A-Z 2021 N - Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Pablo Neruda, 1924)

I've never really read a lot of poetry.  Part of that is that I've often gone through spells where I don't read anything but non-fiction, but equally, it's simply that I've often leaned more into novels (and usually genre stuff at that) than into shorter works, let alone works where the whole thing might be over in a matter of lines.

I may have decided that I don't much enjoy reading Keats, but that absolutely isn't the case with reading poetry in general, as I've learned with this small volume of Pablo Neruda's verse.  Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a small volume (Penguin's edition comes out to 112 pages, and that's with an 18-page introduction, every poem being bilingual on facing pages, and about a dozen Picasso illustrations with blank facing pages), but it packs a punch, to say the least.

The title isn't 100% accurate; the 'Song of Despair' is absolutely a love poem as well, simply one that's more about the pain of love ending than about adoration of the woman Neruda is devoting the words to.  So what we have here is a small collection, just twenty-one poems, most only a page long.  And yet, there's a very good reason that this was chosen to have not just a whole volume to itself, but one in bespoke Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition styling, making it stand out just that little bit more on the shelf, despite having the lowest spine height of the whole bunch.

The poems here are quite unlike the Romantic poets, with their tendency toward placing the object of affection on a pedestal of sorts, as if the lovers were Greek goddesses.  Rather, there's a sort of raw, earthy quality to Neruda's writing, his lovers a part of the world, creatures of sensuality who inspire both words of love and of lust.

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want to do with you
what spring does with the cherry trees.

I mean...  That's definitely a form of worship toward one's lover, but not in any kind of remotely chaste sense. There's a sense of unbridled eroticism to every poem in the collection; the most common metaphors compare the lover to the ocean's depths, to the weather, love as something more akin to a force of nature that cannot be resisted or controlled, rather than anything that could be captured in stone and placed in a museum.

It's difficult to say that this slim volume gives a solid idea of what Neruda's poetry was like over the course of his life, however; this was one of his first published works (composed when he was only 20), while his career lasted until his death in 1973.  That said, given that it is still, a century on, the highest-selling poetry collection in the Spanish language, their timeless quality ensures that Neruda occupies a solid position among the acknowledged masters of poetry.

Picking up the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971 certainly doesn't hurt, though.

A-Z 2021 L - Kalevala (Elias Lönnrot, 1835/1849)

I think I've gone over my love of fairy/folktales before, so I'll forego any introduction about such things, for now.  Instead, given the nature of Kalevala, I should look at the political underpinnings of a writer composing a collection of such stories.

Fairy and folk collections essentially fall into two categories.  There are the variety that most people likely think of, where the stories come from a variety of sources and are thrown together because someone from outside the culture enjoys them; this might best be defined as the Lang approach.  Then there are the collections made with purpose, by people within the culture they are collecting from, trying to make a specific, often inherently nationalistic, statement.  Kalevala is firmly a member of this second variety.

To begin with, it's important to address the things that Kalevala is not.  It is not a collection in the sense that most would think of collections being.  Rather than simply compiling an anthology of sorts, Elias Lönnrot collected the tales that flitted around the 19th-century Finnish landscape, then took his own hand at the bardic skillset, weaving the stories and songs around each other into a single coherent whole, a 600-page poem with chapter breaks.  This is not to say that it's internally consistent; several times characters take credit for events that are properly attributed to others.  That said, the central plotline, largely telling of the interactions between Väinämöinen the eternal singer, Ilmarinen the immortal blacksmith, Lemminkäinen of the islands, and Louhi the Mistress of the North, has mythic qualities all over it, with characters routinely singing (or smithing) reality into the shape they desire, shifting the forms of themselves and others at will, and calling on the gods with visible effects.  A recurring object, the Sampo, is crafted by Ilmarinen for Louhi and provides her homeland with riches, seemingly without end.  While most animals are simply animals, trees and boats seem to be able to speak with Väinämöinen easily.

There are segments that feel almost like in their earlier existence as song-poems in the oral tradition, they were intended almost as a call-and-response; many times through the book, whole sections are repeated with minor variation.  If Ilmarinen is smithing something, he's going to get amazing things that aren't what he was trying to make at least twice, and shove the wonders back into the furnace so he can try again.  If anyone is traveling and needs to request something from a village, he's going to knock on at least two doors and not find what he's looking for before finding it in the third.  The rule of threes is firmly in place here.

All in all, a wonderful read, albeit one with a great many unlikeable characters.  Even the most heroic characters are greatly flawed here; I can count the number of characters who never did anything immoral on one hand, and all of those are female characters.  That seems to be a common trait in mythic scenarios, though; it's near impossible to find characters in epics who aren't flawed and, well... human.

So, what about that nationalistic streak I mentioned?  Well, for that, we have to look at the world as it was for Lönnrot.  His Finland was a largely-autonomous part of Russia at the time, and few were recording the folk songs of the forest people in the north of the country.  A generation earlier, the folklorist Carl Axel Gottlund had lamented that there was no national epic for the Finnish people to unite behind, no central mythology.  Lönnrot's contribution, then, provided that; it's notable that he revised the first edition of it into a single unified whole, 14 years after the initial publishing, and later released an abridged version of the work in 1862 specifically so it could be taught in schools.  A visit to Finland now would show just how important this work became for the culture; it's common to find names from the Kalevala attached to places and businesses (a small town started by Finnish immigrants in Michigan is called Kaleva, with street names to match), and when Don Rosa wrote a Sampo-inspired story in Uncle Scrooge comics, complete with relevant characters, it instantly made him a celebrity there.

It could be, and often has been, argued that Kalevala helped to focus the Finnish national identity, enough that when Russia began trying to limit the autonomy of Finland in the late 19th century, the Finnish people pushed back, long and hard enough that they eventually declared independence in late 1917 (admittedly alongside other issues in Russia).  Its reach extends beyond Finland's borders, however; most notably, J.R.R. Tolkien based parts of The Silmarillion on Kalevala, and the character of Tom Bombadil is almost certainly inspired by Väinämöinen.

In any case, this was a very enjoyable read, and significantly less viking-ey than I expected.  Fancy that, the least coastal part of Scandinavia has a different culture...  but just as rich in mythic lore.

The Yellow Wall-Paper and Selected Writings (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1884-1916) (Penguin Classics Charlotte Gilman, 2/2)

Coming back around after wrapping the local library's challenge so that I don't leave any books unfinished, so I'm back to Charlotte Perkins Gilman once more, reading the back half of this particular volume that I started last week.

After Herland, the remainder of this book is a selection of short stories and poetry from along the length of Gilman's writing career.  The short fiction section sort of comes in two sections, early stories and stories from The Forerunner.  There's a 17-year gap between the two groups, and a very clear change in what Gilman's focus is.

The first six stories in this collection all date to the 1890s, including perhaps Gilman's most famous piece, "The Yellow Wall-Paper".  There is a clear leaning toward feminist thought on display here; of the five early stories chosen, only one doesn't seem to fit in with the others.  "The Unexpected" is a story in four chapters, in which an artist marries a young lady, becomes convinced that she's immediately engaging in an illicit affair, attempts to catch her in the act, and finds that her secret is far more wonderful than he expected.  "The Giant Wisteria" begins as a story about Puritans dealing with a daughter who had a child out of wedlock, then jumps a century forward to people staying in the same house, experiencing a haunting, and discovering the fate of the daughter from the start.  The outlier, "The Rocking-Chair", features two men taking rooms in a boarding-house after seeing a young girl in the window, and having their friendship crumble as both think the other is hiding having gotten to meet the girl, apparently the daughter of the landlady.

"The Yellow Wall-Paper" is a very clear indictment of Silas Weir Mitchell's methods of treating psychological illnesses, a semi-autobiographical account of the slow decline of a woman's sanity when she is forced to remain in a room with nothing to do but look out the window or study the wallpaper; Gilman had been a patient of Mitchell's and sent him a copy of the story in an attempt to convince him that this was a treatment that did more harm than good.  She later wrote in The Forerunner that she had learned the story had the intended effect, and Mitchell stopped using the "rest cure".  The other two stories, "The Extinct Angel" and "Through This", are shorter pieces that are more directed, more obviously focused on feminist ideas, dealing with how the traditional female roles in society completely subsume the personality, the purity, and eventually the sanity of women.  Gilman is decidedly outspoken even in these early pieces, and you can see the beginnings of her focus on feminist social justice that would eventually culminate in Herland.

The remainder of the stories come from later, and are largely devoted to showing how Gilman's views on a perfect society would potentially work in practice.  The women are resourceful, willing to think outside the box when necessary, and more than willing to do what's best for everyone, rather than just themselves.  Additionally, there is the continuing theme, as seen in Herland, of motherhood being a sort of sacred duty, and that those who cannot perform that duty well should be willing to pass it to others who are better-suited.  Everything seems to just be these perfect little settings where all the ills of the world could be quite nicely sorted out if the women were just allowed to have some say in things instead of being buried under all the stresses of their place in a male-dominated society and...

Yeah, they're very didactic, and very much of a kind with the other material from The Forerunner.  While they are well-written and are fun reads, they do begin to feel somewhat the same after a time.  The general formula is: female protagonist is wronged somehow, female protagonist either learns of her own ability to effect change or works out the best way to do so, that change is effected, female protagonist ends the story in a much better position.  The whole theme is women's empowerment, and the various ways that it is illustrated are enjoyable, but in retrospect, the stories really do kind of start to blend together.

The poetry section is somewhat similar in formatting; early poetry holds more varying topics but a general feminist leaning, while later poetry starts to become more obviously political.  While there are a few poems from the period between the early fiction and Gilman's self-publishing, it's a very slim selection, and it's harder to see the development of ideas when they're confined to slim pieces of verse.

This raises perhaps the most important issue I have with the volume I've read here.  There's a 17-year gap with very little of Gilman's material on display here, and importantly, much of her writing during that gap was a mix of nonfiction essays and several nonfiction books, showing the development of her ideas into what would eventually become the topics of The Forerunner in general and Herland in specific.  And yet, for some reason, the "Selected Writings" on display here have completely missed that arguably-important part of her oeuvre.  Not even the piece she wrote on the topic of why she wrote "The Yellow Wall-Paper" made it in, and that story is the first part of the collection's title!  It feels like an unusual omission, especially in a collection edited by a scholar with multiple Gilman-themed works to her name.

All this is to say that I certainly see why Gilman belongs on a classics shelf, and while the shape of her ideas is clearly on display in the stories and novel included here, I do wish that the collection hadn't had such a large piece of time left obscured.  There is value in seeing the development of ideas, and I would be very interested to have been able to see the evolution from what is on display in "The Yellow Wall-Paper", "The Extinct Angel", and "Through This" to become what was spelled out in Herland and The Forerunner.

The Metamorphoses (Publius Ovidius Naso, 8 CE)

One of the things that always stands out as a potential sticking point when dealing with any work of literature is the question of the language on display.  I don't mean the quality of the language, though that's certainly an aspect; rather, I mean the language the work was written in.

Let's take as an example the book I finished today, a 2000-year-old poem written in Caesar's Latin and focused on tracing the theme of transformation through the entirety of the Greco-Roman mythology, from the creation narrative all the way through the deification of Gaius Julius Caesar.  It's a long piece, covering both well-known and less-known stories, and including shortened and focused-in versions of the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid.

There's basically two ways to go about reading this book.  Well, books; Ovid wrote it in 15 volumes, originally, but it's typically released as a single volume, now.  The option exists to read it in the original Latin, but one needs to be able to read Latin in order to do that.  There's plenty of words that look vaguely recognizable to an English-speaker, but if you're not fluent in the language, you'll be looking back and forth between The Metamorphoses, a Latin dictionary, and a guide to grammar, and all of the elegance that exists in the language is lost.

viribus absumptis expalluit illa citaeque
victa labore fugae spectans Peneidas undas
“fer, pater,” inquit “opem! sī flūmina nūmen habētis,
quā nimium placuī, mūtandō perde figūram!”
vix prece finitā torpor gravis occupat artūs,
mollia cinguntur tenui praecordia libro,
in frondem crinēs, in ramos bracchia crescunt,
pes modo tam velox pigris radicibus haeret,
ora cacumen habet: remanet nitor unus in illa.

The alternative is to read it in translation.  This can be a bit of a touchy subject; there have been numerous translations of The Metamorphoses with different objectives in mind; Penguin Classics alone has three different ones that are maintained in print, with one being a prose translation by Mary Innes, another being a verse translation by David Raeburn, and the third being Arthur Golding's translation from 1567, the first translation of Ovid's work into English and certainly an influence on Shakespeare (this likely being where the Bard found the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, as depicted in A Midsummer Night's Dream and retold with a changed setting as Romeo and Juliet, and located in Ovid's Book IV).

When faced with a vast array of translations, it can be hard to choose one to read.  When I decided I wanted to read this (based on encountering it in The Longing), the version immediately on offer was the 1727 version published by Samuel Garth, and translated by... rather a team, including John Dryden, William Congreve, and Alexander Pope.  This particular translation struck me as somewhat flawed; while there is poetry to be found here, the forced rhyming schemes combined with the way that spelling in the eighteenth century was more of a set of guidelines than any kind of hard-and-fast rules made it rather difficult for me to enjoy the content while part of my brain wanted to just scribble all over it with a red pen:

The nymph grew pale, and in a mortal fright,
Spent with the labour of so long a flight;
And now despairing, cast a mournful look
Upon the streams of her paternal brook;
Oh help, she cry'd, in this extreamest need!
If water Gods are deities indeed:
Gape Earth, and this unhappy wretch intomb;
Or change my form, whence all my sorrows come.
Scarce had she finish'd, when her feet she found
Benumb'd with cold, and fasten'd to the ground:
A filmy rind about her body grows;
Her hair to leaves, her arms extend to boughs:
The nymph is all into a lawrel gone;
The smoothness of her skin remains alone.

The translation I was able to find on short notice, in a quick local search of the thrift stores and used book stores, was that of Horace Gregory, currently published by Signet Classics.  This translation came out in the 1950s, and was far more readable, perhaps less poetic but also not forcing itself to try and rhyme lines that don't rhyme in the original Latin:

The girl saw waves of a familiar river,
Her father's home, and in a trembling voice,
Called, "Father, if your waters still hold charms
To save your daughter, cover with green earth
This body I wear too well," and as she spoke
A soaring drowsiness possessed her; growing
In earth she stood, white thighs embraced by climbing
Bark, her white arms branches, her fair head swaying
In a cloud of leaves; all that was Daphne bowed
In the stirring of the wind, the glittering green
Leaf twined within her hair and she was laurel.

When I was almost completely through, a third translation became available to me, as a copy that I had requested from the public library arrived, the 1990s translation by Allen Mandelbaum.  I really wish that this had been the one I was reading all along; from what I've perused of it, it feels like the best of the bunch (though obviously I haven't had a chance to see what any of the ones offered by Penguin look like, yet):

Exhausted, wayworn, pale, and terrified,
she sees Peneus' stream nearby; she cries:
"Help me, dear father; if the river-gods
have any power, then transform, dissolve
my gracious shape, the form that pleased too well!"
As soon as she is finished with her prayer,
a heavy numbness grips her limbs; thin bark
begins to gird her tender frame, her hair
is changed to leaves, her arms to boughs; her feet—
so keen to race before—are now held fast
by sluggish roots; the girl's head vanishes,
becoming a treetop.  All that is left
of Daphne is her radiance. 

These are all interpreting the same Latin passage, and obviously the same core meaning is there, but with somewhat different voices showing through the lens of translation.  Speaking as someone who doesn't actually have any functional knowledge of Latin beyond knowing root words that are used in English, all I have that I can base my understanding of Ovid's writing on is the translations on offer; as such, I have to go by the translation that feels the best to me, to judge which one best shows what the ancient poet's craft was actually putting forth.

With so many different ways to render the passage into English, it really ends up coming down to a question of what one wants.  With these ancient works, not just Metamorphoses but also those of Homer, Virgil, and the other ancient poets, you have your choice of old or new, verse or prose, workmanlike accuracy or lyrical flow, and this isn't even a problem that's limited to finding dead-tree books; Wikisource has two complete translations, two additional partial ones, and two more that they appear to be planning on putting up at some point.  Many more recent novels that are translated between languages only have one translation on offer, so a reader doesn't have to worry about this dilemma. But with these ancient works that have been translated repeatedly, well...  we're rather spoiled for choice now, and deciding which version to read can have some rather significant consequences for your enjoyment.

Even works originally in English are affected by this; Penguin offers both Beowulf and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in prose, verse, and untranslated versions, the latter being the original unmodified text (in Beowulf's case, with a glossary and pronunciation notes provided on every page to help you with words you might not know).  I can handle Chaucer in the original, with a minimum of effort... but the last time I read Beowulf, it was an edition with side-by-side original and translated text, and...  English that far back has extra letters that we don't use anymore, and, well...

Hwæt! Wé Gárdena      in géardagum
þéodcyninga      þrym gefrúnon·
hú ðá æþelingas      ellen fremedon.

All that said, this is why I don't mind that my Penguin Classics collection has two different copies of The Epic of Gilgamesh.  But more on that on a later date.