HJN, Clay.
Odor of Sanctity
James Mansfield Nichols
The body is detritus wrested free
From the last-minute clutch of agony.
The mortal launchpad of a soul now lies
Charred by the life’s fierce burn, the prey of flies.
The faithful fight for one shred of the foul
Infested holy bed, in lamentation.
A lucky few handle with adoration
The final black deposit of the bowel.
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]
Saint Jerome, patron saint of translators, by Bellini
I’m nervous if a post of mine runs longer than a couple of scrolls, so I’m parceling the translation now into one stanza at a time until the end. I realize that I run the risk of confining myself to a vanishingly small audience if the requirement is that visitors must know or care about Spanish. I console myself, however, by reflecting that my including the source text (a common practice) means a passerby may at the very least taste a morsel of good English verse if nothing else. My sense of Yeats’s poem is that each stanza holds up well as a complete idea, so can repay a moment’s attention.
“A Prayer for My Daughter” by W. B. Yeats
(Spanish translation by James Mansfield Nichols)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14635/a-prayer-for-my-daughter
A Prayer for My Daughter (3)
May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.
Una Oración para mi Hija (3)
Que se le conceda belleza, pero no
La belleza que a un desconocido le perturbe el ojo,
Ni a ella tampoco ante un espejo; porque tales,
Habiendo sido embellecidas sobremanera,
Estiman que la belleza basta en sí,
Pierden la bondad natural, y tal vez
Esa intimidad reveladora del corazón
Que escoge bien, y nunca hallan amigo.
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]
Tom Jones Drawing. Urban cowboy.
I read somewhere today that someone said that something “almost ought to be illegal.”
A statement like that always reminds me of how terrified I am, as a stylist, of adverbs. I estimate that at least half the time I spend in self-editing is in weighing which adverbs can be axed.
Of all the parts of speech, adverbs are the most unreliable, the most likely to corrupt and pollute and obfuscate straightforward utterance. They’re the quintessential weasel words. Their sole purpose is to put hedges and dodges and jukes around good old verbs and adjectives (and sometimes other adverbs). They’re the tool of speech that cowers behind plausible deniability. (I never said that.)
Almost ought to be illegal? Some things ought to be illegal that aren’t, undoubtedly. And vice versa. But is there anything that should be almost illegal, not quite? Or else, on the verge of being considered illegal, but not reaching a state of full consideration?
The slightest attempt to make sense of such bafflegab reveals how noxious and fatuous and perverse and subversive it is. It ought to be illegal.
[Copyright (c) 2018, James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]
Saint Jerome, patron saint of translators, by Bellini
“A Prayer for My Daughter” by W. B. Yeats
(Spanish translation by James Mansfield Nichols)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14635/a-prayer-for-my-daughter
A Prayer for My Daughter (2)
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory’s Wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed.
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.
I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour,
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come
Dancing to a frenzied drum
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.
Una Oración Para Mi Hija (2)
Una vez más la tormenta aúlla, y medio escondida
Debajo de esta capucha de cuna y la cubridora
Mi hija sigue durmiendo. No hay más obstáculo
Que el Bosque de Gregorio y una colina desnuda
Por el que el viento nivelador de techos y almiares,
Engendrado en el Atlántico, pueda ser detenido.
Y hace una hora que me paseo y rezo
A causa de la gran tristeza que llevo en la mente.
Hace una hora que me paseo y rezo por esta niña,
Y que escucho chillar el viento de mar sobre la torre,
Y por debajo de los arcos del puente, y chillar
En los olmos arriba del río inundado;
Imaginándome en un ensueño emocionado
Que hubieran llegado ya los años venideros
Bailando al toque de un tambor frenético
Desde la inocencia asesina del mar.
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]
Saint Jerome, patron saint of translators, by Bellini
“A Prayer for My Daughter” by W. B. Yeats
(Spanish translation by James Mansfield Nichols)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14635/a-prayer-for-my-daughter
Celebrating recent renewal of contact with my long-lost daughter raised in Spain, I undertake this translation into Spanish of Yeats’s “Prayer for My Daughter.” This poem helped me through a long period of remorse and grief over the separation from her as a toddler. At one time I had it memorized and would recite it during long miles driven over South Texas as a salesman. I hope to share the poem and much else with her when I travel to Spain in the Fall.
I welcome suggestions from persons who know the two languages on how to improve my translation. I intend to devote more space here in future to the art and craft of translation, perhaps connecting with a handful of persons who share my interest in it.
Yeats’s poem has ten eight-line stanzas. I’ll deal with each stanza in a separate post in cumulative fashion so that the ending post will have the complete effort. Any attempt to impose regular rhyme or rhythm on my Spanish rendering is beyond my powers. My goal is to convey its sense as faithfully and naturally as possible.
A Prayer for My Daughter (1)
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory’s Wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed.
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.
Una Oración Para Mi Hija (1)
Una vez más la tormenta aúlla, y medio escondida
Debajo de esta capucha de cuna y la cubridora
Mi hija sigue durmiendo. No hay más obstáculo
Que el Bosque de Gregorio y una colina desnuda
Por el que el viento nivelador de techos y almiares,
Engendrado en el Atlántico, pueda ser detenido.
Y hace una hora que me paseo y rezo
A causa de la gran tristeza que llevo en la mente.
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]
JMN, photo.
Hollie Jean Burmeister makes such a to-do over her old-fashioned frozen pies. I don’t know what the big fuss is. The canned pies at Mustang Mart cost ninety-eight cents apiece, half of what the frozen ones do. The Kandi-Whip gets soft as soon as the air hits it. Don’t ask me how they do that. Ever so often they mark ’em down half price, and I buy a dozen at a time. Where else can you get a fifty-cent pie that’ll serve six people?
I stopped buying frozen pies when I had my second child. I said life’s too short and I’m too busy making a home for my family to have to thaw something out every time I serve it.
I’m gonna contribute two apple and two cherry to the bake sale for the Montgomery Clyde Hatch Antique Playtime Palisade. They’ll bring at least twenty dollars apiece. Juneau, my daughter, is running the sale. She’s Chairwoman of the MCHAPP Foundation. Her goal is to raise enough money to clear the mesquite so they can break ground on the Mudpie Arena.
Come to think of it, I’m gonna put my pies in tin foil plates so they look frozen. You don’t want people to think you’re goin’ cheap on ’em when they’re springing for twenty dollars a pie.
[Stag Country, Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]
HJN, Hand. Fired clay with partial glaze.
When I was a student of literature I recall being influenced by a school of critical theory (Rene Wellek?) that said an author’s biography was irrelevant to a consideration of his or her text. Once it was loosed from the pen it had an existence of its own irrespective of the character and deeds of its author.
I think the predisposition acquired in those studies to seek a direct, unmediated confrontation with art has stayed with me as I ponder the current climate in which the work of certain artists in various media, both living and dead, is being reconsidered by some, shunned by some, in light of crimes or abuses known or alleged to have been committed by the artists. I can’t see how this serves art.
I hope that, in the realm of human conduct, decency will prevail and justice will be served where justice is due. My duty as citizen of a struggling democracy with flawed institutions is to exert myself however possible to support the good and resist the bad. Where art is concerned, my goal is to try to keep my eyes, ears and mind wide open to the art as art.
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]
Luis de Góngora y Argote by Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Google_Art_Project
I once took a poetry writing seminar conducted by a prominent American poet based at the time in Colby College. She was already an eminence in the early stages of her career and has achieved Olympian status since. I lunched with her several times outside class and was both flattered and dazzled by her attention.
When it was my turn to share my poems with the group she dealt unsparingly with them. Her critique was withering. I deserved it. I had been a cocky participant in the sessions, perhaps inflated by imagining that she had been receptive to my extracurricular flirtations. My work was undistinguished. For a long time I kept the copies of those poems that she had marked up as relics of my abandoned aspirations to be a poet.
Years later I had a friend who was also a recognized poet with a solid body of published work to his credit. He received multiple fellowships to teach poetry in public school districts around the state. In my town he solicited poems to be considered for inclusion in an anthology of local versifiers. It was calculated vanity press, but also flattering and vivifying for the community.
I worked in advertising at the time but, encouraged by the poet, provided several old stabs of my own at creating a poem. He saw a glimmering of merit in one. What he did has stayed with me.
He proceeded to carve out the poem, such as it was, that lurked in my draft. He published it in his anthology, crediting me as its author. It was much improved. He didn’t add or rephrase anything, just selected the words that should survive and discarded the rest. It was a nurturing and generous act of editing (and of teaching).
I doubt that what I submitted for the anthology was any better than what I had submitted for the seminar. The difference was in how it was dealt with. One treatment took the wind out of my sails; the other one gave me a puff. Both approaches helped me.
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]
Aatish Taseer
I very much appreciate supportive comments. They encourage me to up my game.
I quoted a paragraph from a remembrance of V.S. Naipaul published by Aatish Taseer in the NYTimes:
Taseer is a writer I had not encountered previously. What struck me in his account was the dynamic it expressed between him and his assassinated father. It had resonances of my relationship with my own father, who died a natural death, but whom I too mourn in a complicated way.
Taseer knew Naipaul personally — calls him his “cruel friend” — and seemed to take comfort from Naipaul’s wry advice: Say your father died in, not for, Pakistan. It implied support for a son’s or daughter’s not feeling obligated to buy unconditionally into glib lionizing of a celebrated parent. Somehow, the Yes, yes, yes! in the anecdote gave, for me, just the tilt needed to support the perverse humor and insight behind Naipaul’s targeted mischief with prepositions.
I have a distinct weakness for humor based on parts of speech.
A quotation should be allowed to speak for itself is my working philosophy. It’s quite possible, though, that a little framing of why it speaks to me would not be amiss sometimes. I’ll think seriously about that.
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]
EthicalDative 
Reflection on Popular Entertainment
Michael Kitchen, “Foyle’s War”
I’ve never snorted cocaine or been present when someone else did. But I would know exactly how to do it because I’ve seen it five thousand times in movies and TV.
I’ve never held a handgun with that cupped, two-handed, arms-full-out stance, which is, presumably, the prescribed way. I could do it flawlessly, however, because I’ve seen it ten thousand times in movies and TV.
I’ve seen coitus and onanism simulated in movies and TV too many times to count, though with negligible how-to value.
The trinity of drugs-guns-sex has had a grip on show business for decades, evolving steadily from play-like to realistic.
There’s no righteous indignation coming here; I’m too compromised and ambivalent on too many fronts to simulate prudery or lofty virtue. It’s simply an interesting topic to mull over.
I’ve been a fan of The Sopranos, the Godfather movies, The X-Files, NYPD Blue, Grey’s Anatomy, Deadwood, True Blood, GLOW, and the comedy of Jim Jefferies and Amy Schumer, for example, just to establish bona fides for not being squeamish. I get no jollies from murder and mayhem per se, but when the trinity gets good dramatic or comedic backing it works for a larger purpose.
If spectacle in which the trinity figures prominently disappeared, there would still be Foyle’s War, The Crown, Endeavor, Broadchurch, Arthur & George, Inspector Lewis, Grantchester, The Ambassador, Lark Rise to Candleford, Emma, Cranford, Toast of London, Shetland, W1A, The Office-UK, and Doc Martin.
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]