larvatus prodeo
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Below are the 18 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Michael Zeleny" journal:
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02:22 pm
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the woman poet
Je me suis toujours plu à chercher dans la nature extérieure et visible des exemples et des métaphores qui me servissent à caractériser les jouissances et les impressions d’un ordre spirituel. Je rêve à ce que me faisait éprouver la poésie de Mme Valmore quand je la parcourus avec ces yeux de l’adolescence qui sont, chez les hommes nerveux, à la fois si ardents et si clairvoyants. Cette poésie m’apparaît comme un jardin ; mais ce n’est pas la solennité grandiose de Versailles ; ce n’est pas non plus le pittoresque vaste et théâtral de la savante Italie, qui connaît si bien l’art d’édifier des jardins (aedificat hortos) ; pas même, non, pas même la Vallée des Flûtes ou le Ténare de notre vieux Jean-Paul. C’est un simple jardin anglais, romantique et romanesque. Des massifs de fleurs y représentent les abondantes expressions du sentiment. Des étangs, limpides et immobiles, qui réfléchissent toutes choses s’appuyant à l’envers sur la voûte renversée des cieux, figurent la profonde résignation toute parsemée de souvenirs. Rien ne manque à ce charmant jardin d’un autre âge, ni quelques ruines gothiques se cachant dans un lieu agreste, ni le mausolée inconnu qui, au détour d’une allée, surprend notre âme et lui recommande de penser à l’éternité. Des allées sinueuses et ombragées aboutissent à des horizons subits. Ainsi la pensée du poète, après avoir suivi de capricieux méandres, débouche sur les vastes perspectives du passé ou de l’avenir ; mais ces ciels sont trop vastes pour être généralement purs, et la température du climat trop chaude pour n’y pas amasser des orages. Le promeneur, en contemplant ces étendues voilées de deuil, sent monter à ses yeux les pleurs de l’hystérie, hysterical tears. Les fleurs se penchent vaincues, et les oiseaux ne parlent qu’à voix basse. Après un éclair précurseur, un coup de tonnerre a retenti : c’est l’explosion lyrique ; enfin un déluge inévitable de larmes rend à toutes ces choses, prostrées, souffrantes et découragées, la fraîcheur et la solidité d’une nouvelle jeunesse !
― Charles Baudelaire, Sur mes contemporains : M. Desbordes-Valmore, OC II, pp. 148-149 |
I always took pleasure in seeking in external and visible nature, examples and metaphors that helped me to characterize the pleasures and the impressions of a spiritual order. I dream of that, which the poetry of Mme Valmore made me feel when I traversed it with these eyes of adolescence that are, in nervous men, at once so ardent and so clear-sighted. This poetry presents itself to me as a garden; but it is not the imposing solemnity of Versailles; neither is it the vast and theatrical picturesque of learned Italy, who knows so well the art of edifying gardens (aedificat hortos); not even, not, not even the Valley of the Flutes or Tænarum of good old Jean-Paul. It is a simple English garden, romantic and novelistic. Flowerbeds represent therein the abundant expressions of sentiment. Ponds, limpid and motionless, which reflect all things resting upon the overturned vault of the skies, represent deep resignation all strewn with memories. Nothing is lacking in this charming garden of a past age, neither some Gothic ruins hiding in a rural spot, nor the unknown mausoleum that, at the turning of a pathway, surprises your soul and instructs it to think of eternity. Sinuous and shaded pathways end in sudden horizons. Thus the poet’s thought, having followed capricious meanders, emerges into vast perspectives of the past or the future; but these skies are too vast to be completely unclouded, and the temperature of those climes too warm to forestall the buildup of storms. The stroller, in contemplating these expanses veiled in mourning, feels his eyes well up with the tears of hysteria, hysterical tears. The flowers lean over in defeat, and the birds speak only in low voice. After a precursory flash, a thunderclap resounded: it is the lyric explosion; at last an inevitable flood of tears returns to all these prostrate, suffering, and discouraged things, the freshness and the solidity of a new youth!
― translated by MZ |
Tags: baudelaire, french, poetry, translation
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09:24 am
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homage to a government
Homage to a Government
Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home
For lack of money, and it is all right.
Places they guarded, or kept orderly,
We want the money for ourselves at home
Instead of working. And this is all right.
It’s hard to say who wanted it to happen,
But now it’s been decided nobody minds.
The places are a long way off, not here,
Which is all right, and from what we hear
The soldiers there only made trouble happen.
Next year we shall be easier in our minds.
Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it’s a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.
— Philip Larkin Thus Charles Baudelaire paid his homage to the joy of martial obedience in Le peintre de la vie moderne: ( Read more... )
Tags: baudelaire, french, larkin, poetry, politics, translation
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04:08 pm
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concerning the lives of stéphane mallarmé on and off the isle of ptyx
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Il n’existe que trois êtres respectables :
Le prêtre, le guerrier, le poète. Savoir, tuer et créer.
Les autres hommes sont taillables et corvéables, faits pour l’écurie, c’est-à-dire pour exercer ce qu’on appelle des professions.
— Charles Baudelaire, Mon cœur mis à nu
There exist but three respectable beings:
The priest, the warrior, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
The rest of men belong to the fatigue party, made for the stables, in other words for the practice of that, which is called professions.
— Charles Baudelaire, My heart laid bare[0] |
Stéphane Mallarmé began his career in nearly devotional emulation of the ill-fated cultivator of les fleurs du mal. Notwithstanding the affinities of his ethos, his destiny was to differ in one significant regard. Or so he insisted in a letter to his friend Henri Cazalis, written in October of 1862:[1] ( Read more... )
Tags: baudelaire, french, huysmans, jarry, mallarmé, translation, valéry
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05:38 am
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12. role models
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ecce respondeo dicenti, ‘quid faciebat deus antequam faceret caelum et terram?’ respondeo non illud quod quidam respondisse perhibetur, ioculariter eludens quaestionis violentiam: ‘alta,’ inquit, ‘scrutantibus gehennas parabat.’ aliud est videre, aliud ridere: haec non respondeo.
— Aurelius Augustinus, Confessiones
See, I answer him that asketh, “What did God before He made heaven and earth?” I answer not as one is said to have done merrily (eluding the pressure of the question), “He was preparing hell (saith he) for pryers into mysteries.” It is one thing to answer enquiries, another to make sport of enquirers. So I answer not.
— Augustine of Hippo, Confessions |
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La Fontaine, entendant plaindre le sort des damnés au milieu du feu de l’Enfer, dit : « Je me flatte qu’ils s’y accoutument, et qu’à la fin, ils sont là comme le poisson dans l’eau. »
— Chamfort, Maximes et Pensées, Caractères et Anecdotes
La Fontaine, hearing complaints of the lot of the damned in the midst of hellfire, said: “I trust that they get accustomed to it, and that in the end, they rest there as fish in water.”
— Chamfort, Maxims and Thoughts, Characters and Anecdotes |
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FEU. Purifie tout. — Quand on entend crier « au feu », on doit commencer par perdre la tête.
— Gustave Flaubert, Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues
FIRE. Purifies everything. — Upon hearing the cry of “Fire!”, one must begin by losing his head.
— Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary of Received Ideas |
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Il y a du Dante, en effet, dans l’auteur des Fleurs du Mal, mais c’est du Dante d’une époque déchue, c’est du Dante athée et moderne, du Dante venu après Voltaire, dans un temps qui n’aura point de saint Thomas.
There is Dante, in effect, in the author of the Flowers of Evil, but it is a Dante of the fallen era, an atheistic and modern Dante, a Dante who comes after Voltaire, in a time that will have no saint Thomas.
— Jules Barbey D’Aurevilly, Les Poètes[0] |
1978 years ago, Jesus welcomed all men to partake of his company:[1]
| Δεῦτε πρός με πάντες οἱ κοπιῶντες καὶ πεφορτισμένοι, κἀγὼ ἀναπαύσω ὑμᾶς. |
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. |
His words are echoed and amplified through our God-fearing land. The authority of the Son of God is buttressed by the all too human urge to connect with a role model of one’s choosing. ( Read more... )
Crossposted to ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) larvatus, ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) about_poetry, philosophy, and real_philosophy.
Tags: aquinas, aristotle, baudelaire, dante, french, jesus, milton, plato, shakespeare, soteriology, spinoza
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02:15 pm
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the ethos of translation I
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Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door —
Only this, and nothing more.” |
Une fois, sur le minuit lugubre, pendant que je méditais, faible et fatigué, sur maint précieux et curieux volume d’une doctrine oubliée, pendant que je donnais de la tête, presque assoupi, soudain il se fit un tapotement, comme de quelqu’un frappant doucement, frappant à la porte de ma chambre. « C’est quelque visiteur, — murmurai-je, — qui frappe à la porte de ma chambre ; ce n’est que cela et rien de plus. » |
Une fois, par un minuit lugubre, tandis que je m’appesantissais, faible et fatigué, sur maint curieux et bizarre volume de savoir oublié, — tandis que je dodelinais la tête, somnolant presque, soudain se fit un heurt, comme de quelqu’un frappant doucement, frappant à la porte de ma chambre, — cela seul et rien de plus. |
( Read more... )
Tags: baudelaire, french, mallarmé, poe, translation
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01:44 pm
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les petits maîtres
― à Eric Gans
petit-maître
Vieilli, littéraire. Jeune élégant, jeune élégante aux allures et aux manières affectées et prétentieuses.
Pluriel : des petits-maîtres, des petites-maîtresses. ( Read more... )
Tags: baudelaire, french, language, mallarmé, sex, translation
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08:55 am
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say what?
― for David W. Affeld
“Art must be despised and considered to be completely worthless before anything can be derived from it again, or else it must be applied to everything. It is therefore ridiculous to try for any kind of personal success.”
« Quand j’aurai inspiré le dégoût et l’horreur universels, j’aurai conquis la solitude. »
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“Once I have inspired universal disgust and horror, I will have conquered solitude.”
― translated by MZ |
« Ma carrière n'avait pas été un échec, commercialement tout du moins : si l’on agresse le monde avec une violence suffisante, il finit par le cracher, son sale fric ; mais jamais, jamais il ne vous redonne la joie. »
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“My career had not been a failure, at least commercially: if you assail the world with sufficient violence, it ends up spewing its filthy lucre; but never, never does it give you back any joy.”
― translated by MZ |
( Read more... )
Tags: baudelaire, comedy, corbière, doggerel, french, houellebecq, poetry, traducement
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03:24 am
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des esseintes
| Afin de jouir d’une oeuvre qui joignît, suivant ses voeux, à un style incisif, une analyse pénétrante et féline, il lui fallait arriver au maître de l’Induction, à ce profond et étrange Edgar Poe, pour lequel, depuis le temps qu’il le relisait sa dilection n’avait pu déchoir. |
To enjoy a literary work that adjoined, according to his wishes, to an incisive style, a penetrating and feline analysis, he had to get to the master of Induction, that profound and strange Edgar Poe, for whom, since the moment when he started re-reading him, his devotion could not have declined. |
( Read more... )
Tags: baudelaire, french, huysmans, poe, translation
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05:42 am
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franco-american prophecy
| Le monde va finir. La seule raison pour laquelle il pourrait durer, c’est qu’il existe. Que cette raison est faible, comparée à toutes celles qui annoncent le contraire, particulièrement à celle-ci : qu’est-ce que le monde a désormais à faire sous le ciel ? — Car, en supposant qu’il continuât à exister matériellement, serait-ce une existence digne de ce nom et du dictionnaire historique ? Je ne dis pas que le monde se réduit aux expédients et au désordre bouffon des républiques du Sud-Amérique, que peut-être même nous retournerons à l’état sauvage et que nous irons, à travers les ruines herbues de notre civilisation, chercher notre pâture, un fusil à la main. Non ; — car ce sort et ces aventures supposeraient encore une certaine énergie vitale, écho des premiers âges. Nouvel exemple et nouvelles victimes des inexplorables lois morales, nous périrons par où nous avons cru vivre. La mécanique nous aura tellement américanisés, le progrès aura si bien atrophié en nous toute la partie spirituelle, que rien parmi les rêveries sanguinaires, sacrilèges, ou anti-naturelles des utopistes ne pourra être comparé à ses résultats positifs. Je demande à tout homme qui pense de me montrer ce qui subsiste de la vie. De la religion, je crois inutile d’en parler et d’en chercher les restes, puisque se donner encore la peine de nier Dieu est le seul scandale en pareilles matières. La propriété avait disparu virtuellement avec la suppression du droit d’aînesse ; mais le temps viendra où l’humanité, comme un ogre vengeur, arrachera leur dernier morceau à ceux qui croiront avoir hérité légitimement des révolutions. Encore, là ne serait pas le mal suprême. |
The world is going to end. The only reason for which it could last, is that it exists. This reason is feeble, compared to all those that announce the opposite, particularly to this one: what does the world have from now on to do under the sky? — Because, supposing that it should continue to exist materially, would that be an existence worthy of its name and a historical dictionary? I do not say that the world reduces itself to the expedients and the farcical disorder of the republics of South America, that perhaps we shall even revert to savagery and that we shall proceed, across the grassy ruins of our civilization, to seek our grazing ground, rifle in hand. No — because this fate and these adventures would still presuppose a certain vital energy, echo of the first ages. New example and new victims of the unexplorable moral laws, we shall perish by what we had believed to live. Mechanics will have Americanized us so much, progress will have so thoroughly atrophied in us all our spiritual faculties, that nothing among the sanguinary, sacrilegious, or anti-natural daydreams of the utopians could be compared with its positive results. I ask any thinking man to show me what remains of life. Concerning religion, I believe that it is useless to speak and to seek its remains, since to go to the trouble of once again denying God is the only scandal in such matters. Property had virtually disappeared with the suppression of the right of primogeniture; but the time will come when humanity, like a vengeful ogre, will extract its remainder from those who will believe themselves to have legitimately inherited from the revolutions. Still, that would not be the supreme evil. |
( Read more... )
Tags: baudelaire, french, politics, translation
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08:11 am
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9. the means of language
— for Eric Gans
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Quand il parlait, il ne levait jamais un bras ni un doigt : il avait tué la marionnette.
— Paul Valéry, Monsieur Teste |
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When he spoke, he never raised his arm, nor his finger; he had killed the puppet.
— Paul Valéry, Monsieur Teste[0] |
It is customary to introduce a French subject in the history of ideas (l’histoire des mentalités) with the simile coined by the great mediaevalist Marc Bloch:[1] « Le bon historien, lui, ressemble à l’ogre de la légende. Là où il flaire la chair humaine, il sait que là est son gibier. » The good historian, says Bloch, resembles the legendary ogre: wherever he smells human flesh, there he knows to seek his prey. But the postmodern ogre is a conflicted creature. Undermining the cause of his own carnivorous appetite, he holds that the singularity of definitively modern works consists precisely in their fundamental ambiguity. In so far as historical events are molded by human hands, this singularity must extend to all subjects of modern history.
Witness Ross Chambers epitomizing French literary modernism in the two key masterpieces of that movement, Charles Baudelaire’s verse collection Les fleurs du mal and Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary:[2]Their writing has an elusive quality that resists interpretative closure and makes it difficult, perhaps impossible, to locate a subject in which an “intended meaning” would have originated. As a result, reading modern works becomes a literally interminable procedure, and in both the text and its interpretation the insistence of unconscious forces ― that is, of desire ― becomes impossible to ignore. Physicists teach that perpetual motion is impossible. Economists agonize over the prospects of full employment. Little do they know that resistance to interpretative closure is all it takes to ensure that the tribe of literary critics becomes fully employed in the manufacture of perpetual motion compelled by the insistence of desire and predicated upon the impossibilities of ignoring.( Read more... )
Tags: baudelaire, descartes, larkin, meaning, oedipus, peirce, poetry, russell
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07:00 am
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11. endgame
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Le dernier acte est sanglant, quelque belle que soit la comédie en tout le reste : on jette enfin de la terre sur la tête, et en voilà pour jamais.
— Blaise Pascal, Pensées |
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The final act is bloody, howsoever fine all the rest of the play: in the end they throw some earth over our head, and thus therewith forever.
— Blaise Pascal, Pensées |
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Toute plaisanterie dans un homme mourant est hors de sa place ; si elle roule sur de certains chapitres, elle est funeste. C’est une extrême misère que de donner à ses dépens à ceux que l’on laisse le plaisir d’un bon mot.
— Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères |
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Any joke made by a dying man is out of place; if it turns on certain subjects, it is dreadful. It is a wretched thing, to give the pleasure of a witticism, at one’s own expense, to those one leaves behind.
— Jean de La Bruyère, The Characters |
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Le soleil ni la mort ne se peuvent regarder fixement.
— François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes |
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Neither the sun nor death can be looked upon steadily.
— François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims[0] |
In 1862, the year that followed the glory of the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal with the farce of his failed attempt to gain election to the French Academy, Baudelaire saw his friend and publisher Auguste Poulet-Malassis declared bankrupt. The poet was heavily invested in this failure. His finances collapsed. At that time, he began another journal, which he entitled Hygiène:[1]
| Plus on veut, mieux on veut. |
The more you will, the better you will. |
Plus on travaille, mieux on travaille et plus on veut travailler. Plus on produit, plus on devient fécond.
Après une débauche, on se sent toujours plus seul, plus abandonné. |
The more you work, the better you work and the more you want to work. The more you produce, the more fertile you become.
After debauchery, you always feel more alone, more abandoned. |
Au moral comme au physique, j’ai toujours eu la sensation du gouffre, non seulement du gouffre du sommeil, mais du gouffre de l’action, du rêve, du souvenir, du désir, du regret, du remords, du beau, du nombre, etc.
J’ai cultivé mon hystérie avec jouissance et terreur. Maintenant, j’ai toujours le vertige, et aujourd’hui, 23 janvier 1862, j’ai subi un singulier avertissement, j’ai senti passer sur moi le vent de l’aile de l’imbécillité.[2] |
Morally, as physically, I always had the feeling of the abyss, not only of the abyss of sleep, but of the abyss of action, of dream, of memory, of desire, of regret, of remorse, of beauty, of number, etc.
I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now, I always have vertigo, and today, January 23, 1862, I underwent a singular warning, I felt passing over me the wind of the wing of imbecillity. |
 The revulsion of flesh, the withdrawal from its touch, avowed by this man of the crowd, finds its complement in the transposition of a hoary sexual cliché into the realm of productive labor:It’s a commonplace observation but true just the same ― the more you fuck, the more you want to fuck, and the better you do fuck! When you overdo it your cock seems to get more flexible: it hangs limp, but on the alert, as it were. You only have to brush your hand over your fly and it responds. For days you can walk around with a rubber truncheon dangling between your legs. Women seem to sense it, too.
― Henry Miller, Sexus[3] But the discipline of creative work failed to accrue though fatigue party practice in the way of the young man’s well honed aptitude for debauchery. Baudelaire fantasized about fleeing to Honfleur, into his mother’s care, responsible for the production of his greatest poems five years earlier. He practiced the prescription of Pascal’s Wager, praying to the dead dearest to him. Prayer was unavailing. ( Read more... )
Tags: baudelaire, death, french, translation
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11:21 pm
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10. survivor of suicide
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Le suicide est le plus grand des crimes. Quel courage peut avoir celui qui tremble devant un revers de fortune ? Le véritable héroïsme consiste à être supérieur aux maux de la vie.
— Napoléon I, Maximes de guerre et pensées
Suicide is the greatest of crimes. What courage could possess he who trembles before a reversal of fortune? True heroism consists in being above the ills of life.
— Napoleon I, Maxims of War and Thoughts |
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L’orgueil est toujours plus près du suicide que du repentir.
— Antoine de Rivarol, Maximes, pensées et paradoxes
Pride is always closer to suicide than to repentance.
— Antoine de Rivarol, Maxims, thoughts, and Paradoxes |
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On a, relativement à la gravité du sujet, écrit très peu sur le suicide, on ne l’a pas observé. Peut-être cette maladie est-elle inobservable. Le suicide est l’effet d’un sentiment que nous nommerons, si vous voulez, l’estime de soi-même, pour ne pas le confondre avec le mot honneur. Le jour où l’homme se méprise, le jour où il se voit méprisé, le moment où la réalité de la vie est en désaccord avec ses espérances, il se tue et rend ainsi hommage à la société devant laquelle il ne veut pas rester déshabillé de ses vertus ou de sa splendeur. Quoi qu’on en dise, parmi les athées (il faut excepter le chrétien du suicide), les lâches seuls acceptent une vie déshonorée. Le suicide est de trois natures : il y a d’abord le suicide qui n’est que le dernier accès d’une longue maladie et qui certes appartient à la pathologie ; puis le suicide par désespoir, enfin le suicide par raisonnement. Lucien voulait se tuer par désespoir et par raisonnement, les deux suicides dont on peut revenir ; car il n’y a d’irrévocable que le suicide pathologique : mais souvent les trois causes se réunissent, comme chez Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
— Honoré de Balzac, Illusions perdues
Considering the gravity of the subject, very little has been written about suicide; it has not been studied. Perhaps this malady cannot be studied. Suicide results from a feeling that if you like we will call self-esteem, so as not to confuse it with the word “honor”. The day when a man despises himself, the day when he sees himself despised, the moment when the reality of life is at odds with his hopes, he kills himself and thus pays homage to society, before which he does not wish to stand stripped of his virtues or his splendor. Whatever one may say of it, among atheists (exception must be made for the Christian suicide) cowards alone accept a life dishonored. There are three kinds of suicide: firstly the kind that is but the final bout of a prolonged sickness, and which surely belongs to the domain of pathology; secondly the suicide arrived at through despair; thirdly the suicide arrived at through reasoning. Lucien wanted to kill himself through despair and through reasoning, the two kinds of suicide from which one may retreat; for the only irrevocable kind is the pathological suicide; but often the three causes come together, as in the case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
— Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions |
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SUICIDE. Preuve de lâcheté.
— Gustave Flaubert, Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues
SUICIDE. Proof of cowardice.
— Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary of Received Ideas[0] |
Born on 9 April 1821, Charles Baudelaire made several attempts on his life before realizing himself as a poet. At the age of 24, he sent his mistress Jeanne Duval with a letter to the court-appointed guardian of his paternal inheritance:[1]
Je me tue ― sans chagrin. ― Je n’éprouve aucune de ces perturbations que les hommes appellent chagrin. ― Mes dettes n’ont jamais été un chagrin. Rien n’est plus facile que de dominer ces choses-là. Je me tue parce que je ne puis plus vivre, que la fatigue de m’endormir et la fatigue de me réveiller me sont insupportables. Je me tue parce que je suis inutile aux autres ― et dangereux à moi-même. Je me tue, parce que je me crois immortel et que j’espère.
― Lettre à Narcisse Ancelle, Paris, le 30 juin 1845 |
I kill myself ― without sorrow. ― I feel none of those disturbances that men call sorrow. ― My debts never have been a sorrow. Nothing is easier than mastering these things. I kill myself because I could no longer live, because the weariness of falling asleep and the weariness of awakening are unbearable to me. I kill myself because I am useless to others ― and dangerous to myself. I kill myself, because I believe myself to be immortal and because I hope.
― Letter to Narcisse Ancelle, Paris, 30 June 1845 |
As with every other melodramatic gesture commemorated in the poet’s correspondence, the suicide attempt resonated with concern among his intimates, without realizing the threatened consequence in its author’s life. Its concerns recur, in the images of death and decay, self-loathing and self-immolation, which play a crucial part in his art.[2] ( Read more... )
Tags: baudelaire, french, poetry, suicide, translation
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06:30 pm
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3. principles and circumstances
The revolutionary fevers of 1848 redefined the identities of European powers for generations to come. Their germs came from France. The first banners of rebellion arose in the cause of universal suffrage. The end of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in 1814, with its tragic aftermath at Waterloo in 1815, ushered in the reactionary restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in the person of Louis XVIII. This new King of France was a brother of Louis XVI, guillotined during the revolution. The key to his fate was forged by Talleyrand. That shadowy architect of French polity, who in 1796 had consigned it to Napoléon’s Brumaire coup d’état, endured to rescue it in 1814 from humiliation by its victors at the Congress of Vienna.  ( Read more... )
Tags: anarchism, balzac, baudelaire, french, politics, talleyrand, translation, violence
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02:27 pm
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2. beaten into dignity
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PAUVRES. S’en occuper tient lieu de toutes les vertus.
RADICALISME. D’autant plus dangereux qu’il est latent.
RÉPUBLICAINS. Les républicains ne sont pas tous voleurs, mais les voleurs sont tous républicains.
— Gustave Flaubert, Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues
POOR. To concern oneself with them does the duty of all virtues.
RADICALISM. All the more dangerous when it is latent.
REPUBLICANS. Not all republicans are thieves, but all thieves are republicains.
— Gustave Flaubert, The Dictionary of Received Ideas[0] |
It is July of 1865. Charles Baudelaire is forty-four years old. He is a self-proclaimed pederast, cannibalistic patricide, police spy, and proofreader of pornography. He is a voluntary exile from his native France. He constantly denounces the character of his countrymen. He equally detests his philistine Belgian hosts. His hip and edgy public fails to take heed of his cautionary messages concerning the perils of intoxicants. The future beacons of symbolism, Mallarmé and Verlaine, already regard him as their literary master. During his brief passage through Paris, he deposes “an enormous bundle” of new manuscripts in the office of Gervais Charpentier, editor of the Revue nationale et étrangère. The texts have been long promised to the bookseller Julien Lemer. Charpentier has published several of their predecessors seven years earlier. He knows what to expect. Nevertheless, of the eleven eagerly anticipated prose poems contained therein, he chooses to publish but six. He rejects the rest as unsuitable for public consumption.[1] Among the texts so designated, a flagrant insult to the moral sensibilities of the progressive republicans and other moderate opponents and loyal supporters of the Saint-Simonian regime of the Second Empire, a jeering, brutal slogan: ( Read more... ) Here ends the second chapter of the second part of the book previously entitled Representation and Modernity, begun in 1986 and submitted by the author and accepted by Hilary Putnam and William Mills Todd III, in partial satisfaction of 1993 degree requirements at Harvard University. Some of the subsequent chapters have been posted elsewhere in this journal. Comments, questions, suggestions, and requests shall be gratefully considered and promptly answered.
Tags: anarchism, baudelaire, french, goethe, heraclitus, plato, politics, proudhon, socrates, translation
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06:05 pm
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5. beau geste
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RADICALISME. D’autant plus dangereux qu’il est latent.
RADICALISM. All the more dangerous when it is latent.
— Gustave Flaubert, Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues[0] |
Complementing his treatment of mimesis, Erich Auerbach’s 1944 essay “Figura” lays down a classic account of figurative meaning. According to Auerbach, “figura is something real and historical which announces something else which is also real and historical. The relation between the two events is revealed by an accord or similarity.” Thus figurae connect persons and events as symbolic links in a providentially understood historical sequence. Thus the world recounted in the Bible remains imperfectly revealed. Every pivotal historical moment therein is understandable as a figura perpetually pregnant with meaning, yet always resistant to maieutic, the Socratic midwifery that might deliver full figuration a later historical moment. Within such moments history itself, with all its concrete force, remains forever a figure, cloaked, forever inviting and forever requiring the final disclosure, the final demystification, yearned for by the author of the Book of Revelation. As such, figurae are identifiable only in retrospect, when a type, or promise adumbrated or constituted by an earlier event or person is fulfilled or realized by its anti-type, a later event or person. Accordingly, in order to approach an understanding of the figurative meaning of the bad glazier and his bohemian tormentor, we must achieve two tasks. The first is to provide a retrospective account for these characters as realizing a prior historical promise that inheres in the locus classicus. The second is to define their fulfillment by the ensuing turn of historical events that comprises their locus modernus.[1] ( Read more... )
Tags: anarchism, baudelaire, french, history, poe, poetry, politics, terrorism
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11:00 pm
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the beatings will continue until morale improves
Rachel calls again. She asks whether Michael ever loved her. If so, how can he treat her that way? Michael reminds her of her predecessor turning out the same question. From each according to her ability, to each according to her need. Rachel has had her chance. Michael gave her many opportunities to get things right. She chose to salt the ground and poison the well. She is feeling sorry now. She wants to know what would happen if she came back. Michael declines to predict. She wants Michael to know that she had her reasons for striking out at him. Michael declines to excuse. She wants to know what to do with her tender feelings. Michael suggests an appropriate receptacle. ( Read more... )
Tags: baudelaire, insanity, love, wacky punani
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09:50 am
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1. the bad glazier
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Il n’existe que trois êtres respectables :
Le prêtre, le guerrier, le poète. Savoir, tuer et créer.
Les autres hommes sont taillables et corvéables, faits pour l’écurie, c’est-à-dire pour exercer ce qu’on appelle des professions.
— Charles Baudelaire, Mon cœur mis à nu |
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There exist but three respectable beings:
The priest, the warrior, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
The rest of men belong to the fatigue party, made for the stables, in other words for the practice of that, which is called professions.
— Charles Baudelaire, My heart laid bare[0] |
It is the 26th of August, 1862. Charles-Pierre Baudelaire is forty-one years old. After losing his father thirty-five years earlier, the bereft son wasted no time in squandering most of his patrimony at the earliest opportunity. Yet to this day, he commemorates the late Joseph-François Baudelaire, philosopher and theologian educated at the University of Paris, a defrocked abbot and inflexible republican, in a reliquary transported through his frequently changes of Parisian domicile. The jealous stepson of the dashing general Aupick, Baudelaire takes solace in the former commander of the Ecole polytechnique and ambassador to Madrid and Constantinople having passed away five years earlier, bequeathing to the full-fledged orphan the undivided attention of the widowed Mme. Aupick. For the past two decades this grown-up has been subsisting in the state of legal minority, supervised by a conseil judiciaire administered by the notary Narcisse Ancelle. His livelihood depends on cadging handouts from his beloved mother to supplement the allowance from the remainder of his inheritance and the proceeds from his translations of Edgar Allan Poe and occasional journalism. For the past fifteen years he has cultivated notoriety as the poet of Les Fleurs du mal, with six of its blossoms judicially condemned and censored for obscenity. About twenty months earlier he has published its expanded and improved second edition, meant to support his fervid, failed candidacy for the Académie française. An erstwhile defender of the revolutionary barricades, he is now become an adept of pure art, a dedicated dandy, and an acute opium addict. His political fervor has transmuted into self-flagellation in the midst of a Jansenist crise de foi.[1] ( Read more... )
Crossposted to larvatus, _lutetia, about_poetry, againstnature, history, les_nerfs, old_french_lit, and philosophy.
Tags: baudelaire, french, poetry, rhetoric, translation, violence
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06:36 pm
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0. rien de louche
Il n’existe que trois êtres respectables :
Le prêtre, le guerrier, le poète. Savoir, tuer et créer.
Les autres hommes sont taillables et corvéables, faits pour l’écurie, c'est-à-dire pour exercer ce qu'on appelle des professions.
— Charles Baudelaire, Mon cœur mis à nu |
There exist but three respectable beings:
The priest, the warrior, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
The rest of men belong to the fatigue party, made for the stables, in other words for the practice of that, which is called professions.
— Charles Baudelaire, My heart laid bare, translated by MZ |
Charles Baudelaire in 1855, photograph taken by Nadar
Je suis fier d’une chose, et très fier. C’est que mes enfants, si Dieu m’en donne, n’auront pas du sang de marchand dans les veines. Leur grand-père n’aura pas mis le matin un pain à cacheter sous la balance pour qu’elle pèse un centigramme de plus et qu’elle livre un centigramme de mélasse de moins; lequel centigramme répété vingt fois dans la journée fait un cinquième de gramme, et au bout de cinq jours un gramme, de sorte qu’après avoir pendant un mois mérité six cents fois d’aller en prison, on gagne un sou — six grammes de mélasse valant un sou. Voilà le commerce.
Avant d’épouser une femme riche tout honnête homme doit dire : Cet argent a-t-il été gagné en faisant des livres, en enseignant, en travailllant avec une plume à la main ? Au grand soleil ? Point de pièces qui aient sonné dans un comptoir !
Sentir dans mes cheveux une main qui a roulé des cornets ! Boire l’infini dans un œil qui pendant dix ans ait épié l’instant où l’acheteur se retournait pour enlever une pincée de sucre an poudre ! Pouah !… Si ce n’est elle qui l’eût fait, c’eût été son père. Si ce n’est son père, son grand-père, si ce n’est son grand-père, son bisaïeul.
J’ai pour devise : Rien de louche — et tout commerce est louche. Je méprise autant la veuve Clicquot que la mère Grégoire. On vole en grand, voilà tout. Ils sont nécessaires ces gens-là? oui, comme les lacquais. Je donnerai mes bottes à mon lacquais, mas pas la main de ma fille.
— Stéphane Mallarmé à Henri Cazalis, octobre 1862 |
There is one thing I am proud of, and I am very proud of it. It’s that my children, if God gives me any, will not have the blood of merchants in their veins. Their grandfather will not have placed one morning a piece of sealing-wax under his scales, so that they weigh a hundredth of a gram more and deliver a hundredth of a gram of molasses less, which hundredth of a gram repeated twenty times a day makes a fifth of a gram, and after five days a whole gram, so that after having deserved imprisonment six hundred times in a month, you make one sou’s profit — six grams of molasses being worth one sou. That’s business for you.
Before getting married to a rich woman, every honest man should ask — was that money earned by producing books, by teaching people, by living by the pen? Out in the open air? No coins that have rang on the counters!
To feel running through my hair a hand that has rolled pastry! Drink the infinite in the eyes that for ten years watched for the moment when a customer’s back was turned to remove a pinch of powdered sugar! Phew! Even if she had not done it herself, her father would have. And if not her father, her grandfather; if not her grandfather, her great-grandfather.
I have for a motto: Nothing suspect, and all business is suspect. I despise the Veuve Clicquot as much as Mother Grégoire [a saloon-keeper in an operetta by Scribe and Boisseaux]. It’s stealing big, that’s all. Is this kind of people necessary? Yes, just like servants. I will hand over my boots to my servant, but not my daughter’s hand in marriage.
— Stéphane Mallarmé to Henri Cazalis, October 1862, translated by MZ |
Édouard Manet, Stéphane Mallarmé, 1876, oil on canvas 27x36cm, Musée d’Orsay
Tags: baudelaire, french, mallarmé, poetry, vanity, violence
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