Well-trodden ground

 

The Christmas lull in new posts hasn't been entirely down to Christmas revels. I've been rewriting and adding to a number of older posts, especially these:

William Shakespeare (kind of): 1 Henry VI

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2019/01/william-shakespeare-kind-of-1-henry-vi.html

Sir Walter Scott's novels, a brief guide

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2014/07/sir-walter-scotts-novels-brief-guide.html

Scott's Ivanhoe:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2012/03/ivanhoe-librivox.html

Scott's Anne of Geierstein:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2020/11/sir-walter-scott-anne-of-geierstein-1829.html

*

In the course of working on these posts I've of course been reading, and with great delight: the Henry VI plays and Scott's Waverley. 

But this is all well-trodden ground for me, and I've also been yearning for less familiar things. So I've been dipping gradually deeper into Peter Philpott's latest poetry book, Telling the Beads (2020), and since I don't seem to have anything else to share, this seems like a good place to note down one of Peter's structuring sources, the pagan month-names recorded by Bede in his De temporum ratione 15, with their approximate modern equivalents. 

(The Anglo-Saxon names below have seemingly been creatively reverse-engineered from Bede's latinized forms; I'm not sure who should take the credit for that.)

Æftera Gēola      (After-Yule)    = January

Sol-mōnaþ          (Mud-Month, cake month (?))  = February

Hrēþ-mōnaþ        (Month of the goddess  Hrēþ (Rheda in Bede's text). Nothing else is known of her.)   = March

Ēostur-mōnaþ      (Month of the goddess Eostre. Survives in the modern word "Easter") = April

Þrimilce-mōnaþ   (Month of three milkings (per day, as Bede explains)) = May

Ærra Līþa             (Before-Lithe (=midsummer)) =June

Þrilīþa                   (Three-Lithe . . . intercalary days at midsummer?)

Æftera Līþa          (After-Lithe) = July

Weod-mōnaþ        (Weed-month) = August

Hālig-mōnaþ         (Holy month) = September

Winterfylleth         (Winter full (i.e. full moon) -- the first full moon of winter, Bede explains) =October

Blōt-mōnaþ          (Month of blood-sacrifice) =November

Ærra Gēola           (Before-Yule) = December

More intercalary days at Yule? 

Elsewhere Bede mentions Mōdraniht (Night of the Mothers) as a (sacrificial?) feast on the day we call Christmas Eve.

These twelve months seem to have been lunar, hence about 29.5 days each, hence totalling just 354 days, which could account for intercalary days (?) at midsummer and yule. 

Further information:

https://wyrtig.com/EarlyGardens/British/LaborsOfTheMonths/AngloSaxonMonthNames.htm

*

One of other key inputs to Telling the Beads, Peter tells us, is Bertolt Brecht's poetry collection Die Hauspostille (1927; it has been given the English titles Manual of Piety and Devotions for the Home). Here's the beginning of one of the best-known poems (and the final one in the collection), "Vom armen B.B.":

Of poor B.B.     

I, Bertolt Brecht, came from the black forests.

My mother bore me into the city

while I was in her womb. And till my dying day

the chill of the woods will lie there inside me.

In the asphalt city I’m at home. From the beginning

supplied with every last sacrament:

with newspapers – and tobacco – and with brandy.

To the end, suspicious, lazy, content.

I’m amicable with the people I meet. I don

a bowler hat in just the way they do.

I say: they’re animals with a quite peculiar smell.

And I say: so what – I am too.

Translation by Martyn Crucefix. The full text is here: https://martyncrucefix.com/2015/08/25/a-new-translation-of-brechts-of-poor-b-b/

Peter says he's most familiar with Brecht's poems in translations by Amos Weisz. 

Here's Amos Weisz's "poor b.b.": http://www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/awe25.html

Here's an extract from "The Ballad of the Pirates" (Ballade von den Seeräubern). 

Across a violet horizon

Caught in the ice by pale moonlight

On pitch-black nights when mist is rising

And half the ship is lost from sight

They lurk like wolves between the hatches

And murder for the fun of it

And sing to keep warm in their watches

Like children drumming as they shit.

Oh heavenly sky of streaming blue!

Enormous wind, the sails blow free!

Let wind and heavens go hang! But oh

Sweet Mary, let us keep the sea!

They take their hairy bellies with them

To stuff with food on foreign ships

Then stretch them out in sweet oblivion

Athwart the foreign women's hips.

In gentle winds, in blue unbounded

Like noble beasts they graze and play

And often seven bulls have mounted

Some foreign girl they've made their prey.

Oh heavenly sky of streaming blue!

Enormous wind, the sails blow free!

Let wind and heavens go hang! But oh

Sweet Mary, let us keep the sea!

Extract from the full translation (not sure who did it) that I found on Amanda Kendal's blog:

https://thevoluptuousmanifesto.blogspot.com/2016/10/ballade-von-den-seeraubern-ballad-of.html

Here's a bit of "Legend of the Dead Soldier" (Legende vom toten Soldaten):

They filled him up with a fiery schnapps

To spark his sluggish heart

And shoved two nurses into his arms

And a half-naked tart.

He’s stinking so strongly of decay

That a priest limbs on before

Swinging a censer on his way

That he may stink no more.

In front the band with oompah-pah

Intones a rousing march.

The soldier does like the manual says

And flicks his legs from his arse.

Their arms about him, keeping pace

Two kind first-aid men go

Or else he might fall in the shit on his face

And that would never do.

(Translation by John Willett. The full text is here: https://www.socialistproject.org/war-and-imperialism/legend-of-the-dead-soldier/ .)

*

But it occurs to me that though I've dipped into two of the major sources of Telling the Beads I haven't quoted any Peter Philpott's own text, so here (since it's the appropriate time of year) is the "month" part of After-Yule:

(7) After Yule

Let's start by making a good old mess

fill up our mouths with sweetness still

the sun has told us she will return

start in this world please not some other

humble & contaminated is how we live

the urge is to keep alive not pure

greyness a good vast screen -- pro

ject upon whatever strikes -- oh

fudge it & make it, this is poesis

you don't find the blessed things

you make them up from the same

old words trailing their rot behind

drifts of dead leaves still slobbering

fraying into indescribable dust

savour it & worship it -- new life

will spring whatever we do (most

ly -- and that may be everything)

whatever end we aim ourselves at

"Another economy flux: the evidence richer growing emerges, omnivorous little all."

more never imagined

freed finally informs

ruined world constraint

sometimes re-emergent pronouns

new constraints

ridiculous subjects

                                -- maybe

                                                -- guess

                               

                                                   no reason postponed

                                                   no purpose choosing

                                                   not imagined things

                                                   freed finally beauties

                                                   yes

Peter describes the format in his introduction:  "Each month begins with a text composed of a poem (in a simple strophic form to be used for that month), and then an oracular sentence and a further short poem in an open field form. These latter two programmatically employ vocabulary taken from Wound Scar Memories" [an earlier collection].  

winter foliage / whitsun

Beech, January 30, 2017

5. future foliage


how to recognize trees in winter – by the buds
on their leafless twigs. do they have scales, half cupped,
or no scales, protected by matted hair? “We can
not name what barely we’ve begun to know.”
as in winter we’ve nothing but what’s to come
to recognize it by. how very fast it all went,
last yellow fronds on spears, all long fallen, having
been ravished by flaring colours, say: the most beautiful
ravished you. left you a shell, or left you behind
as a shell in chill, so shape something, sharpish, but when?
listen: if there’s so little time, there’s little choice
but to relocate memory to the future, postpone
the naming of what barely we’ve begun to know, and not
let a single stirring of a leaf – which today has vanished
(where to?) and which tomorrow will return – go unseen.




Monika Rinck, one of the six poems in "the humours of foliage", translated by Nicholas Grindell.


http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/six-poems-monika-rinck/




It was Amos Weisz's translations that got me really interested in Monika Rinck. Here's one of them ("Pfingstrosen" in German) :


Whitsun roses

in all phases of foliation the clusters nest,
loaded packets, dense, tight, and mute
squats in buds the launch for fats
centres clad in purple and / or white
there live back-to-back petals bent
on nutty stalks and blossom out.
when it started raining, when I
held the heavy head at the stalk
in my great hand,
childhood was drawn into the damp air,
sharp screams, wanting it,
lured by whitsun into habit.
types of desire arose
and faded as I heard the whisper
of their many thousand petals I wanted
to muss up, crumple, shred the rain-wet rose
wanted to tear off its petals,
throw them around,
and stamp on them, call friends,
                               come and see
the big fat flower thingy I've got here
white round as a cat's head without eyes, me, me,
I want to drive the cat's head that's no cat
through the mad pack of my wishes
done in and touched up, no unharmed
I leave the sublime roses lifeless & brittle in the middle
of the rapids down which
           Comes my
                               childhood

Monika Rinck, six poems translated by Amos Weisz.


http://www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/awe1.html


This is part of the remarkable selection of Amos Weisz's writings that Peter Philpott has recently added to his re-born Great Works site. Weisz suffered from mental health problems, and committed suicide at a young age in 2008.


Pfingst = Pentecost, the fiftieth day after Easter Sunday (counting both ends) = Whitsun or Whit Sunday in Britain, apparently so named for the white baptismal robes.  Whitsun, or rather the following Whit Monday, was a public holiday until 1978, when it was replaced by the fixed Late May bank holiday. That must be why the word "Whitsun", so commonplace in my youth, seems then to have utterly disappeared from my life.


Whitsun (poem by Sylvia Plath)


This is not what I meant:
Stucco arches, the banked rocks sunning in rows,
Bald eyes or petrified eggs,
Grownups coffined in stockings and jackets,
Lard-pale, sipping the thin
Air like a medicine.

The stopped horse on his chromium pole
Stares through us; his hooves chew the breeze.
Your shirt of crisp linen
Bloats like a spinnaker. Hat brims
Deflect the watery dazzle; the people idle
As if in hospital.

I can smell the salt, all right.
At our feet, the weed-mustachioed sea
Exhibits its glaucous silks,
Bowing and truckling like an old-school oriental.
You're no happier than I about it.
A policeman points out a vacant cliff

Green as a pool table, where cabbage butterflies
Peel off to sea as gulls do,
And we picnic in the death-stench of a hawthorn.
The waves pulse like hearts.
Beached under the spumy blooms, we lie
Sea-sick and fever-dry.                         








Last year I took a booklet of Alistair Noon translations of Monika Rinck on a road trip but as it happened  I never opened them. I certainly will now.






Monika Rinck, two poems translated by Alistair Noon.


http://gistsandpiths.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/two-poems-by-monika-rinck-translated-by.html



Alder, February 1st, 2017