I had to go home for a couple of days - missing my partner and son. He was delighted to see me, but I suspected that my lovely partner had been relishing a break of her own, interrupted by my return. Harumph.

Alongside my poetry, I have been trying to break the back of my PhD thesis out here. It's one of those pieces of academic writing (an attempt to claim that translated poems have generic characteristics, and to name those characteristics) which cries out for pompous neologisms. I thought I had invented some good 'uns - paraphor and outerrupt for example. Once home, though, I checked them on the Web and discovered - inevitably - that they have all been used before in other contexts.

Keener than before, therefore, to have some minimal access to the Internet, I discovered that nearby Caernarfon has a wireless access cloud in Castle Square. I shall be visiting there soon - and uploading these journal entries when I do.

The pathetic nature of the last entry (after months of silence) made me feel I should do something more towards this Journal.

I'm in Wales for a month, alone, working on my poetry and my recently-ignored PhD. I have a tiny caravan, a pitch among the trees and - this is significant - no Internet connection (in fact, no mobile coverage either. Hm.) I did wonder how I would have felt in the unlikely event that, when I turned this laptop on a few minutes ago, I had received a message saying something like: Welcome to ForestNet, the Forestry Commission's Wireless Cloud... - frankly, I would have packed up and gone home.

We spent a few days in Lübeck in the run-up to Christmas. It's a place I used to visit occasionally when I lived in Hamburg, and have been back there a couple of times since. On this visit, showing my partner (and baby) around, I remembered how a visit a couple of years ago - and especially the Marienkirche - had helped to break a fallow period in the writing of Scattering Eva (the poem).

On that occasion, after looking around the various churches and their exhibitions about rebuilding after the 1942 Palm Sunday Bombing Raid, the fallen bells (click on the thumbnail for a selection of photos from Flickr) in the Marienkirche and the partly-restored statuary had me drafting a poem fairly rapidly. I imagined it as a single poem, but it was quickly absorbed into the longer piece - not quite a centrepiece, but some sort of turn-point, as if describing a reflective day-trip away from Hamburg, where the main action of the longer poem is set.

I have been interested in the cautious but growing debate in Germany in recent years about the balance of perpetrator and victim, complicity and resistance during the Second World War. Having exercised self-critique for so long - and so thoroughly - Germans are talking about other aspects of their experience of the period and testing out different ways of discussing and portraying events (the film Downfall is an example - earlier productions such as Heimat also touched on this; and there are historians re-examining Dresden, as well as the idea that Hitler's final act of intended annihilation was against 'his own' people. These discussions create more controversy in Germany, perhaps, than outside it).

There is a small memorial stone in Lübeck to the Lübeck Church-Martyrs (I can't find any decent English sites - there is a German Wikipedia entry here). The stone is in German and English. It commemorates the arrest and execution of three Catholic churchmen and one Evangelical pastor - ostensibly for breaking the wireless laws and undermining morale. They had been active in exchanging information and ideas on the progress and morality of the war with other churches and individuals and had formed some sort of an anti-war movement. Interestingly, the Palm Sunday 1942 destruction of Lübeck - and their churches - had given their thinking a powerful and somewhat primitive religious impetus (of the 'sign from God' type).

What intrigued me in particular, though, was a phrase in the translation, in which the 'justice' meted out by the Nazis on the Churchmen (they were tried and guillotined in Hamburg in 1943) is described in the German as 'wild' and in the English as 'arbitrary'. 'Arbitrary' doesn't seem to carry the force of the idea to an English reader - perhaps it does to a German; and yet we also have the idea of 'wild justice' (as in Revenge Tragedy), which is something else entirely - something comprehensible. It is one of those odd moebius strips which translation sometimes produces.

So, I think, 'there's a poem in that'. But I don't want to write poems on those themes - not for a while, perhaps never again. And so this long entry which begins with What I Did On My Holidays ends with a whimper. Oh, except for the original poem mentioned above:

Lübeck

Palm Sunday, Lübeck. Christ has taken
Jerusalem, the burghers settle at oak tables.
Europe capers through its Todestanz.

This night, a little Gehenna will be tipped,
a little late, down the white throats
of Petri, Maria, Michel. The bells will fall

to lie soft-buckled in pits of shattered tiles.
Here's the soot-stained Christ of the Limbless,
of the Torso, and the Helpless Hand. Here's Mary,

clutching a stone book, the clasps blown off.
Whatever word it held will never drift
from the gutted roofs.

*

In the breakfast-room
the ladies are complaining of little sleep.

The men who melted in the East
watch from mantlepieces.
Broad shoulders. Level gazes.

They jostle there like gables
in a town of bankrupt merchants.

*

Pastor Bärbel, between organ phrases,
modulates Iraq. She drips a little Goethe,
Freud, the marginalia of a mediaevalist:

Let there be no stone for the German dead.
No carved name for a finger to trace.
The dead lie together in the far homeland.
Once something has bloomed, it can never end.

Naja.

My partner reveals to me that whenever I steal a bit of food from our child's plate (whether jokingly or because he has lots to spare), she is suffused with an irrational rage which she feels only just able to suppress. As a psychologist, she finds this interesting and assumes it must be innate.

I test it out, and sure enough, on stealing a mushroom from his well-ladened bowl, she blanches and flashes me a look which is fairly disturbing. I mock the idea that we should take such things seriously, but she is unmoved - something so primal must be respected, she claims, and no, we have not 'moved on' simply because we no longer are squatting on the floor of a cave.

So, I say, when I trudge back from Aldi on a foggy evening carrying fresh bleeding chunks of grocery and enter the cave, you feel an overwhelming urge to present yourself on all fours on the kitchen floor?

Apparently not.

Where are yer, Adam? Answer yer frigging phone!

I have had this kicking around on various websites for a while now, and keep returning to it. It consists of a late-night message, left (in error) on my answerphone, cut up and set to some audio loops.

The ethics of taking a stranger’s late-night drunken ramblings are appalling, I know, but there was something about the underlying narrative that is fascinating, and I hope I have done some justice to it in the editing (as well as giving it a bit of extra spin.)

Play the file (*.mp3, about 3mb)

The original answerphone message is here – voice.mp3

Transcript of original:

Message received yesterday at 2.18 a.m. ... Where are yer, Adam? Where are yer? ... You’re supposed to be with me, I’m waiting in the Chinese now, where are yer? ... You’ve left us again! ... Dickhead … Where are yer?! ... ‘ve yer gone ‘ome to yer wife, is that ‘er? ... I’m furious … Don’t bother to ring me, because I’m sat here in the Chinese and…I’m sorry but…er…erm…that’s it, it’s over … Yeah, bet yer wife’s listening to this, in’t she? ... Yeah, answer yer friggin’ phone … Dickhead … Where is she? ... Oh you’ve got my…you’ve got my number, so…ring me. Yeah? ... Dickhead

I was discussing an extract from Tennyson’s In Memoriam today with a class of students, and we found ourselves talking about the complex emotions of going to look at a house where you had once lived or with which you had particular emotional associations.

It struck me that hunting down images of former homes on the web (see previous posts) falls between two sensations: the slightly furtive – and sometimes oddly dizzying – experience of approaching a former home, and the rather more settled experience of simply looking at a photograph which you have always possessed. The former has a stalkerish – or at least self-conscious – quality, and something of that remains in the hunting down of photographs in other people’s web collections. On the other hand, it feels free from the fear of discovery.

The Tennyson piece has a middle stanza which elegantly delivers grief, shame and the (impossible) desire for discovery; and the device of burying ‘hold’ within ‘behold’ is beautifully done.

Extract from
In Memoriam A.H.H.

VII.
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand.

A hand that can be clasp’d no more—
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but, far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

Tennyson

I have a borderline obsession with the Brecht/Weil song Die Mackie Messer Moritat – the fantastically grisly relish with which German female vocalists deliver it, the seemingly-random exclusion of certain verses, the frankly odd English version by Blitzstein.

The best version, to my mind, is by Ute Lemper and well worth a download from your online music store of choice.

I have a stalled project to do some sort of translation of it, making some sort of of child-scaring ballad, but there is something so powerful about the form and meter of the original that it seems impossible to escape its chime.

Here’s the original lyric, and the best attempt at a faithful song translation by Willet:

Die Moritat von Mackie Messer
Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne
Und die trägt er im Gesicht
Und MacHeath, der hat ein Messer
Doch das Messer sieht man nicht.

Ach, es sind des Haifischs Flossen
Rot, wenn dieser Blut vergießt!
Mackie Messer trägt ‘nen Handschuh
Drauf man keine Untat liest.

An der Themse grünem Wasser
Fallen plötzlich Leute um!
Es ist weder Pest noch Cholera
Doch es heißt: Macheath geht um.

An ‘nem schönen blauen Sonntag
Liegt ein toter Mann am Strand
Und ein Mensch geht um die Ecke
Den man Mackie Messer nannt.

Und Schmul Meier bleibt verschwunden
wie so mancher reiche Mann
Und sein Geld hat Mackie Messer
Dem man nichts beweisen kann.

Jenny Towler ward gefunden
Mit ‘nem Messer in der Brust
Und am Kai geht Mackie Messer
Der von allem nichts gewußt.

Wo ist Alfons Glite, der Fuhrherr?
Kommt das je ans Sonnenlicht?
Wer es immer wissen könnte –
Mackie Messer weiß es nicht.

Und das große Feuer in Soho
Sieben Kinder und ein Greis
In der Menge Mackie Messer, den
Man nicht fragt und der nix weiß.

Und die minderjährige Witwe
Deren Namen jeder weiß
Wachte auf und war geschändet
Mackie, welches war dein Preis?

Und die Fische, sie verschwinden,
Doch zum Kummer des Gerichts
Man zitiert am End den Haifisch,
Doch der Haifisch weiß von nichts

Und er kann sich nicht erinnern
Und man kann nicht an ihn ran,
Denn ein Haifisch ist kein Haifisch
Wenn man nicht beweisen kann.

Denn die einen sind im Dunkeln
Und die anderen sind im Licht
Und man siehet die im Lichte
Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht.

Brecht/Weil

*

The Ballad of Mac the Knife
See the shark has teeth like razors
All can read his open face
And Macheath has got a knife, but
Not in such an obvious place

[untranslated verse]

[untranslated verse]

On a beautiful blue Sunday,
See a corpse stretched on the Strand
See a man dodge around the corner…
Mackie’s friends will understand.

And Schmul Meier who is missing
Like so many wealthy men:
Mack the Knife acquired his cashbox
God alone knows how or when

Jenny Towler turned up lately
With a knife stuck in her breast
While Macheath walked the embankment,
Nonchalantly unimpressed

[untranslated verse]

And the ghastly fire in Soho,
Seven children at a go—-
In the crowd stands Mac the knife, but
He’s not asked and doesn’t know

And the child bride in her nightie,
Whose assailant’s still at large
Violated in her slumbers—-
Mackie how much did you charge?

[untranslated verse]

[untranslated verse]

Because the one acts in the darkness
And the other stands in light
And those things we know in daylight
We never see at night.

John Willett