Butterfly in the Sidewalk

There was a wheelcheer moving in front of me in the sunshine, and after it passed through a puddle there was a swallowtail butterfly balancing in its center. Its wings were glued together and it didn't wish to move, so I thought it injured. I lifted it by its wings and took it to the grass, so that no one would tread on it. There the beautiful yellow wings spread and the butterfly limped in air around the puddle, touching the asphalt and limping again in hesitation. Then it lowered itself in the middle of the puddle and put its wings together.

a Mountain Man

The T was not very full, but you still had to squeeze in next to a stranger in order to sit. A cheery, perfect-looking family stood by a vertical hand rail. The father, lightweight lad with glasses, had a baby back-pack with a 1.5-year-old in it. From the eyes of the boy starved overexcitement stared. The T stopped and a blue-shirted mountain of a man treaded within. He stood across from the family, unshakable and mute as the T surged forward. Suddenly, his heavy gaze found the boy, and he smiled, lifting his lips with heaviness, as if they were, indeed, made of rock. The boy smiled back and hit the edge of the backpack with impatient and awkward hand. At this, the mountain-man felt a rocking impulse to shake of his silence, and his eyes faced the father as he addressed him with a smile and a mumble. Father did not expect the address, and watched incredulously, as words were born from the mumble of a stranger:
- It is like, like he has to smile, you know, - the stranger said.
The wife and mother in law looked at the mountain man cautiously, nodded and looked away. The mountain man felt the discrepancy between his words and that which stirred him to speak. He looked at the smiling boy again and mumbled a little more, as a mountain rumbles, compelled by fire from within.
- He just like, just has to smile, - he said and hesitated, - even the eyes are smiling.
The father nodded and produced a "yeah"-like noise. The family considered the matter concluded, but the mountain still looked at them and at the boy.
- There is a fire in them, - he said finally.
And the mountain stopped rumbling, feeling, perhaps, that it has reached the summit of eloquence. It stepped uneasily from one foot to the other, looked at the boy for one last time and at the unseeing parents and shuffled to the other end of the train.

Zwielicht, Joseph von Eichendorff

Кто бы мог подумать, что немецкая лирика может быть такой чуткой и живой? Тем не менее, это именно так, и по счастливой случайности я писала сочинение о стихотворении «Zwielicht», написанном Eichendorff. Оно показалось мне несколько утрированным, - почти издевательством над романтическими страхами и волнениеями, порождаемыми природой. Однако, по прослушивании Liederkreis (op. 39) у Schumann, понятно, что стихотворение это, пожалуй, даже и не о сумерках, и намного трагичнее, чем кажется с первого взгляда. Вот моя попытка художественного перевода на русский и само стихотворение в орининале.

Сумерки

Расправил крылья полумрак,
Жутко движутся деревья,
Сном тяжелым бредут тучи -
Что означает этот страх?

Коль имеешь лань любимую,
Не пускай ее пастись одну,
В лесу трубя бредут охотники,
Замолкают и дальше бредут.

Коль имеешь друга близкого,
В этот час не верь ему,
За взглядом ласковым и голосом
Готовит войну он в коварной тиши.

Что сегодня усталое клонится
Новорожденным завтра встает,
В ночи многое обронится,
Прячься, бодрствуй и будь готов!

Zwielicht, Joseph von Eichendorff

Dämmrung will die Flügel spreiten,
Schaurig rühren sich die Bäume,
Wolken ziehn wie schwere Träume -
Was will dieses Graun bedeuten?

Hast ein Reh du lieb vor andern,
Laß es nicht alleine grasen,
Jäger ziehn im Wald und blasen,
Stimmen hin und wider wandern.

Hast du einen Freund hienieden,
Trau ihm nicht zu dieser Stunde,
Freundlich wohl mit Aug und Munde,
Sinnt er Krieg im tückschen Frieden.

Was heut müde gehet unter,
Hebt sich morgen neugeboren.
Manches bleibt in Nacht verloren -
Hüte dich, bleib wach und munter!

On the Prowl

"Surely," I said, "not much wildlife remains in the city." Gees and squirrels don't count in Boston, of course. Nature, indignant, was swift with its rebuff.
At two in the morning that day I fancied a walk around my neighborhood. When I was lost in the contemplation of the ghostly light effects in the foliage and the swaying of an occasional passerby, my companion safeguarded me against running into a fluffy-tailed skunk. Luckily, the beast was concerned with his own affairs. A block or two later we stopped to look for a source of sudden bid-like chattering and with a surprise discovered a pair of raccoon eyes accosting us from the bushes. She walked out, a plump svelte body pivoted on delicate pale feet, and impassively walked away down the street. Yet, the sound did not seize, and we noticed a little creature in distress pacing the balustrade of the nearest house. "Rak-tak-tak-tak-tak. Mommy, Mommy," - he called more and more desperately, as he scrambled along back and forth and made an occasionally pass to come down.
Though the mother seemed determined to instill some independence into the youngster, tonight was not the night. His courage was not up to par, and she was forced to return and stop the undignified racket. Out of nowhere, a slick shadow appeared on the roof and slid down a drain pipe onto the balustrade: it was her with a stern and condescending look of a woman with arms akimbo. To her dismay, she found the youngster stuck in the railing, and fumbled him for some 5 minutes. We came as close and looked from below at the face of the creature, wild but unabashed, as it met, as we all do, the annoyances of its daily routine.

Review: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude

Where are the braids of my great-grandmother, the bread loaves shaped by my great-great-grandfather's hands in his backery 150 years ago, where do I find the string, on which the generations are strung like beads? Perhaps the beads have turned to dust with the decades of wear, as the smiles of my great aunts circled like fall leaves in the streets of the post-war years and disappeared under the tires of soviet automobiles and the many identical soles of soviet citizens, unidelized back into reality by the length of the milk lines. Or maybe somewhere, under the trunk of my subconscious, the dainty dust bunnies of faded generations are hiding still, holding their grudge against the moderns and their computers.
But they are almost as good as forgotten, as we, schoolchildren, learn to write the same mistakes in grammar school, and decide for the same reasons and out of the same greed to wage different wars, where the prison camps will have toilets as bad as in 1945 (see Guenter Eich, "Latrine"). But the murmuring denizens of the reality called the Past will keep haunting us just a little bit, even through the din of the city and the plastic shells of ear-phones. And reality it is, this Past, by the virtue of having existed sometime. Yes, there is still Soviet Russia, there is still Ghengis Khan and the Beligan colonization of the Congo. And the people who have given rise to us almost anawares, exist somewhere as a part of the Everything that is known. Only we, who are fortuitously living in the present, forget to remember them.

This is what "100 Years of Solitude" speaks and murmurs about in one's ear. The history repeats and mirrors itself with a mocking smile in different decades on different faces, and the past, no matter how forgotten, is a part of the long chain with only one link in the present. As the names repeat, so personalities repeat, with subtle variations, with hereditary memory and hereditary forgetfulness. It is not only the tale about the cycle of time and history doomed to forgetfulness. It is a tale of real people with real bones existing almost independently from the history that bore them and suffering their own passions and tragedies as people do. To all of this add flying carpets, insomnia plagues and levitating priests, fueled by hot chocolate, and the light of truth will reveal itself before your eyes. Wonderful book to read, and reread when turning older and less foolish.

Review: Достоевский, Игрок

Это произведение безусловно не сравнится по сложности с шедеврами Достоевского, но здесь тоже присутствует несколько блестящих моментов. Особенно иронично было личное появление бойкой и жизнерадостной богатой бабушки вместо телеграммы о ее смерти, с часа на час ожидаемой жадным до денег семейством наследников, и ее сумашедший проигрыш всего состояния у них на глазах. Блестяще было показано сумасшествие азарта, и затмение, находящее на человека, заболевшего им: как будто все в мире помимо игры теряет для него интерес. Выбраться же из этого состояния очень нелегко, и даже если человек сам понимает, что летит в пропасть, продолжает свое падение путем самообмана. Этим заблуждением повесть и заканчивается: «О, у меня предчувствие, и это не может быть иначе! У меня теперь пятнадцать луидоров, а я начинал и с пятнадцатью гульденами! Если начать осторожно... - и неужели, неужели уж я такой малый ребенок! Неужели я не понимаю, что я сам погибший человек. Но - почему же я не могу воскреснуть. Да! стоит только хоть раз в жизни быть расчетливым и терпеливым и - вот и все! Стоит только хоть раз выдержать характер, и я в один час могу всю судьбу изменить!»

Review: Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

This is a very wonderful collection of memories, perhaps tainted by the biased lens through which Hemingway - and really anyone for that matter - learns to see the past, rendering people and himself differently than many supposedly impartial online articles. One could argue that it is a deceptive tale, not really an autobiography that paints the self with the elementary colors of Truth, aimed at self-deprecation. Frankly, I would rather be deceived by a narrator with charm, who has reconciled himself with the past and thereby attained a new truth that is almost truer than the truth he has lived. After all, if there is Truth in itself, it is unattainable by any human observer, so the next best truth is the subjective and partial one we all hold in the jewel cases of our thoughts.

What Hemingway writes is this second truth about his young days in Paris, truth seen through his memories and not taken from some universal cosmic log that keeps track of every event and thought on our foolish earth. His language, though deliberately aimed for impartial simplicity, betrays nostalgia and resignation that caught up with him only later in life. When I read this, I want to knock on wood too:

"Poor everybody," Hadley said. "Rich feathercats with no money."

"We are awfully lucky."

"We`ll have to be good and hold it."

We both touched wood on the cafe table and the waiter came to see what it was we wanted. But what we wanted not he, nor anyone else, nor knocking on wood or on marble, as this cafe table-top was, could ever bring us. But we did not know it that night and we were very happy.

He suggests that only luck keeps happiness for us, and without it, many chances to one, we shall perish, led by momentary infatuation, by stepping off a cliff . One cannot have everything, and in the desire to gain the world, loses all. Here I bow to the rule of reason, but perhaps once in a while it gets overthrown by bands of ragged impulses: "When I saw my wife again standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her. She was smiling, the sun on her lovely face tanned by the snow and sun, beautifully built, her hair red gold in the sun, grown out all winter awkwardly and beautifully..." And one can feel, how fatally irreversible life is. But one tends to value more that, which is fragile, and so we do.
Hemingway writes: "But I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself." And this applies to happiness as well, except noone can find anything better to fill the space with.

There are also many interesting thoughts about creation and writing and a few anecdotal recollections of notable people. He speaks of hunger as a good discipline, from which one learns, and perhaps he is right. I learn from it too, from different forms of hunger. He speaks of them too. Physical hunger, hunger for recognition, hunger to work, hunger for that which one cannot have. Hadley, Hemingway's first wife, says in the novel that "Memory is hunger." A Moveable Feast is perhaps an attempt to appease that kind of hunger.

The memoir describes Scott Fitzgerald's life with some melancholy details that make me wish it were a bit more stable and left us with another Great Gasby. Though, if he were not a dreamer with days submerged with champaigne, there would probably be no Great Gasby. By some accounts, Fitzgerald stole some writing from his wife, but Hemingway describes her as a selfish woman, jealous of her husband's work.

I wonder, does one have to have problems to be a great writer, or does one acquire them in the process?