English (anglais)

Mappemonde mettant en évidence la Roumanie et l’Italie.

The Tristia and the Epis­tu­lae ex Ponto, or Rome on the Shores of the Black Sea

Trans­lated from French

Once upon a time, dur­ing the reign of Au­gus­tus, there lived a man who could be­lieve him­self blessed: Pub­lius Ovid­ius Naso, known as Ovid. A fash­ion­able poet in the golden age of Latin po­et­ry, lu­sor amo­rum (singer of loves), his play­ful pen had con­quered Rome and his fa­cil­ity in verse-mak­ing bor­dered on the prodi­gious: “I tried to write in prose, but the words came to fit the me­ter so per­fectly that what I wrote was verse.” For­tune, birth, il­lus­tri­ous friends, a house ad­join­ing the Capi­tol—noth­ing was lack­ing for this Ro­man knight who en­joyed a life more se­cure and com­fort­able than ev­er.

Yet one morn­ing in the year 8 of our era, when Rome awoke, sin­is­ter news coursed through the streets: the cher­ished child of the mus­es, then fifty years old, had just de­parted un­der im­pe­rial es­cort. Not for some golden re­treat on a clement shore, but for a relegatio (house ar­rest)1The relegatio (house ar­rest), though re­sem­bling exilium (ex­ile), was legally dis­tinct: it en­tailed nei­ther loss of cit­i­zen­ship nor con­fis­ca­tion of prop­er­ty. Ovid, who had been granted mercy on both counts, was care­ful to spec­ify that it was by abuse that his con­tem­po­raries called him an ex­ile: quippe rel­e­ga­tus, non ex­ul, di­cor in illo (it is not said that I am ex­iled, but only rel­e­gat­ed). But what good was ob­serv­ing a dis­tinc­tion he made only as a point of hon­or? He him­self freed him­self from it: a pa­tria fugi vic­tus et exul ego (van­quished and fugi­tive, I see my­self ex­iled from my home­land); exul eram (I was in ex­ile). in Tomis2Pre­sen­t-day Con­stanța in Ro­ma­nia., a glacial town at the ex­treme edge of the em­pire, on the in­hos­pitable shores of the Black Sea.3Bid­ding a fi­nal farewell to the Capi­tol, the ex­ile pro­nounced these adieus that Goethe would make his own at the mo­ment of his de­par­ture from the Eter­nal City: “Great Gods who in­habit this au­gust tem­ple so near to my home, and whom my eyes shall see no more; […] you whom I must leave, […] dis­charge me, I be­seech you, from Cae­sar’s ha­tred; this is the only grace I ask in de­part­ing. Tell that di­vine man what er­ror se­duced me, and make him know that my fault was never a crime”.

The Mystery of His Disgrace

What was the cause of this relegatio with­out tri­al, by Au­gus­tus’s will alone, and what rea­son did this prince have for de­priv­ing Rome and his court of so great a poet to con­fine him among the Getae? This is what we do not know and shall never know. Ovid evokes a car­men et er­ror (a poem and an im­pru­dence), mur­mur­ing enig­mat­i­cal­ly:

“Ah! why did I see what I should not have seen? Why have my eyes be­come guilty? Why, fi­nal­ly, through my im­pru­dence, have I come to know what I should never have known?”

Ovid. Les Élé­gies d’O­vide pen­dant son exil [t. I, Élé­gies des Tris­tes] (The Ele­gies of Ovid dur­ing his ex­ile [vol. I, Ele­gies of the Tris­ti­a]), trans. from Latin by Jean Marin de Kervil­lars. Paris: d’Houry fils, 1723.

If The Art of Love, pub­lished a decade ear­lier, was the carmen or of­fi­cial pre­text, the error or true fault re­mains an enigma sealed in the po­et’s tomb:

“Ovid’s crime was in­con­testably to have seen some­thing shame­ful in Oc­tavius’s fam­ily […]. The learned have not de­cided whether he saw Au­gus­tus with a young boy […]; or whether he saw some equerry in the arms of the em­press Livia, whom Au­gus­tus had mar­ried when preg­nant by an­oth­er; or whether he saw this em­peror Au­gus­tus oc­cu­pied with his daugh­ter or grand­daugh­ter; or fi­nally whether he saw this em­peror Au­gus­tus do­ing some­thing worse, torva tuen­tibus hir­cis [un­der the fierce gaze of goat­s].”

Voltaire. Œu­vres com­plètes de Voltaire, vol. 45B, […] D’Ovide, de Socrate […] (Com­plete Works of Voltaire, vol. 45B, […] On Ovid, on Socrates […]). Ox­ford: Voltaire Foun­da­tion, 2010.

Let us there­fore for­get the hy­pothe­ses, as nu­mer­ous as they are strange, of those who wish at any cost to di­vine a se­cret two mil­len­nia old. It suf­fices to know that, in the throes of ex­ile, in the sobs of iso­la­tion, Ovid found no other re­source than his po­et­ry, and that he em­ployed it en­tirely to soften an em­peror whose ran­cor he had in­curred. “The Gods some­times al­low them­selves to be ap­peased,” he told him­self. From this were born the Tristia4Re­jected forms:
The Five Books of Sor­rows.
Tris­tium libri quinque (V).
De Tristibus libri quinque (V). and the Epis­tu­lae ex Ponto5Re­jected forms:
Let­ters from Pon­tus.
Ele­gies writ­ten in the prov­ince of Pon­tus.
The Four Books of Epis­tles writ­ten in the prov­ince of Pon­tus.
Pon­ti­cae epis­to­lae.
De Ponto libri quatuor (IV)..

Chronicle of an Eternal Winter: The Drama of Tomis

Ovid’s ele­gies dur­ing his ex­ile are the jour­nal of a man lost far from his own, far from a civ­i­liza­tion of which he was once the most ami­able rep­re­sen­ta­tive; a long lamen­ta­tion ad­dressed to his wife, to his friends re­main­ing in Rome, and to an im­pla­ca­ble power from which he awaits clemency in vain. Tomis presents it­self in the guise of a “land full of bit­ter­ness,” for­ever bat­tered by winds and hail of an eter­nal win­ter, and where even wine, “pet­ri­fied by cold,” freezes into ice that must be cut with an axe. The poet feels him­self an ab­so­lute stranger there; a pris­oner un­learn­ing Latin amid bar­barous words and the fright­ful cries of the Getae:

“they con­verse with one an­other in a lan­guage com­mon to them; but I can make my­self un­der­stood only through ges­tures and signs; I pass here for a bar­bar­ian, and [the­se] im­per­ti­nent Getae laugh at Latin words.”

Ovid. Les Élé­gies d’O­vide pen­dant son exil [t. I, Élé­gies des Tris­tes] (The Ele­gies of Ovid dur­ing his ex­ile [vol. I, Ele­gies of the Tris­ti­a]), trans. from Latin by Jean Marin de Kervil­lars. Paris: d’Houry fils, 1723.

Facing Adversity

Where did Ovid draw the nec­es­sary courage to bear such cruel ad­ver­si­ty? In writ­ing:

“[If you] ques­tion me about what I do here, I will tell you that I oc­cupy my­self with stud­ies ap­par­ently of lit­tle use, and which nev­er­the­less have their util­ity for me; and if they served only to make me for­get my mis­for­tunes, it would not be a medi­ocre ad­van­tage: too happy if, in cul­ti­vat­ing so ster­ile a field, I de­rive from it at least some fruit.”

Ovid. Les Élé­gies d’O­vide pen­dant son ex­il, t. II, Élé­gies pon­tiques (The Ele­gies of Ovid dur­ing his ex­ile, vol. II, Pon­tic Elegies), trans. from Latin by Jean Marin de Kervil­lars. Paris: d’Houry, 1726.

More­over, the for­mer Ro­man dandy has not en­tirely dis­ap­peared: el­e­gance, re­fined traits, com­par­isons more in­ge­nious than solid per­sist, some­times to ex­cess. Quin­til­ian al­ready judged him less oc­cu­pied with his own mis­for­tunes than as an am­a­tor in­genii sui (lover of his own ge­nius). Ac­cord­ing to Seneca the El­der, Ovid knew “what was ex­u­ber­ant in his verses,” but ac­com­mo­dated him­self to it: “He said that a face was some­times made much pret­tier by a beauty mark.” This con­stancy in giv­ing some turn to his thoughts, some “beauty mark,” in the French man­ner—“one would al­most say he was born among us,” notes the trans­la­tor Jean Marin de Kervil­lars—is the ul­ti­mate mark of his per­son­al­i­ty, the avowed re­fusal to let dis­tance from the cap­i­tal an­ni­hi­late the artist. And af­ter hav­ing so of­ten de­scribed this re­mote­ness as a kind of death, he ends by find­ing Rome on the shores of the Black Sea, con­clud­ing: “the coun­try where fate has placed me must serve as Rome for me. My un­for­tu­nate muse con­tents her­self with this the­ater […]: such is the good plea­sure of a pow­er­ful God.”6More re­signed than re­solved, he did not go so far as to in­scribe on his door­way’s lin­tel, as Hugo would, EX­IL­IUM VITA EST (EX­ILE IS LIFE or LIFE IS AN EX­ILE).

  • 30 min
Mappemonde mettant en évidence le Japon.

Saying the Unsayable: Hi­roshi­ma: Sum­mer Flow­ers by Hara Tamiki

Trans­lated from French

There are events in the his­tory of mankind that seem to mark the limit of what lan­guage can ex­press. The abyss opens, and words, de­riso­ry, ap­pear to re­coil be­fore the hor­ror. Hi­roshima is one such abyss. Yet, faced with the un­sayable, some have felt the im­per­a­tive duty to bear wit­ness, not to ex­plain, but to not let si­lence com­plete the work of de­struc­tion. At the fore­front of these watch­men stands Hara Tamiki (1905-1951), sur­vivor, whose sto­ries col­lected un­der the ti­tle Hi­roshi­ma: Sum­mer Flow­ers con­sti­tute one of the found­ing acts of what crit­ics would call “atomic bomb lit­er­a­ture” (gen­baku bun­gaku)1“Atomic bomb lit­er­a­ture” refers to works born from the trauma of 1945. Car­ried by sur­vivors like Hara Tamiki and Ôta Yôko, this genre was long “judged mi­nor, lo­cal, doc­u­men­tary” by lit­er­ary cir­cles. Its strength lies pre­cisely in its at­tempt to in­ter­ro­gate “the lim­its of lan­guage, its un­cer­tain­ties, its lacks” in the face of hor­ror and at the same time to strive to com­pen­sate for them, as Cather­ine Pinguet em­pha­sizes.
Re­jected forms:
Lit­er­a­ture of the atom.
Gem­baku bun­gaku.. A tril­ogy “of a world that never stops burn­ing”2Forest, Philippe, “Quelques fleurs pour Hara Tamiki” (“A Few Flow­ers for Hara Tamik­i”), art. cit., the work—­com­posed of Pre­lude to De­struc­tion (Kaimetsu no jokyoku), Sum­mer Flow­ers (Natsu no hana) and Ruins (Haikyo kara)—re­counts, in three stages, the be­fore, the dur­ing, and the af­ter.

A Writing of Deflagration

Hara’s style is not that of con­trolled writ­ing, but a “de­scent into the frag­ile psy­che of a des­per­ate man” con­fronted with ter­ri­bly un­done, al­most un­rec­og­niz­able land­scapes, where it seems im­pos­si­ble for him to find traces of his life as it was just mo­ments be­fore. His dis­lo­cated writ­ing, which of­fers no land­marks, has as its set­ting a city it­self an­ni­hi­lat­ed, “dis­ap­peared with­out leav­ing traces—ex­cept for a sort of flat layer of rub­ble, ash­es, twist­ed, burst, gnawed things” to bor­row the words of Robert Guil­lain, the first French­man on the scene. It is on this can­vas of des­o­la­tion that Hara projects some­times “shreds of in­ter­rupted ex­is­tences”, some­times frag­ments of mem­ory fill­ing the voids of a torn re­al­i­ty.

This stylis­tic de­con­struc­tion reaches its parox­ysm when, in the po­etic in­ser­tions, Hara adopts a par­tic­u­lar form of Japane­se—the katakana usu­ally re­served for for­eign words, as if the usual lan­guage had be­come in­ept:

“Sparkling de­bris
/ stretch into a vast land­scape
Clear ashes
Who are these burned bod­ies with raw flesh?
Strange rhythm of dead men’s bod­ies
Did all this ex­ist?
Could all this have ex­ist­ed?
An in­stant and a flayed world re­mains”

Hara, Tamiki, Hi­roshima : fleurs d’été : réc­its (Hi­roshi­ma: Sum­mer Flow­ers: Sto­ries), trans. from Ja­pa­nese by Brigitte Al­lioux, Karine Ches­neau and Rose-Marie Maki­no-Fay­olle, Ar­les: Actes Sud, coll. “Ba­bel”, 2007.

While Hara, in­side the fur­nace, was suf­fer­ing through this Dan­tesque spec­ta­cle, stunned in­tel­lec­tu­als, at the other end of the world, were try­ing to think through the event. On Au­gust 8, 1945, Al­bert Ca­mus wrote in Combat: “me­chan­i­cal civ­i­liza­tion has just reached its fi­nal de­gree of sav­agery. We will have to choose, in a more or less near fu­ture, be­tween col­lec­tive sui­cide or the in­tel­li­gent use of sci­en­tific con­quests. Mean­while, it is per­mis­si­ble to think that there is some in­de­cency in cel­e­brat­ing thus a dis­cov­ery which first puts it­self at the ser­vice of the most for­mi­da­ble rage of de­struc­tion that man has shown”3Ca­mus’s ed­i­to­rial was pub­lished on the front page of the news­pa­per Combat only two days af­ter the bomb­ing and be­fore that of Na­gasa­ki. It of­fers the ex­act coun­ter­point to the re­ac­tion of much of the press, such as Le Monde which head­lined the same day about “A sci­en­tific rev­o­lu­tion”. By go­ing against the en­thu­si­asms of the time, Ca­mus es­tab­lishes him­self as one of the quick­est and most lu­cid in­tel­li­gences at the mo­ment of the ad­vent of the nu­clear age.. Hara does not phi­los­o­phize, he shows; and what he shows is pre­cisely this “rage of de­struc­tion” planted like a blade in the very flesh of men.

A Few Flowers on the Vastest of Tombs

The cen­tral sto­ry, Sum­mer Flow­ers, opens with an in­ti­mate mourn­ing: “I went out into town and bought flow­ers, for I had de­cided to go to my wife’s grave”. For Hara, the end of the world had al­ready be­gun a year ear­li­er. He had lost his wife, Sadae—the per­son dear­est to his heart—and, with her, the purest de­lights of this life. The catas­tro­phe of Au­gust 6, 1945, is there­fore not a rup­ture sprung from noth­ing­ness, but the mon­strous am­pli­fi­ca­tion of a per­sonal dra­ma, which min­gles with the col­lec­tive one of the atomic bomb vic­tims and para­dox­i­cally ends up be­com­ing a rea­son for be­ing, an ur­gency to speak. “’I must leave all this in writ­ing,’ I said to my­self”, giv­ing him­self the courage to live a few more years. His writ­ing is no longer merely a lament amid the ru­ins; it trans­forms into a memo­rial to Hi­roshi­ma, a few flow­ers laid for eter­nity on the vastest of tombs; an act of re­sis­tance too against the si­lences, whether im­posed by the cen­sor­ship of Amer­i­can oc­cu­pa­tion forces4Af­ter the 1945 sur­ren­der, Amer­i­can oc­cu­pa­tion au­thor­i­ties es­tab­lished a Press Code that for sev­eral years pro­hib­ited the dis­sem­i­na­tion of overly raw in­for­ma­tion and tes­ti­monies about the ef­fects of the bomb­ings, thus de­lay­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of many works, in­clud­ing those of Hara. “To suf­fer in si­lence, then”, sum­ma­rizes psy­chol­o­gist Nayla Chidiac in her work L’Écri­t­ure qui guérit (Writ­ing That Heals), which de­votes an en­tire chap­ter to Hara., or born from dis­crim­i­na­tion against the “at­omized” (hibakusha), whose stig­mata en­gen­dered fear and re­jec­tion.

Silence of the Dead, Silence of God

But this mis­sion that kept him alive ended up crush­ing him. In 1951, he signed a farewell note, haunted by the specter of a new Hi­roshima with the out­break of the Ko­rean War: “It is time now for me to dis­ap­pear into the in­vis­i­ble, into the eter­nity be­yond”. Shortly af­ter, he threw him­self un­der a train. His ul­ti­mate ges­ture, as No­bel Prize win­ner Ôé Ken­z­aburô would write, was a fi­nal cry of protest “against the blind stu­pid­ity of the hu­man race”.

When the voices of wit­nesses fall silent, mem­ory takes refuge in the ob­jects that the crime left be­hind. Decades lat­er, it is this ma­te­rial mem­ory that priest Michel Quoist con­fronts dur­ing his visit to the atomic bomb mu­se­um. He is struck by the vi­sion of “clocks, pen­du­lums, alarm clocks”, their hands for­ever frozen at 8:15: “Time is sus­pended”. This strik­ing im­age is per­haps the most ac­cu­rate metaphor for Hara’s ef­fort to crys­tal­lize the fa­tal in­stant. It is this same im­age that would in­spire Quoist to write a lap­idary poem in per­fect res­o­nance with Hi­roshi­ma: Sum­mer Flow­ers:

“In­ter­rupt­ed, erased peo­ple
/ dust
/ shadow
/ night
/ noth­ing­ness
Si­lence of the dead
Si­lence of God

Why do you keep silent, the dead? I want to hear your voice!
Cry out!
Howl!
Tell us it is un­just!
Tell us we are mad! […]
IT IS NIGHT OVER HI­ROSHIMA”

Quoist, Michel, À cœur ou­vert (With an Open Heart), Paris: Les Édi­tions ou­vrières, 1981.

  • 8 min
Mappemonde mettant en évidence le Japon.

The Dawn of Medieval Japan in Its Epics

Trans­lated from French

The peace­ful Heian pe­riod (794-1185) ended in a con­fla­gra­tion. Fol­low­ing bat­tles of rare vi­o­lence, two ri­val hous­es, the Taira and the Mi­namo­to, suc­ces­sively ousted the court aris­toc­ra­cy, which pos­sessed nei­ther suf­fi­cient army nor po­lice, and brought about the ad­vent of the feu­dal regime. Thus be­gins the Ja­pa­nese Mid­dle Ages. This pe­riod of up­heaval was such that “one would have to search in the Ger­man Mid­dle Ages to find sim­i­lar con­fu­sion.” The re­fine­ment of Heian fem­i­nine lit­er­a­ture was suc­ceeded by vir­ile tales, full of “assassinations,” “stratagems,” “mar­velous feats of arms” and “long-pre­pared vengeances” — “source of em­bar­rass­ment and trou­ble for his­to­ri­ans.”

With Rosary in Hand and Sword at the Belt

From this tur­moil were born the “war­rior tales” (gunki mono­gatari), which stand at the cross­roads of his­tor­i­cal chron­i­cle, na­tional epic, and pro­found Bud­dhist med­i­ta­tion. Their func­tion was more­over less lit­er­ary, in the sense we un­der­stand it, than memo­rial and spir­i­tu­al: it was above all a mat­ter of “ap­peas­ing […] the souls of war­riors who had per­ished in com­bat” and, for the sur­vivors, “of seek­ing mean­ing in the chaotic events that brought an end to the old or­der.” This func­tion fell to the “biwa monks” (biwa hōshi or biwa bōzu), gen­er­ally blind bards. Sim­i­lar to our troubadours of old, they trav­eled the coun­try, de­claim­ing in a singing voice the great deeds of the past. Draped in monas­tic robes, doubt­less to place them­selves un­der the pro­tec­tion of tem­ples and monas­ter­ies, they ac­com­pa­nied them­selves with their four-stringed lute, the biwa1“Born in the king­dom of Per­sia and its bor­der­ing re­gions, the biwa spread through­out East Asia along the Silk Road. Per­fected in Chi­na, it reached the Ja­pa­nese ar­chi­pel­ago around the 8th cen­tury.” Hyōdō, Hi­romi, “Les moines joueurs de biwa (biwa hōshi) et Le Dit des Heike” (“The biwa-play­ing monks (biwa hōshi) and The Tale of the Heike”) in Bris­set, Claire-Akiko, Bro­tons, Ar­naud and Stru­ve, Daniel (ed­s.), op. cit., whose chords punc­tu­ated the melan­choly of the nar­ra­tive.

At the heart of the reper­toire that these artists trans­mit­ted from mas­ter to dis­ci­ple, a fun­da­men­tal tril­ogy re­counts the frat­ri­ci­dal strug­gles that tipped the ar­chi­pel­ago into a new era: The Tale of Hō­gen (Hō­gen mono­gatari)2Re­jected forms:
Récit des trou­bles de l’ère Hogen (Tale of the Trou­bles of the Hogen Era).
La Chronique des Hogen (The Chron­i­cle of the Hogen).
Récit de l’ère Hō­gen (Tale of the Hō­gen Era).
His­toire de la guerre de l’époque Hō­gen (His­tory of the War of the Hō­gen Pe­riod).
Hōghen mono­gatari.
Hōghenn mono­gatari., The Tale of Heiji (Heiji mono­gatari)3Re­jected forms:
Épopée de la ré­bel­lion de Heiji (Epic of the Heiji Re­bel­lion).
La Chronique des Heigi (The Chron­i­cle of the Heigi).
Récit de l’ère Heiji (Tale of the Heiji Era).
Réc­its de la guerre de l’ère Heiji (Tales of the War of the Heiji Era).
Heïdji mono­gatari.
Heizi mono­gatari., and the most il­lus­tri­ous of all, The Tale of the Heike (Heike mono­gatari)4Re­jected forms:
Le Dit des Heikke (The Tale of the Heikke).
L’Aven­ture d’Heike (The Ad­ven­ture of Heike).
His­toire des Heike (His­tory of the Heike).
Con­tes du Heike (Tales of Heike).
Con­tes des Heike (Tales of the Heike).
La Chronique des Heiké (The Chron­i­cle of the Heike).
La Chronique de Heiké (The Chron­i­cle of Heike).
Chroniques du clan Heike (Chron­i­cles of the Heike Clan).
La Geste de la mai­son des Héï (The Geste of the House of Hei).
Geste de la famille des Hei (Geste of the Hei Fam­ily).
His­toire de la famille des Hei (His­tory of the Hei Fam­ily).
His­toire de la famille Heiké (His­tory of the Heike Fam­ily).
His­toire de la mai­son des Taira (His­tory of the House of Taira).
His­toire de la famille des Taïra (His­tory of the Taira Fam­ily).
Récit de l’his­toire des Taira (Tale of the His­tory of the Taira).
Ro­man des Taira (Ro­mance of the Taira).
La Geste des Taïra (The Geste of the Taira).
Feike no mono­gatari.. The first two, while they may ap­pear pro­saic in de­scrib­ing how the Taira and Mi­namoto grad­u­ally in­sin­u­ated them­selves into mil­i­tary power un­til ac­quir­ing de­ci­sive in­flu­ence over court af­fairs, none­the­less pre­pare the com­ing drama and al­ready con­tain that “sen­si­tiv­ity to the ephemer­al” (mono no aware) that will find in The Tale of the Heike its most ac­com­plished ex­pres­sion:

“The world where we live
Has no more ex­is­tence than
A moon­beam
Re­flected in wa­ter
Drawn up in the hol­low of the hand.”

Le Dit de Hō­gen; Le Dit de Heiji (The Tale of Hō­gen; The Tale of Heiji), trans. from Ja­pa­nese by René Sief­fert, Paris: Pub­li­ca­tions ori­en­tal­istes de France, 1976; reis­sued La­grasse: Verdier, coll. “Verdier poche,” 2007.

Impermanence as Destiny

A mon­u­men­tal work, a ver­i­ta­ble Aeneid of the in­ternecine strug­gles and bit­ter wars that tore apart the two hous­es, cul­mi­nat­ing in the Bat­tle of Dan-no-ura (April 25, 1185), The Tale of the Heike nev­er­the­less rad­i­cally de­parts from West­ern tra­di­tion. In­stead of open­ing, in Vir­gil’s man­ner, with arma virumque (arms and the man), the Ja­pa­nese chron­i­cle re­calls from its first line “the im­per­ma­nence of all things”: “The proud in­deed do not en­dure, just like the dream of a spring night.” The char­ac­ters, great and hum­ble, are all swept away by the same whirl­wind, il­lus­trat­ing to the point of sati­ety that, ac­cord­ing to Bossuet’s for­mu­la:

“The time will come when this man who seems so great to you will be no more, when he will be like the child yet un­born, when he will be noth­ing. […] I came only to make up the num­ber, yet they had no need of me; […] when I look close­ly, it seems to me a dream to see my­self here, and that all I see are but vain sim­u­lacra: Præ­terit enim figura hu­jus mundi (For the fash­ion of this world passes away)51 Cor 7:31 (La Bible: tra­duc­tion of­fi­cielle liturgique (The Bible: Of­fi­cial Litur­gi­cal Trans­la­tion))..”

Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne, Œu­vres com­plètes (Com­plete Works), vol. IV, Paris: Lefèvre; Firmin Di­dot frères, 1836.

Thus, The Tale of the Heike re­sem­bles a con­tin­ual ser­mon, where all the vi­cis­si­tudes in the lives of he­roes serve to il­lus­trate this law of im­per­ma­nence (mujō) and the van­ity of hu­man glo­ries. The case of Taira no Tadanori (1144-1184) is ex­em­plary in this re­gard. Sur­prised by the en­e­my, he dom­i­nates his ad­ver­sary, but some or­di­nary ser­vant of the lat­ter in­ter­venes and cuts off his right arm at the el­bow. Know­ing his end has come, Tadanori turns west­ward and in­vokes the Bud­dha in a firm voice ten times be­fore be­ing de­cap­i­tat­ed. At­tached to his quiv­er, this farewell poem is found:

“Car­ried away by dark­ness
I shall lodge be­neath
The branches of a tree.
Only flow­ers
Will wel­come me tonight.”

Hoff­mann, Yoel, Poèmes d’adieu japon­ais: an­tholo­gie com­men­tée de poèmes écrits au seuil de la mort (Ja­pa­nese Death Po­ems: An An­no­tated An­thol­ogy of Po­ems Writ­ten on the Thresh­old of Death), trans. from Eng­lish by Ag­nès Rozen­blum, Malakoff: A. Col­in, 2023.

A Mixed Legacy

This Bud­dhist sen­si­bil­i­ty, which per­me­ates even the blood­i­est sce­nes, is nev­er­the­less not al­ways suf­fi­cient to el­e­vate a nar­ra­tive that may ap­pear slow, reg­u­lar, uni­form to minds formed by West­ern aes­thet­ics. Like the sound of the Gion bell, the march of the tales is reg­u­lar, too reg­u­lar even, and some­what mo­not­o­nous. I re­gret that such il­lus­tri­ous nar­ra­tives have not found an equally il­lus­tri­ous poet who might have fixed them forever; that they lacked a Homer who might have given them a va­ri­ety, a sup­ple­ness eter­nally ad­mired.

As Georges Bous­quet notes, Home­ric he­roes of­ten have “strange gai­eties or weak­nesses that let us touch their hu­man­ity with our fin­ger; those of Taira never cease be­ing con­ven­tional and cold.” While the naive Greek sto­ry­teller al­ways lets a vague and fine smile show through be­hind the words, “the Ja­pa­nese rhap­sodist never leaves the epic tone and stiff bear­ing.” Where “the joy­ful ex­pan­sion of the trou­vère res­onates like a fan­fare, here one hears only the melan­cholic ac­cent of the des­o­late Bud­dhist: ’The val­or­ous man [too] ends up col­laps­ing no more no less than dust in the wind’.”

  • 15 min
Mappemonde mettant en évidence le Vietnam.

The Kim-Vân-Kiêu, or the Vietnamese Soul Unveiled

Trans­lated from French

There are works that carry within them­selves the tastes and as­pi­ra­tions of an en­tire na­tion, “from the rick­shaw puller to the high­est man­dar­in, from the street ven­dor to the great­est lady in the world”. They re­main eter­nally young and wit­ness the suc­ces­sion of new gen­er­a­tions of ad­mir­ers. Such is the case of the Kim-Vân-Kiêu1Re­jected forms:
Kim, Ven, Kièu.
Le Conte de Kiêu (The Tale of Kiêu).
L’His­toire de Kieu (The Story of Kieu).
Le Ro­man de Kiều (The Novel of Kiều).
Truyện Kiều.
His­toire de Thuy-K­iêu (S­tory of Thuy-K­iêu).
Truyên Thuy-K­iêu.
L’His­toire de Kim Vân Kiều (The Story of Kim Vân Kiều).
Kim Vân Kiều truyện.
Nou­velle His­toire de Kim, Vân et Kiều (New Story of Kim, Vân and Kiều).
Kim Vân Kiều tân-truyện.
La Nou­velle Voix des cœurs brisés (The New Voice of Bro­ken Heart­s).
Nou­veau Chant du des­tin de mal­heur (New Song of Un­for­tu­nate Des­tiny).
Nou­veaux Ac­cents de douleurs (New Ac­cents of Sor­row).
Nou­veau Chant d’une des­tinée mal­heureuse (New Song of an Un­for­tu­nate Des­tiny).
Nou­veau Chant de souf­france (New Song of Suf­fer­ing).
Nou­velle Voix des en­trailles déchirées (New Voice of Torn En­trail­s).
Nou­veaux Ac­cents de la douleur (New Ac­cents of Pain).
Nou­velle Ver­sion des en­trailles brisées (New Ver­sion of Bro­ken En­trail­s).
Le Cœur brisé, nou­velle ver­sion (The Bro­ken Heart, New Ver­sion).
Đoạn-trường tân-thanh., this poem of more than three thou­sand verses that re­veals the Viet­namese soul in all its del­i­ca­cy, pu­ri­ty, and self-de­nial:

“One must hold one’s breath, one must tread with cau­tion to be able to grasp the beauty of the text [so much] is it gra­cious (dịu dàng), pretty (thuỳ mị), grandiose (tráng lệ), splen­did (huy hoàng).”

Du­rand, Mau­rice (ed.), Mélanges sur Nguyễn Du (Es­says on Nguyễn Du), Paris: École française d’Ex­trême-Ori­ent, 1966.

The au­thor, Nguyễn Du (1765-1820)2Re­jected forms:
Nguyên Zou.
Nguyên-Zu.
Hguyen-Du.
Not to be con­fused with:
Nguyễn Dữ (16th cen­tu­ry), whose Vast Col­lec­tion of Mar­velous Leg­ends is a crit­i­cism of his time un­der the veil of the fan­tas­tic., left the rep­u­ta­tion of a melan­cholic and tac­i­turn man, whose ob­sti­nate mutism earned him this rep­ri­mand from the em­per­or: “You must speak and give your opin­ion in coun­cils. Why do you thus shut your­self up in si­lence and only ever an­swer with yes or no?” A man­darin in spite of him­self, his heart as­pired only to the qui­etude of his na­tive moun­tains. He came to curse the very tal­ent that, by el­e­vat­ing him to the high­est of­fices, dis­tanced him from him­self, to the point of mak­ing it the moral con­clu­sion of his mas­ter­piece: “Let those who have tal­ent not glo­rify them­selves for their tal­ent! The word ’tài’ [tal­ent] rhymes with the word ’tai’ [m­is­for­tune]”. True to him­self, he re­fused all treat­ment dur­ing the ill­ness that proved fa­tal to him and, learn­ing that his body was grow­ing cold, he wel­comed the news with a sigh of re­lief. “Good!”, he mur­mured, and this word was his last.

The Epic of Sorrow

The poem re­traces the tragic des­tiny of Kiêu, a young woman of in­com­pa­ra­ble beauty and tal­ent. While a ra­di­ant fu­ture seems promised to her along­side her first love, Kim, fate strikes at her door: to save her fa­ther and brother from an un­just ac­cu­sa­tion, she must sell her­self. Thus be­gins for her a jour­ney of fif­teen years, dur­ing which she will be in turn ser­vant, con­cu­bine, and pros­ti­tute, flee­ing one mis­for­tune only to find a worse one. Yet, like the lo­tus that blooms on the mire, in the midst of this very ab­jec­tion, Kiêu pre­serves “the pure fra­grance of her orig­i­nal no­bil­ity”, guided by an un­shake­able con­vic­tion:

“[…] if a heavy karma weighs on our des­tiny, let us not re­crim­i­nate against heaven and let us not ac­cuse it of in­jus­tice. The root of good re­sides within our­selves.”

Nguyễn, Du, Kim-Vân-Kiêu, trans. from Viet­namese by Xuân Phúc [Paul Schnei­der] and Xuân Viết [Nghiêm Xuân Việt], Paris: Gal­li­mard/UNESCO, 1961.

Between Translation and Creation

It was dur­ing an em­bassy to China that Nguyễn Du dis­cov­ered the novel that would in­spire his mas­ter­piece. From a story one might judge ba­nal, he knew how to cre­ate an “im­mor­tal poem / Whose verses are so sweet that they leave, on the lip, / When one has sung them, a taste of honey”3Droin, Al­fred, “Ly-Than-Thong” in La Jonque vic­to­rieuse (The Vic­to­ri­ous Junk), Paris: E. Fasquelle, 1906.. This Chi­nese fil­i­a­tion would, how­ev­er, be­come an ap­ple of dis­cord for nascent na­tional pride. In the ef­fer­ves­cence of the 1920s-1930s, it armed the crit­i­cism of the most in­tran­si­gent na­tion­al­ists, of whom the scholar Ngô Đức Kế be­came the spokesper­son:

“The Thanh tâm tài nhân [source of the Kim-Vân-Kiêu] is but a de­spised novel in China and now Viet­nam el­e­vates it to the rank of canon­i­cal book, of Bible, it is truly bring­ing great shame upon one­self.”

Phạm, Thị Ngoạn, In­tro­duc­tion au Nam-Phong, 1917-1934 (In­tro­duc­tion to Nam-Phong, 1917-1934), Saigon: So­ciété des études in­dochi­nois­es, 1973.

In truth, be­yond its bor­rowed or li­cen­tious pas­sages, the Kim-Vân-Kiêu is above all the echo of the in­jus­tices suf­fered by the Viet­namese peo­ple. “The songs of the vil­lagers have taught me the speech of jute and mul­berry / Tears and sobs in the coun­try­side evoke wars and mourn­ing”, writes Nguyễn Du in an­other poem4This is the poem “Day of Pure Clar­i­ty” (“Thanh minh ngẫu hứng”). The Fes­ti­val of Pure Clar­ity is when fam­i­lies honor their an­ces­tors by go­ing to the coun­try­side to clean their tombs.. Through­out the epic ap­pears this vi­brant, of­ten heartrend­ing sen­si­tiv­ity of a poet whose heart beats in uni­son with the suf­fer­ing that smol­dered con­fus­edly in the hum­ble mass­es, as this pas­sage tes­ti­fies:

“The reeds pressed their equal tops to the hoarse breath of the north wind. All the sad­ness of an au­tumn sky seemed re­served for a sin­gle be­ing [K­iêu]. Along the noc­tur­nal stages, when a clar­ity fell from the ver­tig­i­nous fir­ma­ment and the dis­tances were lost in an ocean of mist, the moon she saw made her ashamed of her oaths be­fore the rivers and moun­tains.”

Nguyễn, Du, Kim-Vân-Kiêu, trans. from Viet­namese by Xuân Phúc [Paul Schnei­der] and Xuân Viết [Nghiêm Xuân Việt], Paris: Gal­li­mard/UNESCO, 1961.

A Mirror for the People

The for­tune of the Kim-Vân-Kiêu was such that it has left the do­main of lit­er­a­ture to be­come a mir­ror in which ev­ery Viet­namese rec­og­nizes them­selves. A pop­u­lar song has thus erected its read­ing as a ver­i­ta­ble art of liv­ing, in­sep­a­ra­ble from the plea­sures of the sage: “To be a man, one must know how to play ’tổ tôm’5Viet­namese card game for five play­ers. Very pop­u­lar in high so­ci­ety, it is re­puted to re­quire much mem­ory and per­spi­cac­i­ty., drink Yun­nan tea and re­cite the Kiêu” (Làm trai biết đánh tổ tôm, uống trà Mạn hảo, ngâm nôm Thúy Kiều). Su­per­sti­tion has even seized upon it, mak­ing the book an or­a­cle: in mo­ments of un­cer­tain­ty, it is not rare for one to open it at ran­dom to seek, in the verses that present them­selves, an an­swer from des­tiny. Thus, from the schol­ar’s cab­i­net to the most mod­est dwelling, the poem has known how to make it­self in­dis­pens­able. It is to the scholar Phạm Quỳnh that we owe the for­mu­la, which re­mains fa­mous, that sum­ma­rizes this sen­ti­ment:

“What have we to fear, what should we be anx­ious about? The Kiêu re­main­ing, our lan­guage re­mains; our lan­guage re­main­ing, our coun­try sub­sists.”

Thái, Bình, “De quelques as­pects philosophiques et re­ligieux du chef-d’œu­vre de la lit­téra­ture viet­nami­en­ne: le Kim-Vân-Kiêu de Nguyễn Du” (On Some Philo­soph­i­cal and Re­li­gious As­pects of the Mas­ter­piece of Viet­namese Lit­er­a­ture: the Kim-Vân-Kiêu by Nguyễn Du), Mes­sage d’Ex­trême-Ori­ent, no. 1, 1971, p. 25-38; no. 2, 1971, p. 85-97.

  • 17 min
Mappemonde mettant en évidence le Japon.

In the Margins of Dreams: The Ghosts of Ueda Akinari

Trans­lated from French

It is of­ten in the mar­gins that the most sin­gu­lar ge­niuses nes­tle. Son of an un­known fa­ther and an al­l-too-known moth­er—a cour­te­san from the plea­sure quar­ter­s—Ueda Ak­i­nari (1734-1809)1Re­jected forms:
Ak­i­nari Oue­da.
Ueda Tôsaku.
Uyeda Ak­i­nari. saw his mother only on­ce, when he was al­ready a grown man and cel­e­brated writ­er. Adopted by a mer­chant fam­ily in Os­aka, his ex­is­tence was marked by this orig­i­nal shame upon which his en­e­mies never hes­i­tated to at­tack him: “My en­e­mies say of me: he is a tav­ern child; worse still, he is some off­spring of an aged pimp! To which I re­ply: […] in any case, I am in my moun­tain the sole gen­eral and I know no peer there”. Added to this was an in­fir­mity of the fin­gers2An in­fir­mity he would wear as a badge by sign­ing his mas­ter­piece with the pseu­do­nym Sen­shi Ki­jin, that is, the Crip­ple with De­formed Fin­gers. that pre­vented him from per­fect cal­lig­ra­phy, para­dox­i­cally ori­ent­ing him, the proud young man lit­tle in­clined to com­merce, to­ward a re­lent­less in­tel­lec­tual and lit­er­ary quest. From this trou­bled ex­is­tence, from this raw sen­si­tiv­i­ty, would be born his mas­ter­piece, the Tales of Rain and Moon (Ugetsu mono­gatari)3Re­jected forms:
Con­tes des mois de pluie (Tales of Rainy Month­s).
Con­tes de la lune vague après la pluie (Tales of the Vague Moon Af­ter Rain).
Con­tes de la lune et de la pluie (Tales of Moon and Rain).
Con­tes de pluies et de lune (Tales of Rains and Moon).
Con­tes de la lune des pluies (Tales of the Moon of Rain­s).
Con­tes de lune et de pluie (Tales of Moon and Rain).
Con­tes du clair de lune et de la pluie (Tales of Moon­light and Rain).
Uegutsu mono­gatari..

Of Sources and Dreams

Pub­lished in 1776, these nine fan­tas­tic tales mark a turn­ing point in the lit­er­a­ture of the Edo pe­ri­od. Ak­i­nari, break­ing with the “tales of the float­ing world”, a friv­o­lous genre then in vogue, in­au­gu­rates the man­ner of the yomihon, or “read­ing book”, aimed at a cul­ti­vated pub­lic to whom he of­fers a space of dream and es­cape. The orig­i­nal­ity of his ap­proach lies in a mas­ter­ful syn­the­sis be­tween Chi­nese nar­ra­tive tra­di­tions and Ja­pa­nese lit­er­ary her­itage. While he draws abun­dantly from col­lec­tions of fan­tas­tic tales from the Ming and Qing dy­nas­ties, such as the Tales by Can­dle­light (Jian­deng xin­hua), he never con­tents him­self with a sim­ple trans­la­tion or servile adap­ta­tion. Each tale is en­tirely Japanized, trans­posed into a na­tional his­tor­i­cal and ge­o­graph­i­cal frame­work and, above all, trans­fig­ured by a unique melan­choly.

To con­ti­nen­tal sources, Ak­i­nari blends with con­sum­mate art the rem­i­nis­cences of his coun­try’s clas­si­cal lit­er­a­ture. The in­flu­ence of nō the­ater is ev­ery­where per­cep­ti­ble, not only in the ges­tures and phys­iog­nomies—venge­ful spir­its, war­rior ghosts, des­per­ate lover­s—but also in the very com­po­si­tion of the tales, which skill­fully ar­range the dis­tanc­ing from the world and the dra­matic pro­gres­sion up to the ap­pear­ance of the su­per­nat­u­ral. Sim­i­lar­ly, the el­e­gant and flow­ery prose (gabun) is a vi­brant homage to the golden age of the Heian pe­ri­od, and par­tic­u­larly to the Tale of Genji (Genji mono­gatari).

A Ghostly Humanity

What strikes in the Tales of Rain and Moon is that the world of spir­its is never en­tirely cut off from that of the liv­ing. Far from be­ing sim­ple mon­sters, Ak­i­nar­i’s ghosts are en­dowed with a com­plex per­son­al­i­ty, of­ten richer and more orig­i­nal than that of the hu­mans they come to haunt. Their ap­pear­ances are mo­ti­vated by pow­er­fully hu­man feel­ings: fi­delity be­yond death, scorned love, de­vour­ing jeal­ousy, or in­ex­tin­guish­able ha­tred. The specter is of­ten merely the ex­ten­sion of a pas­sion that could not be sat­is­fied or ap­peased in the earthly world. Its voice, com­ing from be­yond the grave, speaks to us with trou­bling moder­nity about our­selves.

Thus with Miyagi, the aban­doned wife who, in The House Among the Reeds, waits seven years for the re­turn of her hus­band who left to seek his for­tune. Dead from ex­haus­tion and sor­row, she ap­pears to him one last night be­fore be­com­ing noth­ing more than a burial mound upon which this heart­break­ing poem is found:

“So it was,
I knew it and yet my heart
Lulled it­self with il­lu­sions:
In this world, un­til this day,
Was this, then, the life I have lived?”

Ueda, Ak­i­nari. Con­tes de pluie et de lune (Ugetsu mono­gatari) (Tales of Rain and Moon), trans. from Ja­pa­nese by René Sief­fert. Paris: Gal­li­mard, coll. “Con­nais­sance de l’Ori­ent. Série japon­aise”, 1956.

The fan­tas­tic in Ak­i­nari is there­fore not a sim­ple mech­a­nism of hor­ror; it is the mag­ni­fy­ing mir­ror of the soul’s tor­ments. Specters come to re­mind the liv­ing of their fail­ings, the moral con­se­quence of their acts. The vengeance of a be­trayed wife or the loy­alty of a friend who takes his own life to keep his prom­ise are so many para­bles about the force of com­mit­ments and the fa­tal­ity of pas­sions.

The Chiseler of Chimeras

Ak­i­nar­i’s style is un­doubt­edly what con­fers upon the work its per­ma­nence. He com­bines the no­bil­ity of clas­si­cal lan­guage with a sense of rhythm in­her­ited from nō, cre­at­ing a sin­gu­lar mu­sic that be­witches the read­er. The very ti­tle, Ugetsu, “rain and moon”, trans­lates this be­witch­ing melody into an im­age—that of moon­light blur­ring in the mur­mur of fine rain, es­tab­lish­ing an ideal set­ting for su­per­nat­u­ral man­i­fes­ta­tions, a spec­tral world where the bound­aries be­tween dream and re­al­ity fade.

An in­de­pen­dent artist, Ak­i­nari took nearly ten years to pol­ish his mas­ter­piece, a sign of the im­por­tance he at­tached to it. An in­tel­lec­tual in­de­pen­dence that also man­i­fested it­self in his vir­u­lent polemics with the other great scholar of his time, Mo­toori Nori­na­ga, a na­tion­al­ist be­fore his time. While the lat­ter erected Japan’s an­ces­tral myths as “the only truth”, Ak­i­nari mocked this ideal by as­sert­ing that “in any coun­try, the spirit of the na­tion is its stench”. Thus, this son of a cour­te­san knew how, through the sole force of his art, to es­tab­lish him­self as a cen­tral fig­ure, a “per­fect an­ar­chist”4The ex­pres­sion is Al­fred Jar­ry’s about Ubu, but it could, by a dar­ing anal­o­gy, qual­ify Ak­i­nar­i’s spirit of com­plete in­de­pen­dence. who, by play­ing with con­ven­tions, brought the fan­tas­tic tale to an un­equaled de­gree of re­fine­ment. His sin­gu­lar­i­ties, which re­quired par­tic­u­lar courage in a Ja­pa­nese so­ci­ety that erected con­form­ity as the supreme virtue, did not fail to fas­ci­nate Yukio Mishi­ma, who con­fesses in Mod­ern Japan and the Samu­rai Ethics (Ha­gakure nyū­mon) to hav­ing car­ried Ak­i­nar­i’s work with him “dur­ing the bomb­ings” and ad­mired above all his “de­lib­er­ate anachro­nism”. The Tales of Rain and Moon are not merely an an­thol­ogy of the gen­re; they are a rein­vented im­age of sto­ry­telling in the Ja­pa­nese man­ner, where the mar­velous and the macabre com­pete with the most del­i­cate po­et­ry, leav­ing the reader un­der the last­ing charm of a strange and mag­nif­i­cent dream.

  • 8 min
Mappemonde mettant en évidence l’Iran et la France.

From Isfahan to Ménilmontant: The Journey of Ali Erfan

Trans­lated from French

The Ori­ent, with its mys­ter­ies and tor­ments, has al­ways nour­ished the West­ern imag­i­na­tion. But what do we re­ally know about con­tem­po­rary Per­sia, about this land of po­etry that be­came the the­ater of a rev­o­lu­tion that dis­rupted the world or­der? It is a win­dow onto this Iran, steeped in con­tra­dic­tions, that the work of Ali Er­fan opens for us—writer and film­maker1Filmmaker: An episode il­lus­trates the di­rect threats that weighed on the artist and pre­cip­i­tated his ex­ile. When his sec­ond film was screened in Iran, the Min­is­ter of Cul­ture, present in the room, de­clared at the end: “The only white wall on which the blood of the im­pure has not yet been shed is the cin­ema screen. If we ex­e­cute this traitor and this screen be­comes red, all film­mak­ers will un­der­stand that one can­not play with the in­ter­ests of the Mus­lim peo­ple.” born in Is­fa­han in 1946, and forced into ex­ile in France since 1981. His work, writ­ten in a French lan­guage he has made his own, is a poignant tes­ti­mony of rare fi­nesse about the tragedy of a peo­ple and the con­di­tion of ex­ile.

Writing as Resistance

In his art of prob­ing souls tor­mented by tyranny and the ab­sur­dity of fa­nati­cism, many see in Ali Er­fan the wor­thy heir of the great Sadegh He­dayat2Sadegh He­dayat: Fa­ther of mod­ern Ira­nian let­ters, buried at Père-Lachaise, in Paris.. His writ­ing, of im­pla­ca­ble raw­ness, plunges us into a dark and op­pres­sive uni­verse, al­most Kafkaesque—that of a so­ci­ety de­liv­ered to the ter­ror es­tab­lished by the “hal­lu­ci­na­tory phi­los­o­phy of the imams”: whether it be the per­se­cuted women of Ma femme est une sainte (My Wife Is a Sain­t), the op­pressed artists of Le Dernier Poète du monde (The Last Poet of the World), or the cursed fig­ures of Les Damnées du par­adis (The Damned of Par­adis­e). The death that per­me­ates these sto­ries is not that of vi­o­lence alone, but of the to­tal­i­tar­ian State that en­gen­ders it, this ed­i­fice that, to erect it­self, needs a ce­ment of bod­ies. It is this same ce­ment that we find in Sans om­bre (With­out Shad­ow), a pow­er­ful tes­ti­mony about the Iran-I­raq War, this “ap­palling char­nel house,” com­pa­ra­ble to the trench bat­tles of the Great War, which drank the blood of hun­dreds of thou­sands of men:

“There were also vol­un­teers who, with the idea of dy­ing, ex­ca­vated the ground to make holes like graves, which they called ’bri­dal cham­ber for the lovers of God.’

But it mat­tered lit­tle what mean­ing each gave to his tem­po­rary dwelling; he had to dig his hole in the di­rec­tion of Mecca and not in re­la­tion to the en­emy who was fac­ing him.”

Er­fan, Ali. Sans om­bre (With­out Shad­ow), La Tour-d’Aigues: Édi­tions de l’Aube, coll. “Re­gards croisés,” 2017.

If Ali Er­fan does not have the joy of be­liev­ing, that is his de­fect, or rather his mis­for­tune. But this mis­for­tune stems from a very grave cause, I mean the crimes he has seen com­mit­ted in the name of a re­li­gion whose pre­cepts have been dis­torted and di­verted from their true mean­ing, faith be­com­ing mad­ness:

“He opened one of the thick files with­out haste, re­moved a sheet, ex­am­ined it, and sud­denly cried out:

—Lock this woman in a burlap sack, and throw stones at her un­til she dies like a dog. […]

And he con­tin­ued, re­peat­ing the same ges­ture, toss­ing aside the writ­ing of one who had trav­eled to God, seiz­ing an­other […]. He sud­denly stood up, stand­ing on the table, and cried like a mad­man:

—Let the fa­ther stran­gle his son with his own hands…”

Er­fan, Ali. Le Dernier Poète du monde (The Last Poet of the World), trans. from Per­sian by the au­thor and Michèle Cristo­fari, La Tour-d’Aigues: Édi­tions de l’Aube, coll. “L’Aube poche,” 1990.

Of Exile and Memory

Ex­ile is a wound that never quite clos­es. In Adieu Ménil­montant (Farewell Ménil­montan­t), Ali Er­fan leaves his na­tive Per­sia for a time to speak to us of France, his land of refuge. The novel is a trib­ute to the rue de Ménil­montant, that cos­mopoli­tan quar­ter of Paris where he lived and worked as a pho­tog­ra­pher. It is a ten­der and some­times cruel chron­i­cle of the life of the “lost souls of the world,” those pari­ahs of life who, like him, have washed up in this refuge. How­ev­er, even in France, Iran is never far away. The smells, the sounds, the faces, ev­ery­thing re­calls the lost Ori­ent. A mem­ory that, to fight against obliv­ion, se­lects from the past the most salient fea­tures.

Each time he un­der­takes to write, Ali Er­fan seeks the time of his early youth. He tastes the ec­stasy of rec­ol­lec­tion, the plea­sure of find­ing lost and for­got­ten things in his na­tive lan­guage. And, as this re­cov­ered mem­ory does not faith­fully re­count what hap­pened, it is the true writer; and Ali Er­fan is its first read­er:

“Now, I know its lan­guage [French]. But I don’t want to speak. […] Madame says: ’My dear, say: jas­mine.’ I don’t want to. I want to pro­nounce the name of the flower that was in our house. What was it called? Why don’t I re­mem­ber? That large flower that grew in the cor­ner of the court­yard. That climbed, that turned. It climbed over the door of our house, and it fell into the street. […] What was it called? It smelled good. Madame says again: ’Say, my dear.’ I cry, I cry…”

Er­fan, Ali. Le Dernier Poète du monde (The Last Poet of the World), trans. from Per­sian by the au­thor and Michèle Cristo­fari, La Tour-d’Aigues: Édi­tions de l’Aube, coll. “L’Aube poche,” 1990.

The work of Ali Er­fan, at once sin­gu­lar and uni­ver­sal, plunges us into an op­pres­sive Ori­ent, where the leaden cloak of a ten­tac­u­lar theoc­racy weighs heavy. Cer­tain­ly, one might fear that the writer of ex­ile serves, de­spite him­self, only to feed the clichés of “West­ern Is­lam­o­pho­bia” — a the­sis at the heart of “Is Ex­ile Lit­er­a­ture a Mi­nor Lit­er­a­ture?” by Hes­sam Noghre­hchi. But who­ever saw only this side of things would miss the es­sen­tial point; for Per­sian cul­ture has al­ways made sep­a­ra­tion and ex­ile the source of its purest song. Such is the les­son of Rûmî’s flute, whose sub­lime mu­sic is born from its stem torn from its na­tive reed bed: “Lis­ten to the reed flute tell a sto­ry; it laments the sep­a­ra­tion: ’S­ince I was cut from the reed bed, my com­plaint makes man and woman groan’”. The voice of Ali Er­fan, like that of this flute, is thus born not despite the crack, but in­deed through it, trans­mut­ing the bru­tal­ity of re­al­ity into a poignant melody.

  • 11 min
Mappemonde mettant en évidence le Sénégal, la France, le Cameroun et la Guinée.

Coups de pi­lon by David Diop, or the Word Made Flesh and Fury

Trans­lated from French

The work of David Diop (1927-1960)1Re­jected forms:
David Man­dessi Diop.
David Léon Man­dessi Diop.
David Diop Mendessi.
David Mambessi Diop.
Not to be con­fused with:
David Diop (1966-…), writer and aca­demic, win­ner of the Goncourt des ly­céens prize in 2018 for his novel Frère d’âme (Soul Brother)., as brief as it was bril­liant, re­mains one of the most grip­ping tes­ti­monies of mil­i­tant negri­tude po­et­ry. His sole col­lec­tion, Coups de pi­lon (Ham­mer Blows, 1956), res­onates with undi­min­ished force, ham­mer­ing con­sciences and cel­e­brat­ing the in­de­fati­ga­ble hope of an Africa stand­ing tall. Born in Bor­deaux to a Sene­galese fa­ther and a Cameroo­nian moth­er, Diop ex­pe­ri­enced Africa less through pro­longed res­i­dence than through dream and her­itage, which takes noth­ing away from the power of a voice that knew how to echo the suf­fer­ings and re­volts of an en­tire con­ti­nent.

A Poetry of Revolt

Diop’s po­etry is above all a cry. A cry of re­fusal in the face of colo­nial in­iq­ui­ty, a cry of pain in the face of his peo­ple’s hu­mil­i­a­tion. In a di­rect style, stripped of all su­per­flu­ous or­na­ment, the poet de­liv­ers his truths like so many “ham­mer blows” in­tend­ed, in his own words, to “burst the eardrums of those who do not want to hear and crack like whip strokes on the ego­isms and con­formisms of or­der”. Each poem is an in­dict­ment draw­ing up the bloody bal­ance sheet of the tute­lary era. Thus, in “The Vul­tures,” he de­nounces the hypocrisy of the civ­i­liz­ing mis­sion:

“In those days
With shouts of civ­i­liza­tion
With holy wa­ter on do­mes­ti­cated brows
The vul­tures built in the shadow of their talons
The bloody mon­u­ment of the tute­lary era.”

Diop, David, Coups de pi­lon (Ham­mer Blows), Paris: Présence africaine, 1973.

Vi­o­lence is om­nipresent, not only in the the­me, but in the very rhythm of the phrase, sober and sharp as a blade. The fa­mous and la­conic poem “The Time of Mar­tyr­dom” is the most poignant il­lus­tra­tion, a ver­i­ta­ble litany of dis­pos­ses­sion and colo­nial crime: “The White killed my fa­ther / For my fa­ther was proud / The White raped my mother / For my mother was beau­ti­ful”. These un­adorned vers­es, giv­ing the text its strik­ing force, have dis­con­certed some crit­ics. Sana Ca­mara sees in them, for ex­am­ple, a “sim­plic­ity of style that bor­ders on pover­ty, even if the poet at­tempts to cap­ti­vate us with the irony of events”. Yet it is un­doubt­edly in this econ­omy of means, this re­fusal of ar­ti­fice, that the bru­tal­ity of the sub­ject reaches its parox­ysm.

Africa at the Heart of the Word

If re­volt is the en­gine of his writ­ing, Africa is its soul. She is that ide­al­ized moth­er­land, glimpsed through the prism of nos­tal­gia and dream. The open­ing apos­tro­phe of the poem “Africa” — “Africa, my Africa” — is a dec­la­ra­tion of be­long­ing and fil­i­a­tion. This Africa, he ad­mits to hav­ing “never known”, but his gaze is “full of your blood”. She is by turns the lov­ing and scorned moth­er, the dancer with a body of “black pep­per”, and the beloved wom­an, Rama Kam, whose sen­sual beauty is a cel­e­bra­tion of the en­tire race.

It is in this dreamed Africa that the poet draws the strength of hope. To the de­spair in­spired by the “back that bends / And lies down un­der the weight of hu­mil­ity”, a voice re­sponds, prophet­ic:

“Im­petu­ous son, that ro­bust and young tree
That tree over there
Splen­didly alone in the midst of white and with­ered flow­ers
Is Africa, your Africa that grows again
That grows again pa­tiently ob­sti­nately
And whose fruits grad­u­ally have
The bit­ter taste of free­dom.”

Diop, David, Coups de pi­lon (Ham­mer Blows), Paris: Présence africaine, 1973.

A Militant Humanism

To re­duce Diop’s work to an “an­ti-racist racism”2Sartre, Jean-Paul, “Or­phée noir” (“Black Or­pheus”), pref­ace to l’An­tholo­gie de la nou­velle poésie nè­gre et mal­gache de langue française (An­thol­ogy of New Ne­gro and Mala­gasy Po­etry in French) by L. S. Sen­ghor, Paris: Presses uni­ver­si­taires de France, 1948., to bor­row Sartre’s for­mu­la, would be to mis­un­der­stand its uni­ver­sal scope. If the de­nun­ci­a­tion of Black op­pres­sion is the start­ing point, Diop’s strug­gle em­braces all the wretched of the earth. His po­etry is a clamor that rises “from Africa to the Amer­i­cas” and his sol­i­dar­ity ex­tends to the “docker of Suez and the coolie of Hanoi”, to the “Viet­namese ly­ing in the rice field” and the “con­vict of the Congo brother of the lynched of At­lanta”.

This fra­ter­nity in suf­fer­ing and strug­gle is the mark of a pro­found hu­man­ism. The poet does not con­tent him­self with curs­ing, he calls for col­lec­tive ac­tion, for unan­i­mous re­fusal em­bod­ied by the fi­nal in­junc­tion of “Chal­lenge to Force”: “Stand up and cry: NO!”. For, ul­ti­mate­ly, be­yond the vi­o­lence of the word, David Diop’s song is “guided only by love”, the love of a free Africa within a rec­on­ciled hu­man­i­ty.

The work of David Diop, cut down in full bloom by a tragic death that de­prived us of his forth­com­ing manuscripts, re­tains a burn­ing rel­e­vance. Léopold Sé­dar Sen­ghor, his for­mer teacher, hoped that with age, the poet would go “hu­man­iz­ing him­self”. One can af­firm that this hu­man­ism was al­ready at the heart of his re­volt. Coups de pi­lon (Ham­mer Blows) re­mains an es­sen­tial text, a clas­sic work of African po­et­ry, a vi­aticum for all youth yearn­ing for jus­tice and free­dom.

“That is al­ready a lot for a work that is, all things con­sid­ered, quite lim­it­ed, for a first and—alas—last work. But there are texts that go to the heart of things and speak to the en­tire be­ing. Lyri­cal, sen­ti­men­tal, ex­pres­sion of a per­sonal de­mand and anger, this po­etry ”launched gravely to as­sault chimeras“ […] is in­deed one of those that will eter­nal­ly, to pla­gia­rize Cé­saire, defy ”the lack­eys of or­der“ [that is, the agents of re­pres­sion], one of those that […] will al­ways ob­sti­nately re­mind us that ”the work of man has only just be­gun“, that hap­pi­ness is al­ways to be con­quered, more beau­ti­ful and stronger.”

So­ciété africaine de cul­ture (ed.), David Diop, 1927-1960 : té­moignages, études (David Diop, 1927-1960: Tes­ti­monies, Stud­ies), Paris: Présence africaine, 1983.

  • 7 min