O Erro de Sócrates

László Krasznahorkai. War and War. George Szirtes trad. (2016) Tuskar Rock Press

. . . this was the point, he said, especially in the way it came to him in all its banality, vulgarity, at a sickening ridiculous level, but this was the point, he said, the way that he, at the age of forty-four, had become aware of how utterly stupid he seemed to himself, how empty, how utterly blockheaded he had been in his understanding of the world these last forty-four years, for, as he realized by the river, he had not only misunderstood it, but had not understood anything about anything, the worst part being that for forty-four years he thought he had understood it, while in reality he had failed to do so, and this in fact was the thing of all that night of his birthday when he sat alone by the river, the worst because the fact that he now realized that he had not understood it did not mean that he did understand it now, because being aware of his lack of knowledge was not in itself some new form of knowledge for which an older one could be traded in, but one that presented itself as a terrifying puzzle the moment he thought about the world, as he most furiously did that evening, all but torturing himself in the effort to understand it and failing, because the puzzle seemed ever more complex and he had begun to feel that this world-puzzle that he was so desperate to understand, that he was torturing himself trying to understand was really the puzzle of himself and the world at once, that they were in effect one and the same thing, which was the conclusion he had so far reached, and he had not yet given up on it, when . . .

Rhyme or Reason

Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word "Stimmung". 1963. The John Hopkins Press

To the traditional interpretation of the new rhyme technique as due to the decay of ancient quantity and the rise of stress in the Romance languages, I should like to add a further explanations based on the different function of phonetic consonance in the ancient and modern languages respectively: The device of homoioteleuton was used in the ancient languages to express intellectual correspondences: nect- , flect- , plect- , or, especially, in the endings of the declension: omnia praeclara rara; abiit, fugit, evasit. A language which has established the principle of rhyme as a basis of grammatical accord can draw from it little poetic effect (in French the scant remainders of grammatical consonance -é, -er, -ais are never poetic). Rhyme as a poetic device has originated in our modern languages because it is no longer used for grammatical concordance: it serves to link words which precisely are not easily connected, and therein lies its charms. The Latin sequence quoted above appears in modern languages without grammatical rhyme (toutes les belles choses sont rares), and we may assume that the decay of the Latin nominal and verbal declension system must have contributed to the development of rhyme as a poetic device. While the inflectional system was still in full vigor, the poetic flavor of language could be enhanced only by quantitative prosody. That the disappearance of grammatical rhyme opened the way to poetic rhyme is also suggested by the fact that in late antiquity (and later, through the Middle Ages in the so-called Reimprosa) rhyme was used, in prose alone, as a device for underlining intellectual parallelism (cola). It was employed by Tertullian (according to Vossler) because it belonged to the “sophistical and rhetorical apparatus of Greco-Latin artistic prose” —and Christian propaganda should not show a style inferior to that of the heathen. It is well known that Augustine, although in his discussion of metrics (De musica) he fails to mention rhyme as a “musical phenomenon”, was the first to use the rhyme form in a poem; it is to be found in a psalm, reminiscent of later Romance tirades, contra Donatianum, which is somewhat in the middle between poetry and dogmatic propaganda. I would suggest that, in the rescue of rhyme from its prosaic commitments, nothing was more influential (in a Latin which had freed itself from the quantitative system and which —at least in the case of the spoken form, Vulgar Latin— was about to lose its declension system) that was the idea of (the musical) world harmony. With the Romans, the expression consonantia vocum (which, as we have already seen, was a by-product of their world harmony) was applied to grammatical accord, but now we find “consonance” used as the name for the rhyme ([con]sonans, acordans in the old Provençal Leys d’Amors, etc.), since this, likewise, is an echo of the world harmony (the German word for rhyme meant originally “order” and may render the idea of the numeri. Rhyme as a musical device is in line with Ambrose’s addition of oriental music to the text of his hymns in praise of world harmony —oriental music that would have sounded as barbarous to the nice ear of the Greeks as the rhyme. The tremendous development of music is not thinkable without the Christina idea of world harmony: as Ambrose says in his History of Music (quoted by Vossler), music was “freed from the shackles of metrics”: in the alleluias, or in the final lines of psalms, music went its own way, apart from the text. Now rhyme itself is perhaps of a parallel “barbaric,” oriental original (Lydian according to Vossler, but Syrian according to W. Meyer aus Speier); it is also a typically Christian device (“In the first six centuries there is hardly a single rhymed poem to be found in Latin that is not inspired by Christian sentiment” —Vossler). Is it, then, too bold to assume, along with the introduction of a music joined with words and expanding beyond the range of words the introduction also of a second music within the words themselves, i.e., rhyme, used as a devise in unison with the idea of world harmony and possessed of all the emotional, unintellectual impact of this idea? The Gesamtkunstwerk technique implies generally synesthetic devices: the “musicalization of poetry”  by the rhyme would be only another feature of the conception of art as musical art. The polyphony in which the manifoldness of the universe is brought to unity, is echoed within the poem by a device which holds together words that strive apart. Both polyphony and rhyme are Christina developments, patterned on world harmony; in the ambiguity of the word consonantia in the Middle Ages (“chord” or “rhyme”) we may grasp the fundamental kinship of the two meanings. Rhyme is now redeemed from intellectualism, it is an acoustic and emotional phenomenon responding to the harmony of the world.

Xadrez e Filosofia Política

Metamorphōseōn

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 199-202

He loked as layt so lyȝt,
So sayd al þat hym syȝe
Hit semed as no mon myȝt
Vnder his dyntteȝ dryȝe.

um poema mesopotâmico

inquieto e simultâneo
arqueou as asas e poisou, deus,
na muralha da cidade, nos tijolos açafrão.

ele que vira as profundezas,
chilreou e aninhou a cabeça
na curvatura do próprio pescoço.

e tu quando virás, estrela da Véspera?
e quando lustrará
seu canto o teu sono?

Enfin la beauté

𒅴𒂠

Gonzalo Rubio, Shulgi and the Death of Sumerian, in "Studies in Sumerian Literature" (2006) Brill

O Sacrifício de Isaac

Génesis 22:1-19. Tradução do Hebraico minha

para a Teresa, que pediu 

[22.1] E aconteceu depois destas coisas, e Elohim testou Abraão, e disse-lhe, Abraão, e disse, Aqui estou eu. [2] E disse, Vá, pega no teu filho, no único, aquele que amaste, em Isaac, e vai até à terra de Mória*1, e sobe-o até lá, para o imolares naquele dos montes que eu te direi. [3] E madrugou Abraão de manhã e pôs a sela no seu jumento e pegou em dois dos seus rapazes consigo e em Isaac seu filho, e cortou lenha da imolação, e levantou-se, e foi até ao lugar que lhe disse Elohim. [4] No terceiro dia Abraão ergueu os seus olhos e viu o lugar na distância. [5] E disse Abraão aos seus rapazes, Andem, fiquem aqui com o jumento, e eu e o rapaz vamos ali, e adoraremos, e regressaremos até vós. [6] E pegou Abraão na lenha da imolação e pô-la sobre Isaac seu filho e pegou com sua mão no fogo e na faca, e foram os dois juntos. [7] E disse Isaac a Abraão seu pai, e disse, Meu pai, e disse, Aqui estou eu, meu filho, e disse, Aqui está o fogo e a lenha, e onde está o cordeiro para a imolação? [8] E disse Abraão, Elohim verá do cordeiro para a imolação, meu filho, e foram os dois juntos. [9] E chegaram ao lugar que Elohim lhe tinha dito, e construiu lá Abraão o altar e dispôs a lenha e amarrou Isaac seu filho e pô-lo sobre o altar de sobre a lenha. [10] E estendeu Abraão a sua mão e pegou na faca para matar o seu filho. [11] E clamou-lhe um anjo de Yahweh dos céus e disse Abraão, Abraão, e disse, Aqui estou eu. [12] E disse, Não estendas a tua mão sobre o rapaz, e não lhe faças o que quer que seja, pois agora soube que tu tens medo de Elohim, e não poupaste o teu filho, o teu único, de mim. [13] E ergueu Abraão os seus olhos e viu que ali atrás estava um carneiro preso nos arbustos pelos chifres, e Abraão foi e pegou no carneiro e imolou-o numa imolação pelo seu filho. [14] E proclamou Abraão o nome do monte: Yahweh-Verá*2, tal como se diz hoje no monte, Yahweh verá. [15] E clamou um anjo de Yahweh a Abraão uma segunda vez dos céus. [16] E disse, Por mim jurei - palavra de Yahweh - pois vi que fizeste esta coisa e não poupaste o teu filho, o teu único. [17] Por isso abençoar-te-ei uma grande benção, multiplicarei multiplamente a tua semente como as estrelas do céu e como a areia na língua do mar, e possuirá a tua semente a porta dos seus inimigos. [18] E serão abençoadas na tua descendência todas as nações da terra, visto que ouviste a minha voz. [19] E voltou Abraão aos seus rapazes, e levantaram-se, e foram juntamente para Ber-Sheva, e morou Abraão em Ber-Sheva.

*1 מוריה/Moryáh :: Nome composto teofórico, "Visto/ordenado por Yahweh"
*2 Yahweh-yir'eh

Imagem: Sacrifício de Ishmael, Antologia Timurid, Shiraz, 1410-1411 @ Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa

A tradição islâmica, comemorada no Eid Al-Adha, afirma que fora Ishmael, o filho de Abraão com Hagar, e não Isaac, o filho de Abraão com Sarah, o alvo da ordem de Deus.