Herbsttag

Keatsmas is coming fast, and I’ve been meaning to build up to it with at least one other poem. Here it is:

Herbsttag

Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr gross.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
Und auf den Fluren lass die Winde los.

Befiel den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
Gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
Dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
Die letzte Süsse in den schweren Wein.

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
Wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
Und wird in den Alleen hin und her
Unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.

–Rainer Maria Rilke

Here is my very unscholarly translation. (Feel free to improve it, Scharnhorst!)

Lord: It is time. The summer was enormous.
Lay your shadows along the sundial,
And let the winds loose across the acres.

Tell the last fruits to reach full size;
Give them yet two southerly days,
Bring them to perfection, and chase
The last sweetness in the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house will not build now.
Whoever is alone will stay that way for a long time,
Will wake up, read, write long letters,
And wander up and down the avenues,
Restless, when the leaves follow.

I found an interesting walk-through translation of this poem, in case you’re leery of mine. Of course you lose everything in translation. A particularly problematic line is the first one of the last stanza, which is unforgettable in the German and impossibly awkward in English.

I have no end of admiration for Rilke’s rhythm and beauty of language. I wonder if this poem is something to the Germans like “To Autumn” is to us. It seems likely, and I was delighted to see it on my friend’s German mom’s blog, along with—what joy!—an excellent picture of stubble plains.

Arthur & George

Never read a book if you can discern the reason you’re reading it. Was I unfairly enticed by the idea of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, taking on a real-life mystery? I like a good plot as much as the next woman, and I enjoyed Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, so I thought, here we have an author I like, a situation that intrigues me (I own, and have read, The Complete Annotated Sherlock Holmes, which is a delightful example of people taking fiction way too seriously, and yet, what’s wrong with that? There are a lot of worse things to take seriously), and a setting I want to read about (I mistakenly thought the book would take place in Edinburgh).

Well, I was disappointed. Even if one had no expectations from the author and no misapprehensions about the setting, I can’t imagine how the ending could fail to disappoint. And maybe my taste is not subtle enough, but I found hardly any of those extremely interesting ideas that fill Flaubert’s Parrot.

I blame the literary craft. Was Barnes trying to follow a novelistic scheme taught in a writing class or a how-to-sell-your-book workshop? I kind of doubt it, because it wasn’t all that gripping, but it seemed much more conventional than Flaubert’s Parrot. Let’s forget Arthur and George and revisit the book I actually liked.

Flaubert’s Parrot seemed imperfect to me. It didn’t seem like a very cohesive book. I think it took on way too many ideas and didn’t fully develop them. But, in the end, I think I like that better. You read the stuff he says and you think, “Hey, I love what he said. I want to hear more.” Whereas if an author has fully developed his themes, you don’t really want to hear more.

I loved the way Barnes expressed Flaubert’s philosophies in Flaubert’s words and in his own. There were many captivating ideas about writing, which was a well-developed theme of the book. This is great:

Do the books that writers don’t write matter? The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he’s been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?

There are entries I’ve planned for this blog that are right now puckering and sprouting snowflakes. It’s weird how something completely irrelevant to this world (are any of the posts I do actually post relevant to contemporary existence?) can still have an expiration date.

And even though I was frustrated by the woefully inadequate development of the narrator’s own history, I think it was vividly described in mentions here and there:

And you do come out of it [mourning a death], that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.

The reader knows next to nothing about this death. But sometimes it’s best just to say a little bit. It has more impact. You get an idea of what’s happened, but not too much. You never really get to the bottom of it. Life is like that too. I won't even get started on what he says about love. I want to include one last quote about reading. I’ve had conversations like this that raise similar questions about the pointlessness of writing. I have what I think are good motivational answers, but I just want to share the beautifully expressed question for now.

Some people, as they grow older, seem to become more convinced of their own significance. Others become less convinced. Is there any point to me? Isn’t my ordinary life summed up, enclosed, made pointless by someone else’s slightly less ordinary life? I’m not saying it’s our duty to negate ourselves in the face of those we judge more interesting. But life, in this respect, is a bit like reading. And as I said before: if all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it's yours. But what if such an answer gradually becomes less and less convincing?

How about Donut?

Nothing pretentious about this establishment.

On the bus today

I stumbled across the most fabulous blog with Blogger’s “next blog” feature. Someone is faithfully writing about their experiences riding the bus every day.

I love riding buses. There was a year in high school when I had to ride the bus through its entire first route around the other end of town after school (there weren’t enough buses, so many of them did two routes) and then the bus would pick up its second load of people and head for my neighborhood. It took a long time to get home. But I really liked it. In the days of wires and cords, you weren’t really expected to be doing six other things to maximize your time on the bus, and it was a very peaceful ride. I just like looking out the window.

This blogger chronicling the daily bus rides has a good sense of humor and detachment. I think it’s a grand idea. I thought about having a category of posts on this blog talking about our daily commutes, but that seems like it might be dangerous, since we are all so eminently stalkable.

Countdown to Keatsmas

As October 31 approaches, I recommend that all aesthetes memorize “To Autumn.” It’s a life-strengthening task, a sense-thickening feat, a time-enriching devotion. I can still remember how it felt to exist the morning I began to memorize it. I spent an hour or two in the periodicals section of Buswell Library, not the most picturesque location in the world, but the one that consistently won the Record’s award for “best chairs to sleep in” on campus. There are windows in that part of Buswell, and the light elated me as I half-drowsed and drank in the words of that great, ambitious, lively poet of indolence.

Every year I have found a willing or quasi-willing audience for a recitation of this poem. More often than not this weird birthday celebration is disappointing and humiliating for me. But I still recommend the memorization experience for everyone, whether anyone ever cares to listen to you or not. There is no doubt that you will be the happier for learning this poem.

1.

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

2.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

3.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,*
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

* The picture above is the closest thing I have to a picture of barred clouds. Usually the venue for a Keatsmas recitation is selected for the presence of stubble plains, or at least an open sky upon which to observe said clouds. In the absence of stubble plains, a lake makes a very pleasant setting.