"ABBA ABBA" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burgess Anthony)

TWO

Giovanni Gulielmi, doctor of letters of the University of Bologna, had a small private income, derived from the rents of the land in Lazio left him by his father, who was untimely dead of Naples cholera, some British gold invested with the banker Torlonia, and what he got from the tenants of the first and second floors of the large house facing the Basilica of Santa Cecilia in the piazza named for her in the Trastevere district of Rome. The third, top, floor was enough for his mother and himself. Their cook and maid lived out. They had no coach. Gulielmi had a study of his own, very bare, with rugs on the marble, a massive English mahogany table that had been his maternal grandfather's, and three pictures on the walls. These were respectively by Labella, Macellari and Zappone, minor painters of respectively the Umbrian, Florentine and Venetian schools, and were respectively of the Annunciation, the Jordan Baptism and the Scourging at the Pillar. Here he worked at translations from English into Tuscan – unprofitable work, except for his version of Byron's Beppo, which had gone into three Turin printings. He sat with Endymion and the 1820 poems of John Keats and the fine-eyed, wavy-maned Guiseppe Gioacchino Belli one forenoon of November sunlight and intense blue Roman sky, song and the noise of fish and vegetable vendors coming from below. Belli looked without favour at the beginning of Gulielmi's draft translation of the Ode to a Nightingale.

" 'My heart is sad and my senses are oppressed by a stupor as of sleep, as if I had been drinking hemlock.' Yes yes yes. What does he know about drinking hemlock? We have all heard this kind of thing before."

"The content, yes. The shape, the melody, no."

"Which you cannot translate."

"That argues its superiority as poetry. Byron is all too translatable."

"Poetry should be about things. What things is poetry about since 1815? The poet's mistress is cruel to him. The poet fears he is going to die or fears he is not going to die. Rather like seasickness. The world is a fearful emptiness, but birds and flowers grant some little consolation. Perhaps next year there will be a new subject, but I think most poets have their elegies on Napoleon waiting."

"Here is something different," Gulielmi said, picking up a single sheet from his table. "The young man gave me this as an example of a sonnet in the Petrarchan form, difficult in a language like English, which has so few rhymes."

"Why does it have few rhymes? It is not natural for a language to have few rhymes. Italian is full of rhymes."

"Something to do with the endings dropping off," Gulielmi vaguely said.

"I cannot understand English and you say this little man is untranslatable."

"This poem is about a cat. A cat belonging to some lady called Signora Reynolds."

"Facetious then, light, nothing."

"Catullus wrote on a sparrow."

"Light, nothing."

"But listen to the sound. It sounds like a cat."

"A sonnet?"

"Listen.

'Cat, who hast past thy Grand Climacteric,

How many mice and rats hast in thy days

Destroy'd? – how many tit bits stolen? Gaze

With those bright languid segments green and prick

Those velvet ears – but pr'ythee do not stick

Thy latent talons in me -' "

"Enough. It is nothing but noise."

"Latent applied to claws is good. Latentes. What to an Englishman is an abstract Latin word takes on here the right physical attributes. The claws are not just hidden but latent – ready to come out. Not just hidden but known to be hidden. Like Christ in the tabernacle."

"Blasphemy blasphemy blasph -"

"Blasphemy to discuss the word latens?"

"It is a bad poem."

"But you don't quite understand my meaning, his -"

"Nor do I wish to."

"Let me finish. It's only fourteen lines."

Belli got up from his chair, really a kind of Scotch creepystool, and addressed an invisible audience of academicians. "Gentlemen," he declaimed, "I have an astonishing new discovery to impart. The sonnet-form is at last known to possess fourteen lines. The truth has been ascertained and confirmed beyond all possible shade of doubt by means of the new computorial digital device invented by the learned and honourable Doctor Giovanni Gulielmi -"

"Let me finish," said Gulielmi, grinning, "damn you."

"As the man said to the whore who received a message her mother was dying. No, no, I am sorry. That was unworthy. There is something unworthy in me that spurts out, like a night emission. There I go again. I am sorry, sorry. This lowness in myself. I try to subdue it." He beat his breast thrice and histrionically. And then: "It's a strong hand," he admitted, glancing at the manuscript before, with heavy grace, reseating himself. "More of a man's hand than a boy's."

"He's only a few years younger than you, than me."

"He has a boy's mind. Finish the thing."

" '- and upraise

Thy gentle mew – and tell me all thy frays

Of Fish and Mice, and Rats and tender chick.' "

"So ends the octave," Belli said. "I can tell it was the octave. But what noises – eis, icch."

"Cat noises. Listen.

'Nay look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists -

For all the wheezy Asthma – and for all

Thy tail's tip is nicked off – and though the fists

Of many a maid have given thee many a maul,

Still is that fur as soft as when the lists

In youth thou enter'dst on glass-bottled wall.' "

Belli made a cabbage of his face, as though, for a large audience, enacting nausea. "Such noises. Th and tch and rdst and glsbtld. English has no music."

"May it not be that Italian has too much music?"

Belli thought about that. "Write a sonnet in Tuscan about a cat," he then said, "not that any poet should or would, and you would have the creature presented through a lithe and sinuous melody of exquisite verbal configurations."

"This is an old battle-scarred cat, its ears nicked, full of asthma. It is no feline odalisque. Try those last two lines in Italian and see what you get. Let's see. 'Pur'ora morbido é il manto tuo come ai di' delle lizze che giostravi tra cocci di bottiglie a co' di molti muri dt cinta.' "

"That's not poetry."

"Nor is it cats fighting on a wall. Poetry or not, it's still too musical. Our language is full of damnable chiming bells."

"On cue." Belli grinned as the Angelus started. "You timed that well, you had your eye on your watch." He went over to the window and opened it to let the bell-clash swagger in. He leaned on the sill to look down on buying and selling Trasteverines. "Look down on our buying and selling Trasteverines," he said. "How do they think of the Angelic Annunciation, if they think of it at all? A girl called Maria slurping her noonday minestra, probably with the Angelus clanging outside, the angel whizzing in like a wasp through a broken window to tell her that a bird has laid an egg in her belly. How would your Misiter Kettis like that, the respectable cat-loving Englishman?"

"The joke could not be conveyed in English. The English do not call a penis a bird."

Belli turned his back on the sky and bells and harlequin-pied street-scene with actor's swiftness. "There I go again. I must attend to what I say. I am not serious enough. God forgive me." It was a little too much like acting, Gulielmi thought, and not good acting. Belli had been merely an amateur actor. Also amateur billiards-player, amateur poet. In what then was he professional? Minor officer in the Stamp Department of the Government of the Holy City? He would not admit where his professionalism lay or could lie, would he but cease to resist its pull. It lay precisely in the image of a slattern called Mary slurping her soup and the Archangel Gabriel buzzing in like a wasp, in the conveying of that image in the soiled language of the streets. It lay in a perhaps never to be written sonnet on a Roman cat, mauled, torn and randy, ready to piss on any cardinal's robe that offered. Something better than Keats could ever do. Gulielmi said:

"For God's sake, what do you mean by serious?"

"Eternal truths," Belli said too promptly, "impressive spiritual essences, God and country and the roaring giants of history. Not, by Bacchus, cats."

"Cats are the eternal truths, and the taste of noonday soup, and farting, and snot, and the itch on your back you can't quite reach to scratch. Rome as those lying and cheating bastards down there, not Rome as the imperial or the papal essence. Think of all those odes to Bonaparte, where are they now? The reality, and you can read of it in the Gazette de Francfort, is a swollen body on St Helena and the cancers working away in it."

Belli bunched his fine face, shrugged, belched out a Roman beeeeeeh, became upright and handsome and serious. "A balance should be possible. Between the claims of the physically transient and the spiritually permanent. But finally it is the spirit that counts, since, as you say, there is a dying body on St Helena. Poetry should hymn the spirit and not talk of asthmatic cats."

"We've had too much spirit, I think. I think the time is coming when sonnets must be written about the pains of constipation."

"You go too far as ever, but I forgive you. I am due back now at the office. When shall we eat supper somewhere?"

"I think we ought to eat supper with this young poet. He is altogether aimable, totally simpatico. You will like him."

"I speak no English. He speaks no Italian."

"A little. He's reading Italian. He has a volume of Alfieri."

"That will make him very gloomy."

"He also has some French. Less than you, true, but some."

Gulielmi did not say that John Keats also had a fair copy of a rejected sonnet-with-coda written by Belli, a regretted dirty joke, the something regrettable that got into him and out again. He said instead:

"We could give him supper in some osteria. This Scotch doctor is starving him for his stomach's sake."

"Let him read his Alfieri and learn serious Italian. Then perhaps we can talk seriously about the great tragic themes and the difficult art of rhetoric. But cats' claws, no. Fighting on walk and getting nicked ears, no. Shameful triviality." The bells clashed on.