Bell, Books and Candle

SENIOR PROM

2011-06-24T17:18:00.001+02:00

To see oneself in them is not so easy,
Indeed, when tables are so far away:
This side, the adults, disappointed with
The menu or the wine, as usual;
And here, the crowded, noisy, colourful
Bunches of boys and girls,
These ones in low-cut gowns and make-up, they
In smart dark suits and slicked down hair, the gesture
Ready for fight or drunkenness, like gangsters
At a convention or
Poor people at a wedding
–For youth is just a form of poverty,
Despite these modest luxuries
It can sometimes afford.

Inside each one a silent music sounds,
Since there’s a private party for each one,
Apart from this they share,
Which is nobody’s and is everyone’s,
While the slow dinner contravenes the cautions
Of those who did not want to stay up late,
And flaming looks fly from the cheap champagne
To the endless legs of girls in miniskirts.

We would not want to be that age again,
The tipsy adults say.
At most, we’d just ask for some extra time,
Which is our right: let this short interval
Between two uncertainties be longer,
As we would wish for these subdued desires,
Or for the sympathy of these worn out
Female colleagues who look today their best,
While disenchanted certainty tells you,
When you think you can reach for these illusions,
That it’s time to go home.

But not before complying with this rite
Which brought you here tonight:
Admitting that this ground which you now give
Belongs to them,
As it will soon
–Perhaps you stayed up later than you thought–
The merciless morning light.

A HOUSE DOWN IN THE SEA

2008-06-15T16:26:00.003+02:00

A HOUSE DOWN IN THE SEA

A room with waves
inside,
where the foam and the din of the waves would reach
the bed. A room with tides.
Alive with fish.
With jellyfish.
Wet and smart,
salty and chilling.
That was my dream.
My feet tread on the sand
and I’m afraid it will prove a lie:
Blindly I touch you, keeping my eyes shut.

JOSEFA PARRA
English version by José Manuel Benítez Ariza

STORM-SAIL

2007-06-25T12:02:00.001+02:00

Well, I can pretty imagine what it is: a reinforced sail, used in storms. English is sometimes disarmingly obvious. The problem is the Spanish translation, "vela de tormenta", is not only obvious, but also somewhat suspicious. Do seamen really say that? (Are seamen interested in the poetic "allure", so to say, of their jargon?)

A TRANSLATOR'S DIARY (3)

2006-08-10T09:40:00.000+02:00

Funny trip after the exact meaning of the word "douche". How to translate all its implications (a vaginal cleansing) in a merely figurative use of the term?

POETRY AND HOT-DOGS

2006-07-25T07:48:00.000+02:00

Nabokov in Lolita: We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbour, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.

That is the conclusion of a long paragraph devoted to our expectations that friends would not change, would adjust for life to the image of them we cherish. If this it true (it is!), then we can be sorry for that hypothetical book of poetry, and for us, who will not read it nor, in case we did, will appreciate it.

And we can also be sure that the same applies to us. So we'd better not show any such deeds of ours to anybody who knows us in the role of hot-dog stand operators. Better give them a hot-dog (and not a very remarkable one), if that is what they expect.

***

Sorry, but spam keeps on trying to stick to my latest entries, so I have had to cut off the possibility of anonymous comments. I hope unregistered readers will understand.

WINDS

2006-07-16T21:29:00.000+02:00

Hot, sand-raising Levante (east wind) or freezing Poniente (west wind): if you live on the southwestern coast of Spain, summer is reduced to this alternative. So you'd better stay at home and just dream about the possibilities of crossing the seafront and being on the beach for a while; but don't do it. Let tourists enjoy what they paid in advance. Winds do not spoil prepaid illusions.

AMERICAN DREAMZ (THE MOVIE)

2006-07-12T12:51:00.000+02:00

American Dreamz - thoroughly incorrect, but true as life: the president, poor thing, discovers one day that the world is not what the dossiers made up by his collaborators say or what TV reflects... Just a question of perusing newspapers, especially foreign... TV contests are a hoax. And even suicide terrorists have their feelings and may enjoy Broadway musical shows and dream of becoming a Sinatra or a Dean Martin. Middle-class families are unsurmountably flashy, even if they are of Arab origin... And a Guantanamo-fated trio of dormant terrorists may be as funny and cheeky as their equivalent in anti-communist Ninotschka. Yeah, I enjoyed it (it was a hot summer afternoon and Madrid Colombian-peopled main avenues were so hostile). I laughed heartily. So did my daughter, who probably missed the political implications, but suspected something important was at stake. And it was. The idea that even our deepest terrors can be a matter of derision. Thanks God.

(Also published in Imdb, signed with my initials)

A TRANSLATOR'S DIARY (2)

2006-07-03T11:10:00.000+02:00

This I learnt today: what a toecap is. And that's why there are capless shoes, God bless them. (How long did I take to find out? Half an hour?)

A TRANSLATOR'S DIARY (1)

2006-06-30T13:56:00.000+02:00

First thing to be thankful for: the sort of unexpected intimacy one gets with the original text. I guess any author enjoys being translated; but, if they could feel the presence of the translator as intensely as the translator notices the nearness of the text, not so many would be so happy about letting a stranger get so close.

SCHLESINGER

2006-06-29T07:35:00.000+02:00

Surprised by the unexpected beauty of John Schlesinger's films. Until now I only cared for Midnight Cowboy. But, after seeing Yanks, The Falcon and the Snowman and The Innocent, I think the point is elsewhere: in the nostalgia of a heroic past which is nevertheless made up of human passions and weaknesses, but ennobled by distance and remembrance. Some critics say this is due to Schlesinger's homosexual sensitiveness. But that's nonsense, and can only be applied to his deep understanding of male feelings and self-image, but not to his ability to portray the past as we can only see it in self-indulgent fantasies (Yanks) or in tricky sentimental old films (in Casablanca-like The Innocent).

SEX

2006-06-26T07:57:00.000+02:00

How much sex is involved in Wilder's Ariane, for example. And no indecencies shown.

THEORIES

2006-06-25T12:06:00.000+02:00

Why do some people see everything through theories? Ask them, 'Do you like Mozart?', for example, and they will say: 'Yes, I read a paper about him which...' Which is not obviously the point.

KISS ME, NOT-SO-STUPID

2006-06-23T07:37:00.000+02:00

What Kim Novak lacks in Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid: sense of humour. This does not matter much in Hitchcock's films, for example: in them, the humour comes from the director, from the way he sees or arranges the facts in the film. But in Wilder's, humour -and dignity- springs from the characters themselves, from their open-faced cynicism, from the way they assume the ridiculous or strange situations they live through.

We do not quite like Polly the Pistol, the prostitute Novak plays here: too stolid, too unsympathetic for a prostitute; but much too indecent for the good-girl-in-trouble she is supposed to be at heart. Perhaps Wilder does not tell us her whole story. The interesting character here is Mrs Spooner, the honest wife of amateur composer Orville J. Spooner, who wants to sell his work to famous singer "Dino" (Dean Martin as himself) and uses Polly (hired as Spooner's fake one-night wife) to lure him to stay for the night and listen to his songs. The angry real wife, ignorant of the arrangement, gets drunk in the joint where Polly works and sleeps it off in her caravan, where Dino finds her. She's been a fan of his since her teens and easily succumbs to his charms. No ill feelings, though: after a night which must have been glorious -Dino pays her $ 500- she still plays the offended wife for a few days, until the expected result comes: Dino sings one of Spooner's songs on TV and Mrs Spooner and her husband reconcile, no questions asked.

That's the key of the business: ask no questions if you want to lead a happy, confident life. And let everybody have their own secrets. Nobody's perfect.

IN EXILE

2006-06-21T13:54:00.000+02:00

An absolutely gorgeous girl at the bus stop. Drivers look at her in passing. Men, young and old, make a sort of circle around, just to keep her at convenient looking distance... But this circle also seems an act of respect, as if all men here wanted to show their genuine awe, and perhaps fear, of true beauty; of beauty which can't be transferred to others in mere sexual intercourse. I don't think anybody here would like to have sex with this girl; not now, not immediately. We would not get anything from it. We would need some routine first to ease this feeling of strangeness. Beauty doesn't give itself so easily; which condemns us all -even would-be lovers- to a sort of exile.

ELEMENTARY MATHS

2006-06-19T16:49:00.000+02:00

Let's see: seventy per cent of forty eight per cent is: less than thirty five per cent. Figures do not lie. Nevertheless, in democracy you can call this "a vast majority", as the headlines of some Spanish newspapers say today. The strange thing is that, with victories like this, who needs a defeat?

NO ICE REQUIRED

2006-06-18T20:56:00.000+02:00

(After seeing The Four Horsemen of Apocalypse)

Ingrid Thulin: let her put a finger inside your nightcap and no ice will be required.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON

2006-06-17T21:20:00.000+02:00

An appropriate image after reading Amis's The Old Devils: half empty glasses of wine, bottles, finished long drinks. The friends are gone. And the resulting chaos looks like an image of your life: things to put away, books still not read.

AFTER A SUMMER RAIN

2006-06-16T17:44:00.000+02:00

Yes, Mr Higgins: the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain. Especially, if the drainage system is obstructed by the dirt and dust of a two-year drought and decades of neglect.
Even so, it's wonderful to smell the damp earth.
Here where hurricanes hardly happen.

THE OLD DEVILS

2006-06-15T15:35:00.000+02:00

Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils: not “a bloody funny lovely bloody book”, as the back cover of the Penguin edition puts it. None at all of that eager, mannish sort of humour we can expect after such a description. Instead, it is a sad, depressing, autumnal novel. An old man writing about other old men and women and stating plainly that they are not better now than they used to be. Writer Alun Weaver, a professional Welsh –and, more than probably, a fraud– comes back to Wales after living and working in London for years. His literary prestige and fame is amply celebrated by his old pals, a collection of elderly nondescripts who spend their time drinking. Two of them happen to have been in love with Rhiannon, Weaver’s wife. The irony of the story is that, although Weaver manages to have flirts with the wives of two of his old pals, and does not seem to care about nobody’s hurt feelings, he is the only real loser in the game. At his request, one of his friends tells him plainly that the novel he is writing is literary crap. And he is shown to be just one of those parasites that seem to grow out of fake patriotism, the kind that flourishes in Wales as it flourishes, let us say, in some peripheral regions of Spain. At the end, with Weaver well out of the way, we are not surprised to find that old liaisons are renewed and survivors partly reconcile with forgotten, unattended feelings.

(I wonder if a novel like this, in which the Welsh language is convincingly described as a unpronounceable jargon nobody, not even Welshmen, can understand, and where professional nationalists are made fun of, could have been written in Spain. Not probably. Not now. The land seems to be full of Alun Weavers –I could mention one or two who write for one of the most widely circulated newspapers–, jealous of their privileges and ready to defend them with as much impudence as can be gathered. With full support of the press, of course.)

LEMON

2006-06-14T09:36:00.000+02:00

Jack Lemon: the perfect American who knows it isn't so nice to be the perfect American all the time. Examples: his part in Avanti!, which is more or less the same he plays in Missing (although the circumstances are slightly different, as even a perfect American can notice).

(AFTER READING AN ARTICLE ABOUT IRAN'S PRESIDENT)

2006-06-13T11:25:00.000+02:00

Yes, a true, sincere fanatic in power is even worse than a corrupt ruler. But the amount of harm they can cause depends on external factors. As a rule, fanatics last less than corrupts. Hitler remained in power for thirteen years, which is not much if compared with other 20th-century tyrants. In 1945, a thirty-year-old man might have regarded the whole experience of his rule as an episodic nightmare, and have still time to live a better life under different conditions. This, provided that he could forget all about the war and its effects. But obviously this is not easy. Many people my age, who only suffered Franco's regime in their childhood, declare sincerely that they were marked by it for good. Perhaps that's why Alan García has been again elected in Peru. He caused real havoc in his first mandate, but nobody seems to remember. He wasn's a fanatic. He was just... what everybody knows, a lesser harm. Live and let live, they say.

DISAPPOINTMENT

2006-06-12T10:54:00.000+02:00

Current opinions about Larkin as an obstinate reactionary. You can admire the results of common sense applied to poetry, as in his case. But there is a kind of conservatism which is the direct result of so-called common sense applied to political and social issues. This is not Larkin's case. His ideology, as that of many 20th century conservatives, springs from disappointment, from the weaknesses of progressive thinking and political correctness. And the funny thing is that disappointment may not be a good inspiration for a social programme, but no doubt it is an excellent one for literature.

BYRON, LARKIN, ME

2006-06-11T01:38:00.000+02:00

When I published Las amigas, my first verse collection, some critics said it showed a clear influence of Philip Larkin. In fact, I had not read Larkin by the time I had finished most of the poems included in that book. But in the six-month interval between its completion and its publication, there was a surprising surge of interest for Larkin's poetry in Spain. Some of his books were translated and Spanish versions of many of his poems appeared in poetry magazines. Even I translated four or five of his poems for RevistAtlantica, which perhaps gave critics the wrong clue to track back the tone and subjects of my own poetry. In fact, it was just the other way round: it was the tone and subjects of my poetry which proved useful for me to render Larkin's verse into Spanish. But of course there was a clear, recognisable affinity. Where did it come from? From a place no Spanish critic was able to recognise then, in spite of its being obvious: Byron's Don Juan, which I had read enthusiastically during the previous years, and was significantly quoted by one of the aknowledged masters of the time, Jaime Gil de Biedma.

AN EXPLANATION

2006-06-11T01:15:00.000+02:00

Why Bell, Books and Candle? Just a variation of the title of Richard Quine's Bell, Book and Candle. In Spanish the film was known as Me enamoré de una bruja ("I fell in love with a witch"), which I changed slightly to Me enamoré de Kim Novak ("I fell in love with Kim Novak") when I used this title to name one of my books. Well, that's to prove my long-term devotion for this title (and for Kim Novak, of course).