At least half a dozen people I know are reading a new, annotated collection of Anton Chekhov’s stories, edited by Okla Elliott and Kyle Minor – two awesome young literati – published in 2008 by an awesome young house known as New American Press (www.newamericanpress.com). The collection is entitled The Other Chekhov and consists of ten stories by Chekhov, all but three or four of which I have not read before.
Many of the stories are by the young Chekhov, whose pseudonym was Antosha Chekhonte, from the period prior to 1888, but there are also three from the 1890s. For those who may not know, Chekhov’s life was short – born in 1960, dead in 1904 – but his production long, hundreds of stories, plays, and other writings. And he is one of the masters, perhaps the father of the modern short story.
The ten stories in this collection are varied examples of the richness of Chekhov’s craft and his genius, which are by turns subversive, humanistic, sociological, terrifying, and scathingly humorous. I was pleased to see that none of the very early “twist” stories were included which, although Chekhov always amazes with his prose, conclude with a gimmick. (And why not? He was just earning a few extra roubles as a young medical student, by publishing his first pieces at the age of twenty.)
One of the two earliest pieces here, “In a Strange Land” (1882-5), in fact, could be used as a caricature of the contemporary western racist opening a door to foreigners and feeding them well while insulting them at the table – a little portrait of hell. Some of the shortest pieces – e.g., “The Huntsman” – remind one of Chekhov’s wonderful definition of very short fiction as reading which “feels rather like swallowing a glass of vodka.”
Others of the stories haunt by virtue of their unsentimental depiction of human suffering (“Misery,” 1886), the portrayal of the power of human passion suppressed (“The Witch,” 1886), dramatizations of solipsistic foolishness (“From the Diary of a Violent-Tempered Man” and “The Kiss,” both 1887).
While each story in this assembly is powerful and memorable, the two I found most haunting Dr Chekhov wrote later in his too short life – “Gusev” (1890) and “The Murder” (1895). “The Murder,” in a mere 40 pages (of large, eye-friendly type) achieves what most novelists would require two or three hundred pages even to begin to approach, the creation of a world both strange and familiar, at once real and surreal, and cause of great wonder. “Gusev,” for its part, does something I don’t believe I have ever seen done in language, at least not like that – a haunting, hallucinatory piece which portrays the grittiest of realism, but then...
Another distinguished feature of this collection is that each of its ten stories is introduced by a distinguished practitioner of the art of fiction and/or translation: Pinckney Benedict, Fred Chappell, Christopher Coake, Paul Crenshaw, Dorothy Gambrell, Steve Gillis, Michelle Herman, Jeff Parker, Benjamin Percy and David R. Slavitt. These introductions are by turns playful, esoteric, suggestive, illuminating – one even takes the form of a cartoon complement to the story it introduces. And they can be read before or after the story, as the reader wishes – a couple of the introducers request the readers to come back to the introduction after they have read the stories. Add to these ten introductory pleasures, the excellent, brief, knowledgeable introduction to the book itself by its two editors – Okla Elliott and Kyle Minor – and you have the makings of a literary feast.
A word about the translations: they are by Constance Garnett. Garnett-bashing seems to have become an international sport in recent years. But Constance Garnett was like a mighty human bridge, facilitating the passage of millions upon millions of readers into a world containing some of the greatest wonders of literary achievement – Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov… She was good enough for D. H. Lawrence, for James Joyce, for Katherine Mansfield, and she is certainly good enough for me.
Is there anything at all that I missed in this book? No – however, I would have loved it if Messrs. Elliott and Minor had included Dr Chekhov’s “The Black Monk.” But that’s a quibble. This book is a literary treasure. And for a real, literary review of it, read Walter Cummin’s piece which will appear in the Summer 2008 edition of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s international journal, The Literary Review.
Let me conclude by proclaiming that New American Press is a class act – this book has a beautifully designed cover, high quality paper well bound, reader-friendly typeface, no typos that I caught and, of course, the incomparable content – for the modest price of not quite sixteen bucks. You can’t hardly buy a bottle of decent vodka for that. Each of these stories is a generous dram of the real stuff, triple distilled, ten generous glasses of it. Messieurs et madames: Enivrez-vous! Inebriate yourselves on the words of the master!
Greetings from this ancient capital!
Thomas E. Kennedy
(www.thomasekennedy.com)
Friday, March 28, 2008
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
PAIN.
This starts with me, but it is not about me. It is about pain. The pain of hurting and the not knowing why you hurt. Or knowing why and the reason making it worse.
I have lived a life in which I never thought much about my health. I eat and drink as I please, exercise a bit, mostly don’t smoke anymore but for an occasional cigar, have had no real health problems and, aside from the occasional tooth ache and a bout of indignity with a urologist a while back, very little pain.
This past Sunday I woke at 5:28 a.m. It was my 64th birthday, and I’d invited Lady Alice and my kids and son-in-law out for a birthday lunch. But the clock was set for 6:30 and it was only 5:28. Something else had awakened me.
Pain. In my side. Bad pain. Very bad. Appendicitis? I limped out to my computer, googled “appendicitis.” Right side. This was the left. And escalating. I limped around the apartment, groaning like an old man, instructing myself not to act like a baby, thinking, God has decided to cut me down on my 64th birthday! Which somehow seemed ironic and vaguely funny, though the pain would not allow me to laugh. There was a basic background of excruciating pain which every so often would notch up and remain at the new level.
Pain this great, I thought, cannot continue for long. It continued. Half an hour. Forty-five minutes. An hour. I leaned on a chair back, bowed forward across the surface of the dining table, knelt on the floor with my butt in the air and my chest on a cushion, lay on my right side, left side. Nothing helped.
I tried to think. What to do? Emergency room? Call the emergency doctor? What’s the number? But my brain was taken up by the pain, no room for thought, trying to fathom it. Without success. Abstract from it. Can’t. Now it was an hour and fifteen minutes, and the pain still constant and very bad. On a scale of 1 to 10? This has its own scale which outweighs all normal measures. Here there’s only max.
You baby! Pull yourself together! Can’t. Why do I hurt so bad?
As the pain moved toward an hour and a half’s duration, I went back in to the bedroom and woke Alice. I said, “Honey, I need your help.”
Within a minute, she was on the phone calling the emergency doctor. There was a queue on the line, and we were told by a recorded voice that we were number fourteen. Which meant a good hour before we got through and then no doubt three or four or five hours before the doctor came. Alice called the hospital emergency room to ask for an ambulance, was told we should take a taxi out, so she called for a cab and was promised one in ten minutes.
At which point I ran for the bathroom and heaved. Twice. Red. Blood? I thought of my father who at 58 one day threw up blood, lived on in terrible pain for three days, then died. My heart went out to him for those three days of pain. Here I was not quite at two hours and almost willing to die to be free of it.
Meanwhile Alice cancelled the taxi and called back to demand an ambulance. They were there in less than ten minutes. Two young men. The one said to me, “Boy, some birthday present, huh?”
They drove me to the trauma center at Rigshospitalet – the hospital made famous by Lars Van Trier in his TV series Riget, later optioned by Stephen King as The Kingdom, although King could never touch Van Trier in terms of intelligent eerie dark humor.
The details of what happened at the trauma center are not interesting – other than to say that everyone was enormously kind and that finally, to put an anticlimax on it, I learned that the pain was probably due to the passing of a kidney stone. So, nothing fatal. Curfew would not ring for me that day. But what did interest me about the whole experience – aside from the confirmation that, despite complaints to the contrary, the Danish health care system seems to me to function extremely well and the confirmation of the great good fortune of modern medicine as well as of having someone who loves you and will stand by you in need (to be more specific my great fortune at having Lady Alice by my side!) – was what it taught me about pain.
I had never known pain like that before and for the four unbroken hours (four hours and 20 minutes to be exact) that it continued, it occupied me constantly. The only relief I found came via my mind and my emotions – the relief of thinking about and empathizing with everyone I know who had experienced pain – my father in his three days of dying, my friend Susan and my former student Cindy who had battled cancer for their lives and won, my oldest brother who’d endured holes being drilled into his skull, my son who was in pain after an operation and denied the additional morphine he requested, my friend David who’d had his breast bone sawed and pried open to have a new valve installed in his heart, my mother who just before she went into her final paroxysm said, “I’ve never had such a headache before,” which I suddenly understood to have been pain of extremely great magnitude.
And I thought of the torture victims whose stories I know via Inge Genefke and the torture rehabilitation center organizations here and whose pain was not only as bad as what I was experiencing but far far worse and further amplified and complicated by the fact that it was being caused intentionally by other human beings in order to promote their suffering and to try to eradicate their personalities with pain. With my intellect I could see how much worse that was, and although it did not alleviate my own pain, it gave some degree of comfort for me to be able to feel a rending compassion for those suffering souls in their lonely torment.
When one of the hospital orderlies told me that the pain I was experiencing was said to be similar to the pain of a woman in childbirth, this did not have the same effect on me. Because, although I have respect and compassion for women in the pain of childbirth – indeed am awed by their ordeal, I can not help but feel that it must alleviate the pain to know that it is leading to the delivery of a new life into the world. Torture victims must have an almost exactly opposite impression of their pain, their degradation; that it serves no good, on the contrary. I think about the fact that today, the day after, I ache in all the muscles of my chest, in my pleura, the muscles of my back – because I was literally writhing with pain for four hours. What after-affects – sequelae – do torture victims experience, both physical and psychological? It does not bear contemplating. The vast majority of us will never know anything of that kind of hell of pain.
And my own pain yesterday was in a sense, in the words of the ambulance attendant, a birthday gift of sorts. Because it opened a part of my mind and taught me something.
It taught me that pain is another dimension. It gave me a glimpse of what it is like for anyone stuck in that dimension and made me understand, graphically, the need for empathy. And it made something else quite clear to me: I do not wish to visit that dimension again anytime soon.
Still, the end awaits us, and we do not know what path will take us to it. And as Sophocles put it, in one of the greatest scraps of dark humor of all time, “Count no man happy until he is laid in his grave.”
But something else, too: We are all in this together.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
www.thomasekennedy.com
I have lived a life in which I never thought much about my health. I eat and drink as I please, exercise a bit, mostly don’t smoke anymore but for an occasional cigar, have had no real health problems and, aside from the occasional tooth ache and a bout of indignity with a urologist a while back, very little pain.
This past Sunday I woke at 5:28 a.m. It was my 64th birthday, and I’d invited Lady Alice and my kids and son-in-law out for a birthday lunch. But the clock was set for 6:30 and it was only 5:28. Something else had awakened me.
Pain. In my side. Bad pain. Very bad. Appendicitis? I limped out to my computer, googled “appendicitis.” Right side. This was the left. And escalating. I limped around the apartment, groaning like an old man, instructing myself not to act like a baby, thinking, God has decided to cut me down on my 64th birthday! Which somehow seemed ironic and vaguely funny, though the pain would not allow me to laugh. There was a basic background of excruciating pain which every so often would notch up and remain at the new level.
Pain this great, I thought, cannot continue for long. It continued. Half an hour. Forty-five minutes. An hour. I leaned on a chair back, bowed forward across the surface of the dining table, knelt on the floor with my butt in the air and my chest on a cushion, lay on my right side, left side. Nothing helped.
I tried to think. What to do? Emergency room? Call the emergency doctor? What’s the number? But my brain was taken up by the pain, no room for thought, trying to fathom it. Without success. Abstract from it. Can’t. Now it was an hour and fifteen minutes, and the pain still constant and very bad. On a scale of 1 to 10? This has its own scale which outweighs all normal measures. Here there’s only max.
You baby! Pull yourself together! Can’t. Why do I hurt so bad?
As the pain moved toward an hour and a half’s duration, I went back in to the bedroom and woke Alice. I said, “Honey, I need your help.”
Within a minute, she was on the phone calling the emergency doctor. There was a queue on the line, and we were told by a recorded voice that we were number fourteen. Which meant a good hour before we got through and then no doubt three or four or five hours before the doctor came. Alice called the hospital emergency room to ask for an ambulance, was told we should take a taxi out, so she called for a cab and was promised one in ten minutes.
At which point I ran for the bathroom and heaved. Twice. Red. Blood? I thought of my father who at 58 one day threw up blood, lived on in terrible pain for three days, then died. My heart went out to him for those three days of pain. Here I was not quite at two hours and almost willing to die to be free of it.
Meanwhile Alice cancelled the taxi and called back to demand an ambulance. They were there in less than ten minutes. Two young men. The one said to me, “Boy, some birthday present, huh?”
They drove me to the trauma center at Rigshospitalet – the hospital made famous by Lars Van Trier in his TV series Riget, later optioned by Stephen King as The Kingdom, although King could never touch Van Trier in terms of intelligent eerie dark humor.
The details of what happened at the trauma center are not interesting – other than to say that everyone was enormously kind and that finally, to put an anticlimax on it, I learned that the pain was probably due to the passing of a kidney stone. So, nothing fatal. Curfew would not ring for me that day. But what did interest me about the whole experience – aside from the confirmation that, despite complaints to the contrary, the Danish health care system seems to me to function extremely well and the confirmation of the great good fortune of modern medicine as well as of having someone who loves you and will stand by you in need (to be more specific my great fortune at having Lady Alice by my side!) – was what it taught me about pain.
I had never known pain like that before and for the four unbroken hours (four hours and 20 minutes to be exact) that it continued, it occupied me constantly. The only relief I found came via my mind and my emotions – the relief of thinking about and empathizing with everyone I know who had experienced pain – my father in his three days of dying, my friend Susan and my former student Cindy who had battled cancer for their lives and won, my oldest brother who’d endured holes being drilled into his skull, my son who was in pain after an operation and denied the additional morphine he requested, my friend David who’d had his breast bone sawed and pried open to have a new valve installed in his heart, my mother who just before she went into her final paroxysm said, “I’ve never had such a headache before,” which I suddenly understood to have been pain of extremely great magnitude.
And I thought of the torture victims whose stories I know via Inge Genefke and the torture rehabilitation center organizations here and whose pain was not only as bad as what I was experiencing but far far worse and further amplified and complicated by the fact that it was being caused intentionally by other human beings in order to promote their suffering and to try to eradicate their personalities with pain. With my intellect I could see how much worse that was, and although it did not alleviate my own pain, it gave some degree of comfort for me to be able to feel a rending compassion for those suffering souls in their lonely torment.
When one of the hospital orderlies told me that the pain I was experiencing was said to be similar to the pain of a woman in childbirth, this did not have the same effect on me. Because, although I have respect and compassion for women in the pain of childbirth – indeed am awed by their ordeal, I can not help but feel that it must alleviate the pain to know that it is leading to the delivery of a new life into the world. Torture victims must have an almost exactly opposite impression of their pain, their degradation; that it serves no good, on the contrary. I think about the fact that today, the day after, I ache in all the muscles of my chest, in my pleura, the muscles of my back – because I was literally writhing with pain for four hours. What after-affects – sequelae – do torture victims experience, both physical and psychological? It does not bear contemplating. The vast majority of us will never know anything of that kind of hell of pain.
And my own pain yesterday was in a sense, in the words of the ambulance attendant, a birthday gift of sorts. Because it opened a part of my mind and taught me something.
It taught me that pain is another dimension. It gave me a glimpse of what it is like for anyone stuck in that dimension and made me understand, graphically, the need for empathy. And it made something else quite clear to me: I do not wish to visit that dimension again anytime soon.
Still, the end awaits us, and we do not know what path will take us to it. And as Sophocles put it, in one of the greatest scraps of dark humor of all time, “Count no man happy until he is laid in his grave.”
But something else, too: We are all in this together.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
www.thomasekennedy.com
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
THE FIVER -- SOMETHIN' ELSE!
We learned last week that Ruth, who owned the Fiver (Femmeren) here in Copenhagen, had gone on to her reward and that the Fiver had locked its doors, unlikely to open them again.
This is a great loss – even in this ancient city of 1,525 pubs. Serving houses they call them – værtshuse – which sounds a bit more elegant. Small humble establishments. The Fiver was among the very best of them, a small brown place located at Classensgade 5 on Copenhagen's east side. It had a fabulous collection of jazz CDs and the atmosphere of a clubhouse – a noir club for men and women, with jazz and cigarette smoke, beer and whisky and vodka, and always somebody to talk to if you wanted that or a quiet corner to sit and read or brood in if that's what you were after.
It was at The Fiver that I first heard the wonderful CD Somethin' Else. It was Lady Alice who brought me in to hear it there in 1999 when I was 55 years old. Ironic because the record was cut on my 14th birthday in Hackensack, New Jersey, a stone's throw from my Queens home across two rivers. But I had to fly over the whole wide ocean to the east, thousands of miles and wait forty-one years to hear that album in that wonderful dark little place in Copenhagen.
Anyone who has never heard that record need only hear the list of its personnel and, if you love jazz, you will hurry out to find it: Juli9an "Cannonball" Adderley on alto sax, Miles Davis on trumpet, Hank Jones on piano, Sam Jones on bass, and Art Blakey on drums. On this album you will hear arguably the very best version of "Autumn Leaves" ever recorded – with Miles on trumpet those leaves will break your heart and patch it up again with the wisdom of pain.
At any time if you wanted to hear Somethin' Else in the Fiver, you needed only to ask who was on duty at the bar – Morten, perhaps – to put on "Elsa," which is how they pronounced it in there, giving the record a woman's name, a woman who was really somethin'!
So taken was I by The Fiver that it became chapter 25 in my book Kerrigan's Copenhagen, A Love Story – a novel disguised as a guide to the serving houses of Copenhagen. But more important than that, it became the place that Lady Alice and I would invite our most cherished of guests visiting from abroad – Walt and Alison Cummins, Bob and Lisa Stewart, Dave Poe and Candy Stevens, Thomas and Lisa McCarthy, David Applefield, and my wonderful publisher, Roger Derham, who was the man who put Kerrigan's Copenhagen and the following three books of my Copenhagen Quartet in print (www.copenhagenquartet.com). If I have forgotten to mention others who joined them there it is no doubt because I'd swallowed too many Stolis that night!
The regulars of The Fiver always made my guests feel right to home. One of my favorite evenings was one that went on to the wee hours with Bob Stewart and Lisa. It was Bob's 60th birthday. That was the night, if I remember correctly, that Bob told the story of his fist-fight, at the age of eighteen, with Chuck Berry – a great story which ultimately became a fine poem, scheduled to see print in The Literary Review.
As we sat there, a prominent musician who will here remain nameless came in – let's call him Niels – and I said, "Niels, I'd like you to meet Bob and Lisa. They're from Kansas City." Niels was delighted because Kansas City was the birthplace of so much great jazz. He sat down and started slinging names of great Kansas City jazz musicians at Bob, but Bob, who knows a lot of jazz musicians, didn't know any of those Niels mentioned.
After a while, Niels stopped slinging names, ordered another double Jack, whipped out some hash and a chillum and lit up. After a few moments of meditative puffing, he looked at Bob and said, "You don't know shit, do you?" A moment Bob and I always recall with relish.
I am pleased to recall that before the great Fiver closed its doors, Lady Alice and I managed to invite our good Copenhagen American friend Dave to join us there one evening. Dave had the foresight to take some pictures, and if I knew how to upload them onto this blog, I would do so.
As mentioned there are 1,525 serving houses in Copenhagen. And I will tell about some of them in future blogs. But now there are only 1,524, and the one that is missing is one that was really somethin' else.
Five seconds of silence, please, and five fingers of Stoli, for the late, great Fiver.
Greetings from this ancient capital!
Thomas E. Kennedy
www.thomasekennedy.com
This is a great loss – even in this ancient city of 1,525 pubs. Serving houses they call them – værtshuse – which sounds a bit more elegant. Small humble establishments. The Fiver was among the very best of them, a small brown place located at Classensgade 5 on Copenhagen's east side. It had a fabulous collection of jazz CDs and the atmosphere of a clubhouse – a noir club for men and women, with jazz and cigarette smoke, beer and whisky and vodka, and always somebody to talk to if you wanted that or a quiet corner to sit and read or brood in if that's what you were after.
It was at The Fiver that I first heard the wonderful CD Somethin' Else. It was Lady Alice who brought me in to hear it there in 1999 when I was 55 years old. Ironic because the record was cut on my 14th birthday in Hackensack, New Jersey, a stone's throw from my Queens home across two rivers. But I had to fly over the whole wide ocean to the east, thousands of miles and wait forty-one years to hear that album in that wonderful dark little place in Copenhagen.
Anyone who has never heard that record need only hear the list of its personnel and, if you love jazz, you will hurry out to find it: Juli9an "Cannonball" Adderley on alto sax, Miles Davis on trumpet, Hank Jones on piano, Sam Jones on bass, and Art Blakey on drums. On this album you will hear arguably the very best version of "Autumn Leaves" ever recorded – with Miles on trumpet those leaves will break your heart and patch it up again with the wisdom of pain.
At any time if you wanted to hear Somethin' Else in the Fiver, you needed only to ask who was on duty at the bar – Morten, perhaps – to put on "Elsa," which is how they pronounced it in there, giving the record a woman's name, a woman who was really somethin'!
So taken was I by The Fiver that it became chapter 25 in my book Kerrigan's Copenhagen, A Love Story – a novel disguised as a guide to the serving houses of Copenhagen. But more important than that, it became the place that Lady Alice and I would invite our most cherished of guests visiting from abroad – Walt and Alison Cummins, Bob and Lisa Stewart, Dave Poe and Candy Stevens, Thomas and Lisa McCarthy, David Applefield, and my wonderful publisher, Roger Derham, who was the man who put Kerrigan's Copenhagen and the following three books of my Copenhagen Quartet in print (www.copenhagenquartet.com). If I have forgotten to mention others who joined them there it is no doubt because I'd swallowed too many Stolis that night!
The regulars of The Fiver always made my guests feel right to home. One of my favorite evenings was one that went on to the wee hours with Bob Stewart and Lisa. It was Bob's 60th birthday. That was the night, if I remember correctly, that Bob told the story of his fist-fight, at the age of eighteen, with Chuck Berry – a great story which ultimately became a fine poem, scheduled to see print in The Literary Review.
As we sat there, a prominent musician who will here remain nameless came in – let's call him Niels – and I said, "Niels, I'd like you to meet Bob and Lisa. They're from Kansas City." Niels was delighted because Kansas City was the birthplace of so much great jazz. He sat down and started slinging names of great Kansas City jazz musicians at Bob, but Bob, who knows a lot of jazz musicians, didn't know any of those Niels mentioned.
After a while, Niels stopped slinging names, ordered another double Jack, whipped out some hash and a chillum and lit up. After a few moments of meditative puffing, he looked at Bob and said, "You don't know shit, do you?" A moment Bob and I always recall with relish.
I am pleased to recall that before the great Fiver closed its doors, Lady Alice and I managed to invite our good Copenhagen American friend Dave to join us there one evening. Dave had the foresight to take some pictures, and if I knew how to upload them onto this blog, I would do so.
As mentioned there are 1,525 serving houses in Copenhagen. And I will tell about some of them in future blogs. But now there are only 1,524, and the one that is missing is one that was really somethin' else.
Five seconds of silence, please, and five fingers of Stoli, for the late, great Fiver.
Greetings from this ancient capital!
Thomas E. Kennedy
www.thomasekennedy.com
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
PUTTING YOURSELF SECOND
Okla Elliot’s recent blog post about his translation activities, contemplating whether he wished to be a writer first and translator second or vice versa, reminded me of a conversation I once had with the excellent translator of the fine Dutch novelist, Marcel Möring. Her name is Stacey Knecht, and she comes from Brooklyn but had moved to the Netherlands and was now translating Dutch literature into English.
I, too, had done some translation of Danish literature, and my conversation with Stacey clarified something for me. At that time – late ‘80s/ early ‘90s – I was a kind of half-hearted translator- rendering stuff from Danish into English for no reason other than that I could not really fathom the impact of Danish poetry or fiction unless I got it over into my own native English. But I tended to be an impatient translator back then. I wanted the pay-off fast and if something didn't seem right, I would consider taking liberties to make it what I saw as right. A translation that I did of a Klaus Rifbjerg poem for the magazine Frank, Rifbjerg referred good-naturedly to as “enthusiastic.”
And occasionally I made the kind of mistakes that are called howlers. Obvious, glaring errors that evoke a howl in the knowing reader. I did this with a couple of poems by Thorkild Bjørnvig once – translations that were destined to appear in Tel Aviv Review. Thorkild was not only a wonderful poet who had an amazing life (for more information read his book The Pact – about his friendship with Karen Blixen – a.k.a. Isak Dinesen, known no doubt to some as Meryl Streep), but he was also, in my experience, an incredibly kind man who wore his very large reputation lightly. When I sent him my translations, he wrote back saying that they were excellent and he was very happy with them; however, he added, they are not about foxes but about ravens. (The word for fox in Danish has a resemblance to the word for raven, and I blundered right into that mistake because I had not carefully taken the time, eyes and mind wide open, to check and check again my translation.)
Stacey was clearly a more dedicated translator than I. We met at an international conference at Kasteel Well in the Netherlands, where I used to teach, and she was attending my fiction workshop because she wanted to focus more on her own writing for a while. Ironically, Marcel visited our workshop and gave a reading from one of his books – The Great Longing – in English, Stacey's translation. It was wonderful –students and faculty alike were enthralled. Afterwards we sat in the salon of the castle – named for the fifteen-year-old daughter of the house, Sophie, who had died nearly 500 years before – sipping cognac from snifters and talking, and Marcel was encouraging Stacey to go on translating his fiction. For an author to lose an outstanding translator is a great loss.
I said to Marcel, “She’s good, huh?” and he said, “The best.” So I asked Stacey, "What does it take to be as good a translator as you clearly are?" and she answered, "You have to put yourself second."
I've never forgotten that. Now when I put on my translation cap, I remind myself that it must be a humble one, that while I'm translating, I am less important than the person I'm translating, that I come second. Of course I have to let my instinct and my intuition into the process as well – otherwise, the translation will be slavish and uninspired. But I must maintain that humility which will have me read and reread and reread and keep looking at words, hunting for the words that I translated quickly and facilely so that my eye might see them fresh, might see through the easy mistakes one makes, the false linguistic friends, or the easy mistaking of a present tense for a past, of a present tense used to indicate future. Actually, this process has also helped me in editing my own fiction – because it has made me more patient at revising my own stuff now, too, and even at proofing it.
Since most of the people I translate are still alive, if there is something I don't understand, I will contact them and question them about it to try to get it right, as close as I can to the original. And I always submit the translation to the author for final approval. Not all translators do -- some even have it in their contracts that they have the final say, and this can result in bad feelings.
Most Danes are good at English and can get a sense of it if you didn't quite catch something in the poem or fiction, and most are willing to work with you in the interests of getting it right, but without trying to usurp your "sovereignty" as the English-speaker in the relationship. Some will call in third parties to review the translation, and that can rankle, particularly if it is, for example, somebody’s cousin who happens to be good at English or born in Bath or somewhere – and Americans, as some find it amusing to remind us yanks, do not speak English. Sometimes the consultant called in is an academic with a lot of knowledge of English but little imaginative facility in deploying that knowledge.
Nonetheless, even in these cases, it behooves the translator (behooves me I should say) to resist the urge to fly into a Donald Duck like rage and simply dismiss all the “suggestions” out of hand. Because sometimes something valuable is brought into the process, sometimes something that you did passably is made better. And those moments call for a repositioning of the humble cap on the skull and, again, putting oneself second.I think for most people who aspire to be artists, their own vision is hard-pressed to put itself second to the vision of someone else. For this reason, I satisfy my wish to translate mostly with short works -- individual poems and stories, only occasionally a book. I have translated scores of poems and many stories, but of my approximately 28 books, only three are translations, and two of them are not quite completed yet. While I work on them, they come before my own writing. But those are short stints.It is indeed an honor and honorable work to render a piece of good writing, of art even, from another language into our own. It makes us a kind of messenger of the gods, a semi-divine go-between.
But although it is a pleasure for me to be able to do that, I have no doubt about it: I am a writer first.As a writer, sometimes you get a taste of being translated. Sometimes it is into a language that you have not a jot of understanding of, so you can only trust. I've had a few stories in the former Yugoslavian magazine SVESKA (which funnily enough means, very nearly, ‘prune’ in Danish, but ‘notebook’ in Serbian) and could only trust the translator because I could not even read my name in the Cyrillic lettering.
With Danish it is another matter. I do have a fair mastery of it and cannot resist involving myself if someone is translating something of mine from English. Once someone was rendering one of my stories into Danish and sent it to me for review. There was a sentence where I had incorporated a phrase from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" -- "the melancholy, long withdrawing roar" -- by which of course I meant the sentence to have an echo of the loss of faith as reflected from Arnold's magnificent poem. That sentence in my story had not been translated in any way resembling those words, and I suggested that she find the standard Danish translation of Arnold's poem so that the sound and sentiment of that line could be retained. She thought I was being fussy. "No one is going to notice this anyway," she said.
My current translator, Birgit Fuglsang, however, is a dream, and she makes me understand how much hard work it is to BE translated when you have a good translator who wants you to be fully satisfied with the result. Which keeps me honest when I am translating, too -- wearing the humble cap, keeping myself second.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
www.thomasekennedy.com
I, too, had done some translation of Danish literature, and my conversation with Stacey clarified something for me. At that time – late ‘80s/ early ‘90s – I was a kind of half-hearted translator- rendering stuff from Danish into English for no reason other than that I could not really fathom the impact of Danish poetry or fiction unless I got it over into my own native English. But I tended to be an impatient translator back then. I wanted the pay-off fast and if something didn't seem right, I would consider taking liberties to make it what I saw as right. A translation that I did of a Klaus Rifbjerg poem for the magazine Frank, Rifbjerg referred good-naturedly to as “enthusiastic.”
And occasionally I made the kind of mistakes that are called howlers. Obvious, glaring errors that evoke a howl in the knowing reader. I did this with a couple of poems by Thorkild Bjørnvig once – translations that were destined to appear in Tel Aviv Review. Thorkild was not only a wonderful poet who had an amazing life (for more information read his book The Pact – about his friendship with Karen Blixen – a.k.a. Isak Dinesen, known no doubt to some as Meryl Streep), but he was also, in my experience, an incredibly kind man who wore his very large reputation lightly. When I sent him my translations, he wrote back saying that they were excellent and he was very happy with them; however, he added, they are not about foxes but about ravens. (The word for fox in Danish has a resemblance to the word for raven, and I blundered right into that mistake because I had not carefully taken the time, eyes and mind wide open, to check and check again my translation.)
Stacey was clearly a more dedicated translator than I. We met at an international conference at Kasteel Well in the Netherlands, where I used to teach, and she was attending my fiction workshop because she wanted to focus more on her own writing for a while. Ironically, Marcel visited our workshop and gave a reading from one of his books – The Great Longing – in English, Stacey's translation. It was wonderful –students and faculty alike were enthralled. Afterwards we sat in the salon of the castle – named for the fifteen-year-old daughter of the house, Sophie, who had died nearly 500 years before – sipping cognac from snifters and talking, and Marcel was encouraging Stacey to go on translating his fiction. For an author to lose an outstanding translator is a great loss.
I said to Marcel, “She’s good, huh?” and he said, “The best.” So I asked Stacey, "What does it take to be as good a translator as you clearly are?" and she answered, "You have to put yourself second."
I've never forgotten that. Now when I put on my translation cap, I remind myself that it must be a humble one, that while I'm translating, I am less important than the person I'm translating, that I come second. Of course I have to let my instinct and my intuition into the process as well – otherwise, the translation will be slavish and uninspired. But I must maintain that humility which will have me read and reread and reread and keep looking at words, hunting for the words that I translated quickly and facilely so that my eye might see them fresh, might see through the easy mistakes one makes, the false linguistic friends, or the easy mistaking of a present tense for a past, of a present tense used to indicate future. Actually, this process has also helped me in editing my own fiction – because it has made me more patient at revising my own stuff now, too, and even at proofing it.
Since most of the people I translate are still alive, if there is something I don't understand, I will contact them and question them about it to try to get it right, as close as I can to the original. And I always submit the translation to the author for final approval. Not all translators do -- some even have it in their contracts that they have the final say, and this can result in bad feelings.
Most Danes are good at English and can get a sense of it if you didn't quite catch something in the poem or fiction, and most are willing to work with you in the interests of getting it right, but without trying to usurp your "sovereignty" as the English-speaker in the relationship. Some will call in third parties to review the translation, and that can rankle, particularly if it is, for example, somebody’s cousin who happens to be good at English or born in Bath or somewhere – and Americans, as some find it amusing to remind us yanks, do not speak English. Sometimes the consultant called in is an academic with a lot of knowledge of English but little imaginative facility in deploying that knowledge.
Nonetheless, even in these cases, it behooves the translator (behooves me I should say) to resist the urge to fly into a Donald Duck like rage and simply dismiss all the “suggestions” out of hand. Because sometimes something valuable is brought into the process, sometimes something that you did passably is made better. And those moments call for a repositioning of the humble cap on the skull and, again, putting oneself second.I think for most people who aspire to be artists, their own vision is hard-pressed to put itself second to the vision of someone else. For this reason, I satisfy my wish to translate mostly with short works -- individual poems and stories, only occasionally a book. I have translated scores of poems and many stories, but of my approximately 28 books, only three are translations, and two of them are not quite completed yet. While I work on them, they come before my own writing. But those are short stints.It is indeed an honor and honorable work to render a piece of good writing, of art even, from another language into our own. It makes us a kind of messenger of the gods, a semi-divine go-between.
But although it is a pleasure for me to be able to do that, I have no doubt about it: I am a writer first.As a writer, sometimes you get a taste of being translated. Sometimes it is into a language that you have not a jot of understanding of, so you can only trust. I've had a few stories in the former Yugoslavian magazine SVESKA (which funnily enough means, very nearly, ‘prune’ in Danish, but ‘notebook’ in Serbian) and could only trust the translator because I could not even read my name in the Cyrillic lettering.
With Danish it is another matter. I do have a fair mastery of it and cannot resist involving myself if someone is translating something of mine from English. Once someone was rendering one of my stories into Danish and sent it to me for review. There was a sentence where I had incorporated a phrase from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" -- "the melancholy, long withdrawing roar" -- by which of course I meant the sentence to have an echo of the loss of faith as reflected from Arnold's magnificent poem. That sentence in my story had not been translated in any way resembling those words, and I suggested that she find the standard Danish translation of Arnold's poem so that the sound and sentiment of that line could be retained. She thought I was being fussy. "No one is going to notice this anyway," she said.
My current translator, Birgit Fuglsang, however, is a dream, and she makes me understand how much hard work it is to BE translated when you have a good translator who wants you to be fully satisfied with the result. Which keeps me honest when I am translating, too -- wearing the humble cap, keeping myself second.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
www.thomasekennedy.com
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
THE BOOKSHOPS OF COPENHAGEN MINUS ONE: Chester's turns the key.
A couple of months back, I had the pleasure of sharing the joy that the city I chose as my home has, amongst its many delights (which include 1,525 serving houses), at least eight outstanding independent bookstores: Arnold Busck, Politiken’s Boghal, Atheneum, Chester’s Book Café, Paludan’s Book Café, Tranquebar, the Jazz Cellar (mostly records but also books), and the absolutely unique, Booktrader.
Well as of this evening – Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 – their number has decreased by one when Chester’s Book Café turned the key on its Christianshavn Shop for good. For bad, rather. It is always sorrowful to say goodbye to a great place, an inspired space.
Chester’s – with its leaders Anders and Lars – has been a wonderfully supportive place, not only for readers, but also for writers. The café had a variety of excellent coffee and cakes, beers and wine, and hosted regular public readings. I personally launched each of the four novels of my Copenhagen Quartet there. Walter Cummins and I launched our co-edited book, The Literary Traveler, there three years ago and were joined at the reading by the wonderful Baronness Varvara, whom the essay I read was about. Chester’s also hosted the launch of an issue of The Literary Review in which I had included a feature focusing on the Danish Writers School and including samples of work from several of the students who had recently completed their education there. A couple of years back, I assisted in the launch of a book by the 93-year-old (alas now deceased) Bob Deane, who had written about his late wife, Ebba Lund – the girl with the red beret who had helped ferry many many Jews to safety in Sweden when the Germans occupied Denmark during World War II. And my partner, Alice Maud Guldbrandsen, launched her book there in 2005, Silence Was My Song: The Bombing of the French School – an emotional evening of remembering not only the dead, but also the survivors of that tragic catastrophe. And last year, Chester’s generously hosted the launches of both my new books – a novel and a story collection.
That’s at least ten readings that I myself and Alice had the privilege of holding there – but there were scores and scores more, by outstanding Danish and international writers.
Chester’s was a place that cared about writers and made us feel at home. The shop stocked our books and made them visible and available to the many readers who came in to enjoy a coffee while browsing and listening to the jazz playing from Chester’s outstanding collection of CDs. It was a place where we spent many pleasant afternoons and evenings –even on past closing time until we finally moved the company around the corner to the Eiffel Bar to continue into the wee hours.
About three weeks ago, Alice and I went in and heard the sad news from Anders. Alice was in again a couple of days ago to say goodbye – I couldn’t make it then or for the closing reception today, so I have to choose this method of saying goodbye and paying tribute to a great place for books that ended much too soon.
Chester’s will continue to exist as an on-line bookshop, and that is good. They will even continue to sell their excellent blends of coffee on-line, and that is good, too.
Still, I have reached the age where I don’t like changes – especially changes of this sort. Chester’s was there for not quite five years. All of us who had the good fortune to be frequent visitors there can count ourselves among the lucky ones.
We’ll remember Chester’s. Thank you, Anders. Thank you, Lars. Thanks to all of those who made it run.
Don’t forget to google Chester’s Bogcafé or contact chester@chester.dk for future book orders.
And don’t forget to support your local independent bookstores. Because if you don’t, they will disappear. And we need them.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
(www.thomasekennedy.com)
Well as of this evening – Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 – their number has decreased by one when Chester’s Book Café turned the key on its Christianshavn Shop for good. For bad, rather. It is always sorrowful to say goodbye to a great place, an inspired space.
Chester’s – with its leaders Anders and Lars – has been a wonderfully supportive place, not only for readers, but also for writers. The café had a variety of excellent coffee and cakes, beers and wine, and hosted regular public readings. I personally launched each of the four novels of my Copenhagen Quartet there. Walter Cummins and I launched our co-edited book, The Literary Traveler, there three years ago and were joined at the reading by the wonderful Baronness Varvara, whom the essay I read was about. Chester’s also hosted the launch of an issue of The Literary Review in which I had included a feature focusing on the Danish Writers School and including samples of work from several of the students who had recently completed their education there. A couple of years back, I assisted in the launch of a book by the 93-year-old (alas now deceased) Bob Deane, who had written about his late wife, Ebba Lund – the girl with the red beret who had helped ferry many many Jews to safety in Sweden when the Germans occupied Denmark during World War II. And my partner, Alice Maud Guldbrandsen, launched her book there in 2005, Silence Was My Song: The Bombing of the French School – an emotional evening of remembering not only the dead, but also the survivors of that tragic catastrophe. And last year, Chester’s generously hosted the launches of both my new books – a novel and a story collection.
That’s at least ten readings that I myself and Alice had the privilege of holding there – but there were scores and scores more, by outstanding Danish and international writers.
Chester’s was a place that cared about writers and made us feel at home. The shop stocked our books and made them visible and available to the many readers who came in to enjoy a coffee while browsing and listening to the jazz playing from Chester’s outstanding collection of CDs. It was a place where we spent many pleasant afternoons and evenings –even on past closing time until we finally moved the company around the corner to the Eiffel Bar to continue into the wee hours.
About three weeks ago, Alice and I went in and heard the sad news from Anders. Alice was in again a couple of days ago to say goodbye – I couldn’t make it then or for the closing reception today, so I have to choose this method of saying goodbye and paying tribute to a great place for books that ended much too soon.
Chester’s will continue to exist as an on-line bookshop, and that is good. They will even continue to sell their excellent blends of coffee on-line, and that is good, too.
Still, I have reached the age where I don’t like changes – especially changes of this sort. Chester’s was there for not quite five years. All of us who had the good fortune to be frequent visitors there can count ourselves among the lucky ones.
We’ll remember Chester’s. Thank you, Anders. Thank you, Lars. Thanks to all of those who made it run.
Don’t forget to google Chester’s Bogcafé or contact chester@chester.dk for future book orders.
And don’t forget to support your local independent bookstores. Because if you don’t, they will disappear. And we need them.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
(www.thomasekennedy.com)
Monday, February 11, 2008
SEX WORKERS OF THE WORLD REJOICE!
As readers of these periodic Shouts will know, prostitution has been legal in Denmark since the end of the last millennium. In a society where it is viewed as a violation of human rights to force a woman to carry a pregnancy to term – because it is, after all, that woman's body over which to decide, it seems quite logical to decline to criminalize the sale of sexual services by an adult woman – or man, for that matter. Thus, prostitution has been legal here since 1999.
What is not legal, however and fortunately, is for third parties to profit from the sale of sexual services. This would seem to have solved – at least in principle – the old problem of trying to suppress the oldest profession. (That unscrupulous persons do exist who find ways to exploit women and children and force them into sexual slavery is also an unfortunate, nay, despicable fact; but this Shout is not about that – this Shout is about another, to my mind, brighter aspect of this issue.)
As my criminologist friend here, Professor Dave Sorensen, has pointed out to me, this also led to the solution of a long-standing problem about the right of the physically and mentally handicapped in this advanced social democracy to have their sexual urges satisfied on a regular basis – with public funding. At present, a monthly government allotment is available for visits to prostitutes by disabled persons in recognition of the inevitability of sexual desire and of the rights of all adults to seek satisfaction for their sexual needs with consenting adult partners. (How can you fail to love a country that recognizes the inalienable right of men and women to get laid?! And provides funds to secure the fulfillment of that right?)
This allotment has been in focus in the media recently because a fellow named Torben Hansen, who suffers from cerebral palsy, has sued the government for declining to cover the additional costs of having a prostitute visit him in his home because "access barriers" prevent him from visiting a prostitute himself – which, he charges, constitutes disability discrimination. (If Torben can't come to the prostitute, let the prostitute come to Torben.)
At a time when doctors no longer routinely make house calls, it would hardly seem fair to expect a prostitute to do so without extra compensation. (This might be said to constitute professional discrimination.) The question here is whether the state is willing, or required, to pay that extra fee. In the case of medical visits, it is a matter of how sick the patient is – if you are very sick, an emergency doctor can be dispatched; so perhaps in the case of the prostitution service it should be a matter of how horny you are – whether you are, so to speak, dying for it. As Molly Bloom said to Leopold, "Give us a touch, Poldy. I'm dying for it!"
And as my friend, Professor Sorensen points out with a bemused smile, there is also a movement afoot to secure the right to government-funded prostitution for the unattractive, the awkward, the bashful, those with halitosis…
I say that if you fund it, they will come.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
(www.thomasekennedy.com and www.copnhagenquartet.com)
What is not legal, however and fortunately, is for third parties to profit from the sale of sexual services. This would seem to have solved – at least in principle – the old problem of trying to suppress the oldest profession. (That unscrupulous persons do exist who find ways to exploit women and children and force them into sexual slavery is also an unfortunate, nay, despicable fact; but this Shout is not about that – this Shout is about another, to my mind, brighter aspect of this issue.)
As my criminologist friend here, Professor Dave Sorensen, has pointed out to me, this also led to the solution of a long-standing problem about the right of the physically and mentally handicapped in this advanced social democracy to have their sexual urges satisfied on a regular basis – with public funding. At present, a monthly government allotment is available for visits to prostitutes by disabled persons in recognition of the inevitability of sexual desire and of the rights of all adults to seek satisfaction for their sexual needs with consenting adult partners. (How can you fail to love a country that recognizes the inalienable right of men and women to get laid?! And provides funds to secure the fulfillment of that right?)
This allotment has been in focus in the media recently because a fellow named Torben Hansen, who suffers from cerebral palsy, has sued the government for declining to cover the additional costs of having a prostitute visit him in his home because "access barriers" prevent him from visiting a prostitute himself – which, he charges, constitutes disability discrimination. (If Torben can't come to the prostitute, let the prostitute come to Torben.)
At a time when doctors no longer routinely make house calls, it would hardly seem fair to expect a prostitute to do so without extra compensation. (This might be said to constitute professional discrimination.) The question here is whether the state is willing, or required, to pay that extra fee. In the case of medical visits, it is a matter of how sick the patient is – if you are very sick, an emergency doctor can be dispatched; so perhaps in the case of the prostitution service it should be a matter of how horny you are – whether you are, so to speak, dying for it. As Molly Bloom said to Leopold, "Give us a touch, Poldy. I'm dying for it!"
And as my friend, Professor Sorensen points out with a bemused smile, there is also a movement afoot to secure the right to government-funded prostitution for the unattractive, the awkward, the bashful, those with halitosis…
I say that if you fund it, they will come.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
(www.thomasekennedy.com and www.copnhagenquartet.com)
Monday, February 4, 2008
LIFE, DEATH & GRACE PALEY
A few months ago Grace Paley died. I met her only once and had always hoped I might have the good fortune to meet her again. That one time was in 1986 at a barbeque in Vermont one summer evening, and to the annoyance of the hosts and other guests, I hogged her company far longer than was polite. Why she allowed me to do so I do not know, for I can only imagine it was uncomfortable to hear me lengthily gushing at her ear trying to articulate the pleasure her stories had given me, how particularly her story “Faith in a Tree” had encouraged me. She would have been 64 years old that evening, my age now; at 42, I perceived her as elderly. But wise. And she radiated something warm and kind and smiling. In any event, she was kind enough not to turn her back and flee, to allow me my one opportunity to celebrate her.
She was not quite 85 when she died, and The New Yorker in December of 2007 published a poem of hers about death which takes my breath away each time I read it. Until reading that poem, the statements about death which have most satisfied my own perception of the inevitable end we cannot quite conceive have been ancient ones – from Chaucer and Gilgamesh:
There is the house where people sit in darkness;
dust is their food and clay their meat.
they are clothed like birds with wings for covering,
they see no light, they sit in darkness…the house of dust.”
-The Epic of Gilgamesh (tr N. K. Sandars)
and
What is this world? What asketh man to have?
Now with his love, now in his colde grave,
Allone, withouten any compaignye.
Fare wel, my swete…
-Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Knight’s Tale,” lines 2776-80
Now, however, I add Grace Paley’s breath-taking expression of the end awaiting us all – because somehow it takes the cold loneliness of that end and makes it an embrace of another, of the one you most love, a last embrace in words:
One Day
One day
one of us
will be lost
to the other
this has been
talked about but
lightly turning
away shyness this
business of con-
fronting the
preference for
survival
my mother said the
children are grown we
are both so sick let us
die together my father
replied no no you
will be well he lied
of course I
want you in the world
whether I’m in it or
not your spirit
I probably mean
there is always
something to say in
the end speaking
without breath one
of us will be lost
to the other
-Grace Paley
Against the poems of death, of course, there are the ones of life. Grace Paley’s marvelous story “Faith in a Tree” has always – since I first read it in New American Review number one from 1967 – been such a confirmation of the determination to live and be happy, and I keep it in my heart alongside two others – one from antiquity, one from the mid-20th century.
The former is, again, from Gilgamesh, the words of the divine ale-wife challenging the hero’s ambition to find eternity:
Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh, where do you roam?
Why do you come here, wandering these pastures
In search of the wind?
The life you seek you shall not find,
When the gods created mankind,
Death for mankind they held in mind,
Life they kept inside their hands.
You, Gilgamesh, fill your belly,
Make merry by day and by night.
Of each day make a feast of rejoicing,
Day and night dance and play!
Let your garments be sparkling fresh,
Thy head be washed; bathe thou in water,
Pay heed to the little one that reaches for your hand,
Delight your spouse with your embrace
And rejoice in hers.
For this, too, is the lot of mankind!
And finally there is this exchange between Caligula and his advisor Cherea in Albert Camus’s play, Caligula, which sums up most simply and profoundly, to my mind, the choice that lies before us:
Caligula: Men die, and they are not happy.
Cherea : Yes, but I choose to live and to be happy.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
See also http://www.copenhagenquartet.com/ for information on four independent novels about the souls and seasons of Copenhagen, each written in a different style and set in a different season and which can be read independently of one another or together in any order desired: Kerrigan's Copenhagen, A Love Story, which is a novel disguised as a guide to the bars of Copenhagen, each chapter unfolding in a different serving house; Bluett's Blue Hours, a noir tale about the deep dark of Copenhagen winter and the seamier sides of life in this beautiful capital; Greene's Summer, about a Chilean torture survivor who comes to Copenhagen to be treated in a torture rehabilitation center and meets a Danish woman who has herself survived a violent marriage; and Danish Fall, a satire about 12 people connected to a Danish firm which is being downsized.
And on the website http://www.thomasekennedy.com/ you are invited to see film clips from a documentary video of the Copenhagen novels and find information about Kennedy’s 2007 books of fiction, A Passion in the Desert and Cast Upon the Day, as well as the forthcoming essay 2008 essay collections: Riding the Dog: A Look back at America and
Writers on the Job: 20 Tales of the Nonwriting Life (co-edited with Walter Cummins)
She was not quite 85 when she died, and The New Yorker in December of 2007 published a poem of hers about death which takes my breath away each time I read it. Until reading that poem, the statements about death which have most satisfied my own perception of the inevitable end we cannot quite conceive have been ancient ones – from Chaucer and Gilgamesh:
There is the house where people sit in darkness;
dust is their food and clay their meat.
they are clothed like birds with wings for covering,
they see no light, they sit in darkness…the house of dust.”
-The Epic of Gilgamesh (tr N. K. Sandars)
and
What is this world? What asketh man to have?
Now with his love, now in his colde grave,
Allone, withouten any compaignye.
Fare wel, my swete…
-Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Knight’s Tale,” lines 2776-80
Now, however, I add Grace Paley’s breath-taking expression of the end awaiting us all – because somehow it takes the cold loneliness of that end and makes it an embrace of another, of the one you most love, a last embrace in words:
One Day
One day
one of us
will be lost
to the other
this has been
talked about but
lightly turning
away shyness this
business of con-
fronting the
preference for
survival
my mother said the
children are grown we
are both so sick let us
die together my father
replied no no you
will be well he lied
of course I
want you in the world
whether I’m in it or
not your spirit
I probably mean
there is always
something to say in
the end speaking
without breath one
of us will be lost
to the other
-Grace Paley
Against the poems of death, of course, there are the ones of life. Grace Paley’s marvelous story “Faith in a Tree” has always – since I first read it in New American Review number one from 1967 – been such a confirmation of the determination to live and be happy, and I keep it in my heart alongside two others – one from antiquity, one from the mid-20th century.
The former is, again, from Gilgamesh, the words of the divine ale-wife challenging the hero’s ambition to find eternity:
Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh, where do you roam?
Why do you come here, wandering these pastures
In search of the wind?
The life you seek you shall not find,
When the gods created mankind,
Death for mankind they held in mind,
Life they kept inside their hands.
You, Gilgamesh, fill your belly,
Make merry by day and by night.
Of each day make a feast of rejoicing,
Day and night dance and play!
Let your garments be sparkling fresh,
Thy head be washed; bathe thou in water,
Pay heed to the little one that reaches for your hand,
Delight your spouse with your embrace
And rejoice in hers.
For this, too, is the lot of mankind!
And finally there is this exchange between Caligula and his advisor Cherea in Albert Camus’s play, Caligula, which sums up most simply and profoundly, to my mind, the choice that lies before us:
Caligula: Men die, and they are not happy.
Cherea : Yes, but I choose to live and to be happy.
Greetings from this ancient kingdom!
Thomas E. Kennedy
See also http://www.copenhagenquartet.com/ for information on four independent novels about the souls and seasons of Copenhagen, each written in a different style and set in a different season and which can be read independently of one another or together in any order desired: Kerrigan's Copenhagen, A Love Story, which is a novel disguised as a guide to the bars of Copenhagen, each chapter unfolding in a different serving house; Bluett's Blue Hours, a noir tale about the deep dark of Copenhagen winter and the seamier sides of life in this beautiful capital; Greene's Summer, about a Chilean torture survivor who comes to Copenhagen to be treated in a torture rehabilitation center and meets a Danish woman who has herself survived a violent marriage; and Danish Fall, a satire about 12 people connected to a Danish firm which is being downsized.
And on the website http://www.thomasekennedy.com/ you are invited to see film clips from a documentary video of the Copenhagen novels and find information about Kennedy’s 2007 books of fiction, A Passion in the Desert and Cast Upon the Day, as well as the forthcoming essay 2008 essay collections: Riding the Dog: A Look back at America and
Writers on the Job: 20 Tales of the Nonwriting Life (co-edited with Walter Cummins)
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