Book reviews at European Literature Network

Over the last few years, I have been writing book reviews for the European Literature Network, which aims to promoted translated European literature for anglophone readers. Here are some of the most interesting ones:

The Girl with the Leica, by Helena Janeczek. https://www.eurolitnetwork.com/rivetingreviews-jennifer-sarha-reviews-the-girl-with-the-leica-by-helena-janeczek/

Antal Szerb. https://www.eurolitnetwork.com/rivetingreviews-antal-szerb-why-you-should-be-reading-him-by-jennifer-sarha/

Journeying, by Claudio Magris. https://www.eurolitnetwork.com/rivetingreviews-antal-szerb-why-you-should-be-reading-him-by-jennifer-sarha/

The Impostor by Javier Cercas. https://www.eurolitnetwork.com/rivetingreviews-jennifer-sarha-reviews-the-impostor-by-javier-cercas/

Zone by Mathias Enard. https://www.eurolitnetwork.com/%e2%80%8erivetingreviews/

Painters' Paintings at the National Gallery; or, working your working space.

The Painters’ Paintings at the National Gallery is not the kind of exhibition I would generally want to pay money to see – too many pictures of people, I thought, too many portraits of the artist and his friends, when my preference is for landscapes and architectural spaces. Being in London for the Bank Holiday Monday, however, I had another look at the exhibition website and thought, hmm, there could be interesting stories about what the artists had thought about the paintings they possessed.

There were, but that’s not what made this the most enjoyable and thought-provoking exhibition I have seen in a long time.

The curators were clear about what had inspired this exhibition: a gift from Lucian Freud of Corot’s The Italian Woman, donated to the National Gallery in 2013. From this began an interest in the private collections of artists, and what we can learn from them. This is a question they have explored through eight painters, with Freud, Matisse, Degas, Reynolds, Watts, Leighton, Lawrence, and van Dyck. Each is presented with a self-portrait, and the first two of these, Freud and Matisse, struck me with a follow-up question: what do we wear to work when we work from home?

©Musée Departement Henri Matisse

Both Freud and Matisse wear suits in their self-portraits, Freud with a grey suit with no shirt underneath, Matisse with a brown morning suit. The first was selected, I would guess, for the effect of grey cloth with pink flesh. The second, however, just looks like a suit he would wear in daily life, suggestive of Matisse’s status as a gentleman who wears certain kinds of suits in certain times of day. Both seem an impractical choice – surely you are likely to splatter paint on your clothes as you work – and I don’t know whether they actually wore these suits while they were painting. But what matters, what is more interesting, is that they chose to present themselves as doing so. It makes these suits their ‘work-clothes’, outfits worn especially to indicate one’s status as currently working, different from the clothes worn at home while not-working, or outside, when one’s audience is larger and more societal in nature. For anyone who has worked from home, this is a crucial question – what differentiates the work-you from the home-you when both are at home?

Walking through the rest of the exhibition with this in mind, I noted the prevalence of the painter’s smock – a more practical outfit, clearly, but also one which denotes the artist’s professional identity. The most interesting portrait, however, and one which gave me oodles of delight, was Watts’s Self-Portrait in a Red Robe, where he has dressed up as a Venetian lawyer from the Renaissance. Here is a man who, on deciding how to present himself in his self-portrait, thought that a costume from a different historical and cultural context would be the way to go. I love it, and will from now on aim to stealth-cosplay (as a Young Revolutionary from Les Miserables? As Lix Storm from The Hour? As Arthur from Inception?) at least once a week.

 © Watts Gallery

Another thought which I kept returning to throughout the exhibition was the question of work space. What does it tell us that Freud liked to look at contemplative women in his living room? Degas surrounded himself with paintings by his friends and rivals – what did he get out of looking at them? Suggestions for a new kind of brushwork, ideas for dynamic composition, different ways for capturing the world? My walls tend to be covered in historical landscapes involving water (Canaletto, Gallen-Kallela), with occasional pockets of nineteenth-century train travel – what does that say about me? My computer sits under an early modern Flemish interior and a nineteenth-century painting of an Alhambra courtyard – what kind of a work space do they create?

And this is where the crux of the exhibition lies for me; it’s about work, how we present ourselves physically when we work, what identities we assume when we are ‘at-work’, what kind of a space do we need to do our best work. It’s a question rarely raised beyond particular professional uniforms or health and safety concerns over ergonomic chairs, but it is, I think, worth considering. Who knows what I might produce dressed as Enjolras and staring at Caravaggio’s Bacchus all day long?

Sicily: Culture, Conquest, and multiculturalism

A few weeks ago I went to see the British Museum exhibition Sicily: Culture and Conquest. My interest in Sicily stems from two things: Diodorus Siculus, a first-century BCE Greek historian from Agyrium in Sicily, has been the main object of my research for many years (he is the primary classical source on Sardanapalus). Secondly, I am a great admirer of Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, and in the third season of that show Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter spend several weeks in Palermo, allowing the show to apply its magnificent cinematographic gaze to the Cappella Palatina, and giving me an incurable longing to visit. An exhibition focusing specifically on Greek and Norman Sicily was thus a curiously fortunate combination of all the things I most wanted to see.

I was not disappointed; the exhibition was full of historically interesting artefacts as well as beautiful art, and accompanied by large-scale photographs of Sicilian scenery, which did nothing to abate my yearning to travel. It was also thoughtfully curated, and the companion book provided further information on Sicilian history and on what seems to be the focus of the exhibition: multiculturalism. Although Sicily has been colonised by numerous foreign invaders (Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs), the most significant cultural productions seem to have occurred during the Greek (734-241 BCE) and Norman (1061-1266 CE) periods. These were also times when the colonisers chose to incorporate previous local traditions and practices into their own, and brought about a culturally hybrid society.

One remarkable artefact was the tombstone of a woman named Anna, dating to from 1148 and including eulogies in four languages: Judeo-Arabic, Latin, Greek and Arabic. These texts were not simply translations of each other; rather they took the trouble to record the year of her death in the respective cultural traditions – 1148 in Latin, 544 in Arabic, 6657 in Greek (from the creation of the world in 5508 BCE) and 4909 in Judeo-Arabic (from the creation of the world in 3761 BCE). This tells us something about the cultural context in which Anna lived: that she and her family were probably multi-lingual and multi-religious, and that both of these things were something they wanted to highlight, and to share with their community. Theirs was, it suggests, a community in which multiculturalism was a part of social life.

One other thing which gave me great delight at the exhibition was the Sicilian Arabic poetry peppering the exhibition walls, written by local poets after the Norman conquest, and discussing the complicated notions of home after exile. Thus writes Ibn Hamdis, born in Syracuse in 1056 CE, who left the island after the conquest:

Oh my Sicily. In memory

A desperate longing for you and

For the follies of my youth returns. Again I see

The lost happiness and the splendid friends,

Oh Paradise from which I was expelled!

What is the point of recalling your splendour?

It is perhaps a subtle theme throughout the exhibition, but worth keeping in mind when we engage with cultural history, and culturally charged artefacts; to what extent is culture connected to nationalities and nationalisms? Does cultural engagement necessarily vary between ownership and appropriation, or is there a wider range of possibilities – interaction without laying claims?

Oratory and Rhetoric: Skills Training for the Modern Age

Last week I attended a conference on Oratory and Rhetoric: Ancient to Early Modern at University College London. My own research looks at both classical antiquity and its reception in the early modern period, and it was a pleasure to hear papers focused specifically on the transmission and use of ancient materials. In addition to such scholarly joys, however, there was a question which kept rising during the presentations as well as in the discussions afterwards: the potential application of oratory and rhetoric for modern life. What advice would a classical rhetorician, or an early modern one, give about the practical uses of effective language?

 

This is a topic that interests me, but I would like to approach it a little sideways. Oratory and rhetoric have a long history with many areas of focus, and one which I’ve been researching recently is the idea of rhetoric as praxis, as a practical wisdom which enables us to respond to and manage varied information – factual data, persuasive arguments, the mood of your audience. Rhetoric is, at heart, about manipulating language in order to produce a certain response. This involves figuring out what constitutes effective language, and in the history of rhetoric and oratory we have thousands of years of research into the best way to teach this skill.

Aristotle in the fourth century BCE categorised rhetoric as a practical science, with an aim not just to produce knowledge, but also to induce action. Cicero in the first century BCE positioned rhetoric as the organising principle of all fields of inquiry. Both of these writers had an immense impact on later developments in education, particularly rhetorical skills training – Cicero, for one, was used as the ideal model of good writing for several centuries in the late medieval and early modern periods.

One of the ways in which this training was accomplished was by asking students to produce detailed commentaries on ancient texts, involving an analysis of the different parts of speech: the choice of vocabulary, the structure of the argument, the effect created by emotive or rational appeals. These commentaries survive, with varying levels of originality, from the fourth century CE onwards, which means that we can follow the different ways people have understood what constitutes effective language. They also allow us to unpack the cultural logic which underpins their ideas – if Quintilian in the first century CE warns against speaking ‘effeminately’, does he say this for the same reasons that orators in the twenty-first century would?

The ability to analyse the construction of a given text is a skill we teach in English Literature courses; our students are trained to assess style and content as well as historical and political context, and to create elegantly formed and well-knit arguments (ideally!) based on their readings. And although this is a practice generally applied to literary texts, I have in my lecturing days invited my students to perform a rhetorical analysis of an academic article – because how can you write an argument if you don’t know how to read one?

This kind of critical intelligence is the primary outcome of a humanities education, but knowing how to assess arguments has use beyond academia. Being capable of analysing both the intended point of a text and the strategies employed to create that effect is a key part of media literacy – this is something we all need to know in order to judge things like political speeches, or the validity of a blog post, or even the quality of a newspaper article. Moreover, the ability to apply these critical skills into your own writing – deciding the appropriate language and the relevant content for a job application or a professional email – is crucial for modern life.

The historical study of oratory and rhetoric includes a wealth of strategies for teaching these skills, which can, in turn, be applied to modern needs and modern training practices. And if impact in higher education is about delivering transferable skills, here is a vast source of research that is waiting to be tapped. Who would not want to attend a CPD session inspired by Cicero’s rhetorical practice? Or communications workshop based on Quintilian and gendered language?

Sources: 

Aristotle, Rhetoric.

Cicero, De Oratore.

Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Maud W. Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380-1620 (Oxford: OUP, 2011).

Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria.

Delacroix, Sardanapalus, and liking things

Last week I went to see an exhibition on Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art at the National Gallery. It’s an intriguingly curated show – there are clear opportunities to see the influence of other painters on Delacroix as well as the influence of Delacroix on others, but there are also organised explorations around research questions, both conceptual (the development of orientalism) and historical (Delacroix’ reputation in the art world). Which made it a very enjoyable event, and enjoyable precisely as a thought-provoking experience.

The thoughts I had were, naturally, about the Death of Sardanapalus. Sardanapalus, the legendary last king of Assyria and the topic of my research for the past six years, was famous for his crossdressing, bisexuality, and being deft with a spindle. Not that you see any of that in Delacroix’s painting, which is more concerned with the interaction between decadence and death. 

Sardanapalus was also known for losing his kingdom to Arbaces the Mede, and choosing to die on a pyre with all his eunuchs, concubines, and treasures rather than be captured by the enemy. There was considerable interest in antiquity in the exact amount of stuff which Sardanapalus added to his pyre – Athenaeus of Naucratis, one of the main sources on the Sardanapalus legend, lists the number of golden couches and tables (150) as well as talents of gold and silver, and of course purple cloths. Diodorus Siculus, on the other hand, spends only one sentence on it, and Lord Byron’s play Sardanapalus, which inspired Delacroix, depicts a somewhat different scenario. Within the later history of the Sardanapalus legend this is not a scene that has received much attention.

Which raises the question of why Delacroix chose it instead of, say, the dramatic moment of Arbaces discovering Sardanapalus in the midst of his concubines, spinning purple wool. There are, I’m sure, good reasons related to contemporary trends in historical painting, or the personal interests of the painter, but looking at it as a Sardanapalus scholar, it occurs to me to wonder why people choose to engage with this character. What is there in his narrative that makes people want to include him in their art? In my work, I look at how Sardanapalus was used as a rhetorical tool with argumentative power, but apart from his value in logical disputation, does anybody like him? Sardanapalus is very rarely portrayed with anything other than vituperation; he was an exemplar of a man deserving invective for both Aristotle and Cicero, and their later influence has ensured that this attitude was repeated until (at least) the nineteenth century. Byron’s play Sardanapalus was reviewed as correctly representing an ‘effeminate’ character; the thought of not counting this against him doesn’t seem to have occurred to anybody.  

I find him interesting because he embodies something that is supposed to be inherently incompatible: a man who wears women’s clothing and enjoys the ‘delights of Aphrodite with men as well as women’, but is also a successful military commander who defeats the rebels in three battles. This apparent contradiction has resulted in a lot of debate, in which various writers attempt to explain, or explain away, the impossibility of these two characteristics being possessed by the same man. Which in turn ends up revealing a lot about the tortuous logic used to prop up normative concepts of gender. This has been the focus of my research for many years, and I’ve enjoyed thinking about it, as you do when you spend a lot of time wrapping your mind around the same question.

But I also find Sardanapalus delightful in his own right. Every narrative which tells his story takes on an editorial stance, usually disapproving, but at the centre of it all is a guy who refuses to be ashamed of his gender practices or his sexual preferences. This for me is the most interesting part about Byron’s play – Sardanapalus’s defence of his philosophy of life, used to counter the accusations of Salemenes, Arbaces, and Myrrha, who all feel that he should not be what he is. It is worth remembering that is the play which Delacroix read, and then ignored; the scene which he painted does not occur in Byron’s play, only in Diodorus.

Which is rather interesting in itself.

Umberto Eco: Working at the Interstices

The death of Umberto Eco – novelist, scholar, probably the best-known public intellectual in Europe – last week was a loss to the world. I have been reading and rereading his books for twenty years, both his novels and his academic works, and they have been an endless source of delight; it is a great sadness that we shall have no more. Eco’s writings reflect his remarkable mind, and the idea that everything is interesting, everything is worth exploring. There is a curiosity about the world, combined with a consistently applied seriousness: Eco might talk about Thomas Aquinas or about Italian television, but his consideration of both is equally thoughtful.

For an academic, this can have revolutionary implications – allowing your focus to expand beyond your current project, spending time thinking about something not covered by departmental research parameters. As an independent scholar, this is a pleasure I have been allowing myself more and more. It is a practice which has enriched my research as well as my quality of life.

Last summer I spent many commuter hours reading Eco’s popular non-fiction, and many lunch hours with his online interviews. My favourite is one from the Paris Review, which includes a description of Eco’s work practices:

I always say that I am able to use the interstices. (…)Our lives are full of interstices. This morning you rang, but then you had to wait for the elevator, and several seconds elapsed before you showed up at the door. During those seconds, waiting for you, I was thinking of this new piece I’m writing. I can work in the water closet, in the train. While swimming I produce a lot of things, especially in the sea. Less so in the bathtub, but there too.

It is a simple thought, and not new; that imaginative and intellectual labour can be achieved anywhere, that we need not be chained to our desks to work. Yet what comes across here is less the spread of work to every moment of every day (which for many of us is already ingrained) than the removal of ‘work’ from thinking. A freedom from the pressure of ‘work’ at least, from the anxiety of being productive. What if we were able to look at thinking as an opportunity, a pleasure, rather than a duty?

This pleasure of thinking is what makes Eco such a fascinating historical novelist. It’s not only that he offers detailed and accurate information about the period in question, but that he creates a plot around the crucial debates of the time. His historical context is not something in the background, a question of fashion or architecture or a few local wars, but rather it constitutes the point of the story. By showing us what people were arguing about, Eco enables us to see the cultural framework that underpins those arguments.

In the Name of the Rose we have debates about heresy, but we are made to see them as being about reconciling different political practices as much as about what constitutes religious dogma – and above all, about turning individual preferences to ideology. The question of whether laughter is compatible with Christianity might seem to us a ridiculous dilemma, but Eco’s novel demonstrates how it could constitute a reasonable query, how it works and is supported by the accepted imaginative reality to which logic can be applied. Much as we might debate about whether Han shot first, or what would have happened if Neville Longbottom had been the Chosen One, or whether Steve Rogers will ever find his Bucky. These are arguments that you have in the pub rather than on a podium.

I started rereading Baudolino over the weekend; a novel ostensibly about the creation of the Prester John legend. Like all of Eco’s novels, it’s built around an inquiry, in this case how to force Italian cities to stop fighting each other so that Frederick Barbarossa can take a break. But it’s also about how rhetoric can be used as a social strategy, and the temptations of narrative imperatives, and whether reality is constituted or informed by language, and many other things I haven’t yet got to. These are the debates Baudolino is having with his friends, with colleagues and enemies and strangers in the bar. These are, I suspect, debates which I will be having inside my head for a while.

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).