Sculpin

I don’t generally mention books I dislike by name, lest their authors show up around here and whine at me. But this prose is so purple, I can hardly help but share it. The book is Pomegranate Soup, and it’s dreadful. It’s a first novel; someday the author will look back and wince, and in that she has all my sympathy. Occasionally a description of food will rise to plain competence, or even a little better. Overall, though, the writing is as subtle and elegant as a brick to the head. I slogged through the first couple of chapters and then started riffling around to find out whether it got any better. No, but it did get sillier:

Layla was indeed still in the throes of a hiccup fit, but she was nowhere near suffering. The young girl was lying upstairs on the mattress the three sisters shared, splayed out like a star fruit with soliloquies of love-struck Shakespearian heroines running across her muddled brain. The image of Malachy’s sapphire eyes sent tremors through her body; the hot node below her belly tingled and sent waves of pleasure down to her toes.

So this was how love was supposed to feel, Layla thought, like the ecstatic cries of a pomegranate as it realizes the knife’s thrust, the caesarean labor of juicy seeds cut from her inner womb. Like the gleeful laugh of oil as it corrupts the watery flour, the hot grease bending the batter to its will and creating a greater sweetness from the process — zulbia, the sugary fried fritters she loved so. Falling in love was amazing. Why hadn’t anyone ever told her so?

I can’t imagine why nobody’d ever mentioned the shouting pomegranate of love to the poor girl.

All that said, I know of a woman who would go absolutely gaga over this book. There’s no accounting for taste.

“As you find that stillness within, welcome the angels, beginning with the Angel of Vision. Listen carefully and allow the Angel of Vision to speak to you…” So says Gary Quinn, who goes on to list all the other angels you should “access… and put to work.”

I think he missed some angels:

Angel of incidence
Angel of repose
Angel of attack
Angel of inclination
Angel of sideslip
Angel of view
Angel of vanishing stability
Angel of elevation
Angel of depression
Angel of approach
The carrying angel

$70 is the new $50. The location field is the new command line. Water is the new oil. Fake is the new real. Awake is the new sleep. Sleep is the new sex. Death is the new pornography. Ignorant is the new educated. The individual is the new group. Death is the new sex. Blue is the new green. Green is the new black. Orange is the new black. Pink is the new red. Blood is the new black.

Gary mentioned that it’s World Poetry Day. I keep stumbling across Rilke references this month, so here’s something by Rilke, translated by Robert Bly:

You see, I want a lot.
Perhaps I want everything:
the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shivering blaze of every step up.

So many live on and want nothing,
And are raised to the rank of prince
by the slippery ease of their light judgments.

But what you love to see are faces
that do work and feel thirst.

You love most of all those who need you
As they need a crowbar or a hoe.

You have not grown old, and it is not too late
To dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret.

I had a lot of fun with this. Gromit posted a beautiful Italian poem with his translation of the last five lines. (And, Gromit, I hope you do not mind my reposting this. Please let me know if you do.)

POETI DIMENTICATI

La meraviglia vive nel silenzio
come i fiori respirano la luce.
Questa è forse la vostra sorte
amici poeti, già accolti
nelle ombre profumate del Lete:
ma ancora parlate, a convito,
dal popolo infinito dei sogni.
Cantaste la terra buona,
la ferrea età che ci incalza,
l’amore, il polline, le gemme,
la morte, carezza d’oblio.
Siete rientrati nel vortice
lievissimo della bellezza,
per sempre verrete a incontrarci
nel tremito delle libellule,
nel magico crepitio del fuoco,
dal nero di spente rose
al sangue di roventi spine.

-Alberto Frattini (1991)

…
forever you will come to meet us
in the trembling of the dragonflies,
in the magical crackling of the fire,
from the black of lifeless roses
to the blood of burning thorns.

That’s so gorgeous that I was impatient to read the first lines. So impatient that I decided to just make up a translation off the top of my head, without that little intermediate step of, oh, learning Italian. My draft mistranslation:

The observed miracle lives in silence
and breathes light into flowers.
A question’s impulse becomes the voice
of a friend of poets, always beloved,
your shadows perfumed by Lethe,
while a knit skein calls together
the people of the infinite god of sleep.
You sing of the good earth,
the iron of our own armatures,
love, onions, precious stones,
the dead, beloved obligations.
Again in your beauty you come
to the flimsiest of crossroads
and always you will come to meet us
in the trembling of dragonflies.

I am particularly proud of translating “ancora parlate” as “knit skein”. Proud in a sick way. Mistranslating things is fun. How would you translate these lines, Gentle Reader?

Things I think late at night: “apple” is to “apical” as “tipple” is to “typical” and “topple” is to “topical”. Also, less neatly, as “vessel” is to “vesicle”. I start thinking things like this around 3:30 a.m., hoping that juggling words will help me sleep, and then they wind up keeping me awake even later.

Oh, I wish for some good reason to say in conversation, “My typical tipple is to topple the topical.” Unfortunately, I’m not quite sure what it might mean. But it’s fun to say. (Come to think of it, there’s a passage in Ojos de Brujo’s “Zambra” that sounds an awful lot like that.)

Some safety advice I think I can follow, from Seattle City Light:

“Be careful with ladders! Don’t stand higher than the top two steps…”

Standing higher than the top two steps would be quite a trick.

Another word I’d like to import: gholonbeh, “gift-wrapped insult”. Perhaps it could carry the connotation of a whole lot of related insults all knotted up into a nasty wad.

Serious thoughts must have gone into the selection of a Persian word that has enough power to unload a ton of weight on one’s heart. Gholonbeh in itself means an indescribable lump or a bulge of something, for example, if you stuff your pockets it will form a gholonbeh. However, in dialogue, the same word signifies a load of insult which is delivered in a roundabout way via metaphors and hints. You won’t find a definition for this word anywhere and, should there be a dictionary bold enough to include it, you’ll be sure to find the translation inadequate if not incorrect.

– Zohreh Khazai Ghahremani on Iranian.com

Is she describing “gholonbeh” accurately? I have no idea, but I love the metaphor.

There’s a handy Yorkshire expression “to thoil”, a tight little parcel of verb meaning to be able to afford an object, but to feel guilty spending the money. “I don’t dislike that candlewick bedspread,” a Leeds woman might say, “but I couldn’t thoil to pay that price.”
– Alan Bennett, “Going Round”

I’d like “thoil” as part of my own working vocabulary. For more on Yorkshire dialect, consider A Survey of Yorkshire Dialect on the Internet. Rifle around there a while and you’ll find such words as “snooac” (to smell in a snuffing manner) and “nithered” (perishing with cold). I think “wazistheart” may be old Yorkshire dialect for “bummer”.

Mary Oliver is coming to town to read from her second volume of New and Selected Poems. She’ll be at Town Hall on November 8 at 7:30 pm. The reading is presented by the U Bookstore and the Seattle Public Library.

Tickets are cheap — $5 or free with book purchase — and a portion of the proceeds benefits the Seattle Public Library and Richard Hugo House.