`How Camellias Are Grown'

“Marianne was intensely interested in the techniques of things -- how camellias are grown; how the quartz prisms work in crystal clocks; how the pangolin can close up his ear, nose, and eye apertures and walk on the outside edges of his hands `and save the claws/for digging’; how to drive a car; how the best pitchers throw a baseball; how to make a figurehead for her nephew’s sailboat. The exact way in which anything was done, or made, or functioned, was poetry to her.”

That’s Elizabeth Bishop on her friend Marianne Moore. It shows, of course, in Moore’s poetry, and I felt the same impulse as we spent a second day exploring Portland: How do the keepers of a Zen garden make and maintain those designs in the gravel? How do you play cricket and can Americans hope to learn the rules (we watched a group of young Indian men playing)? How does an ice machine work? How do you keep the cabbage crisp in a grilled pastrami Reuben?

In our wanderings we noticed the storefront Church of Elvis, Virginia Woof Dog Daycare, Elephant Deli, Voodoo Doughnuts and a faded but still legible sign painted on the side of a building advertising De Sotos (Chrysler stopped making them in 1961). We finally found the Portland Japanese Garden, which is green, quiet and sublimely beautiful. Koi fish, weirdly bionic-looking creatures, swim in the ponds. My 8-year-old pointed at them, licked his lips and asked, “Did you bring the tartar sauce?"

We returned to Powell’s and triumphed again: a used copy of Eugenio Montale’s The Second Life of Art and the new translation, by Brian Reeve, of Chekhov’s Sakhalin Island (1895), his account of the Russian penal colony in Siberia. It’s Chekhov’s longest work and among his least read. We can thank the English publisher Oneworld Classics for bringing it back into print. Here’s how Chekhov begins the book:

“`Why is it so cold in this Siberia of yours?’

“`Cos that’s the way God wants it!’ replies the coach driver.

“Yes, it’s May now, and by this time in European Russia, the woods are turning green and the nightingales are pouring out their song, while in the south the acacia and lilac have been in blossom for ages already, yet here, along the road from Tyumen to Tomsk, the earth is brown, the forests are bare, there is dull ice on the lakes, and snow still lying on the shores and in the gullies.”

Chekhov’s minor key, familiar from the stories and plays, suffuses even his putative journalism. Saturday morning in a Portland city park, I listened to a young couple argue loudly in Russian. They stood face to face, shaking their fists like Lenin, and over and over he called her “Blyadischa!” In a letter she wrote in 1964 to Anne Stevenson, Bishop writes:

“…someone I have read & read since I have been in Brazil, is Chekhov. If only more artists could be that good as well as good artists. He makes most of them look like pigs -- and yet he sacrificed nothing to his art, either. I feel I could die happy if I could write one story -- or poem -- about Brazil one third as good as `Peasants.’”