For Rest

It’s not for rest, these trees don’t sleep,
There is no agonising peace (Tomas Lurgsy, Forest)

In the Shadows

‘Subtext sits in the shadows cast by words’ (Leo Barnard, The Unworking World)

Musing on Muses

A woman is a useless muse: death and money drive my art. (Christoff Kvisvik)

Art, Life, Camille Renard

His books got progressively worse, whilst work on those other creations – his children – continued apace. Not only that: it was beginning to reap rewards. When Camille wrote to a friend that Baptiste, his second son, had won a prize for art at school, one senses he believed that his son that was not the artist, but the piece of art itself… (‘My Best Three Works’: The Children of Camille Renard, by Francis Grey)

Nothing Like Declivity

I recall publishing this poem about suicide on Valentine’s Day a few years ago. There’s a charm in such childishness, I fancy, which is why I emplore you all to revisit it today, unless the over-indulgent use of the word ‘declivity’, jokes about boiling your head and puny parodies of T S Eliot fill you with the kind of dread that no words will budge.

Missing Body?

To say that my Tomas Lurgsy poll was inundated by tribes of eager critics salivating over the chance to have their say on the greatest Bulgarian-poetry-related mystery since the peculiar disappearance of Ludomir Birovnik’s fountain pen would be what politicians don’t like to call a lie (but which, all things considered, is).

A rough handful of personages, nonetheless, have managed to complete the strenuous task of thinking for ten seconds and checking a box, for which I heap blessings upon them. As for the rest of you scruffy scoundrels, may all the potatoes in your pantry turn green and all the small children in your neighbourhood chant your name in mildly malicious tones whensoever you leave the house.

I suppose I could leave the poll open for a little while longer and I suppose I shall (though god knows four months is long enough to ask for an answer to a question). Meanwhile I don’t see the harm in exploring the results thus far, which seem to lean overwhelmingly (well, forty percent anyway) in favour of the word ’body’. To put that in the context of the poem:

the body crushed, blood thoughts regather:
roll to rivers in bad weather;
rushing forth to greet again
the field of my dear father’s grave

Now one has the opportunity to see the lines reproduced as such, I wonder whether anyone has second thoughts. My wife, for instance, awoke from a fourteen hour sleep last week with the theory that the missing word might be ‘kitten’. I daresay she’s wrong – and that she ought not to lie in bed quite so long – but it’s always nice to view things from another perspective.

And what of my ideas? Well, I’ve always been a fan of ‘berries’, partially inspired by the knowledge that Lurgsy was once, like the best of us, rather too fond of the old bilberry wine. Still, I’m as open as anyone to suggestions…

Heidi Writes to Say…

She may be eschewing her duties to me as a critic, but Heidi Kohlenberg keeps going as a letter writer, elegantly butting her way into whatever topic I happen to be discussing. And for this I thank her. Or do I? Here, in any case, is her latest missive:

Georgy, my dear little innocent doughball - has it never occured to you that the Luis Funnel/Malcolm Harding/Johannes Moeping affair might have been a set-up from the start? Put it this way – who had heard of the work before it appeared on your list? I certainly hadn’t – and neither, I fancy, had you. Moeping claims in this review that he didn’t make the suggestion. But if he didn’t, who the heck did? Hidden codes or no hidden codes, I still don’t see how Funnel’s translation ever got through the net. Why would Malcolm Harding devote his time to writing a book about it unless there was something in it for him? Remember that both Harding and Funnel are frustrated translators. As for Moeping – well, what can I say?

I don’t know, Heidi, what can you say? Not that I’m altogether keen on turning this whole Luis Funnel [sic?] thing into yet another is-it-or-isn’t-it-a-conspiracy debate. There comes a time when one has to accept that things aren’t necessarily more complex than they seem. And as much as I like to poke holes in the soft clay of our perceived realities, too much poking doth a sore finger make.

Merentes/Funnel/Harding/Moeping

For those of you who haven’t read Johannes Möeping’s review of Luis Fuñnel’s San Estebon in Winter, here’s the synopsis you don’t really deserve.

The book to which the review refers is, in fact, the 1997 translation of a book originally written in 1956; the similarly titled San Estebon in Winter – a mediocre melodrama by Guillermo Merentes. Möeping ponders:  how did Fuñnel, a mere translator, come to be more famous than Merentes, the actual author? Could it be through the supreme poetic delicacy of his English adaptation?

No – it was instead by the means of a code he had concealed, with strange skill, within his text, discovered in due course by another translator, the famous Scottish fruitloop Malcolm Harding (most famous for his translations of Fabio Muzakaki’s work) who went on to write his own book about Fuñnel’s work, published in 2000. This revealed, amongst other things, that Funnel’s translation contained a secret message regarding the facist leader Felipe Elverde (aka ‘The Great Green’). It also revealed, in my opinion, that the majority of translators are, quite frankly, mad.

As noted, you can and should read more about this here. 

What I hope to do sometime over the next week, meanwhile, is to take a look at what Luis Fuñnel has been up to in the last decade. What were the implications of Harding’s discoveries? Is he still translating? Does he really support Felipe Elverde? How did he react to seeing his name on my list of Greatest European Novels by Contemporary Writers?

All of this – and more – to come.

Opening Line Please

It was one of those ‘you bring your own story’ artworks. All very well I thought: after all, don’t we bring our own story to most, if not all of the art we consume? Sure we do; we can’t help it. Still, one wonders - is it too much to ask for an opening line?
(D H Laven)

Stop the Olive Press

Last week I made what may be considered, in retrospect, a rather nebbishy attempt to analyse the life and work of the ever-controversial Greek novelist Alexis Pathenikolides. Truth be told, no sooner had I announced that I would be tackling this subject than I felt I had nothing special to say. Perhaps I ought to have concentrated on his book – The Twisted Olive Tree. I could have elaborated, for instance, on his much-discussed theory that life is, in many senses, much like an olive. Or else I could have scrutinized the various ways in which characters within that book wield bayonets; remarking succintly upon the symbolic significance of their respective styles. Instead, I flapped hither and thither, seeking needless permission from an invisible control tower before making any sort of landing on the helipad of simple good sense.

I can’t be the first, however, to have struggled with Pathenikolides. The truth is, no one really knows how to deal with him: thus the current fuss over his squirrel-smothering brother - but another in a long line of items brought forward in order to ‘explain away’ the perceived enigma that we call Alexis P.

What I might have been clearer about, yet, is that when all the snow has fallen, the foxes have hidden and the nuts have been gathered in a large muslin sack, one feels inclined to agree with Sebastien Cheraz regarding the pivotal riddle. As is often the case with people whom we find impenetrable, baffling and recondite, the real mystery probably lies in the lack of a real mystery. Which is to say, Alexis Pathenikolides is extraordinarily, unfathomably normal.