of rendering like Craige's, which is the poem I remember from my youth. It was not until I was talking about it with a friend last year and he brought up the objection vis-a-vis roads that I realized a better translation was needed.) I heard it again recently in Oaxaca, a man played guitar and sang it prior to a poetry reading.
Machado's clarity of voice as he addresses you, asks you to reexamine the ground you're walking on, gives you the reader a new point of perspective. Likewise another restatement of this metaphor, this obvious truth — poems of a slightly different form but closely related theme are a few of Pablo Antonio Cuadras's about el maestro de Tarca. The first and eighth poems in his series both feature el maestro sitting up on la Piedra del Ãguila, telling his disciples what is fitting and just. The maestro's seafarer plays much the same role here as the wanderer (in the desert?) of Machado.
(â… )
Seated up on Eagle Rock
el maestro de Tarca told us:
It is fitting
it is just
that the seafarer
should grasp
all things by their name.
In times of danger
the things without names
are the ones that harm.
(â…§)
Seated up on Eagle Rock
el maestro de Tarca told us:
It is fitting
it is just
that the seafarer
should leave to the waters
his adventure.
Wake formed
time lived
Wake dissolved
time erased.
One thing I love about Machado's treatment of this universal truth is how easily it can be parodied, and how the parodies can ring clear, can bring out new shades of meaning in the original. What at first seems paradoxical can with a slight twist of the lenses be made to appear blindingly, obviously the case. Take for instance Leilani Hagberg's line in the title of this piece, or my expansion on it:
Cuentista, son tus palabras
la idioma y nada más;
cuentista, no hay idioma,
se hace idioma al hablar.
Al hablar se hace la idioma,
y al recordar las sÃlabas habladas
se oye el relato que nunca
se ha de volver a narrar.
Cuentista no hay idioma
sino espuma sobre las aguas.
Storyteller, it's your words
that make up language, nothing more.
Storyteller, there's no language;
by speaking you create the language.
Language is built by speaking,
and the memory of syllables uttered
is the sound of a story
You'll never get to tell again.
Storyteller, there's no language,
just foam upon the waters.
For language (while it is of course a facility created over hundreds (or tens?) of thousands of years by all of humanity in concert) has as highly personal a quality to it when considered in the particular case as does one's path. A sillier (and a fun, and rewarding, to be sure) parody, and one that indeed suffers from the same symptom of misunderstanding as does Craige's version, is:
Jugador, son tus apuestas
el casino y nada más;
Jugador, no hay casino,
se hace casino al apostar.
Al apostar se hace el casino,
y al lanzar las fichas en el fieltro
se oye el dinero que nunca
se va a poder recuperar.
Jugador no hay casino
sino monedas en la mar.
Gambler, it's your wagers
that make the casino, nothing more;
gambler, there's no casino:
we make the casino by gambling.
By gambling we make the casino,
and tossing down your tokens on the felt
you hear money that you'll never
get to pick back up.
Gambler, there's no casino,
just coins dropped into the sea.
Let's look at another fragment of Machado's concerned with paths and wanderers; this one from "I keep dreaming of pathways":
I keep dreaming of pathways
evening's pathways —The hills,
the golden hills, the green green pines,
dusty holm oak trees!...
And where does this pathway lead?
I keep singing, oh wanderer,
you at the end of the pathway...
–now evening is falling–.
And let's let evening fall.
Not quite sure how to bring out what it is that I find so compelling about the central metaphor these pieces all have in common, why it rings so clear to me and (I hope) to the reader. (—Not to take any unwanted liberties.)
Jugador, son tus apuestas
el casino y nada más;
Jugador, no hay casino,
se hace casino al apostar.
Al apostar se hace el casino,
y al lanzar las fichas en el fieltro
se oÃa el dinero que nunca
se va a poder recuperar.
Jugador no hay casino
sino monedas en la mar.
(Note I posted a revision in comments that I think is a much better poem)
by Jeremy Osner
Think of time as a river of events
think of time simply as a river: Events the features
of the landscape the river flows through.
The river erodes the landscape. The landscape
is formed, created, given shape
by the river. Analogies for time.
Time shapes you but does not abide, abiding
that's an action to be taken. Swim upstream.
The analogy here is imperfect. Swim
upstream/ float/ swim downstream/ bob
in the current.
The surface of the river.
The landscape here is reality
in its spacial dimensions
as they may appertain
picking a scab
Reality cannot be---
analogized because the analogy chosen
must of necessity itself be a part of reality
cannot get a foothold, perspective
outside it
Picturing reality
mapping reality
Map is analogy
Cartographer/ poet. Poems, their varying
degrees of realism, they blossom forth:
construct a universe immaculate in conception corrupt in execution
a map
which deconstructs/ creates the world
around you reader, "pulls you in",
so to speak. You scratch your head
and look up at the clock,
your eye zooms in
on a fly that's buzzing around the 7.
It's half past 8 and down the street a dog is barking.
posted morning of September 21st, 2013: 3 responses
Wednesday, September 11th, 2013
by Jeremy Osner
The dead of 9/11
are photographed
and silent
and the crater they fell into long since filled
with detritus of 21st C. dreams in America
and ragged strips of newsprint
without any columns of ink,
they're blank and they're torn. and the
names of the dead
scroll by beneath the image
of America.
Dream is not a revelation. If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the person with open eyes lucid enough to fit thoughts together. Dream — a scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows — is essentially poetry.
El sueño no es revelación. Si al soñador un sueño lo permiterÃa ahorrar algún luz sobre si mismo, no realice ese descubrimiento la persona de ojos cerrados sino la de ojos abiertos y lúcidos suficientamente para los pensamientos juntos a unirse. El sueño —entre las sombras chispea el miraje— en su esencia es poesÃa.
I have been writing a lot of poetry lately, much of which has not really taken any shape yet, in both English and Spanish. Here are a couple passages in English that seem worth expanding on.
Act out this savage pantomime
in the distance
crickets
in the distance
the voices of your
subjunctive
saviors
and you stumble thru the steps
of some long forgotten scene
of some brutally ironic
forgotten scene.
and sometimes it can help to be brutally honest
to tell the truth I mean
and to deceive
deceive with honesty
so to speak
deceive with savage apathy
passivity
liquidity and self-congratulation:
conflating
to seed the pastures
of some chaotic Babylon
imagined.
and the insect hum behind the melody
pervasive rhythmic ambiance
Not a form of beauty but of void, this binary
now, so what--
Void is imperceptible when it's cloaked in a mask of being
Void here should be taken to mean Nullity
and our Reality/ is riddled through
is torn asunder by infinite
void and void and voids/ impossible
to pluralize this empty heart
of being.
and the minutes are like hours, like idle, carefree hours
forgotten as they pass.
Forgotten as the second hand
ticks by on some imagined sundial
as streams/ evaporate
into desert
as protostellar nuclei condense
volcanic
intrinsic to our nature/ even
as the void repulses us
¶ and the insect hum behind the melody pervasive
and basic to nature
intrinsic
to meaning.
to say the minutes pass like hours predictable creeping by
o verminous horde, to say
to say you've said all this before, to call the riddle
meaningless and petty
To get behind the riddle to its source, to its creator/
interact for God's sake
and call it growth, and chalk it up
to destiny
so sliding frame by frame by
these episodes and episodic memories
of our ill-spent youths
and current circumstances
different pathways and strands of meaning surround you
encroach on your experience of the moment
your sense of reality
so to speak
you've come unstuck in time and out of luck
so walk your pilgrim's path
so celebrate your misfortune
grin
at the indeterminate slices
of subjunctive structure that enframe you.
Occasionally in the past I've blogged about books that I come to with no idea at all in advance, what to expect. Sáez de Ibarra's Mirar al agua is one such. I first came upon the author's name and the title a few weeks ago when Marta Aponte recommended it. This is always a fun way to read, completely free of expectations.
The first couple of stories I've so far just skimmed the first lines of, not found much of anything to draw me in. "Las Meninas" (left) I find fascinating, a story told entirely in dialog, extremely fast-pased. I find it renders very nicely in English. "Una ventana en Via Spermazella" and the next few stories seem very interesting but have not been quite able to crack the code that will get me into the stories. Especially intriguing among these is "La PoesÃa del Objeto."
"La superstición de Narciso" is just spellbinding. More experimental than anything else thus far. "Escribir Mientras Palestina" (which I'm midway into now) is a nicely engaging piece of first-person narrative about a visit to Palestine.
Wow, there is some great poetry in this issue of Metamorphoses. Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Hilst, Orhan Veli, Benny Andersen (whose "Kierkegaard on a bicycle" is going to be my new favorite poem for at least a little while),...
posted afternoon of August 17th, 2013: Respond ➳ More posts about Translation
(Note I posted a 
se forma la palabra. Se concibe
author's name and the title a few weeks ago when Marta Aponte recommended it. This is always a fun way to read, completely free of expectations.
Especially intriguing among these is "La PoesÃa del Objeto."
