Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous: Summer XXVI. Music
Today I have read The Tempest. It is perhaps the play that I love best, and because I seem to myself to know it so well, I commonly pass it over in opening the book. Yet, as always in regard to Shakespeare, having read it once more, I find that my knowledge was less complete than I supposed. So it would be, live as long as one might; so it would ever be, whilst one had strength to turn the pages and a mind left to read them.
... It is ripe fruit of the supreme imagination, perfect craft of the master hand. For a man whose life’s business it has been to study the English tongue, what joy can equal that of marking the happy ease wherewith Shakespeare surpasses, in mere command of words, every achievement of those even who, apart from him, are great? I could fancy that, in The Tempest, he wrought with a peculiar consciousness of this power, smiling as the word of inimitable felicity, the phrase of incomparable cadence, was whispered to him by the Ariel that was his genius. He seems to sport with language, to amuse himself with new discovery of its resources...
Among the many reasons which make me glad to have been born in England, one of the first is that I read Shakespeare in my mother tongue. If I try to imagine myself as one who cannot know him face to face, who hears him only speaking from afar, and that in accents which only through the labouring intelligence can touch the living soul, there comes upon me a sense of chill discouragement, of dreary deprivation. I am wont to think that I can read Homer, and assuredly, if any man enjoys him, it is I; but can I for a moment dream that Homer yields me all his music, that his word is to me as to him who walked by the Hellenic shore when Hellas lived? I know that there reaches me across the vast of time no more than a faint and broken echo; I know that it would be fainter still, but for its blending with those memories of youth which are as a glimmer of the world’s primeval glory. Let every land have joy of its poet; for the poet is the land itself, all its greatness and its sweetness, all that incommunicable heritage for which men live and die. As I close the book, love and reverence possess me. Whether does my full heart turn to the great Enchanter, or to the Island upon which he has laid his spell? I know not. I cannot think of them apart. In the love and reverence awakened by this voice of voices, Shakespeare and England are but one.
Alpha.
I can’t say that I’ve read Shakespeare in my “mother tongue.” We both speak English, but they are hardly the same language. Not infrequently I feel the need for a translator for what I suspect are some of his best lines. The meaning of English words change over time while some disappear from common usage as still others appear. The Cultural Literacy of readers changes even more. The most uneducated theatergoer of Shakespeare’s time would know references I can only guess at.
Even so, I probably get a greater percentage of what Shakespeare tried to communicate than I get from reading Homer or Goethe in translation. Thomas Mann may be easier to read in translation since, as much as I appreciate his prose, I don’t detect that much poetry in it. James Agee is an American writer I esteem so much that I would urge non-English speakers not to bother reading him in translation -- unless you could find an equally talented and poetic translator. Like Edward Gibbon and Wendell Berry, he has a knack of writing sentences that make me smile merely from his use of language. The subject doesn’t seem to make much of a difference.
There is, however, another side to what I started saying about Shakespeare and changing language and the understanding of that language. Shakespeare has done an amazing job of preserving his own time. If there had been no Shakespeare, that time, and the language of that time, would be so much more foreign to us than it is now. Every performance of Shakespeare is a magical trip back to 16th century England.
Last weekend of summer.
I worked three straight eight hour days to close out our “official” summer, and the last day was the best. The local newspaper reported that 60,000 people gathered to watch or participate in “the largest dragon boat festival in the United States,” including teams from all over North America, and almost no one seemed to know how to sort their damn trash. (Why would anyone think that big aluminum cooking trays belong in with the Compost?) Between day one and day two (I worked a different event on Friday) I fine tuned my usual work plan and took advantage of some leeway I have with my boss on account of being the oldest, but more importantly, longest serving employee, so that I totally rocked yesterday. I practically received a standing ovation when I finally went to our headquarters (the usual array of giant debris boxes (dumpsters) where there was very little to sort as I had pre-sorted most of the event up-front. We were subcontractors on this job and I’ve worked many times with the guy who was in charge of the people doing set-up and hauling. He knows me and is also one of those rare people in the real world I actually enjoy talking to. He must have instructed his crews to back off and let me take care of the stations on Sunday, as I was even able to take most of them down at the end of the day, so that even the final bags were mostly sorted and could just be tossed or emptied into the dumpsters.
The frustrating thing is that all our events could be this smooth if only everyone would just do what I do. But it is surprisingly hard to convince them. And by the time they figure it out, they are often ready to move on to other things, as part-time, seasonal, low-pay, trash related work turns out not to be everyone’s life goal.
Many years ago, back when we did all our sorting back-of-house, we had a great team of people (only three of us survive) and one woman said, as four of us stood around a table drenched in compost juices sorting bag after bag of event trash, that she had a new dating rule that required her to expose her potential boyfriends to the sorting life as quickly as possible. This after a guy she was seeing took one look at her literally jumping into 40 yards of compost and took off never to be seen again. Mostly, our crews seem to date each other -- which gets awkward after the break up.
But yesterday went swimmingly. I’m tired and just a little sore but I can’t really think of any way I would have preferred to have spent my weekend.
Oww! I think I sprained my rotator cuff patting myself on the back.
Next: Autumn I. Hawkweed.
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