side
J. S$. Wallace

Ahead is your harbor
Behind is your source
Glance over your shoulder 3
To check on your course.
RE are all the whittlers gone? Once, a man felt
naked without a jack-knife and whittling was a
favorite way of whiling away the time. The average
man and boy just whittled; some went on to skilled work
like assembling full-rigged schooners inside bottles, circum-
venting the narrowness of the bottle necks with a trick I
won’t give away.

Where are all the whistlers gone? The mouth organ play-
ers? Those who favored the jew’s harp or the octarino?
There was a time if you had nothing else you carved a
whistle or played on a comb with a tissue over it. There
was a time when the streets at night sounded with these
instruments, with hurdy-gurdies, with male quartets return-
ing, let us hope, from barber shops. :

There are lost sights we are well without: hunchbacks
.. . bow legs ... cross eyes ... hairlips ... faces disfi-
gured by smallpox or infantile paralysis . ..

You no longer-see coal oil (kerosene) brought home in
gallon cans with a raw potato on the spout to keep it from
slopping. You don’t hear the clop-clop of horses delivering
raw milk: delivering it from open cans into open pitchers
with a bonus of bugs. (Two of my sisters died as a result
and this column nearly didn’t get written.) As the old say-
ing has it: things are not as good as they used to be and
they never were. >

((What am I looking back for? Tomorrow — as this is
written—I am off to Georgia, USSR) ... Do svidanya...
au revoir ... arrividerci ...

w
FOR ALL MY CHILDREN

Say out loud:
i C..U R22 BA B

Show Boat lavishly staged

THEATRE

but it hasn’t much heart

HOW BOAT, the musical

comedy. by Jerome Kern and

Oscar Hammerstein II, has
been around for a good many
years.

One of the first major North

American musicals with a plot,
it has become something of an
institution.

In the audiences at Toronto’s
O’Keefe Centre can be found
young men and women, and the
generation before them, and an-
other still earlier generation, all
of them attracted to the foun-
tain-head of so many durable
romantic songs—Only Make Be-
lieve, Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat
Man, Why Do I Love You? and
Bill.

And, of course, Ol’ Man River.
Who can forget the highlight
of so many concerts, when Paul
Robeson sang about the Negro
laborer. on the Mississippi! Ol’
Man River from the first be-
came a folk song. But Robeson
made it a folk song of protest.

The memory of Robeson’s
eloquence—of his anger and his
human warmth—insistently re-
minds us that the Ol’ Man River
in the current production is al-
together too. mellow. It is 1966,
there are harsh civil rights real-

ities, and they can’t be glossed
over. The production number
built around this song is well
sung, it is graceful and melodi-
ous, but it does not lift you out
of yourself. It does not rouse

you. It should.

The show generally does not
seem to have much heart;
exhibits little real bounce. The
acting is generally rudimentary,
mechanical at best, and does
little more than hint at the cha-
racters—the showbusiness peo-
ple, the actors, hoofers, singers,
Negro
workers and servants and ordi-
nary townspeople along the riv-

promoters, gamblers,

tury.

Music Theatre of New
affluent Lincoln Centre,

in the slick commercial
of Broadway.

it

er in the late Nineteenth ©

4
ee

One expects more from

Of course the new Show B
is lavishly costumed, it has 8
singing and good dancing;
sets are breath-taking, there.
romance .and gaiety, and 5@
ness and sentimentality.
there are all those melo |
songs for the nostalgic listener
and his bemused offspring. _

—Martin Stom —

——|

Yor

more

than one is accustomed to see

output :

800 YEARS AGO

He sang of the greatness of man

tional tolerance. Fought over

By MONICA WHYTE
MOSCOW | from the beginning of time,
HE 12th century. The Mid- invaded by Romans, Byzan-
dle Ages. A tinte of tians, Persians, Arabs and

Turks, Georgia in the 12th
century was enjoying a re-
spite and entering a golden
age. The arts flowered and
philosophy, painting,
and poetry reached their
zenith, crowned by the genius
of Shota Rustaveli.

This year the World Peace
Council is marking the 800th
anniversary of the Georgian
bard.

warring barons, of.strug-

* gles between. Church - and
State, of England before
Magna Charta and France not
yet France, but Burgundy,
Brittany, Normandy and Poi-
tou. The Holy Roman Empire
was at its height and the Teu-
tonic Knights embarked on
the periodic German suicidal
fit, Drang nach Osten—drive
to the east. The papal throne
was bought and sold, killed

prose-

‘Rustaveli’s concept,

for and fought for. The Age
of the Crusades, of death to
the heretics, the Jews and
Moslems. Knowledge and
thought were _ dangerous,
men’s minds were fettered by
the ever-watchful Church. A
time of bloodshed and fire,
death, destruction, treachery
and murder.

The Dark Ages.

And on the very edge of
Europe, the Christian king;
dom of Georgia flourished in
a spirit of religious and na-

Not much is known of him.
Records which have survived
indicate that he came from a
noble family and was prob-
ably chancellor of the ex
chequer in the reign of Queen
Thamar. His fame rests sol-
ely on the epic poem, Knight
in a Tiger’s Skin. It is doubt-
ful that any other poem has
penetrated into the life and
soul of a people to the extent
that Shota’s has in the hearts
of his countrymen. For centu-
ries the poem has been taught
by fathers to sons, for centu-

ries a copy of the book has
been part of a bride’s dowry.

To this day any Georgian can -

recite long passages-in a de-
clamatory, rolling style re-
miniscent of an ancient story-
teller.

The plot of Knight in a
Tiger’s Skin is complicated

_and has points of similarity

with such epics as Tristan and
Isolde, or the King Arthur
cycle. What distinguishes it

is the voice of reason and en-
lightenment raised over 100
years before the Renaissance.
The three heroes of the tale
are men from different coun-

tries, united in brotherhood _

and loyalty to each other. In
this is
the highest expression of

man’s nature.

Rustaveli, by virtue of his
time and country, stood at
the crossroads of the Chris-
tian west and Moslem east.
His familiarity with Greek
philosophy and the influence
of Persian and Arab. litera-
ture, with their strong tradi-
tions of sensuality and emo-
tionalism, shaped a sceptical
attitude toward Christian es-
cetism. At a time when the
western church insisted on
the subordination of man to
the greater glory of God, the
transitory nature and unim-
portance of man’s earthly life
as compared to the problems
of his immortal soul, and the
evil of women and carnal
love, Rustaveli sang of the
greatness of man, glorified

love, expounded the freedom
of the individual. His heroes
do not conform to the rigid

convention of medieval epics, ~

rather they share the warm
humanity and failings of Re-
naissance literature.

Rustaveli’s poem has been
translated into many languag-
es. Unfortunately the only
available translation into Eng-
lish was made by Marjory
Scott Wardrop more than 50
years ago. She did- not at-
tempt a verse rendition, but
only to convey the sense of
the original, and the result is
stilted and awkward. Never-
theless it does give some idea

-of a work which is the heri-

tage not only of the Georgian
people, but of the whole
world.

In connection with the
800th anniversary celebra-
tions which took place in
Tbilisi, the capital of Geor-
gia, at the end of September,
the Wardrop translation has
been republished in the Soviet
Union and should shortly be
available in Canada.

October 28, 1966—PACIFIC TRIBUNE—Pag?

oat
the

re

diovs