I've been having weird dreams about the Hanged Man--as an image. This led me back to 1977 and French Lit class. Here's a little Villon from Ballade des Pendus:
And the rain has soaked us and has laved us clean,
And the sun has withered us and turned us black.
Ravens and crows have hollowed out our eyes
And plucked away our beards, our eyebrows too.
Never at any time are we at rest;
Swayed this way and then that, as the wind wills,
It pushes us about, just as it pleases,
More beaked by birds than any tailor's thimble.
On translation: Michael Cunningham writes in his introduction to Death in Venice that all writing is translation, that the ideal words in a writer's head and heart never transfer through her pen or keyboard into the work of art she imagined. I agree. I also agree that all translation (foreign language, erasure, cutup) is rigorous right-brain exercise, and I need something disciplined. The Song of Songs translation is too raw emotionally for me to attempt right now. So I return to the one word site for freewriting, and to translation in spots or splotches to stay with poetry. I like to think we're married (not in the sense of antique furniture, where two discrete pieces try to pass themselves off as one) but in the sense that maybe we're joined at the metrical foot.
Thanksgiving is fast approaching, and I'm not feeling particularly thankful. I need to focus more on what's here than what's not. (A line about Death sucks a rotten tooth comes to mind
I used to post five things for which I'm grateful--maybe I should do that again.
Rafiki's vocabulary, especially the chirrups when I come home;
Shadow's Grumpy=the-dwarf grumbling snores;
Spearmint flannel pajamas;
Garnet and topaz fall leaves and the girl who dives into them;
High heels, higher heels, highest heels.
These things adimpleate (see yesterday) my days; #4 and #5 surely erase my vultuous nature. ( http://www.savethewords.org/ )
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1 comment:
I'm always hung up on 'The Tower', the image & the metaphor--I see it in every literary triumph or tribulation (and even in the poem you posted above), and the notion that destruction, entropy, and ruin are afflictions that serve to polish the grimed layers of pretense from the pure and essential state of being that is immune to their reckoning is what gets me through the day sometimes.
I was trying to think, a few days ago, if I had any enduring Thanksgiving traditions other than eating turkey with my mother. Five things for which to be thankful is (I think) as wonderful as any I've heard of--especially as I read of it here, with the function to illuminate and remind, rather than simply to acknowledge.
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