Sunday Night is... Yma Sumac and more corruption

Yma Sumac singing Tumpa. The Inca Princess. My parents - particularly my mother - adored her. It was the five octave range, the glamour and the sheer scale. I think she might been on Sunday Night at The London Palladium once. Perhaps it was something like this.

*

The corruption I was thinking of on Friday wasn't big in scale, in fact it would not be called corruption, not most times, not in some places. The giving of gifts and the accepting of gifts. The courtesy versus the bribe. The way we offer gifts not for some concrete favour but because we hope to please. And in pleasing to receive the favour of no more than a smile. Or trust. So we give flowers, or chocolates, or treat someone to dinner. And then we're friends aren't we? And things follow from friendship? And where is the stern spoilsport Puritan who is against friendship? You will, I hope, speak up for us at the meeting? Put our point of view? We are friends, after all. How do I look in this? You look great. Thank you, you are a true friend.

It is customary to slip the guide a tip. You should slip the doctor 500 ft in an envelope at the hospital. Or at least offer him a chicken. Or rather don't offer it, just bring it. There you are, I thought I'd bring this for you doctor. You can get past the guard for £100. You'll never do a deal here unless you offer a gift - that is the local custom. They do it all the time. They are very honourable and won't sign a contract, saying if you can't trust their word they won't do business with you. Let me offer you a drink / a ring / a car / drugs / an envelope with cash in it / an even bigger deal

You can claim for heating and for phone calls if they are business. Just call it a percentage. I am sure we can come to an agreement on this. Well, let's not examine it too closely. Payment in cash? Look, we both know the score but something has to be hammered out. Shall we? Go on then. I work for them even when I'm at home, they can afford a paper clip / a stapler / a litter bin, /a set of old files / a table lamp / a coffee maker / a drill / just one pair of shoes. How many pairs of shoes have I / you worn out for them?...

Small corners, small deals that blow up under the microscope into luxuriant growths. Or, in other circumstances, circumstances without microscopes, small deals that blow up into such luxuriant growths they are the forest in front of you, and that's just the forest. See that forest? It has always been a forest. It's right there. You can practically smell it. Good hunting in there, they say. Bit empty of trees beyond that fence. Why would anyone live there, exposed to the weather. This is forest life. The world is like a forest. You learn to move in it and it's just fine. We are simply forest dwellers, it suits us. Those corpses? Such things happen in forests. And you know what? There really are forests. Can you deny that is a forest? That's all it is, nothing more. Forest world.

We are an adaptable species: we can live on plains, on islands, in cities, in fields, in forests, in gutters. None of this is surprising. There are of course the corpses, the corpses to balance with the friendships, the offering of chickens, the kind words, the tiny calculations of favour and the demands of favour. One slips into the other.

Is that a party of politicians there at the edge of the fields? Who is that moving through the forest? Whose mansion is that? Whose corpse is that?

Corruption corrupted

The furious devout drench is with us. Sky like smoke. Road like glass.

I listen to Gordon Brown on Afghanistan as I drive in to work. For the first time in a long time, apart from the first question where, to a three word question, 'Are we winning?' his answer bulldozes on for about three-hundred breathless words (how can he not see how counterproductive this is?) I think he is making his case well, or well enough. He argues that we are fighting the Taliban because of their ideological links and close collaboration with Al Qaeda who are currently holed up in the mountains of Pakistan under attack by the Pakistani army. He talks of extremists rather than Islamist extremists or jihadists but we broadly know what is meant. He talks of building up Afghan forces until they can take over the fighting and policing, and links it to reducing corruption. He mentions heroin, he mentions the village-based societies of the country, he talks of Karzai as having a desire (questionable to many, I imagine) to reduce corruption and he talks about pressurizing other members of the alliance to provide more troops.

Nothing unexceptionable here. However, he doesn't mention the threat to Pakistan's nuclear weaponry, which must be the main worry, almost too big a worry to be bringing to public attention; he seems surprised and slightly outraged - as he surely cannot be - that the Taliban are fighting a guerilla war rather than ranging armies in direct conflict; and he nowhere makes mention of the nature of Taliban rule as a possible reason for fighting them.

And that last point is the mootest. To supporters of the Iraq War it was about WMD, about establishing a secular democratic state in the region, and about liberating Iraq from the universally admitted horrors of Saddam Hussein. To opponents it was about a ruthless oil grab, though I have heard nothing about that recently, and about US triumphalism and imperialism. The question of the death count, and at whose hands, will continue unanswered except to those committed to one or other side.

Afghanistan was always primarily about Al Qaeda, about Bin Laden's safe haven. The rule of the Taliban was horrific but the argument against intervening - the argument against all interventions - was that it was none of our business, that the Afghan people would rise against the Taliban in their own time, and that mass beheadings, stonings, oppression of women, and so forth were a matter of cultural difference that we had to respect because we were no better in our own foul ways. That argument remains in place though it doesn't convince me.

Why not?

It is partly to do with the issue of corruption. When the recent election in Afghanistan was declared corrupt the cultural difference argument went out of the window. That was not what we expect of elections, we raged. When football stadiums were being used for mass public executions that was cultural difference.

I don't want to caricature this position too much because circumstances were different. In the case of the election we were supposedly in charge so were in position, supposedly, to enforce the cultural norms we expect. We were in charge because of the invasion. In the case of Taliban rule we had no influence and were certainly not in charge. So was it worth the war and the deaths and the being in charge in order to support a corrupt government with a corrupt election behind it?

Nevertheless, I still think the passion outweighs the facts. There are no mass executions, no terrorising of great swathes of the Afghan population, there are schools that girls can attend and there is progress on infrastructure. This is not nothing. It may mean we are imposing our cultural values on people from another culture but no one actually complains about such things, only that they haven't gone far enough or are not sufficiently secured. A corrupt election still remains a corrupt election - though it might be worth asking how many other places continue to have corrupt elections and at what degree of corruption, or have no meaningful elections at all - nevertheless there seems to be no doubt the Afghan election was corrupt. And we are in charge.

I want to think a little further about corruption - since it affects us all in different ways - in another post.

Devoutly drenching

Dire weather warnings since the morning. I am on trains again, London and back for the PBS Board and AGM. The train back packed to squeaking point, but no rain yet. Then, on the platform at Cambridge - where we arrive late - it begins, innocuously enough at first, and even fades a little on the second leg of the journey, so there is only a faint, barely-perceptible ghostly drip at Wymondham. But by the time I'm home from the station it is beginning to gather itself for a proper effort. Soon it snores and growls up, starts beating at the bathroom skylight and creeping in at the badly sealed hall skylight. It's still at it and is probably in for the night, possibly for two more days and nights. A furious devout drench, says Larkin. I suppose there is something devout about its earnestness, its sheer devotion to duty. Rain reporting, sir. Good chap. Go and polish those streets and when you've done see if you can get those gutters overflowing.

For some reason I start thinking of Frost's 'Home Burial' - the Jarrell and Brodsky essays - and want to reread it. This is how it begins:

HE saw her from the bottom of the stairs
Before she saw him. She was starting down,
Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.
She took a doubtful step and then undid it
To raise herself and look again. He spoke
Advancing toward her: "What is it you see
From up there always--for I want to know."
She turned and sank upon her skirts at that,
And her face changed from terrified to dull.
He said to gain time: "What is it you see,"
Mounting until she cowered under him.
"I will find out now--you must tell me, dear."
She, in her place, refused him any help
With the least stiffening of her neck and silence...

The question of verse as narrative has been in my mind this week, maybe that is why I think of this poem now, the sheer narrative that is, not meditation or development of idea, but story. What - apart from poetic 'effects' such as onomatopoeia, alliteration etc - makes it different from a story in prose. What is it about verse that changes story?

Another time... Late now. One tired week with one more to come. Then a spell of silence.

Two poems: G István László and Anna T Szabó

Two poets appearing in the Hungarian bilingual Arc anthology New Order, due out in January.


The Cat

Cats without mice are pointless, no use
to anyone, they guard kings on their deathbeds,
their gaze the farside of the significant moment
willing to help the fresh-from-the egg
bird-shaped mess on the car or the bins
to its death, to spread an infection that is not
a disease but scratches away under the skin
of conscience, to keep sharpening their nails
while feeling an aversion to time, disgusted
that what confronts them, here, in the misted mirror
does not fill it and cannot address them –
because there is no trace of night in those eyes,
which are light without shadow bare as
plain canvas. The true aristocrats are those
who fossick among rotten grapes and tin cans
to discover someone’s jar of cockles
while their whiskers never get dirty
who eat with indifference even when hungry
the way time gazes through trees.


G István László


ISTVÁN LÁSZLÓ GÉHER (pen name: G. István László),
was born in 1972 and is a poet and translator, work-
ing as an Associate Professor of English at the De-
partment of Comparative Literature at the Károli G.
University, Budapest. He holds degrees in Hungar-
ian and English Literature from L. Eötvös Univer-
sity in Budapest. He was a member of the Cambridge
Writer’s Conference, 1999, the International Writ-
ing Programme in Iowa, 2007 and the International
Writers Workshop in Hong Kong, 2008. In 2008 he
gained a three months‘ scholarship in Schloss Soli-
tude, Stuttgart, as a Fellow Writer. His selected po-
ems are to be published in a German-Hungarian bi-
lingual edition in autumn 2009. He has written six
books of poetry, most recently Homokfúga (Fugue of
Sand, 2008).

His translations of Plath, Dickinson, Shake-
speare, Hughes and Yeats have appeared widely in
journals and anthologies. His awards include a fel-
lowship to the International Writers’ House in
Rhodes, The Móricz Grant, an NKA Literary Grant,
The Babits Grant for Translation, the Radnóti and
the Zelk awards for Poetry.



Part 1 from This Day
‘Wherever I lie is your bed’

Imagine this. It was early afternoon
and I was out looking for a new apartment
wondering as I went, what next to do,
while staring vacantly at January stores,
their worn-out goods, their seasonal display
and thought of many things along the way –

suddenly everything vanished:
the tram clattered between the houses, over
the bridge, and instead of broad
vistas of river and road
dense fog hung over invisible water –
I stood astonished.

Fog everywhere: anxiety was a tight
cold sleepless night;
that’s my life I thought and felt it glide
swiftly away but I wasn’t part of the ride;
my life went on without me inside.
I felt it all but saw nothing anywhere
of the rails I was speeding on
safe across the bridge, on water, ground or air,
in the clouds or a plane high above land
with all assurance of reality gone
but for the cold metal barrier in my hand.

Nothing new then for two long minutes, no less.
And anything might happen now I guess.


Anna T. Szabó


ANNA T SZABÓ, poet, writer and translator was born
in Transylvania (Romania) in 1972 and moved to
Hungary in 1987. She studied English and Hun-
garian literature at the University of Budapest and
received her PhD in English Renaissance literature
in 2007. She was 23 when her first volume of poetry
appeared, and received the Petőfi Prize (1996),
founded for promising young poets. She has since
published four more volumes of poetry and has re-
ceived several literary prizes.

She has translated many poems and lyrics, es-
says, novels, drama, radio plays and librettos, and
writes essays, newspaper articles and reviews. She
also worked for the British Council as a co-leader of
a translators’ workshop in Budapest (2000-2004), as
the co-editor of the homepage of the Hungarian Book
Foundation and as a film critic and translator for
the journal Cinema (1997-2007). She is currently the
poetry editor of the literary journal The Hungarian
Quarterly which publishes Hungarian literature and
essays in English.

It rains in Manchester

Not proper rain, not really, just a kind of mizzly puttering kind of rain, as if it longed to drench you and wash you away, but didn't quite have the energy to do so. The train journey is long and slow, just two carriages creeping up the map of England, past the flatlands of Ely and Peterborough, gentling into Grantham and Nottingham, then entering upon a few hills until the landscape either side does begin to drop away between Sheffield and Manchester.

From the station by taxi straight to the centre where the reading is to take place. Greeted by Simon R , my contact, then by John McAuliffe who appears with my fellow reader Vona Groarke, just flown in from Dublin where she has been carousing with her kinfolk. We sit and talk for a while then the reading.

Vona's is in two halves, the first crystalline, clear, minute and superbly shaped monastic notations, quiet objects of beauty, the second a magnificent translation from the Irish of, Lament for Art O'Leary, in which a woman and her sister lament the murder of the woman's husband. No man has been more admired and missed and well-regarded as Art O'Leary. He seems a vast commanding figure, cruelly done down. The women pass the keening between them. It makes me think of the function of keening. Patrick Leigh Fermor talks of professional mourners and keeners in Greece, as was common in many places: it is a gathering together of grief and praise on terms of eloquence. Is it the symbolic size of the figure I am pondering, and what the figure stands for? The sheer weight of the lament carries you with it. Each death is worth this. Each death is incomprehensible and comprehended. No death is worth all this. But then what else is life worth? I buy a copy.

My own selection is a fairly rolling selection. Who knows how it goes down? Can never really tell. Je sui comme je suis / je sui fait comme ca. Well no, pas moi, that is Jacques Prevert. Il est fait comma ca. And none of us is quite as free of responsibility as that.

Then dinner. Martin Amis joins us, and blogger friend Peter who now lives in Manchester. I eat pig's trotters. A mistake of the non life-threatening kind. Talk ranges from Metaphysical Poetry, the toothbrush moustache, and 1989, down to Rugby League and Arsenal.

The next morning I lead a class on Hecht's 'The Grapes'. I have talked this poem through a number of times, each time it's different. Yes, the theatricality, and yes, the air - or so it seems to some - of pomposity. More on that another time.

The very nice taxi driver who takes me there is Pakistani but is unsure which is the Whitworth Building. I ask him how things are in Pakistan. Very bad, he says. That's why we leave. Corruption at deep level, everywhere. Politicians just after money. I ask him what he makes of British politicians and their corruption. He laughs. It is, he says, 100,000 times worse in Pakistan. What we are doing now shows there is no corruption here.

What's that? I ask.

I am hurrying to take you to your meeting. That is straight dealing. At home they wouldn't bother.

The paragon of uncorrupted virtue steps from the taxi, finds his own way to the Whitworth Building and defends a New York poetic grandee. Incorruptibility is hard work.

On the train home a young girl with her mother and younger sister. The girl is loud and wants to occupy mother's emotional space. In fact the space of everyone in the carriage. She wants to be noticed. I think she might be a nightmare in school. Then, as we are approaching Brandon, she says: I like Brandon. The sound of the name. An incipient poetic instinct briefly rises to the surface.

Then she goes back to singing, I'm just a teenage dirtbag, baby... with some gusto. Mother remains quiet.

1989

The ceremony beginning the reburial of Imre Nagy, 16 June 1989. As I remember I was standing just off the bottom right hand corner of the picture.


By the time the Berlin wall came down we were back in England, but from January through to September we were in Hungary - in a rather privileged position. I was British Council Scholar, originally for five months but then an extended period. We were living most of that time in the vacant flat of the sociologist and writer Miklós Haraszti who was then in the USA, as, what he called, "Dissident in Residence' at Bard College.

There is far more to say about him, the flat, the district, and when I get around to writing a proper book about life, the universe and everything - let's call it a memoir, for argument's sake - about this year and this place. Enough to say it was in central Pest, the University district, a very short walk from the Danube, as also to Vörösmarty tér, the central square where the publisher and friend for whom I was translating various things was located.

During the year we got to meet a number of the dissident leaders and became friends with the president-to-be of Hungary, the admirable Árpád Göncz, not that we had any idea he would be president then.

Day by day, week by week, the big wheels and small wheels were falling off the state to the extent that there was considerable apprehension that the whole shebang - party, state, country, people - would come to grief. Hungary was far ahead of the rest in this respect. I remember the TV interview with the Czech non-person Alexander Dubcek that could be received in Slovakia which was the subject of diplomatic protests. I remember vigils for Vaclav Havel and the great core events such as the gathering and march on 15 March and the reburial of Imre Nagy , the executed prime minister of the revolutionary government in 1956 on 16 June. I was at both these events.

There was the first mention of 1956 not as a counter-revolution but as a revolution. There was the cutting of the wire fence on the Austrian border. There was the visit of George Bush Snr, as of Michael Jackson. There was the tragic transmission from Tienanmen Square on 4 June. There were the tensions with Ceausescu's Romania. There was the constant heady edginess.

And Poland. And the keys in Prague. The wall and Christmas Eve outside the Romanian Embassy.

It seems no time, and it seems an age. I have every day's newspapers up in the attic. I have the little paper flag with the hole cut out of the centre. Possibly even the tricolour cockade.

At this distance does it seem a good thing? Were too many babies thrown out with the big bathwater?

I am absolutely certain it was a good thing. I am absolutely certain that getting misty-eyed about Stalin or about any of the central aspects of Eastern Bloc communism is being dishonest or soft in the head. There were babies in the bathwater, of course. No-one moves from evil to good in one simple step. It wasn't all evil and it certainly is not all good. But 1989 was not the exchange of a spiritual state of purity for a corrupt material state, as some would have it. The kind of social coherence created by suppression is not worth having.

Suppression is not to be welcomed. Oppression is not to be welcomed. In some ways, I preferred visiting Budapest in the eighties to visiting it now. But history is longer than twenty years. I was twenty years younger then. The world seemed a little simpler. The word 'freedom' had a solid four-square look to it. Now we tend to think some of it is smoke, and some of it is mirrors. We forget the solid part.

There was a very good BBC4 documentary on the end of the wall on Friday. I never mean to watch TV but this gripped me. It seemed fair minded to all sides but fully understood why it was good to see the wall collapse. What kind of state is it, after all, that has to wall its citizens? There remains something solid about the word 'freedom'. In some ways it is more solid than ever.

The word 'freedom' is, I think, more applicable to post-1989 than pre-1989. Complexity, after all, is one of the great freedoms, possibly the greatest.

Sunday Night is... Buffy Sainte Marie

Little Wheel Spin and Spin, Big Wheel Turn Around and Around

I adored this voice when I first heard her version of the magnificent Lyke Wake Dirge. But she's not doing it on YouTube so this is the next best thing. It sends shivers up my spine.

*

Back from London. Father in hospital, thin, unshaven, wild looking, and talking a blue streak for almost an hour. One doctor reckons they poisoned him with the wrong medicine, he says. He can't stop talking. He is reckoning up what has happened, how he has got here, what all this is about. Naturally. 'Keep the beard,' I say as we leave. Can't imagine him doing so.

*

Then the Hungarian Cultural Centre for the pre-launch of the Hungarian anthology I have just edited for Arc. Comes out properly in January. Two of our poets are here though, Anna T Szabó and István László, together with translators George Gömöri, Peter Zollman and Ágnes Lehoczky. Place quite crowded out. Some poems by Szabó and László next. But late now.