miglior acque

Worse than Selfridges

2012-01-22T23:51:00.010Z

Yet again, I find myself in the terrorising elbow-patched bruise-fest that is the Cambridge University Press booksale and let me tell you, it’s been worth every dig. I’ve stopped being polite at these things: I used to be ‘Oh I’m sorry, I couldn't just squeeze past you there?’, while they politely ignored me. Now I just shove past and thrust my hand towards shelves, and anyone in my way takes their chances. During a particularly brutal crush, one girl turned to me and said: ‘It’s worse than the Selfridges Sale’. I agreed, though I’ve never been to a Selfridges sale. It must be awful though. But I doubt you see a certain member of the royal family getting stuck in like the rest of them. So I feel this sale experience has a certain amount of class. The worst is when one of the assistants brings out fresh boxes and there is a flurry of activity where everyone present jostles for the best position to see them come out of the box. There’s an awkward moment where people realise that they cannot actually put their hands into the box while she’s trying to empty it, but you can see that everyone wants to do that. As soon as they are put on the shelf, hands begin to desperately reach for whatever is placed there. It’s all wonderfully primitive and surely mitigates all the civilising influence of books. Imaging acting like a vulture over the The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music, and yet, that is just what it’s like.

Despite all this, dear readers, I’ve managed a lovely little haul and am delighted with myself. I now look a bit like Karl standing on my coffee table and looking around, ever so slightly mad. Sadly I don't have quite the space he does for books. It’ll run for another couple of weeks and I’ll probably only get a few more visits. Unless I see Cornish’s wonderful new book on volgarizzamenti, then I think I've done for this year. Now joining the crazy world of me are:

Kowaleski & Goldberg (eds), Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing and Household in Medieval England; Farrell & Puppa (eds), A History of Italian Theatre; G.H. & E.R. Crichton, Nicola Pisano and the Revival of Sculpture in Italy [1938]; D. M. Bueno de Mesquita, Giangaleazzo Visconti Duke of Milan (1351-1402): A Study in the Political Career of an Italian Despot [1941]; C.S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper [1980]; J. M. Hastings, St Stephen’s Church: An Illustrated Study of the Origins of ‘Perpendicular’ Architecture in England [1955]; Maiden, Smith & Ledgeway (eds); The Cambridge History of The Romance Languages, vol. 1; Cook, Enigmas and Riddles in Literature; Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare; Keith, Engendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic; Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England: Passports to Paradise?; Yeager, Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative; Kuehn, Heirs, Kin, and Creditors in Renaissance Florence; Ricketts, Visualizing Boccaccio: Studies on Illustrations of The Decameron, from Giotto to Pasolini; Payne, The Architectural Treatse in the Italian Renaissance; Lillie, Florentine Villas in the Fifteenth Century; Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism; Matthews (ed), The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Synge; Najemy (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli; Ferris (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin; Everist (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Music; McAuliffe (ed), The Cambridge Companion to the Qur'an; Brand, Italy and the English Romantics; Hardie, The Epic Successors of Virgil; Martindale (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Virgil; Gowing, Empire and Memory: The Representation of the Roman Republic in Imperial Culture; Dover (ed), Plato: Symposium; Kenney (ed), Ovid: Heroides XVI-XXI; Hinds, Allusion and Intertext; Moule, An Idiom Book of New Testament Greek; Logan (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More; Tacconi, Cathedral and Civic Ritual in Late Medieval and Renaissance Florence: The Service Books of Santa Maria del Fiore; Kelley, Reinventing Allegory; Parker, Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing.

Not in the CUP sale, but picked up in the Heffers sale were: Wolfthal, In and Out of the Marital Bed: Seeing Sex in Renaissance Art (Yale, 2010) and Andrew Cole & D. Vance Smith (eds), The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory (Duke, 2010); while in Oxfam I found a lovely copy of D.F. McKenzie’s Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts in the lovely Panizzi series published by the BL in 1986. I’ve also been very fortunate in finding a copy of Gerhard Rohlfs, Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti, 3 vols (Einaudi, 1966-1969), which I’m really delighted to have.

Welcome, my pretties, one and all!

I Want It, I Want It, I Want It, I Want It!

2012-01-16T17:05:00.007Z

In 2005 appeared two volumes of the Enciclopedia fridericiana (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, Treccani), ed. by Girolamo Arnaldi, Ortensio Zecchino, Arnold Esch, Antonio Menniti Ippolito, Alberto Varvaro and Cosimo Damiano Fonseca. In 2008 a third volume was added, on the work of Frederick himself. It is a massive, gorgeous, vast project, produced in the wake of the the anniversary celebrations of his birth, in 1194. Compelling, complex, learned, Frederick was dubbed by a contemporary chronicler stupor mundi. Leafing through the pages of these three volumes makes for not a little stupor at its breath and its beauty.

I want this. What can I say? God I want this SO much. And now, an Italian bookseller has the three volumes on eBay for €1,500. That sounds a lot and I know what you're thinking: don’t be insane. Indeed. But I still want this! I really want this. I cannot, of course, allow myself to even consider it. But know this: when it sells, as I’m sure it will, I shall look back upon this very moment filled with regret. And it will not go away.

So if you have €1,500 and you like the Middle Ages, then you could do a lot worse than to acquire this. If, in addition to the money and a love of the Middle Ages, you have a huge and generous heart, why don’t you buy it for me! I know you won’t though. I know that.

I’d like to go and have a little cry now.

Like this:

British Library, Royal Manuscripts Exhibition

2011-12-11T11:38:00.003Z

I have not yet managed to get to this marvellous and lavish exhibition but draw my reader’s attention to the review by my learned friend and colleague David Rundle, over on Bonae litterae.

The image is via the British Library's excellent Facebook page, which has several albums of photos of manuscripts in the exhibition.

‘A Letter to King Richard II’

This unusual manuscript is the fruit of over a decade of diplomatic rapprochement between England and France. The Letter to King Richard was written in support of Charlves VI of France's policy of reconciliation with England. The image here illustrates this union, with the crowns of France and England joined through the peace of Christ, represented by the Crown of Thorns, between them.

Philippe de Mézières, Epistre au Roi Richart.
Paris, 1395.
Presented to Richard II
Royal 20 B. vi, f. 1v
© The British Library Board

Unpacking My Library

2011-11-17T08:03:00.004Z

A couple of years ago Jo Steffens brought out a book called Unpacking my Library: Architects and Their Books (Yale University Press, 2009), a wonderfully snoopy interesting look at the libraries of architects. Now, the very fine scholar Leah Price has brought out, in the same series, a book called Unpacking my Library: Writers and Their Books (Yale University Press, 2011). I want it!

Recently the FT did a piece on it, which you can read here.

This is library of James Wood and Claire Messud, in Cambridge Massachusetts.

Weekend, dir. Andrew Haigh (2011)

2011-11-10T10:44:00.000Z

Weekend, written, edited and directed by Andrew Haigh, opened in the UK on Nov. 3. It tells the story of Russell (Tom Cullen), a nice gay guy, pretty sorted, who has an ordinary life and good friends, who are mostly straight. After visiting his best friend Jamie, along with his wife and child and some of their friends, he makes excuses and goes home. Instead he goes to a nightclub where he (eventually) picks up Glen. The story turns on their weekend together. Little ‘happens’, in the sense that they spend time taking drugs, having sex, and especially, talking. Talking about nothing, talking about identity, about what each wants from life, what each gets from it. The film is about intimacy, about love, about intersubjectivity. It is nothing short of a stunning achievement and Tom Cullen’s performance is one of the best I have ever seen on screen. It is shot beautifully in Nottingham, with Russell’s 14th-floor flat observed with the power of someone who has lived there for a lifetime. The most powerful thing about this film is its ordinariness, its lack of veneer, or polish. It depends for its success on a magnificently moving script and a remarkable chemistry between both main actors (Tom Cullen and Chris New).

On the weekend of the ridiculously over-hyped opening of the Leonardo exhibition, I felt as if I had just discovered another masterpiece. High Art is alive and well.

Images

2011-10-20T14:18:00.003+01:00

I'm really annoyed that my photos have been deleted by Google+, so this is kind of an act of rebellion. A statement. I like this image very much.

Google+ just deleted my photos on Blogger

2011-08-03T10:43:00.003+01:00

I'm so upset about this. It seems that Google+ and Blogger host photos in the same place. When I opened my Google+ account, it gave me one of those automatic messages about importing photos from Blogger, which, unthinkingly, I did. I then thought, again unthinkingly, that nobody really needed to see such random pictures on my Google+ account and deleted the album. But Google+ failed to tell me that it would delete all my blogger photos...permanently.

They're gone. All gone.

I may just close this blog down. I may just close my stupid Google+ account down too.

Hour by Hour, grain by grain

2011-07-11T18:36:00.010+01:00

One of my favourite words in Italian is clessidra, meaning hourglass, from the Greek klepsydra, meaning water clock.

Well, this is now my favourite clessidra: Marc Newson’s Ikepod Hourglass. It is a 60-minute counter, measuring 265 x 300 x 3 mm, and the ‘sand’ is carbon or nickel plated nanoballs.

For some other photos and a review see here. While my heart says that I have to have one, my head (and other half) says, Lear-like: never, never, never, never, never.

K P Clarke, Chaucer and Italian Textuality (OUP, 2011)

2011-07-08T18:28:00.006+01:00

K P Clarke, Chaucer and Italian Texuality, Oxford English Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) has just been published.

Below is from the OUP website:

Examines Chaucer and his Italian sources with a strong emphasis on Italian manuscripts
Seeks to understand Chaucer’s Italian sources as they were read by Chaucer himself, within a manuscript context that accommodates many layers of meaning on the page
An appendix of the Mannelli glosses published in one place for the first time
When Chaucer came into contact with Italian literary culture in the second half of the fourteenth century he was engaging with a productive, lively and highly varied tradition. Chaucer and Italian Textuality provides a new perspective on Chaucer and Italy by highlighting the materiality of his sources, reconstructing his textual, codicological horizon of expectation. It provides new ways of thinking about Chaucer’s access to, and use of, these Italian sources, stimulating, in turn, new ways of reading his work. Manuscripts of the major works of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch circulated in a variety of formats, and often the margins of their texts were loci for extensive commentary and glossing. These traditions of glossing and commentary represent one of the most striking features of fourteenth-century Italian literary culture. These authors were in turn deeply indebted to figures like Ovid and Statius, who were themselves heavily glossed and commented upon. The margins provided a space for a wide variety of responses to be inscribed on the page. This is eloquently demonstrated in the example of Francesco d’Amaretto Mannelli’s glosses in Decameron, copied by him in 1384. This material dimension of Chaucer's sources has not received sufficient attention; this book aims to address just such a material textuality. This attention to the materiality of Chaucer's sources is further explored and developed by reading the Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale and the Clerk’s Tale through their early fourteenth-century manuscripts, taking account not just of the text but also of the numerous marginal glosses. Within this context, then, the question of Chaucer's authorship of some of these glosses is considered.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1: Chaucer and Ovid: The Latin and Vernacular Heroides
2: Boccaccio as Glossator
3: Reading Boccaccio in the Fourteenth Century
4: Chaucer as Glossator?
Conclusion
Appendix One
Appendix Two
Bibliography

Readership: Students and scholars of medieval literature

K. P. Clarke, Sykes Research Fellow in Italian Studies, Pembroke College, Cambridge

Kenneth Clarke studied Italian and History of Art at Trinity College, Dublin and the Alma Mater Studiorum, at Bologna, and went on to do his doctorate in medieval English at University College, Oxford. He is the Sykes Research Fellow in Italian Studies at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he currently teaches medieval Italian and English literature.

Bernard O’Donoghue, Farmers Cross (Faber, 2011)

2011-07-07T09:47:00.004+01:00

Flying over Farmers Cross, Cork; Photo credit: © Donncha O Caoimh, via here

Bernard O’Donoghue (born in Cullen, Co. Cork, 1945) has just published his fifth collection of poetry Farmers Cross (sixth if you count his Selected Poems by Faber in 2008) and it is a work of beauty, of sadness, of delicate memories polished by continual, countless recollection. Much of O’Donoghue’s poetic voice is poised between the Ireland of his childhood and the England of the greater part of his life, his education and his career as a fellow in Oxford, where he teaches medieval literature as well as twentieth-century poetry. This inbetweenness makes for a powerfully observed poetic of belonging and non-belonging, of the outsider and the local, with an eye for detail that no local could see but to which no outsider would have access.

The collection’s title poem, ‘Farmers Cross’, explores events immediately following the death of his father and his mother’s decision to return to England. A cheque signed on the day he died, paying for his subscription to the Irish Farmers Journal, was returned marked ‘Not honoured: signatory deceased’. While his mother ‘took to farming like a native’, his father ‘hated farming: every uphill step | on the black hill where he’d been born and bred.’ Farming for him was a cross, unwillingly inherited. She was good at it, despite her city upbringing (‘as if she’d not grown up by city light’), and has a strong sense of the honour, dignity, and sacrifice of the work. Its rewards, for her, are reaped in the next life: ‘she always said the front row in Heaven | would be filled exclusively by farmers’. But no matter how good she was at farming, no matter how much of a native she resembled, she had married into it, and when her husband died, her connection with the farm was lost. The townland of Farmers Cross is where the airport in Cork was built, on a hill and prone to fog. It is from here that his mother leaves for good, as ‘the lights | fought a losing battle with the fog’. Its atavic identity as a farm persists over its subsequent use as an airport: ‘they’d | always said it was a hard farm to work’. Farmers Cross, then, becomes the point of departure as well as the point of return for the poet, both in his imaginative and real geography.

The ground worked in Farmers Cross is not just that in the Cork of O’Donoghue’s childhood but that which he came to work himself over the years: the poetry of the middle ages. There is a translation of Piers Plowman (B Prologue 1—37), a man who knew the land, a poem all about getting into that front row in Heaven. There is a translation of Dante’s Purgatorio 2. 61—81, Virgil and Casella, which opens: ‘«Voi credete | forse che siamo esperti d’esto loco; | ma noi siam peregrin come voi siete’, rendered as: ‘I think you must believe | that we know all about arrangements here; but we are outsiders, just the same as you are.’ That esperti d’esto loco (echoing of course Inferno 26. 98 and the ‘expertise’ of another great traveller, Ulysses) becomes a very vernacular ‘arrangements’, while peregrin moves from ‘pilgrim’ and ‘stranger’ to the somewhat starker ‘outsider’, echoing a theme very much being explored in Farmers Cross. The theme of the traveller, the outsider, is not explored via the figure of (Dante’s) Ulysses but instead an older, and altogether stranger figure in the Old English poem ‘The Wanderer’. O’Donoghue effortlessly allows the poem’s universality to compellingly apply itself to the present (pp. 28—9):

Cities lie in ruins; populations lie dead,
their bodies heaped by the crumbling walls.
Some die in battle, but more are victims
of assaults from the skies. Some are left
for scavengers to come under cover of night
to steal what they can. Few have the honour
of dignified burial by friend or relation.

Compare the Old English:

Wōriað þā wīnsalo,———walden licgað
drēame bidrorene,———duguþ eal gecrong,
wlonc bī wealle.———Sume wīg fornōm,
ferede in forðwege,———sumne fugel oþbær
ofer hēanne holm,———sumne se hāra wulf
dēaðe gedǣlde,———sumne drēorighlēor
in eorðscræfe———eorl gehȳdde.

Bruce Mitchell, the great Old English scholar, described the Wanderer’s philosophizing as ‘strong in feeling, high in dignity, and wisely reflective’: I can think of no better description of Bernard O’Donoghue’s Farmers Cross.

The Survival of Letters: Faddan More Psalter on Display

2011-07-05T15:00:00.000+01:00

The Faddan More Psalter—discovered in a bog in Co. Tipperary in July 2006—after extensive technical examination and restoration, has gone on display in the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin. Its discovery was the subject of an Archaeology Ireland special, as well as a wonderful documentary on RTE television. Two leaves have now gone on display, as well as the book’s cover—itself a remarkable survival—whose technical examination has revealed the presence of papyrus. The precise meaning of such an extraordinary discovery is still being teased out and will be for some time to come.

They have included a short film on the discovery and highlights of its conservation, and the displays carry some material on the huge task of preserving what remains and understanding it. For example, due to some of the inks used, the parchment has disappeared while the letters themselves have survived, like a kind of 8th-century insular alphabet soup.

The National Museum have released two publications to mark this exhibition; The Faddan More Psalter: Discovery, Conservation and Investigation and Reading the Faddan More Psalter: An Introduction while the documentary is also available for purchase.

If you are in Dublin this summer, this is a must see, the kind of survival no one dared hope for nor thought they would ever see in their lifetime.

Máire Flavin, mezzo-soprano

2011-07-04T09:20:00.004+01:00

Listen to Máire Flavin, an Irish mezzo-soprano, at the Cardiff Singer of the World Competition 2011. Beautiful voice and a great performance. She eats up the stage and has a wonderful presence. A star in the making, clearly.

She sings Clara Schumann’s Lorelai; Henri Duparc, Chanson triste; Manuel Rosenthal, La souris d’Angleterre; and Philip Martin’s setting of The Lake Isle of Innisfree.

Books, and What to Do with Them, #2

2011-06-29T20:33:00.014+01:00

This is the Casa Kike, in Costa Rica, designed by architect Gianni Botsford for his father and his 16,000 books. It won the RIBA’s Lubetkin Prize in 2008, and the RIBA International Award Winner 2008. I think you’ll agree that it is a very striking house. I am in love with how the books have been included as co-occupant of the house, almost built around them.

This (and photos and drawings) from Botsford’s website:

By coupling indigenous techniques and materials with modern design technologies and aesthetics GBA has created this intimate double pavilion for a writer in Costa Rica.

A main studio space, with library, writing desk and grand piano, is the writer’s daytime space. The pavilion’s wooden structure, sourced from local timber, sits on a simple foundation of wooden stilts on small concrete pad foundations. Roof beams of up to 10 m long and 355 mm deep allow for an interior with no vertical columns. The mono-pitched roof elevates towards the sea shore, while the interior is through ventilated via a completely louvred glazed end façade.

Set at a short distance along a raised walkway, a second smaller pavilion mirrors the first. This contains sleeping quarters and a bathroom. Externally, the pavilions are clad in corrugated steel sheeting, another locally used construction material. The overall effect is that of a building which blends with its surroundings, both visually and environmentally.

Photographs © Christian Richters

Books, and What to Do with Them

2011-06-29T15:45:00.008+01:00

I am a simple man with simple taste. The worst part of my taste is that it is so good, resulting in me constantly having to do without what those tastes demand. Some years ago I was at a meeting with a medievalist in Oxford. While in her rooms I noticed a rather nice book caddy in perspex set on castors. She told me that she had bought it in Habitat and set me off on a quête worthy of a medieval knight. Now mostly when I visit scholars in their place of work I’m more distracted by what is on the shelves rather than the shelves themselves. I don’t often suffer from shelf envy; that happens much more often with books. But this was a bit different. It was one of a series of limited edition pieces that Habitat, in 2004, had commissioned from various celebs to celebrate 40 years in business. The book caddy was designed by Louis de Bernières, intended to hold those books used very often, like a thesaurus or a dictionary, and to save having to get up from one’s desk. From time to time (which means, eh...daily) I look on Ebay and generally online to see if one might appear for sale and it never does. It would seem that when they said limited edition, they meant it. As Habitat goes into administration, and its future is uncertain, my mind turns once again to this lovely book caddy and I wonder will one ever appear. I know exactly what I would put on these shelves too, my copy of the Commedia (Petrocchi, Repr. corr. edn. 1994 [4 vols]), the Rime (De Robertis, 2002 [5 vols]), the Convivio (Brambilla Ageno, 1995 [3 vols]) and the Monarchia (Shaw, 2009 [1 vol]) in the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Dante (Firenze: Le Lettere), and my Enciclopedia Dantesca (ed. Umberto Bosco, 1970–8 [6 vols]).

I did spot one in Lady Antonia Fraser’s study, though not while we were having tea and talking about literature and scented candles. Rather, it was while I was having tea with myself and reading the Guardian’s wonderful online (though now sadly discontinued) Writer’s Rooms series, photographed by Eamonn McCabe.

There must be something wrong with me that while I admire the lovely bookcases, the gorgeous desk and elegant room, I cannot really keep my eyes of that little book caddy.

Christian Materiality and Material Christians

2011-06-28T09:18:00.007+01:00

This is an exciting year for Christian Materiality, as well as for Material Christians. Those interested in the former and who, in fact, are the latter can now acquire the new and excellent Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone, 2011). This, combined with the major exhibition at the British Museum, Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe (with a beautiful catalogue edited by Martina Bagnoli, Holgar A. Klein, C. Griffith Mann and James Robinson, British Museum Press, 2011), makes for lots to think about.

Anyone who knows Bynum’s work, especially her recent essays and lectures, will find the argument and material discussed in this book familiar. It is written in a highly readable style and is clearly intended for a very wide, non specialist, audience. As anyone knows who has tried to do such a thing, it is extremely difficult and requires enormous expertise and control. Caroline Bynum is gifted with all of these skills and the result is a marvellous exploration of one fascination aspect of medieval religious practice. The book is divided into four main chapters: 1. Visual Matter; 2. The Power of Objects; 3. Holy Pieces; and 4. Matter and Miracles. These are supplemented with fifty black-and-white illustrations and a richly documented store of notes at the end (though no bibliography).

In her introduction, Bynum discusses how she is interested in exploring ‘one of the central contradictions of the later Middle Ages: the increasing prominence of holy matter in a religion also characterized by a need for human agency on the part of the faithful, a turn to interiority on the part of spiritual writers and reform-minded church leaders, and an upsurge of voluntarism, negative theology, and mysticism’ (p. 18). She talks a lot about the thingness of holy matter and how those critical views suggesting that these objects always pointed beyond themselves fails to do sufficient justice to just how thingy they are, how they call attention to themselves as things. She also discusses what she means by materiality, emphasizing its plasticity and tactility, developing these around ideas of fragmentation, parts, and wholes. She seeks to clarify what she means by the ‘body’, ‘materiality and agency’ and ‘material culture’, terms used with an historical perspective and in contrast to their current, popular use in cultural studies. (There’s a very enjoyable impatience in her attitude to how her own work has becomes subsumed into some of these new trendy topics).

The very schematic table of contents is richly suggestive of what the reader will find inside:
Introduction, Nicholas of Cusa and the Hosts of Andechs; The Periodization of Holy Matter; Materiliaty; Beyond “the Body”; Matter as Paradox. Visual Matter, Image Theory; The Materiality of Images: Two Theoretical Considerations; The Materiality of Images: Examples; Viewer Response; Materiality as Self-Referential; Material Iconography; The Material in the Visionary; Living Images; The Cross; Conclusion. The Power of Objects, Two Caveats; Definitions and Examples: Bodily Relics and Contact Relics, Dauerwunder, Sacramentals and Prodigies; The Theology of Holy Matter: Relics, Sacramentals and Dauerwunder; Dissident and Heretical Critiques; The Example of Johannes Bremer; Holy Matter in Social Context; The Case of Wilsnack; Conclusion. Holy Pieces, Parts, Wholes, and Triumph over Decay; Theologians and the Problems of Putrefaction; The Contradiction: Fragmentation as Opportunity; A Comparison with Jewish Practice; The Iconography of Parts and Wholes: The Example of the Side Wound; Concomitance as Theory and Habit of Mind; Conclusion. Matter and Miracles, Three Examples; Elite and Popular: Again a Caveat; Theories of Miracle as a Way of Accessing Assumptions about Matter; The Historiography of Matter; Conceptions of Matter and Change; Change as Threat and Opportunity: A Reprise; Reducing Change to Appearance; Explaining Miracles by Limiting Change; Using Physiological Theories to Contain Miracles; Matter as Dynamic Substratum; Holy Matter as Triumph over Matter; The Materiality of Creation. Conclusion, Reinterpreting the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries; Jews, Muslims, and Christians; Theories, Medieval and Modern; Again the Paradox.

Listen to Caroline Bynum talk about miracles at Stanford

‘Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe’ is a major exhibition at the British Museum, running from 23 June — 9 October 2011. It had previously been mounted at The Cleveland Museum of Art and The Walters Art Museum. Bringing together a range of material from all over Europe, it successfully demonstrates the diversity, the quality and the beauty of many of these objects. Highlights include the wonderful Reliquary of the Holy Thorn, about 1390–97, France, commissioned by Jean, Duc de Berry (watch Dora Thornton talk about it here); the Reliquary head of St Eustace, about 1200, Basle, Switzerland; the wonderful material relating to St Cuthbert and St Thomas Becket. I was thrilled to see the gorgeous reliquary now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (see here).

Dating to around 1173–1180, it is in silver, with niello and gemstone, and measures just 2¼ × 2¾ × 1¾ in. (5.7 × 7 × 3.4 cm)—that is, very small, especially given the exquisite detail. Since Thomas was martyred in 1170, it is a very early example of a reliquary associated with him. The sides display a brief narrative of Thomas’s martyrdom, four knights assaulting him, one extending a sword towards his neck, which was bowed as in prayer when he was killed. An angel on the lid makes a sign of blessing over the event. On the other side (not shown above), Thomas’s body lies in state, while an angel carries a small child—the saint’s soul—to heaven. The top of the casket is set with a piece of red glass (supposed to be a ruby) and it seems likely that the casket contained a blood relic. Bynum illustrates this piece in Christian Materiality, fig. 15, p. 72, says of it on pp. 70–1: ‘the reliquary of Thomas Becket’s blood, the blood itself (which is presumably a few rusty, dried flakes) is hidden in a casket, not displayed, but a large jewel has been constructed on the top by backing rock crystal with red foil to evoke the redness of blood. The stuff of the jewel is palpable and shouts out living redness, but it plays visually with its own physicality; it is neither the blood in the container nor the ruby it appears to be’. See too the catalogue entry by Barbara Drake Boehm, no. 97, p. 186, for a circumspect analysis of the inscription, partially damaged, and what might have been contained in this reliquary.

The catalogue, beautifully illustrated, has the following essays: 1. Derek Krueger, ‘The Religion of Relics in Late Antiquity and Byzantium’; Arnold Angenendt, ‘Relics and Their Veneration’; Holger A. Klein, ‘Sacred Things and Holy Bodies: Collecting Relics from Late Antiquity to the Early Renaissance’; Guido Cornini, ‘“Non Est in Toto Sanctior Orbe Locus”: Collecting Relics in Early Medieval Rome’; Éric Palazzo, ‘Relics, Liturgical Space, and the Theology of the Church’; James Robinson, ‘From Altar to Amulet: Relics, Portability, and Devotion’; Martina Bagnoli, ‘The Stuff of Heaven: Materials and Craftsmanship in Medieval Reliquaries; Barbara Drake Boehm, ‘“A Brilliant Resurrection”: Enamel Shrines for Relics in Limoges and Cologne, 1100–1230’; Cynthia Hahn, ‘The Spectacle of the Charismatic Body: Patrons, Artists, and Body-Part Reliquaries’; and finally, Alexander Nagel, ‘The Afterlife of the Reliquary’.

Those who can are encouraged to watch the recent one-hour piece on BBC 4 presented by Andrew Graham-Dixon, featuring Sr Wendy Beckett and Neil MacGregor (as well as Pembroke’s own Emily Guerry talking about La Sainte-Chapelle). Well worth watching, with an especially interesting segment on Bishop Oscar Romero, known in El Salvador as San Romero.

Read Bynum’s new book, go to the exhibtion.

Cavalcanti, Rime, ed. De Robertis, finally

2011-06-27T22:09:00.006+01:00

Those attentive to my 'Books I Dream of Owning' will note that I have managed to find a copy of Guido Cavalcanti, Rime, con le rime di Iacopo Cavalcanti, ed. Domenico De Robertis, Nuova raccolta di classici italiani annotati, 10 (Torino: Einaudi, 1986). This took quite a bit of looking and in the end I picked up a copy for a mere €13 from the rather good website selling secondhand books: www.libri-usati.com and well worth a visit. A bit of underlining but all in pencil and easy to remove.

I know that the standard edition is now Rime, ed. by Letterio Cassata, Medioevo e Rinascimento, 3 (Anzio: De Rubeis, 1993)—which I have—but I really like De Robertis’ commentary.

Such is my delight, I reproduce a sonnet below:

Chi è questa che vèn, ch’ogn’om la mira,
che fa tremar di chiaritate l'âre
e mena seco Amor, sì che parlare
null’omo pote, ma ciascun sospira?

O Deo, che sembra quando li occhi gira!
dical’ Amor, ch’i’ nol savria contare:
cotanto d’umiltà donna mi pare,
ch’ogn’altra ver’ di lei i’ la chiam’ira.

Non si poria contar la sua piagenza,
ch’a le’ s’inchin’ ogni gentil vertute,
e la beltate per sua dea la mostra.

Non fu sì alta già la mente nostra
e non si pose ’n noi tanta salute,
che propiamente n’aviàn canoscenza.

(Rime IV, ed. De Robertis, pp. 16–19)

Wycliffe, In Our Time

2011-06-25T10:47:00.002+01:00

Glasgow, The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, MS Hunter 191 (T. 8. 21), f. 2v, from the opening of the Gospel of St John in the Wycliffite translation.

Listen to Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time, with Sir Anthony Kenny, Prof. Anne Hudson, and Dr Rob Lutton discussing John Wycliffe and the Lollards.

from the website:

John Wyclif was a medieval philosopher and theologian who in the fourteenth century instigated the first complete English translation of the Bible. One of the most important thinkers of the Middle Ages, he also led a movement of opposition to the Roman Church and its institutions which has come to be seen as a precursor to the Reformation.
Wyclif disputed some of the key teachings of the Church, including the doctrine of transubstantiation. His followers, the Lollards, were later seen as dangerous heretics, and in the fifteenth century many of them were burnt at the stake. Today Lollardy is seen as the first significant movement of dissent against the Church in England.

Jane Draycott, Pearl (Carcanet, 2011)

2011-05-23T10:00:00.000+01:00

British Library, MS Cotton Nero A. x., art. 3, f. 42r.

The four poems in British Library, MS Cotton Nero A. x. art. 3 are known to students of medieval literature with the modern titles Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with the poet often referred to as the ‘Pearl Poet’ or the ‘Gawain Poet’. Much has been written about the four poems and about the manuscript, about the fascinating set of images contained therein, with much of the attention directed at the remarkable Arthurian poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The beautiful poem that opens the manuscript, however, has certainly been less studied. It has also been less translated: Marie Borroff published one in 1977, Vantuono in 1983 and Casey Finch produced one in 1993. These translations are for the most part by professional academics and medievalists, while one can point to translations of Gawain by contemporary poets, such as Armitage or Merwin. This situation has now happily changed with the wonderful translation by the English poet Jane Draycott. Introduced by the medievalist and poet Bernard O’Donoghue, the short poem is rendered with a great simplicity and power. It is a dream vision in which the narrator laments the loss of his pearl, often thought to be his little daughter. During his vision he sees her across a stream and begins a dialogue with her. She explains what he sees and comforts him, clarifying what he cannot understand. The poem’s masterful control is most evident in having the narrator continue to not understand, and when he attempts to cross the stream to be with his pearl, he wakes up. Bereft. The poem is technically extraordinary: written in an alliterative meter, with 101 stanzas of 12-lines, divided into five-stanza sections. It turns on a series of what are called concatenating rhymes, where the rhyme-word ending one section will begin the next section, and where the word’s sense is stretched and elongated with dazzling dexterity.

The first stanza (ll. 1-12; f. 39r in the manuscript) amply demonstrates Jane Draycott’s skill:

Perle plesaunte, to prynces paye
To clanly clos in golde so clere:
Oute of oryent, I hardyly saye,
Ne proued I neuer her precios pere.
So rounde, so reken in vche araye,
So smal, so smoþe her sydez were;
Queresoeuer I jugged gemmez gaye
I sette hyr sengeley in synglure.
Allas! I leste hyr in on erbere;
Þurȝ gresse to grounde hit fro me yot.
I dewyne, fordolked of luf-daungere
Of þat pryuy perle withouten spot.

One thing I know for certain: that she
was peerless, pearl who would have added
light to any prince’s life
however bright with gold. None
could touch the way she shone
in any light, so smooth, so small –
she was a jewel above all others.
So pity me the day I lost her
in this garden where she fell
beneath the grass into the earth.
I stand bereft, struck to the heart
with love and loss. My spotless pearl.

Look at the boldness of that opening line, the sense of certainty and incomprehension, the way she captures the emphasis of this first stanza, its almost hypnotic beat of statement after statement. I love the way it seems to rise and fall. I think that that ‘I dewyne, fordolked of luf-daungere’ translated as ‘I stand bereft, struck to the heart | with love and loss’ is just magnificent, where the enjambment renders the line more powerful (as O’Donoghue rightly sees in his introduction, p. 8). Great poems can make for great translations, other great poems really. Read this great translation because it is also a great poem.

Modern editions of the poem Pearl are available. The best is that of E. V. Gordon for Clarendon Press in 1953, but see too that in The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, 5th ed., published with an English translation (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007), the readily accessible Everyman edition, prepared by J. J. Anderson (London: J. M. Dent, 1996) and the rather more difficult to find The Pearl Poems: An Omnibus Edition, ed. William Vantuono, 2 vols (New York: Garland, 1984), the first volume of which has Pearl. On the image above see Kathleen L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts, 1390-1490, 2 vols (London: Harvey Miller, 1996), Cat. 12 (Vol. 2, pp. 66-68), and see also A.S.G. Edwards in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997). A digital facsimile (badly needed) is in preparation, with details available here.

Sir Denis Mahon (8 Nov 1940—24 April 2011)

2011-05-08T11:26:00.005+01:00

Sir Denis Mahon at the National Gallery in London. On the left is Guido Reni’s ‘Rape of Europa’, which he had bought in 1945 for 85 guineas Photo: Ian Jones

The great collector, art historian, expert in the Italian seicento Sir Denis Mahon has died.

Read obits here, here, here, and read an interview here.

Poetry Now, and Again

2011-04-17T17:08:00.000+01:00

On Thursday (Apr 14th, 2011, p. 15) the Irish Times published a letter on Poetry Now.

The End of Poetry, Now

2011-03-28T10:26:00.021+01:00

After such powerful lectures by Belinda McKeon and Anne Carson on Thursday it was with high expectations that the DLR Poetry Now Festival proceeded for the rest of the weekend. The audience was not disappointed.

The first day of readings opened strongly with Joseph Woods, Luis García Montero, and Paul Farley, introduced by Eiléan Ni Chuilleanáin. Woods read from is forthcoming collection with Dedalus Press, who have published his previous two, Sailing to Hokkaido (2001) and Bearings (2005) in a single volume entitled Cargo (2010). Montero read in Spanish with translations read by Martin Veiga. Paul Farley gave a strong and highly enjoyable reading, mainly from his last two collections, The Tramp in Flames and The Ice Age. The second reading of Friday was introduced by Philip Coleman, and had Heather McHugh and Michael Longley read. Very different poets and very different readings. McHugh got up and grabbed the crowd by the...eh, throat. With a kind of sharp and unpredictable humour, it was terrifying to watch and exhilarating to experience. She commented, joked, challenged, discussing as she went along, at one point stopping to question her choice of a particular word. The last poem she read was entitled ‘What He Thought’, a wonderful exploration of the glib, the easy, the lesson of difficulty. It closes with the image of Giordano Bruno, face covered in an iron mask to prevent him inciting the crowd: ‘poetry is what | he thought, but did not say’. Longley read mainly from his new collection A Hundred Doors (Cape, 2011), with a gorgeous, almost unbearable nuance. Particularly powerful was his poem ‘Citation’, a ‘found poem’, made from his father’s citation for the Military Cross. Longley read with the softness of one putting petals back on a flower, with syllables that were so delicate you needed a pair of tweezers to separate them. He is an artist working with gold leaf, brushing it on with his breath.

Saturday’s readings had Dave Lordan, Fiona Sampson and Jaan Kaplinski. Lordan read a kind of performance poem, with enormous energy, while Sampson’s reading was a good deal more muted, more intricate, more poised. And Kaplinski opened his reading with a poem he said he had not yet written, which comprised a minute of silence. There followed the evening reading, by Sinéad Morrissey and Gerald Stern, beautifully introduced by Aengus Woods. Morrissey read from her latest collection Through a Square Window with a quietness and firmness that made you sit up straight and sometimes lean forward, catching details in a breeze. Stern asked that the lights be raised over the audience in the (normally darkened) Pavilion Theatre so he could see them, read to them. This speaks volumes, volumes of poems. He was a ball of pure energy and read with an extraordinary sense of engagement and wit. This sense of fun is anchored by a tremendous sense of the important, the essential, the utterly compelling.

Sunday’s afternoon reading was with Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Don Paterson. These are two poets who listen to waters that run deep under ‘official’ English. Ní Dhomhnaill writes in Irish and has often talked about the experience of writing in a language that is spoken with fluency by a small proportion of the population but claimed to be spoken (for all sorts of social and political reasons) by a considerably higher number.¹ I greatly enjoyed the reading but she has a school-mistress quality that made me a little nervous and she read like she was speaking to a group of intelligent but lazy students who could get this if they really tried. I felt as if I had not done my homework. Paterson read from his latest collection Rain as well as new, unpublished work.² He has a remarkable sense of ease with his own discomfort, all the more remarkable because it in no way mitigates that discomfort for the listener/reader. I believe Paterson to be a great poet.

A theme of silence ran like an undercurrent throughout this year’s festival, inadvertently perhaps, inasmuch as these things ever are, pointing up the end of the festival. From Carson’s lecture on untranslatability and the silences of translation, to Longley’s remarks about the silent white spaces on the page (and cf. the epigraph by Barbara Guest, The future writ in white space, in his A Hundred Doors), to Aengus Woods’ meditation on Adorno and the (too) oft-quoted remark about poetry being impossible after Auschwitz and Gerald Stern’s response that only poetry is possible after Auschwitz, not to mention (!) Kaplinski’s silent poem one minute long.

It was a chance to meet old friends and make new ones. Catching up with the poet and illustrator PJ Nolan for example, was a great pleasure, as was meeting the poet Leanne O’Sullivan. I was greatly glad to meet Nikolai Popov, an academic and translator (as well as the husband of Heather McHugh), a man with an aristocratic intelligence and the vague and exquisite sadness of an exile. Meeting him was what I think it would be like to meet Dante.

Belinda McKeon closed proceedings by thanking those who’d contributed to making this year’s Poetry Now Festival the great success that it was and struck an emotional note as she expressed her regret that the festival is to be dismantled. Heaney, too, expressed grave concern at this decision when he accepted the Irish Times Poetry Now Prize for Human Chain. When Longley began his reading, he lamented the decision to ‘tinker with the Festival in any way’. It was a remark warmly received by the audience. This is a bad decision and being taken for bad reasons. The financial crisis has created a state of exception in which all manner of decisions are allowed to be taken under one guise but with motivations that are not at all related, quite unequal to the consequences. Dun Laoghaire has suffered a terrible loss and the end of the Festival left me with a sense of having witnessed something pass from us, without being able to properly articulate it nor indeed resist it.

Belinda McKeon let poetry have the last word, and read a wise and warning poem:

‘Had I not been awake’

Had I not been awake I would have missed it,
A wind that rose and whirled until the roof
Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamores

And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
Alive and ticking like an electric fence:
Had I not been awake I would have missed it,

It came and went so unexpectedly
And almost it seemed dangerously,
Returning like an animal to the house,

A courier blast that there and then
Lapsed ordinary. But not ever
After. And not now.

from Seamus Heaney, Human Chain (Faber, 2010), p. 3

1. See her essay ‘Why I Choose to Write in Irish, the Corpse That Sits Up and Talks Back’, first published in The New York Times Book Review, 8 Jan 1995, pp. 27-28, repr. in Representing Ireland: Gender, Class, Nationality, ed. Susan Shaw Sailer (University Press of Florida, 1997), pp. 45-56.

2. On which I’d had occasion to write about.

(A) Night with Anne Carson

2011-03-25T12:27:00.004Z

Photograph by Einar Falur Ingólfsson

Anne Carson’s Nox (New York: New Directions Books, 2010) is very hard to talk about because it is a lot of things. And it has quite a bit of thingness to it. Written after the death of her brother, it is an extended exploration of Catullus’s Poem 101, itself written after the death of his brother. Because the elegy is stunning, I reproduce it here:

Multas per gentes et multa per aequora uectus
--aduenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
--et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem.
quandoquidem fortuna mihi tete abstulit ipsum,
--heu miser indigne frater adempte mihi,
nunc tamen interea haec, prisco quae more parentum
--tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu,
--atque in perpetuum, frater, aue atque uale.

Produced on a single long sheet of paper, folded like an accordion and stored in a box, it is not a book but feels like it is at a point somewhere between a papyrus roll and a codex. A meeting of Greek and Latin, the old and the new. Anne Carson is a distinguished classicist and this powerfully liminal bookness can not be accidental. She seems to be exploring the very nature of how we read in its most physical dimension. When one reads it, it is almost easier to handle the pages while leaving it inside the box, like one is rummaging through Carson’s most personal effects. A box of memories, a box of memory, even.¹ It is a livre d’artiste, with the word artiste including poet: at once a book-object, art-book, a book-poem, a page. When open, the left hand side has a ‘dictionary’ entry for each word of Catullus 101, while the right hand page will have pieces of paper glued on, family photos, scraps of letters written by her brother Michael, pieces of her own mind. The sections are numbered 1—10, subdivided 1.1, 1.2 and so on. I place the word dictionary in scare quotes there because even these entries, which look ‘official’, are in fact her own, highly nuanced understanding and definition of the word: it, too, becomes another mode of expression. It is encylopaedic, like a poetic Isidore of Seville: Truth from Words.² Thus, the poem unfolds along parallel lines, etymology, translation on one side, recuperation, recreation, history (his-story) on the other, both constantly intersecting, nourishing each other. The book is almost impossible to “cite” in the tradition sense: it must be experienced.

Nox opens by thinking about history, its closeness to elegy. History comes from the Greek ‘to ask’ (ἱστωρεῖν): ‘One who asks about things - about their dimensions, weight, location, moods, names, holiness, smell - is an historian’. The word ‘autopsy’ is used by historians to mean eyewitnessing. “To withhold this authorization is also powerful. Herodotus carefully does not allege to have seen a phoenix, which comes only once every five hundred years... Herodotus likes to introduce such information with a word like λέγεται: ‘it is said,’ as one might use on dit or dicitur” (1.2). This leads to Carson repeating what she had heard about her brother’s dog and his reaction to Michael’s death, calming down once he put his paws on the coffin. Putting together the tiny scraps of information Michael revealed about himself, his few letters home, his few telephone conversations, Carson proceeds on this recuperation, meditation, creating both a history and an elegy. All the while, each word of Catullus 101 slowly works on the reader, with an insistent slowness that becomes inescapable. In section 7.1 Carson says that Catullus 101 has always exerted a powerful force on her:

Nothing in English can capture the passionate, slow surface of a Roman elegy. No one (even in Latin) can approximate Catullan diction, which at its most sorrowful has an air of deep festivity, like one of those trees that turns all its leaves over, silver, in the wind. I have never arrived at the translation I would have liked to do of poem 101. But over the years of working at it, I came to think of translating as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch. I guess it never ends. A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end.

Photo: Hannah Whittaker/New York Magazine

That image of the tree showing its silvery leaves in the wind is a festivity that is revealed to us, that to which we have access. Carson has used the image of the tree to capture the difference between Greek and English: “There’s something about Greek that seems to go deeper into words than any modern language,” she has said. “You’re down in the roots of where words work, whereas in English we’re at the top of the tree, in the branches, bouncing around.” This is not an either/or, it is a both. Without one, there is not the other. Feeling around for the roots makes us understand what we are doing when we are bouncing around in those branches.³

Another important dimension to this book is that it is a facsimile: from the Latin fac make (imperative of facere) and simile like (neuter of similis), make like. On the back of the box Carson writes: ‘When my brother died I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book. This is a replica of it, as close as we could get.’ This is like the original but not the original: that is, it is untranslatable, like Catullus 101. Replica is a suggestive word to use: replicatio means a folding or rolling back again (of a book, for example), while in English it also means a reply, or a reproduction. In a sense, this is a replicatio, a rolling back of the original, and it is a reply to her brother, a reply with an address that he never left. That poignant ‘as close as we could get’ does not just refer to the accuracy of the facsimile, but to the closeness it brings them, brother and sister. In a famous essay, Walter Benjamin talked about the age of mechanical reproduction taking something away from the ‘aura’ of the work of art. The reproduction points relentlessly to its original, and to that which it is not: ‘The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity... The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical–and, of course, not only technical–reproducibility’.⁴ In a very wonderful analysis of this idea of authenticity and reproducibility, Michael Camille looked at the way in which facsimiles of the Très Riches Heures are packaged and sought to examine how, in fact, the facsimile emphasized the aura of authenticity by pointing up its rarity. The facsimile became the only means of accessing the manuscript, something Camille noted was the effect of the publicity material released by Faksimilé-Verlag Luzern: ‘After the facsimile has been produced the original will be locked away forever!’⁵ When one opens out the page(s) of Nox, it becomes apparent that the back side of the page is white. In the language of manuscripts, its recto is blank, while we read its verso. In a wonderful interview with Parul Seghal in the Irish Times Carson says that “Because the backs of the pages are blank, you can make your own book there. We did this with a class of eight-year-olds. They loved it.” We are invited to make our own reply. In many ways, that is what makes Nox so powerful, the way it invites, the way the reader participates and experiences, and shares. As Seghal says: “Nox trains the reader how to read it”.

Benjamin also says in his essay on mechanical reproduction: ‘Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space’ (p. 214). But in talking about the technical challenges for the book, Carson has spoken of how her friend and collaborator Robert Currie thought about the book: “I like to walk around ideas, but I’m not intrinsically spatial as a thinker. I make a page, which is a flat event. Currie has a way of observing any page and knowing how it would be in space. He added spatiality to these pages.” The possibilities afforded the kind of quality reproduction that can now be made and the nature of the very design of Nox extend even to Benjamin’s sense of the production lacking ‘time and space’. In other words, Nox is an event in 3D, an encounter occuring in time and space.

The Dun Laoghaire Rathdown Poetry Now Festival festival opened in heady style with a lecture by Belinda McKeon earlier in the day entitled “The Eye of the Poem” in which she discussed the idea of attention and attentiveness, the poem as object of attention, the reader as object of the poem’s intention. With generous and penetrating reference to all of the poets reading this year, she explored the notion of how attention concretizes both that which is in the poem and the reader encountering the poem. The lecture will be available as a podcast and will repay attention.

Anne Carson delivered the opening address at this year's DLR Poetry Now Festival: The Untranslatable (In All of Us).⁶ It was with great excitement and not a little trepidation that I made my way to hear it. Speaking while images were projected onto a screen, it was two lectures, one in images and one in words. She talked about silence and cliché, and what happens when we arrive at the untranslatable. She discussed the plant Odysseus is given by Hermes to resist the power of Circe: μῶλυ (Od. 10. 305), a word that belongs to the gods. She then reflected on the trials of Joan of Arc, described as fraught with translation issues: thousands of words passed between her and the lawyers, all being translated back and forth between her French and the Latin of the lawyers. But Joan’s response to a question on the nature of the voices she heard resisted translation, it was a language of the gods: “The light comes in the name of the voice”. With great ease, Carson then moved on to talking about Bacon and his “Brutality of Facts”, examining the surface of the work, its painted, violent reality and the continual drive to eradicate narrative, his attempts to “destroy clarity with clarity”. She set up a dichotomy between cliché and catastrophe, one the opposite of the other. The cliché is the question, it allows us not to think, or to think the already thought; the catastrophe is the answer.⁷ She then looked at translating the colour purple from the Greek word κάλχη, referring to the purplefish, but which leads to the verb καλχαινειν, to make dark and troublous (like a stormy sea), to ponder deeply (LSJ). When Hölderlin came to Sophokles’ Antigone: “You are obviously grown dark in mind over some piece of news” (Soph. Antig. 20: τί δ᾽ ἔστι; δηλοῖς γάρ τι καλχαίνουσ᾽ ἔπος) he translated it with: “Du seheinst ein rotes Wort zu färben”, You seem to colour a red word, you dye your words red. This “deadly literalism” as Carson calls it leads her to think about his madness and the madness that is in translation, as well as the silence that falls within the word. But if cliché and catastrophe seem to offer two ways (only), one of naming, one of chaos, translation offers a third place to be, between naming and namelessness. She ended with Paul Celan’s poem in praise of Hölderlin (‘Tübingen, January’) and his neologism Pallaksch, which sometimes meant yes, and sometimes meant no. Perhaps a word from the gods, meaning yes and meaning no. A good one for a translator to tackle, a middle way between cliché and catastrophe.

It was a stunning, sensitive and graceful offering, received gratefully by an audience in rapture.

McKeon’s meditations on attentiveness and the power of poetry to keep us in its aim, as well as Carson’s consideration of translatability, καλχαινειν, cliché and catastrophe took on a very sharp focus as the audience realized that the DLR Poetry Now Festival will no longer exist in its current format. It is to be incorporated into another literary festival (‘Mountains to Sea Book Festival’), in a much reduced scale. I greatly regret this loss of an individual identity for the Poetry Festival, especially considering how long it has taken to establish and build up. Financial pressure is certainly part of it, but other pressures of audience and accessibility have undoubtedly played their part, all with concerns of metrics and measurability, impact and the perceived elitism of poetry. It all makes me fear that we are all now much too close to a kind of cliché and catastrophe that have nothing to do with poetry.

Notes:

1 See the remarks by Jess Row (here) on memory, the ars memorativa, esp. via the Rhetorica ad Herennium. The box in which Nox comes is not just like that archivists use for precious and delicate books or manuscripts, it might also be the room Carson likens to translation itself.

2 To paraphrase the title of John Henderson, The Medieval World of Isidore Seville: Truth from Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

3 And cf. “Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.” Carson, Autobiography of Red, p. 3.

4 See Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' in Illuminations, ed. with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 211-244, with citation from p. 214.

5 See Michael Camille, 'The Très Riches Heures: An Illuminated Manuscript in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Critical Inquiry, 17 (1990), 72-107, at p. 72. For further fascinating work on facsimiles, see Sandra Hindman and Nina Rowe (eds), Manuscript Illumination in The Modern Age: Recovery and Reconstruction (Evanston, Il: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, 2001).

For reviews of Nox see that of Meghan O'Rourke in The New Yorker; Andrew Motion in The Guardian; Sam Anderson in New York Magazine; Ben Ratliff in The New York Times; Michael Dirda in The Washington Post; Peter Stothard in the TLS; Tom Payne in The Telegraph; Jess Row in The New Republic

Not strictly speaking a review, but excerpts from a reading, an interpretation can be seen here:

and here

6 There is a transcription(?) of another slightly modified version of the lecture here.

7 Cf. καταστροφή, an overturning, sudden turn, conclusion (LSJ)

Another timepiece from the McGonigles

2011-03-22T22:55:00.002Z

I've had occasion before to blog about the McGonigle brothers and their extraordinary watches. Well, the brothers have developed another watch, entitled "Tuscar". It is gorgeous, and features a new in-house calibre movement. Read the specs here. Read the Press Release here.

Listen Again

2011-03-18T10:54:00.002Z

Listen to Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time with Miri Rubin, Ian Wei and Peter Denley talk about the Medieval University.

From the website:

In the 11th and 12th centuries a new type of institution started to appear in the major cities of Europe. The first universities were those of Bologna and Paris; within a hundred years similar educational organisations were springing up all over the continent. The first universities based their studies on the liberal arts curriculum, a mix of seven separate disciplines derived from the educational theories of Ancient Greece.

The universities provided training for those intending to embark on careers in the Church, the law and education. They provided a new focus for intellectual life in Europe, and exerted a significant influence on society around them. And the university model proved so robust that many of these institutions and their medieval innovations still exist today.

Irishmen writing in Italian

2011-03-16T09:22:00.005Z

On March 29th, a letter in the collection of Roy Davids will come on sale at Bonhams, London, written by James Joyce to Carlo Linati, an Italian writer and translator. In the two-page letter, written in Italian, Joyce asks Linati to translate some of his work, explaining the trouble he was having with the censors: He wrote: “For the publication of Dubliners I had to struggle for ten years. The whole first edition of 1,000 copies was burnt at Dublin by fraud; some say it was the doing of priests, some of enemies, others of the then Viceroy or his consort, Lady Aberdeen. Altogether it is a mystery.” A transcription of the Italian has not been published [a translation has appeared in The Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert (1966)] but hopefully when this letter makes its way to a new owner, it will see the light of day.

Still Alive

2011-02-17T20:56:00.007Z

Agnolo Bronzino, 'Portrait of Bartolomeo Panciatichi',
tempera on wood, 104 x 84 cm; Florence, Uffizi Gallery.

I am still alive. I feel I should say this since it has been an unforgivably long time since I last posted. Things have been busy in the land of Miglior Acque, book buying has been proceeding with gusto, and the work is proceeding at a rate that I can only describe as flat out. So, that's that. Books. I have recently been lucky enough to acquire Storia della letteratura italiana, gen. ed. Enrico Malato (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1995-2002), which was originally published in 14 volumes. It was then reissued with Il Sole-24 Ore in 24 volumes. The pagination is the same and so is the text, so one can reliably cite them and use them. They are really excellent, though some of the medieval chapters have been republished in revised monograph format. This is the case for (the excellent) Lucia Battaglia Ricci, 'Giovanni Boccaccio', which came out in Vol. 2, Il Trecento [1995], pp. 727-877, but which was republished in a revised 2000 monograph. In any case, I'm delighted to have it and am often using it. There have been some good books come up at Bennett & Kerr lately too, such as Ricci's 1965 Monarchia, which I'm glad to have, though I have my eye on Prue Shaw's new edition for the Edizione nazionale. I was particularly happy to get Giuseppe Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio's Decameron (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), and Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). I also recently got my hands on a lovely uncut copy of Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Decamerone, ed. by Giuseppe Petronio, Nuova raccolta di classici italiani annotati, 3, 2 vols (Torino: G. Einaudi, 1950). This is an edition not that easy to find here and it was very reasonably priced and I needed it. Petronio has also produced a couple of other important essays on the Decameron such as Il Decamerone. Saggio critico (Bari: Laterza, 1935); and a couple of articles reprinted in I miei Decameron (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1989).

The Cambridge University Press booksale this January was where I spend a few hours at the beginning of term and I picked up a few bargains that I was delighted with: they sell the hardbacks for £7 and the paperbacks for £3. Particularly pleasing were: Piero Boitani, English Medieval Narrative in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, trans. Joan Krakover Hall (1982); Susan Woodford, Looking at Pictures (1983); Jeryldene M. Wood (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Piero della Francesca (2002); Jeremy Tambling, Dante and Difference: Writing in the Commedia (1988); Peter Humfrey (ed), Venice and the Veneto, Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance (2007); Fiona Somerset, Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England (1998); Jessica Rosenfeld, Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry: Love after Aristotle (2011). A pretty good haul, all things considered. I was also quite delighted to pick up Nicolai Rubinstein (ed), Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence (London: Faber, 1968) in G. David & Sons a couple of weeks back. A lovely, elegant thing really.

In January I had a very brief but very enjoyable visit to Florence to visit some colleagues, to work in the library, and to see the wonderful Bronzino exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi. I was kindly hosted by William E. Coleman and Edvige Agostinelli, who are in the final stages of a very exciting project editing Boccaccio's Teseida - they are preparing an edition for the Chaucer Library, which will be a text they believe is closest to what Chaucer had access; an 'old spelling' edition with SISMEL; and a digital facsimile of the autograph, BML, MS Acq. e Doni, 325. They've been working hard on the autograph and have a whole host of new readings to offer. It is important work and will be very exciting to work on.

At the BNCF, I was able to look at a manuscript, Magliab. II, II, 8, which I'm writing about right now: it is the oldest extant witness to the Decameron and has been the subject of some very exciting work by Marco Cursi: see esp. his Il Decameron: Scritture, scriventi, lettori. Storia di un testo (Roma: Viella, 2007), but see too 'Per la più antica fortuna del Decameron: mano e tempi del «Frammento Magliabechiano» II, II, 8 (cc. 20r-37v)', Scrittura e civiltà, 22 (1998), 265-293. I'm picking up some crumbs left behind.

The Bronzino exhibition was a revelation. Verily. A magnificent achievement for all concerned, with a beautiful, serious, scholarly catalogue (Carlo Falciani and Antonio Natali (eds), Bronzino: Painter and Poet at the Court of the Medici [Florence: Mandragora, 2010]). The great portraits were on display, especially 'Eleonora of Toledo with her son Giovanni', and I stood and marvelled at her dress: you can see the threads, and to be honest, it looks like it has been woven rather than painted. And I was intrigued by the two Panciatichi portraits. The famous portrait of Lucrezia is the subject of a wonderful essay in the catalogue by Elizabeth Cropper, which argues that the religious views of the couple offer ways to interpret some parts of the painting, such as her chain and its device reading amour dure sans fin. I got to wondering about his portrait. The background is just so odd, perspective that does not quite make sense, buildings that cannot be identified, possibly recognizable Florentine (Michelangelesque). And at the same time, completely...bonkers. Perhaps, if there are dimensions to the Lucrezia portrait that were executed with discretion because of a whiff of unorthodox Lutheranism, there might be new ways to interpret this portrait too? I'm not exactly suggestion that it merits some sort of Dan Brown wild symbology goose chase, but maybe the background is begging a question that has not yet been asked. Why is it so elaborately impossible?

A PhD in the Humanities

2010-11-14T08:40:00.000Z

and then, just to turn that smirk into a tear, watch this (thanks to Karl Steel over at ITM):

Boccaccio, by Boccaccio

2010-10-31T14:40:00.010Z

Of Boccaccio's autograph manuscripts, it is arguably that of the Decameron that has attracted the most attention in recent years. Now in the Staatsbibliothek - Preussischer Kulturbesitz, in Berlin, under the shelfmark "MS Hamilton 90", this fascinating manuscript, produced in the 1370s, clearly shows an author concerned with the 'packaging' of his great masterpiece. This is all the more interesting because the late Boccaccio is often thought of as more interested in the production of Latin works, as repudiating the earlier, youthful and foolish vernacular work. The manuscript certainly disturbs any neat division anyone might wish to draw between these two Boccaccios.

While there had been some talk earlier in the twentieth century of this being an important manuscript, but it was not until the publication in 1962 of Vittore Branca and Pier Giorgio Ricci, Un autografo del Decameron (Codice hamiltoniano 90), (Padova: C. E. D. A. M., 1962), that its true importance was realized. Branca and Ricci identified it as an autograph and the former set about producing a critical text based on it. This was subsequently published as Decameron: edizione critica secondo l'autografo hamiltoniano (Firenze: L'Accademia della Crusca, 1976), and appeared simultaneously as volume 4 of Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, gen. ed. Vittore Branca, Classici Mondadori 10 vols (Milano: A. Mondadori, 1964-1998). The 600th anniversary of the death of Boccaccio fell in 1975 and was the impetus for a good deal of publications on the author and his work. So, in 1974, there appeared, under the auspices of Charles S. Singleton, Decameron: Edizione diplomatico-interpretativa dell'autografo Hamilton 90 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). This contains a very important description of the manuscript by Armando Petrucci, 'Il MS. Berlinese Hamiltoniano 90. Note codicologiche e paleografiche' (pp. 647-661); as for the rest of the volume, it really never recovered from the scathing review by Branca in Studi sul Boccaccio 8 (1974), 321-329.

In 1975 Branca produced a beautiful facsimile of the manuscript: Decameron: facsimile dell'autografo conservato nel Codice Hamilton 90 della Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz di Berlino, Manus summorum: autografi dei capolavori nella civilità universale riprodotti in facsimile (Firenze: Alinari). Well, dear reader, while perusing on Ebay what did I find only a rather reasonably priced copy of the said facsimile and before I could say Buy It Now, it was winding it way from sunny Italy to the dark and wintry North. I am so delighted to have this. It is invaluable to be able to check each passage from the printed text against how it appears in the autograph, keeping an eye on how the punctuation and capitalization are marked out. This has been rather wonderfully discussed by Lucia Battaglia Ricci in her Boccaccio (Rome: Salerno, 2000; = 'Giovanni Boccaccio', in Storia della letteratura italiana, ed. by Enrico Malato, 12 vols [Roma: Salerno Editrice, 1995], Vol. 2: Il Trecento [1995], pp. 727-877), where she suggests that Boccaccio distinguishes between narrative layers that are not always easily reproduced in modern printed editions. She makes some very important points too about the look and feel of the manuscript: it is a rather serious book that looks for all the world like a university text.

The beautiful and witty catchphrases are also a constant source of fascination for me. There are thirteen catchwords in the manuscript though there were others since the final three quires are missing. The one illustrated above occurs on f. 71v and represents Pietro di Vinciolo, at Dec v 10 37; his text reads 'che poco'. Branca saw in these an illustrative programme reflecting the work's thematic concerns. So, the figures represent the triumph over Fortune, Love, and Wit (fortuna, amore, and ingegno), four portraits for each. Six of the ten male figures are merchants, which he saw as indicating the social class in which many of the stories are set and perhaps indicating too the presence of this class amongst the work's earliest readers and copyists. (While not dissenting [too much] from Branca, I have a somewhat different take on these catchwords, outlined in greater detail in the third chapter of my forthcoming Chaucer and Italian Textuality [Oxford: Clarendon Press]).

The facsimile was set and printed in the famous Stamperia Valdonega, in Verona, in 325 copies; mine is numbered 188. The photographs were taken by Alinari; the paper produced by the Cartiera Ventura di Cernobbio; it was bound by the Legatoria Torriai di Cologno Monzense, and comes boxed in brown cloth and card. It is a thing of sober beauty. And a great addition to the library.

Schubert : Impromptu in G-flat Major D.899 No.3

2010-10-26T14:08:00.000+01:00

Hell's Half Acre, Lazarides Gallery London, October 12-17, 2010

2010-10-22T11:00:00.001+01:00

Dante: no other medieval author continues to exert such an extraordinary force on the modern imagination. Those who've read his Comedìa never recover; those who've never read him still feel like they know the Inferno, and because it has become such a cultural norm, they probably do know it. At Cambridge, Prof. Robin Kirkpatrick has been undertaking a massive critical and creative engagement with Dante over the past couple of years in a project entitled Performance, as well as a conference at CRASSH entitled Pain in Performance and 'Moving Beauty'. This year, on October 30th, Performance 2010 will further explore Dante and other texts in a series of performances, music, dance, art and drawings.

Recently, the Lazarides Gallery in London held an exhibition (suggestively) entitled Hell's Half Acre in which sixteen artists produced work evoking Dante's Inferno in The Old Vic Tunnels, under Waterloo Station. The setting is an important aspect of this exhibition. You enter and descend into a dark series of cavernous spaces in which artworks are lit by spotlights, passing a projection of a barking dog on the way. Curiously, this not on the list of works exhibited: perhaps no-one wanted to own up to such creature. Your eyes take some time to become accustomed to the low light - I nearly fell over in my first five minutes, adding to my disorientation and considerably heightening the effect! Steve Lazarides is a name often associated with Banksy though he represents over thirty contemporary artists and his vision in putting together this exhibition in this particular space is remarkable. This short review will no do justice to the richness of the exhibition.

The Old Vic Tunnels comprise five long, wide, intersecting tunnels accommodating an exhibition of installations, paintings, sculpture and film. This has allowed works to be displayed with fairly generous space, and installations have room to breathe. It also allows the darkness of the space between works plenty of room to exert itself on the viewer's imagination. The engagement with Dante is not always apparent. A plan of hell is provided in which the names of various artists are found in certain circles, sometimes indicating a whole circle, or merely sitting beside certain sins. There is obviously a good deal of humour involved here and surely a smile was raised when deciding where to put which artist: akin to taking the Inferno quiz. It implies structure, that the exhibition is mapped against the moral design of the Comedy; and while it was enjoyable to think about the interpretative possibilities that became available, I'm not sure that it has been so mapped quite so seriously.

These are images of pain and suffering, of bodies being punctured. There are Boogie's Needles, and Paul Insect's Object Desire, a sphere of syringes with needles pointing out. Threatening, forbidding. Compelling and maybe beautiful too. There is the affecting piece by Jonathan Yeo, For What We are About to Receive, an installation of several panes of glass that need to be viewed from a specific angle to re-compose two kneeling supplicant figures. Here perspective and position are essential. To see the whole image you need to stand in one very specific spot. The act of viewing is rendered performative: it makes the art. But in another real sense, the art makes you. It forces you to stand in front of it, directly, head on. You are being controlled by it. There are often moments in the Comedy when we feel like that.

Bodies too are central to the explorations of Mark Jenkins in a sculptural installation entitled Chrysalis 1-5. These hanging bodies wrapped in clingfilm are quietly waiting, in the foetal position, for something. They are in a limbo-like stasis. Or, given that a chrysalis will become a perfected creature, perhaps there is more of a purgatorial state of becoming about these bodies. There is nothing of expiation in their hanging, it does not feel like a punishment or a purging. It points to a natural state on one hand; on the other it is deeply unsettling that their human form is so developed. They unsettle but they do not disgust. One is compelled by them, compelled to look at them, to try and see their faces (which are not visible). One wants to know who they are and why they are there. One waits for dialogue. Like them.

Readers of the Comedìa in the 1320s must have recognized figures from Florence, perhaps people they knew personally. Branca Doria could have read Inferno 33.136-138 and raised an eyebrow to have found himself there. So too, the present is more than enough for some of these artists contemplating Dante. A wonderful installation by Vhils entitled Bernie Made Off shows a painting of Bernard Madoff on a wall which has suffered serious damage. It is only when one looks more closely that it seems as if the damage, bullet holes, are in fact creating the image. It is an elegant and at the same time angry piece. Viewers have no trouble locating him somewhere in Hell. Quite far down actually. Even his name should have given something away: he becomes almost like the devils in Malebolge with their violent, cruelly parodic names, Malebranche, Malacoda, Scarmiglione, Alichino, Calcabina, Cagnazzo, Libicocco, Draghignazzo, Ciriatto, Graffiacane, Farfarello, Rubicante. Similarly, a piece by George Osodi, Niger Delta Series comprises photographs of the Niger Delta in front of a sand and oil installation. The stagnant, polluted water is surely reminiscent of the Inferno (cf. 'L'acqua era buia assai più che persa'; 'The waters here were darker, far, than perse', Inf 7. 103, trans. Kirkpatrick [Penguin, 2006], p. 63). Perhaps not subtle, but then again, not much about the destruction there is subtle. Again, one has no trouble imagining those responsible somewhere in Hell.

Hell was not the only part of the poem explored. A beautiful piece by Tokujin Yoshioka entitled Stellar had a white sphere hanging from the ceiling, made up of pieces of opaque crystal. A smoke machine filled the room (which was closed off with heavy drapes) with white smoke. I do not have a photo of this piece, but I doubt a photo would really convey the effect. Viewers walked under the sphere, rapt in attention, as we were enveloped. You could really only see people's faces, all moving in an ethereal and quite sublime appreciation of this strangely lit object overhead. It was paradisal and I found it a profoundly moving piece of work. Beautiful. Humane. And joyful.

Bolt from the Blue

2010-10-14T13:46:00.002+01:00

via the BBC website:

This is the moment a lightning bolt appears to strike the Statue of Liberty in New York. New York photographer Jay Fine had spent the night braving the storm in Battery Park City, Manhattan, in a bid to get the perfect picture. Jay spent nearly two hours poised with his camera and took more than 80 shots before striking lucky with this particular bolt of lightning at 8.45pm on 22 September. He said he had been waiting 40 years to get the picture.

To capture the shots Jay used a Nikon D300s with 60mm f/2.8 lens on the following settings: Aperture: F/10, Shutterspeed: 5 seconds, ISO: 200.

Faddan More Psalter

2010-09-18T13:47:00.004+01:00

Some time ago I blogged about the discovery of the Faddan More Psalter in Co. Tipperary in 2006. Conservation work has been carried out on the Psalter which has allowed for some startling discoveries (see here for more). These are discussed with some experts in a wonderful documentary on RTE called 'Treasure from a Bog' (produced by John Murray and written and directed by the great Alan Gilsenan). This documentary goes through the huge technical challenge that the Psalter presented in stabilizing its condition and retrieving as much as possible for study. About 15% of the book survives, and one single page survives almost intact. This offers valuable clues as to the construction of the book and how the parchment was prepared, pricking, ruling, and the like. However, one of the most exciting, and puzzling, discoveries relates not to the book itself but rather to its leather cover. Very few of these have survived so this was already an extraordinary discovery. Analysis revealed that the inside of the cover was lined with a material not found at all in 8th/9th century Ireland: papyrus. This is such an unexpected discovery that its importance and significance cannot be overestimated, but quite what it means is anybody's guess! Does it connect the early Irish church with the Middle East? If so, what does that mean? Exciting stuff. The Faddan More Psalter and its cover are expected to go on display in the Summer of 2011. You can be sure of an update.

CJ Sansom, Heartstone (London: Mantle/Macmillan, 2010)

2010-09-01T13:01:00.001+01:00

It is the summer of 1545 and the king prepares for war with France. Master Matthew Shardlake, the lawyer who has been keeping his head down and trying not to attract the attention of those many grasping and ruthless courtiers who seem to congregate around Henry and his queens, receives a letter from Queen Catherine Parr. He cannot refuse her request to investigate what has led to the suicide of the son of one of the queen's old servants. It is a hopeless case. He and his opposite number, the very disagreeable Master Dyrick, are charged with travelling to Hampshire to take depositions. While there Shardlake decides to make inquiries about a woman he has been visiting in Bedlam and the circumstances that lead to her madness. Thus Shardlake finds himself weaving in and out of two slowly unfolding, terrible, stories. Things come to a head when he must confront enemies old and new on board the Mary Rose.

Sansom is in great form in this marvellous novel. He has a wonderful sense for atmosphere, especially in the Herician court. His vulnerable hunchback lawyer is a figure always on the outside, wanting to be accepted but at the same time resisting being involved since it only leads to danger. The religious upheaval is another wonderful context: everyone is under suspicion and suspects each other. An old cleric, a little too nostalgic for the 'old ways', in a discussion about faith with Shardlake mentions that he doesn't like mysteries, that he needs to solve them. This is true in many ways: Shardlake looks first for the human hand behind the unexplained. The novel is long but not, I think, overlong. It also skillfully sets up the next installment, with a brief but memorable meeting with the young daughter of Anne Boleyn, the Lady Elizabeth. She will, inevitably, play some part in the next novel. In fact, I think she'd have rather enjoyed reading this novel and when you read you'll know why.

Hallelujah for Leonard Cohen

2010-08-04T19:00:00.005+01:00

The Hebrew word הַלְּלוּיָ means Praise the Lord (or more properly Praise Yahweh, being praise הַלְּלוּ and יָ the first two letters of the Tetragrammaton), an injunction to the congregation to join in praise. During Leonard Cohen's wonderful performance of his incomperable 'Hallelujah' at Lissadell House in Sligo, he innovated upon his own song by mentioning Yeats' County. In the first half of the concert he mentioned having learned one of Yeats' poems mentioning Lissadell House over fifty years ago and could not have imagined singing in its gardens. That poem has been much mentioned in recent reviews of these two concerts. It opens Yeats' 1933 collection The Winding Stair and Other Poems and is printed below in full, alongside the master himself singing.

In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the summer's wreath;
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring among the ignorant.
I know not what the younger dreams —
Some vague Utopia — and she seems,
When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics.
Many a time I think to seek
One or the other out and speak
Of that old Georgian mansion, mix
Pictures of the mind, recall
That table and the talk of youth,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.

Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
The innocent and the beautiful.
Have no enemy but time;
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time catch;
Should the conflagration climb,
Run till all the sages know.
We the great gazebo built,
They convicted us of guilt;
Bid me strike a match and blow.

(October 1927)

Very limited edition

2010-07-26T11:23:00.002+01:00

In the 1996 film Tiré à part, dir. Bernard Rapp, with Terence Stamp (speaking French quite beautifully) there is a scene in the study of one of the characters, Nicholas Fabry. It is a scene in which he is looking for something and so pulls all the books off the shelves, but the study itself is quite marvellous (and I've had occasion to refer to it before). Well, I've pulled a quick screen shot from a preview clip. It's a mess but you get the idea.

Wonderful study.

A Beautiful Friendship

2010-07-25T17:32:00.003+01:00

This is a picture featured in the The Observer Magazine, 25.07.10, p. 33 (Travel, 'Casablanca write large'), which shows the library of Dar Khalifa, the Caliph's House, in Casablanca, restored by its owner Tahir Shah.

Isn't it just beautiful?

Books in Bologna - and elsewhere

2010-07-23T23:07:00.006+01:00

My trip to Italy for the NCS Congress in Siena has also resulted in the happy acquisition of a small but select number of books for my delectation and pleasure. This was a combination of picking up books I already knew were in certain shops and picking up some other things unexpectedly. In the former category was Giuseppe Corsi's anthology Rimatori del Trecento (UTET, 1969), an excellent selection of poetry with a hugely detailed critical apparatus. I'd been using the library copy and was using it enough to justify owning it. When I went to Libreria Belli in Bologna to pick it up I happened quite by happy accident upon the Romano and Tenenti edition of Alberti's I libri della famiglia, first published by Einaudi in their NUE series in 1969. This edition has, however, been revised by Francesco Furlan, in 1994, with a text that takes account of new manuscript evidence. It was not cheap but then again, this hardly ever appears second hand (and it is now out of print, like so many other volumes in this series). I'm very happy to own this fascinating work and will be using it more often, both for teaching and research.

I was also kindly gifted some books which I'm delighted to have. Piero Boitani's Letteratura europea e Medioevo volgare (Il Mulino, 2007); Prima lezione di letteratura (Laterza, 2007); and Sulle orme di Ulisse, rev & exp edn (Il Mulino, 2007 [1998]). Taken together these represent a significant part of the research interests of this fine medieval scholar and will be a mine of future reading and study.

At the NCS bookstand, there was a representative of Einaudi and, taking advantage of a conference discount, I decided to procure a copy of Chiara Frugoni, L'affare migliore di Enrico: Giotto e la cappella Scrovegni (Einaudi, 2008), and Maria Luisa Meneghetti, Il pubblico dei trovatori: la ricezione della poesia cortese fino al XIV secolo (Einaudi, 1992). This last I'd been long on the lookout for and was delighted to pick up, but the former got me very excited. It is a very substantial tome by a very famous historian. Then, while in Bologna, I was then able to pick up a copy of Giuseppe Basile (ed), Giotto: gli affreschi della Cappella degli Scrovegni a Padova (Skira, 2002), at Mel Bookstore. I read one alongside the other.

Frugoni's book is very interesting and very good. It is often much more the work of a historian than art historian, in the sense that her readings of the paintings are often somewhat straightforward. They are certainly always very plugged in to the source texts, and the volume includes an edition and translation of Enrico Scrovegni's will which will prove invaluable to contextualizing his much discussed motivations in building and commissioning the frescoes. But there was often room for a bit more verve in her interpretations. She is prompt in her disagreement with the work of other scholars (such as Laura Jacobus, Andrew Ladis, Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona) though does not explain the nature of these disagreements. For example, she takes issue with Jacobus's thesis of multiple entrances to the chapel, something Jacobus elaborates upon quite a bit in her exploration of different scenes being 'choreographed' for different audiences. I'd like to know why Frugoni disagrees. For all that, this is an engaging and informed study of the Scrovegni chapel and is well worth reading.

NCS Siena 2010

2010-07-20T08:32:00.000+01:00

That's it for another NCS Congress. It has been an exhausting five days but they have been of great vitality and interest and immensely enjoyable. Quite apart from the wonderful setting (and the new building in which the conference itself took place was gratefully equipped with air-conditioning), the meeting this time was in great form. I met lots of people, made new friends and caught up with old friends. We were fed and watered with care and attention. The conference dinner, at the Tenuta di Monaciano was one of the best I've ever had, in an exquisite setting. The company was delightful.

At the end of the Congress several scholars who are not Chaucerians gave a perspective on their own experiences attending: it was interesting to hear this, especially as three were from modern language departments. I wouldn't have minded a few Chaucerians talking about their own conference highlights, but this did not happen at this forum. It was the end of the conference and everyone was tired, perhaps talked out. I humbly offer some of my own initial thoughts. While there were Chaucer and Italy threads at the conference, I did think that Chaucer and Italy was not quite as well represented as it could have been, in terms of sessions and how they were scheduled and put together. For example, there was a session called 'The French of Italy', lovely. Why not the vernaculars of Italy? Looking at Tuscan dialects, Genoese, Milanese? (Joseph Grossi gave a paper in my own session on L'Anonimo Genovese, complete with very successful readings in dialect!). This was a missed opportunity, I felt. And I recognize that the opportunity is now passed, and there not much point in complaining now.

There was too the egregious absence of the man of grete auctoritee, the one who has done so much for Chaucer and Italy, who did not have that far to travel. That needs explaining.

There were some rather excellent papers. These included those in the session 'Image Trouble, 1380-1538: The Secular Image': Alastair Minnis, 'Image Trouble in Vernacular Commentary: The Glossing of Evrart de Conty and Francesco da Barberino', Kathryn Starkey, 'An Iconography of the Secular in Der Welscher Gast', and Barbara Newman, 'René of Anjou and the Heart's Two Quests'. I really enjoyed the papers in the 'Italian Encounters' session, Nick Havely, 'An English Reader of Dante in Papal Avignon' [sic Adam Easton], William Robins, 'Did Chaucer Meet Sercambi', and Carolyn Collette, 'Richard de Bury, Petrarch, and Avignon'. Robins argued that Chaucer might well have visited Lucca (and therefore possibly come into contact with Sercambi, and that the exchange might not have been all one way). He did so by outlining the travel itineraries possible in late fourteenth-century Italy while also recognizing the speculative nature of his paper. It was, for all that, a fascinating paper. There were some other good sessions on MSS, Michael Hanly on Jacopo Rapondi of Lucca, for example. And a good session on humanism and the House of Fame. There were some excellent papers in a session on the French of Italy (especially a beautifully detailed and linguistically sensitive paper by Charmaine Lee), and it was an important opportunity to think about just how linguistically complex the scene is for Chaucer in Italy. Other highlights included Glenn Burger's paper on performative reading and manuscript studies, and Martha Rust on paper and parchment and the Middle English verse love epistle, a beautiful piece of work. The plenaries were powerful, chief among them Aranye Fradenburg's. Moving, compelling, enjoyable. And it was great to see Griselda stepping out in style with Richard Firth Green.

But the highlight of the conference, and certainly among the conference's most important papers, was one that was never mentioned again. This is most curious considering how much time we spent talking about manuscripts, theorizing about manuscripts, salivating over manuscript illuminations. Estelle Stubbs gave a paper on the morning of the first day in which she identified the famous 'Scribe D' as John Marchant. The importance of this scribe in copying work by Chaucer has always been recognized, but his identification now allows us to place this copying in a much more specific context (and Stubbs threw the Guildhall into relief in this respect). It was a groundbreaking piece of work, compellingly and elegantly presented, and should have been the talk of the conference.

It was an enormously successful conference.

Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin wins Griffin Prize

2010-06-04T16:50:00.004+01:00

The Irish poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has won the prestigious Griffin Prize for her wonderful collection The Sun-Fish (Gallery Press, 2009). The judges' citation reads as follows:

“This beguiling poet opens many doors onto multiple worlds. From the outset, with the startling imagery of ‘The Witch in the Wardrobe’ – a ‘fluent pantry’, where ‘the silk scarves came flying at her face like a car wash’ – we are in a shifting realm, both real and otherworldly. The effect of her impressionistic style is like watching a photograph as it develops. The Sun-fish contains approaches to family and political history, thwarted pilgrimages in which Ní Chuilleanáin poses many questions – not always directly – and often chooses to leave the questions themselves unresolved, allowing them to resonate meaningfully past the actual poem’s end. She is a truly imaginative poet, whose imagination is authoritative and transformative. She leads us into altered or emptied landscapes, such as that in ‘The Polio Epidemic,’ when children were kept indoors, but the poet escapes on a bicycle ‘I sliced through miles of air/free as a plague angel descending/On places buses went …’ Each poem is a world complete, and often they move between worlds, as in the beautiful ‘A Bridge between Two Counties.’ These are potent poems, with dense, captivating sound and a certain magic that proves not only to be believable but necessary, in fact, to our understanding of the world around us.”

One of my favourite poems from this collection is entitled 'The Cure', and I think that it embodies so many of the qualities that I admire in Ní Chuilleanáin's work, the quietness of it, the tender observation that is never patronizing and the great sense of strangeness. There's also a very delicate kind of 'Irish' feel to it that I have trouble explaining: it is a tone that seems to characterize but at the same time to disappear before your very eyes.

The Cure

They've kept the servant sitting up;
It's late again,
Their fire burning so high they've opened a door,
And from her room

She hears them settling the great questions:
How treat a case
Of green-sickness or, again, one of unrequited love?
The fire burns down,

They close the door. She was writing to her mother,
Resumes: Don't think
Of consulting that fraudulent woman. Her sister, who
Died, had the gift.

... I understand, it must be hard for her,
So long, no news,
But surely, secretly it comforts her heart
That the child thrives.

The voices boom again, the door is wide,
She hears the bell,
Appears with her candlestick, ready to guide
A guest to bed,

Then back to her letter. The lady of this house
Keeps to her room.
The master sighs as he locks the heavy street door.
There is no cure.

(from Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, The Sun-fish (Gallery Press, 2009). Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Winner of the Griffin Prize, 2010.

This is how they all (should) do it!

2010-06-02T13:13:00.002+01:00

On Sunday, I'm off to Glyndebourne to see Così fan tutte, dir. Nicholas Hytner, with Barbara Senator (Dorabella), Sally Matthews (Fiordiligi), Allan Clayton (Ferrando), Robert Gleadow (Guglielmo), Anna Maria Panzarella (Despina) and Pietro Spagnoli (Don Alfonso).

Needless to say, I'm very excited about this.

For a little taster, listen to this:

'Soave sia il vento' from Mozart's Così fan tutte from Glyndebourne on Vimeo.

Words Words Words

2010-05-19T08:14:00.003+01:00

A little while back I wondered whether I should invest in Alberto Asor Rosa's Letteratura italiana (Einaudi) and in the end I did. It is a real mine of wonderful material and I have not been disappointed with it at all. It comprises 18 volumes, 6 tomes in 7 vols [I. Il letterato e le Istituzioni; II. Produzione e consumo; III. Le forme del tempo, part 1: Teoria e poesia and part 2, La prosa; IV. L'interpretazione; V. Le questioni; VI. Teatro, musica, tradizioni dei classici] plus 4 of 'Storia e geografia' [I. L'Età medievale, II. L'età moderna., parts 1 and 2; III. L'età contemporanea], plus 2 vols of dictionary and index, and then 5 of 'Le Opere'. [I. Dalle Origini al Cinquecento; II. Dal Cinquecento all'Ottocento; III. L'Ottocento e il Novecento; IV. Il Novecento, parts 1 and 2].

I have also made another significant addition to the library, also pictured here. Salvatore Battaglia, Il Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana was begun in 1961 at the Unione tipografico-editrice torinese and in 2002 was finished with the publication of volume 21, Toi-Z. I have been looking up the definition of the word bankrupt and I think I recognize it.

This completes a mammoth task of lexical work, comprising a total of 22, 504 pages, 183, 594 words drawn from 14, 061 works of 6, 077 authors. You hear it said that the dictionary is bigger than the OED (in 20 volumes, with a mere 21, 730 words), though with the online updates it is less easy to be so sure. I am already using this pretty much daily and it is just a marvellous thing.

Two volumes of supplements - which I don't yet have - have been published, in 2004 and 2009, edited by the great Edoardo Sanguineti.

Yesterday, Sanguineti sadly passed away. It is the end of an era of Italian poetry. A great man is gone.

The Task(s) of the Translator

2010-04-21T14:27:00.011+01:00

The lastest issue of Anglistik (21.1, March 2010) contains a cluster of essays on translation, edited by Colin Wilcockson and is entitled: 'Focus on Translating into English: Theories, Practices and Problems' (pp. 1-140); he has also written a prefatory essay. Several of these essays are on medieval literature and are noted below for anyone who is interested. Of particular note is the fact that almost all are highly experienced translators and so these meditations and observations will only add to our appreciation of their translations.

Elizabeth Dearnley, 'From Laȝamon to Caxton: The Evolution of the Middle English Translator's Prologue', pp. 13-25, is an examination of changing attitudes to translation through the prologues, mapped against the politico-linguistic situation in England, in particular the status of English, which underwent enormous changes throughout the period.

Bernard O'Donoghue, 'Translation Sir Gawain and the Green Knight', pp. 27-35, will appeal broadly for its incisive appreciation of the ever increasing numbers of translations of SGGK appearing in recent years. Particularly exciting is his laudatory reference to Jane Draycott's translation of Pearl, due out soon from Carcanet. Very much looking forward to that.

Barry Windeatt, 'Translating Troilus and Criseyde: Modernizing the Courtly Poetic', pp. 37-48, asserts that 'it is the courtly style - in all its formality, elevation and pattern - that proves most problematic and elusive to represent. This specialized idiom of courtly poetry is among what now seem the most culturally distant aspects of Chaucer's Troilus, remaining culturally untranslatable into the verse translation so far published' (p. 41). Windeatt goes on to explore further some aspects of this courtly idiom and highlights some particularly knotty passages that require hard choices on the part of a translator.

Colin Wilcockson, 'Some Problems in Translating Chaucer's Poetry into Modern Prose', pp. 49-58, takes its cue from Wilcockson's excellent translation for Penguin of a selection of Tales, and explores some of the challenges that he faced and the solutions for which he opted. These are often of a rhetorical nature, or have social implications, or centre on taboo words, as well as technical problems of forms of address no longer used in Present Day English.

Sioned Davies, 'Translating the Mabinogion', pp. 59-74, sees the work of a translator as necessarily one that aims to do justice to the acoustic dimension of the medieval text, to convey the performance features of the source language text: 'the medieval storyteller 'performed' his tales orally and visually before his audience; the medieval scribe wrote down tales intended for oral delivery - another 'performance'' (pp. 60-61). She goes on then to highlight a range of challenges to the translator of the Mabinogion, such as the order of the tales, punctuation, orthography, conjunctive cohesion and formulaic content, as well as direct speech and the use of the historical present.

R. Barton Palmer, 'Translation and Failure: The Example of Guillaume de Machaut', pp. 75-86, opens with some searching questions on the nature of translation, invoking Anton Popovič and his idea that source language and target language share an 'invariant core' (in 'The Concept of 'Shift of Expression' in Translation Analysis', in The Nature of Translation, ed. James Holmes [The Hague: Mouton, 1970], 127-144). Palmer continues: 'It may be a truth commonly acknowledged that translation is marked by failure. But we are less likely to proclaim that translations are most effective when their makers self-consciously identify the peculiar forms of that failure. This is a principle, I humbly suggest, that we academic translators of medieval texts might do well to keep always in mind' (p. 76). The article proceeds with what he describes as 'an anatomy of failure', drawing on his own experience as a translator.

Robin Kirkpatrick, 'Dante's Commedia: The Translation of Courtesy', pp. 93-114, opens wondering how we should address other people and begins a powerful meditation on courtesy. He observes that Dante's Commedia is 'a poem constructed almost entirely around conversations - between Dante as an actor in his own poem and the souls he encounters in the afterlife, and, equally, between Dante in propria persona and the texts such as Virgil's Aeneid, which he seeks to adjust (or 'translate') to his own purposes' (p. 93). The suggests that a general theory of translation might be developed as an act of courtesy, 'in which the translator stands as mediator not only between the words of the original text and the demands of the target language but also between the ethical principles that speak with differing nuance in differing cultures or epochs'. Kirkpatrick continues this beautiful article with examples of challenges facing the translator, solutions he himself has opted for, and brings them to bear upon a critical reading of the passages themselves. It ends by embracing the post-Babelic world of the translator. 'And if, as in Paradise when confronting the reality of God, there is no logical way in which the task can be successful, the performance itself will nonetheless have its own value. In this perspective, it should not matter at all that a translator discovers that there are umpteen previous versions of the text to which he is attending. Each new effort - like each new performance of a musical score - will stand as an enrichment and celebration of the original text' (p. 114).

The issues also contains: Malcolm Lyons, 'Translation from Arabic: The Thousand and One Nights', pp. 87-91; Walter Pape, 'Reweaving the Veil of Poetry: Translating Goethe's Faust', pp. 115-130; Bernard Adams, 'Translating Hungarian', pp. 131-140.

Vedro con mio diletto

2010-04-18T21:55:00.001+01:00

Getting off the Hook

2010-03-26T08:34:00.008Z

Last night Paul Muldoon gave the opening address for the DLR Poetry Now 2010 Festival. I use the term address because its primary sense, as a verb, is to make straight, to put things right, in order. This was a man with things to say, things of poetry, things of family, of suffering. Of pain. It was one of the most exhilarating evenings I have had in a very long time and I would like to write about it.

The title of the evening's contribution was 'Go Fish: Six Irish Poems'. These poems were: Louis MacNeice, 'Sunday Morning'; W.R. Rodgers, 'The Net'; John Montague, 'The Trout'; Seamus Heaney, 'The Guttural Muse' and 'Limbo'; Medbh McGuckian, 'The Flower Master'; Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, 'The Shannon Estuary Welcoming the Fish'. Just as Muldoon got up to speak before an eager audience a gentleman stood up and demanded to know where he stood on Provisional IRA violence in Northern Ireland. The room froze. Muldoon stood for a moment awkwardly and said that on a good day he stood for himself and there was a nervous laugh, nervously hoping it was all over. It wasn't. The man would not be satisfied with this and persisted. 'I am from Northern Ireland and you represent me, so I want to know where you stand'. Muldoon explained that politics changes, in a way that makes it a difficult subject-matter for poetry. With a bit of heckling from the audience who were saying to the gentleman that it was not the occasion, Muldoon managed to get started.

When it came to read the first poem he paused, looked up and invited the gentleman to read Louis MacNeice, 'Sunday Morning'. It was a stunning move, generous, comfortable, from a man who wanted to involve his audience, every one of them, in his task for the evening. The politics might not be settled and remain divisive, but reading a poem together. Yes, we can do that. The man got up and you know what, he read it rather well. There was a solidity and robustness to his reading that actually worked most unexpectedly. The man finished reading and walked out. It was a pity he did. He would have heard a lot had he remained.

Another gentleman was invited to read Montague's 'The Trout', but he had forgotten his reading glasses on the train from Limerick. His reading was difficult, stilted and halting. It was a powerful and apposite reminder that reading is difficult. And that reading a poem with ease can really not be how it is in the poem at all. Muldoon stood behind him like an angel at St Jerome's shoulder, prompting him when he fell. It was heartbreakingly beautiful and I am filled with emotion even remembering it.

The work of two other poets were read by the poets themselves, Seamus Heaney and Medbh McGuckian. Heaney got up and said: "The Guttural Muse, by Seamus Heaney". As usual claiming no special place, no special right.

Muldoon continued to speak and outlined with a dazzling display of learning and deep reading his sense of a theme running through these poems of fish and water, used in a whole variety of ways with very different effects. It was an extraordinary soundscape of Irish poetry, with Muldoon pausing over words with the delicacy of a carpenter touching a piece of fine wood, a man aware of what it is, of what it was, and of what it might be.

The address was punctuated with autobiographical details. As my medievalist readers will know, and any editors surely do, punctuation can change everything and so this punctuation was everything and changed everything. He spoke about child abuse, something of which as a child he was vividly aware. And he spoke about his sister and her experience. (I couldn't stop re-reading in my mind Muldoon's poem 'The Misfits', from Moy Sand and Gravel.) The abuse of power on the part of the Church is so widespread, so terrible, dreadful—in the sense of one being full of dread. He spoke of the Pastoral Letter issued by Papa Ratzinger, of its inadequacy, its sheer utter inadequacy.

Muldoon's address was marked by a sense of a fullness of time, a timeliness, of καιρός. It was political, social, and yes, it was poetic. The time is now. Muldoon's time is now. Us readers, our time is now.

Last night the poetry belonged to the audience; it was empowering. It was special.

DLR Poetry Now 2010

2010-03-25T16:30:00.004Z

Questions of Travel, by Elizabeth Bishop

There are too many waterfalls here; the crowded streams
hurry too rapidly down to the sea,
and the pressure of so many clouds on the mountaintops
makes them spill over the sides in soft slow-motion,
turning to waterfalls under our very eyes.
—For if those streaks, those mile-long, shiny, tearstains,
aren't waterfalls yet,
in a quick age or so, as ages go here,
they probably will be.
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling,
the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships,
slime-hung and barnacled.

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
—Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
—A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
—Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr'dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
—Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
—And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians' speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"

It was with this poem that Belinda McKeon, in a lecture entitled 'One More Folded Sunset: Mapping the Poem' opened the 2010 DLR Poetry Now festival, offering an extended meditation on the place of poetry and the poetry of place in the work of Bishop and in the work of this year's amazing selection of poets. She is a very powerful reader and brings sensitivity and intellectual rigour in equal measure to her reading; these qualities and skills are much in evidence in her curatorial stewardship of the Festival.

The line-up of poets include a keynote tonight, at 8.30pm, with Paul Muldoon delivering an address entitled 'Go Fish: Six Irish Poets', and Muldoon will read his own work, alongside Anne Stevenson and Homero Aridjis on Saturday evening at 8.30pm. On Friday night, at 6.30pm, Justin Quinn, Luljeta Lleshanaku and Philip Gross will read, which I am very much looking forward to, while at 8.30pm, Derek Mahon and Rosanna Warren will read. On Saturday at 6.30pm Vona Groarke, Kevin Young and Joan Margarit will read, and on Sunday at 4pm John Burnside, Sylva Fischerová and John F. Deane will read.

It's going to be a great festival. Hopefully I'll blog again about it if I can sit down for long enough.

Charles Muscatine (1920-2010)

2010-03-17T13:32:00.005Z

The great Chaucerian scholar Charles Muscatine has died. Read obits here, here , here, here, and here; read about his anti-McCarthy stance here. Fixing higher education never seemed so urgent.

Boccaccio visualizzato, ed. Vittore Branca, 3 vols (Einaudi, 1999)

2010-03-07T17:12:00.007Z

The eagle-eyed amongst my devoted readers will have noticed that a little change has occurred on the side-bar listing those Books I Dream of Owning. That is because I no longer dream of owning Boccaccio visualizzato but now, in fact, possess the said wonder. I have been working on the visual traditions surrounding Boccaccio for a while now and will continue to do so for another piece of work I'd like to complete. So when the chance presented itself to acquire a copy of Branca's great catalogue, frankly I jumped at it. It was a great price too, but I shan't be so vulgar as to talk about such things.

The work was published in 1999 but it had been long awaited, and a series of publications throughout the 1980s and '90s signalled what goodies it was to contain. (For reviews, see those of Christopher Kleinhenz in Speculum 79 [2004], 455-457; and Evelyn Lincoln in Heliotropia 1/1 [2003], available here). The basic idea was to publish a catalogue of images based on Boccaccian texts; these images appeared in manuscripts, on panels (cassoni etc), in paintings, and other media, from the middle ages right down to the modern era. It is a veritable cornucopia and remains a foundational resource.

The first volume contains a set of more general essays. They are: Vittore Branca: 'Introduzione: Il narrar boccacciano per immagini dal tardo gotico al primo Rinascimento'; idem., 'Interespressività narrativo-figurativa e rinnovamenti topologici e iconografici discesi dal Decameron'; Paul F. Watson, 'Architettura e scultura e senso della narrazione: Guido Cavalcanti e le case dei morti'; Victoria Kirkham, 'L'immagine del Boccaccio nella memoria tardo-gotica e rinascimentale'; Creighton Gilbert, 'La devozione di Giovanni Boccaccio per gli artisti e per l'arte'; Andreina Griseri, 'Di fronte al Decameron: L'età moderna'.

The second volume contains works of art of Italian origin. The first section is on Tuscany and northern Italy, and contains: Maria Grazia Ciardi Dupré Dal Poggetto, 'L'iconografia nei codici miniati boccacciani dell'Italia centrale e meridionale', with the relevant schede; Massimiliano Rossi, 'I dipinti - Introduzione: la novella di Sandro e Nastagio', with the relevant schede. The second second treats of the Veneto, and eastern Padania; Susy Marcon, 'I codici illustrati nell'area veneta', and schede; Giordana Mariani Canova, 'I codici dell'area padana orientale: tra Bologna, Ferrara e Mantova', with schede; Augusto Gentili, 'Boccaccio e la cultura figurativa veneziana fra Quattrocento e Cinquecento', and schede. The third and final section of this second volume treats of Lombardy, and western Padania: Antonio Cadei, 'I codici lombardi', with schede; Marichia Arese Simcik, 'I dipinti - Gli affreschi di Roccabianca (la novella di Griselda: Decameron, X 10).

The third volume deals with material produced outside Italy, concentrating on French, Flemish, English, Spanish and German manuscripts. The first section, on French and Flemish territories: Marie-Hélène Tesnière, 'I codici illustrati del Boccaccio francese e latino nella Francia e nelle Fiandre del XV secolo'; Brigitte Buettner, 'Il commercio di immagini: i mercanti, i Rapondi e il Boccaccio in Francia', with schede. Then the other geographical areas are covered in a section called 'Altre aree europee': Catherine Reynolds, 'I codici del Boccaccio illustrati in Inghilterra', with schede; and 'I codici di Spagna e Germania', and schede. A section on incunables ends the volume with Gianvittorio Dillon, 'I primi incunaboli illustrati e il Decameron veneziano del 1492'.

In a work with this much archival work being presented by such a variety of authors (the individual schede are by several different scholars), it is perhaps inevitable that there will be problems, but some are a little more serious. For example, the very famous catchwords in the Berlin autograph, Staatsbibliothek - Preussischer Kulturbesitz, MS Hamilton 90, are described in the scheda of that manuscript (Vol. 2, p. 62), prepared by Maria Cristina Castelli, with incorrect transcriptions of the catchwords themselves. It is a puzzling problem considering how famous this manuscript is, how often it had been described, and how easily available such transcriptions are, not least in Branca's own Cruscante edition. The coverage is by no means complete either and there are several interesting illuminated manuscripts not included. Branca himself was conscious of these problems and went into print subsequently lamenting how rushed the production process was and how he would have addressed them with more time.

Problems apart, however, it is a monumental publication and a testament to the editor's extraordinary energy and capacious learning that he even conceived of such a catalogue, let alone executed it. I am delighted to have it, and it is a delighted to open it.

Principles of the Weighty Tome, or How to Write Fat Books

2010-03-05T17:56:00.003Z

Principles of the Weighty Tome, or How to Write Fat Books

The whole composition must be permeated with a protracted and wordy exposition of the initial plan.
Terms are to be included for conceptions that, except in this definition, appear nowhere in the whole book.
Conceptual distinctions laboriously arrived at in the text are to be obliterated again in the relevant notes.
For concepts treated only in their general significance, examples should be given; if, for example, machines are mentioned, all the different kinds of machines should be enumerated.
Everything that is known a priori about an object is to be consolidated by an abundance of examples.
Relationships that could be represented graphically must be expounded in words. Instead of being represented in a genealogical tree, for example, all family relationships are to be enumerated and described.
A number of opponents all sharing the same argument should each be refuted individually.

in Walter Benjamin, 'One-Way Street' (selections), in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed & intr Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1986; orig. Harcourt Brace, 1978), p. 79.

World Book Day, 2010

2010-03-04T21:33:00.000Z

To celebrate World Book Day, I print a poem from a collection entitled Flood Song by a poet called Sherwin Bitsui (Copper Canyon Press, 2009, untitled poem on p. 6).

I am unable to pry my fingers from the ax,
00000unable to utter a word
0000000000without Grandfather's accent rippling
around the stone flung into his thinning mattress.

Years before, he would have named this season
0000000000by flattening a field where grasshoppers jumped into black smoke.

A Single Man, dir. Tom Ford (2009)

2010-03-04T21:20:00.002Z

Tom Ford is a god in fashion. He stunned everyone when he decided to leave the Gucci group in 2004 and delighted everyone when he developed his own line. He is a man of apparently endless creative energy and has now turned his hand to film making.

I am writing this review because I find myself a little uncomfortable with many of the reviews I have read so far: these have generally been a bit snippy about the cinematography, calling it variously 'tart' or 'air-brushed'. Peter Bradshaw, in the Guardian, writes that the film looks 'like an indulgent exercise in 1960s period style, glazed with 21st-century good taste, a 100-minute commercial for men's cologne: Bereavement by Dior'.

Ok. Fine. This is nicely expressed, but I think hugely unfair and if I may be so bold, somewhat misses the point. I would really like to read a review written by a fashion expert, because there is clearly another kind of language being used in the making of this film and it is one that has thrown a lot of the film reviewers.

The story is based on Christopher Isherwood's novel, published in 1964, and tells of George Falconer (Colin Firth) who is in the midst of a deep, sad, quiet grief at the death of his long-time partner Jim (Matthew Goode). George wakes up that morning and decides that today he will commit suicide: the pain is just too much.

The day is spent saying nice things to people who had never really noticed him before, and silently observing his surroundings. That is, his last day, because of this terrible decision, becomes filled with significance. George is a college professor teaching English to a class of students who are trying to make sense of the Cuban missile crises. Rather, they are trying to make sense of the crises as it is being presented to them by their parents, and, in turn, by their government. George takes the opportunity to run over time in a class that is dragging on to explain that fear is really what is at stake, not the threat itself. He goes around to his friend Charlotte (Julianne Moore), talks about the old days and the disappointments their lives have become and despite this closeness, even Charley doesn't understand what he is going through.

This is such an important aspect of the film. Nobody understands what George is feeling, the depths and the scale of his grief, his bereavement. And everything that Ford does reinforces it. The nostalgic glaze, the beautiful beautiful images throughout the film are all inextricably linked with the impossibility of George's life and the inevitability of his death.

Another critic complained that we are held at arm's length from George, that we never get to know him and that we never feel his grief. Well, not feeling his grief will vary from person to person, but being held at arm's length is very much the point. It is what he does with everyone, because he has to, and what presents his grief with such a terrible aspect of closed-ness, or inexpressibility. It is expressible because of its scale, but also because it is in the first place.

There is great sadness in this film, but it is not an emotional film. And that for me was its most powerful feature. I found it all the more powerful because I was not weeping at the end of it. Enough of the film assures me that Ford knows what he's doing, and in this too I believe he knew what he was doing. As viewers we are denied participation in the grief, and this denial is so subtly and delicately negotiated.

Quite unlike a cologne, this beautiful film has stayed with me.

I am bereft.

King's College London, RIP

2010-01-31T11:32:00.003Z

Things are very bad at King's College London. Evidently there's a budgetary crisis and they have responded by cutting two of the most successful, important luminaries they could possibly have found, Professor Lappin in Philosophy and Professor Ganz, Chair of Paleography. It is hard to believe such a decision. The logic of it makes no sense, minimal costs reaping enormous benefits. The next time King's dares to boast about its rankings on any league tables, then one can only bow one's head in shame and disgust. If they go through with this, it is hard to see how it can recover.

On a completely different note, Vice Chancellors seem to be doing rather well, despite the cuts.

I print this from the Facebook group entitled 'Save Paleography at King's':

The following from Jeffrey Hamburger:

Dear colleagues,

The letter below brings bad news. I normally do not leap into such petition drives, but in this case I think it behooves all of us to read it and to act on it by writing a stiff letter of protest to the persons named as quickly as possible. If you, in turn, know of other groups (beyond Apices, whence this comes) to which this could be circulated, please do so immediately.

Yours, Jeffrey Hamburger

King’s College London is undertaking what they call ‘strategic disinvestment’ and have informed our colleague, David Ganz, on Tuesday that funding for the Chair in Palaeography will cease from 31 August this year, when David will be out of a job. This is part of a wider context whereby all academic staff in the School of Arts and Humanities at King’s have to re-apply for their own jobs before the 1st March. They think this the “most humane way” of losing 22 academic posts.

King’s Chair is the only established chair in Palaeography in the UK (held by our late members Julian Brown and Tilly de la Mare). I am, naturally, writing on behalf of the Comite to express dismay at the loss of the Chair but the more people who write in protest the better.

The person to write to is: Professor Rick Trainor, The Principal, King’s College, The Strand, London WC2R 2LS and copy to Professor Jan Palmowski, Head of the School of Arts and Humanities.

--
Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Kuno Francke Professor of German Art & Culture
Chair, Medieval Studies Committee

Dept. of History of Art & Architecture, Harvard University
485 Broadway, Cambridge MA 02138; Tel. 617 495-8732; Fax 617 495-1769

Women! or Woman

2010-01-29T08:09:00.003Z

Mappa Mundi

2010-01-24T11:22:00.005Z

Listen to Claire Armitstead's podcast on the Guardian website with the poet Phillip Gross, whose collection The Water Table (Bloodaxe, 2009) has won this year's T. S. Eliot Prize. Very interesting (though brief) remarks on good reading, on the importance of deep and engaged reading.

Since this week I heard a very engaging paper by Dr Alfred Hiatt, of Queen Mary, University of London's excellent English department, entitled: 'Maps in and out of literature', I'm going to reproduce a poem from Gross's previous collection, called Mappa Mundi (Bloodaxe, 2003).

Mappa Mundi

I
In the land of mutual rivers,
it is all conversation: one flows uphill, one flows down.
Each ends in a bottomless lake which feeds the other
and the boatmen who sail up, down, round and round
never age, growing half a day older, half a day younger
every time... as long as they never step on land.

II
In the land of always autumn
people build their houses out of fallen leaves
and smoke, stitched together with spiders' webs.
At night they glow like parchment lanterns and the voices
inside cluster to a sigh. Tell us a story, any story, except
hush, please, not the one about the wind.

III
In the land where nothing happens twice
there are always new people to meet;
you just look in the mirror. Echoes learn to improvise.
So it's said... We've sent some of the old
to investigate, but we haven't heard yet. When we
catch up with them, we might not know.

IV
In the land of sounds you can see
we watch the radio, read each other's lips, dread
those audible nightfalls. We pick through the gloom
with one-word candles home... however... only... soon...
while pairs of lovers hold each other, speechless,
under the O of a full black moon.

V
In the land of hot moonlight
the bathing beaches come alive at midnight.
You can tell the famous and rich by their silvery tans
which glow ever so slightly in the dark
so at all the best parties there's a moment when the lights go out
and you, only you, seem to vanish completely.

VI
In the land of migratory words
we glance up, come the season, at telegraph wires
of syllables in edgy silhouette against a moving sky
like code, unscrambling. Any day now they'll fall into place
and be uttered. Then the mute months. The streets
without names. The telephone that only burrs.

Global University

2009-12-05T09:30:00.004Z

Desmond invites stars to help start global cultural university

(SIMON CARSWELL Finance Correspondent)

BUSINESSMAN DERMOT Desmond has invited 163 luminaries from the fields of music, film, theatre, literature, academia and business to submit ideas to help him establish a “global university” for culture and the arts.

Mr Desmond first floated his idea to establish a university of the arts at the Global Irish Economic Forum, the brainstorming event held at Farmleigh in Dublin which was attended by well-known Irish figures from around the world.

The financier wrote this week to the 163 individuals inviting them “to be a founder, a designer and an architect of this initiative” and requesting their expertise to assist in the initiative he is calling “Cultural Odyssey”.

Mr Desmond said in the letter that Ireland should “exploit its deep and world-renowned cultural legacy and talent to establish a global university focusing on culture and the performing arts”.

“As the world economy continues its inexorable shift to becoming knowledge-based, we have many competitive advantages,” Mr Desmond wrote. “The combination of our cultural pedigree and our technological leadership suggests to me that we can create a lasting opportunity for Ireland’s future generations.”

Mr Desmond enclosed a list of people he has invited to participate in the project. They include musicians Bono and U2, Enya, The Corrs and Van Morrison; Hollywood actors Daniel Day-Lewis, Colin Farrell and Liam Neeson; film directors Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan; and writers Brian Friel, Roddy Doyle and Sebastian Barry.

Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin has also been asked to participate in the project. Among the business figures invited to submit ideas are telecoms and media entrepreneur Denis O’Brien, former Intel chief executive Craig Barrett, and Gary McGann, chief executive of packaging group Smurfit Kappa.

Mr Desmond has invited participants to join private discussions on the project’s website. The discussions will range from “syllabus development to architectural concept, from education futures to entertainment futures, from physical location to models of excellence for university design”.

The businessman says the process will be “a fluid, dynamic, responsive approach to collaboration, and your input will change the shape of the conversation”.

Mr Desmond says the project should be united with other similar cultural initiatives within the third-level sector.

This would “optimise the outcome” and “ensure absolute fairness and integrity in any proposal we bring to Government”, he said.

“It is my belief and conviction that the unique Irish spirit is undefeatable,” Mr Desmond says in his letter. “It is this uniqueness that makes you the outstanding world talent that you have become.

“Through the combination of these elements, we can all be part of creating a new chapter in Ireland’s history for future generations.”

The Irish Times, Sat. 5 Dec 2009

* * * * * * * * *

Do we not already have a university of the arts? Or several, really? They're called...universities. Institutions such as Trinity College Dublin, for example. I do not understand why we should spend all this money setting up a university when the arts and humanities departments in the ones we have are being starved of funding. And these are the universities that produced some of these great figures, as if they achieved what they have in spite of their education and not because of it. The mention of output should alone be cause for blood running cold. What does that mean and how can it be envisaged as relevant to the arts? I'm all for thinking dynamically and critically, qualities often great admired by university teachers and tutors amongst their students. Why do we need a new university? I don't think the case has been sufficiently made.

The Sacred Made Real (National Gallery London, 21 Oct 2009 - 24 Jan 2010)

2009-11-29T21:36:00.005Z

Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664), 'Saint Luke contemplating the Crucifixion', 1630s. Oil on canvas. 105 X 84 cm.
Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado (Cat. 4/X6135).

This beautiful exhibition traces a very interesting interaction in seventeenth-century Spanish art between sculptors, who carved and then prepared their work with white gesso, and painters, who finished the work, delicately layering it with flesh tones of remarkable verisimilitude (a process known as encarnación). Many of these wooden pieces remain relatively unknown outside of Spain and indeed many remain outside the purview of standard histories of art. This is because they are not works of art at all, but rather objects of devotion still in use. But as the curator of the exhibition, Zavier Bray, clearly shows, they are of an extremely high artistic quality. What he also notes is the influence of these sculptures on artists. In the example of Valázquez's 'Christ after the Flagellation contemplated by the Christian Soul' (probl. 1628-9), he notes that the little boy, representing the soul, is being invited by the angel to look at Christ's back. This was a space in some sculptural pieces that was reserved for particularly bloody and gruesome attention and Velázquez's experience as a painter of such figures of Christ would have easily given him an insight into such compositions.

There is something very remarkable about many of these pieces and it is hard to remain unmoved by them. Particularly powerful is the 'Sala de Profundis', Room 6, which has a few benches by the walls and a single image, Zurbarán's 'Saint Serapion', 1628. It hung in the mortuary chapel of the Mercedarian monastery in Seville. The space is quiet and sad. The piece is understated. It will remain with me for some time.

Go to see this exhibition.

Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664), 'Christ on the Cross', 1627. Oil on canvas. 290.3 X 165.5 cm
The Art Institute of Chicago, Robert A. Waller Memorian Fund, 1954.15.

Rose Book-Collecting Prize 2009-2010

2009-11-12T12:35:00.001Z

Cambridge University Library is offering students the chance to win £500 by building their own book collections.

The Rose Book-Collecting Prize was endowed in 2006 and is believed to be the first of its kind offered by any European university. As well as the £500 prize money, the winner will be offered 10 years’ free membership of the Friends of Cambridge University Library.

The contest is open to all current undergraduate and graduate students of the University registered for a Cambridge degree. To enter, students should submit a list of their collection together with a short essay, explaining the theme and significance of the collection, by the first day of the Lent full term. Shortlisted candidates will be invited to talk about their collection to the judges.

The judges will make their decision based on the intelligence and originality of the collection, its coherence as a collection, as well as the thought, creativity and persistence demonstrated by the collector and the condition of the books. The value of the collections will not be a factor in determining the winning entry – a coherent collection of paperbacks is a perfectly valid entry. Previous shortlisted entries include ‘Collecting the Gothic’, ‘Missionary travels in the South Seas’, ‘The handwritten record: manuscripts and annotated books’, and ‘German and Austrian travel and first hand experience in Asiatic dominions of the Ottoman Empire, 1871–1918’. In 2009, the prize was won by Boris Jardine (Trinity Hall) for his collection ‘Modernism in print’. For examples of winning topics at other universities, see winning collections.

The prize will be awarded in the Easter Term. It has been funded by Professor James Marrow and Dr Emily Rose in honour of Dr Rose’s parents, Daniel and Joanna Rose.

Professor Marrow said: “By establishing a prize through the UL, we want to stress and call attention to the importance of a great central library, which is the focus of the research activities of the university, and which serves a much wider range of purposes than the college libraries.

“Book collecting brings people together and we hope that a prize administered through the UL will help collectors from different colleges in Cambridge to meet one another and enjoy the company of an enlarged group of similarly-minded individuals.”

Book collecting prizes are fairly common in North American universities. Started by Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, in the 1920s, these contests have encouraged generations of young collectors to become booksellers, librarians, and accomplished bibliophiles.

Full details of the Rose Book-Collecting Prize and how to enter are given on the UL web page at

http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/newspublishing/book-collecting.html

Closing date is Tuesday 12 January 2010.

Notes on a Scandal, and some Watches

2009-10-26T22:20:00.003Z

This video has recently been released by Vedomosti, a Russian business daily newspaper. These are extraordinary timepieces, pieces of art really. I realize that only a tiny number of people will ever be able to enjoy them and those people will have to be very wealthy. Money often comes at a price, I know this too. But while the owners may not be good people, the watches are amazing. The most expensive is that belonging to Vladimir Resin, the deputy mayor of Moscow, who wears a DeWitt La Pressy Grande Complication. Medvedev is wearing a Breguet Classique Moon Phase; the Chechen president Ramzan Kadyrov wears a Bovet Fleurier Minute Repeater. Valentina Matviyenko, the governor of St Petersburg, wears a Harry Winston Avenue Captive (worth about $26,000 while declaring an income of $58,777!). There's a good showing of Ulysse Nardin, Breguet and Patek Philippe. Interesting too is the absence of certain brands: delighted, for example, to see no JLC. With the exception of the Breguet Classique and perhaps the Patek Annual Calendar, which are both very classy watches I will admit, the others are all bling and no watch!

CFP: Error: Aspects and Approaches, Lincoln College, Oxford 16-17 April 2010

2009-10-22T22:12:00.004+01:00

ERROR: Aspects and Approaches

An international Conference at the University of Oxford, April 16-17 2010

This conference is aimed at early career scholars and graduate students. A volume of proceedings comprising selected papers will appear in the Medium Ævum Monographs Series. Contributions are welcomed from diverse fields of research such as history of art and architecture, history, theology, philosophy, anthropology, literature and history of ideas.

Papers will be 20 minutes or less. Please email 250-word abstracts (text only, no attachments please) to oxgradconf@gmail.com by 5th January 2010.

Suggested topics might include:

Misunderstanding; Miscommunication; Misinterpretation; Misattribution; Mistranslattion
Scribal error; Mismatch (image vs. text); Retractions; Textual variance
Factual error; Received error
Personification of error
Mistaken identity
Political mistake
False confessions; Lying
Confusion; Deception
Knightly errance
Theological error; Spiritual error
Scientific error
Disharmony/Discord
Medievalism; Early Modern and later (mis)corrections
Epistemology; Logic
Crime and misdemeanour

The conference fee is expected to be in the region of £25 (twenty-five pounds). We hope to organize a conference banquet in Lincoln's lovely hall on the Friday night and will provide details of this as soon as they are available. All updates and further information can be obtained from www.medieval.ox.ac.uk/omgc.html

H. Wayne Storey, Transcription and Visual Poetics in the Early Italian Lyric (Garland, 1993)

2009-10-22T09:11:00.000+01:00

The return to Cambridge this term began with a quick visit to the local bookseller: joy. Part of the library of a distinguished bibliographer in early Italian print culture had become available and I picked up a few marvellous things. Mainly stuff I've used and wanted, and I had to leave a few things behind too. Very pleased with Franca Brambilla Ageno, L'edizione critica dei testi volgari, Medioevo e umanesimo, 22, 2nd rev & exp edn (Padova: Antenore, 1984); Nicolas Barker, (ed), A Potencie of Life: Books in Society: The Clark Lectures, 1986-1987, British Library Studies in the History of the Book (London: British Library, 1993); Michele Barbi, La nuova filologia e l'edizione dei nostri scrittori da Dante al Manzoni (Firenze: G.C. Sansoni editore, 1938, 2nd ed. 1962); Alfredo Stussi, Introduzione agli studi di filologia italiana, Manuali: Filologia e critica letteraria, (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994); Ezio Raimondi, Tecniche della critica letteraria, Piccola biblioteca Einaudi, 440, (Torino: G. Einaudi, 1983); Ezio Raimondi, La dissimulazione romanzesca: antropologia manzoniana, Intersezioni, 72 (Bologna: Mulino, 1990); Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (eds), Storia della lettura nel mondo occidentale (Roma: Laterza, 1995); Arrigo Castellani, (ed), Nuovi testi fiorentini del Dugento, 2 vols (Firenze: Sansoni, 1952 - can't believe I found this) and Corinna Salvadori, Yeats and Castiglione: Poet and Courtier (Dublin: A. Figgis, 1965 - delighted to have this). However it is H. Wayne Storey, Transcription and Visual Poetics in the Early Italian Lyric, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, v. 1753 / Garland Studies in Medieval Literature, v. 7, (New York: Garland Pub, 1993) that I am really pleased to have found since I was about to order it from the States.

This is an important and interesting book about the early lyric anthologies and the hermeneutics of scribal/authorial compilatio. As the author says in his introduction, 'The proposal is a simple one: that some early Italian poets composed their lyrics with an eye to the manuscript forms in which their poems would be copied and circulated' (p. xxi). The following is what one might call a 'brief notice': the book is in two parts, the first deals with 'Pre-Petrarchan Experiments in Written Poets', comprising four chapters. The first, 'From the Margins: Origins and Theory of Appropriating Official Space', second, 'Transferring Visual Ambiguity: Semantic-Visual Orientations of a Medieval Text', third, 'The Editorial Redefinition of Margins: The Memoriali bolognesi and the Literary Culture of Chigiano L. VIII. 305', and fourth, 'Guittone's Last Booklet: The Visual-Semantic Orientation of the Trattato d'amore'. The second part of the book concentrates on 'the visual poetics of Petrarch's Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta' in three chapters: first, 'Petrarch's Concepts of Text and Textual Reform', second, 'Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta: Manuscripts and Scribal Forms', and third, 'Organizing Strategies: Aperture and Closure in Petrarch's Fragmenta'. It is an excellent book and well worth reading.

Don Paterson, Rain (Faber, 2009)

2009-10-18T20:06:00.006+01:00

Don Paterson is one of the most extraordinary poets writing in the UK at the moment. What is extraordinary is that he writes extraordinary poetry. What is even more extraordinary is that he keeps doing it. Again and again. And now Rain, his first collection since the gorgeous Landing Light (2004) has been published and gone and won the Forward Prize. Not only that but last year's prize for best poem was won by one of the poems in this collection. It is all deserved, richly so.

His work is characterized by a great formality that never makes its presence over-felt in the line, coupled with a simplicity and directness of imagery that will leave you stunned in its wake. This collection is marked by an elegy for the poet Michael Donaghy. This seven-part sequence entitled 'Phantom' sits alongside the other long poem, the utterly wonderful and magical 'Song for Natalie 'Tusja' Beridze'. I've read criticism that this threatens to unbalance the collection but considering that he was closely associated with Paterson in their muscial group 'Lammas' I think that it is entirely appropriate. I read the two side by side actually, one informing the other.

The first poem in the collection is called

Two Trees

One morning, Don Miguel got out of bed
with one idea rooted in his head:
to graft his orange to his lemon tree.
It took him the whole day to work them free,
lay open their sides, and lash them tight.
For twelve months, from the shame or from the fright
they put forth nothing; but one day there appeared
two lights in the dark leaves. Over the years
the limbs would get themselves so tangled up
each bough looked like it gave a double crop,
and not one kid in the village didn't know
the magic tree in Miguel's patio.

The man who bought the house had had no dream
so who can say what dark malicious whim
led him to take his axe and split the bole
along its fused seam, then dig two holes.
And no, they did not die from solitude;
nor did their branches bear a sterile fruit;
nor did their unhealed flanks weep every spring
for those four yards that lost them everything,
as each strained on its shackled root to face
the other's empty, intricate embrace.
They were trees, and trees don't weep or ache or shout.
And trees are all this poem is about.

There's so much to say about this poem, about the work of poetry, about what poetry should do and what poetry actually does and that mysterious and vast space in between. These poems explore this space with a deftness and a great sureness.

This is a beautiful collection from a great writer.

2009-10-01T10:52:00.003+01:00

Miglior acque has been on holiday and before that working on the book. He's been reading nice books too, some of which he'll blog on soon. Top of the list is the wonderful new Hilary Mantel novel Wolf Hall, which has been shortlisted for the Booker. It tells the story of Thomas Cromwell from his origins up to July 1535: it is beautifully written. Also read was Stieg Larsson's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first in the Millennium Trilogy, good stuff and looking forward to reading the rest of them. Peter S. Hawkins, Undiscovered Country: Imagining the World to Come (Church Publishing Inc, 2009) is a beautiful meditation on the afterlife read alongside the Commedia. Valentin Groebner's Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages (NY: Zone Books, 2004) is an excellent essay on violence and its representation in the middle ages (going to read Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others on the plane this afternoon - heading back to Cambridge now).

Have been thinking of investing in Alberto Asor Rosa (dir.), Letteratura italiana, 18 vols (Einaudi, 1982-1996): I've been using it a good bit lately and think it would be great to have to hand. Am I crazy? The postage from Italy is a scandal (literally).

In Our Time with St Thomas Aquinas

2009-09-17T23:10:00.003+01:00

Sandro Botticelli (attrib), St Thomas Aquinas, O.P. (c.1225-1274),
Abegg-Stiftung Museum, Riggisberg, Switzerland

Listen to Martin Palmer (Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture), John Haldane (Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews), and Annabel Brett (Lecturer in History at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge) talk about St Thomas Aquinas with Melvyn Bragg on BBC Radio4's In Our Time.

The Chaucer Blogger is Back

2009-09-13T12:17:00.004+01:00

After a long and lamented silence, Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog is back with learned musings the economic downturn and King Richard issuing laws on Twitter. Great fun. Picked up, with thanks, via JJ Cohen on In the Middle.

Cranky Dante

2009-08-28T18:48:00.004+01:00

Do keep an eye on The Cranky Professor who is making his/her way through the Commedia and blogging on each canto.

Composium

2009-08-28T09:45:00.006+01:00

What follows is the mission statement of Composium.org, a collaborative writing project, or perhaps, concept, that sounds very interesting, even if I haven't got the foggiest what it might actually achieve:

One author can write a classic, but what could a thousand working together achieve? If Composium.org serves no other purpose than to answer this simple question, then so be it.

Composium.org welcomes everyone. On any page (including this one) you can be an author, an editor, a reader and a critic—you can even view a detailed log of ALL previous changes to EVERY page, and compare any point in its history to any other.

Have you been thinking of a great idea for a story, but for one reason or another you have not developed it? Post it—who knows, maybe someone will write the first chapter! Best of all, if the idea turns out to be a big hit, the proof of your invention and any contribution toward it remain for the whole world to see.

We are excited to see what materializes in these next few weeks and months. Composium.org is a tool for writing collaboratively and on a scale unprecedented, but will it produce masterpieces and enrich our own and future generations? Well, not necessarily. The only certain thing is that a golden opportunity awaits.

We wish you the best of luck writing, editing, reading, criticizing, and exploring this exciting new chapter in our written art. Please, after viewing the copyright page, help us by uploading existing classics so we can watch their new forms unfold. (Sorry Mr. Shakespeare, this applies to everyone.)

See you on the field,

Philip Miner

Creator

* * * *

Things have been quiet on miglior-acque lately as I'm writing furiously, or often I'm just furious as I write. I'm trying to get a MS finished and off to the publishers and have been feeling too guilty to blog. Last week I was away at the beautiful wedding of Cris and Shane in Chicago and I just loved the city. While there I took a quick trip to the University of Chicago Library (the Special Collections Research Center in the Regenstein Library to be precise) where I looked at a Boccaccio manuscript. It was such a pleasurable experience. A very helpful librarian gave me the manuscript and directed me to a comfortable reading room where she got on with her work and was friendly and helpful when I needed her. I say this because I've been working in another library over this summer, in the manuscripts department, and the experience is one of utter despair and heartbreak. I've never had a MS consultation so micromanaged before. Even consulting the modern printed books from the shelves is a huge task in itself. When I wanted to use a UV lamp, I realized I'd just asked for a liver transplant. Get me back to the UL quick! While in Chicago I visited Powell's books and was very pleased with what I found. A great stock of medieval books. I had to be restrained needless to say, the bags were not going to take it well when having to be stuffed with books (and they travel badly really). I picked up a copy of Pace & David's Variorum edition of the Minor Poems (Part One), as well as Jody Enders, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama and Paolo Valesio, Novantiqua, which I tried to read about ten years ago and couldn't understand a word of it. It actually looks rather interesting. I've been picking up some nice things here in Dublin too. Like Richard Kearney's Wake of Imagination, which I'm enjoying though suspect when he gets onto the medieval stuff I'll be tutting; Peter Burke, The European Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries, which looks excellent; and Umberto Galimberti, Gli equivoci dell'anima. A certain distinguished professor has been streamlining his bookshelves after retirement in Cambridge and I've been picking them up. I was really delighted to pick up Panofsky's Abbot Suger and Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, as well as some other medieval art stuff (such as a lovely copy of Kathleen Scott, The Caxton Master and His Patron). There's been a good amount of middle English stuff about too and I've been so happy to get F. P. Pickering, Literature and Art in the Middle Ages, Offord's edition of the Parlement of the Thre Ages, Beadle's anthology of The York Plays (Arnold, 1982, and hard to find), Hodgson's edition of the Cloud of Unknowing (EETS), and Alexandra Barratt's lovely Longman anthology of Women's Writing in Middle English. But I was most pleased with Scattergood edition of The Poems of Sir John Clanvowe (Brewer, 1975). I love the way that it is set too, in a kind of typewriter typeface, there's a sense that it was done on Brewer's kitchen table and one can really imagine him saying the famous line he uttered to a young scholar in the Press's early days, the world needs this book but not many copies of it. One rarely sees s/h copies of Clanvowe around, so that's just marvellous.

Have also been enjoying the discussion over on In The Middle on the critique of prose that is seen to exclude, on creativity and on blogging and anonymity. All gives me a lash as I re-read every sentence and wonder who on earth will be reading any of it.

I can't go on, I'll go on.

Robert Bartlett, The Hanged Man (Princeton UP, 2004)

2009-08-08T11:19:00.006+01:00

Lordy, it's been a while since I last posted. Apologies. I've been trying to finish something before term begins and it is taking much longer than I had hoped. Sigh.

I have very much enjoyed reading Robert Bartlett's book The Hanged Man: A Story of Miracle, Memory, and Colonialism in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2004). It is aimed at a broad audience, not exclusively academic; the highly engaging writing style will ensure such a wide audience.

The story is relatively simple, if somewhat striking. Around 1290 a notorious brigand called William Cragh was hanged in Swansea. The process of execution did not go smoothly: the gallows broke and while Cragh was considered dead, he was hanged again for good measure. This second hanging assured everyone that he was dead and the man was taken down and brought away. An eye witness (William de Briouze junior) described the dead man:

His whole face was black and in parts bloody or stained with blood. His eyes had come out of their sockets and hung outside the eyelids and the sockets were filled with blood. His mouth, neck, and throat and the parts around them, also his nostrils, were filled with blood, so that it was impossible in the natural course of things for him to breathe air through his nostrils or through his mouth or through his throat ... his tongue hung out of his mouth, the length of a man's finger, and it was completely black and swollen and as thick with the blood sticking to it that it seemed the size of a man's two fists together. (p. 6).

I provide this dramatic and rather gory account because it does not look like a man in that shape would be capable of much, let alone recover. But that is what he did, living for another fifteen years or so. As he was being prepared for burial those present noticed him moving. The Lady Mary de Briouze, stepmother to the eyewitness cited above, wife of the lord, he who condemned Cragh to death, had prayed to Thomas de Cantilupe to protect the man, and it was this event that lead to an investigation in 1307 into Thomas's sanctity. Bartlett sifts through the documentation of this investigation (now in the Vatican Archives) and provides a rigorous analysis and contextualization of what is found there. So there's a fascinating chapter on 'Time and Space', pp. 53-67, in which he discusses how the accounts describe distance and time. Distance, for example, is referred to in the length of crossbow shot, and time in terms of how long it takes to walk between places. There is a tradition that he who is hanged once cannot be hanged again, one that seems to be in the background of Piers Plowman B 18. 380-4, 'It is noght used on erthe to hangen a feloun | Other than ones' (cf. C 20. 421-422). This is not exactly the scenario here, in that it does not appear to be an imperfect hanging, but a case of resurrection. Cragh had prayed to the right saint, since Cantilupe was particularly associated with resurrections. Apparently resurrections were still rather unusual in the late thirteenth century:

'a careful study of 4,756 miracle accounts from eleventh- and twelfth-century France found only sixty cases of resurrection; that is, 1.26 percent. Thomas de Cantilupe's forty is thus a number equivalent to fully two-thirds of the miraculous resurrections over these two centuries in France. It is worth noting, however, that resurrection grew more common over the course of the Middle Ages. While they form only 1.26 percent of miracles recorded in eleventh- and twelfth-century France, they constitute 2.2 percent of miracles examined in thirteenth-century canonization processes and 10.2 percent in fourteenth-century ones' (pp. 51-52).

This is fascinating: why is there such a leap in resurrection miracles in the fourteenth century?

In sum, this is a riveting story, marvellously written. Read it.

I've been picking some interesting things up lately too (here in Dublin). Found a very nice copy of Helen Barr's Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England, and also Gianni Vattimo's The Transparent Society, which is marvellous. I then picked up his Beyond Interpretation, which I'd bought several years ago and never read, and am increasingly drawn to his work. Have also managed to pick up some very nice s/h philosophy, mainly Heidegger, but some Caputo, too who is quite fascinating. I also picked up a copy of the lovely Tel quel anthology from 1968 entitled Théorie d'ensemble (Éditions du Seuil).

On my desk now is the score of Scarlatti's Griselda (1721), and that's the next thing I'll post about.

The Grimani Breviary

2009-06-08T20:10:00.007+01:00

The publishing house Salerno Editrice, based in Rome, has just announced the publication of a splendid facsimile of Venice, Bibl. Nazionale Marciana, MS Lat. I 99 (2138), the so-called Breviario Grimani, named after its owner Cardinal Domenico Grimani. The manuscript comprises 832 folios, 28 x 19.5 cm (11 x 7 ¹¹/16); justification: 15.5 X 11.5 cm (6⅛ X 4½ in.); 31 lines of gotica rotunda in two columns; 50 full-page miniatures, 18 large miniatures, 18 small miniatures, 12 bas-de-page calendar miniatures.

The Grimani Breviary is the most elaborate and arguably the greatest work in the history of Flemish manuscript illumination. Purchased by Cardinal Domenico Grimani by 1520 for the enormous sum of five hundred ducats, it brought together the leading illuminators of the time, including the Master of James IV of Scotland (probably Gerard Horenbout), Alexander Bening (the Master of the First Prayer Book of Maximilian?), the Master of the David Scenes in the Grimani Breviary, Simon Bening, and Gerard David. More important, each of these artists created for this manuscript some of his most exquisite and original miniatures.

Thus Thomas Kren, Maryan W. Ainsworth and Elizabeth Morrison in their catalogue entry, No. 126 in Illuminating the Renaissance: The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript Painting in Europe (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003), pp. 420-424. One can hear the frustration in their tone when they wrote about the massive amount of work still to be done on this manuscript: 'Indeed, the two-day examination of the manuscript by Maryan W. Ainsworth and Thomas Kren proved woefully inadequate to the task of sorting out all of the stylistic and technical issues that the book raises' (p. 420), a frustration all more acute since the manuscript was not actually displayed in this exhibition.

After you finish drooling, read Michael Camille, 'The Très Riches Heures: An Illuminated Manuscript in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Critical Inquiry, 17 (1990), 72-107; and see too Sandra Hindman and Nina Rowe, (eds), Manuscript Illumination in The Modern Age: Recovery and Reconstruction (Evanston, Il: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, 2001).

If anyone would like to buy me this facsimile for a birthday or Christmas, or Easter, or really, any other day of the week, please feel free. It is selling, apparently, for €22,000.

Getting Medieval on the BBC

2009-06-07T21:48:00.006+01:00

Great long silence lately on my part: apologies. I've been busy, writing like crazy, travelling, and teaching. Was in Oxford yesterday for a school's dinner with my old second years. Lovely to see them again. Lovely. They'll do well.

Picked up a couple of lovely things in Oxfam books:, but most happy with J. B. Whiting's Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings mainly before 1500 (Cambridge, MA & London: Belknap Press & Oxford University Press, 1968) for a cool seven squids. Also picked up a copy of Anne Carson's Decreation and have been making my way v e r y v e r y s l o w l y t h r o u g h i t. I've been lucky to pick up a number of other things lately. For example, the second edition of Barbi's edition of the Vita Nuova (Bemporad, 1932), in super condition, from the library of an Irish priest! I also found a copy of Gombrich's Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, 2nd ed. (Phaidon, 1986), which I cannot wait to get into.

Over the past while the BBC has been broadcasting lots of stuff on poetry, including medieval poetry. Michael Wood has a programme on Beowulf, and Simon Armitage has one on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. While the first on Beowulf is quite good, though there's a bit too much lunatic fringe about it and looking meaningfully into meres and the like. But generally it was ok.

I was quite looking forward to Armitage on Gawain, thinking that he would talk about translating the text, how he went about it, what poetic challenges he faced. And there are glimmers here and there of this. But mainly it is not very good. Not very good at all in fact. He makes just a few references to the Middle English, including testing out words on local northern farmers to see if any of it sounds familiar (admitting he was disappointed he didn't find them speaking in fluent Middle English NW Midland dialect...). The rest is filmed 'on location', but based speculatively on where that location might be. There isn't a trace of a medievalist to be found. Michael Wood discussed Heaney's translation of Beowulf with the man himself. Why didn't Armitage talk to Bernard O'Donoghue about translating the poem, as a poet and a medievalist. (I'm tempted to wonder why O'Donoghue did not do the documentary himself). It was a real missed opportunity.

One worrying thing was his reference, twice, to the Green Knight picking up his head and putting it back on his shoulders. This first happens when Armitage opens the film, and then while talking to someone who'd been healed at the well of St Winefride (in Holywell), he repeats it while comparing the gesture to the miracle of the said saint, whose severed head is reattached by Saint Beuno and restored to life.

The Green Knight never replaces his head on his shoulders. What happens is far more interesting and a poet of Armitage's creativity and imagination should not be so deaf to this. The Green Knight's head is kicked about the court for a bit as his torso remains. This torso reaches down and picks up the head and opens his eyelids and speaks. When he gets back on his horse he does so continuing to hold his head in his hand. The scene is one of an extraordinarily careful management of the horror. Putting his head back on his shoulders would have been positively banal by comparison.

For þe hede in his honde he haldez vp euen,
Toward þe derrest on þe dece he dressez þe face,
And hit lyfte vp þe yȝe-lyddez and loked ful brode,
And meled þus much with his muthe, as ȝe may now here:
'Loke, Gawan, þou hatz hette in þis halle, herande þise knyȝtes;
To þe grene chapel þou chose, I charge þe, to fotte
Such a dunt as þou hatz dalt—disserued þou habbez
To be ȝederly ȝolden on Nw Ȝeres morn.
Þe knyȝt of þe grene chapel men knowen me mony;
Forþi me for to fynde if þou fraystez, faylez þou neuer.
Þerfore com, oþer recreaunt be calde þe behoues.'
With a runisch rout þe raynez he tornez,
Halled out at þe hal dor, his hed in his hande,
Þat þe fyr of þe flynt flaȝe from fole houes.
To quat kyth he becom knwe non þere,
Neuer more þen þay wyste from queþen he watz wonnen.
What þenne?
Þe kyng and Gawan þare
At þat grene þay laȝe and grenne,
Ȝet breued watz hit ful bare
A meruayl among þo menne.

(SGGK, ll. 444-466, ed. Tolkien & Gordon, rev. Davis, [1967], p. 13)

He held the head up straight with his hand,
and turned the face towards the king who sat on the throne.
He raised his eyelids and stared at him open-eyed;
then with his mouth said the words you will hear.
'Be sure, Gawain, you're ready, as you have sworn
to seek conscientiously until you find me,
as you've said in this hall, in these knights' hearing.
Seek out the Green Chapel, I urge you, to get
such as blow as you have struckf. You've earned the right
to be promptly repain on New Year's morning.
Most people call me the Green Chapel Knight;
so, if you ask, you won't fail to find me.
Therefore come, or be called a defaulter.'
With a violent tug he pulled the reins round,
and galloped out the hall door, his head in his hand,
so that fire from the flint sparked off the hooves.
To what country he went no one there knew,
any more than they knew where he'd come from at first.
What next?
The king and Gawain then
laughed at this green man.
But they had to face the truth
that this was unnatural.

(trans. Bernard O'Donoghue [Penguin, 2006], p. 16).

I should say that his translation does not make this mistake; it seems to be a kind of misremembering. I know I'm being a bit snippy about this as a mistake, and it is a mistake. But it is also interesting. It is as if Armitage wishes to make the Green Knight whole, to restore him to a fully human form as soon as possible after Gawain decapitates him. This is in such contrast with the Green Knight himself, who might be said to accentuate his non/in-human form. And this is a very important part of his character and of the story. It also feels like a kind of injustice to the violence of Gawain's act. He performs an act of great violence, described in detail: the blade shatters the bone, and goes through his neck with such force that the edge of the blade bites into the ground. This too is important.

Dancing at Lughnasa, by Brian Friel at the Old Vic (dir. Anna Mackmin), until May 9th 2009

2009-05-03T11:09:00.006+01:00

Now in the last week of its run at the Old Vic in London, this production of Brian Friel's beautiful play Dancing at Lughnasa (pronouced Loooo-Na-Saa, for the non-pagans) can only be described as a remarkable triumph. The play is told in flash-back sequences by the young Michael Evans, who remembers his childhood in a rural Donegal house of five women. The women have just welcomed back Uncle Jack, a missionary priest for a lifetime in Uganda, who has returned in a state of confusion. His gradual recuperation, and the realization that Jack has been sent back from his parish for becoming more native than the natives themselves, is traced out against the backdrop of the annual Lughnasa festivals, especially the harvest dance. The women desperately want to go, and in a carefree moment of delight resolve to go, dancing around the kitchen in ecstatic excitement. Kate (Michelle Fairley), the eldest sister, the only one with a steady income as the local schoolteacher, has a change of heart and insists it would be improper for women of their age to be seen at such an event. And the chance of something fun and wonderful evaporates. And all that is wonderful (in the sense of being full of wonder) evaporates throughout the rest of the play.

The women desperately want to get away, and this yearning is palpable throughout. But responsibility is important too, and Christina, who has had Michael out of wedlock, takes a job in the local factory to earn an income and hates every day of it for the rest of her life. Rose and Agnes go off to England and die there, destitute. This is recounted in a truly heartbreaking moment by Michael, in what is a masterpiece of understated acting by Peter McDonald. The rest of the cast are extremely strong. Niamh Cusack plays Maggie with wonderful sensitivity, and Andrea Corr, playing Chris, is really excellent. There are moments in the play where it was clear that her tears were not acted. (I say this as I was blubbering myself!). The set design is super too, as it is part of the Old Vic's experiment with theatre in the round. The result allows for all sorts of interesting things, such as Michael's continual circling of the kitchen space, watching the sisters and what's happening to them. It adds to the poignancy of his memories as an adult.

Dancing at Lughnasa is a great great modern play, and this is a great production. GO TO SEE IT if you can.

McKeon on Toibin

2009-04-27T10:00:00.003+01:00

Read Belinda McKeon's Irish Times article on the Irish writer Colm Tóibín here.
His new novel, Brooklyn has just been published by Penguin Viking.

Roberto Benigni, Tuttodante (Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London)

2009-04-06T12:36:00.002+01:00

Over the past number of years the Italian actor Roberto Benigni has been performing the work of Dante Alighieri to delighted and enthusiastic audiences around Italy and now, around the world. He is known for his exuberance and energy, and these were much in evidence last evening at Tuttodante in his single London date on his world tour. Every Italian in London seems to have turned out for the show and were in festive mood when he appeared on stage. He decided to do the show in English, and this became a recurring gag throughout the performance, an assurance that he was, in fact, speaking in English. His English was, in fact, a lot better than he let on, as he often used idioms and slang words that would not be characteristic of a beginner. The audience were clearly delighted when he did turn to Italian and would sometimes shout out ‘in italiano!’ I imagine that the decision to do the show in Italian was one of consideration for the audience in London, but I do rather wonder if it was entirely successful. But there was something moving about him trying to find the right word, using a language that was a mixture of Italian and English, a plurilinguismo worthy of its subject-matter.

I remember when Benigni devised this show and came to Bologna with it: tickets were impossible to get hold of and I did not get to see it. When this opportunity arose, I was more than ready to seize it, with both hands. (I was invited to the show by my generous benefactor at Pembroke.)

Benigni is a man of extraordinary energy and passion and his love of Dante is clear, sincere, and profound. But most of the show was taken up with what might be called a preamble, a funny and at times excoriating set of observations on the absurdity of contemporary Italy. A key figure in this comedy is Silvio Berlusconi, and Benigni often referred to Berlusconi as a highly sexual man, a man who likes to be photographed with pretty girls, in various states of undress, etc. Andreotti, too, made an appearance, characterised as a man who has been granted eternal life in Italian politics. Benigni then proceeded to a long introduction to Inferno 5, the canto of the lustful in the first circle of Hell, interspersed with explications and close readings. Particularly powerful was the way in which he deployed a profoundly affective reading of the New Testament, especially the woman touching the hem of Christ’s garment, in his reading of Francesca’s Amor ch’a nullo amato amar perdona (Inf 5. 103). It was much appreciated by the audience who burst into applause, and it was, for me, an indication of a brilliance that I was not quite expecting. The performance culminated in a recitation of the full canto, beginning to end. It was a fitting way to end the evening.

What I enjoyed about this was the strong sense that it was explaining itself; the poetry took centre-stage and was given room to breathe. What was clear too was Benigni’s sense of the poem’s searing relevance to contemporary society, that it is as much an indictment of our time as it is of Dante’s own time. This is the performance of a committed, engaged, and public intellectual, a man trying to make sense of his world, with a certain knowledge of the injustice that marks it, and deep sense of indignation at the continuance of those wrongs. What is striking is that I could be talking as much about Dante there as I am about Benigni.

Michael Symmons Roberts, The Half Healed (Cape, 2008)

2009-04-02T13:32:00.007+01:00

This is Michael Symmons Roberts's fifth collection of poetry and I'm really enjoying making my way through it. He returns to the theme of the body, but this time in the context of violence and destruction. Much of the collection is set in war torn cities, with the image of the hotel, abandoned, gutted, destroyed, as a recurring motif. These hotel rooms can be the site of a couple making love in 'Armistice', or there's the beautiful deserted room in 'Room 260', with its pristine abandoned perfection that is touched only once a year, in mid-July: by 'a perfect | coin of gold light prints onto the wall: | a gift of imperfection, | blemish in the blackout seal.' It is a kind of Newgrange soltice scene. The imagery is complex and enjoyably so. The name 'Intercontinental' recurs, which is meant to resonate the way it does. Symmons Roberts has a great sense of how some of these words and names can be completely transformed by some action, by events. There is a series of poems call 'Last Words', commissioned by the BBC to commemorate 9/11 and which takes as its theme the text messages sent by those in the planes that flew into the Twin Towers. There is anger in these poems, but it is controlled, never allowed to take over. The poems have, too, a great melancholy, a great sense of loss, of what we have lost. There's a lot at stake. The religious language, used by the poet so often and so effectively, and the way that language is transformed or carried out of meaningfulness is another powerful theme that resonates throughout the collection (and his work more generally).

I print in full a poem entitled 'Hooded'.

Six men, hooded, face a wall on knees,
hands bound behind their backs.
How did it come to this?

Ancentral, printed deep, a lineage
through hangman, ku klux klan,
back through the polar pioneers

to foxglove, bluebell, capuchin,
robin and red riding back
to killers, cobras, kings in hiding,

anoraks and duffels, pac-a-macs,
a lizard's ruff on burning sand,
a harebell, snail shell, cadillacs

with soft tops, trout tucked in weed,
shelter, uniform, ashes and sack,
a fashion choice, a rule, a creed,

back to blind, wink, skin-shade
to protect the blue, brown, green,
so yes, the first hood was an eyelid.

And now we hood our enemies
to blind them. Keep an eye on that irony.

This work is strong, important and beautiful.

April: National Poetry Month

2009-04-01T18:21:00.002+01:00

April is the cruellest month, but it is also National Poetry Month in the United States.

The wonderful poster was designed by Paul Sahre.

Bodies

2009-04-01T08:20:00.003+01:00

Yesterday I saw Bodies: The Exhibition at the Ambassador in Dublin. So bodies have been on my mind lately. The specimens on display are real, and the way the exhibition is marketed it is considered to be a teaching aid. In the words of the organizers: "This method of preservation creates a specimen that will not decay. This offers thousands of unique teaching possibilities for educators at all levels, including medical professionals, archeologists and other scientists."

With current technology, I do rather wonder whether they needed real bodies, other than for the sensational aspect. And they way that they have prepared some of the specimens, such as the arteries, is with a process called 'corrosive casting', which means that they fill the vessels with a liquid that sets and they then corrode the arteries around them, leaving the polymer in the shape of the vessels. So what you're seeing is a polymer specimen in the shape of an original, rather like what they did to reveal the bodies under the ash at Pompei. Other specimens are actual bodies treated in a special preservation process.

Very few of the bodies were female, all of the others were male; it is interesting that the male bodies were represented in active poses, playing tennis, volleyball, conducting an orchestra. The female specimens were used to illustrate adipose tissue (i.e. fat) and the female reproductive system (and another raising her arms in praise of the heavens). In other words, I found an interesting gender discourse at work in the exhibition.

I did find the message of the exhibition a bit uncertain. For example, they displayed specimens of a smoker's lungs and then placed a perspex box beside it for the cigarette boxes of visitors who have decided to give up. Then other points urged visitors to appreciate the complexity of the body and to begin to treat their own body better. But I'm not sure at all that this is how and why the individual items were displayed. As an account of the body, each component individually works, but I feel that holistically a convenient message was imposed that feels a tad preachy.

What I really wanted to know was who they were; who were they playing tennis and volleyball with? And most important of all, what piece of music was the man with the baton in hand conducting? Surely, no matter how complex your body is, it's what you do with it that really compels.

* * *

To this end, I think that the really marvellous exhibition 'Assembling Bodies' at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge is a good deal more successful. It runs until November 2010 and I intend to return. It covers an extremely wide range of issues. Organized around seven thematic headings, it comprises both artifacts and art objects; the whole exhibition fits into one room on the second floor, so it is easy to take in at a visit but provides enough to keep one ruminating. The thematic headings include: Assembly of Bodies; Measuring and Classifying; Art and Anatomy; The Body Multiple; Extending and Distributing; Genealogies and Genomes; Body and Landscape. A very good catalogue has been prepared for the exhibition. Well worth a visit if you're in Cambridge.

* * *

And as if the gods were conspiring to keep me thinking bodies, I have just picked up a copy of this new collection of essays on the theme of Dante and the human body, which comes out of the UCD annual Lectura Dantis (in this case, held between 2003-2004). It comprises: Simon A. Gilson, 'The Anatomy and Physiology of the Human Body in the Commedia'; Vivian Nutton, 'Dante, Medicine and the Invisible Body'; Joseph Ziegler, 'The Scientific Context of Dante's Embryology'; Simone de Angelis, 'Sanatio and Salvatio: "Body" and Soul in the Experience of Dante's Afterlife'; Manuele Gragnolati, 'Nostalgia in Heaven: Embraces, Affection and Identity in the Commedia'; Elizabeth Mozzillo-Howell, 'Divina Anatomia: Laying Bare Body and Soul in the Commedia'; Vittorio Montemaggi, ' "La rosa in che il verbo divino carne si fece": Human Bodies and Truth in the Poetic Narrative of the Commedia'; Oliver Davies, 'World and Body: A Study in Dante's Cosmological Hermeneutics'. Have already looked at Mozillo-Howell's very interesting essay (thoroughly resonant for the Bodies exhibition), and of course Montemaggi's very excellent essay.

DLR Poetry Now Festival 2009

2009-03-29T23:01:00.001+01:00

This year's DLR Poetry Now Festival has been extraordinarily good. I heard Belinda McKeon's opening address on Thursday, a deeply engaged and serious meditation on the role of poetry in modern life, taking a cue from Auden's poetry makes nothing happen. She began with Husserlian phenomenology, moved on to empathy, and then wove her observations into an acknowledgment of the work of all the participating poets. It was skilled, humane, and reinforced in one, yet again, just how important poetry is; how important.

On Thursday, Robert Pinsky gave an opening lecture, which I missed (I write this red-faced), and on Friday evening the first reading took place, featuring Sujata Bhatt, Paddy Bushe and Paul Batchelor, followed later by Harry Clifton and Tomas Venclova. These too, alas, I missed, but I heard they were fantastic.

Saturday had readings from Valzhyna Mort, Ellen Hinsey & Ian Duhig, all extremely enjoyable. Mort read in Belarussian and some translations. She was strong and urgent. Hinsey read some work on violence, drawn from International War Crimes testimony. It was compelling and almost impossible to listen to without breaking. Duhig's reading was super, full of anger and a searing sense of justice. Later Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin read, with her characteristic understated humour, wearing her learning lightly, followed by the remarkable Tomaž Šalamum who read in Slovenian and English. Finally, Frank Bidart read. He was gorgeous.

I speak of Bidart with a bit of affection because he lead a poetry workshop in the morning in which nine poets participated. I was lucky enough to be among them. He was gentle and humane and such a careful reader. He ran way over time in his utter fastidiousness, giving time to everyone, wanting to read and re-read poems aloud incorporating suggested changes, repunctuations. It was also a great pleasure to meet and read the work of the other poets. One in particular, Padhraig [PJ] Nolan, designed the programme and the beautiful broadside for Heaney's birthday. His blog is as measured as his poetry: read it.

On Saturday another very special event took place: a celebration of Seamus Heaney's 70th birthday. A group of poets read Heaney's work, with the great man sitting in the front row. Everyone chose something that meant a lot to them, and Venclova read a Lithuanian translation of 'Mid-Term Break'. It was an experience to hear a translation in a language I do not know of a poem I know better than my own hand. Deeply deeply moving. A very special birthday gift was presented to him: a painting entitled 'Inheritance' by the great Hughie O'Donoghue. Heady stuff when the greats are in conversation with each other.

Today had the Strong Reading and Award for Best First Collection. Ciaran Berry's The Sphere of Birds (Gallery); Patrick Cotter, Perplexed Skin (Arlen House); Áine Moynihan, Canals of Memory (Doghouse); and Simon Ó Faoláin, Anam Mhadra (Coiscéim). The very deserving winner was Ó Faoláin who gave a super reading of his work, full of humour and humility but with a great sureness of touch. He seemed so comfortable but not too comfortable. Mary O'Malley, the judge for this year's competition, cited his flexibility, and it was much in evidence.

The final reading (to a packed house I might add) had Adam Foulds read from his extraordinary The Broken Word, which I immediately bought afterwards and started to read in full. Then Colette Bryce read, from her three collections. There was something so formal but relaxed about her work. I confess that I did not know either of these poet's work but have come away with books under arm and am hungry for more. The final poet to read was Carol Ann Duffy. She was funny, reading poems from The World's Wife, and elegiac, reading poems from Rapture. She had such a presence on stage, understated but very self-assured (right down to the little bow she took at the end, the only poet I saw do such). It was a terrific reading, and a terrific way to end. Belinda graciously thanked all who participated, poets, audience, staff, the lot. I look forward to next year. It is simply not to be missed.

I went away feeling enriched and blessed.

Mieke Bal

2009-03-23T08:49:00.005Z

Read anything you can get your hands on by Mieke Bal. I've just picked up a copy of her Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories (Indiana U.P., 1987) and am hooked on it. I've already read her Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre & Scholarship on Sisera's Death (Indiana U.P., 1992) and greatly enjoyed it. She's well known as a cultural theorist, biblical scholar, and feminist critic, but that's only the beginning. Her website gives an indication of the richness and breadth of her work. She also seems to have a good number of Irish graduate students, all working on really fascinating things.

Read Mieke Bal.

In Search of Art: Marina Carr, Marble, The Abbey Theatre

2009-03-14T09:44:00.005Z

Last night had the penultimate performance of Marble, Marina Carr's new play at the Abbey Theatre. Carr has never shirked from writing the elemental forces that truly terrify and Marble is no different. The play opens with two old friend, Art (Stuart McQuarrie) and Ben (Peter Hanly), in a swanky hotel drinking brandy and smoking cigars. Art tells Ben that he'd had a dream about Ben's wife the night before, that he'd made love to her in a beautiful marble room on a marble bed. This image of marble becomes the a motif throughout the play, almost a refrain from the four characters. It turns out that Catherine (Aisling O'Sullivan), Ben's wife, had the same dream about Art, even though they hardly know each other. Instead of considering this as just one of those coincidences (sure!), the lives of these two couples begin to unravel. Art's wife, Anne (Derbhle Crotty) is determined to control the reality around her, planning everything and deciding when to go to bed before she gets up. When confronted with Catherine's increasingly erratic behaviour, she only grips more fiercely onto what she has.

Carr shifts the setting from rugged landscapes to the urban. The action takes place in hotels and fancy restaurants, and luxurious homes in the suburbs where the most taxing thing a housewife will have to do is go to the shops to buy washing up liquid. The women are desperate. They have found themselves in these desolate lives, in landscapes as desolate and lonely as a bog in the midlands. The dream generates a reality that is as unreal as anything they've encountered and their attempts to embrace that is desperate to watch.

The set design was very good, sensitive to the surreal, the tricks of the eye and the mind. And the subtext of Giorgio de Chirico was very interesting. De Chirico is famous for melancholic scenes in monumental space, often with marble figures lying in the open, beside arches, waiting for something to happen.

For all of the power of the play, there is something not quite right about it. I don't know whether the acting was a little tired, or whether the writing was a little uncontrolled. I have a sense that the forces at work between the words were not quite fully ready; there is an unfinished quality about the writing and a slight sense of a paralysis of awe about it that did not satisfy.

Women in Art

2009-03-13T16:44:00.000Z

Slow Reading and Slow Writing: A Return to the Art of the Essay

2009-03-11T10:38:00.008Z

Have a read of Lindsay Waters, 'Slow Writing; or, Getting Off the Book Standard: What Can Journal Editors Do?', Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 40 (2009), 129-143, where he talks about the tyranny of the monograph in the academy and calls for a return to the art of the essay. He takes a fairly savage swipe at Žižek and his lack of clarity, and the tone of the article sometimes makes me a little uncomfortable. Perhaps this is not so much to do with me disagreeing, but more because I ask myself whether I am guilty of writing hermetically, for three other people who have written on the subject, or whether I do manage to express myself to an interested reader.

The article is deliberately provocative, and the critique of jargon is interesting, and likely won't be much appreciated by many, shall we say, theoretical scholars.

We need to slow down and remember that the essay has been the main form for humanistic discourse. The book is an outlier. Many of the writings that changed the direction a scholarly community was marching toward were essays. Think of Edward Said’s ‘Abecedarium Culturae’ or Paul de Man’s ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality,’ to stay in recent history and not begin, as I easily could, an epic catalogue from Montaigne’s ‘De l’amitié’ onward. Some of the most important books are collections of essays not unlike journals, sometimes assembled with no pretence at forging a unity of them, such as John Freccero’s Dante: The Poetics of Conversion. (pp. 132-133)

In an article that looks at what the role of editors can be in this new world of the essay, he might have mentioned that Freccero's book might not have seen the light of day nor taken the form it did had it not been for the editorial work of Rachel Jacoff. And it might also be said that for publication purposes, edited volumes are not actually counted (they aren't for the RAE). This too surely needs to change.

Whatever one's views of Waters' article, surely one can never be reminded often enough of the importance of good writing, of craft, of making oneself understood and of being clear. Ars longa, vita brevis.

Bonæ Litteræ

2009-03-05T22:01:00.002Z

You'll have noticed a new link on my blogroll which is Bonæ litteræ, by the rather excellent Dr David Rundle, a scholar of English renaissance humanism. These are various and occasional musings on Renaissance humanism, manuscripts, scribes, and a great many other learned things. Well worth reading.

World Book Day 2009

2009-03-05T10:31:00.002Z

Today is World Book Day.

Happy World Book Day.

Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence (Courtauld Gallery, London, 12 Feb-17 May 2009)

2009-03-03T22:10:00.000Z

Now showing at the Courtauld Gallery in London is an exhibition dedicated to cassoni, or painted marriage chests. This is an area that has been the subject of much study in the last twenty or thirty years and cassoni have emerged as an extremely important aspect of domestic art in the Italian renaissance. A recent exhibition, curated by Cristelle Baskins, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, centred on painted marriage chests and the catalogue is another important contribution to the field (Cristelle L. Baskins, Adrian W.B. Randolph, Jacqueline Marie Musachio and Alan Chong, The Triumph of Marriage: Painted Cassoni of the Renaissance (Pittsburgh: Periscope Publishing, 2008; ISBN: 9781943772867). This Courtauld exhibition, curated by Caroline Campbell, is an intimate affair, and that is very intentional. There are just ten items on display, all fitting (fairly) comfortably in a single room. The centrepiece is undoubtedly the famous Morelli chest, painted by Biagio di Antoinio (1446-1516), Jacopo del Sellaio (1441-93), and Zanobi di Domenico (active ca. 1464-74). These two imposing chests depict 'Camillus and the Gauls' and 'The Schoolmaster of Falerii', with two spalliere depicting Horatius Cocles and Mucius Scaevola and Lars Porsenna, respectively. These are the only cassoni to survive with their spalliere intact, so they are very important in thinking about how the cassone worked with its related items. While they are now almost attached to the cassoni Campbell asserts, I think quite correctly, that they would have been placed much higher up on the wall and she points to their rather low view-point as evidence. She also speculates that they may have formed a continuous panel. The viewer (Renaissance, modern) had their eye drawn both vertically and horizontally; the whole room was part of the effect, not just a framed item bracketed away from the rest of the room.

Another fascinating pair of panels are by Giovanni Toscani (around 1370/90-1430), depicting scenes from Boccaccio's Dec II 9, the story of Ginevra, Bernabò and Ambrogiuolo, dating to about 1425. This is an interesting one because only one of the panels (the first), now in the National Gallery of Scotland, was known in any detail. The other, in a Private Collection, has been brought together for this exhibition and it is great to see them together. The panels attest to the popularity of Boccaccio in the early fifteenth century, but what is even more interesting is the way that much of the story hinges on a trick involving a chest, and so the chest itself figures prominently in the first panel. Campbell makes some very interesting remarks about this panel, the way that Ginevra assumes a masculine role and how the artist chooses to depict her dressed as a man in the final scene even though the text explicitly states that she had changed into her feminine clothes. Ginevra is only shown twice as a woman, 'probably to mask the unusualness of her behaviour' (p. 86). There would be much to say about such a dynamic. In fact, Campbell wonders about the choice of Boccaccio as a source for the iconography and links the move away from Boccaccio, and love stories, about mid-century, to more martial themes to the change in commissioning patterns of painted marriage chests, when it became the responsibility of the groom's family rather than that of the bride.

One of the most stimulating aspects of this material was the attention that Campbell paid to the literary texts in the possession of Morelli, in particular a compendium associated with Morelli now in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (Pal. 359). 'The unassuming appearance, contents and lack of illustrations of this chapbook, purchased form "Zanobi Deleicha", make it very typical of surviving manuscripts of this type. Its contents mirror the core genres of stories depicted on cassone frontals: Roman poetry, contemporary Tuscan verse, ancient Greek, Roman, biblical and modern history. As such it provides a good framework for exploring the subjects depicted on cassoni and spalliere panels, and decoding their meanings.' (p. 34). This is good stuff and I intend to learn more.

Another pair of panels, by Lo Scheggia (1406-86) are exhibited, depicting 'The Journey of the Queen of Sheba' and 'The Meeting of Solomon and Sheba', both dating to around 1450. These are both in private collections and so it is a treat to see them exhibited. Another panel by a Florentine follower of Lo Scheggia, dating to around 1460, depicts 'The Siege of Carthage and the Continence of Scipio' (Courtauld P.1966.GP.129). There is another chest depicting the Battle of Pharsalus, in which Caesar defeats Pompey, by an unidentified artist, dating to around 1470-5 (Courtauld F. 1947.LF.3). The final pair of panels are in the collection of the Earl of Harewood at Harwood House, depicting 'The Rabe of the Sabine Women', and 'The Reconciliation of the Romans and the Sabines', dating to around 1480.

Go to the exhibition. And buy the catalogue: Caroline Campbell, with contributions by Grame Barraclough and Tilly Schmidt, Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence: The Courtauld Wedding Chests (London: The Courtauld Gallery in association with Paul Holberton Publishing, 2009), ISBN: 9781903470916.

Mick Imlah (1956-2009)

2009-01-20T15:49:00.004Z

Mick Imlah died on 12 January, aged just 52. His first collection of poetry in 20 years, The Lost Leader (Faber, 2008) had recently been published and had won the Forward Prize. He had also been shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize. His death is a terrible loss to contemporary poetry. The Lost Leader is a huge and powerful poetic history of Scotland. I print one poem from the collection:

Guelf

Love moves the family, but hate
makes the better soldier;
why would the boxer scatter his purse,
sell up his soul, be Ugolino evermore,
for the soft-hard piece of his rival's ear—
were it not for the lovely taste of hate;
if it didn't award him a pleasant pillow
of hate to soften the stone of his cell?
Dante, who loved well because he hated,
Hated the wickedness that hinders loving.

Read reviews here, here, here, and here. Read obits here, here, here, and here. And this.

Gone Cuckoo

2009-01-13T17:51:00.005Z

I have been remiss here in leaving it so long to post. One thing happened, then another. And then it was now.

Last evening I watched The Natural World on BBC iPlayer, which talked about the Cuckoo. Prof. Nick Davies, an expert and fellow of my college, talked about the bird and its pretty awful behaviour. I know that it is silly to think in moral terms about the behaviour of birds but I found it all rather...well chilling actually. The cuckoo doesn't build a nest of its own. I had known this. It was the rest that I was a bit sketchy for me.

The cuckoo lays its eggs in other birds' nests, making room for it by eating the eggs it finds there. When this is done, and it manages to get the shape and colour to match, the egg hatches and the reed warbler begins to look after the cuckoo as its own chick. Then, the blind and featherless monster chick senses the other eggs in the nest and throws them out of the nest. In one piece of footage, David Attenborough cooly talks us through the chick pushing another hatched reed warbler chick out of the nest. All this while Prof. Davies walks around College and the Fens during a beautiful summer's day. One scene has him looking around rivers and trees, spectacularly shot, then he's in the College Library looking up learned books about egg-collecting (now illegal). And then you realize you are watching a kind of cuckoo snuff movie.

I'll never look at a cuckoo clock in the same way again. Ruined, I am.

Writers' Rooms

2008-12-01T10:30:00.005Z

One of the greatest pleasures meeting fellow academics is the chance to get into their rooms and have a look around at their books. I remember having terrible trouble concentrating during meetings with my supervisor(s) such was my curiosity to have a look around and enjoy the space. Sometimes, if I visit someone and I know them well enough, I simply excuse myself for fifteen minutes explaining that I'll be distracted unless I have a little newsy around. It's about admiration and enjoyment rather than wanting to know someone else's business.

It is perhaps for this reason that I so enjoy the Guardian's Writers' Room series, photographed by Eamonn McCabe. An exhibition collects these photographs together at the Madison Contemporary Art Gallery in London. A preview is available here. I realise that these photographs are about much more than the bookshelves (which often you cannot see that well). It's about the space, about an aura of creativity and a recognition of its mystery. This is especially the case when you find yourself saying "Oh I could never work there...". And the space itself has a kind of creativity, it is a negotiation, something that the occupant, the writer, chips away at over the years. The space is, in a way, another work by the writer. And it is this that I find so fascinating about these photographs.

above: Beryl Bainbridge's room.

Books Books Books

2008-11-27T20:36:00.003Z

Help. I think that may be what I need. Help. I have gone a little insane on the old book buying front lately and this term have been adding significantly to the Biblioteca del Crazy Guy. Just before I moved over I found a lovely original copy, in two parts, of Rossetti's parallel text edition of Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer's Troylus and Cryseyde (from the Harl. ms. 3943) compared with Boccaccio's Filostrato [London: Pub. for the Chaucer Society by N. Trübner & Co, 1873]). I also picked up some of those parallel texts transcriptions of Troilus MSS in the Chaucer Society series. Very pleasing. Still in Oxfam on St Giles, I found a (cheap-ish) copy of the Z-Text facsimile (Brewer, 1994), prepared by Brewer and Rigg. In BW's, I found a lovely discounted copy of Claire Donovan's The De Brailles Hours (BL, 1991) which I very much enjoyed reading.

I have also received some books in lieu, such as the excellent facsimile of Bodleian Library, MS Arch. Selden B. 24, intro. Boffey & Edwards (Brewer, 1997), and Butterfield's collection of essays in Chaucer and the City (Brewer, 2006), which is extremely good. I also got some interesting Palgrave books, such as The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Chaucer (2006); Baldwin's A Guidebook to Piers Plowman (2007), which looks very good; Cooney's collection Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages (2006); Edwards' Chaucer and Boccaccio (2002), which of course I'd read by did not own; Patterson's Temporal Circumstances (2006), most of which I've read before, but with a few new things; Tison Pugh's Queering Medieval Genres (2004); Martha Rust's Imaginary Worlds in Medieval Books (2007), which I have not read yet but am looking forward to; and Elizabeth Scala's Absent Narratives (2002).

It was however, when I moved over that I discovered G. David, a rather well-known bookseller here in Cambridge. There I found some marvellous things, mainly Chaucer editions and criticism (about 15 items or so) but other stuff too, such as Philippa Tristram, Figures of Life and Death in Medieval English Literature (London: Paul Elek, 1976) which I did not know. These books belonged to the late and lamented Derek Brewer, which he'd sold off shortly before he passed away. I feel unworthy to have them, but glad too.

A visit to Oxford last weekend for a very enjoyable birthday party provided the opportunity to return to BW's where a distinguished don was selling his books after retirement. Gawd. I hardly knew where to look. What I'm particularly pleased with is Mary Wack's Lovesickness in the Middle Ages (UPenn, 1990); Smither's edition of Havelok (Oxford, 1987); and Vantuono's edition of Pearl (Garland, 1984), though sadly vol. 1 only. I'm not exactly sure how good it is, but it is rather full. Vol. 2 seems utterly irretrievable. Anyway, there was lots of Langland too, which I wanted, but I restricted myself to Justice & Kerby Fulton's Written Work (UPenn, 1997), and then Bloomfield's PP as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse and Robertson & Huppé's PP and Scriptural Tradition. Very pleased with that haul I must say.

By the way, I managed to find a paperback copy of Volume 1 Foster & Boyde's Dante's Lyric Poetry. Yes, a paperback was printed of the first volume only, which I had never seen. I'm still on the lookout for the whole thing in h/b, needless to say. But I'm getting there. I also picked up some volumes (1, 6 & 10) of Tutte le opere di Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. by Vittore Branca (in 10 volumes, published between 1964-1998), but am still missing vols 2, 3, 4, 5/1, and 9, which I despair of ever seeing in the flesh. I also found a copy of Judson Boyce Allen's Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages (Toronto, 1982), which is very hard to find and looks now like it was printed during the war the paper is so yellowed (in every copy I've ever seen actually!).

I'm afraid that this is just a taster of what has been going on this term chez miglior acque but I admit I'll have to cool it for a while. I have now been banned from using my debit card or credit card for a number of months. I may also need a psychiatric evaluation before I'm allowed them back.

Breaking Down Barriers, 19-30 October 2009

2008-11-24T18:31:00.003Z

Just received news of the Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference to be held between 19-30 October 2009 on the subject 'Breaking Down Barriers'. This from the website:

In these days of increasing fragmentation and hyper-specialisation in academia, Compass aims to foster connections amongst scholars. To further this cause, Wiley-Blackwell and the Compass Editors-in-Chief are organising this online conference to promote interdisciplinary approaches.

The first Compass conference aims to cut across academic boundaries - within and between disciplines, between theory and practice, approaches and methodologies by providing a space for multi- and cross-disciplinary review.

In particular, we welcome papers on the sub-themes of:

Paradigms

Borders

The Environment/Energy

Communication

Justice/Human Rights

Abstracts are invited for survey/review papers from the disciplines of History, Literature, Philosophy, Religion, Geography, Linguistics, Sociology, and Social Psychology. Preference will be given to papers which interest more than one discipline.

While the sub-themes reflect important intersections between these subjects, the overall theme of Breaking Down Barriers expresses the cross-period, cross-discipline remit of the Compass project. This conference represents our largest undertaking to date in the service of interdisciplinary collaboration.

The conference will be entirely virtual taking place online 19-30 October 2009. Participants can attend at any time during the conference, when it suits their schedule, to download keynote addresses, read and comment on papers, and take part in other activities. The conference will include all the sessions you would expect from a real conference including keynote speakers, workshops, question and answer sessions, and a book exhibit. Papers will be posted online along with commentaries for discussion and comment. Accepted papers will be published in special issues of the Compass journals.

Call for Papers: Play: Aspects and Approaches

2008-11-12T12:21:00.006Z

Miglior acque is pleased to announce that the 2009 Oxford Medieval Aspects and Approaches Conference will take place on April 3-4, and that it will be on the subject of Play. For further information and updates click here.

Joyful Joyful

2008-11-05T15:09:00.001Z

Show Me The Money

2008-11-02T10:04:00.006Z

I normally keep this blog fairly medieval and bookish in its interests but the past few weeks and the next couple of days are a little unusual for anyone who reads the newspapers and keeps up with what's going on. I am, of course, not eligible to vote in these elections and am reluctant to enter into any strongly politicized ramblings. I know who I'd vote for, but then, anyone who reads this probably would vote the same way. I am going to limit myself to a small observation.

It has been reported that Barack Obama's aunt is an illegal immigrant living in Boston. She appears to have had her application for political asylum, made in 2004, rejected by a federal immigration judge. The timing is suspect, needless to say. That such a leak might have come from a government official is certainly unethical and might even be illegal. Senator McCain has said that it is a family matter and out of bounds, though I think most grassroots and diehards will consider this yet another reason to believe that Senator Obama is not American.

This lady is 56, she lives in public housing, she has volunteered as a resident health advocate for the Boston Housing Authority, and has apparently recently stopped because she is recuperating after surgery on her back. It is clear the lady does not have much money, and according to the Obama campaign they have not been in contact for two years. She did attend his swearing-in ceremony as a Senator, but he was under the impression she had travelled from Kenya for that.

This is all a sad story of a woman in her mid-fifties, with no money, wanting to live in the US and getting sick there. Frightening, terrifying.

And what does she do: the Federal Election Commission lists a Zeituni Onyango in South Boston as making a series of contributions, totaling $265, to the Obama campaign, with the most recent contribution, $5, made on Sept. 19.

This lady's nephew is running for President of the United States of America, one of the most powerful and influential positions of political and social importance in the world, a man who is running with one of the richest war chests ever raised in a campaign that has seen some of the most extraordinary expenditure ever devised. She is just a few days away from potentially becoming a family member of the President. And what does she do? And she donates five dollars to his campaign.

Five dollars.

This lady gave five dollars for her nephew to become the President of the United States of America.

I am trembling with admiration for her and for him. I hope that she recovers from her surgery, and I hope that he becomes President.

A Civic Education

2008-10-28T16:02:00.009Z

Last evening saw the 2008 K G Sykes Lecture at Pembroke College Cambridge, delivered by Professors Lucy Riall and Marizio Viroli entitled 'The Religion of Liberty and Italian Antifascism (1922-1945)'. The discussion was lively and the speakers were excellent. There was a very stimulating and dynamic sense of exchange between both speakers and there was a great sincerity in their engagement with the problems. A good night had by all I rather think.

During dinner I learned about Viroli's new Master in Civic Education [pdf here], which he runs in Asti drawing on experts from his own university, Princeton, as well as elsewhere. It all takes place under the aegis of a non-profit organization called Ethica Forum and it is intended to bring a new way of integrating an ethics of exchange and learning. The Masters is intended develop a sense of civic responsibility, of creating a holistic engagement with ethics in work and life. I must say that I found it rather compelling and can only imagine how it must be looked upon with suspicion by the Academy in Italy. Here's the section on what's driving the project:

L’obiettivo educativo del Master è di offrire ai partecipanti l’opportunità di acquisire una consapevolezza matura e critica della coscienza civica e del suo significato morale, politico, storico mettendo in risalto le implicazioni che essa comporta per i cittadini d’oggi, così come emerge dalla ricerca dei migliori studiosi e delle più prestigiose istituzioni internazionali. Il Master è rivolto a studiosi, insegnanti, magistrati, avvocati, giovani professionisti, funzionari di enti pubblici, regionali, nazionali ed europei, ufficiali, manager pubblici e privati, persone impegnate nell’associazionismo laico e religioso. Il principio fondamentale al quale saranno ispirate le attività del Master è la certezza che l’educazione civica consista in una combinazione di responsabilità morale e saggezza che può essere insegnata solamente in un contesto che rispetti profondamente le diversità, la libertà morale ed intellettuale e che ripudi ogni forma di indottrinamento. In linea con questo principio, il Master presterà particolare attenzione affinché i docenti che terranno i corsi abbiano dimostrato di possedere, oltre alla competenza scientifica, una genuina passione per l’insegnamento ed un’impeccabile reputazione d’integrità etica. Essi inoltre saranno invitati a sottoporre all’attenzione dei partecipanti un’ampia gamma di opinioni in campo morale, religioso e politico. Nello specifico il Master dovrà fornire agli studenti una solida conoscenza in campo storico, politico ed etico con particolare attenzione alle teorie della cittadinanza, aiutarli a far propria una rigorosa consapevolezza di problemi e ragionamenti etici, insegnare loro a comprendere il mondo contemporaneo.

It was very depressing to hear Viroli speak with such sadness about the state of his country. The incredible system of corruption and patronage in the university sector is doing very bad things to the way that the future generations of scholars are being produced and nurtured. The brain drain is extraordinary and excruciating and it is difficult to see how it can be sustainable. Perhaps, I learned last evening, there is hope.

Derek Brewer (1923-2008)

2008-10-24T11:39:00.003+01:00

The great Chaucerian scholar Derek Brewer passed away yesterday.

Dante In Our Time

2008-10-23T09:28:00.003+01:00

Listen to Melvin Bragg's In Our Time talking about Dante's Inferno with guests Dr Margaret Kean (St Hilda's College, Oxford), Dr Caire Honess (Leeds) and Prof. John Took (UCL). Some very good discussion.

Prayer, by Alice Oswald

2008-10-20T09:03:00.003+01:00

Alice Oswald's first collection of poetry, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile was published by Oxford University Press in 1996 and she has followed this impressive debut with equally impressive collections Dart (2002) and Woods, etc. (2005). In 2007 Faber republished her first collection. She writes the kind of poems I would love to write, they are huge in their perspectives. She looks at her environment and she seems to see all that is important, like the world curving into the eye of an eagle. One of my favourite poems from this collection is called Prayer:

Here I work in the hollow of God's hand
with Time bent round into my reach. I touch
the circle of the earth, I throw and catch
the sun and moon by turns into my mind.
I sense the length of it from end to end,
I sway me gently in my flesh and each
point of the process changes as I watch;
the flowers come, the rain follows the wind.

And all I ask is this—and you can see
how far the soul, when it goes under flesh,
is not a soul, is small and creaturish—
that every day the sun comes silently
to set my hands to work and that the moon
turns and returns to meet me when it's done.

On Allegory: Some Medieval Aspects and Approaches (Newcastle, 2008)

2008-10-07T17:22:00.003+01:00

Miglior acque is proud to present: On Allegory: Some Medieval Aspects and Approaches, ed. by Mary Carr, K.P. Clarke, and Marco Nievergelt (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), ISBN 1-84718-400-6. Pp. ix + 269. This volume of original essays took its inspiration from an Oxford graduate conference held in 2005 at Lincoln College.

Here is the Table of Contents:

E. G. Stanley, 'Allegory Through the Ages, As Read Mainly in England and As Seen Anywhere' (pp. 1-27); Meredith Bacola, 'The Persistence of Narrative: An Exploration of Hans Memling's The Seven Joys of the Virgin' (pp. 28-41); Kirsten Stirling, '“The Picture of Christ Crucified”: Luthern Influence on Donne's Religious Imagery' (pp. 42-55); Olga Malinovskaya, 'Personification and abstractio in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy' (pp. 56-69); Darragh Greene, 'Sum newe thing: Autobiography, Allegory and Authority in the Kingis Quair' (70-86); Catherine A. M. Clarke, 'The Allegory of Landscape: Land Reclamation and Defence at Glastonbury Abbey' (pp. 87-103); Alice Spencer, 'Erotic Dialogue and the Meaning of Margaryte in Usk’s The Testament of Love' (pp. 104-132); Jane Griffiths, 'Truth and Prophecy in Stephen Hawes’ Conforte of Lovers' (pp. 133-155); William Rossiter, 'Translation of Allegory or Allegory of Translation? Petrarch’s Redressing of Boccaccio’s Griselda' (pp. 156-182); K. P. Clarke, 'Reading/Writing Griselda: A Fourteenth-Century Response (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Plut. 42,1)' (pp. 183-208); Crofton Black, 'Allegory, Cognition, and a Philosophical Controversy: Two Texts by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola' (pp. 209-230); Vincent Gillespie, 'Afterword: On Allegory, Allegoresis and the Erotics of Reading' (pp. 231-256). There is a list of Contributors, pp. 257-259 and an Index, pp. 260-269.

Enjoy!

Camera Ready

2008-10-01T22:23:00.005+01:00

Check out the New York Times College Issue article entitled: "The Camera-Friendly, Perfectly Pixelated, Easily Downloadable Celebrity Academic", by Virginia Heffernan, which test-drives five celebrity academics and their online lectures. Fascinating stuff and well worth a browse.

Read too the article on Barack Obama as a senior lecturer in law at the University of Chicago. Fascinating and compelling reading. And depressing, too, when one looks at the Republican presidential and vice-presidential candidates.

Jiminy Cricket! No Escaping This Grasshopper

2008-09-29T17:33:00.007+01:00

My first stroll around Cambridge had me pass the Corpus Clock, just up the road, and it was a wonderful treat. This was something I'd anticipated, seeing articles about it on the BBC website, and elsewhere (here & here and see the video here). The enormous and ferocious grasshopper sitting on top of the clock is the clock's escapement, mechanism, a "grasshopper escapement" actually, a regulator developed by John Harrison and intended as an homage by the clock's inventor Dr John Taylor. What he has done is effectively to turn the clock inside out, so the escapement and escapement wheel become its major features. The grasshopper, exquisitely detailed, sits on top of the wheel eating away at time: the clock is called the "Chronophage". And an inscription on the outside ledge reads Mundus transit et concupiscentia eius (I John 2: 17). Time is not on our side.

The dial comprises a series of Vernier strips, beneath which are three discs which have a set of constantly lit LED lights. So the time telling is not digital but entirely mechanical.

But time is relative, too. So while Harrison's invention was an important step in the development of a clock that told the correct time (or rather a clock that told the correct time for a longer period of time), this clock is only correct once every five minutes. This is because it actually stops, speeds up, and slows down, making the viewer constantly aware of the passing of time. It does not just tell the time, it draws attention to time. It's a clever idea, and it is hard for me to express the discomfort felt when you actually see the clock stop. You almost hold your breath waiting for it to start again (like watching a patient flat-line!). The clock is supposed to remind us that tempus fugit, it confronts us with our own mortality.

As I start a research fellowship here in Cambridge, these are good and important things to have before me. Tempus fugit, so get on with it!