Read a Book in One Sitting Day!

[dhampyresa]

I did it! I read the book without getting out of my chair. (It says one sitting, so you have to not get up for it to count /rule I made up)

Read a Book in One Sitting Day is something spywindow came up with. The rules are here. (You will note that the rules allow you to get up while reading the book.)

Anyway, I was planning to read Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World on account of how I love trickster so fucking much as does lunik_the_bard who recced it to me in the first place and I completely trust her taste in these matters. (A not insignificant portion of our conversations revolve around tricksters.)

I had things to do today and it was also really hot, so by the time I went outside to read and settled down it was almost 1850. This included a good fifteen minute of my ereader being more or less unresponsive because I clicked the wrong thing.

So there I was, comfortably settled in -- had my book, had something to drink, had space to stretch out my legs -- and reading. For about three-quarters of an hour, I read Trickster. It was very interesting, even if I didn't always agree with the author or thought he was reaching too much. A lot of the parallels are well-explained, as is the breaking down of the various elements. Also, not counting the foreword, it starts with what is probably the most appropriate way to start a book about tricksters ever which is:

The first story I have to tell is not exactly true, but it isn't exactly false, either.

See what I mean? I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the book, especially the part about gender that the footnotes have assured me is coming.

Except I had to stop reading it, if I wanted to acheive my goal of reading an entire book in one sitting, given that I was only 8% in. It was apprently going to take me 8 more hours to finish it. This wouldn't have been a problem, if I hadn't been outside and entirely unwilling to get out of that chair without reading a book start to finish. (Next year, I will try not underestimate the length of the book I plan to read and to be less tired so as to read faster and not start curling up in the heat and dozing off /secretly a cat)

So I set Trickster aside for later and went looking for another book on the ereader. I ended up picking Alcools by Guillaume Apollinaire. (Link goes to Project Gutenberg, btw.)

Alcools is a collection of poems Apollinaire wrote between 1898 and 1913. (And if you're wondering if that's an ominous date: yes, he died in WW1.)

Reading this book was a really weird mindfuck, because it took me ges to realise that there was no punctuation at all. No wonder it didn't make sense! It also kept jumoing back and forth between ideas from poem to poem with references to poems before and poems after, so for most of the book I had no idea what was going on. I kept reading though, because it was lovely. I just really enjoyed the way it was written. (Somewhat pettily, it was also good to read poetry that looked and sounded like poetry and not the "random line jumps without rime" approach that seems to be popular these days.)

The only poem in the collection I knew going in was Le Pont Mirabeau, which is lovely.


Le Pont Mirabeau

Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

Les mains dans les mains restons face à face
Tandis que sous
Le pont de nos bras passe
Des éternels regards l’onde si lasse

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

L’amour s’en va comme cette eau courante
L’amour s’en va
Comme la vie est lente
Et comme l’Espérance est violente

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure

Passent les jours et passent les semaines
Ni temps passé
Ni les amours reviennent
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine

Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure


The Mirabeau Bridge (translation from here)

Under the Mirabeau flows the Seine
And our amours
Shall I remember it again
Joy always followed after Pain

Comes the night sounds the hour
The days go by I endure

Hand in hand rest face to face
While underneath
The bridge of our arms there races
So weary a wave of eternal gazes

Comes the night sounds the hour
The days go by I endure

Love vanishes like the water’s flow
Love vanishes
How life is slow
And how Hope lives blow by blow

Comes the night sounds the hour
The days go by I endure

Let the hour pass the day the same
Time past returns
Nor love again
Under the Mirabeau flows the Seine

Comes the night sounds the hour
The days go by I endure

That said, my favourite of the poems in the book is Crépuscule.


Crépuscule

Frôlée par les ombres des morts
Sur l’herbe où le jour s’exténue
L’arlequine s’est mise nue
Et dans l’étang mire son corps

Un charlatan crépusculaire
Vante les tours que l’on va faire
Le ciel sans teinte est constellé
D’astres pâles comme du lait

Sur les tréteaux l’arlequin blême
Salue d’abord les spectateurs
Des sorciers venus de Bohême
Quelques fées et les enchanteurs

Ayant décroché une étoile
Il la manie à bras tendu
Tandis que des pieds un pendu
Sonne en mesure les cymbales

L’aveugle berce un bel enfant
La biche passe avec ses faons
Le nain regarde d’un air triste
Grandir l’arlequin trismégiste

Twilight (translation from here)

Brushed by the shadows of the dead
On the grass where day expires
Columbine* strips bare admires
her body in the pond instead

A charlatan of twilight formed
Boasts of the tricks to be performed
The sky without a stain unmarred
Is studded with the milk-white stars

From the boards pale Harlequin
First salutes the spectators
Sorcerers from Bohemia
Fairies sundry enchanters

Having unhooked a star
He proffers it with outstretched hand
While with his feet a hanging man
Sounds the cymbals bar by bar

The blind man rocks a pretty child
The doe with all her fauns slips by
The dwarf observes with saddened pose
How Harlequin magically grows**

*Importante note! In the original French, this person is not referred to as "Colombine" but as "l'arlequine", that is a female Harlequin.

** Another importante note! In the original French, this third Harlequin is referred to as "arlequin trimégiste", which is a clear reference to HermèsTrimégiste, ie Hermes Trimegistus.

The evolution of Harlequin from female to male to ungendered and "thrice-greatest" is probably my favourite thing about the poem. "L'arlequine", in particular, is what made me sit up (literally, actually) and pay attention. I am deeply, deeply saddened the translation loses that.

I love the atmosphere of this poem, the quiet shadowy elegiac melancoly of it, the imagery of arlequine bringing to mind Mélusine, the way it's structured like an evening at the theater with a before and an after a three act play, the tarot-like symbolism of the hanged man, the potential creepiness of it all buffeted by the slow dreamlike quality of the rythm of the words. It's really really really beautiful and yes, "crépusculaire".

So that's how that went for me. Didn't even get rained on!