Burnt Norton

T.S.エリオットの詩などこれまで読んだこともなかったのですが、先々週、偶然、ＢＢＣラジオの Words and Music で Anna Massey が Burnt Norton を朗読しているのを聴きました。
本日、岩崎先生の翻訳があるのを偶々図書館で見つけました。firecat さんによると「前期後期を問わず、高齢者には身にしみる詩だろうが、若い人も早めに読んでおいて損はない」とのこと。ちょっと読んでみようかな。

四つの四重奏

Four Quartets: read by Ralph Fiennes

http://www.faber.co.uk/work/four-quartets/9780571249596/
http://www.lrbshop.co.uk/product.php?productid=11215&cat=327&page=1

Waste Land, The & Four Quartets (BBC Radio Collection)

http://www.bbcshop.com/Drama+Arts/The-Wasteland+The-Four-Quartets/invt/9780563523352

Secret Places in the Four Quartets
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mj0vd

BURNT NORTON
(No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')

T.S. Eliot

I

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

II

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

III

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.

IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?

Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

V

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always―
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/norton.html

この番組はとても丁寧に作られていて、エリオットが the Metaphysical Poets と呼んだ詩人たち（ John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Carew, Andrew Marvell ）の詩も、こちらは Derek Jacobi の朗読でしたが、この Burnt Norton と併せて、音楽とともに流すという趣向です。とても感心しました。
以下、番組プロデューサーの詳しい解説です。さすがはＢＢＣですね。ＮＨＫとはかなりレベルが違います。

Producer's note
In his influential essay The Metaphysical Poets, T. S. Eliot brought about a revaluation and reassessment of interest in a group of 17th Century poets who had been neglected for a considerable time.
He examined one by one the characteristics which are generally considered ‘metaphysical’: the elaboration of simile to the farthest possible extent, rapid association of thought, compression and sudden contrasts of images.
In his view their unique contribution was to unite thought with feeling – something he called “Unification of Sensibility” – a faculty which was lost in the age of Milton and Dryden (who could think but not feel) and the succeeding age of Tennyson and Browning (who could feel but not think).
Eliot also saw close connections between the complexity of his own poetry and that of the Metaphysicals.
This programme interlaces the five sections of Burnt Norton (the 1st of Eliot’s Four Quartets) with music and the metaphysical poetry of John Donne and Andrew Marvell etc.
Anna Massey reads the Eliot and Derek Jacobi reads the Metaphysicals. They meet in the middle where both take part in Andrew Marvell’s A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body.
In 1931 TS Eliot wrote to Stephen Spender: "I have Beethoven’s A minor Quartet on the gramophone, and I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly, or at least more than human gaiety, about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die."
Eliot’s Four Quartets are to some extent inspired by this quartet – the only Beethoven Quartet in 5 sections, as are all four of the Eliot Quartets. Eliot said he wanted to get "beyond poetry, as Beethoven in his later works, strove to get beyond music".
The language and thought in the Four Quartets is so elliptical and compressed that it would be inappropriate and presumptuous to match the poetry and the music too literally. The aim has been to allow the poetry to breath by placing moments of musical reflection between the 5 sections of the poem. In some cases the music matches the mood in others it provides a contrast. Below I have suggested some tangential (possibly subconscious) connections between the words and the music. However these are entirely personal and hopefully the programme stands on its own without a knowledge of these connections.

Producer's note (cont.)

Burnt Norton

Section 1:
“Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future”
The opening section introduces the theme of time. The poem considers the relationship between life in time, a life of bondage and suffering, and life in eternity, freedom, and happiness. This leads into the “Et vitam venturi” from Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. In this part of the Mass, Christians look forward to the life to come when they will live outside of Time. Beethoven constructs his fugue subject out of a chain of descending thirds which return to the original note – a concise emblem for eternal recurrence in eternity.

Section 2:
“Garlic and sapphires in the mud”
Eliot develops the theme of time and memory – “To be conscious is not to be in time”. One of the central images of the poem is the memory of a rose-garden with a pool. Takemitsu’s Quotation of Dream plays with memories of Debussy’s La Mer and transforms the material into a Japanese flower-garden with a lake

Section 3
“Here is a place of disaffection”
Eliot contrasts the redeemed time of eternity with the bondage of temporal time where “time-ridden faces” are “distracted from distraction by distraction.” In later years he admitted that the section beginning “Descend lower, descend only / Into the world of perpetual solitude” was inspired by the London Underground, “a place of disaffection” where “the world moves / In appetency, on its metalled ways / Of time past and time future.” John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine suggests the mechanistic world of fast travel and machines – though he possibly found it more exhilarating that Eliot.

Section 4
“Time and the bell have buried the day”
Much of the inspiration behind the Four Quartets came from Eastern philosophy with its emphasis in eternal recurrence and withdrawal from the temporal world of will and illusion. In this section the poet withdraws into the world of night where “the light is still / At the still point of the turning world.” The 4th movement of Mahler’s 3rd Symphony is a setting of a passage from Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra in which the Eastern prophet Zarathustra meditates on Night and Eternity

Section 5
“Words move, music moves / Only in time”
Eliot explores the connection between music and time. The idea that music exists both inside and outside of time. In other words we experience music through time but it also exists as an abstract concept outside of time – “the end precedes the beginning, / And the end and the beginning were always there / before the beginning and after the end.” We end with the poem’s inspiration, the last section of the central movement from Beethoven’s late A minor quartet in which for pages time itself seems masterfully suspended.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00p3092