Her Permitted Say

A clear blue sky: a new day.

This time not on anyone else's behalf: this one I am making for myself, "of hammered gold and gold enameling,.." 

I am weak, but not so weak as I was, and there is still time, a little bit of time.

The first one, appropriately enough, is the Arabian Nights: The Book of One Thousand Nights and a Night. Foolish and embarrassing stuff, but you enter by the door that opens to you. And there is that moment, that moment of surfacing from one tale to find yourself in the framing tale, and the vertigo of half-remembering that there's a frame above this one too, which hints of a frame still larger and more unknown.

Every night we wake from sleep: there's always the hope, or the fear, that someday we'll wake from waking, and recover the thread of the previous tale, the one of which this life's tale was just an explanatory aside. 

And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say.

Marble Canvas

image from St Mary Magdalen's, Mortlake, London

Clear and cold. This morning Sir Richard Burton
lies on his slab where the light of morning
pours through a marble canvas. His wife lies
on a lower slab, and all around the pink-pearl dawn,
flushed, like milk with a little blood stirred in,
laps in, just as she planned it, just as she pictured it,
when he said “I don’t give a damn. Just
don’t put me in the dark.” He wanted to be
left in the desert or tossed into the sea, he had said:
but seeing the trouble on her Catholic face, he softened.
Anywhere, he said. Doesn’t matter. Just not dark.

in response to this Morning Porch post.

Djinn

The first thousand years were the hardest.
The oil in the bottom grew tacky; it snagged
my ectoplasm, pulled me out
of the little shape I had.
Every time the sea surge
spun us over the rocks
I thought it was a hand: I thought
I'd found a master. That I was getting out.

But gradually you learn. The second thousand years
I learned to fill that brass-lined space completely,
till the lamp was like a second skin. I knew
the rocking, and the bumping over stone.
I told myself I didn't miss a body.
Nothing hurts, when you're made of smoke; except that
Tugging from the sticky oil. I imagined houris,
but all of them were small and curved
like the inside of the lamp.

When you finally came I knew, though. I knew at once
it was a human hand. Heat, say the philosophers
in Baghdad, travels well through metal.
And the motion was deliberate. Not the slow
sleepy indifference of the sea. Your fingertips
were warm through the thin worn skin of brass.

Well. That's the deal: you call and I have to come.
But no one told me how much work it would be.
Like smoke, I poured out, into the dizzy air
And I tried to remember
How to harden. I was terrified. I might just blow away.
I had only the touch of your fingers for an anchor.

In the stories they say I took my shape at once.
They have to say that kind of thing. They leave out
The time you had to stay with me and whisper reassurance.
The time you had to tell me it was all right after all
If all I was, was smoke. That the granting of wishes
could wait. How I wailed when the wind rose,
and cowered in your shadow.

Against Prissy Translation

I'm reading Richard Burton's translation of the Thousand Nights and a Night (a.k.a. The Arabian Nights.) I've also read a very entertaining commentary: The Arabian Nights: A Companion, by Robert Irwin. This book greatly endeared itself to me by referring to Burton's "barmy erudition." Burton's notes are copious, learned, and eccentric in the extreme: he seizes any excuse to display his extensive, bizarre, and highly unscientific knowledge of foreign sexual habits; and tells us, for example, in far more detail than we want, exactly how various peoples go about blinding or castrating unfortunate superfluous heirs.

But Irwin also attacks Burton's translation, and I don't agree with him about that. The things he accuses Burton of doing, Burton does indeed do. He fetches up archaic English words with abandon (this possibly bothers me less than people who may have to look more of them up, but he has excellent judgement about what words to use: many of them should never have fallen out of usage -- hent, dight, etc.: marvelous pithy words that I'd be glad to see rescued from the linguistic attic.) He also translates the poetry as poetry -- not always as wonderful poetry, and, since I'm innocent of Arabic, I can't say whether that's accuracy or clumsiness. Irwin also takes Burton to task for preserving the "rhymed prose" of his original, and that's what I really want to talk about.

Rhymed prose is something I had never encountered before reading the Nights, and the effect is charming. When the pitch of the narrative is to rise -- for example, when we meet a particularly beautiful lady or particularly fearsome demon -- you'll find the final words of clauses rhyming. Irwin singles out this as a particularly "unattractive passage":

But in the stress and stowre I got sundry grievous wounds and sore; and since that time, I have passed on my back three days without tasting food or sleeping aught, so that my strength is down brought, and the world is become to me as naught.

Now certainly Burton has to work to make the rhymes; to use inversion, and to fetch in quaint words to do so. But why he should not even attempt to translate such an interesting and integral feature of his original as the rhyming prose is beyond me. Also beyond me is why he should not reproduce the archaic language in which the original is, I don't doubt, written. Again, I know no Arabic; but I know something of various oral and semi-oral storytelling traditions, and they all use archaic, quaint words. Why exactly a translation should not reproduce this part of the reading experience baffles me. The argument, if it were explicit, would l suppose be that "accurate" translation trumps "atmosphere," but I don't think that holds water for a moment. There's no way to really separate out the semantic charge of a word from its atmospheric charge -- and anyway, why would we want to do so? Why is conveying the one a legitimate task of translation, and the other not?

Someone who translated, say, Tolkien, without attempting to follow the changes into archaic language, would in my opinion seriously distort him. The fact that many modern people, particularly literary people, roundly dislike dropping into archaic language in order to signal a change in formality, and prefer the boundary between poetry and prose to be clear-cut, does not give the translator carte blanche to simply erase these features and replace them with something the audience likes better. The whole point of translation is to bring something strange and new to readers -- not to convince them that the whole world shares their provincial tastes.

And in this, Burton triumphs. The reader of his Nights enters a different world. And Burton was perfectly fitted for this task by his very defects: he's juvenile in just the same way the composers and audience of his book were juvenile. He loves the bizarre and sensational. His racism and sexism echoes theirs. He is attuned to them. Reading his Nights is not always a pleasant experience, but it is always an illuminating one.