Le Plat Pays

Weide in de lente - Veldweg: Albijn Van den Abeele

Waiting in for a carpet to be delivered a few Saturdays ago I caught a fascinating radio programme, Brel et Moi, featuring the Belgian singer/songwriter, Jacques Brel and presented and written by Alastair Campbell (yes, that Alastair Campbell). Such a short life. A serial womaniser in Paris, a demanding paterfamilias in Brussels. Self centred and driven but loved by those he worked with and, heavens, what a talent.

Years ago the Brel song that seduced me was Le Plat Pays (the Flat Land), a love song to his native Flanders. A poem in its own right, lyrical and elegaic. I was born and spent my childhood in a similarly flat land of earth, water and wide skies on the other side of the North Sea and the song stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard it. It still does.

Maybe only a Belgian could pull it off. Using each of the four winds Brel celebrates the different moods and seasons of this modest and - nowadays at least - peaceful stretch of land. He opens himself to embrace the rain and cold and the tedium and monotony, as well as warmth and sunlight. Winter. Summer. Everything in between.

The lyrics are below. I'm not attempting a translation. There are a few versions floating around on the web but they don't really reach the level of the original. According to one contributor to the programme there is a view that Brel's work is pretty much untranslatable and it's true that those songs that have made it into English haven't necessarily benefitted. One of the other contributors, Mel Smith, is a Brel devotee who neither reads nor understands French: the ferocious intensity, the sweat and saliva (literally) of Brel's performances were enough to captivate him.

Cue for a video of a mesmerising live performance of Le Plat Pays. Enough of my words. Listen.



Avec la mer du Nord pour dernier terrain vague
Et des vagues de dunes pour arrêter les vagues
Et de vagues rochers que les marées dépassent
Et qui ont à jamais le cœur à marée basse
Avec infiniment de brumes à venir
Avec le vent de l'ouest écoutez-le tenir
Le plat pays qui est le mien

Avec des cathédrales pour uniques montagnes
Et de noirs clochers comme mâts de cocagne
Où des diables en pierre décrochent les nuages
Avec le fil des jours pour unique voyage
Et des chemins de pluie pour unique bonsoir
Avec le vent de l'est écoutez-le vouloir
Le plat pays qui est le mien

Avec un ciel si bas qu'un canal s'est perdu
Avec un ciel si bas qu'il fait l'humilité
Avec un ciel si gris qu'un canal s'est pendu
Avec un ciel si gris qu'il faut lui pardonner
Avec le vent du nord qui vient s'écarteler
Avec le vent du nord écoutez-le craquer
Le plat pays qui est le mien

Avec de l'Italie qui descendrait l'Escaut
Avec Frida la Blonde quand elle devient Margot
Quand les fils de novembre nous reviennent en mai
Quand la plaine est fumante et tremble sous juillet
Quand le vent est au rire quand le vent est au blé
Quand le vent est au sud écoutez-le chanter
Le plat pays qui est le mien.

Jacques Brel

More insight into the inspiration for the song? There's a set of masterly, evocative photographs of Le Plat Pays here, just a click away.

I keep returning to them.

Kill Claudio

I must have been around 17 years old and was in the audience on a school trip when Maggie Smith's Beatrice spoke these words to Robert Stephens' Benedict.

A pause and a silence that you could have cut with a knife.

As a comedy, Much Ado about Nothing has a dark side. The male rage and vitriol (including that of her much-loved father) heaped upon Hero after her faithfulness is questioned, for one thing. It reminded me of present day newspaper stories about honour killings. Shakespeare did seem to have a fixation on cuckoldry and you wonder (well I do) whether he subscribed to the attitudes he bestows on some of his male characters.

Then I think that he has to have the benefit of the doubt. Any man who can create a such a human, stroppy Beatrice must be all right. She and Benedict are equals, each gradually dismantling their own defences against the possibility of love (with a little help from their friends of course).

Much Ado came to an open air performance in our town last week courtesy of a touring theatre company. Four men and two women, covering several roles each (Beatrice was also Dogberry!). It was played for laughs and the goal was entertainment, text interspersed with asides and banter with the audience. We were eating out of the actors' hands after the first two minutes for they were genuinely funny. A relaxed, enjoyable evening but somehow the light/dark qualities of the play stood out all the more because of it.

Beatrice and Benedict will be OK. Claudio and Hero are heading for the divorce courts.

....

The night was dark and close and warm. I was the only one walking home, but this isn't a problem here. Houses and gardens. Trees. High hedges. A stream. A pub with drinkers sitting in the gardens, talking and laughing. Several cars went by, then for the last ten minutes, silence. Just the sound of my own steps. Friends were unavailable or away and I was glad I had pushed through reserve and inertia to go to the play on my own - not something that comes easily however often I do it.

I opened the front door and went indoors, locking up behind me.

Once Upon a Time

Rue Mouffetard, Paris
www.terragalleria.com

Steve, the library assistant, said jokingly that he should perhaps date stamp the book for a year rather than the habitual three weeks.

Spells of Enchantment – The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture is a collection of wonder and fairy tales from the 2nd century AD to 1988 by authors ranging from Andersen to Voltaire to W B Yeats. At thirteen hundred pages and sixty plus stories, Steve is right, it isn’t a quick read. A week later and I’m just three tales in.

In the editor’s words:

In the wonder tales those who are naïve and simple are able to succeed because they are untainted and can read the wondrous signs. They have retained their belief in the miraculous condition of nature, revere nature in all its aspects. They have not been spoiled by conventionalism, power or rationalism. In contrast to the humble characters, the villains are those who use words intentionally to exploit, control, transfix, incarcerate, and destroy for their benefit. They have no respect or consideration for nature and other human beings, and they actually seek to abuse magic by preventing change and causing everything to be transfixed according to their interests.

and then this

Enchantment means petrification. Breaking the spell equals emancipation.

If I discover nothing else, I’ve been introduced to the writing of Angela Carter, whose tale, The Tiger’s Bride, a feminist variation on Beauty and the Beast, makes me want to run out and read everything else she has written. Here's a wonderfully gothic description of the scene as the heroine’s father gambles, his daughter as forfeit:

But then the snow comes, you cannot escape it, it followed us from Russia as if it ran behind our carriage, and in this dark, bitter city has caught up with us at last, flocking against the windowpanes to mock my father’s expectations of perpetual pleasure as the veins in his forehead stand out and throb, his hands shake as he deals the Devil’s picture books.

The candles dropped hot, acrid gouts of wax on my bare shoulders. I watched with the furious cynicism peculiar to women whom circumstances force mutely to witness folly, while my father, fired in his desperation by more and yet more drafts of the firewater they call grappa, rid himself of the last scraps of my inheritance.

Fabulous.

****

I’d better come clean. The subject matter was not the only attraction of the book. What made it leap off the shelf into my hand was the name of the editor. I’d never come across any of his books until this.

Thirty years ago this month I owed the first of my three homes in Paris to him. He was American, a visiting professor at Nanterre University who needed to rent out his studio for three semesters to take up a temporary post in East Berlin. I had arrived from England to work a few weeks previously in the wake of the breakup of a long and tortuous love affair. Totally alone, I was staying in a cheap hotel and looking for somewhere to live. I developed a tentative friendship with a Peruvian postgraduate student, a gentle, quiet man who was moonlighting at the hotel as a weekend receptionist and who put us in touch.

A faint memory lingers of my quasi-landlord. Blue eyes, blue jeans, nice smile.

In the August of 1978 he set off for East Germany and I moved into the flat in the Ve arrondissement, the heart of the Left Bank, on the rue Mouffetard, a cobbled street, narrow and picturesque, that snakes downhill from the Place de la Contrescarpe to the rue Censier.

More memories float back into focus. You left the bustle of the daily street market, passed through a dark, narrow passage to a small courtyard. The flat was on the ground floor of the far building. Eerily quiet it was, considering the crush of people on the street.

****

Nine months later. I found an apartment with a new friend and a white cat on the rue Andre del Sarte up against the massive stone bulk of the Butte Montmartre, convenient for the Gare du Nord and the train journey to the job I had been offered in Chantilly.

Invisible links.

Paths that cross.

Lives that intersect

I would stay in Paris for ten years. I don't know how I did it. Looking back I suspect I might indeed have had a fairy godmother. The years were marked as much by searching and hunger and lostness as excitement and adventure. Yet opportunities came when they were needed. Helpers stepped out of the shadows at critical moments.

It would be another fifteen years and I'd be back in England before the happy ending started to manifest. Slowly. It wouldn't be the one that I had envisaged. And the process still continues.

Tuesday

Aimless doesn't work. I like having a fairly firm structure to my free days, though I often tell myself the opposite. Tuesday began early with a trip to the bicycle repair place (I fell off the bike, very publicly, two weeks ago - no bones broken but the machine wasn't so lucky) and ended with an evening yoga class.

Somewhere in between, to the local arts centre for a lunchtime viewing of Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical animated film about a young girl with a taste for the music of Iron Maiden, growing up in Teheran from the 1970s to the 1990s. Witty, harrowing, tragic and at times downright comical, with a political edge. I learned a surprising amount that I didn't know previously about the history of Iran and the rise of fundamentalism. One quibble: ten minutes could perhaps have been cut somewhere towards the end; the last half hour was a little too long for me.

French with English subtitles but there's a dubbed English language version out there as well. Definitely recommended.

Intimacy

I catch The Band's Visit and find that I am in agreement with most reviewers: the film is a delight without being cloying. Members of an Egyptian police band find themselves stranded overnight in a dead-or-alive Israeli desert town. The band members and the locals, who offer them awkward and somewhat reluctant hospitality, form bonds of intimacy in inauspicious circumstances.

Politics aren't mentioned. Instead, we have halting conversations between guests and hosts about love, about the importance of music, about the pain of loss. Because they know they will never see each other again, confidences are shared. And the unspoken contrast is always there, between lively, open, cosmopolitan Alexandria, where the band hail from and which we never see, and the sterile Israeli settlement. There's much humour alongside the poignancy, including a positively Chaplinesque scene at the local roller skating rink. .

I spot a friend in the cinema audience. We meet up afterwards and compare notes. This happens in a small town (or even a not-so-small town), you meet people you know. Those of us who have alternative tendencies, who are interested in the environment and world cinema, and walking and yoga, tend to hang out in the same places.

We run into each other unexpectedly. Then we talk. I'm really not used to this.