Reading with my father

            These, coasts,

       were the prayers of the age-old boy

       who stood at a rusted balustrade

       and, smiling, slowly died.

       Shores, how much these cold lights say

       to the tormented one who fled from you.

       Blades of water glimpsed between the arcs

       of shifting branches; rocks brown in the foam;

       arrows of roving

       swifts . . .

            O lands,

       if I could trust in you one day,

       funeral trappings, gilded frames

       for the agony of every being.

            Now I return to you

       stronger (or deluded) though the heart

       seems to dissolve in glad-and savage-memories.

       Sad spirit of the past

       and you, new will that calls me,

       perhaps it's time to unite you

       in a calm harbour of wisdom.

       And one day we shall hear the call again

       of golden voices, bold enticements,

       my more divided soul. Think:

       to make the elegy a hymn, to be remade;

       to want no more.

            To be able

       like these branches,

       yesterday rude and bare, alive today

       with quivering and sap,

       for us too to feel

       among tomorrow's fragrances and winds

       a rising tide of dreams, a frenzied rush

       of voices toward an outcome, and in the sun

       that swathes you, coasts,

       to flower again!

       Montale

It would have been unusual, I think,
if the years after his wife’s, my

mother’s death, which found my father

returning to La Jolla to live among

friends of their youth, did not allow, 

in this adjusted family geometry, a 

deferred rapport between us to unfold. 

As incompletely as I could imagine

how our unexpected family residue 

struck him, I think I can say that

for both of us it did invite an or-

iginal conciliation, more than a 

reconciliation, in its two most dis-

tant members. I know that I am for-

tunate, that our lives allowed my 

natural hunger for a true rapport 

with my father to furnish entire 

vacant quarters of my mind, not 

with inheritance or belief but with 

confidence and ease, in talks we'd 

pursue on many themes after breakfast, 

before I would set out for those day-

time and evening distractions of the 

young bachelor, flying down from 

San Francisco once or twice a month. 

His never-doubted interest in one's 

intellectual growth had never expired, 

and not just as an element of paternal 

duty. What was telling, was how that 

motive brought back so clearly to him 

the education he had been given and 

never laid aside, but also never ex-

ercised in such plain sight in years.

It was almost startling to seem to 

sit with him at Cate (then the Santa 

Barbara School for Boys), and re-open 

Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad; or 

bring him back to Twain to take that 

voyage down the river with me, into 

the "Negro question" as it marked our 

past. I found how a single book we might 

read - Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian as 

much as Lord Devlin on Woodrow Wilson’s 

foreign policy, Too Proud to Fight - 

could let us appreciate our strikingly 

sympathetic but distinct sensibilities. 

This pleased him, both in the exertion 

and its evidence, and certainly with

less surprise than the same impressions 

came to me. But it did something else, 

that one could see. It comforted him 

in a project of his own. And we had not 

yet done that. Tone of voice, setting, 

time of life played their part, but 

for me they distinguished less an ex-

ception than a stunning, shining rule, 

that texts are meeting places we can

carry. 

Such a book, I think, has lately been

published and will likely find its way 

into further presentation here, Jonathan

Galassi's new poetry, Left-Handed. I've

already exhibited his translations of 

Leopardi and of Montale, and I've known

him to be one of the great editor-pub-

lishers of his generation. I'd not been 

aware of his poetry.

To anyone who has been interested occa-

sionally in reading this page, I espec-

ially commend these poems, which com-

prise a continuous narrative drawn from
elements of his life. They achieve with 
the reader what Montale foretold for an-
cient intimates, not for self-disclosure
but to unite in a calm harbour of wisdom.
You probably learned it from your father,
that this can be done, and probably you
wish to pass it on.

Eugenio Montale
Riviere
  [extract]
1925
Jonathan Galassi, translation
Collected Poems, 1920-1954
op. cit. 


Jonathan Galassi

Left-Handed

Knopf, 2012©

Montale, Ashbery, in transit

E andando ned sole que abbaglia
sentire con triste meraviglia
come'è tutta la vita e il suo   travaglio
in questo seguitare una muraglia
che ha in cima occi aguzzi di   bottiglia.


And walking in the dazzling sun,
feel with sad amazement
that all life and its torment
consists in following along a wall
with broken bottle shards embedded in its top

Some departure from the norm
Will occur as time grows more open about it.
The consensus gradually changed; nobody 
Lies about it anymore. Rust dark pouring
Over the body, changing it without decay -
People with too many things on their minds, but we live
In the interstices, between a vacant stare and the ceiling,
Our lives remind us. Finally this is consciousness
And the other livers of it get off at the same stop.
How careless.

So l'ora in cui la faccia più impassibile

è traversata da una cruda smorfia:

s'è svelata per poco una pena invisibile.

Ciò non vede la gente nell'affollato corso.

I know the moment when a raw grimace

crosses the most impassive face:

for an instant an invisible pain is revealed.

The people in the crowded street don't see it.

.. Yet in the end each of us

Is seen to have traveled the same distance - it's time

That counts, and how deeply you have invested in it,

Crossing the street of an event, as though coming out of it were

The same as making it happen. You're not sorry,

Of course, especially if this is the way it had to happen,

Yet would like an exacter share, something about time

That only a clock can tell you: how it feels, not what it means.

This posting was conceived

in glad memories of times

with Mme Ulli Steltzer,

portraitist of Mann, Einstein,

Oppenheimer, Bruno Walter, 

and me; lady of Princeton
and one's mentor in coffee.

Yes, Ulli. I'm Papa's

complaint with Brahms.

Eugenio Montale

Ossi di Seppia, 1926

Jonathan Galassi, translation

Cuttlefish Bones

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998©

John Ashbery

Saying It to Keep It from Happening

 Houseboat Days

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975©

Ludwig van Beethoven

Op. 73, Adagio un poco mosso

Walter Gieseking, piano

Herbert von Karajan

The Philharmonia Orchestra

EMI, 1952©

Suppose it were Friday cxlviii: As we were looking

                     Or che in fondo un miraggio

                     di vapori vacilla e si disperde,

                     altro annunzia, tra gli alberi, la squilla

                     del picchio verde ..

There is a way of appreciating
Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window,
which sees it as a classic ex-
ercise in his telling a story
about the world from a hero's
subjective "point of view."

It is. It happens, in a way
he unravelled completely -
some years later in Vertigo -
equally to tell a story to
him about himself, that the
director unveils to us only
slightly in advance: that he
is looking for someone he can
trust. Who knew, it would be
someone who could dissolve
his point of view and redeem
its narrative of voyeurism?

Who doesn't think of Montale,
writing poems at the same
time, who could just as eas-
ily have been imagining the
entrance of Omar Sharif in
David Lean's Lawrence of A-
rabia, every time there is
Grace Kelly, coming to see
the captive Jimmy Stewart?

With his imagery Hitchcock
showed change and prepared
its renewal, so much more
volatile than a gunshot by
a distant rider in Arabia,
that it keeps pace with a
revolution in the subject
of trust, continuing today.
I don't accuse him of not
wishing to go so far. It's
the reach of his eloquence.

                  Now that in the distance a mirage

                  of vapors shifts, dispels,

                  the green woodpecker's shrilling in the trees

                  announces something else.

Eugenio Montale
Collected Poems
  1920 - 1954
    Corrispondenze
    [fragment]
Jonathan Galassi
  translator and editor
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998©


Alfred Hitchcock
  director
John Michael Hayes
  screenplay
Robert Burks
  cinematography
Rear Window
Paramount, 1954©

Saturday commute lii: Aftermath of the gallery going

Who has ever known it to fail,

for a Friday evening of gal-

lery-going to revive that aes-

thetic spirit so many of us

have dutifully laid by, in our

obeisance to the genius, all

week, of free enterprise? Nor

could we bear, really, for the

aesthetic response to invade

that getting act, much as we

may suppose it would be seemly

to order our affairs along the

lines of der Stijl.

But we never really know, do we, that our suppressions of the ill-timed aesthetic spark and of the lingering entrepreneurial impulse are dependable, so that the oddest overlay between admiring and getting persistently surfaces without warning. You can find factory workers at shift changes responding as they might at Wildenstein, and denizens of upper Madison circling each other in the plainest vestiges of the acquisitive dance. 

Nor is this confusion any less acute in west Los Angeles, where the worlds of art and of commerce are so seam-lessly miscegenated as to arouse the most active concern among the shirt-less, as to which of these ostensibly discrete motives has precipitated the slightest passing glance. I freely admit, that if you are Norwegian, say, or Greek, these categories may well strike you as artificial; but when is it not in the nature of a category to be artificial? I'm actively concerned that such a question draws us to the precipice of reading Whitman, but it surfaced only yesterday in Montale; and one does wish to run a blog where one can feel safe to know where one is.

The Friday swirl of gallery going and the kiss at the factory gates portray the problem of the category well enough, as being that of the neck with two pen-dants, where every pendant really is a conch revealing no more than one of its rotations at a time, denying or celebrating a semblance as the occasion may warrant. The existence of the semblance is some-thing religion is invented to mediate, either in dismissing its importance as frivolously mortal, or in reinforcing every hallucinatory category as divinely mandated. This is not a mind/body problem; it is a humanity problem.


Many have remarked, that the celebra-
tion of the semblances between cate-
gories and their permeability is an 
act of aesthetic response. Certain
mentalities are subjected to great
anxiety by this conduct, seeing it
as quite voluntary, and therefore 
quite naughty, and therefore quite 
incompatible with the survival of 
the republic. We shall hear this
anxiety unanimously affirmed again 
this evening, even under the pre-
tense of debate. As they marshall
their genius to articulate how we
must be administered, they will
be discussing how we must be
stopped.

  

Clearly defined borders

Rapture of schoolmarms,

currency systems, and a

shower of safety glass:

I like to discover dis-
tinctions, don't you a-
gree? Not cut myself on
an arbitrary intrusion.

                       I see a valley of moist Montale plus                                myself plus George Herbert.

                       Wait here. Stay alert.

                       When the red apples are ready on

                       the trees,

                       Don't you feel like saying, 

                       "Apples, please .."

  Time and again, a light will
  elicit respect for a border
  shaped by nature - which, e-
  ven in error of application,
  is unforgettably worth pursu-
  ing. For this I am grateful:


  He was no democrat, no pacif-
  ist, no martyr (if these are
  pure professions); and the in-
  tellectual clarity he achieved
  was the clarity not of suffer-
  ing but of disillusion. But
  truth is independent of the
  stimulus that has provoked its
  discovery, and the conditions
  that have guided its expression.

Frederick Seidel

Nice Weather

  Sweet Day, So Cool,

  So Calm, So Bright

op. cit.

Hugh Trevor-Roper
Student [Fellow] of
  Christ Church, Oxford
The Last Days of Hitler
  i: Hitler and his Court
op. cit.

Suppose it were Friday L: "ero intriso di te"

S'empì d'uno zampettìo

di talpe la limonaia ..

The lemon-house was being over-ridden by the moles' stampedes ..

                             

  Oh resta chiusa

  e libera nell'isole

  del tuo pensiero

  e del mio,

  nella fiamma leggera

  che t'avvolge ..

  
     






  Oh stay locked 
  and free
  in the islands of your thought 
  and mine,
  in the gentle flame that 
  folds you in ..

                                                                                                

                                                                                         

  


  Rapito e leggero ero intriso
  di te, la tua forma era il mio
  respiro nascosto, il tuo viso
  nel mio si fondeva, e l'oscuro


  pensiero di Dio discendeva
  sui pochi viventi, tra suoni
  celesti e infantili tamburi
  e globi sospesi di fulmini


  su me, su te, sui limoni ...






Rapt, weightless, I was drenched with you,
my hidden breathing was your form,
your face was merging into mine,
and the dark idea of God


descended on the living few
to celestial tones
and children's drums
and globes of lightning strung above


the lemons, and me, and you ...














Eugenio Montale
Collected Poems, 1920-1954
  i    Nella serra 
  ii   Incantesimo
  iii  Nella serra
Jonathan Galassi, translation
op. cit.