May I say, rather unhelpfully, that I treasure your Substack just as it is? What I most enjoy is your gift for making me see the subject in a new and beautifully surprising way.
Jeffrey, just do whatever works better for you. Your newsletter is your castle, and you're the king. In my own newsletter, I'm an autocratic queen – a benevolent one, I hope, but still an autocrat.
I enjoy reading all these different Substack because I quite never know what to expect. My advice for you and all of our fellow substackers is "Surprise me!"
I have a lot of Neruda on my bookshelves and have been taken by him well before I entered high school (I began studying Spanish in 7th grade and continued through college; I'm rusty now speaking the language ). I've always found the "Book of Questions" a delight for how each question forces the reader to pause and then revel in Neruda's imagination and magic. His love poems are exquisite.
As for your Substack, Jeffrey, just write, which you do beautifully, as often as you like and about whatever you like.
P.S.: Jay is a friend of mine. Your note made me laugh.
Hello Jeff, if your readers enjoyed your piece on whimisical, unanswerable questions I think they would enjoy the briliant Australian writer, Richard Flanagan's, memoir, Question 7, published last year and itself based on a Chekov story of the same name. Essentially, it posits that the only questions worth asking are the ones that are impossible to answer. I think i have mentioned this before on a substack comment but it's worth repeating in the context of your wise decision not to go for a formal survey. Your reader's responses below tell you all you need to know.
Yours, just back from Paris with K where after five hours at the hugely impressive Hockney retrospective and a three hour stroll through the Pere Lachaise cemetery - Oscar Wilde easier to locate than Jim Morrison - I had a rare and unexpected epiphany - aren't they all by their nature rare and unexpected?
Thank you, Richard. I know you've mentioned Question 7 before, and it's certainly a book I would like to read. Your Paris trip sounds busy but wonderful. And congratulations on the epiphanic moment: all too rare in my experience.
As you know, Jeffrey, I love reading your writings. Besides your craft, I always learn a few things about the places you travel, live in, and visit, not to mention the books you read and paintings you admire.
And I believe you can be personal and vulnerable, as much as you are an "English"! :-)
Thank you, Yi. I really like how we can learn from each other through our writing. I'm sure you're right, being English probably doesn't prevent me from writing more personally. It might be more a matter of personal reticence...
Quite honestly, Jeffrey, I could wish more people with a writing platform shared this endearing quality of yours. I look forward to each of your posts but I'm not inclined to analyze, it might spoil my enjoyment. My general impression is of unpretentious writing that springs from thoughtful, curious and long sustained engagement with world culture. You're sharing a treasure trove, what's not to like? I wouldn't change a thing.
And that is just perfectly alright. It's what makes reading so interesting, and the reading experience so personal; it's not on the writer, but the reader. :-)
I think translating “Clandestina” as “indocumentada” is a splendid notion. Your impulse leads me to conjure an exercise in which one plays at imagining how the author and/or translator might choose some different words or devise other phrases imagining the poem composed in a contemporary setting.
As for your footnote, valued and generous friend, I will not suggest that your placing "vulnerable" in quotation marks adds to the weight of my earlier joke . . . But to revise the Billy Joel song, we like you just the way you are.
Thank you, Jay, for your support and friendship, which I highly value. And I like your imaginary exercise. Imagine the social and moral subtleties of Henry James subjected to such a treatment!
David, I love that image of Henry James on Twitter! He'd hardly have got to the first comma before hitting the character limit, I suspect. And thank you for your kind words too.
I'm listening to Ives ~ The Unanswered Question, because sometimes you do give homework, Jeffrey, whether you meant to or not. 😉 Neruda’s unanswerable questions, particularly in today's world of over-information, transparencies, and half-baked truths invite the reader to play. And maybe even remind us that we don't have to know everything because that's not the point!
I love that you mention Jay and that you focus on Neruda whom I've loved for so long. If you question what to do with your Substack? I answer with kudos and admiration for your depth of literary readings. And I can't help but offer a favorite poem by Neruda:
XII Your Breast Is Enough
Your breast is enough for my heart,
and my wings for your freedom.
What was sleeping above your soul will rise
out of my mouth to heaven.
In you is the illusion of each day.
You arrive like the dew to the cupped flowers.
You undermine the horizon with your absence.
Eternally in flight like the wave.
I have said that you sang in the wind
like the pines and like the masts.
Like them you are tall and taciturn,
And you are sad, all at once, like a voyage.
You gather things to you like an old road.
You are peopled with echoes and nostalgic voices.
I awoke and at times birds fled and migrated
that had been sleeping in your soul.
—Pablo Neruda (tanslated by W. S. Merwin)
Para Mi Corazón
Para mi corazón basta tu pecho,
para tu libertad bastan mis alas.
Desde mi boca llegará hasta el cielo
lo que estaba dormido sobre tu alma.
Es en ti la ilusión de cada día.
llegas como el rocío a las carolas.
Socavas el horizonte con tu ausencia.
Eternamente en fuga como la ola.
He dicho que cantabas en el viento
como pinos y como los mástiles.
Como ellos eres alta y taciturna,
Y entristeces de pronto, como un viaje.
Acogedora como un viejo camino.
Te pueblan ecos y voces nostálgicas.
Yo depserté y a veces emigran y huyen
pájaros que dormían en tu alma.
Jeffrey, have you encountered Edmond Jabès" _The Book of Questions_? I love it ...
Wow, Mary, thank you for your kindness and for sharing that beautiful poem by Neruda in Merwin's fine translation. How can I reply but to echo the beginning of the poem and say “me basta tu presencia;” your presence here as a reader is enough to make me happy as a writer? 🙏
I have a complicated relationship to Neruda’s love poetry, so extraordinary and ascendant in its raptures. I just finished watching the television serialization of Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The love in it between Dorrigo and Amy seems to me a divine Nerudian sad voyage.
Just began reading the novel and Flanagan's prose and profound insightfulness reach a very high level.
I discovered Neruda's love poems in the midst of a love affair. It ended long ago, but Neruda keeps it alive in my heart and smooths the edges of its ending. Perhaps the "Book of Questions" would have been a better beginning.
How fascinating to have a published set of questions that you asked in your lifetime. It makes me wonder what my own set of questions would be.
I appreciate you taking the time to translate these and your description of Ives and Neruda. I love how imaginative, and even whimsical, some of his questions are. He didn't allow his rational mind to cloud the question.
Thank you, Donna. Perhaps this kind of question making could be good for us all? I like your point about him not clouding the issue with rationality: maybe a good lesson for a poet.
The preguntas of LXXIII are somewhat profound in spite of Neruda's absurdity. I cannot remember if I've heard Ives' Unanswered Question. He wasn't played regularly on the classical music station, and while I did listen to selections of Ives while studying music history, he wasn't one that I had to focus on.
I preferred Satie's humourous take on music I always enjoy playing his Trois Gnossienes - Satie took out the bar lines and time signature, which makes it confusing until you realize the music is completely regular in rhythm. Satie included ridiculous interpretive instructions throughout the Gnossienes, such as 'tres perdu', 'ouvrez la tete', 'de maniere obtenir un creux' (how to achieve absolutely nothing), and 'questionnez'.
Thank you, Holly. I've long enjoyed listening to Satie. I hadn't imagined, though, that playing his music could be such fun! Maybe he and Neruda would have got on well together.
One more voice in the chorus of “Keep on doing what you do.” Your signature is affectionate and curious erudition. It’s unique. “Vulnerability” is in fashion now, in part because we’re swamped by emotionless, generic writing, but there’s more than one way to hold a reader’s interest. Some writers do “vulnerability”with grace and style and keen intelligence. In general, though, I think this trend is overrated. Some of the greatest writers of the past would be mystified by the notion that an essay requires quivering personal revelation. How “vulnerable” was E.B. White?
My heartfelt thanks, Rona. There's no writer on Substack whose opinion I value more than yours. I have also read doing “vulnerability” with the qualities you describe. But I don't think I'd be able to do that. The more I write, the more important I find the task of finding my own voice (or voices). But it's no easy task. Thank you for your encouragement!
Some of those questions almost feel like koans. As if they aren’t meant to point at the absurdity of our experience as humans.
Whatever their intention, or if there was no intention at all, they are nonetheless thought-provoking in their impenetrability.
As for the writing on your Substack, Jeffrey — I’ve said it to other writers on here, but what I like about each persons work is that it illuminates things that interest them. And so, in that sense, whatever interests you, whatever you’re passionate to write about it, feels like the best direction for your writing. :)
Your gift for beautifully unexpected & memorable comparative analysis is unmatched in my experience on Substack. Thank you for the respect you show readers in providing interpretive space & encouraging personal agency in drawing resonant conclusions from your writings.
May I say, rather unhelpfully, that I treasure your Substack just as it is? What I most enjoy is your gift for making me see the subject in a new and beautifully surprising way.
And I love Belgium.
Thank you, Laura! Not unhelpful at all - and lovely to hear! Thank you for your constant support for the ERL.
And Belgium, land of chocolate, moules frites and Tintin. Great place!
(And of course old Hercule P.). Such a pleasure Jeffrey!
Yes, HP, of course!
Jeffrey, just do whatever works better for you. Your newsletter is your castle, and you're the king. In my own newsletter, I'm an autocratic queen – a benevolent one, I hope, but still an autocrat.
I enjoy reading all these different Substack because I quite never know what to expect. My advice for you and all of our fellow substackers is "Surprise me!"
Thank you, Portia! I really appreciate your words and your longstanding readership. And I agree, surprise is an important element in writing essays.
I have a lot of Neruda on my bookshelves and have been taken by him well before I entered high school (I began studying Spanish in 7th grade and continued through college; I'm rusty now speaking the language ). I've always found the "Book of Questions" a delight for how each question forces the reader to pause and then revel in Neruda's imagination and magic. His love poems are exquisite.
As for your Substack, Jeffrey, just write, which you do beautifully, as often as you like and about whatever you like.
P.S.: Jay is a friend of mine. Your note made me laugh.
Thank you for your delightful comment, Maureen! Neruda has a special place in my heart, too. And I agree about the love poems.
Today on a breezy and hot summer's day in Tokyo, these lines seem appropriate to quote:
Es la mañana llena de tempestad
en el corazón del verano.
Como pañuelos blancos de adiós viajan las nubes,
el viento las sacude con sus viajeras manos.
Innumerable corazón del viento
latiendo sobre nuestro silencio enamorado.
Hello Jeff, if your readers enjoyed your piece on whimisical, unanswerable questions I think they would enjoy the briliant Australian writer, Richard Flanagan's, memoir, Question 7, published last year and itself based on a Chekov story of the same name. Essentially, it posits that the only questions worth asking are the ones that are impossible to answer. I think i have mentioned this before on a substack comment but it's worth repeating in the context of your wise decision not to go for a formal survey. Your reader's responses below tell you all you need to know.
Yours, just back from Paris with K where after five hours at the hugely impressive Hockney retrospective and a three hour stroll through the Pere Lachaise cemetery - Oscar Wilde easier to locate than Jim Morrison - I had a rare and unexpected epiphany - aren't they all by their nature rare and unexpected?
Thank you, Richard. I know you've mentioned Question 7 before, and it's certainly a book I would like to read. Your Paris trip sounds busy but wonderful. And congratulations on the epiphanic moment: all too rare in my experience.
As you know, Jeffrey, I love reading your writings. Besides your craft, I always learn a few things about the places you travel, live in, and visit, not to mention the books you read and paintings you admire.
And I believe you can be personal and vulnerable, as much as you are an "English"! :-)
Thank you, Yi. I really like how we can learn from each other through our writing. I'm sure you're right, being English probably doesn't prevent me from writing more personally. It might be more a matter of personal reticence...
Quite honestly, Jeffrey, I could wish more people with a writing platform shared this endearing quality of yours. I look forward to each of your posts but I'm not inclined to analyze, it might spoil my enjoyment. My general impression is of unpretentious writing that springs from thoughtful, curious and long sustained engagement with world culture. You're sharing a treasure trove, what's not to like? I wouldn't change a thing.
That’s so kind of you to say so, Pauline! And I’m happy with no analysis (I’m not sure I’m doing any myself). I feel lucky to have you as a reader.
And that is just perfectly alright. It's what makes reading so interesting, and the reading experience so personal; it's not on the writer, but the reader. :-)
Keep writing, and keep being you!
I think translating “Clandestina” as “indocumentada” is a splendid notion. Your impulse leads me to conjure an exercise in which one plays at imagining how the author and/or translator might choose some different words or devise other phrases imagining the poem composed in a contemporary setting.
As for your footnote, valued and generous friend, I will not suggest that your placing "vulnerable" in quotation marks adds to the weight of my earlier joke . . . But to revise the Billy Joel song, we like you just the way you are.
Thank you, Jay, for your support and friendship, which I highly value. And I like your imaginary exercise. Imagine the social and moral subtleties of Henry James subjected to such a treatment!
Henry James would have been awful at Twitter, especially when there used to be a 140 character restriction.
Echoing the others that I enjoy your imagination.
David, I love that image of Henry James on Twitter! He'd hardly have got to the first comma before hitting the character limit, I suspect. And thank you for your kind words too.
I'm listening to Ives ~ The Unanswered Question, because sometimes you do give homework, Jeffrey, whether you meant to or not. 😉 Neruda’s unanswerable questions, particularly in today's world of over-information, transparencies, and half-baked truths invite the reader to play. And maybe even remind us that we don't have to know everything because that's not the point!
Eek! Sorry about the inadvertent assignment, Lani 😓 I like your take on Neruda's questions. Not wanting to know everything feels liberating...
I enjoy homework from Teacher Jeffrey. He makes me feel smarter. 😉😅
😅
I love that you mention Jay and that you focus on Neruda whom I've loved for so long. If you question what to do with your Substack? I answer with kudos and admiration for your depth of literary readings. And I can't help but offer a favorite poem by Neruda:
XII Your Breast Is Enough
Your breast is enough for my heart,
and my wings for your freedom.
What was sleeping above your soul will rise
out of my mouth to heaven.
In you is the illusion of each day.
You arrive like the dew to the cupped flowers.
You undermine the horizon with your absence.
Eternally in flight like the wave.
I have said that you sang in the wind
like the pines and like the masts.
Like them you are tall and taciturn,
And you are sad, all at once, like a voyage.
You gather things to you like an old road.
You are peopled with echoes and nostalgic voices.
I awoke and at times birds fled and migrated
that had been sleeping in your soul.
—Pablo Neruda (tanslated by W. S. Merwin)
Para Mi Corazón
Para mi corazón basta tu pecho,
para tu libertad bastan mis alas.
Desde mi boca llegará hasta el cielo
lo que estaba dormido sobre tu alma.
Es en ti la ilusión de cada día.
llegas como el rocío a las carolas.
Socavas el horizonte con tu ausencia.
Eternamente en fuga como la ola.
He dicho que cantabas en el viento
como pinos y como los mástiles.
Como ellos eres alta y taciturna,
Y entristeces de pronto, como un viaje.
Acogedora como un viejo camino.
Te pueblan ecos y voces nostálgicas.
Yo depserté y a veces emigran y huyen
pájaros que dormían en tu alma.
Jeffrey, have you encountered Edmond Jabès" _The Book of Questions_? I love it ...
Wow, Mary, thank you for your kindness and for sharing that beautiful poem by Neruda in Merwin's fine translation. How can I reply but to echo the beginning of the poem and say “me basta tu presencia;” your presence here as a reader is enough to make me happy as a writer? 🙏
What a beauty, Mary.
"Like them you are tall and taciturn, /
and you are sad, all at once, like a voyage."
I have a complicated relationship to Neruda’s love poetry, so extraordinary and ascendant in its raptures. I just finished watching the television serialization of Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The love in it between Dorrigo and Amy seems to me a divine Nerudian sad voyage.
Just began reading the novel and Flanagan's prose and profound insightfulness reach a very high level.
Flanagan seems to be coming up a lot. Maybe it's time I read something by him.
I discovered Neruda's love poems in the midst of a love affair. It ended long ago, but Neruda keeps it alive in my heart and smooths the edges of its ending. Perhaps the "Book of Questions" would have been a better beginning.
How fascinating to have a published set of questions that you asked in your lifetime. It makes me wonder what my own set of questions would be.
I appreciate you taking the time to translate these and your description of Ives and Neruda. I love how imaginative, and even whimsical, some of his questions are. He didn't allow his rational mind to cloud the question.
Thank you, Donna. Perhaps this kind of question making could be good for us all? I like your point about him not clouding the issue with rationality: maybe a good lesson for a poet.
The preguntas of LXXIII are somewhat profound in spite of Neruda's absurdity. I cannot remember if I've heard Ives' Unanswered Question. He wasn't played regularly on the classical music station, and while I did listen to selections of Ives while studying music history, he wasn't one that I had to focus on.
I preferred Satie's humourous take on music I always enjoy playing his Trois Gnossienes - Satie took out the bar lines and time signature, which makes it confusing until you realize the music is completely regular in rhythm. Satie included ridiculous interpretive instructions throughout the Gnossienes, such as 'tres perdu', 'ouvrez la tete', 'de maniere obtenir un creux' (how to achieve absolutely nothing), and 'questionnez'.
Thank you, Holly. I've long enjoyed listening to Satie. I hadn't imagined, though, that playing his music could be such fun! Maybe he and Neruda would have got on well together.
One more voice in the chorus of “Keep on doing what you do.” Your signature is affectionate and curious erudition. It’s unique. “Vulnerability” is in fashion now, in part because we’re swamped by emotionless, generic writing, but there’s more than one way to hold a reader’s interest. Some writers do “vulnerability”with grace and style and keen intelligence. In general, though, I think this trend is overrated. Some of the greatest writers of the past would be mystified by the notion that an essay requires quivering personal revelation. How “vulnerable” was E.B. White?
My heartfelt thanks, Rona. There's no writer on Substack whose opinion I value more than yours. I have also read doing “vulnerability” with the qualities you describe. But I don't think I'd be able to do that. The more I write, the more important I find the task of finding my own voice (or voices). But it's no easy task. Thank you for your encouragement!
It’s not so much ability as inclination, I think. Your mind goes in a different direction—the road less traveled.
I was unaware of the piece of music. Yes, I think portentous is the word. Please don't change your Substack, I love the variety and your voice.
Thank you so much, June!
As a recent visitor I fear I can offer no helpful feedback. But what I have seen I have loved. Who knew belgium was so charming?
Thank you, Evelyn! 😊
Some of those questions almost feel like koans. As if they aren’t meant to point at the absurdity of our experience as humans.
Whatever their intention, or if there was no intention at all, they are nonetheless thought-provoking in their impenetrability.
As for the writing on your Substack, Jeffrey — I’ve said it to other writers on here, but what I like about each persons work is that it illuminates things that interest them. And so, in that sense, whatever interests you, whatever you’re passionate to write about it, feels like the best direction for your writing. :)
Thank you for that encouragement, Michael! Much appreciated.
Your gift for beautifully unexpected & memorable comparative analysis is unmatched in my experience on Substack. Thank you for the respect you show readers in providing interpretive space & encouraging personal agency in drawing resonant conclusions from your writings.
Thank you, Alisa. I truly appreciate your taking the time to give such generous and thoughtful feedback. It means a lot to me.