It’s New Year’s Day 1953, in the Basque city of Tolosa. A bertsolari – composer and singer of extemporized sung verses called bertsos – named Pedro Anaitio is recording some of his lines for Alan Lomax. Actually, maybe his name isn’t Pedro Anaitio, but that’s how Lomax notated it, and none of the experts who have retraced Lomax’s steps through Franco’s Spain in 1952 and 1953 have been able to tell different. Lomax took no photograph of him; one of the only remarks he made concerning him was that he hesitated slightly before singing “not because of shyness, but because he was composing the songs he was going to give us.”

The song, in fact, will probably not thrill you. Anaitio has a “just fine” kinda voice, and the tune is… nice, though not great by any means. But the translation of the lyrics provide – at least to my thusly-inclined sensibility – this fleeting but affecting, sympathetic, and wistful perspective into this fellow’s state of mind, heart, etc., in this moment of improvisation, before a stranger’s microphone, at some hour in the afternoon on New Year’s Day. What is produced, I think, is very beautiful poetry.

(Credit to Aintzane Camara & Juan Mari Beltran for the translation from Basque to Spanish; Judith Cohen for Spanish translation into English. Though too reminiscent of English As She Is Spoke for you, perhaps?)

Here people could live well, getting along well together,
Not because it’s easy, if it doesn’t come naturally.
Offering whatever one can, offering it freely.
It’s not good to get angry, without being able to suffer.
For someone who doesn’t know, I tell you, it’s inevitable.

We’ve really enjoyed the fiesta.
It’s time to start now.
I don’t really like going over the stories again and again.
Let’s make an effort now on one side or the other.
I value good will – thanks, young man!

I was born in Navarre, I grew up in Guipuzcoa.
I’d like to leave something for tomorrow, and not say everything today.
Why should we get tied up in this situation?
I offer you a life of many years, to all those present.

There’s something that must be said – let’s start.
If you’ve said something wrong, don’t leave.
Certainly you’ve seen something similar before.
Here I’ve started to sing now before you.

An unidentified man with cats in the Basque village of Arbizu, in Navarre, shot by Alan Lomax in August of 1953. Sure, a somewhat arbitrary image, but I think somehow a complementary one. Courtesy of the Alan Lomax Archive.

The University of Kentucky Press has recently published a new book of James Archambeault’s photographs, Historic Kentucky, the fifth in his catalog of Kentucky photo volumes. The images therein are among Archambeault’s most evocative and moving, and are, to the credit of all, accompanied by a Wendell Berry forward and an introduction by the artist, both of which place the images in their contemporary context. Namely (and crudely): the places seen in this book are history, in the vernacular sense of the phrase, or are rapidly becoming it.

In his preface, Berry (the greatest living Kentuckian thinker and writer) quotes the late Guy Davenport (one of the greatest, living or dead, Kentuckian thinkers and writers): “every building in the United States is an offense to invested capital. It occupies space which, as greed acknowledges no limits, can be better utilized.” And: “Money has no ears, no eyes, no respect; it’s all gut, mouth, and ass.” Every other page reveals a homestead, a general store, a meeting house that, as the photographer wryly notes in caption after caption, is no more, having either been left to rot into neglected ground or torn down to make way for some whim of invested capital, be it one of agribusiness, energy concern, or pork-barrel politic. A gorgeous view of the Wildnerness Road that brought pioneer families across the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky is included here – hike that trail now and where once our frontiering ancestors saw the ridges, hollers, and creeks of the Kentucke promised land you’ll find mountaintops ripped off for the coal underneath.

Most Kentuckians have a weakness for waxing rhapsodic about the natural riches of our state and the romantic lives we have lived in, on, and among them – horse farms in the Bluegrass; steamboats down the Ohio into the Mississippi; covered bridges over the countless creeks, streams, and branches; Daniel Boone trekking through the Red River Gorge – but I wonder how many of those with the privilege to wile away their hours in flights of pastoral fancy consider the havoc the market is wreaking on their natural and historical idylls. Kentucky romanticism is a big business; coffee table books, calendars, greeting cards, encyclopedias honoring some stripe of the state’s character or other are legion. Archambeault’s previous books are among the most visible (and beautiful) manifestations of this self-regard, and it’s a vindicating thing that Historic Kentucky has come out, just in time for Christmas, to remind his fellows of the rapacity of gut, mouth, and ass threatening the magnificent sites and sights of the Commonwealth.