Romanticism: connecting some dots

You know that feeling when you're sleeping away from home, and you wake up in the dark and grope around, but the walls are in the wrong place, and so you wind up completely disoriented? That's what reading the German Romantics is like to me. Naturally, I could hardly have paid them a greater compliment, either from their perspective, or from my own. A while ago I read the fragments of Novalis, and more recently the fragments of Schlegel. Why? Well, they're fun, for one thing—and even funny:

The critic is a reader who ruminates. Therefore he ought to have more than one stomach.

The function of criticism, people say, is to educate one's readers! Whoever wants to be educated, let him educate himself. This is rude; but it can't be helped.

Apothegms like these have that surreal and contemptuous wit found later in Nietzsche. But Schlegel is not just Nietzschean: he seems to contain the entire history of modern Western thought in his various snippets. I offer you, for instance, Duchamp (or Eliot): "In order to write well about something, one shouldn't be interested in it any longer. To express an idea with due circumspection, one must have relegated it wholly to one's past; one must be wholly preoccupied with it."

Empson: "If some mystical art lovers who think of every criticism as a dissection and every dissection as a destruction of pleasure were to think logially, then 'wow' would be the best criticism of the greatest work of art. To be sure, there are many critiques which say nothing more, but only take much longer to say it. / People always talk about how an analysis of the beauty of a work of art supposedly disturbs the pleasure of the art lover. Well, the real lover just won't let himself be disturbed!"

Bakhtin, Frye etc.: "Many of the very best novels are compendia, encyclopedias of the whole spiritual life of a brilliant individual."

Schopenhauer: "Every human being who is cultivated and who cultivates himself contains a novel within himself. Bt it isn't necessary for him to express it and write it out."

André Breton: "Many witty ideas are like the sudden meeting of two friendly thoughts after a long separation."

Even the Schlegelian idea of the complete man goes back to the Renaissance cult of elasticity—compare, in particular, Grafton's recent portrait of Alberti, which I read last week—"A really free and cultivated person ought to be able to attune himself at will to being philosophical or philological, critical or poetical, historical or rhetorical, ancient or modern: quite arbitrarily, just as one tunes an instrument at any time and to any degree."

And all this from a thinker accused of excessive mediaevalism!

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Alberti's On Painting reconfigures the myth of Narcissus as an allegory about the origins of art, the beautiful soul attempting to capture the fleeting currents of the world on a watery canvas. Schlegel's writing, likewise, seems to capture one's own thoughts in a sudden flash—his words the reflection of anything already present. That flash is wit, which "gives an elasticity and electricity to a solid style". Novalis was into wit, too: "Every proposition must have independent character—must be a self-evident whole, the seedpod of a witty idea." It is for this reason that Schlegel introduces the notion of self-contradiction: "It is equally deadly to the spirit to have a system and not to have one. One must resolve to combine the two." (Pirsig said nothing more, but only took much longer to say it.) Wasn't it Emerson who said that self-contradiction is the mark of great genius, that only common minds are bound by consistency?

Because of this aesthetic, you can say almost anything about Schlegel. Frederick Beiser illuminates this point well—albeit unwittingly—in his book The Romantic Imperative. You can call Schlegel a progressive or a reactionary. You can see in Schlegel the historicising hermeneutics of Schleiermacher, or the text-based, kabbalistic formalism of Shklovsky. You can say that Schlegel found his romanticism in Schiller's cult of beauty and ancient/modern contrast, or you can say that Schiller only inculcated Schlegel's classicism. You can say that Schlegel is pro-system, or anti-system—that his philosophy is a reaction against the Enlightenment, or a resolution of its problems. You can say that he believes in absolute, transcendent knowledge—and that he denies the possibility of attaining it. You could compare that last contradiction to Kant—who posits the noumenon but denies direct perception of the same—or you could read Schlegel in a Kantless vacuum—Schlegel, after all, for whom Kant was already out of date, for whom Fichte was the real deal, at least until 1797 when even Fichte had become passé. This was the same Fichte who first achieved fame by being mistaken for Kant, back in 1791. It goes on and on.

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Lovejoy vs. Spitzer.

This all-inclusive quality is one reason why Lovejoy wanted to abandon the word 'Romanticism' in favour of 'romanticisms'. He broke the concept down into smaller pieces, which he called unit-ideas. The unit-idea is the classic Lovejoy notion: you discover throughout intellectual history certain small, hard concepts that persist through time—and then you can write a history of these concepts, hence his masterpiece on the Great Chain of Being. The unit-ideas of German Romanticism, according to Lovejoy, are three—Ganzheit (holism), Streben (dynamism), and Eigentümlichkeit (diversification). Personally I would have left it at arcanism and irony, but then Lovejoy was a more brilliant man than me. In 1944 Lovejoy was taken to task by one Leo Spitzer—a sort of intellectual outsider sometimes lumped in with other literary philologists like Curtius and Auerbach—for what Spitzer perceived as an excessive analytism. By breaking Romanticism up into these parts, argued Spitzer, Lovejoy was destroying its organic totality, and thus failing to understand it as a complete entity. Understanding things as a complete entity is classically German: as a historical discipline it is called Geistesgeschichte.

(Gombrich, who moved the Warburg tradition away from its German roots towards the analytism of Karl Popper, criticised his predecessor Panofsky for practicing Geistesgeschichte—the mentality of the Renaissance, insisted Gombrich, could not be discovered in every brushstroke of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. In this respect Gombrich had a deep kinship with Lovejoy, primarily interested in how discrete visual forms and techniques persist and change over time. In his Inventing the Middle Ages, Norman Cantor associates this formalist discipline with a conservative politics of stability and peaceful tradition.)

It is worth noting that the very notion of 'understanding something as a complete entity' is a central problem in Romanticism, particularly for Schleiermacher. For Schlegel, the unity behind the fragmented world can only be approached, never attained: this is why, like Empson, he mocks those who bewail the analysis of art. But Spitzer sees Lovejoy's position as tending towards nominalism: there are no universals of thought (like 'Romanticism'), only a series of particular unit-ideas. This, for Spitzer, is a misappropriation of the methods of natural science.

Lovejoy responded immediately. (Both attack and response can be found in the Journal of the History of Ideas, volume 5, issue 2.) For Lovejoy, it was Spitzer's position that led to nominalism—for if organic wholes like Romanticism cannot be broken up into constituent parts, then there is no reason to believe that Lovejoy's idea of Romanticism bears any relation to Spitzer's. Instead of a history, or a series of histories, we would end up with a number of discrete wholes in the mind of each thinker. The Geist posited by Spitzer remains a solipsistic, unverifiable entity—a ghost.

For John Emerson, it all depends on how you look at it: one's conclusion is determined by one's prior perspective. But I think we can be bolder, and say that Lovejoy is right. Spitzer is still clouded by Plato, putting universals before particulars—as a result, Spitzerian Romanticism is delicate to the point of being completely uninteresting. In 1944, the Germans were on the point of defeat in more ways than one. The Hegelian fiction of the 19th century, that cultures are unified entities in which every part reflects organically the whole, was losing out to the ruthless analyses of Anglo-American philosophy. There were those who still talked in historicist terms, such as Spitzer and Cassirer, Whorf and Panofsky, but they were no longer, except for Panofsky, the mainstream. The weight of evidence just seemed, and still seems, too strongly against them.

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Romanticism and the palato-alveolar sibilant.

Who were the great German philosophers before Kant? Leibniz, Thomasius, Wolff, Lessing, Mendelssohn, Hamann, Herder, Jacobi. Who were the great German philosophers after Kant? Fichte, Schiller, Schlegel, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. This sudden surfeit of sibilants is no coincidence. You know where you stand with a Kant—just listen to that name, solid and proper. But after Kant, everyone starts sitting around scratching their heads, trying to work out, What next? After Kant, everyone worth his salt is writing stuff like this, from Fichte:

The judgment of any system or a priori relation of phenomenae [sic] exists in any rational or metaphysical—or at least epistemological—contradiction to an abstract and empirical concept such as being, or 'to be', or 'to occur', in the thing itself or of the thing itself.

The sibilance of those names is the sound of certainty—of all that is solid—melting away, of architecture sinking in a bog. (It's a very German sound. Given its representation of the vague and mystical, we might spell it sibyllance.) Hegel evaded the problem by producing a sort of pimped-out version of Herderian historicism, but you can still hear in his name the still small voice of Schlegel! Speculative philosophy finally got back into the Kantian saddle with names like Heidegger and Gadamer, but it took more than a hundred years.

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John Holbo, who turns up everywhere these days, is a fan of Romanticism. In fact, he thinks that postmodern literary philosophy—now generally referred to as Theory—can be 'helpfully regarded as a late repetition of German Romantic themes'. Back in December '05, John wrote:

Theory, I will argue, is a form of late romanticism. . . More specifically, Theory is the latest chapter in the history of the counter-Enlightenment. My tag to encapsulate this comes from Friedrich Schlegel: "It is equally deadly to the spirit to have a system and not to have one. One must resolve to combine the two." This contains the key to the puzzle of why so much eclecticism and, frankly, contradiction can cohabit under the roof of one term.

Despite this, it took him till last June to read Andrew Bowie's 1997 classic, From Romanticism to Critical Theory, which argues something similar:

The German philosophical traditions I shall be exploring [from Schlegel onwards] are the historical and theoretical 'condition of possibility' [that's a Kantian joke] of the new wave of theory which developed from the 1960s onwards in the work of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man and others.

Now Holbo has two copies of Bowie's book, one for the bedside table, the other for loo-time. (He keeps the latter under a stack of Better Homes and Gardens, to be sure, but it's there.) He and Bowie like to bully up against poor old Beiser, who thinks that the postmodernists' claiming of the Romantics is 'one-sided and anachronistic'. In fact, Frühromantik, as Beiser labels Schlegel et al., was 'a unique historical phenomena'. Note that 'phenomena' has become feminine, just as it was for Fichte, quoted above, who pluralised it as 'phenomenae'. Lacan, no doubt, would have much to say about this feminization of the neuter. It all relates to the mirror stage, you see, and Narcissus, and the attempt to capture the self among the fleeting impressions of an infant's world.

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In a recent post at the Valve, Holbo implies that the Romantic roots of the postmodern aesthetic can be seen in the use of the mixed style or genre, noting Schlegel's concept of Mischung. For Schlegel, modern literature was born out of the mixing of genres in the Middle Ages—a progressive, chaotic phenomenon unknown to the stable and cyclical symmetries of classical literature. The modern form is designated Romantisch. Schlegel seems to discern one classical anticipation of the modern state—"In Plato we find unmixed all the pure types of Greek prose in their classic individuality, and often incongruously juxtaposed"—but here the conflicting elements are only juxtaposed, not mixed. I am not sure what to make of this. The same general idea appears in Bakhtin's essay on dialogic discourse, which claims that the modern novel derives from the cross-pollinating currents of mediaeval romance:

The element of translation and remodelling appears in the case of the novel somewhat more rude and striking. One might say that European novelistic prose began and developed in a process of free (transformative) translation between one work and another.

Or again, "Every novel in its totality, from the point of view of language, and of the linguistic consciousness invested in it, is a hybrid." If modern or postmodern literature and thought is essentially mixed or mongrel, then there is a sense in which one work flows into the next, having no discrete boundaries. In this we see the genesis of the postmodern notion of intertextuality, of the Open Work. Hence the Romantic taste for Tristram Shandy.

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Gawain recently wrote to me, as a critique of some of the material I've been peddling of late, "I don't care about theory this and theory that and how they relate, if I cannot somehow connect it to my life and I am not great at connecting dots; which just leaves me with the impression of dazzling technique and nothing to hold onto."

Damn. Go read some Schlegel, anyway. You'll have a good laugh.

Anniversary buchukchulukes

Yesterday was the first anniversary of the Varieties. Happy returns! It has been an interesting year, to be sure. Perhaps the biggest thrill has been the many generous compliments from bloggers I myself admire; but every comment in the box, even a pedantic correction, quickens my pulse. Chris Miller, one of my favourite sparring-partners, once wrote of me that

Bring him a box of fortune cookies, and he will take you on an amazing trip through the English dictionary and down the major roads (as well as the twisted cul-de-sacs) of European literature—and that’s why his blog is so much fun. You just never know where he’s going to take you.

Not only have I not forgotten this remark, but it has become a tacit manifesto of sorts for me. Since then I have made no attempt to stay on-topic in what I write, seeking instead the unpredictable digression. And you know, it's a more exciting way to write—I see the trait in some of my best peers. It is no surprise that Chris is referring to one of my earliest pieces, On the Antiquity of Fortune Cookies, which is still my own favourite, along with that most personal piece on the wells of London, Chalybea. Other posts have been much more popular. Easily the most viewed—found for the most part from prurient Googlesearches, somewhat predictably—was my rumination on enforced transvestism, though I suppose thrill-hunters may have been dismayed by the rather academic context of my remarks. Kiss-words in Latin got a great many hits too, so perhaps I have helped to bust that myth, just a little. More delights included Slate.com picking up my Apocalypto review, not a great piece, but no matter. Possibly the surprise of my blogging year was the discovery of a considerable Brazilian readership. Bem-vindo, amigos! But in celebration of year one, I have updated my very first post, and one appropriate to origins, on the Chicken and Egg—still rude in execution, but in some ways a template for what would come—with a bit about Plutarch, my new love.

Now, truly, I am glad I have not yet capitulated, as I have wanted to on occasion.

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With all this in mind, it is good to see my own friends going strong. Chris is the flat-out winner of the Varieties Award for Blog Prolixity for his fascinating post on Lorado Taft on sculpture, thrashing Gawain with a whopping 8,889 words. Gawain boy has done good too, though—take for instance his classic recent speculation about beauty. He promises more pieces on taste for me to lock horns with soon. My sharp archaeological comrade Raminagrobis continues to frustrate me by not writing enough: still, I can relate to everything he does write. Languagehat, meanwhile, continues to be the ultimate problem-solver, as well as producing the snide fare we all enjoy—really, he could pen this stuff in his sleep, but it's no less fun. John of Blog Meridian scribbles with an infectious enthusiasm, and with no less infectious a feeling for place, and his latest post is a charmingly ramshackle agglomeration of ideas, full of hints. Hank Heatly breaks from painting place—in this John is his true comrade—to dissert on ancient timekeeping. (Have you read this, Hank?) Simon Holloway, finally, who brings out the philosemite in me, charms me with his Biblical geekdom, and would charm my wife with his Lord of the Rings geekdom.

My best new discovery is Imaginative Universal, especially as its proprietor, the mysterious Herr Ziffer, or Ashley as he signs himself elsewhere, has stopped writing about programming, and has started instead on phenomenology, occultism, jargon and other offbeat philosophical topics. It's serious stuff, but has none of the smugness and predictability that usually plagues blog-philosophy. Ziff has the rare talent of finding uses for abstract philosophy in discussing modern culture. This is how to do it, Kugelmass.

Berkeley

For the last 9 days, San Francisco has been the city of journeys; Berkeley, rather, has been our home. Lily's aunt and uncle have put us up in their marvelous house high in the Berkeley hills, cold and beautiful in modernist glass and wood. Up here my experiences have been communal, not solitary, although dark has come in early, and with it the threat of the wild, of old age, even of death. Armies of Argentine ants, with multiple queens, and thus difficult to exterminate, threaten to emerge from underneath the walls. Uncle Peter tells us of raging eucalypt fires, and shows us the houses precariously held up on poles, ready to topple at the first sign of an earthquake. We felt the tremors of a 3 or a 3.5 just the other night. Thus it goes, says Peter. At night I huddle inside, my hands and fingers frozen, eating to stave off the chill, with the candles lighted to stave off the dark. In the morning all the glass lets the sunlight swell into the house, and you can go out on the terrace and gaze out over the Bay.

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Peter took me out in the car to see the town. As in San Francisco, the local architecture is spectacular, and there are stunning art deco pieces all over the place, in particular the high school and public library. The style has the high excitement of the machine-age and Howard Carter, and on the façade of the library, designed in 1930 by James Plachek in a 'zigzag Moderne style', we see Mayanesque carvings, chevrons, pilaster caps and odd Egyptianesque murals by Simeon Pelenc, celebrating the production of books:


Inside the ceiling resembles native textiles, and the hanging lamps have a clean geometry—the combination a perfect expression of its milieu:


One sees Egypt also in the obelisks of the Edwards Stadium, named after George Cunningham Edwards, 'freshman in the first class of this university', and 'member of its faculty continuously from graduation till death in 1930'. Edwards, according to his plaque, was modest, kindly and selfless, but best of all, 'he believed in youth and youth made him its confidant'. What a remarkable phrase! Youth, I fear, never quite managed to make me its confidant, and wise old age has recently abandoned me in favour of 'grand-dad chores'. Still, perhaps maturity will take me under its wing at some point.


Much of the design is in gables, cornicing or window-details, simply delightful. Then there are the numerous art deco cinemas, with their magical signs evoking America before it was paranoid, such as this one:


Today we took a tour around the Scharffen Berger Chocolate factory, where the wife and I sampled various delicious products, and gazed at the machinery. We munched happily on chocolate nibs, and Mrs. Roth felt 'weak at the knees' upon sniffing a vanilla-bean. She has a better sense of smell than me. I, on the other hand, was attuned to discover the atavistic forms of art deco in the gigantic metal processors:


They recall de Chirico, or Ernst's Ubu. Thus the same shapes and lines, full of gaiety but never trite, continually assert themselves in this town, a reminder of better times. The sun gives the forms and colours proper substance. L'Architecture—wrote Corbusier—c'est le jeu savant, correct et magnifique des formes sous la lumière. But the locals do not look up at the walls, only go about their business in preparation for the new year festivities.

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Peter is a cultivated man, but he is also earthy. He shows me the different trees of Berkeley, and the first he pointed out was what he called the Araucaria, what I would call the monkeypuzzle, my favourite. Last week he stopped in the roadside to collect refuse eucalypt for decoration and firewood. On the kitchen window-sill, Peter is growing narcissus, which he calls paperwhites.


Youth made Narcissus its confidant. When I first read the Metamorphoses, a long while ago, occasionally glancing at the Latin, I was charmed by the three-word sentence roger anne rogem, 'be asked, or ask?'—the context is love, of course. I decided to name a couple in my first novel, Roger and Anne Rogem. I haven't yet written that novel. Still, the Varieties is my window-sill, and with a modicum of narcissism I have now grown many blooms upon it.

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A witty spot of sgraffito


Not, despite appearances, the home of Nam June Paik


The far distant Oakland elephant cranes, from the hills, at dusk

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Food plays a big part in our life at Berkeley. Cooking and eating is a warm and convivial defence against the terrors outside, and a little red does wonders for winter melancholy. In the morning I eat oatmeal with currants and rhubarb jam. Palta has been a favourite at tea-time, mashed up with black pepper, salt and olive-oil on slices of baguette. In the evening, we do not just eat—we dine. Peter is constantly in the kitchen with his apron on, slicing and sizzling, tossing and drizzling. On occasion he corrals Lily into an apron also, royal blue, in which she looks heartbreakingly pretty. I do not cook. For Christmas I attempted to peel the potatoes, which was a disaster. I'm better with words than with food. Some are good with both, alas. But I eat with great gusto.


Peter likes to go to the Berkeley Bowl to get his groceries. This is, quite simply, the best grocery store I have ever seen. The produce is gorgeous and extensive, including dozens of exotic fruits I'd never seen before—durians, buddha's hands, taro, heirloom tomatoes, naga imo, and these kiwano melons:


When I saw these melons I insisted we buy one, though 3 dollars apiece. What I wanted most to try was the durian, which is banned on the Singapore MRT and allegedly tastes like custard, despite smelling of 'pig-shit, turpentine and onions, garnished with a gym sock'. But Peter thought they weren't ripe, as we could sniff them without vomiting. So I settled for a horned melon. The four of us shared it for afters the other day, and to be honest it tasted pretty bland, the inside gelatinous with fibrous seeds:


Peter, a Chileno, shows us a Chilean favourite, along with the palta; it is a sort of salsa made with cilantro, keylime juice, peppers and red onions, called pebre:


We eat this spooned generously on bread, as a side to the meal. For mains we have eaten salmon and chili con carne, but my favourite were these little skirt steaks, prepared expertly by Peter's wife, which we took medium-rare:


Isn't your mouth watering just looking at them? In the background would be a little light classical music, and our napkins, red for the girls and blue for the boys, are in brass rings. The table is spotlit in halogen, and Peter extinguishes all useless lights in the kitchen. Thus in this house high in the hills, darkness surrounds us. There is no saying of grace. But there is a toast—I suggest Lechayim! for his nonobservant Jewish wife—and we clink glasses, all except my own wife, who has no taste for wine. Over dinner we are treated to a Shandean tale of family history—the girl who made the rough crossing from Chiloe to the mainland in mysterious circumstances, recounted by a local villager—full of digressions and interruptions, dialectic. It was a Romantic ideal for Karl Solger and Jean Paul, who admired Sterne. The digression is the story:

Jean Paul made extensive use of delays—of interruptions, prefaces to prefaces, and extra pages, in order to loosen narrative convention and raise the reader to a pitch of imaginative stimulation, where he could awaken to the realisation that the preparative or the delay and the goal, if understood rightly, are identical.

For dessert we eat pears cooked in white wine, demerara and orange liqueur, topped with hand-whipped cream and a seasonal plum pudding.


With this our supper ends. It is New Year's Eve. Peter has suggested champagne, but decides against it. He is going to bed before midnight—normally he is up till one or two—just to be contrary. In this he reminds me of my father. Lily is keen to stay up. At the moment she is rereading Anne of Green Gables to remember her childhood. I help with some washing-up, the lights are put out, the music is put off, and the cold and the silent dark hold illimitable dominion over all. There are troubles with us, and our sojourn's end is beckoning dully. The new year has come. I have new shoes. The devil has been ritually executed, to put a smile on the world's face. I make no resolutions. There will be no more photographs, not for a while. I have taken a great number, many of my lovely wife, in all her myriad costumes, with all her myriad faces. It is the time of year to be sentimental and unabashed, and to combat the anxieties of illness and death with an unforced lightness of heart, with an eye for beauty in nature and upon the human face, and most of all with the determination to take pleasure in the food and sustenance of life as it is lived now. Friends, let us build our lives in the Art Deco style.

When, looking for his corps, they only found
A rising stalk, with yellow blossoms crown'd.

Gedichte: II

The internet's a great place, isn't it? According to Wikipedia, Saddam is currently 'most likely on his way to hell', though that won't be there by the time you read it. But the web is full of nice chaps, ready to offer their expertise. Steve Languagehat and I have traded advice now and then, and Stuart Heath, Simon Holloway and others have been kind enough to lend me their wisdom on more than one occasion. Now another fellow has come to my aid, handsome young Irishman Aidan Kehoe, who keeps a delightful blog—how can you dislike a man who writes a post in German on morsecode mnemonics, and lists "the French as a people" as his sole "disenchantment"? (Myself, I think the French are underrated, but then so are the British, not to mention the Americans.) Mr. Kehoe, in fact, has considerable fluency in German, and at my request he agreed to assist me in my translation of Herr Rochs' poetry, my previous attempt at which, with mixed results, can be found here. This is the second installment; the German original was written just four days after the first one.

Und menge ich von Nichts, als Lieb'
Und nie von andern Dingen,
Jedennoch stets genug nur blieb'
Mein Leben lang zu singen.

Ich brauche meinem Liebchen fein
Nur tief ins Aug zu sehn
Damit die Lieder gross und klein
Zu ihrem Lob entstehn.

Und bringe ich sie dann ihr dar
So Lohnt mich suess ihr Kuss
Und eine neue Liederschaar
Bringt ihr dann neuen Gruss.

5. Nov. 1876

My effort at comprehending this was poor, but Aidan came to my rescue, though Rochs' apparent archaism stretched even his powers. The second word menge, which normally means 'mix', is the chief sticking-point—here's what Aidan had to say on the matter:

It could be that menge was intended to convey the obsolete form of the verbal counterpart of Mangel 'lack [of something]'. The current verb is mangeln, but the Grimms list mengan as appearing in Hochdeutsch in that meaning long before Mangel itself.

Well, I take his ingenious word for it, as it's the only way I have of making sense of the first verse. Perhaps Herr Wokan will have other things to say. Aidan notes further, delightfully apoint, that such an explanation 'would require that your great-great-grandfather had both the desire and the education to be ridiculously archaic, though! All the same, such a combination was relatively fashionable in 1875'. It certainly was. Aidan's help is implicit throughout the first two verses here. There's one more thing to say, which is that I have taken a different stylistic tack for this version. With my last effort I was still writing in a Conradian style, whereas here I have kept to a strict accentual metre, in imitation of the original, which is in ballad metre, and in return allowed myself more freedom in sense. This isn't entirely comfortable to me, but as an experiment I don't think it is a failure. The last line is really mine—for a closer rendering, feel free to substitute 'My darling should readily greet'. The translation is for my wife, to whom kittle and bejaune are known terms of endearment.

And I've wanted for nothing but Love—
No, ne'er for a single damn thing—
But I've had enough push come to shove
That for livelihood lifelong I sing.

And I need only glance at my kittle,
And to look her so deep in the eyes,
For songs in her praise great and little
To swiftly materialise.

So I offer her these as a token
For one of her kisses so sweet,
Till a new flock of sonnets well spoken
Should knock my bejaune off her feet.

San Francisco: another photo essay

The consonants are a church of
hands interlocking, stops
and measures of fingerings
that confine the spirit to
articulations of space and time.

In the Church of the Holy Name, near Ocean Beach, a caretaker asked me, Are you Catolic, den? I was hoping this wouldn't come up. I lied through my teeth, No, my mother's a Catholic. I came here for her sake. I'm an agnostic. He said, So you don't b'lieve in notting? I replied, No, I'm not sure, I don't know if God exists. The man said, When you gonna know? Good question, I replied, and both of us laughed, he in sincerity. But being in a place like this—I gestured around at the airy 1964 interior, the high glass dome—makes you feel a bit spiritual, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah, he said, smiling. It's de house of de Lord.

Well, I suppose there's an unreligious sort of experience for you.


Most men, as you know, stand up to pee. Me, I prefer to sit, like a lady. I just think that micturating, like defecating, should be a leisurely, relaxed sort of affair. It's the same with washing. I learnt to shower during my graduate days, but really I'm a bath man. It's so much more gentlemanly to wash yourself while reclining back in a tub, than standing in a vigorous blast of steam and water. Some say it's less hygienic, as you're sitting in your own dirt. Those people don't understand how soap works. Thus, I prefer to sit and relax while washing and excreting. But when I'm out walking, I prefer a bit of physical resistance, which is why I'm not averse to a four-hour trek in the pouring rain now and then. Within five minutes my shoes had filled up with water, and my hair was dangling in loose wet curls into my eyes. There was no question of an umbrella. Mrs. Roth, inexplicably, again declined to join me. The trick is to stick it out till that point where you can't get any colder or wetter, and just lose yourself in looking and thinking, that way the discomfort ceases to bother you. I actually made the mistake of stopping for a hot muffin, which afforded a few minutes of pleasure, but only accentuated my condition when I returned to the road.


My second journey in San Francisco, west from the edge of Haight-Ashbury to the ocean and back, was quite different to the first. In my last post I showed you a bright and well-known stretch of the city; in this one I show you an overcast sky hanging over the west side towards the ocean, a quiet area full of orientals rather than beatniks and Italians. On Irving, a block or two south of Golden Gate Park, there are over a thousand nail-salons, vying for space with the markets and discounteries, the used bookstores, the Chinese restaurants, and the occasional boutique. Another block south and it's almost all houses, but what houses! In terms purely of vernacular local architecture, this town is easily the best I've seen in America, and even ranks with the finest parts of London. There's an extraordinary variety, each house on a street different from its neighbors, and so many colors, forms and textures.




This stuff was easily enough to keep me entertained. But I enjoyed the more monumental buildings too, such as this one, a great period piece of American modernism:


Naturally I explored a couple of bookstores in the area, though they weren't much cop. Black Oak on Irving had a two-volume edition of Roger Bacon's Opus Maius, which might have tempted me, only I'm not buying books now. Anyway, I've already read it, and it wasn't as great as I wanted it to be. I was hoping for something more magical, maybe even an elaborated version of his earlier De Secretis Operibus Naturae (1252), which rattles off in a Leonardesque way about Greek fire, the quadrature of the circle, telescopes and microscopes, the concealment of secrets, artificial flying machines, incantations, anagrams, menstruation, counterbalances and so on. In fact the Opus, presented to Pope Clement IV in 1267, turned out to be a systematic exposition of Bacon's reading in natural philosophy during the preceding decades. As such, it's not terribly exciting, though it does have moments of undeniable methodological interest. Bacon was a tireless collector of manuscripts, and was particularly lusty in his hunt for Seneca's epistles, which make up the dull bulk of Bacon's writing on moral philosophy. But at some point he joined the Franciscans and gained access to the personal library of his great predecessor, Robert Grosseteste; this reading, combined with his knowledge of Arabic sources, contributed to substantial chapters on optics, astronomy, and empirical method. The latter, which Bacon claims is wholly unknown among his contemporaries, consists of three things: investigation by observation and experiment, an open mind and rational use of experimental data, and better results than 'speculative science'. Ah, better results! Here we have some enjoyable inventions, at last—a stone which will put an army to flight, perpetual lamps, bituminous 'Malta' to eat through armour, magnets and gunpowders. . . great stuff.

(Bacon is a bit confused about language, though—he claims that Latin is derived from Greek and Hebrew, bless him, listing the following loanwords, many correct: domus, scyphus, clericus, laicus, diabolus, Sathanas, ego, pater, mater, ambo, leo, bos, ager, malum.)

*

The vowels are physical
corridors of the imagination
emitting passionately
breaths of flame. In a poem
the vowels appear like
the flutterings of an owl
caught in a web and give
aweful intimations of
eternal life.

My movement through San Francisco, as best it could have done, proceeded by observation and experiment. I walked where my eyes took me. Bacon, for whom all science was merely the handmaiden to theology, would have approved of the myriad churches—including Korean and Assyrian—on my route. Here was the first impressive example, St. Anne's, on Judah:


The second big church was the Holy Name, miles further west, and south towards Lawton. Where St. Anne's is eclectic, drawing on Gothic and Moorish styles and somewhat Italian in feel (and colour), the Holy Name is decidedly modern, with a slightly pagodesque roof and rounded 60s lines inside. It had some tasteful, abstract stained glass, and some rather dull sculpture, but the most interesting object for me was the ambry (or almery, Latin armarium), containing the holy oils:


I cannot, incidentally, identify the round black solids in the jars, nor could the caretaker. (Are you Catolic, den?, etc.) Outside you could already smell the salt smell of the sea. Lily's aunt teaches at a school near here. The winds were up and in my face, though it had stopped raining by this point. My shoes and socks, sodden through, squelched mercilessly as I trudged down to the shore. I wasn't prepared for what I saw. There were hot green and red grasses lining the road that separates the streets from the beach, burning violently, longly as the cars rushed past in the gathering gloom:


And then the roar and break of the ocean, grey and silver and white, brutal.


I first saw it through two dunes over the road from Lawton. I was miles away. The strand was ochre and wet, deserted, save for a few crusties and lonesome men—four gulls darted dark against the crashing surf and for a moment I thought they were horses or dogs, cantering in the distant sea. I couldn't have been further from the green and gentle waters of the Fisherman's Wharf. The winds were really galing at this point, and sands were coursing over the shore, blue and brown, with the roar in my ears, and the plovers all gadding about in tiny multitudes. Being in a place like this made me feel a bit. . . spiritual. Or romantic at least. I've been reading some of the German romantics lately, the philosophy and criticism. You feel they really wanted to be outside, here, not stuck indoors waving their arms to evoke the sublime in Hamlet. If the monumental churches had led me from 3rd to 48th, zigzagging to the north and south, then here was my telos, the closest approximation to a religious experience I could have had.

The walk home did not contain much to stir my heart, and in my condition I found it rather tiring. The dusk descended dully as I walked east along Lincoln, gazing occasionally into the park as the trees bent in the gales. I was not in the same city I had walked so pleasantly on Friday. I had no ridiculous poetry to mock here; the overcast west is a prosaic sector. The glamour and variety of downtown and North Beach had been replaced by a grey continuity, overlooked but full of small surprises. But then, theology is not a thing of glamour and variety. It is more of a grey continuity, full of small surprises, tending toward revelation. San Francisco is eating away at me, and part of me wants to put up and stay, London be damned.

Nature does nothing in vain. Roger Bacon wrote that, a good Aristotelian—but it will serve as well for the romantics, and for their modern heirs, the beats, to whom this city has long been home.

San Francisco: a photo essay

Do any of my readers live in San Francisco? What a wonderful city you have! A couple of days ago I took my first trip down there, from up here in the Berkeley hills, where we're staying. Berkeley itself is a heaven of chi-chi bohemianism, a mobbed cheeseshop with playing-cards for queue-tickets, a guy playing piano next door, the sort of broken jazz you might hear in a Woody Allen movie, and it was raining outside, and slim beauties with rosy cheeks and vague traces of ethnicity, wrapped up in wools and fashionably-distressed denim.

But San Francisco, well, that's something else. I took the BART down to Embarcadero, where I pottered about towards the Ferry Building smelling money wherever I walked. I took pictures of buildings, that's easy, but what I really wanted was to snap people, and throughout the day I saw dozens of people I wanted to snap—a black gentleman with a peacock feather in his hat getting his brown shoes shined, a Chinese waiter with his collar up adjusting his bow-tie for a shift, an old guy in a tux sweeping the butts off the street outside Hustler's, a Patrick Bateman with a comb dancing in his fingertips, the most beautiful six year-old I've ever seen playing with her daddy in Pioneer Park, gaggles of dirty intellectuals up in North Beach—but I couldn't muster the courage to ask, and hey, I wasn't about to just snap them without asking either.

*

After admiring the lavish takeaways of the Ferry Building I headed up Montgomery and turned on Columbus at the Pyramid and the Transamerica Scientology building, which did not have these pretty windows:


Past all the hunan restaurants I stopped for an hour at City Lights. The bookstore used to be twinned with Compendium Books in Camden Town, round the corner from where I once lived, but then Compendium closed five years ago. So I came to see what all the fuss was about, here where it all started. In fact before I came I'd been reading some classic San Franciscan poetry, you know, the 60s stuff. I was using the famous anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960. God, this shit stinks! It reads like a bunch of hippies brought up on Whitman and high modernism and having precious little of anything to say for itself, other than Screw the establishment and Gee, isn't nature, like, amazing? Rule no. 1 for poets: never use the words 'poem', 'poet' or especially 'poetry'. Rule no. 2: we've all read Joyce and Eliot, some of us like them, you don't need to allude to them. Look, recycling of Finnegans Wake from Robert Duncan's 'The Dance':

I'll slip away before they're up
and see the dew shining

And some original but incompetent Joyceifying from his 'A poem beginning with a line by Pindar':

damerging a nuve. A nerb.
The present dented of the U
nighted stayd. States.

And look, recycling of The Waste Land from Jack Spicer's 'Imaginary Elegy II':

Tarot cards
Make love to other Tarot cards. Here agony
Is just imagination's sister bitch.
This is where the sun tormented castle which
Reflects the sun. Da dada da.
The castle sings.
Da. I don't remember what I lost. Dada.
The song. Da. The hippogriffs were singing.
Da dada. The boy. His horns
Were wet with song. Dada.
I don't remember. Da. Forgotten.
Da. Dada. Hell. Old butterface
Who always eats her lovers.

This is cringeworthy! But it's not just direct quotation, the whole idea of poetry made up of a bunch of banal images and little else is taken straight from the haiku crap being peddled in the 1910s. Duncan's 'The Question':

Have you a gold cup
dedicated to thought
that is like clear water
held in a flower?

or sheen of the gold
burnishd on wood
to furnish fire-glow,
a burning in sight only?

(Sorry, man—Shakespeare already did 'burnish' and 'burn'.) But you noticed that 'burnishd', right? That's no accident. Here's an academic to decode this strange typo for us: 'Dropping a silent e can signify action against authority; but at times distorted orthography signifies moral dysfunction.' That's Bob Perelman's article 'Write the Power' from the 1994 American Literary History. Write the power, huh? Look, he's one of them, all over that wordplay game. So here's some more of Spicer's stupid Elegy, which unfortunately for us is far from imaginary, this time channeling that insufferable faux-naivety of Gertrude Stein:

God must have a big eye to see everything
That we have lost or forgotten. Men used to say
That all lost objects stay upon the moon
Untouched by any other eye but God's.
The moon is God's big yellow eye remembering
What we have lost or never thought.

Then there is a tasteless balladesque scribble by Helen Adam called 'I Love my Love', full of gold and purple and hair and embraces and that sort of girl stuff. But like it or not all this electric drivel was bouncing round in my head as I walked up Columbus, and not only that, but also the library books I'd picked up by Alan Watts, the Bay Area's most famous philosopher. Tim Leary gives some good bibliobole for Watts' Joyous Cosmology, calling it 'a brilliant arrangement of words describing experiences for which are language has no vocabulary'. That's irony, I'd recognise it anyday. Watts is into Hesse, of course. Hesse is a godsend for me. Whenever I'm depressed at how goddamn serious and brilliant those Germans were, I think of Hesse, who singlehandedly proved they could be as dumb and blunt as us anglophones. I'm not sure which is the worst of his books, maybe Steppenwolf. It's generally a bad sign, I think, when there's a rock band named after your book. Anyway, Watts is absolutely thrilled with the schtick Hesse was peddling in the Glass Bead Game or Magister Ludi or whatever you want to call it, and describes the set-up—

From such elements as the design of a Chinese house, a Scarlatti sonata, a topological formula, and a verse from the Upanishads, the players will elucidate a common theme and develop its application in numerous directions. No two games are the same, for not only do the elements differ, but also there is no thought of attempting to force a static and uniform order upon the world. The universal language facilitates the perception of relationships but does not fix them, and is founded upon a "musical" conception of the world in which order is as dynamic and changing as the patterns of sound in a fugue.

This is the Leibniz fantasy, that all manifestations of human art and culture have something in common, and probably something mathematical like a topological formula. The arts all speak a 'universal language', that dream of the 17th century. Prescriptive aesthetics is banished as an authoritarian political force, a 'static and uniform order'. And in true German fashion the highest artform is music, which is probably the same as math, and the archetype here is naturally the Bach fugue, which math types of the Hofstadter variety are well known to love. I don't know, all this gump makes me want to play an Irving Babbitt role, damn the romantics. Here's some more Watts, from the 1974 Essence of Alan Watts:

Only there's an arrangement to pretend that you ought to be somewhere else, so the place where you are is the place where you are always pretending you ought to be somewhere else—

Wow, that's jazz, ain't it!

—This is the nature of life, this is the pulse. I ought to be somewhere else. If you discover that that's the trick you're playing on yourself, you become serene and you don't entirely give up the game because you've seen through it. You say, "Hmm, it really might be fun to go on playing."

Cool, man. In the margin some guy's written 'prosaic, commonplace, dull'. So anyways, City Lights has a mini-wall in the entranceway full of Atlas Press and other surrealist books, which I liked. I got sidetracked downstairs flicking through Slavoj Žižek and other postmodern ruffians, but this quickly bored me so I went upstairs to ask what I could get there and nowhere else. The girl pointed me to a wall at the back stuffed with countercultural fanzines and other local productions, so I spent a while leafing through these rants, psychedelic comix and dharma-bum verses of the Duncan variety. I had to buy something of course, but it was small, a copy of the latest Mineshaft Magazine, which OK isn't local, but a California and City Lights type of affair at any rate. There are some amusing R. Crumb drawings in it at least. I mean, what's the point of going to City Lights and buying a book by Slavoj Žižek?

*

I was caught by the white façade of Peter and Paul gleaming real bright in the Bay sun. That was in Washington Square Park. They've done a good job with the medieval look, don't you think?


Around the front is an inscription, it says LA GLORIA DI COLUI CHE TUTTO MUOVE PER L'UNIVERSO PENETRA E RISPLENDE, that's from the Paradiso. (Hey, it says so right there.) I had lunch in a little Italian on the corner, it was a fat cheeseburger with fried onions and chipped potatoes, delicious. What's Going On? was playing on the stereo, and the sun was burning down on me, so I had to take off my gloves and hat and jacket. The waitress winked at me, like Italians are supposed to. I felt a perfect contentment at that moment, the kind of thing that can never last. I saw Coit Tower to the east, though I didn't know what it was yet, and resolved to explore it later. After lunch I walked down one of those profound hills towards the docks. The docks were full of tourist crap, with the worst waxwork museum I've ever seen, and a pier for California sealions that sit and laze about fatly for visitors to snap. I don't want to disappoint you.


A guy was playing bongos badly on the waterfront, when I came back he was gone and there were four japanese kids banging various drums and gongs mostly in time, that was more fun. There were human statues, mostly blacks, just the sort I'm familiar with from Covent Garden. I caught these beautiful birds outside the fryhouses:


The best thing there was a museum of automata, mostly old musicboxes and arcade games from the centuries gone. There was this mechanical horse too:


Dusk was wafting in. The tourists were still bustling about the docks in their droves, I was missing my wife, who'd declined the steep hillwalking involved in any trip to the city, but I wasn't quite ready to go home yet. So I climbed back up the hill towards Pioneer Park and Coit Tower—cars were crawling up the slopes but on foot I quickly mounted—young families were playing in the eventide, and the peachy glow came down all over the bay. I didn't feel like paying five bucks for the elevator to the top, so I just admired the murals and headed back down Kearney towards Union Square.


There was an old celestial gentleman stopped on the stairs cut into the roadside, it reminded me of Saint Michael's Hill in Bristol, gazing out into the city. I sat behind him and caught my breath. There were white statues of women on the top of a nearby building, and next to it the Zoetrope with its elegant verdigris and where 'so many movie ideas were hatched' according to the sign outside.

You feel lofty up there, San Francisco makes you feel lofty. The old gentleman just sat there, minding his business. I wanted to snap him, but as I said before I couldn't. So I went on down the hill into the thick of things. Down there you feel good and dirty, and there are bluehouses and stripjoints next to the eateries, just like a real American city. Normally putting pictures in b/w is sort of an artsy pretence but in this case I had to do it, because it reminded me too much of a book I've got at home, from the 60s, beautiful silvery photographs of Philadelphia teeming with life. So the b/w here reminds me of the rough 60s feel of the place.


I wound up in Union Square, watching a Jewish family with woolly hats and thick gloves and scarves talking about Hanukkah, the little girl had golden blonde hair and was hopping up and down with excitement for the big tree and all the coloured lights and her dad was telling her earnestly not to walk off the sidewalk because only grown-ups can do that, it's dangerous. It was a very romantic place, even with the guy next to me on the bench working on his laptop, with a copy of The Language Instinct next to him. I wish Mrs. Roth could have been there with me, but it wasn't to be. San Francisco is a place full of such rapid ambiences, you can be in the glass canyons one minute and out in a small seaside town the next, with every shade in between. If there are any San Franciscans reading this I'd love to hear from you, such is the season for open arms and a sense of wellbeing, I'm all the more glad to walk arm in arm with my fellow man. Merry Christmas!

Poetics and the Curse of Irony

Hayden White, Metahistory (1973)
Douglas Robinson, The Translator's Turn (1992)

The similarity between these two books is not immediately evident—the one a critique of nineteenth-century historiography, the other a translator's manifesto. Both, however, have their roots in the tradition of American literary criticism represented by Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye—brilliant outsiders who have remained hugely influential without becoming part of the mainstream, a position analogous to that of, say, de Chirico in modern art. White and Robinson, like Burke and Frye, aspire to philosophical system: they create grand structures into which they fit their analyses. And like Burke and Frye, White and Robinson see language—tropes, plots, speech-acts—as the basis of their systems. They are therefore sceptical about language, interrogating it, suspicious of its tactics and subtleties. They are, in another word, ironists, which is to say they are members of that vast crowd of postmoderns avant la lettre.

In The Rhetoric of Religion (1961), Burke describes religion as the arbitrary canonization of a single principle, a rhetoric confused for a metaphysics. For Burke, religion is ultimately poetic, and so just as a poem can have a guiding metaphor, so can a faith; he calls this guiding metaphor a 'master-trope' or 'god-term'. Frye, in his late and lesser-known The Critical Path (1968), compares Marxism and Christianity as examples of 'myths of concerns', patterns of rhetorical language designed only to convince:

The real enemies of such movements are not those who oppose but those who are indifferent: the opposite of faith is not doubt, but the inability to see what all the fuss is about.

Both Burke and Frye deny to religion what they deny to literature—that which structuralists call 'positive truth', the notion that a claim has any validity beyond the confines of its own contextual system. There is only a circular 'relative truth', created by sophisticated structures of linguistic tropes. These tropes go back to Aristotle—metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony. They are, in essence, ideals of the relations possibly existing between two objects: metaphor is the relation by similarity, metonymy the relation by contiguity, synecdoche the relation of part to whole, and irony the relation by inversion. (Individuals will quibble about the exact definitions.) And by this extreme analysis, complex ideologies and patterns of thought are reduced to their conceptual atoms. Without objective validity, these units form not a science but what both Burke and Frye, following Aristotle again, call a poetics, a structure of contingent associations, a vocabulary of parts and aesthetic networks.

*

Burke and Frye, then, turned religion and literary criticism into poetics; in the same manner, White turns historiography into a poetics—'I have attempted to establish the ineluctably poetic nature of the historical work'—and Robinson does the same for translation studies. White will use the four poetic tropes to classify modes of writing history, and Robinson will use them to classify methods of translating.

The debts are explicit—White makes copious reference to Frye, and Robinson to Burke. In his masterpiece, Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Frye recycled and developed Aristotle's fourfold classification of drama as epic (romance), tragedy, comedy and satire, and found these archetypes in the entire run of Western literature, from Homer to Joyce. White, likewise, recycles Frye's expanded categories to classify historiographical writing of the 19th century—Michelet writes romance, Ranke writes comedy, Tocqueville tragedy, and Burckhardt satire. These words have become loosed from their conventional meanings, but not completely—satire, for instance, is revealed not as the moralistic surrision of Pope and Swift, but as the monstrous absurdity of Jarry and Beckett, and is shown to deny all comprehension of man's struggle among his own and with the natural world. Burckhardt, with his aestheticism and his distrust of objective historical accuracy, becomes a sort of gloomy fantasist, painting the Quattrocento as he would have dreamt it, as a moment of perfect light and liberty, between the ecclesiastical repression of the Middle Ages and the political conformism of modern times. Satire, in its turn, corresponds to the trope of Irony, which subverts the connection between a word and its referent.

There's a lot more to White's system—he adds more fourfolds, such as (radical, anarchist, liberal, conservative) and (mechanist, organicist, contextualist, formist)—and much of it is convincing. At times, however, the patterning wears a little thin. Frankly, it is difficult for me to keep in mind the image of Burckhardt as a nihilist jester, abandoning the narrative plots of Michelet and Ranke for an impressionist pointillisme of his subject. The abstract here comes too forcefully before the particular.

But irony is what interests White the most. It would not be too great an exaggeration to say that he perceives irony to be his bugbear, his nemesis. Such a perception is the hallmark of the postmodern condition. White diagnoses twentieth-century historiography as a largely unsuccessful attempt to escape the grip of irony—a mood which distrusts the grand narratives of historicism, preferring the simple and mythical, the direct and fragmentary—and which leads to a stifling scepticism towards intellectual endeavour. Yet White fully admits the irony of his own work:

It may not go unnoticed that this book is itself cast in an Ironic mode. But the Irony which informs it is a conscious one, and it therefore represents a turning of the Ironic consciousness against Irony itself.

Unfortunately, Irony is a stronger foe than White credits, and indeed a stronger combatant than White himself. Umberto Eco, in a rare moment of lucidity, put the postmodern condition, the condition of irony, like this:

A man who loves a very sophisticated woman knows that he cannot say to her, "I love you madly," because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say this, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, 'I love you madly'." At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence.

I find something unpalatably, uproariously true in these words. And so they come irrefragably to mind when I discover White caught—unintentionally—in the same state, writing about two key metaphors in the work of Benedetto Croce:

I shall forgo the temptation to interpret them in a Freudian manner as phallus and womb, not because Croce condemned every effort at psychoanalytical historiography, calling it "valet's history" and deriding its practitioners as pseudo scholars seeking a cheap interpretation without the work required by true historical comprehension; but because, in accordance with this prejudice, Croce refused to reveal enough about his private life to permit muster of the kind of detailed evidence that alone can render a psychoanalytical interpretation convincing.

In 'forgoing' this temptation, of course, White has succumbed to it—he has no need of spelling out the Freudian interpretation, only of suggesting it. The ironic condition manifests itself as insecurity, the need to defend oneself against all possible charges of omission. This process reached its nadir in Sorrentino's fascinatingly awful novel Mulligan Stew (1979), which opens with a series of arch replies to editorial rejection letters, in this case richly deserved. In academic terms, the condition was strongly developed by writers like Frye and Burke, who removed the objective foundations of criticism, and who wrote in a polemic and defensive mode to compensate. I try to conquer this insecurity in my own writing, but not with complete success, as this very sentence attests. And so the great and terrible monster Irony consumes me, just as it consumes White—Irony cannot be turned against Irony, as the only thing that can defeat Irony is ignorance, which is impossible to achieve except by senility, lobotomy, or a nasty fall. Once you eat from the tree of knowledge, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And you shall know that you are naked, and hide yourself. There will be no going back.

*

Hayden White's Metahistory is designed to prove that what we consider good historiography is only one possibility of several, all equally valid. Douglas Robinson's The Translator's Turn is designed to prove that what we consider a good methodology of translation is only one possibility of several, all equally valid. His particular aim is to debunk the hegemony of 'sense-for-sense' translation, something for which I've always felt some distaste. As a reader who likes surfaces, I find sense-for-sense translation over-conservative and stifling. Robinson clearly feels some kinship not only with Burke and Frye (both of whom critique the valuation of content over style) but also with Barthes and Derrida, whose pompous projects are really no more than attempts to recover the value of the signifier over the signified, style over content, or in Derrida's terms, writing over speech. It is the latter allegiance which causes Robinson to reproduce in a later book some terrible Sokalian piffle, Derrida on 'iterability':

Because the possibility of reuse (and thus what may in some new use need to be defined as a misuse) is present in every "original" or "ordinary" context, a wedding in which the minister says "I now pronounce you husband and wife" is never simply "one" context which, subtracted in a philosophical discussion, would yield the "null context." It is always a fraction between one and zero, a fractal between binary poles, a fractured context or contextuality.

This is Robinson, lacking any real command of language, at his worst. But there is fruit to be salvaged from his project. In the earlier book, he posits a series of methodologies under the rubrics of rhetorical tropes (just as White had done for historiography), which Robinson calls (following Burke) 'master tropes'. Since irony has been a theme of this post, let's look at what Robinson thinks an ironic translation is:

The ironic translator wants to succeed this way too [ie. to overcome the impossibility of translating perfectly], but not by seeking equivalence—rather, by denying its possibility.

There are a number of ironic translation stances. One says, "The SL [source language] text is too brilliant, I can't translate this, I'm not a good enough translator, maybe nobody is." A second says, "This isn't the original, this is just a translation, don't start thinking you're reading the real thing, here." A third says, "Look how bad the SL text was, I'm just rendering it faithfully, don't kill the messenger."

Here we see the same anxiety, and the same attempt to forestall criticism, as we encountered above with White, Sorrentino, and myself. Robinson mounts a stirring polemic defence of the translator's art: he is desperate to show that the translator is not inferior to the original writer, and that he should not show obeisance or humility towards the text with which he is working. In other words, Robinson advocates an ironic attitude for the translator—and his various other tropes amount to the same consciousness via a different route. It explains Robinson's more outlandish propositions, for instance, that the translator should make shit up, especially when rendering functional reports:

The meteorological translator [ie. of weather reports] who feels bored can begin to vary his or her translations, experiment with variety, staying at first within the bounds of acceptability—referring to groundhogs or bunions, livening up his or her discourse with sportswriter-type verbal creativity—then carefully pushing past those bounds, testing the water. This means risking his or her job, of course; but then, surrendering to the boredom means risking his or her sanity, and one has to set one's priorities in this sort of thing. . . it is arguably better to quit after six months of subversive delight than after six months of mind- and body-numbing boredom.

Who can fail to admire this sort of brio? Naturally, Robinson's anti-authoritarian (though irritatingly PC, as evidenced by the relentless 'or hers') aesthetic leads him to delight in Zukofsky's Catullus, an example of the 'homophonic translation' covered at Languagehat here. There's an amusing passage where he gives a literal paraphrase of 'Minister wet to lee, pour the Falernian', etc. The result is total nonsense, of course. Robinson attempts an innovative translation of Jorge Guillén's poem 'Desnudo', admitting, with a modesty false but nonetheless warranted, that 'I am no poet'. The irony is that someone full of ideas, and with a keen insight into the wretched clichés and prejudices of translation studies, should turn out to be completely incompetent at translating. Robinson is gorged on the theories of others—Burke, Derrida, Thomas Kuhn, later Grice and Austin, even the cutting-edge neuroscience that would beget Damasio's Descartes' Error in 1995—and yet he dismisses theory, or rather advocates theory as a way of transcending theory, in favour of practice. But in practice, Robinson has no feel for the English language. With Robinson, as with White, we see the triumph of the abstract over the particular, theory over practice. Their formal systems are full of valuable observations, and yet amount, for all their sophistication, to symptoms of the same ironic condition that afflicts us all.

Latin: an alternate history

I never trust a language without palato-alveolar sibilants. But this could just be the Jew and Teuton in me. You need a thickness in a tongue, a roughness, and the closest Latin comes is a labiodental fricative, although the voiced variety would arrive only in the first century AD, when the Latin V started becoming consonantal. The sibilant deficiency gives the language a cold, precise quality, a mood augmented by its elaborate inflectional system, and (in contrast to Greek) by its syntactic brevity—a rhetor like Demosthenes could deploy a full panoply of articles and particles, lacking in Latin, to organise and embellish his thoughts.

What I most dislike about Latin, however, is its lexical conservatism, a resistance to fancy quite alien to our (my) sensibilities. Homer could roll out elaborate compounds like the rhododaktulos and koruthaiolos with which we're familiar; Pacuvius, Ennius' nephew, tried to do the same in Latin, as in a line preserved by Quintilian—nerei repandirostrum incurvicervicum pecus, 'The flock of Nereus snoutuplifted, neckinarched'—but it didn't catch on. Indeed, Quintilian sneers at Pacuvius for such an attempt, calling the effect 'harsh' [dure]. The orator then offers a classification of different compounds—the sort of thing we have Sanskrit names for now, delightfully—listing those built from different languages, of two or three elements, etc. He concludes:

But compounds are better suited to Greek than to Latin, though I do not think that this is due to the nature of our language: the reason rather is that we have a preference for foreign goods, and therefore receive κυρταύχην with applause, whereas we can scarce defend incurvicervicus from derisive laughter.

Interestingly, Quintilian denies that compounding is not suited to the nature of Latin; but the history of the language suggests otherwise. One can talk about the nature of a language not in any existential, Hegelian terms, but just insofar as Quintilian himself discussed consuetudo, ie. that which the speakers of the language are accustomed to doing. True, there are compounds, even some in verse, where metrical difficulties apply—such as Vergil's auricomos, 'golden-tressed', applied to the Bough—but it is not the norm. L. J. D. Richardson's essay, 'Virgil and the Homeric Epithet', Greece and Rome 1943, examines some of the issues involved.

The mainstream history of Latin through the Middle Ages and Renaissance is a history of dogged adherence to classical models, falling away, and then again reviving, an adherence which reached its peak with the cult of Ciceronianism in the 16th century. Erasmus makes fun of these classical pedants in his dialogue Ciceronianus (1528), whose stock fool Nosoponus has compiled an alphabetical lexicon of all the words and phrases used in Cicero's works, a lexicon to which he limits himself in his own writing. It was not so far-fetched—the real-life humanist Nizolius had already compiled his Thesaurus Ciceronianus for the same purpose. (An old tutor once accused me of being a 'Nizolian engrosser of blotted pie-dish linings', an insult which for some reason has lingered with me.) Within 100 years, Justus Lipsius and Joseph Hall would be channelling Seneca in Cicero's place, terse instead of fully periodic.

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But there have been at least two attempts to make Latin interesting—the first in seventh-century Ireland, the second in High Renaissance Italy. By 600 classical Latin had definitively given way to mediaeval—Gregory of Tours is sometimes taken as the first 'bad Latinist'—and in the British Isles the language remained a somewhat alien commodity. It was here, after all, that scribes began adding spaces between words to aid reading, something unknown on the Continent. It is quite possible that Adrian of Canterbury introduced to Britain the North African tradition of decadent Latin found notably in Apuleius. Graves notes in the preface to his tight-arsed Golden Ass:

In my translation I have made no attempt to bring out the oddness of the Latin by writing in a style, say, somewhere between Lyly's Euphues and Amanda Ros's Irene Iddesleigh [Graves is obviously thinking of this essay]; paradoxically, the effect of oddness is best achieved in convulsed times like the present by writing in as easy and sedate an English as possible.

These words were written in 1947, eight years after Finnegans Wake, in the dusk of High Modernism, by a snivelling reactionary. But Apuleius, with his rhyming alliterations and occasional unusual forms ('famigerabilis') is quite tame compared to the verbal bestiaries of the seventh century Isles. I've already written about that bizarre Irish grammar of this period (or a little later), the Auraicept. The body of Hiberno-Latin poetry known as the Hisperica Famina, available in a modern edition with translation by Michael Herren, preserves many such oddities:

Uelut innumera apium concauis discurrunt examina apiastris
melchillentaque sorbillant fluenta alueariis,
ac solidos scemicant rostris fauos.

Titaneus olimphiam inflamat arotus tabulatum,
thalasicum illustrat uapore flustrum
flammiuomo secat polum corusco supernum,
almi scandit camaram firmamenti.

Or glaucicomantes cellium, 'bluemantled hills'. Apparently there's some Hebrew loaning in here too, but I don't remember where. From these roots, historically speaking, grew the literary tradition in England—most scholars read Aldhelm, the first great English writer (of Latin), as a writer in the 'hisperic' tradition, though this is disputed.

Still more interesting is the work of the mysterious Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, a grammarian of sorts from 7th-century Britain or Ireland. His treatises, the Epitomae and Epistolae, are full of odd collocations and deliberate perversions and obfuscations. He has been commonly taken as a parodist, though Vivien Law reads him rather as an arcanist. Words in his text are like gnostic spellwords, little observing Latin morphology—at one point he lists Twelve 'Latins', his jargon spewing out in a torrent of letters: assena, semedia, numeria (nim, dun, tor, quir, quan, ses, sen, onx, amin, ple), metrofia (dicantabat, bora, gcno, sade, teer, rfoph, brops, rihph, gal, fkal, clitps, mrmos, fann, ulioa, gabpal, blaqth, merc, pal, gatrb, biun, spadx), lumbrosa, sincolla, belsavia, presina, militana, spela, polema. H. A. Strong, better known as the translator of Hermann Paul, wrote a marvelously speculative 1903 article on these words, which if you have access to JSTOR is available here. Elsewhere Virgilius deliberates about the declension of ego, and specifically about its vocative case (how do you say "O I"?). He writes of word-scrambling, scinderatio fonorum—as if from Greek φωνη—

Scinderatio autem litterarum superflua est, sed tamen a glifosis sensuque subtilibus recipitur; unde et fona breuia scindi magis commodius est quam longa, ut Cicero dicit: RRR SS PP MM N T EE OO A V I, quod sic soluendum est: Spes Romanorum perit.

With these examples, Latin is played with by outsiders. In humanist Italy it would be played with again. The relationship of Latin to Italian—specifically, to Tuscan, unquestionably the queen of Italian dialects—had been of great interest since Dante's De volgare eloquentia (1305). In 1435 a debate was held at the Papal Chancellery in Florence. All the greats were present—Flavio Biondo, Poggio Bracciolini, Leonardo Bruni, and so on. Bruni argued that Tuscan had evolved out of the vernacular Latin spoken by the ancients; Biondo, on the other hand, argued that Tuscan had arisen from the clash of Latin with the tongues of barbarian (Lombard) invaders in the early Dark Ages. The debate was politically charged, of course—Bruni the Florentine, whose earlier work had established Florence as heir to the Roman Republic, and Biondo, based at Rome, the man who had coined the 'Middle Ages', desperate to restore classical Latin free from impurity. Biondo was right, in any event.

The debate was still going with Machiavelli in the next century. So when works started being written in the 'Macaronic style', mixing Latin and Tuscan in the same sentence, it must have been a rude shock. As the humanists were gaining a historical consciousness of their language and culture, so the Macaronic poets would dissolve history in their linguistic conflations. The first great monument of the style is the legendary 1499 Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii:

Peritissimamente quivi la dulciloqua Logistica fece alquanta narratione: physiculabonda laudava la praestante factione et la nobilitate della materia et arte et inveto (quale non se trovarebbe in Muriano) et vituperando la sua natura, et dixe. . .

A first edition of this work is still available on abebooks for $185,000; alas, I could only afford the modern translation. Like Graves, Joscelyn Godwin admits in his introduction to having made no effort to reproduce the book's style in English, only his reason is laziness, not pointed stylistic conservatism.

The canonical writer in the genre, however, is Teofilo Folengo, aka. Merlin Coccaius, a favourite of Rabelais's. When I was last in Florence I walked into an Einaudi, and my eye alighted on a copy of Folengo's great epic, Baldus. It was a beautiful edition, with a facing-page translation into modern Italian, and illustrated with contemporary paintings in full colour. The clerk was amazed that I wanted to buy it, especially as my Italian was only barely adequate to make the purchase. Later I spent an entire evening in my hotel-room, deciphering the first page with a bad Italian dictionary. It was fun!

Magna bachiocheries hominis, ratione dobati,
et cui soletto fazza levata datur,
velle per has tenebras orbum seguitare mulazzum.

Grande è la coglioneria dell'uomo, pur di ragion vestito, se pur lui solo in su la faccia rivolge al cielo, quando per le tenebre si mette a inormar le peste di un mulaccio cieco.

This is a typical excerpt, three lines from Folengo's lyrics Zanitonella, XVIII, with an Italian prose gloss. We see here, as in the Hypnerotomachia, the conflation of Italian (fazza, seguitare) and Latin (ratione, datur) forms, the combined form (mulazzum) as well as the plain weird (bachiocheries).

Of course, this material is all immensely difficult, and at the last count beyond my meagre capabilities. It pleases me, however, to know it exists, and some day I'd be interested to explore further. Why were these two places, the early mediaeval British Isles and flourishing humanist Italy, so diametrically opposite in culture, the twin loci for such verbal experimentation? Was it the heightened conflict, at each time, of elite Latin with the thriving vernacular? The degree and direction of cultural appropriation is difficult to discern in both cases. None of the above writers has given Latin palato-alveolar sibilants (although by this time Ecclesiastical Latin had provided a tch for the hard classical c); nor have they diminished its inflections, nor increased its verbosity. But they have provided a new rhythm, allowed not just new words but new ways of forming words, and put the slangiest of speech into written letters, just as Rabelais would allegedly comb the French shores for unrecorded billingsgate.

I leave you with this modern hispericum, C. A. Carruthers' Latin rendering of Lewis Carroll:

Est briligum: tovi slimici
In vabo tererotitant;
Brogovi sunt macresculi,
Momi rati strugitant.

Update: Languagehat links; further discussion of the vocative I, unexpectedly, at Jabal al-Lughat, which cites a reference to Virgilius from Eco's The Name of the Rose.

Update 12/08/07: "zmjezhd", née Uncle Jazzbeau, links, with more to say on macaronism.

Two compositions

Insomnia is a terrible thing. I feel trapped in the apartment, with the wife asleep, and only the company of my thoughts. It can be too asphyxiating to read, or at least read seriously, and yet there is little else to do. I work on some German, or on some auction catalogues. I listen to Ys for the fiftieth time.


When morning comes the world is of course irreproachable. Dawn has become cold even here, and from my balcony the fraicheur, and the vague forms of the distant mountains—so unlike what I have grown up with—and the exoskeletal plant stacks, with whose forms I find myself almost obsessed—all are caught up in the nets of cables overhead. The landscape of Tempe, in all its stripsprawling lowrise aridity, is dominated by verticals—palms, lights, beams, and the nearby presence of 'A' Mountain.


So walking home at night, past the playing-fields, the attenuated verticals come to assume the solemnity of men. In a pictorial frame, narrative is unconsciously created by imbalance. I have never crossed the two low guards on this path, nor will I. For to do so would make what lies beyond all the less mysterious.

Gedichte: I

Wenn du an meinem Herzen liegst,
So eng und weich und warm,
An meine Brust dein Kaeppchen schmiegst,
Vergeht mir Leid und Harm.—

Durchs Fenster scheint des Mondes Strahl,
Der laechelt mild herein;
Weisst noch? Als uns zum ersten Mal
Vereinigt sah sein Schein?

Und wenn ich ihn seitdem erblick'
Gruess' ich ihn still vertraut;
Er war's, der unser junges Glueck
Zu allererst geschaut!—


When upon my heart you rest
So close and soft and warm,
Nestle ridinghood against my breast,
Shrug off all bale and harm.

From the window comes the shine
Of moonrays mildly smiling and sublime—
Remember, how his gaze, benign,
United saw us, once upon a time?

And when I've seen him since, in tryst,
I greet him trusting, quiet in thought—
It was his glance, his light, that caught
Us first so young, in love, in bliss!

1 November 76

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This is my first effort, an untitled lyric in a fairly legible hand. The original is not wonderful, and neither is my translation, but it's a start. I don't dislike the poem at all: the verse is calm and formal, romantic but not overdone. More interesting is the poem's tension between its gentle mood and the presence of the moon as a third party, almost voyeuristic—the moonlight 'saw' (sah) and 'looked upon' (geschaut) the lovers. [The following sentences, while false—see the comments—are still to be taken as if true. It's better that way, really.] The hint of darkness is compounded by the lover's Käppchen, which means a cap, and specifically the Catholic skull-cap also called a zucchetto or pileolus—but here it suggests something else, namely the story of Rotkäppchen or Red Riding Hood, hence my translation. The word vertraut, which connotes familiarity and trustedness, begins to suggest the trust of Rotkäppchen for her 'grandmother'. What big eyes you have! All the better to see you with.