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Poetry
Posts about Poetry
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.
One of the first poems I ever translated was "Der Novembertag," by Rainer Maria Rilke. The closing line of the poem has the wind in the chimney sounding out "eines Totenkarmens Schlussoktaven." I mistranslated this as "a death-karma's closing octaves" which has always struck me as a beautiful and enigmatic image...
This morning it occurred to me to mention this in my recently-created Mastodon account; and Mastodon came through! A couple of people suggested the archaic German Totencarmen, meaning "funerary song," obviously the correct interpretation.
Der Novembertag
Kalter Herbst vermag den Tag zu knebeln, seine tausend Jubelstimmen schweigen; hoch vom Domturm wimmern gar so eigen Sterbeglocken in Novembernebeln.
Auf den nassen Daechern liegt verschlafen weisses Dunstlicht; und mit kalten Händen greift der Sturm in des Kamines Wänden eines Totenkarmens Schlußoktaven.
The November Day
Cold autumn can muzzle the day, silence its thousand jubilating voices; from the steeple whimper, so peculiar, death bells in November's mist.
On the wet rooftops lies sleeping a white fog; and with cold hands the storm inside the chimney's walls strikes a lamentation's closing octaves.
I am not making much headway with understanding the rest of the poem, but this image from Ernesto Mejía Sánchez' "Long Play/Boleros" leaps off the page at me:
TU ROSTRO se borra como el de la moneda en las yemas
del avaro
YOUR FEATURES worn away like those of the face of a coin in a miser's fist
I'm interested in the relationship between Asemic Writing/Logograms and Sound Poetry. Sound Poetry is to spoken language what Logograms is to written language: it succeeds by sounding superficially like language but without conveying meaning (at least, in the way that language traditionally conveys meaning). I'm interested in finding more examples of Sound Poetry; all I really have on tap currently are Altazor and this piece by Hugo Ball:
Every beginner ought to be given, as you have surely received, the tools of the craft. Or else one must beg, borrow or steal them. (Better still to fashion one's own...)
Hey look at that! I translated a rhyming, metered poem, and preserved the rhyme and meter! Not sure that has ever happened before. Goethe inscribed this poem in a book given to his daughter (according to Blumenberg, the book was Johnson's Dictionary) --
My translation--
The books are thick! and full of stuff!
I'm never going to learn enough!
If it won't come in my head,
I'll leave it in the book instead.
(Note -- found this poem while reading Blumenberg's Care Crossing the River.)
Yet, can't we do better than silence? Today, each student will receive a musical score and a instrument designed to imitate birds. A birdcall. Once in Ani everyone will hide in the ruins and start calling the birds. At first a few cries will interrupt the silence, then a melody will grow until a chorus of bird calls echo across the valley all the way to Armenia. And the singing will go on to the point of exhaustion, until the birds return to Ani and life comes back to the forgotten city.
