Personal Blogs

In your heart

the stars are like enemies, exploding

to tell you what you really are.

Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth.

leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs--

leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.

When I first started to learn tap dancing I was really anxious.

The teacher said, "Calm down. Relax and take it easy. Don't force it."

... surrounded by sand on every side?

In the Autumn I was banished.

I am grateful the Emperor banished me.
Now I see the moon over the mountains shining.

I am grateful the Emperor banished me.
Now I hear the owls in their woodlands calling.

I am grateful the Emperor banished me.
Now I watch the carp in their ponds swimming.

All these were lost to me at the Emperor's court. 

I thought buying and selling stamps would be an easy business. But I soon came unstuck.

By a huge stroke of luck, our stressed-out sheriff recruited a very calm assistant. Pure serene deputy.

Not under foreign skies
Nor under foreign wings protected -
I shared all this with my own people
There, where misfortune had abandoned us. 
[1961]

INSTEAD OF A PREFACE

During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I
spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in
Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone 'picked me out'.
On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me,
her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in
her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor
characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear
(everyone whispered there) - 'Could one ever describe
this?' And I answered - 'I can.' It was then that
something like a smile slid across what had previously
been just a face.
[The 1st of April in the year 1957. Leningrad]

So begins a famous poem by Anna Akhmatova. 'Not under foreign skies, Nor under foreign wings protected' is familiar but I did not know where it came from, or understand what it was about, until I read something by a man who kept it in his wallet, through many travels in the Cold War years, and tried to learn it by heart.

Some translations have “‘Could you describe this?' And I answered ‘I can.’” But I prefer the version above, which seems to emphasise not so much that the poet is capable of describing, but that she steps forward bravely as an individual human witness.

If you want to know why the journalist tried to memorise the poem, and about Akhmatova’s story, see http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180515-requiem-how-a-poem-resisted-stalin

I thought of setting up a recycling business. But then I scrapped the idea.

All the kids loved visiting the food distribution centre. Except Lisa.

She got locked in the frisa.

I thought I'd make an old-fashioned record of a couple of musical-hall songs. On vinyl, you know, and when you've played the first side you turn the record over: all that sort of stuff, needle etc.

But I hit a problem.

I decided the 'A' side should be 'I do like to be beside the seaside'. But then, you see, I couldn't decide what the 'B' side should be.

“But where are the snows of yester-year?” popped into my head for some reason.

This famous refrain is from Rosetti's translation of the Ballade des dames de temps jadis by Villon. You can find several translation of the poem collected at a rather nice site http://lachlan.bluehaze.com.au/snows_of_yesteryear.html

But what intrigued me was finding that Rosetti invented 'yester-year’ to translate the French ‘antan’. 

'Antan' is from Latin 'ante annum' and so probably meant 'before the year' = 'last year', and so Rosetti's translation is rather glorious. 'Yester' seems to have had an original sense of recent or close in time, and there are several English compounds. Apart from 'yesterday' we have 'yestermorn', 'yestereve' and so on.  But before Rosetti’s coining 'yester-year' doesn't seem to have been recorded.

Nowadays both 'yesteryear' and 'antan' have acquired the wider meaning of times gone by, not just last year, presumably influenced by the wistful nostalgia of Villon's brilliant line.

'Yester' is interesting because it seems to have the same origins as Latin 'hesterno' and ancient and modern Greek χθες (pronounced something like 'ch' in 'loch' followed by 'thez'.)

Greek for tomorrow is αύριο, avrio. Once I dined with a Greek priest and he told me this anecdote.

“Some American tourists were here last week. They asked me if Greek has word corresponding to the Spanish mañana. 'Of course', I replied. 'But not so definite'”.