John the Barman

Herschel Uranus Keats

On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer by Keats

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

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"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;"

The telescopic image first seen by Hershel would have been a watery one swimming across his field of view. He first thought it was a comet. The 'Eureka!' moment, if that's what it was, came weeks later when he discovered that it was a planet.

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What is fascinating is that later in his life Hershel talks about his discovery of Uranus in same terms as Keats, surely the finest example of poetry expressing a scientific discovery.

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I am indebted to tonight's BBC radio programme, 'Adventures in Poetry' by Peggy Renolds for relating the story.

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Picture: Voyager 2 1986

Labels: Herschel, Keats, Uranus

Sad Girl and Her Acorn

The sad girl thought about the acorn
she’d buried in the wet black peat;
her small treasure rotting in the unrelenting rain?

She thought about the lonely boy’s Lego
and into her dark, wet bog a pile of red and white blocks clattered.

Taking a single red block
soon huge,
white, asymmetric wings
pixilated out with tiny white bricks,
a fractal formula
(of six dimensions)
that grew soft warmth
till she lifted away
and the oak shed a pool of red leaves.

After watching the film, ‘Lilya4ever’ in Swedish by Lukas Moodysson, a relentlessly miserable story of Lilya, an Eastern European victim of sex trafficking.

The acorn is Swedish, the Lego Danish and the image from:
http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs15/f/2007/078/2/1/___White_Agel_Wings_1024x748___by_PinkMonkeyLove.jpg

FROM THE HUNGARIAN OF SANDOR FOLDALATTI translated by John Glendale

I - BLUE

Blue: sweet colour of far away,
the colour of farewell, the colour
I remember from your eyes.

A childhood blue once trembled
where the city stutters
into dusty scrub and empty

marshalling yards.
The last grim veil of innocence
was blue.

If I were asked to construct
a world that wasn’t there,
I’d make its every surface

scrupulously blue
and you, the only
resident.

II - TODAY, I AM A NEW MAN

Today, I am a new man,
a stranger in the town that bore me.

How simple it is to become a ghost -
just one word, one gesture, and we slip

through the fretwork of other people’s lives
as easily as water through a stone.

Gradually, my heart sheds its weight,
this once familiar rock has hatched a swallow.

Just for today, if I were to pass myself in the street,
I wouldn’t even raise my hat, or say hello.

VI - REMEMBER THOSE WILD APPLES

Remember those wild apples
we would gather in the autumn, stained
with a half-faced blush, or the viridescent
shadow of a vanished leaf?
They clung to the early cold like a young girl’s heart.

Grandfather said they were all seeded
from that first tree God espaliered in Paradise;
its fruit so bitter, even Adam felt compelled
to spread softened honey on the flesh
before he could savour exile, and the world.

Author Note:

Sándor Foldalatti was born in Budapest on March 29th 1952. Since graduating from the University of Pezs with a combined Honours Degree in Fruit Husbandry and Applied Transport Mechanics, he has worked as a ticket collector on the Budapest underground. He is the author of two collections of poems: ‘The Straw Clock’ (Sobor Press, 1989) and ‘A Bicycle of Feathers’ (Ferihegy Books, 1995). He lives in a one bedroomed flat in central Budapest with his German wife Erika, five children, a large black dog, a three legged cat and a dwarf ocelot.

The translator would like to thank Janos Kukorelly, Director of Traffic Flow with the Hungarian State Subterranean Railways, for providing the literal translations from which these English versions derive.

Johnthebarman note:

Sandor's poems take me and tell me of places so close yet on the other side.
Tonight I hope to go to John Glendale's book launch in Edinburgh.

Song of the Moon, Rusalka's aria from Dvorak's Opera 'Rusalka'

O moon high up in the deep, deep sky,

Your light sees far away regions,

You travel round the wide,

Wide world peering into human dwellings

O, moon, stand still for a moment,

Tell me, ah, tell me where is my lover!

Tell him. please, silvery moon in the sky,

That I am hugging him firmly,

That he should for at least a while

Remember his dreams!

Light up his far away place,

Tell him, ah, tell him who is here waiting!

If he is dreaming about me,

May this remembrance waken him!

O, moon, don't disappear, disappear!

Translation by Jules Brunelle (brunellejules@videotron.ca)

Mesiku na nebi hlubokem
Svetlo tvé daleko vidi, 
Po svete bloudis sirokém,
Divas se v pribytky lidi.
Mesicku, postuj chvili
reckni mi, kde je muj mily
Rekni mu, stribmy mesicku,
me ze jej objima rame,
aby si alespon chvilicku
vzpomenul ve sneni na mne.
Zasvet mu do daleka,
rekni mu, rekni m kdo tu nan ceka!
O mneli duse lidska sni,
at'se tou vzpominkou  vzbudi!    
Mesicku, nezhasni, nezhasni!

Unnatural Death

Goya 1808

They shot the six ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldier it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting in the water with his head on his knees.

from In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway

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Great-hearted Tydeides, why enquirest thou of my generation? Even as are the generations of leaves such are those likewise of men; the leaves that by the wind scattereth on the earth, and the forest buddeth and putteth forth more again, when the season of spring is at hand; so of the generations of men one putteth forth and another ceaseth.

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from Book VI of The Iliad, Before attacking Tydeides asks his opponent to identify himself and this is Glaukos's reply (Lang, Leaf, and Myers trans)

Matthias Grunewald about 1500

Labels: Ezra Pound, Goya, Hemingway, Tydeides, Wet Dead Leaves

Carpet Bazaar

Leave your shoes and cameras. Be absorbed in the bright magical patterns, as alive today as thirty centuries ago. Patterns within patterns. Motifs of trees and leaves repeated through the ages. Pink and yellow leaves of sycamore. Yellow willow blades and long brown pine needles in deep soft piles.

Pools of light radiate from the trees and an autumn sun choreographs a path as sun beams run along spider silk tightropes. By day walking among the carpets feeling the texture beneath my feet and passing the same place many times seeing more, the two sides to the leaves, two tones, two colours and how they dry curling upward and how more leaves are upside down. The smells change as one moves, transient subtle decays, exotic perfumes, the clamour of voices.

In those evenings I leave the bazaar, cross the Bosporus bridge to work the arc light for a dancer's performance, returning at night to sleep in a melon stall, behind the shutters in the pile of green melons.

Today is all wind and rain. The Sycamore leaves madly shake themselves to death, a dance of death as they brake free. Yesterday's yellow ash leaves like discarded fish bones are now only pale spines.