Music in literature

The finest poem I know about music is Tomas Transtromer's 'Schubertiana'.

Schubertiana

I

In the evening darkness in a place outside New York, a viewpoint point where one single glance will encompass the homes of eight million people.
The giant city over there is a long shimmering drift, a spiral galaxy seen from the side.
Within the galaxy coffee-cups are pushed across the counter, the shop windows beg from passers-by, a flurry of shoes leave no prints.
The climbing fire escapes, the lift doors glide shut, behind police-locked doors a perpetual seethe of voices.
Slouched bodies doze in subway cars, the hurtling catacombs.
I know too – without statistics – that right now Schubert is being played in some room over there and that for someone the notes are more real than anything else.

II

The endless expanses of the human brain are crumpled to the size of a fist.
In April the swallow returns to last year’s nest under the guttering of this very barn in this very parish.
She flies from Transvaal, passes the equator, flies for six weeks over two continents, makes for precisely this vanishing dot in the land- mass.
And the man who catches the signals from a whole life in a few ordinary chords for five strings,
who makes a river flow through the eye of a needle,
is a stout young gentleman from Vienna known to his friends as `The Mushroom," who slept with his glasses on
and stood at his writing desk punctually of a morning.
And then the wonderful centipedes of his manuscript were set in motion.

III

The string quintet is playing. I walk home through warm forests with the ground springy under me,
curl up like an embryo, fall asleep, roll weightless into the future, suddenly feel that the plants have thoughts.

IV

So much we have to trust, simply to live through our daily day without sinking through the earth!
Trust the piled snow clinging to the mountain slope above the village.
Trust the promises of silence and the smile of understanding, trust that the accident telegram isn’t for us and that the sudden axe-blow from within won’t come.
Trust the axles that carry us on the highway in the middle of the three hundred times life-size bee swarm of steel.
But none of that is really worth our confidence.
The five strings say we can trust something else. And they keep us company part of the way .
As when the time-switch clicks off in the stairwell and the fingers – trustingly – follow the blind handrail that finds its way in the darkness.

V

We squeeze together at the piano and play with four hands in F minor, two coachmen on the same coach, it looks a little ridiculous.
The hands seem to be moving resonant weights to and fro, as if we were tampering with the counterweights
in an effort to disturb the great scale arm’s terrible balance: joy and suffering weighing exactly the same.
Annie said, `This music is so heroic,’ and she’s right.
But those whose eyes enviously follow men of action, who secretly despise themselves for not being murderers, don’t recognize themselves here,
And the many who buy and sell people and believe that everyone can be bought, don’t recognize themselves here.
Not their music. The long melody that remains itself in all its transformations, sometimes glittering and pliant, sometimes rugged and strong, snail-track and steel wire.
The perpetual humming that follows us now –
up the depths.

Not at all, Arbutus. It took me, of course, some more time to read it, but I thoroughly enjoy it. Excellent poem and, most importantly, to the point.

Thanks a lot!

Parla

Think I've fixed it now.

I've long ago abandoned following this Nobel "parade", but this time, apparently the institution did a good job, mostly, I guess, as a lifetime award to one of their old Nordic esteemed men (he is Sweedish and already 81).

Apparently, Arbutus, the poem you gave us the pleasure to explore is in English translation. So, who is the man to be credited accordingly?

Parla

One good Nobel Prize Winner for literature deserves another Arbutus et al!

According to the preface to my Pasternak selected poems, the author originally desired to become a composer and was much taken by the music of Scriabin. He eventually settled on writing - third-time lucky for him - after early forays into music and philosophy. Apparently his love of Scriabin is mentioned in Safe Conduct, an autobiographical work (which alas I don't possess a copy of).

There aren't many musical references in his poems, but a few in the selected come from a volume he published called Themes and Variations.

Here's a passage from Wiki:

'Boris Pasternak was also a composer, and had a promising musical career as a musician ahead of him, had he chosen to pursue it. He came from a musical family: his mother was a concert pianist and a student of Anton Rubinstein and Theodor Leschetizky, and Pasternak's early impressions were of hearing piano trios in the home. The family had a dacha – country house – close to one occupied by Alexander Scriabin;... and Pasternak wrote many years later of witnessing with great excitement the creation of Scriabin's Symphony No. 3, "The Divine Poem", in 1903.

Pasternak began to compose at the age of 13. The high achievements of his mother discouraged him from becoming a pianist, but - inspired by Scriabin - he entered the Moscow Conservatory, but left abruptly in 1910 at the age of twenty, to study philosophy in Marburg University. Four years later he returned to Moscow, having finally decided on a career in literature, publishing his first book of poems...

Pasternak's early compositions show the clear influence of Scriabin. His single-movement Piano Sonata of 1909 shows a more mature and individual voice. Nominally in B minor, it moves freely from key to key with frequent changes of key-signature and a chromatic dissonant style which defies easy analysis. Although composed during his time at the Conservtory, the Sonata was composed at Raiki, some 27 miles north-east of Moscow, where Leonid Pasternak had his painting studio and taught his students'.

So apparently there are some early compositions by him extant?

Mark