The Waste Land and Modernity

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hlb38
45分

BBC Radio 4

11小時 · 

'April is the cruellest month, breeding / lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / memory and desire, stirring / dull roots with spring rain',

The Waste Land is a core text in Modernist poetry & one of TS Eliot's best known. Commemorate his birth - today, 1888, in St Louis, USA.

In Our Time - The Wasteland & Modernity http://bbc.in/1ojeVPN

The Waste Land and Modernity, In Our Time - BBC Radio 4

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss TS Eliot's seminal poem The Waste Land.

BBC.IN

Birth of a new world: the Tolkien poem that marks the genesis of Middle-earth

On this day in September 1914, as war broke out, Tolkien created the mythical land that led him to The Lord of the Rings. Here’s the story of the poem that changed his life

• Mordor, he wrote: how the Black Country inspired Tolkien’s badlands

• John Garth
• theguardian.com, Wednesday 24 September 2014 08.29 BST
• Jump to comments (4)

Origin story … Martin Freeman in the film version of The Hobbit. Photograph: Warner Bros/AFP/Getty Images

A century ago today, Russian forces were beginning the 133-day siege of Przemyśl and the German army took Péronne. Meanwhile, in a Nottinghamshire farmhouse, a young man wrote a poem about a mariner who sails off the earth into the sky. The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star deserves its day in the spotlight alongside war commemorations. It was the founding moment of Middle-earth.

Neither elves nor hobbits were yet in JRR Tolkien’s mind. But the star mariner is remembered in The Lord of the Rings, as Eärendil, forefather of kings, whose light in a phial wards off Mordor’s darkness. In the vast backstory of The Silmarillion, he carries the last Silmaril, a jewel preserving unsullied Edenic light, seeking aid against the primal Dark Lord.

None of this is in Tolkien’s poem from 24 September 1914. As an invented origin myth for the evening star, it is all energy and enigma:

Éarendel sprang up from the Ocean’s cup 
In the gloom of the mid-world’s rim; 
From the door of Night as a ray of light 
Leapt over the twilight brim, 
And launching his bark like a silver spark 
From the golden-fading sand; 
Down the sunlit breath of Day’s fiery Death 
He sped from Westerland.

The poem hurtles on for a further five stanzas, but reveals nothing of background or motives. Yet Éarendel’s maverick course has much to do with Tolkien’s predicament as war broke out.

His taste for poetry had been formed at school when he translated poetry into Latin and Greek, and by his interest in the epics of Virgil and Homer. Until 1913, he had pursued a classical education at school and Oxford. But then he switched to English, an upstart discipline with a stiff backbone of Germanic philology. This was the study of the history of English and its cousin languages, German, Norse and Gothic, and it used rigorous comparison to reconstruct the common ancestral language spoken in pre-literate times. Philologists also reconstructed the unrecorded legends that could be glimpsed in fragments scattered through medieval literature.

JRR Tolkien at 24 in 1916 in his military uniform

By the time the 22-year-old Tolkien visited his aunt’s farm in Gedling in September 1914, he was laying the groundwork for an academic career. War threatened everything; relatives urged him to enlist. He was determined instead to complete his degree. Éarendel’s oblique voyage across the paths of the fixed stars accords with the visible movements of Venus but also, I suggest in Tolkien and the Great War, matches Tolkien’s journey off the well-trodden path of enlistment.

An insight from the historian Hugh Brogan got me looking at the poem again for the journal Tolkien Studies. What I found reveals the poem as a daring piece of cultural reappropriation, and one of two steps in late 1914 which set Tolkien on the threshold of Middle-earth. It is almost too perfect that this should be a myth of origin and transformation.

Brogan told me he thought Tolkien had plagiarised Shelley:

Arethusa arose 
From her couch of snows 
In the Acroceraunian mountains, 
From cloud and from crag, 
With many a jag, 
Shepherding her bright fountains.

He certainly appears to have borrowed the rhyme scheme and much of the rhythm, plus some of the spirit. Shelley describes how a nymph flees a river god by diving under the earth – a transformation myth to explain the origin of natural phenomena. This is just the kind of thing Tolkien was trying to emulate for the evening star.

His opening also closely echoes a phrase in the Aeneid, translated by one contemporary as “Aurora arose/ and left the ocean’s rim.” However, the “Ocean’s cup” is translated from Beowulf. Éarendel is Old English, too, and has kindred names in other Germanic legends that also relate to stars.

Yet others refer instead to the sea; a German philological book Tolkien had just read argues that all these names hark back to a lost tale of the ultimate seafarer, an Odysseus of the northern oceans. But that didn’t explain the star references. He abandoned philological rigour to imagine a myth in which the seafarer became the evening star.

This is not plagiarism. Tolkien consciously uses Shelley’s classical template as a vessel for a Germanic-style myth, as if to say: enough with the Mediterranean, it’s time English literature looked north. The big step, however, was the realisation that he could turn philological reconstruction into creative narrative. That is one of two principles underpinning Middle-earth.

The other principle followed within weeks, when he was immersed in a literature and language entirely unrelated to Latin, Greek, Germanic or any other Indo-European language. In a talk to fellow students about the Finnish epic Kalevala, he put its distinct flavour down to the fact that Finnish comes from Finno-Ugric stock. If the language is different in descent, its legends will be too, he said.

Meanwhile, he was privately reworking the Kalevala story of Kullervo. As if he could not help himself, he illogically began replacing some of the names with ones in an entirely invented language. It looks and sounds a lot like Finnish, yet it is recognisably a prototype of Quenya or “high-elven”. Tolkien had been inventing languages for years, often inspired by real languages, but now for the first time one of them set up home in story.

It was a breakthrough that promised to breathe life into his linguistic creation. He abandoned The Story of Kullervo for something far more original. If languages and legends were interdependent, as he now saw, he would create legends with their own nomenclature – the hallmark of Middle-earth. And with his 24 September 1914 poem, he had found a way to invent those legends. He could go beyond philology, in imagining the half-forgotten origins of recorded legends.

While finishing his degree and after enlisting in June 1915, Tolkien worked on this formula. On his return from the Somme in 1916, he used it as the basis for The Book of Lost Tales, the first version of The Silmarillion. That seminal opening line “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” is usually seen as Tolkien’s breakthrough moment. The real honour should go to “Éarendel sprang up from the Ocean’s cup”.

• The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star appears in The Book of Lost Tales, part two, edited by Christopher Tolkien

Hearing voices allowed Charles Dickens to create extraordinary fictional worlds

The novelist said he did not invent, but merely recorded what he heard and saw. This prompts questions about the act of writing

• Hearing voices: What's your experience when reading?

• il

• Peter Garratt
• theguardian.com, Friday 22 August 2014 15.21 BST
• Jump to comments (0)

Dickens' Dream … Charles Dickens in his Gad’s Hill Place study, in Higham, Kent, conjuring up his characters while asleep. Detail from the watercolour sketch by Robert William Buss. Courtesy of The Charles Dickens Museum

Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust (1934) ends with its protagonist, Tony Last, trapped in the Brazilian jungle by his captor, Mr Todd, who compels him to read aloud the complete works of Charles Dickens, in sequence, over and over, without end – or escape. It's a fantastically dark conceit: the great Victorian novelist as the sadist's accomplice. It also links Dickens to the possibility that there is something potentially oppressive, even imprisoning, in experiencing the human voice. Voices, it suggests, may tyrannise the mind.

Waugh linked Dickens elsewhere with hearing voices. In The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), most notably, the middle-aged writer Pinfold suffers an acute mental crisis while at sea, repeatedly hearing the thrum of human voices coming from the ship's pipes. Or so he assumes: in fact, these voices are persistent, imaginary, and unsolicited – that is, auditory verbal hallucinations, seemingly related to Pinfold's dependency on alcohol and sedatives (Waugh wrote from first-hand experience). The voices follow Pinfold around wherever he wanders on the ship, causing increasing perturbation. And the ship's captain has the unmistakably Dickensian name Steerforth (after James Steerforth in David Copperfield, another sadistic master).

Most modern readers may feel instinctively that literary experience has much in common with the act of overhearing. Reading fiction is a process of allowing characters' voices to sound in the inner ear, and absorbing the imagined noise they make (magically cued by curls of ink on a page). It's common to think of writers, too, building fictional worlds through voices, as if creativity begins as a subtle internal overhearing. The analogy between imagining and hearing certainly runs deep in our myths of culture. Inspiration, that theory of composition at once ancient, Romantic, and modern, tells us that creativity ignites by admitting some mysterious other voice into the writer's flow of being. To write means having one's voice disrupted, taken over, rendered by another. Dickens believed this, too.

Later in his career, Dickens's vocal impersonations of his own characters gave this truth a theatrical form: the public reading tour. Although wisdom has it that "doing" the different voices of his cherished characters hastened his death, no other Victorian could match him for celebrity, earnings, and sheer vocal artistry. The Victorians craved the author's multiple voices: between 1853 and his death in 1870, Dickens performed about 470 times. "Amid all the variety of 'readings', those of Mr Charles Dickens stand alone," beamed the Times in 1868. Edgar Johnson, his first post-Freudian biographer, wrote in the 1950s: "It was [always] more than a reading; it was an extraordinary exhibition of acting that seized upon its auditors with a mesmeric possession."

Hearing voices and inventing character were also indivisible aspects of his creativity. Dickens understood his astonishing writing practice as the summoning of voices. "Every word said by his characters was distinctly heard by him," one critic stressed in 1872. Dickens himself considered his novels to come from some autonomous source beyond volition, as he wrote to his friend John Forster: "when I sit down to my book, some beneficent power shows it all to me, and tempts me to be interested, and I don't invent it – really do not – but see it, and write it down". How literally he meant this is hard to judge. But allowing in unsolicited presences was central to his self-understanding as a writer. Mrs Gamp, the disreputable nurse from Martin Chuzzlewit, intruded repeatedly on Dickens when he was writing that novel, "whispering to him in the most inopportune places – sometimes even in church – that he was compelled to fight her off by force", as the American writer JM Peebles later put it.

Like mesmerism, which he took up, illusion and hallucination were topics of serious interest to Dickens. An essay of 1857, My Ghosts, published in his own journal Household Words, explored these fragile mental states. And his fiction features unanchored voices, such as in his 1866 Christmas story The Signal-Man, which begins with the sudden intrusion of an unidentified voice bellowing "Halloa!" out of nowhere. Members of theinternational hearing voices movement today argue that voices represent a part of the person that wants to be heard and acknowledged. Whether modern theories help us to better understand Dickens, or vice versa, seems unclear. But he was an exemplary source of voices, as both a writer and performer, in ways that should ask us to consider how we culturally frame literary creativity, inner speech and audition, and unusual mental experience.

* Peter Garratt is a lecturer in the department of English studies at Durham University and a participating researcher on the Hearing the Voice project.

A Spell before Winter by Howard Nemerov

A Spell before Winter

After the red leaf and the gold have gone,
Brought down by the wind, then by hammering rain
Bruised and discolored, when October's flame
Goes blue to guttering in the cusp, this land
Sinks deeper into silence, darker into shade.
There is a knowledge in the look of things,
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.

Now I can see certain simplicities
In the darkening rust and tarnish of the time,
And say over the certain simplicities,
The running water and the standing stone,
The yellow haze of the willow and the black
Smoke of the elm, the silver, silent light
Where suddenly, readying toward nightfall,
The sumac's candelabrum darkly flames.
And I speak to you now with the land's voice,
It is the cold, wild land that says to you
A knowledge glimmers in the sleep of things:
The old hills hunch before the north wind blows. 

Howard Nemerov

Kang-i Sun Chang 新增了 2 張相片。

7小時 · 

Many many thanks to Jiayan Mi 米佳燕 for taking us to the Scott and Hella McVay Poetry Trail in Princeton, where I found this poem by my former teacher Howard Nemerov (1920-1991).

收回讚*****

The Desuetude of Howard Nemerov - Cosmoetica

www.cosmoetica.com/TOP54-DES51.htm

  Howard Nemerov was born March 1, 1920 in New York, New York. He graduated from the Society for Ethical Culture's Fieldstone School in 1937 and went on to study at Harvard, earning a bachelor's degree in 1941. Throughout World War II, he served as a pilot in the Royal Canadian unit of the U. S. Army Air Force. He married in 1944, and after the war returned to New York with his wife to complete his first book. He then began teaching, first at Hamilton College and later at Bennington College, Brandeis University, and Washington University, where he was Distinguished Poet in Residence from 1969 until his death.

  Nemerov's numerous collections of poetry include Trying Conclusions: New and Selected Poems, 1961-1991 (University of Chicago Press, 1991); The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (1977), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize; The Winter Lightning: Selected Poems (1968); Mirrors and Windows (1958); The Salt Garden (1955); and The Image of the Law(1947). His novels have also been commended; they include The Homecoming Game (1957), Federigo: Or the Power of Love (1954), and The Melodramatists (1949). Nemerov received many awards and honors, among them fellowships from The Academy of American Poets and The Guggenheim Foundation, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and the National Medal of the Arts. He served as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1963 and 1964, as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets beginning in 1976, and as poet laureate of the United States from 1988 to 1990. Nemerov died of cancer in 1991 in University City, Missouri.

Kang-i Sun Chang 新增了 2 張相片。

28分鐘 · 

The last time I studied with the poet Howard Nemerov was in spring 1973. The last assignment I did in his class was a poem in imitation of Emily Dickinson. Nemerov was a Formalist, to whom rhyme and meter were absolutely important. He died of cancer on July 5, 1991. To this date I'm grateful to him for his mentorship.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

https://www.facebook.com/VirginiaWoolfAuthor

可查Wikipedia

Text：http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100101.txt

16


Well then, Nancy had gone with them, Mrs. Ramsay supposed, wondering, as
she put down a brush, took up a comb, and said "Come in" to a tap at
the door (Jasper and Rose came in), whether the fact that Nancy was
with them made it less likely or more likely that anything would
happen; it made it less likely, somehow, Mrs. Ramsay felt, very
irrationally, except that after all holocaust on such a scale was not
probable. They could not all be drowned. And again she felt alone in
the presence of her old antagonist, life.

Virginia Woolf

“And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life.”
— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

the moon and Shakespeare

http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/art-of-movement/writing-by-moonlight/part/4

“O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.” – William Shakespeare, “Romeo and Juliet,” 1597

More than 800 years later, William Shakespeare is not content to leave the moon in the sky.

In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” he makes the moon a character in itself, the aptly named “Moonshine,” depicted rather comically as a man with a lantern, a dog and a thornbush. Why this bumbling trio? Elizabethans believed the pattern on the moon’s face was that of a human with a four-legged friend, the dangling light leading the way.

Elsewhere on Shakespeare’s stage, an invisible cord connects moon and man, their emotions swelling and subsiding in unison. Indeed, Othello blames the moon for inducing the madness that leads to his murder of Desdemona – an allusion to the idea of moon-inspired “lunacy,” which dates back at least as far as ancient Greece:

“It is the very error of the moon;
She comes more nearer the Earth than she was wont,
And makes men mad.” – William Shakespeare, “Othello,” around 1603

O, swear not by the moon,
the inconstant moon

Love -- some might say a madness of its own -- also flourishes under the soft glow of moonlight, as Romeo woos Juliet. But like matters of the heart, the satellite is a changeable creature – if Romeo had hoped to set his love in stone, he might have wanted to pick a more reliable rock than Shakespeare’s “inconstant moon.”

“Like many playwrights of his time, Shakespeare is influenced by the classical tradition of the moon being associated with the goddess Diana, who is perversely the goddess of chastity, but also associated with Lucina, goddess of childbirth,” said Professor Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute, at the University of Birmingham, England. “So in that way, the moon is eroticized both positively and negatively.”

胡適之先生也很喜歡丁尼生Lord Alfred Tennyson的詩 ："Ulysses" ( 1833)、St Simeon Stylites ，The Charge of the Light Brigade；

胡適之先生也很喜歡Lord Alfred Tennyson的詩，最早在留學時代：1915年3月....

胡適曾經用格律詩體翻譯了英國詩人阿爾弗雷德· 丁尼生（Alfred Tennyson ，1809-1892 年）的《輕騎兵出擊》，譯為《六百男兒行》。

The Charge of the Light Brigade

六百男兒行

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

1.

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!

"Charge for the guns!" he said:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

半里复半里，半里向前馳。
馳驅入死地，六百好男兒。
男兒前進耳，會須奪炮歸。
馳驅入死地，六百好男兒。

2.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"

Was there a man dismay'd?

Not tho' the soldier knew

Someone had blunder'd:

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

男兒前進耳，豈復生恇懼。
軍令即有失，吾曹豈復顧。
不敢复詰責，戰死以為期。
偕來就死地，六百好男兒。

3.

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon in front of them

Volley'd and thunder'd;

Storm'd at with shot and shell,

Boldly they rode and well,

Into the jaws of Death,

Into the mouth of Hell

Rode the six hundred.

左右皆巨砲，巨砲當吾前。
炮聲震天地，炸彈相蟬聯。
男兒善磬控，馳驅入鬼谷。
六百好男兒，偕來臨地獄

4.

Flash'd all their sabres bare,

Flash'd as they turn'd in air,

Sabring the gunners there,

Charging an army, while

All the world wonder'd:

Plunged in the battery-smoke

Right thro' the line they broke;

Cossack and Russian

Reel'd from the sabre stroke

Shatter'd and sunder'd.

Then they rode back, but not

Not the six hundred.

刀光何熠爚，殺敵如犬羊。
孤軍當大敵，聲名天下煌。
蒙彈冒矢石，陷陣复衝堅。
怯哉哥薩克，逡巡不敢前。
敵陣亂且靡，男兒縱轡歸。
歸來非六百，六百好男兒。

5.

Cannon to right of them,

Cannon to left of them,

Cannon behind them

Volley'd and thunder'd;

Storm'd at with shot and shell,

While horse and hero fell,

They that had fought so well

Came thro' the jaws of Death

Back from the mouth of Hell,

All that was left of them,

Left of six hundred.

左右皆巨砲，巨砲逼吾後。
炮聲起四圍，轟然若當吼。
砲彈相蟬聯，馬僕健兒死。
苦戰得旋歸，歸自鬼伯齒。
鬼谷入復出，復出良不易。
悲彼戰死者，朝出暮相棄。

6.

When can their glory fade?

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wondered.

Honor the charge they made,

Honor the Light Brigade,

Noble six hundred.

英名何時墜，一戰驚天下。

勗哉天下人，欽此專嚴者。

----
St Simeon Stylites by Lord Alfred Tennyson

胡適在與楊聯陞談論楊先生的"自搏和自撲" 論文時，指出英國詩人丁尼生Tennyson 的作品 Saint Simoen Stylites有中古"聖徒"這方面的描述 ，他推薦楊讀該詩。

----給高宗武的信

有意思的是，該文給胡適的不朽論，竟不是胡的三不朽（楊聯陞先生在給《陳世驤先生選集》作序敬輓，就是用胡適的話來破題的--該文功力不凡），或是像我們在＜華爾街院長＞中了解的，B. Graham 的墓誌銘是刻了他與胡適都極喜愛的丁尼生 (Alfred, Lord Tennyson 1833)詩歌 “Ulysses”的句子。Wikipedia article "Ulysses (poem)". （詳《努力、探尋、發現、永不退讓、不屈服》）

有意思的是，該文給胡適的不朽論，竟不是胡的三不朽（楊聯陞先生在給《陳世驤先生選集》作序敬輓，就是用胡適的話來破題的--該文功力不凡），或是像我們在＜華爾街院長＞中了解的，B. Graham的墓誌銘是刻了他與胡適都極喜愛的丁尼生 (Alfred, Lord Tennyson 1833)詩歌 “Ulysses”的句子。Wikipedia article "Ulysses (poem)". （詳《努力、探尋、發現、永不退讓、不屈服》）