Byron, A Long Journey (Byron Society)

An invited contribution (with many thanks):

http://www.thebyronsociety.com/byron-a-long-journey

Some additional illustrations:

Tony Harrison, Delphi

Michael Foot, Prague visit and lecture,
30/10/1988-1/11/1988

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 

Slovak Translation, Bratislava, 1988

"It pays to be good" - self-portrait of a moralistic doctor (A.J.Cronin)

A. J. Cronin, from Adventures in Two Worlds (1952), Chapter 28:

"Of all the patients who passed through my consulting-room–a long procession–none were more lamentable than those brought there by their own excesses. As I sat at my desk, my eyes shaded by my hand, listening in silence, like an abbé in his confessional, to some disastrous history of self-indulgence, I could not but reflect on the sweet virtue of moderation. And often, wryly, I called to memory the prophetic words of my puritanical old grandmother whose ancestor had died for the Covenant at Bothwell Bridge and who, when I was a child and detected in some misdemeanour, would call me to her knee and, having first placed her steel-rimmed spectacles in her Bible to mark the place, inform me that I should not receive from her my usual Saturday ‘fairing’, then solemnly adjure me: ‘ You see now … it pays to be good.’

But, in this last court of appeal, when the patient was stripped for examination on my couch, it was seldom a smiling matter. There were the gluttons, the voracious eaters who, unable to resist the lure of rich meats and succulent sauces, of pâté and pastries and truffles, had already dug their own graves with their teeth. The old lechers, with soggy prostates, weakened sphincters, and all the load of misery which the goddess Venus joyously bestows upon her acolytes in reward for a lifetime’s service. Then the drug addicts, of every shape and variety–from the pitiful old scrubwoman who used to beg tremblingly for a bottle of laudanum ‘to ease her colic’–and who usually got it, poor creature–to the smart society girl, glibly sure of herself but with twitching nerves, flashing a false heroin prescription and vainly asking me to oblige her by filling it, ‘as the chemist’s was closed.’ Finally, there were the dipsomaniacs…"

Let us applaud the more compassionate and less judgemental attitudes of modern doctors!

COLENSO BOOKS: A selection of titles

Orders and enquiries to the publisher: 

colensobooks@gmail.com

A Short Cycle Ride to Martinstown (Winterborne St Martin)

No iPod music today, just a cycle ride for exercise
(and my first lockdown sighting of some bluebells).

Miroslav Holub (1923-1998), Poet and Immunologist

Miroslav Holub became a friend when I was working in Prague.

We also spent time with another (visiting) friend, a great poet with related scientific and medical interests, Dr. Dannie Abse, who once wrote, in his poem, Lunch with a Pathologist (not about Holub),

"My colleague knows by heart the morbid verse
Of facts..."

These are rather sombre poems for our times:


A Helping Hand, translated by George Theiner


A helping hand

We gave a helping hand to grass –
and it turned into corn.
We gave a helping hand to fire –
and it turned into a rocket.
Hesitatingly,
cautiously,
we give a helping hand
to people,
to some people…

From Haemophilia/ Los Angeles

Translated by David Young and Dana Hábová

And so it circulates

from San Bernardino Freeway

to the Santa Monica Freeway and

down to the San Diego Freeway and

up to the Golden State Freeway...

each blood cell carrying

four molecules of hope

that it might all be something

totally different

from what it is.

From Vanishing Lung Syndrome

Translated by David Young and Dana Hábová

Once in a while somebody fights for breath.

He stops, getting in everyone's way.

The crowd flows around, muttering

about the flow of crowds,

but he just fights for breath.

From Interferon

Translated by David Young and Dana Hábová

Always just one demon in the attic.

Always just one death in the village...

Likewise, cells infected by a virus

send signals out, defenses

are mobilized, and no other virus

gets a chance to settle down

and change the destiny. This phenomenon

is called interference.


Finally, a short poem by Dannie Abse:


Valediction

In this exile people call old age
I live between nostalgia and rage.
This is the land of fools and fear.
Thanks be. I'm lucky to be here.

Songs of English Miners - Zpěvy anglických havířů (Prague, 1956)

Prague, 1956. Czech translations by Jiří Valja, of
Come All Ye Bold Miners, Ballads and Songs of the Coalfields 

(compiled by A.L.Lloyd, London, 1952). 

Woodcuts in Czech edition by Vladimír Rocman.

Zdeněk Stříbrný, Professor Emeritus of English Literature,
Shakespeare scholar.

Thank you again for this precious book, Zdeněk!

 

From the afterword/epilogue 

Bookseller's description of the book

from https://www.databazeknih.cz/knihy/zpevy-anglickych-haviru-285692:

"Výbor ze sbírky písní a balad anglických horníků, vydané známým anglickým folkloristou L. Lloydem v Londýně r. 1952. Písně, seskupené ve výboru do 6 oddílů (Práce, Zábava, Láska, Nebezpečí, Bída a trampoty, Boj) líčí pravdivě život a boje anglických horníků a jsou vyznamným dokladem umělecké tvořivosti pracujícího lidu. Většina jich byla vytvořena již v době těžkého zápasu horníků v Anglii o chléb a lidská práva v 19. století, a proto v nich zaznívá trpká nota smutku a povzdech nad těžkou, neodměněnou a potupnou dřinou. Jen v několika málo písních zrcadlí se ještě šťastnější život anglických horníků před průmyslovou revolucí (na rozhraní 18. a 19. století). - V závěrečných poznámkách uvádí pořadatelka výboru některé obdobné texty české, které dokazují příbuznost dělnické tvorby, vyrůstající z obdobných společenských podmínek".

Státní nakladatelství rásné literatury, hudby a umění, Prague, 1956.

Překlad Jiří Valja

Ilustrace/foto Vladimír Rocman



A,L. Lloyd wrote in the original English preface:

"In the spring of 1951, as part of the mining industry's contribution to the Festival of Britain, it was decided to try to collect coalfield songs before they disappeared. I was asked to arrange a competition...The greater part of the songs and ballads quoted here come from the coalfields of North-eastern England"

In the introduction, Lloyd wrote:

"These are rough songs, mostly made by rough men. Hardly any have claim to poetry. Only a few are folk-songs in the strict sense...yet they are songs which have meant much to miners...Songs that are as close as these to the heart of the common people may have a direct functional quality which goes far beyond mere diversion. Many of them were made up not so much to decorate life, as to make it bearable".

One of the most powerful and enduring songs in the collection is "Miner's Life is Like a Sailor's":

"Keep your hand upon your wages,
And your eyes upon the scale".

Dick Gaughan's version is the one that people may know best.


The Gresford Disaster, Ewan MacColl


It's not easy to forget what was going on in neighbouring countries like Hungary and Poland in 1956, the year that the Czech edition of British miners' songs was published. In Czechoslovakia; dissidents and regime objectors were being sent to work (hard and dangerous penal labour) in the uranium mines in Příbram during the same period.