August 9, 2017 · 10:11 pm

Being Happy is For What?: Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector

One day at school young Joana, the female protagonist in Near to the Wild Heart, asks her teacher a philosophical question that shows she is more thoughtful than most other children: “What do you get when you become happy?”  Her teacher is flummoxed at the child’s unusual question so asks Joana to repeat it.  This time Joana asks, “Once you’re happy what happens? What comes next?”  The teacher asks her to rephrase the question one more time in different words.  Joana comes up with: “Being happy is for what?”

Joana spends the rest of the novel attempting to answer her own question.  What will make her happy and how will she know when she is truly happy?  When she is a little girl she is raised by her widowed father and from a young age Joana displays a unique curiosity about life.  She enjoys role playing with her dolls and spending time with her father and making up spontaneous poems with him.  When her father dies she is forced to live with an aunt and uncle who can’t seem to connect with their free-spirited niece so they send her off to a boarding school.

Despite the fact that Joana enjoys her solitude and likes to feel free and untethered, she marries a man named Octavio anyway. From the beginning of her marriage, Joana feels that her role as a wife causes her to abdicate her freedom and her identity.  She is most comfortable in the morning when Octavio leaves for work.  Did she marry Octavio because she thought it would bring her this elusive feeling of happiness?  Now that she is living with him she is not so sure about anything.  She contemplates leaving Octavio and when she discovers that he is having an affair with his ex-fiancé, Joana is handed the perfect reason to break off the marriage.  With the exception of her father, all of Joana’s relationships are unsatisfactory and disappointing to her.  She  spends a great deal of time pondering the relationship with her husband and their marriage:

It was his fault, she thought coldly, anticipating a new wave of anger. It was his fault, it was his fault.  His presence, and more than his presence: knowing that he existed took away her freedom.  Only rarely now, in a quick escape, was she able to feel.  That was it: it was his fault.  How hadn’t she discovered it earlier? she wondered victoriously.  He stole everything from her, everything.

The style of Lispector’s novel is very similar to her later work, Agua Viva.  The story is told in the third person, but from the point of view of each character’s most inner thoughts. Piece of the plot, like Joana’s thoughts, are given in fragmented pieces of melodic prose.   Joana’s thoughts linger over questions of life, death, solitude, freedom and happiness which are themes that Lispector continues to explore in her later works.  Images of the sea are also prevalent in this novel as Joana feels an affinity to the freedom and boundless nature of the ocean.  When she first goes to her aunt and uncle’s house, she consoles herself by lying on the beach, close to the sea.

The grains of sand nipped her skin, buried themselves in it.  Even with her eyes closed she felt she felt that on the beach the waves were sucked back by the sea quickly, quickly, also with closed eyelids.  Then they meekly returned, palms splayed, body loose.  It was good to hear their sound.  I am a person.  And lots of things would follow.  What?  Whatever happened she would tell herself.  No one would understand anyway.

It is fitting that at the end of the story Joana decides to take her father’s inheritance and roam.  The last time we see her she is standing on the deck of a ship, looking out to sea and loving her freedom, her choice and her newly found serenity: “The ship floated lightly on the sea like on gentle open hands.”

I have found that Lispector’s novels, although brief, take quite a bit of time and concentration to understand and appreciate. What resonated with me about this book, in particular, is the idea of finding the right balance between solitude and  company.  But when I closed the last page of the book I had the distinct feeling that I ought to start the book over for fear of what I didn’t grasp in her writing the first time around.

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August 4, 2017 · 1:21 pm

Love Has Finally Arrived: My Translation of Sulpicia

Euterpe, Muse of Music and Poetry

Since it is Women in Translation month, I thought that it would be interesting to write a little post and offer my own translation of the only female  poet from Ancient Rome whose work has survived.  Sulpicia, born during the Augustan period and a contemporary of Horace, Ovid and Vergil,  wrote six love elegies which were not published on their own, but instead appended to the volume of poetry penned by Tibullus.  Even nowadays her poems can only be found in the Loeb, for instance, as part of the Corpus Tibullianum.  For many years scholars have denied the fact that a woman could have written these poems but it is now widely accepted that it was the daughter of upper class Roman citizens, connected to Augustus’s inner circle, who composed these elegies.  Unfortunately, more recent studies have criticized Sulpicia’s poems and judged them as inferior to her contemporaries because they are missing the literary allusions that are prevalent in other elegiac poets.

After translating Sulpicia’s poems, however, it is evident that she was keenly aware of the elegiac forms of her fellow Roman poets.  Regardless of what one might think of their literary merit, Sulpicia’s six poems, addressed to her lover Cerinthus, are the only opportunity for us to sneak a glimpse into the mind and heart of a Roman female from her own perspective.

I offer my translation of Sulpicia Poem XIII in which she confirms that the rumors about her love are more than just rumors and she wishes to cast aside all veils and embrace her joys and affections:

Tandem venit amor, qualem texisse pudori
quam nudasse alicui sit mihi fama magis.
Exorata meis illum Cytherea Camenis
adtulit in nostrum deposuitque sinum.
Exsolvit promissa Venus: mea gaudia narret,
dicetur siquis non habuisse sua.
Non ego signatis quicquam mandare tabellis,
ne legat id nemo quam meus ante, velim,
sed peccasse iuvat, vultus conponere famae
taedet: cum digno digna fuisse ferar.

Love has finally arrived, and a rumor that I tried to conceal
this kind of love would bring me much more shame than
revealing it openly. I begged Venus with my poems and
she brought him right to me and placed him in my lap.
Venus has kept her promises.  If anyone is said to be lacking
in his own happiness, then let him speak about my joys.
I wouldn’t wish to entrust anything to wax tablets for fear
that someone else might read about my feelings before my
love. It pleases me to have engaged in this transgression;
I am tired of wearing a mask because of this rumor.
Let it be said that we have been together,
each of us equally worthy of the other.

I love the tone of this poem, that Sulpicia doesn’t care about rumors and she wants to free herself of societal expectations placed on her.  The digno and digna in the last line is my favorite part of the elegy—both she and her lover are “worthy of” and “fitting for” one another.

What is everyone else reading for #WITMonth?

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August 2, 2017 · 6:38 pm

I’m Heroically Free: Água Viva by Clarice Lispector

I brought along a copy of Clarice Lispector’s  Água Viva with me on my beach vacation last week thinking that a book whose title can be translated as “living water” or “jellyfish” would be quite fitting.  I quickly realized that Lispector’s book, although a mere 86 pages, would take me some time to read and fully absorb.  I had to approach this text as I would a dense, meditative, philosophical volume of poetry, something to be digested slowly, one small piece at a time.

This book is nearly impossible to critique, but on a the most basic level it can be described as an unnamed narrator attempting to capture her thoughts about intense, philosophical topics such as time, life and death.  She tells us that up until this point she was engaged in painting but has put down her paint brush and taken up her pen and typewriter instead.  Throughout the text she is acutely aware of her process and oftentimes returns to discussions of painting and music and the similarities among all of these art forms.  She is also very fond of describing things in nature—flowers, a turtle, cats, a cave, oysters, the sea are all beautifully described as she experiences them.  The narrator seems to be addressing a lover but so much of the text reads like a personal meditation that the text could very well have been written as a meditation to the author herself.  But, as so often happens with this book, just when we think we grasp her meaning, she reaches for another topic which may or may not be connected.

I noticed during my first time reading through the text that the words free and freedom appeared quite a few times.  I kept this in mind as I read Água Viva  through a second time and had a very different experience than my first encounter.  I actually went back and counted and found she uses the words free or freedom sixty times in this short narrative. The title of her book, which evokes images of the ocean, is especially fitting because of the freedom and weightlessness we feel when swimming in the open sea.  In addition, the narrator’s unstructured writing frees her from the constraints of a traditional narrative and she often returns to a discussion of her process throughout her text:

A new era, this my own, and it announces me right away.  Am I brave enough? For now I am because I come from the suffering afar. I come from the hell of love but now I am free of you.  I come from afar—from a weighty ancestry.  I who come from the pain of living. And I no longer want it.  I want the vibration of happiness  I want the impartiality of Mozart.  But I also want inconsistency.  Freedom? it’s my final refuge.  I forced myself to freedom and I bear it not like a talent but with heroism: I’m heroically free.  And I want the flow.

But her interest in freedom goes much deeper than the form, or lack of form, that her writing takes.  The narrator’s existential crisis is being worked out on the pages before us in an attempt at self-knowledge that will make her free.  As I read through her text I was also reminded of the many factors in our lives that make us feel chained down, not free—clearly defined gender roles, time, space, love.  Love, in particular, seems to threaten her freedom on more than one occasion.  But she  always writes her way out of her restraints and embraces her freedom.  I will end with a few of the passages in which she contemplates this freedom:

To remake myself and remake you I return to my state of garden and shadow, cool reality, I barely exist and if I exist it’s with delicate caution.  Around the shadow is a heat of abundant sweat.  I’m alive.  But I feel that I have yet to reach my limits, borders with what? without borders, the adventure of dangerous freedome.  But I take risks, I live taking risks.

Yes, this is life seen by life.  But suddenly I forget how to capture whatever is happening, I don’t know how to capture whatever exists except by living here each thing that arises and no matter what it is: I am almost free of my errors.  I let the free horse run fiery.  I, who trot nervously and only reality delimits me.

And suddenly I feel that we shall soon part.  My frightened truth is that I was always yours alone and didn’t know it.  Now I know; I’m alone.  I and my freedom that I don’t know how to use.  Great responsibility of solitude.  Whoever isn’t lost doesn’t know freedom and love it.

 

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July 29, 2017 · 5:23 pm

Evening Fantasy by Hölderlin (The German Library)

Volume 39 of The German Library is an anthology of poetry from 1750 to 1900 and the table of contents promises translations of poetry from Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Brentano, Heine, and Nietzsche, just to name a few.  Michael Hamburger, in his Foreword to this edition, writes about the impossibility of stylistically categorizing such a vast scope of literature that encompasses “the most various and contradictory developments.”   Looking through the contents of such a book is intimidating and overwhelming, especially for someone like myself who is in no way an expert on German literature and poetry.  I decided to just dive into the poems to see which ones might capture my fancy without too much analysis and I was not disappointed with the selections.

I had originally bought the volume to get a taste of the writings of Clemens Brentano who had a close relationship with Karoline von Günderrode.  Although I enjoyed Brentano’s poetry, it was actually that of Hölderlin that I found the most pleasing.  I wouldn’t dare try to analyze this author’s poetry, even the few selections in this volume, but I will share one poem that especially resonated with me:

Evening Fantasy

Before his shaded threshold the plowman sits,
Contented; smoke ascends from the warming hearth.
A welcome rings to wanderers from
Evening bells in the peaceful village

The sailors must be coming to port now, too,
In distant cities; gaily the market’s noise
Recedes, is still; in quiet arbors
Friends take their meals in convivial splendor.

And where am I to go? Other mortals live
From pay and labor, alternate work and rest,
And all is joyful; why does only
My heart not rest, with its constant stinging?

A spring-like garden blooms in the evening sky,
The countless roses bloom, and peaceful seems
The golden world; O take me with you,
Lavender clouds, and up there then may in

The light and air my bliss and my grief dissolve!—
But as if frightened off by my foolish plea,
The spell is gone; it’s dark and lonely
Under the heavens I stand, as always.

So come to me, soft slumber; my heart has wished
Too much; but someday, youth, you will lose your glow,
You restless youth, forever dreaming.
Peaceful and cheerful are the aged.

(trans. Kenneth Negus)

 

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July 27, 2017 · 7:48 pm

The Bookshop and The Beach: My Vacation to Maine

Harding Books on Route 1 in Wells, Maine

My family and I went on our annual summer vacation this year to Kennebunk Beach in Maine. This has been our favored destination for the past few years and I thought I would say a few words about my favorite bookshop in Maine and my recent finds there. Harding’s Rare and Used Books is located one town adjacent to Kennebunk, in Wells, Maine on Route 1.  The staff is kind, friendly and very knowledgeable.  I was told by the employees that they buy books every day and their owner, a very nice gentleman named Douglas, also buys books from auctions and dealers.

One realizes this is a serious bookshop when, upon opening the front door, one encounters two gigantic piles of their newest acquisitions.  It took me a while to sift through these piles, but my patience was greatly rewarded by finding a first edition of I, Claudius by Robert Graves. I also dug out a copy of Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and William H. Gass’s Reading Rilke from these piles.

 

The rest of the store is like a maze with rooms of various shapes and sizes piled with books from floor to ceiling.  Harding’s has a wide variety of first editions as well as signed books and they also have  the largest selection of books about New England that I have ever encountered.  I found a first edition copy of Within the Harbor by Sara Ware Bassett, a New England author whose books are set in two Cape Cod villages that she created.  This is an interesting little find that makes visiting this store so much fun.

A view of part of the hard copy fiction books at Harding’s

 

I spent most of my time in the Latin and Ancient Greek, Poetry and Classic Fiction sections.  Among the classic fiction books, I found two titles to add to my ever growing collection of New York Review of Books classics and I also found five Virago Modern Classics to add to my shelves.

My haul from Harding’s

The Latin and Ancient Greek section had a nice selection of Loebs as well as ancient authors in translation.  My favorite find was a dual language edition of Oedipus by Sophocles with an introduction by Thornton Wilder.  The illustrations in this edition are also quite interesting.

I also found in the Ancient Civilization section a copy of Michael Grant’s book on Nero which is in mint condition; not only is it an excellent introduction to this enigmatic and misunderstood emperor (and my favorite), but it also contains some gorgeous color plates to go along with the text.

Among the poetry books I found a hard copy edition of the Collected Poems of W.H. Auden that was only $5.00.  I have to say that all of the books at Harding’s are very reasonably priced, including the first editions and signed books.

But I didn’t spend all of my time in the bookshop.  I also enjoyed the beach very much, worked on my tan and did a little swimming even though the water was quite chilly.  My daughter did some surfing (I only watched and took some pictures.)  My beach reads were Henry Green’s Party Going and Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva—more thoughts on those to come.

Surfing at Kennebunk Beach

Finally, we had some truly fabulous meals in Kennebunk and Kennebunkport.  One of our favorites is David’s KPT in Dock Square whose selection of raw oysters is spectacular and decadent.  It is no surprise that the seafood dishes, in particular, are wonderful no matter the restaurant.  I will spare everyone pictures of my food as well as a picture of myself wearing one of those goofy lobster bibs.  The picture below is a view we had during Sunday Brunch.

Where have you spent your holidays this summer?  Have you found any interesting books or bookshops?

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