I will be reading alongside Yves Bonnefoy at Shakespeare and Company, Paris 5e on Monday 23 November at 7 pm. We will read in French and in English from three of my recent translations of his work, The Present Hour, Rue Traversière and The Anchor's Long Chain, all published by Seagull Books. This is a wonderful chance to hear an extraordinary French poet read his poems in the setting of one of the English language's great bookstores.
Up in the dark, breakfast in bed, reading every small story in the NYT (Le Monde is an afternoon pleasure, on paper, purchased at a corner kiosk, sometimes read in the park, feet up on a chair), for example, airport security, or lack of, in Charm-el-sheik (sp?). Newspaper reading expands to fit the time available.
Bed made to gloomy organ music from the church across the way, English children's voices down on the sidewalk, also a lot of last night's trash (truly the cash-strapped city must have laid off its sweepers, those gentle green men--in fact, mostly black--with their brooms).
I can delay a little longer. I make myself a cup of instant coffee, and top up the teapot with hot water (Joyce says somewhere, perhaps in Portrait of the Artist, that his family was so poor they used the morning tea leaves three times over): I chain-smoke tea, or shall we say, lightly-flavoured hot water. Waiting for the water to boil I clean up the breakfast dishes, sweep oatmeal and breadcrumbs off the floor, dump all the organic trash into my compost; ie, one of the balcony pots, either the one with the catalapa stripling I was given in September at the Marché aux fleurs, or the mock orange I bought: porridge, apple cores, wilted lettuce, tea leaves, coffee grounds. I sweep the balcony...I
So here I am, no more excuses for not getting down to work. But what work? A book review?--do that later. A Baudelaire translation--maybe. Baudelaire is a good poetry school. I think I said this already. I'm learning to rhyme, Baudelaire to my left, Robert Lowell's Imitations to the right. Lowell's translations of Baudelaire are extraordinary, like his Rimbaud. They are not always accurate in terms of semantics, but they are terrific poems in their own right, and I can rummage through them for ideas, diction, tone, a zillion things the run-of-the-mill academic, accurate, literal translation can't offer. Lowell is best, it seems to me, at the chewy, realist poems: early (!) Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Pasternak.
Last evening I went to a memorial film viewing for Chantal Akerman at the Brussels--Wallonie Cultural Centre over by the Centre Pompidou. They showed her last film, which contains excerpts from earlier films, none of which I have ever seen. I thought I might only stay for a bit, but it was extraordinary, and I stayed till the end, though not for the discussion afterwards. It began late: I watched people arrive, meet friends, settle and wondered who this person was behind my eyes, my skin, watching, feeling insignificant, foreign, even to myself.
Actually, I think books are becoming trendy. Yesterday, on my way to get my flu shot on the Rue Monsieur le Prince, I walked past a Kitchen Place, very chic, Boffi or something, and on the shelves above the cooking island on display, there was: dishware? No. Shiny pots and pans? No. Books, and not cookbooks either.
Diito. If you are nearby head to Sonia Rykiel on the Boulevard St Germain. If it hasn't changed since I last went by in September, the very elegant couture on offer is, throughout the large store, on two levels, surrounded by bookshelves, tall, wide, and packed with real books, not books by the foot. It's a stage set, but it's worth a look. Lick the window, as the French call window shopping.
Sure, it frees up a lot of space if you read books online, but I've tried and it doesn't begin to match the pleasure of holding a book in your hands, as French--and other European (but not the UK?)--know. Book prices are protected in France, so sellers like Amazon can't undercut them. Which means that there are still book stores in every city neighbourhood and town, and folks who like spending time in them, looking over the tables, browsing the shelves, picking up and putting down volumes as tenderly as relics, as the New York Times records in a story this morning. Now I know I'm in the middle of a literary neighbourhood in a literary city--Paris--right now, but in California I live in the Latin Quarter of one of the world's big universities, Stanford, and the bookstores are few and far between and the university one, in particular, sells sweatshirts and mugs in most of its (considerable) ground floor square footage. I'd have to go to City Lights in San Francisco to find the atmosphere I can find in innumerable small and bigger bookstores on every block in the fifth and sixth arrondissements of Paris. So vive le prix unique for books. And down with chain stores.
as the French call The Martian, which I went to see yesterday afternoon, a sunny Sunday which I could have spent strolling or sitting in the park under coloured leaves with children screaming on the playground nearby, but I needed to take my mind off something unpleasant involving--never mind--and a movie full of adventure, that got a half-decent review from Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, seemed like a good way to do it.
And indeed, it did the trick, despite some heaviness. The landscapes were disappointing: don't think Mars will be on my list of places to go for their scenic properties, except for the starry skies, but the plot, which darts between the astronaut left on Mars, the space ship, or whatever you call it, returning with the rest of the crew (one Latino, two beautiful but smart women, two others), and NASA HQ in Houston (diverse, but including some square-jawed, over-tall Caucasians in ties), is fun, with some tense and some weepy, heart-warming moments (message to Mom and Dad from the abandoned astronaut, the crew's near death-experience of a reunion off Mars, the Whole World's rejoicing on cable TV, in English and Mandarin, at the miraculous rescue).
I've been translating Baudelaire—a mixture of the prose poems in Spleen and the poem-poems in Fleurs du Mal. I had a vague idea that there might be a book in a collection of the prose poems that had a versified twin. I’m no longer so sure about this, but I’m finding at least a couple of things fascinating: firstly, that all the types (widows, children, artisans, clowns, prostitutes and mistresses) still stroll Parisian streets and parks in modern dress. Spend an hour or two sitting in a chair, nose in and out of your book, in the Luxembourg and you will see Baudelaire's world go by. It strikes me that most of the people I see are universals, and that this wouldn't be true in California, which is too new. But it might be true in London, for instance, if only I knew London well enough? That the world of Dickens or Woolf goes about its business in modern dress?
Then there is the fairground scene in Baudelaire: a prose poem about an old saltimbanco, or showman. These old fairs still exist, seasonally, on the outskirts of Paris and in the city proper, in the Bois de Boulogne and the Tuileries, for example, at certain times of the year. They are a little like state fairs or the PNE (Pacific National Exhibition) and CNE in Canada: bump-cars, games, agricultural produce, cotton candy. But a couple visits to Ikea-Avignon in the last two weeks also makes me think that there might be a poem there too, that absorbed into itself a lot of the old stereotypes.
We arrived here, under the Mont Ventoux, last Wednesday. The mistral was blowing, already at the TGV station in Avignon, even harder as we drove northeast towards the Dentelles de Montmirail and the Mont Ventoux. Grape vines turning colour, olive trees shimmering silver and covered with fruit—no worms this year, unlike last, so there will be a good crop, come Christmas, and lots of oil.
This morning our next door neighbour—the two houses have a common wall and both sit smack on the road on the way up to the village—banged on the door and Michel went down. Paul was excited and wanted him to put his shoes on and go next door. It turned out he’d killed another boar, with his team, hunting yesterday, Saturday, and he wanted to give Michel part of it. Poor Michel! He tried to refuse, but Paul was having none of it and so Michel spent the rest of the morning skinning and butchering a joint, and wondering how we’d ever eat it all. Freezer, we decided, let our foodie kids deal with it at Christmas. I chopped it into stew-sized pieces and put them in a big container with half a bottle of wine, herbs, onions and carrots. Maybe we’ll make ourselves a small pot of civet before the rest goes in the freezer, which normally we would unplug when we leave, but perhaps not, after all.
We are going away tomorrow morning to the Vaucluse for two weeks. No internet, which is both frustrating and revealing. I miss it for quick checks of Wikipedia sorts of things while I'm working, or bringing up a poem I want to reread. I won't miss it for long as far as the ipad goes. It usually feels good to wean myself off that: the 24 hour news cycle and the ease of avoiding more "serious" reading by reading magazine articles online. The ipad is far too addictive.We can, and do, of course check email, by going to the little village library or the house of a friend or relative, but personally I don't very often.
Had hoped to go and read in the park again this afternoon, but it is cold all of a sudden. So I was a flaneur for an hour or two, aimlessly peering in windows, thinking about how much good food there is to eat everywhere. Even the very ordinary, indeed rather grungy supermarket two blocks away on the Rue de Seine, is far more appetizing than the most luxurious Whole Foods store back in California. The cheeses! The butters! The fruit and vegetables!