Monday Afternoon Poetry: Translating Mallarmé

Over at The Valve, Adam Roberts has posted a new translation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s wonderful poem “Tout l’ame résumée.” (A little background: Stéphane Mallomar was the first to coat the graham cracker of poststructuralism with creamy, marshmallow Symbolism and the dark chocolate of rhyme.) It’s an inspired idea, and I tried my hand at translating it myself. My version is below, along with the original French, with formatting and phrasing borrowed from Roberts’s post. I’d love to hear your thoughts, line readings, or corrections; also, feel free to post other translations of your own, in any language. Snuggle Bunny, surlacarte — tag, you’re it. (Also, a shout-out to petitpoussin for her ongoing Poetry Monday series.)

Here is Stéphane Mallarmé’s ‘Toute l’âme résumée’ from 1895.

Toute l’âme résumée
Quand lente nous l’expirons
Dans plusieurs ronds de fumée
Abolis en autres ronds

Atteste quelque cigare
Brûlant savamment pour peu
Que la cendre se sépare
De son clair baiser de feu

Ainsi le chœur des romances
À la lèvre vole-t-il
Exclus-en si tu commences
Le réel parce que vil

Le sens trop précis rature
Ta vague littérature.

And here is my attempt at an English translation.

We express our whole soul
When we slowly exhale
Those several rings of smoke
Driven out by other rings

That attest to some cigar
Briefly, brilliantly smoldering
Ash separating itself
From the clear kiss of fire

Thus the choir of romances
Rises to your lips—
If you begin, begin by
Excluding reality. It is vile.

Too much precision of sense erases
Your vague literature.

***

You can find my notes on the translation here, and a funny turn in the comment thread here.

Elliott Smith

Elliott Smith’s rarities album, New Moon, has just come out, and I’ve been playing it for about a week, thinking about all his records and how to write about them. His death knocked the wind out of me. I got into Nirvana when Kurt Cobain was already dead, so I only grieved for him in a vague, abstract way. With Smith, on the other hand, although I didn’t have any personal grief, I did feel some unusually acute need to go back to the trail of songs and make sense out of them.

Every one of his songs is an elegy. They have precedents — John Lennon, Nick Drake, certain moods of Dylan’s, writers like the Beats and Bukowski — but they also inhabit a world of their own. There are songs about romantic failures, in which Smith blames himself for pushing a woman away, or hurting her, and wrecking his chance to escape to a place of redemption:

You had plans, for both of us
That involved, a trip out of town
To a place I’d seen, in a magazine
That you left lying around (“Miss Misery”)

You once talked to me about love
And you painted pictures of
A never-never land
And I could have gone to that place
But I didn’t understand (“I Didn’t Understand”)

The other dynamic in his songs, one that ultimately has more range and more sorrow and more angles, is what to do about people fucking up. Part of Smith longs to stay there with them, lap for lap, drink for drink, providing them with compassion and comfort.

Drink up baby, look at the stars
I’ll kiss you again between the bars
Where I’m seeing you there with your hands in the air
Waiting to finally be caught (“Between the Bars”)

But the darker side of this is obvious to him; in one song, he talks about wrapping his “poison arms” around his lover. Not only is he complicit with them, and likewise imprisoned, but he’s actually helping render her or him more passive:

Do what I say and I’ll make you OK
And drive them away
The images stuck in your head

The people you you’ve been before
That you don’t want around around anymore
That push and shove and won’t bend to your will
I’ll keep them still

Not that this sort of power is any lasting prize; the person wastes and wastes away until they become remote again in death. Smith gets disgusted, and a lot of his songs have a sharp tone of moral judgement:

Baby Britain feels the best
Floating over a sea of vodka
Separated from the rest
Fights problems with bigger problems…
For someone half as smart
You’d be a work of art
You put yourself apart
And I can’t help until you start (“Baby Britain”)

Then Smith stops short. He catches himself using the same kind of conditional, foreshortened language you find in self-help books and twelve-step programs. He realizes that he’s actually pulling away: if you’re going to try to get better, fine, but otherwise I can’t be around you. That makes him exactly like the guy in “No Name #2″ (it’s fitting that Smith uses the personal form of “Untitled”) who just lets a suicide happen:

A couple of words that hid a crime
“You’re just fine
You’ll be just fine
But I’m on the other line”

In the song, Smith makes the guy remember by physically attacking him. Anyway, he knows people who have come clean, gone straight. They’re still bled, only they’re “bled white.” They end up just as dead:

That’s the man she’s married to now
That’s the girl that he takes around town

She appears composed, so she is, I suppose
Who can really tell?
She shows no emotion at all
Stares into space like a dead china doll…
XO, Mom
It’s okay, it’s alright, nothing’s wrong (“Waltz #2″)

Smith’s most astonishing songs live out this contradiction so fully that the one thing becomes the other thing. In songs like “Easy Way Out,” it’s impossible to tell whether the easy way out is being good, or falling down. In “Angeles,” which happens over the course of a day at the races, winning and losing get confused. In “Independence Day,” the Fourth of July is literally everything: mindless patriotism and optimism, independence, death, rapture, transformation, and, most of all, connection to another person:

I saw you at the perfect place
It’s gonna happen soon, but not today
So go to sleep, and make the change
I’ll meet you here tomorrow
Independence Day

***

Over at Irrelevant Narcissism, Brandon has a brilliant new post on Gray’s Anatomy in which he describes the program’s strange overlapping of romantic soap opera with the medical ethic of care. You can say this much about Elliott Smith’s unsolved music: it lays bare the devastating core of caring.

You say you mean well, you don’t know what you mean
Fucking oughta stay the hell away from things you know nothing about

I haven’t talked about the music yet. As most people know, Smith moved from playing mainly whisper-quiet, acoustic songs, to recording albums that mixed those songs with swelling, symphonic pop. Towards the end of his life, he started to write himself into every part of his passion play: he became the dying junkie and the big, indifferent success, both at the same time. He also started to inhabit his dreams, in part because he was playing anew with romancing heroin. Acoustic songs like “Memory Lane” and “Let’s Get Lost” had him actually escaping to a sort of paradise with his lover, like John Murdoch finally standing on the shores of Shell Beach. (This was all conscious: Smith also wrote a song called “A Distorted Reality Is Now A Necessity To Be Free.”)

As for the other songs, it’s impossible to know exactly what significance the crescendo had for Elliott Smith, but maybe part of it was an attempt to write something other than an elegy. Through the force and accumulation of instruments and sound, he stretches out the moment a little longer, endures longer without one person or the other disappearing — through misery or moralism — into themselves. To go anywhere, for him, was to go toward death. To hear his records, you have to watch with him a little while. You have to stay.

And everybody’s gone at last
Well, I hope you’re not waiting
Waiting around for me
Because I’m not going anywhere
Obviously

Here at The Kugelmass Episodes…

…we play your requests, as The Constructivist knows.

Ben Wolfson‘s asked for copies of my current reading for my upcoming qualifying exams in literature.

The exams are based on three lists and accompanying essays. The first list covers American and Continental Modernism; the second, “self-fashioning” from the Greeks all the way to American Transcendentalism; the third, philosophical and theoretical writing on selfhood and authenticity.

Modernism
Self-Fashioning and Western Culture
Philosophy and Theory

In other news, the filmosphere appears to have gotten back on its feet. One of the best absentee bloggers in the world, R. Sheehan, has unexpectedly returned to Terrible Beauty with a new post on Pan’s Labyrinth. The blog is still so freshly unwrapped that there’s no blogroll, but there is a whole lot of interesting thinking. After I saw PL, I wrote some quickie criticism and proposed a video game.

Petitpoussin has also been turning her attention to film criticism, with terrific posts on Clint Eastwood and masculinity, as well as on Speed and the American capitalist sublime.

Enjoy!

-Kugelmass

In Which I Demonstrate Sagacity In All Religious Matters

You can’t see it, but in my backpack there is a copy of Lonely Planet: Thailand, which I have sort of read cover to cover during my bus rides around Thailand. This is in Northern Thailand, near Chiang Mai. Prior to my arrival, I have also read a B. Dalton booksellers edition of Essential Buddhist Writings: Now With More Dhammapada, and have attempted, at various times, and in various ways, to meditate. I am on a tour of the rainforest with my friend NB, and one of the park rangers, Sam. This is in December, 2001. I’ve eaten next to nothing, and my clothes are not wicking moisture away as much as one would hope, or as much as they seemed to on that fateful day in REI.

SAM: There are all kinds of useful plants that you can find in a rainforest. (snaps off part of a thin, leafy, brilliantly colored plant) This one, for example, I chew when I have a headache. And this one, over here, you eat when you want divine power with women. You know? An aphrodisiac? Divine power from the gods; Buddha blessing.

NB: Do they allow you to collect all this from the forest? Do people still live here?

SAM: Well, people used to. Rebels, actually, would camp out in the parks. It’s very hard to catch them in the forest.

ME: Does the divine power come from the Buddha?

SAM: No, from other gods. The Buddha works with them.

ME: So you believe in all these other gods, and the Buddha?

SAM: The Buddha for important things. Buddha’s blessing on the other things.

NB: Do they teach this to all the park rangers?

SAM: No, I’m only telling you, specially. We’re not actually supposed to give tours. That’s why I’m telling you these secrets.

(We take pictures in front of the enormous tree.)

NB: What did you do before you worked as a ranger?

SAM: Well, I was living in a monastery for many years.

ME: You see, NB, this is an important part of the culture. A lot of the people live in monasteries for a certain period of time as young adults, in order to gain some spiritual perspective on the world—

SAM: No—

ME: —and they then return to the world, having had their experience of ascetic, religious life. It’s almost a rite of passage into adulthood. Is that what it was like for you, Sam?

SAM: No, I was doing business before, which I liked.

NB: Why did you decide to go into the monastery?

SAM: Because I was working with this man, and then we started to have some very serious business problems. The man I was working for was trying to kill me.

ME (eventually): What made you decide to leave the monastery and become a ranger?

SAM: That man got run over by a car.

(Beat.)

NB: Did you say over eighty species of songbirds?

Getting Lincoln Wrong: Ann Althouse, The New York Times, and the American Student

(x-posted to The Valve)

Law professor and conservative blogger Ann Althouse, in a post (and follow-up post) in which she advocates discontinuing the study of fiction in schools, has drawn my attention to a report by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which claims that American students are increasingly well-informed about American history. You may have read the optimistic New York Times article here.

The claim is based on a 2006 assessment test for students in the 4th, 8th, and 12th grades. The most politically significant results were gains by 4th graders, who entered school only slightly prior to the 2002 passage of George Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. Althouse concludes, “quit bitching about No Child Left Behind.” What you may not know is that the answer to the showcase question from the 4th grade test — about Abraham Lincoln’s 1858 speech on slavery, and quoted by both Althouse and the Times — is completely wrong.

This is more than a matter of oversight. It is a matter of the fundamental relationship between ideology and practices of reading. Althouse’s real target is the kind of reading that calls ideology into question, including the study of fiction. She missed the flaw in a question designed for fourth graders for the same reason Sam Dillon missed it, at The New York Times: because the mistake was grounded in ideology, and that ideology is a comfort.

(thanks to tomemos for the link; he has responded to Althouse insightfully here)

***

Here is the question.

A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect that it will cease to be divided.
–Abraham Lincoln, 1858

What did Abraham Lincoln mean in this speech?

a) The South should be allowed to separate from the United States.
b) The government should support slavery in the South.
c) Sometime in the future slavery would disappear from the United States.
d) Americans would not be willing to fight a war over slavery.

The correct answer, according to the examiners, is c: “Sometime in the future slavery would disappear from the United States.”

Here is the quotation from Lincoln in context. I beg your forgiveness for its length; if you read it from beginning to end, you will have done more than Althouse:

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation not only has not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached and passed. A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect that it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South. Have we no tendency to the latter condition? Let any one who doubts carefully contemplate that now almost complete legal combination—piece of machinery, so to speak—compounded of the Nebraska doctrine and the Dred Scott decision.

All of the urgency in that address—its mood of grim determination in the face of tremendous uncertainty, and everything, in short, that secures its claim to greatness—belies the notion that Lincoln could already foresee an end to slavery. Instead, he predicted the possibility of victory in a decidedly partisan struggle against the doctrine of inevitable progress:

Senator Douglas holds, we know, that a man may rightfully be wiser to-day than he was yesterday—that he may rightfully change when he finds himself wrong. But can we, for that reason run ahead, and infer that he will make any particular change, of which he himself has given no intimation? [...] Whenever, if ever, [Douglas] and we can come together on principle, so that our cause may have assistance from his great ability, I hope to have interposed no adventitious obstacle. But, clearly, he is not now with us—he does not pretend to be, he does not promise ever to be.

It should be no surprise that the adjective used in the Times to describe the NAEP is “bipartisan.” The modern political myth of bipartisanship without appeal to principle is coded into the passivity of waiting for slavery to eventually end, the “correct answer” for which Lincoln furiously indicts his opponent. It’s this kind of over-writing (here, over-writing Lincoln) that produces ideology; the same kind of over-writing that will not acknowledge a group that has not made any significant improvement in scores since 2001, in any age group: African-Americans.

***

Where does this leave the attack on fiction? Althouse writes,

I’m saying that the reading materials used in teaching reading should be nonfiction, so that students are absorbing information and practicing critical thinking while they read. (first post)

Look, my main point is efficiency…I’m also not opposed to teaching history and science through the kinds of novels and storybooks that present the information accurately. (second post)

The debate hinges on the question of information — what qualifies as information, what standards are used to evaluate the accuracy of information, and above all how students will be tested on what they know. I was immediately reminded of Lionel Trilling, who in “Manners, Morals, and the Novel” had this to say about history in relation to art:

As we read the great formulated monuments of the past, we notice that we are reading them without the accompaniment of something that always goes along with the formulated monuments of the present. The voice of multiplication which always surrounds us in the present, coming to us from what never gets fully stated, coming in the tone of greetings and the tone of quarrels, in slang and in humor and popular songs, in the way children play, in the gesture the waiter makes when he puts down the plate, in the nature of the very food we prefer….And part of the melancholy of the past comes from our knowledge that the huge, unrecorded hum of implication was once there and left no trace—we feel that because it is evanescent it is especially human. We feel, too, that the truth of the great preserved monuments of the past does not fully appear without it.

Trilling is describing two different, related things here. First of all, the ability of literature to encode information very densely through the representation of everyday events. Second, the relationship between those uncountable events that escape history because they are mundane, and the larger kinds of undecidability produced by what philosophy calls “counter-factuals.” In fact, the kinds of information and habits gained from a lifetime of reading fiction are incompatible with multiple-choice exams, because such exams of necessity exclude a multiplication of voices, and have no mechanism for the kinder offices of doubt: curiosity, reserve, and toleration. The strength of Lincoln’s convictions came from the real historical uncertainties to which he opposed them. It is little wonder that he would be read so badly by thinkers like Althouse; her incurious zeal is of a piece with the exam that seems to give us such good news.

Farm Camp

When I was eleven years old, I went to farm camp.

I have to call it “farm camp” because I don’t really know what it was called; my parents got a brochure printed on purple-blue paper, with three pages, and that was all. According to the brochure, the campers were encouraged to do all sorts of wholesome things, such as forking hay, and would be in contact with various exotic animals, such as emus.

I want to stress, right from the start, that this camp actually did have an emu. It was a very shy animal, and we didn’t see much of it, but it was there.

Other than the emu, it wasn’t really a “camp” in any of the normal senses of the word. For example, there weren’t other campers. What there was, was an absence, created when a college student (with an internship through the University of California Davis) quit. I took over his jobs, along with the family’s son, who was also eleven.

The family was breaking up; the parents were divorcing, and the son was intensely traumatized by it. The house was divided into wings, as a result of the divorce, and the two of us lived together in a little cabin nearby. At that particular moment, he was fixated on the werewolf film Silver Bullet, and at night we would talk about werewolves, which are hard to kill.

My job, during the day, was to walk around a huge expanse of land throwing food into catfish ponds. The catfish, like the emu, were very shy; the pond would sit in brownish silence until I threw in the food. Then the surface of the water boiled black. The land was dry, and most of it was taken up with star thistle, which is an invasive and very sharp species. They work their way into your palms and ankles. When I was finished feeding the catfish, the owner would give me a pair of gloves, and I would move around the property pulling up thistles.

My shoes got so grimy with catfish mud, and thistles, that we threw them out as soon as I was home. The owner would see me safely to a huge thistle patch, and then he would disappear from the scene to make phone calls on behalf of his project, which was to save the wild bunch grasses of California. Sometimes he would call my parents, late at night, telling them that he could save a hundred acres for $10,000. He’d actually managed to buy a whole preserve of bunch grasses, and he and I spent a night there, eating graham crackers and talking about invasive plants, in a sort of treehouse he’d built with a sleeping platform. The area was full of hills, visible in the moonlight.

“Foreign species can’t survive more than a year, but our native species don’t hold out against the European grasses. The whole landscape changes,” he’d say to me, thoughtfully. The son was not there; he had broken down in a fit of crying, insisting that we’d be eaten alive.

I called home a couple of times; every time I did, the owner stood in the room with me, listening. Almost the whole week was up when I finally got across the message that “camp” was all thistles and catfish. I didn’t go home, though, being interested to see how it was going to end.

The last day was the Farmer’s Market. We were standing there, the owner and I, surrounded by huge tanks full of live catfish. He gave me an apple to eat; when I was finished, and about to throw out the core, he grabbed it and put it in his mouth. He chewed for a while, spit out a stem and two seeds into his hand, and said, “That’s how you eat an apple without wasting any.”

People would come up to us; I remember them as being young, nervous yuppies, mostly in their thirties, with clear skin and sometimes with babies. They’d order a catfish, and the owner would pull one of the black, squirming fish out of the tank, throw it on a cutting board, and wave a dull butcher knife over his head. Then he’d say, “Do you want it DEAD or ALIVE?”

“Alive!” they’d scream. At which point he would smile, lower the knife, and wrap the fish in butcher paper. I would watch them; they were universally too startled not to pay. They’d run off, with the package tucked under one arm. Without warning, for some time afterwards, their purchase would squirm.

Preface: Telling Stories

When I was writing my post on The Little Mermaid, a strange and not-very-pleasant image occurred to me. I felt like a trained seal. I’ve spent about three weeks trying to figure out why, and I’ve finally realized that doing “close readings” on my blog makes me a little uncomfortable. I have a little training in philosophy, and am capable of writing posts about abstractions; I have a lot of interest in progressive politics, and am not above writing polemics. But I didn’t choose to go into either politics or philosophy; I chose to study literature. I would hate to think that the only way to blog that is to unpack symbols, as if doing so sooner, rather than later, could save a kitten or extinguish a house fire somewhere.

I’m not against going back to polemics or purer critique from time to time. I’m all in favor of digging into books and pop culture. Still, for me, what I gain from political and philosophical texts remains different from the philosophical study of concepts, or the political project of advocacy. The most integrated form, for me, is the story, or even the yarn, lint-gathering, without destination.

Some of you will have heard these stories, since they’re true; apologies in advance.

-Kugelmass

A New Voice: Nicolas Bourbaki

Dear readers,

Expat poet and philosopher Nicolas Bourbaki has just showed up in an Argentinian journal called Zone, with the wonderful, very awkwardly titled poem “The Humpty Dumpty Hikikomori.”

I’ve been waiting for Bourbaki’s fiction and poetry to show up in print, having already eaten up his writing on Wittgenstein and Derrida. The poem is a Prufrock intertext, but it also reminds me of Berryman:

Come and see through morning thickness the many things

 Caught in the moment when a music stops,

 And each chair must find a dancer, more or less willing,

 To settle down under. Come and see the intermittence

 In the spectacle, circulating in these morning halls

 Like the unwashed breath and pinkish fingers

 Of a thousand spotted feathers… Come

More here.

All Contemporary Novels Fail Deliciously, And The Form Will Be Dead In 40 Years

Girl #1: You know what would be awesome?
Girl #2: What?
Girl #1: If rabbits laid chocolate Easter eggs.
Girl #2: Yeah, but then their entire species would, like, fail.
Girl #1: Yes, but they would fail deliciously.

–Bard High School Early College
via Overheard in New York, May 1, 2007

On Boredom

For a little while now, Sinthome at Larval Subjects has been posting excerpts from Spinoza, sometimes with annotations. I’ve been merely a lurker for these, but I’ve appreciated them, in part because they’ve reminded me of the debts I owe Spinoza.

A White Bear, over at Is There No Sin In It?, has continued her wonderful series of revisionist definitions of words with a post on boredom, following her posts on pornography and decadence. I’m going to tackle the subject briefly here, a little in the style of Spinoza, and perhaps write more on boredom later. Honestly, A White Bear’s creative and persistent emphasis on the definition of words has led me to wonder whether “word events,” symposiums, might emerge as a complement to book events.

AWB’s definition centers on boring artworks, such as films by Michelangelo Antonioni. Actually, she’s not bored by films like L’Avventura, finding them “hypnotic” and “seductive,” and neither am I. As far as I can tell, Antonioni is atmospheric, much like Henry James in his later novels. Sometimes, this kind of art is called “plotless” because the plot is focused, subtler…more fleeting, more quiet.

There are two kinds of atmospheric art: there’s minimalism, and there’s impressionism. Minimalism reacts against modernity by trying to batter down the walls surrounding consciousness. It repeats itself until it is heard, if it is a piece of music, almost like a beeping alarm clock; it secedes violently from the endless series of figuration, if it is an abstract painting. It is the natural child of movements like surrealism, because it is associative for the audience. Rothko’s reds, the tones of an Aphex Twin record, or the harsh voids in Robbe-Grillet, are gradually pearled over by memory and thought.

Impressionistic works, like L’Avventura or Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil, substitute imagery for narrative; the ideological content may be the same, but our experience differs. They are equivalent to those showerheads that strain the water through what looks like a broad chrome sunflower, instead of spitting it out a nozzle.

***

Something that bores me is something that, without doing permanent injury, constrains me without compensation. By compensation, I specifically mean the satisfaction of an appetite: a physical appetite, or the abstract desire for increased power of action.

I could say more, but not without taking a certain ironic risk.

Have a good night. -JK