Falling leaves

It's fall and Ottawa is at it's most beautiful in the fall. It's not just the leaves—although they are extraordinary here. There is something about the light that is amazing.

The Serpentine One and I fell in love during the fall. We did it again every year. And then we were married during the fall. Fifteen years this week.

Anyway, I love falls generally.

It can be a time of abundance. It is for nature and it often is for humans too. Not necessarily though and one of the things that makes all human happiness bittersweet is knowing that others at the same point in life are not so happy.

Speaking of things that make some people happy and others bitter, I love the writing of Mark Steyn. It's a touchy issue as there is a bitter tribal war going on in North America right now and he is definitely on one side of it. There are people who are so invested in that battle that they are consumed with hatred at the mere mention of Steyn's name.

That's a shame because Mark Steyn is one of the very best writers alive right now and people who cannot see beyond their political differences to appreciate that cheat themselves out of a lot of pleasure.

I mention all this because Steyn generously shares some of his writing about music on his website and this week he writes about the song Autumn Leaves. It's worth reading. (That link will go dead in about a week from this posting.)

Steyn writes mostly about the English version. The original is a poem by Jacques Prévert that uses dead leaves as the central metaphor but that image goes way back. Homer uses it as does Kierkegaard. When Prévert wrote the poem, though, he knew that everyone hearing it would immediately think of another poem—one of the most famous poems ever written in French. This poem:

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l'automne
Blessent mon coeur
D'une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l'heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure

Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.

 You can't really translate it. Well, you can in that what it says is pretty simple. The mourning of the violins of autumn are making our poet sad. He remembers the old days and he cries. It ends on a resigned note. Fate, in the form of a nasty wind, will prevail with him just as it has with the dead leaf. That's the meaning but it's not the poetry.

If there is bitterness in sweetness, however, there can also be sweetness in decline and death and Verlaine lets us know that without ever saying it. 

It's really odd poetry. The lines are very short with either four of three syllables. There is a pattern of four syllables, four syllables, three syllables that repeats throughout the poem.

The odd thing is that these words are utterly common place.

Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure

I remember
The days gone by
and I cry.

Quote them by themselves and you don't think "wow". There is nothing about this poem that is powerful by itself. Everything about it is quiet and understated.

It's only when you stop and think about it that you notice that it is compressed. Forty-five words! Sixty-six syllables!

The whole thing recalls the strung-together haiku of Basho. And it's so magnificent that even Johnny Mercer couldn't have done justice to this in translation. It's been set to music by a whole lot of people including some of the greatest French composers of the twentieth century. The best version of all, however, was done by a lounge singer.