Words on Wednesday: Erich Fried, another library discovery, and thoughts on the nature of poetry

Whilst bumbling about the library earlier this June (some might call it work) I happened upon 'On Pain of Seeing' a translated (from German) collection of poetry by the Austrian-British writer Erich Fried who, up until that moment, had been completely unknown to me.

Erich Fried (1921-1988)

I was interested in what he had to say about the nature of poetry, reproduced here in full from the book's preface:

   Poems are reflections of structures in our minds which are composed of thoughts and emotions. We often become fully aware of these structures only through such reflections and through our attempts to fix them in words.
   These structures and their reflections are never completely original (which anyway would make them incomprehensible) for even where allusion and association are not consciously employed, thought and verbalization are based on countless conventions. This does not prevent a poem from throwing a critical light on some of these conventions.
It is part of the nature of the reflections we call a poem that it takes shape by means of sounds, mainly words, and that it acquires from he structures it reflects not only contents, but also formal and rhythmic elements.
   As these structures are never wholly conscious and are unstable, the poet cannot reproduce their reflection at will. In trying to 'fix' a reflection - that is to say by writing a poem - sometimes a more complex structure forms in the writer's mind, thus enabling him to reflect more and 'give more of himself'.
   My poems for me are chiefly ways of understanding myself and means for coping with tensions engendered by impressions and insights. These might stem from the world around or within me as long as I neither shut myself off (consciously or unconsciously) from my experiences nor allow myself to become obtuse or cynical.
   Confronting one's own poems in turn has further effects on one's life and writings. This way of confronting my experiences by means of writing can possibly be of interest to others simply because being a poet does not make me basically different from others inhabiting the same world and exposed to similar experiences. Thus, trying to communicate my attempts of coping with the wold can make its infinitesimal contribution to changing this world.
   With Ernesto Che Guevera ('Socialism and Man in Cuba'), I believe that the main task for art is the fight against alienation. Poems are traces of this fight which one wages with oneself. These traces need not appear at first sight as committed poems. They can, for instance at first simply appear as a new way of exploding familiar forms or of using them in a new way. But even committed poetry in the narrower sense is in my view always justified when it really fights alienation, which must of necessity include avoiding alienation in one's own language and imagery unless as a deliberate means: quotation, parody, allusion, 'montage'.
   I have been wring poems for thirty years; beginning with love and political ones. Then I became immersed in experiments with sound and association, anticipating some of the techniques of recent German 'konkrete' poetry. Poems operating with word associations (an longish poetry cycles which interest me particularly as a means of conveying more complex structures) are virtually untranslateable and therefore largely excluded from the present selection.
   The order of the poems is of my choice.

London, 1969.

& here is a poem from said collection:

DEFINITION

A dog
that dies
and that knows
that it dies
like a dog

and that can say
that it knows
that it dies
like a dog
is a man

Library Tales: Dedications IV

Back again...
Only a few this time as I've been stuck working with some quite dull books (or quite dull authors who don't write interesting dedications). So, these are mostly quite old ones from earlier this summer.

Dedicated to the memory of Obie, our wonderful dog, who

passed away as this edition was completed. She affected

many of our most important decisions.

To 
Gloria and Danny
who know a lot about values without thinking about them at all

To an obstacle that became
an opportunity
S N O W
[???]

To
The noble quest for those elusive goals -
Knowledge, Peace and Justice

For Sarah
who has accomplished much more than she is
willing to admit

To Neil, who became
a scuba diver, juggler, and logician
all while I was working
on this one book

To the three ladies of my life
and the laughing gull

To my old pals,
"Bill," "Bert," and "Alf."
Who have sat in the mud with me

Love is life's wonder!
I dedicate this book to Jean
[In a book about electromagnetics]

For Reggie
who is almost always right

Words on Wednesday: Kavafy Koncludes.

Here are some 'final words' from C.P. Cavafy, all these poems come from towards the end of his life, but I don't think this is the last we'll see from Cavafy on this blog. 

I'm very pleased to have found the work of Constantine Cavafy and expect I'll return to his poetry repeatedly. One of the great benefits of working in a library when one loves books and literature is the occasional, quite accidental, discovery of some previously unknown writer.

Early published works (and short Biography)

Productive 'middle' period

A brief word about the excellent translation in my edition of C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems (London: Catto & Windus, 1998), compared to some other translations (Cavafy wrote in Greek) Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard seem to have grasped the straightforward language abundant with wit and dry humour that can be passed over, focusing too much on his dramatic flourishes or classical forms.

NERO'S DEADLINE (1918)

Nero wasn’t worried at all when he heard
what the Delphic Oracle had to say:
“Beware the age of seventy-three.”
Plenty of time to enjoy himself.
He’s thirty. The deadline
the god has given him is quite enough
to cope with future dangers.

Now, a little tired, he’ll return to Rome—
but wonderfully tired from that journey
devoted entirely to pleasure:
theatres, garden-parties, stadiums...
evenings in the cities of Achaia...
and, above all, the sensual delight of naked bodies...

So much for Nero. And in Spain Galba
secretly musters and drills his army—
Galba, the old man in his seventy-third year.

I'VE BROUGHT TO ART (1921)

I sit in a mood of reverie.
I've brought to Art desires and sensations:
things half-glimpsed,
faces or lines, certain indistinct memories
of unfulfilled love affairs. 

Let me submit to Art:
Art knows how to shape forms of Beauty,
almost imperceptibly completing life,
blending impressions, blending day with day.

FROM THE SCHOOL OF THE RENOWNED PHILOSOPHER* (1921)

For two years he studied with Ammonios Sakkas,
but he was bored by both philosophy and Sakkas.

Then he went into politics.
But he gave that up. That Prefect was an idiot,
and those around him solemn, officious nitwits:
their Greek—poor fools—barbaric.

After that he became
vaguely curious about the Church: to be baptized
and pass as a Christian. But he soon
let that one drop: it would certainly have caused a row
with his parents, ostentatious pagans,
and right away they would have stopped—

something too horrible to contemplate—
their extremely generous allowance.

But he had to do something. He began to haunt
the corrupt houses of Alexandria,
every secret den of debauchery.

Here he was fortunate:
he’d been given an extremely handsome figure.
and he enjoyed the divine gift.

His looks would last
at least another ten years. And after that?
Maybe he’ll go back to Sakkas.
Or if the old man has died meanwhile,
he’ll find another philosopher or sophist:
there’s always someone suitable around.

Or in the end he might possibly return
even to politics—commendably remembering
the traditions of his family,
duty toward the country,
and other resonant banalities of that kind.

IN DESPAIR (1923)

He's lost him completely. And he now tries to find
his lips in the lips of each new lover,
he tries in the embrace of each new lover
to convince himself that it’s the same young man,
that it’s to him he gives himself.

He lost him completely, as though he never existed.
He wanted, his lover said, to save himself
from the tainted, sick form of sexual pleasure,
the tainted, shameful form of sexual pleasure.
There was still time, he said, to save himself.

He lost him completely, as though he never existed.
Through fantasy, through hallucination,
he tries to find his lips in the lips of other young men,
he longs to feel his kind of love once more.

DAYS OF 1896 (1927)

He's become completely degraded. His erotic tendencies,
condemned and strictly forbidden
(but innate for all that) were the cause of it:
society was totally narrow-minded.
He'd gradually lost what little money he had,
then his social standing, then his reputation.
Nearly thirty, he'd never worked a full year—
at least not at a legitimate job.
Sometimes he earned enough to get by
acting the go-between in deals considered shameful.
He ended up the type likely to compromise you thoroughly
if you were seen around with him often.

But this wasn't the whole story—that wouldn't be fair;
the memory of his beauty deserves better.
There is another angle; seen from that
he appears attractive, appears
a simple, genuine child of love,
without hesitation putting,

the pure sensuality of his pure flesh
above his honor and reputation.

Above his reputation? But society,
totally narrow-minded, had all its values wrong.

FOLLOWING THE RECIPE OF ANCIENT GRECO-SYRIAN MAGICIANS (1931)

Said an aesthete: “What distillation from magic herbs
can I find—what distillation, following the recipe
of ancient Greco-Syrian magicians—that will bring back to me 

for one day (if its power doesn’t last longer), 

or even for a few hours,
my twenty-third year,
bring back to me my friend of twenty-two,
his beauty, his love.

What distillation, following the recipe
of ancient Greco-Syrian magicians, can be found
to bring back also—as part of this return to the past—
the little room we shared.”

ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF ANTIOCH (1932-33) Unpublished

We in Antioch were astonished when we heard
what Julian was up to now.

Apollo had made things clear to him at Daphni:
he didn’t want to give an oracle (as though we cared!),
he didn’t intend to speak prophetically 

unless his temple at Daphni was purified first.
The nearby dead, he declared, got on his nerves.

There are many tombs at Daphni.
One of those buried there
was the triumphant and holy martyr Vavylas,
wonder and glory of our church.

It was him the false god hinted at, him he feared.
As long as he felt him near he didn’t dare
pronounce his oracle: not a murmur.
(The false gods are terrified of our martyrs.)

The unholy Julian got worked up,
lost his temper and shouted: “Raise him, carry him out,
take him away immediately, this Vavylas.
You there, do you hear? He gets on Apollo’s nerves.
Grab him, raise him at once,
dig him out, take him wherever you want,

take him away, throw him out. I'm not fooling around.

Apollo said the temple has to be purified.”

We took it, the holy relic, and carried it elsewhere.
We took it, we carried it away in love and in honor.

And hasn’t the temple done brilliantly since!
In no time at all a colossal fire broke out, 

a terrible fire,
and both the temple and Apollo burned to the ground.

Ashes the idol: to be thrown out with the garbage.

Julian blew up, and he spread it around—
what else could he do?—that we, the Christians,
had set the fire. Let him say so.
It hasn’t been proved. Let him say so.
The essential point is: he blew up.


*
Sakkas (d. 243 A.D.)
The 'Socrates of Neoplatonism', who taught in Alexandria and who is said to have had Longinus, Herennius, Plotinus, and the two Origens among his disciples.

Library Tales: Observations II

The irony that the book 'Successful Dissertations and Theses' was greasy.

I've seen my first students wearing jeggings in the library. This is not a good thing.

If you're going to make the effort to come into the library for 9am, I'd suggest you don't bother spending all your time; listening to music, watching videos, texting and chatting with your friends. My advice, just stay in bed a little longer next time.

Calling your book 'A very short, fairly interesting and reasonably cheap book about ... x' or 'Discovering statistics using IBM SPSS statistics : (and sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll)' doesn't make you sound fun or witty, it just makes you an arse.

On discovering the book 'Globalization and Cultural Trends in China' by Liu Kang, I wondered what books other computer games characters might write...

Liu Kang, Academic

Liu Kang, Shaolin Monk

Library Tales: Interestingly titled II

The Dumbest Generation: How the digital age stupefies young Americans and jeopardizes our future (or, don't trust anyone under 30)

A History of Orgies by Burgo Partridge

Amazons and Military Maids: Woman who dressed as men in pursuit of life, liberty and happiness

How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians

Cocaine Fiends and Reefer Madness: An Illustrated History of Drugs in the Movies

An Anglo-Norman rhymed Apocalypse: With commentary [followed by a dissertation on the seven deadly sins]

The Antichrist's Lewd Hat

We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda

Against the Grain: An Autobiography by Boris Yeltsin
The Irony! I thought he was very much for 'The Grain'