Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 It is more, I hope, out of curiosity than a sense of duty that I ordered Don Quixote from the library although some years ago someone expressed surprise that such a literatus as I hadn't read it. Well, one can't read everything. In the translation by Edith Grossman in the Vintage edition, it is highly readable, which was my first concern, but as yet, on page 140 out of 940, I've yet to see that the space given to comparisons with Hamlet by Harold Bloom in the Introduction would have occured to me beyond the authors being contemporaries.

The question might always be asked of such large-scale works if they need to be quite so long and Don Quixote probably doesn't, each episode being similar to the one before like separate items in a sitcom series but that might not be entirely Cervantes's fault. He wrote the second part because somebody else had written a continuation of what now stands as only the first half.

I was gladdened to see some lit crit commentary incorporated early doors with the art of poetry translation covered by,

no matter the care they use or the skill they show, they will never achieve the quality the verses had in their first birth,

and, as seems to me regarding prolific artists,

"If there weren't so many...they would be more highly esteemed.",

which might apply to Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Balzac and all those who produced enormous amounts of similar work.

What is not obvious is whether Don Quixote itself would be as highly esteemed if it consisted of fewer words. I feel, by page 140, that I've already got the idea of it but the misadventures might take a different turn later. My main interest is in deciding who the would-be knight errant most resembles in real life, its model being the fashion for such heroes in the pulp fiction of the day. As such, the satire could as easily be directed at science fiction, for example, with its chronic litany of green monsters from faraway galaxies constantly at war with their zapping guns. But the Don is delusional and so one can't help but think of two recent Prime Ministers who had no self-awareness or any conception of their innate foolishness. However, in his dreams of being a genuine knight errant, he also looks like Everyman or at least those I've met who imagined themselves perhaps poets, sportspersons or careerists but had no talent for such things. And it especially reminds me of all those enterprises I've ever undertaken, imagined were within the compass of some gift I had except I didn't have it in the necessary amount. I'll be sticking with the book for a while yet in the hope of being able to say I've read it but even more in the hope that some further depth to it justifies all the writing, and subsequent reading, time it demands.

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We come here to celebrate good things and mostly avoid derogatory comments about fellow creative types. There is nothing to be gained here by disrespecting others. In a world often apparently fuelled by animosity, I'd like to contribute to that essential part of humanity that makes the most of its good things.

Good things, though, are achieved by the avoidance of bad practice and at some godforsaken early hour this morning I heard what immdiately sounded like the worst line of poetry I'd ever heard,

The Tibetans have 85 words for states of consciousness.

It's from Cows by Selima Hill. It was in Poetry Extra, repeated three times on today's schedule on Radio4Extra in which Dalgit Nagra selected a programme in which Caroline Bird shared some favourites with Roger McGough. You can't get much more Radio 4 than that.

There were a number of poems a bit like Cows that made their points and elicited some sympathy but few appeared to me to have much 'poetry' going on in them. It was more like a workshop on Mindfulness, promoting or exhibiting an awareness of the world but not necessarily through the medium of language as an art form, only using it as a vehicle to advertise the poet's heightened sensitivity that we were invited to admire and thus share.

The poem, and all such work by Selima and her kind, would be widely admired in poetry groups up and down the country and it surely isn't for me to deride that which gives satisfaction to thousands of readers.

But, no, this 15-syllable line lies dead in the water. By all means, poetry doesn't have to rhyme, scan or possibly not even aspire to the condition of music. It often helps if it aspires to some form or discipline but it needs to be, in this website's favourite mantra, 'any good'. We might sympathize with the feelings Selima is expressing and I'm not going to deny that it communicates but there's a lot of such 'poetry' about - all precious and right on and vitue signalling- and it's not what I'm getting out of Elizabeth Bishop.

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Happily, for once, I picked the winner of Young Musician of the Year and with more confidence than I can muster about horse racing at present. The result might in due course be seen to have foreshadowed a time in which the world's leading classical musicians are mostly called either Wang or Kanneh-Mason, which will suit me very well.