Thursday, December 24, 2015

Nativity

Shadows flicker against the wall
within the cave it is perpetually night
(I find my vision gets dimmer with age
- when we are alleged to see more sharply -
in the low light of a single candle flame
it is getting much harder to read
year by year)
there is a form I barely am able to perceive.
I wonder if it is better here than the open air
where my eyes would surely be closed against the sun
where all forms find their origin in the one.

2015

Sunday, December 20, 2015

Brazil

Blown away to get my purple belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu from 10th Planet black belt Alex Canders.


Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Like a white stone in the depths of a well...

Like a white stone in the depths of a well...
Anna Akhmatova
working translation by Greg Pavlik

Like a white stone in the depths of a well
within me there lies one memory.
I can not - and do not - want to expel
this, my greatest joy and my agony.

I think that anyone who closely looks
can see this recollection reads
as harrowing sadness in a tragic book -
a warning, and a sign of need.

I know the gods forever strive
to wreck the body but cannot touch the mind;
assurance that you will forever live
as a memory I can’t leave behind.

Original:
Как белый камень в глубине колодца,
Лежит во мне одно воспоминанье.
Я не могу и не хочу бороться:
Оно - веселье и оно - страданье.

Мне кажется, что тот, кто близко взглянет
В мои глаза, его увидит сразу.
Печальней и задумчивее станет
Внимающего скорбному рассказу.

Я ведаю, что боги превращали
Людей в предметы, не убив сознанья,
Чтоб вечно жили дивные печали.
Ты превращен в мое воспоминанье.

Sunday, October 11, 2015

Requiem Fragment

Requiem Fragment
Anna Akhmatova
translation by Greg Pavlik

10 Crucifixion

      Do not lament me, O Mother,
      seeing me in the tomb.


The angelic chorus glorified the hour of eternity,
when the heavens convulsed in a river of fire:
He cried to His Father “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”
And to His Mother, he spoke: “Do not lament me”…

1938

Mary Magdalena writhed, and wept
as the beloved John froze like stone (or salt).
Where the Mother stood in silence -
no one dared to look.

1940

Translator notes. I chose to translate this poem much less loosely than my interpretative translation of Akhmatova’s Lot’s Wife – there Russian readers will recognize that the final stanza is essentially my own poem (with an explicit reference to the unrelated work of Scott Cairns, in fact).

Instead, this section of Requiem is much closer to the original (1), with only minimal augmentation. Nonetheless, it is also very different from Akhmatova’s in certain critical respects. Requiem itself is a difficult and evocative work – its melancholy is inseparable from the suffering of both Akhmatova herself and the Soviet people under Stalin. In some sense, I have abandoned this context in my translation. Educated Russian readers would have recognized Akhmatova’s work as using the imagery of the hymnography of the Paschal Nocturnes, the final liturgical setting of Great and Holy Saturday chanted before the entombed body of the dead Christ, which includes a deeply moving dialogue with his Mother. (2)

I have chosen to deepen the liturgical elements of the poem and play off themes that recur in and around the Lenten Triodion. The text of the Slavonic service is rendered here in English as it is commonly used in American parishes within the Russian Orthodox tradition. Second, I use the Hebrew directly in quotation from the Psalter, emphasizing its position as a liturgical prayer. While the dialogic element from the Nocturnes service is repeated, maintaining the liturgical connection, here the address to the Mother is clearly one of human filial affection.

The river of fire is evocative of the image God as “consuming fire”, which, St Isaac says is experienced as bliss by the pure in heart. The second stanza – and I do not believe there is any intention at all in the original to do this – also points back to the story of Lot and Sodom and implicitly re-invokes the image of fire. Akhmatova makes no association with salt. I have tried intentionally not to recall the poetics of Stabat Mater in the final lines.

(1) Original Russian:

10
РАСПЯТИЕ

   Не рыдай Мене, Мати,
   во гробе зрящия.

Хор ангелов великий час восславил,
И небеса расплавились в огне.
Отцу сказал: "Почто Меня оставил!"
А матери: "О, не рыдай Мене..."

1938

Магдалина билась и рыдала,
Ученик любимый каменел,
А туда, где молча Мать стояла,
Так никто взглянуть и не посмел.

1940, Фонтанный Дом

(2) From the Eastern Orthodox Liturgical Service of Paschal Nocturnes:

Do not lament me, O Mother, seeing me in the tomb, the Son conceived in the womb without seed, for I shall arise and be glorified with eternal glory as God. I shall exalt all who magnify thee in faith and in love.

Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee!

I escaped sufferings and was blessed beyond nature at Thy strange birth, O Son, who art without beginning. But now, beholding Thee, my God, dead and without breath, I am sorely pierced by the sword of sorrow. But arise, that I may be magnified.

Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee!

By my own will, the earth covers me, O Mother, but the gatekeepers of hell tremble at seeing me clothed in the blood-stained garments of vengeance; for when I have vanquished my enemies on the cross, I shall arise as God and magnify thee.

Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.

Let creation rejoice, let all born on earth be glad, for hateful hell has been despoiled, let the women with myrrh come to meet me, for I am redeeming Adam and Eve and all their descendants, and on the third day shall I arise.

Monday, September 28, 2015

Lot's Wife

Lot's Wife
by Anna Akhmatova
an interpretive translation by Greg Pavlik
The righteous Lot heard the voice of God
As if coming from the distant and black mountains.
But his wife,
She saw what was until yesterday her blessing.
Under the beautiful spires of Sodom,
Where she sang spinning cloth -
The empty window of the room,
In which her children were born.
She looked – and her pain died with her,
For she could look no more:
Her body translucent salt,
Her feet joined the earth.
Who will mourn for Marah?
An insignificant role in a grand saga -
Yet my conscience cannot forget
The one who gave her life for a fleeting glance.
-----
Original poem
И праведник шел за посланником Бога,
Огромный и светлый, по черной горе.
Но громко жене говорила тревога:
Не поздно, ты можешь еще посмотреть
На красные башни родного Содома,
На площадь, где пела, на двор, где пряла,
На окна пустые высокого дома,
Где милому мужу детей родила.
Взглянула – и, скованы смертною болью,
Глаза ее больше смотреть не могли;
И сделалось тело прозрачною солью,
И быстрые ноги к земле приросли.
Кто женщину эту оплакивать будет?
Не меньшей ли мнится она из утрат?
Лишь сердце мое никогда не забудет
Отдавшую жизнь за единственный взгляд.

Saturday, August 08, 2015

Ancestor Worship

Some profound lessons in how to be human that we can learn from our Confucian friends


Friday, August 07, 2015

Fascinating Lives

There is something, I think, admirable in a quiet life: care for family, constructive participation in community, hard work. But there are times and places (perhaps all times, but not all places?) where simply attending to the simple things of life becomes a kind of impossibility: whether for psychological or moral reasons. I was reflecting on two persons recently who have struck me by not only their intellectual genius but also by the sheer force by which they pushed against the norm, one for reasons of psychology and one for reasons of morality.

Yukio Mishima: narcissist, political fanatic, suicide. And one of Japan's greatest novelists. I recently completed the Sea of Fertility tetralogy, which traces the life of Shigekuni Honda from youth to retirement as a wealthy attorney, centered around what Honda believes are the successive reincarnations of his friend Kiyoaki Matsugae: as a young rightist, a Thai princess and an orphan. The most powerful of the four novels, in my opinion is the second: Runaway Horses. The book seems to rebuke the militant nationalism of Japanese reactionaries, though ironically enough Mishima himself ends his own life under the banner of a similar ideology. Mishima's fascinating portrait of an inherent dark side of youth - a taming of a deep inhumanism - so to speak, comes through almost all the novels, but most strongly in the last. This echoes a theme he developed in The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, though I can think of few works that more strongly explore this theme than the Lord of the Flies. In any case, Mishima is masterful in exploring aberrant developmental psychology - even as he, himself, seems to have been stricken with his own disordered personality.

Maria Skobtsova: atheist, symbolist poet, Bolshevik revolutionary - and a renegade nun arrested for helping Jews in Paris by the Gestapo, she allegedly died by taking the place of a Jewish woman being sent to death. Jim Forrest provides a useful overview of her life - unlike most lives of a Christian saints, this is no hagiography: it is a straightforward story of life. At the same time, we see a life transformed by a dawning realization that self-denial is a path to transformation -

"The way to God lies through love of people. At the Last Judgment I shall not be asked whether I was successful in my ascetic exercises, nor how many bows and prostrations I made. Instead I shall be asked did I feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and the prisoners. That is all I shall be asked. About every poor, hungry and imprisoned person the Savior says ‘I': ‘I was hungry and thirsty, I was sick and in prison.’ To think that he puts an equal sign between himself and anyone in need. . . . I always knew it, but now it has somehow penetrated to my sinews. It fills me with awe."

And despite a life dedicated to service, she remained an acute intellectual, a characteristic of so many Russian emigres in Paris. This too reflected her view that redemption and suffering where intertwined - my favorite piece On the Imitation of the Mother of God
- draws this out beautifully.


Saturday, June 20, 2015

Aporias

1.
Actually
He likes word games
   Diffident
In the way they circle about
   Starlings in flight
   Or Seraphim.

2.
With sweeping gesture
   Left to right
Hands hang with head
Under the pressing of the sun:
   Weight of doubt
   Or will.

3.
Against open air, tumultuous sea
   Turtle green
The division is nowhere more evident
Where sand meets froth
   Stark, blinding glare
Wind balmed
   Until night.

4.
Cleanliness,
   Next to godliness
The echo of countless schoolmarms
Chiding, chilling - without regret
   Yeah, rather,
   Motherhood.

Friday, June 19, 2015

What The World Needs More Of

The interview with these two kids - Chris and Camryn Singleton - is available on BBC, but I wanted to pull out this remarkable commentary in a related article:

"People are hurting in Charleston. But for the hundreds who packed into the gymnasium at the Goose Creek High School, it was also a reminder of the importance of love.

Sharonda Singleton coached the girls' athletics team here. As her photo rested on an easel on the polished floors in the vast sports hall, her friends and family paid tribute. Speaking for the first time since the deadly attack on the AME church where she worshipped, Sharonda's two children, Chris and Camryn, told me they forgive the man who killed her.

 "We already forgive him and there's nothing but love from our side of the family," Chris told me.

Many will find this incomprehensible. Charleston is often called the Holy City for the number of churches it is home to, and the role religion plays here. For some, like Chris and Camryn, unwavering faith is the only way to turn such a devastating loss into something positive."

This immediately brought to mind the sayings of Fr Zosima in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, which not to many years ago were the source of a kind of epiphany for me that in a sense reoriented by own thinking:

"Strive to love your neighbor actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immort
ality of your soul. If you attain to perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbor, then you will believe without doubt, and no doubt can possibly enter your soul. This has been tried. This is certain.

Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself. Avoid fear, too, though fear is only the consequence of every sort of falsehood. Never be frightened at your own faint-heartedness in attaining love. Don't be frightened overmuch even at your evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science. But I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting farther from your goal instead of nearer to it—at that very moment I predict that you will reach it and behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you."

....


"At some thoughts one stands perplexed, especially at the sight of men's sin, and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always decide to use humble love. If you resolve on that once for all, you may subdue the whole world. Loving humility is marvelously strong, the strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it." 

....

"“Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of anyone. For no one can judge a criminal until he recognizes that he is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more than all men to blame for that crime. When he understands that, he will be able to be a judge. Though that sounds absurd, it is true. If I had been righteous myself, perhaps there would have been no criminal standing before me. If you can take upon yourself the crime of the criminal your heart is judging, take it at once, suffer for him yourself, and let him go without reproach. And even if the law itself makes you his judge, act in the same spirit so far as possible, for he will go away and condemn himself more bitterly than you have done. If, after your kiss, he goes away untouched, mocking at you, do not let that be a stumbling-block to you. It shows his time has not yet come, but it will come in due course. And if it come not, no matter; if not he, then another in his place will understand and suffer, and judge and condemn himself, and the truth will be fulfilled. Believe that, believe it without doubt; for in that lies all the hope and faith of the saints.”


This time, Chris and Camryn have moved me beyond words by living this reality.

Addendum/edit: more of this humbling love on display