On Humanity’s Moats and Bridges: Douglas Glover’s latest epigram @ Global Brief

Mar 092013
 

Global Brief logo

Two principles rule in human affairs: identity and difference. We yearn for home, comfort and familiarity (self, family, tribe, city, country, language, culture), and yet we are always engaging with difference (through simple curiosity – one of the most endearing human traits – or need, or love, which is the aesthetic attraction). This sets up a paradoxical oscillation between paranoia (excessive fear of pollution coming from outside) and schizophrenia (an inability to distinguish self from other; all messages are the same).

Moats and bridges are perhaps unhappy metaphors for thinking about inter-state relations –except that, of course, that is the way in which we tend to think of them. We are always digging moats, and simultaneously building bridges to get over them. This begs the question: why dig the moat in the first place?

— read the rest @ On Humanity’s Moats and Bridges : Global Brief.

DG goes “viral” @ Winnipeg Free Press

Mar 092013
 

I am quite sure that “went viral” doesn’t fit my present circumstances — a bit hyperbolic, I’d say. But it’s always nice to have someone in the press using the phrase next to one’s name. The Winnipeg Free Press, BTW, is a venerable Canadian journalistic institution.

dg

A Canadian author’s book on writing went viral on social media recently, leading to thousands of would-be fiction writers searching their manuscripts for “Copula Spiders.”

Douglas Glover’s book Attack of the Copula Spiders (Biblioasis) coins the term to refer to the multi-appendaged mess created by circling and linking all of the variations of the verb “to be” in a paragraph. (Copula is a term for the link between subject and predicate of a verb.) Excessive use of sentence constructions like “he was happy” or “the building was unassuming” lead to “flaccid and uninteresting prose,” he writes.

Joe Ponepinto, book review editor of the Los Angeles Review, brought Glover’s ideas to the literary world in a much-circulated blog post subtitled “Why I’ll never write (or read) the same way again.”

via Cameron Dueck’s arts column – Winnipeg Free Press.

Old Shep: The NC Sheepdog Award for Curatorial Excellence

Mar 082013
 

dog

RWGray Victoria

I’ve left this too long. Mea culpa. My bad. Little noticed in the high-speed fizz of daily life at NC, Senior Editor R. W. Gray has been doing some exceptional curatorial and development work. It’s time to pay attention, say what is what, give credit where it is due. Rob came onto the masthead to curate the NC at the Movies section of the magazine, way back in the misty time before time (I have now forgotten when, almost two years ago, I think). But I also told him he could think of his position on the masthead as a kind of fiefdom; he could be a Lord of the Marches and develop his area of the magazine as he saw fit.

He managed the movie part just fine, but he also started cultivating a doughty band of younger writers and movie critics. So we ended up with fine movie pieces introduced by Jon Dewar, Megan Mackay, Sophie Lavoie and Jared Carney. There was “sheepdogging” involved (our word for herding writers through the gates to publication): consultation, editing, rewrites. It’s easier and faster to curate the piece yourself, let me tell you. But that’s not the point. As Rob realized quite quickly, NC is meant to be inclusive and an access point for new writers, people with energy and ambition. We don’t take submissions; this is the way we engage.

A few months ago Rob launched himself into an even more arduous and ambitious project. He wanted to showcase poets he had noticed, often poets with a heterodox approach to putting words on the page. But he also wanted to make this project inclusive in other ways. He decided to match the poets up with outside critics, younger academics in most cases. More work for the poor man. Sheepdogging poets AND critics. We had middle of night despairing email interchanges. Luckily, most of you will never know the agonies of getting poetry layouts right on WordPress. Rob learned the hard way. I fear it burned him out. He is a mere shell of the man he once was. But look at what the magazine got in return. Nicole Markotić’s at risk or at least? Poems  — With an Afterword on her Poetics by Tammy Armstrong; Shane Rhodes’s Stray Dog Poetics — With an Afterword by Rob Ross; and in this month’s issue, Jennica Harper’s amazing The Sally Draper Poems: A Poem Cycle | Introduced by Tammy Armstrong. These are gorgeous, wonderful productions and, in a couple of cases, incredibly difficult to put into print. R. W. Gray’s name is not on any of them, though he was everywhere in the background, sheepdogging (or curating).

This is very informal, my way of letting you all know the work Rob has been doing behind the scenes. Not everyone “gets” the magazine the way he does; and, of those, very few are so happy to put others forward and stay out of the limelight.

Good Old Shep.

Time to break out the company Talisker.

dg

2 a.m., student packets done, the mind turns to higher things

Mar 072013
 

Time for a little merengue!

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-PckWpsdYs]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPwIsTanhzs&feature=related]

Longtime readers of the NC Blog will recognize these videos (late at night, merengue phantoms haunt me). I am still looking for a suitable Walter Benjamin or Viktor Shklovsky quote to fit in here. Surely, Benjamin had a theory about merengue and modernity. I seem to recall a passage in The Arcades Project —

dg

The Case of the Copula Overdose, or, Why I’ll Never Write (or Read) the Same Way Again — Joe Ponepinto @ The Saturday Morning Post

Mar 022013
 

Douglas Glover changing the world one reader at a time…

dg

I reviewed a book a while back that has stayed with me for many months and has affected the way I write and read, and it’s opened my eyes to a weakness in much creative writing, even in published books. Douglas Glover’s Attack of the Copula Spiders (Biblioasis, 2012) criticizes many aspects of fiction, but saves its most withering scorn for the rampant and indiscriminate use of copulas.

via The Case of the Copula Overdose, or, Why I’ll Never Write (or Read) the Same Way Again | The Saturday Morning Post.

Out & Back, DG’s Trip to Culebra, February 2013

Mar 012013
 

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DG working on his new book at Brava Beach, Culebra. Beach attire includes $6 bathing suit purchased at Zeller’s in Simcoe, Ontario, circa 2003. Note snorkel gear, coconuts, palm frond lean-to. On this trip, dg was introduced to three major life-changing innovations: mojitos, snorkeling & mojitos.

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Brava Beach

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Brava Beach

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Resaca Beach

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Susie’s Restaurant with outside bar at far left. Next to the bar is the driveway to a gas station behind the restaurant. Then the canal. The driveway is usually crowded with cars till 6pm. At 6pm the gas station closes and the bar opens.

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Feral cat, one of many that hang out in front of Susie’s Restaurant. There were cats everywhere, cats and feral chickens. Deep in the woods there were chickens.

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 Five cats outside of Susie’s. See the eyes.

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Rooster under the table at Zaco’s Tacos where dg drank mojitos in the afternoon.

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Milka’s, one of the island grocery stores, also liquor store and valuable source of Häagen Dazs ice cream after mojitos at Dinghy Dock.

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A sign of the times.

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The old San Idelfonso graveyard, still in use. San Ildefonso was the original island village, but the American Navy moved all the people out to Dewey when the island became a Naval training station.

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Canal that runs from one side of the island to the other. This is looking east toward the ferry dock and the town square.

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The canal photo above was taken from the bridge. See the dinghies docked just left of centre at the bottom? That’s a restaurant called Dinghy Dock. Dinner starts at 6pm. You eat right next to the water and huge tarpon gather under floodlights in case someone throws them food. At 7pm Bulldog bats started swooping over the water, fishing with their feet. Amazing to watch. Good place to sit and drink mojitos before wandering home to bed.

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Dinghy Dock Restaurant

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El Eden Restaurant.

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Feral cats at the food kiosks at Flamenco Beach. There is a sign at the entrance to the beach that reads NO PETS. But there are chickens and cats all over the place.

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Great breakfast and lunch. The owner has a friendly dog, too. One morning when dg was missing his dog, the restaurant dog came and lay down on his foot.

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Vibra Verde dog, a friend to authors and a shrewd manuscript critic.

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A vicious wild cat, ready to pounce and viciously maul something, viciously.

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Another extremely vicious cat. This one rubbed up against dg’s legs and dg briefly thought about bringing it home in his luggage.

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Road side horses. Moderately vicious.

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Dewey from Resaca Mountain.

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Tamarindo Beach

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Land crab

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Heron

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Egret

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DG, thinking about mojitos, Resaca Beach. Wearing his ultra-cool Lake George Arts Project Bands ‘n Beans t-shirt. Shorts by Ralph Lauren (purchased economically at the Lake George outlet store). Watch, a Casio Illuminator.  Note the vast crowds on this extremely crowded beach.

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Our tracks. Resaca Beach. This place should be avoided because of the crowds.

—Photos by dg and mf

 

David Winters on Heywood Broun’s Inner Tube @ Writers No One Reads

Feb 272013
 

Broun’s next text, Inner Tube (Knopf, 1985), was acquired by legendary editor Gordon Lish, whose stylistic influence can be felt throughout Broun’s subsequent work. By now Broun had become—a little like Barry Hannah, another author from Lish’s stable—a writer less of conventional “sentences” than of freewheeling, aphoristic riffs. But beyond this, Inner Tube displays a brilliant strain of misanthropy that is all Broun’s own. The book begins with the narrator’s mother committing suicide by putting her head through a TV screen. Compelled to escape this constitutive trauma (plus his incestuous lust for his sister), he flees into an increasingly fractured, ersatz social world. Along the way, man is revealed as merely

an over-evolved creature whose most dangerous enemies come from within… Imagine the first useless panic, the first nightmare, the first crushing turn of anomie. Ten thousand generations later, all we can do is palliate. Misery abhors a vacuum, and history is a list of sedatives.

Eventually Broun’s narrator escapes from this failed civilization, leaving to live alone in the desert. Inner Tube’s plot provides no palliation; instead it presents a pessimistic awareness that “we are animals. All the consoling fabrications must be waived.”

Read the rest of the essay at Writers No One Reads • [The following is a submission from David Winters,….

Putting Pressure on the Sentences: Sam Lipsyte @ Paris Review

Feb 272013
 

I write what I want. I try to write what I’d like to read. I think about not wasting a reader’s time, my own included. As to the what and the how, I’m certainly not the first to use those terms. I guess others would call it content and style, and so forth. Of course, they can never be untangled from each other. They are each other. My point, and it’s an obvious one, I think, to many writers and readers, is that the story is nothing if you are not invested in every line of its telling. I’m talking about that charged feeling, the startling stuff, the poetry, the humor, the hurt, and getting your effects through language as well as through the situation. Your desired effect might be something percussive, or languorous, or plain-spoken, or richly complex, but they all require artifice, manipulation, in order for their power to compel us and to be sustained, undeniable. And here’s the crucial thing: By not thinking of your sentences as mere delivery trucks for the information of your story, by putting pressure on them, you often end up with a much more profound “what” than you could have dreamed up beforehand. As I said, this is really obvious. But it took me a long time and the help of teachers to figure it out.

via Paris Review – Pressing Flesh with Sam Lipsyte, Giancarlo DiTrapano.

The art of “Breakfast at Midnight” author Louis Armand

Feb 262013
 

Louis Armand’s acid noir tale Breakfast at Midnight is a real delight, the kind of book that both embraces and breathes life into the standard tropes associated with the hard-boiled genre. In an upcoming review (forthcoming from Rain Taxi), I describe the novel as “a pinball fever dream, sopping with sweat, booze, and sex, that bathes its confines in an unsettling atmosphere of grime.”

Armand is not only a writer, but also a photographer and painter of some wonderful abstract canvases. Here below are two examples of his work. His website contains multiple galleries, all certainly worth a view.

untitled-red-1999-1

merz-is-dead-2002

(via atelierlouisarmand)

—Benjamin Woodard

Exhuming Neruda

Feb 252013
 

 

In March, the  Chilean government plans to exhume the remains of Pablo Neruda.  Neruda died  just days after a violent, U.S.-backed coup in 1973 ousted President Salvador Allende.  The official cause of Neruda’s death was listed as complications from prostate cancer. But rumors have swirled for years. Many people close to Neruda have claimed that the poet was poisoned by forces loyal to the brutal dictator, Augusto Pinochet.

Neruda’s exhumation and subsequent testing may not provide a final answer, but the investigation will certainly be interesting to watch over the next few months.

(Via Time Magazine’s News Feed.)

–Richard Farrell

 

Dispatches from the Front Lines: Jason Lucarelli at Gordon Lish Event in New York

Feb 242013
 

Sam Lipsyte & Gordon Lish at Columbia University, February 21. Photo by Jason Lucarelli

Mr. Snorkel here, writing from Culebra PR. I got in last night (Casa Resaca — resaca means undertow), with the surf still ringing in my ears, and found this email waiting for me. It’s from Jason Lucarelli, the same who wrote the wonderful essay on Lish and literary compositon in the current issue of NC. I thought it best to just give you the uncut report.

dg

Doug,

Sorry for the half-crazy phone message I left you. I had just found out about Gordon Lish speaking at Columbia on the 21st and I figured I would try to see if I could convince you to go.
A few choice quotes:
“I’m willing to make an enemy of anyone here over the lightest pretext.”
“Take heart to the statement: Form is all.”
“If it cannot be framed, it just isn’t there.”
“I’m not here to talk about literature. It’s not about literature. It’s about staying alive.”
“The wound becomes, if you’re lucky, the life.”
“You have to be determined to make your craziness profitable.”
“We are helpless in the sway of all we have read.”
“Those who use the language have a lot to answer for.”
Sam Lipsyte and Ben Marcus escorted Lish into the room, and Richard Ford sat next to him too, which was surreal enough for me. You’ll be happy to know I approached Sam after the reading, talked a bit about Venus Drive and one of the stories I am looking at for my lecture. (Hopefully I wasn’t too much of a fan.)
Hope all is well with you. Attached is a creepy photo I took from the lecture.
Jason Lucarelli

New analysis of Genesis reveals ‘death sandwich’ literary technique

Feb 212013
 

Researchers at Keele University, UK, and Amridge University, USA, have discovered that Genesis uses an early example of a technique known as ‘bracketing’, which sandwiches one theme between two mentions of another theme. The technique is commonly used today, such as when bad news is sandwiched between two bits of good news. The new analysis of Genesis reveals a striking pattern between the two key themes of ‘life’ and ‘death’. The opening and closing verses of the book contain frequent mentions of life, whereas mentions of death are only found in clusters in the middle.

via New analysis of Genesis reveals ‘death sandwich’ literary theme.

The Art of the Sentence: Stephen Sparks on Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine @ Tin House

Feb 202013
 

Stanley Crawford is an amazing and amazingly ill-known writer. I interviewed him when I had my radio show back in the mid-nineties. Stephen Sparks blogs elegantly at Invisible Stories and is an editor at Writers No One Reads; both are sites you should haunt every spare moment you can afford.

dg

“Sometimes when I am weary of seeing things in that flat, three-dimensional manner once so much boasted of, two plus two, and all the rest, there seems to be no longer any precise moment when old Unguentine vanished from my life, it seems rather an almost gradual process that went on over many years and as part of a great rhythm, as if, through some gentle law of nature, his disappearance would be followed by his gradual reemergence, that he would come back, so on, so forth.”—Stanley Crawford, Log of the S.S. the Mrs Unguentine

Here we find ourselves all at sea just eight pages into Stanley Crawford’s 1972 novella, this long sentence playing out across the water to give an early inkling of the lulling bewilderment we’ll grow accustomed to in the voyage ahead. It’s narrated by Mrs Unguentine (always Mrs, just like the eponymous ship), who relates a few pages prior that her husband, man overboard Unguentine (never Mr) “had been steering all those years with no idea of what he was steering towards” and whose legacy of aimlessness she’s doing her part to maintain.

via Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine | Tin House.

Measuring our lives in unread books | Andrew Gallix @ guardian.co.uk

Feb 202013
 

There was a time when a learned fellow (literally, a Renaissance man) could read all the major extant works published in the western world. Information overload soon put paid to that. Since there is “no end” to “making many books” – as the Old Testament book Ecclesiastes prophesied, anticipating our digital age – the realm of the unread has spread like a spilt bottle of correction fluid. The librarian in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities only scans titles and tables of contents: his library symbolises the impossibility of reading everything today. The proliferation of lists of novels that you must, allegedly, have perused in your lifetime, reflects this problem while compounding it. On a recent visit to a high street bookshop, I ogled a well-stacked display table devoted to “great” novels “you always meant to read”. We measure out our lives with unread books, as well as coffee spoons.

via In theory: the unread and the unreadable | Books | guardian.co.uk.

Catherine Malabou on Derrida’s Concept of Life

Feb 202013
 

I found this fascinating video via David Winters who saw it on the European Graduate School site: Derrida, and life inside the machine of, well, life. We seem to be on a Derrida theme lately. This fits with Jacob Glover’s essay on Derrida “What If God is One of Us?” in the current issue of NC, an essay based on Derrida The Gift of Death. See also Wes Cecil’s lecture on the NC Blog “On Derrida: Deconstruction (among other things) Explained, Jacques the Tormentor”. Catherine Malabou herself is a fascinating person, a rare woman in the male dominated club of Continental philosophy.

dg

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDf0m5UqC4o[/youtube]

 

The definitive answer to Nietzsche?

Feb 192013
 

I think of this as a defiant cry of anguish delivered against the encroaching darkness of atheism. Either that, or an annoying brainworm jingle (it’s not a song, you couldn’t call it that) that will infect your thoughts for the rest of the day.

dg

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GubzawOcyxg[/youtube]

A call from the sheer cliff face: Pathos | Lee Rourke interviewed @ Full Stop

Feb 182013
 

Lee Rourke‘s novel The Canal (published by Melville House in the U.S.) won The UK Guardian‘s ‘Not The Booker Prize 2010’. Here is another of those great PATHOS interviews on the writing life at Full Stop.

dg

Give one example in which you had high hopes for success (artistic, commercial, or otherwise) but had those hopes dashed.

Always. I’m never satisfied. I look at my books, everything I’ve written and think: is this it? Is this all I’m capable of? Is this all it’s going to bring me? But that’s only normal, right?

Do you feel like the world owes you a chance to make a living as a writer?

The world owes me nothing. The world is indifferent to me, it feels nothing for me. I am merely attempting to secure some sort of foothold on the sheer cliff face up to its sumptuous plateaus.

via Pathos: Lee Rourke | Full Stop.

rob mclennan on the new issue of FENCE magazine (in which we both appear)

Feb 152013
 

rob mclennan writes here an affectionate and well-read overview of the latest issue of FENCE in which we both appear. He has a poem there called “The Linden Lea Transitions.” Watch for a story of rob’s coming in a future issue of NC.

dg

Generally, I’ve been impressed by the breadth and the quality of each issue of Fence, and every issue contains a surprise, and there are more than a couple within. I’m intrigued by Graham Foust’s poem “Collected Poems,” that begins:

Names for poems—why do I, on Earth, bother?
Some untitled verse is out there just waiting
to be used, like a life vest or a rifle
or an almost impossibly large number,
my noise-only memory’s noise-only ghost.

Emily Pettit, with her poem “Water I Have Seen A Duck,” is slowly becoming a favourite, and there is some remarkable work by a number of other poets, both familiar and unfamiliar to me. I’m attracted to the oddness of Brandon Downing’s poem “DICK CARLA ASTRO,” a four part sequence that begins: “Her breasts shot right out her shirt. / I have one of the things instantly // In my jaw. Both her hands drop / Down—[…].”

via rob mclennan’s blog: FENCE magazine v 15, no 2: winter 2012-13.

The Day After, “I Love You”

Feb 152013
 

Beautiful enough to increase tolerance for the baffling (orgy of whales) and encourage travel to Iceland at the same time. If only to become stoney and juttingly one with the landscape.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/58912692[/vimeo]

–R.W. Gray

 

Life at NC Central Command

Feb 142013
 

My elderly neighbour just knocked on the door to check and see if I was okay. He said he hadn’t seen me leave the house lately and thought I might be sick. He said he noticed the lights were on till the early morning, but that didn’t mean anything; people go away and leave their lights on to fool robbers. He offered to bring me food. This was very sweet. He walks with a cane, has had multiple strokes, has glaucoma. But then I became alarmed: Without being conscious of my decline I have become a figure of public charity, a lost soul. In the evenings now I see the ghost of my old cat Hobbes prowling in the backyard.

dg

A dream of my youth

Feb 122013
 

I saw Easy Rider the first time in a movie theater in Edinburgh when was in graduate school, age 21. It’s a picaresque and a pastoral combined. A dark pastoral because, hidden in the vast and gorgeous land, is a world of violent intolerance. It had a gloriously romantic effect on me that I find difficult to articulate in its complexity. Among other things, I grew a full beard and hair down to my shoulders (for many of you who have only known me in my dotage, this may come as a shock). All The Band members except Levon Helm were southwestern Ontario boys. Robbie Robertson is from Toronto. Garth Hudson is from Windsor. Richard Manuel is from Stratford. And Rick Danko was from Simcoe, where my mother grew up, just ten miles from our farm. They were local heroes, especially to my younger brother who started playing the guitar in high school. His first band was called Norfolk (after the county where we grew up). His bass player remembered being a little boy and Rick Danko feeding him raw hamburger (or sausage) over the meat counter at the butcher shop where he worked. I don’t know if this story is true anymore. But it was a story. I tell you this for no reason — it came to mind after writing tonight.

dg

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMy3AbpkYvw[/youtube]

That Kind of Day

Feb 092013
 

I discovered Lhasa de Sela’s music in 1999 and she died of cancer New Year’s Day in 2010. Not enough time all the way around. She was born American, raised partly in Mexic0, and ended up living and singing in Montreal. And she could sing.

dg

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOLg_XY2cWA[/youtube]

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJaOptRE00E[/youtube]

Llorando
de cara a la pared
se apaga la ciudad

Llorando
Y no hay màs
muero quizas
Adonde estàs?

Soñando
de cara a la pared
se quema la ciudad

Soñando
sin respirar
te quiero amar
te quiero amar

Rezando
de cara a la pared
se hunde la ciudad

Rezando
Santa Maria
Santa Maria

—Lyrics via Lyricsmode.com

Obsession, Metaphor and Writing novels: The Paris Review Interview with J. G. Ballard

Feb 052013
 

Ballard wrote the autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun that was made into the great 1987 movie of the same name (with John Malkovitch and Christian Bale; directed by Steven Spielberg) and the novel Crash that was made into the great 1996 movie of the same name by the director David Cronenberg. I always find it interesting when writers talk about obsession; it always seems to me the best work, the most intense work, develops out of obsession (or the obsession develops as a reflection of the artistry and concentration needed to complete the work).

dg

Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one’s conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.

via Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 85, J. G. Ballard.

No Paris in Disneyland: Dwelling in Possibility with Bill Hayward @ The Best American Poetry

Feb 032013
 

“It all started in the backseat of my sister’s truck.” That’s the hair-trigger response anytime anyone asks Bill Hayward to talk about “artistic inspiration.”

Well, really it started with snapshots. There was the truck, but there was also Wyoming. In Wyoming, a young Hayward watched red ants bring beads up from deep within the earth—from old burial sites. It was how the earth fused past and present, he noted. Then there was fourth grade art class. Hayward smushed a paintbrush onto paper, watched the bristles splay out, rapt at the potential that lay before him. A humorless art teacher snapped him back to reality— “You’re going to ruin that brush!”

via No Paris in Disneyland: Dwelling in Possibility with Bill Hayward [by Alissa Fleck] – The Best American Poetry.

This Waltz — Leonard Cohen

Feb 022013
 

Student packets, story to write, this is where I go: order pizza from Pizza Time, splash vodka into a glass, listen to Lenny, and push on into the night.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQm1OmLMNno[/youtube]

Cohen says this is his translation of Federico García Lorca’s poem “LittleViennese Waltz.” The lyrics go like this.
(after Lorca)
Now in Vienna there’s ten pretty women
There’s a shoulder where Death comes to cry
There’s a lobby with nine hundred windows
There’s a tree where the doves go to die
There’s a piece that was torn from the morning
And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost
Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz with the clamp on it’s jaws
Oh I want you, I want you, I want you
On a chair with a dead magazine
In the cave at the tip of the lily
In some hallways where love’s never been
On a bed where the moon has been sweating
In a cry filled with footsteps and sand
Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take it’s broken waist in your hand
This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz
With it’s very own breath of brandy and Death
Dragging it’s tail in the sea
There’s a concert hall in Vienna
Where your mouth had a thousand reviews
There’s a bar where the boys have stopped talking
They’ve been sentenced to death by the blues
Ah, but who is it climbs to your picture
With a garland of freshly cut tears?
Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
Take this waltz it’s been dying for years
There’s an attic where children are playing
Where I’ve got to lie down with you soon
In a dream of Hungarian lanterns
In the mist of some sweet afternoon
And I’ll see what you’ve chained to your sorrow
All your sheep and your lilies of snow
Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay
Take this waltz, take this waltz
With it’s “I’ll never forget you, you know!”
This waltz, this waltz, this waltz, this waltz …
And I’ll dance with you in Vienna
I’ll be wearing a river’s disguise
The hyacinth wild on my shoulder,
My mouth on the dew of your thighs
And I’ll bury my soul in a scrapbook,
With the photographs there, and the moss
And I’ll yield to the flood of your beauty
My cheap violin and my cross
And you’ll carry me down on your dancing
To the pools that you lift on your wrist
Oh my love, Oh my love
Take this waltz, take this waltz
It’s yours now. It’s all that there is

.

Here  at Harper’s is the Spanish version of Lorca’s poem and another translation.

dg

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