Manolis Anagnostakis, "Old Roads"

Margarita Zorbala, "Old Roads" (1975) • poem: Manolis Anagnostakis (translation) • music: Mikis Theodorakis

Δρόμοι Παληοί Μουσική: Μίκης Θεοδωράκης Ποίηση: Μανώλης Αναγνωστάκης Ερμηνεία: Μαργαρίτα Ζορμπαλά Δρόμοι παλιοί που αγάπησα και μίσησα ατέλειωτα κάτω απ' τους ίσκιους των σπιτιών να περπατώ νύχτες των γυρισμών αναπότρεπτες κι η πόλη νεκρή.   Την ασήμαντη παρουσία μου βρίσκω σε κάθε γωνιά κάμε να σ' ανταμώσω κάποτε φάσμα χαμένο του πόθου μου κι εγώ.   Ξεχασμένος κι ατίθασος να περπατώ κρατώντας μια σπίθα τρεμόσβηστη στις υγρές μου παλάμες.   Και προχωρούσα μέσα στη νύχτα χωρίς να γνωρίζω κανένα κι ούτε κανένας κι ούτε κανένας με γνώριζε με γνώριζε.

Old Roads Music: Mikis Theodorakis Poem: Manolis Anagnostakis Interpretation: Margarita Zorbala Old roads – roads that I loved and hated endlessly, let me walk under the shadows of the houses, the nights of coming back, unavoidable, and the city, dead.   My insignificant presence I discover in every corner. Let me meet you someday, lost spectre of my Desire, me too   Walking, forgotten and rebellious holding a trembling spark in my damp palms.   And I kept on walking in the night without recognizing anyone And no one, either, and no one, either, recognizing me, recognizing me.

 

Isaac Bashevis Singer: "Literature... an Intellectual Sport"

Isaac Bashevis Singer, "Who Needs Literature?" Los Angeles Review of Books, November 11, 2019 [Original Yiddish text, first published in Forverts on October 20, 1963; tr. David Stromberg]:

• The crisis of literature: I sometimes fear that all of humankind may sooner or later come to my conclusion: that reading fiction is a waste of time. But why should I be afraid? Just because I would personally be one of the victims?
  No, it’s not just that. Even though we can now land on Mount Everest in a helicopter, it would be a pity if we no longer attempted climbing to the top. The value of literary fiction is not only its capacity to both entertain readers and teach them something, but also as a sport — an intellectual challenge. Even if we could invent a machine that would report to us precisely all of the experiences of a Raskolnikov, a Madame Bovary, or an Anna Karenina, it would still be interesting to know if this could be done with pen and paper. [...]
  Put this way, literature would still seem to survive as an intellectual sport. But it would be a sport in which only people playing the sport, as well as a few amateurs, would be interested. A man who walked on foot to California might summon our admiration, but his walking would not be taken seriously as a medium of communication. For this reason, I fear the day when literary fiction becomes a sport. It often seems to me that we are already at this point. It has actually already happened with poetry, including in our own Yiddish language. The poetic word is now read almost exclusively by poets. In such a great and wealthy land as the United States, works of poetry are often published in 500 copies and a good part of these is distributed by authors among their friends. Drama has not yet reached the sad state of poetry, but it’s going in that the same direction.
  As for literary prose, we often feel like it’s doing well. Books of prose are still bought in hundreds of thousands of copies. But when we look a little deeper into the matter, we see that what we nowadays call “literary fiction” is often far from literary fiction. Works are often sold under the label “novel” that are in fact three-fourths or a 100 percent journalism.
• The forgotten rules of the game: It often seems to me that modern critics suffer from amnesia. They’ve forgotten the elementary rules of the game called literature. It’s no feat to score grand victories in a chess game if, right from the start, one player gets more pieces than another, or if the rules of the game change with each round [...] Instead of admitting that there’s a crisis in literature and that journalism must step in on behalf of literature, literary critics, publishers, and often writers themselves have, consciously and more often unconsciously, changed the concept, they’ve ostensibly expanded it, but in reality simply confused and forgotten it. It’s as if people playing a sport had suddenly decided that a participant in a footrace can ride a bicycle. It’s a revolution that, instead of enriching the field, impoverishes and liquidates it.
• Artistic purity–the way out: For those genuinely interested in literature and its achievements, such works are a sign of a tragic downturn, a sickness that people try to cover up with bragging, false cures, harmful injections, and drugs. We have so expanded the definitions and so deformed the rules that everyone can play and everyone can win. Anyone who understands how rarely a true talent is born and how extremely difficult it is to be original — to discover something of one’s own in the art of writing — can clearly see that we are not dealing with progress but regress, a sort of literary anarchy that’s good only for the big publishers and their printing presses, for television and Hollywood. [...] Precisely because people today are surrounded by a sea of information related to all kinds of fields, genuine modern artists have to deliver more and more artistic purity, more substance, a greater focus on the portrayal of character and individuality. But for this one has to have exceptional gifts. It is, simply put, harder than ever to be original and creative in new ways. 

"O mio babbino caro"

Giacomo Puccini, Gianni Schicchi: "O mio babbino caro", Lauretta: Maria Callas (soprano)

O mio babbino caro, mi piace, è bello, bello, Vo'andare in Porta Rossa a comperar l'anello! Sì, sì, ci voglio andare! E se l'amassi indarno, andrei sul Ponte Vecchio, ma per buttarmi in Arno! Mi struggo e mi tormento! O Dio, vorrei morir! Babbo, pietà, pietà! Babbo, pietà, pietà!

Oh my dear papa, I love him, he is handsome, handsome, I want to go to Porta Rossa To buy a ring! Yes, yes, I want to go there! And if I loved him in vain, I would go to the Ponte Vecchio, And throw myself in the Arno! I am anguished and tormented! Oh God, I'd want to die! Papa, have pity, have pity! Papa, have pity, have pity!

Oh my beloved father, I love him, I love him, I’ll go to Porta Rossa, To buy our wedding ring! Oh yes, I really love him! And if you still say no, I’ll go to Ponte Vecchio, And throw myself below! My love for which I suffer, At last, I want to die! Father, I beg, I beg! Father, I beg, I beg!

Offenbach's Barcarolle ("Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour")

Jacques Offenbach, Les Contes d'Hoffmann, Act 2: "Barcarolle (Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour)," Giulietta: Anna Netrebko (soprano) • Nicklausse: Elina Garanca (mezzo-soprano):

NICKLAUSSE Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour, Souris à nos ivresses, Nuit plus douce que le jour, O belle nuit d'amour! GIULIETTA, NICKLAUSSE Le temps fuit et sans retour Emporte nos tendresses! Loin de cet heureux séjour, Le temps fuit sans retour Zéphyrs embrasés, Versez-nous vos caresses; Zéphyrs embrasés Donnez-nous vos baisers. Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour, Souris à nos ivresses, Nuit plus douce que le jour, O belle nuit d'amour!

NICKLAUSSE Beautiful night, oh night of love, Smile upon our drunkenness, Night softer than the day, O beautiful night of love!   GIULIETTA, NICKLAUSSE  Time flies and irretrievably Takes away our tenderness! Far from this happy place, Time flies irretrievably Burning Zephyrs, Bathe us in your caresses; Burning Zephyrs Gift us your kisses. Beautiful night, oh night of love,  Smile upon our drunkenness, Night softer than the day, O beautiful night of love!

J. S. Bach the Rebel

Ted Gioia, "J.S. Bach the Rebel," Lapham's Quarterly, October 16, 2019 [excerpted from Music: A Subversive History by the same author]:

I’ve talked to people who feel they know Bach very well, but they aren’t aware of the time he was imprisoned for a month. They never learned about Bach pulling a knife on a fellow musician during a street fight. They never heard about his drinking exploits—on one two-week trip he billed the church eighteen groschen for beer, enough to purchase eight gallons of it at retail prices—or that his contract with the Duke of Saxony included a provision for tax-free beer from the castle brewery; or that he was accused of consorting with an unknown, unmarried woman in the organ loft; or had a reputation for ignoring assigned duties without explanation or apology. They don’t know about Bach’s sex life: at best a matter of speculation, but what should we conclude from his twenty known children, more than any significant composer in history (a procreative career that has led some to joke with a knowing wink that “Bach’s organ had no stops”), or his second marriage to twenty-year-old singer Anna Magdalena Wilcke, when he was in his late thirties? They don’t know about the constant disciplinary problems Bach caused, or his insolence to students, or the many other ways he found to flout authority. This is the Bach branded as “incorrigible” by the councilors in Leipzig, who grimly documented offense after offense committed by their stubborn and irascible employee.

Sgt. J.D. Salinger

Nicolaus Mills, "Son of Sam Cop Pays Tribute to Army Buddy Sgt. J.D. Salinger," Daily Beast, November 11, 2019:

“He was brave under fire and a loyal and dependable partner,” Keenan [John, NYPD Chief of Detectives, in a sympathy letter written to Matt Salinger after his father’s death] observes. “On many occasions in the course of an assignment, although pinned down by artillery, machine gun or small arms fire, he did what had to be done.” But for Keenan, what was most telling about Salinger was his refusal to let the brutality of the war harden him. “Did he tell you,” Keenan asks Matt Salinger midway into his letter, “how he saved a group of wounded German soldiers from being executed by understandably fired-up GI’s?”

[...]

Salinger had insight into what a Nazi victory would mean as a result of living in Austria less than a year before Germany annexed it, and during the war he got a firsthand view of Nazi death camps that never left him. In her memoir, Dream Catcher, Salinger’s daughter, Margaret, remembers him once telling her, “You never really get the smell of burning flesh out of your nose entirely, no matter how long you live.”
Salinger’s horror at what he and the Fourth Infantry Division had seen was enough for him to briefly check himself into an Army hospital in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1945. “I’ve been in an almost constant state of despondency and I thought it would be good to talk to somebody sane,” Salinger wrote Ernest Hemingway, with whom he had become friends earlier in the war when Hemingway was a correspondent for Collier’s.

Elizabeth Bishop, Lonely and Dedicated

Scott Bradfield,"It’s Always a Good Time to Revisit the Brilliance of Elizabeth Bishop" (A Review of Thomas Travisano, Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop), The Washington Post, November 8, 2019:

• Her loneliness: “When you write my epitaph,” she once told her lifelong friend, Robert Lowell, “you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”
• Her talent: James Merrill once claimed she “had more talent for life — and for poetry — than anyone else I’ve ever known.”
• Her secrecy: It is hard to think of a major American poet who revealed so little about herself while revealing so much about the human world we inhabit. Through about 100 poems published during her lifetime, Elizabeth Bishop — in her compact, reticent, nearly invisible way — contained multitudes. [...] “You know what I want?” she once asked her friend, Richard Howard. “I want closets, closets, and more closets.” There was something secret about every poem she composed, like a private space that you only slowly found your way into. And one that never made you eager to leave.
• Her literary method: Most of all, Bishop never lacked the luxury of time, working for years and even decades on individual poems until she got them just right. There was a dogged pertinacity to the way she composed poems, relentlessly hunting down every perfect word and nuance, often assembling her lines on a large bulletin board over her desk, like one of those serial killer-hunting detectives in a television series.