It evokes a complex and striking hero, a new form of deity, haunting and idiosyncratic: "He is affection and the present since he opened the house to foaming winter and the hum of summer, he who purified drink and food, he who is the charm of fleeting places and the superhuman deliciousness of staying still." That last phrase is wonderfully telling. The book ends, however, with the marvellous "Genie", described by Ashbery as "one of the greatest poems ever written". In "Barbarian" this unpredictability becomes deliberately violent, each word a contradictory punch: "The pennant of bloody meat against the silk of arctic seas and flowers (they don't exist) / Sweetness! / Live coals raining down from gusts of frost, – Sweetness!" Nymphs out of Horace with Directoire coiffures – Siberian folk dances, Chinese girls painted by Boucher." There are the exquisite transformations of the small prose piece "Winter Festival" that swerves and switches as if everything were always happening at one and the same time: "Trails of skyrockets lengthen, in orchards and garden paths along the Meander – the greens and reds of the setting sun. The dynamic suppleness, the heaping up and amassing of detail, is sustained through poem after poem. Sounds of cities, in the evening, and in sunlight, and always." In "To a Reason" there's a startling vision of utopia, the poem hovering between the vatic and something more akin to megalomania – "A tap of your finger on the drum releases all sounds and initiates the new harmony". These are assertive gestures, exhilarating in their confidence – "Enough had. In contrast to the more elaborate structures of "Childhood", there are also short declamatory poems such as "Departure" or "To a Reason".
The recent Penguin Classics version translated by Jeremy Harding, for example, has "What is that feeble gleam at the corner of the ceiling-vault, like light through a vent?" But Ashbery keeps to the gothic theme and gives us something more akin to Edgar Allan Poe than to a glimpse of salvation – "Why would a spectral cellar window turn livid in one corner of the vault?" The section's complex final sentence has been read in various contradictory ways. He is filled with boredom and simmering rage, combined with a dizzying sense of claustrophobia and inferno ("At a vast distance above my underground salon, houses take root, mists assemble"). The poem's speaker is living in a rented tomb "very far below the earth".
The fifth and final section of "Childhood" again relishes strange gothic perspectives. Here he addresses the startling possibilities of Rimbaud's metaphor and gives it flight. The French word "lessive", which Ashbery delivers wonderfully as "laundry", is frequently expressed in English versions by the relatively low-key "wash". I gaze for a long time at the melancholy gold laundry of the setting sun." In that last extended phrase we have one of the highlights of the book. I am the walker on the great highway. I am the learned scholar in the dark armchair. We are presented with several versions of a constantly transforming self: "I am the saint, at prayer on the terrace. Section 4 delivers a remarkable form of listing. – You follow the red highway to arrive at the empty inn." There's a nice touch here Ashbery carries the bee metaphor, used to describe the leaves, just a little farther than the original the word "l'essaim" meaning "the swarm" is precisely rendered, but he then translates "entoure" not as "surrounds" or "gathers around" but as "buzzes around".
The old people buried standing up in the rampart overgrown with wallflowers." This mixture of the magical and macabre extends to an abandoned rural community: "The swarm of golden leaves buzzes around the general's house. – The dead young mother descends the front steps. Its second section describes a mysterious château and its inhabitants, presented with dark, gothic detail: "That's her, the dead little girl, behind the rosebushes. One of the most successful pieces is "Childhood".
0 kommentar(er)
