DON’T LET THE OLD MAN IN
We’re invisible
When was the last time
Anybody turned their head
Crossing us down main street?
We’re ghosts
Some kind of walking dead
We made it this far
That’s no mean feat
It’s not too late
Nor too soon
It’s not too late
Now is the time
Never surrender, never quit
Clench your teeth with grit
Shout Alalalalai
Alexander’s battle cry
Since you must be eighty
To make it to president
There’s mileage ahead of us
Come on cheer up matey
We’re in the zone, the right segment
The age of the really strong
More often right than wrong
It’s not too late
Nor too soon
It’s not too late
Now is the time
Never wiser, never better
Still the same go-getter
We’re shepherd dogs not sheep
A promise we must keep
It’s not too late
Nor too soon
Not too late
Don’t let the old man in
Alan Bennett, now 91, is one of the last living writers who grew up in the shadow of not just the Second World War – but the First World War too. He was brought up in Leeds, surrounded by First Word War veterans and war widows.
Bennett is completely drenched in the past, but not in a rose-tinted version. It’s more nostalgia in its original Greek sense – the pain of going back.
No wonder he is pitch perfect in The Choral, a quite wonderful film. It’s very moving and very funny – the rare combination that Bennett specialises in, where the poignancy heightens the humour and vice versa.
It’s the story of the Choral Society, set in 1916 in a Yorkshire mill town – filmed in Saltaire’s splendid, robust classical terraces and mighty Salts Mill.
The tragedy of war is the ever-present background to the story but, cleverly, you never see a single scene on the Front.
Because the upmarket male singers of the Choral have joined up, the society must recruit rough teenagers – and a new choirmaster, in the shape of Dr Henry Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes).
The Choral (12A). Film Review. By Harry Mount
Luis Alberto de Cuenca
William of Aquitaine Returns
I’m going to make a poem out of nothing.
You and I will be the protagonists.
Our emptiness, our loneliness,
the deadly boredom, the daily defeats:
all these things will go into the poem,
which is bound to be short, since they
fit in a few lines, maybe as few as seven,
or perhaps eight, if this last line counts.
—Translated from the Spanish by Gustavo Pérez Firmat
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These Anemones, Their Song Is Made Up As They Float Along
In 1954, in June
I saw a total eclipse of the sun by the moon.
I saw the flowers fold up, the birds
Stopped singing to the morning, the grass
Grew wet, and it was dark.
I was awake, but when I was awake
A while longer I woke up and said
“I have slept until now,” and now
I have stopped sleeping altogether.
“I’ve never thought of myself as a translator, more as someone who has done some translations,” Eliot Weinberger says in his Art of the Essay interview, which appears in our new Fall issue. “Of course, I worked with Paz for thirty years, and I did Huidobro’s Altazor, three times actually, and Villaurrutia’s Nostalgia for Death and some other things.” This week, we’re featuring some of those Paz translations.
Octavio Paz
Target Practice
The tide covers, discovers, recovers, and always walks in the nude.
The tide weaves and unweaves, embraces and separates, is never the same and
never another.
The tide, sculptor of forms that last as long as their surge.
The tide breaks rocks, polishes conchs.
The tide always assaults itself.
The tide, surge of syllables of the interminable word, without beginning or end, spoken by the moon.
The tide is angry, and on some nights, beating against the rock coast, it announces the end of the world.
The tide, transparency crowned with whitecaps that vanish.
The perpetual tide, the unstable tide, the punctual tide.
The tide and its daggers, its swords, its tattered flags, the conquered, the victorious.
The tide, green spittle.
The tide, sleeping on the chest of the sun, dreaming of the moon.
The tide, blue and black, green and purple, dressed in the sun and undressed in the moon, spark of noon and heaving breath of night.
The tide at night, murmur of bare feet on the sand.
The tide, at dawn, opens the eyelids of the day.
The tide breathes in the deep night and, sleeping, speaks in dreams.
The tide that licks the corpses that the coast throws at it.
The tide rises, races, howls, knocks down the door, breaks the furniture, and
then, on the shore, softly weeps.
The tide, madwoman writing indecipherable signs on the rocks, signs of death.
The sand guards the secrets of the tide.
Who is the tide talking to, all night long?
The tide is honest, and eventually returns all of its drowned.
Storms come and go, the tide remains.
The tide, hard-working washerwoman of the filth that people leave on the beach.
The tide does not remember where it came from or where it’s going, lost in
its coming and going, between itself, among itself.
There, at the cliffs, the tide closes its fist and threatens the earth and sky.
The tide is immortal, its tomb is a cradle.
The tide, chained to its surge.
The melancholy of the tide under the rain in the vagaries of dawn.
The tide knocks down the trees and swallows the town.
The tide, an oily stain spreading with its millions of dead fish.
The tide, its breasts, its belly, its hips, its thighs, beneath the lips and between
the arms of the wind in heat.
The spring of sweet water leaps from the rocks and falls into the bitter tide.
The tide, mother of gods and goddess herself, the long nights weeping on the islands of Ionia, the death of Pan.
The tide contaminated with chemical waste, the tide that poisons the planet.
The tide, the living carpet on which the constellations walk on tiptoes.
The tide, lioness whipped into fury by the hurricane, panther tamed by the moon.
The beggar, the nuisance, the bore: the tide.
Lightning splits the chest of the tide, plunges, disappears, and is reborn, turned into a little foam.
The yellow tide, the hired mourner and her flock of laments, the bilious and her wealth in complaints.
The tide: does it walk asleep or awake?
Whispers, laughter, murmurs: the coming and going of the tide in the coral gardens of the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, in the cove of Unawatuna.
The tide, horizon that drifts off, hypnotist’s mirror that mesmerizes lovers.
The tide with liquid hands opens the deserted lands populated by the gaze of the contemplative.
The tide lifts these words, rocks them for a moment, and then, with a swipe, erases them.
—Translated from the Spanish by Eliot Weinberger
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