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"Cigarettes"
Jun. 21st, 2007 12:30 pmOne of the saddest poems I have ever read. The first time I read it I thought, "Interesting, but I don't quite get it..." I read it a couple more times and realized, "Okay, so it's about how certain pleasures (- like cigarettes -) can eventually translate to despair and suffering." Then, tonight, as I was randomly flipping through the book I have this in, I read it again. It's about AIDS?
Problems of translation are, perhaps, not so great
between languages, as between different versions
of the same language. Why, for example,
does "fag" mean homosexual in America, when,
in England, it means cigarette? Does this imply
that those who first observed the phenomenon
of smoking in the New World were homosexual?
This would cause some consternation on Columbus Day,
and, in all likelihood, the assumption is unjustified,
since Columbus and his crew were not English-speakers.
Yet, if we dismiss the idea of happy crowds of
homosexual Italian or Spanish mariners
returning to Europe with cigarettes in hand,
eager to introduce this new pleasure to their lovers,
we should perhaps concede that there is some connection
between the two ideas. It was Oscar Wilde, after all,
who described smoking as "the perfect pleasure, because"--
he opined--"it always leaves one unsatisfied."
It is clear from this that he was thinking of sexual pleasure,
of the working-class youth with whom he so recklessly dined
in fashionable restaurants of the eighteen nineties.
A cigarette is like a pashion in that it is inhaled deeply
and seems to fill all the empty spaces of the body,
until, of course, it burns down, and is put out amid
the shells of pistachio nuts, or whatever trash
may be at hand, and the passion may leave traces
that in time will grow malignant: he who has taken pleasure
may die many years after in the room of an anonymous
hotel or hospital, under the blank gaze of a washstand,
a bad painting or an empty vase, having forgotten entirely
the moment that announced the commencement
of his dying. And perhaps he will not understand:
it is another false translation, like someone stumbling over
the word for cigarette in a new and intolerable language.
-John Ash
Problems of translation are, perhaps, not so great
between languages, as between different versions
of the same language. Why, for example,
does "fag" mean homosexual in America, when,
in England, it means cigarette? Does this imply
that those who first observed the phenomenon
of smoking in the New World were homosexual?
This would cause some consternation on Columbus Day,
and, in all likelihood, the assumption is unjustified,
since Columbus and his crew were not English-speakers.
Yet, if we dismiss the idea of happy crowds of
homosexual Italian or Spanish mariners
returning to Europe with cigarettes in hand,
eager to introduce this new pleasure to their lovers,
we should perhaps concede that there is some connection
between the two ideas. It was Oscar Wilde, after all,
who described smoking as "the perfect pleasure, because"--
he opined--"it always leaves one unsatisfied."
It is clear from this that he was thinking of sexual pleasure,
of the working-class youth with whom he so recklessly dined
in fashionable restaurants of the eighteen nineties.
A cigarette is like a pashion in that it is inhaled deeply
and seems to fill all the empty spaces of the body,
until, of course, it burns down, and is put out amid
the shells of pistachio nuts, or whatever trash
may be at hand, and the passion may leave traces
that in time will grow malignant: he who has taken pleasure
may die many years after in the room of an anonymous
hotel or hospital, under the blank gaze of a washstand,
a bad painting or an empty vase, having forgotten entirely
the moment that announced the commencement
of his dying. And perhaps he will not understand:
it is another false translation, like someone stumbling over
the word for cigarette in a new and intolerable language.
-John Ash
