I felt a Funeral, in my Brain -- Emily Dickinson

Guest poem submitted by Nick Grundy, in response
to yesterday's offering:

(Poem #871) I felt a Funeral, in my Brain I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, And Mourners to and fro Kept treading--treading--till it seemed That Sense was breaking through-- And when they all were seated, A Service, like a Drum-- Kept beating--beating--till I thought My Mind was going numb-- And then I heard them lift a Box And creak across my Soul With those same Boots of Lead, again, Then Space--began to toll, As all the Heavens were a Bell, And Being, but an Ear, And I, and Silence, some strange Race Wrecked, solitary, here-- And then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down-- And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing--then-- -- Emily Dickinson

How strange - I first read the Hopkins poem (#870) last week in a book by
Andrew Solomon about depression called "The Noonday Demon" (it's wonderful,
but this is not a book advert).  If you feel like running a depression theme
- I don't know if you have already - another one Solomon used which is also
a bit of a favourite of mine is the Emily Dickinson above.  Reading the one
after the other, there's a rather lovely counterpoise between them: the
rhythm of the Dickinson is measured where the Hopkins is frantic, but
strangely (given that she uses "I" and he "we") I find the Hopkins more
personal or individual.

I hadn't thought of the poem, before reading Solomon, as being about
depression, and of course I suppose one shouldn't really say it's *about*
anything, but to my mind reading it as such makes the sense break through
more forcefully than before.  Not to, um, coin a phrase.

Nick.

[Minstrels Links]

The Hopkins poem referred to above:
Poem #870, No worst, there is none

Other poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
Poem #59, To a Young Child
Poem #3, Inversnaid
Poem #35, The Windhover
Poem #134, Pied Beauty
Poem #260, Moonrise
Poem #606, God's Grandeur

Other poems by Emily Dickinson:
Poem #92, There's a certain Slant of light
Poem #174, A Route of Evanescence
Poem #341, The Grass so little has to do -
Poem #458, The Chariot
Poem #529, If you were coming in the fall
Poem #580, Split the Lark
Poem #687, Success is counted sweetest
Poem #711, I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Poem #829, It dropped so low in my regard

The Name -- Alexander Pushkin

Guest poem submitted by Nick Grundy:

(Poem #760) The Name What is my name to you? 'T will die: a wave that has but rolled to reach with a lone splash a distant beach; or in the timbered night a cry ... 'T will leave a lifeless trace among names on your tablets: the design of an entangled gravestone line in an unfathomable tongue. What is it then? A long-dead past, lost in the rush of madder dreams, upon your soul it will not cast Mnemosyne's pure tender beams. But if some sorrow comes to you, utter my name with sighs, and tell the silence: "Memory is true - there beats a heart wherein I dwell." -- Alexander Pushkin

Translation by Vladimir Nabokov.

---------------
Infuriatingly, I can't find any online resources which carry parts of
Nabokov's translation of "Eugene Onegin" - but "The Name" is at least a
translation of Pushkin...  The obvious advantage those translating from
their native tongue have is that they can retain the feel of the original -
there's something peculiarly Russian about this, and "timbered night" is a
lovely phrase.  You can almost smell them, or hear them rustling!

Nabokov is, predictably, amusingly nasty about people whose methods of
translation he disagrees with.  I've appended (an abbreviated) part of a
longer essay which you can read at
[broken link] http://magazines.enews.com/classic/nabokov080441.html
- always assuming you aren't irritated by his style - it's worth it, though,
as some of the examples he uses are worryingly believable, and when he
describes reading a translation of Gogol's short story "Overcoat" as leaving
him "with the impression that I am witnessing a murder and can do nothing to
prevent it", you rather know what he means.

Then, of course, you remember that another translator of Pushkin - Walter
Arndt - called Nabokov's version of "Onegin": "...the sad ritual murder
performed for the purposes of an ever more insatiable lexical necrophilia."
Perhaps you start to think that it's a strange business, translation.

There's also a poem called "On Translation) which he wrote in tetrameter
sonnets (like those in Eugene Onegin) to defend his decision to translate
the work in free verse.  It's at http://www.tetrameter.com/nabokov.htm

Nick.

[Nabokov on Translation]

Three grades of evil can be discerned in the queer world of verbal
transmigration. The first, and lesser one, comprises obvious errors due to
ignorance or misguided knowledge. This is mere human frailty and thus
excusable. The next step to Hell is taken by the translator who
intentionally skips words or passages that he does not bother to understand
or that might seem obscure or obscene to vaguely imagined readers; he
accepts the blank look that his dictionary gives him without any qualms; or
subjects scholarship to primness: he is as ready to know less than the
author as he is to think he knows better. The third, and worst, degree of
turpitude is reached when a masterpiece is planished and patted into such a
shape, vilely beautified in such a fashion as to conform to the notions and
prejudices of a given public. This is a crime, to be punished by the stocks
as plagiarists were in the shoebuckle days.

The second, and much more serious, sin of leaving out tricky passages is
still excusable when the translator is baffled by them himself; but how
contemptible is the smug person who, although quite understanding the sense,
fears it might stump a dunce or debauch a dauphin! Instead of nestling in
the arms of the great writer, he keeps worrying about the little reader
playing in a corner with something dangerous or unclean. Perhaps the most
charming example of Victorian modesty that has ever come my way was in an
early English translation of "Anna Karenina." Vronsky had asked Anna what
was the matter with her. "I am beremenna" (the translator's italics),
replied Anna, making the foreign reader wonder what strange and awful
Oriental disease that was; all because the translator thought that "I am
pregnant" might shock some pure soul, and that a good idea would be to leave
the Russian just as it stood.

But masking and toning down seem petty sins in comparison with those of the
third category; for here he comes strutting and shooting out his bejeweled
cuffs, the slick translator who arranges Scheherazade's boudoir according to
his own taste and with professional elegance tries to improve the looks of
his victims.

     -- [broken link] http://magazines.enews.com/classic/nabokov080441.html

Dead Man's Dump -- Isaac Rosenberg

Guest poem submitted by Nick Grundy:

(Poem #746) Dead Man's Dump The plunging limbers over the shattered track Racketed with their rusty freight, Stuck out like many crowns of thorns, And the rusty stakes like sceptres old To stay the flood of brutish men Upon our brothers dear. The wheels lurched over sprawled dead But pained them not, though their bones crunched; Their shut mouths made no moan, They lie there huddled, friend and foeman, Man born of man, and born of woman; And shells go crying over them From night till night and now. Earth has waited for them, All the time of their growth Fretting for their decay: Now she has them at last! In the strength of her strength Suspended - stopped and held. What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit? Earth! Have they gone into you? Somewhere they must have gone, And flung on your hard back Is their souls' sack, Emptied of God-ancestralled essences. Who hurled them out? Who hurled? None saw their spirits' shadow shake the grass, Or stood aside for the half-used life to pass Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth, When the swift iron burning bee Drained the wild honey of their youth. What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre, Walk, our usual thoughts untouched, Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed, Immortal seeming ever? Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us, A fear may choke in our veins And the startled blood may stop. The air is loud with death, The dark air spurts with fire, The explosions ceaseless are. Timelessly now, some minutes past, These dead strode time with vigorous life, Till the shrapnel called 'An end!' But not to all. In bleeding pangs Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home, Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts. A man's brains splattered on A stretcher-bearer's face; His shook shoulders slipped their load, But when they bent to look again The drowning soul was sunk too deep For human tenderness. They left this dead with the older dead, Stretched at the cross roads. Burnt black by strange decay Their sinister faces lie, The lid over each eye; The grass and coloured clay More motion have than they, Joined to the great sunk silences. Here is one not long dead. His dark hearing caught our far wheels, And the choked soul stretched weak hands To reach the living word the far wheels said; The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light, Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels Swift for the end to break Or the wheels to break, Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight, 'Will they come? Will they ever come?' Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules, The quivering-bellied mules, And the rushing wheels all mixed With his tortured upturned sight. So we crashed round the bend, We heard his weak scream, We heard his very last sound, And our wheels grazed his dead face. -- Isaac Rosenberg

(1890-1918)

Ok - one or two comments - in isolation, there are parts of this poem I find
rather irritating - but there are some lines in there I absolutely adore.
 "Earth has waited for them,
  All the time of their growth
  Fretting for their decay:"
is really ghoulish, and reminds me slightly of the start of '1 Henry IV',
where the earth is described in similar terms -
 "No more the thirsty entrance of this soil
  Shall daub her lips with her own children's blood."
Thata also ties in reasonably nicely with the "old sceptres" a few lines up,
too - "Who hurled them out? Who hurled?".

Nick.

[Biography]

        born Nov. 25, 1890, Bristol, Gloucestershire, Eng.
        died April 1918, France

British poet and painter killed in World War I.

Rosenberg first trained to be a painter, winning several prizes at the Slade
School of Art, London. He enlisted in the British Army in 1915 and is best
known for his 'trench poems', written between 1916 and 1918, which showed
great imaginative power and originality in imagery. His Collected Works,
with a foreword by Siegfried Sassoon, first appeared in 1937; an edition by
Ian Parsons including poetry, prose, letters, paintings and drawings, was
published in 1979.

        -- EB