A Momentary Taste of Being

An intensely tricky poem to translate--see one translator's struggle here . Le Pont Mirabeau Guillaume Apollinaire Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine Et nos amours Faut-il qu'il m'en souvienne La joie venait toujours après la peine Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure Les jours s'en vont je demeure Les mains dans les mains restons face à face Tandis que sous Le pont de nos bras passe Des éternels regards l'onde si lasse Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure Les jours s'en vont je demeure L'amour s'en va comme cette eau courante L'amour s'en va Comme la vie est lente Et comme l'Espérance est violente Vienne la nuit sonne l'heure Les jours s'en vont je demeure Passent les jours et passent les semaines Ni temps passé Ni les amours reviennent Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

from When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me? Saul Frampton      Around this time a fog descended over northern Europe. It covered the Rhine, merging with the reed beds and sea mists. It cloistered the churchyards of France. It slipped inside books, it tarnished sword blades.  It scaled the high walls of Oxford and surrounded Aristotle. It seems to enter flesh itself, and confuse the identities of thins and the very boundaries of mater. And then it settled in men's minds. . . .      Scepticism arrived as a new and intoxicating intellectual force in the sixteenth century.

Flitting like a bumblebee from blossom to blossom--my reading flung wide over the entire field, I'll never make it back to the hive: from When I Am Playing with My Cat How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing with Me? Saul Frampton But with the hardening of religious attitudes that inevitably resulted, Stoicism began to snowball, almost in a kind of ideological feedback loop. For what made is so difficult to displace as an attitude was the fact that it was seen to be quintessentially noble, honourable-- male --and no self-respecting sixteenth-century man who called himself a man would beg to differ, as is affirmed in an emblem from Henry Peacham's Minverva Britannica (1612):  Amid the waves, a mightie Rock doth stand, Whose  ruggie brow, had bidden many a shower, And bitter storme; which neither sea, nor land, Nor JOVES sharpe-lightening ever could devoure: This same is MANLIE CONSTANCIE of mind, Not easly moov'd with every blase of wind. And if so, it speaks vol...

from When I am Playing with My Cat, How Do I know That She Is Not Playing with Me? Saul Frampton Our zeal performs wonder when it seconds our inclinations to hatred, cruelty, ambition, avarice, detraction, rebellion. But moved. . . toward goodness, benignity, moderation, unless by miracle some rare disposition prompt us to it, we stir neither hand nor foot. Our religion is intended to eradicate vices whereas it covers, nourishes, incites them.  (Quoting Montaigne) All too true and frightening, and so how much more frightening, then, when words, spoken innocently enough and without guile or intent to deceive can be used to foment division and unrest.  Words of faith, rightly used and wrongly construed still result in the negative that Montaigne conceives here.  So our doctrine must not only be sound, but soundly worded so that there can be nothing within it that can be taken to detract from the value of another human being--nothing that can be interpreted to mean th...

One issue I never tire of tiring of is the question of homosexuality whenever a relationship, of whatever sort, occurs between two men.  The latest example to tweak me in this way is from a very fine (so far) study of Montaigne--the second in as many years. from When I Am Playing With My Cat, How Do I Know That She Is Not Playing With Me: Montainge and Being in Touch With Life Saul Frampton      Montaigne's letter is clearly a moving testament to his friend. But the question that inevitably raises itself is to what extent was there more than friendship at stake--that is to say, was it a platonic relationship or a romantic one?      The idea that the two men's relationship was a homosexual one is by no means implausible, but neither is it necessarily the case: Montaigne later adds to his essay a reference to: 'that other Greek licence . . . justly abhorred by our conscience', meaning homosexuality, a crime one of his schoolmasters, Marc-Antoine M...

La Carte et la Territoire reviewed I'm surprised by much of this review.  Not the Houellebecq I'm accustomed to--at least according to this review.

"Social Experiment" The challenge of the untranslatable word

Continuing a survey of de Maupassant's short works

The Stories of Guy de Maupassant considered

"Autumn" considered

A Mallarmé sonnet: sybolisme at its apex

Composing the last I came upon a really nice site for French Poetry that I wanted to preserve here and in the links in the right-hand column: Les Grands Classiques