Lying flat out without stirring himself,
Frollo got the French to equip him,
For that is the way of the French:
Getting their shoes on while lying down.
That’s according to Andrew de Coutances, anyway. The awkwardness of a literal translation is one of life’s little joys. I’m always pleased by an oddity on a Chinese menu, for instance. Asian cultures obviously have a concept which almost but doesn’t quite translate into either “Lucky” or “Happy”. I’ll have The Seven Lucky Golden Wish Vegetables, please. My favourite business name - and it still makes me chuckle to think of it - belonged to a Chinese café down on good old Southsea Parade in Portsmouth. It was called The Intrepid Bun.
Languages are limited; concepts can slip between the words. I suppose that poetry attempts to exploit this: to use words to convey something more than the total sum of those words. But if, for example, you were to imagine that Wallace Stevens’s Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock was a literal translation from something in Mandarin Chinese, it might take on a whole new dimension.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.
Oh lucky wish dance!
OK, we have to talk. I agree that cupcakes are very 2009, but if this is very 2010, what, I tremble to ask, will be very 2011?
ReplyDeleteI confess, though, I did swoon at "problems such as this kind can be manifold", which echoed Donne's love sonnets.
Very good question, Peter. Gazing into my crystal ball, I confidently predict that 2011 will be the year that cricket becomes America's number one sport.
ReplyDeleteHave you read Netherland, which features cricket in New York? I found it disappointing, which is worse really than hating it.
ReplyDeleteThe Intrepid Bun sounds like something from Victorian nonsense poetry, or perhaps a companion to Mervyn Peake's Frivolous Cake:
ReplyDeleteA freckled and frivolous cake there was
That sailed upon a pointless sea,
Or any lugubrious lake there was
In a manner emphatic and free.
How jointlessly, and how jointlessly
The frivolous cake sailed by
On the waves of the ocean that pointlessly
Threw fish to the lilac sky.
I knew that poem pretty well by heart when I was 15 or so: don't suppose it's entered my head for 30years.
Curious to see how odd bits of Lear, Peake, et al read almost like Wallace Stevens -- and vice versa. Not that I draw any conclusion from this. Or anything else.
Ah, thanks for the Cake, Jonathan - I've recently come to believe that Peake's "Rhymes without Reason" has been more important in forming my worldview than any other book.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, it can be a fine line between 'nonsense' and 'serious' verse...
Gaw - heard about it but not yet in my pile of things to read...
Ha, Wallace Stevens as a Chinese menu writer - I like it! (He spent all his life working in insurance, so he should know how to use words to mean something slightly different from what you think they mean.)
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