Women looking for words

What a sad season this silly St Valentine's month is turning out to be, with the disappearance of two unforgettable female voices. And I'm not referring to Whitney Houston. The death of the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska on 1 February and that of American lyricist Dory Previn on St Valentine's Day didn't draw nearly as much media attention, but the loss to lovers of wise and honest voices is immeasurably greater.

It might seem facetious to compare a 'serious' Nobel Prize winning poet to a more 'superficial' singer-songwriter with strong Hollywood ties, but let's leave literary snobbery aside and look at the words they left us. Both these women, both in their late eighties when they died, spent a long lifetime obsessively looking for the right word. In fact, Szymborska's very first published poem (in a daily newspaper in 1945) was titled 'Looking for a word'. And who can ever forget Previn's delectably witty song 'Yada Yada (La Scala)' about the frustration of too many words? In case you don't know it, here's an excerpt:

Let's stop talking, talking, talking, wasting precious time, 
just a lot of empty noise that isn't worth a dime,  
words of wonder, words of whether, 
should we, shouldn't we be together, yada yada yada (...)
So we sit at a restaurant table, 
discussing reasons we're unable
to commit.
That's not it...

And Szymborska, in one of her early poems from the fifties, 'Classifieds', which already contained the wit and wonder and ironic distance for which she would later become famous, stated:
I TEACH silence
in all languages
through intensive examination of:
the starry sky,
the Sinanthropus' jaw, 
the grasshopper's hop,
an infant's fingernails...

While Szymborska wrote with dry self-mocking about her profession, producing small marvels such as 'Some people like poetry', 'Evalation of an unwritten poem' and the absolutely delightful 'Poetry reading' (Twelve people in the room, eight seats to spare - / it's time to start this cultural affair. / Half came inside because it started raining, / the rest are relatives. O Muse.), Previn's songs about love and longing are rawer, more gut-wrenching, but often not without humour, albeit a very black humour. An excerpt from 'Lady with the braid':
Would you care to stay till sunrise?
It's completely your decision.
It's just the night cuts through me like a knife.
So would you stay a while 
and save my life?
I don't know what made me say that,
I have this funny sense of humour,
You know I couldn't be down-hearted
if I tried.

Szymborska, as could be expected from a great poet, often wrote about death and mortality, but even when she tackled such very serious subjects, she maintained her ironic distance and her sense of wonder. One of her more recent poems from the nineties, 'Among the multitudes', ends with this sharp 'self-portrait': Fate has been kind / to me thus far. / I might never have been given / the memory of happy moments. / (...) I might have been myself minus amazement, / that is, / someone completely different.  Indeed. Wislawa Szymborska 'minus amazement' wouldn't have been Wislawa Szymborska.

Previn, perhaps more unexpectedly for someone who was 'only' a folk singer, didn't shy away from the topic of death either. In 'The new enzyme detergent demise of Ali Mcraw' she delivers the news of her own death in the following way: Mine was a Wednesday death. / One afternoon at approximately three fifteen / I gave up and died. / Nobody cried. / Mine was a bloodless death, / not grim, not gory, / more like Ali McGraw's new enzyme detergent demise / in Love Story, / neat and tidy / unlike Christ's on Friday. 

Szymborska even dared to write her own 'Epitaph' while she was still in her thirties: Here lies, old-fashioned as parentheses, / the authoress of verse. Eternal rest / was granted her by earth, although the corpse / had failed to join the avant-garde, of course. (...)

Both Previn and Szymborska wrote movingly about suicide too, Previn in a song about Mary C Brown who jumped off the letter H of the Hollywood sign because she had not become a star (and then was finally mentioned in the press, in the obituary columns), and Szymborska in 'The suicide's room' with the mournful ending: You think at least the note must tell us something. / But what if I say there was no note - / and he had so many friends, but all of us fit neatly / inside the empty envelope propped up against a cup. 


I could go on singing the praises of these two artists, separately and together, but I'm hoping that by now you're tempted to rediscover them for yourself. And if you don't know them yet, believe me, you're in for a treat. Since they both wrote a poem/song with the evocative title of 'Going home', I'll end by quoting Previn one last time: Going home is such a ride. Isn't going home a long and lonely ride? Let's hope they're both finally home.






  

On radio, writers and wet hair

So here I sit with unbrushed teeth and wet hair dripping on my keyboard - probably permanently damaging my computer - and it's all the fault of writers on the radio.

I was innocently listening to France Inter this morning, as I do every morning while showering, dressing, having breakfast and mentally preparing for the day, when I was jolted into a state of catatonic bliss. The studio guest was so brilliant that I couldn't take the risk of missing a single phrase by opening the tap to brush my teeth or switching on the blowdryer for my hair. It was that old Italian wizard Umberto Eco talking - in fluent French with an occasional English word thrown in when he couldn't find the exact French phrase - about languages and literature and lists, translation and interpretation, 'real' books versus e-books, classic writers versus contemporary writers, and much much more. Eco, a professor of semiotics probably most widely known for his best-selling novel The Name of the Rose, recently published a non-fiction 'dialogue' with a French writer, Jean-Claude Carrière, under the delightful title of N'espérez pas vous débarrasser des livres ('Don't hope to get rid of books').

Don't ever hope to get rid of books - or of wise and witty writers, or of the humble radio. That was my fervent wish as I listened, transfixed, to Umberto Eco. Yes, he admires internet for opening up access to information (the Holocaust, he claims, wouldn't have been possible if there had been internet), but he also fears the false information that could be spread in this democratic way. He compares his relationship to internet with his relationship to his car. The fact that he owns and drives a car doesn't mean he can't complain about his car, does it?

But he is at his brilliant best when he talks about books and reading. He regards himself as 'a young writer' - at the age of nearly eighty! - because he only started publishing at fifty. And since becoming a published author, he has preferred reading classic authors rather than his contemporaries - for fear of being influenced, he says, but then adds rather mischievously: Either he finds contemporary writing bad, worse than his own, which upsets him, or he finds it better, which also upsets him... Much less upsetting to stick to the classics.

I was so inspired that I wanted to rush off, wet hair and all, to write it all down before I forget. But as I left the bathroom, I caught the daily Revue de la Presse on the same radio station - and because the Nobel Prize for Literature had been announced yesterday, the press review was also at least partly devoted to literature.

(I have to confess, my first reaction yesterday, when I heard that Mario Vargas Llosa was the 2010 laureate, was a kind of selfish joy because here was a winner of whom I'd actually read a few books, as opposed to all those worthy Nobel winners whose books I know I should have read...)

So I hung on to listen to the press review - and was rewarded with the most magnificent quote from Vargas Llosa, published in today's edition of the newspaper Liberation. According to our latest Nobel laureate, literature expresses a different truth from historical, political or social truth; literature expresses 'a truth made up of lies'.

Three cheers for the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, the Italian Umberto Eco and a French radio station that gave me a great start to my day. Now let me go and dry my hair and brush my teeth...

Pinter of the pregnant pause

Just a short note to end the festive season's blog-fasting. In my previous entry I humbly confessed that I, like millions of other enthusiastic readers, don't know the work or even the names of many of the Nobel Prize for Literature laureates of the last century. Harold Pinter, who passed away on Christmas Eve, was one of those I did know and admire, for his political passion as much as for his powerful plays.

I saw some of these plays on stage or as screen adaptations, and as a drama student I actually read some of them too, which is more than many people can say about the work of well-known modern playwrights. In many of the tributes after his death, he was praised as 'one of the most influential' and imitated playwrights of his age'. After having seen plays like the brilliant Betrayal I can only agree. No one else could use the pregnant pause on stage in quite the same devastating way. In Pinter's work, what was not said always sounded more important than what was actually said.

Therefore the most apt -and witty - tribute I came across, was a letter published in the International Herald Tribune last week. A reader suggested that Harold Pinter's death should be commemorated by a minute of silence - followed by a pause.