Coffee

He sits alone at the table with his notebook closed in front of him, now and then sipping the coffee from a paper cup. It's a Friday night, around ten, and the place is packed. They all seem to be the same age, more or less, fifteen to twenty, maybe a few in their early twenties, here and there a mom with a couple of daughters. This must be the one place to hang, for miles around, or how could there be so many of them?

A good two-thirds of them are girls, circled around tables in clusters of five or six, maybe with one boy among them. Sometimes a couple of guys come in by themselves and get on line, but they don't stay, they just get their coffee and drive off again. All told maybe sixty or eighty indoors, a dozen or two at tables outside, and more — he can't see how many — just milling around the parking lot, talking and laughing. The girl sitting at a table outside, for instance, the slight girl with the flip of straight brown hair nearly reaching down to one eye, whom he notices each time he lifts his eyes to the window — has she really been laughing and talking without interruption for an hour?

For their part the guys mostly don't say much, they just listen and watch, their posture a little stiff, uttering a few words now and then. He can't hear anything that's being said; all around the room the conversations are mixing together, indistinguishable, without ever a gap of silence, and over it all there's music of some sort — he can't make out the songs or doesn't know them anyway — drifting over the whole room, providing a kind of continuo.

He's a little surprised how few couples there seem to be. One or two are obvious, hugging or horsing around, and no doubt there are others who keep it to themselves, who maybe aren't quite comfortable yet with being physical around their other friends. They're young, after all, there will be time to come for all of that.

He is not always solemn, as he is now. He has his moments of joy. He thinks, I feel those moments more deeply than these kids do because I know how fugitive they are and they do not, yet. But no, the kids really do seem pretty damn happy.

These things that occur to him, at times, in the late evening hours.

Yes, but who will cure us of the dull fire? (3)

I'm not quite halfway through re-reading Cortázar's Rayuela and my copy is now in three pieces and threatening to disintegrate entirely. It was never much of a book qua book to begin with: cheap, browning paper, flimsy paperback cover, typography with two different style “l”'s used apparently at random. I have another copy in a box somewhere (I think), but it's a bit of a chore to get to. One of these days I'll have to try to hunt up a hardcover, not that easy a task since the standard editions of most books in the Spanish-speaking world usually seem to be paperback.

I've reached the point where Oliveira has walked out on La Maga, Maga's ailing infant son Rocamadour has died, and Maga herself has vanished to Uruguay or Italy or possibly to drown in the Seine. In Chapter 34 Oliveira returns to the apartment they formerly shared, and picks up a novel (said to be Lo prohibido by Pérez Galdós though it is not named by Cortázar) that Maga had been reading. Two texts make up the chapter, alternating line by line: a portion of the hackneyed Lo prohibido, and Oliveira's reflections — pretty condescending ones — on Maga's lowbrow reading habits. Eventually, Oliveira's thoughts wander to the meaning of his terminated relationship with Maga. In the following translation I have unravelled and discarded the Pérez Galdós thread:

I'm not going to explain to you what is known as Brownian motion, obviously I'm not going to explain it and all the same the two of us, Maga, we compose a figure, you a point in one location, me a point in another, moving around, you now maybe in the rue de la Huchette, me now discovering this novel in your empty room, tomorrow you at the Gare de Lyon (if you're going to Lucca, my love) and me on the rue du Chemin Vert, where I've discovered an extraordinary little wine, and little by little, Maga, we go on composing an absurd figure, with our movements we draw a figure identical to the one flies draw when they fly around a room, here and there, suddenly making a half turn, from there to here, that's what's called Brownian motion, now do you get it?. A right angle, a line that soars, from here to there, from back to front, going up, going down, spasmodically, braking suddenly and tearing off in the same instant in another direction, and all of this weaves a drawing, a figure, something non-existent like you and I, like two points lost in Paris going from here to there, from there to here, making their drawing, dancing for nobody, not even for themselves, an interminable figure without meaning.

Similar conceits are common in Cortázar's writing (see, for example, the story “Manuscript Found in a Pocket,” in which, in a kind of obsessive game, a man and a woman subject the possibility of seeing or not seeing each other again to the whims of their separate travels through the Metro). The idea that human relationships (and possibly human existence in general) are governed by a series of random encounters and disencounters was deeply engraved in both his philosophy and his fiction. Equally central was the recognition of the human desire to preserve something against the advent of oblivion; in the very next chapter (which is 87, if you're reading “the long way”) he quotes an Ellington song, then reflects:

Why, at certain moments, is it so necessary to say “I loved that”? I loved a blues, an image in the street, a poor dry river in the north. Give testimony, fight against the nothingness that will erase us. So, still lingering in the air of the soul, are those little things, a swallow that came from Lesbia, some blues that occupied in the memory a tiny space the size of perfumes, stamps, and paperweights.

In the "next" chapter (that is, means Chapter 105), this idea is continued, but in its inverse: here the subject the things that have not been preserved from oblivion:

I think of those objects, those boxes, those utensils that appear at times in warehouses, kitchens, or hiding places, and whose function nobody is now capable of explaining. The vanity of believing that we understand the works of time: time buries its dead and holds on to its keys. Only in dreams, in poetry, in a game — lighting a candle, carrying it down a corridor — do we approach at times that which we were before being that which who knows if we are.

I don't think it's a coincidence that these expressions of what for want of a better name might be called existential pessimism come in quick succession, nor that they come at this point in the book. The desertion of Maga by Oliveira and the death of Rocamadour together are the bleakest part of the novel. And just as in Cortázar's short story “El Perseguidor” (“The Pursuer”) where the death of a different child provokes in the jazz musician Johnny Carter a harrowing vision of a field of (presumably funerary) urns, the “Brown(e)” these pages bring to mind is not the discoverer of Brownian motion but the author of Hydriotaphia.

Update (6/05): I tracked down two annotated Spanish-language editions of Rayuela. The easier to locate (and more useful for most readers) is the paperback edition compiled by Andrés Amorós (Cátedra: Letras Hispánicas, Madrid 1992; ISBN: 84-376-0457-5), which contains a lengthy interpretive Introduction, extensive footnotes to the text of the novel (mostly identifying proper names or defining bits of argot), and — a nice touch — a fold-out map of Paris.

The other is the Edición Crítica prepared under the direction of Julio Ortega and Saúl Yurkievich, in the Colección Archivos series (ALLCA XXe, Nanterre, France, 1991; ISBN 84-00-07112-3). This is a doorstop-sized hardcover with several hundred pages of essays, the text of the Cuaderno de bitácora in which Cortázar planned out the book, and a complete history of the writing of the manuscript and its publication. Unfortunately, the only notes to the body of the novel itself are to textual variants. For scholars only, impressive as it is.

Yes, but who will cure us of the dull fire? (2)

For the uninitiated, the above is the opening phrase of Chapter 73 of Gregory Rabassa's translation of Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (Hopscotch), which I am slowly re-reading. Chapter 73 being the first chapter, or rather a first chapter, not counting epigraphs and the “Table of Instructions” in which it is explained that there are at least two ways to read the book: in the usual order from Chapter 1 to Chapter 56, or following the table, beginning with Chapter 73 then proceeding to Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 116, Chapter 3, etc., and concluding (or rather not concluding, as the final chapters cycle endlessly) with Chapter 131. The word Rabassa translates as “dull” is sordo, which is the same word that is used for our English “deaf,” but which can also mean silent, muffled, mute, etc. “Dull” seems a dull choice of word, but honestly I can't think of a better one. The Spanish is Sí, pero quién nos curará del fuego sordo... As to what the “dull fire” is all about, the only real insight one could gain would come through reading the book, which I urge you to do, if you are so inclined. Otherwise, no matter.

Cortázar loved jazz, dabbled in playing it (on the trumpet, and apparently not very well), and wrote some of his most interesting essays or quasi-essays about it (the best being “Louis enormísimo cronopio,” about Louis Armstrong). In Rayuela there is one long set-piece, broken up over several chapters, in which the various members of the Club of the Serpent, a diverse group of exiles and bohemians resident in Paris, spend an evening getting drunk on bad vodka and listening to old jazz 78s (and blues 78s as well, though Cortázar generally and with some justice lumps them together as “jazz”). In Chapter 17 this culminates in a bravura sentence, running more than two pages, in which the narrator poses what could be called a metaphysical defense of jazz, winding up with these words:

... an archetypal form, something from before, from below, that brings Mexicans together with Norwegians and Russians and Spaniards, that reincorporates them into the dark and forgotten central flame, clumsily and badly and precariously it returns them to a betrayed origin, it shows them that perhaps there have been other paths and that the one they took was maybe not the only one or the best one, or that perhaps there have been other paths and that the one they took was the best, but that perhaps there were other paths that would have been sweet to walk down and that they didn't take, or that they took only in a halfhearted sort of way, and that a man is always more than a man and always less than a man, more than a man because he has in himself all that jazz suggests and lies in wait for and even anticipates, and less than a man because out of this liberty he has made a moral or esthetic game, a chessboard where one must be either bishop or knight, a definition of liberty which is taught in school, in the very schools where the kids are never taught ragtime rhythm or the first notes of the blues, and so forth and so on.

(Rabassa's translation, somewhat modified)

The above could well be seen as a manifesto for the novel in which it occurs, perhaps even a manifesto for Cortázar's work and life as a whole.

Salamander

When I was a kid there was a low-lying vacant lot across from our house, mucky and smelling of skunk cabbage in the spring, and if you turned over the right kind of stone (and one quickly learned to judge the right dimensions and placement, not too high and dry but not too deep in the muck) there was a good chance that, along with the assorted beetles and sow bugs and ants, you would encounter a delicate, motionless little form beneath, dark brown with a red stripe down the back, four tiny, fingered limbs. If you touched one it would wriggle away in a half-hearted fashion, its movements more sluggish still if the weather was cold.

These were the ordinary red-backs, the only kind I ever found in that lot. Closer to the lake, in the sphagnum woods, you could turn up the diminutive red efts, faintly spotted down the back, which I knew were the terrestrial phase of drab green newts that must have swum in the lake, not that I ever saw them. And once a friend found a heftier creature, a marbled salamander or a tiger, not far from the same woods.

I never see salamanders where I live now. It's a little too dry, too built up, too close to town. And nothing calls attention to itself less than a salamander. Silent, defenseless, innocuous, the salamander leaves little impression of itself. It's neither dangerous nor delicious, and has so little weight in our folklore and popular culture that its usual name, at least in America, is lifted pedantically from ancient Greek (though “newt,” as well as “eft,” are from an obscure Anglo-Saxon root). No one imitates the salamander, or fears it, in fact nobody except for herpetologists thinks about it much at all. There is some vague lore about its ability to survive in fire (allegedly because it was seen crawling from burning logs), there is one excellent short story (Julio Cortázar's) about an axolotl, which is, however, a rather more garish creature altogether, and that's about it. No Muppet, I'm almost certain, is modelled on a salamander.

These being hard times for amphibians in general, perhaps salamanders are fated to vanish. Interestingly, their distribution neatly reflects the ancient boundaries of Laurasia: they can be found in North America, Asia, and Europe, but not in Australia, Africa, or South America. A little more development, a little more ozone, and good-bye. Chances are they would be little missed. Unlike frogs and toads, I have never heard great claims for their efficacy in destroying mosquitoes or other pests, nor do they seem to be a food species of choice for any more conspicuous species. Their charms are subtle and solitary, qualities that are — sadly — little valued now.

But maybe their one defense will protect them still. In the deep woods, snug under their stones and rotten logs, they will wait. Natural Taoists, they will never seek to dominate, they will always be willing to sacrifice a little more, will ask nothing, and perhaps they will prevail in the end. They will miss us, I think, a little.

Notes on the jazz lyrics in Cortázar's Rayuela (Hopscotch)

Update 2014: the discussion below is now very much out-of-date, but I'll leave it up in case it's of use to anyone.

Julio Cortázar was a great jazz fan. In one section of his novel Rayuela there is a long set-piece, broken up over several chapters, in which the members of the “Club del Serpiente” pass an evening listening to records, most or all of which are American jazz and blues records from the '20s and '30s. In the original Spanish-language text several of the songs are quoted, in English. When the English-language version of the novel, created by Gregory Rabassa, was published, most of these lyrics were changed substantially and, in most cases, without any self-evident reason. This was presumably done with the author's blessing, since he worked closely (if at a substantial geographical remove) with Rabassa on the preparation of the translation. But why? [Update 2013: see footnote¹]

My first assumption was that Cortázar had mangled the lyrics when he wrote the book, either because he was working from memory or because he had difficulty making out the correct lyrics. Though Cortázar was a professional translator and knew English very well, he occasionally shows signs, when he quotes from the language, of being a little uncertain with vernacular expressions (his compositor or publisher may have been more uncertain still), and in a few instances (the lyrics aside) Rabassa clearly cleaned up English phrases that were not idiomatically likely (“This is a plastic's age” being one example). Since Rabassa was a jazz aficionado himself, he may have known or discovered that Cortázar had the lyrics wrong and corrected them, with the author's knowledge. (“It don't mean a thing if it ain't that swing” being one example of an obvious misremembering or printer's error.)

But some spot-checking of lyrics on the web suggests that frequently Cortázar's original versions are more accurate than the corrected ones. (Many of these tunes, by the way, can be heard at the online Red Hot Jazz Archive.) The only guess I can make — and it's a hesitant one, at best — is that the lyrics were intentionally altered in the Pantheon edition to avoid copyright clearance issues. Some examples follow.

Rayuela Chapter 13:

... Don't play me cheap.

Satchmo cantaba Don't play me cheap
Because I look so meek

Hopscotch Chapter 13:

... Don't play me cheap.

Satchmo was singing:

So what's the use
If you're gonna cut off my juice

Rayuela Chapter 15:

Champion Jack Dupree ...

Say goodbye, goodbye to whiskey
Lordy, so long to gin,
Say goodbye, goodbye to whiskey
Lordy, so long to gin,
I just want my reefers
I just want to feel high again —

Hopscotch Chapter 15:

Champion Jack Dupree ...

So long, whiskey, so long ver-mouth
Goodbye, goodbye, gin.
So long, whiskey, so long ver-mouth
Goodbye, goodbye, gin.
Jus' want some good grass
'Cause I wanna turn on again —

Rayuela Chapter 15:
Big Bill [Broonzy] ...

They said if you white, you all right
If you brown, stick aroun',
But as you black
Mm, mm, brother, get back, get back, get back.

Hopscotch Chapter 15:
Big Bill [Broonzy] ...

If you're an ofay, well, you're okay,
An' if you're tan, you're all right, man,
But if you're brown or black, mmn,
Step down, git back, git back.

Rayuela Chapter 16:

It don't mean a thing if it ain't that swing
[obvious error]

Hopscotch Chapter 16:

It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing

Rayuela Chapter 16:

You so beautiful but you gotta die some day,
You so beautiful but you gotta die some day,
All I want's a little lovin' before you pass away.

Hopscotch Chapter 16:

Skin like darkness, baby, you gonna die some day,
Skin like darkness, baby, you gonna die some day,
I jus' want some lovin' be-fore you go your way.

[This is an interesting case because after quoting the three lines in a block, Cortázar works them into the text of the following paragraph. So does Rabassa, but curiously he uses the original lyrics, not the substituted ones.]

Rayuela Chapter 17:

[unidentified]

I could sit right here and think a thousand miles away,
I could sit right here and think a thousand miles away,
Since I had the blues this bad, I can't remember the day —

Hopscotch Chapter 17:

[unidentified]

I can set right here and think
three thousand miles away,
set right here and think
three thousand miles away,
can't remember the night
had the blues this bad any-way …

Rayuela Chapter 106:

The Yas Yas Girl [= Merline Johnson]:

Well it's blues in my house, from the roof to the ground,
And it's blues everywhere since muy [sic] good man left town.
Blues in my mail-box cause I cain't get no mail,
Says blues in my bread-box 'cause my bread got stale.
Blues in my meal-barrel and there's blues upon my shelf
And there's blues in my bed, 'cause I'm sleepin' by myself.

Hopscotch Chapter 106:

[no attribution]

Cold feet on the kitchen floor, cold feet on the ground,
cold feet everywhere since my man left town.
Cold feet in the butcher shop, cold feet in the store
since nobody comes around to grind my meat no more.
Cold feet on the motor and cold feet on the stones,
and cold feet in my bed, 'cause I'm sleeping all alone.

Rayuela Chapter 106:

Johnny Temple [“Between Midnight And Dawn”]:

Between midnight and dawn, baby we may ever have to part,
But there's one thing about it, baby, please remember I've always been your heart.

Hopscotch Chapter 106:

[no attribution]

Between now and tomorrow, babe, morning, we'll have to part
midnight to morning, babe, tomorrow we'll have to part
Please remember just one thing about it, I've always been in your heart.

Update (5/18/2005): More evidence that copyright issues may be the explanation: in Chapter 87 of Rayuela there is a nine-line quote from Ellington's “Baby when you ain't there,”

I get the blues down North
The blues down South
Blues anywhere,
I get the blues down East,
Blues down West,
Blues anywhere.
I get the blues very well
O my baby when you ain't there
ain't there ain't there —

In Rabassa's translation the lines are simply omitted, perhaps because the length of the quote put it beyond the limits of fair use without permission.

Incidentally, at least two compilations of most of the quoted tunes have been issued. One, issued by the Institute of Pataphysical Studies of Melbourne, Australia is El Jazz para leer Rayuela / The Jazz to read Hopscotch. The track listing is as follows:

Chapter 10
1) "I'm coming, Virginia" (Cook - Heywood) 3.10 m
Frankie Trumbauer & His Orchestra
New York 13/5/1927
2) "Jazz me blues" (Delaney) 3.02 m
Bix Biederbecke & His Gang
New York 5/10/1927

Chapter 11
1) "Four O'clock drag" (Gabler) 2.49 m
Lester Young with The Kansas City Six
New York 28/3/1944
2) "Save it pretty mama" 3.26 m
Lionel Hampton

Chapter 12
1) "Wrap your troubles in dreams" 2.43 m
Coleman Hawkins
New York 1/5/1944
2) "Grooving high" 2.42 m
Dizzy Gillispie
3) "Empty bed blues" 3.25 m
Bessie Smith
New York 20/3/1928

Chapter 13
1) "Don't play me cheap" (Dial - Randolph) 2.54 m
Louis Armstrong
Chicago 26/4/1933

Chapter 14
1) "After the rain" 4.07 m
John Coltrane
New York 29/4/1963
2) "Village blues" (Marsala) 2.48 m
Sidney Bechet
3) "See see rider" 2.55 m
Lonnie Johnson
Copenhagen 16/10/1963

Chapter 15
1) "Jelly beans blues" 3.20 m
Ma Rainey
New York 16/10/1924
2) "Blue interlude" 3.25 m
Benny Carter
10/10/1933
3) "When I'm drunk" 8.30 m
Champion Jack Dupree
En vivo 1971
4) "Black brown and white" 3.06 m
Big Bill Broonzy
Paris 20/9/1951

Chapter 16
1) "Hot and bothered" 3.16 m
Duke Ellington & His Orchestra
New York 1/10/1928
2) "I ain't got nobody" 5.40 m
Earl Hines
New York 7/3/1964

Chapter 17
1) "Mamie's blues" (Desdume) 2.46 m
Jelly Roll Morton
New York 16/12/1939
2) "Stack O'Lee blues" (Lopez) 2.20 m
Waring's Pennsylvanians
18/4/1928

I was able to obtain the above from Leedor.com in Argentina. Some of the tracks are actually later performances that did not exist when Rayuela was written. The CD also includes a reading by Cortázar of Chapter 7 of the novel.

A second compilation, which may be obtainable in Europe, is called Jazzuela (Recopilación de Pilar Peyrats K Industria Kultural, Barcelona, 1979). These are the tracks:

I'm Coming Virginia
Jazz Me Blues
Four O'Clock Drag
Save It Pretty Mamma
Body and Soul
Baby Doll
Empty Bed Blues
Don't You Play Me Cheap
Yellow Dog Blues
Mahogany Hall Stomp
See See Rider
Blue Interlude
Junker's Blues
Get Back
Hot and Bothered
It Don't Mean A Thing
I Ain't Got Nobody
Mamie's Blues
Stack O'Lee Blues
Jelly Beans Blues

Neither compilation appears to have tried to include the songs quoted in Chapter 106.

There is, by the way, a different kind of “correction” in the English version of the same author's short story “El Perseguidor” (“The Pursuer”). In the original the jazz musician Johnny Carter (modelled on Charlie Parker) is, somewhat ridiculously, a marijuana fiend; in Paul Blackburn's translation he is, like Parker and more plausibly, a heroin addict.² Again, it is likely that this was with Cortázar's blessing, since Blackburn was a good friend (and for a time the author's North American agent).

<sup>1. A 1965 letter from Cortázar to editor Sara Blackburn essentially answers the question. Cortázar agreed to rephrase the lyrics to avoid copyright hassles, since the laws regarding the use of even short snippets of lyrics were stricter in the US than in Argentina and France. The letter, which is dated November 20, 1965 and is entirely in English, can be found in Volume 3 of the 2012 expanded edition of Cortázar's Cartas. Sara Blackburn was, at the time, married to Paul Blackburn, Cortázar's agent, friend, and occasional translator.↩

2. Apparently this was due to an innocent mistake on Cortázar's part. Martín Caparros reports that Cortázar told him that at the time he wrote the story he knew nothing of the effects of the two drugs; when Blackburn pointed out the implausibility Cortázar elected to leave the original alone, although in the translation the choice of drug was changed. Caparros: "It is strange to imagine now a time when a Latin American in Paris, thirsty for modernity and for various underworlds, had not the faintest idea what marijuana was." ↩</sup>

Further reading:

Rabassa, Gregory If This Be Treason: Translation & Its Discontents New Directions, 2005; (discusses his work translating Cortázar and other writers).

Cortázar, Julio Cartas (5 volumes), Alfaguara, 2012; (includes some of Cortázar's letters to Rabassa during the time the latter was working on the translation of Rayuela).

Yes, but who will cure us of the dull fire? (1)

As far as I can recall, it's been at least twenty years — maybe more like twenty-five — since I last read Cortázar's Rayuela (Hopscotch). Since I've long regarded it as one of the foundations of my outlook on life, I'm starting to re-read it again, which I plan on doing slowly, taking breaks now and then when something else of interest is at hand. I read Spanish, but not with the facility that I do my own language, so I'm keeping Gregory Rabassa's estimable translation handy for the times when I need it. In general, when I start reading a book in Spanish the first few chapters are slow going; then once I get accustomed (or re-accustomed) to the author's way of writing and particular vocabulary I can pick up the pace and dispense with the re-reading I often have to do at first. Rayuela is not an easy book (though not, to be sure, as tough going as Lezama Lima's Paradiso, which was tough sledding even in translation — Rabassa's as well — though well worth it).

Reading the first few chapters I'm surprised both at how much I remember in some ways (sentences nearly verbatim, details of description, etc.) and how much I had forgotten (whole characters, in at least one case thus far). And of course, as with any dense, rich book, I'm coming across things that had never struck me before (or maybe they did, but I've just forgotten).

In one of the “expendable chapters” (#84) I found this little bit (via Rabassa):

Imagination has been praised to excess. The poor thing cannot move an inch away from the limits of its pseudopods. In this direction, great variety and vivacity. But in the other space, where the cosmic wind that Rilke felt pass over his head blows, Dame Imagination does not go. Ho detto.

There are several things worth noting here, in one short paragraph. The ho detto (Italian for “I have spoken”) may or may not allude to the “previous” chapter (which is chapter 3 if you're following the longer of the book's two alternative courses and reading the book hopscotch-style), in which Cortazár describes how in his childhood he had first come up against the unappealable Hispano-Italo-Argentine ¡Se lo digo yo! [...] Glielo dico io! — "I say so!” — with which his elders could settle any argument. The pseudopods are explained earlier in chapter 84: people begin like amoebas, but as they grow up their pseudopods harden (“what we call maturity”). But what really interests me here is the reference to the imagination. A few years after the book was published, during the political tumult of 1968 Paris, the words L'imagination au pouvoir! were found scrawled on a wall; it would become, for Cortázar, a key text, a motto, and in some ways it can serve as an epigraph/epitaph for his entire life. But Rayuela is plumbing the depths well below such easy slogans. It may be that Cortázar, who became more politicized as the Sixties and Seventies wore on (in part, it is said, because of the events of 1968), stepped back from the existential abyss across which the “cosmic wind” was whistling, but I doubt he would ever have disowned the paragraph above. The truest test of intellectual honesty is not the ability to see to the bottom of others' convictions, but the willingness to confront the limitations — perhaps even the vacuity — of one's own deepest-held beliefs. I don't think I've yet come to the bottom of the darkness of this very dark book.

The awaited

(A synopsis of a story, perhaps a screenplay)

The setting: Northern Europe; a small island community on the edge of the sea; sometime before 1700.

The two-dozen or so men and older boys of the community have set off in two boats on a fishing or sealing trip expected to last three or four days. They don't return.

Many of the women have never been out of the village; a few are from other islands or the mainland, but have never gone back. There are a few small currachs, but nothing sturdy enough for a sea voyage.

At first the women and young children hope for the return of the men. After a while — later for some than for others — they realize that this will never happen. They do not alter their routines much, but carry on, as they had been accustomed to doing when the men were away, living off stored food and gathered shellfish, plus milk from their livestock. They eat a little less.

After a hard winter that reduces their numbers by two or three the women begin to address the matter of food. They fish a little from the currachs in the surrounding waters, they work in their stony fields as they have always done but a little harder. There is not enough but they survive anyway. Very occasionally, during the good weather, a fishing boat puts into shore for a visit, but the women have little to trade and no one is willing to get on board with the fishermen and leave. Eventually, though, one of the younger wives does go off with a young fisherman. She is never spoken of again.

After a year or two has gone by, and the women have become thin and drawn, one of them refers in passing to a chore she must see to before her husband comes home. There is cold silence. A few weeks later someone else makes a similar remark, and this time heads are nodded. Before long the imminent arrival of the men becomes the sole topic of conversation. Hands are kept busy sweeping out and tidying the dwellings. There are increasing indications of madness.

The story ends with the prow of a boat breaking around the rocks and into view from shore. We don't see who is on board.

Leopardi

There’s a new eatery in town, a kind of delicatessen / restaurant specializing in chicken, and we went in to check it out. While we were eating (I had crab cakes, as I rarely eat poultry), I happened to notice the fabric on the cushions of the bench across from me. Not surprisingly, this was decorated with images of chickens; what was more curious, though, was that there were also several lines of Italian verse, written in an antique hand, repeated through the pattern. The more I looked, the more familiar the words seemed. Now I don’t speak Italian, but I can read it to some extent, and the first line was clear enough:

Dolce e chiara è la notte e senza vento

Something like: mild and clear is the night and without wind. The remaining lines I had more trouble with, in part because of penmanship, but I could make out the words “luna” and “lontan.”

My first guess was that they night be from Dante. I’ve read the Inferno in English in its entirety, and much of it in Italian, and bits and pieces of the other two canticles in translation. The style seemed right, but not the present tense. Still, the first line seemed very familiar.

When I got home I Googled a few words and quickly found out why I recognized them. They weren’t by Dante, but by Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837). I’ve never read him, but I did know this:

"Leopardi"

The night is warm and clear and without wind.
The stone-white moon waits above the rooftops
and above the nearby river. Every street is still
and the corner lights shine down only upon the hunched shapes of cars.
You are asleep. And sleep gathers in your room
and nothing at this moment bothers you. Jules,
an old wound has opened and I feel the pain of it again.
While you sleep I have gone outside to pay my late respects
to the sky that seems so gentle
and to the world that is not and that says to me:
“I do not give you any hope. Not even hope.”’
Down the street there is the voice of a drunk
singing an unrecognizable song and a car a few blocks off.
Things pass and leave no trace,
and tomorrow will come and the day after,
and whatever our ancestors knew time has taken away.
They are gone and their children are gone
and the great nations are gone.
And the armies are gone that sent clouds of dust and smoke
rolling across Europe. The world is still and we do not hear them.
Once when I was a boy, and the birthday I had waited for
was over, I lay on my bed, awake and miserable, and very late
that night the sound of someone’s voice singing down a side street,
dying little by little into the distance,
wounded me, as this does now.

That’s a poem by Mark Strand that I’ve always enjoyed, one line of which (“I do not give you any hope. Not even hope”) had, oddly enough, been in my mind just a day or so before I went into the restaurant. I always assumed the poem was an adaptation, but had never come across the original, which, I now know, runs as follows:

XIII - La sera del dì di fiesta

Dolce e chiara è la notte e senza vento,
E queta sovra i tetti e in mezzo agli orti
Posa la luna, e di lontan rivela
Serena ogni montagna. O donna mia,
Già tace ogni sentiero, e pei balconi
Rara traluce la notturna lampa:
Tu dormi, che t’accolse agevol sonno
Nelle tue chete stanze; e non ti morde
Cura nessuna; e già non sai nè pensi
Quanta piaga m’apristi in mezzo al petto.
Tu dormi: io questo ciel, che sì benigno
Appare in vista, a salutar m’affaccio,
E l’antica natura onnipossente,
Che mi fece all’affanno. A te la speme
Nego, mi disse, anche la speme; e d’altro
Non brillin gli occhi tuoi se non di pianto.
Questo dì fu solenne: or da’ trastulli
Prendi riposo; e forse ti rimembra
In sogno a quanti oggi piacesti, e quanti
Piacquero a te: non io, non già, ch’io speri,
Al pensier ti ricorro. Intanto io chieggo
Quanto a viver mi resti, e qui per terra
Mi getto, e grido, e fremo. Oh giorni orrendi
In così verde etate! Ahi, per la via
Odo non lunge il solitario canto
Dell’artigian, che riede a tarda notte,
Dopo i sollazzi, al suo povero ostello;
E fieramente mi si stringe il core,
A pensar come tutto al mondo passa,
E quasi orma non lascia. Ecco è fuggito
Il dì festivo, ed al festivo il giorno
Volgar succede, e se ne porta il tempo
Ogni umano accidente. Or dov’è il suono
Di que’ popoli antichi? or dov’è il grido
De’ nostri avi famosi, e il grande impero
Di quella Roma, e l’armi, e il fragorio
Che n’andò per la terra e l’oceano?
Tutto è pace e silenzio, e tutto posa
Il mondo, e più di lor non si ragiona.
Nella mia prima età, quando s’aspetta
Bramosamente il dì festivo, or poscia
Ch’egli era spento, io doloroso, in veglia,
Premea le piume; ed alla tarda notte
Un canto che s’udia per li sentieri
Lontanando morire a poco a poco,
Già similmente mi stringeva il core.

I haven't had time to make (or better, find) a full translation, though I've looked it over enough to see both differences and similarities between Strand's version and the original. Strange drift and mingling of circumstance, that reveals the source of a favorite poem through the upholstery of a chicken restaurant.

Postscript: The restaurant mentioned above has since closed. However, it fascinates me to know that someone has translated Strand's version back into Italian: La sera è calma e limpida e senza vento / La luna bianca come pietra aspetta sopra i tetti...

The Bear's Rock

Thanks to a correspondent from Italy who contacted Andy Irvine, I now have the Macedonian lyrics and an English paraphrase for "Mechkin Kamen" ("The Bear's Rock"), which can be found on Andy Irvine & Davy Spillane's CD East Wind (where it is sung by Márta Sébestyen) as well as on Mozaik's Live from the Powerhouse (sung by Andy). Each line is sung twice; for the most part the second part of each line then becomes the first part of the following.

Vo Krushevo ogan gori, vo Krushevo gusta magla
Vo Krushevo, gusta magla, Mechkin Kamen krv se lele
Mechkin Kamen krv se lele, tam se bia tri voivodi
Tam se bia tri voivodi, Turska voiska tri illyardi
Prv voivoda Damé Gruev, vtor voivoda Pitu Guli
Vtor voivode Pitu Guli, a triti ot Ali Bakhov

Andy writes: “I cannot translate it but it means more or less — In Krushevo terrible fires and destruction. At the Bear's Rock there came three chieftains/leaders. Three leaders against 3,000 Turkish soldiers. The first chieftain was Dame Gruev, the second was Pitu Guli, and the third chieftain was Ali Bakhov. That's about it!”

There's a little more background in the liner notes to East Wind: “The Bear's Rock (Mechkin Kamen) is the site outside the town of Krushevo [or Kruševo — CK] where Pitu Guli and his men made one brave last stand against the Turkish forces during the Illinden rising in Macedonia in 1903. The people of Krushevo, who, along with the rest of Macedonia, had laboured under the brutal Ottoman Empire for over 500 years drove out the Turkish garrison at the start of the rising and proclaimed 'The Krushevo Republic.' It lasted for just ten days before the Turks sent in an army of 20,000 to exact retribution and the Krushevo Republic was drowned in blood."

The illustration at top is of the “Ilinden Spomenik,” a memorial to the heroes of the uprising (and to the antifascist partisans of World War II). From the looks of it the image may have been reproduced from a refrigerator magnet.

All hallows eve

Here are some of the names of the ancient megaliths scattered through the countryside of England and Wales: The Pipers; The Hurlers; The Merry Maidens; Long Meg & Her Daughters; Arthur's Spear; The Robber's Stone; Harold's Stones; The Devil's Arrows; The Devil's Den; The Twelve Apostles; The Giant's Grave; The Bull Stone. In centuries past, while the educated “knew” that these were the work of the Druids, the Romans, or the Saxons, for the folk each monument was linked to some supernatural actor or event:

“The Merry Maidens were girls who instead of going to church on the Lord's Day, went for a walk in the fields. Demons disguised as musicians appeared and began to play dance music, whereupon the maidens recklessly began to dance and enjoy themselves. As their dancing became more and more wanton, a bolt of lightning struck them and the girls and the fiends were turned into stone.“

“The Devil's Den is reputed to be haunted by a gigantic white dog, with glowing red eyes like burning coals. It is apparenty kenneled beneath the tomb. The nearby West Kennet long barrow is also haunted by a huge white dog with red ears. At sunrise every midsummer's day it follows a ghostly priest into the barrow.”

(Quotations from Megaliths by David Corio and Lai Ngan Corio)

I grew up in a part of the northeastern US which, though solidly suburban (it is even more so now) still displayed to the careful observer a discernible imprint of a rural past: abandoned orchards and half-buried foundations among the second-growth woods, stone walls that no longer held anything in or out. I spent a fair amount of time wandering among such traces, navigating not by road signs and property lines but by visible landmarks (“the main hill,” “the brown dock,” “the cow pasture”) — which may in part explain why to this day I am slow to learn street names and often give poor directions. They formed a kind of transitional zone, both in time and in space, between the landscape of human occupation and what we imagined as wilderness (childhood itself, is of course, another kind of transitional zone), and I think it is such zones, rather than say, the deep old-growth forests, that are most conducive to enchantment.

The neighborhood had its local lore, some of it possibly handed down from an earlier time, some of it spontaneously generated from the imagination of childhood. The older kids would relay such things — and much worse, no doubt — to tease and horrify the younger, the more gruesome the tale the better. Most of this is now irretrievable to me, and even what little remains is broken into fragments, embellished by my attempts to shape them into coherence — but then, doesn't the survival of folklore owe as much to the tangled process of forgetting, improvising, and mangling as it does to faithful handing down from one generation to another?

There was one story — attached to an old barn that was still standing but had lost its agricultural purpose — about which I only remember that it had to do with some terrible wasting affliction of horses. (Was it a natural or supernatural affliction? It made no difference: in the mind of children the two are as yet undivided.) Another, which I remember a bit better, was connected to a small water tower at the top of a hill, in which a creature was said to silently lurk, emerging only in certain times of drought, when it quenched its thirst by draining the bodies of whatever animal it encountered (a squirrel, a dog … a child?) There must have been many others; some sort of legends or inventions must have surrounded the house-sized boulder, universally referred to as Transylvania, that was tucked into the woods by the end of the lake. But if so they have descended into the substratum of memory.

There was also, a few miles away, the Leatherman's Cave; but in this case the name derived from a historical figure, a late 19th-century vagabond who wore a hand-tailored leather coat. I've seen a photograph, and his wanderings are amply documented; still, without written records how easily it would have been for his actual story to become obscured, leaving only vague rumors attached to his former digs.

Urban and suburban areas have their own folklore, as Jan Brunvand and others have documented, but it rarely seems rooted in particular places. Modern urban spaces are too transparent, their occupation too transitory, to hold onto a mystery for long. But I suspect that, even for children “out in the country,” the landscape is now largely disenchanted, done in by television and the more efficient horrors of movies and video games. It's a great loss.

Woodland (II)

Yesterday I revisited William Cronon's ecological history of New England, Changes in the Land, and — borrowing some additional ideas from the mammalogist Tim Flannery — examined Cronon's argument that the state of the “primeval” forest encountered by the first European settlers in the Northeast was in fact the end-result of a long process of co-evolution in which plants, animals, and Native American hunters and agriculturalists were all actors. Before the peopling of the continent some 12,000 years ago or so, the North American landscape had been shaped by an assemblage of large grazers and browsers, mostly now extinct, including giant sloths, mammoths and mastodons, and a larger version of the bison. The large herbivores kept the growth of vegetation in check, promoting relatively open woodlands and the proliferation of “edge” environments, and their extirpation, possibly by hunting, would have prompted an increase in forest density as well as a loss of habitat diversity. When the Europeans arrived, however, they commented on the open, “parklike” appearance of the southern New England forests, for by then the Native Americans, in order to encourage the population of species useful for hunting and foraging, had learned to reshape the woodland to their own purposes through the widespread setting of fires. The deep aboriginal Northeastern woodlands, seem, at least in southern New England, to be a myth.

Some parallel ideas emerge in a New York Review of Books article (as it happens, written by the same Tim Flannery) that includes a review of a new book by Franciscus Wilhelmus Maria Vera with the title of Grazing Ecology and Forest History. In Flannery's summary:

In our childhood, we all heard fairy tales about the European wild wood, which is portrayed as a gloomy wilderness where column-like trunks soar above the dank, entangled forest floor. But Vera argues that, except on some mountains, such forests never existed in Europe. Instead they are the invention of the foresters and ecologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who both created the first such forests by excluding grazing animals from forestry reserves, and spread the myth that the forests were somehow natural. […]

In Roman times, Vera points out, northern Europe abounded with great mammals such as aurochs, bison, tarpan, and elk, whose grazing prevented the forest from becoming dense and continuous. Many plants in the underbrush had evolved spines and thorns to protect themselves from the browsers and grazers, and it was these thorny plants that acted as protective nurseries for trees such as oaks. Outside their defensive palisades the forest was reduced to meadow, and so a woodland mosaic resulted. It was, Vera argues, a vegetation pattern that survived well into medieval times, for domesticated cattle, horses, and wild pigs continued to act as their wild ancestors did, both in creating meadows and in perpetuating the oak woodlands.

It has long been argued that Europe's greatest biodiversity is found not in its forests but in environments modified by human beings. Richest of all is the oak forest, a woodland environment that has long been thought of as resulting from the introduction of grazing herds into the primeval forests in medieval times. Vera argues instead that the oak forest is a relic of a pre-agricultural Europe, and thus it is the true primeval European environment. The only change, he contends, was that the herds of grazing animals that maintained it became domesticated, a development which did not substantially affect its structure.

Vera thinks that belief in the existence of the illusory primeval European forest is leading to environmental catastrophe. The last remnants of oak forests are being choked to death by trees because, in an effort to return them to what the environmentalists see as “nature,” grazing by domestic stock has recently been prohibited in them.

The idea of the “primeval” European forest is a powerful presence in our folklore and literature. (Also, more disturbingly, in our national mythology: see Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory for some interesting material on the role of the myth of the forest in virulent forms of German nationalism.) One biography of the Brothers Grimm is entitled, fittingly, Paths Through the Forest. But were the looming woods of folklore ever a reality? No doubt there will be disagreement with Vera's thesis, but if he is right the history of the European forest may need to be rewritten, in order to reflect more fully the series of interactions — between wild animals, livestock, and human beings — that have shaped it. The dark woods of our collective memory may reveal more about our own interior landscapes that about the way things really were.

Woodland (I)

Looking out of my window, and over the rusty or — now — snow-covered roofs of the warehouses that are the closest buildings to our office, there is a fine view of wooded hills in the distance; on some winter afternoons the sunsets over the ridge can be spectacular. The rural aspect of the view is, actually, a bit misleading, for hidden beneath and behind those trees are subdivisions, railway tracks, and a busy parkway. It's true, though, that we're fortunate to overlook a landscape that is “still” forested, and has not yet been divvied up for McMansions and shopping centers.

I say “still” in quotation marks because much of the woodland here is, in fact, second growth; photographs from a century ago often show large open fields where today there are dense expanses of trees. This was once dairy country, and until a few generations ago much of the area — all but the swampiest bogs or the steepest rocky hillsides — was parcelled out into farms that supplied milk for the growing population of New York City. At some point the economics shifted; land close to the city became more valuable for housing, and at the same time better transportation made it possible to ship agricultural products from counties farther north or west where land was cheaper. When the local farms shut down some of the farmland was developed, other tracts were preserved as parkland or watershed, and some fields just went fallow waiting for the right buyer and the right use. Walking through the woods, even in the extensive forested acres of the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation to our north, you can still see the farmers' old stone walls, silent evidence, like the ancient Indian mounds of Ohio and the South, of a culture that no longer exists. The reforestation of the area — along with leash laws — has brought corresponding changes in wildlife populations. Deer, once glimpsed only rarely, are now seen as a plague, the wild turkey has returned, and coyotes — not originally native to the region at all — are increasingly common.

The immigrant agriculturalists from Europe who colonized New York and New England in the 17th and 18th centuries were not, of course, the region's first settlers; neither were they the first people to transform the Eastern woodlands. Two decades ago, in a stimulating, brief book entitled Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, William Cronon surveyed the prospect initially encountered by European settlers:

One must not visualize the New England forest at the time of settlement as a dense tangle of huge trees and nearly impenetrable underbrush covering the entire landscape. Along the southern coast, from the Saco River in Maine all the way to the Hudson, the woods were remarkably open, almost parklike at times. When Verrazano visited Narragansett Bay in 1524, he found extensive open areas and forests that could be traversed easily “even by a large army.”

The relatively open condition of the southern New England woodlands was due to the deliberate use of fire by Native Americans. Not the passive Arcadians Europeans often imagined them to be, the Indians in fact were active agents in shaping — one could easily say cultivating — the forest for their own purposes:

The effect of southern New England Indian villages on their environment was not limited to clearing fields or stripping forests for firewood. What most impressed English visitors was the Indians' burning of extensive sections of the surrounding forest once or twice a year. “The Salvages,” wrote Thomas Morton, “are accustomed to set fire of the Country in all places where they come, and to burne it twize a yeare, viz: at the Spring, and the fall of the leafe.” Here was the reason that the southern forests were so open and parklike; not because the trees naturally grew thus, but because the Indians preferred them so. As William Wood observed, the fire “consumes all the Underwood and rubbish which otherwise would overgrow the country, making it unpassable, and spoil their much affected hunting.” The result was a forest of large, widely spaced trees, few shrubs, and much grass and herbage. […]

In particular, regular fires promoted what ecologists call the “edge effect.” By encouraging the growth of extensive regions which resembled the boundary areas between forests and grasslands, Indians created ideal habitats for a host of wildlife species. […] Indian burning promoted the increase of exactly those species whose abundance so impressed English colonists: elk, deer, beaver, hare, porcupine, turkey, quail, ruffed grouse, and so on. When these populations increased, so did the carnivorous eagles, hawks, lynxes, foxes, and wolves. In short, Indians who hunted game animals were not just taking the “unplanted bounties of nature”; in an important sense, they were harvesting a foodstuff which they had consciously been instrumental in creating.

But if the “parklike” woodlands were not aboriginal, neither were the denser forests they replaced. In The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples, Tim Flannery describes how, before the arrival of humans, a now-vanished assemblage of “megafauna,” including giant sloths, mammoths and mastodons, and a larger version of the bison, once dominated the continent. Like the elephants, rhinos, and the like of the Old World, these massive grazers and browsers would have imposed strict limits on the growth of vegetation. Furthermore, by creating disturbed “edge” environments by means of their wallows, trails, fallen trees, etc. they created conditions favorable to a host of smaller animals and herbacious plants. The relatively rapid extinction of the large herbivores some 12,000 years ago — possibly (it is still debated) at the hand of human hunters — prompted an increase in forestation and a corresponding decline in ecological diversity, and led, Flannery thinks, to the widespread shifts in the distribution of smaller mammals that have been documented in the following millennia. The burning witnessed, much later, by early European visitors, was therefore a kind of partial compensation for the lost effect of the large grazers.

The present condition of the woodlands of the Northeast U.S., then, can't be explained in terms of a simple opposition between “wild” and “developed” land, but must be understood as the outcome of a specific series of historical changes, in which herbivores, Native Americans, colonists, and suburbanites have all been actors. None of this is to suggest that, since there is no “natural” state to preserve, we should have no reservation about strip-mining (or strip-malling) what open space remains. It does, though, argue for a more complex model of the human-natural interactions that have shaped the landscape. Tomorrow I examine a somewhat parallel argument, this time relating to the deep forests of the European past.

Urn burial

What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture. What time the persons of these ossuaries entered the famous nations of the dead, and slept with princes and counsellors, might admit a wide solution. But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a question above antiquarism; not to be resolved by man, nor easily perhaps by spirits, except we consult the provincial guardians, or tutelary observators. Had they made as good provision for their names, as they have done for their relicks, they had not so grossly erred in the art of perpetuation. But to subsist in bones, and be but pyramidally extant, is a fallacy in duration. Vain ashes which in the oblivion of names, persons, times, and sexes, have found unto themselves a fruitless continuation, and only arise unto late posterity, as emblems of mortal vanities, antidotes against pride, vain-glory, and madding vices.

So Thomas Browne, in Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, regarding the unearthing in a Norfolk field of several dozen urns containing ancient Roman burial remains. Browne's point, as I read him, was that the careful interment of the Romans' ashes had come to nought: their names had failed to survive them, and so their lives, their deeds, their kin, were lost to human knowledge for eternity, and no historian could ever restore their identities. The ashes in the urns were now mere stuff, matter without a trace of the spirit it once contained.

It has always struck me as a little surprising that Browne thought, on the other hand, that “what song the Syrens sang” was not similarly “beyond all conjecture.” The enigma was an old one: according to Suetonius, the emperor Tiberius was fond of stumping the grammarians of his time by posing the same, unanswerable, riddle — the one about Achilles, as well. If Browne had a possible solution in mind, though, he apparently kept it to himself. (And thus left it to our own time to resolve: according to the Coen brothers, the sirens sang “Didn't Leave Nobody but the Baby.”)

Stonehenge is the most famous ancient site in Britain, but as far as I know historians cannot retrieve even a single name of one of its builders. We can't even guess at what language they may have spoken or who their leaders or heroes may have been; all we have are sarsens and bones and beads and a few vagaries about “Beaker folk” and “the Meldon Bridge period.” This from peoples who inhabited Britain for millennia and constructed monuments that required the cooperation — voluntary or not — of countless laborers.

In a way, our ignorance of those very things that must have seemed most important to the ancients — their speech, their affiliations, their memories and desires — smooths out the terrain of the past and enables us to interpret its contours more clearly. We see the long, slow processes at work: the gradual supplanting of one people by another, the advent of technology, the decline or increase in the productivity of the land, and we can deliberate the reasons for the changes we observe. From this vantage point, whether a certain chieftain died in battle or survived, whether a famine or epidemic compelled a family to abandon its home, has no visible effect.

Today, in an age when seemingly everything is documented, we scrutinize every twist and turn in our own procession; we speak of the “hinge” of history, of “decisive battles.” But do we really know? The Battle of Antietam may have been decided by the finding of a package of cigars, and Five Forks by Gen. George Pickett's fondness for shad, but would the North have eventually won the war in any case? If the North had lost, would the difference it would have made as the future unfolded still be discernible after a thousand years, or five thousand, or would it survive, at best, only in the fine print of a rarely perused chronicle of “ancient” events?

Sometimes history reclaims a parcel from the vast terrains of the unknown past. Browne could not have known that the decipherment of hieroglyphics would restore to us names that were “but pyramidally extant” in his own day. Letters of Roman soldiers stationed in Britain have been found; we can trace a little, from reading them, of ordinary lives that would otherwise have been long ago subsumed by time and decay. But the general trend towards oblivion remains; whatever our efforts to record and ponder our affairs, to “make provision” for our names and deeds, the long view will eventually lose sight of us.