Today I’m going to wrap up my late summer series of fresh English translations of the early poems of French Surrealist Paul Éluard. Frankly, these poems are having trouble finding an audience – and in my suppositions, this is understandable. Earlier in the series I wrote (generalizing) that modern audiences have expectations of poetry – pre-requisites for our attention and valuation – and these early Éluard poems refuse to meet those expectations.* That’s a large part of what I like about them: their laughter at their refusal.
This abrupt ending means that I won’t get a chance this month to write more about what I know of Éluard’s life and how it might inform that refusal. I probably should know more about the details before writing such an account anyway, but the shortest summary would say: WWI vet therefore likely suffering its endemic PTSD, a leftist in a world where communist and fascist regimes are the current weather fronts, and an unruly, committed lover bilaterally lucky and unlucky in love. He would eventually write some grander poems, poems more full of the stuff that might please more readers and listeners, but this summer’s set of early refusenik poems are one way to confront the way of the world.
Paul Éluard, not a window-shutter hand.
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As performed, Éluard’s “Habitude” is so short that it’s one of the shortest pieces in the history of this Project. It says, I think, a few things about the rules of desire and constraints of propriety. Written when Éluard was helping found Surrealism, it shows how influential the absurdity of Dada was in that movement’s birth. The poem is just long enough to have a contrasting middle section, and I try to highlight that contrast by switching from speaking to singing in performance. The truth, that Éluard proclaims “without saying it” here is that he wants an open window and an ever-expanding wind rushing in.
Even with this foreshortened series, my translations here have likely increased the number of easily online-available English translations of Éluard’s early poetry by 50% or so.
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I’m not sure what the next piece will be (I have several in various stages of completion), but your presenter values variety highly, so it’ll likely be different. This Project is “oversized” and off-the-rack clothes can’t contain it.
To hear my translation and performance of “Habitude” you can weigh the audio player that should be below – but Internet viewing doesn’t make that gadget mandatory, so I offer this highlighted link which will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.
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*It’s also possible that my musical settings and performances might have been less worthwhile, or my being unable to refrain from connecting Éluard’s poems with present political and civic concerns in my recent posts was tiring or awkward to readers. I almost released another musical version of “Habitude” late last week, but I decided my singing on it – though my singing is always roughshod – wasn’t up to the impeccable standards of exquisite vocalizations you’ve come to expect here.
Returning now to my series presenting the early poems of French Surrealist Paul Éluard, you may recall that I was talking about the small contemporary presence early Surrealist poets like Éluard have in America compared to their contemporaries in Surrealism who were painters and visual artists. I wrote then about few reasons you may not have heard of, much less considered, Éluard’s poetry. Here’s another reason: we generally expect poetry to deliver a message to us, if not an explicit moral, memoir bit, or assayable philosophical, spiritual, or political point, then something that conveys a comprehensible, palpable, report of the experience of these things. Sure, poetry might be condensed and shorn of elaborate contextual frameworks – just as a text we might receive on our phones would seem vague to those not party to the conversation and the ongoing relationship of its writer and reader – but we fill in those things most of the time when we consider a poem worthwhile, while visual art is allowed a great deal more freedom. No one is required to hold forth on what water lilies or sunflowers mean in a painting, and melting clocks or obscuring apples may sport with our expectations, but still intrigue us.
So today’s Éluard poem is an appeal to readers to cut him some slack by presenting an ekphrastic poem, a poem implying a case that you could consider its set of words beyond finding its message, but to just enjoy it as a not-fully-decodable object in itself. If we don’t know what a Surrealist painting means, we might still have an experience with it, and one such experience is what Éluard’s “Giorgio De Chirico” means to convey.
One side-effect of that open field we allow visual art is that we may have varied and dynamic experiences – derive entirely new and novel “frames” in our experience of it. As I wrote recently in my run-down of the most popular posts over the decade of this Project: the most popular post here was about how the Statue of Liberty, which is most often seen as a clear expression of freedom and welcome, has another context, partly intended by its creator, but unseen from our usual perspective, the metal giant’s feet have broken free from shackles and chains, and the small island its pedestal rests on once had a jail. Or let’s take the ubiquitous image of the Mona Lisa. What did Da Vinci intend? We don’t know, and we even like to think the enigmatic smile depicted intends for us to wonder. To its patron, the painting they commissioned might mean something about patriarchal ownership. Some surmise that the woman is pregnant and is musing on the child that is to be born. Others, pregnant themselves, could take that same framing and wonder if that face is attempting to misdirect its body from a bout of morning-sickness nausea.
So, as I translated “Giorgio De Chirico” I could see things about De Chirico’s paintings that Éluard was experiencing and reporting on. I enjoyed finding singing English words to convey that from his French. I performed it, tracking just voice and solo acoustic guitar this time, during the same sessions where I was working on the other Éluard poems that I presented in August.
Here are four representative De Chirico paintings. The sharp lines of shadows and bright light, the tiny people dwarfed by structures, all were motifs he commonly used.
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Then yesterday, instead of buckling down and preparing a final mastered mix of the song I’d made, I watched a documentary about 9/11. The one I watched focused on the part not usually considered: the experience in the Pentagon, that giant military office building in Washington D. C. that also suffered a deadly hit by a hijacked airliner that day.
In it, one survivor told her tale of that day. She was a light colonel, working in an administrative desk job, in a building that (other than its massive size) is like a great many other office buildings many work at during any workday, and furthermore she was about to give a presentation on some matter in that common workday misery, a morning meeting in a small conference room there.
And then the speeding fuel-laden airliner slammed into the wall of her facet of the five-sided Pentagon. In darkness, thick smoke, and heat she led a small group trying to find an exit. She grabbed a damp sweater that she found by touch to try to stifle the smoke. She didn’t know the dampness was from jet fuel, not water. The building segment was already aflame, parts not yet immediately destroyed were collapsing in the heat. No one could see much of anything, they had to hold hands to stay together. Her small group made it to a window, a bit of light in the dark chaos. Like many modern office windows, it was not designed to be opened – more than that, it had recently been upgraded to be “blast proof” as protection from something like an outside truck-bomb attack. It was made so that it couldn’t even be broken! Someone in her party picked up that trouble-spot of many an office day, a heavy laser printer, and hurled it at the window. It bounced right back off the glass. Somehow in the dark and smoke, they found the printer again, and threw it again – and that time the blow started to uncase the window’s frame. They pried it out and leapt outside.
Now that’s more excitement than many poetry blogs will offer you most days. Watching this account, everything was intensified by the story’s setting, for I’ve worked in modern office buildings like this, I’ve had the boredom or anxiety of meetings, I’ve carried heavy laser printers and made them work again the second time – frames that make it easy to share that experience.
The documentary also had an account from a man standing outside who saw them pounding ineffectively on that window and who went into the burning building to try to see if he could lead them out, only to find the destruction and conditions inside made it impossible to find any way to them from that exit. It wasn’t until a decade later he found out those pounding at the window had escaped, but for ten years he thought he was the last one to see them alive.
And then, I expanded in my empathy as I watched these accounts, including those who didn’t escape. It called to mind that folks elsewhere in buildings or working boats struck, perhaps nowadays with un-maned mechanisms that don’t need suicidal fanatics inside them, but have up-the-chain commandants upwards to the Commander in Chief who’ve loosed them thinking they have good and sufficient reason to do so.
Now, I’ve ruined a perfectly good essay on art and poetry – and your expectations if you came here for that – but as I revisited this performance this morning to make a final mix you can hear below, those sudden and shuddering skies, the words I translated in August from French: denounced and spinning walls, daylight through leaves, and those who speak without knowing. Mysterious, enigmatic poems and songs can act like objects (as painting or sculpture) engender new feelings, new meanings.* Perhaps it takes a Surrealist, with a willingness to combine outlandish things without favoritism to sensible intent to portray some realities.
A chord sheet of the song I made from my translation of Éluard’s poem.
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If you want to hear my performance of my own translation of Éluard’s “Giorgio De Chirico,” there’s the audio player below. If it’s not there, don’t throw a printer, there’s this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.
It’s been a while since I presented a musical performance of a poem by English poet Frances Cornford, but here’s one from her early book-length collection published in 1910 when the poet was 24 years old. The poem is brief, but it presents the speaker as having had their life and soul ransacked by evil. I don’t know a lot about the biography of Cornford’s youth,* but the situation outlined in the poem is so bleak that it brings up the suspicion that it may be a “persona poem” where the young poet is, perhaps as an exercise, trying to write poems from a variety of viewpoints.**
Many poets early books collect material originally drafted a few years before publication, so it’s plausible that this Edwardian-era poem was written by someone even younger than 24, and yet I, an old man living under a disreputable 21st century regime, found its complaints easy to slip into. I think it helps a modern performer (and I hope, a modern listener) that the poem expresses itself straightforwardly without a lot of shopworn 19th century metaphoric baggage which many of Cornford’s English contemporaries might easily fall into.
I love that description of the soul that had been taken from the singer, a soul that was “bitter, & tender & sweet.” Close readers will note that Cambridge-scene-raised Cornford eschews the Oxford comma in that inventory.
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So, if this is a made-up poetic exercise by a young poet, she did a good clean job of making something. Despite its title and the daunting situation cataloged in the poem, Cornford’s prosody seems almost jaunty, and so that’s how I approached creating the music and performance for it. The words in the poem offer no consolation for all that the devil has taken from the singer – but just as in Afro-American Blues lyrics, the very fact that the singer is singing (not whimpering in pain or self-pity) and accounting for what has been put upon them makes its own point of survival and ability to analyze what they’ve suffered.
You can hear my performance of Frances Cornford’s “Dirge” with the audio player below. What, did the Devil take that away too? No, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog won’t show it, but I provide an alternative: this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.
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*Nepo baby rating? Cornford will see most any other writer’s hand and bust yah: her paternal grandfather was Charles Darwin, and on her mother’s side she was William Wordsworth’s great-niece. Her mother was a lecturer in English Literature at Newnham College. Her father was a notable botanist that flourished in the shade of his evolutionary father. At time of publication, she was newly married to a Cambridge classics scholar. Fun (and confusing) fact: her father and her husband’s given names were both Francis – so upon taking the conventional married name she repeated the complication of being a distaff homonym-named person in a household. One of her grandchildren, Adam Cornford (still living) followed the clans’ conflation of fields between poetry and science.
**Included in the same collection as “Dirge” was Cornford’s best-known poem, the triolet about “A Fat Lady Seen from the Train.” Similarly clean, spare, and sharply spoken in its verse as today’s poem, it curiously has one of the first plausibly disparaging uses of the term “white” by a white poet – and others took issue with that poem’s treatment of its subject almost immediately.
I think it’s possible that the speaker in that poem may not be Cornford, but an invention or external observation. I’ve even mused that since the “fat white woman who nobody loves” is seen through a train window, that the poem’s speaker is seeing her own reflection in the glass. In photos Cornford looks quite thin, making me then speculate about anorexia.
The process of creating music/recording performances of other people’s poetry as part of this Project usually leads me to some deeper understanding of the poem’s text. It’s not something I have to try to do, some preliminary task I need to check off to complete a Parlando Project piece. What kind of music? Who is the person in the text that I will give voice to, even with my limited vocal talents? What is the original, if page-silent, person seeing, feeling? Why are they paying attention to that? What might these things, shared by expression, mean to you and I?
I did write “usually” up there in that paragraph. I found this short poem by early 20th century American poet Elinor Wylie late last winter, and it’s one of those texts that at first glance you want to make it sound – a literary poem that begs to be sung. But if you’d asked me, what does it mean then, or even after I composed the music, even after I’d completed the simple acoustic guitar and voice recording you can hear below, I’d have said: “Well, not much. It means to evoke a sort of beauty I guess, and that may be enough for a few minutes of song.”
My situation right now makes it harder for me to get opportunities to record new things, but I had this recording of Wylie’s poem (like the Claude McKay poem from last time) from a session in my studio space last March. I did the final “mastered” version to distribute* yesterday morning, and then wondered what I’d write about it. Just say: “It’s pretty. That may be enough?”
Besides Yeats, when Wylie mentions “the last white antelope is killed” I thought of this Edwin Ford Piper poem.
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And then my wife came home, dealing with some highly distressing information secondary to her mother who’s been in dementia care for the past decade or so. There’s no easy solution, perhaps no solution, to the problem that news brought. I could only listen and share her distress.
As I tried to go to sleep after holding my wife close, this occurred to me, so late in the process with this poem of Wylie’s: had it attracted me in part because it reminded me of a beloved William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree?” Like Yeats, Wylie imagines a cabin enshrined in a nature scene – but Yeats, even though a practicing mystic, described a realistic cabin, one not unlike the one my wife and I just spent a blissful week in earlier this month.** Wylie’s cabin is not real, it’s a tiny faery house that she will need to transform herself to step inside. The nature around Wylie’s little house is drenched in esoteric symbols. Like Yeats’ Wandering Aengus, in another of that great Irish poet’s poems, with his silver and gold apples; she has apple-scented rain, golden grapes, and silver wasp nests. Yeats wrote his poem living in urban London, but he could go and live where he wrote about in “Innisfree.” Wylie’s cabin is entirely one of imagination.
Suddenly, without planning, and after I had completed the musical piece you can hear with the audio player below, I understood this poem that Elinor Wylie titled “Escape” in a fuller way: imaginative escape can be from dark and intractable life – a habitation in a glittering bubble floating briefly in heavy, toxic, air.
If for some reason your way of reading this post can’t imagine the audio player gadget, I offer this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab which will have its own audio player.
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*”Mastering” is the making the final adjustments to the audio levels and frequency spectrum of a recording so that the resulting recording will sound within expectations in the context of other recordings. This is also a good place to remind readers here that if you want a way to receive or share the audio pieces I present here, without my little essays writing about my encounters: all the Parlando Project audio pieces are available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts or most of the other podcast catalogs/distributors. These are not hour-long chats about the poems and the music – they are just the musical performances themselves, typically 2-5 minutes in length.
**Our recent north shore of Lake Superior cabin wasn’t of clay and wattles made, but cabins in rural Ireland during Yeats’ time certainly were.
When I last posted I was planning on a trip to an off-the-grid cabin on the north shore of Lake Superior. I’ve now returned, and I’ll have some things I’ll write about here shortly. My goals for this trip: to spend some isolated time with my wife, and then while she would take the opportunity to go off on some nature hikes, to have some quiet time to do some reading or playing guitar amid the sounds of nature.*
The northern place we would stay in was in a birch-rich woods between a river and a tiny creek. It was comfortable, but it had no Wi-Fi, no power, no running water.** The place to park our car was ¾ mile from the cabin. The narrow path from there through the woods had steep rocky and root strewn portions. That concentrates one’s thoughts on what to take. Not a parsimonious hiker, I packed needing two car-to-cabin trips: a backpack with toiletries and a week’s clothes for various temperatures, and then a small acoustic guitar in a Tric guitar case that has attached backpack straps.*** In each trip between car and cabin these two backpacked bags left hands free to carry an additional bag. One trip would add a bag of food we brought with us, the other a bag of books: food for the mind and food for the rest of the body.
The forest from the front door of the cabin, with one of the flatter parts of the trail leading to it and the view out the back of the cabin from the bedroom. Every morning when dawn would break it was like living inside an Impressionist painting and looking out the frame through the dense pointillist leaved branches.
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Though I plan to write in a later post or posts about my experiences borne from that bag of books – after all, that’s something regular blogs do – for now I’m finding it hard to get back into the rhythm of producing new musical pieces and more extended thoughts on the texts I combine with them.
So, to tide you over, here’s a little piece, “On the Road,” a lesser-known, but still well-crafted poem by Claude McKay about common days of work enmeshed with people one didn’t choose to be with – rather than my week in the woods as half a pair who had made a determination to be such 22 years ago. Beside the recording below, here’s a link to the text of McKay’s poem. This winter I did a whole month of posts and musical pieces on Jamaican-American immigrant McKay’s poetry, and this one was left-over from then. Audio player gadget below to hear it, and if there’s no such player to be seen, it hasn’t gone off swiving or drinking like McKay’s waitstaff, it’s just being suppressed by some ways of reading this blog which won’t show it. You can use this highlighted link instead – it will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.
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*In theory (and in practice) I’m reading at home too, but I find there’s something added by the context of reading a book in place remote from one usual location, much in the same way that I would play guitar differently in a forest than on a streetcorner – and my home reading must be slotted in with other things. The pleasure of creating the music for this Project, no matter how tied it is to the poetic texts I use, takes away from reading time. There would be no recording equipment or power for a computer in the cabin. I’ll also confess that my country’s misrule has turned me into a habitual doomscroller – and while there are elements of citizenship and warning alertness in that, it’s rarely productive or satisfying.
**Telling a friend about this over breakfast on this my returning week, he asked if I “Went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life….”
And I replied, “You mean like someone else, that other guy? Why yes, I did – but I somehow didn’t get around to writing my manifesto about which academic scientists need to die from letter bombs.”
My friend got the joke. Of “Unibomber” Ted Kaczynski’s nature I am not made nor cultivated. Elevating one’s own thoughts in solitude is a sort of two-headed beast though. Making thought’s resolutions from a majority of one doesn’t necessarily create a Henry David Thoreau. My own Transcendentalist solitude is more at Emily Dickinson’s mode. I enjoy condensing the music of the universe into little poems or six fretted strings, and like Dickinson’s book/frigate, my aged nature hikes are likely stanza to stanza rather than wooded ridge to rocky outcrop.
***The Tric is an excellent but now apparently discontinued guitar case made by Godin, a Canadian guitar maker. It looks (and has those backpack straps) like the “gig bags” sometimes used by musicians, particular those that need to travel by foot or public transit. Like a gig bag it has a tough nylon fabric exterior that is closed by a zipper – but inside a gig bag there is an inch more-or-less of soft foam, enough to protect the instrument inside from little bumps, but not from more serious insults. The Tric case has a couple of inches of rigid Styrofoam inside (like a motorcycle helmet) and that makes it overall as protective as a much heavier conventional standard guitar case made out of vinyl-covered plywood. Just as with a helmet, it’s a better system for absorbing shock from falls, and like a Styrofoam ice chest, it’s better than standard cases for regulating internal temperatures. Despite that added protection a Tric case is as light as non-rigid gig bag, and unlike some highly protective carbon fiber instrument cases it was sold at an affordable price.
(Still reading all the way down here? I think today I’ve finally realized the perfect post for my way of writing: the set of footnotes longer than the body of the post!)
