Tolkien's household and poetic places

Knight_of_the_woeful_countenance_05424uFAMILY MATTERS: Andrew O'Hehir gives a nice overview of Tolkien's "The Fall of Arthur" in the pages of the New York Times that only stumbles at the very end. A couple of reasons why Tolkien abandoned that poem, which his son Christopher notes in the new book, involved the pressures of work and his family. Tolkien the Elder's interest also seemed to flag as his conception of Middle-earth started to grow.  All sounds pretty reasonable to me. If you've ever tried to compose a long work of fiction or nonfiction, and you have a young family, that line about Tolkien's situation might resonant as strongly for you as it did for me. I can relate to the bard. I can easily see us, side by side in the pub down the road from Merton College, throwing back what's left in our pint glasses.

"I'm stuck!" he says. "I can't get a bleedin' moment to meself  for Arthur!"

Tears pop from my eyes. I pound my fist on the bar.

"Aye John, you dinna hae to tell me!  Barkeep, two more glasses!"

Near the end of his review, O'Hehir thinks Tolkien more likely broke off his work because the alliterative, Anglo-Saxon style of the poem doesn't fit the Arthur of history: "If there was ever any historical cognate to Arthur, he was a Celtic Briton who spoke a language ancestral to modern Welsh and Cornish. To write about him in the Germanic or Anglo-Saxon verse style of later centuries ...  can only have struck this eminent philologist as an uncomfortable linguistic and historical pastiche."

Holy smokes that's fancy. Maybe it's true, but more compelling for me is the fact that in the years when he composed his Arthur fragment, Tolkien and his wife had four kidlings -- two early teens, two pre-teens. I'm sure any attempt to write about Arthur's clash with  Saxon invaders paled beside the battles taking place in the Tolkien house!

OH, THE PLACES YOU'LL GO: A post last week on worthwhile poetry websites drew some nice responses from my friends, Jilanne Hoffmann and Michael Odom. Along with my recommendations:

Red Hen Press

Sarabande Books

Copper Canyon

they suggest a couple more that you should start patronizing:

SPD (Small Press Distribution)

Marick Press

Bookmark them and make a point of dropping in on a weekly (or more frequent) basis. You don't have to do too much, but the small gestures count for so much. They encourage the small publishers to continue on with their sacred work and, who knows? You might find yourself discovering some exciting new voices. Hope you're having an excellent week, friends.

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Angels, Neruda, Odom's poetry and more: a roundup

odom_bookComing soon: What begins Michael Odom's book of poetry "Strutting Attracting Snapping" isn't a poem... it's a picture. A sheet of grid paper with a maze written in pencil. The maze has a "Start" and a "Finish" and a lot of twists and meaningful detours in between... and it's much like the experience of reading Odom's powerful chapbook. Look for a Q & A with the author to appear here, at Call of the Siren, very soon. Young readers: How do we  improve our children's reading ability? I think of that all the time, especially as mine grow older and I realize that I can share more of my book interests with them. There's a great comments thread that you might unspool at Games4Learning and gain some helpful ideas to try at home.

Harper Lee: Won't she live forever? It's been impossible to think of the real Scout as susceptible to time and declining health, but then I learned about her  unfortunate situation with her agent and the copyright of "To Kill a Mockingbird." Rather than brood on that, though, I have a question for Ms. Lee: Why won't you say something about your novel's creation before it's too late? If it's a one-off and you never found the right material to make another, then why not say so? (Plenty of "one and done" authors would find deep consolation in what she has to say.)  On the other hand, if Truman Capote helped her to write it,  why not admit it and give credit where it's due? It might be a sore spot, especially for so many years' recognition as the book's sole author, but if someone's going to have a co-author, they could do far worse than Capote, don't you think?

snake12Holy angels, Batman: The Red Serpent takes a pithy, sardonic look at angels as the first comic book superheroes in a new post. What line did I especially like? This one, on something that angels and superheroes have in common: "Items of clothing that closely resemble lingerie or underwear." Check it out. Definitely worth your time.

Pablo NerudaDeathproof: Pablo Neruda was unearthed to decide whether or not he died from a lethal injection given by Augusto Pinochet's regime. So far, the early tests reveal that he had advanced cancer. If anyone deserves to be called a superhero besides an angel -- see item above  -- it's Neruda. He was a superhero for Chile. Whatever the results of the exhumation -- whether death by cancer or poison -- the same's not true of his poetry.  His poetry's immortal. Bullet-proof. That's what Ilan Stavans points out in a lovely item in the New York Times, and that's what Neruda also says, about poetry's power even in the darkest moments, in "A Song of Despair":

Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost, I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.

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Call of the Siren exclusive: Andrew Frisardi's response

It isn't criticism that irritates--we're all adults here, right?--but what does is criticism that misinterprets and, in the process, misleads potential readers. frisardi-dante-coverWhen poet and translator Andrew Frisardi was on the receiving-end of such treatment for his translation of Vita Nova (Northwestern University Press) in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, he did what anyone would do. He wrote to the editors to set the record straight.

They haven't printed his reply, but he's graciously passed it along to Call of the Siren. Frisardi's reply already appears in the comments thread of the post "Some painful reading," but it also deserves special attention here. Why?  Because I think it's a model example of how to respond if you're ever caught in a similar situation.

Frisardi could very well have let his temper flare, but instead he offers a measured response that's very much in the spirit of other TLS letters (so I can't understand why the editors haven't printed it) and that covers a lot of terrain in a short amount of space:

Sir,

I agree with Adam Elgar’s disagreement with Paul Howard’s review of Anthony Mortimer’s and my editions of Dante’s ‘Vita Nova’. The review was off the mark in a number of ways, not least of which was his characterization of contractions such as ‘don’t’ as ‘modern’. Has Mr Howard read Shakespeare or Donne (who don’t hesitate to use ‘em)? Are the Elizabethans ‘modern’? Has he read Dante? Is he familiar with the very frequent speech-register Florentine diction—including contractions—even in the early poems? As for ‘cool’, the 1828 edition of ‘Webster’s’ says it means ‘manifesting coldness or dislike; chilling; apathetic; as, a cool manner’—a meaning still current, certainly an apt one for the context in the poem he cites, and hardly ‘modern’ or ‘politically correct’. Mr Howard criticizes the choice of adjectives in my translation of ‘Tanto gentile’, too, as being intrusively or self-consciously modern. I have the poem describing Beatrice as ‘open’ and ‘self-possessed’, which actually (as I explain fully in the notes section of the book) are truthful interpretations of the untranslatable words ‘gentile’ and ‘onesta’. Anthony Mortimer gives ‘gentle’ and ‘noble’ for the same words, thus ignoring altogether ‘onesta’, the thirteenth-century meaning of which can be given as ‘dignified’–or ‘self-possessed’. Instead he translates ‘gentile’ twice (and ‘gentle’ is questionable at best as a translation for that word). Neither Mr Mortimer nor Mr Howard ask themselves, apparently, why Dante says in the next lines of ‘Tanto gentile’ that people’s tongues tremble and their eyes don’t dare to look at her as Beatrice approaches. Would that be a normal reaction to someone who is merely ‘gentle and noble’, or was everyone in Florence prone to seizures? Rather, self-possession and openness certainly can be disconcerting, precisely because they are qualities of someone who is totally, vibrantly alive. This fits Dante’s view of Beatrice very well, despite the ‘seven centuries of reverence’ that Mr Elgar rightly points out throws a wet blanket over contemporary readings of the ‘Vita Nova’.

Andrew Frisardi Castiglione in Teverina, Italy

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Some painful reading

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Beata Beatrix, ca 1864-70.Here is the look of a great lady on the verge of death. Here is also the look of something else: What it feels like to read a bad book review.

I love the grim, gray pages of the Times Literary Supplement -- make that grim, grey pages -- even though the reading can get pretty tough at times, especially when you stumble on a bad review. They're not exactly hatchet jobs, but they seem just as pointless.

I was disappointed -- and a bit dismayed -- by a recent TLS piece on two translations of Dante's Vita Nova by a fellow who hasn't finished his doctorate yet.

It didn't bother me that he didn't care for the version by a guy I've worked with before -- Andrew Frisardi -- but it's all the high-minded nonsense in his criticism that's hard to take. It's the I-know-Dante-better-than-Dante-himself tone that all graduate Lit students suffer from (speaking from experience here).

"One wonders," the review says about a modern euphemism Frisardi uses, "whether the quest for modernity extends to political correctness. How else to explain the female subject of 'acts cool' when the Italian has a genderless (etymologically masculine) 'colui'?"

This graf is so full of posturing that I'm not going to waste space on an explanation.

A few lines later, there's a nice backhanded compliment: "Where Frisardi's edition excels is in its use of current scholarship. With over 200 pages of notes... it is surely intended for students, though echoing their speech in the lyric is a questionable strategy."

"it is surely intended..." Good grief.  That sounds like the assessment of someone who never steps outside or takes a break from the books. Or hasn't read David R. Slavitt. Or Lowell's imitations.

I'm adding this to my folder of bad examples of book reviews -- right alongside a ridiculously negative review (also in the TLS) of Arthur Phillips' novel The Tragedy of Arthur by an Elizabethan scholar who didn't think Phillips' Shakespearean verse was Shakespearean enough.

If you're ever the subject of such a review, my friends, please take heart. Even though the printed page gives validity to these pieces, try to work through your feelings and just remember that your most important critic should be you (etymologically neutral).

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