Yahia Lababidi,Revolutions of the Heart: “Belief, in the midst of chaos, remembers the indestructible world.”
“Bodies are like poems that way, only a fraction of their power resides in the skin of things, the remainder belongs to the spirit that swims through them.”
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Samantha Power: “The binaries of the modern moment don’t suit a lot of lived experience.”
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John Cheever,Journals: “As I approach my fortieth birthday without having accomplished any one of the things I intended to accomplish—without ever having achieved the deep creativity that I have worked toward for all this time—I feel that I take a minor, an obscure, a dim position that is not my destiny but that is my fault, as if I had lacked, somewhere along the line, the wit and courage to contain myself competently within the shapes at hand.”
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Arnold Bennett: “Ninety percent of the friction of daily life is caused by tone of voice.”
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Arthur Quiller-Couch,On the Art of Reading: “For all great Literature, I would lastly observe, is gentle towards that spirit which learns of it. It teaches by apprehension, not by comprehension . . .”
A couple of years ago, Margot and I embarked
on a tandem reading journey. Concerned that I was succumbing to digital
distraction and losing the ability to concentrate, I prescribed myself Proust
as a therapeutic measure: I would immerse myself in his imagination for ten
pages a day until I had fully traversed the seven volumes of his search for
lost time. I invited Margot along for company, and she willingly took up the
challenge. Ten months later, when the music stopped on the author’s exquisitely
choreographed concluding scene, we were out of breath, exhilarated. Buoyed by
the success of that long haul, we took a quick sprint through The
Count of Monte Cristo—a book a third as long as Proust’s
masterpiece (only 1200-odd pages!), its prose and plot move so fleetly that we
completed it in little more than a month—and continued on to The
Ambassadors, Our Mutual Friend, Daniel Deronda,
and a few other sizable tomes. Companionship is welcome over the long haul of a
substantial work, for whenever one of us gets busy (or lazy) and falls behind,
the other can call out with encouragement from a few chapters ahead.
Halfway on our journey through War and Peace, I read with interest a piece by Janet
Malcolm on English renditions of the Russian classics; on the one hand, it was
a frankly tetchy denigration of the critically acclaimed versions of Richard
Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and, on the other, a generous celebration of
the industry and inspiration of Constance Garnett (1861-1946), whose Homeric
feats of translation first introduced many of the major works of Tolstoy,
Dostoevsky, Gogol, Turgenev, and Chekhov to an English-language audience.
Malcolm’s eye, or better, ear, is focused on the niceties of Garnett’s
Victorian style (which is nice indeed, and clearly shaped, as Malcolm suggests,
by the standards of Dickens, Trollope, and George Eliot), as compared to what
she calls the “flat, awkward English” of Pevear and Volokhonsky. The latter
pair would, no doubt, demur, and, rightly or wrongly, attribute the character
of their prose to greater fidelity to the particular energy of Tolstoy’s mode
of expression than Garnett exhibits. In fact, here’s a relevant exchange from
an interview I did with Pevear and Volokhonsky when their edition of War and Peace was published in 2007:
James Mustich: I’m struck by the connection between the role
of the historian or the novelist trying to impose a false order on things and
the role of the translator who may well impose a false order, or style, on the
work. Comparing your translations of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy to earlier
versions, it seems to me that there is an implicit critique of previous
translations, in that your fidelity to the “happening” of the language, to the
line-by-line happening of the words, takes precedence to the ideal of some
smoother style, some more homogenous style that might be more reader-friendly.
Or even more editor-friendly, as you discovered when you first submitted your Anna Karenina.
(Editor’s Note: When Pevear and
Volokhonsky turned in the manuscript for this to their London publishers, they
were told it was “unreadable.” As Pevear exclaimed to David Remnick in The
New Yorker: “They told us it had to be more
‘reader-friendly.’ But Tolstoy himself is not reader-friendly!” Aided by the
imprimatur of Oprah’s Book Club, it proceeded–friendly or not—to make its way
into the libraries of some several hundred thousand readers.) It
seems like what Tolstoy is saying about historians and novelists, you are
implicitly saying about translating these works—that you can’t impose that
false order, that it’s in the language as it happens that the story is really
told.
Richard Pevear: That’s exactly right. Especially imposing an
order from outside. Because as an experimental writer, Tolstoy’s language, his
seeking in words is also experimental. He worked very hard at how to arrive at,
as he says, the effect that he intended. But certainly, it’s not as if there is
simply an event which has to be recounted to the reader, because it’s also a
way of experiencing that event. A writer only has words to render the quality
of the experience, and so the quality of his language is essential to the work.
The translator has to follow that, or he loses that specific artistic quality,
which is what you’re trying to translate.
Except for its just appreciation of Garnett’s
achievement, which all readers should celebrate, Malcolm’s argument is not
terribly convincing based on the evidence she supplies in her essay. And I’m
not sure that even if it was convincing it would matter much: the content of War and Peace can take care of itself, because
Tolstoy’s multifaceted conception insinuates itself into a reader’s mind as its
own reality, both vast and intimate. (Margot and I were, as it turns out,
reading the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, and I can’t say that I noticed
it much one way or the other.) Virginia Woolf, who no doubt read Garnett, put
it well in A Room of One’s Own:
The whole structure,
it is obvious, thinking back on any famous novel, is one of infinite complexity,
because it is thus made up of so many different judgements, of so many
different kinds of emotion. The wonder is that any book so composed holds
together for more than a year or two, or can possibly mean to the English
reader what it means for the Russian or the Chinese. And what holds them
together in these rare instances of survival (I was thinking of War and Peace) is
something that one calls integrity, though it has nothing to do with paying
one’s bills or behaving honorably in an emergency. What one means by integrity,
in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is
the truth. . . . One holds every phrase, every scene to the light as one
reads—for Nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by
which to judge of the novelist’s integrity or disintegrity. Or perhaps it is
rather that Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible ink on
the walls of the mind a premonition which these great artists confirm; a sketch
which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become visible. When one
so exposes it and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture, But this is
what I have always felt and known and desired! And one boils over with
excitement, and, shutting the book even with a kind of reverence as if it were
something very precious, a stand-by to return to as long as one lives, one puts
it back on the shelf, I said, taking War and Peace and
putting it back in its place.
In an essay in the online magazine Guernica
about her labor executing her magnificent translation of Don
Quixote, Edith Grossman wrote: “looming in the background of all
literary endeavor, establishing a gloomy, compelling counterpoint to the
utopian model, is Flaubert’s melancholy observation: ‘Language is like a
cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the
time we long to move the stars to pity.’”
Dancing bears, stars, pity—the author of War and Peace would no doubt greet that imagery with a
knowing nod. “If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy,”
said Isaac Babel.
“The
years teach much which the days never know,” said Emerson; they gather to
themselves our hopes and fears, faiths and failures, loyalties and memories,
allowing the past to assume an almost institutional presence, a corpus of
authority and belief that guides—knowingly or unconsciously—our thought and
action.
The
days, meanwhile, come and go stealthily, like playful, errant, elusive gods,
slipping away before we have time to apprehend them. Our attention can never
pay enough tribute to these local deities, to the surprise and the routine of
their daily incarnation, and never fix, except in the static glimpse of words
or pictures, the fleeting hours.
1 Pervasive enough to be invisible, powerful enough to disrupt, if not destroy, the shape and substance of our lives, weather is a wonder worthy of our admiration (if not, indeed, our worship). Yet the weather comes and goes so quickly our direct regard of it seldom relaxes into a steady contemplation of the lessons it may carry. The natural landscape remembers the weather’s whims, of course, but (except after the most extreme outbursts) wears them with such nonchalance we hardly notice.
2 A good portion of wisdom is the knowledge that truth is never a fact but always a force; it arrives in our lives like the weather, assured and unpredictable, a resource and a danger.
Is there a watching in the world—a wakefulness—attentive to our thoughts and deeds? All of us, at one time or another, have intuited such intent to some vague presence outside ourselves. The feeling can be provoked—quite readily, in fact—by a landscape (a sylvan setting might provide it, or any spring or fall of water), for there are places that seem alive with apprehensions, as if things gone are still waiting there. Often we can sense such strange advertence to our being in the suspended animation of a fully-moonlit night, or in the eerie surround of profound quiet. Silence can seem so alert. We could assign our sensitivity to mere anxiety, but there are times, I’m certain, when our anxiety is summoned by an unseen audience. In the shadow of its vigilance (whatever its meaning, intention, or intelligence), the very idea of the holy takes root, as the world urges us to repay its watchfulness in kind.
If there were an archaeology of consciousness, fieldworkers would sooner or later discover that prayer lies at the deepest layer of our urge to language. Before we knew we had selves to talk to, I’m sure our fears and longings found their expression in the supplication of unknown powers, as strange and various, and as ever-present, as the weather. To raise one’s own voice in prayer, or even to consider the invocations of others, is to strip the paint of irony from the soul’s abode: the effect can be startling, frightening, purifying—if only for a moment.
A clutch of daffodils stopped my eye
As Wordsworth whispered verses to my ear —
Its yellow now in memory as bright
As in that glancing moment two days past —
Of recollections flowering and clear
That poetry could summon to make last
In extended moments of rhyme and sight.
The color lingers like a consolation
No destiny can ever quite deny,
A resurrection of a passing hour:
Here, where eternity admits its longing
In love for the comings and goings of time.
“In order to live quietly” in Elena Ferrante’sMy Brilliant Friend.
Reading E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime a while back, I came upon a passage that crystallized some thoughts about Lenù and Lila, the Neapolitan girls whose friendship is portrayed with fierce fidelity in Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. The sentences from Ragtime appear in a section describing Father’s experience as part of the Peary polar expedition:
Father kept himself under control by writing in his journal. This was a system too, the system of language and conceptualization. It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.
These words returned my attention to what strikes me as a key chapter in the Ferrante novel, in which the scholarly Lenù is led by the no-longer-schooled Lila into thickets of English vocabulary and Greek declensions, as well as into the emotional tangle of Virgil’s story of Dido and Aeneas, the latter girl hungry for the learning and articulation—the systems of language and conceptualization—that the former, given the chance to continue her education, takes somewhat for granted as homework. At the crux of My Brilliant Friend, and central to the rest of Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, is the power of reading, writing, books: how the narrator (Lenù) alights on them for transport beyond the borders of the girls’ brutally familiar neighborhood, while her brilliant friend (Lila) abandons them for more practical, opportunistic, graspable realities.
Reading acknowledges a past, just as writing invokes a future, and those timelines provide the only path beyond the relentless here-and-now the neighborhood vividly embodies and enacts. Lila realizes this first, and expresses it—exhibiting the brilliance the title endows her with—right after the girls’ discussion of the lovelorn Dido, interrupting Lenù’s catalogue of local boys she insists are infatuated with every move Lila makes.
She said that we didn’t know anything, either as children or now, that we were therefore not in a position to understand anything, that everything in the neighborhood, every stone or piece of wood, everything, anything you could name, was already there before us, but we had grown up without realizing it, without ever even thinking about it. Not just us. Her father pretended that there had been nothing before. Her mother did the same, my mother, my father, even Rino. And yet Stefano’s grocery store before had been the carpenter shop of Alfredo Peluso, Pasquale’s father. And yet Don Achille’s money had been made before. And the Solara’s money as well. She had tested this out on her father and mother. They didn’t know anything, they wouldn’t talk about anything. Not Fascism, not the king. No injustice, no oppression, no exploitation. They hated Don Achille and were afraid of the Solaras. But they overlooked it and went to spend their money both at Don Achille’s son’s and at the Solaras’, and sent us, too. And they voted for the Fascists, for the monarchists, as the Solaras wanted them to. And they thought that what happened before was past and, in order to live quietly, they place a stone on top of it, and so, without knowing it, they continued it, they were immersed in the things of before, and we kept them inside us, too.
What Lila is describing are the thousand and one nights of neighborhood life, the long enchantment of unquestioned—unquestionable—arrangements that one submits to “in order to live quietly,” to pursue love, and laughter, and labor, hoping to lull misfortune into a daze of works and days without engaging the legacies of the past or the freedoms—the invigorating liberty, but also the terrifying, uncertain, unnegotiated independence—of a future, any future across the borders of the known and well-circumscribed world. The fatalistic poverty of the constant present is what Lenù longs to escape, and what Lila, in the wedding that ends My Brilliant Friend, will marry into.
Nostalgia for the old neighborhood, a staple of so many ex-urban lives, but wholly lacking from My Brilliant Friend, is not just a love for the old days, but more truly a longing for days in which old and new had no meaning, for a more or less unruffled now. That now, as the precocious Lila intuits and as Lenù will surely discover as she writes her way into a time to come, is unlettered and, ultimately, unlucky, if not tragic, in its lack of witness to any meaning beyond the pressures imposed by the insistent present tense.
“That conversation about ‘before’,” Lenù tells us, “made a stronger impression than the vague conversations she had drawn me into during the summer.” An impression strong enough, one suspects, to require a lifetime to unravel—or four novels at least.
In the first stanza of his lovely lyric “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” William Wordsworth recounts his vision of
. . . a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
It’s a clear vision, clearly expressed, available not only to other poets but to any walker lucky enough to stumble upon a flourishing field of flowers. Only in the fourth and final stanza of the poem does Wordsworth’s true genius raise its head, immortalizing the poem and its daffodils by the poet’s remembering their glory:
For oft, when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude . . .
In poem after poem—from his lyrical ballads and eloquent sonnets to his magnificent longer poems, such as “Tintern Abbey” and “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”— Wordsworth enriches his experience by reflecting upon it in solitude. Retrospect is Wordsworth’s medium, and he may well be said to have invented it, and perhaps solitude itself, as a dimension of the literary imagination. His achievement is so large, so pervasive in its influence, that we are in danger of barely noticing it today. But much of the most inventive literature created in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, aptly enough, looks back to him.
Although “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” may be the most beautiful expression of the poet’s ethos (and no reading life is complete without a dive into its deep, bracing, and soothing waters), Wordsworth paints his most complete picture in The Prelude, a book-length autobiographical poem on the “growth of a poet’s mind.” It follows him from early childhood and school through studies at Cambridge and residence in London to France during the Revolution. Whether describing the looming, numinous presence of nature he feels while skating as a boy on a lake, or the pageant of passing faces on a London street, or the passions with which he and other enthusiasts greeted the early days of France’s rebellion (“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!”), Wordsworth writes with an eager, earnest energy that integrates experience into the stream of consciousness that is the true, emergent medium of all our lives. In The Prelude’s thousands of pentameters, Wordsworth charts the fears and fabrications, the habits and the intuitions, the shaping processes and private emanations of the self, in a way that no seer had previously envisioned; in his pages the human imagination comes to life as a natural resource worth the work and wonder of cultivation. The vast poem is dense and lyrical and at times slow-going, but it need not be read all at once; it remains a rich reading landscape to wander in, and wandering is the best way to navigate its riches, for serendipity will bring you face to face, again and again, with qualities of your own solitude that you have forgotten or never paused before to recognize.
More thoughts on reading Wordsworth, and “Intimations of Immortality” in particular, here: Telling Time: A Family Album.
The older gods Had endless powers Divorced from prayer And solid flesh, Publicly haunting Endless hours From poised and precious Altitude.
But all alone This Christ desires A physical And private pain That is our own: Thus he requires New faith in bloody Solitude.
Now Pilate, with Great savoir faire, Delivers Christ Into our hands. Such intimacy This God demands. It is His human Attitude.
Jesus is condemned to death
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II: Division of Labor
Christ finds a spider And prays His cross Will be intricate As the spider’s web: In the delicate weave He insinuates grace, Imagining heaven Heavy with lace, Intricate as The spider’s web.
Christ covets Arachne’s curse, To rehearse forever Instinctive tasks Far from redemption’s Unique indenture, Serving the pleasure Of extinct gods Whose commands are all A spider asks.
In laborious glory, This Christ descends To shoulder the story Of the living god. Distending eros Across His back, He essays heaven, Bones in a sack, Dreaming of spiders, Their works and days.
Jesus takes up His cross
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III: Physics
Untried muscles Across Christ’s back Deny His mind Its reverie
Compelling His being, Its bodily force, Toward the rugged embrace Of Calvary.
Surprised to have fallen, Heaven to earth, Christ makes no effort To arise
But considers His birth, Its gravity, Two worlds attracted To one demise.
Jesus falls the first time
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IV: Hoc Est Enim Corpus Meum
O what a child Time conceives, Miracle of Effect and cause,
Steeped in a love Heaven cleaves, Not reconciled To physical laws.
Still, the magnet Of maternal care Corrects the sure Pragmatic path
Toward crucified Eternity. (To Roost in the meshes Of an instant’ s womb
Christ interrupts His destiny: Thus flesh corrupts With sympathy.)
Christ feels a wan, Condign despair Caress God’s plan With human limb;
The imagination Bodies share Impress on Him The ways of man.
Jesus meets His afflicted mother
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V: Chance
A stranger steps in To pick up the story, Impressed into service By circumstance
When Christ lurches into A private dance, Avoiding each crevice In His blesséd path.
What god isn’t lucky, Simon scoffs, as he’s Handed the hard, Right-angled load;
Christ tiptoes, weightless, Up the road, Crossing His fingers Against His stars.
Simon the Cyrenian helps Jesus carry His cross
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VI: Memory
Evolution’s outline — The skeleton of toil — Is traced by Veronica From His passing face, Etching experience And its chronic waste Into the fabric Of memory.
Weeping, the woman Promises to keep The soiled remnant Of their bloody kiss. Christ lauds her loyalty And wonders if Sweat spoils relics Like it tries the heart.
Veronica wipes the face of Jesus
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VII: Traffic
Should a god Not fall upward? Christ asks Himself As He interrupts The business Of the ants, Lumbering toward The insect world.
Carry many times Their weight, The ants continue With their tasks: Learnéd in the means Of chance They gather meat For long winters.
Lingering On hands and knees Christ admires The earth-bound creatures; Ear to the ground He hears a voice whisper Watch their ways And get wisdom.
Jesus falls the second time
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VIII: Incarnation
A warning child, This uttering Christ Silences mothers With His mourning tongue, A mortal language Affixed to flesh, Eye gripping eye, Limb licking limb, Heart stopping mouth With life’s bloody sigh.
Jesus speaks to the women of Jerusalem
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IX: Prayer
A third time falling Christ charms the day And hovers a moment In divine mid-air; He covets the easy Play of flight, The faith of the gay And wordless birds.
A third time falling, Christ floats away But loses His balance In freedom; He crashes to Calvary And hugs the clay, On the knees of the gods He lies bleeding.
Jesus falls the third time
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X: Introspection
Stripped of His garments, Christ loses face, Embarrassed by the crimson sores Which open outward To dress His fate With the jewels and excrement The flesh contains.
Into His body Christ retreats To view His bruises inside out And wander the distances That house desire; He broods down Every bloody alley The inner life demands.
The skeleton beneath His skin, Quiet as a holy ghost, Invokes the anguish Of buried bones Remembering forgotten dead: This is our body, How it haunts the soul.
Jesus is stripped of His garments
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XI: The Night Sky
Fixed on the cross, Christ prays for night And pictures Himself A constellation, Marking time Through endless tides Set in the rhyme And gaze of heaven.
He shuts His eyes: Three points of light Define in darkness His body’s pain, Figured in The drift of stars But left alone In earth’s demesne.
Jesus is nailed to the cross
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XII: The Seasons
Christ marks a calendar Upon His back And numbers it With common weals
Forsaking the powers The sky reveals To score time in His blood and flesh.
Celestial hours Determinedly mesh, Turning eternity Through night and day;
Their heavenly light Christ throws away To observe the solstice Of the staggering heart,
Whose erratic seasons Stop and start, Told not by stars But by sorrows.
Jesus dies on the cross
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XIII: Vespers
The hours seeping From Christ’s wounds Taunt His disciples With work to do;
In fear they free The haunted weight That tumbles through Their trembling hands;
With ritual They shut His eyes And kiss to bless His breathless lips;
A wind from dead To living slips, Through the dim joints Of twilight, weeping.
Jesus is taken down from the cross
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XIV: Sleep and Wake
The impatient body, Perfumed with life, Imagines glory But is made to wait, Uncertain in Its certain tomb.
Beneath death’s stone Dreams concentrate; Far underworld The soul is borne, Worrying every Inhumed bone.
Christ is restless To rehearse His fate, But the shadows looming At the ivory gate Obscure His passage Through the gate of horn.
