Sunday, January 30, 2022

skyscraper ghazals




Taking a break from Thomas Middleton and learning Swedish, I felt a sudden desire to read some modern poetry, and a name came into my mind: Sheila E. Murphy, a poet I've never read. Thus I found my way to the publisher Unlikely Books and their page for Ghazals 1-59 and Other Poems (2017) by Sheila E. Murphy and Michelle Greenblatt. It includes three of the ghazals and I found them so absorbing that I keep going back to them. 

I suppose it's OK to quote one of them here. 


FORTY-TWO

You hurl stones without a glass house then
You mint coins for parallel tossing.

Factor of two intrudes upon faculty of rest,
A blue wedge between the dust of what is and what isn't.

As the furniture collapsed, we made bowlfuls of
Summer in a retrofit, just right for pin light.

Stalks of leeway green made sugar of
Bitter shoots of limestone flowerings.

The outcrop stone bordered the town like darkness around
Sand scraps in a chipped window repeating visuals.

Culpable beings safe from their mishandling of the incident
All crisscross tensile tulips with common shadings in the sea breeze.

Every eye blindly clatters and closes
During peppery late afternoons gone soon.

Coins wrinkle water when interrupting the smooth face
Of laketop burning at the parting of waters scarce.

In a trench of rubble she hid from him and his
Parameters defined without perfume and stock.

Climbed weight rooms crowd out the irascible;
While interludes charm the whole crown to sleep.

The chiseled space I left between us narrowed and
In small lone plum signs levels meshed to singular.

Caresses occur when souls leave keening to
The crowns of the trees, nestling leaves atop leaves.

The mute city expresses itself by
Tapping out Morse Code to reach the distance.

Amended sacrifice litters the daylight;
Nighttime stages herself in front of a crowd.

Those transatlantic puffs otherwise known as clouds
Hold moisture before letting go to rinse us clean.


*

One journey through the poem could begin with the letter C, the hard C-sound (except in the mute "city" but resumed in its capitalized "Code"). For instance in the sequence coin, crowd, crown, clouds ...

The poem annotates various exchanges through the medium of air: tossed coins, dust, light, perfumes, sand, litter, raindrops, morse code and the discomfort of peppery or bitter taints. 

So first this exchange medium of possible union, caress and gift; but also of possible imposition, intrusion, interruption and mishandling.

The poem begins with a responsibility-free dream image in which "You hurl stones without a glass house". Because the flying pellets, the messages or missiles are only transiting through, their relation to your own responsibility can be shrugged off.

In contrast are solid structures that occupy place and produce separation. The trench of rubble, weight rooms, mute city, chiseled space.  The poem registers a need to judge these standing obliterations of occupied space. But it would like to escape responsibility, to enjoy the common shadings of a breeze, to posit a world in which things happen without our agency: in which furniture collapses and caresses occur and eyes blindly clatter and close. 

It dreams of camping in the ruins. It says "we made bowlfuls" but it doesn't say "we made bowls". However the following line's "retrofit" comments sardonically on our powers of post-rationalization and re-framing: a line of questioning that begins with "Culpable beings safe from their mishandling" and continues through e.g. "amended sacrifice" and "stages herself". So the poem is both celebration and lament. 

*


Sheila E. Murphy, in a conversation with Thomas Fink, describes these poems as "pieces working in the American version of the ghazal". That seems right, the relation to the eastern ghazal tradition is quite distant: these poems are characterized by a space and regularity that recalls a modernist building.  Most traditional features are dropped. What does clearly derive from the eastern tradition is: a poem composed of couplets that are separate from each other, not just visually but in discontinuity of thought, image, story, locus. 

Is there any residual trace of the traditional subject matter of medieval Persian ghazals, e.g. "erotic longing and religious belief or mysticism"? (Quote from the Poetry Foundation glossary .) I do sense the shadow of it. 

Here, for comparison and contrast, is a ghazal by Rumi (Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī, 1207 - 1273), in the English translation of Brad Gooch and Maryam Mortaz: the translation doesn't attempt to render formal features of  the Persian original e.g. refrain words and their rhymes. 


If there’s no trace of love in his heart
Cover him like an angry cloud over the moon

Dry tree, don’t grow in that garden,
Poor thing, left without the shade of a tree

Even if you’re a pearl, don’t separate from this love,
Love is your father and your family

In the world of lovers, a deadly sickness strikes
Each day more painful than the last

If you see the blush of love in someone’s face
Know that he is no longer merely mortal

If you see a reed-flute, bent by love, grab it
Squeeze the reed until you taste the sweetest sugar

Shams of Tabriz lures you into his trap
Don’t look left or right, you can’t resist.


Traditional ghazals are of varying length, between five and fifteen couplets. But Murphy and Greenblatt's ghazals are all the same length: fifteen couplets. (Apparently this particular regularity wasn't in their original plan, but it evolved.)

releasing authorship becomes almost inevitable

says Murphy about collaborative work (gently resisting an invitation to try to disentangle individual contributions). 

The lovely Murphy/Fink exchange makes us wish that Michelle Greenblatt could have been part of it too. She died before the collection was published, and its composition was interrupted by long periods when she was in too much pain to write. It puts another slant on a collection that, judging from the three ghazals I've read, voyages in regions far beyond personal testament. 



 



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Thursday, January 27, 2022

The first few preludes

 



For more years than I care to think I've nurtured the idea of composing 24 Preludes in all the major and minor keys. I mean, how hard can it be? A little more so when you can't write music, have no training in composition and limited self-taught technique on the chosen instrument, the guitar in this case. So treat this as a game, as I do. 

The distinguishing feature is the sequence, not following Chopin's cycle of fifths but a scheme of my own, as described here. The basic idea is that all the intervals between successive keys are different. 

In short, the scheme is:

1. C.  2. B Minor. 3. D flat. 4. B flat minor. 5 D. 6. A. 7. E flat minor. 8. G sharp minor. 
9. E. 10. G minor. 11. F. 12. F sharp minor.
13. C minor. 14. B. 15. C sharp minor. 16. B flat. 17. D minor. 18. A minor. 19 E flat. 20. A flat.
21. E minor. 22. G. 23. F minor. 24. G flat. 

I've composed about fourteen of them, I think. But this was mostly ten plus years ago and I've had to re-learn how to play them, working from distant memory and terrible recordings. 

Anyway to pass a quiet day these are the first five, as well played as I could manage.  (I would have liked to have done six, but the next one is tricky.)


Prelude No 1 in C:

Prelude No 2 in B minor:

Prelude No 3 in D flat:

Prelude No 4 in B flat minor:

Prelude No 5 in D:

Enjoy!

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Saturday, January 22, 2022

Today's Swedish vocabulary. Small pine trees, monsters.



I've reached that stage in learning Swedish when I'm apt to produce lists like this, at first in a not wholly vain attempt to absorb unmemorable vocab, but soon slipping  into a fantasy of encompassing the essense of a language in a single page. These are words or phrases that I've had some reason to tussle with in the past few days; things I've read, mainly. 

ordförråd -- vocabulary. (förråd -- store, stock)
oavsett  -- regardless
beträffar -- concerns
Varför då? -- Why?
Varför då då? -- Why, then?
I själva verket -- As a matter of fact
Sanningen att säga,.. -- To tell the truth, ...
nuläget -- the current situation
dagsläget -- the current situation
överklagades -- was appealed against (klaga -- complain)
ta emot -- receive
emotse, motse -- await   
förutsättning -- prerequisite   (förut -- before)
tillit -- trust (cf lita på
egentlig -- real, true  (also riktig, verklig, faktisk)
verksamhet -- activity, work
unna -- to not begrudge someone something
återhämtning -- recovery
oemotståndlig -- irresistible
myndigheterna -- the authorities (myndig -- commanding, authoritative)
minska  -- tr. reduce, itr. decrease, lessen, decline. Related to minst -- smallest, least
utsatt -- exposed, vulnerable. Used to describe utsatta områden (the vulnerable areas), as designated by police in 2015. These are areas with high poverty and crime, often said to be linked to radicalization and a sense of separation from the rest of Swedish society. 
tillfallet -- the case
tillåtelse -- permission
tillstånd -- a permit. It also means a state, e.g. undantagstillstånd -- state of emergency.
förfrågan -- inquiry
återge -- reproduce (e.g. text)
ange -- state, mention, note
upphovsrätt -- copyright (noun). The adjective is upphovsrättslig. Upphov -- origin, source. Upphovsman -- originator, author, instrigator. 
begränsning -- limitation, restriction
enkom -- solely, purposely, especially, expressly 
martall, margran, marbjörk: small twisted or damaged trees, e.g. dwarf pine. According to SAOB the first element is related to "mara", the witchlike being who causes nightmares (mardrömmar). 
knyta -- to tie, untie (knyta till, knyta upp). Also used to describe the formation in plants of a head or heart or tuber or fruit. "Kålen knyter i goda år fasta hufvuden." "Bönderna började äta äpplen och päron, så snart de knutit sig."
kuva -- subdue (feelings), repress, curb. 

*

The last part was to do with trying to translate a knotty poem by Karin Boye. 


Martall

Här i evig blåst
pinar sig martall upp ur stenen,
kröker sig trött,
knyter sig trotsig,
kryper kuvad.

Svarta mot kvällens stormhimmel
tecknar sig vridna spökkonturer.
Vidunder grips av leda
för vidunder.
Går ett stönande genom de rivna kronorna:
O att se en enda gång
rak emot ljuset
stiga en kungaek,
en gossebjörk,
en gyllene jungfrulönn.

Göm dina drömmar, krympling.
Här är de yttersta skären. Så långt ögat når:
martall. 





Here's the best I can do so far. 


stunted pine


here in endless wind
the stunted pine struggles out of the stone
cowering wearily
knitting itself obstinately
and creeping curbed

black against the evening's stormy sky
outlines of twisted ghost contours
deformity is gripped by revulsion
at deformity
a groaning passes through the riven crowns
oh just once to see
straight up into the light
a kingly oak ascend
a boy-birch
a golden girl-maple

hide your dreams cripple
these are the outermost skerries 
as far as the eye can see
stunted pine.


(Karin Boye, from For the tree's sake (1935))


The main translator problem concerns the word vidunder, which means "monster" or "monsters". The difficulty is to do with cultural change as much as language. 

We're no longer comfortable with the kind of thinking that expresses a pejorative view of people or animals or even trees on the basis of form or appearance. Neither "monster" (conveying visceral horror), nor "cripple", are part of a progressive person's vocabulary.  

That in itself doesn't matter. This is a poem from another era and I don't want to disguise it. 

The English word "monster" still thrives, of course, but in contexts that are distinctly out of key with Boye's poem.

For instance, it's often used as a colourful way of saying "very big" or "very overwhelming": a monster truck, or monster bassline. But a connotation of large size doesn't sit very well in a poem about small, dwarf or stunted pines. 

And when "monster" does refer to a monster, it tends to be in contexts appealing to children. For instance Monster Munch (corn snacks shaped like monsters); or Super Monsters, the Netflix animation for young children ("material unlikely to cause offence") in which charming big-eyed kids flip into charming big-eyed monsters and have the gentlest of adventures. Like modern halloween, the programme appeals to children's love of dressing up and role playing. It also carries a social message: that differentness is to be enjoyed and celebrated, that it's OK to look different. It seeks to defuse the atavistic idea of a "monster" and to make it fun, to purge it of monstrosity. And thus for the best of reasons it seeks to rid society of the sensation of monstrosity that Karin Boye's poem is all about. 

So I felt that "monster" was now a word with exactly the wrong kind of associations. Instead I've used the word "deformity", but I'm not particularly happy with the result. 

*

While thinking about this issue with vidunder, I noticed the word again while leafing through Vredgade vittnen (Angry Witnesses, 1966), an anthology of post-civil-war Spanish poetry translated into Swedish by Francisco J. Uriz and Artur Lundkvist. 

The poem was by Dámaso Alonso (1898 - 1990) and I think it's an interesting pairing. It's from his 1944 collection Hijos de la ira (Children of Wrath). 

Alonso's Spanish text "Monstruos" is here. However,  my text re-translates the Swedish ("Vidunder"). 


Monsters


Each day when I get up 
I make this prayer:

O God, 
don't torment me any more.
Tell me what they mean,
these horrors that encircle me.
I'm hemmed round by monsters
who mutely ask me 
just what I'm asking you.
Who maybe ask you too,
and like me vainly disturb
the silence in your unchanging night
with my heart-wrenching question.
In the stars' half-dusk,
in the sunlight's terrible darkness
hostile eyes spy on me,
grotesque forms keep watch on me,
wounding colours lay traps for me:
it's the monsters, 
I'm hemmed round by monsters!

They don't devour me,
they devour my longed-for rest,
they force me to be an anguish that engenders itself,
they make me into a man,
a monster among monsters. 

No, nothing is as terrifying
as this frantic Dámaso, 
as this yellow centipede when he with all his tentacles
            invokes you madly,
as this indwelling beast
when it melts into a flux of anguish.
No, nothing so monstrous
as this vermin that howls unto you,
as this heart-wrenching question
that now affronts you with vociferous groans,
that now says to you:
-- O God,
don't torment me any more,
tell me what they mean,
these monsters that encircle me
and their inner terror that moans to you in the night.


Alonso's poem is a discovery: It is I who am the monster. 

Likewise, though more implicitly, Boye's poem is self-directed: the horror of deformity is her own agonizing consciousness of failing to measure up to an ideal form.


*

Tomas Tranströmer was less spooked than Karin Boye when he wrote about this bog pine: 

Den låga tallen på myren håller upp sin krona: en mörk trasa.
Men det man ser är ingenting
mot rötterna, det utspärrade, dolt krypande, odödliga eller halvdödliga
rotsystemet.

The squat pine in the swamp holds up its crown: a dark rag.
But what you see is nothing
compared to the roots, the widespread, secretly creeping, immortal or half-mortal 
root system.

(from "Några minuter" ("A few minutes") in the collection Mörkerseende (1970), translation by Robin Fulton)

And Evert Taube's martall is positively celebratory:

Men hej, alla vänner som gästa min ö!
Jag är både nykter och klok!
När morgonen gryr skall jag vålma mitt hö
och vittja tvåhundrade krok.
Fördöme dig, skymning, och drag nu din kos!
Det brinner i martallens topp!
Här dansar Calle Schewen med Roslagens ros,
Han dansar när solen går opp!


But hey, all you good friends who visit my isle,
I ’m not quite so mad as I look!
Tomorrow I’ll have my hay hung up to dry
and sift through my two hundred hooks.
It's time for you, night-time, to give up the ghost,
It burns in the stunted pine's top!
Calle Schewen is dancing with Roslagen’s rose,
he’s dancing as sunrise comes up!

(from his song "Calle Schewen's Waltz" (1936))


Here's Axel Borg, also on the skerries, in August Strindberg's novel I havsbandet (By the Open Sea, 1890):

Nu hörde han måsarna skrika och förstod därav att hon summit ut. Han klädde sig därför hastigt, och sedan han samlat sina saker, plockade han fram ur båtgarneringen till en liten frukost, vilken han dukade på mossan under en halvstammig pinjeliknande tall.

Now he heard the gulls screaming and realised that she must have swum out. He therefore dressed himself hurriedly and after collecting his belongings he took out of the boat's hold a little picnic and laid it out on the moss under a pine with a short trunk which looked like a stone-pine. 

(from Chapter 6, translation by Mary Sandbach). 

In the following chapter, Axel actually cuts down a group of these native pines, and carves and wires the only remaining one into the umbrella shape of a stone pine: it's all part of his bizarre plan to fake the mirage of an Italian landscape, up here in the Baltic. 


Get ready for some linguistic tangles.  

The Swedish word tall is the general-purpose word for the native pine Pinus sylvestris, the same species that is called Scots Pine in the UK. In Norwegian the equivalent term is furu and in Danish fyrretræ

[Obviously these latter words are related to the word "fir", a word that is used in conflicting ways by English speakers. By some it's used to mean conifers in general, by others to mean conifers with needles (e.g. not cypresses), by others to mean pine trees specifically (Lambert's treatise calls our tree the Scotch Fir), and by still others to mean all needle trees except pines. Among modern botanists, on the other hand, it means the genus Abies (aka the Silver Firs -- this is the meaning you'll see if you look up Fir on Wikipedia -- a large genus but with no species native to the UK or Scandinavia); also sometimes the New World genus Pseudotsuga (the Douglas Firs).]

Anyway, back to Scandinavia. Swedish also has "fir" words, but they aren't used for the species in general. Fura means a tall long-boled pine, and furu means pine timber, the material you make furniture out of. Meanwhile the Norwegian word tall or toll means a young pine tree. 

SAOB speculates that tall is related to a dialect word tull, which means a young sapling (pine or spruce), especially with reference to the use of the tender shoots (this year's growth) as food for animals, and sometimes people (e.g. to flavour beer or brännvin). So, as often with vernacular tree names, the word origin may go back to some cultural use of the tree. (Like those tree names that originally referred to the tree's fruits: oak, apple, cherry, etc.)

In the Strindberg quotation above, you can see that Swedish also has a "pine" word, pinje, but it means specifically the Stone Pine (Pinus pinea), which might be one of the main Mediterranean species that the Latin word pinus originally designated. 



*

Tall (Scots Pine). Illustration from C.A.M. Lindman's Nordens flora (1901-1905).




It's always worth consulting C.A.M. Lindman's Nordens flora (1901-1905, here in a text revised by Magnus Fries) -- Here's the entry for TALL.  Hopefully I give the general sense but I've unpacked  his long paragraphs and tried to disentangle most of the incapsulation* common in Swedish technical writing. 

The tall or fura (pine, i.e. Scots Pine, Pinus sylvestris) is an impressive conifer. It has a trunk that in favourable conditions for growth is as slender and straight and twig-free as a mast, ascending right up to the crown, which is borne on a few large boughs. It attains a height of 25 - 30 meters, sometimes even 35 meters.

In its upper part it has yellow-red bark, which together with the white trunks of the birches gives to the Nordic woodlands a rare beauty of colour. The pine foliage appears grey-green or blue-green when compared with the spruce's.  [i.e. Norway Spruce, the other large conifer of the Nordic woods.]

One of the features that distinguish the genus Pinus is the strong dimorphism (difference of form) between the shoots. The needles are in pairs (up to five in certain other pine species) on very small "short shoots", which also have a number of membranous brown-grey lower leaves. The short shoot is produced by the long shoot, which bears scattered leaves of a wholly different form, reduced to scales.(See Fig. 2). 

The species of Pinus can also be recognized by the cone scales, which are thicker towards their tips and appear abruptly sheared off with a wart in the centre. The pine cone ripens the year after flowering, in contrast to spruce cones which ripen in the same year. 

The pine is monoecious¤ and wind-pollenated like the spruce, but the young female cones, which (like the spruce) have purple-red scales, are no bigger than a pea (see Fig. 3). The male flowers (the small yellow spike-like groups of stamens, Fig. 5) are massed together to form an oval ring of blooms around the shoot. 

The pine has an extraordinary profusion of pollen, which at the time of flowering covers the ground and pools of water with a sulphur-yellow powder. This phenomenon has acquired the popular name "sulphur-rain". In lands where the pine is rarer than in the north this pollen has been seen on pools that are many miles from the nearest pine tree. Investigations of airborne pollen on lightships+ have shown that pine pollen can be transported a great distance out to sea; even on vessels in the middle of the Atlantic small quantities of pollen have been noted, for the most part pine pollen. 

The pine has deep roots, in contrast to the spruce's shallow spread of roots. It thrives in virtually all kinds of ground. But as a tall stemmed timber tree it prefers free-draining and hence dry and meagre situations, for instance on upland moraine soils, boulder ridges and glacial deltas. Typical plants of these tall-growing open pinewoods are lingon bushes (aka cowberry), ling heather and reindeer lichen. In boggy places the pine becomes dwarfed, i.e. the so-called martall, which at fifty years of age is no higher than a man and has a trunk the thickness of an ordinary walking stick. In general the pine attains a greater age than the spruce.# A pine felled in Dalarna in 1913 showed 654 annual rings. 

Within peatland, especially bogs, people have sometimes unearthed a layer of large pine stumps. These are remnants of pinewoods that in the more arid climate of the Bronze Age were able to grow on the dried-out surface of the peatlands. In the warm post-glacial period pines were able to grow a couple of hundred meters higher than today, as pine stumps found on bare mountainsides bear witness. 

Pine and spruce are our most important trees, economically speaking. Pine timber is firmer and tougher than spruce and lasts well because of its high resin content, particularly in underwater and pile construction.**

The pine occurs here in two forms with different distributions: a northern slender-crowned type (ssp. lapponica) and a southern, more broadly-crowned type (ssp. septentrionalis). The tree has a very extensive distribution in Nordic countries. But like the spruce it is absent from Denmark, large parts of Skåne and much of the southern and south-western coastal regions, as well as the south-westernmost and northernmost parts of Norway. Elsewhere the distribution stretches south of the arctic circle through Europe and northern Asia. The pine came to Nordic lands soon after the last ice age (c. 7000 BCE); as a forest-forming tree it was preceded only by the birch. 

* Incapsulation, also common in German. As a sample, here's a literal rendering of the opening, retaining the Swedish word order:

Genom sin stam, som vid gynnsam växt blir mastlikt smärt och rak och kvistfri ända upp till den av ett fåtal stora grenar uppburna kronan, är tallen eller furan ett imponerande barrträd.

Through its trunk, which with favourable growth becomes mastlikely slender and straight and twig-free right up to the of a few large boughs upborne crown, is the pine or fir an impressive conifer. 

¤ i.e. separate male and female flowers but produced on the same individual plant. In contrast with dioecious (male and female flowers on separate plants) and bisexual (the flowers have both male and female sex organs). The Swedish word for monoecious is sambyggare, which means "living together".

[By the way this handy symbol (¤) appears on Swedish keyboards as shift+4. I don't know what its real purpose is.]

+ The age of lightships is now basically gone. They were used in deep water in the days when existing technology didn't allow sinking foundations for a lighthouse to sufficient depth. There are still three unmanned lightships in use off the coast of Germany. 

# But (though I can't remember the exact details) I believe a Norway Spruce was recently proposed as the oldest living thing so far known -- not an individual tree, but a spreading subterranean root network putting up suckers. 

** Another obsolescent technology. Pile bridges were founded on long poles ("piles") driven into the loose ground until in firm contact with solid substrate. 



smärt -- slender, especially when referring to tall trees (more commonly it's a noun, "pain")
späd -- tender, of shoots  (cf spädbarn -- baby)

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Wednesday, January 19, 2022

Desk journeys

 

Ash leaves. Frome, 18 January 2022.


Join me in a morning wander through the internet. 

Searching for other usages of a Swedish phrase I was struggling with in Dagsmeja, I came to this (in my not very considered translation):

I often toyed with the dizzying thought of being able to choose death myself. Anything else, it seemed to me, just not this degrading workshop death, this machine death with its sterile tangle of hoses, flashing lights, icy alarms and measuring instruments. 

Rather than that the quick crash death, one second of insight, then all over. 

Rather than that the tennis death, a happy step towards the decisive ball and ... 

And rather than that, to be still at the last greedily wide awake, with all my senses alert to draw out the last answer to the last question about the world that's so devilishly being taken from me. 

Bertil Torekull, The Enamelled Heart: A Son's Confessions (Det emaljerade hjärtat: En sons bekännelser, 2002)

I turned back to his epigraphs: Tomas Tranströmer, Gabriela Mistral and William Shakespeare. 

Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), the Chilean poet, may have become known to Swedes of Torekull's generation because of Hjallmar Gullberg's speech when she won the Nobel Prize in 1945. (Mistral, distraught by the suicide of her nephew two years earlier, travelled to Sweden to collect the prize but only out of a sense of duty to the cause of Latin American literature; she was the first winner from that part of the world.) Around the same time Gullberg published two volumes of translations. 

I was surprised how difficult it is to track down good or reputable English translations of Gabriela Mistral poems. I only mean, of course, to read for free online, or tjuvläsa as the Swedish say it ("thief-read"). But still, it suggests a lack of interest in her poetry in the English-speaking world: Mistral translations are by fans (e.g. Ursula K. Le Guin) or with limited availability (e.g. the 2013 bilingual edition of her first book, Desolación, translated by Michael P. Predmore and Liliana Baltra).

Here's what Torekull quoted from her:

Från varje skapelse skall du avlägsna dig med blygsel över att den inte nådde upp till din dröm.

This translated part of item ten in her "Decalogue of the Artist" (1922):

X. De toda creación saldras con vergüenza, porque fué inferior a tu sueño, e inferior a ese sueño maravilloso de Dios, que es la Naturaleza.

X. Each act of creation shall leave you humble, for it is never as great as your dream and always inferior to that most marvellous dream of God which is Nature.

[Source: https://www.poemhunter.com/i/ebooks/pdf/gabriela_mistral_2012_6.pdf . English translation by Doris Dana.]


Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga published under the pseudonym Gabriela Mistral: her pseudonymous surname alluded to the Occitan poet Frédéric Mistral, and also to the Provence wind itself. Trivia fact: "Mistral" is the only surname that appears twice in the list of Nobel laureates: Frédéric Mistral was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1904.


Madre mía, en el sueño
ando por paisajes cardenosos:
un monte negro que se contornea
siempre, para alcanzar el otro monte;
y en el que siempre estás tú vagamente,
pero siempre hay otro monte redondo
que circundar, para pagar el paso
al monte de tu gozo y de mi gozo

 
Mother, in my dream
I walk purplish landscapes:
a black mountain that sways
trying to reach the other mountain;
and you are always in it vaguely,
but there is always another round mountain
to be walked around to pay the toll
to get to the mountain of your joy and mine.


(from "Muerte de mi madre" ("Death of My Mother"). Sourced from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gabriela-mistral -- an article by Santiago Daydí-Tolson that makes me curious to learn more.)


Ash trunks. Frome, 18 January 2022.

THE FOOTPRINT

Of the fleeing man I have
only the footprint,
the weight of his body,
and the wind that blows him...

And the thorn he leaps,
the marsh he crosses,
the bush that hides him
and the sun that reveals him, ...

And his daughter, the blood
that calls out through him: ...
the mouthless cry,
the footprint, the footprint!

Holy sands,
eat up his sign.
Dogs of mist,
cover his track.
Falling night,
swallow in one gulp
the great, sweet
mark of a man.

I see, I count
the two thousand footprints.
I go running, running
across old Earth,
mixing up his
poor tracks with mine,
or I stop and erase them
with my wild hair,
or facedown I lick
away the footprints.

But the white Earth
turns eternal,
stretches endless
as a chain,
lengthens out into a snake,
and the Lord God does not break its back.
And the footprints go on
to the end of the world.

(About half of Ursula K. Le Guin's translation of "La huella", from Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral (2003). Poem source .)


Here's one of her complete poems, with translations in English and Romanian:


BEBER

Al doctor Pedro de Alba

Recuerdo gestos de criaturas
y son gestos de darme el agua.

En el valle de Río Blanco,
en donde nace el Aconcagua,
llegué a beber, salté a beber
en el fuete de una cascada,
que caía crinada y dura
y se rompía yerta y blanca.
Pegué mi boca al hervidero,
y me quemaba el agua santa,
y tres días sangró mi boca
de aquel sorbo del Aconcagua.

En el campo de Mitla, un día
de cigarras, de sol, de marcha,
me doblé a un pozo y vino un indio
a sostenerme sobre el agua,
y mi cabeza, como un fruto,
estaba dentro de sus palmas.
Bebía yo lo que bebía,
que era su cara con mi cara,
y en un relámpago yo supe
carne de Mitla ser mi casta.

En la Isla de Puerto Rico,
a la siesta de azul colmada,
mi cuerpo quieto, las olas locas,
y como cien madres las palmas,
rompió una niña por donaire
junto a mi boca un coco de agua,
y yo bebí, como una hija,
agua de madre, agua de palma.
Y más dulzura no he bebido
con el cuerpo ni con el alma.

A la casa de mis niñeces
mi madre me llevaba el agua.
Entre un sorbo y el otro sorbo
la veía sobre la jarra.
La cabeza más se subía
y la jarra más se abajaba.
Todavía yo tengo el valle,
tengo mi sed y su mirada.
Será esto la eternidad
que aún estamos como estábamos.

Recuerdos gestos de criaturas
y son gestos de darme el agua.


This poem has been turned into a song by Maggy and Luna Negra:




English translation by H.R. Hays:

Drinking

I remember people’s gestures,
They were gestures of giving me water.
 
In the Valley of Rio Blanco
Where the Aconcagua rises,
I went to drink, I leapt to drink
In the whip of a waterfall
That fell in a stiff mane
And broke white and rigid.
I glued my mouth to the foaming
And the blessed water burnt me,
And for three days my mouth was bleeding
From that drink of the Aconcagua.
 
In the country of Mitla,
A day of cicadas, of sun and of walking,
I bent to a pool and an Indian came
To hold me over the water.
And my head, like a fruit
Was between the palms of his hands.
I drank and what I was drinking
Was my face and his face together
And in a flash I knew
That my race was the flesh of Mitla.
 
On the Island of Puerto Rico
At the time of the blue-filled siesta,
My body at rest, the waves in a frenzy,
And the palms like a hundred mothers,
A little girl gracefully opened
A cocoanut close to my mouth
And I drank as a daughter,
Her mother’s milk, milk of the palmtrees.
And I have drunk no sweeter
With the soul nor with the body.
 
In the house of my childhood,
My mother brought me water.
Between one drink and another,
I looked at her over the jar.
My head I raised higher and higher
The jar sank lower and lower.
And still I keep the valley
I keep my thirst and her look.
This shall be eternity
For we are still as we were.
 
 I remember people’s gestures,
They were gestures of giving me water.

Romanian translation by Paul Alexandru Georgescu:

A bea

Păstrez în amintire gesturile
Acelor ce mi-au dat – ofrandă – apa.

În valea Rio Blanco izvorăşte
neastâmpăratul Aconcagua, acolo
vroind să beau, m-am repezit la apa
unei cascade ce-n şuviţe albe
şi îngheţate-şi resfira şuvoiul.

Lipindu-mi gura fremătândă,
m-a ars ca o licoare fermecată.
Trei zile buzele mi-au sângerat de apa
Ce am sorbit atunci din Aconcagua.

În câmpul Mitla, într-o zi cu soare,
cu mers, şi greieri, m-am plecat asupra
unei fântâni, când a venit spre mine
un indian. A vrut să mă ajute
şi, sprijinindu-mă deasupra apei,
el capul mi l-a susţinut aşa cum
oferi un fruct, cu mâinile-amândouă.
Eu beau şi-n apa ceea era chipul
şi-al lui şi-al meu. Atunci înţeles-am
ca într-un fulger, că necunoscutul
din Mitla, indianul, era carne
din neamul meu străvechi, de la-nceputuri.

În insula numită Puerto Rico,
odihna copleşită de albastru,
trup liniştit, talazuri zbuciumate
şi-o sută de palmieri, părând o sută
de mame. O fetiţă-n joacă sparse
nuca de cocos, dăruindu-mi apa
palmierului, maternă, roditoare.
Şi niciodată-asemenea dulceaţă
nu am băut, cu sufletul şi trupul.

Îmi amintesc, pe când eram copilă,
Că mama-mi aducea ea însăşi, apa
între o gură şi-alta, aplecată
pe vasul de-argilă,-i vedeam faţa.
Cu cât se ridica mai tare mâna-i,
cu-atât se cobora mai jos ulciorul.
Am încă-n suflet valea înverzită,
simt setea şi privirea mamei… Poate
aceasta-i veşnicia:
să fim încă
aşa precum am fost odinioară.

Păstrez în amintire gesturile
Acelor ce mi-au dat – ofrandă – apa.





Finally, a bit of Frédéric Mistral:


“I am the fig-tree on the barren mountain;
And thou, mine own, art the reviving fountain!
Surely it would suffice me, could I feel
That, once a year, I might before thee kneel,
And sun myself in thy sweet face, and lay
My lips unto thy fingers, as to-day!”

Trembling with love, Mirèio hears him out,
And lets him wind his arms her neck about
And clasp her as bewildered. Suddenly,
Through the green walk, quavers an old wife’s cry:
“How now, Mirèio? Are you coming soon?
What will the silk-worms have to eat at noon?”

As ofttimes, at the coming on of night,
A flock of sparrows on a pine alight
And fill the air with joyous chirruping,
Yet, if a passing gleaner pause and fling
A stone that way, they to the neighbouring wood,
By terror winged, their instant flight make good;

So, with a tumult of emotion thrilled,
Fled the enamoured two across the field.
But when, her leaves upon her head, the maid
Turned silently toward the farm, he stayed,—
Vincen,—and breathless watched her in her flight
Over the fallow, till she passed from sight.

(The end of Canto II of Mirèio (1859) by Frédéric Mistral, translated by Harriet Waters Preston. The full twelve cantos are here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56008/56008-h/56008-h.htm .)


Gibbous moon and gingko. Frome, 14 January 2022.

*

Here's another internet wandering a couple of days later, and a bit more telescoped:

James Oswald (Scottish composer), "Ettrick Banks" (heard on Radio 3 Breakfast).
Allan Ramsay (1684 - 1758, wigmaker, poet, bookseller and creator of the first circulating library) was the first to publish the words of "Ettrick Banks", in 1724.
In the poem (text below) the lover pleads with a maid at Ettrick Water (Selkirk), to go with him to the Highlands (Loch Earn, Perthshire).
Allan Ramsay (1713 - 1784, portrait painter), eldest son of the poet.
Studied in London under Hans Hysing (1678 - 1752 or 1753), Swedish portrait painter who worked in London.
Hysing came to London in 1700 to work as studio assistant to Mikael Dahl (aka Michael Dahl), another Swedish portrait painter, (1656 or 1659 - 1743). 
Both Swedes appear in the 1735 painting by Gawen Hamilton, "A Conversation of Virtuosis at the King's Arms".
Mikael Dahl was friends with the poet Christoffer Leijoncrona (1662 - 1710), Secretary of the Swedish Legation. 

Ettrick Banks

On Ettrick banks, ae simmer's night,
⁠At gloamin', when the sheep drave hame,
I met my lassie, braw and tight,
⁠Come wading barefoot a' her lane.
My heart grew light;—I ran,—I flang
⁠My arms about her lily neck,
And kiss'd and clapp'd her there fu' lang,
⁠My words they were na monie feck.

I said, My lassie, will ye gang
⁠To the Highland hills, the Erse to learn?
I'll gi'e thee baith a cow and ewe,
⁠When ye come to the brig o' Earn:
At Leith auld meal comes in, neer fash,
⁠And herrings at the Broomielaw;
Cheer up your heart, my bonnie lass,
⁠There's gear to win ye never saw.

A' day when we ha'e wrought eneugh,
⁠When winter frosts and snaw begin
Soon as the sun gaes west the loch,
⁠At night when ye sit down to spin,
I'll screw my pipes, and play a spring:
⁠And thus the weary night will end,
Till the tender kid and lamb-time bring
⁠Our pleasant simmer back again.

Syne, when the trees are in their bloom,
⁠And gowans glent o'er ilka fiel',
I'll meet my lass amang the broom,
⁠And lead you to my simmer shiel.
Then, far frae a' their scomfu' din,
⁠That mak' the kindly heart their sport,
We'll laugh, and kiss, and dance, and sing,
⁠And gar the langest day seem short.



A Conversation of Virtuosis at the Kings Arms, 1734-35 painting by Gawen Hamilton

[Image source: National Portrait Gallery . Creative Commons.]

Hans Hysing (age about 56) is second from left, Mikael Dahl (age about 75, seated) third from left. Gawen Hamilton himself is second from right, wearing a cap not a wig. The King's Arms was in New Bond Street.

Mikael Dahl's portrait of Françoise (Frances) Leijoncrona, the English wife of Christoffer Leijoncrona (1700)




Grafskrifft öfwer den Stoora Biörnen hwilcken af H. K. M:tz
wäldiga arm wijdh Kongzöhr blef nederlagd

Jag i thee wilda fält ther Atlas döttrar blänkte,
uthi mitt öpna swalg thee thama diuren sänkte,
Jag skräckte all den tracht, Jag fruchta aldrig änn
för Jägar-hund och horn, och eij för strijdbar Männ;
Till thes en högre krafft mig rasand Modet stäckte
Tå Norre Werldens pracht mitt wilda hierta brächte.
Och är mitt enda roos, then hiälten mig fält haar,
Som för sin foot till Jord, stört mången hielteskar.


A poem by Christoffer Leijoncrona. The poem is an Epitaph on a Large Bear (in the bear's own voice). Seventeenth-century Swedish is a bit too tricky for me to translate, but the gist is that the bear roamed at large and had no fear of hound or horn or huntsman until he encountered a higher power: the mighty arm of Karl XI (this was at a hunt at Sickelsjö, near Arboga in Västmanland, in about 1682). The bear was stuffed and kept in the royal palace in Stockholm.  (Source and information: Daniel Möller's 2011 University of Lund thesis on animal funerary poems: https://lucris.lub.lu.se/ws/files/5447665/1963879.pdf .)


Hans Hysing's portrait of George Bubb Dodington, 1st Baron Melcombe


The subject of the portrait is not quite certain. If it is indeed the young George Bubb, aged about twelve, this would date the portrait to about 1703. 

One of Robert Browning's Parleyings (1887) is with George Bubb Dodington. The poem (so far as I can understand it) is about political integrity and takes Dodington to task for feathering his own nest; but it argues that his relatively naive professions of public interest would fool no-one today. (The poem's real target was apparently Disraeli.)

 Here's the first sentence:

Ah, George Bubb Dodington Lord Melcombe, -- no,
Yours was the wrong way! -- always understand,
Supposing that permissibly you planned
How statesmanship -- your trade -- in outward show
Might figure as inspired by simple zeal
For serving country, king and commonweal,
(Though service tire to death the body, tease
The soul from out an o'ertasked patriot-drudge)
And yet should prove zeal's outward show agrees
In all respects -- right reason being judge --
With inward care that, while the statesman spends
Body and soul thus freely for the sake
Of public good, his private welfare take
No harm by such devotedness. 






Allan Ramsay junior's portrait of Allan Ramsay senior.















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Monday, January 17, 2022

Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women (1613-14 or 1619-23?)


Julie Cray Leong's costumes for Bianca


[Image source: http://juliecraycostumes.com/women-beware-women . All images from the site of costume designer Julie Cray Leong, for a Shakespeare Theater Company / Academy for Classical Acting production of Women Beware Women (c. 2016: I couldn't find any details of the actors). Initially Bianca wore a simple white dress. Later she wore a richer dress that graphically showed the Duke's hands all over her.]


I'd better emphasize that I'm embarrassingly ignorant of Thomas Middleton's writing. Lots of it is extant: see for instance the many plays on Chris Cleary's very useful site:  https://tech.org/~cleary/middhome.html . One of the few that isn't available there, unfortunately, is Women Beware Women. (There is a plain online text here: https://www.poetryexplorer.net/poem.php?id=10107691 .) Given the ignorance, I of course have no hope of saying anything here that hasn't already been said.

The fact is, I come to Middleton with a bucketload of prejudices. I'm passionate about Shakespeare, but if I can't read Shakespeare I'd rather read plays by early contemporaries: Marlowe and Kyd, for instance. Those who had the poor taste to insist on continuing to write plays when Shakespeare had already scaled the heavens don't get much of a look in with me. At least until we are safely into another era altogether (i.e the Restoration). 

But, well, it's hardly Middleton's fault that he was sixteen years younger than Shakespeare. And actually it's fascinating how divergent Women Beware Women is from Shakespeare's conception of tragedy. It arrives at a serious engagement with human questions but it goes about it in ways that seem quite alienating to a Shakespeare fan, a refusal of expected naturalism, a withholding of confidences about the characters we're watching.

*


MOTHER. Thy sight was never yet more precious to me;
Welcome with all th' affection of a mother,
That comfort can express from natural love!
Since thy birth-joy—a mother's chiefest gladness,
After sh'as undergone her curse of sorrows—
Thou wast not more dear to me than this hour
Presents thee to my heart: welcome again!

LEANTIO [Aside]. 'Las, poor affectionate soul, how her joys speak to me!
I have observ'd it often, and I know it is
The fortune commonly of knavish children
To have the lovings't mothers. 

MOTHER.                                What's this gentlewoman?

LEANTIO. O, you have named the most unvaluedst purchase
That youth of man had ever knowledge of!
As often as I look upon that treasure,
And know it to be mine . . .

[Act I, Scene 1, lines 1-31]


So it starts, rather slowly. A Romeo and Juliet come back to reality after a romantic elopement, but romance is left behind, and this Romeo, crucially, is not from a house "alike in dignity".

Leantio is apparently a man whom women are fond of, and his mother's greeting is effusive. It's odd that his first words are an aside. Middleton has no qualms about freezing the action for an aside, at any moment. (Isabella even has an aside in the middle of performing the masque (V.2.102-105), with the eyes of the on-stage audience upon her.) 

This particular aside registers Leantio's guilty consciousness that he's about to disappoint his mother when she learns of his equivocal behaviour. Is he really knavish? Middleton's drama doesn't really interest itself in individual character or inherent moral status but in how people behave in given circumstances of class and economy. In these circumstances both Leantio and his mother understand Bianca as a prize beyond the expectations of their modest place in society. Leantio tries to emphasize to his mother that it's a vast stroke of good fortune. (Leantio is a "factor", a merchant's agent -- which, we infer, is why he went to Venice.) His mother isn't taken in by Leantio's braggadoccio. She says (what he probably knows already, but won't admit) that Bianca is a prize he should not have collected, it will be beyond him to hold on to her -- and so indeed it proves. [Perhaps she remembers what happened to the factor Lorenzo in Decameron IV.5, source of Keats' Isabella.]

Leantio's insecurity is apparent: he doesn't want his mother going on about what wives might reasonably expect, in case it awakens "spirits" in Bianca, or persuades her to act by "the licentious swindge of her own will". 

Despite the insecurity, he allows himself to imagine that theirs will be a perfect bourgeois household full of children, the envy of the barren rich. But Leantio's often rather browbeaten way of talking about life doesn't suggest he's really cut out for happiness.

Bianca is eloquently silent during this long colloquy. When she does finally speak, it's to say just such compliant things as Leantio would wish. It looks too good to be true, and hints that Bianca, not Leantio, controls the course of events here. Not in herself, but in the fact of her superior condition, that can't just be wished away.  There's an economic instability in the situation. 

[BIANCA ...] I have forsook friends, fortunes, and my country,
And hourly I rejoice in't: here's my friends,
And few is the good number.   

She means just Leantio and his mother (who has not in fact been especially welcoming). This can't last. 

[John Mc Elroy and Ann Christensen write very well about this opening scene -- links below.]

Love or lust is an economic fact that has to be accommodated in one way or another, but lies beyond explanation. What did Bianca see in Leantio? And later, what does Livia see in Leantio? Why does Hippolito, who could pick and choose, desire his own niece? No answer is offered. The play is interested in what these desires lead to, but not in why they settled on one person or another. And especially how they lead to the inexorable logic of money transactions. "All preferment / That springs from sin and lust, it shoots up quickly", Leantio comments (III.2.47); and a few lines later, Livia says smugly "I have enough to buy me my desires" (III.2.63). 

The play that begins in this modest lodging will end in a festivity at the highest end of Florence society. That movement is a large part of what the play's about. The festivity is of course strewn with corpses. There's an element of cautionary tale in this particular tragedy. And yet after all it's a lot of fun. A comitragedy, an ensemble piece (rather well plotted and structured: consider how all the main characters receive about the same amount of focus): it ought to be easy, I fancy, for a company to turn Women Beware Women into an absorbing evening's entertainment.


*

Here's a schematic of who kills who in Women Beware Women:


DUKE   

Sets up the death of Leantio (IV.1). 

Killed by Bianca (accidentally) (V.2).

BIANCA 

Promotes the death of Leantio: because she surely anticipates this outcome when she recounts his "dangerous" behaviour to the Duke in IV.1. This isn't 100% certain, but the natural inference to be drawn from her emphatic "I love peace, sir" is that she senses what the Duke's going to do and wants to  underscore her approval of by all means necessary

Attempts to kill the Cardinal but fails. Accidentally kills the Duke instead (V.2). 

Kills herself (V.2).

LEANTIO

Threatens Bianca (and the Duke, in absentia) with a vengeance that sounds like it might take the form of violence (IV.1). 

Killed by Hippolito (IV.2)

HIPPOLITO

Kills Leantio (IV.2). Applauds Isabella's killing of Livia (V.2). 

Killed by Guardiano (V.2) who has applied poison to the Cupids' arrows, though Hippolito actually finishes the job himself by running onto the guard's weapon. 

ISABELLA

Kills Livia (V.2) with poisoned smoke. 

Killed by Livia (V.2) with flaming gold.

LIVIA

Kills Isabella (V.2) with flaming gold.

Killed by Isabella (V.2) with poisoned smoke. 

GUARDIANO

Conspires with Livia to kill Hippolito and Isabella (IV.2), and instructs Ward in some of the details (V.1). 

Posthumously kills Hippolito with his plan B (the poisoned arrows). (V.2)

Killed by falling into his own trap (intended for Hippolito) (V.2)

WARD

Co-opted by Guardiano to assist in killing Hippolito (V.1), though as usual it's unclear how fully Ward grasps what's going on. 

Runs away (V.2) and survives. 

CARDINAL

Could his mention of "vengeance" at the end of IV.3 indicate a personal impulse to resort to violence against the Duke/Bianca (which is what Bianca seeks to pre-empt). But given his genuine sorrow at their demise (V.2) this seems unlikely. 

Survives assassination attempt by Bianca (V.2)

*

These events come thick and fast at the end. I wanted to check my impression that virtually everyone who gets killed is also a killer, at least in intention. 

The exception, probably, is Leantio (from whose death all else follows). His wild words do express vengeful hatred towards Bianca and the Duke, but they don't suggest that he has formulated any definite plan. Despite his innocence in that regard, his death doesn't arouse much sympathy in us. 

*

And yet Women Beware Women isn't just black comedy. There are times when a different kind of tension holds us, a horrified interest in Livia telling lies to her niece to persuade her into incest, for instance. Above all, the chess scene (II.2) where Bianca is prised away by Livia and Guardiano and subjected to the Duke's implacably calm powerplay (rape ? seduction ? no single word really covers it; King David's claim of Bethsabe in Peele's David and Bethsabe is a pretty close parallel). 

But we have to maintain a quite difficult stance, of pity for the victims (both as themselves, and as representative of all others snared in this way) balanced by observations that significantly reduce our good will toward them. An Isabella who is apparently not bothered that her lover thinks he's committing incest. A Bianca who embraces her role as the Duke's mistress with increasing enthusiasm and ruthlessness. 


Bianca and Leantio

[Image source: http://juliecraycostumes.com/women-beware-women .]

I found these useful (in chronological order):

Charles A.Hallett, “The Psychological Drama of Women Beware Women, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 12, no. 2, [Rice University, Johns Hopkins University Press], 1972, pp. 375–89, https://doi.org/10.2307/449900. Illuminatingly argues for the importance of the concept of cynicism in the play. That is, an accommodation to circumstances, a feeling that no moral values are worth upholding. Interprets Livia's behaviour as arising from ingrained cynicism, and sees Bianca as tragically plummeting into cynicism when the Duke's authority overwhelms her. 

John F. Mc Elroy, “The White Devil, Women Beware Women, and the Limitations of Rationalist Criticism.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 19, no. 2, [Rice University, Johns Hopkins University Press], 1979, pp. 295–312, https://doi.org/10.2307/450210.  Percipient about Leantio's character and on the balance in the play between the simple judgments of a comic mode and a more serious way of seeing the action. But suggests that our coolness of response to Middleton's characters (e.g. their deaths don't affect us with horror or pity) is a limitation of the author's approach.

Anthony B. Dawson, “Women Beware Women and the Economy of Rape”Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 27, no. 2, [Rice University, Johns Hopkins University Press], 1987, pp. 303–20. Writes powerfully about the economic determinism that makes Bianca embrace her new role as the Duke's mistress, and also inhibits the freedoms of Isabella and Livia. Sees the crazy denouement as a failure to fully realize the insights of the earlier part of the play, as many others do. (A view I'd dissent from, as does Ann Christensen.)

Ann C. Christensen, “Settling House in Middleton’s ‘Women Beware Women.’” Comparative Drama, vol. 29, no. 4, Comparative Drama, 1995, pp. 493–518. On the failed households in the play, and contemporary tension between public and private spheres, e.g. Leantio's perception of an opposition between going out to work and keeping a home.


Bianca and the Duke

[Image source: http://juliecraycostumes.com/women-beware-women .]

I suppose if I say that Middleton is no poet then I betray a very limited idea of poetry, but I think you'll know what I mean. His verse looks like it was written fast and with minimal interest in being "poetic", though it's often pithy, observant and forceful. It's an excellent vehicle for a continuous subtle movement of ideas and assertions (both true and deceptive); it allows the drama to flow vividly. But it doesn't throw up many anthologizable flowers. You can go on for pages without ever being recalled to the fact that you're reading iambic pentameters (which anyway he's often pretty casual about, metrically speaking). 

Still, I'll have a go at an anthology, one quote from each character.


FABRITIO

On with your mask, for 'tis your part to see now
And not be seen. Go to, make use of your time;
See what you mean to like; nay, and I charge you,
Like what you see. Do you hear me? There's no dallying,
The gentleman's almost twenty, and 'tis time
He were getting lawful heirs, and you a-breeding on 'em. [I.2.74-79]

ISABELLA

                         Oh the heart-breakings
Of miserable maids, where love's enforced!
The best condition is but bad enough:
When women have their choices, commonly
They do but buy their thraldoms, and bring great portions
To men to keep 'em in subjection --
As if a fearful prisoner should bribe
The keeper to be good to him, yet lies in still,
And glad of a good usage, a good look sometimes. ...  [I.2.164-172]

MOTHER

                       Trust me, y'are too blame,
His absence cannot last five days at utmost.
Why should these tears be fetched forth? Cannot love
Be e'en as well expressed in a good look,
But it must see her face still in a fountain? 
It shows like a country maid dressing her head
By a dish of water.                             [I.3.65-71]

GUARDIANO

The Duke himself first spied her at the window;
Then in a rapture, as if admiration
Were poor when it were single, beckoned me,
And pointed to the wonder warily
As one that feared she would draw in her splendour
Too soon, if too much gazed at.           [II.2.8-13]

LIVIA

I know y'are alone too; why should not we
Like two kind neighbours, then supply the wants
Of one another, having tongue-discourse,
Experience in the world, and such kind helps
To laugh down time, and meet age merrily?  [II.2. 148-152]

DUKE

I am not here in vain; have but the leisure
To think on that, and thou'lt be soon resolved.
The lifting of thy voice is but like one
That does exalt his enemy, who proving high
Lays all the plots to confound him that raised him.
Take warning, I beseech thee; thou seem'st to me
A creature so composed of gentleness,
And delicate meekness -- such as bless the faces
Of figures that are drawn for goddesses,
And makes art proud to look upon her work --
I should be sorry the least force should lay
An unkind touch upon thee.          [II.2.332-343]

BIANCA

Make me not bold with death and deeds of ruin
Because they fear not you; me they must fright.
Then am I best in health. Should thunder speak
And none regard it, it had lost the name
And were as good be still. I'm not like those
That take their soundest sleeps in greatest tempests;
Then wake I most, the weather fearfullest,
And call for strength to virtue.       [II.2.349-356]

LEANTIO

Oh thou the ripe time of man's misery, wedlock,
When all his thoughts, like over-laden trees,
Crack with the fruits they bear, in cares, in jealousies.
Oh that's a fruit that ripens hastily,
After 'tis knit to marriage; it begins
As soon as the sun shines upon the bride
A little to show colour.                  [III.1.271-277]

HIPPOLITO

Come, my life's peace. I have a strange office on't here:
'Tis some man's luck to keep the joys he likes
Concealed for his own bosom, but my fortune
To set 'em out now, for another's liking --
Like the mad misery of necessitous man
That parts from his good horse with many praises,
And goes on foot himself . . .        [III.2.189-195]

SORDIDO

Troth, I think, master, if the truth were known,
You never shot at any but the kitchen-wench,
And that was a she-woodcock, a mere innocent,
That was oft lost and cried, at eight and twenty. [III.3.20-23]

WARD

Her father praised her breast, sh'had the voice forsooth; I marvelled she sung so small indeed, being no maid. Now I perceive there's a young chorister in her belly -- this breeds a singing in my head, I'm sure. [IV.2.116-119]

CARDINAL

                       Is this the best
Amends that sin can make after her riots?
As if a drunkard, to appease Heaven's wrath,
Should offer up his surfeit for a sacrifice? 
If that be comely, then lust's offerings are
On wedlock's sacred altar. (IV.3.19-24)     

*


From what I've seen, commentators tend to regard Ward with particular revulsion. I have a rather different impression. I see him as an adolescent who isn't formed into an adult, as someone who is impossibly shy of communicating to any purpose with the adults, but only with his sidekick Sordido. (Naturally he isn't shy with his guardian either, merely drives him mad by constantly fooling around.) He still lives in a world of play, and -- given what the rest of the play shows us -- is refreshingly free of a consciousness of himself as an economic entity. Certainly his self-centredness and obscenity does expose the brute reality that lies beneath the machinations of the other characters, but, in Ward's own case, words are not matched by deeds; he's an ineffective imitator of the adepts (just as when he imitates Hippolito's dancing). His inspection of Isabella is grotesque, but it's Isabella who means to exploit Ward, not vice versa. For all the vain boasting his own sexual experience is minimal (III.3.21-22) and I don't imagine he'd do anything about being pre-emptively "cuckolded" except to sulk and play cat-and-trap. Guardiano is evidently of the same opinion. 

GUARDIANO: Speak, hast thou any sense of thy abuse? Dost thou know what wrong's done thee?
WARD: I were an ass else -- I cannot wash my face, but I am feeling on't. 
GUARDIANO: Here, take this galtrop, then; convey it secretly into the place I showed you; look you, sir, this is the trap-door to't. (V.1.1-6)



A caltrop or "galtrop" (V.1.5)

[Image source: Wikipedia .]


A simple but effective defensive weapon. I haven't managed to source an image of a seventeenth-century one (the one above is apparently Roman, though I find that hard to believe), but the basic tetrahedral design has remained the same for two thousand years. 

You scattered caltrops on the ground as, especially, a defence against mounted troops. It doesn't seem very plausible to me that Hippolito -- or, as it turns out, Guardiano himself -- would actually die from tumbling onto a caltrop. Perhaps we're meant to think that Guardiano poisoned the tips of the caltrop, just as he did with the Cupids' arrows.  




Fruit of the prostrate Mediterranean plant known as Caltrops (Tribulus terrestris), well known to people who walk barefoot.





Caltrops, painfully extracted from my hand after using it to keep my balance on a sand dune near Torrevieja.


Bianca's new dress

[Image source: http://juliecraycostumes.com/women-beware-women .]

I've been reading Women Beware Women and other plays, edited by Richard Dutton in the Oxford English Drama series (1999). 

I paid a pound for it, which I thought was good value to discover Middleton through four of his best plays, and I still think so. But Middleton calls for many explanatory notes, about a dozen per page. I have no problem with the content of these notes, but their format makes extricating the content a hideous business. I've read them all, and I still wonder if it's someone's idea of a joke.


Julie Cray Leong's costumes for Livia and Isabella

[Image source: http://juliecraycostumes.com/women-beware-women .]


Middleton and Rowley: The Changeling:
Middleton: A Chaste Maid in Cheapside:

Complete list of notes on Shakespeare and his contemporaries:












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