Month: December 2024

The Poems of Robert Burns

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There is one name that comes to mind immediately when you think of New Years Eve and that is Robert Burns due to the international fame of Auld Lang Syne (Old Long Since) a song about a couple of friends enjoying a drink and reminiscing about things they have done in the past. But there is a lot more to Burns than a song that most people know the first verse and chorus to, even if they don’t know any more or what it means and this edition of The Penguin Poets from 1946 is a great introduction. The collection consists of forty three poems and fifty six songs and helpfully for those of us that struggle with the Scots language and dialect there is a single page glossary of common words and translations of lots of others alongside the lines where they occur.

I first came across Burns at school where he was introduced as one of the pioneers of the romantic movement in poetry although we didn’t do much more than the really famous ones including, ‘To a Mouse’, ‘To a Haggis’, ‘A Red, Red Rose’ and the comedic rage expressed in ‘To a Louse’ where Burns gets so annoyed when he sees a louse on a lady’s bonnet in church, all of which are of course in this collection. I really fell in love with the musicality of Burns’ verse however when I was lucky enough to be at The Scotch Malt Whisky Society in Edinburgh for Burns Night and to hear the poems recited with the correct accent made for a wonderful evening which of course included ‘To a Haggis’ and the appropriate, for the venue, ‘Scotch Drink’, the first verse of which (after the initial quote from Solomon’s Proverbs) goes as follows…

Let other Poets raise a fracas
‘Bout vines, an’ wines, an’ drucken Bacchus,
An’ crabbit names an’ stories wrack us,
An’ grate our lug:
I sing the juice Scotch bear can mak us,
In glass or jug.

Scotch bear is barley and Burns is of course talking about whisky, the full twenty one verses of the poem can be read here, let no-one say that Burns wasn’t keen to celebrate his national drink. When I first started to read this book for this blog I did have some problems with the unfamiliar Scots dialect but as I progressed through the works I gradually found it easier to understand and found I needed to refer back to the glossary less and less. Interestingly when I have heard Burns recited I have often had far fewer issues with understanding, I guess this is similar to the way I find reading Middle English easier if I read it aloud and it then seems to make more sense than just reading silently.

So let’s finish where we started with Auld Lang Syne. This is the original version from 1788, in 1795 he changed the first line of the chorus to ‘For auld lang syne, my dear’

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne?

(Chorus)
For auld lang syne, my jo,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp!
And surely I’ll be mine!
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

We twa hae run about the braes
And pu’d the gowans fine;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary foot
Sin auld lang syne.

We twa hae paidl’d i’ the burn,
Frae mornin’ sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
Sin auld lang syne.

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!
And gie’s a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll tak a right guid willy waught,
For auld lang syne.

Happy new year

The Gospel As Recorded by St. Mark

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As this blog is being published on Christmas eve, I have taken the opportunity to review another of the privately printed Christmas books given by Alan and Richard Lane as gifts, in this case the book for Christmas 1951. I’m not going to attempt to review the gospel itself, this blog is concerned with the new translation, this edition of the translation and this book in particular. Penguin were to publish a new translation of The Four Gospels by E V Rieu a year later in November 1952 so this was a first view of this very readable new translation. It was a little odd to select the gospel of Mark as a Christmas gift as only Matthew and Luke include the birth of Jesus, which you would have thought would have been a consideration, but as you can see below Mark starts with the adult Christ being baptised by John in the River Jordan.

Mark is one of the three synoptic gospels where the same stories are told in much the same sequence and in similar words, indeed three quarters of Mark’s gospel also appears in those of Matthew and Luke whilst the gospel of St John is quite different both in style and content. As I said earlier the big difference is the lack of a nativity story in Mark but you also don’t get the Sermon on the Mount or several parables amongst other items in Mark which is quite a bit shorter than the other three gospels.

Looking at the first page as translated by Dr. Rieu it is clear that it is written as much more of story than the classic King James translation which I grew up with, which for all its magnificent prose can be a little daunting to approach, particularly for a modern reader. By way of contrast this is the same passage in the King James version.

1:1 The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God;

1:2 As it is written in the prophets, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.

1:3 The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.

1:4 John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.

1:5 And there went out unto him all the land of Judaea, and they of Jerusalem, and were all baptized of him in the river of Jordan, confessing their sins.

1:6 And John was clothed with camel’s hair, and with a girdle of a skin about his loins; and he did eat locusts and wild honey;

1:7 And preached, saying, There cometh one mightier than I after me, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose.

1:8 I indeed have baptised you with water: but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost.

1:9 And it came to pass in those days, that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan.

1:10 And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him:

1:11 And there came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

It is almost forty years since I first read E V Rieu’s translation of the four gospels. I took it, along with a couple of others from the Penguin Classics series, as my in flight reading for the first time I crossed the Atlantic in February 1986. I’m not remotely religious although I did go to a Church of England primary school for my education between the ages of four and eleven, but the way the gospels are presented in this translation means you can read them more like a collection of four novellas and enjoy the stories as they are told. This edition is really beautifully produced with canvas covered boards and terracotta cloth labels blocked in gold. The pages are a lovely grey and compliment the overall design by Hans Schmoller well. The lion design by Reynolds Stone is different to the one, also engraved by him, used for the Penguin Classic when it was finally published.

My copy was given to typographer Ruari McLean (it has his bookplate inside) who had joined Penguin Books in 1946 with specific responsibility for Puffin books and was instrumental in introducing Jan Tschichold to Penguin. By 1949 he had moved on and was working with Rev. Marcus Morris on the design of a new comic for boys he had devised called Eagle, which would go on to massive success in the 1950’s and 60’s. Tschichold would radically redesign Penguin books in the late 1940’s and came up with The Penguin Composition Rules.

Paint Your Dragon – Tom Holt

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Chosen by way of a comedy interlude between two serious works, I actually have no memory of acquiring this book although I suspect it was part of a job lot of second hand fantasy novels I bought in the early 2000’s most of which have been read and passed on to other people who might be interested. This is the only book by Tom Holt I own, although he has written over seventy novels along with numerous novellas and short stories in his own name and that of K J Parker since giving up his original job as a solicitor in Somerset. As I have probably owned this book for a couple of decades it seems only right to finally read it especially when I read the back cover and it sounds intriguing…

To my surprise this retelling of the George and the dragon story is largely set in modern day Birmingham (England not USA). The local council has commissioned renowned sculptor Bianca Wilson to create a grand statue for the square outside the town hall and much to her amazement she finds herself selecting George and the dragon as the subject, very different to previous works of hers. It’s as though she is being led into the subject, and that’s because she probably is. One of the main premises of the book is that it is possible for the dead to inhabit a statue and effectively come alive again with the statue returning to flesh and blood when it is possessed. The first inkling that Bianca gets that something is amiss is when she and her friend Mike arrive in her studio one morning and on the plinth is just St George, several tonnes of Carrara marble in the shape of a dragon has vanished overnight with no trace of the mechanical equipment that would have been needed to cut it from the plinth or lift it onto presumably a flat bed lorry. Even more oddly the next day the dragon is back and George goes missing and there is a bit of toing and froing over the following days before both statues disappear. In the meantime we are introduced to some more protagonists, to wit five demons that got left behind in the Cotswolds region of England on their way on holiday from Hell to a country music event in Nashville.

I really enjoyed the interplay between the demons, one of which is female and is attracted to the effective leader of the stragglers much to his obvious concern and the situations they get into when they get recruited by St George to help him win the big rematch with the dragon, because who says the saint has to be the good guy after all? The other main characters include Chubby who makes his money selling time to people who need it along with his worryingly sentient computer and Kurt, a professional hit-man who may or may not be dead already. Holt manages to keep the various sub-plots moving at a rapid pace but not so that you lose track of who is doing what, where and why and I loved that the most likeable characters are the least obvious contenders for that position and that St George is clearly a nasty piece of work who apparently won the first contest with the dragon due to a fix with a gambling syndicate so you are rooting for the dragon almost from the start of the book.

I really enjoyed this book and am now surprised I haven’t any more works by Tom Holt. From the evidence of this book he seems to fall into much the same comic fantasy genre as Robert Rankin with unbelievable things happening in a fully believable modern setting.

The Dark Invader – Captain Von Rintelen

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The first Penguin books were published in July 1935 and introduced their distinctive colour coding by subject category, a scheme copied from the Albatross Books in Europe. Initially there was just orange for fiction, dark blue for biography and green for crime but gradually more categories and colours were added including the first cerise for travel and adventure in September 1936. This is that first title and tells in his own words the story of how German WWI spy and saboteur Captain Von Rintelen operated in America for a few short months in 1915 and what happened to him afterwards. It may be thought of as an odd book to be publishing so close to WWII but presumably it was seen as an object lesson for possible activity if Germany did indeed start war again.

Rintelen was chosen from the German Naval Command to go to America to try to stop munitions being shipped to the the Allies. The latest American shells were made from steel rather than the inferior iron still utilised in Europe so were far more destructive, America was still neutral in the conflict so Germany had at first tried to stop America supplying weapons at all as they were seen as taking sides but America then offered to supply Germany as well knowing full well that the British blockade of German shipping routes meant that such a trade was impossible. The only option to the Germans was therefore to stop the ships somehow and Rintelen was just the man, he spoke English fluently and apparently had no problem passing as either English or American and had proved his resourcefulness already in transferring five million marks worth of gold by train and lorry from Berlin to Constantinople to pay bills for the cruisers Goeben and Breslau as German paper money wasn’t being accepted. Rintelen travelled to America via Denmark using papers describing him as a Swiss merchant but once there found that the contact he had arranged had not turned up so he had to start from nothing in the way of a plan but at least he had three million dollars which he had managed to transfer to American banks via various circuitous routes.

Rintelen was to be in America for just four months but in that time managed to do an amazing number of things from arranging manufacture and distribution on board ships of incendiary devices timed to go off during the Atlantic crossing to gaining the contract to supply Russia with wartime supplies none of which made it due to the ships being planted with the devices but which significantly added to the his coffers due to being paid at loading. He also formed a union of dock workers which came out on strike thereby preventing further ships being loaded and ultimately discussed with the deposed president of Mexico starting an uprising with an invasion of America to regain Arizona and therefore directing munitions to an America/Mexico war rather than Europe. That he managed to do so much in so little time and caused major disruption to military supplies across the Atlantic was a tribute to his resourcefulness, that he managed to also largely deflect suspicion from himself was remarkable. However his superiors were not so careful and intercepted telegrams in a code the Allies had access to led to his downfall.

Recalled to Germany, supposedly to review progress and adjust plans Rintenlen was intercepted in his Swiss guise by the British and interned in reasonable luxury at a camp for officers before being transferred to America where he spent four years in a regular prison for actions carried out whilst America was neutral so he wasn’t recognised as a prisoner of war. All this is covered in the book with surprising insights into how well he was treated by the British as opposed to the Americans. The book finishes with him returning to Germany in 1921 as a largely forgotten man. Rintelen came back to Britain in 1933 as he despised Hitler and he lived here until his death in 1949.

This book, along with the sequel ‘The Return of the Dark Invader’ (not published by Penguin) went out of print around 1941/2 when books about the cleverness of German spies ceased to be of interest to the general public and both books stayed out of print for decades. I have found ‘The Dark Invader’ published in 1998 by Frank Cass under their Classics of Espionage series. Apart from that if you want to read this book, and I do recommend it not only for its historical interest but because it is very well written, then you need to hunt down an eighty to ninety year old copy. Fortunately it is surprisingly easy to find them and it shouldn’t cost much more than £10 for a Penguin.

The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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Dawn is breaking in post-war Barcelona when Daniel’s bookseller father guides him through the mist to a mysterious building hidden in the heart of the old city. Here in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, ten-year-old Daniel is allowed to choose one from the hundreds of thousands of abandoned volumes that line the labyrinthine corridors. Inexplicably drawn to ‘The Shadow of the Wind’ by Julian Carax, the boy clutches the book and he and his father leave. That night Daniel reads through the night totally captivated by the story and the quality of the writing and I know exactly how he felt as although my all night reading sessions are well behind me as I found it difficult to put this remarkable book by Zafón down. Perhaps a longer section than I would normally quote will give an insight into the wonderful descriptive prose and the building tension that is maintained throughout the 511 pages. This passage is very early in the book so doesn’t contain any spoilers and describes the night after Daniel took the book to Don Gustavo Barceló, another bookseller but one who knew more about the rarities of printing than Daniel’s father, for him to have a look at. There he discovered that he may well have the last remaining copy of Carax’s final novel and that all the other copies along with editions of all his other books had been systematically bought or stolen and mysteriously found burned over the years.

I turned off the light and sat in my father’s old armchair. The breeze from the street made the curtains flutter. I was not sleepy, nor did I feel like trying to sleep. I went over to the balcony and looked out far enough to see the hazy glow shed by the streetlamps in Puerta del Angel. A motionless figure stood in a patch of shadow on the cobbled street. The flickering amber glow of a cigarette was reflected in his eyes. He wore dark clothes, with one hand buried in the pocket of his jacket, the other holding the cigarette that wove a web of blue smoke around his profile. He observed me silently, his face obscured by the street lighting behind him. He remained there for almost a minute smoking nonchalantly, his eyes fixed on mine. Then, when the cathedral bells struck midnight, the figure gave a faint nod of the head, followed, I sensed, by a smile that I could not see. I wanted to return the greeting but was paralysed. The figure turned, and I saw the man walking away, with a slight limp. Any other night I would barely have noticed the presence of that stranger, but as soon as I’d lost sight of him in the mist, I felt a cold sweat on my forehead and found it hard to breathe. I had read an identical description of that scene in The Shadow of the Wind. In the story the protagonist would go out onto the balcony every night at midnight and discover that a stranger was watching him from the shadows, smoking nonchalantly. The stranger’s face was always veiled by darkness, and only his eyes could be guessed at in the night, burning like hot coals. The stranger would remain there, his right hand buried in the pocket of his black jacket, and then he would go away, limping. In the scene I had just witnessed, that stranger could have been any person of the night, a figure with no face and no name. In Carax’s novel, that figure was the devil.

The plot flies along at a breakneck speed with multiple clues as well as a few blind alleys as to what is going on as Daniel tries to find out what happened to Julian Carax and how he came to be found shot dead in Barcelona when he should have been safely in Paris and what the wartime thug, murderer and now Inspector of Police Fumero has to do with it, as we progress from 1945 when Daniel first visits the Cemetery of Forgotten Books to the end of 1955 when the story finally reaches its denouement. Along the way a cast of superbly drawn characters are introduced, some of which help but more than a few are there to hinder Daniel’s fascination with Carax and his slowly developing interest in women as he goes through his adolescence. At about two thirds through the book and three days after I started I still hasn’t worked out how everybody was linked and how the various plot strands were connected so took an evening off reading to think through what I knew so far without adding more detail. This proved to be a good idea as I finally realised where the story was going and who the man watching from the shadows was, just in time as Zafón was about to upend the story and make my guess a possibility. I read the remainder of the book the next evening as Zafón neatly tied up all the loose ends in an eminently satisfying way.

Sadly Carlos Ruiz Zafón died of cancer in 2020 aged just 55, robbing the world of a great author well before his time. This English language version of the book is translated by Lucia Graves, daughter of the poet and novelist Robert Graves. She was brought up in Mallorca from the age of three, and according to her memoir ‘A Woman Unknown’ she grew up speaking English at home, Catalan with locals, and Spanish at school and it is she who has translated into English all five of Zafón’s ‘Cemetery of Forgotten’ novels.

This is the fifth book from the Penguin Drop Caps series I have written about along with a general overview of the series. There are twenty six in total, one author per letter of the alphabet and previously I have covered Ellery Queen, John Steinbeck, Xinran and W B Yeats.