“El son de las hojas”: Five tree poems from Renaissance Spain

De los álamos vengo, madre,
de ver cómo los menea el aire.

De los álamos de Sevilla,
de ver a mi linda amiga.

De los álamos vengo, madre,
de ver cómo los menea el aire.

*

I come from the aspens, Mother,
from watching them tremble in the breeze.

From the aspen trees of Seville,
where I saw my beautiful lover.

I come from the aspens, Mother,
from seeing how they tremble in the breeze.

**

Tres morillas me enamoran
en Jaén:
Axa y Fátima y Marién.

Tres morillas tan garridas
iban a coger olivas,
y hallábanse cogidas
en Jaén:
Axa y Fátima y Marién.

Y hallábanse cogidas
y tornaban desmaí­das
y las colores perdidas
en Jaén:
Axa y Fátima y Marién.

Tres moricas tan lozanas,
tres moricas tan lozanas
iban a coger manzanas
en Jaén:
Axa y Fátima y Marién.

*

Three Moorish girls caught my eye
in Jaén:
Axa and Fátima and Marién.

Three fine-looking Moorish girls
went out to pluck olives from the tree
and got themselves plucked
in Jaén:
Axa and Fátima and Marién.

Got themselves plucked
and returned in a tizzy,
all their color gone
in Jaén:
Axa and Fátima and Marién.

Three very lively Moorish girls,
Three very lively Moorish girls
went out to pick apples
in Jaén:
Axa and Fátima and Marién.

**

Las mis penas, madre,
de amores son.

Salid, mi señora,
de s’ol naranjale,
que sois tan fermosa
quemarvos ha el aire
de amores, sí­.

*

These troubles I’m having, Mother,
are all from love.

Come out, my lady,
from under the orange grove,
for you are so beautiful
that the very air, I swear,
will ignite with love.

**

So ell encina, encina,
so ell encina.

Yo me iba, mi madre,
a la romerí­a;
por ir más devota
fui sin compañí­a:
so ell encina.

Por ir más devota
fui sin compañí­a.
Tomé otro camino
dejé el que tení­a:
so ell encina.

Halléme perdida
en una montaña,
echéme a dormir
al pie dell encina:
so ell encina.

A la media noche
recordé, mezquina;
halléme en los brazos
del que más querí­a:
so ell encina.

Pesóme cuitada
de que amanecí­a,
porque yo gozaba
del que más querí­a:
so ell encina.

Muy bendita sí­a
la tal romerí­a:
so ell encina.

*

Beneath the holly oak, the holly oak,
beneath the holly oak.

I was going around
on pilgrimage, Mother,
and to show my full devotion,
I went alone,
beneath the holly oak.

To show my full devotion,
I went alone.
I took another road,
and left the one I was on,
beneath the holly oak.

I found I had lost my way
on the mountainside,
so I lay down to sleep
at the foot of a holly oak,
beneath the holly oak.

In the middle of the night,
I woke up, all miserable,
and found myself in the arms
of the one I love the best,
beneath the holly oak.

Poor me! I was so sorry
when morning came,
because I’d been enjoying
the one I love the best,
beneath the holly oak.

Oh blessed be
that pilgrimage
beneath the holly oak.

**

Con el viento murmuran,
madre, las hojas;
y al sonido me duermo
bajo su sombra.

Sopla un manso viento
alegre y suave,
que mueve la nave
de mi pensamiento;
dame tal contento
que me parece
que el cielo me ofrece
bien a deshora;
y al sonido me duermo
bajo su sombra.

Si acaso recuerdo
me hallo entre las flores,
y de mis dolores
apenas me acuerdo;
de vista las pierdo
del sueño vencida,
y dame la vida
el son de las hojas;
y al sonido me duermo
bajo su sombra.

*

The leaves murmur
in the wind, Mother,
and lull me to sleep
in their shade.

A breeze blows
soft and light,
moving the ship
of my thoughts.
It makes me feel
so content, it’s as if
I’ve been given
an advance taste
of heaven,
lulled to sleep
in their shade.

If I happen to wake,
I find myself
among flowers,
scarce able to recall
my cares —
lost to sight,
vanquished by dreaming —
and the sound of the leaves
brings me to life,
lulled to sleep
in their shade.

***

NOTES

These are all anonymous lyrics from the 15th and 16th centuries, translated with the help of a dictionary. I’m no scholar, but based on Cola Franzen’s translations in Poems of Arab Andalusia (City Lights, 1989), among other lines of evidence, I can only suppose that the vivid natural imagery in the Castillian cancioneros reflects strong Mozarabic influence. The association of trees with paradise and seduction seems especially Arab to me.

Tres morillas / Three Moorish girls

I resisted the urge to translate “tan lozanas” as “hot and spicy,” but somehow the racist stereotype of the vivacious, sexually available, brown-skinned southerner feels all too familiar.

So ell encina / Beneath the holly oaks

This song is in a woman’s voice.

The holly oak, or holm oak, Quercus ilex, sports leathery, evergreen leaves and “forms a picturesque rounded head, with pendulous low-hanging branches.” The Wikipedia article also says it’s one of the three best trees under which to grow truffles.

Romerí­as were annual pilgrimages to local or regional shrines associated with saints or the Virgin Mary, and were often quite festive events — a tradition that continues to this day.

Con el viento murmuran / The leaves murmur
This could be in the voice of either sex.
__________

The next edition of the Festival of the Trees will be at Hoarded Ordinaries on January 1. Send your tree-related links to zenmama (at) gmail (dot) com with “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line by December 30.

Fishy

Christmas fern

What might it mean to dream of catfish? They lived in burrows like prairie dogs, whiskered heads popping up as we walked past. “The ground was too saturated to plant this year,” the farmer said, “so I switched to fish.” The small ones were red, and the big ones were bluish gray. They watched us with what I imagined was deep suspicion, but it might just as well have been melancholy, or a blithe lack of concern. “You can watch ’em all day, and you’ll never see ’em blink,” the farmer said.

*

The other night, talking about politicians, my mother said, “I don’t know how they can look themselves in the face.” It was, dare I say, a quote worthy of the president she so despises.

But perhaps the truly gifted ones do manage that. I think Bill Clinton, for example, sees Bill Clinton in everyone he meets. That’s why he always looks so happy in a crowd.

Whereas his successor sees a potential mob: unreadable, as he is to himself. “There’s no cave deep enough for America, or dark enough to hide,” he babbles. “I know the human being and fish can coexist.”

*

There’s a certain period every day around mid-morning when the squirrels run back and forth across the roof. I sit trying to type while claws rattle overhead.

At least, I think it’s squirrels. Maybe it’s another typist. It must be a pretty dull story, though, if I’m in it.
__________

See also All Persons Visiting the Whale, at Heraclitean Fire.

The sound of snow

I watch the snow start: fat flakes at first, growing smaller after the first ten minutes. It’s mesmerizing, and I could sit and watch all day if I only had warmer pants. I envy the deer hunters in their tree stands. It’s like a silent movie: so much in motion without a sound! I wonder how falling snow might be represented in Japanese, which has a lot of onomatopoeia for things that make no sound. As Cornell linguist John Whitman observes:

In addition to those onomatopoeia which imitate the sounds of nature, called gisei-go in Japanese, Japanese recognizes two additional types of onomatopoeia: one that basically suggests states of the external world (gitai-go), and another that basically names internal mental conditions and sensations (gijoo-go). There is some overlap between the two. […]

While some of these forms are clearly descriptive of internal states, e.g., ira-ira “frustrated” (the Japanese press labeled the seemingly unending war between Iran and Iraq the “Ira-Ira War”), there are many which can be used to describe both external or internal states, for example, “gocha-gocha,” which can quite accurately describe either the cluttered state of my office or that of my mind.

Sticklers who prefer a narrower definition of onomatopoeia refer to phenomime and psychomime — see the Wikipedia. Whatever you call it, the profusion of gisei-go, gitai-go and gijoo-go “sounds” constitutes one of the main attractions of Japanese comic books, I think, which for some reason always use katakana for them. The katakana script is also preferred for foreign loan-words, technical or scientific terms, and corporate brands: in general, anything a little out of the ordinary. But in fact onomatopoeia occurs with great frequency in spoken Japanese, perhaps because the language serves a more subjective worldview than, say, English. Here are a few examples I ran across on the web just now as I searched for the sound of falling snow. (Vowels are pronounced as in Spanish.)

Kasa-kasa: A rustle, as of grass or paper — maybe even sleet, I’m thinking.

Zaa-zaa: Another way of representing a rustle. Can also be used for static and other forms of white noise. A shorter version, za-za, denotes rapid footfalls on leaves or grass. Related but softer sounds are represented by saa-saa.

Hyuu-hyuu: The lonely sound of a cold wind. (Ordinary wind goes hooo or byuu.)

Shito-shito: The sound of falling rain.

Tsuu-tsuu: Another rain-sound. Also, the hum of insects.

Fuwa-fuwa: A gentle movement. Even gentler: fuwari-fuwari or funwara-funwara.

Noro-noro: A sound effect for anything happening slowly.

Paa: The sound of light shining. This can also be represented as po, bo, or kaa.

Uttsuri: The sound the heart/mind (kokoro) makes when overwhelmed by beauty.

Gunya: A sudden realization or minor satori — essentially, the sound of one hand clapping.

Shiiin, jiiin, or riiin: The sound of motionless staring. Implies being stunned beyond words.

Shin-shin: Snow as it slowly, steadily piles up.
__________

Sources: J-Slang: Japanese Onomatopoeia; Japanese sound effects and what they mean; A list of Japanese onomatopeia; Arare vs. Hyou [message board discussion].

Wild apples

Jay Pfeil - Wild Apples

Be sure to check out the 18th edition of the Festival of the Trees at Riverside Rambles.

The above print is one the few original artworks I own: “Wild Apples,” by Jay Pfeil. Please excuse the reflection on the glass — since Jay makes a living from her art, I thought I’d better not make too easily reproducible an image.

In addition to its merits as a work of art, it’s valuable to me as part of the Plummer’s Hollow historical record: it depicts an actual tree that stands about fifty feet from my kitchen window, as it appeared during the the artist’s nine month tenancy in this very house, back in 1979-1980. In fact, the print came off a big press that stood, as I recall, right next to the wall upon which it currently hangs in the guest house living room.

Wild Apples
View at larger size

Here’s the same tree as it appeared a week ago, with just a little Photoshoppery to make it a look slightly etchified (excuse the technical art-talk here, folks). I didn’t notice until I compared the photo with the print that Jay must’ve reversed her own sketch at some point in the printing process, because in reality the two trunks overlap in the opposite direction from the way she depicted them. Aside from that discrepancy, one can clearly see how much the tree has grown over the past 28 years, and how much it remains the same. A couple bad ice storms have taken their toll, but every year the tree is still dotted with apples that only the deer could love — and it gets well fertilized as a result.

We have several wild apple trees around the fringes of the field, and I’m sure they represent either old rootstock shorn of its grafts that survived the bulldozing of the Plummer Farm orchard back in the 1950s, or else the direct offspring of orchard trees — apple varieties don’t come true from seed. Here’s a photo taken in what is now our shed lawn, showing a bit of the orchard in the background as it appeared in 1919.

Charles Schroyer in the garden

The child in the photo was a Plummer relative up visiting his grandparents, Jacob and Mollie Plummer, who had a house in town at the time, but probably spent at least part of the summer here in the guest house. I would love to know just how many people have lived in this modest little dwelling over the 150 years of its existence. Just the other week, someone contacted us through the Plummer’s Hollow site to say that an ancestor of his had been born here back in the 1880s, and my Dad — who has done extensive research on the history of the place — had never heard the name. In fact, that was the first good evidence we’ve had that the place was even rented out in the 19th century, when Plummers still lived in the main house year-round.

Jay Pfeil and her soon-to-be husband Richard Sackett only lived here a short time, but they made a big impression on me. I was 12 and 13 at the time, and my brothers and I used to drop in after supper at least once a week for jam sessions: Richard was an accomplished guitarist, and my brother Steve played the five-string banjo. Richard got a job with a local landscaping company, and when time and circumstance permitted, he used to go busking in the streets of State College with some of his musician friends. Jay was exhibiting her works at local and regional arts festivals, with encouragement from her artist mother, who came to visit a couple of times — the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, I guess. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the three of them were role models of a sort, the first people I’d ever known who put art and music at the center of their lives. True, my mother is a writer, but my parents were never what one would call bohemian.

The winter of 1979-80 was a rough one, and Jay and Richard had to leave their Volkswagon bus at the bottom of the road for a couple of months, where eventually it got vandalized. The isolation per se didn’t seem to bother them too much, but they left, Jay said, because there wasn’t enough light here. It’s a north-facing hollow, and the guest house in particular is dark because of its proximity to the woods. For me, of course, the cave-like ambience is one of the main attractions of living here, but then I work with words rather than images. Jay and Richard moved to Black Mountain, North Carolina, where Jay continues to make intaglio prints of local trees, among other things. In a biographical statement on the Piedmont Craftsmen site, she says,

At present I am immersed in drawing new leaves in the spring, with a special love of the native Fraser (or Mountain) Magnolia. I am also continuing to work on a number of other series, such as ‘Paths Through the Woods,’ ‘Plant Portraits,’ and ‘Full Moon’ … Through my daily mountain hikes, I strive to etch or draw my work in their natural locations. Due to the time-consuming and complex nature of etching and engraving, larger works are often finalized in my studio. It is my hope that [by] conveying my enthusiasm and reverence for the wild world … others may enjoy, respect, and conserve the environmental diversity that surrounds us in a sustainable, cooperative balance.

Though Jay may have ended up putting down roots farther south in the Appalachians, the seeds she planted here continue to bear fruit, albeit in a slightly altered form.

Test

sea urchin shell

Plagued by insomnia, I pad downstairs & grab a book at random in the dark. I soon find myself reading about Arctic terns, which fly 22,000 miles each year, circling from one end of the earth to the other so they can spend their lives in continual daylight — an endless frigid summer. They are, the book says, delicate-looking black & white birds with bright red feet & beaks, and very high-strung: they assault anyone or anything that approaches the little hollows in the permafrost where they make their nests. The male & female take turns incubating the eggs, & when the off-duty bird returns, it brings its mate the gift of a small fish.

*

I’ve been thinking about those porcupines of the ocean, the sea urchins. Their transparent, shell-less eggs have been featured in textbooks of developmental biology for over a hundred years, & Aristotle himself first drew attention to the simplicity of their digestive systems with their five hollow teeth and five-chambered stomachs.

Purple sea urchins, I learned recently, use their spines to excavate hollows in solid rock, & so anchor themselves against the surf. The spines attach to ball-and-socket joints, & can be used also for defense or locomotion. The purple sea urchin genome was sequenced just last November, & 70 percent of its genes were discovered to have a human counterpart.

Among my collection of miscellaneous natural objects is a sea urchin’s flying saucer-shaped shell, or test, which I found washed up on a beach when I was a kid. Thirty years later, it still smells faintly of the ocean.

*

Can there be anything lonelier than a fourth-quarter moon, which loses its shine so long before it sets? There it is in mid-morning, like a half-eaten midnight snack of milk & cookies. Imagine trying to describe moonlight to someone who has never experienced anything but day.
__________

Written in response to a ReadWritePoem challenge. (UPDATE) Links to other responses are here.

Streaming

foam leaf 3

Today I came across the term lifestream — “a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline” — and decided that I like the word but dislike the concept. The idea is to blend all of one’s separate online activity streams (Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, WordPress, etc.) into a single stream, often on a platform where no comments are permitted. I’m not sure I see the point of that. A blended feed might make sense, but is anyone really so into me that they don’t want to risk missing a single thing I do online? I sure hope not! I’d much rather have highly discriminating fans, who might only subscribe to my occasional satirical posts, for example, or who might visit my Flickr photostream or the Plummer’s Hollow blog and never even look at Via Negativa. So I’m tickled to be picking up a few unknown “followers” on Twitter who are presumably only interested in my daily quickies at The Morning Porch. In the pre-digital age, desperate poets resorted to megaphones in the public square; now we can infiltrate the mobile phones of strangers.

*

Unity and consistency are temptations we’d probably do well to resist. A friend recently criticized qarrtsiluni for publishing too many hymenoptera in a row — my fault entirely. My poetry mentor, Jack McManis, edited a magazine called Pivot for a couple of decades, and one time he shared with me the secret of how they decided what order to print things in. “I take the whole stack of poems and throw them up in the air,” he said, “and then pick them up without looking at them. That becomes the order for the issue.”

*

“I learned long ago that writing — the outward form of my thinking — is the best means I have for discovering how the various separate and confusing threads of my life actually relate to each other, and how they weave together to form a whole cloth,” Beth writes in the latest post at the cassandra pages, entitled Change — a stirring defense of the blog medium. My own post was already three-quarters complete when I got bored, clicked on my feed reader, and saw hers. There are always other streams, aren’t there? Why obsess over unity? Just today Peter of slow reads and John of slow reading discovered each other, and it’s like they’re long-lost blogging twins.

Beth elaborates:

The blog or journal is, actually, a mirror of that movement through life that I observe in myself — neither like the geese flying across the still photograph, nor like an individual being standing motionless while life swirls around her — but rather the sense of myself as a moving, mutable being who exists in inner and outer worlds that are also in states of constant change. Seen in that way, the “self” doesn’t exist; it cannot be fixed. We humans spend much effort trying to deal with our discomfort about that dual movement, attempting to fix ourselves in time or trying to find ways of convincing ourselves that we won’t someday stop while time continues without us. So we write books, paint paintings, take photographs, build buildings; we have children and fixate on our belief that they represent a continuation of our own animation; we construct religions and place our hope on immortality.

I couldn’t have said it better. (Be sure to read the rest.)

*

Sometimes I’ll spend half an hour looking through a magazine or browsing a well-illustrated blog and find myself getting depressed, because every last picture has people in it. It’s not that I don’t like people. In fact, I believe strongly in the agora and the souk, and the ideals of conversation, hospitality and exchange that they represent. But any place where you can’t get out into the country within an hour’s walk feels very alienating to me: too much otherness, too many strangers. The streets and subways are rivers of humanity in which one can never fully relax. I find it desperately sad that, for a large percentage of the world’s population, escape from other humans and from human-dominated landscapes is nearly impossible.

*

During the last half-dozen years my dad worked as an Arts and Humanities librarian at Penn State’s Pattee Library, he had the unpleasant duty of finding a certain number of subscriptions to cancel each year in order to save the library money. Librarians refer to any regularly issued publication — a journal, magazine, newspaper, newsletter, almanac, annual report, or numbered monograph — as a serial. So my dad was a serial killer. Streams do run dry.
__________

Speaking of the Morning Porch, I’m looking for an artist willing to colloborate on the tumblelog version, with an eye to eventual tree-flesh publication of some sort. Drop me a line if you’re interested.

Sawn

stumped 1

I see, said the blind man, and he picked up a hammer and saw. Not blindness, exactly, but a very objective and analytical kind of seeing is required to cut down a tree, or to cut one up that has fallen on its own and may be spring-loaded with hidden stresses. Especially in a second-growth hardwood forest, where trees aren’t so massive that their falling will always follow a straight line, the logger must stay focused on the play of forces, ready to jump back at a moment’s notice.

stumped 2
Click photo for larger view.

But as time passes and the new surfaces made by a chainsaw begin to weather, strange things can happen. Those few minutes filled with the shriek and stink of the saw can acquire a patina of legend, in the way that violence so often seems to impart a glow of significance to the grayness of the ordinary.

fungus stump

But forget all that and look at the sawn wood. Should we be surprised if something that once passed messages between the sun and the underground kingdoms of the fungi should retain, even in its severed parts, a bit of magic?
__________

Submissions to the 18th edition of the Festival of the Trees are due by Thursday. See here for details.

Bell Pepper

Something has drilled a tiny hole
right above the base of the bell pepper.

I try to picture what it must’ve been like
to inhabit that green cathedral space as it expanded
& its single cloud grew ponderous with seeds.

Imagine the light & the sliding shadows of leaves
shaped like enormous beetles.

Imagine an orange sunset, in the absence of a horizon,
starting from random spots
that slowly spread across the vegetable sky,
deepening week by week into fire-engine red.

There is no heart like this, so roomy, so full of sugar.
If it is a bell, it’s much too good at absorbing
every kind of blow — or else
its tone is too high-pitched
to be heard by anything larger than the head of pin.
__________

Written for the prompt #2 at Read Write Poem. The other responses (mostly food poems) are here.