Umberto Eco on Culture

Culture isn’t knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes.

Umberto Eco, Spiegel Online, 11 November 2009

Claude Lévi-Strauss

23 November 1908 – 31 October 2009

A good innings.

Obituary at The Guardian.

Winston Mankunku Ngozi

1943 – 13 October 2009

A poem by Kelwyn Sole from his debut collection, The Blood of Our Silence (Ravan, 1987):

Mankunku

Dark golden boat
on a sea
far away, rock with me
rock with me:

deep-throated bird
gentle me home
past the mud-lined street
where thoughts stick fast
and children pick rubbish
hungrily

the night flakes notes
from the scalp of my sorrow -

hide in my pillow
and cry for me

———————

Mankunku playing “Yakhal’ Inkomo”

Profile of Mankunku at music.org.za

Short obituary by Ryland Fisher.

Sergey Gandlevsky – The Monument

UNCLE SERYOZHA has lost his marbles, and, very spryly for a man of his age, jumps onto the running board of the general conversation in order to dictate its itinerary:  the storied times when sour cream was so thick a spoon would stand upright in it, and he could have dinner for a ruble and still have enough for a Belomor smoke and beer, keg beer with some heated beer poured into the cold, and salted crackers shaped like rings . . . . Now it’s all over:  the hosts are embarrassed, the guests slink away.  Uncle Seryozha—that’s me.

And our telephone number, my dears, was G9-13-34.  One evening when our parents had gone to the movies, the neighbors’ drinking party gushed over into our living space, and Vladimir Gavrilych, in a dark-blue T-shirt, loose black trousers, and bedroom slippers on his bare feet, played the front-line song “Katyusha” on my mother’s Mühlbach piano with candelabra [old Russian upright pianos are equipped with candleholders on either side of the music rack].  Our neighbor Vladimir Gavrilych hadn’t had occasion to fight, because he had chopped off the index fingers of both hands at just the right time, which did not prevent him from pounding on the keys, yelping boldly, on May 9, 1958.  It was rather frightening.  “Remember this day your whole life long, Sergey,” he adjured me, while in his enforced embrace I was overcome by the smell of vodka, onions, and armpits.  And I did remember.  Once the prison-gangster-in-training Shurik Batashov urgently invited us neighborhood youths to his place and “spilled his seed” into a saucepan, as it is written in Holy Scripture, for our edification.  It was instructive.  Once my father, impassioned by a convivial Thaw-period conversation and forgetting the audibility of the communal apartment, exclaimed in the wee hours that Stalin was the spawn of Lenin.  It was enough to take our breath away.  As for all the rest—music school, the dominant seventh chord, God forbid, plus my quixotic extracurricular reading—Isabelle what’s her name, de Croye [from Scott’s Quentin Durward].  A mixture of intelligentsia upbringing with the studies of the street tuned the future of the lyric hero to an ambiguous harmony.

On the weekends in spring or warm autumn, my parents would pack sandwiches, a thermos of tea, and badminton rackets into a bag with a shoulder strap, and we would go to what was then the last stop on the Fili subway line and then in a bus along the Rublyovsky Highway.  We would find a clearing and play badminton to a fifteen-point knockout.  It was great.  The rackets would moan softly under the blows, the shuttlecock would whizz, my father, his mouth open wide with happy fierceness, would foil or return my mother’s low serves, and my mother would move with the enchanting grace of a large, unathletic woman who was still full of life.  My brother and I, playing dirty little tricks on each other, would wait our turn.

And it came, the turn of youth.  I was an ugly duckling but became a handsome gander.  I was a pensive plant in crooked glasses but became a young Muscovite who had a high opinion of himself.  And Moscow was transformed from the place where I was registered into something like the only possible milieu for habitation.  The fifteen years of my early and late youth now appear to me as one continuous half-drunk nomadic wandering around the center and outskirts of the huge and unfriendly city.  “The youths are on the move,” our compatriots would say as we passed, and they were right.  I took part willingly and diligently in the doings and idleness of that guild of slackers known in current art-historical parlance as the “underground.”  This involvement often presupposed, among other things, bohemian behavior with all its merits and defects.  We were writer-rowdies, or at any rate we tried to be—that was the fashion then.  Certain wild men achieved true virtuosity in the art of raising a ruckus.  My talented comrade Arkady P. managed to roll a trolleybus out of the dead-end street in which it was spending the night and then sent this means of transportation, crammed with his male and female drinking buddies, freewheeling down Great Pirogovskaya Street.  “They don’t make heroes like that any more!” [from Lermontov's 1837 poem "Borodino"].

The late Aleksandr Soprovsky and I never set the town on fire like that.  It’s true, on one of the anniversaries of the October Revolution my reckless and of course dead-drunk comrade jumped up and tore down two or three red flags in one of the lanes of the Arbat.  I, the tipsy witness of these tricks, almost lost control of my bowels.  People of my generation and older are in a position to appreciate Soprovsky’s deed according to the bill of fare of the Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic.

And here’s a less heroic incident, but one that conveys a flavor of past Moscow times.  One lovely May evening, Soprovsky and I were whiling away the time over a briefcase full of cheap port wine in a little park on what was then Herzen Street, near my beloved monument, about which I will explain a bit later.  Before dark, the decorous beginning of our gathering might well have been reflected in the crooked mirror that reigned over the intersection—it’s gone now.  Carried away by a conversation, we just barely managed to set off for our respective homes before the subway closed.  When I called Sasha the next morning to arrange where and how we would carouse away the coming day, my comrade could hardly speak from despair:  the previous evening, in his haste and drunkenness, he had left his briefcase, which contained seditious scribblings and—most important—also his address book, in the park.  As a man of honor, his very first reaction was horror that he had at one stroke “ratted on” a fairly large number of acquaintances who had given him their addresses and telephone numbers.  Soprovsky was inconsolable, and we agreed to meet right away.  Sasha turned up at our rendezvous radiant and sparkling.  After our call, a stranger had called him and said that he had found the briefcase.  Judging from the contents of the briefcase, the stranger continued, it would not be in the interests of its owner for it to end up at the police station.  They met, and when the touched Soprovsky offered to treat his benefactor to some “Agdam” port wine, the man dryly refused:  “Young man, you need to choose your calling—either dissidence or alcoholism.”

And now, as I promised, about my beloved sculpture.  At the corner of Great Nikitskaya (formerly Herzen) Street and one of the Kislovsky lanes, right opposite the zoological museum, there stands a rather ugly gray building with pilasters.  If you steal up to it on tiptoe, your heart pounding, from the direction of the Manège Square, and stand at attention precisely at the third pilaster, before your eyes will appear a raptly masturbating shock-worker of Communist labor—maybe a Stakhanovite miner, maybe a hero-builder of the subway.  There are aficionados who like to catch other monuments of the capital in the act of self-abuse, like say Timiryazev on Nikitsky Boulevard or Tchaikovsky by the Conservatory.  But in these cases, to everyone’s regret,  the depravity of the wretched hunters themselves is on display.  To an unbiased eye, there is not a hint of anything blameworthy in the monuments to the scientist and the composer; I have checked repeatedly, “have looked as assiduously as possible”  [quotation from Eugene Onegin, Chapter 8].  But as for my touristic attraction, it is impossible to see anything else, if you approach it from the correct angle.  It’s unbelievable, but we are dealing here with a classic case of sabotage—only a ten-minute walk from the Kremlin.

Oh, how many times have you come to my rescue, obscene idol, when my enchanting companion would begin to get bored and suddenly remember mama’s nerves and papa’s heart condition, and the luckless Don Juan’s powers to distract the beauty with smooth talk were running dry!  How the unimpressive little park would resound with indecent maidenly laughter, and immediately the hope would be resurrected that papa and mama would be forgotten, and the seduction would succeed!  The charm of the high-relief sculpture would unfold in its fullness when you quickly compared the activity, if you’ll pardon the expression, of the exemplary factory worker with the look on his face.  He would labor indefatigably, as the young ne’er-do-well Shura Batalov once did as a demonstration for the communal-apartment kids, and the monument’s profile, lifted to the heavens, would shine with inspiration, like the physiognomy of Vladimir Gavrilych, our neighbor, as he performed the army song.  Or like mine right now.  After all, recollection is also a sort of fornication, a useless indulgence of the imagination. . . . Time to stop.

But just one more time, the last one for today, toward the end of the play:  how are things going with the family in the pine grove on the Rublyovsky Highway?  How’s the game, what’s the score, who’s winning?  Is everything the same?  It’s the same as always, only the visibility is poor as usual, as if through dusty glass.  I should have fixed them better in my memory, God knows I wasn’t a baby, already eight years old, and I already knew, even if only by hearsay, that people are mortal.  But I couldn’t imagine just how mortal . . . .

And where is the ill-starred briefcase now?  Isn’t its phantom visible in the twilight next to the familiar bench?  And indeed something is showing dark there.  But nowadays you’re afraid even to go near it, you might stumble on an incendiary device.  And the monument stands as it always did, but it’s not easy to get near it because of the constant construction.  By the way, the first definition of the word “monument” in Dal’s dictionary is “anything made in order to facilitate memory.”  Precisely.

(Translated by Susanne Fusso)

© Sergey Gandlevsky. Published with the kind permission of the author.

Sergey Gandlevsky – Stanzas, The Use of Poetry

Stanzas
—In Memory of My Mother

I.

Speak. But what do you want to say? Perhaps
How the barge moved along the city river, trailing sunset,
How all June until the solstice
Summer stretched on its tiptoes to the light,
How breath of linden blew through sultry squares
And how thunder rolled from all directions that July?
You once believed that speech needs an underlying cause
And a grave occasion. But that’s a lie.

II.

Listen: the grocery store reeks of watermelon rot,
An empty crate clatters at a back door around the corner.
From the suburbs, a breeze carries the echo of a handcar
And buries the asphalt in archive leaves.
Drop the Rubik’s Cube to the ground – it’s not worth the trouble.
When all plans fail, eat grapes in the rain,
Sit in the silent yard. Just look with your own eyes.
This is what you’ll recall among the crags and crevices of hell-

III.

So get going. Yet a naked branch – the upas
Of school texts – stubbornly touches the window
Just as it did long ago, at night, especially during rain,
Feeling the pane that mama washed.
Though I remember very little from school
I can still see each grain of sand pouring through
The narrow glass neck, an unforgettable rustle.
A primitive instrument, but what a throat for sorrow!

IV.

Strike spitefully on the floor your ever-wobbly tripod,
Haggard charlatan, not hiding your crookedness,
So that a clear specter of water streams out, smells of ozone
Under the leaking roof of a state-owned house.
The chair jolts you with static electricity,
So speak again, as if tortured, sans schools and manifestoes,
If this hopeless time and god-forsaken place
Instill in you, a total deadbeat, such love.

V.

The widower, forty-seven year old Aizenstadt
Now roams the kitchen, can’t cop his usual downer.
Is there reason to smile at this, my friend? I think not.
Even if his funeral-black boxers hang down to his knees.
In this world, where one needs spirits to be happy,
Behind empty crates the guys who’ve seen better days
Raise a toast to Sergey Esenin or Andy Chenier,
Squander their latest check on drink by tradition.

VI.

After death I’ll go to the outskirts of the city I love,
Lift my snout to sky, throw back my antlers-
Taken by sadness, I’ll trumpet into autumn space
What human words could not express.
How the barge sailed into the wake of sunsetting day,
How iron time on my left wrist sang like a starling,
How the secret door was unlocked with a house key.
Speak. There’s nothing else you can do with this affliction.

[1987]

————————————————–

The Use of Poetry

A prize for poetry can baffle its recipient – when a private thing, a personal predilection that’s almost a whim, is rewarded. It’s as if an inveterate mushroom-hunter or lover of ice fishing were given a prize. It’s customary to think that there are all kinds of whims but poetry is a serious and hardly useless pastime. Yet in the last twenty years, many (and certainly the best) Russain poets have recoiled from the word “use.” Like little children, poets demand that they be loved for no other reason than that they exist.

Society is correct to treat poetry with seriousness, but poetry is also correct to hold onto the bulwark of its own uselessness.

It’s good to sit in the hot sun on the grass and look at a river. But the supposition that the sun, the plants, and the water have the goal and purpose of giving us pleasure hardly enters the healthy mind; about the meaning of nature we can only guess – each person is remitted a certain amount of imagination, intelligence, and temperatment. Such is poetry; its ulimate direct aspirations are unclear and mysterious; the impressions that it produces are only the indirect consequences of its existence.

We can hope that poetry will help us, but we cannot demand help from it. Poetry is a gift, not a salary. Only when we finally take into account, when we get used to the idea that the natural responsibility of poetry is to be poetry, it is conceivable, I think, to fold down your fingers and estimate whether poetry has an earthly task. Not insisting especially on anything, I’ll offer a few thoughts.

First. Occupied primarily by words and by himself, the poet day in and day out writes his ideal self-portrait, personifies on the page a dream about himself. The tactical allegory “lyrical hero” we should understand in its original meaning – the poet “heroizes” himself, displays the most vivid attributes of his personality, subdued in daily life by routine conflict. A constant contact with the ideal twin disciplines the author, helps him not to give up. The author feels that the gap is too wide between himself and the lyrical hero – it’s disasterous for both: the devastation responds as muteness in the best instance, and in the worst, idle chatter.

But the moral return from creativity is known not only to those who write; readers feel it as well.

Poetry relates to reality like a finished manuscript to a rough draft. Art didn’t invent the drama of life. The drama is in the nature of things, but things obscure it. Poetry focuses life to a sharp clarity, and the main celebratory foundation of existence becomes visible from everyday babble. Poetry is the subjunctive mood of life, to remember how we would be, if we were not…. In short, poetry is in a position to better our morals.

Second. Everyone knows that life is not sugar; loneliness is perhaps the most bitter of its burdens. A person often cannot share his despondency, his sudden thoughts, his good moods, but he opens a book, and he’s somehow not alone. It turns out that total strangers were already here, were thinking, were happy or angry like he was, and for the same reason that he is. Suddenly, these people are no longer strange to him. That revealed spiritual likeness bothers the teenager’s feelings of his own exclusivity, but soon enough we become adults and have it up to here with our own exclusivity. In other words, art is also a communication. And poetry is the best means of communication, because it’s the most emotional.

And third. Coffee boils over on the stove just as if it’s trying to put its head through a sweater; the Russian word “train” [poezd] is already preparation for “delay” [opozdanie]; after a twenty-year intermission, the old forgotten poet appears in public in a sport coat, buttoned enthusiastically in the wrong hole. This is all the costly small change of the world, in which we for some reason awaken once and for the last time. It is shameful to be hard of hearing and half-blind. If only inattention to our small creativity, not to say anything about apathy toward Creation, or the ailment of mechanical existence offended us more than profanity! Poetry can help us to value life. Even when a poet curses the universe, he has nevertheless noticed it; it has genuinely disturbed him. “Keen observation,” Mandelstam said, “is the virtue of the lyrical poet.” I dare to add that keen observation is a kind of gratefulness. Poetry, in the end, is always the artless gratitude to the world for the fact of existence. [1997]

————————————–

“Stanzas” and ‘The Use of Poetry” both from: Sergey Gandlevsky, A Kindred Orphanhood (transl. Philip Metres), 2003, Zephyr Press, Brookline, MA. Thank you to Sergey Gandlevsky for granting permission to publish these at Groundwork. Spasibo.

(Here are some audio files of Gandlevsky reading.)

Koninkryk van reën

I’m preparing some folders for Dropbox and came across this 1st draft Afrikaans translation of ‘Kingdom of Rain’ from This Carting Life (Kwela/Snailpress, 2005; English version here). I can’t remember translating it; perhaps someone else translated it? (Please drop me a note.)

Koninkryk van reën

from these I am growing no nearer
to what secret eluded the children
– Derek Walcott, ‘Sainte Lucie’

Iewers in ‘n donker dekade
staan my pa sonder werk,
en onbekend aan my broer en ek,
beneweld in ‘n Boland winter en ‘n skool vakansie.
Soos die kwik daal, maak hy, my pa
‘n fles koffie, koop pastei en ons tjoef
Du Toit’s Kloof pas op in sy ou ‘57 Ford’
en daar wil hy die berge – onder koue wolk,
bruin en blou rotswande nat in die reën –
hy wil dit alles oop, om sy kinders binne te laat
al maak hy verskoning – my streng en grimmige
vreeswekkende pa – al vra hy verskoning vir sy bestaan
sy houplek op die daad verklaar
aan die boswagter of opsigter in staatsgewaad,
altyd net daar om die volgende draai
of aan slaap in ‘n jeep by ‘n aftrek-plek:
‘Nee meneer, ons ry maar net. Ja meneer, dis my kar.’

By die hoogste punt van die pas
stop ons om te eet, en hy, my pa,
my streng en grimmige, vreeswekkende pa,
my pa vir wie ek lief is en sy donker vel,
hy dryf hierdie heelal oop wat hy vreemd genoeg
ons eie maak, wat nie meer myne is nie:
‘n slim ou grys bobbejaan, weggesteek
teen sout-en-peper klip, wat ons dophou;
‘n onuitstaanbare edel roofvoël
selde te sien, en wat nou nes toe vlieg soos die weer draai.

En daar, dink ek, daar is ons nader
aan my pa se God, die wind huilend
en wolke wat oor ons druis, en ons
verruk en klein in die groot kar wat in die wind rond wieg.

Stilte. ‘n Skielike stil punt
as die heelal huiwer, asem skep
en genade binnehaal. En dan
die sneeu wat soos donsveer val
as die wêreld ons
ons vlugtige, blink koninkryk gee,
onkenbaar deur die boswagter. En vir minute
staan daar ‘n kar met drie stom insittendes
staan ons daar op ‘n bergspits, buite
die vinnige verduistering van ons grootword;
te kortstondig om die duister jare te verlig
toe ek sou leer:

hoe die skerp, skoon boerplek van krap en forel
waar ons in die somer swem
nou, in winter, ‘n donker, bruin rotsgedruis;
hoe berg en denneboom en fynbos
of die muis-gedrewe valke van my veld;
die laaste, mosterd-droeë duiwelsnuif
wat my pa deur die lug gooi
om soos ‘n rook-bom teen die grond te plof;
en een keer, ook êrens een somer,
‘n praterige piet-my-vrou;
of die mirakele rondomtalie van waterhondjies
oor ‘n tee-kleurige water-poel
wiegend tussen bruin klip en varing-groen varings;
my eerste en enigste uil,
groot en geheimsinnig
diep binne ‘n dennebos,
groot uil onkenbaar aan ons
totdat jy wegvlieg, ontroer deur ons stemme;
hoe ek ook ontroer sou word, en sou leer
dat hierdie boom en hierdie voël, hierdie wêreld
die aarde en hierdie kind se tuiste
alreeds buite sy besitting val.

En hoe, êrens noord deur die droeë
Boesmanland met sy swart klippe,
oor ‘n bult in die pad, die skielike groen
soos die vreemde en bekende sisklanke
in Keimoes en Kakamas.
En die keelklank was die gorrelende water
oor rotse by Augrabies.
Die Garieb oor rotse by Augrabies,
by Augrabies waar die hek toeslaan
en die hekwag styf-lip soos ‘n sinode:
‘Die nie-blanke kant is vol’
terwyl hy ‘n kar vol
bruingebrande wit jeug deurwink
wat na ons lag, na my pa, my vader
my stille pa wat êrens ver-langs verstaar
en die kind wat hierdie heim-sweer ver verby metafoor aanleer.
En hoe, soos ‘n bobbejaan, die reg en staat
sy fok-jou-stert aan ons sou wys
en weg drentel.

More anger and thoughts on iBurst

If you like your kicks this way, then hold onto something.

Open letter to iBurst

Check it.

Dagga in African Cities

The inaugural edition of African Cities Reader is now available and an extract from unfinished “Dagga” appears in it:

Contents Page (PDF)

“Dagga” (PDF)

Meeting the British, Paul Muldoon

Meeting the British

We met the British in the dead of winter.
The sky was lavender

and the snow lavender-blue.
I could hear, far below,

the sound of two streams coming together
(both were frozen over)

and, no less strange,
myself calling out in French

across that forest-
clearing. Neither General Jeffrey Amherst

nor Colonel Henry Bouquet
could stomach our willow-tobacco.

As for the unusual
scent when the Colonel shook out his hand-

kerchief: C’est la lavande,
une fleur mauve comme le ciel.

They gave us six fishhooks
and two blankets embroidered with smallpox.

– Paul Muldoon, Meeting the British (Faber&Faber, 1987)