If Sylvia Plath were a LOLcat

 Oh dear oh dear, long time no blog. I've been working hard over the summer but hope to be working less hard as of about today and to come back to the blog. Here in the meantime is something I've been meaning to do for a while now.

Having only just discovered the LOLcat translation of T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land', a mere 5 years after it was written, I'm reminded that someone once asked me for a similar translation of Sylvia Plath. So here it is.


The Shorter 'Daddy'


I'm in ur shoe
DO NOT LIKE

Papa Cat is marbl stachoo
marbl harbls
toe as big as walrus, no haz bukkit

Papa Cat is Jerman, or possbly Polish.
Girl kittehs luv Cats That Look Like Hitler WTF?

Oh hai, Ted Hughes
WANT

Whoops, Ted Hughes is vampyr, wait, what?
Not sparkly, DO NOT WANT

Papa Cat is Ceiling Cat
Ted Hughes is Papa Cat
Papa Cat is Basement Cat
kthxbai

Something you might not know about John Clarke

I was lucky enough to meet John Clarke once, maybe fifteen years ago. Clive James was launching a big poetry anthology at the Melbourne Writers' Festival; Clarke was at the launch, and by sheer good luck I was talking (after the speech, not during it: one of my resolutions for 2012 is to go up to anyone who's talking during a speech, concert, movie or any other public performance and give them a good hard smack upside the head. No jury would ever convict me) to a dude who knew a dude who knew him, and finished up talking to him myself. He is a lovely, lovely man, and he loves poetry and is extremely knowledgeable about it.

He's just posted a link on Twitter to an 'appreciation' of Auden that he wrote in 2007 to mark the centenary of that great poet's birth. The poem with which he finishes this post is one of the few poems I know by heart. It's here.

 Photo from the ABC TV Blog

Landscape With The Fall of Icarus

What are the odds of reading two new novels in 24 hours that both reference this painting, I wonder. But having done so, I felt compelled to find it online and have another look at it. Breugel died in 1569, when Shakespeare was five. Imagine still haunting human imagination 550 years later.

If you're wondering where Icarus is, click on the picture to embiggen and then have a look in the bottom right-hand corner.

W.H. Auden was a profoundly political poet and his work, more than most, was written for and about his own times. But he didn't go in for knee-jerk rejection of any universalising thinking, either, and in 'Musée des Beaux Arts' he uses this painting to say something about his own times that is probably true of any place and any age.

Australian Poetry Library

It's a beautiful thing.

Una selva oscura

This morning I paid the princely sum of $10 for this new book:

I was halfway to the bookshop counter, wallet at the ready, very possibly with Casey's recent lovely post about Dante in the back of my mind and thinking $10 was a really good deal for one of the great classics of literature, even if I did have to read it in unsatisfactory translation (for I've never seen a translation of the opening three lines that seemed to me exactly right, and I don't even speak or read Italian, but I know what I like), when I idly opened it at random to check the print size and found to my great joy that what I was about to pay a pittance for was a parallel text, with Dante's exquisite, lucid, singing Italian -- late-medieval vernacular Italian and therefore linguistically at two removes from me, and yet somehow available to instinctive reading -- opposite the translation.

Five years of excellent teaching and intermittent hard slog at Adelaide Girls' High back in the mists of time has left me with the ability to nut out a little bit of German and quite a lot of French if it is put in front of me, but such Italian as has sunk in, ie almost none (though I still remember the Italian for the first phrase I ever consciously learned: Posso provarlo? 'May I try this on?') has done so by accident and through some sort of process of osmosis.

But it strikes me, not for the first time, that this verse is so beautiful one could teach oneself Italian simply by studying a page of this book a day. A dark wood, in which one has lost one's way: can you think of a better metaphor for middle age?

...Françoise sat down beside me with a volume of Dante and construed a few lines of the 'Inferno' to begin showing me how the language worked. 'Per mi si va tra la perduta gente' - 'Through me you go among the lost people'. A line that crushed the heart, but in the middle you could say 'tra la'. It was music.

– Clive James, Falling Towards England

The opening lines likewise crush the heart -- 'In the middle of this life we live, I realised that I was in a dark wood, and the path was lost.' Or words to that effect. Also words to crush the heart, but look at the paper (or whatever it is) that they were written on.

Cross-posted at Read, Think, Write

In praise of the winter solstice

Stephanie at Humanities Researcher is off tonight to a winter solstice feast, where seasonal poems will be read. I will be celebrating Solstice Lite with ceremonial mulled wine up in the Adelaide Hills with my mate R tomorrow afternoon and proposing a ceremonial toast: roll on earlier sunrises and later sunsets. But I love the idea of a seasonal poem, so here is my absolutely favourite winter one, Coleridge's 'Frost at Midnight'.

The frost performs its secret ministry
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud -- and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which flutters on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, everywhere
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And make a toy of Thought.

But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birthplace, and the old church tower,
Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things I dreamt
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My playmate when we both were clothed alike!

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the traces of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Home Maintenance for Women and the Pillars of Modernism

Tonight in Week 2 of my WEA class, I did something I've never done before in my life: I used a power drill. Unfortunately I've been too long acquainted with the works of Freud not to be a little giggly about it. As T.S. Eliot once said, 'After such knowledge, what forgiveness?'

Immortality: a thought

Tennyson, who really was quite an extraordinary sort of chap as fellow devotees of A.S. Byatt will know, once wrote a poem about the myth of Aurora, Greek goddess of the dawn, and her lover and husband Tithonus, who was a mortal man until she went off to Zeus and asked him to grant Tithonus eternal life so the couple could stay together forever.

This, obligingly -- and obligingness was not Zeus's forte as a rule -- he did. But the catch, and there's always a catch in these myths, was that they forgot to ask for eternal youth for him while they were about it. So Tithonus got older and older, but could not die.

Tennyson's 'Tithonus', in which the helplessly ever-aging man is speaking, begins like this:

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
the vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
and after many a summer dies the swan.

Me only cruel immortality
consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms
here at the quiet limit of the world,
a white-hair'd shadow, roaming like a dream
the ever-silent spaces of the East,
far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

Tithonus is, in fact, the Undead. And what made me think of this poem is the gory vampire novel I have chosen to replace the unreadable Dean Koontz one (see previous post). For much is being made in this book, as well it might be when you are trying to fight them off, of the fact that vampires cannot die or be killed unless you utterly destroy their hearts.

And it occurs to me for the first time (although Ken Gelder probably had this idea in Chapter 1 if not the Introduction to his book on vampires) that they are the shadow side of that eternal life in quest of which humankind continues, usually to its detriment, to go. But lift that rock -- look under the Philosopher's Stone -- and what will crawl out from underneath it is something seven feet tall with shark's teeth that wants to rip your head off and drink your blood.

I assume therefore that one of the morals of the vampire story, as of so many stories, is 'Be careful what you wish for', and that it belongs to that powerful old family of narratives that show the horrible fate awaiting the Over-reacher, the mortal who dares to try to usurp the prerogatives of gods: Prometheus, Faust, Viktor Frankenstein, and all the dead bodies who litter the stage at the end of every Renaissance revenge tragedy.

None of this stuff belongs, however, in a 180-word newspaper review. Which is why I have a blog.