Srecko Kosovel 1904-1926
Picture from Carantha
Poets you’ve never heard of: Srecko Kosovel.
Sre�ko Kosovel is the Slovenian Rimbaud, the strongest and the strangest poetical energy of the Slovenian people, a visionary and a contemporary to every reader in every time. Born in 1904, he died in 1926 at the age of 22, but his work is strong, deep and finished as if he had written and lived for a long, long time. Each nation has a “miracle” in its literary history: Kosovel is definitely the most interesting Slovenian poetical icon.
Here is An Autumn Landscape by Srecko Kosovel from an excellent collection of Slovenian poetry translations online.
An Autumn Landscape
The sun is autumn calm
as though in mourning;
behind the slender cypress trees
behind the white wall of the graveyard. �
The grass all red in the sun. �
Do you wear the clogs of dogma?
A bicycle abandoned on an autumn road.
You ride through a dying landscape.
A staid man walks the field,
he is as cold as autumn,
he is as sad as autumn.
Faith in humanity.
To me it is a sacred thought.
A speechless silence is like sorrow.
I am no longer sad
for I do not think of myself.
Many more Kosovel poems at Poetry International Web.
Okay, I think I’m ready to take this public.
I am a map freak. I love maps, historic, hand drawn, topographic, demographic…whatever. As long as it has not been produced by MapQuest, I’m a fan.
So I thought I would do something with this passion, and cleave off a little piece of cyberspace for occaisional indulgences in maps. I have therefore created a new blog, and I invite you to visit Maps and Territories.
Maps and Territories links maps and stories together. It’s an occaisional curio, so don’t expect it to change every day. Once or twice a week will be more like it. You’ll find that I’m strating kind of close to home, and will be venturing out from there. I feel like an explorer finding his feet as he moves across a new landscape.
So have a peek, and enjoy.
A prehistoric clam garden
This weekend’s Vancouver Sun had an article from one of my favourite journalists, Stephen Hume, about a remarkable prehistoric discovery here on the west coast.
All up and down the coast of British Columbia where I live are little beaches tucked in small inlets, that feature a line of rocks that define the low water mark. It’s a curious thing, as biologist John Harper discovered. Were these beaches caused by natural forces or did human beings have a hand in them. Surprisingly, it was very hard to tell:
They didn’t seem to work as fish traps or anything to do with canoes, although a couple of sites appeared to have been modified to allow canoe access along the edges.
But they didn’t share the characteristics of the ice barricades either.
“The archaeologist didn’t think they were man-made features, but couldn’t say they weren’t,” Harper said. “On the other hand, I, the geologist, didn’t think they were natural features, but couldn’t say they weren’t. Conventional science had basically failed.”
Breakdowns in conventional science don’t leave scientists like John Harper satisfied for long. He soon started studying the biology of clams and found out that they thrive in conditions exactly like the ones formed by these barricades: 1 to 3 metres of intertidal sand washed twice a day by the ocean. He looked through ethnographic texts and found a correlation between ancient Kwakwaka’wakaw village sites and the clam gardens he had plotted. He found out that there were stories floating around about clam gardens, but nothing concrete. He needed more help:
He enlisted the help of ethnologist and linguist Randy Bouchard, who recently completed a 30-year annotated translation of Boas. University of Victoria ethno-botanist Nancy Turner introduced him to Daisy Sewid-Smith, a Kwakwaka’wakw linguist and educator whose roots were with the Mamaliliqala tribe of Village Island, and to Chief Kim Recalma-Clutesi of Qualicum who is married to the carver and elder, Kwakwaka’wakw Chief Adam Dick.
“Adam is illiterate,” Harper said. “He was never permitted by his parents to go away to residential school because he was to be a keeper of knowledge.”
Keep it, he did. Late last year, Chief Dick recalled an old song about the clam gardens.
“It’s a four-verse song,” Harper said. “Gilford Island songs are all four-verse songs, I’ve learned. It’s a song about kids helping their mother and one of the verses is about going out to help build the clam garden.”
Now they had a word — lo xwi we — and Bouchard tracked it down in an unpublished dictionary compiled by Boas and held in the American Philosophical Society collection.
“Only Randy could come up with this,” Harper said. “The second line of page 404 contains the word ‘lo xwi we’ and definitions, one of which is ‘low tide mark’ and another which means ‘place of rolling rocks together.’ Boas never understood their function.”
The reason Boas and the other ethnologists missed the significance of the clam gardens, Harper surmised, is because of their own cultural biases in an age of high Victorian sexual prudery.
“I’m learning about clams,” Harper said. “They are often associated with female genitalia and they were under-reported in the ethnographic literature because they were considered a lower food form.”
Then Bouchard turned up an obscure monograph on the Lummi Indians of northern Washington that was published by Bernhard J. Stern at Columbia University in 1934.
It contained a single crucial paragraph, which describes the creation of a clam garden at a place called Elelung on Orcas Island.
“They took the largest rocks that were in the clam bed and moved them out to extreme low water marks, setting them in rows like a fence along the edge of the water,” Stern wrote. “This made clam digging very easy compared to what it had previously been because there are only small pebbles and sand to dig in. It is exceptional to cultivate clam beds in this manner and while other clam beds are used by everyone in the tribe, here only the owners who cultivated the bed gathered.”
An amazing story unfolding right here under our noses on the rain coast.
Joseph Allard 1873-1947
From The Virtual Gramophone
The National Library of Canada has published hundreds of 78s of early Canadian music in their Virtual gramophone project.
Joseph Allard was a superstar in his day, recording dozens of traditional tunes on fiddle with a sparse and tasteful guitar accompaniment. Sample Reel du capitaine (mp3) and then head over to the audio page to hear more. Do what I did: spend the day there.
From Jack Ricchiuto’s Open Wiki comes notes on a talk by Ed Brown:
“Curiosity and wonder allow us to meet things as they are — they make us more receptive. The opposite of interest is trying to decide what something is about so we can fix it. “