English (anglais)

Mappemonde mettant en évidence le Japon et la Russie.

The Requiem of the Ainu People

Translated from French • English (anglais)

Much like the Amerindian nations, what remains today of the Ainu people — once so remarkable and so ardently devoted to freedom — finds itself wretchedly confined to a handful of aboriginal villages. It fades away in silence, abandoned to a fate it scarcely deserves. Before Japanese hegemony, its vast territory spread out, however, in the manner of a majestic tree. The great island of Hokkaido — then called Ezo — formed its massive trunk, from which two distinct branches sprang forth. One, inclining toward the northwest, was none other than the island of Sakhalin — Kita-Ezo or “Northern Ezo”; the other, toward the northeast, traced the rosary of the Kuriles — Oku-Ezo or “Ezo of the Outer Reaches” — strung all the way to the tip of Kamchatka.

At the Confines of the Known World

For nearly a millennium, Japan had no serious notion of these islands concealed beneath mythological mists. The little it knew of them came from the singular wares it received through barter — shark oil, eagle feathers, medicinal lichen, strange garments sewn of bark in summer and of sealskin in winter — or from distant, unreliable hearsay, which described the island chiefs as giants “most wicked and given to sorcery,” capable, at their will, of “producing rain and raising storms”¹. It was not until 1604 that a daimyo was invested at Matsumae; but he contented himself, as it were, with standing guard.

“Negligible and neglected,” these islands were also the only part of the Pacific to escape the tireless activity of Captain Cook. And on that account, they aroused the curiosity of La Pérouse, who, since his departure from France, had burned with impatience to be the first to land there. In 1787, the frigates under his command anchored off Sakhalin, and the French, having gone ashore, came into contact with “a race of men different from the Japanese, the Chinese, the Kamchadals, and the Tartars, from whom they are separated only by a channel.” Captivated by their gentle and spontaneous manners as much as by their uncommon intelligence, La Pérouse did not hesitate to compare them to the best-educated Europeans. He recounts with wonder how an islander, understanding his requests, seized a pencil to trace on paper a rigorously exact map and indicate “by strokes, the number of days’ journey by canoe.”

Then came the Meiji Restoration, which would overturn the age-old equilibria of Ezo, perhaps even more than those of Japan itself. Through a brutal policy of land clearance and colonization, compounded by authoritarian dispossessions, the central administration subjected the Ainu to the guardianship of a stepmother that erased even the name of their land. In this forced marginalization, their rich oral literature, transmitted from generation to generation in the sanctuary of their memory, withered until it was no more than grandparents’ reminiscences. Forgotten were the chants devoted to ancestors (ainu-yukar)², the divine epics (kamuy-yukar), and the tales (uwepeker) in which a vaguely personified nature came alive: the Sea that nourishes, the Forest that shelters, the Bear Cub raised in the village with infinite care… As Kubodera Itsuhiko laments: “Apart from a few elders, the Ainu no longer use their language. They speak Japanese.”

The Sacrificial Fervor of Chiri Yukie

It was to ward off this fate that Chiri Yukie emerged. Torn between her modern Japanese education and the heritage of her grandmothers — illustrious reciters — knowing herself condemned by illness, this Ainu woman devoted her exceedingly brief existence to transcribing in Latin script and translating into Japanese thirteen divine epics, becoming the “young girl who captured the gods” as a “gift to her people”³. Her heart ceased to beat at the age of nineteen, mere hours after the completion of her manuscript Ainu shin’yô-shû (Collection of Ainu Chants)⁴. Her aunt, Imekanu⁵, and her brother, Chiri Mashiho, subsequently took up the torch, publishing imposing continuations. In her preface, whose accents ring like a testament, Chiri Yukie intones the threnody of “those condemned to vanish” (horobiyuku mono):

“Where have all those people gone who lived in peace in the mountains and on the plains? The nature that had existed since ancient times is gradually disappearing. The few of us who still remain open wide, astonished eyes before the evolution of the world. […] Oh, pitiful silhouette in the act of perishing, forced to cling to the clemency of others!”

Tsushima, Yûko (ed.), Tombent, tombent les gouttes d’argent : Chants du peuple aïnou (Fall, Fall, the Drops of Silver: Chants of the Ainu People), trans. from Japanese by Flore Coumau, Rodolphe Diot, Catherine Vansintejan, Pauline Vey, and Rose-Marie Makino-Fayolle, Paris: Gallimard, “L’Aube des peuples” series, 1996.

The Resistance Through the Spirit of Nukishio Kizô

In perfect counterpoint to this funeral eulogy, Nukishio Kizô⁶ refuses the prophecy of extinction. Through his 1934 manifesto, Assimilation and Vestiges of the Ainu (Ainu no dôka to senshô), he rekindles pride in the Ainu name, which, in the language of his people, means “human being.” Excoriating the “ordinary man” (ningen) blinded by self-interest, he calls for the advent of the “virtuous man” (hito, 人). In this ideogram, whose two strokes prop each other up to keep one another from falling, he reads the very allegory of our “need for vigorous and constant mutual support in order to remain standing.” Much as Confucius distinguished the “noble man” (junzi) from the “petty man,” it is in active benevolence, elevated to the rank of virtue, that the intellectual glimpses the hope of a society at last pacified, in which “virtuous men respect the power of nature.”

In Search of Departed Souls

Just as old Ezo has vanished, so too, with these Ainu — brothers of the crashing torrents and of the wind’s lament through the foliage — do there threaten to fade the “sylvan and barbarous theophagy”; the “mythical communion with the invisible”; the wild moors peopled with glorious memories and kamuy gods; and, at last, the “primordial intuitions centering upon the idea of ramat — the spirit, the secret intimacy, the heart of man and of things”⁷. We are losing our own share of animism in a natural world that never ceases to shrink. It is urgent to try to recover it, like those shamans of old who would launch themselves on a quest to recapture the departed souls of the dying before they should dissipate forever.

15 min

Mappemonde mettant en évidence l’Inde et le Pakistan.

The Gold of the Sikhs: Splendor and Universality of the Granth

Translated from French • English (anglais)

One of the holy ponds of India is the “lake of immortality” (Amrita Sara), at Amritsar¹, where the heart of the Sikh faith beats. Whoever goes there is swept along by a human crowd amid the scents of flowers and incense and arrives with it before a marvel: a golden temple enthroned, like a precious jewel, in the midst of the waters. One expects to be charmed and is dazzled instead. An indescribable throng of travelers, pilgrims, and curious onlookers of “all the races of India” jostles and calls out “in sonorous dialects that strike the ear like a blare of fanfares,” while children, running, make the circuit of the marble quays. This temple welcomes all without distinction of sex or religion. Inside, no idol. The sole object of veneration, set in the great hall beneath a canopy of brocade, is the Granth, originally compiled by Arjan, the fifth Guru, and his faithful scribe Bhai Gurdas. “Day and night without respite, as if to achieve a kind of perpetual adoration, granthi [officiants] sing, beneath these revered vaults, passages from the holy book, accompanying themselves on stringed instruments.”

Half a Millennium of Scattered Poetry

The Sikhs designate their sacred book as the Adi Granth (the First Book) or the Sri Guru Granth Sahib (the Venerated Master Book)², but more often still by the vague name of Granth (the Book)³, just as Christians call theirs the Bible (the Books). Now, the Granth is a work entirely unique compared to the canons of other religions: a fascinating poetic anthology containing not only the hymns and canticles of its Gurus, but those of earlier mystics, such as Sheikh Fariduddin, known as Baba Farid, born around 1175. The Gurus themselves having lived between 1469 and 1708, here is half a millennium of scattered Indian poetry, whose uninterrupted recitation (akhand path) requires two days and two nights of granthi relaying one another without rest. That is why, on his deathbed, the tenth and last Guru, Gobind Singh, rather than naming a successor, decreed that this collection would henceforth be the eternal director of souls: “After my death, you must in all circumstances address yourselves to the Granth Sahib; it is he who shall be your Guru; whatever you ask of him, he will show you.”

The Common Kitchen of Brotherhood

The philosophy of the Granth is an education of love and benevolence, cast between the Hindu world and the Muslim world. From the first, it adopts devotion (bhakti) without idols or the yoke of castes. From the second — monotheism and the Sufi impulse without the sharia. By availing itself of high poetry, it gives the idea of what a life worth living can be, a true life; which raises it to the rank of a universal religion. Its prayer invariably closes with these wishes for all humanity: “May Thy will, O Lord, bring peace and happiness to each and to all, throughout the world.” Bhai Gurdas, already mentioned, explains:

“He [the Sikh] truly lives a life of sacrifice, the life of a slave of the Lord whom he loves. […] In his love, he forgets hunger and sleep. His hands are ceaselessly occupied in helping those in need and in comforting those who are cast down. […] Magnanimous, tolerant, and serene, he lives to serve humanity.”

Ladame, Paul-Alexis, « Les Sikhs » (The Sikhs), Cahiers d’études cathares, no. 147, Autumn 1995, pp. 3–38.

The Gurus preached an absolute equality, which finds its most concrete expression in the langar. This word designates the refectory adjoined to the temples and the communal meal served there, open to all. “The langar, launched by the first Guru, […] Nanak, was particularly original and radical in India where, for centuries, […] there were, and still are, prohibitions concerning the persons with whom one eats.” It is said that Emperor Akbar himself, the most tolerant of the Mughal sovereigns, submitted to this unconditional hospitality, sitting in the ranks of the humble to break bread with them⁴.

“Build the raft of contemplation; upon it you shall cross without obstruction,
And you shall strike neither the ocean nor the tide. […]
He who subdues his ego, strips himself of the ’self,’ and adorns himself in this fashion. […]
One parts no more if one truly unites with the Lord.
Then, the coming and going ceases, and one perceives the Lord everywhere.”⁵

In highly symbolic language, this poem admirably summarizes the [Sikh] teaching. Man’s ego (haumai, “me-I”) […] is prisoner of material life and its faults, represented by the ocean and the tide. Because of them, […] he cannot reach the other shore, that of final emancipation (nirvanu) […]. Man must therefore purify his spiritual essence (manu), free it from the gangue of the “me-I,” and thereby render himself pleasing to God.“

Matringe, Denis, Les Sikhs : histoire et tradition des « Lions du Panjab » (The Sikhs: History and Tradition of the ”Lions of the Punjab“), Paris: Albin Michel, ”Planète Inde“ series, 2008.

An Earthly Jerusalem

Evening falls over the Punjab, and the golden temple is haloed with garlands of oil lamps ”whose reflections in the water make it shimmer with the scintillations of a treasure“ (Mircea Eliade). The contemplator then muses that this place is far more than it appears. It is the vision of a city ever ”brilliant […] nobly presenting to the gaze […] its thousands of resplendent domes, upon which the light […] falls and rebounds in dazzling vapor“ (Lamartine). It is the promise of a city that reconciles man with his fellow, as with himself, and from which the original Jerusalem seems to me to drift further with each passing day:

”For a Christian, the temple of Amritsar seems to prefigure the heavenly Jerusalem, a city whose gates, the Book of Revelation says, shall never be closed, so as to welcome all peoples⁶ before the throne of God and of the Lamb. Indeed, there is in this place the herald of a reconciled humanity, all the more moving when one knows the painful history of the Punjab and of Sikhism.“

Vagneux, Yann, « Le Temple d’or » (The Golden Temple), La Croix, January 12, 2024.

11 min

Mappemonde mettant en évidence la Turquie et la Grèce.

He Who Sought Himself: The Grandeur and Solitude of Heraclitus

Translated from French • English (anglais)

Heraclitus of Ephesus reaches us, from the depths of ages, through the fragments of a scroll deposited, in the 5th century BC, in the temple of Artemis. It is still debated whether this scroll was a continuous treatise, or whether it consisted of isolated thoughts, like those that the chance of quotation has preserved for us. Heraclitus expressed himself, in any case, in a sibylline, compact style, apt to astonish; he adopted at once the tone of a prophet and the language of a philosopher. Hence that epithet of the Obscure or Tenebrous (Σκοτεινός) so often affixed to his name, but which seems to me no less exaggerated: “Certainly [his] reading is rough and difficult to approach. The night is dark, the shadows are thick. But if an initiate guides you, you will see more clearly in this book than in broad daylight” (Greek Anthology, from the Palatine manuscript). The fragments that remain of his doctrine are like the flashes of a storm that had mysteriously withdrawn, rending the pre-Socratic night with a fire comparable to no other. Hegel, retracing the emergence of the “light of thought,” recognizes in Heraclitus the most radiantly central figure. Heidegger goes further: “Heraclitus is nicknamed ’the Obscure.’ Yet he is the Clear. For he says that which illuminates, trying to invite its light to enter the language of thought”¹.

The Royalty of Refusal

To this apparent obscurity was added, in Heraclitus, a core of pride and disdain for his fellow men. For when a philosopher is proud, he is never so by halves. A crown prince, he readily relinquished the royal dignity to his brother, then refused to legislate for a city he deemed irremediably “under the sway of a wretched constitution” (πονηρᾷ πολιτείᾳ). There he was, withdrawn in the sanctuary of Artemis, playing knucklebones with children. Did onlookers crowd around him? He would fling at them:

“Why do you marvel, scoundrels? Is it not better to do this than to lead the life of the city with you?” (Τί, ὦ κάκιστοι, θαυμάζετε; Ἢ οὐ κρεῖττον τοῦτο ποιεῖν ἢ μεθ’ ὑμῶν πολιτεύεσθαι;)

Diogenes Laertius, Book IX, trans. from the Greek by Jacques Brunschwig, in Vies et Doctrines des philosophes illustres (Lives and Doctrines of the Illustrious Philosophers), trans. under the direction of Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, Paris: Librairie générale française, coll. “La Pochothèque,” 1999.

This sage had need of no one, scorning even the society of scholars. For all that, he was not an insensible man; and when he grieved over the misfortunes that wove human existence, tears would rise to his eyes. “I have sought myself” (Ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν), he confesses, as though he alone truly fulfilled the Delphic precept “Know thyself.” Nietzsche would feel the sacred terror of this self-sufficiency: “one cannot divine,” the philosopher of the will to power would say, “what the feeling of solitude was that pervaded the Ephesian hermit of the temple of Artemis, unless one finds oneself petrified with dread upon the most desolate and wildest of mountains”².

The Vertigo of Universal Flux

While at the other extremity of the Greek world, the Eleatic school froze being in an icy immobility, Heraclitus conceived of unity as a river in perpetual motion, which remains the same although always different, the new waves ceaselessly driving the old ones before them³. Against the common illusion of permanence, nothing is stable: “Everything flows” (Πάντα ῥεῖ), “Everything is becoming” (Hegel), “All things […] totter ceaselessly […]. I do not paint being. I paint the passage” (Montaigne).

The flowing of all things has this consequence: everything converts into its opposite. If being exists only in change, it is inevitably a middle ground between two opposing terms; at every instant, one stands before that elusive boundary where two contrary qualities meet. A terrible law that applies to the human being himself, whose every age is the death of the one before:

“Has not the nursling vanished in the child, and the child in the boy, the youth in the adolescent, the adolescent in the young man, then […] the grown man in the old man […]? Perhaps […] nature silently teaches us not to dread the final death?”

Philo of Alexandria, De Iosepho, trans. from the Greek by Jean Laporte, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, coll. “Les Œuvres de Philon d’Alexandrie,” 1964.

The Aesthetics of the Cosmic Game

In search of a tragic affirmation of life, Nietzsche would make the hermit of Ephesus his closest ancestor. “The world, in its eternal need for truth, has […] eternally need of Heraclitus,” he would declare. And elsewhere:

“[…] the company of Heraclitus puts me more at ease and comforts me more than any other. The acquiescence in impermanence and annihilation; the ”yes“ spoken to contradiction and war; becoming, implying the refusal of the very notion of ”being“ — in this, I must recognize […] the thought nearest to my own that has ever been conceived.”

Nietzsche, Friedrich, L’Antéchrist (The Antichrist), followed by Ecce homo, trans. from the German by Jean-Claude Hémery, Paris: Gallimard, coll. “Folio,” 1974.

What the German philosopher would find there above all was the antidote to Schopenhauerian pessimism. Far from bending beneath the yoke of supposed faults, injustices, contradictions, sufferings, reality frees itself from all morality: it is “a child playing, pushing pieces on a board: the kingship of a child” (παῖς […] παίζων, πεσσεύων· παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη). If Heraclitus mingled with noisy children at play in the sanctuary of Artemis, it was because he was already meditating there on the “game of the great world-child,” that is to say, God. The will to power takes shape here in Nietzsche’s mind: an artist-force that builds and destroys, with the sublime innocence of a child placing a few pebbles here and there, or piling up heaps of sand only to topple them again, beyond good and evil. It is in the footsteps of the Obscure that Nietzsche “prepares to become the Antichrist, that is, he who rejects the moral significance of the world.”

19 min

Mappemonde mettant en évidence la Corée du Sud et la Corée du Nord.

The Manifold Voice of the People: The Song of the Faithful Chunhyang

Translated from French • English (anglais)

The title must be taken literally: The Song of Chunhyang (Chunhyangga)¹ is, first and foremost, a song. To grasp its essence, close your eyes and imagine a bare stage, occupied by a singer with a fan and a drummer. This duo alone suffices to embody pansori, that authentically Korean art form which Serge Kaganski situates “at the crossroads of theater, opera, performance, gospel, and the two-man-show.” The drum resounds and the raspy voice takes flight, punctuated by the fan that opens and snaps shut with a crisp click that sets the rhythm. Carried away, the audience responds in unison, like “a Baptist choir,” in an intense communion verging on trance.

Born thus upon the stage, this lyrical song became narrative and traveled, borne by oral tradition. Over the centuries, a myriad of anonymous authors enriched it, incorporating other tales of royal inspectors and forbidden loves. From this living matter eventually settled, layer upon layer, fixed texts, authoritative literary editions, the most famous of which are The Tale of Chunhyang (Chunhyangjeon)², or gyeongpan edition, and The Song of the Faithful Chunhyang (Yeolnyeo Chunhyang Sujeolga)³, or wanpan edition.

The Springtime Idyll

The plot tells of the love between Chunhyang (“Fragrant Spring”), daughter of a former courtesan, and Mong-ryong (“Dragon Dream”)⁴, son of a noble governor. In Namwon, in Jeolla Province, just as the flowers begin to bloom, the young scholar abandons his father’s library to stroll in the open air. There, he catches sight of Chunhyang swinging on a swing. This first encounter is painted with the delicacy of the finest prints:

“She grasped the rope with her delicate hands, stepped onto the board, and took flight. […] The leaves of the trees accompanied her back and forth. The red of her skirt made a joyful splash against the surrounding greenery. […] Seen from the front, she was the swallow diving to catch mid-flight a peach blossom petal drifting toward the ground. From behind, she seemed a multicolored butterfly flying off in search of its mate.”

Le Chant de la fidèle Chunhyang (The Song of the Faithful Chunhyang), trans. from Korean by Choi Mikyung and Jean-Noël Juttet, Cadeilhan: Zulma, 1999; repr. Paris; Veules-les-Roses: Zulma, “Z/a” series, 2025.

Love, sudden and immediate, drives the young nobleman to defy convention. He goes to her home by night. Once across the threshold of her chamber, this daughter of the people proves herself no less educated and refined than he: the eye wanders over poems in her hand hung above her writing table, over calligraphies, paintings. It is in this setting that the lovers exchange their vows, sealing a union they still keep secret, separated as they are by birth and fortune.

The Trial of Constancy

In the meantime, Mong-ryong’s father is recalled to Hanyang (Seoul); the young man must follow him to complete his studies and sit for the mandarin examinations. He leaves behind a devoted and faithful wife who, a new Penelope awaiting her Odysseus’s return, swears to honor a “vow a thousand times more precious than gold, a thousand times more beautiful than jade.”

The drama unfolds with the arrival of a successor to the governorship, Byun Hak-do, a lustful and brutal man. Having heard of Chunhyang’s beauty, he demands that she enter his service. The roll call of the kisaengs possesses a Rabelaisian earthiness, where evocative names parade by, such as Miss “Mysterious Mist,” “Apricot Blossom,” or “River Fairy.” Only Chunhyang is absent. Dragged before the tyrant, she dares to stand up to him, arguing that a virtuous woman cannot serve two husbands, even if she be of low extraction:

“Do virtue and fidelity have anything to do with social rank?”

Le Chant de la fidèle Chunhyang (The Song of the Faithful Chunhyang), trans. from Korean by Choi Mikyung and Jean-Noël Juttet, Cadeilhan: Zulma, 1999; repr. Paris; Veules-les-Roses: Zulma, “Z/a” series, 2025.

For this insolence, she suffers torture. Each lash of the whip that falls upon her becomes the occasion for a song of resistance, a painful litany in which she reaffirms her loyalty. “Even if I am killed ten thousand times,” she proclaims, “the love that dwells in my heart, the love that binds the six thousand joints of my body, that love will not change.”

I shall say nothing of the denouement, except that it is a happy one.

The Triumph of Hearts over the Rigors of Arbitrary Power

The Song of the Faithful Chunhyang embraces the entire social scale of the Ancien Régime, from the highest for Mong-ryong to the lowest for Chunhyang. Its success lies in the fact that “it dared to speak aloud of love in this land where young hearts suffocated under authority” and where marriage, a matter of reason, was handled coldly without their having any say. This intimate claim is coupled with a political denunciation of the abuses and corruption that prevailed among the rulers.

I confess that the narrative sometimes suffers from the various additions it has inspired; the Bulletin critique du livre en français (Critical Bulletin of French Books) notes “some inconsistencies, clumsy justifications, […] naivety and sentimentality.” Yet, like a seashell that captures the murmur of the ocean, it preserves, beneath all this, “a whisper and something like a vast, muffled hum: the great infinite and manifold voice” of the poets of the people singing all around⁵. Their vibrant souls, their good and pure feelings have carried this work through the centuries; they enliven it still today, during the great Namwon festival, where the finest myeongchang (master singers) compete. Lee Mee-Jeong reports that some of them practice with such ardor “in order to give their voice the perfection of expressiveness that they even spit blood.” Far from vain, their sacrifice is greeted by the audience, who rise to applaud, tears in their eyes. And “these tears of contemporary spectators are as moving as the tribulations and reunions of the fictional lovers.”

11 min

Mappemonde mettant en évidence le Canada et la France.

The Celestial Shipwreck: Émile Nelligan

Translated from French • English (anglais)

“Nelligan is legendary. The Québécois people are themselves, in a sense, a dream—imagined though real, uncertain yet persistent, and ultimately—who knows?—perhaps saved, perhaps lost. There is a communion between these two legends.”

Vadeboncoeur, Pierre. “Émile Nelligan (1879-1941), poète” (“Émile Nelligan (1879-1941), Poet”), in En quelques traits (In a Few Strokes), Montreal: Fides, 1978.

Need one be reminded that French-Canadian letters are scarcely two centuries old; that they have only just emerged from infancy? Still poor in literary glories, they possess one, however, that exemplifies their own youth. This glory is Émile Nelligan¹: an adolescent of seventeen, almost a child. But through a tragic reversal of the natural order, at this impulsive age which, according to Bossuet, “seems formed only for joy and pleasures” and which “spreads its sails in all directions toward hope,” Nelligan no longer hopes for anything; he is adrift:

“My soul is black: where do I dwell? Where do I go?
All of its hopes lie frozen through:
I am that new Norway of snow
From which the fair skies withdrew.”

Nelligan, Émile. Poésies complètes (Complete Poems), preface by Claude Beausoleil and Louis Dantin, Montreal: Typo, “Typo Poésie” collection, 1998.

And it is not only in these verses, under the blow of some passing disappointment, that he experiences this disenchantment. It is throughout his Poésies complètes (Complete Poems), noble reveries of a cursed angel, who remained a stranger to the compromises that life imposes.

The Cursed Angel

In a famous photograph, this slender schoolboy with a pale face and disheveled hair fascinates with his large, liquid, infinite eyes—eyes that changed, that understood, that dreamed. He went about with ink-stained fingers, his frock coat in disarray, and amid all this, a proud air. “He’s an odd fellow,” some said; “a bit of a poser,” others found. But his pride was only a facade, poorly concealing an exasperated sensibility, now overflowing with enthusiasm, now darkened by a fierce and threatening melancholy:

“This is the reign of bitter laughter and of rage,
To know oneself a poet scorned and set apart,
To know oneself possessed of an uncomprehended heart
Grasped only by the moon and storms upon night’s stage!”

Nelligan, Émile. Poésies complètes (Complete Poems), preface by Claude Beausoleil and Louis Dantin, Montreal: Typo, “Typo Poésie” collection, 1998.

The ambient incomprehension and the vigils spent scribbling feverish verses where “already, among dazzling strokes, madness showed its hideous claw”² eventually undermined his health before its time. He died twice: first, an intellectual death, or madness, at nineteen; then, a bodily death at fifty-seven.

Laughter and Sobs

There is no doubt that Nelligan suffered cruelly from this incomprehension. He who dreamed only of Paris claimed that his verses would one day fly there, only to return as a beautiful book. Such an ambition, youthful and vibrant, offered easy prey to malicious criticism. The most virulent attack came from Le Monde illustré, from the pen of some obscure journalist passing through Montreal, De Marchy or De Marchi, whose first name history has forgotten. With facile irony and petty narrow-mindedness, this censor mocked the adolescent’s originality, going so far as to suggest, in a tone of commiseration, that he write “a little thesis in simple prose” to prove his merit, adding perfidiously: “for we encourage young writers.”

Stung, Nelligan was not slow to respond at a memorable session of the École littéraire de Montréal on May 26, 1899. That evening, facing his detractors, those “men with morose brows / Who disdained [his] life and rejected [his] hand,” the young man rose. Mane flowing in the wind, his gaze aflame, he launched in one breath his stinging reply, “La romance du vin” (“The Romance of Wine”), which sent the room into delirium. It was at once his triumph and his farewell:

“The bells have sung; the fragrant evening sighs…
And while the wine in joyous torrents flows,
I am so gay, so gay, beneath the ringing skies,
Oh! so gay, that I fear I shall break into woes!”

Nelligan, Émile. Poésies complètes (Complete Poems), preface by Claude Beausoleil and Louis Dantin, Montreal: Typo, “Typo Poésie” collection, 1998.

“Le vaisseau d’or” (“The Ship of Gold”)

Product of an improbable alchemy, Nelligan shows himself close to Poe through the macabre, to Heredia through his chiseled verse, to Nerval through his dreamlike nostalgias, but also to Rodenbach through the mists and to Chopin through a music of the soul. He cultivates with pride “his neuroses,” confiding: “I shall die mad… like Baudelaire.” Under the assault of some obsessive dream, some dominating idea, he rushes toward the absolute with “all the effort, all the blood of the soul,” which leads Louis Dantin to say: “Admitting that the man and the work are but a sketch, one must affirm that it is the sketch of a genius.”

This sketch of genius possesses the frightening lucidities of “what the Ancients called in Latin ’vates,’ the diviner, the seer, the prophet, the poet inspired by the gods”³. Roger Fournier evokes the “terrible moment” when the artist sees his end before living it. This premonition is embodied in “Le vaisseau d’or” (“The Ship of Gold”), his most emblematic sonnet. Nelligan paints the splendor of a triumphant vessel, “carved from solid gold,” sailing on unknown seas. But this glorious tableau is there only to be destroyed. In a tragic fall, the ship strikes the reef and sinks, leaving only rich wreckage. The reader then understands, with dread, that it is the poet himself, prophesying his own shipwreck:

“What has become of my heart, a deserted ship?
Alas! it has sunk into the abyss of dream…”

Nelligan, Émile. Poésies complètes (Complete Poems), preface by Claude Beausoleil and Louis Dantin, Montreal: Typo, “Typo Poésie” collection, 1998.

10 min

Mappemonde mettant en évidence le Japon.

Essays in Idleness: A Philosophical Stroll with the Monk Kenkō

Translated from French • English (anglais)

A jewel of hermitage literature, Essays in Idleness (Tsurezure-gusa)¹ is a timeless invitation to seize the fleeting beauty of the world before “the dew on the plains of Adashi” dries and “the smoke of Mount Toribe” fades away (ch. VII)². The author, Urabe Kenkō or the monk Kenkō (1283–1350)³, was neither a fierce ascetic nor even a devout in the narrow sense of the term. An officer of the guard, charged with attending Emperor Go-Uda, he chose to take religious vows only upon the death of his patron, and did so in order to observe his contemporaries from a distance. In an era when the “ruffians of Kantō,” uncultured soldiers, afflicted the court with a “way of life far removed from all humanity, closer to that of beasts” (ch. LXXX), Kenkō knew how to preserve the essential: the ancient taste.

“Kenkō […] is a belated classicist. […] his essays resemble the polished conversation of a man of the world, and possess that air of simplicity and ease of expression which are in reality the mark of a consummate art.

One cannot, when beginning the study of ancient Japanese literature, make a better choice than Essays in Idleness.”

Aston, William George. Littérature japonaise (Japanese Literature), trans. from English by Henry Durand-Davray. Paris: A. Colin, “Histoires des littératures” series, 1902. (Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)).

Upon examining this work rich in confidences, one discerns in Kenkō two contrasting personalities: the aristocrat and the monk. He advocates, to be sure, Buddhist detachment, yet confesses that “a man who had no taste for amorous life” would resemble a “crystal cup lacking a bottom” (ch. III). He criticizes attachment to material goods, yet always feels “a quickening of the heart” (ch. VIII) when recalling the palace décors, the accessories of costumes, or the magnificence of ceremonies. He rails against vulgar drunkenness, yet admits that a glass of sake shared among “intimate friends around the fire” (ch. CLXXV), on a snowy night, is one of life’s charms. These two facets of his character combine to “form a type of old bachelor [truly] sympathetic, and who becomes even more so when one meditates at leisure upon the thoughts and counsels, of such intimate wisdom, that fill the greater part of his writing,” explains Michel Revon. I hold him to be the greatest moralist, the most harmonious and purest spirit of Japan.

The Essence of Zuihitsu: Following the Caprice of the Brush

“Zuihitsu, ”following the brush“ […]. The bonze Kenkō composed the most beautiful book of this genre. He is my master. I went to Kyoto to weep at the place where he had lived. A bonze led me there. […] ”The abbot Kenkō,“ he said to me […], ”it is [the flowers] that are there!“ The Japanese are like the seasons; everything returns […] with them. We are like history; everything dies with us.”

Quignard, Pascal. Petits Traités (Short Treatises). Paris: Maeght, 1990; repr. Paris: Gallimard, “Folio” series, 1997.

Essays in Idleness belongs to that most particular literary genre, the zuihitsu (“following the brush”)⁴, in which the Japanese also place Montaigne’s Essays. And this comparison between Kenkō and our French gentleman, however conventional, is no less apt. One finds in both that sure and delicate taste, that melancholy which is never despair, that wholly humanist enthusiasm not so much for Antiquity as for ancient virtue, and finally that will to paint oneself while painting others. No regular plan, no system to confine the mind; nothing but the caprice of the brush, from which emerges a “jumble of reflections, anecdotes, and maxims thrown pell-mell onto paper, over [several] years, around 1335,” a garden of impressions where wild grass grows alongside rare flowers. The famous incipit sets the tone for this intellectual stroll:

“At the mercy of my idle hours (Tsurezure naru mama ni), from morning to evening, before my writing desk, I note without precise design the trifles whose fleeting reflection passes through my mind. Strange digressions!”

Urabe, Kenkō. Les Heures oisives (Essays in Idleness) (Tsurezure-gusa), trans. from Japanese by Charles Grosbois and Tomiko Yoshida. Paris: Gallimard, “Connaissance de l’Orient. Série japonaise” series, 1987; partial repr. under the title Cahiers de l’ermitage (Notebooks from the Hermitage) (pref. Zéno Bianu), Paris: Gallimard, “Folio Sagesses” series, 2022.

The Poetics of the Unfinished

At the heart of Essays in Idleness beats the poignant sense of the ephemeral. For modern man, the flight of time is, most often, a source of anguish; for Kenkō, it is the very condition of beauty. “It is its impermanence that makes this world precious” (ch. VII), he writes. If our existence were to be eternal, the poetry of the world would vanish at once. From this philosophy of precariousness flows an entirely Japanese aesthetic, that of the unfinished, which prefers to the fullness of the moon the veiled brilliance of a waning star; and to the flower in full bloom the petals that the wind carries off in haste, despite ourselves:

“Whatever the object, its perfection is a defect. Leave things unfinished, as they are, without polishing: I shall find interest in them and feel at ease. I have been told: when one builds an imperial residence, it is customary to leave one spot unfinished.”

Urabe, Kenkō. Les Heures oisives (Essays in Idleness) (Tsurezure-gusa), trans. from Japanese by Charles Grosbois and Tomiko Yoshida. Paris: Gallimard, “Connaissance de l’Orient. Série japonaise” series, 1987; partial repr. under the title Cahiers de l’ermitage (Notebooks from the Hermitage) (pref. Zéno Bianu), Paris: Gallimard, “Folio Sagesses” series, 2022.

By teaching us that “the regret for the scattering of flowers and the waning of the moon” (ch. CXXXVII) is more touching than the praise of their full blossoming, Kenkō does not merely offer us a lesson in poetics; he offers us, better still, a consolation.

9 min

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 • English (anglais)

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)¹ in Tomis², a glacial town at the extreme edge of the empire, on the inhospitable shores of the Black Sea.³

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 Tristia⁴ and the Epistulae ex Ponto⁵.

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.”⁶

30 min

Saying the Unsayable: Hiroshima: Summer Flowers by Hara Tamiki

Translated from French • English (anglais)

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. A trilogy “of a world that never stops burning”², 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

For Gala Maria Follaco, Hara’s style is not that of controlled writing: it is “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 plunges the reader into unease and disorientation, has as its setting Hiroshima itself in tatters, “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 fragments of interrupted existences, sometimes shards of memory filling the voids of a torn reality.

This deconstruction reaches its paroxysm in the poetic insertions, where Hara resorts to 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”³. 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 forces⁴, 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

The Dawn of Medieval Japan in Its Epics

Translated from French • English (anglais)

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, 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)², The Tale of Heiji (Heiji monogatari)³, and the most illustrious of all, The Tale of the Heike (Heike monogatari)⁴. 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)⁵.”

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 • English (anglais)

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-Kiêu¹, 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)², 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”³. 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”.

In truth, this would be like reproaching La Fontaine for having imitated Aesop or Phaedrus; it would be to forget that, beyond the borrowings made from abroad, what asserts itself here is the sovereign incarnation of national genius: “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 poem⁴. Throughout the epic shines through this trembling, often heartrending sensitivity of a poet whose heart beats in unison with the sufferings that smoldered confusedly in the humble masses:

“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’⁵, 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

In the Margins of Dreams: The Ghosts of Ueda Akinari

Translated from French • English (anglais)

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)¹ 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 fingers² 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)³.

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”⁴ 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 Mishima Yukio, 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 • English (anglais)

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 filmmaker¹ 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 Hedayat². 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 • English (anglais)

The work of David Diop (1927-1960)¹, 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”², 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