Tracy Ryan's new Youtube channel Language Learning Life

By Tracy

In the last few days I've revived my till-now inactive Youtube channel now going by the title of Language Learning Life. 

It will feature discussions of language learning (French, German, Italian, Irish/Gaelic and more), reviews of resources for learning particular languages, and posts about translation.

Language studies and literature being on a continuum, there will also be literary items arising from our daily lives — past & future events, short readings including poetry from John Kinsella and Tim Kinsella as well as myself.

It's likely I'll upload quite regularly so don't forget to check back if these topics interest you.

Hope to see you on Language Learning Life... and if you like it, please subscribe!

On Frida Kahlo's 'Wounded Deer' and after Rilke’s Sonnet to Orpheus 2:10

A couple of poems I wrote for my poetry students. These students are a long way from here, and we are a long way from them — a dynamic of the times. I am always wary of the 'ambient intimacy' of the internet, but I share these in the spirit of community. All poetry is a series of departures as well as arrivals, suggesting movement — flow.  The conversations that develop between 'artworks' are inevitably political and ethical ones, and if we write out of colonial spaces (regretfully, disturbingly, and in grim reality), a series of responsibilities arise that are often in tension with the 'aesthetics' of a piece. I refuse 'aesthetics' as a basis of anything generative, but contend with it every time I write a letter, a word, a line... and every time I use any of the senses available to me. This is an act of dissension whose irony is made even more emphatic through the use of this technology (computer, internet etc) to access 'art' and to comment and respond to it.

See Kahlo's painting here. And here's an anti-ekphrastic act, maybe:

Not On Frida Kahlo’s ‘Wounded Deer’, Not Really?

 

When the bow hunters sported the deer out of the woods near Gambier

I was not thinking of Frida Kahlo’s ‘Wounded Deer’, which I do now.

This is not appropriate in so many ways, but maybe it is in others.

 

When the pick-up truck with the stag in the back secured so the antlers

were safe — wall trophy, obviously — but the hindquarters flopping

and bouncing on the open tail-gate, hooves kicking off the road’s asphalt

 

(and I imagine sparks but it was flecks of staling blood), roared

past me on the road through the village, I was not thinking of Frida

Kahlo’s ‘Wounded Deer’, which I do now. Maybe I should have back then?

 

But now I am thinking it through, in another hemisphere, over fifteen years

later. I am trying to be the deer and the stag but not be Frida Kahlo —

I would never try to do that. Which makes me wonder as I unloose

 

arrows out of my skin — nine times I quiver, nine times I transfer

my essence to a tree, nine times I shape the memory into something visceral —

if I am really seeing the past now? There are no deer here, but there are

 

kangaroos and they suffer similar fates. I cannot see Frida Kahlo’s

head on a kangaroo, I cannot build the symbolism, archetypes and set

of personal references. I won’t mystify. If the sea at the end of a wooded path

 

is forced into the sky, so too are the hills of the valley into a different

but intimately connected sky. Wrong images. I wonder about translations of ‘karma’,

and reach for my feet to see if they are secure on an earth that turns fast —

 

or maybe it’s just turning at the necessary speed. Neither fast nor slow.  Maybe

that speed will stay the same no matter what the miners, industrialists and adventurers

do to it in all our names. It frightens me (and honestly, I don’t frighten easily —

 

well, not in a personal sense, anyway) that I have nothing to do with Frida

Kahlo or her deer-stag or her injury or bare forest or fetish for arrays of nine.

But then, why would I use a word like ‘fetish’? What am I painting here?

 

 

            John Kinsella

Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus: version  after 2:10 — a mimesis

 

How we machine machines

might be at the root of the problem,

a root system of fibre-optics

and nanoparticles, the equilateral

 

disjunctions in application

of field-work. We have made it part

of our avatars not only via imposition

but by unnatural selection:

 

each lyrical strain we tune

into our ‘feelings’, remade as satisfaction

and compliance of mystery.

 

Speech to text slips past the inexpressible.

Expansion of services is not the music

we associate with ‘ecology’ — house of the word.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Rilke on Music and Breath

By Tracy


John likes to have music playing in the background when he writes; I can't. I have to have silence.

We've both often written poems inspired by or about music, as have many other poets.

Rilke wrote several poems about music: here is a translation of one of them.

Rainer Maria Rilke

To Music

Music: breath of statues. Perhaps:

stillness of pictures. You language where languages

end. You time,

who stand perpendicular to the way passing hearts go.

Feelings of whom? O you the changing

of feelings into what? —: into audible landscape.

You foreigner: music. You heartspace that’s

outgrown us. Our innermost

that, exceeding us, expels us —

holy farewell:

while the inside surrounds us

as the most skilful distance, as the other

side of air:

pure,

colossal,

no longer habitable.

         trans. Tracy Ryan

One of the most basic challenges of translating is the simple yet heavily polysemous words that can tilt a poem one way or the other. 

In the poem above, I chose "stillness of pictures" for Rilke's "Stille der Bilder". Stille in German means both stillness (lack of motion) and silence — the translator might go with either. 

Likewise, Bilder could refer either to literal pictures or to mental images. So the reader of German gets both (all) resonances; the translation's reader gets a narrowed interpretation. 

In this case I went for "stillness of pictures" because of the preceding literal reference to statues, and because of the assonance; however, the English-language reader thereby loses the idea of silence pertaining to music, and of the mental image (though pictures might suggest them).

It's not a matter of the choices here being right or wrong; all translations are in a sense provisional and incomplete insofar as they convey any "original". 

Of course it's also not a case of there being only one or two polysemous words — all language has this lovely problem — but often a poem is built around the charge of a particularly ambiguous word or two.

There's a similar apparently "simple" hinge-word in the following poem. 

Rainer Maria Rilke

Sonnets to Orpheus Part 2

1.

Breath, you invisible poem!

Outer space always purely

exchanged for our being. Equilibrium

in which I happen rhythmically.

Single wave, whose

gradual sea I am;

you thriftiest of all possible seas, —

gaining of room.

How many of these points in space were already

inside me. Many a current of air is like

a son to me.

Do you recognise me, air, you full of my past places?

You, once smooth bark,

curve and leaf of my words.

         trans. Tracy Ryan

The hinge-word I'm thinking of here is Blatt in German, both leaf and sheet (as in a sheet for writing on). The German text has clearly set up the plant associations with bark, curve, leaf, but though the English "leaf" can also refer to the page of a book, it doesn't sound quite as strongly for both senses in English. That is, when the reader sees it in English, it doesn't seem to stand quite as clearly as both tree-leaf and leaf written upon.

Working on translations (and especially revisiting them) is a great way to hone one's consciousness of this "problem" -- it's a problem that's really a gift.

Rilke — Lullaby

By Tracy

So many Rilke poems when translated into English become more sugary or saccharine than they are in Rilke's German. Frequently he will use an odd, twisted, offbeat or unexpected image that I find converted in some published translations into something altogether more stale or predictable than in the original.

Of course all translation involves loss, and changes are inevitable. But you have to wonder why translators of poetry are so often prepared to lose what is most knotty, individual and memorable in a poem. I think of that approach as "smoothing-out", and I would even prefer to read translations that "fail" in other ways if they nonetheless strive to convey the poem's peculiarities.

In many English versions of this poem, "Lullaby", the striking image of the eyelids being lowered disappears altogether...

Rainer Maria Rilke

Lullaby

When one day you’re lost to me

will sleep still come to you, unless

I’m there above you, like branches

whispering from a linden tree?

Unless I’m there keeping watch

and lowering words almost

like eyelids upon your breast,

upon your limbs and your mouth.

Unless I’m there to lock you, close

you up alone with what’s yours

like a garden with a mass
of lemon balm and star anise.

                           trans. Tracy Ryan

Du im Voraus -- Rilke translation

By Tracy

This poem is already well-known in English translation, so I am adding my version to the many. It reminds me in some ways of Emily Dickinson's "A Loss of Something Ever Felt I", which David Musselwhite once said to me was the ultimate "lost object" poem.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Du im Voraus

You, my beloved lost in advance, my never-appeared,

I don’t know which notes you prefer.
I no longer try, when what’s coming billows over me,

to recognise you. All the great

images in me, scenery learned at a distance:

towns and spires and bridges and un-

suspected turns in the roads

and the immensity of those countries

once traversed by gods:

grows to its meaning in me,

your meaning, elusive one.

Oh, the gardens you are,

oh, I saw them with such

hope. An open window

in a country house — and you nearly

stepped toward me, thoughtful. Alleys I found —

you had just gone along them,

and sometimes the shopkeepers’ mirrors

were still dizzy with you, and gave out, afraid,

my too-sudden image. — Who knows if the same

bird did not ring out through us

yesterday, separately, in the evening?

                                                    trans. Tracy Ryan

World’s End

            after Jakob van Hoddis’s expressionist poem

The sharp-headed citizen grasps at his flying headdress.

A hell of a racket is busting out from here to there.

The roofs are too steep for the tilers split asunder.

Watching the news we are rudely confronted by rising seas.

The storm is upon us, demented waves pole-vault

Beaches and thrust inland to take out the dams.

Most of us have runny noses, which goes with the gestalt.

Coal-bearing rails cascade down from railway bridges.

            John Kinsella

Note: Jakob van Hoddis (Hans Davidsohn) was born in 1887 to a German-Jewish family in Berlin and was murdered by the Nazis in 1942. He published one book of poetry during his lifetime, Weltende, in 1918, though his poetry was collected in 1958. He was resident for some years 'in care' (he suffered from schizophrenia) in Tübingen. There are public steps named after him in Tübingen (that were earlier named after a Nazi doctor, but finally renamed in 1992), and also a plaque on a residential building to mark where he lived. It is not far from where we are staying. The 'expressionist' poem 'Weltende' of which I offer a version (above — I have taken great liberties, but it seems such a prescient poem that I think it works as a commentary on human environmental impact), was published in 1911, and had significant influence on innovative German-language poetry of the time. Hoddis was unable to escape Germany with the rest of his family to Tel Aviv in 1933 due to the British authorities refusing him an entry certificate on the grounds of his mental health condition. The German Wikipedia entry carries far more information on him than the English version.

Weiterschwingen -- Rilke, resonance and response

posted by Tracy

Rainer Maria Rilke

Love Song


How shall I still my soul so it won’t stir
against your soul? How shall I lift it over
you, elevate it toward other things?
Oh, I would like to leave it with whatever
is lost and wasted in some unfamiliar
dark, hidden spot that never rings
in answer when your deepest places do.
Yet everything that touches me and you
takes us together in the way a bow-
stroke draws a single voice out of two strings.
What is this instrument we’re stretched upon?
Who is the player that has us in his hands?
Such a sweet song.


(from New Poems, trans. Tracy Ryan)

A rejection of  "Order" in its relation to power and fascism, aesthetically & otherwise

Doing some background reading while working on Rilke's poems, I came across an article about his so-called Milanese letters, in which in 1926 he expressed an admiration for Mussolini and fascism. Deeply disturbing – so many great poems, but a dubious person -- as Clive James wrote, "no paragon of humanity", or elsewhere, more colloquially, "[i]n many respects Rilke was a prick". (As an aside I don't have time for here, James's wider-context comments provoked much discussion and disagreement.)

I have been thinking a lot about "Ordnung" or "order", here in Germany, immersed not in Rilke's country (he was born in Prague when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire) but in his language -- or one of his languages...  Even in the "Love Song" above, whose ironies have to be appreciated, there is a sense of wanting, if one is to have a relationship, a clear, clean, unmessy one -- seeking purity of self (a kind of Ordnung too) which seems afraid of empathy. While working on my translation I also wrote a kind of response -- ringing or singing further, a "weiterschwingen" to the "schwingen"... which seeks to reject this obsession with Ordnung and its relation to fascism.


Disordered (a poem in response)

“so mächtig und ungeduldig ist mein Verlangen nach Ordnung”
“so powerful and impatient is my desire for order”– Rilke, Milanese letters


Over and over the same thing
just a matter of innocent repeating
and all will be uniform

Never mind the ragged edges
that improbable moon
will soon be full again

trailing disorder but in a manner
wholly cyclical, so sickening
to find in nature and “human nature”

the justification of your own desire
though I cannot love chaos either –
these are two halves of the one

circle, each das halbe Leben, a face
beaming back at you what you project
and I reject the aesthetics of clockwork

too, the metrical turn – I want to happen
across words like a finishing, fallible
streak, one more minor disintegration

among the millions and who cares if we are
out of order so long as we can love each other
not fearing reverberation like strings on your

violin, nor longing for dark and silent spaces
but giving a big bright fiddler’s hickey to
whoever holds us and is playing us if he’s there


Tracy Ryan

Thoughts Regarding Prosody and other Matters

By John, posted by Tracy


I am often trying to reach a prosodic equilibrium between lyric and rhetoric, or, if one prefers, between a gesture to ‘things’ and their quiddity, and a ‘polemic’ or political utterance. I don't want to operate in the ‘passive’ mode in which a lot of ‘nature poetry’ operates — agency is the definitive double-edged ploughshare, it brings humans spiritual and material awareness, but/and it costs everything else. That’s what I am investigating. The question becomes which side of tolerable (for a given reader, I guess), this lyrical-rhetorical weighting falls. Which is not to say I don’t see the ‘pure lyric’ as relevant — in fact, I often dwell, lurk and retreat there — but it is not the only place.

I wrote this manifesto against rapacity early in 2012. Thought it worth posting the link here.

Some time or other I will ask Tracy if she can post the document itself on this blog (thanks, Tracy).

And here’s a translation from French of a great poet from La Réunion. The notes that follow are cribbed from an email I sent to someone when I was translating the poet (I’ve done a bunch of poems) — sourcing/adapting bio information from French sources. I believe this is one of the rare times Auguste Lacaussade — the mid-nineteenth century French poet from La Réunion — has been translated into English. He is an incredible poet and deserves to be read (still). He wrote his poems from afar — schooling in France and looking back to his childhood home on Bourbon, as La Réunion was then known. Later, he returned, but found the racism so hard to deal with that he went back to France (says something). He eventually became quite bitter, and this is reflected in his late poetry. Of both African and French heritage (son of a freed slave woman and a lawyer from a Bordeaux family), Lacaussade resisted slavery on the island and went on to become a very significant French literary figure, though he faded from the limelight and was always (unjustly) in Leconte de Lisle’s shadow. Never made a member of the French Academy, he felt this was due to his ‘mixed-race’ background — no doubt he was right, given the times. A translator of the English Romantics, he has a street and a few schools named after him on the island of La Réunion. Lacaussade is a major poet of place: there’s an intimacy and reflective distance (sure, nostalgia is in there in the configurings or remembered experience as if they are plein-air compositions, but much more... he has his own kind of ‘sublime’ at work).


Auguste Lacaussade’s Le Papillon (The Butterfly)

Your gilded wings, young and stylish butterfly,
Reflect the azured colours of the sky,
You who compete with the breeze’s kiss for flowers
As you pass through the air like a sparkling
Breath, and when dying day’s light is fading,
Sleep upon their fragrant calyxes.

If you see my love, don’t pay tribute to her
Rosy lips as you might the open flower;
Your infatuated eye is permitted this fault;
But I shall be jealous of your supreme happiness:
I alone want to draw from the mouth I idolize
The scents of sensual delight.

translated by John Kinsella


As a postscript, my novel Morpheus is finally out: originally written when I was a 18/19, it’s taken over thirty years to appear. For any of you wanting to join in with the goings-on of Thomas Icarus Napoleon, it’s here.




John Kinsella