Thursday 5 February 2015

Hope Abandoned



Hope Abandoned is my new book. It's very thick, so it will take me some time to read it. It's about the life and times of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) and it was written by his wife. My new book is 40 years old. It cost 1.00 €.


This is my new bag. It's large and sturdy. It's very thick and robust and its purpose is to enable me to carry my plastic, glass, paper and metal rubbish to the recycling containers at the end of the street. It was a freebie from the city's Refuse Department. Hope Abandoned will be 'recycled' elsewhere.

Here's a poem from Osip Mandelstam:

'Eyesight of Wasps'

Armed with the eyesight of slender wasps,

sucking at the earth's axis, the earth's axis, 
I feel everything that ever happened to me,
and I memorize it, but it's all in vain. 

I don't draw and I don't sing, 

and I don't play the violin with a black-voiced bow.
I drive my sting only into life, and love
to envy the powerful, cunning wasps. 

Oh, if I could be compelled

by the sting of the air and the summer warmth
to pass through the worlds of dreams and death,
to sense the earth's axis, the earth's axis . . . 


You can find a short biography and two more poems HERE.


15 comments:

  1. Why is the bag written in English?

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    1. I don't really know why the bag is in English. But they often use English in Vienna, for announcements on trains, information in museums, and even in the cafe house and in street. Viennese enjoy using their English and use any excuse to do so. It's a very cosmopolitan city.

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    2. How strange. I must visit one day.

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    3. On the other side of the bag is written WANTED and underneath are images of a plastic bottle, a drinks can, a newspaper and a tin can.
      Having been to Prague and Budapest you should definitely check out Vienna. It's the classic 3-cities itinerary for tourists from East Asia.

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  2. I hope the book is good. What sort of man was he?

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  3. In one word, he was courageous. An opponent of Stalin he was lucky not to receive the death sentence in the Great Purge. Obviously didn't study Stalin's famous book, which everyone was supposed to do, on how man descended from monkeys because he discovered the difference between right and left. He died in a transit camp near Vladivostock on his way to Siberia.

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    1. Funny route to take to Siberia. However he sounds interesting. I will look out for a £1 copy.

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    2. I'm looking forward to discovering why they sent him that route. I'll try and remember to tell you why they did that when I reach that point in the memoir.

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  4. I rarely buy new books. I can’t justify the cost. Novellas are the worst because they charge you the same price as a novel. Which is why… Christ, I wouldn’t like to put a percentage figure on it… the vast majority of the books I own I bought second-hand. €1.00 is good. £1.00 is good. $1.00 is good. And don’t get me started on the price of coffee. I expect to drink coffee for a week for four quid. I don’t recycle books much. I horde them. My daughter can take what she wants when I die and I know her well enough to know she’ll see the rest go to a good home.

    As regards recycling of waste our local council is very good. We have blue bins and bags for paper and plastic, white bags for glass and brown bins for food waste and they’ve just added two large wheelie bins out the back of each block to take the overflow. Plus banks are cropping up beside most local shopping centres where you can dispose of all of the above and clothes too. Why we waited so long for this I have no idea. It’s always troubled me how much we waste especially on packaging. Yes, it’s all very pretty but, seriously, a cardboard box would do. Or a paper bag.

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    1. I agree with you about the packaging craze, Jim, it irritates me that there is so much plastic packaging, and that I have to see it again littering the beach in Italy when I'm on holiday. This is one of the reasons why I do most of my shopping on the Saturday market where there is no packaging involved aside the odd bag made of brown paper, like "the good old days" which were really good in respect of less packaging!
      My books are mostly 1-2€ purchases and are 'recycled' via the local church bazaar or donated to the local Irish pub which has a reading room with shelves of books to read, borrow, or simply take away. There are also 'take a book and leave a book' cotainers now appearing on street corners in the city and in other town in Austria.

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    2. Forgot to mentioned that latest book, price 0.00€, Detainee 002 by Leigh Sales. One might call it a Sales bargain! It's the story of the Australian David Hicks who was renditioned to Guantanamo following 9/11 and given the number 002.

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    3. I never buy new books either, I just get them from charity shops and then donate back when I have finished. I do buy new art books though when I visit a show in London but that is all.

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  5. That's interesting Rachel, I'm basically the same. Many art books purchased at museums and exhibitions but the novels etc. almost always in charity or second hand shops. Current reading, a J P Sartre which cost 4/6d when it was new.

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  6. The main reason is apart from the financial aspect that I find the old books more interesting to read. They seem to me to be less superficial and more meaningful in depth.

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  7. On listening to the poem read in the original language by a Russian poet on YouTube I found that the words about the "earth's axis" sounded to me like the sound of bees or wasps. Clever.

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