Moralistic claptrap

As so often, Cat and Girl speaks my mind.

Crimean Sonnets

Thanks to the magic of Google Books I've finally managed to track down a complete copy of the Barbara Underwood translations of Mickiewicz's Crimean Sonnets - Mickiewicz is famously untranslatable, but I've always been a fan of Underwood's (rather loose) renderings of these poems. This one, which I had not read before, struck me particularly. The eponymous Tchatir Dagh is a tall mountain in the south of Crimea, which is the subject of a number of the sonnets.

TCHATIR DAGH

(The Pilgrim)

Below me half a world I see outspread;
     Above, blue heaven; around, peaks of snow;
And yet the happy pulse of life is slow,
     I dream of distant places, pleasures dead.
The woods of Lithuania I would tread
     Where happy-throated birds sing songs I know;
Above the trembling marshland I would go
     Where chill-winged curlews dip and call o'er head.

A tragic, lonely terror grips my heart,
     A longing for some peaceful, gentle place,
And memories of youthful love I trace.
     Unto my childhood home I long to start,
And yet if all the leaves my name could cry
     She would not pause nor heed as she passed by.

And in the original Polish:

U stóp moich kraina dostatków i krasy,
Nad głową niebo jasne, obok piękne lice;
Dlaczegoż stąd ucieka serce w okolice
Dalekie, i - niestety! jeszcze dalsze czasy?

Litwo! piały mi wdzięczniej twe szumiące lasy
Niż słowiki Bajdaru, Salhiry dziewice;
I weselszy deptałem twoje trzęsawice
Niż rubinowe morwy, złote ananasy.

Tak daleki! tak różna wabi mię ponęta!
Dlaczegoż roztargniony wzdycham bez ustanku
Do tej, którą kochałem w dni moich poranku?

Ona w lubej dziedzinie, która mi odjęta,
Gdzie jej wszystko o wiernym powiada kochanku;
Depcąc świeże me ślady czyż o mnie pamięta?

The comparison with the Polish original is interesting. It's quite different. Mickiewicz's writing is often histrionic and a little shouty - Underwood has a more staid, understated style.

They are both products of their time, I suppose - the Crimean Sonnets were published in around 1830, Underwood's translations are from 1917. Mickiewicz's verse is looser, the lines jerk all over the place - questions and exclamations proliferate. Underwood's verse is taught, almost Victorian - it's remarkable to me that she insisted on an Italian rhyme scheme for her sonnets, rather than a Shakespearean one generally better-suited to English, but this kind of clean, crisp and highly regulated verse is typical of late-19th/early-20th century poets.

I appreciate Underwood's more meditative approach, however - it chimes nicely with the classical Chinese poetry I've been reading lately, which is nearly always quietly ruminative. Might this be the Quaker in me reflected in my taste in poetry? One wonders.

Stories from Afghanistan

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the outstanding online literary journal Words Without Borders, every month they publish English translations of world literature, usually a different country each month, although they are occasionally arranged thematically. This month's issue covers contemporary writing from Afghanistan, and I'm in the process of making my way through it. There's some wonderful, magical stuff in there.

In "The Idol's Dust" by Zalmay Babakohi, the Talibs in charge of demolishing the colossal Buddhas at Bamiyan find that each pebble of the destroyed statues is itself a small sculpture of the Buddha... before realizing that they themselves are being transformed into stone statues.

"Dasht-e-Laili" is an intense piece about the massacre of Taliban troops in the Dasht-e-Laili desert during the American invasion in 2001, where hundreds or thousands of Taliban prisoners were loaded into shipping containers and suffocated to death before being buried in mass graves. The subject matter and storytelling style are strongly reminiscent of Polish holocaust writing like The Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. The story is in some ways more shocking, though, as it's an event that has not been widely reported in the American press.

My favorite so far, though, has been "To Arrive" by Asef Soltanzadeh, about the arrival of an old Afghan man in Copenhagen airport, where he has come to join his son in in Denmark.  The first paragraph gives you a clue of the languorous, winding style of the story:

When you get off the airplane, it will not be like Kabul airport, or like other cities of Afghanistan for that matter, where they drive stairs up and attach them to the door and then take down the passengers one by one. These days, there have been improvements everywhere, old man. But we, we are lagging behind, and war has taken us further and further back. The only thing we think of is devastation, and not creation . . . they will drive the bridge up and attach it to the airplane door, and when you have passed through, you will arrive in the airport’s waiting room.

As it dawns on the old man that his son is not at the airport waiting for him, he sets off to find his way, not knowing where he is going or knowing any Danish other than the words "yes", "no", and "WC". The slow pace of the action belies a gripping suspense, as his confusion and disorientation are interlaced with memories of his life back in Afghanistan, where his wife's recent death left him with no one to take care of him and prompted him to move to Denmark, where his son sought asylum after deserting from the army during the Soviet invasion. "To Arrive" is what short stories are all about - it's note-perfect. Anders Widmark, the issue's editor and translator of many of the stories, says of Soltanzadeh that he "will become the next great storyteller of Afghanistan." If so, I hope I will have the pleasure of reading more of his writing in the future.

Scottish superlatives

The Guardian is calling an SNP majority in Holyrood - a result that under the STV+ system is supposed to be basically impossible. Iain Macwherter writes that "seasoned political hacks were lost for superlatives in their efforts to encapsulate the scale of the Liberal Democrat defeat. Their vote didn't just collapse, it was vaporised." Areas with centuries-long histories of Liberalism have gone a lighter shade of yellow. Labour has been obliterated as well - and the Tories in Scotland have been nothing more than a rump for some time. The wonder of the whole thing is summed up best for my wonkish brain with this: "In the north-east, another Liberal hunting ground, the SNP won all 10 constituency seats, and then went on to win yet another seat on the top-up regional list vote, which is also supposed to be impossible with the d'Hondt method of calculating the top-up list." (emphasis mine)

Macwherter notes, correctly, that the crushing SNP victory doesn't indicate widespread support for independence in Scotland, which has stood at around 30% for some time. But this is a very exciting development for lefties like me. Scotland is in many respects Labour's base, and the SNP is challenging them from the left. There are serious problems with the SNP (they're big fans of spending money they don't have, for one), but this should put some of the fear of God into Labour. Ed Miliband has already said that Labour needs to "reasses" its policies and position in Scotland - and, frankly, there's nowhere for them to go but Left.

A more serious social democracy than the SNP is offering is exactly where I would like Labour to go - one less focused on throwing money at problems and huge government handouts, and more focused on creative, dynamic, market-inclusive (but not market-based) solutions for increasing social mobility and addressing poverty, deprivation and unemployment.

But this is a very exciting time for Scottish politics. Brian Taylor, BBC Scotland's political editor, wraps up an excellent blog post with these prescient words:

People were voting for a government. A government whose record they found acceptable.
They were not voting directly for independence. Mr Salmond openly acknowledges that.
But a referendum there will be.
I can just hear Alex Salmond now.
They told us, he will say, there would never be a Scottish Parliament.
Then never an SNP Government.
Then never an SNP majority.
Now they will tell us, he will add, that Scots will never vote for independence.

Perhaps, perhaps. That referendum campaign has yet to be called, let alone decided.

But right now Mr Salmond is entitled - fully entitled - to bask in the delight of a simply stunning victory.

The annals of backlash

The Republicans start to come to their senses on Medicare:

After House Republican leaders pushed through a budget that contained a politically charged plan to overhaul Medicare, the chairman of the House tax-writing committee suggested Thursday that he did not intend to draft legislation turning the proposal into law any time soon.
The comments by Representative Dave Camp, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, coupled with remarks by other top Republicans, suggested that the party’s Medicare proposal was firmly on hold even though lawmakers had taken a risky vote to support it in the House.
At a health policy forum at the National Press Club, Mr. Camp noted that Democrats had resisted the Republican approach and said he was “not interested in talking about whether the House is going to pass a bill that the Senate shows no interest in.”
“I’m not interested in laying down more markers,” Mr. Camp said.
His statement followed similar comments by other Republicans, including Representatives Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader, and Paul Ryan, the budget chairman who developed the Medicare plan. They both said Republicans recognized that they were unlikely to win approval of their sweeping Medicare proposal in the debt-reduction talks that began at Blair House on Thursday.

If you fight them they will back down.

Who is Osama bin Laden?

A more-than-slightly unsettling post from Jamelle Bouie over at The American Prospect:

These kids are mostly teenagers, most of whom were very young when 9/11 happened. But still - in ten years since the most historical event of the '00s, have their parents really never talked to them about 9/11 or Osama bin Laden? Did they just space out during that conversation? I just find this so difficult to believe. Bouie makes an even more unsettling point - more unsettling because it is certainly true:

[F]or each generation, America is a very different place, and the America we lost on 9/11 -- the America that didn't profile citizens, torture people, or monitor their phone calls -- isn't even a distan[t] memory for the children and teenagers of today's America.

Scary, isn't it?