Delicious descriptions

Delicious descriptions: Diego Marani on translation

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In Diego Marani’s The last of the Vostyachs, which I have just reviewed, the two linguists argue about language. The Russian, Olga, sees language as key to communication across cultures and to conveying plural meanings. She says to the Finnish Jarmo:

Your language has never known the dizzying heights of universality. No one studies it and all you can do is repeat it among yourselves, because it tells of a tiny country no one knows … our language is translated into a hundred others. A hundred other peoples want to understand us, and invent words in their own language which express our truths.

And hopefully, I presume, to then discuss respective truths heading towards mutual understanding!

For Jarmo though:

Translation causes a language to become solider; like blood in a transfusion, which is gradually tainted by impurities … By being translated, a language picks up meanings which are not its own, which infect it and poison it, and against which it has no defences.

Jarmo clearly has no interest in a global world! He’s not interested in change. In fact, at another point in the novel he says “change implies mistakes”. I’ve had many thoughts about change over my life-time but I must say this idea has not been uppermost.

In the next few weeks, I plan to review the current Quarterly Essay, Linda Jaivin’s Found in translation: In praise of a plural world. Having just read Marani, I think I am going to find this even more interesting than I had expected!

Delicious descriptions from Down under: Lebkowicz and Moorhouse on 1950s Canberra

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At the beginning of this year I reviewed Frank Moorhouse‘s Cold light (my review) which commences with the arrival of his protagonist, Edith Campbell Berry, in Canberra in 1950. The Petrovs, the subject of Lesley Lebkowicz’s The Petrov poems (my review), arrived in Canberra in 1951.

Lebkowicz’s description of Canberra accords very much with Moorhouse’s. The second poem in her verse novel is “Canberra”. It is one of the unrhyming couplet poems in the book – and is also one of the poems that concludes on a single (and significant) line. I’d love to quote it all but I’m not sure about the copyright rules regarding individual poems in a verse novel – so I’ll assume I can quote a goodly percentage of the poem but not all of it*. The poem begins with a lovely description of  the quiet, the space, the birds, and uses that colour most associated with Patrick White, “dun-coloured”, to describe the grass. It then continues

… Their house is between

Kingston and Manuka where shops
for clothing and food squat close to the ground.

There’s a news agency, a shop for sewing materials,
a furniture store – but no cafés, no restaurants.

Civic has two-storey buildings with cloisters
where in winter the wind from Cooma sharpens the cold

into blades. She shivers. All around sheep huddle
and graze, but in Griffith they have a whole house

to themselves: a whole house and plenty of food.

Compare this with Moorehouse’s Cold light. Edith has been offered the honorary (!) job of town planner. She does a lot of reading, and appreciates Walter Burley Griffin‘s** passion and is awed Marion Mahony Griffin‘s gorgeous drawings:

She even had a small vision of her own – about the lucerne. Why not have a working farm in the heart of the city? With cows and and sheep and haystacks. Didn’t Marie Antoinette have her farm – the petit hameau?

She doesn’t voice this to her “boss”, Gibson – “she might not mention this idea at this moment” – which is just as well:

He said, “What we need are more verticals, more variation of skyline, blocks of flats, spires.”

She thought not. Gibson did not have the awe of the plans there in his office; maybe he was past that.

Gibson said, “Griffin didn’t want skyscrapers because he wanted low, large buildings so that light and air could play their parts. Now we have too bloody much of both. Pardon my French. We have too much light and too much air and too many trees and too little else.”

She smiled to put him at ease.

Sixty years later, we are still planning Canberra. We are still arguing about the verticals. How high or how low should we go? And about the green (or dun-coloured as the case may be) spaces. Should we fill some in? But perhaps all cities are like this? In Meanjin‘s The Canberra issue (my review), journalist-author Chris Hammer says, “The city is evolving as the nation it serves is evolving …”. And that, I think, is as it should be.

* The full version is, however, on line at Verity La, albeit not formatted the way it is in the book.
** To read more about the Griffins and Marion’s drawings in particular, see here and here (click on the illustration to see it in better detail.)

Delicious descriptions from Down under: Jane Austen on politics

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I was going to label this post “Jane Austen and plus ça change” but then decided to be provocative, because Austen is regularly criticised for not discussing politics, what was happening in her time, in her novels. Of course, I disagree that novelists have to specifically write about the political background to their stories. Those living in her time would have known, for example, about the Napoleonic Wars and their impact on society, about ongoing discussions regarding slavery, parliamentary power, free trade, and so on. Austen didn’t need to explain that background, and those issues weren’t the matters that she wanted to write about. She had something bigger in mind – human nature.

Nonetheless, I was tickled when reading one of her juvenilia pieces, Catharine, or the bower*, the other day, to come across the following**:

the Conversation turning on the state of Affairs in the political World, Mrs Percival, who was firmly of opinion that the whole race of Mankind were degenerating, said that for her part, Everything she believed was going to rack and ruin, all order was destroyed over the face of the World, the house of Commons she heard did not break up sometimes till five in the Morning, and Depravity was never so general before; concluding with a wish that she might live to see the Manners of the People in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, restored again. “Well, Ma’am,” said her Neice [Catharine aka Kitty], “but I hope you do not mean with the times to restore Queen Elizabeth herself.”

“Queen Elizabeth,” said Mrs Stanley, who never hazarded a remark on History that was not well founded, “lived to a good old age, and was a very Clever Woman.” “True, Ma’am,” said Kitty; “but I do not consider either of those Circumstances as meritorious in herself, and they are very far from making me wish her return, for if she were to come again with the same Abilities and the same good Constitution She might do as much Mischeif and last as long as she did before-.”

Of course, this doesn’t address specific political events or situations, but it suggests (to me anyhow) that politics and history were topics of conversation in Austen’s neighbourhood, and that she was well able to satirise the quality of that discussion. It also demonstrates Austen’s ability to describe and satirise her characters through their own mouths!

Oh, and despite – or in addition to – my comments above, I would argue that Austen’s novels can have a political reading, can show how political debate and events were shaping her world, but that’s a topic for a different post.

*Written in 1792, her 17th year
**This rather idiosyncratic-looking text is based on the original manuscript in the British Library from the Oxford World’s Classics edition published by Oxford University Press (on my Kindle)

Delicious descriptions from Down under: Murray Bail on composers’ houses

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Beethoven's birth house

Beethoven’s birth house

During our recent trip to Europe we managed to follow the trails of a few composers*. We saw statues of JS Bach, CPE Bach, Felix Mendelssohn and Ludwig van Beethoven. We visited Eisenach, where Bach was born and saw the church where he was baptised. We visited Leipzig, where he worked for 27 years and saw the church where he wrote most of his best-known compositions. We visited the house in Weimar where Franz Liszt was based for the last 20 or so years of his life, and the house in Bonn where Beethoven was born. In a previous European trip we visited the house in Salzburg where Mozart was born. We’ve enjoyed this aspect of our tourism, the way it helps put these composers into some sort of geographic and historical perspective.

Given this, and my current interest in the meaning and value of travel, I was therefore rather tickled to read, just this morning, Murray Bail‘s comment in The voyage on composers’ houses:

… the idea of turning composers’ houses into holy houses with perfect wallpaper, bare desk and polished floorboards is more a display of falsity than history, although it hardly deters the visitors who go into every room, wanting to add layers to their general knowledge, mouths open in wonder, in Mozart’s case, amazing how a family with so many children could fit in such a space, how Mozart managed to work with his family around him, making the usual family racket, or the curator’s immaculate recreation of Beethoven’s rooms, not a speck of dust to be seen, though everyone knows he lived in disorder or squalor.

Oh dear, he does have a point!

Franz Liszt's bed

Franz Liszt’s actual bed

Indeed, in our experience, some (many, in fact) of these homes no longer have the composer’s furniture but have been furnished in period style. The curators don’t always even know what sort of furniture the famous inhabitant had, unless there are letters or some sort of contemporary inventory to tell them. In Liszt’s case though, his perspicacious supporter/ruler, Grand Duke Carl Alexander ordered within days of his death that the house be preserved because he knew fans would want to pay homage:

Since […] it can be assumed that Liszt’s innumerable friends and admirers […] will pay homage to the memory of the departed by visiting the rooms which he lived in, the Grand Duke strictly commands that nothing may be changed of the furniture and decorations, that is to the furnishings in the broadest sense, in the rooms in which Liszt lived.  (from the audioguide)

The furniture there really was Liszt’s. Does that make a difference? Do we feel more reverence or awe because we know the great man (or woman) sat on that chair? Is our experience somehow less, if we know the furniture isn’t original? I guess it depends on the tourist.

How does a composer’s house turned into a museum differ from a “straight” museum. Does displaying objects – authentic and/or “only” contemporaneous – in the composer’s own space add value to our experience? Is it better than seeing these objects in an all-purpose museum space, perhaps alongside those of other composers or people of the same time? What sort of experience or knowledge are we seeking? What, to take this to its logical conclusion, is the role of museums? These are the questions I’ve been pondering, in a heightened manner I must admit, since reading Michelle de Kretser‘s Questions of travel (my review).

Bail has discussed museums and tourists in other works – in his novel Homesickness, and in a story that I plan to read soon. Watch this space! Meanwhile, do you have thoughts on the topic? Do you like to visit writers’ homes for example? Why?

* Not to mention writers, and other famous or infamous people, of course.

Delicious descriptions from Down under: Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell on books

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Portrait of Thomas Cromwell. New York, Frick C...

Thomas Cromwell, by Hans Holbein the Younger. New York, Frick Collection. (Photo: Wikipedia)

There are many delicious descriptions to choose from Hilary Mantel‘s Bring up the bodies, which I reviewed earlier this week, and some have already been posted by bloggers in other posts (such as John at Musings of a Literary Dilettante, Lisa at ANZ LitLovers, and Alex in Leeds). Their excerpts relate more to thematic issues, but I want to share one that just tickled my fancy. Thomas Cromwell is, we know, a reader. He comments, for example, on Machiavelli‘s The Prince, which was published in 1532.

I enjoyed this little description of Cromwell and books early in the novel:

After supper, if there are no messengers pounding at the door, he will often steal an hour to be among his books. He keeps them at all his properties: at Austin Friars, at the Rolls House in Chancery Lane, at Stepney, at Hackney. There are books these days on all sorts of subjects. Books that advise you how to be a good prince,  or a bad one. Poetry books, and books that tell you how to keep accounts, books of phrases for use abroad, dictionaries, books that tell you how to wipe your sins clean and books that tell you how to preserve fish. His friend Andrew Boorde, the physician, is writing a book on beards; he is against them. He thinks of what Gardiner said: you should write a book yourself, that would be something to see.

If he did, it would be The Book Called Henry: how to read him, how to serve him, how best to preserve him. …

I love this for several reasons, not the least of which is the insight it provides into publishing in the 16th century. I hadn’t realised quite how varied the output was. I’d also never heard of Andrew Boorde but he’s clearly well enough known to make it into Wikipedia (see the link on his name above). He’s also the subject of a delightful post I found from a blogger called Early Modern John who, as well as describing Boorde as “randy and carnivorous”, filled me in a little about the book on beards.

As with much of Mantel’s writing, though, this excerpt is enjoyable for other reasons, such as for the humorous reference to Machiavelli’s The prince; the sly reference to Stephen Gardiner whom Cromwell sees as his enemy; and the insight into Cromwell’s character, into his love of books and his focus on and loyalty to Henry (with whom, of course, he believes his own best chance of success lies!).

Delicious descriptions from Down under: Carrie Tiffany on smacking

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Actually, this Delicious Descriptions is not a commentary on smacking as the post title might suggest, but it is about a smacking situation – in Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with birds.  It occurs when five-year-old Michael has stolen a penny from his mother and so she smacks him:

Betty doesn’t have the heart to pull his pants down so she smacks him with the wooden spoon through his shorts and shirt-tails and underpants so she isn’t really hitting him at all, just whacking at the layers of clothing and the air trapped between them. He’s never been smacked before. As soon as she releases him he turns on her. He looks about the kitchen in fury. ‘How dare you? You pan, you rug, you – you – you … spoon.’

She gasps. She covers her face with her hands. He’s right. She isn’t a bitch or a slut; she is a pan, a rug, a spoon. She is a woman without a man – a utensil inside a house.

See what I mean about her writing? It packs so much. There’s social history here about parent-child relationships and child discipline, and about women’s lives. And, there’s psychology, particularly regarding sense of self – Michael’s positively defiant one and Betty’s self-deprecatingly negative one. It has an interesting rhythm, with the introductory long sentence describing the action followed by a series of short sentences for the emotional responses. It’s funny, too, but has such a sting. It puts a very specific spin, doesn’t it, on that old adage that “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you”!

Delicious descriptions from Down under: Andrew Croome on Nevada

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I recently reviewed Andrew Croome’s Midnight empire which is mostly set in and around Las Vegas, an area I have travelled through several times. Here is Croome’s description of his protagonist Daniel being introduced to the region:

English: Basin and range desert in Nevada

Mojave Desert, Nevada (Photo credit: amateria1121, CC-BY-SA 3.0, via Wikipedia)

Mythic horizons. They drove into the liquid road-shimmer of the desert, past the Joshua trees and the creosote bushes that bordered the I95.

It was midday, the sun unforgiving. They drove at seventy miles an hour but it seemed slower, the effects of the desert; their perceptions of depth made strange, as if light itself had shortened. It was terrain that felt planetary, the dry sink of an enormous Martian basin, a forever geology of heat and shale.

There is something otherworldly about deserts – any deserts – and the landscape around Las Vegas is typical desert in that sense. It’s vast, multi-hued, vegetated by unusual plants, and both forbidding and mesmerising in that way that is unique to deserts.

Deserts are popular places for secret military activity. Think atomic testing at White Sands in New Mexico and Maralinga in Australia. So too, Creech Airforce Base in Nevada, which is the setting for Midnight empire and which has a long military history from its early involvement in nuclear testing and to drone warfare today.

Croome’s description of the landscape Daniel drives through is evocative, although I do get a bit tripped up on the “terrain that felt planetary”. Isn’t the earth a planet? What exactly does “planetary” mean? I’m probably being a bit picky, though, because, overall the two paragraphs do herald the rather surreal world – physical and mental – that Daniel becomes embroiled in. And anyhow, I couldn’t resist sharing with you his reference to Joshua Trees (pictured in the photo above) because they are worth sharing …

Delicious descriptions from Down under: Courtney Collins and landscape

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There was so much to write about Courtney Collins’ novel The burial in my review this week that I couldn’t share one of my favourite aspects – her gorgeous descriptions of the landscape. When I say gorgeous, I should clarify that the landscape itself isn’t always gorgeous, but her descriptions, her ability to evoke the landscape visually, spiritually and emotionally certainly is.

The imagery draws from the mountains and the earth, and is imbued with multiple meanings. The mountains represent magic and mystery, but also danger, while the earth conveys time and stories. The descriptions feel Australian – and yet there’s little reference to specific, identifiable features, such as gum trees.

Here are two descriptions of the earth:

THE EARTH, AS I can feel it, is pressed together at points and ruptured in parts. And so events seem to fold into each other, like burial and birth. It’s not like the smooth and undulating beauty of a ribbon streaming out. No. The earth buckles with the stories it holds of all those who have cried and all those who have croaked.

and

the earth disturbed and compacting as they rode, all of untold time beneath them.

I love the way these descriptions convey something eternal, permanent, not always benign but somehow reassuring nonetheless. By contrast, here are descriptions involving mountains and our three main characters – Jessie, Jack Brown and then Barlow:

She felt odd—as if some great fissure had finally opened up, and all of the convolutions of herself were meeting at the surface, like so many coincidences at once. And somewhere in it all was her own distinct nature.

Sitting by the ravine she felt her past was not behind her or beneath her, it was everywhere at once, living through her, and the boy and Joe and Bill were just like those she had known before and here on the mountain was something like a second chance …

and

The mountains unfolded and soon he felt with all of his wanting that she would split the summit, come tearing out through the trees and ride determinedly towards him. But she did not.

and

For Barlow, the mountains had unfolded without meaning. The colours and shapes continued to be strange to him and as they had moved higher up the slope he felt the clouds weighing in like the ceiling of a room that was sinking down upon him …

Quite different aren’t they? The mountains seem to be more about self – about defining self – sometimes positive, sometimes not, but often associated with a sense of change.

It’s strong language with slightly unusual rhythms. I found it effective and rather mesmerising.

Delicious descriptions from Down under: Patrick White on men and sheep

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A few months ago I wrote a Monday Musings on the representation of sheep – well, people who work with sheep anyhow – in Australian literature. I was therefore tickled when early in Patrick White’s Happy Valley, which I reviewed last week, he talks of men who work with sheep, as follows:

Men who work a lot in the open, especially men who work with sheep, have a habit of repeating things, even trivial things, several times, perhaps because conversation is scarce and it gives them a sense of company to have  a phrase coming out of their mouths, even if the phrase is already stated. Clem Hagan was like this. He repeated a remark ponderously, sometimes with different intonation just for variety’s sake. He stared out in front of him with an expression that might have been interesting if you didn’t know it was due to his having spent most of his life looking into the distance for sheep. Anyone who stares long enough into the distance is bound to be mistaken for a philosopher or mystic in the end. But Hagan was no philosopher, that is, he searched no farther than the immediate, sensual reality, and this translated into simpler terms meant a good steak with juice running out at the sides, and blonde girls with comfortable busts.

White then goes on to describe a man who thinks he’s God’s gift to women – and whom many women, though it beats me why they do, let think so.

Delicious descriptions from Down under: Mary Durack on Patrick White

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I am slowly – very slowly – reading True North, Brenda Niall‘s biography of Mary and Elizabeth Durack. Life is rather getting in the way of reading at present so, contrary to my normal practice, I am going to post a Delicious Description from it before, rather than after, my review. For those of you who don’t know, Mary and Elizabeth Durack belonged to the Durack pastoral dynasty which made its name in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Mary wrote the best-selling Kings in grass castles which tells her family’s story starting with her ancestors’ migration from Ireland in mid-19th century and following them through New South Wales and Queensland to their pioneering life in the Kimberleys.

But, Mary also wrote novels – including children’s books which were illustrated by her sister Elizabeth – and worked as a journalist writing articles, columns and reviews. I loved coming across, in Niall’s book, a discussion of her review of Patrick White‘s The tree of man in Westerly, in 1957. I’m always interested to hear what writers, who are contemporaries, think of each other. I was thrilled to discover that Durack liked and appreciated White, because some literary luminaries of the time, like AD Hope and Florence James, were not impressed with his modernist style. According to Niall, Durack said that “the critic who dismisses [White’s] often broken and unfinished sentences” would also have to dismiss much of Joyce and Faulkner.

Niall also quotes this excerpt from Durack’s review:

I have little doubt that this is a book destined to become an important part of our literary tradition. It probes deep below the surface to the inner lives of men and women, the emotions, the sensations and dreams they cannot express, either through diffidence, or because they lack words in which to embody them … It is full of the beauty and poetry of nature, the turn of the seasons and the passing for the years expressed in words that ring as clear and true as the stockman’s Condamine bell.

And she was right! Not only has White entered our pantheon of writers, but he is the only Australian to date to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The more I read this book, the more I’m liking this woman…