This Particular Entanglement
Rapper Thomas Riffmatch's latest single takes the form of a love song from one entangled particle to another. His advice? Keep on moving into the light, don't fall into a black hole and store some salt on dry shelves. Everything will be ok… at least, until the inevitable wave-function collapse. Orgasms are simulations… or not!
https://globalvillagebard.ru/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/This-Particular-Entanglement.mp3
Since, at birth, we were not strangled
And by chance became entangled,
All that matters is our energy
To realise possibility.
In general, everything falls:
States have borders, cells have walls;
Confusion reigns, disorder increases –
All must dance to fate's caprices…
But this is a particular case
For our limited human race;
And, although this quality is rare,
I can be certain that you care
Whether I'm up or down, left or right.
Keep on journeying into the light –
For you have too lovely a soul
To let it fall into a black hole.
You and I defy such gravity
And don't think it depravity
To store some salt on dry shelves.
Then, should we find ourselves
At opposite ends of the universe,
It's a blessing, not a curse,
To have limited interactions
With irreconcilable factions,
Being entangled in this world
Into which we've both been hurled.
And, although there may be others –
Fathers, sons, brothers,
Mothers, sisters, daughters –
I can feel you in my waters…
Though never stepping twice,
The feeling's quite precise
And absolutely real,
This sensation that I feel…
From your equal and opposite spin,
I know exactly the state you're in.
Can convert our angular
Momentum into linear,
Our paths becoming skinnier;
With you, I'm eternally at home
Somewhere in the glome.
And this spooky action at a distance
Can combine with the insistence
That you're mine and I'm yours;
That, together, in what nature abhors,
We'll pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps
Until the inevitable wave-function collapse.
©Lyrics written and performed by Thomas Riffmatch to a backing track composed by Nikita Nikitin, recorded and produced in Ekaterinburg by Andrey Bokovikov.
Content, Heraclitus Flow Leave a comment
Место проведения концерта в усадьбе «Остров»
28 августа 2021 года, в крестьянской усадьбе «Остров», Село Остров, Ленинского района Московской области, в рамках фестиваля «Музыка под небом», выступит бард Томас Бивитт с британских островов. В сопровождении оркестра арт-проекта «Новая сказка» переводчик и певец из Шотландии исполнит стихи Лермонтова, которые удивительно легко слились с музыкой гэлов, написанной самим Томасом Бивиттом.
Михаил Лермонтов – возможный потомок авантюриста из Шотландии Джорджа Лермонта, оказавшимся в России XVI века и передавшим гэльский дух свободы через века. Кем был Джордж (Юрий) Лермонт в Шотландии? Истинным предком Юрия был Томас Лермонт, избравший путь поэта-правдоруба дворянин из Эрсельдуна, назвавшийся Томасом Рифмачом.
В его генах и творчестве смешались англо-нормандская и шотландская культуры. После него сохранились рифмы-пророчества, в виде английских рукописей пятнадцатого века и устных преданий.
В первой части выступления прозвучит Легенда Томаса Рифмача о встрече с королевой Эльфов в поэтическом русском переводе Михаила Фейгина.
К такому богатству творчества добавились русские веяния, и родился бриллиант отечественной поэзии – Михаил Лермонтов, Русский, с шотландскими корнями.
Томас Бивитт – шотландец с русской душой. Музыкант впервые выступил перед россиянами в 2009 году на фестивале фонда Ивана Донцова «Вереск», затем последовал концерт в Московском Доме музыки в честь 250-летия Роберта Бёрнса, собравшем полный зал новых поклонников.
Тонкое сплетение русской и шотландской культур вылилось в совместный международный проект «Лермонтов», когда к 200-летию поэта в шотландской деревеньке Эрлстон был установлен его бронзовый бюст. В этом месте, как гласят многовековые рукописи, жил Томас «Рифмач» Лермонт.
«Я хотел приехать в Россию, потому что чувствовал, как её культура тянет меня за рукав!», – говорит уже про себя современный бард Томас Бивитт.
Томас выступает с оркестром под управлением Антона Шабурова в Екатеринбургской филармонии
Свои первые переводы он сделал, благодаря творчеству Владимира Высоцкого, чей день рождения выпал на 25 января, когда родился знаменитый шотландец Роберт Бёрнс. Такое совпадение вдохновило Томаса на несколько музыкальных выступлений в России с музыкальными размышлениями о творчестве двух поэтов двух эпох.
В 2009 я уже переводил, но мой русский язык был тогда довольно простым. Первой переведенной на английский язык песней стала «Лирическая» Владимира Высоцкого, – поделился Томас Бивитт.
Томас живет в России с 2013, сначала в Москве, 7 лет в Екатеринбурге и недавно переехал с женой в Крым. Теперь он профессиональный переводчик научных статей, бард и поэт.
Оркестр арт-проекта «Новая сказка»
Константин Уваров, художественный руководитель проекта «Новая сказка», сказал:
«C творчеством Томаса нас познакомил все тот же Иван Донцов, продюсер проекта «Новая сказка». И мы просто влюбились в Томаса и его произведения! Данный концерт, мы надеемся, это лишь начало нашего совместного творчества с Томасом – в наших планах создание большой музыкальной сказки.»
Томас выступает во дворе домика, где Лермонтов провел свою последнюю ночь на земле – фото ©Валерия Шилова, Пятигорск
В концерте «Музыка под небом» Томас Бивитт исполнит песни на стихи Михаила Лермонтова с музыкой собственного сочинения, высоко оцененной профессиональными музыкантами. Звучание кельтских мотивов на классических инструментах оставят особое впечатление у слушателей второй части выступления Томаса Бивитта и оркестра «Новая сказка» на фестивале «Музыка под небом» 28 августа 2021 года. История великого русского поэта Михаила Лермонтова в его стихах будет исполняться на русском языке, для российской аудитории.
Праведная кровь поэта, Content Leave a comment
«Томас Рифмач и Королева Эльфов»: современная версия романса 13 века «Томас Эрселдун». Русский перевод – Михаил Фейгин. Исполняет Томас Бивитт. Видео снято Регисом Трамбле в Ливадийском дворце, Ялта, Республика Крым, 21 мая 2021 года
«Кровь поэта: пророчество и преемственность в России и Шотландии», Томас Бивитт, презентация конференции в Ливадийском дворце, Ялта, Республика Крым, 21 мая 2021
It isnae over until it's over
I wrote this translation of Vysotsky's Еще не вечер in the run-up to the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. In the original Russian version, Vysotsky has in mind the veteran theatre director Yury Lyubimov, under whose inspired Brechtian leadership the Taganka Theatre departed from the Stanislavskian method-acting approach of the state financed Moscow Art Theatre. Here, the pirate ship serves as a metaphor for the Taganka, facing the might of the «navy» but never quite succumbing to its attacks. In my translation, the pirate captain is Alex Salmond – while the ship is, of course, Scotland.
Бернс-Vysotsky Leave a comment
The Return of the Global Village Bard – Interview with Regis Tremblay for Global Conversations
It was a big pleasure to be interviewed by this fine gentleman Regis Tremblay for his show Global Conversations. I talk about my long and seemingly inevitable journey from Scotland to Russia, my childhood background and my Global Village Bard collaboration programme.
Content Leave a comment
Why this new (w)rapping? (Part 3 – the rhythm of language)
People have been fascinated by the rhythm of language since the earliest times. The formal name for this study, prosody, is derived from the Greek word προσῳδία (prosōidía), which refers both to a song performed to musical accompaniment and to the particular tone or accent given to an individual syllable. Clearly, in terms of their effect, how we perceive words and phrases uttered against the background of time is at least as important as their «actual» semantic meaning. What's more, the devices used to pattern rhythmic language – especially rhyme in its various forms – are key to the preservation of lasting impressions received by our consciousness, i.e. memory. Little wonder then that the study of rhetoric – the art of persuasive or effective language – has always included prosody among its key elements.
These days, although most people have a vague idea what iambic pentameter is (te-tum, te-tum, te-tum, te-tum, te-tum), only prosody bores are likely to be able explain concepts like trochaic substitution, let alone confidently use more obscure terms like catalexis or analyse syllables in terms of onset, nucleus and coda. There's a general feeling that people who flaunt their knowledge of such arcania are… well, just a teeny weeny bit elitist.
No wonder, then, that poetry (at least, its written form) has become increasingly inclined towards so-called «free-verse», which proudly resists prosodic analysis and categorisation. However, I can't help but feel that, in giving the elitists a much-deserved kicking, the free-versers may risk throwing out the mnemonic baby with the prosodic bathwater.
Happily, a prosodist by the name of Derek Attridge has come up with a much less intimidating way of describing the rhythm of language. Attridge's concept of «beat prosody» is based on the insight that rhythm in (English) poetry is realised by the "alternation of beats and offbeats". When taking this approach to the scansion of rhythmic verse, a simple system of symbols is used to indicate the coincidence of stressed syllables with beats and unstressed syllables with offbeats. For the most regular verse, this alternation requires two symbols only – an uppercase letter 'B' to show the presence of a beat, and a lowercase letter 'o' to denote the offbeat. For example,
o B o B o B
The grand old Duke of York
He had ten thou-sand men
However, Attridge's system is also capable of capturing finer nuances of rhythmic expression, e.g. when an offbeat syllable nevertheless carries a certain degree of emphasis or a syllable that is not ordinarily emphasised happens to coincide with a beat.
In addition to its anti-elitism, Attridge's beat prosodic approach addresses other deficiencies in the use of classical prosody to analyse modern English verse. In a 1990 article, Attridge uses the example of the poem Disobedience by A.A. Milne to demonstrate how "four-beat" verse can not only be analysed in terms of alternation between beats and offbeats, but also that its basic rhythmic structure readily lends itself to dipodic division and multiplication, i.e. 1-2-4-8-16.
Discussing the temporal tradition in prosody, in which metrical units are quantised in terms of their duration, Attridge considers the tendency of the stressed syllables of certain languages to fall at perceptually equal time intervals in terms of isochrony, showing that an increase in the number of unstressed syllables per word uttered within the same time frame preserves the natural rhythms of the language at least until the number of nonstresses demands the introduction of a secondary accent".
However, Attridge's significant attempts to use a beat-prosodic approach to analyse iambic pentameter do not fully address the question of isochrony extensively discussed in earlier scholarship and developed in a functional context e.g. by Ravignani & Madison. In his review of Attridge's 1982 book 'The Rhythms of English Poetry', Bruce Hayes notes that, when discussing iambic pentameter, Attridge "applies the idea of an 'escape from binarity' […] with varying degrees of success", Hayes accurately presents Attridge's position as follows:
Poets favour pentameter precisely because it is unnatural: in art verse, the poet is striving for more subtle rhythmic effects, and to achieve them must escape the powerful rhythm of the natural binary hierarchy. Pentameter escapes binarity because five is indivisible, and because (unlike three and seven, the other candidates) it won't match a power of two if a silent beat is added.
(Hayes & Attridge, 1984, p. 916)
Nevertheless, Attridge's strong claim that pentameter avoids binarity (i.e. dipody) is fatally weakened by his reluctance to temporally quantise the pauses at the end of each poetic line. Over his three major books, he only acknowledges this aspect once in passing when discussing a «metrical walking» approach to feeling poetic rhythm:
Some "metrical walkers" like to feel that every beat in five-beat lines will come consistently on the right foot (or the left). These people are happier when they add an "end of the line" step before moving on to the next line.
(Carper & Attridge, 2003, p. 15)
When writing or translating a poem, I consider the process to be complete only after I have entirely committed the text to memory and am capable of reciting or singing it from start to finish in any social setting – sober or drunk! The best way I have found to memorise a poetic text is to go for a long walk and learn it line by line. It is certainly the case that, when doing this «metrical walking» memorising work, I add an «end of the line step». I am convinced it is the isochrony revealed by this process that transforms what would otherwise be mere decorative prose into memorable poetry – or, more accurately, song.
Attridge, D. (1982). The Rhythms of English Poetry. Longman.
Attridge, D. (1990). Rhythm in English Poetry. New Literary History, 21(4), 1015–1037. https://doi.org/10.2307/469197
Attridge, D. (1995). Poetic rhythm: an introduction. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Carper, T., & Attridge, D. (2003). Meter and Meaning: An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry (1 edition). New York: Routledge.
Hayes, B., & Attridge, D. (1984). The Rhythms of English Poetry. Language, 60(4), 914. https://doi.org/10.2307/413802
Ravignani, A., & Madison, G. (2017). The Paradox of Isochrony in the Evolution of Human Rhythm. Frontiers in Psychology, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01820
Content, Heraclitus Flow, scholarly articles, Texts Leave a comment
Lovely Jubilee 2020
I think everyone will agree that 2020 has been a bit of a difficult year for human beings on planet Earth. Now that it is coming to an end, it becomes possible to think about what it means.
There is a phrase in British English «lovely jubbly». I always thought it referred to the (originally Biblical) concept of jubilee, a half-century «sabbath of sabbaths» during which human relationships get reset, but it turns out that the term was first used as a 1950s advertising jingle for an ice lolly called a «jubbly». Then, in the 1970s, it got recycled as a catchphrase used by Dellboy in the TV serial 'Only Fools and Horses'. It has a slightly different connotation in Scots English, where «jubblies» is a slang term for female breasts.
So, this is Thomas Riffmatch's take on 2020. I think a lot of people have been yearning for some kind of jubilee. Perhaps the events of 2020 weren't exactly what we had in mind, but there it is. We will have to make the most of it!
Cover design by Michele Winfield
You shall make this year holy,
Proclaim pandemic liberty;
All must bow down and worship me!
Who can disagree?
Each vagabond and refugee
Returning to his family
To occupy his property
And ponder jubilee.
Slaves and prisoners set free,
All debts erased from memory,
Each grace-and-favour tenancy
Disposed without a fee.
From each, to his ability,
Residing in this colony;
The trend repeated globally –
This lovely jubilee.
Then, lacking the propensity
To live in close community,
The working class and bourgeoisie
Dispute the price of tea.
All coming under scrutiny,
We're drowning in hypocrisy,
Increasing in intensity,
In spite of jubilee.
Then leaders, ruling by decree,
Who were not able to foresee
The scope of herd immunity,
Provide a guarantee.
With striking ingenuity
And nuanced ambiguity,
Financialise society
To gild the jubilee.
But everyone turned out to be,
As usual, much too cowardly
To reach potentiality
And turn the master key.
Norms of herd morality
Applying, all too humanly,
The principle of me, me, me…
And that's no jubilee!
Breakthroughs in technology
And crowd-control psychology
With eyeball-tracking constantly
To see what we can see.
The subsequent economy
Is based on the commodity
Of focused attentivity
In aid of jubilee.
Not quantity, but quality –
The strains of sacred melody
Combine in perfect harmony
To form the base of "we".
But imprecative blasphemy
From Gomorrah and Sodomy
Rang out in animosity
To taint the jubilee.
Stunted in our sov'reignty,
Like Hamlet's sad soliloquy,
We're doomed to be or not to be –
I'm counting: one, two, three…
But there's no sense of urgency;
We live in modest luxury
To face the bare contingency
Of holy jubilee.
Those born in the last century
Are buried in the cemet'ry
Or ashes from the crematory
Scattered out at sea.
Redemptive contiguity
Assures the lasting legacy
Of long-conjoined humanity
In lovely jubilee.
Andrey Bokovikov, Content, Heraclitus Flow, Nikita Nikitin, Thomas Beavitt Leave a comment
Why this new (w)rapping? (Part 2 – memorable speech)
So, why do I think that rap is the new home of contemporary poetry? The famous 20th-century poet Wystan Hugh Auden memorably defined poetry as «memorable speech». I think that is a good definition for a number of reasons. Firstly, the tendency towards so-called «free verse» (lines on a page that have neither metre nor rhyme) means that there is no longer a hard and fast distinction between poetry and prose other than that the latter appears in the form of sentences and paragraphs, while the former appears in the form of lines and stanzas that may or may not also conform to a sentence or paragraph structure. But what if the poetry is not written down? What if it is primarily experienced in its spoken – or declaimed – form? Aren't the best (most memorable) political speeches, for example, more akin to poetry than prose?
Let's take the spoken (oral) form of poetry as primary and worry about how to represent it in written form later. I think that this is the right way to think of it. I don't find much «free verse» to be particularly memorable. Perhaps it looks good on a page. But turn the page and, unless you have a photographic memory, you will most likely have already forgotten what you just read. If you try to reproduce it from memory after a significant passage of time, you may find that you can recall the gist of what was said, but that the words themselves, their organisation into phrases and the exact order in which they appear, elude you. Well, that's how my mind works anyway.
To me, that's the essential nature of prose. You don't expect to be able to recall it word-for-word, but you will be able to paraphrase your impression of the author's story or argument. And here's the catch. Your impression of the story or argument is just that: anything that the author may have wished to keep intact has been lost. In order to go back to it, you will have to turn to the appropriate page (or click on the URL). Human memory is like that. It is essentially frail.
Let's imagine that we want to be able to establish something in human linguistic memory that won't be paraphrased, but that will form a lasting impression that has a fixed relationship to its original utterance, like the Mona Lisa's face on da Vinci's canvas or David's form revealed by Michelangelo's chisel. For this, we will need to turn to the timeless craft of poetry in which two formal elements are combined: rhythm and rhyme.
Why this new (w)rapping? (Part 1 – cultural estrangement)
Since you probably know me as a singer-songwriter / translator and this Global Village Bard blog as a song and poetry translation site, I thought I'd try to explain the new direction taken by my alter ego Thomas Riffmatch and his merry crew.
Like many, I've been exposed to rap (hip hop) music for a few decades now. I suppose my first realisation that this was a major form came with the brilliantly shocking 1988 N.W.A. album 'Straight outta Compton'. After that, it lay dormant in my consciousness for a while. A while ago, I had an idea to investigate the link between rap and calypso, another genre that was born out of the idea of lyrical «battles», but it never came to anything.
While always intrigued by the form, I tended to be put off by the themes of hip hop: talk of bitches and niggas, gang violence and glorified drug-dealing, while interesting as a form of escapism, somehow didn't seem to include my own experienced reality. Call me a privileged white man…
A few years ago, my son Max introduced me to the music of Watsky, a young white rapper from San Francisco. We so loved the whimsical self-deprecating humour of his second studio album 'Cardboard Castles' that we went to his concert at Glasgow's King Tuts. But after a while, I have to say, Watsky's whimsicality started to seem a tad smug and none of his subsequent albums ever quite reached the understated genius of 'Cardboard Castles'.
Much more so than Eminem, Watsky helped me to realise that the rap genre doesn't need to exclude (middle-class) white people like me. Maybe this is because, while Eminem seems to have a chip on his shoulder about being white, falling over himself to show that he is down with his black homeys in terms of social deprivation, Watsky never tries to portray himself other than a goofy overprivileged Californian white boy.
Although I did eventually get tired of Watsky's schtick, I had caught the hip hop bug. Somehow songs didn't sound so authentic any more. Why sing when you can rap? I started listening to a very wide range of rap music from the 1990s to the present day, mainly in the form of playlists and compilation albums. Whenever something caught my ear, I stopped and made a note of the artist. Although I no longer felt excluded by the genre, I was looking for something that was not ALL about niggas and bitches, but that also sought to express bigger ideas about what it means to be a human being.
In short, I was trying to find out what had happened to poetry.
Content, Heraclitus Flow, scholarly articles Leave a comment