They had sixteen pieces of luggage between them. The Botanist was Edith Oliver, who had helped her father revise his official handbook to the Kew Gardens Museum. The Zoologist was Maggie Browne, the Vocalist was Florence Hughes, daughter of the painter Arthur Hughes, the Bacteriologist was Margaret Chick, the Dilettante was Anne (a painter without a studio), and Charlotte was, as she had always been at the Gower Street School, the Humorist. In the days when they had walked from Hampstead to Bloomsbury and back, she had ‘carried on’ and made the way seem short. Now, as they started out, she seemed in excellent spirits. Although they had a bad crossing she danced a can-can for them in the cabin, in her boots and silk directoire knickers. And no-one could dance as well as Charlotte, when she felt like it.
Penelope Fitzgerald: Charlotte Mew & Her Friends (London, 1984)
giovedì 26 marzo 2009
domenica 4 gennaio 2009
A number of quiet good things in Laura Voghera Luzzatto’s new collection ‘Fumo e Profumo’ (Giuntina), beginning, at the beginning, with:
I lunari
Duecento gli anni e più
nascosti nel fondo d’un armadio,
racchiusi, legati da nastrini
nella scatola blu:
libriccini sottili raccolti e salvati
fra tempi infuriati.
Numeri allineati segnano giorni
e anni, contano
e raccontano
lune nuove
e notti di festa,
i sabati fioriti,
le gioie, i lutti
nel girotondo che ci trascina
tutti
dalla creazione del mondo.
I started doodling a translation, but found myself going in, literally, the opposite direction
Postscript
For L. V. L.
How many years how few,
strewn open on the bed,
ligatures ripped,
their onyx box upended,
its wrenched clasps:
the ledgers she knew safe
in quieter times her busy script
checking this and this.
‘Tonight another interlunar’
‘Today never saw the sun
for drifting smoke’
Days of work
their solid count of things done,
Sabbath’s ennui
noted also ‘iron roads
thinning towards horizon’.
I lunari
Duecento gli anni e più
nascosti nel fondo d’un armadio,
racchiusi, legati da nastrini
nella scatola blu:
libriccini sottili raccolti e salvati
fra tempi infuriati.
Numeri allineati segnano giorni
e anni, contano
e raccontano
lune nuove
e notti di festa,
i sabati fioriti,
le gioie, i lutti
nel girotondo che ci trascina
tutti
dalla creazione del mondo.
I started doodling a translation, but found myself going in, literally, the opposite direction
Postscript
For L. V. L.
How many years how few,
strewn open on the bed,
ligatures ripped,
their onyx box upended,
its wrenched clasps:
the ledgers she knew safe
in quieter times her busy script
checking this and this.
‘Tonight another interlunar’
‘Today never saw the sun
for drifting smoke’
Days of work
their solid count of things done,
Sabbath’s ennui
noted also ‘iron roads
thinning towards horizon’.
mercoledì 3 dicembre 2008
Dove Sei?
Today, Franci, a barge with your name on it
brings you back sharp as a photograph.
I re-picture you exactly, brash figurehead
facing down the Atlantic, where it buffeted
the Cliffs of Moher, holding on hard
to your stripey hat.
I think of you now, holed-up in that satellite-town
with your tool-salesman from Novellara:
did you ever complete your laurea,
my improbable philosopher, your thesis on Truth?
Was it beauty you had, after all, or just youth?
– and have you kept that?
Are you scored with soured dream
and making-ends-meet and butting a pram
through the shopperdrome?
Do you hold on to hope?
I would have it that motherhood blooms in you
riotously, like a bank of azaleas,
and twice-married men made crazy
in your landlocked suburb buy ruinous sloops
to name them for you.
Today, Franci, a barge with your name on it
brings you back sharp as a photograph.
I re-picture you exactly, brash figurehead
facing down the Atlantic, where it buffeted
the Cliffs of Moher, holding on hard
to your stripey hat.
I think of you now, holed-up in that satellite-town
with your tool-salesman from Novellara:
did you ever complete your laurea,
my improbable philosopher, your thesis on Truth?
Was it beauty you had, after all, or just youth?
– and have you kept that?
Are you scored with soured dream
and making-ends-meet and butting a pram
through the shopperdrome?
Do you hold on to hope?
I would have it that motherhood blooms in you
riotously, like a bank of azaleas,
and twice-married men made crazy
in your landlocked suburb buy ruinous sloops
to name them for you.
Philip Morre
martedì 25 novembre 2008
Funeral Games
Scour your local charity shops for a copy of ‘Venice – Photographs by David Hamilton’ (Pavilion Books, 1989): the old child-peeper’s smeary shots are of no more interest than one would expect, but the book does contain a remarkable, if incongruous, introductory essay by Peter Lauritzen. Try this:
..It was also in these final decades of the fifteenth century – in the era when Giovanni Bellini and his pupils were inaugurating a Golden Age of Venetian art – that extraordinary ceremonies were being devised for the funerals of the Republic’s Doges as part of the vision of Venice. After the Doge had lain in state for three days, his body, swathed in the most lavish golden robes, was borne on a litter through the Piazza and along the city’s winding streets to reach the great Gothic church of the Dominican order, San Giovanni e Paolo. The most prominent of the city’s six great secular confraternities, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, led the procession. Its meeting hall had long stood adjacent to the church. However, it is seldom realised that the immensely wealthy civic corporation had commissioned a new façade for their building just at this time simply to provide a suitably grand backdrop for the ducal funerals. Mauro Codussi, the architect who completed the building, went even further by moving its crowning elements along the roof line towards the canal so that the entire composition would be centred not on the building itself, but on the first distant view of it from a small bridge over the canal which each of the ducal funeral processions would have to cross.
But the effect of these spectacular public celebrations of the state was not limited to the remodelling of one or two facades. The immense Monks’ Choir inside SS. Giovanni e Paolo had to be removed from inside the building in the seventeenth century in order to accommodate the vast catafalques that were erected to receive the Doge’s corpse during the ducal obsequies. These had become multi-tiered affairs, draped in silver-trimmed black velvet and decked out with literally thousands of candles. The Patriarch of Venice had to climb up several flights of stairs to reach the level where the ducal litter was set down in order to bestow his blessing on the dead Doge. Once the absolution had been given, the Doge’s body was taken to the sacristy where it was stripped. His golden robes would be distributed among the city’s religious houses to make up chasubles, dalmatics and copes: the golden liturgical vestments of the church. It was also at this moment in the sacristy that the reality behind these great ceremonies became apparent as the defunct Doge lay revealed as a straw dummy whose face was nothing more than a wax mask. The real Doge had been buried in secret even before the ceremony of Lying-in-State had begun..
Scour your local charity shops for a copy of ‘Venice – Photographs by David Hamilton’ (Pavilion Books, 1989): the old child-peeper’s smeary shots are of no more interest than one would expect, but the book does contain a remarkable, if incongruous, introductory essay by Peter Lauritzen. Try this:
..It was also in these final decades of the fifteenth century – in the era when Giovanni Bellini and his pupils were inaugurating a Golden Age of Venetian art – that extraordinary ceremonies were being devised for the funerals of the Republic’s Doges as part of the vision of Venice. After the Doge had lain in state for three days, his body, swathed in the most lavish golden robes, was borne on a litter through the Piazza and along the city’s winding streets to reach the great Gothic church of the Dominican order, San Giovanni e Paolo. The most prominent of the city’s six great secular confraternities, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, led the procession. Its meeting hall had long stood adjacent to the church. However, it is seldom realised that the immensely wealthy civic corporation had commissioned a new façade for their building just at this time simply to provide a suitably grand backdrop for the ducal funerals. Mauro Codussi, the architect who completed the building, went even further by moving its crowning elements along the roof line towards the canal so that the entire composition would be centred not on the building itself, but on the first distant view of it from a small bridge over the canal which each of the ducal funeral processions would have to cross.
But the effect of these spectacular public celebrations of the state was not limited to the remodelling of one or two facades. The immense Monks’ Choir inside SS. Giovanni e Paolo had to be removed from inside the building in the seventeenth century in order to accommodate the vast catafalques that were erected to receive the Doge’s corpse during the ducal obsequies. These had become multi-tiered affairs, draped in silver-trimmed black velvet and decked out with literally thousands of candles. The Patriarch of Venice had to climb up several flights of stairs to reach the level where the ducal litter was set down in order to bestow his blessing on the dead Doge. Once the absolution had been given, the Doge’s body was taken to the sacristy where it was stripped. His golden robes would be distributed among the city’s religious houses to make up chasubles, dalmatics and copes: the golden liturgical vestments of the church. It was also at this moment in the sacristy that the reality behind these great ceremonies became apparent as the defunct Doge lay revealed as a straw dummy whose face was nothing more than a wax mask. The real Doge had been buried in secret even before the ceremony of Lying-in-State had begun..
Wednesday Afternoon on St Elena
Lùcia’s walking away in a white dress:
acacia, magnolia, avenue of lindens
block off snapshots of her progress
further off, and further, and further..
St Elena’s famous albino blackbird
lurks somewhere in these gardens: he’s shy
as if he knows something’s awry
- maybe he’d just rather be black..
Lùcia walks away under the lindens
and does not look back
Philip Morre
Lùcia’s walking away in a white dress:
acacia, magnolia, avenue of lindens
block off snapshots of her progress
further off, and further, and further..
St Elena’s famous albino blackbird
lurks somewhere in these gardens: he’s shy
as if he knows something’s awry
- maybe he’d just rather be black..
Lùcia walks away under the lindens
and does not look back
Philip Morre
martedì 18 novembre 2008
Poets Dancing - an occasional series
Much better were the parties in the studio of the Rue
Notre-Dame-des-Champs. A selection was made. Here
were real people really trying to do something. A phonograph
was set going, and the guests danced to their hearts’ content.
Ford himself was indefatigable: a trifle heavy, but enthusiastic.
Ezra Pound was a supreme dancer: whoever has not seen
Ezra Pound, ignoring all the rules of tango and of fox-trot,
kicking up fantastic heels in a highly personal Charleston,
closing his eyes as his toes nimbly scattered right and left,
has missed one of the spectacles which reconcile us to life.
Sisley Huddleston – Bohemian Literary and Social Life in Paris
(London, 1928)
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