Nobel Prize 5: Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916)

ON leaving Cæsar, Petronius had himself borne to his house on the Carinæ, which, being surrounded on three sides by a garden, and having in front the small Cecilian Forum, escaped the fire luckily. For this cause other Augustians, who had lost their houses and in them vast wealth and many works of art, called Petronius fortunate. For years it had been repeated that he was the first-born of Fortune, and Cæsar's growing friendship in recent times seemed to confirm the correctness of this statement.

But that first-born of Fortune might meditate now on the fickleness of his mother, or rather on her likeness to Chronos, who devoured his own children.

"Were my house burnt," said he to himself, "and with it my gems, Etruscan vases, Alexandrian glass, and Corinthian bronze, Nero might indeed have forgotten the offence. By Pollux! And to think that it depended on me alone to be pretorian prefect at this moment. I should proclaim Tigellinus the incendiary, which he is really; I should array him in the 'painful tunic,' and deliver him to the populace, protect the Christians, rebuild Rome. Who knows even if a better epoch would not begin thus for honest people? I ought to have taken the office, simply out of regard for Vinicius. In case of overwork I could have surrendered command to him, and Nero would not have even tried to resist. Then let Vinicius baptize all the pretorians, nay, Cæsar himself; what harm could that be to me? Nero pious, Nero virtuous and merciful,—this would be even an amusing spectacle."

And his carelessness was so great that he began to laugh. But after a time his thoughts turned in another direction. It seemed to him that he was in Antium; that Paul of Tarsus was saying to him, "Ye call us enemies of life, but answer me, Petronius: If Cæsar were a Christian, and acted according to our religion, would not life be safer and more certain?"

More information here.

Next time: Giosuè Carducci.

Tomas Gösta Tranströmer (1931- )

More information here. I'm a little disappointed that 'Gösta' doesn't turn out to mean 'The Ghost', like a Swedish wrestling nickname, but is in fact a version of 'Gustav'.

San Jordi

I went to Barcelona for San Jordi on Easter Saturday, 23 April. It was foggy and Impressionistic from the train.

This is David Martín Copé, one of Marian's many editors, talking to Marian on the phone.

Our good friend and collaborator, the Sinister Sergi Bellver.

It was enough to make you come over all Ernest Thesiger.

But there were some pleasant juxtapositions...

Nobel Prize 4: Frédéric Mistral (1830-1914) and José Echegaray y Eizaguirre (1832-1916)

D'aussi loin qu'il me souvienne, je vois devant mes yeux, au Midi là-bas, une barre de montagnes dont les mamelons, les rampes, les falaises et les vallons bleuissaient du matin aux vêpres, plus ou moins clairs ou foncés, en hautes ondes. C'est la chaîne des Alpilles, ceinturée d'oliviers comme un massif de roches grecques, un véritable belvédère de gloire et de légendes.

from Mes origines: Mémoires et récits (1906)



ESCENA I
MARGARITA, sola.
MARGARITA.-(Asomada al balcón; luego, se retira.) El sol desciende; la tarde acaba; cada vez parecen más oscuras las aguas del lago y menos transparente el azul del cielo. ¡Otro día sin verle! ¡Ah Conrado, mucha crueldad es la tuya si en ti consiste la tardanza!, y si en él no consiste, ¿por qué, Dios mío, no escuchas mi ruego? ¡Era yo tan feliz a su lado! ¡Qué alegría cuando llegaba el domingo y escapábamos de Ginebra, después de oír misa en la capilla secreta de Roger, y él, y yo, con Berta y con Jacobo, íbamos por esos campos a los valles, a las lomas; donde no hay ni odios, ni luchas, ni salmos que hielan, ni pregones que espantan, ni calvinistas de traje oscuro y rostro sombrío! ¡Desde que se marchó Conrado me parece haber caído en un abismo sin aire y sin luz! Y luego ese Walter..., ¡que recobre la salud, Dios mío, y que nos deje!... ¡Que huya, que huya de esta casa ese infame calvinista!

from La muerte en los labios (1880)

Next time: Henryk Sienkiewicz

Waiting for Godot

France 0-2 Mexico

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918)





Octavio Paz (1914-1998)



Between going and staying the day wavers

Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.

The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.

Greece 2-1 Nigeria

Manolis Anagnostakis (1925-2005; trans. Philip Ramp)



Now he is a simple spectator

Now he is a simple spectator
An insignificant fellow in the crowd
Now he no longer applauds nor is applauded
A stranger wandering to the call of the streets.

The new trumpeters come from afar
From the chosen classes of the future
Their cries demolish the decayed walls
They melt the mud into luminous streams.
The pure are coming, the non-hypocrites,
Violators, non-participants, virgins,
Crafty fellow diners, these innocents,
And the registrars of our days.
The great blaze is coming
Amid the jets of merry water.
The final proscriptions are coming.

But now he is a simple spectator
An anonymous little fellow in the crowd
With his arms on his chest a dead man laid out
Now he no longer applauds nor is applauded.

(Always know the when and the how).

Chinua Achebe (1930- )



Vultures

In the greyness
and drizzle of one despondent
dawn unstirred by harbingers
of sunbreak a vulture
perching high on broken
bone of a dead tree
nestled close to his
mate his smooth
bashed-in head, a pebble
on a stem rooted in
a dump of gross
feathers, inclined affectionately
to hers. Yesterday they picked
the eyes of a swollen
corpse in a water-logged
trench and ate the things in its bowel. Full
gorged they chose their roost
keeping the hollowed remnant
in easy range of cold
telescopic eyes ...
Strange
indeed how love in other
ways so particular
will pick a corner
in that charnel-house
tidy it and coil up there, perhaps
even fall asleep - her face
turned to the wall!
...Thus the Commandant at Belsen
Camp going home for
the day with fumes of
human roast clinging
rebelliously to his hairy
nostrils will stop
at the wayside sweet-shop
and pick up a chocolate
for his tender offspring
waiting at home for Daddy's return ...
Praise bounteous
providence if you will
that grants even an ogre
a tiny glow-worm
tenderness encapsulated
in icy caverns of a cruel
heart or else despair
for in every germ
of that kindred love is
lodged the perpetuity
of evil.

Segovia

We went to Segovia. Segovia has: our old friend Ana María Matute

(she's in focus this time, but a little more deaf: she asked my name and signed the book unerringly:
);
a series of wildly hubristic posters displayed all round the city (if you click on the lower image, you'll see just how ridiculous the thing is);


a ruined house;

a concert by Russian Red, who sounds as good close up

as far away;

the house of Maurice Fromkes,

who painted pictures like this;

a dream;

hanging gardens;

chatty nuns;

a mighty cathedral;

a mighty alcázar;

a mighty aqueduct;

tourists brought to the mighty monuments like ants to cake;

suckling pig which, once roasted, you can cut with a spoon;

shiny armrests on the seats at the railway station,

and the station itself, our last view before heading for home.

Current Favourite Sentence

The author was convinced her approach to his father was a deliberate attempt to discredit him and his older brother who, coincidentally, was having sex with his girlfriend in the same field.

Derek Walcott: A Cockup

I'm in Spain at the moment, and so I'm out of the exciting gossip loop which has circled round the recent election for the Professor of Poetry at Oxford. What I want to do here is put down what I have been told by newspapers and friends and try to work out what I think, and I would be very glad for people to tell me I'm wrong or misinformed. There are a lot of links, sorry.

1. Oxford started looking for a Professor of Poetry to follow Christopher Ricks. Ruth Padel stood for the post. Then, Derek Walcott announced his candidacy. A few days before the deadline for nominations, Arvind Mehrotra joined the race. The assumption was that Derek Walcott would be the most likely winner.

2. A few days before the election, newspapers [you will notice that I'm linking mainly to documents from The Guardian here, but the story was reported elsewhere as well] reported an anonymous campaign against Walcott. The word 'smear' was used by newspapers: this was disputed by commentators, because a 'smear' is, they said, an unsubstantiated rumour, and there was coherent evidence that the allegations against Walcott had firm foundations. The substance of the allegations was that Walcott had a long history of sexual harassment against his female students, including in one instance failing a student at Harvard in 1984 because she had refused to sleep with him. He also settled out of court with a student from Boston who accused him of harassment twelve years later. He has always refused to comment on these events.

3. Walcott withdrew from the race. Ruth Padel won the election, despite calls from various people for it to be postponed. She won at a canter, incidentally: 297 votes to Mehrotra's 129. The electorate (spoiled ballots to one side) was therefore 426. Last time, the votes fell as follows: Christopher Ricks: 214; Peter Porter: 175; Anne Carson: 105; Mark Walker: 20; Ian McMillan: 17. An electorate of 531.

4. It is now coming out that Padel may have been an instigator of the allegations against Walcott. There are calls for her to stand down.

Some thoughts and personal opinions:

a. The election for Professor of Poetry is, like most things in Oxford, extremely factional. I was in Oxford for the last election, and it was clear that there was a Christopher Ricks lobby and a Peter Porter lobby, which was the English Faculty fighting amongst themselves, and an Anne Carson lobby, which was largely supported by the Classics Faculty. This time, the English Faculty largely split between Walcott and Mehrotra, and the Classics Faculty went for Padel: she came to give a reading from Darwin: a life in poems which the organising classicist announced as being 'the greatest combination of science and poetry since Lucretius' (this is reported speech from a clear-headed friend of mine who was there).

b. Most people seem to be guilty. Walcott behaved extremely badly in the past. Harvard and Boston behaved extremely incompetently: if Walcott had such a history (there's a personal take in several posts here, which suggests that Walcott's behaviour was both overt and extensive), then why wasn't he fired in the 1980s? Padel behaved extremely sneakily in the present.

c. Mehrotra comes out alright.

d. It would have been an extremely dangerous precedent for the election to have been abandoned or postponed. Walcott's withdrawal is in the final analysis his personal choice. If Padel and Mehrotra had wanted to show their disapproval for the campaign against Walcott, then they should both have withdrawn their candidacies as well, and forced nominations to be reopened.

e. The rubric for the Professor of Poetry runs as follows: "The duties of the Professor include giving a public lecture each term and the Creweian Oration at the University's honorary degree ceremony every other year, setting the theme for, and judging, the Newdigate Prize and the Chancellor's English Essay Prize, judging the prize for an English poem on a sacred subject, and generally encouraging the art of poetry in the University." There is no requirement for the Professor of Poetry to have any personal contact with his students at all, and the competitions are judged anonymously: the question of bad behaviour, sex-for-favours, should not arise. Derek Walcott is 79.

f. Walcott is a much greater poet than Padel or Mehrotra, and a better critic than Padel. The post of Professor of Poetry now looks shaky for the next five years at least.

g. The whole situation is a cockup.

Ana María Matute (1925- )

Nobel Prize 3: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832-1910)

May Seventeenth (1883)

Wergeland's statue on May seventeenth
Saw the procession. And as its rear-guard,
Slow marching masses,
Strong men and women with flower-decked presence,
Come now the peasants, come now the peasants.

Österdal's forest's magnificent chieftain
Bore the old banner. Soon as we see it
Blood-red uplifted,
Greet it the thousands in thought of its story:
That is our glory, that is our glory!

Never that lion bore crown that was foreign,
Never that cloth was by Dannebrog cloven.
I saw the future,
When with that banner by Wergeland's column
Peasants stood solemn, peasants stood solemn.

Most of our loss in the times that have vanished,
Most of our victories, most of our longing,
Most that is vital:
Deeds of the past and the future's bold daring
Peasants are bearing, peasants are bearing.

Sorely they suffer for sins once committed,
But they arise now. Here at the Storting
Stalwart they prove it,
All, as they come from our land's every region,
Peasant Norwegian, peasants Norwegian.

Hold what they won, with a will to go farther;
Whole we must have independence and honor!
All of us know it:
Wergeland's summer bears soon its best flower,-
Power in peasants, peasants in power.

From Arthur Hubbell Palmer, Poems and Songs by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: Translated from the Norwegian In the Original Meters (1915)

Next time: Frédéric Mistral and José Echegaray y Eizaguirre.

Nobel Prize 2: Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903)

'The History of Italy falls into two main sections: (1) its internal history down to its union under the leadership of the Latin stock, and (2) the history of its sovereignty over the world.'

Apparently, 'Mommsen came to take the view that the French were fundamentally Celts, like the Irish, and consequently that it was the Germans, not the modern Latin peoples, who most truly represented the values of the ancient Romans.' Which seems slightly suspect from a post-1945 perspective.

Next time: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.

Nobel Prize 1: Sully Prudhomme (1839-1907)

JUIN

Pendant avril et mai, qui sont les plus doux mois,
Les couples, enchantés par l'éther frais et rose,
Ont ressenti l'amour comme une apothéose;
Ils cherchent maintenant l'ombre et la paix des bois.

Ils rêvent, étendus sans mouvement, sans voix;
Les cœurs désaltérés font ensemble une pause,
Se rappelant l'aveu dont un lilas fut cause
Et le bonheur tremblant qu'on ne sent pas deux fois.

Lors le soleil riait sous une fine écharpe,
Et, comme un papillon dans les fils d'une harpe,
Dans ses rayons encore un peu de neige errait.

Mais aujourd'hui ses feux tombent déjà torrides,
Un orageux silence emplit le ciel sans rides,
Et l'amour exaucé couve un premier regret.

From Les Vaines Tendresses (1875)

Compare and contrast: 'April is the cruellest month...'

Next time: Theodor Mommsen.