In an uncharacteristic gesture I recently invited suggestions on which charities might best benefit from my winter fuel allowance. For those unaware of socialistic Britain, the WFA is a government handout to ensure pensioners like me don’t freeze to death between November and April and thereby cease casting our votes.
Re-reading my post I’m appalled by how self-serving it seems and will think first before playing Lady Bountiful again. However, the charities need not share my self-flagellation and third shares of WFA have now gone to two of them.
The Crow’s Quaker International Educational Trust (QuIET) supports education and peace initiatives through education; she adds “My Meeting sends contributions to the Friends school in Ramallah”. The eccentric capitals appealed to me as did their willingness to work in such a hellhole. A British address meant no cash would be dissipated in exchange rate costs.
Sir Hugh mentioned a personal debt to the National Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Children. I favour child-support charities and this one in particular. Foreigners have pointed out that this outfit is merely national; the one against animal cruelty (ie, RSPCA) has royal support. But that doesn’t mean I’m against furry, feathered or even scaly beasts. Anyway forty quid for them.
The only reason Julia’s suggestion, Water Missions International, (laudable aim: to stop people dying of thirst) hasn’t got their dough yet is because they’re American and I’m dickering about a form of payment which doesn’t simultaneously enrich bankers. Note: After some to-ing and fro-ing with WMI's online system this was eventually achieved, December 15 2010
Ho hum.
Saturday, 11 December 2010
Do poetry translations help?
This is an expansion of a subject I posted a few weeks ago. It's here because I need to put it in an addressable storage location on the Web. Something on motorbikes and/or frying pans is just over the horizon.
Shakespeare into French – some problems
Plus a DIY experiment
In a French translation of Romeo and Juliet I came upon this line from the Queen Mab speech
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep
rendered as:
Se poser sur le nez des hommes quand ils dorment
Even those with minimal French will recognise there has been no attempt to tackle the tricky but worthwhile athwart. Nor is lying asleep distinguished from the bare French: they sleep, they are sleeping. This is a crib to get the reader through the play. The poetry, it seems, may wait.
The same book includes Le Marchand de Venise. Portia’s most famous speech turns out to be rather better:
La vertu du clémence est de n'etre forcée,
Elle descend comme la douce pluie du ciel
Sur ce bas monde; elle est double bénédiction
Elle bénit qui la donne et qui la recoit,
Elle est la plus forte chez les plus forts, et sied,
Mieux que la couronne au monarque sur son trone
A different translator? Perhaps. But then the original is more direct and less concerned with imagery than Queen Mab. Despite the awkwardness of est de n'etre forcée (vs. is not strained) and the unadorned la plus forte (a weak equivalent of mightiest), one might conclude one was reading poetry.
The translations appear in a Les Livres du Poche paperback. Surprising for a French publication the preface writer, Jean-Louis Curtis, has no academic links. The contents appeared first in a bilingual edition of the complete works by the Club Francais du Livre, an established purveyor of popular classics in various languages.
Who might buy this book? A schoolboy needing to know the plotlines or a monoglot intellectual French person who understands poetry and who is bound to be disappointed? It’s worth including a little of Curtis’s preface to establish its French view of things. He sees the play as a tragedy of adolescent tenderness at odds with the stupidity of the adult world. It has no moral or religious core, is purely external and driven by chance. Unlike Phèdre, Tristan and Isolde (sinners against divine order or against Mammon) the star-crossed lovers are complete innocents. Which, he says, is rather marvellous.
He adds: Romeo is a work of superb craftsmanship with the exception of several hors d’oeuvres, which I take to mean bits and pieces. One such bit is in fact Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech which he condemns as “too long.” Here are two of the speech’s other lines.
O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you
Alors je vois que la reine Mab vous a visité
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Trainé par un attelage de petits atomes
The former sounds more like Jane Austen, as if she had left a card. The English - been with you - hints at a gracious attendance. In the second, atomies is an obsolete word and thus the qualifier is forgivable. However the translator opts for the modern word, atoms, which surely makes petits tautological.
Confirmation that these are literal translations with poetry taking a back seat, often a distant back seat.
But might a greater play spur the translator towards something more sublime? Gallimard’s Folio Theatre series Hamlet is translated by the Maitre de Conférences at the University of Paris and a 25-page annotated preface is supplied by by an Emeritus Professor at Sorbonne Nouvelle. One of the preface’s sub-sections, entitled Des Mots, Des Mots et Des Mots, reveals a more knotty, academic - essentially French academic - approach. Shakespeare, we are told, is not writing a metaphysical treatise but has chosen the theatre “the genre par excellence for the inaccessible subjectivity of the author”. Followed by much polysyllablism which I would find obscure in English.
Fortunately I can look at the translation. I apologise for ignoring the obvious passage; its celebrated first line is too easy and translates literally, adopting virtually the same sequence of words. Instead:
Oh! Si cette trop, trop solide chair pouvait fondre,
Se liquéfier and se résoudre en rosée,
Ou si l’Eternel n’avait pas édicté
Sa loi contre le suicide! O Dieu, Dieu!
Comme me semblent fastidieux, défraichis, plat, et stériles
Tous les usages de ce monde.
Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! Oh God, God,
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world
This is much more satisfying. As Portia’s speech, despite its defects, was superior to Queen Mab. Of course it is narrative rather than imagery but there are some hurdles to cross. Here the translator is far more confident. Faced with adjacent melt, thaw, he employs the exact fondre for the former and then, tactically, ignores the latter with its icy implications. Instead he substitutes se liquéfier which conveys the idea of dissolving flesh far better.
And - dare I say it? – his simpler, more obvious, le suicide improves on Shakespeare’s somewhat overwrought self-slaughter, included to eke out the line.
I think the above passage proves that it is possible, in French, to move closer to Shakespeare’s meaning even though the outer reaches of poetic invention may prove intractable. But here’s something different: Gertrude identifying the place where Ophelia died:
Un saule pousse en travers du ruisseau
Qui montre ses feuilles blanches dans le miroir de l’eau.
C’est là qu’elle tressa d’ingénieuses guirlandes
De boutons d’or, d’orties, de paquerettes, et de longues fleurs pourpres
Que les bergers hardis nomment d’un nom grossier
Mais que nos froides vierges appellent doigts-d’hommes morts
There is a willow grows aslant the brook
That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.
Nature proves tougher than solid flesh. WS’s aslant willow doesn’t just cross the brook it does it at an angle and that’s a detail too far. Conflating pousser with en travers would give traverser providing more elbow-room for solving the angle problem but this would be at the expense of losing grows. Flirting dangerously with the Little Learning Sword that hangs over all translators I found myself considering combler which can mean bridging a gap. But not really. Rather filling in as with a gap in one’s knowledge.
Another apparent solecism occurs when those shepherds nomment a nom. Naming a name? Plus a potential red herring in that nom can also mean noun. I take it this ugly repetition is apparently justified by the need to use appeller (to call, ie, identify) on the following line. On the other hand the translator knows full well that WS’s maids were virgins. Also that shepherds who are liberal is likely to be an Elizabethan anachronism and hardi (bold, daring, barefaced) better fills the bill.
Finally, twenty-first century poets who feel unable to rearrange word order as a stress repair tool will sympathise with this translator who cannot match the admirably compact Therewith fantastic garlands did she make and resorts to a predictable subject, verb, object.
Despite these limitations, a mind sympathetic to poetry is at work. As when glassy stream becomes a water mirror. Languages differ and the French have fewer words to play with than Anglophones. Some limitations cannot be overcome except via inventive leaps which may well betray the poet. But suppose the person who wrote the stuff is doing the translation. What are the restraints on inventive leaps?
To avoid copyright concerns I have chosen one of my own (Shakespearean format) sonnets. The date relates to our fifty-year marriage.
St Mary and St Eanswythe, rain and wind.
October 1 1960.
A golden day but let’s forsake fool’s gold
And go in search of useful tolerance.
For there’s no credit, dear, in growing old
And worshipping a doubtful permanence.
Instead we’ll build a fire of cliché sticks,
Burn cards of happiness and humdrum verse,
Distrust old facile “love” since reason mocks
An easy word to hide a lie or curse.
Let’s dwell on anger - pardoned on the wing,
A hand outstretched to aid a swollen knee
A joke that shares more than a wedding ring
A glass of wine that seals complicity.
Spare symbols, mantras, ill-used sentiment
Just say, do, listen, to our hearts’ content
Un jour doré, mais à bas l’or mondaine,
Et allons chercher pour l’amour pratique.
En vieillissant, ca manque du bon ma chère,
Meme chose tes prières pour la certitude.
Et à la place, un feu de nos banalités:
Les cartes joyeuses et tous les poèmes crasse.
N’aimes pas “aimer” – ce masque expert,
Qui cache les mensonges, les paroles maudites.
Acceuilles le colère, pardonnè en clin d’oeil,
Un main tendu pour soigner tes blessures,
Une blague qui vaut mieux qu’une alliance,
Un verre de vin, le preuve d’un bon accord.
Partez symboles, mantras, et pensées fausses,
Dire, faire, écouter du fond du coeur
I have not tried to match French cadences since I do not truly understand them. One irony is that several French lines (the third and fourth, for instance) have willy-nilly appeared as iambic pentameter, however irrelevant this is, no doubt, in French prosody. And, since there wouldn’t be any point otherwise, I cheat. Fool’s gold requires wordplay and becomes worldly gold. Useful tolerance is now pragmatic love. Cliché sticks are possibly improved as banalities. The last line, which again depended on wordplay, is I fear rather feeble.
The rigorous answer is, I suppose, to ignore the English original and strike out on the same theme in French. A parallel piece of verse, if you like. Failing this counsel of perfection (which I am not for a moment suggesting I’ve adhered to) translation is obviously a vital activity since it crosses that initial frontier. I know some French and a tiny bit of German but a ten-year-old’s rendering of even a limerick in Finnish would be more than welcome.
And there is one further advantage, although it concerns the writer rather than the reader. There is no sterner test of relevance than turning something that seemed to have its values into another language.
Shakespeare into French – some problems
Plus a DIY experiment
In a French translation of Romeo and Juliet I came upon this line from the Queen Mab speech
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep
rendered as:
Se poser sur le nez des hommes quand ils dorment
Even those with minimal French will recognise there has been no attempt to tackle the tricky but worthwhile athwart. Nor is lying asleep distinguished from the bare French: they sleep, they are sleeping. This is a crib to get the reader through the play. The poetry, it seems, may wait.
The same book includes Le Marchand de Venise. Portia’s most famous speech turns out to be rather better:
La vertu du clémence est de n'etre forcée,
Elle descend comme la douce pluie du ciel
Sur ce bas monde; elle est double bénédiction
Elle bénit qui la donne et qui la recoit,
Elle est la plus forte chez les plus forts, et sied,
Mieux que la couronne au monarque sur son trone
A different translator? Perhaps. But then the original is more direct and less concerned with imagery than Queen Mab. Despite the awkwardness of est de n'etre forcée (vs. is not strained) and the unadorned la plus forte (a weak equivalent of mightiest), one might conclude one was reading poetry.
The translations appear in a Les Livres du Poche paperback. Surprising for a French publication the preface writer, Jean-Louis Curtis, has no academic links. The contents appeared first in a bilingual edition of the complete works by the Club Francais du Livre, an established purveyor of popular classics in various languages.
Who might buy this book? A schoolboy needing to know the plotlines or a monoglot intellectual French person who understands poetry and who is bound to be disappointed? It’s worth including a little of Curtis’s preface to establish its French view of things. He sees the play as a tragedy of adolescent tenderness at odds with the stupidity of the adult world. It has no moral or religious core, is purely external and driven by chance. Unlike Phèdre, Tristan and Isolde (sinners against divine order or against Mammon) the star-crossed lovers are complete innocents. Which, he says, is rather marvellous.
He adds: Romeo is a work of superb craftsmanship with the exception of several hors d’oeuvres, which I take to mean bits and pieces. One such bit is in fact Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech which he condemns as “too long.” Here are two of the speech’s other lines.
O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you
Alors je vois que la reine Mab vous a visité
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Trainé par un attelage de petits atomes
The former sounds more like Jane Austen, as if she had left a card. The English - been with you - hints at a gracious attendance. In the second, atomies is an obsolete word and thus the qualifier is forgivable. However the translator opts for the modern word, atoms, which surely makes petits tautological.
Confirmation that these are literal translations with poetry taking a back seat, often a distant back seat.
But might a greater play spur the translator towards something more sublime? Gallimard’s Folio Theatre series Hamlet is translated by the Maitre de Conférences at the University of Paris and a 25-page annotated preface is supplied by by an Emeritus Professor at Sorbonne Nouvelle. One of the preface’s sub-sections, entitled Des Mots, Des Mots et Des Mots, reveals a more knotty, academic - essentially French academic - approach. Shakespeare, we are told, is not writing a metaphysical treatise but has chosen the theatre “the genre par excellence for the inaccessible subjectivity of the author”. Followed by much polysyllablism which I would find obscure in English.
Fortunately I can look at the translation. I apologise for ignoring the obvious passage; its celebrated first line is too easy and translates literally, adopting virtually the same sequence of words. Instead:
Oh! Si cette trop, trop solide chair pouvait fondre,
Se liquéfier and se résoudre en rosée,
Ou si l’Eternel n’avait pas édicté
Sa loi contre le suicide! O Dieu, Dieu!
Comme me semblent fastidieux, défraichis, plat, et stériles
Tous les usages de ce monde.
Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! Oh God, God,
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world
This is much more satisfying. As Portia’s speech, despite its defects, was superior to Queen Mab. Of course it is narrative rather than imagery but there are some hurdles to cross. Here the translator is far more confident. Faced with adjacent melt, thaw, he employs the exact fondre for the former and then, tactically, ignores the latter with its icy implications. Instead he substitutes se liquéfier which conveys the idea of dissolving flesh far better.
And - dare I say it? – his simpler, more obvious, le suicide improves on Shakespeare’s somewhat overwrought self-slaughter, included to eke out the line.
I think the above passage proves that it is possible, in French, to move closer to Shakespeare’s meaning even though the outer reaches of poetic invention may prove intractable. But here’s something different: Gertrude identifying the place where Ophelia died:
Un saule pousse en travers du ruisseau
Qui montre ses feuilles blanches dans le miroir de l’eau.
C’est là qu’elle tressa d’ingénieuses guirlandes
De boutons d’or, d’orties, de paquerettes, et de longues fleurs pourpres
Que les bergers hardis nomment d’un nom grossier
Mais que nos froides vierges appellent doigts-d’hommes morts
There is a willow grows aslant the brook
That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.
Nature proves tougher than solid flesh. WS’s aslant willow doesn’t just cross the brook it does it at an angle and that’s a detail too far. Conflating pousser with en travers would give traverser providing more elbow-room for solving the angle problem but this would be at the expense of losing grows. Flirting dangerously with the Little Learning Sword that hangs over all translators I found myself considering combler which can mean bridging a gap. But not really. Rather filling in as with a gap in one’s knowledge.
Another apparent solecism occurs when those shepherds nomment a nom. Naming a name? Plus a potential red herring in that nom can also mean noun. I take it this ugly repetition is apparently justified by the need to use appeller (to call, ie, identify) on the following line. On the other hand the translator knows full well that WS’s maids were virgins. Also that shepherds who are liberal is likely to be an Elizabethan anachronism and hardi (bold, daring, barefaced) better fills the bill.
Finally, twenty-first century poets who feel unable to rearrange word order as a stress repair tool will sympathise with this translator who cannot match the admirably compact Therewith fantastic garlands did she make and resorts to a predictable subject, verb, object.
Despite these limitations, a mind sympathetic to poetry is at work. As when glassy stream becomes a water mirror. Languages differ and the French have fewer words to play with than Anglophones. Some limitations cannot be overcome except via inventive leaps which may well betray the poet. But suppose the person who wrote the stuff is doing the translation. What are the restraints on inventive leaps?
To avoid copyright concerns I have chosen one of my own (Shakespearean format) sonnets. The date relates to our fifty-year marriage.
St Mary and St Eanswythe, rain and wind.
October 1 1960.
A golden day but let’s forsake fool’s gold
And go in search of useful tolerance.
For there’s no credit, dear, in growing old
And worshipping a doubtful permanence.
Instead we’ll build a fire of cliché sticks,
Burn cards of happiness and humdrum verse,
Distrust old facile “love” since reason mocks
An easy word to hide a lie or curse.
Let’s dwell on anger - pardoned on the wing,
A hand outstretched to aid a swollen knee
A joke that shares more than a wedding ring
A glass of wine that seals complicity.
Spare symbols, mantras, ill-used sentiment
Just say, do, listen, to our hearts’ content
Un jour doré, mais à bas l’or mondaine,
Et allons chercher pour l’amour pratique.
En vieillissant, ca manque du bon ma chère,
Meme chose tes prières pour la certitude.
Et à la place, un feu de nos banalités:
Les cartes joyeuses et tous les poèmes crasse.
N’aimes pas “aimer” – ce masque expert,
Qui cache les mensonges, les paroles maudites.
Acceuilles le colère, pardonnè en clin d’oeil,
Un main tendu pour soigner tes blessures,
Une blague qui vaut mieux qu’une alliance,
Un verre de vin, le preuve d’un bon accord.
Partez symboles, mantras, et pensées fausses,
Dire, faire, écouter du fond du coeur
I have not tried to match French cadences since I do not truly understand them. One irony is that several French lines (the third and fourth, for instance) have willy-nilly appeared as iambic pentameter, however irrelevant this is, no doubt, in French prosody. And, since there wouldn’t be any point otherwise, I cheat. Fool’s gold requires wordplay and becomes worldly gold. Useful tolerance is now pragmatic love. Cliché sticks are possibly improved as banalities. The last line, which again depended on wordplay, is I fear rather feeble.
The rigorous answer is, I suppose, to ignore the English original and strike out on the same theme in French. A parallel piece of verse, if you like. Failing this counsel of perfection (which I am not for a moment suggesting I’ve adhered to) translation is obviously a vital activity since it crosses that initial frontier. I know some French and a tiny bit of German but a ten-year-old’s rendering of even a limerick in Finnish would be more than welcome.
And there is one further advantage, although it concerns the writer rather than the reader. There is no sterner test of relevance than turning something that seemed to have its values into another language.
Wednesday, 8 December 2010
Those slightly disabled Swedes
This view from my study window has been Photoshopped to remove the washing line across the garden and an ugly street lamp. Click pic for greater grandeur.
In yet another BBC4 programme devoted to popularising science, a frenetic Swede set out last night to make me love statistics.
Many believe statistics is simply columns of figures. That’s data*. Statistics is data put to use – averaged out, for instance. Statistics tells us on average Swedes have 1.99 legs – reconciling the fact that some unfortunates have only one leg, or perhaps no legs, whereas none have three legs. “Thus we can say,” said the Scandinavian prophet, “that most Swedes have slightly less than two legs.”
But this was mere skittishness. Statistics is serious. It’s generally admitted that whatever suffering Florence Nightingale alleviated at Scutari wasn’t ultimately as important as the data she gathered and interpreted, proving that the so-called hospitals there were far more dangerous than the battle-field. Infection killed more than shells.
However it’s not history that’s astonishing, it’s the future. Google offers computerised translations of websites into seventy languages based on statistical analysis of language. Grammatical and syntactical rules aren’t good enough. Complex sentences in Swedish were uttered to Google’s research wonk who received them on his laptop which precisely and immediately translated them. The next step: mobile phones which allow users speaking in two different languages to hear the result in their native tongues.
Speaking as someone who has spent three decades wrestling with French I’m somewhat depressed.
* Yes, I know data is the plural of datum and I treated it accordingly while still working. But I now think it’s a lost cause.
In yet another BBC4 programme devoted to popularising science, a frenetic Swede set out last night to make me love statistics.
Many believe statistics is simply columns of figures. That’s data*. Statistics is data put to use – averaged out, for instance. Statistics tells us on average Swedes have 1.99 legs – reconciling the fact that some unfortunates have only one leg, or perhaps no legs, whereas none have three legs. “Thus we can say,” said the Scandinavian prophet, “that most Swedes have slightly less than two legs.”
But this was mere skittishness. Statistics is serious. It’s generally admitted that whatever suffering Florence Nightingale alleviated at Scutari wasn’t ultimately as important as the data she gathered and interpreted, proving that the so-called hospitals there were far more dangerous than the battle-field. Infection killed more than shells.
However it’s not history that’s astonishing, it’s the future. Google offers computerised translations of websites into seventy languages based on statistical analysis of language. Grammatical and syntactical rules aren’t good enough. Complex sentences in Swedish were uttered to Google’s research wonk who received them on his laptop which precisely and immediately translated them. The next step: mobile phones which allow users speaking in two different languages to hear the result in their native tongues.
Speaking as someone who has spent three decades wrestling with French I’m somewhat depressed.
* Yes, I know data is the plural of datum and I treated it accordingly while still working. But I now think it’s a lost cause.
Sunday, 5 December 2010
I'm not sure about The Donkey Shelter
The winter fuel allowance (£125) will shortly enter my bank account. I am lucky enough not to need this money and would prefer it ended up with someone who can make better use of it. Mrs BB and I support the sort of charities you might expect of Guardian readers – Amnesty International, Médécins sans Frontières, Book Aid as well as Cancer Research UK, St Michael’s Hospice, Hereford Air Ambulance (those last three clearly profiting from our physical decline).
If you have a pet charity other than those above, preferably something unglamorous that isn’t richly endowed (eg, The Rest Home for Retired Industrial Journalists – I jest! I jest!) sell it to me in 25 words and it will get a mention here and a slice of the pie. The more international the better.
If you have a pet charity other than those above, preferably something unglamorous that isn’t richly endowed (eg, The Rest Home for Retired Industrial Journalists – I jest! I jest!) sell it to me in 25 words and it will get a mention here and a slice of the pie. The more international the better.
Saturday, 4 December 2010
The human equivalent of a farrier
ICY ENDURANCE EXPERIMENT (qv) This is now at an end. Mrs BB said she would refuse to speak to me if I continued.
SNIP, SCRAPE Chatting with dentists and doctors presents problems. But with chiropodists you’re paying, the prognosis is rarely fatal, and, hey, they’re down there and you’re up here. They’ve got to talk. And there’s that comical vocabulary: bunions, verruccas, corns - even seed corns.
My previous chiropodist did house calls but, slightly self-conscious, I entered the new one’s surgery (?) via the Beautonics façade. She used snips chunky enough to sever a power cable and didn’t care where the bits went. Chez Bonden that’s forbidden, Mrs BB insists each nail sliver must be accounted for. Putting down her snips the podiatrist (the words are interchangeable) picked up a scalpel; dimly I recalled the earlier foot-shaper using a modified potato peeler. I was told my memory was at fault.
Snips and scalpels are autoclaved after each session. Verruccas can be blasted cryogenically. I was told to anoint my feet with Vitamin E oil from Holland & Barrett. We talked about newspapers and I was asked to guess which she read. I got it wrong: not the Telegraph but the Saturday edition of The Times. I warned her about lining Murdoch’s pockets. Next time my questions will be more penetrating.
THE NEW NOVEL The central character, a woman, has a facial port-wine stain, naevus flammeus. Plot ideally emerges from factual detail. Perhaps while I lolled on the couch of chiropody a sub-plot-line occurred. Her boy-friend, a French aero-mechanic, is drawn to her by the disfigurement.
SNIP, SCRAPE Chatting with dentists and doctors presents problems. But with chiropodists you’re paying, the prognosis is rarely fatal, and, hey, they’re down there and you’re up here. They’ve got to talk. And there’s that comical vocabulary: bunions, verruccas, corns - even seed corns.
My previous chiropodist did house calls but, slightly self-conscious, I entered the new one’s surgery (?) via the Beautonics façade. She used snips chunky enough to sever a power cable and didn’t care where the bits went. Chez Bonden that’s forbidden, Mrs BB insists each nail sliver must be accounted for. Putting down her snips the podiatrist (the words are interchangeable) picked up a scalpel; dimly I recalled the earlier foot-shaper using a modified potato peeler. I was told my memory was at fault.
Snips and scalpels are autoclaved after each session. Verruccas can be blasted cryogenically. I was told to anoint my feet with Vitamin E oil from Holland & Barrett. We talked about newspapers and I was asked to guess which she read. I got it wrong: not the Telegraph but the Saturday edition of The Times. I warned her about lining Murdoch’s pockets. Next time my questions will be more penetrating.
THE NEW NOVEL The central character, a woman, has a facial port-wine stain, naevus flammeus. Plot ideally emerges from factual detail. Perhaps while I lolled on the couch of chiropody a sub-plot-line occurred. Her boy-friend, a French aero-mechanic, is drawn to her by the disfigurement.
Thursday, 2 December 2010
Whiling away the winter
Google-researching new novel. Progress so far:
TITLE (provisional) The Love Problem. TIME Now, especially re. Afghan war. HERO US-born woman with facial port-wine stain (PWS), commercial pilot in a small way, has left US (“No country for a woman with marred looks”) to live and work in SW France, near Biarritz. FIRST NAME She’s sexually straight but I need something slightly gender-ambiguous, hence (From Top Thousand US Women’s Names): Kristen, Karen, Robyn, Erin, Dana, Cass, Jodi, Jana, Reba. UPBRINGING Arizona, good flying state. Born/raised Flagstaff, town with decayed centre. Failed to make jet pilot with USAF; wonders about PWS. WILL MEET Divorced Brit, once making a living helping other Brits buy French homes, now on his beam ends. FIRST SCENE Driving US male pilot (who first suggested France to her) to airport as he flies back to work in US and leaves her alone.
AIMS: (1) Aspects of disfigurement, (2) … homesickness, (3) … US-France relations against Afghan war background - does French working-class favour what US is doing to Taliban.
MEANWHILE Break off to pick out Lady is a Tramp but can’t figure last eight notes of first eight bars. Email Julia who sends link to Sinatra plus note sequence:
That's -Why- the -La-dy - is - a tramp
D - D - Bflat-D-Bflat- D -Bflat
TITLE (provisional) The Love Problem. TIME Now, especially re. Afghan war. HERO US-born woman with facial port-wine stain (PWS), commercial pilot in a small way, has left US (“No country for a woman with marred looks”) to live and work in SW France, near Biarritz. FIRST NAME She’s sexually straight but I need something slightly gender-ambiguous, hence (From Top Thousand US Women’s Names): Kristen, Karen, Robyn, Erin, Dana, Cass, Jodi, Jana, Reba. UPBRINGING Arizona, good flying state. Born/raised Flagstaff, town with decayed centre. Failed to make jet pilot with USAF; wonders about PWS. WILL MEET Divorced Brit, once making a living helping other Brits buy French homes, now on his beam ends. FIRST SCENE Driving US male pilot (who first suggested France to her) to airport as he flies back to work in US and leaves her alone.
AIMS: (1) Aspects of disfigurement, (2) … homesickness, (3) … US-France relations against Afghan war background - does French working-class favour what US is doing to Taliban.
MEANWHILE Break off to pick out Lady is a Tramp but can’t figure last eight notes of first eight bars. Email Julia who sends link to Sinatra plus note sequence:
That's -Why- the -La-dy - is - a tramp
D - D - Bflat-D-Bflat- D -Bflat
Doesn’t fit. But that’s because I’m in C-major and Old Blue-eyes is in Bflat. Start practising Bflat scale – hey, it’s nearly all black notes. Time to brave the snow; off to Birmingham for LVB pnop cto 4 and Mahler 4.
Sunday, 28 November 2010
Lying on a beach - no raw material
Chez Bonden has twelve CH radiators. To save moola three are turned off, including the one in my study. I resist hypothermia by putting on my fleece, blowing on my fingers and thinking about stuff I have read.
Orwell dying of TB and writing 1984 in an abandoned house on Jura. A Jack London short story about a man outdoors in Alaska in winter, trying to light a fire with a limited number of matches – and failing. Peter Fleming (Ian’s brother) en route from Peking to Kashmir, a 3500-mile overland journey which began in February 1935 and formed the basis of News from Tartary. Gulley Jimson in freezing London, ignoring the cold and thinking only about painting in The Horse’s Mouth.
I tend to ignore explorers like Scott and Shackleton since enduring the cold was part of their reason for going where they did. I do reflect on climbers who embark on severe Alpine climbs in winter since I’ve never understood how they keep their fingers operative (Some don’t, of course, and DIY amputations are necessary.)
PAUSE FOR REFLECTION None of the above enjoyed the benison of having Mrs BB appear at the study door with a cup of Bovril. As now.
But Puccini has the final word. La Boheme opens with students shivering in a Parisian attic in winter. They have no fuel and one offers the manuscript of his novel so that they will be cheered, briefly, by the flames. An ironic passage in the libretto.
No one visits Works Well for its DIY photos; they merely help save words. However Younger Daughter asked me to capture her with Zach; b&w (courtesy Photoshop) turned out somewhat better than colour.
Orwell dying of TB and writing 1984 in an abandoned house on Jura. A Jack London short story about a man outdoors in Alaska in winter, trying to light a fire with a limited number of matches – and failing. Peter Fleming (Ian’s brother) en route from Peking to Kashmir, a 3500-mile overland journey which began in February 1935 and formed the basis of News from Tartary. Gulley Jimson in freezing London, ignoring the cold and thinking only about painting in The Horse’s Mouth.
I tend to ignore explorers like Scott and Shackleton since enduring the cold was part of their reason for going where they did. I do reflect on climbers who embark on severe Alpine climbs in winter since I’ve never understood how they keep their fingers operative (Some don’t, of course, and DIY amputations are necessary.)
PAUSE FOR REFLECTION None of the above enjoyed the benison of having Mrs BB appear at the study door with a cup of Bovril. As now.
But Puccini has the final word. La Boheme opens with students shivering in a Parisian attic in winter. They have no fuel and one offers the manuscript of his novel so that they will be cheered, briefly, by the flames. An ironic passage in the libretto.
No one visits Works Well for its DIY photos; they merely help save words. However Younger Daughter asked me to capture her with Zach; b&w (courtesy Photoshop) turned out somewhat better than colour.
Thursday, 25 November 2010
Ahhh, ain't that cute?
Marja-Leena has disgorged and photographed her pencil/ballpoint container and seems unimpressed by its contents, although to my eye the stuff looks expensive and “artistic” (another way of saying expensive). The contents of mine are predictable, mundane and cheap but the container itself has a history. It’s a Maxwell House coffee tin decorated with magazine cut-outs by my elder daughter, aged 5 – 7, while we in America (1966 – 1972). What is more remarkable is that resides on my windowsill here in Hereford. Prior to returning to the UK we had a garage sale and then threw away thirteen bags of viable household possessions and clothes. But this tin was retained. Neither of us is what you’d call sentimental.
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