Month: September 2024

Decidedly Damp

I have realised that the persistent discomfort I have been feeling since my catheter removal has been the consequence of an infection, which I discussed over the telephone with my GP who ordered antibiotics for us to collect after lunch.

As we left for the Pharmacy, raindrops thundered on our car roof and swept across the windscreen.

The rain continued from early morning throughout the day until a brief respite later as we returned home.

We had returned to splashing along the wet roads.

The few ponies we did see on our trip were decidedly wet.

The freshly washed woodland colours brightly glistened.

and reflecting pools were filling up again.

We have learned that when the weather is stormy gulls tend to venture further inland.

This one, complete with bag of filched chips, is perched on the Tiptoe postbox.

Tonight we dined on Parmigiana crispy chicken breasts; piquant cauliflower cheese; boiled new potatoes, carrots, green beans, and spinach, with which I drank Georges Duboeuf Fleurie 2022.

Garden Views Today

This morning I published

An Innocent Punished

Martin and Jackie have been working steadily at clearance and planting over the last few weeks. Much of the pot planting visible in the following garden views has been recently accomplished by the Head Gardener while our invaluable Journeyman Gardener has used fork and spade in the beds.

In labelling images in the gallery I have generally named one item; assiduous readers will identify others.

The demise of our Weeping Birch was enforced early in the spring.

The Bed still bears its name, and a rambling, scented, Rosa Silueta Lavender has been planted to clamber over the truncated tree.

This afternoon Elizabeth visited bringing a gift of get well dahlias which she had bought because they reminded her of what I had grown in our parents’ garden when we were young.

We then all dined at Rokali’s where I chose lamb Archery with puris; Jackie enjoyed paneer shashlik; and Elizabeth, sag chicken. My sister and I shared special rice. Jackie drank Diet Coke and Elizabeth and I, sparkling water. Service, cooking, and friendliness were as good as usual.

An Innocent Punished

Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor is introduced in https://derrickjknight.com/2024/09/02/the-ravages-of-vice/

This outspoken woman, centuries ahead of her time, on the very first page of this second story in my Folio Society selection, gives her view of the subservient position of women with “His will was always her will, and she loved and obeyed him as a father, so she accepted the offer [of marriage]”.

Maria has this to say about love, honour, and retribution: “despite the kindness she received at first from her husband”, the bride discovers that “Men are very accomplished at showing this in the early days of marriage, indeed it is my opinion that they are so generous with it then that they spend it all in the first year, after which, the springs of charity having dried up, they drive their wives to their graves from very lack of it. And….this is certainly the reason why wives, finding themselves disliked, become involved in infidelities which dishonour their husbands and cost they themselves their lives. What can a husband, or a father or a brother or, at its lowest level, a lover, expect from a woman except disaster if she finds herself disliked and deprived of the one thing she craves?”. Retribution is meted out by the nearest and dearest mentioned in this last sentence.

The author’s staunch Catholicism is featured several times in the story, and probably is the reason for “a great wizard and necromancer” being a Moor of the Muslim faith.

Deception, extreme cruelty, and torture, all play their typical parts in this fast moving story from an author who knows how to engage her readership.

Here is Eric Fraser’s faithful illustration to the tale.

Cloud-Filtered Light

On another warm, yet overcast day, we took a forest drive before lunch. At no time did the sun penetrate the clouds.

Even the heather and bracken in the landscapes flanking Holmsley Passage lacked colour. Wild life of the hoofed variety was in short supply, until we noticed distant

ponies and cattle along Forest Road on our way back home.

On the ancient banked verges of Charles’s Lane

stood the gnarled roots of deep-shaded trees,

while plants nestled atop a fencepost

along Braggers Lane.

As we sat on the patio with our pre-dinner drinks we could hear at least one magpie in the copper beech tree. Since they have cleaned out all our smaller birds I speculated that there must be a pigeon’s nest in that tree, because these large ones do mate all year round.

The afore-mentioned dinner consisted of breaded cod fish cakes; piquant cauliflower cheese; boiled new potatoes; crunchy carrots; and moist spinach, with which I finished the Malbec.

Generally Gloomy

On the last two evenings before bed I watched the highlights of the third, then fourth days of the test match between England and Sri Lanka.

The generally gloomy overcast rainy day kept us indoors after a Tesco shopping trip during which the precipitation subsided temporarily to dreary drizzle. Later the slate grey canopy deprived us of a sight of the thunderous overhead aircraft departing from the Bournemouth air show’s final exhibitions.

Having begun reading a new book, I published

The Ravages Of Vice

This evening we dined on stuffed crust pepperoni pizza and plentiful fresh salad with which I drank more of the Malbec.

The Ravages Of Vice

María de Zayas y Sotomayor (born Sept. 12, 1590, Madrid [Spain]—died c. 1661) was one of the most important of the minor 17th-century Spanish novelists and one of the first women to publish prose fiction in the Castilian dialect.

Little is known of Zayas’ life except that she was born into a noble family in Madrid and may have lived in Zaragoza, where her work was published. It is not known whether she married or when and where she died.

Her novels about love and intrigue, which used melodramatic and frequently horrific elements, were widely read and very popular. Novelas amorosas y ejemplares (1637; “Novels of Romance and Exemplary Tales”) is a collection of short novels about the romantic complications of married life, ostensibly told one evening to amuse a sick woman. The stories are mostly about women who are mistreated by husbands or seducers. Novelas y saraos (1647; “Novels and Soirees”) and Parte segunda del sarao y entretenimientos honestos (1649; “Soiree Part Two and Decorous Amusements”) are sequels. In many of her stories Zayas accused Spanish society of leaving women without the information or emotional strength to resist seduction and abuse. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Maria-de-Zayas-y-Sotomayor

In his introduction to

John Sturrock tells us that the author “was, by the standards of the time, an educated woman, and since women then received very little formal education she was presumably self-taught. She is very ready with an apt classical reference in her stories…..”

“There are two great motive forces [in these] – love and honour. Love is seen, conventionally enough, as a blind and irresistible force which drives women to destruction, while honour is its severe and apparently inevitable concomitant; the second exists as the only way to check the ravages of the first. But it is in her attitude to the concept of sexual honour that Maria shows originality. The concept is essentially a masculine one of course. Men alone have honour; women have their chastity, a reputation even, but should they succumb and lose them then there is nothing they can do about it except wait for punishment. It is the husband, the brother or the father who is dishonoured when a wife, a sister or a daughter is seduced, and it is up to them to wipe out the stain with the blood of the guilty parties. Thus it is that a woman is quite liable to meet her death at the hands of her nearest and dearest. Maria … [says] that men are deceitful, they wreak their nefarious purposes on the weaker sex by duplicity, by making promises they have no intention of fulfilling. Then they subscribe to a double standard of morality, whereby their own infidelities are considered very dashing while those of their womenfolk are punishable by death.” (Sturrock)

As translator Sturrock claims that de Zayas’ prose style “would be impossible and probably undesirable to attempt to reproduce that too faithfully. She writes like a woman in a hurry, impatient often of the niceties of structure and balance. The translation then aims at simplification as much as fidelity, avoiding, at opposite ends of the spectrum, deliberate archaisms and obtrusive modern idioms.” One can only trust that he has been successful in his work.

There are stories in this Folio Society collection. I will feature these one at a time with minimal comment on the prose.

The first is “The Ravages of Vice”, in which we are told of carnage consequent upon deceitfully contrived alleged infidelity. The story races along with good action sequences and the occasional didactic element, such as parenthood where the step-child is loved at least equally as children of a couple: “This is how good married couples ought to behave if they want to live in peace, because a thousand quarrels and upsets arise out of the dislike husbands often feel for their wives’ children, and wives for their husbands’ children.”

Love, honour, deception, and retribution are all Maria de Sayas’s major themes featured in the tale.

Here is Eric Fraser’s faithful and powerful illustration to this story.

Sintram And His Companions

Friedrich Heinrich Karl de la Motte, Baron Fouqué (born February 12, 1777, Brandenburg—died January 23, 1843, Berlin) was a German novelist and playwright remembered chiefly as the author of the popular fairy tale Undine (1811).

Fouqué was a descendant of French aristocrats, an eager reader of English and Scandinavianliterature and Greek and Norse myths, and a military officer. He became a serious writer after he met scholar and critic August Wilhelm Schlegel. In his writings Fouqué expressed heroic ideals of chivalry designed to arouse a sense of German tradition and national character in his contemporaries during the Napoleonic era. His ideas, based on the view of linguistic development first conceived by the philosopher J.G. Fichte, stressed the influence of the mother tongue in shaping the mind.

(Read Sir Walter Scott’s 1824 Britannica essay on chivalry.)

A prolific writer, Fouqué gathered much of his material from Scandinavian sagas and myths. His dramatic trilogy, Der Held des Nordens (1808–10; “Hero of the North”), is the first modern dramatic treatment of the Nibelung story and a precedent for the later dramas of Friedrich Hebbel and the operas of Richard Wagner. His most lasting success, however, has been the story of Undine, a water sprite who marries the knight Huldbrand to acquire a soul and thus become human but who later loses this love to the treacheries of her uncle Kuhleborn and the lady Berthulda. Although Fouqué’s works were at first enthusiastically received, after 1820 they rapidly passed out of fashion. Fouqué died in poverty after belated recognition by Frederick William IV. (Brittanica.com)

I spent the day finishing my reading of

and preparing this review.

In his preface dated December 5, 1914 to the 1915 edition Fouqué discusses thoughts on the sources of a poet’s inspiration, focussing on the Durer drawing which was his source for this work: “A few years ago I found a fine copperplate engraving by Albrecht Durer among my birthday gifts< A knight in armour, with an old, worn face, riding a great horse and followed by his dog, is passing through a dreadful valley, where the clefts of rock and the tree roots distort themselves into hideous forms. The ground is thickly carpeted with poisonous toadstools, and evil serpents crawl in and out among them. Close beside the knight, on a small, lean horse, rides Death; behind, a demonlike shape claws after him with its long arm. Horse and dog look strange and unnatural, as though transformed by the ghastly surroundings, but the knight rides calmly onwards, carrying on his lance-point a transfixed salamander. In the far distance a fortress can. be seen, its fair hospitable ramparts looking down into the valley, whose contrasting desolation seems to sink all the more deeply into the soul.” D. E. Schober, in 1769 suggested “Durer must have taken the idea from some special event, or else he meant it to express figuratively a soldier’s career”.

Fouqué took a good number of years to respond to his friend’s wish that he should write a romance on the theme. Rather than a romance he has written a novel set in his favourite Norwegian period reflecting the sagas of that era in a distinctly magical and satanic mood displaying all he has taken from Durer’s engraving.

His fine descriptive language, as in “the torchlight flickered drearily among the shadows of the vaulted roof” contains much alliteration, for example “still the silence continues. Single voices, in low uncertain tones, tried to renew their interrupted speech of a while since…..strange singing and sighing….”

He makes full use of the weather to set a scene and reflect a mood, harshly dramatic or softly calm.

The quality of the prose is further exemplified below.

I have paired these pages of prose with the exquisite engravings by E. J. Sullivan, demonstrating that both the artist and the author adhere faithfully to Durer’s work. All images can be enlarged in the gallery.

A. C. Farquharson, the translator, has produced a very readable version.

This evening we dined on belly of pork baked in chillis and peppers, carrots, cauliflower, broccoli, and cauliflower leaves.

Undine is featured in https://derrickjknight.com/2016/05/17/undine/