David Prashker's Private Collection

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

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The Argaman Press

Welsh Landscape - R.S. Thomas

                             To live in Wales is to be conscious
                             At dusk of the spilled blood
                             That went to the making of the wild sky,
                             Dyeing the immaculate rivers
                             In all their courses.
                             It is to be aware,
                             Above the noisy tractor
                             And hum of the machine
                             Of strife in the strung woods,
                             Vibrant with sped arrows.
                             You cannot live in the present,
                             At least not in Wales.
                             There is the language for instance,
                             The soft consonants
                             Strange to the ear.
                             There are cries in the dark at night
                             As owls answer the moon,
                             And thick ambush of shadows,
                             Hushed at the fields’ corners.
                             There is no present in Wales,
                             And no future;
                             There is only the past,
                             Brittle with relics,
                             Wind-bitten towers and castles
                             With sham ghosts;
                             Mouldering quarries and mines;
                             And an impotent people,
                             Sick with inbreeding,
                             Worrying the carcase of an old song.

This, certainly, is my Wales, the one that loomed steep and dark and lyrical through the mists along the Severn estuary, the humbled Celtic land viewed from my own Celtic Somerset where I spent a dozen years: outsider looking upon outsider. And this the poem, more than any other, that induced me to write my own "A Song In Welsh".

As I wrote there, to the ancient Saxons, Wales (pronounced Wa-lès) literally meant "outsider", or "foreigner", as Habiru – Hebrew - did in ancient Egypt; a term of derogation, of ostracism; a sending away to the margins of what is no longer your own country. Thomas nonetheless is wrong (and in truth he knows it): there is a present in Wales, but it is an English present, or Anglo-Saxon anyway, of industrialised farmers and unemployed miners, of dark satanic mills imposed on green and pleasant land, of the tolling and tolling of the sad bells of Rhymney, their peals arranged in London, not Caer Dyff.

But even this is not the real tragedy of Cymru (though it is also the same tragedy as the one in Catalunia, the Basque regions of France and Spain, Brittany, Palestine, Crimea, Kurdestan, and rather more non-countries in the world than you might even be aware of, but all of whom are listed here); rather it is that a man like Thomas, steeped in the Welsh language, steeped in history, culture, tradition, that a patriot like Thomas, whose voice, whose landscape, whose lexicon, whose characters and melodies, whose very punctuation describes a Welsh lilt, that such a man should be reduced to the pathetic bitterness of writing those last three lines in English.

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

The Argaman Press

The Madman

Friedrich Nietzsche

(From: "The Gay Science")

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market-place, and cried incessantly: “I am looking for God! I am looking for God!” – As many of those who did not believe in God were standing together there he excited considerable laughter. “Have you lost him then?” said one. “Did he lose his way like a child?” said another. “Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? Or emigrated?” – thus they shouted and laughed. The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his glances. “Where has God gone?” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him – you and I. We are all his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is more and more night not coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? – gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives – who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed – and whoever shall be born after us, for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto…

In Auschwitz, where they recognised that the smell of burned and decomposing flesh was actually the corpse of God, there were many who answered Nietzsche's question precisely by kneeling on the dirt and asking God for guidance nonetheless. Absurd? And yet he gave them answers (see October 28 in "The Book of Days"). In Auschwitz, where they recognised that the smell of burned and decomposing flesh was truly just the corpse of Man (can one use the phrase "truly just" in a sentence such as this one? nothing in the whole of human history was ever more "truly unjust"), there were many who answered Nietzsche's question by putting God on trial, and finding him guilty of both indifference and suicide, and sentencing him as a punishment for this most heinous crime – to eternal life. (Ah, paradoxes! Don't we humans just love our paradoxes!)

Beyond argument (nothing is beyond argument – and yet the phrase is apt), this passage of Nietzsche's is the most cataclysmic in all modern prose: the annunciation of the tearing of the Veil, the blowing of the ram's horn to declare the alarum for the apocalypse, and circumambulate his Black Rock backwards, in order to disintegrate him like a Golem. Yet nowhere is it stated, nowhere is it affirmed, that God is truly dead (indeed, He is self-evidently alive and well and living in these sentences - both the ones I am writing here, and the judicial one, passed by the heirs of Nietzsche).

So many paradoxes (so many necessary parentheses)! And questions – vast, rhetorical questions. Were there ever more rhetorical questions asked in a single breath? Was there ever written a greater, a more extraordinary example, of rhetoric, and hyperbole, than this? But for all my irony, the questions, like the paradoxes, are truly momentous and monumental. How do we live our daily lives, how do we distinguish good from evil, how do we construct a civilisation, if the bulb and the battery have been taken from the torch, and yet we still expect, nay demand, eternal light? Nietzsche was the midwife at the birth of modern Man, an induced delivery by forceps and without benefit of epidural; and what came out of the womb was monstrous – another Golem, this one an anti-Christ; Lucifer's talons, fangs and wings were all in evidence, as well as the impudence and arrogance, the unyielding mind, the rabid rage for destruction, the sarcasm and cynicism, the impious laugh.

These latter words are not mine (though I added the Golem); they belong to Nikos Kazantzakis, the greatest of modern Greek writers, both in Katharevousa – high Greek – and in demotic, the colloquial. Kazantzakis speaks in his "Report To Greco" of his first encounter with the Übermensch:

"His impetuosity and pride swept me off my feet, the danger intoxicated me, and I plunged into his work with fright and longing, as though entering a bustling jungle full of famished beasts and dizzying orchids. Each day I could not wait for my classes at the Sorbonne to end and night to fall. I longed to go home and have the landlady come and light the fire so that I could open his books – they were all piled high on my desk – and begin to share his struggle. I had grown accustomed little by little to his voice, his halting breath, his cries of pain. I had not known – only now was I discovering this – that the anti-Christ struggles and suffers just as Christ does and that sometimes, in their moments of distress, their faces look the same...

"His pronouncements struck me as impious blasphemies, his Übermensch as the assassin of God. This rebel had a mysterious fascination, however. His words were a seductive spell which dizzied and intoxicated; they made your heart dance. Truly, his thought was a Dionysiacal dance; an erected paean raised triumphantly at the most hopeless moment of the human and superhuman tragedy. In spite of myself, I admired his affliction, mettle, and purity, as well as the drops of blood which bespattered his brow as though he too, the anti-Christ, were wearing a crown of thorns."

The story of Kazantzakis' Orphean journey through the thought of Nietzsche is as powerful as any physical epic of the heroes, worthy of adding to this collection both as personal voyage of discovery and as the best brief explication of the Übermensch philosophy that you will read. At its end, before rejecting the philosophy as "just another paradise, another mirage to deceive poor unfortunate Man and enable him to endure life and death", he raises "three cheers for Nietzsche, the murderer of God" and poses one final, rhetorical question of his own, a challenge gauntleted to each of us: "Would I, I wondered, ever be able to confront the abyss with this tranquil, untrembling glance?"

Would any of us?

Friedrich Nietzsche's "The Gay Science" is published by Penguin Classics; "Report To Greco" by Nikos Kazantsakis is published, in English translation, by Simon and Schuster.

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

The Argaman Press

Psalm 121

Attributed to King David

I lift up mine eyes unto the hills,
from whence cometh my help.

My help cometh from the Lord,
which made heaven and earth.

He will not suffer thy foot to be moved:
he that keepeth thee will not slumber.

Behold, he that keepeth Israel
shall neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord is thy keeper:
the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.

The sun shall not smite thee by day,
nor the moon by night.

The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil:
he shall preserve thy soul.

The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in
from this time forth, and evermore

Modern versions of the Psalms-in-English have a tendency to transform into unrhythmic and unscanned prose what, in the original, was intended to be sung, with musical accompaniment. Not so the King James, which manages to achieve the literary impossible – not simply to translate successfully a great work of literature, but to create a new work which is itself a literary masterpiece. Modern versions may be closer to the authentic meaning, may obtain greater accuracy, but to those brought up on the King James they read nonetheless like modern "translations" of Chaucer or Shakespeare. Somehow the archaisms, the obsolescences, the anachronisms, are fitting; after all, these are ancient scriptures, quilled on cow-hide or scratched with a stylus onto wax tablet, something in the range of three thousand years ago.

שִׁיר לַמַּעֲלוֹת

אֶשָּׂא עֵינַי אֶל-הֶהָרִים מֵאַיִן יָבֹא עֶזְרִי

עֶזְרִי מֵעִם יְהוָה עֹשֵׂה שָׁמַיִם וָאָרֶץ

אַל-יִתֵּן לַמּוֹט רַגְלֶךָ אַל-יָנוּם שֹׁמְרֶךָ

הִנֵּה לֹא-יָנוּם וְלֹא יִישָׁן שׁוֹמֵר יִשְׂרָאֵל

יְהוָה שֹׁמְרֶךָ יְהוָה צִלְּךָ עַל-יַד יְמִינֶךָ

יוֹמָם הַשֶּׁמֶשׁ לֹא-יַכֶּכָּה וְיָרֵחַ בַּלָּיְלָה

יְהוָה יִשְׁמָרְךָ מִכָּל-רָע יִשְׁמֹר אֶת-נַפְשֶׁךָ

יְהוָה יִשְׁמָר-צֵאתְךָ וּבוֹאֶךָ מֵעַתָּה וְעַד-עוֹלָם

What King James does not manage, however, and I have yet to find any modern version which manages it either, is to retain the formal structure of the original. In translating an Italian Sonnet, would it not be automatic to retain the fourteen lines, the rhyming scheme, the use of the iambic pentameter? Where, then, are the echo-lines, the couplets, the parallelisms? In the version printed here, I have loosely restored them, while still keeping the text of the King James. Do I sense another task for my old age coming on?

Running my own synagogue for many years, I have found many an appropriate occasion to recite this particular Psalm. On the day that I am writing these lines – April 22nd 1994 – the first free elections are taking place in South Africa, a country, and a cause, close to my heart since I first travelled there sixteen years ago. At the end of shacharit this morning, after a brief sermon from the amud on the background to the elections, I recited this Psalm again, and discovered once again how, given a modern context, these ancient hymns can still reduce a man, a congregation, to tears.

It comes, this Psalm, from a collection (numbers 120-134) believed to have been sung by pilgrims en route to the Temple in Jerusalem for the "regalim", the three harvest festivals of Pesach (Passover), Shavu'ot (Pentecost) and Succot (Tabernacles). Its attribution to King David is certainly apocryphal. The title of the collection is Shirey Ma'alot, Songs of Ascent – the going-up to Jerusalem echoed grammatically in the word Aliyah, which is both emigration to the State of Israel and also the going up to the altar in the Temple, or the amud, the reading-desk, in any synagogue, anywhere in the world.

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersbookofdays.blogspot.co.uk

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

The Argaman Press

Friday, December 18, 2015

Don Quijote In America

Christmas 2015, and the Mindbenders Book Club in San Francisco is wrapping up its year of only reading the very best literature from around the world; a book a month, and then one major piece for which the entire year is granted as time to complete it. Calvino and Kafka, Marquez and Nabokov, Joyce and Melville for the monthly reads, but tonight it's time to wrap up Cervantes' "Don Quijote", or "Quixote" in the Anglo-American spelling.

We are struggling with the multitudes of translations, and it is not primarily those into the English of the Victorian age or 1990s America, but the ones into the remarkably different languages of the several Spanish speakers in the room, two of whom are not native Spaniards but learned the language in the mother country, one of whom is of indigenous El Salvadorian blood and prefers Creole to the Classical lingo of the conqueror and occupier, a fourth is a Venezuelan who regards all other forms of Spanish as anachronistic and incorrect, the fifth an Argentine who has to use the dictionary to learn the meanings of many of Cervantes' neologisms - so no surprise when our conversation turns to Borges, and we begin to understand why he wrote "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", a fictional tale which brilliantly sums up the entirety of post-modernist and structuralist academic theorising and criticism in just eight pages. Every book is different for every reader in every language and at every point of history; but perhaps few are quite so universally different as this one.

So we return to the English translations, all of which likwise transform the novel into something very different again that may not always be what Cervantes intended (not that we know any longer what it was that Cervantes did intend). The Victorian translation presents a rather seriously-minded tale about a delusionary Romantic who learns the hard way. The 1990s version clearly spent too many hours absorbed by Monty Python, and sees Quixote as a Spanish equivalent of "Life of Brian" - a satire on absolutely everything, but especially on the ideals and values that those who occupy the moral high ground like to proclaim, while never actually attempting to live them by example; Quixote sets out to be that example, and his tale is the inexorable consequence: Candide on horseback. The recent American version simply doesn't get the Quijote at all, because it doesn't understand that Spanish culture in Cervantes' time was a very recent emergence from seven hundred years of Islam, but with the Spanish Inquisition in brutal charge of the process of emergence; even more significantly, Americans really don't get satire. I had anticipated this, and had prepared a "treatment" for a late 20th century American retort to Cervantes, which I entitled "Don Quijote in America".

   I imagine Don Quixote Jnr III, grandson of illegal Mexican immigrants who wet-backed into Texas with their extended family when no one was paying attention during World War Two, and made his way to New York where, despite being deaf in one ear, Miguel's father, Rodrigo, earned his living as a barber-surgeon, setting bones, performing bloodlettings, and attending "lesser medical needs", when not simply cutting hair. Don, or Donald as he always insisted, was born on September 29th 1947^[1], and grew up in the 1950s, a total believer in that wonderful chivalric romanticism The Great American Dream.

    In the late 1960s, accompanied by his dad’s former houseboy Sancho Panza, Donald headed across America on a retired Greyhound Bus operated by the Rocinante Bus Company, aiming for the West Coast but travelling via the Deep South, in search of fame and fortune and freedom in the land of opportunity. After spending several months serving Walburgers in the bad end of West Baltimore, he was forced out of his zero-hours contract by a gang-leader who didn’t know that Black Lives Matter and thought that Mexicans and Blacks were just the same; then spent three months in jail trying to prove he wasn’t an Islamic Radical sympathiser just because he was wearing a PLO head-scarf and read poetry by Hafiz. Three months as toilet attendant in a tourist restaurant on a former cotton plantation outside Charleston ended when he was caught reading Mark Twain during the lunch break that his contract didn’t actually permit, and he was then chased out of town by the Ku Klux Klan for daring to assert his rights as an “honorary black man”. His last job was in a wind-farm in the Yosemete mountains that unfortunately burned to the ground in the annual fires.

   While Sancho busked Bob Dylan protest songs, and was beaten to death by a group of Christian evangelists when he tried to take his pregnant girlfriend to an abortion clinic, Donald attempted to gain an education by reading Thoreau, Emerson and Walt Whitman, but was still turned down from every university to which he applied on the grounds that they needed quarterbacks and golfers, not poets and scholars. He spent the last of the '60s and early '70s as a draft-dodger in Canada, worked as a bouncer in a brothel in Nevada for several years, before landing the plum job of PR consultant to an art-house production company in the San Fernando valley, whose high quality “love-interest and intimate human relationships” movies, as he re-branded them, profited to the tune of $60 billion dollars within three years, enabling the company to use the techniques of the leveraged buy-out to acquire the entire means of distribution for all the products in the world, and to furlough Don as a way of avoiding paying him the six months’ severage to which he was entitled.

Still believing in The American Dream, and planning to vote for Donald Trump, Don Quixote Jnr III was last heard of, homeless and penniless, sleeping in an Afghan rug on a bench outside the Shattuck Cinema in Berkeley, where a festival of Disney movies, accompanied by a biopic of the Founding Fathers and an anime version of the Bill of Rights, is in the planning.

^[1] the 500th anniversary of Cervantes’ birth

It is by no means obvious to me how to translate my version either into Classical Spanish or El Salvadorean Creole, and in the current political climate I wouldn't even dare to try the Venezuelan dialect.

You will find a very different take on Don Quijote, or Quixote if you prefer, by clicking here

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersbookofdays.blogspot.co.uk

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

The Argaman Press

Thursday, September 11, 2014

Lament of the Farm-Wife of Wu

Su Tung P'o

Which in today's Chinese would be pronounced Soo Doong Bo, in the same way that Pekin has become Bei-jing and feudal totalitarianism has become... feudal totalitarianism, but under a different name. "The Lament of the Farm-Wife of Wu" could be written in any province of contemporary China, though unlike in Su Tung P'o's time it is unlikely that the Communist authorities would allow it to be published (see the final paragraph of this blog and my page on China in TheWorldHourglass) and probably today's Farm-Wife would end up as a despised migrant worker in the shanty-suburbs of Mei-shan rather than as a suicide in the local stream, though these two fates are not that easy to distinguish either.

We are all raised in the canons of our native literature, not much encouraged in schools to look beyond the geographical boundaries, and even less encouraged by publishers, unless they can see a greater profit in old-and-foreign literature than in the novelties of today in our own tongue. What a vast gap that leaves in our knowledge of the world. And who would think of travelling in literature while also travelling to beaches, churches, art galleries, museums? Read Marquez next time you are resting on the beach at Cartagena, after a day's snorkelling among the coral of Las Islas de Rosarios; or Thomas Mann in Venice; Kafka on a long-weekend in Prague; Jane Austen in a Bath café; or Chinese poetry, which is some of the finest in the world, while waiting for your take-away on Spadina Avenue.

Su Tung P'o, who was also called Su Shih (no connection with Japanese raw fish), was born in Sichuan province in 1036, designed the parks that surround Lake Si in Hangzhou, practiced Buddhism in poetry as well as life, witnessed the reigns of five emperors, and rose to the rank of President of the Board of Rites, giving him authority over all imperial ceremonies and acts of worship; roughly the equivalent of Biblical Joseph in Egypt, though there is no record of Joseph writing poetry. The portrait of him was painted two hundred years after his death, by Zhao Mengfu, the man whose name was later given to a volcanic crater on the planet Mercury, though why is not something I am able to explain.

The translations below are by Burton Watson in "S elected Poems of Su Tung-P'o".

I Travel Day and Night

Past the places
where the Ying river
enters the Huai
and for the first time
saw the mountains along the Huai.
Today we reached Shou-chou.

I travel day and night towards the Yangtze and the sea.
Maple leaves, red flowers - Fall has endless sights.
On the broad Huai I cannot tell if the sky is near or far;
green hills keep rising and falling with the boat.
Shou-chou - already I see the white stone pagoda,
though short oars have not brought us around Yellow Grass Hill.
Waves calm, wind mild - I look for the landing.
My friends have stood a long time in the twilight mist.
Spring Night

Spring night - one hour worth a thousand gold coins;
clear scent of flowers, shadowy moon.
Songs and flutes upstairs - threads of sound;
in the garden, a swing, where night is deep and still.
Lament of the Farm-Wife of Wu

Rice this year ripens so late!
We watch, but when will frost winds come?
They come - with rain in bucketfuls;
the harrow sprouts mud, the sickle rusts.
My tears area ll cried out, but rain never ends;
it hurts to see the yellow stalks flattened in mud.
We camped in a grass shelter a month by the fields;
then it cleared and we reaped the grain, followed the wagon home,
sweaty, shoulders sore, casting it to town -
the price it fetched, you would think we came with chaff.
We sold the ox to pay taxes, broke up the roof for kindling;
we'll get by for the time, but what of next year's hunger?
Officials demand cash now - they won't take grain;
the long northwest border tempts invaders.
Wise men fill the court - why do things get worse?
I would be better off a bride to the River Lord.
Sadly I can't find a copy in Chinese of the Lament; instead, because one has to see this poetry in its Chinese characters, "On Cold Meal at Huang-chou", a poem written after his banishment for taking the wrong side in a political dispute.

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/

The Argaman Press

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

Epigrams

Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are writers who one knows one ought to read, and tries, eventually, but somehow they remain unreadable. Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of these: transcendental poet (the term itself is sufficient to put one off), essayist (who reads essays anyway, unless teachers who are forced to mark them?), poet of Nature ("In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods" - O spare me, please, the constant harvesting of nature images, the drowning-flood of reiterations of the pathetic fallacy), and virtual inventor of the self-help manual...

But wait, was it not Emerson who described, in precisely that self-help manual, "Self-Reliance", "the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his or her own instincts and ideas" (so Wikipedia tells me, and Wikipedia is never wrong)?

Then maybe, maybe there is another kind of writer, heir and disciple of Pascal ("Pensées"), Montesquieu, La Rochefoucauld, writers like Nietzsche and Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, whose works one does not need to read, because their genius does not lie in the totality of their writings, but only in their epigrams. Have I just invented, or discovered, a new genre?

In the opening paragraph I wrote that Emerson "was" one of those writers I had realised I would never read. But then, in 2012, I found myself teaching AP American Literature in a Baltimore high school, helping some 11th graders get the 2-year course done in a single year because the school was closing. Emerson was on the list of examined writers - poems (here and here), the Nature essays (here), and of course the Concord Hymn (here), the one he wrote for the ribbon-cutting ceremony in his home-town on July 4th 1837, for the Concord Monument, the obselisk commemorating the battle there, regarded as the "second shot" in the War of Independence, and therefore studied alongside Longfellow's account of the "first shot", in "Paul Revere's Ride".

Most of his "stuff" (student slang for "literary oeuvre") was way too "boring" (a high school euphemism for "challenging") for these students, who were trained to study examiners' rubrics in detail, in order to know where to look in Shmoop or Cliff's Notes for the minutiae for their essays, and rarely read the actual books at all, which is unnecessary in the epoch of the Internet. So I made the wall-poster that is reprinted at the top of this page*. So I found some recordings of actors reading his translations from the Persian Hafiz, and put them on as background music while the students constructed their A-grade essays without ever so much as opening a book.

* limited space obliged me to leave two of my favourites off that wall-poster, but plenty of room to restore them here:-

                   "As men's prayers are a disease of the will
   so are their creeds a disease of the intellect."

                   "It does not need that a poem should be long.
                               Every word was once a poem.
                                           Every new relationship is a new word."

You can find David Prashker at:

http://davidprashkersprivatecollection.blogspot.com

http://davidprashkersworldhourglass.blogspot.co.uk/