Wczoraj była rocznica śmierci W. H. Audena, a dziś jest dzień tłumacza. W związku (a właściwie zupełnie bez związku) z tym cytat z tego pierwszego ku przestodze temu drugiemu.

Co zawsze podziwiam u Audena, sama wypowiedź jest doskonałą ilustracją tego, o czym mówi - wystarczy spróbować ją przetłumaczyć. Ja poległam.

Whatever else it may or may not be, I want every poem I write to be a hymn in praise of the English language: hence my fascination with certain speech-rhythms which can only occur in an uninflected language rich in monosyllables, my fondness for peculiar words with no equivalents in other tongues, and my deliberate avoidance of that kind of visual imagery which has no basis in verbal experience and can therefore be translated without loss.

Cytat pochodzi z książki Edwarda Mendelsona Later Auden, którą wypożyczyłam na stronie archive.org - bardzo spodobała mi się taka forma udostępniania książek. Gdybym miała możliwość jej ściągnięcia, to nieprędko sięgnęłabym po nią, natomiast  świadomość, że dostęp jest oganiczony czasowo działa mobilizująco.

Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice - "words, words, words" wandering. The ring

At the first glance there is too much ring-giving in MoV: Jessica gives her father's ring for a monkey, Portia gives her ring to Bassanio, Bassanio gives Portia's ring to the "civil doctor", and Portia gives the ring to Antonio in order that he gives it to Bassanio again; finally, Nerissa gives a ring to Gratiano and Gratiano gives it (back) to the "judge's clerk". What an affluence of rings, one may say.

But, as Bassanio (again) rightfully observed, "so may the outward shows be least themselves". Dismissing Nerissa's mock ring, which is never seen but too much told of as an ornament, we may recall, that the only described ring with definite history is Shylock's (as well as all the real money in the play are Shylock's):

Tubal: There came divers of Antonio's creditors in my company to Venice, that swear he cannot choose but break. 

Shylock: I am very glad if it: I'll plague him, I'll torture him: I am glad of it. 

Tubal: One of them showed me a ring that he had of your daughter for a monkey. 

Shylock: Out upon her! Thou tortures me, Tubal: it was my turquoise: I had it of  Leah when I was a bachelor. I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys.

Let us assume that rich Portia was one of the Antonio's creditors (we are not told of the origin of her wealth - but she is undeniably very competent in governing her capital: mark, that she is on very good terms with Bellario, a lawyer providing services to the Duke of Venice) and we can see that it was one ring circulating between numerous people. The ring, treasured for long years by Shylock the Jew as a token of his marriage, seems to burn Christians' hands and constantly changes the owner accompanied by the highest and noblest oaths never kept.

The story of the ring provides an interesting commentary to the pound of flesh case. Let me remind the dialog between Portia and Bassanio when he confesses that he gave out the ring:

Bassanio:              Sweet Portia,
If you did know to whom I gave the ring,
If you did know for whom I gave the ring,
And would conceive for what I gave the ring,
And how unwillingly I left the ring,
When naught would be accepted but the ring,
You would abate the strength of your displeasure. 

Portia: If you had known the virtue of the ring,
O half her worthiness that gave the ring,
Or your own honour to contain the ring,
You would not then have parted with the ring.
What man is there so much unreasonable,
If you had pleas'd to have defended it
With any terms of zeal, wanted the modesty
To urge the thing held as a ceremony?

Some time later Antonio says:

I am the unhappy subject of these quarrels.

And he is right. Readers know perfectly well that Portia is more than aware of  all the circumstances, and, be "ring" replaced with "life" in her speech, it would sound as a rebuke to Antonio, who - let's say it plain - was eager to sacrifice his life for a trifle, denying the virtue and worthiness of God and tempting the Jew into crime by irreverent attitude towards the sanctity of life. Reading the play, I as a reader can't believe that Antonio really meant to forfeit his pound of flesh before Portia entered the Court and made this treat so near to him. It is hard to tell by his further conduct if he learned his lesson. Probably he didn't because he is eager "to be bound again, my soul upon the forfeit, that you lord will never more break faith advisedly".

Every Shakespeare's play is like a kaleidoscope - play with mirrors - you can turn it many ways, but there is still an enchanting ornament inside, not a chaotic mess.

So let me shake the pieces of coloured glass in the tube once more and look at another constellation.

Assuming that the ring stolen by Jessica from her father is obtained, by way of exchange, by Portia, who gives it to Bassanio saying:

This house, these servants, and this same myself
Are yours, my lord. I give them with this ring;
Which, when you part from, lose or give away,
Let it presage the ruin of your love,
And be my vantage to exclaim on you.

Well, the words hardly expected to be heard from a newly wedded wife, more suitable for a businessman! But the businnesmen in play - Antonio and Shylock - don't use such a language: the former speaks constantly of love, the latter of revenge and offence. And one more thing to mark: by the ring Bassanio is given only "house, servants and herself" - not a word about money or goods. After all, the casket of lead he chose. But what with the two other caskets - of silver and gold?

Bassanio with ring on his hand goes to Venice to take part in the trial by Antonio's side, Portia in disguise follows him and wins the process for Bassanio and Antonio, who is not only free from forfeit, but also ensures the Shylock's goods for Lorenzo and Jessica. Quite unexpected turn of things, isn't it? Let us believe in his great affection for Bassanio, but why he cares so much about Lorenzo and Jessica?

Duke bids Antonio to "gratify this gentleman, for, in my mind, you are much bound to him" and it would be proper and natural, if he did so. But it is Bassanio who offers - what can he offer? - Shylock's three thousand as a reward. Why Bassanio? Because he took the loan from Shylock - Antonio only insured it. Bassanio is the party in the trial.

Civil doctor - Portia - is wise enough not to accept these virtual money and claims contentment, but Bassanio insists, so that he has to part with the only real thing he has - the ring, and he does so on Antonio's bidding:

My lord Bassanio, let him have this ring:
Let his deservings and my love withal
Be valued 'gainst your wife's commandment.

So, giving up the ring, Bassanio in fact transforms his marriage into a three party's contract, which is to be only confirmed later in Belmont:

Bassanio: Portia, forgive me this enforced wrong;
And in the hearing of these my friends,
I swear to thee, even by thine fair eyes,
Wherein I see myself, -
Portia:                             Mark you but that!
In both my eyes he doubly sees himself;
In each eye, one: swear by your double self,
And there's an oath of credit. 

Bassanio:                                Nay, but hear me:
Pardon this fault and by my soul I swear
I never more will break an oath with thee. 

Antonio: I once did lend my body for his wealth,
Which but for him that had your husband's ring,
Had quite miscarried: I dare be bound again,
My soul upon the forfeit, that your lord
Will never more break faith advisedly. 

Portia: Then you shall be his surety. Give him this,
And bid him keep this better than the other. 

Antonio: Here, lord Bassanio, swear to keep the ring. 

Bassanio: By heaven! it is the same I gave the doctor!  

Portia: I had it of him: pardon me, Bassanio,
For, by this ring, the doctor lay with me.

What a menage a trois! And a blackmail too - a letter from Bellario and Lorenzo's testimony that she left Belmont after Bassanio in fact give Portia control over the whole company, for all of them: Antonio, Bassanio, Lorenzo gain financially from her forgery. Besides, we can't be sure that Antonio actually gave the ring to Bassanio...

So dear Mr. A. was wrong claiming that Antonio must stay away from Belmont - he is welcome and rewarded ("Antonio, you are welcome; And I have better news in store for you" - says Portia and the last words of Antonio are "I am dumb"), as well as Lorenzo and Jessica.

As for Bassanio, his last words are: "Sweet doctor, you shall be my bedfellow: when I am absent, lie with my wife". A substituted husband.

On several readings of MoV I can't help speculating (though Shakespeare certainly didn't mean it to be understood that way) that Antonio once had taken his chance with Portia's caskets too (that's why he was single - the oath!), but his choice was wrong (silver one, I suppose), nevertheless she took to him and - being very clever - at last found very complicated and highly Venetian way to do as she choose despite her father's will. As for Bassanio: well, he's got exactly what the casket promised: Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he has.

And, to conclude the ring trope, couple of words about women's solidarity.

Portia speaks about Antonio:

... which makes me think that this Antonio,
being the bosom lover of my lord,
must needs be like my lord. If it be so,
how little is the cost I have bestow'd
in purchasing the semblance of my soul
from out of state of hellish cruelty.

But it was Jessica, who said: " our house is a hell" and it is her future wealth is ensured in course of the trial of Shylock: Antonio's condition is that Shylock's money after his death are to get Lorenzo and Jessica. So maybe Jessica, so despised by Auden for "conspicuous waste" of money, was, after all, as Lorenzo described her:

... she is wise, if I can judge of her,
And fair she is, if that my eyes be true,
And true she is, as she hath proved herself.

and used money and jewels taken from Shylock to buy help and assistance of respected Venetian persons to impose her will on her father (after all, we shouldn't believe all the Realto gossips about monkeys remembering the ones about Antonio's bankruptcy proved to be false). Maybe Jessica is the real "semblance of [Portia's] soul", for Portia understands very well what it means to be determined by the father's will:

Oh me, the word "choose". I may neither choose whom I would nor refuse whom I dislike, so is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead father.

And Jessica is not happy with her devices. She only too well realizes the cost of her choice. Her last words in the play are: "I am never merry when I hear sweet music".

A liberating influence

Większość prac krytycznych poświęconych poezji Audena, na które trafiłam, budzi we mnie przemożne poczucie niezręczności, jak gdybym przyłapała autorów na tym, że nie za bardzo wiedzą, co napisać. Jak na razie chlubnym wyjątkiem była książka R. Victorii Arany W.H.Auden's Poerty: Mythos, Theory and Practice, a teraz mam przed sobą drugą budującą pozycję: Auden and After. The Liberation of Poetry 1930-1941 Francisa Scarfe'a. Esej napisany w 1941 roku może wydawać się zdezaktualizowany, przecież Auden wówczas nie napisał jeszcze swoich najważniejszych wierszy, ale mimo wszystkich ograniczeń i błędnych ścieżek, oraz "negatywizmu" (jak przyznaje sam autor), zawiera bardzo trafny obraz poezji Audena, do którego nikt, w moim odczuciu, nic istotnego nie dodał. Esej Scarfe'a potwierdza moją intuicję, że poeta, jak każdy człowiek, nie zmienia się w ciągu życia, tylko idzie swoją własną drogą, i ta droga jest od początku widoczna dla kochającego oka, jakim, niewątpliwie, było krytyczne oko Scarfe'a ("It adds a precious seeing to the eye; a lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind", Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost).

Kilka cytatów, które wydają mi się szczególnie trafne, głębokie lub rozczulające:

He presents the bustle and humbug and smell of modern life by his capacity for mythological thinking, his feeling for all sorts of places, all sorts of people into whose life he has not penetrated but which he intuitively understands, his love of make-believe, his power for brutal generalization which gives point to many fragments of observation, and gives body to his personal beliefs. 

One of the most curious things about Auden is that in spite of his emphasis on psychology, on close examination his poetry is not particularly introspective [...] And it is also noticeable that while his poetry is "about chaps", there is very little about individual chaps and much more about people in general. 

The pseudopsychology, by which disease is represented purely as defense-mechanism and selfishness, leads Auden very often to treat suffering cruelly as though it were a joke. As for Freud, it is amusing to see that a poet who professes immense admiration for Dryden (that poet whom nobody reads, and who is out of the direct line of English poetry, and who, once again, was revived not by Auden but by Eliot, to whom he is better suited) - it is amusing to see this pseudo-classical poet, who is as different from Dryden as an octopus from a whale, holding a Freudian and ultra-romantic conception of the poet. 

Even Auden's Geography (which is one of his main assets: his poems carry us round the world in no time) is psychic, and it is his interpretation of places such as Dover, Iceland and Spain, which led me to use the term 'Psychic Geography'. 

Even his love poems seem to be about other people: he is a poet turned outwards. It is his being 'turned outwards' which accounts for much of his sermonizing. 

The main question now is, why has Auden had such a penetrating influence on the younger writers? A painter recently said to me: 'If I can paint a circle and two splashes of red, and regard my work as complete, I owe that to Picasso.' The same applies to Auden: he has been a liberating influence who gave a younger writers a self-confidence which they might otherwise have had to fight for dearly. Auden broadened into a highway the path which had been hewn into convention and hypocrisy by Eliot, Pound, Owen and the verslibristes. But he did more. The preceding generation was composed largely of intellectual poets - Eliot, Pound, Graves, Riding, Read, the Sitwells - and it is Auden who broke down the new snobbery of intellectualism which was in danger of creating a minority-poetry. He also enlarged, quite definitely, the poetry-reading public. The most suggestible of poets we have had for a long time, he was able to synthesize in his work an enormous amount of the achievements and methods of past writers. Reacting to numerous influences, he was able to enlarge for younger writers the vocabulary, syntax, rhythm and imagery of poetry. That is why so many of the younger poets are accused of 'deriving' from Auden, when it is not the case. Most often they have observed his methods and have used them in their own way. The truth is that, in a sense, Auden has done all this at his own expense, almost to his own detriment. What has happened is that he has not created his own recognizable manner, as Eliot did. He has created 'style which is no style' [...].  

Auden has a host of manners, good and bad. I do not propose to examine them: the pretentious but effective telegraphese of the 'Paid on Both Sides' which passes into the impressionist manner of some of his poems; his 'cine-style' which is a circular view, as the French say, on a whole landscape, town or country in a few lines; that style which is artificially tough and resembles Hemingway; another style in which he heaps up a series of abstractions, culminating in some of his American poems which, with their personified passions, suggest that this writer is lapsing into the eighteenth century and forgetting what passion is; those obvious devices, internal rhyme, half-rhyme, assonance, sprung-rhythm, the omission of pronouns, verbs and other desirable parts of speech, his puns, his conceits, his incorrect and slipshod epithets which startle momentarily, and all types of slang and private jargon: most of these things have already been adequately reviewed by other critics. It is not the presence of these things which creates the particular climate of Auden's poetry; it is rather the co-existence of them. [...]  

Any one poem of Auden is likely to be as much a mixed bag as any one of his books, and his books, in their strange juxtaposition of subject and tone, are rather like a cinema crowd emerging, from the stalls, the boxes and the pit, in a confused and democratic mass through the same exit. [...] Eliot, already so unclassical by the purest standards, is a champagne to a cocktail when compared with Auden. 

What are the real qualities of Auden? One of them is certainly an imaginative interest in the way people live. Even if he misinterprets, as in the case of Honeyman, he is not far wrong in his background. [...] 

And he has also a realization of the vastness and oneness of the human scene. We have seen already that he has no one-track mind: he does not see Spain as an isolated phenomenon, but a symbol of the consciousness of the world, and he usually treats any subject, however small, in its broadest implications.[...]  

Thirdly, his naiveness, in spite of his sometimes heartless jibes and his intellectual leg-pulling, has remained unspoiled, and he is capable of expressing a primitive and pure feeling [...] 

Forthly, Auden has also the vast, living vocabulary which is essential to any poet who wants to be of his time and of the future. He is enabled by this to write on many levels. He is also sensitive (much more than many who have followed him) to the musical qualities of words, though he has shown a tendency to fall rhythmically into rather set patterns [...] 

The most important point about Auden's style is that, for good or ill, he has tried to write poetry very close to common speech, and that he has succeeded. Generally speaking, one might say that in his early poems he tried to express a fairly universal, and in any case a second-hand, subject-matter in an intensely personal style, and since then he has moved towards a more personal subject-matter and a more impersonal style. His ideas are being more and more imprinted with his own particular twist of mind, and one sees increasingly that he is quite incapable of orthodoxy of any kind.

Dobrodziejstwa Internetu-2

Nigdy nie przeczytałabym wierszy Roberta Horana (1922-1981), gdyby Auden nie wybrał ich do redagowanej przez siebie serii młodych poetów amerykańskich (The Yale Series of Younger Poets). Wydany w tej serii w 1948 roku tomik pozostał jedynym w dorobku Horana. Prawie nic poza tym o nim nie wiadomo. Nie obeszło się bez Hominternu (przyjaźnił się z kompozytorem Samuelem Barberem, który wykorzystał jego wiersz "The Queen's Face on the Summery Coin" w swoim cyklu 2 songs (op. 18) z 1942 roku*.)

Edward Mendelson zasugerował, że Auden wybrał wiersze Horana, "zmierzające w kierunku radosnego nonsensu", ponieważ "czuł się w obowązku znaleźć poetów zupełnie niepodobnych do niego samego" ("His next two choices were poets whose work tended towards rhapsodic nonsense; concievably he chose them out od a sense of obligation to find poets entirely unlike himself", E. Mendelson, Introduction to W. H. Auden, Prose, Volume III 1949-55). To przypuszczenie nie wydaje mi się trafne, jeżeli chodzi o Horana. Dla mnie jego wiersze brzmią zdecydowanie wczesnoaudenowsko, i mam mocne poczucie, że to podobieństwo ma swoje źródło nie tyle w zapatrzeniu się w Audenie, ile w patrzeniu w zbieżnym z nim kierunku**.

Robert Horan

Antiphonal Song

What is it eats the hunter's breath

as he picks through the thicket?

The blood that's bound to bleed to death

like a leak in  a bucket.

What is it tires the oarsman so

as he climbs the chaste water?

The love that he leaves and the winds that blow

him on green miles after.

What is it drains the drinker there

at the jumping fountain?

The desert he crossed that brought him there

and the next mountain.

The Queen's Face on the Summery Coin

The queen's face on the summery coin

was never golder nor more regal

than his body's bright and bursting

where once it walked between the the stripes of rain.

The birds swing in their appled cages

and the solid sun will walk

through straw houses where honey rages

churning the light to chalk.

The wind shines on the woody grove.

We live in a copper clock where, on the hour

a polished bell divides the stem and flower

and drains the ghost-built body of its love.

Like the deaf listening for a silence

that follows no sound,

or the sick swung in the balance

between wound and wound,

there is too much eye to see

all but the nearest disorder.

In the sable shadow of this harbor

he lies him down among the singing bees.

Sonnet X

When love is pity then it is perverse;

fed on a stolen fruit, will nourish none,

but, like lost sailors, swing from worse to worse,

whose waves no waters are, whose star's undone.

This coronation of a crippled king

will blacken statues and turn wax the flower;

he cannot kiss whose mouth's devouring

dust for bread and centuries for an hour.

This charity is cool that fools the arms

and set false fires in the dwindled night.

When love is pity, all the blood's alarms

should ring the sleeper from his dead delight.

Then, in red morning, he may see them move,

love and pity down each separate grove.

Kilka dygresji:

* Barber był partnerem życiowym i zawodowym włosko-amerykańskiego kompozytora Geana Carla Menottiego, organizatora festiwalu sztuk w Spoleto, gdzie zagrał jeden ze swoich słynnych koncertów Richter (całkiem urocza historia, jak do niego doszło, bardzo w stylu Richtera, jednak mam nadzieję, że mimo wszystko zapłacono mu za występ ;))

** Owszem, Horan należał do grupy Aktywistów (Activists) (swoją drogą, Auden był ich ojcem chrzestnym, jeżeli chodzi o nazwę, bo przyjęli ją oficjalnie po tym, jak użył tego określenia w przedmowie do wierszy innej poetki z tej grupy, Rosalie Moore) i brał udział w seminarium Lawrence'a Harta, (którego koncepcje Auden dość dokładnie przestawił w tejże przedmowie), jednak jego poezja nie jest jedynie realizacją hartowskiej idei intensywnego (aktywnego) języka poetyckiego, tak jak poezja Tadeusza Gajcego zdecydowanie wykracza poza ramy "katastrofizmu", w porównaniu, na przykład, do poezji Baczyńskiego (zresztą, wykracza w tę samą stronę - formalną, ale za formą w obydwu przypadkach niewątpliwie stoi własny ukształtowany światopogląd).

Skoro doszłam do Gajcego, to dodam, że nie przestaję się dziwić tej łatwości i szybkości, z którą przed IIWŚ rozpzestrzeniały się informacje i trendy kulturalne. Cwietajewa korespondowała z Rilkiem, Achmatowa pozowała dla Modiliani'ego, Auden w latach 20-ch czytał Kawafisa, Lawrence Hart już w latach 30-ch uczył swoich studentów na przykładach z Audena, a Aleksander Messing w 1940 roku w okupowanej Warszawie tłumaczył wierszy Stephena Spendera. Bardziej zadziwiające dla mnie było tylko to, że Brodski spotkał się z Audenem, a Rudolf Nurejev z Erikiem Bruhnem.

Cytat na koniec: "Hobbies," he said. "How did I get off onto hobbies?" (Zooey Glass)