Where It's Another Banger

One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese : Love and the Turning Year by Kenneth Rexroth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a very nice collection of ancient Chinese poetry, published in 1970. The great majority of Chinese poetry in translation has come out since then (I'm sure I'm right but I have zero proof for that statement) but I think you could stack this up against almost any volume that has come out in the last 50 years and it would compare very favorably.

I'm not making any claims about the accuracy of the translations (though I suspect it's alright), or whether these selections are a decently representative sampling of (mostly) Tang and Song poetry, or about the "importance" of any of the poets found here. (There are many highly regarded poets here, like Wang Wei and Tu Fu and others, but there are also a bunch I'd never heard of before--which is cool, actually.) And, in fact, as far as representation is concerned, female poets might be overrepresented here--which I applaud. So is love poetry. But the point is: this is not a textbook or a primer. It's a lovely collection of genuine poetry.

I found it an enjoyable read, and had to limit myself to just a handful of poems a day to make it last. The author chose poetry that's particularly accessible for Western readers, with themes that resonate with many of us, and I think it really works. Here's part of "I Return to the Place I Was Born," by T'ao Yuan Ming:

From my youth up I never liked the city.
I never forgot the mountains where I was born.
The world caught me and harnessed me
And drove me through dust, thirty years away from home...
The farm is only ten acres.
The farm house has eight or nine rooms...
When you come through the gate into the court
You will find no dust or mess.
Peace and quiet live in every room.
I am content to stay here the rest of my life.
At last I have found myself.

I totally understand what he's talking about. I feel just the same. And it's from about 1600 years ago.

That poem is found in other collections, but many of the poems here are not in anything else I've run on to. It has sent me on a search for collections of some of the poets in here, and some of them exist, but are rare (and stupid expensive). Still, I hope it'll hook me up with a few new poets and their works.

Like the previous volume, this is highly recommended, and makes a good starting point for anyone casually interested in Chinese poetry.

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Sir Walter Scott's First Album

Waverley by Walter Scott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Figure 8 was the first Elliott Smith album I bought, the first I was aware of, and I loved it. When I got a chance, I bought the one he made a couple years before that, XO, and it didn't strike me *quite* the same, but I liked it, and came around on it. I worked my way back, over time, to his self-titled album, which was the least like the first one of his I bought. It was a very different sound and I didn't take to it at first. It was like meeting him at his most mature, most creative, most capable, and walking back in time to his most raw. But I recognized in it a lot of the same things I loved about Figure 8 and the other albums and learned to hear it a different way.

That's how I feel about this novel.

Having read a number of his later novels, I found some of this less polished, more awkward, and I was put off a bit by it. But you can trace elements of the later novels back to this one, his first, and see how he evolved, how he was feeling his way forward, toward the author that he would be. Framed this way, a story I might not have cared (if it had been the first of his I opened) still works, still makes sense, and is entertaining.

It contains many of the same themes and motifs--the history of Scotland, the fortunes of great families, the contrast between highlanders and lowland Scots, acts of bravery, lives devoted to honor, the use of realistic dialect, and my favorite, the humanizing and ennobling of marginalized and handicapped individuals. (Davie Gellatley, the mentally handicapped servant boy, is one of several examples in the novel. Though unsuitable for some work, he's shrewd enough, in an amusing way, to fail at anything other than the work he enjoys, so that he's not pressed into jobs he doesn't like, but is good at the ones he does like. And he shows characteristics of a savant, recalling and being able to sing every verse of every song his older brother taught him, in a number of languages, which I found interesting in a 200-year-old novel. Because he likes delivering messages, he's entirely reliable when given that sort of errand, and carries some important messages. Not a big part, but memorable.) Set during the Jacobite Rebellion, the novel is a romantic action story for the most part, and pretty fun to read just on that level.

It's a bit weird, though. Scott usually has an intrusive (I mean that in a neutral way) narrator, the "Let me tell you, dear reader..." type of narrator. Here, though, it seems we get Scott himself as the narrator, and he tells us way too much. He basically walks us through the thinking he did when constructing the plot and devising the characters. It's almost like watching a movie that pauses the action and turns to the director who tells us how he framed the shot or explains why the character is doing what he's doing. That does something to the suspension of disbelief; I won't say it destroys it, but it does wash it out quite a bit. (Actually, it makes me think of Peter Falk in Princess Bride. But that worked in a different way.)

Despite the odd narrator, this first effort still impresses with its round characters. In Edward Waverley, we get a hero not unlike many of Scott's later heroes. In Baron Bradwardine, a family friend, who is both noble and ridiculous, always quoting Latin passages and bits of Scottish law, we get a preview of Lord Oldbuck in his 3rd novel, The Antiquary. And with Fergus Mac-Ivor and a few others, we see the noble character living outside the law. They're not just types, though; they're all original creations with their own style. Even in his first novel, he's already capable of that.

So it's rough, in a way, but it has its charm, and I'm grateful to the novel. Without it, we wouldn't have all the other novels. He almost didn't finish it, and when he did he published it anonymously, not wanting to diminish his career as a poet. But it sold very well and he went on to Rob Roy and Ivanhoe and the rest, so yay for Waverley.

In 2021, this is an enthusiast's book. Others should start with one of his later novels. But I recommend finding a lovely old hardcover somewhere and reading at least one of them!

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