15 june 2025

John Bjarne Grover

Having just completed the brief comments entry of 14 june 2025, I looked up in the bookshelf and saw Olaf Bull: "Samlede digte" ('Collected poems'). In the article on Aristotle I mention the strange phenomenon some years ago when dust settled on some of the bookspines in my bookshelf but not on all - it looked as if the dust could read: "The dust settled on mainly bookspines of linguistic and mathematical subjects".

This book by Bull was one of the exceptional books that attracted dust on the spine in that period years ago when things like that happened, and I now thought: Why did this poetry book attract the dust - along with the books on historical linguistics, mathematics, Homer and others? What is so special about Bull? I pulled the book down and opened it coincidentally on p.339 (the poem 'Knut Hamsun') and I leafed three leaves forwards and stopped at 'Konvolvlen' on page 332 - also on this internet page. When lifting the poem over into english there are some ambiguities that are not the same in english. It starts with line 1 (the humble translation is mine):

Olaf Bull: The convolvulus (Rococo)	Ambiguities
Ah, why did I meet your dust in the book,
convolvulus from the bitter times of youth,
with the petals and the stem crushed in the corner	hook (for 'corner')
between two immortal pages?
Were my lips filled with the summer wind,
then I expanded your crown/corolla out again
and lifted you back through the frost
to beautiful, forgotten flower meadows!
To be grazed/touched by a butterfly among thousands	to roam (for 'to be grazed')
is to get a nobler destiny	decision (for 'destiny')
than here to bear witness to the intoxication
that here so irrepairably will/would perish.	without penance/amendment (for 'irrepairably')
And rather to shed blossoms in peace,
truthful and modest and innocent,
than here to be the imprint of the oath	Eden (for 'the oath')
that since 20 summers has been invalidated!
Convolvulus, you who were consecrated for murdering
a dream of happiness, youthful and stern,	string (for 'stern')
do once again become a joy for a shepherd
among a thousand other flowers on his meadow.

(Interestingly, 'stern/stem' are symmetric, as are other aspects of the poem).

The ambiguities in the poem can be read as follows:

String-hook
roams Eden -
decision without penance/amendment

and thus tells of this analysis of two days ago - what is the innate intuition on left and right parentheses? The 'Chomsky hook' is what I call 'the stringhook' phenomenon - it roams Eden like a decision without amendment.

Could have been the dust on the spine of the book?

The poem also resembles my own poem #56 from 'Stillhetens åndedrag', here in my own word-by-word literal translation:

Hammerschlag	Bull's 'Convolvulus'
There grew the lonely rose	Ah, why did I meet your dust in the book,
in a roadside's gravelled edge.	convolvulus from the bitter times of youth,
Then came a gardener with a pouch	with the petals and the stem crushed in the corner
and moved it home to those among	between two immortal pages?
that garden of beauty which knows	Were my lips filled with the summer wind,
our innermost sympathy.	then I expanded your crown/corolla out again
It grew and throve with friends	and lifted you back through the frost
and own family because	to beautiful, forgotten flower meadows!
its happiness was the beauty's cage.	To be grazed/touched by a butterfly among thousands
Then finally it wanted to taste	is to get a nobler destiny
the inner nature of beauty.	than here to bear witness to the intoxication
And the gardener carried it back.	that here so irrepairably will/would perish.
Then owls are flying in time	And rather to shed blossoms in peace,
and timbers from Lebanon.	truthful and modest and innocent,
There they perhaps later live	than here to be the imprint of the oath
on the heaven's time by borrowing.	that since 20 summers has been invalidated!
You carry a shadow on the forehead,	Convolvulus, you who were consecrated for murdering
a rose on the mid deck.	a dream of happiness, youthful and stern,
You should have been another	do once again become a joy for a shepherd
who carries the earthen away.	among a thousand other flowers on his meadow.

Now checking for the parallel which is Luigi Nono's 'Fragmente - Stille, an Diotima' in the 1983 recording with 'LaSalle Quartet', the time valuations are given here on page 117: The parallel with Nono shows that the music lends emphasis to those lines where there are ambiguities in Bull's poem.

Of course I should also mention the norwegian rhyme 'ryllik.... fyllik...' (= 'yarrow... drunkard...') which was in a draft to a poem in the notebooks that I lost in a church in 2019.

(It is not impossible that 'ryllik' could have been contained in the 'Walmart' massacre that started so to speak in the moment when I came rushing back to the church an hour and 20 minutes after I forgotten the rucksack there - 'valmue' = 'poppy' - and that 'fyllik' = 'drunkard' could have been contained in the 'Ned Peppers Bar' of Dayton some hours later. One of the notebooks was half written, the second half was blank with only a password on the last page, while the other notebook had date annotations to the poems).

Sources:

Bull, O.: Samlede digte. Oslo 1934.

Grover, J.: Stillheten's åndedrag. Vienna 2017.

Nono, L.: 'Fragmente - Stille, an Diotima' (1980) - in 1983 recording by LaSalle Quartet. Deutsche Grammophon (1986).

© John Bjarne Grover
On the web 15 june 2025