the disinherited

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I move in darkness—widowed—beyond solace,
The Prince of Aquitaine in a ruined tower.
My one star is dead; the black sun of sadness
Eclipses the constellation of my guitar.

O you who brought me light in the night of the tomb,
Bring back Posillipo and the Italian sea;
Bring back the flower that made my sad heart glad,
The grove where the rose and vine twined joyously.

Am I Eros or Apollo, Lusignan or Biron?
My brow still burns red from my Queen’s kisses.
I dreamed such dreams in the cave of a swimming siren,

And I’ve crossed Acheron in glory, twice
To play on the lyre of Orpheus and intone
The sighs of the saint and the fairy’s clear cries.

(Gérard de Nerval, originally published 1854, trans. Daniel Mark Epstein, at, hold your nose, The New Criterion in 2000.)

The French original (from here):

     El Desdichado

Je suis le ténébreux, – le veuf, – l’inconsolé,
Le prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie :
Ma seule étoile est morte, – et mon luth constellé
Porte le soleil noir de la Mélancolie.

Dans la nuit du tombeau, toi qui m’as consolé,
Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie,
La fleur qui plaisait tant à mon coeur désolé
Et la treille où le pampre à la rose s’allie.

Suis-je Amour ou Phébus ? . . . Lusignan ou Biron ?
Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la reine ;
J’ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la sirène . . .

Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron :
Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée
Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la fée.

On consideration: I think, not knowing any French that the above translation is a bad one. Did Epstein lose the italics of the French for stylistic reasons, or did they just get lost in the transition to the web? Not sure. Also odd: that Epstein takes the title (Spanish in the original French, in draft the French “Le Destin”) and turns it into plain English (“The Disinherited”). Some background and analysis of the poem here, though note they manage to lose the italics in the French.

northern boulevard

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The bench, the sewermouth, the hydrant placed
On the street are attractive and foolproof,
Their finish is in republican taste
The expense, on democratic behoof.

People wear the city, the section they use
Like the clothes on their back and their hygiene
And they recognize property as they do news
By when to stay out and where to go in.

Near where a man keeps his Sunday plyers
Or young men play regularly, they place
Next to acts of financial empires
An object as magic as a private face.

No use to distinguish between hope and despair
Anyone’s life is greater than his care.

Edwin Denby, originally published in Poems written to accompany photographs by Rudy Burckhardt collected in The Complete Poems. Not sure when it was written. Also: MP3 (0:56, 888kb) of a 1983 reading, from Edwin Denby’s page at Pennsound.

lugubrious letters

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“She and Cook used to write the most lugubrious letters to each other about the unpleasantness of sunrises met suddenly. Sunrises were, they contended, alright when approached slowly from the night before, but when faced abruptly from the same morning they were awful.”

(Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, p. 820)

hélène

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“Hélène had her opinions, she did not for instance like Matisse. She said a frenchman should not stay unexpectedly to a meal particularly if he asked the servant beforehand what there was for dinner. She said foreigners had a perfect right to do these things but not a frenchman and Matisse had once done it. So when Miss Stein said to her, Monsieur Matisse is staying for dinner this evening, she would say, in that case I will not make an omelette but fry the eggs. It takes the same number of eggs and the same amount of butter but it shows less respect, and he will understand.”

(Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, p. 665)

(fernande)

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“Our only other conversation was the description and names of the dogs that were then fashionable. This was my subject and after I had described she always hesitated, ah yes, she would say illuminated, you wish to describe a little belgian dog whose name is griffon.”

(Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, p. 684)

henry-pierre roché

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“He had done a great many things, he had gone to the austrian mountains with the austrians, he had gone to Germany with the germans and he had gone to Hungary with hungarians and he had gone to England with the english. He had not gone to Russia although he had been in Paris with russians. As Picasso always said of him, Roché is very nice but he is only a translation.

Later he was often at 27 rue de Fleurus with various nationalities and Gertrude Stein rather liked him. She always said of him he is so faithful, perhaps one need never see him again but one knows that somewhere Roché is faithful. He did give her one delightful sensation in the very early days of their acquaintance. Three Lives, Gertrude Stein’s first book was just then being written and Roché who could read english was very impressed by it. One day Gertrude Stein was saying something about herself and Roché said good good excellent that is very important for your biography. She was terribly touched, it was the first time that she really realized that some time she would have a biography. It is quite true that although she has not seen him for years somewhere Roché is probably perfectly faithful.”

(Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, pp. 704 in the Library of America edition of Writings 1903–1932)

34q.

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34Q. Coins. Three 5-øre pieces, two of them aluminium and one copper; three 25-øre pieces (some kind of alloy); four 10-øre pieces; one Danish crown; three German 10-pfennig pieces and one 5-pfennig piece; one French 50-franc piece, and a 50-something piece (the inscription is in Hebrew).a

a. Note by ALAIN JOUFFROY: “This box and its contents remind me of the ‘Can of Involuntary Secret Noise’ that SPOERRI presented to me in January 1961 with a dedication on the label signed with orthographic variants of his name: DANIEL SPÖRRI — SPOERRI — SPOERRI-FEINSTEIN — SPÖRRI-FEINSTEIN — SPÖRRI-FAINSTEIN — SPOERRI-FAINSTAIN. [See also 28a, a] On shaking the aluminium can, which contained among other things a key, an empty spook of ACKERMANN’s black thread, one slightly yellowish die, a large safety pin, a tube of paste, an old franc and a compass glued to a pen, one could really hear an incomprehensible noise, similar to that made by those toy puzzles with which one can play for hours trying to return tiny ball bearings to their pockets. This ‘Can of Involuntary Secret Noise,’ which I hung up on my wall between a bronze Benin mask and a MANINA picture, given to me on my last birthday and consisting of pieces of lead glued to brown wood, may have been presented to me by SPOERRI to thank me for the article I wrote about him for his first exhibition (Mostra Personale, Galleria SCHWARZ, Milan, March 16–30, 1961). My introductory text, entitled ‘The Snare-Pictures of DANIEL SPOERRI’ [see 15, b], ends with the words: ‘The idea of reality is to reinvent, as everybody knows.’ But I’m not certain. Maybe he gave it to me, without knowing it, for the symbolical meanings of the objects which it contained, and in particular the key, the compass glued to the pen, the empty spool of black thread and the yellowing die. Key-compass-pen-spool-die constitute, to my eyes, an ensemble of meanings, well tied together, that summarise, like the images of a poem, the half-conscious, half-unconscious impulses that have compelled me since the age of seventeen. I would be interested in knowing if the snare-pictures and objects SPOERRI has given to others correspond as well, and as subtly, to their personalities and sensibilities. (New fact: In trying to find out what there was deep down in the can, which still contains many small objects impossible to identify – among which, no doubt, is the perpetrator of the ‘involuntary noise’ – I uncoupled the pen and the compass. Thus I am certain that the source of the source of the secret noise ought not to be probed.)”b (DANIEL SPOERRI, 1966)

b. What is the secret that JOUFFROY thinks he ought not to probe, and why is the hidden noise involuntary? This dilemma calls to mind immediately the 1916 semi Readymade of MARCEL DUCHAMP, “With hidden noise” (à bruit secret), called by ULF LINDE “one of the most puzzling things DUCHAMP has ever done.”c In the catalogue accompanying the recent DUCHAMP show at Galleria SCHWARZ, LINDE describes it as “a ball of twine mounted between two metal plates, the latter with strange texts engraved on them. There is an object hidden inside the ball of twin – an object put there by WALTER C. ARENSBERG. And the object gives out a sound when in contact with the plates (the voice of the bride?).”

The inscription on the plates – a telegraphic compound of French and English words with periods replacing missing letters – has no special significance, according to DUCHAMP:

P.G   .ECIDES   DEBARRASSE.

LE.   D.SERT.   F.URNIS.ENT

AS    HOW.V.R   COR.ESPONDS

and on the lower plate:

.IR.    CAR.E   LONDSEA

F.INE,   HEA.,   .O.SQUE

TE.U    S.ARP   BAR.AIN

No special significance. The system, at least, is obvious.

There is no intentional mystification in the SPOERRI object, and he inscription, too, bears the mark of the artist’s straightforwardness. He confided to me recently that after he finished gluing the object he discovered that he hadn’t glued it as well as he had intended; and that when he shook it and head a noise, he called it exactly what it was: “involuntary” because it was unintentional and “secret” because he didn’t know the source. As long as JOUFFROY refuses to get to the bottom of the matter – of the can – SPOERRI’s “secret” will remain hidden. (EMMETT WILLIAMS, 1966)

c. Why is there anything ‘most puzzling’ on (or under or by or in or around) DUCHAMP’s thing? If one looks aside (or keeps away) from the superlative here and then simply says (or asks): “What constitutes the puzzling?” I could at once come and say (or reply): “The puzzling is something that does something to me, and I cannot stop it because I don’t know where it is located and don’t know who it is that is doing it (or is it), and furthermore I know that I do not (or will never) know who it is (or who does it) bcause it is located at the edge of the (or my) world (the two worlds are in any case the same), and it is there at the edge of my world so that I cannot (or can never) reach it and stop it, regardless of whether at the edge of the inner or at the edge of the outer world, because it does not jut (or poke) far enough into my world, however large I keep trying to make (or extend or inflate) the latter, for me to grab it.” And if one surmises what I might then be about to say, and says: “Right,” I would then come a step closer and say: “That thing there from DUCHAMP, I can grasp it with my hands (which is one way of reaching it), and I can stop that thing inasmuch as it is doing something (to wit making a noise). I can stop the noise inasmuch as I can put it down. Why should one shake it? I can reach it, I can stop it, and so I cannot call it puzzling – let alone most puzzling, or am I wrong?” (DIETER ROTH, 1968)

(Daniel Spoerri et al., An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (Atlas Press edition, 1995, pp. 121–122)

the book to come

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“But excuses have no place in art, and intentions count for nothing: at every moment the artist has to listen to his instinct, and it is this that makes art the most real of all things, the most austere school of life, the true last judgment. This book, more laborious to decipher than any other, is also the only one which has been dictated to us by reality, the only one of which the ‘impression’ has been printed in us by reality itself. When an idea – an idea of any kind – is left in us by life, its material pattern, the outline of the impression that it made upon us, remains behind as the token of its necessary truth. The ideas formed by the pure intelligence have no more than a logical, a possible truth, they are arbitrarily chosen. The book whose hieroglyphs are patterns not traced by us is the only book that really belongs to us.”

(Proust, Time Regained, trans. Andreas Mayor & Terence Kilmartin, p. 914)