Birthday Greetings Part Two

Today, May 9, is the birthday of Charles Simic, Lucian Blaga, Dante Alighieri.

Most everybody knows Dante Alighieri, and lots of people know Charles Simic, but Lucian Blaga is probably less known to Americans. So let’s start with him.

Blaga (May 9, 1895 – May 6, 1961) was a renowned Romanian philosopher and poet. He seems to have had equal influence as both, in that eastern European intellectual way where you could be a philosopher, writer, university professor and a diplomat, as Blaga was. Andrei Codrescu has translated some poems by Blaga in At the Court of Yearning: Poems by Lucian Blaga.

He also seems to have defined the Romanian spirit and it’s poetic horizon—a definition of Romanian national identity—using a really old folk ballad called Mioritza—as a combination of environment and culture in an essay called the Mioritic Space.

In the ballad, there are three shepherds. The first shepherd, a Moldavian, is warned by his lamb (the enchanted ewe Mioritza) that the others are going to kill him because he is wealthy and has more sheep, intending to steal his riches and flocks. The Moldavian accepts this stoically as his fate, and asks the lamb to tell the other two shepherds to bury him in the meadow near his sheep, nature and the stars. He also asks Mioritza to tell the other sheep, the shepherd’s mother, everyone else that he has not been killed but that he married a prince's daughter at heaven's gate.

The space bounded by the sheep’s travels, and thus the boundary of where the story exists, was what Blaga called the Mioritic Space, and co-extensive with the boundary of Romania. The telling of the story creates at the same time the culture and environment of Romania within which the story exists.

It’s probably more complicated than that but you get the idea.

Here’s a poem in English translation:

May Gives Itself With Sweet Abandon
Lucian Blaga

We shall remember once, and too late,
This simple, yet fine, moment,
This very bench where we are seated,
Your burning temple next to mine.
From hazel stamens, cinders fall
White as the poplars they land on.
Beginnings want to be fecund:
May gives itself with sweet abandon.
Hills of gold ash rise around us,
The pollen falls on you and me—
Falls on our shoulders and our lashes,
Into our mouths when speaking,
On eyes, when we are silent with wonder—
And there’s regret—we don’t know
Why it would tear us from each other.
We shall remember once, too late,
This particular moment,
This very bench where we are seated,
Your burning temple resting on mine.
We can see in dreams, through our longing—
Latent in the golden dust—
These forests that could be
But that will never, never, grow.

Next, the Ted Williams of poets: Dante Alighieri (May 9, 1265 – September 14, 1321)

What to say about the Dantemeister? Best poet ever?

I guess there’s some dispute about Dante’s exact day of birth, but what the heck. Let’s roll.

As we all know, DA occupies the same place in all of Italian historyslashculture that Blaga has in 20th Century Romania. He’s the man, the playmaker, the big cheese. T. S. Eliot’s favorite book of the Commedia was allegedly the Paradiso, but one can’t help thinking that, in some things, Eliot was kind of a jerk. Still it does have that socko ending:

Here powers failed my high imagination:
But by now my desire and will were turned,
Like a balanced wheel rotated evenly,

By Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

My original favorite-ish translation of the Commedia (XXXIII years ago) was Laurence Binyon’s, which Pound praised, and which Binyon wrote in an English version of terza rima. Nowadays there are lots of new translations of one or the other of the books. I really enjoyed Robert Pinksy’s when it came out and still do. He made a point of talking about the difference between English and Italian by saying the Italian phrase in the first line of the Commedia “silva oscura” (five syllables) is “dark woods” (two syllables) in English, though both have two beats.

Bethatasitmay, here’s three short excerpts from my three favorite Cantos:

If, however, to learn the root
Of our love is now your own desire,
I will speak as one who weeps in speaking.

One day for our pleasure we were reading
Of Lancelot and how love captured him.
We were alone and innocent of suspicion.

Several times the words forced our eyes
To meet and stole the color from our faces.
But one single moment conquered us.

As we read how her long-desired smile
Was kissed by that hero and lover,
This man, never to be severed from me,

Trembling, leaned over, kissed me on the mouth—
The author of that book was a Gallehaut—
And that day we read no more.

-Canto V, Inferno

. . . afterward I saw
Two souls frozen in one hole so close
That one’s head served as the other’s hood.

As a hungry man chews on a hard crust of bread,
The one on top sank his teeth into
The other’s nape at the base of the brain.

Tydeus gnawed the head of Menalippus
With no more fury than this sinner showed
In gnawing at the skull of skin and bone.

You who by this sign of bestiality
Show hatred for the one whom you devour,
Tell me why, I said; and for the favor,

If you have any reason for your grievance,
When I know who you are and what his sin,
I will pay you back in the world above

Unless my tongue should dry up in my throat.

Raising his mouth from his savage meal,
The sinner wiped his lips upon the hair
Of the head that he had chewed on from behind.

Then he began, You want me to make new
A desperate grief which even to call back
Crushes my heart before I start to speak.

But should my words become a fruitful seed
Of infamy for this traitor whom I gnaw,
You’ll see me speak and weep at the same time.

-Cantos XXXII & XXXIII, Inferno

A crown of olive over her white veil,
A woman appeared to me; beneath her green
Mantle she wore a robe of flaming red.

My soul, which for so long now
Had not felt as overwhelmed as when I’d stood
Trembling with fear in her presence,

Without seeing with my eyes
But by the veiled power she projected,
I felt the tremendous force of the old love.

The moment that uplifting power struck
My sight, as it had already pierced me through
Before I’d left my boyhood years behind,

I turned round to the left with the blind trust
Of a small child who races toward his mother
When panic hits him or he comes to grief,

To say to Virgil, There is not a drop
Of blood in me that is not trembling:
I recognize the signs of the old fire.

But Virgil — he had left me there bereft
Of himself — Virgil, my sweet father — Virgil
To whom I gave myself for my salvation!

Not even all our ancient mother Eve had lost
Could keep my cheeks, already washed with dew,
From turning dark once more with troubled tears.

Dante, because Virgil leaves you now,
Do not weep yet, do not weep yet, for you
Must weep for yet another pointed sword!

Like an admiral who goes to stern and prow
To see the crews that serve on other ships
And to encourage them to do good work,

So on the left side of the chariot —
When I turned, as I heard my name called,
Which I record here through necessity —

I saw the lady who first appeared to me
Veiled by the angels’ flower-festival
Fix her eyes on me from across the stream.

Although the veil that flowed down from her head
Which was encircled by Athena’s leaves
Did not permit her to be seen distinctly,

Like a queen unyielding in her look,
She went on like one who speaks and keeps
Back the most heated words until the end:

Look at me! I am, I am Beatrice!
How did you ever dare to climb this mountain?
Did you not know that people here are happy?

-Canto XXX, Purgatorio

'nuff said.

Speaking of Mount Purgatorio, May 9 is also the day (in the year 1336) that Italian poet Francesco Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux. Dante was a big influence on Petrarch, and Petrarch in turn was a big influence on Elizabethans like Willy the Shake. Frank wrote a big long letter about it, which is part Purgatorio, part Confessions. And in the letter he in fact quotes:

Men go to admire the high mountains and the great flood of the seas and the wide-rolling rivers and the ring of Ocean and the movement of the stars; and they forget themselves.

-Augustine of Hippo

You can find the letter online if you’ve a mind to.

Finally, today is also the birthday of current Poet Laureate Charles Simic.

Here’s a couple of poems by Mr. Simic:

Eyes Fastened With Pins
Charles Simic

How much death works,
No one knows what a long
Day he puts in. The little
Wife always alone
Ironing death's laundry
The beautiful daughters
Setting death's supper table.
The neighbors playing
Pinochle in the backyard
Or just sitting on the steps
Drinking beer. Death,
Meanwhile, in a strange
Part of town looking for
Someone with a bad cough
But the address somehow wrong,
Even death can't figure it out
Among all the locked doors...
And the rain beginning to fall
Long windy night ahead.
Death with not even a newspaper
To cover his head, not even
A dime to call the one pining away,
Undressing slowly, sleepily,
And stretching naked
On death's side of the bed.

In the Library
Charles Simic

for Octavio

There's a book called
"A Dictionary of Angels"
No one has opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered
The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.
Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.
She's very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.