Cheerful rebel

Cheerful and playfully arrogant,
done up in his boots and his good felt hat,
the slanting leaves that shared his accent
in the wood were smiling like sharpened axes
as he made past the barn and the sheepfold,
his weapon slung over his shoulder
as if he was heading to work in the field,
as per usual, though he was heading for the war.

Yet May fell within weeks and September
went AWOL; now he can’t for the life
of him, as he peers in his bag, remember
the ferns that waved him off: one loaf
of bread is left, and the devious enemy
is taking pot shots from ridges in the hills,
so he can't see their faces—if they have them.
Also, his boots pinch and his hat has holes.

So he crawls on his belly, he's flat on his face
on a slope of crumbling sand and mud
as the clattering hoof-beats of riders race
past above him on a raised dirt road,
and he’s holding his arms in a pincer
about his head, as a child, for camouflage;
he peeks up the mud-bank, where the air
and earth split his vision, half-and-half.

The sky still seems hopeful—if empty—
though the way out leads through a marsh.
He rubs at his side where the hardy
shoots of marram grass dug harshly
into his ribs, and he thinks—on rolling over,
once the riders are out of range—
"I would have laughed when I was younger:
now I just shake and cringe."

A ravenous wolf troop will sweep
through the countryside, ravaging hedge
and crop. Will the copse get the chop
along with the tree of knowledge
of good and evil? To use for another spear
shaft? To lighten a while the dismal mood
around that evening's pitiful campfire?
To ruin the gloom with the surplus firewood?

(Dawlish, 2001)

I really love you, Attila

About ten years ago, I did a reading course in Hungarian (it was supposed to allow us to make use of economics material in the original language, but the lecturers also covered some literature), and I translated a handful of the poems of Attila József. This was a labour of love, for which I sat in the old SSEES library with my English-Hungarian dictionary, splitting the words up one by one to discern their grammatical functions—consulting whatever English translations I could get my hands on for fresh possible connotations.

The best translations available in English at that time were by John Bátki; I still prefer the results of his first effort to those of his second, since the original formulations often seem to me to have more resonance—though perhaps that's because I read them first. (In one brash poem, called Attila József, he addresses himself: "I really love you, believe me. It's something I inherited from my mother".) Since then, the excellent Scots poet Edwin Morgan has produced a pamphlet, though it's difficult to get hold of and I've only seen a few of the individual poems.

As to my own efforts, I hadn't looked at them for some time, until reminded by the title of one of the posts below. Here is the poem in question, with its characteristic "list" form, illustrating the multifarious possibilities of action that the poet seems to be weighing up—illustrating too, perhaps, the anxiety and the luxury of choice. In Hungarian, it's in couplets, but that proved a bit too tricky.

To sit, to stand, to kill, to die
To shove this chair away from me,
to squat in front of a speeding train,
to climb a mountain carefully
or tip my bag out on the plain;
to feed a bee to my pet bug
or with some granny, snuggle close;
to have a tasty soup to sup,
to sneak through mud on tippytoes;
to place my hat on the railway line
or skirt the lake shore in a rush,
or sit on the bottom, looking fine—
or with the breakers, in a flush;
to bloom with the flowers of the sun
or merely to let out a lovely sigh
to drive away a fly—just one—
or dust my book of grit and grime;
to clean a mirror with my spit,
to make a truce with deadly foes—
or knife them all and from the slit,
study the blood as it overflows;
to watch a young girl as she turns
or sit around and twiddle my thumbs;
to light up Budapest so it burns,
to wait for a bird to take my crumbs;

o life, that's writing now this verse,
you tie me up, you let me loose,
you make me laugh, you make me curse—
o life, you make me choose!

(1926)

Dry, indecorous language

I've taken a week off work to study maths and economics, and may post some of my findings on these subjects throughout the week. I'm using this piece of software, bought for me by my wife for Christmas, though I haven't had a chance to look at it thoroughly until now. I might eventually write some sort of review of it.

O life, you make me choose

While filling out the "profile" section for this blog, it occurred to me that it might be a useful exercise to elaborate the extent—and so the limits—of my interests more fully, as an indication of the sorts of things I might want to write about. These take in:

Economics and political economy; maths in economics; methodology in the social sciences.

Politics, political sociology, political philosophy (favourite philosophers: Marx, Montaigne, Locke).

History (European, Russian, Ukrainian, Byzantine; Austro-Hungarian; the Renaissance; the Enlightenment; fascism; socialism; humanism; history of the UK; history of London; ancient history, especially of Rome; history of science and technology); historical materialism; the history of imperialism and theories of imperialism.

Novels: of the English, my favourite is Wuthering Heights, or perhaps Pride and Prejudice; of the American, USA by Dos Passos, or Fiesta by Hemingway—or, from my youth, Kerouac's Desolation Angels ("that part of the green he was that was given moving juice", he says at the top of the mountain of a caterpillar he spots on a leaf there); of the Russian, Platonov's The Foundation Pit, a savage satire of Stalinism and the power of jargon to oppress; also German (Kafka) and French (Proust). But I like classical science fiction too, especially Philip K Dick and Ray Bradbury.

Poetry: in English, my favourites are Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Blake and Shelley; I'm also inordinately fond of Milton's Paradise Lost. Of the moderns, I'm especially fond of Patrick Kavanagh, the crazy Catholic mystic. Of the Americans, I like Walt Whitman, "a Kosmos", and Allen Ginsberg. From other countries: Blok, Mayakovsky, Mandelstam of the Russians; from elsewhere: Brecht's Poems 1913-56 (I've had this book since I was 16 and my copy is now held together by a pair of yellow-luminous shoe laces), Erich Fried (100 Poems Without A Country), Attila József (the greatest proletarian poet), Dante, Lucretius (De Rerum Natura), Yehuda Amichai, Irving Layton (sexist, but he has classical poise).

Favourite Shakespeare play: Hamlet, I'm afraid.

The films of Bergman (of the not so well-known ones, the one I like the most, I think, is Shame, a political drama about the impact of war or violent civil disruption on personal relations), Tarkovski (Solaris and Ivan's Childhood), Pasolini (The Gospel According to St Matthew), Rossellini (Rome, Open City); Visconti's The Leopard, with Bert Lancaster as the philandering old patriarch, the Prince of Salina; old Hollywood films (The Maltese Falcon); superior-quality Soviet propaganda films (eg The Dawns Are Quiet Here); Laurel and Hardy films (Sons of the Desert); Edgar Reitz's Heimat 1, 2 and 3 (number 2 is the greatest long film of all time, and the part with Reinhardt in Venice is an astounding film in its own right, comparable with anything at all, so far as I'm concerned).

And only recently I saw Csillagosok, Katonak ("Staries, soldiers", I think, but translated as "The Red And The White") by Miklós Jancsó, a profound and unusual film with almost no dialogue or soundtrack, about the Russian civil war and its cycles of meaningless, arbitrary violence. Very memorable.

Also: Dekalog, which is, of course, stupendous stuff (the one about killing is a brilliant polemic against the death penalty—though it is not only that; but I like the last one best, about the brothers' stamps). Oh, and the Iranian film, Where is My Friend's House?, which has fairytale-like or "oral" visual elements in it, such as the repetition of the image of the zigzag path between villages. Plus two heartbreaking Iranian-Kurdish films, A Time for Drunken Horses and The Blackboard.

Music: Nick Drake, Magazine, The Stranglers, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Shubert (especially the majestic 9th), Shostakovich, Nirvana, Urusei Yatsura.

Languages: I took a crash reading course in Hungarian at university (now mostly forgotten, sadly), and I've been studying Russian on and off for a while now.

I also take an interest in English grammar and comparative world religions.

Whither Rus?

What's all this about? Why now?

Four thoughts:

• there is currently loads of oil money washing about (so I'm told), boosting the confidence of the ruling elite, who, Nero-like, continue with violin practice while the Third Rome burns;
• America, pinned down, appears relatively weak;
• ahead of the "difficult" changeover in 2008, an appeal to "great power" nostalgia looks as though it might be helpful at home in binding and rallying the swindled masses to the patriotic cause of the state; and
• those proposals for positioning missile-defence systems in central-eastern Europe can't have helped.

Inaugural post

Having of late undergone some disillusionment, I have decided to dust myself down, pick up my paddle and set off once again in my small bark, across treacherous waters, on a quest to seek out an answer the question: What is true?

This, I realise, may take some time.