Jean Cocteau and friend
To coordinate more closely with the NFL playoffs, “Sports Saturday” was moved to Tuesday this past week and will be appearing again this coming Monday. Today I offer up a cat-in-front-of-the-fire poem that came to mind as I was tending our wood stove during the recent cold snap. It’s my father’s translation of the first stanza of a Jean Cocteau poem, and it captures the mercurial nature of cats. Note the parallel in the poem between the shapes our imaginations perceive in the hearth fire flames and feline movement. The spinning wheel of fairy tales, meanwhile, functions as metaphor for the artistic process. Cats, as Cocteau sees them, are artist magicians whose transformational magic is even greater than that of fantasy storytellers.
Cat
By Jean Cocteau, trans. by Scott Bates
The fire’s a funny flaming fish
The closed cat is asleep
If very quietly I shift
The cat can change her shape
The spinning wheel must never cease
High in the castle towers
For changing into a princess is
One of her lesser powers
