Love the wild swan

One of the other books I'm reading these days is Czeslaw Milosz's A Year of the Hunter. This book is a diary of a year, 1987 Aug - 1988 July. I am still on early pages, now beginning September. 

I just perhaps need to reiterate this thing about a poet's prose. Somehow a poet's sensibility and the relationship with words, metaphors, phrases, sentences is quite something. The economy of the prose, the simplicity yet the depth it can reflect. Like deep, clean, refreshing pool of water. Generally, it is a treat to read prose by poets.

Here's a little paragraph and a poem he refers to from the preface:

There is also another explanation for the title. My youthful dreams of excursions "on the trail of nature" were never fulfilled, and yet I did become a hunter, although of a different sort: my game was the entire visible world and I have devoted my life trying to capture it in words, to making a direct hit with words. Alas, the present year of the hunter brings, in the main, reflections on the incommensurability of aspirations and accomplishments, despite the existence of an entire shelf of books written by me. I repeat to myself a poem by Robinson Jeffers that I translated into Polish a long time ago, and I see more clearly than ever before that I could well have adopted it as the motto for all my creative work:

Love The Wild Swan

"I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade's curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunger, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings."
- This wild swan of a world is no hunter's game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast,
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your...self? At least
Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

Czeslaw Milosz received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. Here is his Nobel Lecture. His fame he believes is narrow, what he calls "providential equanimity inscribed in my destiny: never too much fame, just the right amount."

Some time back I bought a book of his poems, translated. The poems are yet to find me. But his another collection, a poetry anthology 'A Book of Luminous Things' finds me flipping through its pages often. He has selected poems from all over the world, often translated, and presented across a few key themes. So many poems like the one above. A beautiful selection.

More from 'A Year of the Hunter' if I am able to read through more. 

A General Theory of Oblivion

Read this book at my pen friend’s recommendation. Novel by Jose Eduardo Agualusa. Translated from Portugese. It is about a woman, in Angola, living in an apartment locked out from the world for over thirty years, surviving. 

But perhaps it is also a quiet thank-you note to the simple joys of reading. A reader cannot help but note the sentences of reading-love spread throughout the book. I have collected some, here they are:

On the apartment, the books

Orlando owned a valuable library - thousands of titles, in Portugese, French, Spanish, English and German, among which almost all the great classics of universal literature were to be found. 

The misreading

My weakness, my vanishing eyesight, it means I stumble over letters as I read. I read pages I've read so many times before, but they're different now. I get things wrong, as I read, and in those mistakes, sometimes, I find incredible things that are right.

Further,

If I still had the space, the charcoal, and available walls, I could compose a great work about forgetting: a general theory of oblivion.

I realise I have transformed the entire apartment into a huge book. After burning the library, after I have died, all that remains will be my voice.

The books, burnt

Whenever she wanted to go out she would look for a book in the library. She felt, as she went on burning those books, after having burned all the furniture, the doors, the wooden floor tiles, that she was losing her freedom. It was as though she was incinerating the whole planet. When she burned Jose Amado she stopped being able to visit Ilheus and Sao Salvador. BurningUlysses, by Joyce, she had lost Dublin. Getting rid of Three Trapped Tigers, she incinerated old Havana. There were fewer than a hundred books left. She kept them more out of stubbornness than to make any use of them.

The boy learning to read

Then the boy did the washing-up and put away the crockery. He roamed about the house, curious:

'You know you've got a lot of books.'

'A lot of books? Yes, I did have a lot. There aren't many now.'

'I've never seen so many.'

'Can you read?'

'I'm not very good at putting the letters together. I only did one year at school.'

'Would you like me to teach you? I'll teach you to read and then you can read to me.'

Subalu learned to read while Ludo convalesced.

The doorman

Nasser Evangelista was pleased with his new job. He wore a blue uniform, very clean, and spent most of his time sitting at a desk, reading, while he watched the foor out the corner of his eye. He had developed his taste for reading during the years spent locked up in Sao Paulo prison in Luanda.

...That morning, Nasser Evangelista was rereading, for the seventh time, tge adventures of Robinson Crusoe..

Monte and his retirement

He planned to spend his final years rereading Jorge Amado, Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, Luandino Vieira, Ruy Duarte de Carvalho, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The woman, now old:

'My family is this boy, that mulemba tree out there, and a phantom dog. My eyesight gets worse every day... In any case, I don't aspire to any more: the light, Sabalu reading to me, the joy of a pomegranate every day.'

***

Lots about books, and reading.

And just perhaps how nature feels about her human children. So lost in ideas, forgetting the basics. Some sensible advice:

'You can eat better without spending more', she explained to Little Chief. 'You and your friends fill your mouths with big words  - Social Justice, Freedom, Revolution - and meanwhile people waste away, they fall ill, many of them die. Speeches don't feed people. What the people need are fresh vegetables, and a good fish broth at least once a week. I'm only interested in the kinds of revolution that starts off by getting people sat at the table.'

***

Another little beauty:

Exorcism

I carve out verses
short
as prayers

words are
legions
of demons
expelled

I cut adverbs
pronouns

I spare my
wrists

***

The book itself didn’t take long to read. In a long while have I read something this quickly. Just a few hours. It reminded me briefly of 2666, Bolano. Just an image.

Brief chapters, interspersed with empty title pages, the chapter titles like a poem running through the book, a lot of breathing space yet keeps you moving quick. Things converge, things so disparate converge… in a set of coincidences that forms the core narrative. But it is not a narrative. Perhaps a brief sketch. Underlying the sketch is a personal tragedy, that doesn’t make itself felt, except perhaps in the eccentricities. I feel that there is still an affirming of life in the book. The argument of to be or not to be is more between memory and forgetting. A general theory of oblivion.

Enjoyed the read.