Windswept and Tempest-Tossed

The day before yesterday Hurricane Emma swept over Germany, but it appeared quite unspectacular (except perhaps in the mountains or at the shoreline), just heavy clouds and rain with a few strong gusts. I stood at J.'s and Ge.'s window for a while and watched the sky, which was mostly covered by billowy grey clouds with thin darker ones moving along underneath, and watched the antenna on a roof on the opposite building waggle in the wind, and a crude quadrilateral weathervane swinging around forty-five degrees and back again on its chimneytop perch. The doors and windows were often pushed out by gusts, accompanied by a general creaking, and the wind whistled in the oven in the corner room. In the evening news we were treated to another classic scene of a weatherman encased in a large jacket, subjected to the blustering wind and spraying brine of the seashore, clutching an oversized, furry (and, in this case, bedraggled) microphone that resembles a dog of the Pekingese breed, and trying to shout louder than the turbulent elements.

Yesterday and today the sky has still been a troubled grey, with gusts and rain, but the worst of it is apparently over. Before I went to sleep last night, inspired by a quick skim through a volume of Keats ("The Pot of Basil" is even more macabre than I remembered it), I wrote two bad poems. One, rhyming at first and then degenerating into free verse, has no intentional deeper meaning but, if one really wants to, one can read a whole lot into it. It's set in a coral city in whose interior there are great caverns populated by merpeople who look like blue-tinted Greek statues and grow beautiful, supple fins. In the central hall, where the mer-king sits on an enormous pearl in an ancient oyster, his people have gathered around him: his servants, his trident-bearing merman citizens, and ranks of mermaids who, their faces fixed in horror, are soundlessly singing a mournful song like the chorus in an ancient tragedy. Another tribe of merpeople, glittering in bronzen (it probably rusts in water, but whatever) and gold armour, descends on them and kills them all, and the waters of the cave turn turbid. They depart. The oyster slowly shuts on its pearl and guards the graveyard like a sphinx, but the débris settles to the seafloor as if it were only sand that had been stirred up by the silent passage of a giant sting-ray, and it seems as if nothing had happened. The End.

But for the second poem I wrote about the wind, and used the metaphor (which I'm probably not the first to come up with) that it rushes over the earth in search of something. When it stirs the leaves, it is rummaging among them; when it is violent, it is enraged that it cannot find the desired object and wreaks vengeance on whatever crosses its path; when it whistles through buildings it is subdued and dejected. I wrote the poem in French, though my I.Q. invariably drops about 50 points when writing in that language. After it was done, I remembered an infinitely better poem about the wind, namely Jean de la Fontaine's "Le Chêne et le Roseau," which T. and I read in our lessons with Marie. The last line has been echoing in my mind (so has "My Heart Will Go On" from the film Titanic, which I snobbishly abhor; but I have, after all, heard that song a million times).

Le Chêne et le Roseau

Le Chêne un jour dit au Roseau:
"Vous avez bien sujet d'accuser la nature;
Un roitelet pour vous est un pesant fardeau;
Le moindre vent, qui d'aventure
Fait rider la face de l'eau,
Vous oblige à baisser la tête,
Cependant mon front, au Caucase pareil,
Non content d'arrêter les rayons du soleil,
Brave l'effort de la tempête.
Tout vous est aquilon, tout me semble zéphyr.
Encor si vous naissiez à l'abri du feuillage
Dont je couvre le voisinage,
Vous n'auriez pas tant à souffrir:
Je vous défendrais de l'orage;
Mais vous naissez le plus souvent
Sur les humides bords des royaumes du vent.
La nature envers vous me semble bien injuste.
-- Votre compassion, lui répondit l'arbuste,
Part d'un bon naturel; mais quittez ce souci:
Les vents me sont moins qu'à vous redoutables;
Je plie, et ne romps pas. Vous avez jusqu'ici
Contre leurs coups épouvantables
Résisté sans courber le dos;
Mais attendons la fin." Comme il disait ces mots,
Du bout de l'horizon accourt avec furie
Le plus terrible des enfants
Que le Nord eût portés jusque-là dans ses flancs.
L'arbre tient bon; le Roseau plie.
Le vent redouble ses efforts,
Et fait si bien qu'il déracine
Celui de qui la tête au ciel était voisine,
Et dont les pieds touchaient à l'empire des morts.

From: Fables, Jean de la Fontaine (L'Aventurine, 2001)

* * *

Before I finally nodded off, I translated the fable. I worried most about capturing the essence of the words as well as the convoluted and stately word order, and least about reproducing the rhythm, etc., with any great technical fidelity. To do justice to the seventeenth-century language, I tried to use antique-ish terms and grammar whenever they were better than modern ones. (Aquilon, by the way, is the Roman equivalent of the Greeks' North Wind, Boreas.) Today I revised it a little, and found it decent, so here it is:


The Oak and the Reed

One day the oak said to the reed:
"You surely have cause to accuse Nature;
A wren for you is a burden most weighty,
The least wind that by chance
Wrinkles the water's countenance
Obliges you to bend your head,
Whilst my brow, to the Caucasus in powerful resemblance,
Not content with stopping the rays of the sun
Braves the efforts of even the tempest.
For you every wind is an Aquilon;
to me every wind is a Zephyr.
And, if you were born in the shelter
Of the foliage with which I o'erspread the vicinage,
You need not have suffered so greatly;
I had defended you from the storm;
But you are born most often
On the watery borders of the domains of the wind.
Toward you nature seems to me highly unjust.

"Your compassion," replied to him the plant,
"Arises from natural goodness; but relinquish that care:
The winds are less menacing to me than to you,
For I bend but I do not break.
Until now you have, against their fearful blows,
Resisted without bowing your back,
But let us await the end." As he spoke out these words
From the edge of the horizon there rushes with fury
The most terrible of the children
That the North had borne until then in his flanks.
The tree holds out well; the reed bows,
The wind redoubles his efforts,
And does so well that he tears out the roots
Of him whose head had once neighboured the sky
And whose feet were touching the empire of the dead.