Cielo arriba - a poem by Raquel Lanseros

As a way to unwind during my still ongoing self-isolation, I have been translating works by Spanish poet Raquel Lanseros into my native Norwegian. These translations are primarily language exercises and intellectual games on my part rather than professional renditions. Even so, they are immensely satisfying, and a reminder to myself about the calming and invigorating powers of poetry, and I will continue to share my translations in future blogposts. I remain very grateful to Raquel Lanseros herself for allowing me to publish these and to share them with the world. 

This time I have chosen "Cielo arriba", a poem that can be found in its original language here. As usual, an English rendition of my translation will be found at the end, but note that this is meant to convey the choices I've made in the translation into Norwegian, rather than being a translation into English.



Himmelen over

(Cielo arriba; Raquel Lanseros)       

Og kor frydfullt, og med slik ein iver
støyter ein seg mot verda
og allereie før ein forstår det elskar ein henne.

Og slik ein urgamal fascinasjon
over å oppdage den heimlege leira
og finne den hjå froskane i dammen
som kvekkar dei uforanderlege sanningane,
og i den søte raven i søtsitronen
som i sin søtleik etterliknar same draumen. 

I leitinga etter det store, som ein går ut frå
inneheld det vesle, gjev ein seg deretter i kast med
det som lukka krev, og råsa
held ikkje opp med å freiste vandraren.       

Og den gjer seg om til tid, og landskapa
opnar seg opp og dirrar i under,       
og ansikta marsjerer forbi og striden
fornyar sin tusenårige silhuett,
og verdshjulet vender seg og vender seg
og bytter ut styrken med trøyttleik,
men hugtakinga er utan ende
og ein kjenner seg i live fordi ein veit
at alt, for alltid, er i fyrstegrøden.     

Og ein legg seg ned ved kanten av lagnaden
for å drikke av skuggen. Då høyrer ein
kvekkinga frå froskane i dammen.

Den opphavlege sanninga som alltid kjem attende
til den som allereie skjønar kva som er sant.



Heaven above

And how joyfully, and with what eagerness
one throws oneself against the world
and already before one understands it, one loves it.

And such a primordial fascination
at discovering the native clay
among the frogs in the pond 
who croak the immutable truths, 
and in the sweet amber in the citron 
who in its sweetness imitates that same dream.

In the search for the great, which one presumes
contains the small, one gives oneself over to
what fortune demands, and the path
does not desist from tempting the wanderer.

And it turns itself into time, and the landscapes
unfold and stirs in wonderment, 
and the faces march by and the struggle
renews its millennial silhouette, 
and the world-wheel turns itself and turns itself
and substitutes strength with tiredness,
but the enchantment is without end 
and one feels alive because one knows
that everything, forever, is in its firstfruits. 

And one lays oneself down by the edge of fate 
to drink of the shadow. Then one hears 
the croaking from the frogs in the pond.  

The first truth that always comes again
to those who understand already what is true.

On the popularity of Bede

Venerable the Bede may have been, but not clairvoyant
- Endeavour Morse, Endeavour S02E01


Today is the feast-day of Bede (d.735), a monk at the monastery of Jarrow in Northumbria (now on the coast of Durham County) who was canonised in 1899. In the English-speaking world, Bede is currently most famous as a historian, in particular for his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, the ecclesiastical history of the English people. Among later historians in medieval England, Bede was a model to be emulated in the writing of chronicles, and William of Malmesbury (d.1143) praised Bede's work in one of his own chronicles, Gesta Regum Anglorum, the deeds of the kings of the English. Indeed, William claimed to be the first historian since the Venerable Bede to have undertaken a historiographical project on such a scale.

Historia Ecclesiastica provides us with a valuable, if questionable source to Britain's history before 735, and the accuracy of several of Bede's claims have come under close scrutiny in modern historical research. Once, at a conference in Oxford, I was sitting in a pub together with a group of mostly junior scholars, where David Rollason, one of the most established scholars of early medieval Northern England, told about how he had once written a paper on Bede's Historia, tentatively titled "Would you buy a car from this man?". Sadly, the paper was never published.

 In the Middle Ages, however, Bede's reputation as a historian was greatest within England. In the rest of Latin Christendom, Bede's significant and widespread popularity rested predominantly on his theological works, which circulated widely from a relatively early point. A good example of this disparity in popularity between his historical and his theological work can be found in Legenda Aurea, the collection of saints' legends written in the 1260s by Jacobus de Voragine. Here, Jacobus engages several times with the history of the British Isles, such as when recounting Saint Germanus of Auxerre's journey to Britain. Germanus' sojourn to Britain is also mentioned by Bede, and it is possible that Bede serves as the ultimate source for Jacobus' account, but there is no reference to this in Legenda Aurea. This is notable, because in several other chapters of Legenda Aurea, Jacobus mentions Bede as an authority for various claims, but only for Bede's theology, and never for his historical writing. This might serve as a good measurement of Bede's importance outside of England.

The popularity and importance of Bede's theological works can also be illustrated in a different way. Just as Jacobus de Voragine had employed Bede as a theological authority in Legenda Aurea, Bede's scriptural commentaries were a part of that corpus of established scriptural knowledge that provided the foundation for several commentators in the new flourishing of theology that came about in the post-Carolingian period. To exemplify this, we have a fragment from a German breviary which is now kept in the special collections at the University Library of Southern Denmark.

Lectio from the office for the celebration of the dedication of a church

RARA Musik M 4, fragment XI, Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek

The fragment contains readings and chants for the feast of the dedication of a church. The exact date of this feast naturally varied from institution to institution, but the repertoire of liturgical material was common to all of Latin Christendom. This was a feast in which the new church was typologically connected to the temple of Solomon, the model for all Christian churches according to Christian exegesis. Another typological connection was also made to the site of Bethel where Jacob wrestled with God's angel, about which I have written more here.

In order to emphasise the connection between the new church and the old temple, theological authorities were invoked in the readings for the feast of the dedication. In the fragment above, we see one of the lessons read aloud during Matins, and this text provides a good insight into Bede's place among theological authorities. 

The lesson itself, as it stands in the fragment, is of unknown provenance. It is a collection of snippets and quotations from older works, where each individual part can be identified, while the current constellation of materials might have been assembled at any point and at any place. The snippets in question all refer to the temple of Solomon, and the surviving Latin text reads as follows (I have not yet had time to translate it):  


[superimpositi]s sibi inuicem ordinibus lapidum [a]mbulando ac proficiendo de uir[t]ute in uirtutem. Cepit salemon [e]dificare domum domini in jerusalem in [m]onte moria. Edificat in monte domus domini in uisione quia dilatata per orbem ecclesia in una eademque fidei et ueritatis catho[l]ice societate consitit. Namque in scissura mentium deus non est sed factus est in pace locus eius ac habitacio eius in syon. Edificatur in monte in ipso uidelicet sal[u]atore nostro. Ipse est enim mons montium qui de terra quidaem per originem assumpte carnis ortus est sed omnium terrigenarum potentiam ac sanctitatem singularis culmine dignitatis transcendit. In quo nimirum monte ciuitas siue domus domini constructa est quia si non in illo radicem frigat spes et fides nostra nulla est tu au[tem]


Despite being an assemblage of parts, this is coherent, and its coherence is a testament to the skillful compiling of the unknown liturgist who executed this passage. The compilation points to the importance Bede in two ways. First of all, by the fact that this compilation includes material from his treatise on the temple of Solomon, De templo salomonis. Secondly, by the fact that Bede is woven into the text twice (and perhaps even more, given that we have lost the opening of the lesson). 

The lesson comprises four snippets of texts: First, an extract from Bede; second, an extract from 2 Chronicles 3:1 (to which Bede's text presumably refers); third, a passage whose author is as yet undetermined, but who appears to be either Johannes Cassianus, Eucherius, or Hrabanus Maurus; fourth, another extract from Bede's De templo salomonis. In short, Bede appears to bookend the entire passage - although since the opening is lost we cannot make any certain judgement about this. 

What we see here is a good example of Bede's importance and popularity as a theological authority in the intellectual milieu of Latin Christendom. While his historiographical enterprise might have been appreciated more notably in medieval England, his theology established him as one of the universal theologians among Latin Christians throughout the Middle Ages.

Bendita alegría - a poem by Raquel Lanseros, in translation

A few days ago, I posted a translation into Norwegian of a poem by the Spanish poem Raquel Lanseros, whose works have been a source of much delight and happiness in the ongoing self-isolation. In addition to providing a range of beautiful mental images conjured up by her mastery of words, these poems also serve as an opportunity for me to improve my Spanish, which I do in part by translating some of them into my own language.

Raquel Lanseros herself has very graciously permitted me to publish these translations, their roughness and uneven quality notwithstanding.

This time, I have published the poem "Bendita alegría", the original text of which can be found on this website. An English translation of this poem can be found here.

Following my own translation into Norwegian, I will provide a rendition into English - not of the original poem, but of my translation so that it will be possible to see the choices I have made to adjust the original text to a very different language.




Velsigna glede          

(Bendita alegria)  

Dei forvekslar deg med andre, glede:
naivitet, enkelheit,
forenkling,
uskuld.
Dei undervurderer deg gjennom diminutivar
du erstatning for lukka,
du euforien si stakkars syster

Dei verkar for å ha gløymt den tilfrosne rutinen
når det innstendige vert blodfattig
og frykta fangar som ein klippevegg

Eg ber deg: plukk ikkje opp den kasta hansken,
gløym utfordringa som kjem frå vankunne.
Lat oss ikkje verte fortapte på eitt eller anna hav,
utan ditt ljos, glede,
det som kjem frå dine romslege hender,
det som forvandlar sjela til ein plass å bu.

Sjå vekk frå skyttargravene si mumling,
frå opportunistane sin tomme retorikk.
Du er den som utskil den reinaste fridomen,
som er anden sin spontane orgasme.

Velgjerande glede,
den reine av smak,
den velviljuge,
du som lever og råder i den reine margen,
no – og i gryinga av kvar einaste time –
ver hjå oss. 




Blessed joy

They confuse you with others, joy: 
naivete, simpleness, simplicity,
innocence.
They underestimate you through diminutives
you substitute for happiness, 
you poor sister of euphoria.

They appear to have forgotten the frozen routine
when the insisting becomes blood-drained
and fear catches you like the face of a cliff.

I beg you: do not pick up the thrown gauntlet,
forget the challenge posed by ignorance.
Let us not be lost on some sea or another
without your light, joy, 
that which comes from your spacious hands,
that which transforms the soul to an inhabitable space.

Look away from the mumbling of the trenches, 
from the empty rhetoric of the opportunists.
You are the one that exudes the purest freedom,
which is the spontaneous orgasm of the spirit.

Well-met joy,
the pure of taste,
the well-willing,
you who lives and reigns in the pure marrow,
now - and in the dawning of each single hour -
stay with us.

The Ascension in Bellinge

Today is the feast of the Ascension, which commemorates Christ's departure from the disciples after the Resurrection. It was an important feast in the cycle of liturgical celebrations known as the temporale, i.e. the movable feasts that celebrated events in the life of Christ. The Ascension is attested to in the gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles, but with varying details. Moreover, additional details in the narrative accrued in the centuries following the time of Christ, as can be seen in the rendition of the Ascension from Bellinge Church on Fyn in Denmark. 

Bellinge Church as it stands today is mostly a late-medieval structure, although elements of the Romanesque style points to an older structure. In 1496, the interior of the church was decorated with scenes from the Bible, as well as some saint stores (most notably the legend of Saint George, which will hopefully be the subject of a future blogpost). These wall-paintings were executed by Ebbe Olesen and Simen Petersen, two Danish painters, and it is thanks to an inscription incorporated into the wall-painting programme that we know it was finished in 1496.

The Ascension is depicted on the second of the three vaults of the nave, and is visible when standing with your back against the choir. The scene depicts Christ being taken up into a cloud, as recounted in the gospels and in Acts, with only the lower parts of the kirtle and his bare feet showing. The Virgin Mary and the disciples surround the place from which he was taken up.

As with several episodes from the Bible, further details were added to the Ascension narrative as Christianity developed and spread. One such detail came into place relatively early, namely that when Christ ascended into Heaven, his feet left an imprint on the stone on which he had stood. This belief led to the building of a chapel on this site at a relatively early date, and it became part of the story that was told to the new converts to Christianity. The detail of Christ's footprints can be seen quite prominently in the heavily-restored wall-paintings of Bellinge, as two black sole marks are shown beneath Christ's rising feet. It is yet another example of how apocryphal details that are not mentioned in the Bible came to be accepted as historical truth, and thus shaped the way the narratives of Scripture were rendered in text and image.

Invocación - a poem by Raquel Lanseros, in translation

I became an academic in part because I find a great pleasure in reading being a key element of my work. Yet there are times in the academic year when reading moves stodgily, and it is difficult to get a sense of any progress. This is particularly the case when there are exams to grade, or, as is currently the case, when the students I am supervising are finishing their dissertations and require, and also deserve, repeated check-ins and feedback on drafts in various stages of incompleteness. In such periods, I usually turn to poetry to keep my reading going, and one of the poets I have been reading lately is Raquel Lanseros, an exceptionally gifted contemporary Spanish poet, who has been publishing recordings of selected poems on her Twitter feed, which has been a great source of comfort.

Reading Spanish poetry is a pleasure because of the poetic potential embedded in the language itself, it is a tongue capable of saying many beautiful things, and saying many things beautifully. As I'm trying to improve my own Spanish, this poetry also helps me to dive deeper into the language, it helps challenging my understanding of the creativity of the language, and it broadens my vocabulary. To amplify these aspects of reading, I have also spent part of the solitary hours of the pandemic-imposed self-isolation trying to translate some of the poems of Raquel Lanseros into my native Norwegian - an excercise that also helps to strengthen my sense of my own language as well.

While I'm still learning Spanish, and while I'm not sufficiently well-versed (pun intended) to translate Spanish poetry as a professional, I have nonetheless decided to put some of my translations on this blog, both to expose more people to her wonderful texts and also to provide a Norwegian rendition of these poems.

The first poem I present is my translation of Invocación [Invocation], which was the first poem by Raquel Lanseros that I heard and read. The poem can be read in its entirety on this website. An English translation is found here. I give you my Norwegian translation, followed by an English-language rendition of that translation, so as to give non-Norwegian speakers a chance to both get the gist of the poem and evaluate the accuracy of my translation, as well as seeing the choices I have made in trying to walk that thin line between a literal translation and a faithful rendition of the content.

I am very grateful to Raquel Lanseros for allowing me to put this translation on my blog.



Påkalling

Av Raquel Lanseros


At den aldri meir må vekse inni meg,
denne tilsynelatande roa som dei kallar "skepsis".

Eg ville ha flykta frå ettersmaken,
frå kynismen
i dei innskrumpa menneska sin nøytralitet.

Eg vil alltid tru på livet,
eg vil alltid tru
på tusen uendelege mogelegheiter.

Måtte sirenesongen alltid lokke meg,
måtte sjela mi alltid ha ein dose godtru.

Gje at kroppen min aldri dannar
ein tjukkhud si ytre, urørleg,
tilfrosen.

Eg gret heller framleis
for umogelege draumar,
for forboden kjærleik,
for småjenta sine sønderknuste fantasiar.

Eg vil flykte frå den samansnurpa realismen.

Lat leppene mine samle på songar,
mange, og høglydte, og med mange notar,
for der vil kome tider av tagnad.




That it may never again grow inside of me,
this apparent calm they call "skepticism".

I would have fled from the aftertaste,
from the cynicism
of the neutrality of the shrivelled men.

I will always have faith in life,
I will always have faith
in a thousand endless possibilities.

May the siren song always enchant me,
may my soul always have a portion of good faith.

O that my body never forms
the exterior of a pachyderm, immobile,
frozen stiff.

I'd rather weep
for impossible dreams,
for forbidden love,
for the little girl's broken fantasies.

I wish to flee from the realism strung too tightly together.

Let my lips gather songs,
many, and loud, and with many chords,
for times of quietness will come.

Grains of sand - or, the disproportionate amount of time it takes to answer a simple question

It is a familiar problem: You want to make a minor statement in an article, and you know that you have fairly good reasons to make this statement, and you also know that whether or not that statement can be verified is of very little significance to the overall point of the text you are writing. You could leave it at that. You could present the statement as a skein in a greater tapestry and leave it for some future reader to be sufficiently plagued by doubts that they will undertake that deep dive into the source material that you are trying to avoid. You could do that - but there is this nagging doubt in the back of your head, the dissatisfaction of leaving a loose end, the discomfort of knowing that you are presenting something that isn't as thoroughly checked as it could be.

I have experienced this mental trajectory on numerous occasions. It happened particularly often when I was writing my MA dissertation, and then it owed a lot to my general lack of experience as a researcher - I had not learned to leave some questions aside, I had not quite learned to prioritise, to resist the temptation of something that my inexperience and romanticism believed might open up an important point that could transmute my work into something great and memorable. Experience has taught me to deal with these temptations in a better way, and I have learned to identify more quickly which questions will not be worth the trouble. Yet even so, sometimes I am unable to resist.

The most recent example happened last night. For the past few days I have been preparing a presentation I will give at a forum for medievalists at Linnaeus University, where I work. This is an opportunity for me to test a new research topic and to get feedback on something I hope to publish in one form or another. And it is precisely because I am in this early stage of my research that it has been so very difficult to avoid falling down the sundry rabbit holes along the way. 

The topic in question is the cult of Saint Thomas of Canterbury - or Thomas Becket if you prefer - in medieval Denmark. This is a topic that has received some attention by previous researchers, but usually in a peripheral way. In order to gather as much material as possible, I have been researching the liturgy of Saint Thomas as it survives in a handful of printed Danish breviaries, and this material has proved immensely fruitful.

I will not go into details about my findings on this topic here, mostly because my thoughts are still a bit too scattered and my ideas are still too poorly formulated. Suffice it to say that it made sense to compare the liturgy of Saint Thomas with that of Saint Alban, the protomartyr of England. They are both English saints, and they both appear to have had a significant cult in the bishopric of Odense, where one of the breviaries was printed. Unfortunately, the liturgy of Saint Alban has not yet been edited, at least to my knowledge, at the only way for me to properly compare the two saints was to jump straight into the rabbit hole, i.e. to transcribe the office of Saint Alban as it is transmitted in the first printed version of Breviarium Othoniense, the Odense breviary, from c.1482.

First nocturne of the office for Saint Alban

Breviarium Othoniense 1482, f.369f 

(København, Kongelige Bibliotek LN 29)

It began very tentatively: A quick look at the opening of the office to scan for similarities or any noteworthy details that might save me the trouble of transcribing all of the office, but this approach ended up drawing me in all the more strongly. Because there was, in the first column, some details that strengthened and partly confirmed my suspicions, and I decided to see where this would lead me. I gave in and started transcribing. Initially, I thought that I could just do a little bit before bedtime, go to sleep, and then dabble with the transcription on and off throughout the workday. But once you have embarked on a trail like this one, it is very difficult to get out of it, and you end up sifting grains of sand to find that one grain of information that you can actually make use of. And so it continues, for a long, long time.

In the end, I kept transcribing for several hours until I finally managed to get some sleep, and I continued once I had woken up. The main result is that I now have a rough transcription of the liturgy for the feast of Saint Alban, and this is in and of itself a very useful outcome, as a transcription will make it possible for me to search the text and easily compare with other materials. As for the question that had lured me into this task, a question that was of such a kind that it could only engender new questions rather than any firm answers, I managed to find enough to justify the endeavour, but only because my suspicion was shown to have been reasonable.

It remains to be seen what I can do with the information I have gathered through the transcription of Saint Alban's office, beyond the vague confirmation that I was right to be doubtful. Perhaps I will not find much use for this information in the end. Or perhaps the only significant outcome will be that by going down that rabbit hole I have rid myself of the nagging sensation that I ought to pursue this query. In academic terms, this is not little.

Martyrdom of Saint Alban

BL MS Royal 2 B VI, f. 10v, St Alban's Psalter, 1240-60

Courtesy of British Library