I

“Blume, Baum, Vogel”

Bist allein im Leeren,
Glühst einsam, Herz,
Grüßt dich am Abgrund
Dunkle Blume Schmerz.

Reckt seine Äste
Der hohe Baum Leid,
Singt in den Zweigen
Vogel Ewigkeit.

Blume Schmerz ist schweigsam,
Findet kein Wort,
Der Baum wächst bis in den Wolken,
Und der Vogel singt immerfort.

—By Hermann Hesse

The title just reminds me of the Memory, Sorrow & Thorn trilogy by Tad Williams, one of the more entertaining Tolkien plus Arthurian fantasies I've read, though that was years ago.

II

A.
Today I limited myself to two comics, both of which were entertaining diversions: Girls, issue 23, and X-Men: First Class, issue 7 (of 8). According to The X-Axis, my source for X-book related comic reviews, X-Men: First Class, an 8-part limited series, is returning this summer as an ongoing series, and as Paul O'Brien notes, this is ludicrous. They already have three regular ongoing X-Men titles (X-Men, Uncanny X-Men and Astonishing X-Men) as well as Ultimate X-Men; O'Brien adds New X-Men to the first three, but it's a different case, whereas the other titles in some way all include “classic” X-Men. Furthermore Marvel tried this a few years ago with the John Byrne penned and penciled X-Men: The Hidden Years, which, a bit differently than this series, filled the gaps between those mid/late-60s titles and the relaunch nearly a decade later. This series modernizes (we've got cell phones, modern cars and computers, and the like) the X-Men but also tells Silver-Age-esque single-issue stories that, were they in continuity (and perhaps they're meant to be) would be filling in gaps between issues within those first 60+ issues, not between cancellation and return.

And as O'Brien has mentioned on numerous occasions, X-Men: First Class is a simple pleasure. It is simply illustrated and told. It employs characterization and approximations of realistic dialogue. It tells good stories. And it treats its characters as teens (whereas New X-Men stars teens who are treated as victims of violent assault and murder, which is to say, as disposable units of melodrama), but in a way that seems astonishingly realistic, and the only other Marvel titles to do so are the excellent Runaways (up to now penned by Brian K. Vaughan, but, I believe, to be taken over by Joss Whedon ... I can hear ammoniacal getting out and loading the guns now) and Spider-Man Loves Mary Jane, about which I've read, though I admit that I haven't yet read it myself.

The reason why I like this issue is because of the cover. It's not a great cover, whatever that means, and it has more than its share of soap-opera, but something in the art, something in the depiction of the Scarlet Witch, Wanda, reminds me of the recent and beautifully illustrated New Avengers, issue 26. Furthermore, there haven't been any good Warren Worthington stories in years, perhaps since he first lost his wings in the Mutant Massacre ... two decades ago.

As for Girls, this is 1950s & 60s pop-horror-sci-fi fun. If you haven't been reading it up to this point—admit it, you haven't—the story goes, briefly, as follows: a town is wrapped in an impenetrable sphere/bubble, a giant sperm in a field zaps people who get too close and sucks up dead women into itself with its tail, and hundreds of identical “girls” are on the loose, attacking/killing women but mating with men and then laying eggs, which hatch more girls. The story is simply a matter of survival, gender relations, and figuring out what's going on. The series ends with issue 24. It's guilty-pleasure fun, but without much guilt.

B.
CNN has a somewhat obnoxious little video tied to their “Eye on India” series about arranged marriages and, in particular, about a certain arranged marriage between wealthy Ramneeq (26) and Preet (24). The video's lead-in read: “Parents pick bride; divorce rate just 2 percent.” The story itself says that most marriages are still arranged, and the country's divorce rate, not that for arranged marriages, is 2%. Three aspects of such marriages are explored: 1) the difficulty in finding a partner (so why not use the parents for help), 2) “tradition” (grandpa did it, so I might as well, too), and 3) the idea that meeting and getting married shortly thereafter saves all the joy of discovery (getting to know the person you'll supposedly spend the rest of your life with) for later ... see, arranged marriages are more mysterious, exciting ... fun!

Those last two reasons mimic the defense-of-marriage rhetoric you hear from U.S. Xtian conservatives; the former speaks to those (often younger) Americans in urban and suburban environments who feel the need to resort to online dating services. The story itself engages in three different levels of discourse that intersect a bit: a simple descriptive “here's a guy I met and a wedding I attended” blog entry, a “let's educate those westerners about the world's largest democracy” piece, and a self-help for the western world argument that tells us “hey, perhaps tradition isn't so bad in this (post)modern world.”

The “story” itself is throw-away and vapid, but I find the lead-in a tad annoying, for its juxtaposition of the two phrases (“Parents pick bride” and “divorce rate just 2 percent”) lacks a verb and only employs a semi-colon, but seems to imply a connection. It furthermore goes from the very specific (parents picking Preet as Ramneeq's bride) to the general (India's divorce rate) with no explicit logic in between. Anyone smart enough to talk about causation and correlation, or about rhetoric or syntax or logical fallacies, etc., could of course tell us to read nothing into this headline, even though it seems structured for us to do exactly that. Look, when parents arrange marriages, divorce rates go down! Actually, that's quite unfair of me, for there is no talk of such rates going down, only that India has a low one. But as far a I can tell the statement “arranged marriages have a low rate of divorce” is about as informative as “women with low self-esteem report less abuse than those with healthy self-esteem” or “most polygamists do not have only one wife.”

C.
Quick comment: the Rex Goliath “Giant 47 Pound Rooster” 2004 shiraz was indeed tasty and worth the money. One local store sells the brand for $5.99 a bottle.

III

My first impulse is to say that this is a terrible translation, especially if I consider the first stanza, which, but for the last line, seems to have nothing to do with the first stanza of the German. The second and third lines of Salinger's text are pure fabrication; his first is the second of Hesse's poem. Furthermore he turns a regular indicative (“You glow”) into an imperative (“Glow”). There is no “hour” or “shadow” in Hesse's poem, but there is emptiness or space (“im Leeren” ... usually we deal with die Leere, space or void, but das Leere is used when talking about staring into space) and an abyss (“am Abgrund” ... at the abyss or precipice). In the final line the flower named/called/designated “Pain” is introduced but through an inversion of “Dunkle Blume Schmerz”—“Dark flower, Pain” (the English comma being merely a convention here for the vocative or appositives).

The second and third stanzas are, however, more faithful, though a few changes in the third stanza (changing “Wolken” [clouds] to “Heaven” for example) annoy me. And in the second stanza it shouldn't be suffering's tree, a possessive, but rather Suffering, the tree, or the tree, (named) Suffering. Indeed, the flower is pain, a state caused and/or indicated by its solitary nature and its opening and closing by day and night; the tree is suffering or sorrow, forever fixed and fossilized, stretching toward the sky; and the bird, the only free one, the one who can fly and whose voice is carried on the wind far and wide is eternity. Or invert them, ascribe them to a romantic poetic ego who gives his pain, and suffering and eternity names: flower, tree, and bird. This much is clear from the German and yet obscured at best or absent at worst in the translation.

“Flower, Tree, and Bird”

Glow, lonely heart,
alone with the hour.
She waits in the shadow:
pain, the dark flower.

Now stretches its branches
suffering's tree,
where sings in the gree leaf
the bird, eternity.

Pain's blossom is silent,
her speech is gone.
The tree grows toward heaven,
and the bird sings on.

—Translated by Herman Salinger