Mark Fuller Dillon's Blog, page 47

R. A. Lafferty's Advice On Writing

QUESTION: What thing is most necessary for a young person wishing to become a writer.

ANSWER: A good spoke-shave of matched flint-stones is the most necessary thing for a young person wishing to become a writer. Without a good spoke-shave, there is no way to fashion a good lance. Without a good lance there is no way to kill a grown Wooly Rhinoceros. And really elegant writing can only be done on the shoulder-blade bones of the Wooly Rhinoceros.

Do not cheap-jack it, young people. Do not settle for less than the best. Do not write on the shoulder blades of a cave bear. A cave bear is much easier to kill. It may be killed in its sleep. But what you write on its shoulder blades will lack elegance.

The shoulder blades of the Wooly Puma may be used for writing elegant short poems. And the Wooly Puma is almost as dangerous as the Wooly Rhinoceros to encounter and kill. But its shoulder blades are not big enough to allow longer and more substantial writing.

Do not, in any case, write on a bull's shoulder blades. The inferiority of the writing on such a surface will give you away.

For elegant narration, there is nothing like the shoulder blades of the Wooly Rhinoceros to write on, an obsidian blade set in antler handle to cut the letters into the elegant bone, and "Fat John's Dragon Blood Ink" (he really makes it from Dire Wolf blood) to fill in the notches and cuts for high visibility.

Go first-class in everything you use if you wish to attain distinction.

-- R. A. Lafferty, "Calamities Of The Last Pauper."

La main blanche et la blanche patte

Another of my attempted translations, this time from Paul Verlaine.

As usual, for the sake of accuracy, I've decided to fall back on prose. And as always, comments are welcome. I'm not a translator; if my choice of words is dead wrong, then please let me know!

Femme et Chatte

Elle jouait avec sa chatte;
Et c'était merveille de voir
La main blanche et la blanche patte
S'ébattre dans l'ombre du soir.

Elle cachait -- la scélérate ! --
Sous ces mitaines de fil noir
Ses meurtriers ongles d'agate,
Coupants et clairs comme un rasoir.

L'autre aussi faisait la sucrée
Et rentrait sa griffe acérée,
Mais le diable n'y perdait rien...

Et dans le boudoir où, sonore,
Tintait son rire aérien,
Brillaient quatre points de phosphore.

From
Poèmes saturniens,
Œuvres complètes de Paul Verlaine, Tome Premier.
Librairie Léon Vanier, Editeur. Paris,  1907.

* * * * *

Woman and Cat,by Paul Verlaine.

She played with her cat, and it was marvellous to see the white hand and the white paw frolic in the black of night.

She concealed -- the little minx! -- under mitts of black thread her murderous agate nails, sharp and glossy like razors.

The other one, likewise demure, withheld her sharp claws, but the devil keeps an eye on these little details....

And from this boudoir that rang with airy laughter shone four bright specks of phosphorous.

Your Essence of Complexity

They rise beneath a haloed moon: the gusts
Fragrant with ice, with pollen grains of snow,
With spice of buried hay from long ago,
With river-chill, with fallen cedar dusts,
With tang of wood-smoke aspen, and the lusts
Recalled from stained-glass canopies aglow
With maple scarlets. From the past, I know
The long-remembered scent a lover trusts.

I breathe your essence of complexity,
Your personal perfume of autumn cold
And winter warmth, your mellow moods, your sauce,
Your fascinating femininity
And all the balm of kisses unforetold,
That memory brings back to stir my loss.

Not Always True, But Often So.

And where do you belong? The questions peal.
And where is any passion that can seem
As tactile or as warm as morning's dream,
As laurelled as the autumn winds that seal
Dead ice upon the waters of your zeal?
As all the reds of evening drown and stream
Into the swamps and holes of night's regime,
You sense the grip, the tugging of the Real.

It pulls. There is no shelter on the rock,
No hand to guide your steps to any hatch
That might allow escape from who you are.
The night is poised, and panther-swift, will stalk
And strike. Be grateful, then, if you can catch,
Before that fatal eye-blink, one bright star.

Perspective

"We poets." Please! I never don that word.
You might as well reduce a man who cries
To nothing but his brimming pickled eyes.
You might as well transform into absurd
Stick-figures all the sinews of a bird,
Pretend that nothing feathered leaps and flies.
To speak like this would hasten the demise
Of any clear perspective undeferred.

I set up rhymes as paddles work with clay,
As cracked and sweating hands replace a stone,
As lace-white fingers tug a lucent thread,
As lorry drivers navigate the day.
I write because I spend my nights alone
As many living do, and all the dead.

Dactyl Unaffable

Lancing a boil in the heat of the desert air
I was astounded by not getting anywhere.
What is my luck in this garden of insect bites?
All I can hear is a chorus of parasites
Howling a song about humans for dinnertime,
Breakfast and (fecklessly, recklessly, in the slime)
All other meals that an insect would chew upon.
One more day here would be crossing the Rubicon.
I have had plenty enough of too much of this.
One more damned bug and I'll blast 'em for emphasis.
Raise a fly swatter and bring out the chemical
Insecto-toxico-mortu-systemical!

Amphibrachosaurus

These reptiles in leather, in dinosaur feather
Have tethered their hopes to my peanut and soap stew.
I wish I could tell them, these flavours would fell them
And so I must vanish before they turn mannish.

The Unmeasured Age of the Stars in their Dementia

Another attempted translation of Leconte de Lisle. The vocabulary gave me trouble, and so I'd welcome any criticism of my accuracy.

La Joie de Siva

Les siècles, où les Dieux, dès longtemps oubliés,
Par millions, jadis, se sont multipliés;
Les innombrables jours des aurores futures
Qui luiront sur la vie et ses vieilles tortures,
Et qui verront surgir, comme des spectres vains,
Des millions encor d'Éphémères divins;
Et l'âge immesuré des astres en démence
Dont la poussière d'or tournoie au Vide immense,
Pour s'engloutir dans l'ombre infinie où tout va;
Tout cela n'est pas même un moment de Siva.
Et quand l'Illusion qui conçoit et qui crée,
Stérile, aura tari sa matrice sacrée
D'où sont nés l'homme antique et l'univers vivant;
Quand la terre et la flamme, et la mer et le vent,
Et la haine et l'amour, et le désir sans trêve,
Les larmes et le sang, le mensonge et le rêve,
Et l'éblouissement des soleils radieux,
Dans la Nuit immobile auront suivi les Dieux;
Se faisant un collier de béantes mâchoires
Qui s'entre-choqueront sur ses épaules noires,
Siva, dansant de joie, ivre de volupté,
O Mort, te chantera dans ton Éternité!

From
DERNIERS POÈMES
by Leconte de Lisle.
Alphonse Lemerre, Editeur. Paris, 1895.

The Joy of Siva,
by Leconte de Lisle.

The centuries, where the Gods long since forgotten once multiplied in their millions; the countless days of tomorrow's auroras which will gleam on life and its old tortures, and from which will arise, like vain spectres, a million more divine Ephemerae; and the unmeasured age of the stars in their dementia whose dust of gold swirls in the immense Void, only to be engulfed by the infinite darkness where everything goes; all of this is not even a moment for Siva.

And when, barren at last, the Illusion that designs and creates has hushed the sacred matrix from which was born ancient man and living universe; when earth, and flame, and sea, and wind, and hatred, and love, and desire without respite, tears and blood, lies and dreams, and the glare of radiant suns have followed the Gods into the motionless night; then, with a necklace of gaping jaws to clack together on her black elbows, dancing with joy, drunk with pleasure, Siva will sing you, O Death, into your own Eternity!

Plain yet Rich, Simple yet Subtle, Graceful yet Strong

"Here are a great many words I have uttered about words -- more than I had meant. The subject is indeed important, as I said at the beginning, not only to writers, but to all of us -- both as readers and as ordinary human beings, who have to think in words, and to talk them, and to write them, at least in our letters. It is important to us, too, as inheritors of our native tongue, which each of us, in his own minute degree, must help to leave better or worse for those that come after us. We may question, indeed, whether style has ever been much improved by books on style. The influence of creative writers, of national history, of social change, surely weighs far more. And no teaching can give talent; yet sometimes, perhaps, it may help to save talent from being wasted. A lot of writing is too confused and obscure; a lot is too wordy; a lot is too peevish or pompous or pretentious; a lot is too lifeless; a lot is too lazy. These are not hopeless faults to cure oneself of, if only one can remember them. If you can remember to pursue clarity, brevity, and courtesy to readers; to be, if not gay, at least good-humoured; never to write a line without considering whether it is really true, whether you have not exaggerated your statement, or its evidence; to shun dead images, and cherish living ones; and to revise unremittingly -- then, though you may not, even so, write well, you are likely at least to write less badly. For, obvious as such precepts are, nine-tenths of the books that are written seem to me to ignore one or more of them.

"The English of [the] future, even if its bounds are ever more widely set, will inevitably differ more and more from ours. That is part of the eternal change of things, and can be accepted without too much regret. But what that English of the hereafter is like, depends, as I have said, in its minute degree on what each of us says each day of our lives. One may hope that it will still be a language plain yet rich, simple yet subtle, graceful yet strong. Whether the effort to keep it so succeeds or fails, I trust that even those who disagree most strongly with all I have said, will yet agree that this effort needs, generation after generation, to be made."

-- F. L. Lucas, Style .
First published in 1955 by Cassell & Co. Ltd. Reprint edition: 2012 by Harriman House Ltd.

Comfort Me With Apples

David Longhorn's anthology, Supernatural Tales 28 , has a story -- or should I call it a segment of a story? -- that I recommend to anyone who thinks our field is too familiar, too clichéd.

The story, "Comfort Me With Apples," is part of a longer piece by Jacob Felsen, "Bright Hair About The Bone." It turns the most common of human issues into something quietly strange, and its deceptively simple ending has remained in my head for the past few hours.

For me, this is the great advantage of supernatural fiction, horror fiction, dream fiction: it makes the familiar seem alien, and by doing this, paradoxically, it brings us back to the lonely questions that keep us awake in those hours long before sunrise. It brings us back to ourselves.