Du prophetscher Vogel du,
Blütensänger, o Coucou!
Bitten eines jungen Paares
In der schönsten Zeit des Jahres
Höre, liebster Vogel du;
Kann es hoffen, ruf ihm zu:
Dein Coucou, dein Coucou,
Immer mehr Coucou, Coucou.
Hörst du! ein verliebtes Paar
Sehnt sich herzlich zum Altar;
Und es ist bei seiner Jugend
Voller Treue, voller Tugend.
Ist die Stunde denn noch nicht voll?
Sag, wie lange es warten soll!
Horch! Coucou! Horch! Coucou!
Immer stille! Nichts hinzu!
Ist es doch nicht unsre Schuld!
Nur zwei Jahre noch Geduld!
Aber, wenn wir uns genommen,
Werden Pa-pa-papas kommen?
Wisse, daß du uns erfreust,
Wenn du viele prophezeist.
Eins! Coucou! Zwei! Coucou!
Immer weiter Coucou, Coucou, Cou.
Haben wir wohl recht gezählt,
Wenig am Halbdutzend fehlt.
Wenn wir gute Worte geben,
Sagst du wohl, wie lang wir leben?
Freilich, wir gestehen dirs,
Gern zum längsten trieben wirs.
Cou Coucou, Cou Coucou,
Cou, Cou, Cou, Cou, Cou, Cou, Cou, Cou, Cou.
Leben ist ein großes Fest,
Wenn sichs nicht berechnen läßt.
Sind wir nun zusammen blieben,
Bleibt denn auch das treue Lieben?
Könnte das zu Ende gehn,
Wär doch alles nicht mehr schön.
Cou Coucou, Cou Coucou :,:
Cou, Cou, Cou, Cou, Cou, Cou, Cou, Cou, Cou(Mit Grazie in infinitum)
Alone on stage, ennervating the audience mostly with the voice and a glance or a gesture has a singularly dramatic effect. This is what the Falmouth theatre-studies graduate, Jak Stringer achieved with her performance of “Walks with Wilkie” at the now well-established literary festival in Penzance in mid-June last year. The venue in the Acorn, once a Victorian chapel added an extra ambience to the subject, Wilkie Collins the eccentric friend of Charles Dickens and author of classics like “The Moonstone” and “The Woman in White”. Less remembered are his plays and less for his travel writings in Cornwall by means of which he initially gained fame. Curmudgeonly in some respects and daring in others, Jak Stringer has fell for him hook, line and sinker.
Jak Stringer, who has also received rave reviews from the NME as a musical impresario, shows herself to be an assured and energetic performer. In the year previous to this performance she retraced the footsteps of Wilkie Collins, bringing the stories from his somewhat forgotten classic, ”Rambles beyond Railways subtitled ‘Notes on Cornwall taken a-foot’, to life on the Acorn stage. This she does with verve and alacrity. Jak displays a range of emotions; at first sounding like a naive and almost, but not-quite, over-enthusiastic primary school teacher and rising to the eeriness of a Macbeth Witch into her recollection of an ancient lynching or parochial haunting. She poses Wilkie’s dilemmas from the 1850s-“Did the people of Looe consume their rats?”and “What made the women of Saltash clean the boots of strangers for sixpennyworth of beer?” and dauntingly examines the evidence for his finding a tavern filled with babies at the Lizard.
Jak Stringer
Creeping around the stage and sometimes not averse to a little appropriate melodrama, this performance was a continuous pleasure to watch-not least because Stringer varied the tempo and maintained a narrative pace throughout. She also used humour. She also showed her initial pleasure at receiving Collin’s bound volumes through the post. These she waived invitingly at the audience. In fact she used few props, none more effective than her woollen shawl sometimes drawn around her to convey poverty or want, at others spread to show joy at the reception which Collin’s work eventually received.
Neben dem Bach
Den roten Weiden nach
Haben in diesen Tagen
Gelbe Blumen viel
Ihre Goldaugen aufgeschlagen.
Und mir, der längst aus der Unschuld fiel,
Rührt sich Erinnerung im Grunde
An meines Lebens goldene Morgenstunde
Und sieht mich hell aus Blumenaugen an.
Ich wollte Blumen brechen gehn;
Nun laß ich sie alle stehn
Und gehe heim, ein alter Mann.(1915)
St Ives-based multi media artist Mary Fletcher has co-ordinated an interesting exhibition in The Redwing Gallery, Penzance on behalf of volunteers at the venue. This runs until the end of January and has already received positive reviews such as that by the well-known local poet and commentator, Frank Ruhrmund. Writing in the Cornishman at http://www.westbriton.co.uk/Volunteers-thanked-gallery-assistance/story-25852842-detail/story.html, he states about the exhibition and the co-ordinator herself, “A gallery renowned for its support and promotion of outsider art, it is not all that surprising that Mary Fletcher should feel at home there. It is only two years since, for the first time in her long career, that she has been able to enjoy a working space outside of her house, at White’s Old Workshops in Porthmeor Road, St Ives. Many will recall her solo show held last year in the St Ives Arts Club Arts which celebrated her first year in her new working space.”
Mary Fletcher at The Redwing
The relaxed atmosphere in The Redwing owes something to its bohemian ambience and partly due to its secluded location. The comfortable seating, bookstands and available refreshments all add to the effect. Here, Peter Fox and Ros Williams, co-directors of the Redwing Gallery, have created a space which is primarily concerned with outsider art. The current exhibition certainly adds to the general comfortable charm of the space. Mary Fletcher’s lyrical canvases remind me of an excellent and memorable exhibition by Litz Pisk who had worked at the Old Vic Theatre School (b.1909 in Vienna) many years ago at Newlyn Art Gallery. Interestingly, a student of Max Reinhardt, Pisk designed for Brecht and Weil’s first
Figures by Litz Pisk (not at The Redwing)
production. http://www.baacorsham.co.uk/mparkin/p65.htm and also her film work for Isodora is at http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0685496/ Mary Fletcher’s paintings too look a little like dancing musical characters against a colourful background grid. There are also a number of interesting sculptures and small figurines in the exhibition which are also worthy of attention.
Once again, Vaughan Warren, educated at the Royal Academy Schools (The RA Schools was founded in 1769, and remains independent to this day. This independence enables the Schools to offer the only three-year postgraduate programme in Europe.) has turned in a range of varied and intriguing work. Two of his pictures, I found particularly appealing, although it is worth remarking that all his paintings, like his self-portrait in the manner of Cezanne, benefit from his wide knowledge of art history. The first portrays a sleeping head surmounted delicately above a breast in a transport of lovely colours. This evocative duo puts one in mind of those lovely lines from W.H.Auden:-
“Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephermeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.”
The second painting,energetic and interesting, executed in black, white and greys shows a view above St Just and looks down literally upon, in the distance, the Great Western Hunt in progress. As Wilde once remarked, ” The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Uneatable”. The unspeakable in this context means appalling, horrendous, wretched and indeed may remind one of another poem of Auden’s in quite another way:-
From Musée des Beaux Arts (1940)
“Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy
life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”
Mr Vaughan Warrent Admission is free, and this show by the gallery’s volunteers can be seen in the Redwing Gallery, Wood Street, off Market Jew Street, Penzance, 11am to 4pm.
Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.
The condition of being in Exile, is one common element in the human condition. It is certainly an important factor in Irish culture as is well pointed out in this excerpt from The Guardian on Beckett and Joyce – http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/feb/28/ireland-exile-culture
Here Sean O’Hagan mentions,”This sense of spiritual as well as cultural displacement was evoked, too, by the poet Patrick Kavanagh, who walked the streets around Ealing Broadway in 1953 willing himself to remember his native Monaghan “until a world comes to life – morning, the silent bog”. In the second half of that same decade, an estimated half a million people left Ireland to begin their lives all over again, abroad.” There is spiritual exile, linguistic exile and the sense of personal exile when someone close dies or moves away, in an emotional or geographical sense.
George Klaar (1920-2009)
I have just been reading a deeply moving account of lost Austrian-Jewish culture in George Klaar’s Last Waltz in Vienna and was sorry to hear of his passing.http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/george-clare-memoirist-who-recalled-life-in-nazi-vienna-and-postwar-berlin-1726060.html .This threnody mentions his experiences not only in Vienna but also in Berlin, from where Klaar attempted his escape from the Nazis, initially to Ireland. A different approach and general introduction to exilliteratur (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exilliteratur) is to be found in Martin Maunthner’s book on German Writers in French Exile 1933-1940. Mauthner was born in Leningrad of Austrian parents. He worked in journalism and with the
Katharina Mann in Munich in 1905-she later converted to Lutheranism
European Commission in Brussels as a senior information officer. He also worked with Randolph Churchill on the biography of the latter’s father. In fact the book centres around a small port near Toulon. It makes much mention too of Aldous Huxley, Somerset Maugham,H.G.Wells, Muggeridge and Mosley. The French writers, Malraux and Gide are included in this account of the émigré community which provides an introduction to the intellectual drama and the tragic zeitgeist of this seven year period. The major figures are naturally Thomas, whose wife Katia came from a wealthy Jewish family of mathematicians, and his francophile brother Heinrich Mann, as well as Thomas’s son Klaus who engaged in a bitter battle of words at one stage with the Berlin based, Gottfried Benn- before the latter was to realise the full implication of Goebbel’s authoritarian drive from 1933 to achieve the synchronisation of the arts (Gleichschaltung) from his Ministry of Propaganda as Weimar collapse. Directed against Bolshevism it engendered militarism and focussed on anti-semitism taking in gypsies and homosexuals on the way and ending in the horrors of the Holocaust. This was all under the title of popular enlightenment. The account by Mauthner lacks the stylistic verve of George Klaar’s biographical account which affords an insight into the historical development of fascism upon Jewish life in Vienna.
Many Jews who were physically harassed and otherwise threatened by the Nazis and travelled to many locations and were exiled to Amsterdam, Stockholm, Zürich, London, Prague, Moscow as well as across the Atlantic to both North and South America. Martin Mauthner’s book seems to have three great strengths. It shows the wide variety of responses of individual refugees and their attempts to organise opposition to Hitler and the hampering difficulties other countries governments and other organisations presented. There is considerable detail about individuals like Feuchtwanger and Schwarzschild, famous at the time and now unfortunately neglected as well as journalists, publishers, cartoonists and illustrators. This book confines itself to writers, poets and playwrights but is particularly intriguing on the splits with the communists and within the United Front. The cruel trials under the auspices of Stalin proving a profound sticking point; also the different approaches in the Spanish Civil War.
Leopold Schwarzschild Editor of Das Neue Tagebuch
Just this morning I recieved an interesting posting concerning classical antiquity from http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.co.uk/ with a version of Ovid’s Tristia and the mortifying effects of having to leave his wife behind in charge of his posessions.
Illa dolōre āmēns tenebrīs nārrātur obortīs sēmjanimis mediā prōcubuisse domō,
utque resurrēxit foedātis pulvere turpī crīnibus et gelidā membra levāvit humō,
sē modo, dēsertōs modo complōrāsse Penātēs, nōmen et ēreptī saepe vocāsse virī,
nec gemuisse minus, quam sī nātaeve meumve vīdisset strūctōs corpus habēre, rogōs,
et voluisse morī, moriendō pōnere sēnsus, respectūque tamen nōn periisse meī.
Vīvat, et absentem, quoniam sīc fāta tulērunt, vīvat et auxiliō sublevet usque suō.
Translated by A.Z.Foreman as:-
I’m told she fainted from grief, mind plunged in dark, And fell half-dead right there in our house. When she came round, with disheveled dust-fouled hair, Staggering up from the cold hard ground, She wept for herself, for a house abandoned, screaming Her stolen man’s name time after time, Wailing as though she’d witnessed our daughter’s body Or mine, upon the high-stacked pyre; And longed for death, to kill the horror and hardship, Yet out of regard for me she lived. Long may she live! And in life give aid to her absent Love, whose exile the Fates have willed.
Du lernst ihn in einer Gesellschaft kennen.
Er plaudert. Er ist zu dir nett.
Er kann dir alle Tenniscracks nennen.
Er sieht gut aus. Ohne Fett.
Er tanzt ausgezeichnet. Du siehst ihn dir an…
Dann tritt zu euch beiden dein Mann.
Und du vergleichst sie in deinem Gemüte.
Dein Mann kommt nicht gut dabei weg.
Wie er schon dasteht – du liebe Güte!
Und hinten am Hals der Speck!
Und du denks bei dir so: “eigentlich …
Der da wäre ein Mann für mich ! ”
My provisional and tentative translation for which is:-
You get to know him around and about.
He chats and seems friendly.
He knows who are the latest tennis stars.
He looks great-no fat anywhere.
He dances beautifully.
Then both of you remember your husband!
…and when you compare them in your thoughts
Your husband doesn’t come out of it very well!
Goodness, how he has become already!
The back of his neck like a lump of bacon.
You think to yourself, ”Well actually,
There goes the chap for me…”
These, however, are only the first two verses and then the implication neatly reverses again, delightfully….
I came across Bubnova on LiveJournal, and was then happily directed onto sundry museum sites and the Wikipedia. Varvara Bubnova was born in 1886 and died in 1983, and was one of a small set of Russian emigre artists that headed not west, but east – to Japan. She spent 35 years in that country, till 1958. A puppet to politics, she found herself declared an undesirable alien in Japan in 1936, while during the war years, she was stripped of her Soviet citizenship for ‘allying with the enemy’. Evidently her citizenship was restored to her, because she was allowed to return to the USSR, spending time in Sukhumi, before settling in St Petersburg, where she spent the last years of her life.
Bubnova was one of the artists who participated in the famed Donkey’s Tail and Jack of Diamonds exhibitions in 1913, along with the likes of Tatlin, Malevich, Goncharova, Rozanova…
Thirty paintings by Claude Monet are part of a new exhibition investigating his influence on Austrian artists.
Vienna’s famous Belvedere (www.belvedere.at) set up the exhibit called “Im Lichte Monets. Österreichische Künstler und das Werk des großen Impressionisten” (Looking at Monet. The Great Impressionist and His Influence on Austrian Art) in its Orangerie (Lower Belvedere).
More than 40 works of art by renowned Austrians are on display to show the immense impact Monet’s oeuvre had on their creations. Several Attersee lake scenes as well as various garden depictions and coastline impressions demonstrate the remarkable achievements of Gustav Klimt, Emil Jakob Schindler and many others. While most of Monet’s works are rather large paintings, Schindler’s small creations present a welcome contrast. Surprising additions are paintings by Herbert Boeckl and Max Weiler – artists who were influential in the middle of the 20th century.
Kerry Harding’s soft and evocative canvases take the natural world around the North
Kerry Harding at work in her studio at Krowji
Coast with it’s trees, hedges and seasonal variations as a starting point. Her website may be found at http://www.kerryharding.co.uk/. Kerry was very interesting on the topic of the famous Dresden artist, Gerhard Richter https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/ mentioning his process, his photographic work and his continuous experimentation using a wide variety of methods and sometimes controversial subject matter. She also mentioned his ability to work on different projects simultaneously. She worked very hard to create a welcoming atmosphere in her space- as she says on Twitter, “studio almost ready, tinsel and fairy lights then its done.” A lovely range of paintings that I found so interesting that I came back to browse them for a second time. It was also informative to hear how some canvases were composed of many underpaintings-up to ten or more layers.
Kathryn Stevens, http://kathrynstevens.co.uk/, clearly rejoices in the freedom of working on a large scale. The billowing colours of her canvases express the joy of painting in bright colours. Some of them have a feathery and eloquent quality that puts one in mind of Georgia O’Keeffe (or perhaps Otto Gottlieb) but here we have an abstract expressionism with an upbeat and optimistic feel. She told me how she works freely, sometimes with music and chatted with the same exuberance that her work conveys. I was particularly taken by a study in
Kathryn Stevens’s studio
crimson, scarlet and white. She hails from St Ives and her paintings exhibit the wondrous light for which the town has become famous.
In short there was much to add cheer on a cold Sunday. It was good to see the Siobhan Purdy’s work again- which adorns the wall opposite as I write, the Mexican and Maya themed prints in the Apex space and to talk again with Naomi Singer whose glass works continue to thrive. Interesting too were the textile pieces by Zoe Wright.
Esther Connon -Work in progress
Before returning to the Melting Pot once again, I went into see the illustration work of Esther Connon and was much taken by her story of TheWhite Butterfly which can be seen on http://www.estherconnon.co.uk/stories.html?s=5. I wondered if it would be possible to animate some of this according to the methods of http://thepapercinema.com/ and this fascinating method may be seen both on videos on the papercinema site and on the community project in St Ives filmed earlier this year by my friend Alban. Altogether with the new building project at Krowji already under-way, great developments can be expected from this artistic phoenix rising from the ashes of the Grammar School at Redruth.
penwithlit 