Mentioned in dispatches

The war against chaos and for the reordering of books and furniture downstairs is being fought with patience, vigour and resolve. There is progress on all fronts. Our victorious battalions of damp rags, vacuum cleaners, bookcase movers, book transporters and rubbish disposers have penetrated enemy lines and there is light at the end of the window. The effect is generally pacific and while pockets of resistance undoubtedly remain they will be mopped up within a few days.

The troops have even had time to attend a wedding tonight, alcohol consumption strictly limited. A smart turnout is promised for the morning when we will take London by surprise.

The reign of clear surfaces will last a thousand years.

Four ways of reading the unfamiliar

On commenter Charles's recommendation I bought Charles Fernyhough's The Baby in the Mirror and have read five chapters so far. It is a fascinating book about early child development as seen from the point of view of a neuroscientist and parent.

In becoming aware of the way the baby learns to put the world together I also become aware of the way I am reading the book. I think there are at least four distinct ways.

1. As plain language: the baby (newborn / neonate) is capable of doing this, that or the other. So, for example, at an early stage the baby sees an object but then immediately forgets it. I register this as pure information.

2. As tone: this is the autobiographical part, where the author speaks intimately of the baby (Athena) and the mother (Lizzie) telling us where they are or what they happen to be doing. It is an assurance of normality much of the time. The writer isn't a mad scientist experimenting on his child - he has deeply tender feelings about the baby and exercises his curiosity with appropriate warmth. Good guy, normal.

3. As analogy: this is the poetic aspect of the book. Fernyhough is consistently seeking parallels. For example, he compares the adult brain to an office block that shuts down at night, whereas the child's brain is an office where 'the cleaners are wandering around all day long. The supervisor has gone missing. The technicians are reinstalling software and upgrading the phone system even as a poor drone is trying to work.' This analogy is extended. It amuses me, and I recognise the analogy as a picture that echoes certain brain functions - I don't mean that it is like them, but that it directly copies them. It is a kind of literal analogy.

There is a pleasure in reading that, but there is a greater pleasure in finding an analogy such as, 'At four weeks she was like a beached foetus, vainly practising her underwater moves while waiting for the tide to come back in' where the parallel is still in some ways literal but there is an element of lyricism in it. The swimming movements of the foetus and the tide carry powerful transformatory associations.

And there are the hidden analogies too, those smuggled into sentences, such as '...the way she trawled her slow, unblinking gaze across the ceiling, while her arms rehearsed delicate flamenco moves' where the enriched language enters the reader as an extra delicious dimension.

This is poets' work. In fact it rather reminds me of Peter Redgrove's poetry in some places, and I wonder whether he has read Redgrove's poem 'The Visible Baby'. I'm on home ground here.

4. As pure science: and this is the nub, because here a whole range of neurological terms and processes appear under their formal names. This is the part that is like a lecture. It is, however, a lecture in a subject of which I am ignorant. I have a vague idea of the areas of the brain, and know roughly what a neurone is, but the rest is just words to me. I wonder if I ought to have a large diagram of the brain at my side, or whether I ought to have read a little primer in neuroscience first. The words drift by in their lab coats filing in through a big main entrance then getting themselves lost down corridors only they know, and into offices and labs I have never seen. Even to describe their effect on me I have to resort to the analogy method of part three, in other words to seek some familiar ground.

But then I wonder what I am doing, or, rather, what is the reading process I seem to be undergoing? Essentially I am seeking information of the first kind, and am pleased to make the acquaintance of the author via the second kind, where he is successfully doing his best to persuade me that this is a human transaction after all, and we could talk about it over a coffee in a friendly way and maybe watch a game of football or talk about the poems of, say, Don Paterson, which he clearly has read. He could in fact shift onto my ground. He is not a remote boffin.

What then of the words I don't know? The boffin words. Here is where I think I am very like baby Athena. These words are objects belonging to a whole category or system and I am as likely to forget such objects as is baby Athena to forget those she has seen when her attention is turned away from them. They no longer exist. Words without recognisable objects are hard enough, but when they form parts of clearly logical systems, learning just a word or two seems hopeless. Nevertheless, I read on, and when I come across the unknown words I hope to be accumulating some crude but usable elements of the system - much as baby Athena does -without taking on too much extra work. And I remember how that was precisely my difficulty with physics at A level. Unless I understood it all - system, first cause, the lot - it was just a bunch of what semioticians call floating signifiers that didn't so much float as drown.

So I find that my chief pleasure in the book comes from parts 1 and 3 above, and number 3 particularly because I don't feel the analogies are there merely as folksy sugar to make the medicine go down as, say, part 2 might be - not that it is, though it is the primarily success of part 3 that persuades me it isn't mere sugar. I am drawn to the third kind of reading because I am convinced that Fernyhough's analogies are genuine discoveries by a human being who is, at heart, as deeply puzzled as I am, as is only right to be.

It is not so much at the assurance level, but at the metaphorical level, those chance meetings down the tunnels of dark and light in our imaginations, that we become human beings to each other.

Correcting genius

It's not necessarily genius, of course, but we tend to think that the work of an author is, in some ways, sacrosanct - except, that is, to the wise editor, who may be there during the development of the work in a, possibly, advisory role, or to the good literary friend, or partner, to whom the author reads the work in its various states. For others, it is beyond modification. However influenced and modified the final work the sense of ownership resides with the author.

It is the sense of ownership that is sacrosanct. People - people I have never met - have sometimes sent me half-baked work, work with no real hope of publication, along with a note to explain how keen they are to stress the copyright. Ownership is vital to them.

The phrase 'Homer nodded' is adapted from the Latin poet Horace, who recognized that even genius can slip up. Maybe genius is not a matter of perfection then, but of something else, that is if it makes sense to talk of 'genius' at all. Prodigy, virtuoso and master or maestro are some of the possible synonyms (not that, as a poet, I believe in synonyms) for genius. The online etymology dictionary gives its origins as:

...late 14c., from L. genius "guardian deity or spirit which watches over each person from birth; spirit, incarnation, wit, talent," from root of gignere "beget, produce" (see kin), from PIE base *gen- "produce." Meaning "person of natural intelligence or talent" first recorded 1640s.

The first instance of its modern use is cited in the huge OED, also known as Murray's English Dictionary, the full thirty-five volume set of which I picked up second hand for a knock-down price several years ago, comes from 14th century John Gower (O Genius min own clerke Come forth and here this mannes shrifte) but I am not here to quibble etymologies. I am here to consider the evidences of Márai nodding.

Nabokov had a healthy distrust of translators, even, one might argue, a fear and contempt of them. Given half a chance they would, he felt, mess up his beautiful text, 'rearranging Scheherazade's chamber', as I recall he put it. They had to be kept in order. 'Take heed, sirrah; the whip!' as Lear admonishes his Fool. Fool, we must assume, knows the whip.

But Márai does nod. Those great coloratura arias of his where a theme is lent massive wings are often sung as part of rather creaky stories on a stage where props sometimes fall to pieces. It should be stressed that the mechanism of the plot is very much secondary to the quality of the music, and particularly of the arias, and that if a stage door drops off its hinges, or a plywood 'antique' cabinet collapses when leant on, it is to be overlooked. Nevertheless it is, Maestro, less than perfect.

I have spent several days trying to get the inconsistent chronology of the next Márai into some kind of order. It isn't the first time. Each of the books I have translated of his had its share of inconsistencies, but this new one has more than most, and more conspicuously.

Is it my job then to correct these? If the furnishings of Scheherazade's chamber are badly made, do I have the right to mend the broken chair leg or clean the stain off the magnificent rug? If Homer nods, do I nudge him posthumously? Márai's own editors of the time did not do so. Do I stake my 'genius' against his then? As a poet I may be granted some genius, if only in the very basic sense of the word that means I am the poem's author, that my authorship is sacrosanct, and that once I have submitted the poem for publication my authorship is defended by law. Woe betide the miscreant who dare change my text thenceforth!

As a translator though, I am not a genius. I am not worthy! as Wayne keeps repeating in Wayne's World.

But Márai is dead, the copy editor notes the inconsistency and, in effect, takes it for mine. Chronology! Márai's bane! Well, I bridle, I am just the translator. Let the editors put things right. In any case I feel a little mischievous, meddling in the carelessness of genius. Genius has amplitude, I think. It is a kind of largeness and if it contradicts itself, very well, it contradicts itself. You told me the gentleman was thirty-two, but now you seem to be saying he was forty-three! Pah! That is not art, that is Lego!

Very well, I will rise on my genius hind-legs to correct genius and, who knows, it is not impossible, genius might nod back and say, 'Thanks for fixing that.'

Kicks and Cyberscares

I am re-reading Satantango for style in order to prepare the final draft, and there are pages at a time when it's a thrill, but also passages where it feels knotted and obscure, where I simply haven't understood what LK was getting at but had to move on. Now is the time to sort out those passages and to peer back into the dark

The thrills are quite intoxicating. I suppose a translator shouldn't say this, but there are times I feel the prose is on a high - that is to say my own prose - and that that is quite as exciting as writing my own poems when I am writing well. The language seems to be surfing, wave on wave, brewing and breeding. I don't flatter myself by imagining I have written the book but I do feel I am bringing something into being. When people ask - as they do - why do this, there is the answer.

The truth is I have hardly ever done anything literary just for the money in itself. That is the advantage of having a foot in regular work - I am not dependent on freelance exploitation. If I don't like it, I don't have to take it.

The only problem is that I like a great deal, both books and people, and my mouth finds it very difficult to form the word No.

*

Having said that I got a scare yesterday when, during the editing, the Word programme suddenly quit. I tried again, two or three times, with the same result. So I copied the whole text and pasted it into a new Word document. No change. Next I tried pasting it into the AppleWorks 6 format. It wouldn't load. I couldn't work on the text because every time I moved the cursor the programme quit. For safety's sake - not knowing what the problem was, whether it was on the computer or in the document - I sent my university address a copy of the unfinished redraft and another to New Directions. Maybe they could do something with it at their end.

Finally, I copied and pasted the whole text into a simple Text document. I thought it would be too big but Text accepted it and now I could work again, though without any sophisticated text devices. But then I copied the Text version into AppleWorks and that was fine, and while Works is not as handy as Word, it is better than nothing. A great sigh of relief.

The question now is whether I should paste it all back into Word, because all my other Word documents are working perfectly well - so the bug was in the specific document, not in the programme, or so it seems - and the text having been twice through the laundry (it is, I reflected, rather like money laundering) it might be clean enough. I haven't done that so far.

I am back on LK's waves and wavelength, caressing and unknotting in Works, saving after every change. The thought of losing years of work to a bug!

A new angle on choice and constraint

I am due to appear on a BBC World Service radio discussion programme as one of three people willing to talk about ideas. Sheena Iyengar is one of the other two. So I looked her up and she gives this very nice 20 minute inaugural lecture on choice. One of the points she makes is about constraint, an idea I have been pursuing regarding poetic form. I know the lecture is playful and introductory rather than in depth and detailed, but you can see the ideas dangled in front of you and understand that they are just strings waiting to be pulled to see what might be at the end of them - or indeed, perhaps more interestingly, along them.

She gives the lecture in the context of business - which is not where I expected it to be coming from, though the commercial aspects are obvious.

I know twenty minutes is long for a YouTube clip but this has considerable charm and a great deal of intelligence.

Not the Ronettes: Be Our Grandbaby

Photos courtesy of Rich and Helen


Marlie at about 10 weeks. It doesn't take much to turn a frown into a smile, or even a half-smile as we have here, but you never quite know what that 'not much' is. Sometimes it's a noise, sometimes it's a movement, sometimes it's a face, sometimes now it is her own face in the mirror. But you never know, because the same things can frighten or upset her. She loves looking at Rich, her father, and he can tease her by hiding.

I still haven't quite got used to being a grandparent. But then I am not sure if I have ever got used to being anything. Often it is as if consciousness were sitting in another chair near mine, taking it all in, and there's this body thing that it has, sometimes reluctantly, to get back into. I say the whole boiling is strange. Sometimes other people say: don't believe your eyes and I reply, but what else am I to believe? But it isn't the eyes that are doing the replying - it's the consciousness in the chair.

As for little Marlie, her consciousness flitters about her like a moth, and sometimes it lights right there, in the middle of the brain, and that might make her smile, smile back at the mirror, while we too flit about her, strange, large, more or less necessary objects, because, after all, what else is there?

Sunday Night is... The Ronettes

Girl groups of the sixties, the ones I remember: The Ronettes, The Shirelles, The Shangri-Las, The Marvelettes, Martha and the Vandellas, The Supremes, The Chiffons, The Delrons, The Chantels, The Crystals, Ruby and The Romantics, The Orlons, The Vernon Girls... the beehives, the straightened hair, the wigs, the matching clothes, the pouts, the backing dancers in their uniforms, the lead singer pushing it at the front...

'.... just reeling off their names is ever so comfy' said Auden about the names of various kind of lake in Bucolics. When it comes to the girls it is also sharp and poignant and moving. The music continues and bops and rocks and sways as do they, full of smile and routine, the one-hit wonders, the one-album wonders, the veterans on their fourth or fifth come-back tour. And the girls in the audience for The Ronettes above go wild.

There is something about historical happiness that is close to unbearable and elevating at the same time. 'I can make you happy, darling, just you wait and see...' Happiness boxed.