The Peculiarity of Trees

The trees are being peculiarly.
I cannot say, how.
It makes me uneasy.

Pentti Saarikoski, translated by Susanna Laaksonen.

It is comforting to know that trees 'behave' around others. Despite appearances, this blog is not dendrophilic (if a blog can be passionate about something; it's cousin to the questions about what powers are innate to guns). I sense communication in everything from rustling leaves to the pepper grilling in the kitchen ('Will you turn me all ready?' grumble sizzle grumble grizzle seethe). Saarikoski, who was born in Impilahti in 1937 and died in a monastery 46 years later, was a major figure in Finnish literature in the 1960s and 70s. Enough years for you? That Saarikoski didn't have many may have been due to his heavy drinking. Saarikoski's father was a journalist; his mother, the daughter of a baker. He spent a few years working as a satirical columnist for the conservative newspaper Uusi Suomi, writing under a pseudonym (Nenä). He married (Mia, whom he called his Molly Bloom), joined the Finnish Communist Party (That must have gone down well with his ex-employers.) and edited the Party newspaper, Aikalainen.

He put his politics in his poetry:

120 miles from Leningrad
(trans. by Anselm Hollo)

We sit here surrounded by our forests,
backs turned to the giant and stare at his image in a well’s eye.
He wears a dark suit, white shirt, silver-grey tie.
In this country everything is quite different,
there people walk on or without their heads.

So we have Saarikoski openly angry, married and Communist. Oh, yes, and famous, and living a little tiny weensy bit beyond the edge.

It's not fair to portray him as hard (as if you could, given the poem atop the page). Here's a reflective pondering of war:

What would happen to me
it there was a war and they closed the borders?
I couldn't go anywhere, disqualified as I am
from soldiering; I suppose
I'd have to sit up nights, composing
orders for the day.

Saarikoski was neither forced to satire nor married to political diatribe. He is described as a trickster, compared with James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, Che Guevera, Rilke and Rimbaud, and held by some to be a philosopher. Certainly, he was prolific: fifteen collections of poetry, five prose works, three radio plays, and more than seventy translations (modern and ancient), including Alan Ginsberg, J D Salinger, Euripedes, Sappho, Philip Roth and Italo Calvino. (It was fun putting that list in order.) Do you hunger for a couple of specifics? Saarikoski translated The Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses, getting Greek mythology two ways.

Shades of Kit Marlowe: What if Saarikoski hadn't died so young?

A biscuit for you trivia hounds: Saarikoski liked to use Webster's Third New International Dictionary. A consolation bikky for those of you dedicated to strict form: Saarikoski wasn't. (Tell yourselves that you are wiser than he.)

The heavy drinking -- this is not a unique passage, be warned -- led to repeated stays in hospitals, which led to reevaluation of life, which led to an interest in early Christianity. This brought Saarikoski to translate Matthew's gospel. He proceeded to set Christ and his apostles as revolutionaries. Don't go all 'duh' on me. We're talking Che Guevera. It's another sort of revolution. We're also in the late 1960's and in Finland. Consider your place- and time-line.

Here's a bleakly impressive list. Saarikoski went to London, came back and returned to hospital. He weighed a whopping 126 pounds (57 kilos). This is no surprise, given what was going on with him. Here's the list, as found online: alcoholismus chronicus, epilepsia symtomatica, chirrosis hepatis, and encopresis. Hep and epilepsy alone would be enough to send me back to bed for the long haul and have me drinking nothing harder than mint tea.

In the 1970s, Saarikoski retired. He and his wife moved to Kerava, north of Helsinki, where Saarikoski developed an interest in the work of Eino Leino, a Finnish poet who straddled the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

He had a gift for gentle and evocative descriptions: The moon is the heel of a limping shoe. (translated by Doug Robinson)

Saarikoski's travels took him not only to England, but also to Ireland, Greece, France and elsewhere. He moved to Sweden. Towards the end of his life, he started talking about returning to Finland, but it never happened. In 1983, Saarikoski died of cirrhosis of the liver. He is buried in the graveyard of monastery of Valamo in Heinävesi.

Here's a taste of the translator of myths --

Aft, he sleeps,
untwitching,
he has seen all places
and been made to suffer,
they call him godlike,
the ship rides the wine-dark waves,
he is on his way home,
he sleeps.

(translated, in turn, by Anselm Hollo)

-- and of the philosopher --

Life is given to man
to make him consider carefully
the position he’d like to be dead in,

grey skies pass over,
the sky’s a hanging garden
and earth comes into the mouth like bread.

I am at a loss for the translator for that poem. It's from Runot ja Hipponaksin runot, which was published in 1959, and please don't ask me to translate the title. I'm happy enough to have found it.

There's literal truth in the poem, if you are of that mind. The earth does come into the mouth like bread -- as bread and as other things. But . . . I've been buried alive and the earth coming over you sounds like a storm, like thunder at the end of the world. Unite Saarikoski's 'earth coming into the mouth like bread' with Catullus' 'starvelings under the earth' and you have food fit for thought.

Fell Creatures

I do not like thee, Dr Fell.
Why this is, I cannot tell.
But this I know, and know full well.
I do not like thee, Dr Fell.

It's not as great a leap from Catullus as you might think (Okay, it is.). Tom Brown (you know he had some school days) wrote this in 1680. It was inspired in part by a Latin poem (There's the Catullus connection.) and in part by the existence of one Dr Fell, a clergyman and dean of Christ Church College, Oxford, who very much desired the expulsion of young Tom Brown.

Fell gave Tom a test: to write a poem in the style of an epigram and to translate work by Martial. What came before Tom Brown's (inner or outer) eyes was this:

Non amo te, Sabidi, nec possum dicere quare;
Hoc tantum posso dicere, non amo te.

Brown translated this thus:

I don't like you, Sabidius, and I can't say why; all I can say is I don't like you.


Fell paved the road; Brown walked it.

As a child, I knew none of this. When I first sniffed the darker winds of fell, the definitions that went beyond the past tense of 'to fall', I felt a shivery kinship with my predecessor who hadn't liked the doctor.

It is fortunate that I lived in a single-storey apartment, for another I didn't like lived between levels:

When I was going up the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish, I wish he'd go away.

This, by Hughes Mearns, is one of those malleable pieces whose words change from one collection to the next: go away or stay away; I wish, I wish or I wish that he would. No matter. There he was, waiting to be seen, not on the landing but shadowy and solid on the stair.

Over the years, not entirely to my surprise (having been given an early warning system in the forms of Brown, Mearns, Gorey, Thurber and Addams), I have met my allotted share of men on stairs and fell doctors. By and large, I have to agree that I didn't like them, could not (politely, at any rate) say why, and wished wholeheartedly that they would go away.

To a one, succumbing to time's wearings, they have, to date, obliged.

Of Your Unworlding

As Catullus wrote it:

Multus per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
advenia has misera, frater, ad inferias,
ut te postromo 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, ave atque vale.

As respun by the late Robert Fitzgerald:

By strangers' coasts and waters, many days at sea
I came here for the rites of your unworlding,
Bringing for you, the dead, these last gifts of the living.
And my words -- vain sounds for the man of dust.
Alas, my brother,
You have been taken from me. You have been taken from me,
By cold Chance turned a shadow, and my pain.

Here are the foods of the old ceremony, appointed
Long ago for the starvelings under earth:
Take them; your brother's tears have made them wet; and take
into eternity my hail and my farewell.

I lose myself in 'unworlding'. It awestrikes me. Even if you (o lucky soul) have never mourned, how could you not weep for 'by strangers' coasts and waters'? 'And my words -- vain sounds for the man of dust.' I want to have written that and count myself amongst the fortunate for having read it. One of my writing tutors inveighs (repeatedly) against the sin of repetition. Here, in the midst of forward motion juxtaposed with death, we have that pause: 'You have been taken from me. You have been taken from me.' We stand among the mourners who are frozen by their grief. As to 'the starvelings under earth', if those aren't God-touched words, then I know none that are.

As an entity, that translation . . . If Fitzgerald had sone nothing else with his life, he would have been born for good reason.

I promise not to take permanent residency in the biographical, but who would miss such a dual opportunity as this? Fitzgerald and Catullus, taken in either direction, make a tantalizing ride.

There are two of them. This may not be the briefest journey.

Gaius Valerius Catullus was a 1st century (but not centurian) Roman poet who lived from 84 to 54 BCE -- thirty whopping years. (Most of us, in this era, assume we'll be granted more, and will do less.) It is widely believed that the scene of his entry into this world was set in fair Verona. He was born into an equestrian (among the upper classes) family and lived most of his life in Rome.

Robert Fitzgerald was a 20th century American who lived from 1910 to 1985. He grew up in Springfield and (in fellowship with others in this blog) went to Harvard. While he was there, his work saw print in Poetry Magazine. Before WWII, he worked for the late New York Herald Tribune and Time Magazine. During the war, he served in Guam and at Pearl Harbor. After the war, he taught at Sarah Lawrence and Princeton and was the poetry editor of The New Republic.

Neither man spent much time far from a passable center of his current microcosmic universe. Both knew a thing or ten about loss, which links them with every member of the species, regardless of era, shape or land.

Catullus' time was also that of Cicero, who lived from 106 to 43 BC, when somebody else decided that he'd lived long enough. (Cicero watched the assassination of Julius Caesar, made speeches calling for Octavian to overthrow Antony, and thus manoeuvred himself onto a list of people to be killed. Life amongst the mighty isn't always either safe or lengthy, and is even more seldom both. Down time's Roman roadway, Cicero's son Marcus, then a consul, announced Antony's suicide to the senate. There are many ways to imagine that speech.)

One of my ancestors saw a then modern-dress version of Julius Caesar, with Orson Welles playing the lead. The Cicero-Caesar-Antony-Marcus story would transpose neatly to modern dress and stage or screen. The casting might horrify, but the story would shift eras without scratching a flea.

Many of Cicero and Catallus' contemporaries liked the latter's poems; the former questioned their morality. His work can be sexually explicit and he explores homosexuality, which would have been enough to see his books burnt and him beaten in eras later than his own -- but need poems be moral? Do poems have to deal only with beauty? Should they reflect -- or pretend to reflect, or attempt to reflect -- cleanly, without distortion? Of what use is a bound medium? And who's to be the determiner of morality in verse? It stirs the anti-McCarthy globules in my blood, and they are legion.

Catullus' affair with 'Lesbia' (so named in honour of Sappho -- and you have to give some due to a man who cloaks his mistress in the word-robe of a lesbian), a woman a decade older than he, birthed a number of poems. Sex and romance aside, Catullus also wrote hymns, tirades (properly called 'invectives', but he might forgive me for being other than proper) and condolences, and was not above sniping at ex-lovers and the ex-lovers of ex-lovers. He had, at the least, an enviable range.

Fitgerald did, as well, and not in writing alone. He edited, taught, translated and wrote. That's an enviable CV. He didn't haul around that, 'I'm not a waiter. I'm an actor,' luggage. He did his jobs and he did them well. Full dedication on all fronts. That's admirable.

Faith (in a nonreligious sense) is another parallel. Catullus catted about. Fitzgerald was married three times. A literally literary death-side note: Fitzgerald was Flannery O'Connor's literary executor. Fitzgerald's third wife, Sally Fitzgerald, compiled Flannery O'Connor's letters and essays. Note, please, the congruency.

Catullus' work influenced that of Ovid, Homer and Virgil. The admirers of Ovid & Co. have been relatively constant, maintaining their passion throughout the years. Those of Catullus (here's faithlessness again) let him fade away. His was rediscovered in the late Middle Ages. He also influenced Robert Fitzgerald, whose translations of his work are -- for good reason -- highly valued. Here, Catullus has company. Among the ancients in the Fitzgerald canon are Sophocles and Euripides. Moving to the moderns, he edited collections of James Agee's work. If those Fitzgerald edited and translated could sit around a pub table and talk . . . I'd pour the beer if it meant being able to eavesdrop on the conversations.

Even if you bed down with Cicero, morally speaking, Catullus is due some recognition for influence in terms of time span alone: Virgil, Homer, Ovid, writers in the Middle Ages, writers in the 20th century -- That's a good run, even if the house was sometimes not sold out.

Fitzgerald died in Connecticut at the age of 74. Catullus' ending is not known. Some of his poems refer to events that took place in 55 BCE, so he was around then. No poems of his can be found from later than 54 BCE, so it is presumed that he died that year. If he lived and died thus now, he might be buried in a paupers' field. He who writes and fades away . . .

So much for these menfolk. For my part, I am a 21st century woman, uncharted, often lost, usually attempting to use words as a compass (and knowing that to be as useful as storing a magnet in her hard drive).

For the moment, at least, I'm still ticking. The two other vessels lie, emptied of their poetry. Or, as my friend Walter says, 'They've joined the majority.' So, in our courses, must we all. It would be nice to leave a body of work, instead of only a body, behind.