it is. It’s light. It’s physics. What it plays at the part which has no need of notes. How it smiles: well, you needn’t. And drives it back into time. Monk dances in the general direction of the piano. He sees a Monk already seated there, never gone. He moves towards his shape to make it true. He reinhabits his own outline, blood mumbles out of his mouth and crawls along the bones of his skeleton, his right foot dances to the time he has set himself, his flippers slip back into their gloves of quiet, and he knows he needn’t but he does. He was a Waldorf salad, as Cole Porter would say; he was a Berlin ballad; he was the nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire; he was an O’Neill drama; he was Whistler’s mama; he was Canajun fare. A square so hip they turned Gotham green. Our boy Glenn Gould. He played with his wrists below the keyboard; below or at—no higher. He sat on a special homebuilt seat built low to get those wrists right. Add a scarf add a mountain of sweaters add no circulation in your jambes, add an extra overcoat and momma!—they’re gone ga-ga. This c/o the Beaches, Anglican Hogtown magic, this genie caught inside an inn at the corner of Don Mills and suburbia, this c/o T.O.’s north of the Lawrence Plaza Brasilia poured-concrete stretch genius who might of a night bomb his car past concrete things flashing past instead of trees, listening to Streisand, pleased with the concrete which does not enter into the civilized discussion he is conducting with Goldberg the way lovely trees can and take you away from the point you are making inside a speeding vehicle which steams up nicely as you finish the point pulling into a donut shop for a coffee; as when over arborite in a booth used
cars through a window are something to cast your eyes over, but never mind; as when a harvest of ’56 Chevy Impalas don’t enter your blood the way the sun coming up behind one of them could. C/o that. C/o phones; c/o edits; c/o a voice on a track talking to another voice on a track commented on by a third voice on a third track, though they have never met; c/o a night ride with Downtown. The sky you enter driving is large and violet. The orange light blurs to a shimmer above the violet. Around the orange on the violet comes a yellow all the way around, shimmering with white… —Hey, wait a minute! What happened to the piano? Where’s Monk?
Where the hell did the piano go? Where did Monk go this time? Below the surface of the water the iceberg is a hexagon. Monk is doing some geometry. He breaks off a piece of ice. He holds it in his left palm. He strokes it with his right. Out flows the beautiful uncut hair of graves. Monk winds it ’round his head. Voilà!—a fez of hisself c/o Walt Whitman, Esq. Monk surfaces with a splash. He cats with his hat. He giggles a twostep or two. He gives an angel a smile. The future is jealous. It sidles up to the bar and stands him a round. He takes notice; oh, he is aware; he dips delicious rubies, my dear, in the drink. He winks at the angels, he blows Walt a kiss, the future goes crazy and moves in close.
Love and Translation G O L D I E M O R G E N TA L E R
From The Exile Book of Yiddish Women Writers. Published in 2013 by Exile Editions. Goldie Morgentaler teaches British and American literature and is the translator of the works of Michel Tremblay, I. L. Peretz, and Chava Rosenfarb. She lives in Alberta.
M
y mother and I used to fight about translation. These were not genteel disagreements but passionate, intemperate shouting matches. She would say: “That’s not what I meant! You twisted my words. Why can’t you just translate what I wrote?” I would say: “Because its not English; you can’t say that in English!” Or: “It’s too sentimental, too much mush, too many adjectives.” She would say: “What a cold language English is!” My mother was the Yiddish writer Chava Rosenfarb; she died in January 2011, at the age of eighty-seven. I tell you about our quarrels not to suggest that my mother and I had a
quarrelsome relationship. On the contrary we seldom fought about anything non-literary. Nor do I tell you this because I want to demonstrate that she and I were a team, a translating team, although that is exactly what we were. I tell you this because I want to emphasize how important writing was to my mother’s life and how much emotion, passion, and energy she devoted to it. The first thing journalists and reviewers usually say when they refer to my mother is that she was a Holocaust survivor, as if this one event defined her for all time. Well, she was a Holocaust survivor, but it was not the essence of her life. When asked
in two events where the Owls went one, two. geist chapel, inc. announcements: Geist Chapel is a family friendly church in the Fishers, IN area, lead by Dr. Max Anders and Luis Llerena, focusing on the 7 Marks of a Complete Christian. boe’s geist won’t seek second term: Michael Geist will not seek a second term
Findings 31