Europe 1600-1815; or, artefacts which make me feel feelings about history

The Victoria and Albert Museum has a new permanent exhibition about European cultural artefacts from 1600 to 1815. I went to see it today, and it was – how shall I put this – fantastic. While my devotion to the British Museum remains sincere and unalterable, there were displays here which made me glow with happiness, and I definitely intend to go again. (And again. Visitors to London, this is where I will be dragging you next.)

It is a large exhibition, with variation in both cultural origin and societal usage. We start with Napoleon in Egypt, move through the French Revolution to home decorations and local fashions throughout Europe (I particularly liked the Norwegian wooden tankards), a brief interlude in a Venetian masquerade (where they have a wii-like game in which you can dance with a harlequin – I would have tried, but there was a group of very enthusiastic old ladies before me. NEXT TIME.), to neo-classicism, literary salons, and Louis XIV, finishing with some lovely Berninis.

There were several pieces I loved. Cutlery with slogans from the French Revolution was a delight, and I made a special point of checking if the gift shop had any modern replicas for sale (they did not). Which is a shame, because  I would have bought them and gleefully used them. But I also appreciated the curation here; it is one thing to know that political events influenced the production of goods, and quite another to have those goods presented in their original context. Not only was there information about when and where they were made, but it was also clear that there were competing production lines for different political affiliations, pro-king and pro-revolution, and that this was a way to demonstrate your views. As well as to manufacture and sell a brand. One thing I would have liked to see was more information about who owned these particular objects. I appreciate that space is limited and that provenance is not always available, but it would have been interesting to know who bought a mug with Louis XVI hugging his family goodbye.

© Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Another favourite was an eighteenth-century French tray for salon board games, in which players travel from meeting to friendship and love (or acquaintance, or apathy, or contempt). Last year I attended an evening of French salon games at the Warburg Institute, and this game was one of the options offered (We were also invited to make our own. I don’t remember what I put in mine but I remember enjoying it immensely, which is slightly ominous in retrospect). The whole evening was highly entertaining; we played a memory game involving tragic sighs, attached beauty spots to interesting places, and told romantic stories competitively (I won). The lady who had organised the event mentioned that she was interested in arranging something similar as an evening at the V&A – perhaps she knew they had an original board – but I’ve not heard of any such things happening. It would, I think, be a draw. Certainly I would draw all my friends in.

The last part of the exhibition which I will particularly mention (I have saved some for next time, because there were so many delightful things) is the inclusion of three small rooms: a mirrored room from Lombardy, the cabinet of a Parisian noblewoman from 1778, and an interior with wood panelling and classical motifs. These were gorgeous, and inspired the aforementioned glow, because they showed not only the objects and the decorations, but also how they may have looked in their original context and, moreover, how they would have been used. The mirrored room has a harp; I knew that ladies in the eighteenth century played music, but this showed me where they might have performed, what kind of an instrument they might have used, what they could have looked at while they played. Or, I knew that ladies had closets in which they retired to read and write (Samuel Richardson’s novels are full of ladies with private closets, and are ostensibly mostly written in them), but I hadn’t realised what one such room might look like: a fireplace, a few chairs for receiving visitors, decorated walls so that she would have something pleasant to look at as she read. In both cases, we get a sense of what it would have been like to occupy that space. And that, as an imaginative endeavour, was both fascinating and highly enjoyable.

Lisbon; or, reading poetry in a language you don't (quite) know

Two months ago I was in Lisbon, climbing the hill of Alfama in order to visit the Castelo São Jorge. I had just arrived from London and Lisbon was full of sunshine; I had already decided that this was the most beautiful city in the world.

Castelo São Jorge, a Moorish citadel captured by the Portuguese Christians in 1147 (José Saramago’s novel The History of the Siege of Lisbon investigates this event) consists of a fortified area at the top of one of Lisbon’s seven hills. It contains the ruins of a fortress, a small archaeological museum, a dilapidated garden enclosure with fountains, a courtyard with a miradouro (a view-seeing terrace), and ramparts covering half the citadel which overlook the city of Lisbon. It’s one of the few parts of Lisbon that survived the earthquake of 1755, and offers fantastic views as well as historically interesting architecture.

The Castelo São Jorge was the first thing I had wanted to see in Lisbon, and I began my excursion with a walk around the walls – mostly so that I could continue looking at Lisbon from on high as well as making happy sighs because everything was so amazingly beautiful. There were stone benches for people to sit on, a wine-kiosk and a café; it was clearly a space made for slow meandering. This was an approach I was prepared to take, and so I meandered. Noticing some writing on a nearby bench, I meandered closer to have a look, and discovered a poem by Sophia de Brello Meyner.

© J. J. sarha

Here’s the thing – standing in front of this bench you are at the top of the tallest hill in Lisbon, with the city on your right and the estuary of the river Tejo on your left. There is a lot of water and a lot of sky, and a lot of pale buildings to reflect the water and the sky. There’s a lot of light. This is pretty much the perfect place in the world to read that poem – reading it there will punch you right in the feelings. What interests me is that someone had decided to place this bench there and to engrave it with poetry; someone had decided that this is what people should think and feel when they stand there. 

Specifically, this is what English-speaking people should experience – people who probably won’t know anything about Sophia de Mello Breyner or about Portuguese poetry, but who ought to know that this poetry exists, and that it is something that can contribute the view in front of them.

A good decision, I thought. I came home and looked into Sophia de Mello Breyner, and discovered that she was a renowned twentieth-century writer, famous for writing children’s stories as well as poetry, and that she had been a critic of Salazar’s dictatorship and had briefly served as an MP for the Socialist Party. She is the second woman to have been buried in the Pantheon after Amalia Rodrigues. 

Three of Sophia de Mello Breyner’s collections have been translated into English. Nevertheless, I was interested to see how her poetry would work in Portuguese – I am a translator by hobby (and occasionally by profession), and while my Portuguese is, ahem, limited, I was eager to see the structure of the poems as well as any sonal qualities that might be missed in the English version. My academic translations tend to aim towards word for word transmission rather than elegantly formed English, so I was also curious to see what kind of a poetic tension could take place between two languages.

What I found was A Bilingual Anthology of  28 Portuguese Poets, translated by Richard Zenith and Alexis Levitin. It includes a general introduction to modern Portuguese poetry – very useful for a newbie like me – and on page 5, there was this:

Thinking is a discomfort, like walking in the rain

When the wind kicks up and it seems to rain harder.

Pensar incomoda como andar à chuva

Quando o vento cresce e parece que chove mais.

The author is Alberto Caiero, a shepherd-poet who mostly writes about sheep – this poem is called ‘The Keeper of Sheep’. Or rather, the author is Fernando Pessoa, the most famous Portuguese poet of the twentieth century, and Alberto Caiero is one of his heteronyms: fictional poetic personas with separate biographies, styles, and interests. Alberto Caiero is a shepherd-poet, but there is also Álvaro de Campos, a naval engineer, and Ricardo de Reis, a classicist (further immortalised in another Saramago novel, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, in which Reis returns from Brazil after Pessoa’s death and has interactions with his ghost). Pessoa’s best-known work is The Book of Disquiet (Livro do Desassossego), written from the perspective of Bernardo Soares, an assistant book-keeper. (This is a book I’d brought with me to Lisbon, and consumed as appropriate with Portuguese wine, occasionally reading out loud to my travel companion. It’s about a depressed alcoholic trying to escape from or delve into his own brain, and it’s wonderful.) Being able to read Fernando Pessoa in the original is one of the reasons I am studying Portuguese.

But there were other gems in this anthology; for example, Eugénio de Andrade, a friend of Sophia de Mello Breyner and a translator of Federico Garcia Lorca.

OUTROS RITMOS, OUTROS MODOS

Não é o mar, não é o vinto, é o sol

que me dói da cintura aos sapatos.

Sol de fins de julho,

ou de agosto a prumo: finas

agulhas de aço.

É o sol destes dias, aceso

na folhagem.

Bebendo a minha água.

Colado à minha pele.

É doutro território, doutro areal.

Tem outros ritmos, outros modos,

outros vagares para roer

a cal, morder-me os olhos.

Até quando cega canta ao arder.

It isn’t the sea, it isn’t the wind, it’s the sun

that aches in me from my waist to my shoes.

The sun of late July,

or perpendicular in August: fine

needles of steel.

It is the sun of these days, burning

in the foliage.

Drinking my water.

Stuck to my skin.

It’s from another realm, another stretch of sand.

It has other rhythms, other modes,

other lazing times in which to gnaw

limestone, bite my eyes.

Even as it blinds, it sings as it burns.

I’ve been studying Portuguese with Duolingo since May – I have a basic grasp of grammar and some vocabulary, but I would struggle to have a conversation beyond ‘two tickets please’. My Portuguese is enough, however, to engage with this poem; I know that ‘não’ means ‘no’, and while the English translation of the first line is both accurate and pleasing, looking at the Portuguese version tells me that there is an emphasis on the ‘no’. This in the English version is given to the objects it denies, the sea and the wind and the sun. Portuguese, like Latin but unlike English, is somewhat flexible with word order, which allows such emphasis to be allocated.

Examining the sentence structure from the third line onwards, I am able to note that the sun becomes the focal point of the argument, and that it maintains this centrality until the end. The English translation makes it clear that the sun constitutes the question which the poem is trying to answer; why does it work the way it does, on our eyes and on our skin? The sun in Lisbon is everywhere – I know myself that it can give both sunburn and lots of feelings – but does it borrow that light from somewhere else, other rhythms, other modes (outros ritmos, outros modos)? Is this why it works so insidiously? The Portuguese in this poem may be beyond my skills to translate, but reading it like this still allows me to interact with it. It also tells me things about how poetic rhythms work in Portuguese and how assonance can be made to serve rhyme.

My anthology is full of equally exciting texts, but I’m going to limit myself to just one sonnet, ‘Standing at Fearful Attention’ by Alexandre O'Neill.

Perfilados de medo, agradecemos

o medo que nos salva da loucura.

Decisão e coragem valem menos

e a vida sem viver é mais segura.

Aventureiros já sem aventura,

perfilados de medo combatemos

irónicos fantasmas à procura

do que não fomos, do que não seremos.

Perfilados de medo, sem mais voz,

o coração nos dentes oprimido,

os loucos, os fantasmas somos nós.

Rebanho pelo medo perseguido,

já vivemos tão juntos e tão sós

que da vida perdemos o sentido…

Standing at fearful attention, we’re grateful

to fear, which keeps us from going mad.

Decision and courage are bad

for our health; life without living is safer.

Explorers whose exploits are history,

standing in fear we struggle against

ironic ghosts in our ongoing quest

for what we weren’t and never will be.

Standing in fear with no voice of our own,

just teeth that gnash on our hearts in fury,

we are the madmen, we are the ghosts.

A flock of sheep pursued by fear,

we live so together and so alone

that life’s meaning has disappeared.

Sources:

Richard Zenith (ed.), 28 Portuguese Poets. A Bilingual Anthology (Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2015).

Lions! At the British Museum

Yesterday I visited the lions at the British Museum. Not the ones by the front entrance, although I might have said hello to them (silently) as I walked past, but the ones in the Assyrian collection (Room 10, to the left of the main entrance). These lions once adorned the walls King Ashurbanipal’s (c. 668-627 BCE) North Palace in Nineveh. The labels do a marvellous job of telling us how the wall panels would have been placed within Ashurbanipal’s palace, and also where the palace would have been situated in Nineveh. (Not that a virtual re-imagining of what it might have looked like would not also be lovely – get on that, British Museum!)

I visited the lions because they are one of my favourite exhibits in the British Museum, but also because I am working on a project for my friend Rebecca Moss, who has created a fantastic piece of public art involving a different kind of lion. Her work features Chinese guardian lions, an ornamental tradition of placing lion statues at the gates of important buildings as protection. Lions are not native to China, and this tradition is thought to have originated in the Asiatic lions which were given as tribute by Central Asian states during the Han dynasty. The same species of lion, then, that would have roamed the hills of Mesopotamia and that were commemorated in Ashurbanipal’s wall panels.

© Trustees of the British Museum

The label next to the reliefs draws our attention to the fact that while lions have been represented in Mesopotamian art for a long time before the Neo-Assyrian period (c. 911-609 BCE), these were sculpted with particular care and vividness. Lions were seen as a worthy opponent of the king, and it was the king’s particular duty to protect his people by hunting and killing them – no one else was permitted to do so. (There exists a letter from an anxious writer who wants to know what he should do about a lion trapped in his loft – apparently it was eventually sent to the king in a cage.)

In the British Museum, we see Ashurbanipal shooting arrows at lions, throwing javelins at lions, holding a club (only partially visible) over a lion, rescuing foreign princes from lions, and stabbing a lion while holding it by the throat. (The fact that one of the consequences of his focus on lions is a statue in San Francisco, commissioned by the Assyrian diaspora, showing Ashurbanipal tenderly cuddling a lion-cub  is a source of endless delight.)

This is royal propaganda, to be sure, but there are many interesting things going on apart from the sheer display of power. The special hat of the king, for one; a special hat, according to Julian Reade, which only the king was allowed to wear, and which consisted of a felt helmet and a sort of tied up bandana. The one worn by Ashurbanipal is always decorated with flowers, some of which resemble the star of Ishtar. We know that Ashurbanipal aligned himself with Ishtar in several of his public statements – one of his inscriptions narrates a vision in which Ishtar promises to aid him in battle, and to fight in his stead. Perhaps these ornamentations are another way to signal this affiliation? I now have a mind to go through every sculpted portrait of Ashurbanipal just to examine the specifics of his flower symbolism.

© Trustees of the British Museum

There is variety among the flowers as well. When I started looking for specifically Ishtarian symbols, I realised how many flowers there were; tied to Ashurbanipal’s wrists and elbows as bracelets, filling the fabric of his clothes, even decorating the reins on his horses. I also noticed that he is the only one wearing decoration-filled garments – everyone else, courtiers as well as servants, are shown wearing plain clothes. What does this say about him? Was he the only one allowed decorative symbols in his clothes, or is this a sculptural point about how the King is very very special?

But to return to the lions. Ashurbanipal’s display of his lion-killing prowess may have a hint of head-of-state-wrestling-with-tigers, but what I find fascinating is the fact that he draws attention to its performativity. In two of the panels, we see that the lion is caged; we also see a little boy, with a cage of his own (Health and Safety in the Neo-Assyrian court!), who is clearly tasked with releasing the lion. Ashurbanipal is showing us that his lions were delivered to his palace for him to kill at his leisure. (There is a wonderfully sarcastic label next to this, pointing out that the King apparently found it more convenient this way.) 

© Trustees of the British Museum

And this is interesting. He could have presented himself killing the lions in the wild, and those of us looking at him 2600 years later would never have known. So why does he do this? What kind of power is he trying to display here, a king deliberately portraying himself as cautious? What kind of cultural logic is at work here?

There is also a tame lion depicted in one of the panels, sharing a wall with a dog on a leash. Perhaps these sculptures are less about Ashurbanipal (well, insofar as anything commissioned by Ashurbanipal is ever about anything else – he is very committed to his self-branding, which is one of the reasons I find him so endearing) than about lions. A dog is a wild animal which needs to be tied up in order to be allowed in the King’s garden. But a lion, the King’s enemy and equal, may enjoy it at his ease.

 © Trustees of the British Museum

Sources:

• Augusta McMahon, ‘The Lion, the King, and the Cage: Late Chalcolithic Iconography and Ideology in Northern Mesopotamia’, Iraq, 71 (2009), pp. 115-124.
• Arthur Piepkorn, Historical Prism Inscriptions of Ashurbanipal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933).
• Julian Reade, Assyrian Sculptures (London: The British Museum Press, 1983).
• Edward H. Schafer,  The Golden Peaches of Samarkand, a Study of T'ang Exotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963).