um poema do Iosif Brodskii

A Halt in the Desert

So few Greeks live in Leningrad today
that we have razed a Greek church, to make space
for a new concert hall, built oin today's
grim and unhappy style. And yet a con-
cert hall with more than fifteen hundred seats
is not so grim a thing. And who's to blame
if virtuosity has more appeal
than the worn banners of an ancient faith?
Still, it is sad that from this distance now
we see, not the familiar onion domes,
but a grotesquely flattened silhouette.
Yet men are not so heavily in debt
to the grim ugliness of balanced forms
as to the balanced forms of ugliness.

I well remember how the church succumbed.
I was then making frequent springtime calls
at the home of a Tartar family
who lived nearby. From their front window one
could clearly see the outline of the church.
It started in the midst of Tartar talk,
but soon the racket forced its rumbling way
into our conversation, mingling with,
then drowning out, our steady human speech.
A huge power shovel clanked up to the church,
an iron ball dangling from its boom, and soon
the walls began to give way peaceably.
Not to give way would be ridiculous
for a mere wall in face of such a foe.
Moreover, the power shovel may have thought
the wall a dead and soulless thing and thus,
to a degree, like its own self. And in
the universe of dead and soulless things
resistance is regarded as bad form.
Next came the dump trucks, then the bulldozers . . .
So, in the end, I sat — late that same thing —
among the fresh ruins in church's apse.
Night yawned behind the altar's gaping holes.
And through those open altar wounds I watched
retreating streetcars as they slowly swam
past phalanxes of deathly pale streetlamaps.
I saw now through the prism of that church
a swarm of things that churches do not show.

Some day, when we who now live are no more,
or rather after we have been, there will
spring up in what was once our space
a thing of such a kind as will bring fear,
a panic fear, to those who knew us best.
But those who knew us will be very few.
The dogs, moved by old memory, still lift
their hindlegs at a once familiar spot.
The church's walls have long since been torn down,
but these dogs see the church walls in their dreams —
dog-dreams have cancelled out reality.
Perhaps the earth still holds that ancient smell:
asphalt can't cover up what a dog sniffs.
What can this building be to such as dogs!
For them the church still stands; they see it plain.
And what to people is a patent fact
leaves them entirely cold. This quality
is sometimes called 'a dog's fidelity'.
And, if I were to speak in earnest of
the 'relay face of human history',
I'd swear by nothing but this relay race—
this face of all the generations who
have sniffed, and who will sniff, the ancient smells.

So few Greeks live in Leningrad today,
outside of Greece, in general, so few—
too few to save the buildings of the faith.
And to have faith in buildings — none asks that.
It is one thing to bring a folk to Christ;
to bear His cross is something else again.
Their duty was a single thing and clear,
but they lacked strength to live that duty whole.
Their unploughed fields grew thick with vagrant weeds.
'Thou who doest sow, keep they sharp plough at hand
and we shall tell thee when they grain is ripe.'
They failed to keep their sharp ploughs close at hand.

Tonight I stare out through the black windows
and think about that point to which we've come,
and then I ask myself: from which are we
now more remote — the world of ancient Greece,
or Orthodoxy? Which is closer now?
What lies ahead? Does a new epoch wait
for us? And, if it does, what duty do we owe? —
What sacrifices must we make for it?


Joseph Brodsky. in Selected Poems. George L. Kline (trad). Harper & Row (1973)

Nous demanderons

Platoniciens nous saurons toute notre cité, kantiens nous saurons tout notre devoir. Platoniciens, ou héritiers des anciens platoniciens, nous saurons toute notre République et nous saurons toutes nos lois. Kantiens ou héritiers des —nouveaux— kantiens, nous saurons toutes nos obligations morales. Mais nous demanderons aux anciens que ces obligations morales demeurent belles, nous demanderons aux chrétiens que ces obligations morales demeurent saintes, demeurent charitables, aux messianiques nous demanderons qu'elles demeurent ardentes, aux cartésiens nous demanderons qu'elles demeurent distinctes et claires, aux bergsoniens nous demanderons qu'elles demeurent profoundes, intérieures et vivantes, mouvantes et réelles.

Charles Péguy. La Bonne Anée 

A distância infinita

La distance infinie des corps aux esprits figure la distance infiniment plus infinie des esprits à la charité, car elle est surnaturelle.

Charles Péguy. La Bonne Anée

// John Burside, Haar

(Nota: 'Haar' è scozzese per 'Hoar', quindi 'brina'.)

Haar
Matthew 19-22

This is as good as it gets:
this cold fog over the water, this pale
companion to the dreams I can't forget
and never quite recall.

Stale afternoon. My neighbour stands in her yard
and watches the sky:
her children are gone; her husband is lost at sea;
how she remembers them now is by looking out patterns

for Arran sweaters, mittens,
balaclavas. Her landlord, a lickspittle spiv
in a flat tweed cap,
sits in his house on Toll Road

counting his money.
He's not really sure what it's for,
and he's mostly past caring
— maybe he knew something once, and maybe he woke

in the small of the dark with a glimmer of scent on his hands
that he couldn't quite place.
Now he's alone with his ledger.
He won't have a cat.

All day, the harbour dwingles.
Nothing much happens; there's nothing to smell or touch,
the shore road is mostly gift shops and fish'n'chips,
a colourless tavern, the glister of handmade toffees.

There are day trips out to the island, to see the puffins;
fairground attractions; amusements; a tidy marina;
boys in their hot-cars, waiting for someone to see them;
fishermen; coaches; pleasure boats; tailored poodles.

It's warmer at night, when the lights go on in the pool hall,
the moon on the empty firth like the spirit of neon,
girls from the Glasgow Fair drifting down to The Ship
for vodka and cranberry, Budweiser, rum and black,

but days are best: these days of salt and fog,
mornings when last night's dreams fit snug in my head,
erotic and golden, the clue to a better life
than this fudged and elaborate pact with a stranger's daytime.

The old town is gone.
The high sails out on the water,
boatloads of herring
gutted and trimmed on the pier,

the marriage feasts of skate
— to bring forth children —
the dead in their box-beds,
whispering under the eaves.

Now, as the haar comes in,
I look for ghosts,
children with dip-nets,
women with salt in their faces,
men going out before dawn in the coats that will drown them,

but this is as good as it gets: this quiet fog,
the cool of it threading my eyes
with the promise of elsewhere,
its breath on my skin like the lover I meet in a dream.

My neighbour stands in her yard and stares at the sea;
her landlord drifts in a stupor of calculation;
the town hall opens for bingo; the harbour whitens;
foghorns call from the firth, like abandoned cattle;

and as I walk back from town with the milk and a paper,
the haar whites out the main streets, one by one:
James Street, John Street, Burnside, Tollbooth Wynd,
one step ahead all the time, as I make my way home,

tracing a path of erasure back to the house
where all I possess is laid up, like a storm:
my furniture, my books, my ornaments,
my lost love in the kitchen, brewing tea.

John Burnside

This is Aleppo

After a while I complied with my grandmother's request to switch on the radio, and searched round for a station. I found one as the clock turned seven.
'This is Aleppo.'
I drew a veil of silence over the voice.
'Let's hear the news,' protested my grandmother.
Flicking through the pages of the morning paper, I said:
'It's stale news.'
'New things may happen, my son,' exclaimed the old lady, suddenly conscious of her age.

Walid Ikhlassi. The Dead Afternoon in Modern Arabic Short Stories. Denys Johnson-Davies (trad). OUP (1967)

Ler Hegel

Portanto, esta categoria, ou seja, a simples unidade da autoconsciência e do ser, contém em si a diferença; isto porque a sua essência reside precisamente na alteridade ou diferença absoluta e imediata para consigo mesma. De forma que a diferença existe, mas de forma totalmente transparente, e como uma diferença que portanto não é diferença nenhuma.

Hegel. Fenomenologia do Espírito. §235. Tradução minha.

Diese Kategorie nun oder einfache Einheit des Selbstbewußtseins und des Seins hat aber an sich den Unterschied; denn ihr Wesen ist eben dieses, im Anderssein oder im absoluten Unterschiede unmittelbar sich selbst gleich zu sein. Der Unterschied ist daher; aber vollkommen durchsichtig, und als ein Unterschied, derzugleich keiner ist.

Às vezes pergunto-me porquê. 

Maravilhas de um persista amador

بهتر (behtar) == better
دختر (dokhtar) == daughter
برادر (brâdar) == brother
بد (bad) == bad

Depois de tantos anos a amaldiçoar o Indo-europeu, isto agora só pode ser νέμεσις.

Encomia Philologiæ

§1

As a humanist whose field is literature, I am old enough to have been trained forty years ago in the field of comparative literature, whose leading ideas go back to Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Before that I must mention the supremely creative contribution of Giambattista Vico, the Neopolitan philosopher and philologist whose ideas anticipate and later infiltrate the line of German thinkers am about to cite. They belong to the era of Herder and Wolf, later to be followed by Goethe, Humboldt, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Gadamer, and finally the great Twentieth Century Romance philologists Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer and Ernst Robert Curtius. To young people of the current generation the very idea of philology suggests something impossibly antiquarian and musty, but philology in fact is the most basic and creative of the interpretive arts. It is exemplified for me most admirably in Goethe's interest in Islam generally, and Hafiz in particular, a consuming passion which led to the compositio n of the West-Ostlicher Diwan, and it inflected Goethe's later ideas about Weltliteratur, the study of all the literatures of the world as a symphonic whole which could be apprehended theoretically as having preserved the individuality of each work without losing sight of the whole. 

There is a considerable irony to the realization, then, that, as today' s globalized world draws together in some of the lamentable ways I have been talking about here, we may be approaching the kind of standardization and homogeneity that Goethe' s ideas were specifically formulated to prevent. In an essay published in 1951 entitled "Philologie der Weltliteratur", Erich Auerbach made exactly that point at the outset of the postwar period, which was also the beginning of the Cold War. His great book Mimesis, published in Berne in 1946 but written while Auerbach was a wartime exile teaching Romance languages in Istanbul, was meant to be a testament to the diversity and concreteness of the reality represented in Western literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf; but reading the 1951 essay one senses that for Auerbach the great book he wrote was an elegy for a period when people could interpret texts philologically, concretely, sensitively and intuitively, using erudition and an excellent command of several languages to support the kind of understanding that Goethe advocated for his understanding of Islamic literature. 

Positive knowledge of languages and history was necessary, but it was never enough, any more than the mechanical gathering of facts would constitute an adequate method of grasping what an author like Dante, for example, was all about. The main requirement for the kind of philological understanding Auerbach and his predecessors were talking about and tried to practice was one that sympathetically and subjectively entered into the life of a written text as seen from the perspective of its time and its author (eingefühling). Rather than alienation and hostility to another time and different culture, philology as applied to Weltliteratur involved a profound humanistic spirit deployed with generosity and, if I may use the word, hospitality. Thus the interpreter's mind actively make s a place in it for a foreign Other. And this creative making of a place fo r works that are otherwise alien and distant is the most important facet of the interpreter's philological mission. 

All this was obviously undermined and destroyed in Germany by National Socialism. After the war, Auerbach notes mournfully, the standardization of ideas, and greater and greater specialization of knowledge, gradually narrowed the opportunities for the kind of investigative and everlastingly inquiring kind of philological work that he had represented, and, alas, it's an even more depressing fact that since Auerbach's death in 1957 both the idea and practice of humanistic research have shrunk in scope as well as in centrality. The book culture based on archival research as well as general principles of mind that once sustained humanism as a historical discipline have almost disappeared. Instead of reading in the real sense of the word, our students today are often distracted by the fragmented knowledge available on the internet and in the mass media.

Edward Said. in Orientalism (2003 Preface).

§2

Etwa füng Jahrhunderte ist es her, seit die europäischen Nationalliteraturen Vorrang vor dem Lateinischen und Selbstbewußtsein gewannen; kaum zwei, daß der geschichtlich-perspektivische Sinn erwachte, der es gestattete, einen Begriff wie den der Weltliterature zu bilden. Zur Bildung des historisch-perspektivischen Sinnes und zu der philologischen Forschungstätigkeit, die aus ihm entsprang, hat Goethe selbst, der vor 120 Jahren starb, durch Tätigkeit und Anregung entscheident beigetragen. Und schon sehen wir eine Welt entstehen, für die dieser Sinn nicht mehr viel praktische Bedeutung haben dürfte.

Erich Auerbach. Philologie der Weltliteratur. (1952)

§3

كُلُّ لِسَانٍ فِي آلْحَقِيقَةِ إِنْسَانٌ

Cada língua é um ser humano.

não digas nada, nos disse
o Persa em árabe incerto,
mantém-te na estrada
Amorosa onde igual
é a noite e o dia,
fiel e pagão,
e ond' das alturas, das
encruzilhadas, o Deus
se curva e te toca
na alma co queixo

Boopis Khristos

Entrada de Cristo em Jerusalém acompanhado por anjos. Egipto. (c.500 AD)

@ Berlim (?) Colecção desconhecida