the dense bush

The village itself, like most other villages, was made up of clusters of several hundred small round mud-and-thatch huts, which were scattered all over the plateau. The majority of the people, again like any other villagers in the land, were subsistence farmers by trade. Their lives revolved around their fields, which spread out on the eastern side of the village, across the valley. Also closely involved with their everyday way of life was the dense bush which almost enclosed the village in all directions but the east. Somehow, everything: the village, the valleys, the thick bush and the fertile brown fields were all in turn surrounded by hills and mountains.

Wilson Katiyo, A Son of the Soil, 1976 (”Not for resale outside Zimbabwe,” says this Longman reprint from 1988.)



That we are ourselves and that our leaders in space-time do not in fact exist; that there is sufficient peace in each of our deaths to maintain a universe of light; but we retain a compartment of loathing in each as a weapon; that we would as soon kill a leader as follow one; that to kill means to negate you before us, to void your identity so it is like ours, though less rich (your great ignorance) if you interfere at all with our lives, now passed in voluntary negation; that we also retain certain ancient shamanic or visionary powers, which allow the projection of images in public arenas, that is mind space, for the purposes of haunting, cursing, omenizing, and terrorizing those who would harm us or innocent others. this is not a fiction as document: it is proposed as vision to be deployed for instruction, weapon, solace, or nothing at all, we want you mindful that we see you, in all ways previously ascribed to omnipotent deity. i will continue to present the range of our power our syntax our marks our reflections and conversations, as scribe, as names, as light, as seer and as creature owl. you will do as you wish but may yet be affected, for you are not in control of all matter, and we are forceful and capable of changing the particles, for example, of thought and ideation. you may not be able to bear it; we hope you cannot.

Alice Notley, How the Dead Women may operate, from Negative Space, from Alma, or the Dead Women, 2006

repetitions and variations

We can observe these forms everywhere in nature, and we see how easily all forms of matter on earth – so why not the human consciousness as well? – will yield to what I’m calling the regulating effect of chance. In this way, we can find comfort in imagining that it’s possible to write as easily as frost creates its fernlike repetitions and variations on a window-pane, or as concisely as the flesh of kiwifruit clings to the black cardinal points of its seeds, and even that it might be possible to write completely gray on gray, as when a large cloud, without edges or breaks, will very slowly, as it spreads, begin to reveal a consistency and a direction.

Inger Christensen, The Regulating Effect of Chance, from The Condition of Secrecy: Essays, 2018, tr. Susanna Nied



Shudders of cold convulsed her. Her teeth chattered in an icy frost, full stop. Her shapely ice-cold hands lay still (as in a deep frost, shuddering with cold, slender woman with eyes wide open, renowned silk sheets), full stop. Her shining eyes wandered flickeringly in the dark, and her quaking lips breathed, colon, open quotation marks, capital o-aitch Helena, em-dash, em-dash, Helena, em-dash, close quotation marks, rotation marks, flotation marks.

Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1929, tr. Michael Hoffmann

our look is what keeps (forever)

The black is a cruel tangent to the little girl’s forehead and cheek. We can never escape from the other, grown-up face that has to deal with our looking and has seen our type before: we are intruders, we feel the pressure of the pages – the possibility of imaginative freedom – against our fingers; our look is what keeps (forever) the pages unread.

T.J. Clark, in his preface to the revised edition of The Painting of Modern Life, 1999. The painting he's describing is Manet’s Le Chermin de fer, 1872 – 73.



Here nothing is decided but only here can the power of decision be tested.

Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks, 1948, tr. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins

strolling grandly over the roof

For weeks he had forced himself not to look for Isobel, but this effort of will was no longer needed. He was like a man who stops writing letters to a friend he is soon to meet in the flesh.

Jessica Anderson, An Ordinary Lunacy, 1963



Mid-May had passed, and after the bell he heard the cry of a kite.
“So it’s here again,” he muttered to himself, listening from bed.
The kite seemed to be strolling grandly over the roof, and then it flew off toward the sea.
Shingo got up.
He scanned the sky as he brushed his teeth, but the kite was nowhere to be seen.
But it was as if a fresh young voice had departed and left the sky over the roof serene.

Yasunari Kawabata, The Sound of the Mountain, serialised 1949 – 1954, tr. Edward J. Seidensticker

between them are mixed ashes

The Poet is dead in me – my imagination (or rather the Somewhat that had been my imagination) lies, like a Cold Snuff on the Rim of a Brass Candle-stick, without even a stick of Tallow to remind you that it was once cloathed & mitred with Flame. That is past by! – I was once a Volume of Gold Leaf, rising & riding on every breath of Fancy – but I have beaten myself back into weight & density, & now I sink in quicksilver, yea, remain squat and square on the earth amid the hurricane, that makes Oaks and Straws join in one Dance, fifty yards high in the Element.

Coleridge in a letter to William Godwin, March 1801

It seems to those who cry that all is lost, almost all almost lost; worse still it seems on the one hand that all has been lost by me, on the other hand that all has lost me; a double mourning then spreads itself over the earth like two sheets, one black, one white, one feminine, one masculine, one easterned, one westerned, and between them are mixed ashes, showing now carmine now grey,

Hélène Cixous, Neuter, 1972, tr. Lorene M. Birden

a step when it is taken

Read this year.

What is a sentence. A sentence is a duplicate. An exact duplicate is depreciated. Why is a duplicated sentence not depreciated. Because it is a witness. No witnesses are without value.

(Gertrude Stein, How to Write, 1931)

“We will advise you to take any step you have decided on,” said Miss Luke. “It must be advisable to take a step. There is more point in a step when it is taken.”

(Ivy Compton-Burnett, More Women Than Men, 1933)

as if she was

As I was looking at three translations of Norwid’s Fortepian Szopena I noticed that everybody had translated one of the phrases, “co chwila, co chwila,” with a different set of words. One of them liked “moment, by moment,” another one “each moment, each moment,” and the last one, “from beat to beat.’ That was Teresa Bałuk, later criticised for being too nice and smooth by Agata Brajerska-Mazur, who said that in order to translate Norwid well you need “extensive knowledge -- not only of the translated text but also of the but also the whole of the author’s works and ideas.” (I don’t have any of that and I’m still disturbed by the infidelity to Norwid’s comma.) Arie Gallas, who co-translated the “each moment, each moment” version with Jerome Rothenberg, lists Polish among the Foreign Language Skills on his C.V., but their poem still comes with an afterword that claims he is “hard to conceive for those of us cut off from him by language.” Rothenberg, Gallas, and a third writer who has just entered their article, Jeffrey C. Robinson, prove their point by quoting Polish writers who agree on “the impenetrable obscurity of [Norwid’s] style and his jarring syntax” (Czesław Miłosz). Their list ends with Bogday Czaykowski, who believes the dead poet “thought of himself as a reader of signs, of traces left by God for human beings to recognize and decipher.”

All of the Polish-English dictionaries I could find told me that “chwila” meant either “moment” or “instant”, with the Cambridge Polish-English Dictionary adding another suggestion, “while.” If, for some magical reason (say aliens cast spells on you), you needed to translate Norwid’s “chwila” as “while,” would the phrase have to become “in a while, in a while”? But then we’re always looking forward to a piece of future scenery without inhabiting our own moment and that seems to be the antithesis of those three real translations by Bałuk, Rothenberg, Gallas, and “moment, by moment”’s Danuta Borchardt.

Translation was on my mind. When I walked upstairs from the Norton Simon’s Ellsworth Kelly exhibition to the Henri Rousseau painting of monkeys in the galleries above I imagined the pointed leaves in Kelly’s Suite of Plants Lithographs were being echoed in Rousseau’s jungle. I remembered how happy André Gide sounds in his journals when he notices that his dislike of Alexandre Dumas is shared by an author he admires, Colette. It’s good for him to see his sensations removed from obscurity in another person.* On Monday, after I had stepped away from Maurice Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure, 1950, to watch Agnes Varda’s 1968 film, Lions Love (… and Lies), I had to put the book down for the rest of the day because Viva, one of the Lions characters, was reciting Blanchot’s lines in my head every time I came back to them. I had been reading a chapter that describes the condition of Anne, who is, argues Kevin S. Fitzgerald, a kind of Euridice removing herself from Thomas, who is an Orpheus. “[F]or Thomas's limit-experiences resemble the near death experience of Orpheus in Hades.”

“Then, suddenly,” writes Blanchot, in this translation by Robert Lamberton, “with the noise of a tempest she entered into a solitude made out of the suppression of all space, and, torn violently by the call of the hours, she unveiled herself. It was as if she was in a green valley where, invited to be the personal rhythm, the impersonal cadence of all things, she was becoming with her age and her youth, the age and youth of others.” Although I wouldn’t normally have seen a connection between Thomas and Viva, I realised that if the Warhol star really had begun saying those lines it would not have sounded wrong. The movie, in which people often borrow phrases from Shakespeare, or from Michael McLure’s 1965 play The Beard, or, in one scene, from St. Augustine, would have made sense of the words as they came out of her Buster Keaton stoneface, and the translation from one place to another would have felt legitimate.** Varda’s works are arguments for the carrying capacity of movies, all except Vagabond, 1985. (People who like Vagabond will talk about the personality of the protagonist rather than the filmness of the film.)

Instead of reading Thomas I wached the Melbourne Cup and fooled about, trying to fit the word “translation” around the death of Cliffsofmoher – translated from one of the three hopes of Ireland into nothing or something stupid like that. In light of the dead horse it seems strange to see all these live people running around.




* Originally I wrote “his hatred of Alexandre Dumas” which was nice but I was working off my memory of the passage and “hatred” felt like too much when I looked it up.

After Bella-Vista, which is quite recent, I take up La Maison de Claudine, which I did not yet know. I enjoy reading in it: “Neither my brothers’ enthusiasm nor my parents’ disapproving amazement got me to take an interest in The Three Musketeers.” Yes, I am glad not to be the only one who failed to lose his heart to Dumas père when his companion in boredom is Colette.” (11th of February, 1941. Translated by Justin O’Brian.)

Hatred was not really honest. “I can’t say hatred,” I thought.



** If I were Varda I would be making a joke about Viva’s stoneface being a stoned face, but it needs a French cadence and I’m not French. It would suit her general way of using words, Mur Murs, Faces Places, and so on.