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Yearly Archives: 2014
If you’re deaf, don’t believe all you read
To use TV subtitles or not to use them? With my digital hearing aids my ears deal with most everyday situations pretty well. But I find some TV a bit difficult and often use the subtitles as a back-up. This is fine for most programmes, but for live programmes (such as the news) the subtitles are pretty hopeless because they’re not synchronised and seem to be spontaneously produced, buggered up and (sometimes) corrected as the programme unfolds. I watched the BBC News channel at 1pm today. At one point, the presenter was giving some background to a story about former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. He was explaining how long Sharon had been in a coma. The subtitles, however, told a puzzling story: “Mr Sharon”, they said, “has been in e-commerce since 2006.”
Bet you didn’t know that!
Against war, French style
The French singer Renaud wrote this song in 1994.
The translation which follows the French text is mine.
LA MÉDAILLE
Un pigeon s’est posé‚
Sur l’épaule galonnée
Du Maréchal de France
Et il a décoré
La statue dressée
D’une gastrique offense
Maréchaux assassins
Sur vos bustes d’airain
Vos poitrines superbes
Vos médailles ne sont
Que fiente de pigeon
De la merde
Un enfant est venu
Aux pieds de la statue
Du Maréchal de France
Une envie naturelle
L’a fait pisser contre elle
Mais en toute innocence
Maréchaux assassins
Le môme mine de rien
A joliment vengé
Les enfants et les mères
Que dans vos sales guerres
Vous avez massacrés
Un clodo s’est couché
Une nuit juste aux pieds
Du Maréchal de France
Ivre mort au matin
Il a vomi son vin
Dans une gerbe immense
Maréchaux assassins
Vous méritez rien
De mieux pour vos méfaits
Que cet hommage immonde
Pour tout le sang du monde
Par vos sabres versés
Un couple d’amoureux
S’embrasse sous les yeux
Du Maréchal de France
Muet comme un vieux bonze
Il restera de bronze
Raide comme une lance
Maréchaux assassins
L’amour ne vous dit rien
A part bien sur celui
De la Patrie hélas
Cette idée dégueulasse
Qu’à mon tour je conchie
Renaud Séchan
THE MEDAL
A pigeon perched
On the braided shoulder
Of the Marshal of France
And he decorated the upright statue
With a gastric offense
Marshals – assassins –
On your busts of bronze
Your superb chests
Your medals are
Nothing but pigeon’s droppings
Nothing but shit
A child came
To the feet of the statue
Of the Marshal of France
A natural need
Made him piss against it
But in all innocence
Marshals – assassins –
This unthinking child
Has nicely avenged
The children and mothers
You have massacred
In your dirty wars
A tramp slept
One night at the feet
Of the Marshal of France
In the morning, dead drunk,
He vomited his wine
Like an enormous fountain
Marshals – assassins –
You deserve nothing better
For your misdeeds
Than this filthy homage
For all the blood of the world
Shed by your swords
Two lovers are kissing
Under the gaze
Of the Marshal of France
Dumb as an old priest
He will stay set in bronze
Stiff as a lance
Marshals – assassins –
Love means nothing to you
Except, alas, patriotic love
That disgusting idea
That I, in my turn, abhor.
Renaud Séchan
The First World War: a soldier’s declaration
Unlike Wilfred Owen (see previous blog), Siegfried Sassoon survived the war. But in July 1917 he made the following statement against it:
“I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.
I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this War, on which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purpose for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.
I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them; also I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the contrivance of agonies which they do not, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.”
The statement was read out in the House of Commons on 30 July and reported in The Times on the 31st. He remained in the army, was wounded in the head on 30 July 1918, was sent home and put on indefinite sick leave. He officially retired from the army on 12 March 1919. He continued to write prose and verse.He died in 1967.
Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration has at its centre the real-life encounter between Sassoon and army psychologist W.H.R. Rivers at Craiglochart in 1917 (Penguin Books, 1992, and no doubt reprinted subsequently).
The Old Lie
If I understood the BBC correctly yesterday, we are in for four whole years of centenary celebrations of the First World War. I won’t be celebrating.
After gas was used for the first time on 22 April 1915, Wilfred Owen wrote this poem against the idea that Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori – it is noble and fitting to die for one’s country:
DULCE ET DECORUM EST
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
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