Chopin

  

 Chopin

by Gottfried Benn

translated by Michael Hofmann

Not much of a conversationalist,

ideas weren't his strong suit,

ideas miss the point,

when Delacroix expounded his theories

it made him nervous, he for his part

could offer no explanation of the Nocturnes.

A poor lover;

mere shadow in Nohant

where George Sand's children

rejected his attempts

at discipline.

His tuberculosis

took the chronic form,

with repeated bleeding and scarring;

a creeping death,

as opposed to one

in convulsions of agony

or by firing squad:

the piano (Erard) was pushed against the door

and Delphine Potocka

sang him

a violet song in his last hour.

He took three pianos with him to England:

Pleyel, Erard, Broadwood,

for twenty guineas

he would give fifteen-minute recitals in the evenings

at the Rothschilds' and the Wellingtons', in Strafford House

to the assembled cummerbunds;

then, dark with fatigue and imminent death,

he went home

to the Square d'Orleans.

Then he burned his sketches

and manuscripts,

didn't want any leftover scraps

betraying him–

at the end he said:

"I have taken my experiment

as far as it was possible for me to go."

Each finger was to play

to no more than its natural strength,

the fourth being the weakest

(twinned with the middle finger).

At the start, they occupied the keys

of E, F sharp, G sharp, B and C.

Anyone hearing

certain of his Preludes

in country seats or

at altitude,

through open French windows

on the terrace, say, of a sanitorium,

will not easily forget it.

He composed no operas,

no symphonies,

only those tragic progressions

from artistic conviction

and with a small hand.

The reader is confronted with disparate fragments about Chopin in a non-chronological order that elude unified view of the artist.  Though limited in scope, it sensitively sketches the musical life of a fragile artist.  Its unrhymed and free verse afford the poem an open character. Presumably, what fascinated Benn about Chopin was his manifold playfulness that does not go in depth. Benn characterized Chopin as a diffident lover and a shadow in Nohant whose advice on their upbringing would have been ignored by George Sand’s children. Following the topic of failure in everyday life, the third stanza thematizes illness and death, in order to deal with his artistic performance in the next verse. Benn clarifies that the preludes are not meant for “everybody” by referencing to the semipublic play in England to which Chopin had been invited by Jews and the nobility (Cummerbunds) . Because he wished to leave only complete works behind, Chopin is said to have burned his “sketches and manuscripts” before his death. The poem disregards the intimate details of his relationships. The penultimate stanza speaks about Chopin’s technical advice for the Piano, stressing the importance of activity of each individual finger, especially the notorious weakness of the fourth finger. The end of the poem thematizes the reception of Chopin after his death with great poignancy. This is a great poem that bathes in existential pathos.

Notes (source Wiki) : 

Delacroix was a great painter and a friend of Chopin. The first stanza sounds both ironic and tender, and fills me with joy when thinking of the modesty of a great artist like Chopin. The love affair between the novelist George Sand and Chopin is quite famous. The bucolic landscapes of the black valley that surround the George Sand  family château in the village of Nohantis where they spent long summers for seven years, from 1839 to 1846, skipping only 1840, when she was upset by the failure of her play, Cosima, and he was ill. They separated two years before his death for a variety of reasons. And it was at Nohant that the musician composed most of his works for piano, from the Third Sonata to the last of the Grand Polonaises.

Delphine Potocka (March 1807 – 2 April 1877) was a Polish countess and a friend and muse to Chopin . In 1825 she married Count Mieczysław Potocki (thereby becoming a countess), with whom she had two daughters. Unhappy in her married life, she eventually divorced Potocki. After parting with her husband, Potocka went abroad, where she maintained close contacts with Chopin. She studied piano with him, and their friendship continued throughout Chopin's life; two days before his death in 1849, at his request, she sang for him an aria from Handel's Dettingen Te Deum.  

Cummerbund:  It’s a pleated waist sash worn with single-breasted tuxedo jackets. Traditionally black, they are also available in other colors, most notably burgundy, bottle green, rich gold, and even white.

Let’s Hurry

Let’s Hurry

by Maxim Amelin

translated by Derek Mong and Anne O. Fisher

Let’s hurry

to grace this meager table

with red tomatoes

and stacks of melon wedges,

with onions

and dill, with parsley and peppers,

with garlic and goose-pimpled

cucumbers. Let the oil,

resplendent

as sunlit amber, glimmer.

It’s time to slice

black bread, to strew salt

lavishly.

Let’s offer bottles full

of wine and tipple

till they’re gone. How pleasant

to placate

our palates and sup with taste!

We won’t give up,

we won’t give in to autumn,

not a bit.

For God, the Creator of All,

likes naughty lovers

far more than dreary doubters.

Maxim Amelin is he one of the most brilliant of all contemporary Russian poets. I first heard about him while listening to an interview with the Russian poet Vera Pavlova where she praised Amelin lavishly. 

Poet, critic, editor, and translator, Maxim Amelin is among the last generation of Russian poets to grow up in the Soviet Union, or as the poet Aleksei Tsvetkov wrote in Poetry Magazine: “those in the thirty- to forty-year-old range… the children of perestroika―or one should say the orphans, since their alleged mother went missing long ago” (February 2008). The recipient of numerous national awards, including the Moscow Reckoning Award, the Anti-Booker, the Novyi Mir Prize, and the Bunin Prize, his work has been translated into over a dozen languages. In 2013 Amelin won the prestigious Solzhenitsyn Prize for his contributions to Russian poetry. 

A loving collector of neologisms and a devoted student of Revolutionary word-smithing (like Mayakovsky), Amelin keeps his poetry in suspension through a tension of opposites. He writes of bodily pleasures while musing on the body’s resurrection.

This poem is such a pleasure to read that I felt the pulse of running around and setting the table to host a party. Its accelerating pace is frenetic as the title itself. What a pleasure to read such a lively verse in these depressing times! It has amazing oomph and alacrity. And that line, 'we won’t give in to autumn' sums up the spirit.

Five minutes after the air raid

Five minutes after the air raid

By Miroslav Holub  

Translated by George Theiner

In Pilsen,
twenty-six Station Road,
she climbed to the third floor
up stairs which were all that was left
of the whole house,
she opened her door
full on to the sky,
stood gaping over the edge.

For this was the place
the world ended.

Then
she locked up carefully
lest someone steal
Sirius
or Aldebaran
from her kitchen,
went back downstairs
and settled herself
to wait
for the house to rise again
and for her husband to rise from the ashes
and for her children’s hands and feet to be stuck back in place.

In the morning they found her
still as stone,
sparrows pecking her hands.

Miroslav Holub was a curious mixture, perhaps a unique one: he was one of  Czech Republic’s  most prolific and original poets and also a distinguished scientist, a leading immunologist. What makes Holub so unusual is his distinction in both fields. Miroslav Holub is one of the half dozen most important poets writing anywhere", says Ted Hughes. "One of the sanest voices of our time”, writes A. Alvarez in an introduction. His fantastical and witty poems give a scientist's bemused view of human folly and other life on the planet. He loved experimental poetry and wrote free and irregular verses. "I prefer to write for people untouched by poetry," he said in an interview.

"Five Minutes After the air Raid", is a poignant and nostalgic evocation of a woman who loses everything after her home and family are destroyed by a bomb. The poem skillfully balances the use of a factual journalistic tone with striking and at times shocking imagery, which combined evoke strong reactions in the reader. The encompassing sensation of horror and tragedy are profoundly characteristic of Holub's entire oeuvre and his poetic style.

It begins with the plainest of physical descriptions:

"   In Pilsen,
   twenty-six Station Road,
   she climbed to the third floor
   up stairs which were all that was left
   of the whole house,

   she opened the door
   full on to the sky,
   stood gaping over the edge."

One minute the woman appears to be on solid ground, making her everyday ascent to her home Upon opening the same door she has opened many times before she is met with a shockingly different world to the one familiar to her. She is simply gaping into the open sky putting herself on the peril of falling down. This move from certainty to uncertainty in this poem is amazingly swift. No sooner have we taken the address on board than we are treading those free-standing stairs. What dreadful history do they suggest? Are they the hallucination of a damaged mind, or real wreckage? How can the climbing woman avoid further injury?
 
The buildings physical ruin directly reflects the woman's emotional state: "this was the place the world had ended". These lines demonstrate the fragility of human existence, and it is telling that they are singular and separate from the rest of the poem, creating a gap, between the first stanza of the poem, and the rest, its purpose is to demonstrate the divide between the woman's old life, and that which follows the bomb. Holub is expressing that everything we know, everything we take for granted can be taken away in a single moment.

Holub reveals, the woman's disoriented mental state by having her perform an illogical action. She locks up the house. Why? There is nothing left to protect. Everything she had is gone, and Holub emphasizes this, by suggesting she is protecting.

"Sirius or Aldebaran"

They are the two brightest and most precious stars in the sky. Perhaps those are the stars she thought only she had the luck of feasting every day from her kitchen. Now that the house is gone, her deranged mind thinks that someone can steal those stars she had cherished as her own delight.

She is expecting the impossible at the end. She "went back downstairs / and settled herself / to wait / for the house to rise again / and for her husband to rise from the ashes / and for her children's hands and feet to be stuck in place. / In the morning they found her / still as stone, / sparrows pecking her hands." She is mentally deranged now. Her physical presence is there like a stone. But the mind is gone!

This is one of the saddest and deeply moving poems I have read in recent times.