david spooner
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Apatura iris (Purple Emperor)
FOREWORD TO SCHMETTERLINGE
BY CARL SPITTELER In cheerful mood with hands quite full I set out to market at a stroll and found a snoozing semiotician at the toll: “Anything to declare?” A wink - a literary rabble lay browned off while the patrol stood eyes sharp right flexing their critical might. I was recalling my animal mission during this intriguing animation when the sentry interjected — This sure pricks public interest the more! What`s that you prize? Let`s see with my own two eyes! — There`s nowt but butterflies. — You`re not telling me there`s nothing to tax? — Look for yourself, just the tight hairy thorax. He weighed and measured, twitching to regulate found fault, fussed, muttered to himself then whispered some correct format, saying this and meaning that SUDDENLY - heaven only knows why BUZZ! All three scattered in their fuzz way up to the skies and went off shooting through the town glistening from roof to roof up and down then a dead straight road they follow along furtive hedges into green hollows over river and field and meadow they fly, and airborne roam until in flaming twines, roses, festoons they found a home. Translator: David Spooner COMMENTARY to VORWORT (FOREWORD) This poem from Switzerland has not been translated into English before. It is written out of an unusual, almost Aesopian perspective, like other poems in this 1889 book , Schmetterlinge (Butterflies). Carl Spitteler would regularly tramp the Alps, observing the wildlife, and he developed a knowledge of lepidoptera matched in the literary world only by Nabokov and Gozzano. The virtue of taking an insect-eye`s view of the world is especially clear in this ironical take on bureaucrats and academics. Their efforts to bring everything under their intellectual domination is mocked in this celebration of the flight of the creatures. The main challenge of translation was to find sharp contemporary equivalents for the object of Spitteler`s satire. In order to bridge the almost 120 years between the writing of the original and present-day intellectual and academic industries, I have sought to give it a modern spikiness. I have already produced in 2006 the first translation into English of his novel Imago (1906), where Swiss society at the turn of the last century is portrayed as inhabiting a far more relaxed world than today`s. So the poem has had to be updated for a more robust, perhaps even frantic, end-of-its-tether age. Unlike some other poems in Schmetterlinge, there is not much idiomatic Swiss-German in the Foreword. I have worked from the original publication of this poem, since the final few couplets that Spitteler later added, and that appear in the Artemis-Verlag Collected edition of 1945, seem unworthy of the poem as first conceived. Spitteler uses various forms of rhyme in the poem, sometimes line to line and at sometimes in alternate lines. Rather than attempt to follow exactly the pattern of his German rhyming - difficult at the best of times from German into English - I have rhymed, or half-rhymed, where it has come naturally. David Spooner from: DR. DAVID SPOONER, awarded American Medal of Honor for Natural History; sponsors the DAVID EUGENE SPOONER AWARD FOUNDATION FOR ADVANCES IN ENTOMOLOGY WITH PHILOSOPHY; founder of Butterfly Conservation East Scotland 8.10.2010 Dear Prince Charles, Re. proposed windfarm at Fermyn Woods, Rockingham Forest I am writing to canvass your support for the campaign to halt the installation of Wind Turbines in Fermyn Woods, Rockingham Forest, Northamptonshire. Leaving to one side this as a manifestation of the increasing industrialization of Britain`s countryside, this wood is the main stronghold of the extremely rare Purple Emperor butterfly (Apatura iris). Indeed there are no comparable sites north of Northants, and of course it does not appear in Scotland east or west. The turbines will disturb its flight paths and, like all lepidoptera, it is of an exceptionally finicky character flying as it does at tree-top level. With the news this week from Oxford University that one species of plant, insect or animal becomes extinct every 2 weeks in Britain, the time has surely arrived to call a halt to this depredation. Hopefully you may feel able to lend your voice to another cause against the current of change and activity for its own sake. Yours sincerely, Dr. David Spooner On the EPAW home page |
