In Lieu of an Introduction

. . . he recommended to all those who might be impressed with a sense of their importance to bury a copy or copies of each work properly secured from damp, &c. at a depth of seven or eight feet below the surface of the earth; and on their death-beds to communicate the knowledge of this fact to some confidential friends, who in their turn were to send down the tradition to some discreet persons of the next generation; and thus . . . the knowledge that here and there the truth lay buried . . . and was to rise again in some distant age . . . —this knowledge at least was to be whispered down from generation to generation.

—Thomas De Quincey, “Walking Stewart”

Livius Andronicus: An Odyssey is peregrinatory, and an Iliad, no doubt, genocidal, but an Idyssey is gestational as regards idiosyncrasy--or oddness.

Dr Johnson: Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.

Mrs Thatcher: There is no such thing as a womb with a view.

Ben Jonson: By G—, ’tis good, and if you like’t, you may!

—Petrus Tornarius, Imaginary Conversations

History

Stauffenberg (tall officer standing at attention, far left) and Hitler at the Wolfsschanze (Wolf's Lair) in East Prussia in 1944

Then gone; I am learning to live in history.

What is history? What you cannot touch.

—Lowell

"I never knew what to do with so many fingers when I still had them all!"—Colonel Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, who had lost all but three fingers in combat and so had difficulty arming the bomb with which he almost succeeded in killing Hitler in 1944.

Think not too much of that which no one knows!

“White blackness” takes the measure of free rhyme.

Denk nicht zufiel von dem was keiner weiss!*

Wrote Stefan George, who spoke for their language in his time.

He seems to have favored loaded dice.

You don’t know German? Nor do I.

Ours in that case scarce to reason why!

Think not too much of that which no one knows!

Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg in 1944

*Denk nicht zufiel von dem was keiner weiss!" published in 1914 by Stefan George (1868-1933), whose poetry is reported to have inspired Stauffenberg:

Denk nicht zuviel von dem was keiner weiss!

Unhebbar ist der lebenbilder sinn:

Der wildschwan den du schossest den im hof

Du kurz noch hieltest mit zerbrochnem flügel

Er mahnte—sagtest du—an fernes wesen

Verwandtes dir das du in ihm vernichtet.

Er siechte ohne dank für deine pflege

Und ohne groll . . doch als sein ende kam

Schalt dich sein brechend auge dass du ihn

Um-triebst in einen neuen Kreis der dinge.

Translated by DeepL (with a little help from PRD):

Think not too much of that which no one knows! / The meaning of life's image cannot be unraveled: / The wild swan that you shot, / Which you kept a while in the courtyard with a broken wing, / Recalled—you said—a distant related something you destroyed in him. / He died without thanks for your care / And without resentment . . . but when his end came / His sinking eye rebuked you for having / hustled him into a new circle of things.

December 28, 2024

In the Snare of Words

After Yves Bonnefoy*

O poetry

I know that you are scorned and rejected,

Thought play-acting, if not a lie,

Weighed down by the faults of language,

The water called brack and bad that you offer those

Who thirst even so, but turn away, disappointed, towards death.

And yet I know that if anything on Earth remains

Besides the wind, the ridge, the sea,

Yours will be the first speech to break the long silence,

The first words to catch fire beneath the dead world's wood.

*Abstracted and imitated from Yves Bonnefoy’s long poem Dans le Leurre des Mots. Bonnefoy, who died in 2016 at the age of 93, has been called “perhaps the most important French poet of the latter half of the 20th century” (Enyclopædia Britannica). For his full poem, in a bilingual edition, see Bonnefoy, The Curved Planks, translated by Hoyt Rogers (2006).