RGB Colour Scheme TRANSLATION Vol. 2. Issue 1 MT 2020
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at the knees How Pantagruel broke the Chitterlings François Rabelais
8 Corona Paul Celan
tr. Eve Mason
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From ‘Discours sur le colonialisme’ Aimé Césaire
tr. Mhairi Tait
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The most perfect excess Ana Luísa Amaral
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Island Line Jennifer Sloyan
tr. Margaret Jull Costa
18 In a network of lines that intersect Ned Summers 20 for laura Adelaide Ivánova 24 Stills Michael Woods
tr. Francisco Vilhena
26 Tahimik Maia Brown 28
Flowers of Flesh Jules Michelet
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Stock Photography Emma Levin
tr. Maia Brown
tr. Matthew Redman
32 Barefoot Silvina Ocampo 35
tr. Matty Matsagoura
Acknowledgements & Content Warnings
facebook: email: editors:
@RGBColourScheme rgbcolourscheme@gmail.com Adam Husain / Orna Rifkin / Thomas Dervan / Kitty Blain
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The Chitterlings advanced so near that Pantagruel perceived that they stretched their arms and already began to charge their lances, which caused him to send Gymnast to know what they meant, and why they thus, without the least provocation, came to fall upon their old trusty friends, who had neither said nor done the least ill thing to them. Gymnast being advanced near their front, bowed very low, and said to them as loud as ever he could: We are friends, we are friends; all, all of us your friends, yours, and at your command; we are for Carnival, your old confederate. Some have since told me that he mistook, and said cavernal instead of carnival. Whatever it was, the word was no sooner out of his mouth but a huge
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How Pantagruel broke the Chitterlings at the knees
The chitterlings, which are sausages, make to advance
Translated into English by Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty and Peter Antony Motteux
Kiss-mine-arse
Higgledy-piggledy
little squab Sausage, starting out of the front of their main body, would have gripped him by the collar. By the helmet of Mars, said Gymnast, I will swallow thee; but thou shalt only come in chips and slices; for, big as thou art, thou couldst never come in whole. This spoke, he lugs out his trusty sword, Kiss-mine-arse (so he called it) with both his fists, and cut the Sausage in twain. Bless me, how fat the foul thief was! It puts me in mind of the huge bull of Berne, that was slain at Marignan when the drunken Swiss were so mauled there. Believe me, it had little less than four inches’ lard on its paunch. The Sausage’s job being done, a crowd of others flew upon Gymnast, and had most scurvily dragged him down when Pantagruel with his men came up to his relief. Then began the martial fray, higgledy-piggledy. Maul-chitterling did maul chitterlings; Cut-pudding did cut puddings; Pantagruel did break the Chitterlings at the knees; Friar John played at least in sight within his sow, viewing and observing all things; when the Pattipans that lay in ambuscade most furiously sallied out upon Pantagruel. Friar John, who lay snug all this while, by that time perceiving the rout and hurlyburly, set open the doors of his sow and sallied out with
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his merry Greeks, some of them armed with iron spits, others with andirons, racks, fire-shovels, frying-pans, kettles, grid-irons, oven forks, tongs, dripping pans, brooms, iron pots, mortars, pestles, all in battle array, like so many housebreakers, hallooing and roaring out all together most frightfully, Nabuzardan, Nabuzardan, Nabuzardan. Thus shouting and hooting they fought like dragons, and charged through the Pattipans and Sausages. The Chitterlings perceiving this fresh reinforcement, and that the others would be too hard for ‘em, betook themselves to their heels, scampering off with full speed, as if the devil had come for them. Friar John, with an iron crow, knocked them down as fast as hops; his men, too, were not sparing on their side. Oh, what a woeful sight it was! The field was all over strewed with heaps of dead or wounded Chitterlings; and history relates that had not heaven had a hand in it, the Chitterling tribe had been totally routed out of the world by the culinary champions. But there happened a wonderful thing, you may believe as little or as much of it as you please. From the north flew towards us a huge, fat, thick, grizzly swine, with long and large wings, like those of a windmill; its plumes red crimson, like those of a phenicoptere (which in
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A sizeable pig cometh hugely
The sky, having been clear before, changeth, and mightily for the worse
Languedoc they call flaman); its eyes were red, and flaming like a carbuncle; its ears green, like a Prasin emerald; its teeth like a topaz; its tail long and black, like jet; its feet white, diaphanous and transparent like a diamond, somewhat broad, and of the splay kind, like those of geese, and as Queen Dick’s used to be at Toulouse in the days of yore. About its neck it wore a gold collar, round which were some Ionian characters, whereof I could pick out but two words, US ATHENAN, hog-teaching Minerva. The sky was clear before; but at that monster’s appearance it changed so mightily for the worse that we were all amazed at it. As soon as the Chitterlings perceived the flying hog, down they all threw their weapons and fell on their knees, lifting up their hands joined together, without speaking one word, in a posture of adoration. Friar John and his party kept on mincing, felling, braining, mangling, and spitting the Chitterlings like mad; but Pantagruel sounded a retreat, and all hostility ceased. The monster having several times hovered backwards and forwards between the two armies, with a tail-shot voided above twenty-seven butts of mustard on the ground; then flew away through the air, crying all the while, Carnival, Carnival, Carnival.
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Corona
✹
Paul Celan
Aus der Hand frißt der Herbst mir sein Blatt: wir sind Freunde. Wir schälen die Zeit aus den Nüssen und lehren sie gehn: die Zeit kehrt zurück in die Schale. Im Spiegel ist Sonntag, im Traum wird geschlafen, der Mund redet wahr. Mein Aug steigt hinab zum Geschlecht der Geliebten: wir sehen uns an, wir sagen uns Dunkles, wir lieben einander wie Mohn und Gedächtnis, wir schlafen wie Wein in den Muscheln, wie das Meer im Blutstrahl des Mondes. Wir stehen umschlungen im Fenster, sie sehen uns zu von der Straße: es ist Zeit, daß man weiß! Es ist Zeit, daß der Stein sich zu blühen bequemt, daß der Unrast ein Herz schlägt. Es ist Zeit, daß es Zeit wird. Es ist Zeit.
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translated by
Eve Mason Autumn eats its leaf from the palm of my hand: we’re friends. We shell time from the nuts and teach it to walk: time retreats into its shell. Sunday’s in the mirror, dream is for sleeping in, the mouth speaks its truth. My eye drops to my lover’s sex: we take each other in, we share dark words, we love one another like poppy and memory, we sleep like wine in mussel shells, like the sea in the moon’s blood-beam. We stand entangled at the window; they watch us from the street: it’s time that people knew! It’s time stone yielded to bloom, time that unrest’s heart beat faster. It’s time that it were time It’s time.
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from Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme
trans la Mhai ted by ri Tai t
So comrade, they will be your enemies—loftily, lucidly, and consequentially so—not only sadistic governors and torturous prefects, not only flagellant colonisers and gluttonous bankers, not only crapshitting, cheque-licking politicians and subservient magistrates, but likewise and in the same vein, spiteful journalists, cash-smothered academics goitrous with ignorance, metaphysical ethnographers, wacky Belgian theologians, and gossiping intellectuals, all born reeking of Nietzche’s thigh or fallen out of the calendar-sonof-the-King or who knows what Pléaide, those paternalists, lovers, corruptors, back-thwackers, amateur exoticists, denominators, agrarian sociologists, dozers, hoaxers, gougers, meticulizers, and in general, all those who, playing their role in the sordid division of labour for the defence of Western bourgeois society, attempting, with diverse strategies and by foul diversions, to break up the forces of Progress—even if it means denying the very possibility of Progress—all of them lackeys to capitalism, all of them, avowed or shamed, accomplices to plundering colonialism, all responsible, all loathsome, all slave-traders, all henceforth indebted to the barbarity of revolution.
And sweep out all obscurers, all inventers of subterfuge, all phoney fraudsters, all gibberish-handling jargon-wielders. And don’t try to distinguish if these gentlemen are of good faith or bad, if they personally have good intentions or bad, if they are, personally –that’s to say in their intimate conscience of Pierre or Paul—colonialists or not, the essential thing is that their subjective aleatory good faith is without any relation to the objective social reverberations of the crooked drudgery they facilitate as the guard dogs of colonialism.
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O excesso mais perfeito Ana Luísa Amaral Queria um poema de respiração tensa e sem pudor. Com a elegância redonda das mulheres barrocas e o avesso todo do arbusto esgauio. Um poema que Rubens invejasse, ao ver, lá do fundo de três séculos, o seu corpo magnífico deitado sobre um divã, e reclinados os braços nus, só com pulseiras tão (mas tão) preciosas, e um anjinho de cima, no seu pequeno nicho feito nuvem, a resguardá-lo, doce. Um tal poema queria. Muito mais tudo que as gregas dignidades de equilíbrio. Um poema feito de excessos e dourados, e todavia muito belo na sua pujança obscura e mística. Ah, como eu queria um poema diferente da pureza do granito, e da pureza do branco, e da transparência das coisas transparentes. Um poema exultando na angústia, um largo rododendro cor de sangue. Uma alameda inteira de rododendros por onde o vento, 12
The most perfect excess translated by Margaret Jull Costa I wanted a tensely breathing, immodest poem with all the curvaceous elegance of baroque women and with, on its reverse side, a slender plant. A poem Rubens would have envied, on seeing it across the gulf of three centuries, its magnificent body reclining on a divan, bare arms lying loose by its sides, naked but for some gorgeous (really gorgeous) bracelets, and a cupid up above, in his little cloud-niche, quietly keeping watch. That is the poem I wanted. Something that went beyond the Greek ideals of equilibrium. A poem made of excess and gold, and yet very beautiful in its obscure, mystical power. Yes, I wanted a poem quite different from the purity of granite, the purity of white, the transparency of things transparent. A poem reveling in anxiety, a vast rhododendron the color of blood. A whole avenue of rhododendrons where the wind 13
ao passar, parasse deslumbrado e em desvelo. E ali ficasse, aprisionado ao cântico das suas pulseiras tão (mas tão) preciosas. Nu, de redondas formas, um tal poema queria. Uma contra-reforma do silêncio. Música, música, música a preencher-lhe o corpo e o cabelo entrançado de flores e de serpentes, e uma fonte de espanto polifónico a escorrer-lhe dos dedos. Reclinado em divã forrado de veludo, a sua nudez redonda e plena faria grifos e sereias empalidecer. E aos pobres templos, de linhas tão contidas e tão puras, tremer de medo só da fulguração do seu olhar. Dourado. Música, música, música e a explosão da cor. Espreitando lá do fundo de três séculos, um Murillo calado, ao ver que simples eram os seus anjos junto dos anjos nus deste poema, cantando em conjunção com outros astros louros salmodias de amor e de perfeito excesso. Gôngora empalidece, como os grifos, agora que o contempla. Esta contra-reforma do silêncio. A sua mão erguida rumo ao céu, carregada de nada 14
as it passed, would stop, amazed, dumbstruck. And there it would stay, imprisoned by the canticle of those gorgeous (really gorgeous) bracelets. Naked and curvaceous, that was the poem I wanted. A counterreformation of silence. Music, music, music filling its whole body its hair entwined with flowers and serpents, a fountain of polyphonic amazement flowing from its fingertips. Reclining on a velvet-upholstered divan, its plump, curvaceous nakedness would make griffins and sirens grow pale. And make mere temples, so contained and pure and upright, tremble with fear at one fiery golden glance. Music, music, music and an explosion of color. Peering across three centuries, a silent Murillo comparing his simple angels with the naked angels of my poem, which sang, along with other fair-haired stars, psalms of love and perfect excess. Góngora turns as pale as the griffins on contemplating this poem. This counterreformation of silence. Its hand reaching up to the sky, grasping nothing 15
by Jennifer Sloyan 堅尼地城 Kennedy Town; earth city of staunch monks; metal railings where we watched the sea and buses to homes no longer mine 香港大學 HKU; vast knowledge of fragrant harbours; yellow stones sloping to some sort of happiness, or at least memory, at least warmth 中環 Central; the middling link; poverty bridge to leagues of sterile luxury I wonder if I can enjoy, and do 16
金鐘 Admiralty; gold o’clock; ocean portal to funk and dance and suffering and the whole world really 銅鑼灣 Causeway Bay; copper gong gulf; paths carved into my cortex to jewels of the mouth and heart and smile 鰂魚涌 Quarry Bay; cuttlefish gushing; cyan chances to see you, untaken, that time has all at once made kinder 17
para laura by Adelaide Ivánova
em 1998 quando encontraram o corpo gay de matthew shepard sua cara tinha sangue por todo lado menos duas listras perpendiculares que era por onde suas lágrimas haviam escorrido naquele dia o ciclista que o encontrou não ligou logo que o viu pra polícia porque o corpo de matthew estava tão deformado que o ciclista achou ter visto um espantalho sábado passado em são paulo um grupo de homens e dois PMs mataram laura não sem antes torturá-la laura foi vista ainda viva por outro sujeito que gravou e postou no youtube o vídeo de uma laura desorientada e quem não estaria 20
last saturday in são paulo a group of men and two Military Police killed laura not without first torturing her laura was seen still alive by some guy who recorded and posted the youtube video of a laura disorientated and who wouldn’t be 21
for laura translated by Francisco Vilhena
in 1998 when they found the gay body of matthew shepard his whole face was bloodied but for two stripes perpendicular where his tears had flowed that day the cyclist who found him did not call the police right away because the body of matthew was so disfigured that the cyclist thought he’d seen a scarecrow
com sangue jorrando da boca e da parte de trás do vestido? laura tem um corpo e um nome que lhe pertencem laura de vermont (presente!) foi assassinada por homens pelo estado e pela nossa indiferença aos 18 anos num sábado
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blood spewing from the mouth and from the back of the dress? laura has a body and a name that belong to her laura de vermont (presente!) was murdered by men by the state and by our indifference aged 18 on a saturday.
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tahimik, or silence poem(s) in Tagalog and English, by Maia Brown buhok ng mahal ko ang isang maliwanag na bulaklak. binubuksan niya ng boses niya para mahal kita pero sa loob ng bunganga niya ang isang maluwang lobo.
my love’s hair is a bright flower. he opens his voice for I love you but inside his mouth is one wide wolf.
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1. Open your mouth! I shout to a rose full of hair. Inside is my lover, who has been hiding like a wolf, unable to say my name. 2. Inside my lover’s mouth I find hair tangled like a cassette tape— pencilled backwards into an I love you, a mouth prickly with roses; a wolf of silence.
3. He eats me Like a rose swallows thorns Like wolves cough up bloodshed Like words are wound backwards Into mouths sealed shut. It all ends in silence. 4. sometimes in the dark // when it’s quiet flowers bark out // of prickly mouths press their voices // to a window of hair bellowing love // to a silent moon. 27
FLOWERS
OF FLESH
From La Mer by Jules Michelet, 1861 Translated by Matthew Redman
Across the belly of the globe, in the amniotic waters of the Line and along its volcanic floor, the Sea teems such a superabundance of life that she cannot, it would seem, equalise her creations. Life supersedes the vegetal by dint of sheer vivacity. Her offspring emerge already on the rung of animal completeness. But these animals boast queer botanical curlicues, bear the splendid trappings of a glossy and exuberant flora. Survey the vast seascape and you will declare it a tangle of plants, flowers and shrubs – from familiar shapes and colours such words spring to mind. And yet the plants move; the shrubs are saturnine; the flowers shiver with a nascent sensitivity, as they grope towards a substantial Will. Charming oscillation! Graceful ambivalence! Astride the frontier-line that separates the kingdoms of plant and animal, the soul, as if in the midst of a fantastic féerie, witnesses its own primordial awakening. It is the pale dawn glow and the sudden roseate genesis. Bursts of colour, vitreous and nacreous by turns, herald the night’s dream and the ripening day of thought. Thought! Dare we speak its name? No. A dream this remains, a vision. But it is of the sort which brightens imperceptibly, like the waking dreams of morning […] Darwin observes that “our earthly fields and forests are empty and barren as deserts compared to those which line the seabed.” And indeed, all who traverse the glassy waters of the 28
Indies are struck by the phantasmal wonders at their depths. An especial enchantment lies in the singular exchange between plants and animals of their natural traits and appearance. Soft and gelatinous plants, their rounded organs resembling neither stem nor leaf but rather living, supple flesh, appear intent on deception, that we might mistake them for animals. The real animals, on the other hand, strive for a perfect planthood. Thus each kingdom wholly imitates the other. Some possess the nigh-eternal fastness of the tree, others blossom and wilt like the flower; observe the sea anemone, pale and pink-petalled like a marguerite, or else the very likeness of a crimson aster (were land asters adorned with spots of azure!): at the moment of childbirth, upon bearing a daughter anemone from her corolla, she will melt away exhausted before your eyes. More varied still is that veritable Proteus of the seas, the alcyon, which may take any form or colour that it please. It may be plant, it may be fruit; it may spread like a fan, or prosper into a bushy copse, or depress itself, becoming like a dainty flowerbed. Lean over the gunwale and glimpse the reefs and coral banks: the quilted deep heaves into view. It is a lurid sea-meadow, its hills and valleys green with tubipores and astraeans, white-dotted with globular fungia, historiated with little mazes of meandrines. Velvet green cariophyllids, the tips of their calcite branches clouding into orange, entice their nutriment, drifting motes and atoms, with gentle wafts of their golden stamens. At the upper reaches of this sunken world, rising many feet tall as if to offer shade from the sun, majestic gorgonians, fibrously swaying like willow, or palm, or liana, and flanked by the dwarf trees of the Isididae, form a forest. The plumaria spreads its vine-like tendrils from tree to tree, entwining them in its thin, light-dappled branches. The scene charms and perturbs us; it is a fey vision. Viewed through the prisms of seawater, that dense and fluid fata morgana, the colours of the reef are bestowed fleeting tinges, a molten mobility, a fickle shimmer, a hesitation, a doubt. 29
Try to look like you’re not thinking about Barbara.
Scream, please. Thank you.
Try to look like you’re not thinking about Barbara.
I want you to point at the computer like Barbara did, on the day she found the folder.
“You can’t just pay actors to pretend to be office workers,” she said.
But you can.
You can create a universe that’s friendly, and efficient.
And where no-one goes to stay with their sister.
Barefoot
by Silvina Ocampo
translated by Matty Matsagoura
Those fights dished out like a cut of yesterday’s cold meat are the worst. They tie you to a double-knotted uneasiness, impossible to untangle and sticky to the touch, like chest rub— thought Cristián Navedo, as he aggravated the situation on his desk, deepening the disorder by piling up new books and documents, whose presence contributed to the ever-growing range of paper mountains that loomed over the table. He lived in constant fear of suffocating to death beneath those papers lost forever in clutter, the kind of bits of paper that you search for and never find, for they float about in undefined space, somewhere in a pool of even more papers, behind bookshelves, trapped in dark corners sprinkled with dashes of earth. And yet, as a child, he was taught to be orderly, to leave his clothes folded over the chair before bed, to put his work-
books and pencils away neatly in his desk drawer, and, not infrequently, he went without dessert. But all this achieved nothing except aggravate his inclination for disorder. It only really showed him how better to organise his disorder—manically. Cristián kept everything, even his childhood notebooks, and despite this he lived in perpetual worry of having lost everything. Behind the scenes of this regimented object-chaos lurked an obsessional inner life that seeped right through him, reaching unimaginable depths; he kept everything, even fights aborted the day before. But he could always find those again; arguments never got lost. Arguments... He logged every single one he had with Alcira, as one would in an accounts book. They hadn’t known one another for very long, but they felt so in tune with
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one another that it seemed as though time itself only began when they met. And out of nowhere, like slow assassins creeping into a house at nighttime, arguments began seeping into their days, like a betrayal. Slowly, as their love grew, so did the distrust and that tedious thoughtlessness that love drags along with it, like the creases one finds in a poorly-ironed suit that are impossible to smooth out, no matter how hard one tries. Such creases were unfortunately interspersed with episodes of shouting and of silence— it was disgraceful, all of it. That’s how mutual disagreement settled between them, which would gradually simmer down to a form of hushed resentment, with the next shouting match always lying in wait. Cristián secretly missed his more naïve, detached and exotic lovers. It was just so easy to trust someone who didn’t matter to him too much. Those sweet-shop crushes, crushes on the corner of greengrocers, or found along beaches, crushes that cost him nothing. His morning walks in the sunshine, his empty hours, his solitude, his visits to his cousins’, the divine generosity of time, and the disgrace of being permanently alone; everything was preserved. He remembered Ethel Buyington and the on-and-off relationship that kept them talking for a month. She gave him such an ethereal feeling, that transparent English girl who entrusted him with her life, that very first afternoon, sitting on a bench in a square. She told him the story of her childhood, set at a school in London. She only stayed at her parents’ in the holidays, and never for more than four or five months. She had written a novel by the age of fourteen and under her bed she kept a box containing all of her treasures. A doll, a museum 33
comprised of a little box with lots of compartments, where she collected all types of curiosities: a butterfly, stitches from an appendicitis operation, a sunset stone, a snail, a milk tooth, doll’s eyes, and then the novel, and then eighteen poems dedicated to her doll. Ethel finished her studies more ignorant than when she began them, and then went off to travel along the coasts of Africa with a French family. In her absence, her mother died; her sisters sold the furniture and the house they’d lived in. She received the news a month later; her treasures were lost somewhere along the way. When she returned to England her small room, once covered in birds’ wings and flowers, was erased beyond recognition; they had even sold the cretonne plants. She couldn’t find the museum of boxes from under her bed anywhere. She was no longer fourteen, not even in her old portraits; she could no longer write or feel the way she once did. So, she became a ballerina and danced barefoot to avoid any dependence whatsoever on dance shoes, which get lost on trips under hotel beds. Ethel was right to do as much. But Cristián – he needed all his stuff so desperately! He needed his armoury of books, diaries and papers to do anything, needed his regiment of shoes, only to end up wearing the same ones over and over and never doing any dancing in them! Oh! To be as happy as trapeze artists and contortionist ballerinas, who never need any baggage save that of their own bodies! But Alcira, thought Cristián...
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THANK U 4 READING RGB COLOUR SCHEME ISSUE 4 Our special special thanks to The JCR of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, for providing funding towards the printing of this issue. The University of East Anglia’s ‘Egg Box,’ for their help with printing and advertising. Ana Luísa Amaral and Margaret Jull Costa, for giving us permission to reprint the translation of ‘O excesso mais perfeito’, originally published in What’s in a Name (2019). Adelaide Ivánova, Rachel Long, Francesco Vilhena, and the Poetry Translation Centre, for allowing us to reprint ‘para laura’, which first appeared in English translation in the hammer and other poems (2019). Rachel Sved (instagram: @rachel.sved) for allowing us to use her artwork for the front and back covers of this issue, as well as on pages 2, 11, and 34. And all our wicked cool contributors and readers. Thank you!!! This issue was printed in Norwich in December 2020, using recycled paper. All proceeds from pay-what-you-want sales of this issue were split toward two charitable organizations: Haven Distribution (www.havendistribution. org.uk) and the Peckham Community Kitchen.
content warnings: How Pantagruel broke the Chitterlings at the knees contains a (comic) description of battle. for laura contains mention of violence, murder, torture and disfigurement.
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