Thoughts on Satie

[DaveW Mitchell]

Thoughts on Satie
-----------------------

A frangible epistle:
The clatter of ivory
Again made dentate,
Served up with malaise elephantine
And blacklings Ariadne, accompanied
By the palest of Saturnines.

Revised 5 August 2000

[david rutkowski]

gymnopedie numero quatre

celle-ci n'etait qu'un nuage
lisant le journal d'un corps nu
et y trouvant l'essence cageur
des bords immenses de la faim

[DaveW Mitchell]

My French is much too limited and pedestrian to comprehend, let alone
translate, the nuances of your piece, so all I can do is tell you what
it seems to evoke (from some dim ancestral recess inhabited by my
Gallophone forebears) that meshes with my original feelings:

"This is just a wraith,
reading the news from a body stripped
and finding there the ribbed essence
of hunger's vast shores"

I'd much appreciate a note on your viewpoint, as I'm sure the tone is
far different from the desaturated image I carry away....

Regards
Dave

[david rutkowski]

Very interesting translation. My knowledge of Satie is limited to
playing his three gymnopedie on guitar. There may be a fourth, but I
assumed there isn't. I imagined him exploring the same spaces as the
first three, but reaching something so refined, it resulted in silence.

French is my second language, and I've neglected it for the last few
years, so I might have tapped out a quasimodal quatrain ...

gymnopedie number four

this one was not more than a cloud
reading the newspaper of a nude body
and finding there the cage-essence
of the vast shores of hunger

The "cageur" (coining a term in francs) here refers to John Cage, who
eventually brought silence to the concert hall ...

[Zita Maria Evensen]

My French is almost non-existent -- just memories of subzero winters
at Purdue when language was required of my grad work. I chose French which was
offered at 7:30 ayem :-/ But I love this repartee. More!!

/z.

[DaveW Mitchell]

Thank you so much, David

To my own surprise, my instincts for basically unfamiliar langauges are
still intact, and I thank you for confirming that. The sense did come
across remarkably well, a tribute to your own expressive abilities.
I am actually a translator, of Russian science, but never
considered myself at all good at finding the imagery freight carried by
languages used metaphorically. I was taken by the multiple
possibilities for 'cageur' but completely overlooked Cage.
This was one of my 'philatelic' poems, written to accompany a series of
stamps honoring French composers...

[DaveW Mitchell]

Thank you, too... It's a nice break from a massive survey of the
literature on charged bubbles in liquids!!!

D

Zita Maria Evensen wrote:
>
> My French is almost non-existent -- just memories of subzero winters
> at Purdue when language was required of my grad work. I chose French which was
> offered at 7:30 ayem :-/ But I love this repartee. More!!
>
> /z.
>
> david rutkowski (david...@yahoo.com) writes: