Water Nymphs’ Preludes

III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

～from “Preludes,” by T. S. Eliot

“When she got out of the water, what a change was seen in her!”
(I am in love with this water nymph-esque beauty.)
*From Folk-Tales of Bengal, by the Rev. Lal Behari Day, with 32 illustrations in colour by Warwick Goble, Macmillan & Co., Ltd, 1912, London.

“She rushed out of the palace... and came to the upper world.”
*From Folk-Tales of Bengal, by the Rev. Lal Behari Day, with 32 illustrations in colour by Warwick Goble, Macmillan & Co., Ltd, 1912, London.

“A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings.”

— T.S.Eliot, The Wasteland.

“Coming up to the surface they climbed into the boat.”
*From Folk-Tales of Bengal, by the Rev. Lal Behari Day, with 32 illustrations in colour by Warwick Goble, Macmillan & Co., Ltd, 1912, London.

A Frightening Angel

I was in high school when I read Rilke for the first time, in an underground “indie” bookstore (a real treasure trove for books) near the National University of Taiwan—an area full of “book caves” and “sequestered nooks for books”—catering for university students and academics alike. It was his Duino Elegies translated into Chinese by a famous poet, and my love affair with Rilke thus began. The verses were heartrendingly powerful in such a way that I was instantly blown away.

My senior high school years were a time I do not care much to remember: the first thing I would do after school everyday, was to go straight into a bookstore—only then would I feel able to breathe. But it was also during that time when I started writing poetry intensely, and my passion for poetry bloomed like wild roses as if they knew there were no tomorrow.

English translation by Stephen Mitchell (my personal favourite translator of Rilke’s works), from the First Elegy of Duino Elegies, 
Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1992.

ʻA Guardian of the Kingdom’ from a Persian version of Qazwini’s ʻAjāʼib al-makhlūqāt wa-gharāʼib al-mawjūdāt,’ “The marvels of creation and the oddities of existence,” commonly known as “The cosmography of Qazwini,”
circa 1500-1550 CE. (image via)

A poem is to be developed from these musings and words which arrived this early evening, and something has been on the back of my mind for quite some time—to work on “Dialogue Poetry”—quite a special genre both in a literary and visual/aesthetic sense.

So, for now, to be continued...

♪

The fifty poems that were published by Albert Giraud (born Emile Albert Kayenbergh) as Pierrot lunaire: Rondels bergamasques in 1884 quickly attracted composers to set them to music, especially after they were translated, somewhat freely, into German (1892) by the poet and dramatist Otto Erich Hartleben. (Hartleben later went on to write his own Pierrot poems—"The Harp" and five rondels titled Pierrot, Married Man.) The best known of these settings is the atonal song-cycle derived from twenty-one of the poems (in Hartleben's translation) by Arnold Schoenberg in 1912: Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds Pierrot lunaire (Thrice-Seven Poems from Albert Giraud's Pierrot lunaire—Schoenberg was numerologically superstitious). But the poems have dense histories as songs and sets of songs both before and after Schoenberg's landmark Opus 21. The bullet-point that follows lists early twentieth-century musical settings chronologically and notes how many poems were set by each composer (all, except Prohaska's, are in the Hartleben translations) and for which instruments.

Pfohl, Ferdinand: 5 poems ("Moon-rondels, fantastic scenes from 'Pierrot Lunaire'") for voice and piano (1891); Marschalk, Max: 5 poems for voice and piano (1901); Vrieslander, Otto: 50 poems for voice and piano (46 in 1905, 4 more in 1911); Graener, Paul: 3 poems for voice and piano (c. 1908); Marx, Joseph: 4 poems for voice and piano (1909; 1 of 4, "Valse de Chopin", reset for voice, piano, and string quartet in 1917); Schoenberg, Arnold: 21 poems for speaking voice, piano, flute (also piccolo), clarinet (also bass clarinet), violin (also viola), and violoncello (1912); Kowalski, Max: 12 poems for voice and piano (1913); Prohaska, Carl: 6 poems for voice and piano (1920); Lothar, Mark: 1 poem for voice and piano (1921).

*extract of information on Pierrot Lunaire via Wikipedia