Day 27: Baudelaire, Chekhov, Wang Xiaobo
Poem: Charles Baudelaire - Spleen (J'ai plus de souvenirs), translated by Edna St Vincent Millay
Read the full poem here with various translations. I have chose Millay's very jazzy translation where she has added extra details:
I swear to you that if I lived a thousand years
I could not be more crammed with dubious souvenirs.
Souvenir is French for memory, so a more literal translation would read "I have more memories than if I'd lived a thousand years". Millay is having some fun with it. How great are the following lines:
Holding more heaped unpleasant bones than Potter's Field;
I am a graveyard hated by the moon; revealed
Never by her blue light are those long worms that force
Into my dearest dead their blunt snouts of remorse.
The other translators have sought to keep with Baudelaire's gothic tone, but Millay makes it so campy.
I wish I liked Baudelaire's poetry more- I always feel as though I am missing something reading the english translations, and his ideas do not feel as shocking today as they did in his time. But his prose poems remain very fresh-they still feel experimental and are often very funny. I'll write about his prose another time.
Story: Anton Chekhov - The Lady With the Dog
Chekhov's most famous story, a very classic love story, but told so well. This is in the "wistful" category of romance where you expect to weep at any given time. Other love stories in this category I think are Normal People, Stoner, the Before Trilogy and maybe Brokeback Mountain.
Those are also the only love stories I have ever consumed, and the whole time I read this story I kept thinking about those other ones, thinking "surely this story has to be different..." and you know what? All these stories are exactly the same (except for Brokeback), but still, I love this kind of story. I like to feel things. Do I need to conjure up the spirits of past loves? I don't think so, but I guess wistful love stories give me a cathartic feeling that other people have experienced lost love the same way.
Essay: Wang Xiaobo - The Maverick Pig
Yes!!!!!! This short essay is one of the best stories I have ever read. It is my fourth or fifth time reading and every time I am invigorated by it.
I wish it was free online. You can find it behind a paywall at Harper's, or you can find it in his book of essays of the same name or in the larger unabridged book On the Pleasures of Thinking. Hint hint: Anna's Archive; however I do recommend all his essays as just being really funny and to the point.
I don't have a lot more to add today. I am have overshared too much in the previous entries and am glad to just point at some things and say I like them.