KOSMOCHLOR

Frédéric et les étoiles

2013-02-10T18:15:00.000+01:00

Big Militaire - from the website of Frédéric Mouly, Artiste

Cher Frédéric,

I haven’t seen you in a long time, and now you are gone. I’m sorry you thought you had to leave. They said it was some internal waterfall of blood, but you know how it goes.

Today, as soon as I received the email about you, gone, I googled you because I wanted to upload a few of your paintings, to pay my respects. (In English it’s almost the same as “to pay a visit,” only the currency is different). There was nothing at all on line. A secret artist, you were. Or a shy one. While I remember you as a painter, I discovered you were a photographer, too, but your website was down, or closed, or something. Nevertheless, I did find the ghost of your domain (forgive the pun.) And here it is, one of your photographs: “Le Big Militaire,” which I love.
. . .

For me you will always be twenty-one. Where were we? In Deauville, at Le Casino de Deauville. Your brother announced that he was going to win so much money he would buy "une rivière de diamants." We didn't win, but I was happy because I had never set foot in a game parlor. I must have told everyone about the family tale of my grandfather losing a streetful of buildings (or maybe it was just one big building full of paying tenants? My dad, le conteur, had that famous dramatic fiber...), so--I was saying--Granddad lost a fortune the night before he got married, and he had to work for the rest of his life. The incident, surely told and retold as a ward against the Devil of Poker, scared my father out of all kinds of card games. The scare was handed over to me, and I was never able to play cards, not even a slot machine in a bar. Imagine visiting a casino!

So you were twenty-one. And that night I slid my arm under yours. En tout bien tout honneur, and HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE, but you were an artist of the shy persuasion, and you untangled your arm from mine. There, embarrassing thirty-year-old person (me)!

I seldom saw you in the following years. My impression is that you disentangled your arm from many arms that would have liked to stay entangled with yours.

You had such freckled charm. I think you didn't know.

La vie dans les étoiles, Mouly 1987 (from my private collection)

I'm looking at La vie dans les étoiles (Life among the Stars), right now, and I would like to thank you for letting me have this painting, a long time ago. I can see you there among the twinklers, like the shy heart that you are. I didn't know you that much, but I will miss you.

See you around, Frédéric.

Georg Heym, The Poet Who Dreamed in Light Blue

2012-12-03T17:15:00.001+01:00

Juggler (The Surface and Beneath) by
Heather Wilcoxon, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art

In cities strange and yet weirdly familiar, women watched by monstrous demons give birth to headless infants, vast gods straddle apartment blocks and gaze balefully out on an urban hell, and the savage giant War dances wildly on the mountains while a mighty city sinks into an abyss. (in Georg Heym’s Poems, bilingual edition, translated from the German by Anthony Hasler, 2006, Northwestern University Press.)

First published in Weird Fiction Review May 9 2012

PART ONE – The Author

Georg Heym’s works are an enthralling mixture of classical German lyricism and arresting visions of urban dysplastic images à la Metropolis. The city of Berlin, under the domination of the City God (Der Gott der Stadt), is the theater of Gothic horrors — visions of war and death where the romantic macabre walks hand in hand with images taken from Greek myths. Heym is also known for the formal beauty of his sonnets, which place him amongst the greatest poets of the German tradition. Heym was saluted as the first expressionistic poet, a decade before Expressionism became the dominant artistic trend in post-WWI Germany.

I translated the short-short story “Die Dissektion” — in fact a poem of six hundred words packed with images so strong they hurt — for The Weird, (read it here : Weird Fiction Review) and I fell in love with the author.

Two (very different) innovative authors and their similar upbringing

I recently translated one of Gustave Flaubert’s juvenile short stories, “Quidquid volueris”[1]. As I was trying to establish the first publication date, I found an uncanny resemblance between Flaubert and Heym’s formative years. There is no similarity between the two authors’ works in terms of the aesthetic of their writing, but both Flaubert and Heym tackled themes ahead of their times.
Flaubert unleashed a storm of criticism after the publication of his scandalous (for the time) novel Madame Bovary. The public outrage dragged him to court, and the author was condemned for describing the antics of a young housewife in search of evasion. A long, suggestive scene was censored (a case of too much showing instead of telling). As for Heym, his works were less known outside the literary circles, but had the larger public read about his headless infants and monstrous demons, he would have surely been branded unhinged and dangerous.
Heym was born in 1887, a year before Flaubert died; nevertheless, his family context – upper middle class – resembles Flaubert’s, and both authors received a classical education (high school classical teaching remained consistently the same across Europe until the late twentieth century). I wondered whether these ingredients were needed to obtain an individual who would later bring new themes to literature, breaking with the past.

Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner

Recipe for a Modern Poet (or “Bake Your Own Georg Heym”)

Take a well-to-do but sine nobilitate family and mix with lackluster results in school. Add an authoritarian and irascible father and a loving, sentimental mother. Sprinkle with blank, monochord verses later labeled as “juvenilia.” Encourage the subject to marinate in passionless high-education studies, preferably Law.

Your Heym-dough will seek solace in epic deeds (drinking, dueling, whoring and getting kicked out of several schools), and he will chant the fearless protagonists of past revolutions, thus cutting his poetic teeth on grand plays imbued with classical German lyricism.
Despite the stiff theatrical production produced in this early period, it is crucial that you do not skip this step: later on your poet will have to express his internal turmoil in perfectly formed verses.
At some point, your poet-dough may be exposed to the influence of the Nietzsche yeast. He may write in his diary that he longs to realize the Übermensch ideal in his own person (1906). Do not panic and do not take the dough out of the oven; a story will spurt from this idea: “The Madman,” in which madness is depicted as a form of ultimate salvation. Because madmen are above ordinary laws, insanity entails the most perfect form of freedom, as illustrated by the final image: the madman soaring like a bird high above reality.

If the previous procedure is correctly applied, the blooming author, disappointed with his contemporaries, will join a club of think-alike youths (it will be Der Neue Club, The New Club, in Berlin, 1910). Inspiring meetings will simmer in a café that should preferably sport an ironic name (the Neopathetische Cabaret or Neo-Pathetic Music-Hall). If you keep the fire going, the group leader, Kurt Hiller, will salute your artist as an expressionistic poet, which will brand him a true precursor; Expressionism — a creative movement in pre-WWI Germany fostering the idea that art’s purpose is to express the subjective feelings of artists — will be at its zenith during the 20s.
The baking is going well. You should now be satisfied to see the subject’s first poems appear (the same year, 1910) in the radical magazine Der Demokrat, and the first collection, Der ewige Tag (The Eternal Day), will be published in 1911, to be favorably reviewed by the famous poet Ernst Stadler. Given the positive critiques, your lyrical dough will decide to abandon his career in Law.
Meanwhile, let a resonant, clichéd tragedy, Atalanta, find its way into print (1911) and do not despair but look at your creation through the oven glass: the dough is now golden.
Take your poet out of the oven, for he is baked.

Portrait of Georg Heym

And from now on things become very, very serious, albeit for a very short time.
The new poet displays both an exquisite sensibility and a tormented spirit. A few poems, like his tragedies, are inspired by the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath, but with more elegant results; others are haunted by classical myths and Gothic tropes; others still, from his later years, are widely considered some of the finest love poems ever written in the German language.
You have in fact created one of the most characteristic voices of German literature.

Too soon did he go

In contrast with his morbid visions, Georg Heym is known for his exuberant good health and stocky appearance. A friend says Georg makes him think of a butcher boy, and everyone thinks our romantic author a force of nature. But Heym dies young, at twenty-four years of age. In 1910, he had noted down a dream in which he advanced hesitantly across a kind of thin “stone slab,” which turned out to be a sheet of ice (Hasler, op. cit.). Uncannily, Heym drowns during a skating expedition on the ice of the Havel River, in 1912. At his funeral, friends dance around his casket, declaiming Hölderlin (a major German poet, 1770 – 1843).

I do not know which verses were chosen to bid the young poet adieu, but here is a poem Georg wrote in 1905, in memory of Hölderlin:

To Hölderlin

And you, too, you are dead, son of the springtime
You, whose life only resembled
blazes shining in the night’s basements
where men forever look for
conclusion and liberty.
You are dead. For they have foolishly reached
for your pure flame
to put it out. For these beasts have always
hated the sublime.
And, as the Moirai
plunged into infinite pain
your spirit which faintly trembled,
God wrapped into a cloth of darkness
his virtuous son’s tortured head.

One of Hölderin’s poems that influenced Heym:

From “In Lovely Blue” (In lieblicher Blaue)

Translated by by George Kalogeris

Like the stamen inside a flower
The steeple stands in lovely blue
And the day unfolds around its needle;

The flock of swallows that circles the steeple
Flies there each day through the same blue air
That carries their cries from me to you;

We know how high the sun is now
As long as the roof of the steeple glows,
The roof that’s covered with sheets of tin;

Up there in the wind, where the wind is not
Turning the vane of the weathercock,
The weathercock silently crows in the wind.

Hölderlin’s style is more descriptive, more classical, compared with Heym’s verses, but we can recognize the theme that will find an echo in Heym’s formal sonnet “Reverie in Light Blue,” which you will find below, with the original text and my translation.

A collection of poems, Umbra Vitae, is published posthumously (1912), followed by a collection of short stories, Der Dieb (The Thief, 1913, English translation by Susan Bennet: The Thief and Other Stories, 1994, Libris, first published April 1985), and a collection of sonnets, Marathon (1914).

In 1924, Kurt Wolff publishes the collection of poems compiled by Heym’s literary group Der Neue Club: Umbra Vitae, including forty-seven xylographs by Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner.

After the poet’s untimely death, enthusiastic readers will find echoes of cataclysmic prophecies in his work, as in “Mit weissem Haar in den verrufnen Orten” (With White Hair, on Barren Plains), which foreshadows 1917. The poem describes the suffering of the enslaved working class in the mines of cold Russia. When night comes, the slaves dream of a head perched on top of a pole, riding the agitated waters of a “rebellious sea,” and it is the Czar’s head…

The City’s God

Georg Heym expressed the despair and solitude of urban life.

Fascinated by death, he was obsessed with the modern phenomenon of the metropolis: in his view the triumph of technology was destined to explode and unravel into apocalyptic involution. Nothing will change the city’s fate. Living in the city is unnatural.

In “Der Gott der Stadt” (The God of the City), sprawling cities kneel to Baal, who straddles blocks of buildings, his belly glowing red in the setting sun, and millions cower in the streets, booming their music made of praises and terror, while factory fumes and grime of smokestacks rise in the air towards the giant’s feet. And the elements themselves, perverted by the god, stare at the crushed humanity, sending tempests and seas of fire cracking on the asphalt.

We can read here the influence of a Belgian poet, Emile Verhaeren (1855 – 1916), one of the founders of Symbolism. In “L’âme des Ville” (The City’s Soul, in Les villes tentaculaires, Tentacular Cities, 1895), Verhaeren writes:

Un air de soufre et de naphte s’ exhale,
un soleil trouble et monstrueux s’ étale;
l’ esprit soudainement s’ effare
vers l’ impossible et le bizarre;
crime ou vertu, voit-il encor
ce qui se meut en ces décors,
où, devant lui, sur les places, s’ élève
le dressement tout en brouillards
d’ un pilier d’ or ou d’ un fronton blafard
pour il ne sait quel géant rêve?

An air of sulfur and naphtha exhales,
a hazy and monstrous sun expands;
the mind suddenly staggers
towards the impossible and the weird;
crime or virtue, can one still glimpse
something that moves in this decor,
where, right ahead, in each plaza, soars
the blurred height
of a golden pillar or a bleary pediment
for who knows what gigantic dream.

Fritz Lang’s 1927 German expressionist film Metropolis

Verhaeren’s verses — rhymed in the original French — strike me as overwrought and melodramatic. Still, these images inflamed the imaginations and influenced many artists of the time.
In Heym’s poems, however (and it is the difference between mere imagination and genius), the chill, perfectly stylized form frames and contains the vivid images, distancing the reader. The distance and “monumentality”, in John Holfson’s words, quoted by Hasler (ib.) make, by contrast, the excesses of Heym’s apocalyptic visions even more horrific.

Heym was a unique figure in the pre-war poetic landscape. His aggressive images set him apart as more than a mere harbinger of Expressionism. Georg Heym was the first poet to use the stylistic epitomes that would later become the movement’s most characteristic tropes.

Blood Red and Powdery Blue

On one side, the bleeding images of apocalyptic cities, on the other, soft landscapes of waters blending with the sky. Nature, when left to her own devices, embroiders the world with harmony.

Träumerei in Hellblau (Reverie in Light Blue)

Alle Landschaften haben
Sich mit Blau gefüllt.
Alle Büsche und Bäume des Stromes,
Der weit in den Norden schwillt.

Blaue Länder der Wolken,
Weiße Segel dicht,
Die Gestade des Himmels in Fernen
Zergehen in Wind und Licht.

Wenn die Abende sinken
Und wir schlafen ein,
Gehen die Träume, die schönen,
Mit leichten Füßen herein.

Zymbeln lassen sie klingen
In den Händen licht.
Manche flüstern, und halten
Kerzen vor ihr Gesicht.

Here is my take (as usual, not so literal):

All the expanses of land
Are filled with blue as are
All the bushes and trees of the river
That swells in the north afar.

Blue countries of clouds,
Sails scattered white,
The shore of the sky in the distance
Sprinkled in wind and light.

When the evening falls
And we close our eyes,
Lovely dreams tiptoe
With winged feet inside.

The cymbals they let clink
In their hands that glimmer.
Many whispers, and then shadows
Before your face they flicker.

PART II: Translating the Untranslatable

The hardest part of doing this translation

German is such a romantic language. Reading German authors like Heym or Rainer Maria Rilke (although the latter was Bohemian-Austrian), I often wonder if Romanticism, and particularly expressionism as a literary style, could only be invented by author who wrote in that particular language of Gothic ascent. In English, at least contemporary English, an ornate style can easily teeter on the banks of the purple sea, but the best romantic style flows so beautifully in German. As I translated “The Dissection,” I faced the difficulty of dealing with a prose that was so formally perfect in the original that the mere idea of “transporting” it into another system of references seemed iconoclastic to me.

Translating is making decisions, and sometimes the text lures the translator into the easy path, which is the most obvious translation of a word with multiple meanings. It is particularly difficult with German, which is a highly polysemous language. Still, the translator should resist the sirens of “first-level” or “most-common” meaning.

The strongest example of the above, and the most difficult translation decision in this text was the passage:

Die Ärzte traten ein. Ein paar freundliche Männer in weißen Kitteln mit Schmissen und goldenen Zwickern.

The most obvious translation is:

The doctors entered. Several amicable men in white gowns with duelling-scars and gold-rimmed pince-nez.[2]

But I wondered, why the duelling-scars ?

The translator explains in the footnote #5: ‘”Schmiss”: “duelling-scar”. Traditionally, many male university students belonged to fraternities known as “Studentenverbin– dungen”. The members of a fraternity usually drink together and engage in duelling. The scars resulting from the wounds received were considered a sign of bravery and boldness.’

This translation is plausible, given that Heym himself engaged in duels during his university years. Moreover, in one of his diary entries, he used “Schmissen” in a figurative way, referring to his heart with dueling scars.

On the other hand, the structure of the phrase in weißen Kitteln mit Schmissen indicates that “Schmissen” may refer back to “Kitteln” (gown, which I rendered with the more modern “coat”). How did the doctors’ white coats sport dueling scars? Did the frat boys carry out their dueling deeds in their surgeons’ gowns? It seemed more logical, and simpler, to me, to use the other meaning of “Schmiss”: rent, a hole in fabric.

I translated the sentence:

The doctors entered. A few friendly men in white coats with rents and gold-rimmed pince-nez.

Suddenly, the passage made more sense, even though the explanation based on duels was more romantic.

And the final version became:

The doctors entered. A few friendly men in frayed white coats and gold-rimmed pince-nez.

Those who have haunted hospitals wearing white, like I have, will recognize the much-washed coats that fray at the cuffs and hems…

But then again, the author may have wanted to imply both meanings: the down-to-earth frayed coats, and the remainders of ancient duels on the faces of the doctors, now older and wiser (because they wear glasses for near vision).

A short-short, a poem in prose

Translating a very short story is more difficult, given the relative weight of the words. Georg Heym was a poet above everything else, and the first expressionistic poet, at that: the use of images, and particularly colors, as vehicles of emotions is the foundation of the story itself. Colors serve to create similitudes and transitions from the gritty reality of the dissection table to the dream that forms in the dead man’s head, as a resonance of the doctors’ hammering on his skull.

“Splendid reds and blues” sprout on the dead man’s body. Why “splendid”? The colors of decomposing flesh announce new life more than decay, and the wonderful colors foreshadow the explosion of reds in the second part of the story, the memory of a past love in summer: poppy fields; the man’s lover “a flower of flames;” and a billowing dress as a “wave of fire in the setting sun.”
The contrast between the doctors, who were “friendly” a minute before, but now resemble “hideous torturers, blood flowing on their hands as they” dig “ever more deeply into the frigid corpse and” pull “out its innards, like white cooks gutting a goose.”

It is a poem, and every word carries a strong meaning.

Repetition as a style

To get across the author’s intent, I had to keep certain repetitions: in a six-hundred-fifty-seven-word story (a little more than two standard-manuscript pages), there are ten occurrences of the word “white.” It is typical of Heym’s style, as you can see in the poem “Reverie in Pale Blue.” In my translation of the poem I did not keep the repeated words as they did not have the same effect in English, the words being in too close proximity. In “The Dissection,” though, repetition could and was used to render as much as possible of the original style.

In Heym’s work, repetition serves two purposes: first, it creates a contrast, as the same word is used in a gruesome and then a lyrical context; second, repeating a word accentuates the rhythm of a sentence with an obsessive insistence.

In other places, in a variation around the sentence structure, the same word is found in a different position. A paragraph begins with Die Ärzte traten ein. And, in the next paragraph, the beginning is Sie traten an den Toten.

The word “traten” is a counter-example, as I made the decision of using two different translations because the repetition added little in English:

Die Ärzte traten ein. (“Traten” means, generically, “to join,” but the meaning changes in different contexts. The most logical translation was “The doctors entered.”)
Sie traten an den Toten (They stepped up to the dead man.)

How this story influenced me personally
“The Dissection” influenced my writing directly. It was one of those famous multiple repetitions that inspired me:

In front of the large window, opened a wide sky filled with small white clouds that swam in the light, in the silent afternoon, like small white gods.

I liked the sound of this sentence so much I used a similar repetition as I was largely rewriting a story that was published in the magazine of my high school when I was fourteen (my first published story ever). And the restyled story, “The Hand,” appeared in the #358 issue of Weird Tales (August 2011), edited by Ann VanderMeer.

[1] For the anthology edited by Rick Claw, The Apes of Wrath, forthcoming in March 2013 from Tachyon Publications.

[2] Arlene Elizabeth Sture, Georg Heym’s Der Dieh: Ein Novellenbuch. Five Short Stories in English Translation with an Introduction and Commentary, 1-1-1979, McMasters University.

Dino Buzzati - The Colomber and Other Stories

2012-05-07T10:37:00.000+02:00

The Colomber, I miracoli di Val Morel (The Miracles of Val Morel, 1971)

Article first published in Weird Fiction Review on Feb. 12, 2012

When I die, I want to remember that I used to be Dino Buzzati. Becoming a carefree, happy soul, unaware of my previous life, would be a total swindle. (quoted by Domenico Porzio, I Primi Piani, 1973)
Every real pain is written on slabs of a mysterious substance, compared to which granite is butter. And eternity cannot erase it. Dino Buzzati, “I due autisti” (The Two Drivers, in Il colombre e altri racconti, 1966)

Mental Ants
I discovered Buzzati’s art when I was eighteen years old. On my birthday, a friend gifted me with a strange book comprised mainly of drawings. It was not exactly one of those illustrated volumes with speech bubbles which the critics have baptised graphic novels (because comic books have little artistic pretension in their eyes). I would have called it a picture book for grownups. The cover displayed a gigantic grey werecat poised to devour a woman dressed in harem-fashion flowing attire. The title read I miracoli di Val Morel (The Miracles of Val Morel, 1971), and it was Buzzati’s last, iconic work, published a year before his death.

Unlike most of my books, which lurk, still unpacked, in my basement (my apartment cannot host them all), this book is on a shelf, beside other works penned by Buzzati. Each drawing displays the acronym “PGR” (Per Grazia Ricevuta: For a Received Grace). The Miracles of Val Morel illustrates the victories of a nun with a halo, Saint Rita da Cascia, who deflects dangers ranging from “foul deeds,” stacked in the overflowing drawer chests of a girls’ boarding school, to “volcanic cats” threatening a village, not to forget “mental ants.” I will get to these curious insects soon.

Back then, on my eighteenth birthday, I clutched the little book, thinking that it was a weird gift indeed. I studied those surreal drawings for hours. I found the naïve style surprising, and the theme unexpected. Why had Buzzati — who was an agnostic — drawn images in the Catholic tradition of the ex voto? But here they were, thirty-nine thanksgiving plaques donated to a church by the imaginary recipients of ad hoc miracles, votive offerings to the regiments of Heaven for personalized services. Because, you see, saints are not supposed to act like demigods. Forgetting that the people of the shining haloes can only intercede with the superior powers on behalf of the faithful, and working miracles is not part of their job description, the popular religion has inspired formulae like “Santa Rita (Sant’Antonio, San Nicolo’…) fammi la grazia” (do me a favor).
Back to the mental ants.

Le formiche mentali (The Mental Ants), I Miracoli di Val Morel (The Miracles of Val Morel, 1971)

It would seem that actually in Longarone and in the Zoldo Valley, in the year 1871, there was a brief invasion of mental ants, apparently from the Balkan region. Tiny, almost imperceptible in their normal state, they grew dramatically once installed within the cerebral convolutions, which the insects reached through the ears. The victims, however, were very few. The infected were gradually transferred to the province’s asylum, and all traces of the patients vanished.
Mental ants, with their mere presence, loosen the ontological solidity of the everyday world, insinuating the doubt about the very existence of the infected person. Dino Buzzati, I Miracoli di Val Morel (The Miracles of Val Morel, 1971)

In the book, Buzzati recounts how he found a chapel in Val Morel during an excursion in the mountains of Belluno, a town located fifty miles to the north of Venice. Several reference articles, both online and in print, cite Val Morel as a real place, but it is not. Not in the Dolomites, at any rate. A “Valmorel” does exist: it is a renowned ski resort on the other end of the Alpine arc, in the French region of Savoy. In reality, Buzzati took inspiration from the Sanctuary of Madonna di Parè in Limana, Belluno province.

The creation of an imaginary place is important, as it characterizes the story itself as “out of this world” and in this case adds to the ironical, iconoclastic angle. The irony, by the way, eluded young anticlerical-me as I leafed through the pages that very first time. I found the whole endeavor, with a saint super-nun dispensing graces, utterly disturbing — well, although today I love this booklet with no reservations, I still find it disturbing even now.

Once the first shock was overcome, I saw the irony on each page. But then again, why such insistence on temptation and redemption in the mind and heart of an artist who had no religious faith?
I wondered if a man of his time could forget about his Catholic upbringing entirely. The idea of sin is particularly present in Buzzati’s artistic production as a painter, in the form of a tormented dramatization of carnality, the mise en scène of its irresistible attraction, and the subsequent punishment, however ironic. Buzzati believed the only way to overcome one’s inner demons was to rise above one’s instincts. The Miracles of Val Morel (1971) illustrates the monsters’ constant attacks, and a rescue by the better part of the tempted person in the nick of time.

After all, the cathedral builders raised stone spires to escape the netherworld demons’ bites, although the demons reappeared in the gutters, which became gargoyles. The elongated body of the gutters/gargoyles had a purpose: to throw the water as far as possible from the wall. Still, the builders could have made the gutters in the shape of angels, but no. Everything that altered the purity of the elevation had to be monstrous. For what are all these grotesques if not the externalisation of the inner demons? Half expelled, the dark impulsions are now under control and ready to battle the evil spirits that come from the external, secular world (the “century,” in the Church’s language).

Buzzati was not a religious man, and even on his deathbed he saw no priest (a bishop hovered about, but Buzzati never invited him in). There was a nurse, a discreet nun who, twenty-five years later remembered the writer as a quiet, undemanding patient “who never ringed the bell” to call her.

Maybe the earth is tired, too, and is drooping in God’s lap – Dino Buzzati, Poema a fumetti, (Poem Strip, 1969)

Towards the end, Buzzati told the nun “You’re lucky, because you have your faith,” to which she replied, “You have your quest, and it is a beginning of faith.” The exchange ended there.
The quest haunted his writing. In a short story published when he was a war correspondent for the Corriere della Sera (one of the foremost Italian newspapers), Buzzati wrote about a prince who leaves his palace and his old life to devote himself to seeking the boundary of his father’s kingdom, a boundary he may never find. On his quest, he is accompanied by seven men whose task it is to go back home, one at a time, to gather news and deliver the information back to him, wherever he is.
The protagonist of the story symbolizes a man who severs all ties with his origins, to do some soul-searching, and becomes separated from what he believed to be his identity. The seven messengers, who in turn face an increasingly long journey to reach the hometown and then to go back to the prince, symbolize the fading memories of a world that used to be the only accepted reality.
After much wandering, it appears that

There is no frontier, I suspect, at least not in the sense we are accustomed to. There are neither valleys nor mountains closing the way. Probably I will cross the threshold unawares, and I will continue to go on, oblivious. “I sette messaggeri” (The Seven Messengers, Mondadori, 1942).

The prince realizes that he will never give up his quest until his dying day. The initial fear of the unknown is transformed into the restless desire to find out what lies ahead, farther and farther away.
Here is a passage from a literary article (an “elzeviro[i]” in the Italian press jargon) written more than twenty years after “The Seven Messengers”:

There is a world, still unexplored, where energy flows, a world of correspondences that escapes our control. One could say that a visible barrier surrounds it, separating it from us. Through this hermetic border echoes and messages reach us nevertheless, with such evidence, even physical, that doubt is no longer possible. There lie secrets that will surely be decrypted in the future, facts of such magnitude to outshine all the great discoveries of this century. ” Ma la scienza dice di no” (But Science Says No, Corriere della Sera, 9/11/1966).

To live is to wait for something that never comes
Fifteen years after Buzzati’s first novel was published, in 1933, recognition came with a new edition of the widely acclaimed Il deserto dei tartari, (The Tartar Steppe, Milan, 1940), the metaphor of a life spent on the brink of salvation or damnation, courage and cowardice, and, above everything else, a life spent waiting. In an interview for the new edition, which marked the definitive consecration of the book as a best seller, Buzzati told a fellow journalist, Alberico Sala, how he felt when he was writing the novel, every single night after work, for years:

… months passed, years passed, and I wondered if it would always continue this way, if the wishes, the dreams of my youth would atrophy little by little, and fade, if the big opportunity would come or not, and around me I was seeing other men, some of my age, others much older, who let themselves be carried away by the same slow river. (Interview by fellow journalist Alberico Sala, Introduction to the 1966 Oscar Mondadori edition.

This passage epitomizes the fundamental theme in Buzzati’s literary works: life is a series of unmatched expectations, and as you live, you can only wait and then renounce your expectations. And human beings, despite their common lot, face their fate alone, in eternal solitude.

The man

Dino Buzzati Traverso (1906 – 1972) was born in San Pellegrino, Belluno (Veneto region), in his family’s ancestral villa at the foot of the Dolomite Mountains. His mother, with whom he lived until she died in 1961, descended from a patrician family that had given seven doxi (supreme magistrates) to the Serenissime Republic of Venice; his father, who belonged to an ancient Bellunese family, was a professor of international law at the prestigious University of Pavia and the recently born Bocconi University of Milan.

The Buzzatis lived in Milan and spent their holidays in their villa near Belluno. All his life, Dino Buzzati loved the Alps, which inspired both his first novel and his very last work. His father died of pancreas cancer when Buzzati was fourteen. Dino was convinced that he would die from the same cause. And he did.

The third of four children, in 1924 he enrolled in the law school of Milan, not for inclination but because his other brothers had chosen different paths, and Dino was expected to take up the paternal torch. Even before graduation (he wrote a thesis on the legal aspects of the Concordat between the Catholic Church and the Italian state), he was hired at the age of twenty-two by the Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera, where he would remain until his death. He began at the copy-editing department, was promoted to the important job of “titolista,” the person who writes the titles of all the articles, and then became a reporter, a war correspondent, a critic and an essayist.

During World War II, Buzzati served in Africa as a journalist attached to the Regia Marina. After the end of the war, Il deserto dei Tartari (The Tartar Steppe) brought critical acclaim and fame to the author. He was fifty-four when he married young Almerina Antoniazzi in 1966, three years after the release of his partially autobiographical last novel, Un amore (A Love Affair), which is thought to have been inspired by his relationship with Almerina.

In 1950, following the death of his dog Diabolik, named after a popular comic book hero, he published “In quel preciso momento” (In That Precise Moment), a diary and collection of notes on the apprehension of passing and the mysterious void on the other side.

On December 8, 1971, Buzzati left his home for the hospital, knowing he would not come back. He made the tour of the rooms, and in his study he took a sheet of paper and made a pencil sketch of his armchair. Empty.

Surely we will live for a long time. But what about fifty years, let’s say, a hundred years from now? What will become of us? Who will remember us? In one hundred and fifty years his sublime verses will live on, the words will fall in place, their truly exact place, like crystal blocks, and concentric waves will still expand across the world to crash against the cliffs of darkness. In quel preciso momento (In That Precise Moment, a collection of notes, 1950).

Works Summary

A journalist, writer, poet, playwright, librettist, stage costume designer, painter, and graphic artist, Dino Buzzati wrote five novels, nine collections of short stories and poetry, and many theatre and radio plays. He wrote four librettos for operas composed by Luciano Chailly and a libretto for Giulio Viozzi’s La giacca stregata (The Cursed Jacket, also a short story).
His paintings and drawings have been shown in many exhibitions. Buzzati used to say that he saw himself as a painter that had a day job as a journalist. His artistic and writerly sensibilities are combined in a comic book, the hallucinatory contemporary version of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice Poema a fumetti (Poem Strip, 1969), and his last work, I miracoli di Val Morel (op. cit.).

Selected Bibliography

Bàrnabo delle montagne (Barnabo of the Mountains, a novel, 1933)
Il segreto del bosco vecchio (The Secret of the Old Forest, a novel, 1935)
Il deserto dei Tartari (The Tartar Steppe, a novel, 1940)
I sette messaggeri (The Seven Messengers, collection of short stories, 1942)
La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia (The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily, children’s book, 1945)
Il grande ritratto (The Great Portrait, a novel, 1960)
Un amore (A Love Affair, a novel, 1963)
Il capitano Pic e altre poesie (Captain Pic and Other Poems, poetry, 1965)
Il colombre (The Colomber, collection of short stories, 1966)
Poema a fumetti (Poem Strip, graphic novel, 1969)
I miracoli di Val Morel (The Miracles of Val Morel, commented drawings, 1971)

His children’s book La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia was translated by Frances Lobb into English as The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily.

The Tartar Steppe, the novel that earned him international fame, was completed in 1939 and first published in 1940. The novel tells the story of a military outpost that awaits a Tartar invasion, a poignant depiction of the passing of life. An American edition (Boston, Davin R. Godine) was published in 2005, in the translation of Stuart C. Hood.

Il deserto dei Tartari was made into a film in 1976, directed by Valerio Zurlini and starring Vittorio Gassman, Philippe Noiret, Max von Sydow, and Jean-Louis Trintignant.
Other works inspired films: Un amore, directed by Gianni Vernuccio (1965); Il fischio al naso, by Ugo Tognazzi (1967); Il segreto del bosco vecchio, by Ermanno Olmi (1993); and Bàrnabo delle montagne, by Mario Brenta (1994).

Buzzati also wrote short stories featuring fantastic animals such as the bogeyman and, his own invention, the Colomber (il colombre). In 1991 Mondadori published Il bestiario (The Bestiary).
He is considered the Italian Kafka by many. His stories, even the most fantastical ones, are grounded in reality, and for this reason a few critics list his work as magic realism. I think Buzzati’s sensibility resonates with the most typical elements of the Weird. The fantastical events may appear to be grounded in reality, yet the way he approached mysterious phenomena conveys anxiety — and attraction — towards the unknown that stirs ominously under the apparent banality of the everyday world.

Commentators have said that Buzzati always used ordinary settings because he was, above everything else, a reporter. It may be so, but, without wanting to compare two forms of art that vibrate on different dimensions, let us look at Buzzati’s graphic works, to get a glimpse of the man’s heart (for did he not say of himself “I am the victim of a cruel misunderstanding: I am a painter who, for a rather long period, has taken up the hobby of writing, and was known as a writer and a journalist as well”?). In his art, we can see the Uncanny punch out of the fragile envelope that keeps everything together, until reality itself is destroyed.

Il Duomo di Milano (The Cathedral of Milan, 1952) in La boutique del mistero (The Mystery Boutique, 1968)

The Colomber, a Tendril-Animal?

The story I have translated for The Weird,“Il colombre,” was first published in the collection Il colombre e altri cinquanta racconti, Mondadori, 1966) —

Stefano Lazzarin , in his essay “Il Vipistrello”[ii]—how shall I translate this appellation? It’s a concertinaed word from the Italian “pipistrello” (bat) and the Latin name of the bat “vespertilium,” of the evening; it could be a Vesperbat — Lazzarin, I was saying, considers Kafka’s Odradek, Cortázar’s Adbekunkus, and Buzzati’s Colombre “living creatures even more disturbing because they can be captured only through the sound of a literally impossible word.”

Tommaso Landolfi, a twentieth-century master of the Italian Weird, invented the concept of the tendril-word. A tendril-word curls up around itself and comes away completely unmoored from reality:

We all have, either voluntarily or by accident, done the experiment of tossing and turning a word in our heads until all meaning leaks out, living the word empty. At this point the word seems to detach itself, not only from the object to which it is normally tied, but from every possible object or foothold or support. The word starts to curl up, and twine around itself within the mind. At first it resembles the tips of a branch, which the fire in the fireplace twists and shrivels before burning them, and then the emptied word resembles only itself.

We could call these words that have no conceivable relationship with the world of phenomena “tendril-words.”

Now, what are they?

Are they unrecognizable objects or actual standalone words? And, in the latter case, where are they and what do they symbolize? And we ourselves — what are we supposed to do with them, in which space, in which abyss of the soul should we let them swarm? Once again we cannot but feel overcome by them; nor, dismayed, do we find anything better than to retreat hastily from that world of shadows and threatening words and return the words to their trite, tentative meaning. Tommaso Landolfi, Des mois (A Few Months) 1967, in Id., Opere. II. edited by Idolina Landolfi, Milan. 1960 – 1971 (my translation).

Lazzarin explores the universe of the tendril-animals: “The tendril-word is (almost) always a tendril animal, maybe thanks to that phantasmal power Italo Calvino attributes to animals:”

The animal, real or imaginary, has a special place in the dimension of the fantastic: as soon as it is named, it assumes a phantasmal power; becomes allegory, symbol, emblem. Italo Calvino, “Il cielo, l’uomo, l’elefante” (Sky, Man, Elephant, on Pline the Elder), 1982, in Saggi. 1945 – 1985, quoted by Lazzarin, my translation.

Let us meet the Vipistrello as it enters one of Landolfi’s novels:

A vesperbat, not a bat, but very precisely a big vesperbat, has entered — I can’t see how — and is fluttering about. Am I saying that it entered my cabin, and it’s fluttering around me? No, not at all, I mean it is exactly within the walls of my skull. First it was trapped in the strong cobwebs, and then, after ripping them with its wriggling, it has started banging obstinately against my forehead, like a big fly against the windowpane: he got in, somehow, and it doesn’t know how to get out. Of course, sneezing with all my might, I have popped it out, grabbed it, flattened it with my hands and an iron bar; then I have folded it eight times, I have smoothed it out some more and I have slipped it into the usual tube of carbonic culidrid, where it has joined the others. Tommaso Landolfi, Cancroregina, 1950 (my translation).

There is a fundamental difference, Lazzarin says, between the fantastic animal in the literature of the previous centuries and the weird inventions of the twentieth century: Landolfi’s Vipistrello is an animal that actually exists, at least for the narrator. “We cannot neutralize the Uncanny[iii] by confining it to the repertoire of allegories: that allegory is flesh; it is not just a symbol; that ghost is solid and scary. As another great twentieth-century writer in some ways close to Landolfi, Buzzati, would say, it is not, or not only, a symbol; and from that comes the terror” (Lazzarin, op. cit.).

So – they insist – would it be by any chance an allegory? Would it, so to speak, symbolize death? or some danger? or years that pass? Nothing at all, gentlemen: it is simply a drop of water, only it climbs the stairs. […] No, I tell you, it’s not a joke, there’s no double entendre, alas, it’s just a drop of water, but apparently, at night it goes up the stairs. Tick, tick, mysteriously, step after step. And that’s why we’re scared. Dino Buzzati, “Una goccia” (One Drop of Water, in Terrore alla Scala (Terror at La Scala, 1949.) (my translation).

After Borges, Buzzati is another taxonomist of imaginary animals and a great inventor of names. At first glance, this big shark of ill repute looks like an ordinary monster; one would think that it is little more than a rewrite of Melville’s white whale: a huge mythological beast, but not a tendril-animal. Buzzati, in his conversations with Panafieu[iv] confessed to not having known the sea enough to “absorb its beauty.” So maybe he was wishing to bridge the gap by using as models the great nineteenth-century texts that spoke of cursed ships and ocean monsters, and in particular, he would have thought of Moby Dick (Lazzarin, ibid.). In a letter written March 29, 1935, Buzzati confirmed that Melville was one of his favourite authors: “Moby Dick. There’s an endless, long-winded, baroque novel, and some more, but it is indisputably extraordinarily brilliant.”[v]

Nevertheless, we do not seem to need to collect further biographical documents to answer the question about the relationship between the Colomber and Moby Dick. In the table of Miracles of Val Morel of same title, which Lazzarin considers the figurative version of the Colomber, it appears in fact an ironic distancing that is, at the same time, an admission. In the caption we read:

I know that certain closed circles of scholars entertain the belief that the Colomber is nothing more than an arbitrary plagiarism of the great White Whale immortalized by Melville. But I know equally well that they are wrong. Too many times was the Colomber spotted and described by witnesses too serious to be rejected, and one cannot doubt its existence. Every time, the monster — which we must call so because it is a marvel, not because it is the harbinger of woes — was seen of a greenish or green color, or blue greenish. Never white. Dino Buzzati, The Miracles of Val Morel (my translation).

Dino Buzzati, La balena volante, (The Flying Whale, 1957) in La boutique del mistero (The Mystery Boutique, 1968)

In other words, tendril-animals have nothing to do with the merveilleux of the previous centuries. This category of imaginary monsters is made possible by Freud’s discovery of the unconscious mind. These inventions are not mythical and their universality can only be found in a tentative symbolic analysis. But at the end of the night (the night of the conscious mind, or Calderòn de la Barca’s slumber of reason, the condition that produces monsters[vi]) the tendril-animal springs from the unconscious, and is psychologically real.

Francisco Goya, El sueño de la razón produce monstrous, 1797

The name

Marco Perale[vii], quoted by Lazzarin, investigates on the Spanish consonance of “colombre” (original spelling), by comparing it to culebra and culebrón (‘snake’ and ‘big snake’), as well as the slang word colombres (‘eyes’: Buzzati’s colombre has four in the 1971 table) and its derivatives columbrar (‘to peek’) and columbrón (‘the glance’).

Fact is, Buzzati was not familiar with Spanish, even though both the Spanish culebra and French couleuvre ‘snake’ derive from the same Latin base coluber-colubri ‘snake ‘, which is also the origin of the Italian aesculapian colubro ‘snake ‘ (and more specifically: ‘snake of the family of Colubrid snakes’).

So what is the connection with the tendril-animals? Is the colomber a version in chiaroscuro of Moby Dick or is it a species of overgrown water snake, a waterhorse, a cousin of another animal of Buzzati’s Bestiary, the Serpenton? We are still in the field of myths, legends, the realm of the merveilleux. But Buzzati himself reveals that the idea from which his short story was born was a bizarre and a bit obsessive word:

“Il colombre” […] was born from a [distorted English] noun: […] A friend of mine […] told me that her American friend, instead of saying ‘ How many kilometers? ‘ said ‘ “How many colombers?”… She said that the Americans butchered the word. I liked this «colombers» word. Then I imagined a beast, a monster, and so this is where this story comes from […]. Yves Panafieu, quoted by Lazzarin, pp. 153 – 154, my translation.

Il serpenton dei mari (The Big Sea Snake, in I miracoli di Val Morel, 1971)

Is “colomber” a tendril-word? A word that designates a non-existent reality, but which we cannot get rid of – unless we fictionalize it by writing a story? A confirmation could come from an interesting feature of the monster, a feature that differentiates the Colomber from the legendary marvels like sea snakes or the White Whale: that of not being perceptible by anyone but the predestined (“And the strange thing is that nobody can see him but the victim himself”).

So who is right, Stefano Roi, the protagonist, who spots the menacing shape of his persecutor on the horizon of all the seas on which he ventures, or the other sailors, who see, inexorably, nothing: “He sailed and sailed, and in the wake of his ship, day and night, in dead calm and in choppy waters, trailed along the colomber […] And no one on board could see the monster, except for him.”
Lazzarin thinks that this passage casts doubt on the existence of the beast; it is an obsession — the marine, externalized version of Mental Ants, which Stefano and his father can see:

The colomber is a huge fish, terrifying to behold, extremely rare.
Depending on the sea, and the people living by its shores, it is also called kolomber, kahloubrha, kalonge, kalu-balu, chalung-gra. Naturalists strangely ignore it. Some even maintain that it does not exist.

Another possible interpretation is that the author wanted to make sure that the doubt on the creature’s existence was caused by the scientists’ obstinacy vis-à-vis phenomena they cannot explain. I think that Buzzati, like Landolfi, subtly conveys that the Uncanny, or “the Unfamiliar”, (l’inquiétante étrangeté as Marie Bonaparte translated Freud’s die Unheimliche) is real, because it is real for the psyche.

I, Angelo Dal Pont, typographer at Polpet’s, was severely disturbed by mental ants, which said to me: You know you don’t exist, don’t you?[viii]

First published by Weird Fiction Review

[i] The “elzeviro” is a neat and elegant typographic font created in the XVIth century by the engraver Christoffel van Dyck for the Dutch family of typographers Elzevir, who published classical works (particularly Latin and Greek) in accurate scholarly editions. This publishing house is the ancestor of Elsevier (Amsterdam), today’s leader in the scientific and medical publishing world. In the XIXth century’s Italian press, “elzeviro” became the term used to designate the opening article on the third page of a newspaper. It was usually a piece of literary or theatrical critique, or an erudite reflection on a topical or cultural theme.

[ii] Stefano Lazzarin, “Il Vipistrello, colombre, animale giglio : vampiri linguistici del Novecento italiano” (The Vesperbat, Colomber, Lily Beast: Linguistic Vampires of the Italian Twentieth Century), in Arches de Noé, 2006.

[iii] In the Freudian sense of the Uncanny (“die Unheimliche,” literally, the Unfamiliar).

[iv] Yves Panafieu, Dino Buzzati: un autoritratto (Dino Buzzati: an Autoportrait) Milan, Mondadori, 1973, p. 48.

[v] Dino Buzzati, Lettere a Brambilla (Letters to Brambilla), edited by Luciano Simonelli, Novara, Istituto Geografico De Agostini, 1985, p. 228.

[vi] “The sleep of reason produces monsters.” Pedro Calderòn de la Barca, Life Is a Dream. Madrid, 1635.

[vii] Cfr. Marco Perale, Buzzati e lo sciamano. Fonti iconografiche e tematiche del ‘Colombre’, Studi Buzzatiani, IX, 2004, pp. 37 – 46. Quoted by Lazzarin.

[viii] Dino Buzzati, op. cit.

The Colomber, I miracoli di Val Morel (The Miracles of Val Morel, 1971)

Dino Buzzati, Poema a fumetti, (Poem Strip, 1969)

Adieu, Paris

2012-05-02T19:41:00.002+02:00

Like Plato's Philosophers' City

Adieu, Paris!

Me voilà dans le lounge d'Air France, where I'm pitting Campari against Martini, and Campari is winning.

Told an attendant she had wonderful hair. She said her secret was olive oil. She is from Saint Domingo, and they have special olive oil beauty products there. She said "You're so beautiful"—which isn't true but so nice to hear.

So, Dear Blawg, I haven't written to you (since December 31!) because I was scared. I was terrified that you would want to talk me into staying.

I don't want to stay.

I mean. Paris is great, but I know her like my pockets. All novelty is gone. I need something new.

For a few days, I caressed the idea (as the French would say) of migrating to New Zealand. But I'm going back to school, to add another peau d'âne (ass' skin, well, I know that it sounds awful in Anglish, but this French expression means exactly what it means: a donkey's hide: a new university degree). And the old agreement between New Zealand and France has expired: now French students pay as much as international students do, c'est à dire about $20,000… No. I don't want to pay that much for my fifth master's degree. And maybe I should get serious and prepare a Ph. D.

Because.

I would be like the vampire in 'The Vampire's Diaries," which puts his immortality to good use by stacking university degrees. Studying so much easier than living. Getting a new degree is like learning a new language when you already know a few.

Living is another kettle of snakes, tho'.

I'm so excited, guys. I swore to myself that my next blawg post would be while I neared the beautiful Athens of the North, and here I am, waiting for a flight that will take me to another segment of my long, long life. Oh, yes. I've changed peaux d'ânes so much I have kept the ability to be astonished by change.

The French call it: le compte-rendu d'étonnement (the "astonishment report").

Flight's calling. More soon.

Adieu 2011, Hello 2012

2011-12-31T01:06:00.000+01:00

Dear 2011,

You've been a bitch.

You've been wonderful (right in the middle of all that rubbish, like an exotic flower growing out of hydroponic sputum).

You brought me to the edge of the cliff and you caught me by the hair in the nick of time. That was cool.

You tricked a neighbour into coming to my rescue and together we killed the Spirit of Gio's Apartment (she bought him off). Supercool.

When I had nothing to eat, you inspired another well-to-do neighbour to give me all her dried tomato soup because she could not digest it, and also half a box of pasta (I think it was Penne). Cool, too. I can digest lyophilized soup, and I've got no problem eating gluten.

I haven't written many stories, but that 's not your fault. I was busy building magical glass-brick walls impervious to tickling.

And I tiled a few walls.

(Let's not forget the tiling.)

And you, Paris, the song was lying: you're not a blonde. You're an angry biker. That's why I stayed out of the traffic.

Fireworks are shooting up. Fire fighters have opened their high-ceilinged halls to dance with the Parisians. They dance a lot. I can hear no car foghorns.

Hey, Tour Eiffel, I've never liked you. Here's to you.

The War of the Worlds, 1953

Hello, New Year,

I'm so excited.

All these photographs (but the image from The War of the Worlds, naturellement) were taken on the way from Rue des Pyrénées to Bercy Village (à Paris, sur la Terre, la Terre qui est un astre--Jacques Prévert)

Essay on Michel Bernanos: The Mountain Dead from Life (The Other Side of the Mountain)

2011-11-21T15:30:00.001+01:00

The Other Side of the Mountain is the strange, horrific, unforgettable story of two sailors, the young and innocent narrator and his unlikely friend, a seasoned ship cook who has seen it all until the two are stranded on an island surrounded by a sea of blood, where a mysterious mountain looms, dead and deadly.

When I was offered the opportunity to translate this novella for The Weird: A Compendium of Dark and Strange Stories, I said to myself: "Oh, oh, it will be quite an experience," as rendering the author's style in English wasn't the easiest of tasks. This masterpiece of French literature of the fantastic fascinated and scared me...

The following essay has appeared in Weird Fiction Review (Essay: Michel Bernanos' The Mountain Dead from Life) along with critiques by Jeffrey Ford and Edward Gauvin.

The story

In a story written in first person, the narrator always survives, but the beginning of this novella doesn’t bode well. Our young narrator, after an evening awash with wine, wakes up on a ship (the period is undetermined: the narration flows outside of time). He somehow signed up to become a ship boy. After a few days in which the narrator survives a rough welcome onboard, the boat is caught in dead calm. The sailors run out of food and become barbarians who swallow gallons of rum and end up devouring one another. It is in these appalling circumstances that a friendship is born, that of the young narrator with Toine, the ship cook. From now on, their fate is sealed. The unleashed elements create a cyclone that gobbles up the ship in an end-of-the-world atmosphere.

The two survivors find themselves on an island surrounded by a sea of blood, under a red sun. The island is a strange place, with unimaginable carnivorous flowers, a place where the human figure appears only engraved in horrible statues of striking realism. All the villages are deserted. No animal life can be found, only hostile flora. A persistent drumming resonates in the ground, as if the heart of a gigantic beast beat under the mountain. What secrets does this island conceal?

The unnamed protagonist and Toine come to believe that their survival depends on what awaits them on top of the formidable mountain visible on the horizon.
As the horrific situation unfolds, I try to reassure myself by thinking that the story cannot end with the narrator’s demise…

A poet with a painter’s palette

La montagne rouge, painting by Brigitte Bergeret

No summary can render the poetic tone of the writing. As Stéphane Aldeguy points out in his preface to the latest French edition (La Table Ronde, Paris, 2008), Michel Bernanos, through his brief and intense work, dreamed of “serving poetry”. He had no desire to develop an allegory or suggest any hidden meaning. He wanted to gift us with the beauty of an enigma that would find its raison d’être in itself. His intent was to move us by the terrible beauty of his images, without rational explanation, only following the inspiration of an author who wrote as a visual artist would have painted.

Poetry, yes, but not so much in the choice of words or the music of sentences: the interest of this novella is not on the paragraph level; it rather lies in the author’s ability to create an atmosphere of staggering landscapes, unearthly storms and constant psychological disquiet.
This story is a brilliant and peculiar narrative that borrows from the adventure novels in the vein of Stevenson to switch to the fantastic as our two sailors move from one world to another, passing through the mirror, and the writing becomes labyrinthine, baroque, challenging the translator.

La montagne morte de la vie (literally: The Mountain Dead from Life): What does this strange title mean?

Translating the title was the first challenge, and it soon became clear that it was an impossible task. Even for French natives, it takes some effort to seize the author’s intention.
La montagne morte de la vie does not mean “the dead mountain.” Bernanos’ red mountain died from life as the ivy on my balcony died last summer from the drought (all right, I forgot to water it).
The French title summarizes the central theme of the novella: the idea of death caused by an excess of life and energy: ‘This place is as green as can be.’ The French original reads ‘vert à en mourir,’ meaning ‘green to death.’ The story depicts an unrestrained adoration of Nature by a nature dying from its own thirst for life: It was a world full of life moving towards death. (p. 396 of The Weird)

The man, his life, his works

Michel Bernanos, born in 1923, was the fourth of six children, and the third son of Christian writer Georges Bernanos, an icon of French literature.
Michel wrote under pseudonyms in genres that the literary community considered as minor, small streams compared to the powerful, romantic works written by his father. He told about his father in a confidence to Dominique le Roux that “he felt his paw on his shoulder.” Dominique Le Roux wrote that Michel told him that “his father crushed him.”

One day, in the summer of 1964, Michel left his home of Gentilly in the Parisian suburbs. Three days later, he was found dead in the forest of Fontainebleau. He was forty-one years old. Michel Bernanos had made two suicide attempts the previous year. In his preface to La montagne morte de la vie (La Table Ronde, 2008), Stéphane Audeguy recalls that scouts had found his body, his torn identity card and a travel bag empty at his side. “We have the right to regret,” the commentator adds, “that his body was found at all”. There is indeed a sort of legend that begged to be born, an aura of tragedy that would have matched Michel Bernanos’s intent as an author pacing the land of confusion between reality and imagination.

Most of Michel Bernanos’ works of the fantastic were published posthumously. La montagne morte de la vie was published for the first time by Pauvert in 1967 (three years after the author’s suicide). It is the only work signed by the author with his real name, as if he had wanted to exist in the literary world under his true identity just before walking to the other side.

La montagne morte de la vie became an instant success and was regarded as one of the masterpieces of the fantasy genre in contemporary French literature.
All the other books written by Michel Bernanos, poems and novels, were published in his lifetime under the pseudo of Michel Talbert (crime novels published by Marabout and by Le Fleuve Noir) and Michel Drowin for other novels or genre short stories (now also in the catalogues of Le Castor Astral and La Table Ronde).

All of Bernanos’ fantastical novels are set in a tropical forest, poisonous and deadly, reminiscent of the author’s Brazilian experience. We can draw a parallel with the French forest where the author ended his existence.

The author’s father, Georges Bernanos, exasperated by his experience of the Spanish civil war and disappointed by politics in France, had left the country with his family in 1937. He wrote in his diary: “I went first to Paraguay, and then Brazil.” “I lived the year before the war [WWII] in a solitary fazenda with my wife and children, away from railways and roads, without any company outside our horses and cows” (but later, we learn from the diary that they also bred zebus). George Bernanos will return to France after the war, to die in 1948.
Michel Bernanos begins to write poems as early as 1938 (at fifteen years of age). In 1939 his brother Yves almost dies from malaria in a risky expedition with a missionary, a slightly lunatic Indian priest. In 1942 Michel, nineteen years old, leaves Brazil for London, where he joins the organisation of the external resistance “France Libre” in 1983. He serves as a submariner until late 1944. After the war, he returns to Brazil in 1946 and creates an rubber plantation in the Amazonian forest, which will provide the setting of his first fantasy novel and the inspiration for the imaginary forests of the stories published after his death, like the cycle of the Montagne morte de la vie (The Other Side of the Mountain).
In 1948, the year of Georges Bernanos’ death, Michel Bernanos moves permanently to Gentilly, in the Parisian suburbs. In 1953 he marries, has a daughter, and works in the film and publishing industries.

In 1956 he makes a short appearance in a film written by Robert Bresson, Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (A Man Condemned to Death Breaks Free).

In 1960, his mother’s death affects him deeply. In the same year, he writes The Murmur of the Gods, his first fantasy novel.

Bernanos’ short novels, novellas and short stories written in the fantastical vein are:

▪ Le Murmure des dieux (The Murmur of the Gods), 1960, as Michel Drowin.
▪ L’envers de l’Eperon ( 1961) (The Back of the Sporn), 1961, published posthumously.
▪ La montagne morte de la vie (The mountain Dead from Life), 1063, written in nineteen day and published posthumously by Jean-Jacques Pauvert in 1967. Latest edition by La Table Ronde, 2008 (editorial line La petite vermillon). Both the previous English translation, by Elaine P. Halperin, and the latest by yours faithfully, are titled The Other Side of the Mountain.

2008 edition, La Table Ronde
▪ Ils ont déchiré Son image. (They Have Destroyed His Image), 1963, a tale of the fantastic, published posthumously. This short story can be read as a complement to The Other Side of the Mountain.

Le Castor Astral, a publishing house in Bordeaux, published in 1987, La forêt complice, a collection of short stories including:

La forêt complice (The Colluding Forest), first published in 1964, as Michel Drowin;

La parole donnée (The Given Word), 1963, as Michel Talbert, previously published only in 1982 by La Pensée Universelle);

Ils ont déchiré Son image. (They Have Destroyed His Image), first published 1963.

Only The Murmur of the Gods was published during the author’s lifetime, under the pseudonym of Michel Drowin.

The immutable forest

Bernanos’ favourite settings, forests, swamps and arid mountains, are the background of characters that walk the threshold between life and death.

As Toine, a father figure, tells the young narrator:

“I’m so sorry, son, that you’ve got to be stuck with me in my waking nightmare. But let’s not lose our heads, or we will never come out of this. Here, everything is a mystery. Don’t expect to find answers. Here, like everywhere else, death prowls alongside of life, only it’s more visible here.” . The Other side of the Mountain, p. 396 of The Weird.

The story is an initiation journey where the characters are little by little seized by a fascination for the unthinkable; their experience of the unknown in this vegetable world that has absorbed all animal flesh, among the chatoyant colours of exotic fruits, the encounters with carnivorous plants that know how to deploy every seductive charm to attract and kill their prey; the poisonous sap from the fruits the two sailors are forced to eat for lack of other food; strange moans; a penumbra suffused with a red glow – all of which gradually displaces them into what they sometimes call ‘another world,’ ‘another life,’ or yet an ‘upside down world.’

Still, Bernanos’ fantasy is strictly “natural,” without ever staging the supernatural, and the mystery remains the context of real life. The phobic representations are ephemeral and dissolve in panic fear.

Gaston Bachelard speaks of the “forest as before me, before us… it reigns in the antecedent,” (my translation) and, for Max Ernst “[the forests of Oceania] “are, it seems… impenetrable, black and russet, extravagant, secular, swarming, diametrical, negligent, ferocious, fervent, and likeable, without yesterday or tomorrow.” (Translation by Elizabeth B. Childs).
“Timeless childhood” is cited as a trope of the fantasy genre by Todorov; as Freud would say ” beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed” returning in the impression of uncanny, which brings back an once-familiar memory altered and translated into something else.

Characters lost in sensory strangeness

Throughout The Other Side of the Mountain, in an insistent, repetitive manner, the characters hear a thumping sound that seems to come from the depths of the earth:

One would think that a giant’s heart is beating under our feet.

The two friends hear a squeaking, a crackling of trees, and someone or something wailing.
After a few pages, colours appear as a counterpoint to this panic atmosphere:

My gaze was captured by the highest mountain far away. The mountain rose as red as a forge fire. And the beating, which had calmed in the meantime, resumed its thumping with diabolic intensity. A long sigh sounded and the pale light dimmed. The forest retook his place, the black leaves stroking the dark sky…

Alone, the mountain kept its red glow against the shadows for a moment before fading into darkness. The unfamiliar stars resumed their diamond-like twinkling.

‘It’s over,’ Toine said. He lay down on the ground. I stretched out beside him.

‘We can sleep now,’ he said. (p. 397)

The visual illusion is brought back to the level of a natural phenomenon and, as Jules Verne would say, sensible, rational knowledge often manages to “demystify the sensory illusion.”
But the visions continue:

Minuscule beads of blood covered the place where the vine had hugged my wrist. Overcome by disgust, I tried to chase away the horrid idea that the plant was carnivorous. On the ground, the vine continued to writhe like a reptile. (p. 393)

Hideous beauty

Later on, there is a “hideous crust” a petrifying mortar (p. 402). The mineral world triumphs.

A gigantic arc of red sand like talcum powder bordered a thick red wall that rose toward the sky, flaunting the wounds of time. These furrows traced grimacing masks resembling mineral giants petrified during uncountable centuries.

No plant life was discernable on the vertical wall. The atmosphere reminded me of a sepulchre but without the odour of decomposition, as if time had consumed the compost. (p. 390)

The dead mountain is an agent of entropy. Nothing can reconcile Man with Nature. The universe is hostile. Life contains the germs of destruction, and all living beings of flesh and blood are bound to encounter the void. Redemption and salvation do not exist. Michel’s pessimistic view contrasts strikingly with his father’s Christian faith.

The moving vines gave us no quarter and we had to alter our path to avoid them. If life multiplied its forms in the plant world, the forest remained void of animal life. Not the smallest mosquitoes dancing in the patches of light. We humans were somehow suspended between the mineral and the vegetable. The gift of life was available only for the creatures that wore no flesh, as if no incarnated god had ever visited this place. (p. 400)

What can possibly happen to the narrator in such a place?

An initiation journey

Bernanos takes us on a journey to the end. There is the struggle for survival, the will to face the unknown, the quest for salvation. But there are especially – and here undoubtedly lies Michel Bernanos’ talent – sumptuous, scary, fascinating images. If the first part of the novella is evidence of a certain narrative effectiveness and contains a few strong moments of horror, the second part offers surreal and absurd visions that are more original and convincing. Images and mysterious phenomena threaten to ensnare the characters, without the slightest respite. The horror takes on wondrous features; nature is never what it appears to be. And a reddish light drowns everything in the ultimate disruption of a lush and wild life.

This novella, utterly original, may superficially remind you of Lovecraft but William Hope Hodgson is perhaps more appropriate a comparison. You could also think of Jean Ray. Still, Bernanos’s view is utterly pessimistic, and the tone of all his fantasy stories (I have not read his noir and mystery novels to this day) is horrific, as distant as can be from Ray’s sly humour.

Reading The Other Side of the Mountain was an unsettling experience (and the depth of the narration appeared to me more strongly on my second reading). Translating it, trying to preserve every single passage of the original, the tone, the meaning, knowing that rendering the author’s tormented style in a language that — besides the influence of French after Hastings — remains proto-Germanic in essence (the debate, if you wish, is open on this point); oh, well, it was a stimulating enterprise.

Gio Clairval, Weird Fiction Review, November 21 2011

THE WEIRD: I have participated in one of the largest thematic anthology projects of all time, and I'm still alive!

2011-10-31T14:51:00.000+01:00

The Weird is out! Amazon.com

How It All Began

The day was Sunday, the month April, the year 2010, and I didn't know it would be the first day of a several-month-long captivity in the VanderMeers' Donjons (they have virtual oubliettes in their basement; the Dragon is Jeff himself). To put together this mammoth anthology, Ann and Jeff themselves lived like recluses. I suppose they needed a European correspondent to bring a dose of international suffering to the project.

Jeff sent me an email saying "For the big book of weird there is a small chance we might need a re-translation of a short novel of 30k. Is this the kind of thing you could do? From the French to English?

I also have a need for some research on copyright on a book in France."

The short novel was La montagne morte de la vie, (translated in English as "The Other Side of the Mountain"), written by Michel Bernanos, the son of the much more famous Georges Bernanos. The copyright research turned out to be for the same book.

I hadn't read anything written by Bernanos Jr. (when Jeff asked about his short stories, I thought he was asking about Georges' short fiction, and I answered that he had written none). I researched the author and learned that he had published under various pseudonyms, to avoid using the name made famous by his illustrious father. When I read La montagne... (I will comment on this incredible story soon).

As I've been living in France for a longer time than in Italy (where I was born), I enquired about the French and Italian authors who would be in this landmark anthology.

I asked Jeff if he had thought of that great Belgian horror author, Jean Ray. (He had.) And what about Claude Seignolle (a springy ninety-five-year-old French author), an authority in the French literature of the fantastic? Which Italian author? Dino Buzzati, who was a master of the uncanny.

The Rights Acquisition Lottery

And then I plunged into the dangerous world of Translation Rights. My job consisted in finding who owned the rights, negotiating the acquisition and conducting a ballet between Florida (where the VanderMeers' Donjons loom) and Paris, Milan, Barcelona, Madrid, ... Jeff, and the Atlantic Corvus people negotiated most rights, but I had the unique pleasure of dealing with the owners of the stories I translated, and a few others, some of which consisted simply in finding who owned what, and who was the right person to call, which surely is a torment invented in some special hell designed for anthologists.

I remember with fondness the hunt across the Netherlands for a lady who had bought from her daughter the rights to all the works of a deceased author. I found her attorney, and he promised to get back to me with news soon. The announced day passed, and still no news (Jeff NEVER put pressure on me. Never ever. He only suggested to tell the attorney that they probably shared common ancestors). I called again, and again, but the attorney didn't have an answer. So I tried to contact the owner over the phone. The nice old lady said, "Listen, I have to go, and I'm late. Why don't you tell me what you're selling, instead of asking if I can sell you something?"

Followed more months spent hunting down contacts, sending emails, calling people on the phone—which made the difference in the end.

Most heirs are represented by agents. If the agency is small, the process is swift. Not so with bigger organisations. Once you get a print or electronic-edition permission, the battle isn't won concerning a new translation, as separate department deal with the estates and the translation permissions. Agents or their assistants steered me through the process. They told me who to contact and volunteered to speak to their colleagues, supporting my demand.

I discovered why a few major pieces written by illustrious (and still copyrighted) deceased authors are still known to the Anglophone audience through translations done fifty years ago, written in a style that doesn't appeal to contemporary readers, and even sporting a few mistakes! In spite of this, the old translation is bought over and over, by anthologists and school textbook editors. Fact is, it is TOO difficult to obtain the permission for a new translation, particularly when your request concerns a single story! In one case (Cortazar's "Axolotl"), I had to convince the heir, via the agent, that the existing translation didn't do justice to the original. The heir and the agent went through my translation, word for word. When the Estate gave the imprimatur, I felt as if I'd conquered a mountain.

I translated for this anthology:

Julio Cortazar, “Axolotl,” 1956 ( Argentina)
Dino Buzzati, “The Colomber,” (Il colombre), 1966 (Italy)
Michel Bernanos, “The Other Side of the Mountain,” (La montagne morte de la vie) 1967 (France)
Claude Seignolle, “The Ghoulbird,” (Le hupeur) 1967 (France)
Georg Heym, “The Dissection,” (Die Dissektion) 1913 (Germany)

THE WEIRD: A Compendium of Dark & Strange Stories
Edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer Amazon.com

Foreword: Michael Moorcock
Introduction by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

Afterword: China Mieville

Table of Contents

Alfred Kubin, “The Other Side” (excerpt), 1908 (translation, Austria)
F. Marion Crawford, “The Screaming Skull,” 1908
Algernon Blackwood, “The Willows,” 1907
Saki, “Sredni Vashtar,” 1910
M.R. James, “Casting the Runes,” 1911
Lord Dunsany, “How Nuth Would Have Practiced his Art,” 1912
Gustav Meyrink, “The Man in the Bottle,” 1912 (translation, Austria)
Georg Heym, “The Dissection,” 1913 (new translation by Gio Clairval, Germany)
Hanns Heinz Ewers, “The Spider,” 1915 (translation, Germany)
Rabindranath Tagore, “The Hungry Stones,” 1916 (India)
Luigi Ugolini, “The Vegetable Man,” 1917 (new translation by Anna and Brendan Connell, Italy; first-ever translation into English)
A. Merritt, “The People of the Pit,” 1918
Ryunosuke Akutagawa, “The Hell Screen,” 1918 (new translation, Japan)
Francis Stevens (Gertrude Barrows Bennett), “Unseen—Unfeared,” 1919
Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 1919 (translation, German/Czech)
Stefan Grabinski, “The White Weyrak,” 1921 (translation, Poland)
H.F. Arnold, “The Night Wire,” 1926
H.P. Lovecraft, “The Dunwich Horror,” 1929
Margaret Irwin, “The Book,” 1930
Jean Ray, “The Mainz Psalter,” 1930 (translation, Belgium)
Jean Ray, “The Shadowy Street,” 1931 (translation, Belgium)
Clark Ashton Smith, “Genius Loci,” 1933
Hagiwara Sakutoro, “The Town of Cats,” 1935 (translation, Japan)
Hugh Walpole, “The Tarn,” 1936
Bruno Schulz, “Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass,” 1937 (translation, Poland)
Robert Barbour Johnson, “Far Below,” 1939
Fritz Leiber, “Smoke Ghost,” 1941
Leonora Carrington, “White Rabbits,” 1941
Donald Wollheim, “Mimic,” 1942
Ray Bradbury, “The Crowd,” 1943
William Sansom, “The Long Sheet,” 1944
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph,” 1945 (translation, Argentina)
Olympe Bhely-Quenum, “A Child in the Bush of Ghosts,” 1949 (Benin)
Shirley Jackson, “The Summer People,” 1950
Margaret St. Clair, “The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles,” 1951
Robert Bloch, “The Hungry House,” 1951
Augusto Monterroso, “Mister Taylor,” 1952 (new translation by Larry Nolen, Guatemala)
Amos Tutuola, “The Complete Gentleman,” 1952 (Nigeria)
Jerome Bixby, “It’s a Good Life,” 1953
Julio Cortazar, “Axolotl,” 1956 (new translation by Gio Clairval, Argentina)
William Sansom, “A Woman Seldom Found,” 1956
Charles Beaumont, “The Howling Man,” 1959
Mervyn Peake, “Same Time, Same Place,” 1963
Dino Buzzati, “The Colomber,” 1966 (new translation by Gio Clairval, Italy)
Michel Bernanos, “The Other Side of the Mountain,” 1967 (new translation by Gio Clairval, France)
Merce Rodoreda, “The Salamander,” 1967 (translation, Catalan)
Claude Seignolle, “The Ghoulbird,” 1967 (new translation by Gio Clairval, France)
Gahan Wilson, “The Sea Was Wet As Wet Could Be,” 1967

Daphne Du Maurier, “Don’t Look Now,” 1971
Robert Aickman, “The Hospice,” 1975
Dennis Etchison, “It Only Comes Out at Night,” 1976
James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), “The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Terrible Things to Rats,” 1976
Eric Basso, “The Beak Doctor,” 1977
Jamaica Kincaid, “Mother,” 1978 (Antigua and Barbuda/US)
George R.R. Martin, “Sandkings,” 1979
Bob Leman, “Window,” 1980
Ramsey Campbell, “The Brood,” 1980
Michael Shea, “The Autopsy,” 1980
William Gibson/John Shirley, “The Belonging Kind,” 1981
M. John Harrison, “Egnaro,” 1981
Joanna Russ, “The Little Dirty Girl,” 1982
M. John Harrison, “The New Rays,” 1982
Premendra Mitra, “The Discovery of Telenapota,” 1984 (translation, India)
F. Paul Wilson, “Soft,” 1984
Octavia Butler, “Bloodchild,” 1984
Clive Barker, “In the Hills, the Cities,” 1984
Leena Krohn, “Tainaron,” 1985 (translation, Finland)
Garry Kilworth, “Hogfoot Right and Bird-hands,” 1987
Lucius Shepard, “Shades,” 1987
Harlan Ellison, “The Function of Dream Sleep,” 1988
Ben Okri, “Worlds That Flourish,” 1988 (Nigeria)
Elizabeth Hand, “The Boy in the Tree,” 1989
Joyce Carol Oates, “Family,” 1989
Poppy Z Brite, “His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood,” 1990
Michal Ajvaz, “The End of the Garden,” 1991 (translation, Czech)
Karen Joy Fowler, “The Dark,” 1991
Kathe Koja, “Angels in Love,” 1991
Haruki Murakami, “The Ice Man,” 1991 (translation, Japan)
Lisa Tuttle, “Replacements,” 1992
Marc Laidlaw, “The Diane Arbus Suicide Portfolio,” 1993
Steven Utley, “The Country Doctor,” 1993
William Browning Spenser, “The Ocean and All Its Devices,” 1994
Jeffrey Ford, “The Delicate,” 1994
Martin Simpson, “Last Rites and Resurrections,” 1994
Stephen King, “The Man in the Black Suit,” 1994
Angela Carter, “The Snow Pavilion,” 1995
Craig Padawer, “The Meat Garden,” 1996
Stepan Chapman, “The Stiff and the Stile,” 1997
Tanith Lee, “Yellow and Red,” 1998
Kelly Link, “The Specialist’s Hat,” 1998
Caitlin R. Kiernan, “A Redress for Andromeda,” 2000
Michael Chabon, “The God of Dark Laughter,” 2001
China Mieville, “Details,” 2002
Michael Cisco, “The Genius of Assassins,” 2002
Neil Gaiman, “Feeders and Eaters,” 2002
Jeff VanderMeer, “The Cage,” 2002
Jeffrey Ford, “The Beautiful Gelreesh,” 2003
Thomas Ligotti, “The Town Manager,” 2003
Brian Evenson, “The Brotherhood of Mutilation,” 2003
Mark Samuels, “The White Hands,” 2003
Daniel Abraham, “Flat Diana,” 2004
Margo Lanagan, “Singing My Sister Down,” 2005 (Australia)
T.M. Wright, “The People on the Island,” 2005
Laird Barron, “The Forest,” 2007
Liz Williams, “The Hide,” 2007
Reza Negarestani, “The Dust Enforcer,” 2008 (Iran)
Micaela Morrissette, “The Familiars,” 2009
Steve Duffy, “In the Lion’s Den,” 2009
Stephen Graham Jones, “Little Lambs,” 2009

K.J. Bishop, “Saving the Gleeful Horse,” 2010 (Australia)

How I met Tina Aumont—a mythic actress and an anti-diva

2011-10-29T17:13:00.000+02:00

Tina Aumont, born in Hollywood to film star Maria Montez and French icon Jean-Pierre Aumont. Jean Cocteau wrote a poem for her birth and Marlene Dietrich sang lullabies while cradling her. (From Romanhattan website)

It was some time around the turn of the millennium. Film producer and actor Ivan Galietti, an Italian friend transplanted in New York, had come to Paris for one of his frequent visits to Tina, who was fifty-four or fifty-five and looked ten years younger.

She was one of the kindest persons I'd ever met. How, I wondered, can this woman be a myth of the twentieth century, and be so easy-going, so approachable, like the girl next door.

The first thing that struck me was her eyes, immense, dark, soulful. Age tarnishes most beauties, but her face, dominated by those incredible eyes, remained unlined. Her youthful looks weren't the result of the surgeon's scalpel. Even if she had needed to negotiate with time, which she did not, she couldn't have afforded the cost.

A photograph of Tina, taken
a couple of years before I met her

She could afford pretty much ... nothing. After her glory days, her father's heritage in the hands of her stepmother, an Italian actress, she was reduced to living in a minuscule apartment located in a modest Parisian quarter full of penniless immigrants, and the rent was paid by the city's social services. Tina's flamboyant career had taken a downturn in the late seventies, when she was banned from Italy, her country of adoption, for drug possession. Leaving Italy had broken her heart.

Tina worked with great directors like Fellini, scandalous directors like Tinto Brass, who said she was the most beautiful woman with whom he'd ever worked, and many others. Several among the films in which she starred were intellectual and elegant, other fell into the category of B movies. To all her films, she brought her magnetic, compelling presence.

But Tina loved the needle, and little by little her contracts dwindled to nothing. The French television tried to lure her back into acting, but she seldom kept up with the schedule, and when the dressers prepared her for a scene, they could see the needle holes constellating her arms.

The day I met Tina, Ivan, my boyfriend Pierre and I set off with her for a promenade in the forest of Fontainebleau, half an hour or so to the south of Paris. Before leaving, we had a couple of beers in a café. She had water, an entire bottle. At the time, she was already treated for respiratory problems, but she rolled joints in full sight on the café table, and she smoke the first in a taxi, to the driver's despair. Unabashed, she rolled down the window and puffed on.

The second time I saw her, it was at her funeral in Paris, Cimetière du Montparnasse, on the 18th of November 2006.

Paris had gifted us with one of those wonderful autumn days, sunny and warm. I arrived early, and Ivan was nowhere in sight. Tina's friends had gathered in front of the entrance. Knowing nobody, I waited on the opposite side of the street. The crowd stared at me, a few heads put together, whispering. What crosses your mind when, during a ceremony, a bunch of strangers can't pull their gazes off you? I wondered whether I had picked the right clothes for a funeral. I tugged uncomfortably at my black sweater, glanced down at my long skirt, grey with black arabesques, and light-brown leather boots, but could find nothing wrong with my attire, and tossed my grey shawl over my shoulder, to give myself a countenance.

Ivan arrived at last, in time for the crowd to move over to the grave. As these gatherings go, a few friends recounted their memories of the deceased. Ivan read a poem he'd written for Tina.

I remember the anecdote told by Nadine Trintignant (sister of Tina's first husband, Christian Marquand). In a scene, Tina, standing before the camera, was supposed to start walking to the right. During the first take, she walked off to the left. "Cut!" director Lina Wertmuller ordered. "Tina, you know you should walk to the right." Tina nodded. "Okay." The camera rolled, and Tina walked to the left. "To the right, Tina, please!" Tina smiled. "To the right. No problem." And off to the left she went. Take after take, there was no way to convince her to walk as the script demanded. It's not that she refused to comply, but some daydream held her in a firm grasp. Finally, one of the grips lay down on the floor, out of the camera's view, and gently turned Tina's feet to the right, and she stepped in that direction.

After the funeral, Ivan and I followed Tina's friends to a bistrot. Someone showed me one of her last photographs, taken in the hospital. Despite the oxygen tubes, she hadn't changed a bit. At sixty, she still looked young.

Now was the moment to enquire about the strange gazes pinned on me when I arrived at the cemetery. So I put the question to the woman sitting next to me.

She answered: "You looked so much like her, we thought Tina had found the way to attend her own funeral. It would have been typical of her."

"I look nothing like her." I was going through one of my dark-hair phases, when I dye my reddish-brown hair dark brown or black, with a long fringe (or bangs, my American friends would say), and I'd hidden my eyes behind large sunglasses. But still.

"I can see it now," the woman said. "But the silhouette and the hair were so similar we really thought her ghost had come to say goodbye."

Goodbye, Tina. You aren't forgotten. Walk free, in the direction of your desire. Maybe I'll see you around Paris, some day.

Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities: How it charms, tricks and scrambles your mind

2011-10-24T01:24:00.005+02:00

Wax model for eye surgery, Musée Orfila, Paris

I gave my daughter one of my contributor's copies of The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities as a birthday present. It was the first time I presented her with a book. Ever.

She's a compulsive reader, but books are not her kind of birthday present. For her, books are things to borrow from Mum and to give back worn and torn. I am her personal library. Only, libraries charge you when the book comes back in a pitiful state. Mum's library is a forgiving institution. Still, each time my daughter hands me a tattered paperback, I can't help feeling a pang of sorrow to my bookworm's heart. She prefers borrowing paperbacks because she can fold the book backwards, breaking the spine in the process. (She's a barbarian.) This volume was a hardcover, though. And I had my own copy anyway. Ha. So... .... on her birthday, I gave her this thing of beauty:

==> ==> ==> ==> ==> ==>

She looked at me askance. "A book."

"There's a story of mine in it," I said defensively.

"Oh, thank you, Mum!" What else could she say?

The following day, she told me, "This cabinet des curiosités must be splendid."

"It is."

"It would be great to visit."

"You can't. They made it up."

(And by the way, I set fire to that place of evil.

Well, it wasn't me. The governess did it. Oh, buy the book and you'll know the truth.)

Back to the book: my daughter had only read the introduction, which had tricked her into believing that the good doctor's Wunderkammer was a real place.

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer have put a rather unbelievable doctor, and the (mostly) deranged people who knew him when he was alive, in an impossible cabinet of curiosities, and they have made it all so real in the introduction that someone who has not read about the current anthology and knows nothing about the previous book (The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases) has no reason to question the reality of characters and place.

Take a look at the gallery of artworks illustrating the horrible, amazing, odd story behind the stories of Thackery T. Lambshead.

The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinetof Curiosities is fiction disguised in non-fiction. To paraphrase Borges, Dr. Lambshead has passed away, but his cabinet of curiosities will perdure, bright, solitaire and infinite, perfectly immobile, armed with precious items, incorruptible, secret . . .

Julian, a novel by Gore Vidal (and Christians, pagans, Amenabar's Agora, freedom of thought, and lions)

2011-10-15T17:41:00.020+02:00

OMG...

Libanius to Priscus

Antioch, March [A.D.] 380

Yesterday morning, as I was about to enter the lecture hall, I was stopped by a Christian student who asked me in a voice eager with malice, "Have you heard about the Emperor Theodosius?"

I cleared my throat, ready to investigate the nature of this question, but he was too quick for me. "He has been baptised a Christian."

I was noncommittal. Nowadays, one never knows who is a secret agent.

This passage is the beginning of Julian by Gore Vidal. I devoured the novel in a couple of days, but when I got to the point where the protagonist was murdered, and one of his teachers ferreted out the assassin, it saddened me so I set the book aside for a few weeks. I didn't want to meet the man who had killed such an interesting and endearing character.

Then my daughter dropped by, asking as usual for a good read, and I put the book under her nose. She grabbed it.

"What? A historical novel?" she protested after flipping through the first pages. "A book published in 1962? I want something NEW, like the last one! [The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi], or something published a couple of years ago at most, like the one before. [Robert Palmer's Debatable Space]. This Vidal guy isn't even a classic, or I would know [she's a student of modern English literature]"

"Just read it."

She called the day after. "I can't put it down."

I finished reading the last pages since, and I can say it is one of the best historical novels I've ever read.

The novel

Witty, extraordinarily accurate and beautifully written, this best-selling novel retraces the life of Roman Emperor Julian, narrated in first person. Two of his mentors, renowned pagan philosophers, exchange letters on Julian's manuscript, adding first-hand accounts that are both dispassionate and tongue in cheek. The result is a multifaceted and often contradictory portrait of the protagonist.

Julian (331-363) was Emperor Constantine's nephew. After his ascension to the title of Emperor, he became embroiled in a fierce intellectual war with Christianity and died at the age of thirty-two during a military campaign in Persia.

Remembered only as "the Apostate" in the following centuries, Julian was a philosopher, a fine essayist and had a charming personality. He tried to preserve the Hellenistic culture and the ancient religious eclecticism crushed by the violence of the New Religion.

In the novel, the characters are penned with all their humanity and flaws. Despite the complexity of the themes, Vidal handles the ideas of the time in a simple and effective way. The novel captures the religious and political ferment of a brutal age and restores the legacy of a ruler who wanted to preserve the ancient tolerance.

This historical reconstruction provides, as all historiography should, a picture of the past that serves the contingencies of the present.

I asked my accomplice and friend Daniel Pasetti, historian specialising in ancient Rome, to chat with me about the book, the protagonist, and his time.

A Roman Emperor speaking in broken Latin?

Gio. What's different about this emperor, Julian?

Daniel. Julian was a Greek-speaking emperor. He spoke Latin, of course, but with a strong accent. He was the first non-Latin emperor in history. There had been an African and Eastern emperors, born in Latin families, though, but Julian is the first about whom we know with certainty that his first language was not Latin.

G. Still, if tradition has left more information about him, it must mean something, that he was more important than others.

Sources sources sources

D. Yes and no. The abundance of sources is based on two fundamental reasons: the importance of the person who wrote about something, and the importance of the contents, which gave the documents greater chances of survival.

Concerning Julian, we have Ammianos Markellinos (Ammianus Marcellinus), the most important historian of the 4th century A.D. Ammianus, born in Syria to a Greek-speaking family (but he wrote in Latin, the language of history) was an officer of medium-high level in Constantius II's and later Julian's army. He was personally present in many of the events later recounted in his Res Gestae, and got out of a few tight spots, barely saving his life, as in the Persian siege of the Roman city of Amida during the reign of Constantius. He was also present in the Persian campaign that cost Julian his life.

Above everything else, in addition to being a witness, Ammianus had a great intellectual honesty. In his narration, Julian emerges as the ideal emperor, for his culture, dedication to public interests, courage, tolerance. Practically a Titan, but not without flaws. Although Ammianus was a pagan, like Julian, and shared his religious views, he criticized a few of Julian's ideas as demagogic. And indeed, they were.

If he did not hold back about Julian's flaws, there is no reason to suspect that he was exaggerating his merits. We must be grateful to Ammianus and Fate, too, which let us get some of his work. Without Ammianus, we would know much less about the 4th century, and Gore Vidal wouldn't have written about Julian with the same historical exactitude.

Religious freedom

G. Ok, but what about the question of religious freedom?

D. It strikes me that the not-so-Christian Gore Vidal was attracted to Julian, who is remembered as "the Apostate." Nor is it without significance that an emperor who remained in office for just two years has been remembered with such hatred for centuries. Sure, he was Caesar (in the late Empire, "Caesar" was the title of the emperor's representative in charge of a few areas; in Julian's case: Gaul, Britain and Spain) and lived in Gaul for six years, but his religion policy was implemented for only two years, when he became Augustus, the emperor's title.

Being Augustus is cooler than being Caesar

G. And why isn't Vidal's interest surprising?

D. Because Julian's action against Christians was not a "real" persecution. It was a clever (from his point of view) attempt to pull the carpet from under their feet. He did not forbid Christians to practise their faith. In fact, Christians have never really been forbidden to worship their God, if not in very few occasions and for a short time.

And the thing about Christians eaten by lions? Medieval propaganda!

G. Hold on. What about persecutions? Christians thrown to the lions?

D. The story of persecutions is very different from what it is commonly believed, and in fact, we can say that Christianity triumphed not despite the persecution, but maybe just because it was not persecuted systematically. The only documented episode of Christians thrown into the arena occurred not far from your home, in Lyon, under the reign of the "good" Emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Then nothing... We don't hear about lions eating Christians if not from medieval sources, which are entirely unreliable. It could have happened a few more times, but it is rather unlikely.

A beautiful icon of Ignatius of Antioch, Martyr

Ancient civilisations were violent, and certainly had a taste for blood, but not the way we think today. Where's the fun in watching ordinary people, shaking and shrieking, being devoured by beasts? And how long would the show last? One minute? And then what? Would you sit in the traffic across the city for two hours straight just to watch a thirty-second show? Imagine going to Madison Square Garden to see a boxing match between Mike Tyson and a convicted shoplifter. What fun. What you want to see is a combat, not a severed head flying off over the ropes after two seconds. The ancient audience wanted a good fight not just blood.

G. They weren't afraid of blood, I suspect.

D. They were not, but blood was simply the outcome of action. Action was fun, not blood.

G. All right, but there was persecution, even without lions.

D. Well, it's complicated.

G. It's always complicated with you.

D. No persecution occurred in the way we all imagine, no Christian hunt as such, systematic and over the centuries. There were episodic moments of intolerance, sometimes violent. And laws. Mostly not reinforced, though. In short, we can say that today's widely accepted scenario is that there was a long period of tolerance interrupted by intermittent persecution, limited in time and space.

All this bad reputation... for what?

G. Hold on. This is what you think.

D. No, that's what you can read in any good ancient history handbook published in the last thirty years. Or you can hear about it in a college class in Roman history or history of Christianity. The most severe persecution and perhaps the only deserving the name, happened under Diocletian and the tetrarchs, which included among other things the confiscation of holy books and actions against the clergy (less against the faithful, who were nevertheless forbidden to meet). And the law was applied in leopard spots, so to speak, harsh in some places, moderate in others, and nothing at all in most. Then came Constantine, and things changed.

Julian's campaign to restore religious eclecticism

G. And then Julian arrived, and things changed again.

D. Well, between Constantine and Julian came Constantius. In reality, Julian, though hostile to Christianity, wasn't interested in violent persecution à la Diocletian. He adopted Constantine's policy, but in an opposite way. Constantine, with the edict of tolerance in A.D. 311—actually issued by Galerius (a Caesar) had put all religions on an equal footing; i.e. he had stressed the right to worship all faiths, including Christianity. However, Constantine had clearly favoured Christianity, both giving precedence to Christians in prominent positions around him, and increasing tax exemptions in favour of the clergy. Julian did the same thing, but in favour of the pagans. His was not a persecution with condemnations and executions, but the attempt to push Christianity back within the limits that other religions had, surreptitiously more or less favouring all other cults. Even non-Roman cults . . .

G. Now you're saying Christians were bad . . .

D. Christians weren't bad, but they weren't good either. They were men of their time, neither the best nor the worst. Nevertheless, Christianity carried a virus for which classical societies had no antibodies, a bit like the European diseases brought to America by the Spaniards. The idea that there was a "real" religion, with a real god, one's own (and that the other gods were false and such faiths had to be eradicated) was surreal for the ancient societies.

In this light, your typical uneducated pagan was hostile to Christianity because he believed that "all" gods were real, including the Biblical God. Diocletian, a slave's nephew and a shepherd's son, materialised this sentiment with his persecutory policy against Christians. Just because he was a traditionalist—he was a traditionalist even in the typical pagan's eye.

It is no coincidence that especially the emperors that we could define "progressive" were hostile to Christianity, according to the accepted historical canons. The implications of the Christians' dogmatic conception of religion were clear to these emperors, who were "liberal" in their time. Some practices that have become recurring scourges in the history of Western civilisation were introduced by the Christian Churches. Anti-Semitism? Introduced by the Christians— as in a Freudian Oedipal conflict, where the sons want to kill the father. The burning of books deemed blasphemous? Another Christian novelty. Also, things worsened considerably for women.

One of the first female scientists, victim to Christian fundamentalists

G. I'm thinking of Hypatia, a mathematician, astronomer, physicist and the head of the Neo-Platonist school of philosophy in Alexandria.

D. Yes. She was slaughtered by a mob of Christians—shredded to pieces, literally. Her crime was freedom of thought, with the aggravating circumstance of having the wrong reproductive organs. Her public execution illustrates a new climate, but, as always, one must put the episode in its context. Christian "Taliban" teemed in Egypt and in the East. They were less strong and less violent in the West. Nevertheless, they shared the same ideology.

G. Off topic: Is the Amenabar film a correct historical reconstruction?

D. It is surprisingly correct. I've seen two minor errors only: dust in the street (the streets of Alexandria were all paved: Alexandria was the Los Angeles of the Roman Empire); and the Roman soldiers' uniforms, which had changed by the fourth century (we've seen the same uniforms since the first historical film of all time).

So why did Christianity prevail?

G. Still, it is unthinkable that a religion would become prominent only through the boost of a political leader. There must be deeper reasons.

D. True. In effect, Christianity grew thanks to complex factors. Generally speaking, it was the winning religion in a universal tide of monotheism. At this point, the various traditional cults were looked upon with affection, but few really believed in the gods of ancient time, Jupiter & Co. Monotheism, in its various forms, was prevailing. Christianity however was the best organized and—how should I put it?—the simplest, least -intellectualised religion, more suited to the poorest among the urban strata. A neat opposition between right and wrong gets into the popular mindset easily. And then Christians had a great advantage: a Jesus certainly lived in Palestine.

We know little about him. He was one of several prophets/sages/rebels/mages the East produced steadily. Christianity coalesced around the figure of a Rabbi (teacher), perhaps a rebellious political and religious reformer, and syncretised a universe of elements coming from Judaism, Sol Invictus' cult (Mithraism), other solar deities of Hellenistic tradition, and also from Zoroastrianism. Christianity triumphed, but it could have been some other cult, if a few elements of the jigsaw had come together in a different way. Who knows—a cult with Simon Magus or the God Sol? Or the Aryan version of Christianity.

However, political power has a weight in effecting a push, perhaps not the ultimate push, but one important enough. In fact, Christianity—from which derive the Greek Orthodox Church, closer to the first Christian roots, and the Catholic Church, and the subsequent Protestant variants—is based on the Nicene Creed.

Council of Nicea, A.D. 325, followed by the
Council of Constantinople, A.D. 381
(Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed)

Christians fought over Jesus' nature: is he one with the Father or separate?

G. You mean the dogma of Jesus genitum non factum (generated, not created): "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father."

D. Exactly. It would have been enough at the time to give a strong political thrust in the opposite direction, in favour of the Aryans, and today Jesus would be considered Factum non genitum (created, not generated).

G. I think that today most people would find the debate on Jesus single or double nature strange.

D. After fifteen centuries of monotheism, yes. But at the time, the world was polytheist, although it was changing into monotheist. In the Nicaens' view, admitting that Jesus had been created (a real physical son, a separate person) meant to admit that there wasn't a unique god, that there were other divine entities. In other words, polytheism, kicked out of the door, would come back through the window! The reasoning was correct, in a way. Why was the Aryan Creed adopted by German tribes more easily than the Nicene Creed? Because Aryans believed Jesus was a separate person. Aryanism was a monotheism with a polytheistic angle . . .

Power relations and dogma

G. In other words, behind the clouds of incense, there are often, though not always, power relations—politics.

D. Exactly. In the Church, as the faithful listen to the Pope, the priest or the minister, this past, the Council of Nicaea (which constitutes the foundation of that personal spiritual relationship with the divine) is not apparent, but it happened. Nothing comes from nothing.

G. Are you saying that one should force lessons on the history of Christianity on little old ladies in church?

D. Of course not, but beliefs may be forced on people through the force of habit. Critical thinking is a necessity, to grant an individual the freedom of refusing or accepting these beliefs. I am for freedom of worship but even more for freedom of culture.

The Fire of Alexandria, Berlin, XIX-century woodcuts by Hermann Göll, 1876.

(In fact, we do not know with certainty that the Library was burned,

but the city's main temple, the Serapeum, containing a library,

was destroyed by the Coptic Pope Theophilus in A.D. 391.)

Like the best wines

G. What else have you read of Gore Vidal?

D. I have read various collections of articles, and I very much liked The Golden Age, set during the Roosevelt presidency. I'm curious about Duluth and I've seen enthusiastic critiques of The City and the Pillar, his controversial debut. If the quality standards of Vidal's other novels are half as high as those of Julian, all his work deserves to be read. I am keeping his books on my shelves, to be savoured slowly, as one does with the best wines.

G. I see a problem with your strategy: once you start reading one, you'll devour the rest in no time.

ODD? The oddest of anthologies is out to get you!

2011-10-11T23:55:00.009+02:00

Odd: The sense of "strange, peculiar" is first attested in 1580s from the notion of "odd one out, unpaired one of three" (attested earlier, in the fifteenth century, as "singular" in a positive sense of "renowned, rare, choice"). From the Online Etymology Dictionary

The unique Myster Odd shows one of the possible ways in which your life is going to be oddified (WARNING: includes perverted bubbles, hanged fish and someone who loses his footing):

Today sees the release of the first ODD? anthology edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.
The first? Yes. It's a series.

Each 70-80k volume will contain reprints, previously unpublished stories, and new translations of classic and hard-to-find stories.

Among a wealth of great, great stuff (see the full table of contents here), you will find a new translation of "The Head" by Karl Hans Strobl, concocted by yours faithfully.

See all the uncanny details here: odd odd anthology odd video odd subscriptions odd contest on Jeff VanderMeer's blog.

You can buy the oddity at:

The True Story of the Feejee Mermaid

2011-09-18T00:29:00.015+02:00

The Feejee Mermaid – The original drawing

of the London Exhibition, 1842, now at the Boston Museum

THE MERMAID!!! – The wonder of the world, the admiration of all ages, the theme of the Philosopher, the Historian, and the Poet. The above surprising natural production may be seen at No. 59 Saint-James Street every day, Sunday excepted, from ten in the morning until five in the afternoon. Admittance One Shilling.

In 1822, the Turf Coffeehouse in London displayed a strange mummy, a two-foot tall specimen with a baboon-like head covered in thin black hair, and human eyes, chin, breasts and nails. The face was contorted into an expression of fear or horror.

Juan Cabana's Mermaid

The mermaid had been brought to London by an American sailor, Captain Samuel Barrett Eades. In Batavia (now Jakarta), the captain had seen several curiosities. He was told the mummy had been recently caught off Japan by a fisherman who, without understanding the value of his find, had sold it to Dutch merchants. To purchase the marvel, good Captain Eades sold his ship for the sum of 6,000 dollars. He only owned one eighth of the ship but did not ask for his English partner's permission, so great was his faith in the exceptional value of the sea-maid.

Missionaries believe in the Mermaid

On his way to England, Eades exhibited the mermaid in Cape Town, where crowds rushed to admire it. A missionary and distinguished member of the church, Dr. Phillip, wrote a letter to the London Philanthropic Gazette: "I have to day seen a Mermaid, now exhibiting in this town. I have always treated the existence of this creature as fabulous, but my scepticism is now removed." The small size of the specimen did not worry him, for he surmised that the mummy had shrunk by floating about in salt water.

Wonderful Etruscan statuette (VIIth century B.C. ?)

from the necropolis of Strozzacapponi

(Antiquarium of Corciano, Perugia, Italy)

Bureaucrats want to tax the import
Upon Eades' arrival in London, the mummy was confiscated by Customs, for it wasn't clear whether these creatures should be subjected to import duties or quarantine. When the specimen could finally be exhibited, three to four hundred people a day paid a shilling to admire it.

Eades had called on an anatomist, Sir Everard Home, to certify the specimen's mermaid-nature. Sir Home sent his assistant, William Clift, to examine the mummy. Clift, an expert anatomist, touched the mummy's breasts and found a suspicious thickness below them: the junction of what appeared to be the lower body of a salmon and the upper torso of a baboon. Clift felt with his hands the point where the bones had been sawed to bring them to the proportion of human limbs. The head, too, was that of a baboon. The eyes were artificial, the fingernails made of horn.

Eades was in shock; he exhibited the Mermaid nevertheless, after swearing Home and Clift to silence.

It's real. It's REAL!

The majority of scientists of the time had already discarded the discovery, but one Dr. Price wrote an article in the Gentlemen's Magazine of October 1822, declaring that he had had the opportunity to examine the mermaid at the exhibition (under Captain Eades' jealous eyes) and that he was absolutely certain the specimen belonged to a new species. Several naturalists went to see the mummy and most of them supported Dr. Price.

Imagine Eades' relief when other naturalists (less skilled than William Clift) declared the mummy real.

The Ship Owner treats the Maid like his daughter

Mr. Ellery, the owner of the ship Eades had sold without permission, wasn't happy. He went to see the sly captain and tried to get his money back, but not only did Eades refuse (he didn't even offer a share of the hefty profit made with the exhibition); he threatened to leave the country with the Maid of the Sea!

Ellery appeared before the court of Chancery to obtain a restraining order preventing Eades from leaving the country with the mummy or selling it. His lawyer's argument was that the Maid was in a condition similar to a naive lady who had eloped with her beau, an adventurer who was after her heritage. The young woman's parents could appeal to the Lord Chancellor, who had the faculty of making the imprudent heiress his ward, and the young lady could not marry without her ward's consent. The mummy "be it man, woman or mermaid" had been purchased with the result of the ship's sale, which made the specimen Ellery's propriety, too. The Lord Chancellor released the order. Eades could not leave London.

Antique mermaid mummy preserved at Karukayado Temple,

city of Hashimoto, Wakayama.

Now the increasingly questionable captain was stuck in London with his belle. Everything could have continued for months, maybe years, if not for a mistake dictated by [insert: hubris, stuppiddity—you, know, like in a plot that works only because the character behaves like an idiot]. He boasted about Home certifying the specimen's authenticity. Home's nose prickled with rage, and the gentleman ordered Clift to write an article exposing Eades' fraud. The article appeared in the Morning Herald.

But the Mermaid was not a maid

Other newspapers reprinted Clift article. As we would say today, the scholarly debate went viral. Londoners began to criticise the gullibility of the working classes, and the naturalists who had endorsed the Mermaid.

Certain Mr. Murray sneered at the scientists who had supported Captain Eades. One of Murray's friends, the well-travelled Mr. Morrison, recounted blood-curling stories about the habits of the "yellow tribes," who seized children, tortured them horribly to obtain that suffering-maid facial expression and cut the little bodies in two to sew together the human torsos and the lower halves of innocent salmons.

And anyway, after four months, the Londoners were after new sensational displays.

Toby, the Learned Pig

The Mermaid toured England in the company of Toby, the Learned Pig. Two thugs tried to enter a fair exhibition. Thrown out by the bouncers, they threatened the manager to come back in force and steal the Maid of the Oceans, after destroying the stall.

The manager tucked the Mermaid under his arm and ran to court, asking for protection (the marine lady was the Lord Chancellor's ward after all). This stunt made the headline news and drew more spectators, eager to witness theft and murder.

A voluptuous fishtailed girl

The tour of the provinces continued into 1825. At the Bartholomew Fair, a performer used the drawing of a voluptuous fishtailed woman to lure the spectators into buying tickets (surely a Victorian version of Daniel's Sirenetta).

La Sirenetta by Daniel Pasetti

The Mermaid disappeared until 1845, although William Clift affirmed he had seen it in a French country museum. Other Memaids were exhibited in fairs and museums. Mr. Eades, ruined, had resumed his job as a sea captain to repay the owner of ship Eades had sold to buy the fake. He worked for twenty years. And, a few years after Eades' death, in 1840, a man who declared himself to be the son of the Mermaid's ancient owner met one of Barnum's associates.

Our beauty was ready to begin her American career in the famous circus...

Curious about more curios? Buy buy buy buy!

THE THACKERY LAMBSHEAD CABINET OF CURIOSITIES

Source: Read this fantastic book:
The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History, by Jan Bondeson

The ancestor of medieval bestiaries

2011-09-10T08:47:00.027+02:00

Very practical set of arms, claws and tail (no source available)

The forthcoming Bestiary anthology, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (see the post including the ToC) , inspired an exploration of the origins of medieval bestiaries. The bestiary included entries about ordinary, exotic and mythological animals (the authors believed that mythological beasts were as real as the others), offering analogies, symbols and moral parables.

I have found the grandfather of medieval bestiaries in the person of Claudius Aelianus, a Roman author (ca. 175 – ca. 235) who, like many snobs of his time, despised Latin and wrote in Greek.

De Natura Animalium-original title Περὶ Ζῴων Ἰδιότητος- (On the Nature of Animals) is not a collection of stories about animals. Our Claudius put together descriptions of oddities worth the best cabinet of curiosities. The author's intent was to offer information to those that, in the pursuit of truth and wisdom, strived to explore and understand the wonders of the world.

Claudius Aelianus on Tritons:

It is general knowledge that a species exists, born in the sea, similar to the human species from the head down to the middle of the body.

Though it is hard to believe, they say that when a triton is touched, its scales disappear. The governor of Acaia, wanting to verify the creature's nature, ripped off a swathe of its skin and threw it into the fire; a foul stench burned his nostrils, clearly indicating that it could be neither a terrestrial nor a marine animal.

Triton, 2nd century Archaeological Museum Istanbul
Gigantomachia, Photo by G. Dall'Orto

Unfortunately, all curiosity abandoned the governor when he fell from a small boat into the sea. The citizens of Tanagra interpreted the incident as punishment for the crime against a triton, since the corpse that washed back on shore reeked of the same odour as the triton's burnt skin.

It is shameful for a man of sound principles not to lend credence to Apollo Didymaeus [so called because he was Artemis' twin brother—Yours Faithfully Translator's note], who dubbed the triton "sea lamb" when he sang "A triton, a monster from the depths belonging to Neptune's flock, was captured by nets let down by fishermen."

Apollo was cute
(Lycian Apollo -Louvre)

[doesn't look like a lamb to me, given those mean-looking claws]

Therefore, if an omniscient god declares that this creature belongs to Neptune's flock, we cannot question his words-Claudius Aelianus *

Something in the general tone of the piece tells me that the author himself lent little credence to the story.

The next post will bring you the extraordinary story of the Feejee Mermaid.

----
*This translation is not exactly a first-hand car. The passage was translated to English by yours-faithfully from Daniel Pasetti's Italian translation of Conrad Gessner's Latin translation from the original Greek text (Conrad Gessner was a Swiss scientist and natural historian of the Renaissance). An English translation by A. F. Scholfield has been published in the Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols. (19[ ]-59). Well, I could have handled the translation from Latin, but Gessner's translation was very literal, retaining a lot of Greek phrasing (very convolute).

Weird Tales Summer Issue

2011-08-10T12:45:00.005+02:00

On the Weird Tales site, editor Ann VanderMeer fondly calls WT #358 the "Goes to Hell issue."

Cover art by Carrie Ann Baade. Take a look at her fantastic paintings here.

This issue features my story "The Hand," about a psycho-lover who loves too much. I wrote about this character for the first time when I was fourteen, and it came back to haunt me last year, stirred by a prompt for the Shock Totem Flash Fiction Contest. I'm not really a flash-fiction writer, and I usually rework and expand the initial idea. Since my first participation in the contest (in March 2010), I sold two of these (dark) stories: "The Hand" to Weird Tales and "Playground" to PS Publishing.

Here's the Weird Tales ToC:

THE EYRIE, by Ann VanderMeer
A SWEET DISORDER IN THE DRESS, by Genevieve Valentine
WEIRD CINEMA, by Robert A. Kowal
THE LIBRARY by Cynthia Ward
CARRIE ANN BAADE, Interviewed by Ann VanderMeer
THE DINER ON THE EDGE OF HELL, by Ramsey Shehadeh
JAGANNATH, by Karin Tidbeck
A BEGINNERS GUIDE TO SANDCASTLE ALCHEMY, by Nik Houser
LOOK AT THE JAM IM IN, by Richard Holinger
THE HAND, by Gio Clairval
A CONTRACT WITHOUT LOOPHOLES, by Eric Lis
BEELZEBUBS MESSIAH, by Brant Danay
LOST IN LOVECRAFT, by Kenneth Hite

I can't wait to grab my contributor's copy.

Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities: Finally, the Truth. All is veridicious!

2011-07-13T01:21:00.012+02:00

"Curiosus, cupidus, studiosus" is the definition of curiosity in Trevoux's dictionary, published in 1771: attention, desire, passion of knowledge

Over the years eccentric people would collect odd, strange and fantastic items, to assemble them in cabinets. The richest (or craziest) among these people devoted entire rooms to their collections. In Germany, a collector's room was called Kunst und Wunderkammer, meaning "Chamber of Art and Marvels." In France, the appellation was cabinet de raretés.

Curiositas by Francesco Calzolari (explorer, pharmacist, naturalist and collector, 1522-1609 Verona, Italy)

A few Cabinets of Curiosities came to life during the 17th century, and became very fashionable in the 18th century. Alas, several collections were dispersed after their owners' death, or discarded as silly and unscientific endeavours until in the twentieth century a renewed interest sparked the creation of the first European museums dedicated to old mirabilia.

In 2008, the NY Museum of Modern Art hosted an exhibition titled Wunderkammer--I missed out on it. I would have killed for a catalogue.

Nicholas Lampert: Locus Tank (MOMA, 2008)

In Wunderkammer time of splendour, natural objects were called "Naturalia," and considered the work of God, while artefacts were known as "Artificialia." When we visit such exhibitions, the distinction appears odd. Boundaries are blurred. The fantastical rivals reason. Beliefs and scientific knowledge overlap. Art and sciences are blended together.

Let's take the remora (suckerfish), a popular guest of cabinets of curiosities.

This fish has a modified dorsal fin that sticks to larger marine animals (or your back, if you ask nicely). The Latin word remora means "obstacle." Contemporaries of the Wunderkammer time believed that a tiny remora could stop the course of a ship, sink it, destroy the cargo, and drown the crew (did it work with the insurance company?).

In 1822, an extraordinary find, the famous Feejee Mermaid, bought by American captain Samuel Barret Eades, for the price of a ship, restored the belief in those mythical creatures. Experts examined the specimen and validated it: The old scholars were right! Mermaids really existed. No one remarked on the fact that the original Greek myth described mermaids as half women half birds.

Notwithstanding what I wrote in my previous blog post, Dr. Thackery Lambshead only collected certified items. I am freely correcting my erroneous statement and I hereby declare that I was neither threatened nor forced by editors Ann & Jeff VanderMeer to retract my testimony.

Here's a partial list of the real & veridicious items displayed in Dr. Lambshead's Cabinet of Curiosities, or described by sincere, authoritative & expertful writers:

- Electrical Neurheographiton

- Pulvadmonitor

- Singing Fish

- Olivaceous Cormorant

- Coffin Torpedo

- Decanter of Everlasting Sadness

- Dracula's Testicles

- Harness and Leash for Fly

- Oneyroscope

- Box of Reversed Commas

(and many more!)

You don't believe me? Read the book : link

How I Burned Evil Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities to the Underground

2011-07-07T10:28:00.017+02:00

The Burning Pea

Felicino - You don't strike me as the arsonist type.

Gio – Watch me.

Felicino – I can't. The good doctor's cabinet is in ruins.

Gio – Precisely. I set fire to it myself.

Felicino – Hold on. It wasn't you. The arsonist was Lambshead's housekeeper, one Paulette.

Gio – Yes, but that's one of my characters, and, as Gustave Flaubert put it, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." Now, look at him—

Felicino – Who?

Gio – The Jeff VanderMeer. He wrote that Paulette's account was probably false. Liar.

Felicino – I told you not to trust the descendant of the Flying Dutch. Plus, he's been known for allying himself with little green people:

VanderMeer Helps Aliens Invade Earth

So what happened?

Gio – One fine day of July, last year, VanderMeer Himself sent me a prompt, to write a piece for one of his anthologies.

Felicino – That was cool of him.

Gio – Yes, but it turned out it wasn't the right prompt. Ann is the one that sends the right prompts. He's the one that tries to mislead you. Like with this Public Refutation in Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities .

But I did burn the Doctor's cabinet. I did!

Felicino – Calm down.

Gio – So I wrote a story with my friend Daniel Pasetti.

Felicino – The one whose thesis will change the face of History?

Gio – Yes. (The thesis is scheduled for publication in 2058). But Jeff rejected our story, under the pretext that we hadn't used the prompt.

Felicino – The one he hadn't sent you.

Gio – That one, yes. So I thought I'm going to burn your darped cabinet and all the curios. I wrote a new story in half an hour, stopped by the usual Writers' 'Orshop, where all my friends said "Is this a joke?", and sent the new story to Jeff.

Felicino – And he bought it.

Gio – Yes. He said "That pea story is the perfect capper." I was stripped of my revenge!

Felicino – Stop crying. It's a great anthology. Look at that line-up:

Holly Black, Greg Broadmore, Ted Chiang, John Coulthart, Rikki Ducornet, Amal El-Mohtar, Minister Faust, Jeffrey Ford, Lev Grossman, N.K. Jemisin, Caitlin R. Kiernan, China Mieville, Mike Mignola, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Garth Nix, Naomi Novik, James A. Owen, Helen Oyeyemi, J.K. Potter, Cherie Priest, Ekaterina Sedia, Jan Svankmajer, Rachel Swirsky, Carrie Vaughn, Jake von Slatt, Tad Williams, Charles Yu (and many more).

Aren't you happy?

Gio – Oh, yes, I AM! But in this antho, they all behave like a bunch of Absurdists.

Felicino – What d'you mean?

Gio –Do you believe anything of what they wrote for the anthology is true? Come on. I tell you, the only true story is "The Pea." I was there. I set the place on fire.

I did.

" The Pea," by Gio Clairval, can be found in the wondrous HarperCollins anthology

Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer.

OUT ON JULY 12!

ODD? (which is not an acronym: "Odd" is odd)

2011-06-29T00:44:00.006+02:00

During the French Revolution, a severed head, fallen into a basket after the execution, retains its consciousness and attaches itself (literally) to the body of a mutilated woman. This union beyond death allows the head to access the woman's memories and witness her repulsive crime. . . ("The Head" by Karl Hans Strobl)

When Jeff VanderMeer asked me if I was interested in translating a story from German for the anthology he and Ann VanderMeer were putting together, I typed: "Sounds interesting. What's the title of the anthology?"

"ODD?"

"Okay, but what does O.D.D. stand for?"

Another ToC, this time including my translation of Karl Hans Strobl's "The Head," from German.

Strobl (Glau, 1877-Perchtoldsdorf, Wien, 1946) was an Austrian writer of fantastical fiction. Discovered by his contemporary public thanks to the novel Die Vaclavbude, this prolific author published a hundred pieces, including novels, novellas and short fiction.

The story selected by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, "Der Kopf,"1899, appeared in the collection Lemuria - Unheimliche Geschicten (Uncanny Stories), in 1917, the edition I used for my translation. It is my favourite, too.

ODD? Table of Contents, edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

“Is it odd or are you too normal?”

Amos Tutuola – “The Dead Babies”

Gustave Le Rouge – “The War of the Vampires” (new translation by Brian Evenson and David Beus)

Jeffrey Ford – “Weiroot”

Leopoldo Lugones – “The Bloat Toad” (new translation by Larry Nolen)

Mark Samuels – “Apt 205″

Michael Cisco – “Modern Cities Exist Only to Be Destroyed” (published only in a limited edition previously)

Nalo Hopkinson – “Slow Cold Chick”

Sumanth Prabhaker – “A Hard Truth About Waste Management”

Hiromi Goto – “Stinky Girl”

Eric Basso – “Logues”

Edward Morris – “Lotophagi”

Karin Tidbeck – “The Aunts” (new story; previously unpublished)

Jeffrey Thomas – “The Fork”

Rikki Ducornet – “The Volatilized Ceiling of Baron Munodi”

Leena Krohn – “The Night of the Normal Distribution Curve” (new story; previously unpublished, translation by Anna Volmari and J. Robert Tupasela)

Amanda le Bas de Plumetot – “Unmaking” (new story; previously unpublished)

Karl Hans Strobl – “The Head” (new translation by Gio Clairval)

Caitlin R. Kiernan – “A Child’s Guide to the Hollow Hills”

Stacey Levine – “Sausage”

The synopsis of Bride of the Golem

2011-06-21T13:26:00.001+02:00

I have been busy cutting wood and tiles, but here's the synopsis of Bride of the Golem, an Anthology of Humorous Jewish Horror, in which will appear "Toytfogl (Bird of Death)," a story co-written with Daniel Pasetti.

From Mimetic Declination, the blog of the editor, Gus Ginsburg:

Barry Rosenberg “Gershom’s Golem”. World-weary kabbalist Gershom makes a golem to do his yardwork but ends up with a kvetcher.

Norman Rubin “Aunt Bessie and the ‘It’”. A fierce ghostly presence fails to scare a yiddishe bubbie.

Sharon Diane King’s “Feast of the Laughing Cow” is a deliciously anachronistic Rabelaisian romp set in the ancient land of Israel.

Jim Meirose “Deni-al”. Golem Noir. A kabbalist makes a golem. A mobster wants to buy him. A rabbi gets in the way.

Melissa Yuan-Innes “WWWJD”. A satirical story of Joseph Cartaphilus, Wandering Jew.

Liz Coley “Till Death Does His Part”. Death comes for Ms. Edelstein, but she won’t be carted away so easily.

Aaron Simon “My Dog the Dybbuk”. A young man finds his beloved dog taken over by a dybbuk, the spirit of a Yiddish-obscenity-spouting cranky old man

Adina Rosenthal “Succubus-in-law”. A woman’s Passover seder with her new mother-in-law becomes her last supper.

E. Mitchell “I Was a Teenage Yeshiva Boy Werewolf”. A delightful spoof of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” with werewolves.

Eric Joel Bresin “Pig”. A reimagining of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a young and unobservant Greg wakes up one Shabbat morning as a pig.

David Hendrickson “Floater”. Elderly Hiram Silverman is afflicted by a most unusual floater in one of his eyes.

Tonia Brown “Zombie Golem”. A man accidentally kills his girlfriend during a bout of consensual rough sex, then consults a kabbalist to reanimate her.

Mike DiChristina “Mr. Met”. Lenny, a man with a gambling habit and a mystical autocad scanner kills his wife for money, then in a fit of remorse, brings her back, to his misfortune.

Ken Liu “The MSG Golem”. During a space voyage, a Chinese girl descended from the Jews of Kaifeng receives a message from God to make a golem from MSG to save a planet.

David Naimon “Member”. A revised reprint (with permission of Zyzzyva Magazine) of a story of a young man’s dread facing his bar mitzvah.

Anna Taborska “Dirty Dybbuk”. A proper orthodox woman from Golder’s Green, London, is inhabited by the spirit of a deceased nymphomaniac.

A.B.S. Dudevant “The Gingerbread Golem”. A richly-written story of an Ethiopian Jewess who creates a Golem to get rid of her husband.

Gio Clairval “Toytfogl”. Humorous with an antiquated Lovecraft/Steampunk vibe, the story of two fin-de-siecle professors who unleash an unnaturally evil beast.

Gus Ginsburg “By Way of Explanation”. A newly vampiric Hassid decides to become a mohel to get his blood, while his wife is convinced he’s become homosexual.

G. Miki Hayden “The Cantor and the Ghost”. The ghost of newly deceased Rabbi Wild haunts and bedevils a congregant he dislikes. The Cantor tries to mediate.

Did Stephen Hawking Kill Philosophy?

2011-05-05T08:58:00.029+02:00

Hawking and Mlodinow think that philosophy is dead and that today only science is able to explain reality and the universe (but Umberto Eco disagrees).

Socrates Undead

In 2010, Bantham Books published The Grand Design, by physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.

The book was reviewed on the weekly magazine L'Espresso by Italian academic and writer Umberto Eco, widely known for his philosophical-historical mystery novel The Name of the Rose.

I talked with my friend Daniel Pasetti, who is putting the last words to a thesis in history and philosophy.

Is philosophy really dead? (Is this a stupid question?)

Gio Clairval: What do you think of Hawking's book? And of Umberto Eco's opinion?

Daniel Pasetti: You can look at the book's central idea from a general and from a specific point of view. Concerning the general point of view, the end of philosophy is a classic tale of the twentieth century: the announcement of the death of a discipline, an art, a genre, even a civilization. Disasters are cool and provide food for the audience's curiosity. The Western civilization is dead, and so is psychoanalysis, literature, democracy, dictatorship, machismo, feminism, communism, the automobile, ballpoint pens, and so forth.

Is Science Fiction really dead? (Is this a cyclic question?)

G. Many things die in literature—in addition to our characters, I mean.

D. Oh, yes The most successful subgenre of science fiction is the "Rant on the Death of Science Fiction." Hard SF, Space Opera, Post-apocalyptic SF etc. All have had their glory moments. Then the readers' interest declines, to return in waves. The only subgenre never touched by the crisis is "Death of SF,' forever verdant and fresh. It's been around for half a century or more, so present and solid that, even though it's no narrative, we can consider it literary matter; it has all the features, conventions, tropes and variations on the theme, and national schools of thought…More literary than that ... you die.

G. I agree, but things that peter out or lose their usefulness, and then "die," do exist.

D True. The Soviet Union is really dead, and no one talks about it anymore. The quadrille is dead, and nobody has been dancing the quadrille for a few centuries, and it goes without saying, alchemy is dead—

G. I think Alchemy is undead. But can we go back to Hawking and Eco?

D. Yes, yes. But you must agree on the fact that, if we talk obsessively of the death of something, it means that the dead thing is alive, right?

G. Let's leave the cemetery and go back to Hawking.

Those two fellows claim philosophy is dead, but then they go on talking philosophy

D. All right. On the specific level, I think Eco is right. Questions on the foundations of what exists, "How can we understand reality?", "Why is there something rather than nothing?" are exquisitely and traditionally philosophical questions, but the point is that even Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow's answers are philosophical.

The answers offered in the book, the fruit of research and the interaction of hard sciences—physics, cosmology,…-- all have illustrious antecedents in the history of philosophy, since the Greeks.

Hawking and Mlodinow invoke a realism dependent on different models that can offer different, satisfactory answers, and, according to the authors, the answers depend on the ping-pong between our models and reality, which depends on the plurality of the models themselves...

G. Fascinating. Now can you say it in English?

D. Well—

G. Okay. As Michael Shermer puts it "None of us can ever be completely sure that the world really is as it appears, or if our minds have unconsciously imposed a misleading pattern on the data. I call this belief-dependent realism. [...] In his new book, The Grand Design, co-authored with the Caltech mathematician Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking presents a philosophy of science he calls “model-dependent realism,” which is based on the assumption that our brains form models of the world from sensory input, that we use the model most successful at explaining events and assume that the models match reality (even if they do not), and that when more than one model makes accurate predictions “we are free to use whichever model is most convenient.” Employing this method, Hawking and Mlodinow claim that “it is pointless to ask whether a model is real, only whether it agrees with observation.” The full article is here: Stephen Hawking's radical philosophy of science.

D. Yes, yes. Do you remember Hilary Putnam's "Truth and Ethics" and his internal realism?

G. (Sniffs the air). I think the coffee is boiling. 'Xcuse me a sec.

D. Eco remembers (and I read Putnam, too).

G. That's why I work with you. Because you're the one who reads all the Putnams. One or two sugars?

D. Well, Putnam uses almost the same words Hawking and Mlodinow use.

G. I don't think it's cool to accuse Hawking of being a plagiarist. It'd make you look bad. I'm going to edit this one out.

D. This whole thing is an ancient topic we've heard a thousand times, and not only from Putnam! Kant moved exactly in this direction with what he called "Ich Denke" (I think) and Leibniz, too, with his "Apperception," and so many others. The problem of "perceiving perception" is ancient, the answers uncountable.

Hawking and Mlodinow replicate ancient answers, too. Other issues raised in the book are easily found in the history of philosophy.

G. Most of my friends don't want to read the history of philosophy. That's why they read Hawking.

D. Take the existence of other universes, or the thesis of creation without a "creator." Already done, by Protagoras, Spinoza, Marx, and many others. A crowd of materialists have already questioned the idea of a God creating all things. Come on!

Science seeks answers, philosophy seeks questions.

G. Okay, some of Hawking and Mlodinow's answers repeat century-old theories, but now there are scientific theories to sustain them.

D. Yes, and a few passages of the book relate the particular beliefs of several ancient and medieval philosophers, which often built conceptions of reality very close to the current ones, and sometimes ended up attributing perceptions ... to the seven planets (in their time, they counted the Moon in).

However, philosophy is not about competing with science. Philosophy works on another plane. Philosophy precedes scientific questions by questioning the fundamentals of science. Ultimately, philosophy opens new areas of thought. Science is about researching the answers; philosophy creates questions. Martin Heidegger argued "we should not so much seek answers, but other questions."

On a personal level, you can stumble across answers that seem satisfactory to you. But philosophy doesn't know satisfaction. Philosophy is anxious work that creates more anxiety.

G. I'm editing this one out, too. Never worked in advertisement, have you?

D. In some ways, philosophy has "created" the world as we know it. Though you can also locate philosophical thoughts in Indian and Eastern culture, these are very rarely detached from religious thought.

How Europe conquered the world

[Editorial Note: I suggest skipping this rant and starting with the intriguing question I put just below. Although you may have to come back to read this ridiculously long paragraph if you want to get my question.]

The only area of the world where, historically, explanations of reality became autonomous from religious beliefs, to form what we call "philosophy," is the Mediterranean basin. From there, through the Greco-Roman civilization, this idea of philosophy independent from religion spread to the rest of Europe. And Europe, with all its flaws (but also its merits) imposed this idea on the entire world. Why did Europe succeed? Because it was militarily stronger? Richer? Not so much. Europe became richer and stronger than the rest of the world, but it wasn't so in the beginning. During antiquity and in the middle ages, some provinces of India or China were infinitely richer and more populous than even the major European kingdoms. And they were also more advanced technologically. They had everything to win in a world competition, but they lost. Why Is That? They didn't have everything, that's why. They had many certainties and few questions, those questions from European philosophers and scientists sparked Europe's intellectual development, and therefore its scientific development. Actually, it was Plato who conquered the world, not his Majesty's fleet nor the Grande Armada.

Plato, the first colonialist

G. Do you mean that colonialism is Plato's fault?

D. In a sense, yes, the civilizations originated by Plato conquered the world. But the anti-colonialists are "Plato's children" as well. Ho Chi Minh became a revolutionary in Paris, not in some temple in Indochina. When we use certain categories, we use them in an extensive way, and we often forget what they imply in detail. "Western world" means Hitler, Auschwitz and colonialism, but also their enemies; the ' Western world ' is the Ku Klux Klan, but also Martin Luther King. The modern ideas of human rights came alive in the triangle of Great Britain-France-United States, with all their antecedents in the model of a Roman citizen. What I mean is that Europe, and later on, the Western civilization, by conquering the world, has inoculated it with both its diseases and their vaccines. And behind this conquest stands the continuing interrogation and the feverish analysis that we call philosophy.

G. Let's go back to Hawking and Eco or we will talk football, next.

D. Yes, and—

What about God? Is He dead, too?

G. Wait, wait! I have another question. I read a few reviews of The Grand Design on line, and I noticed that almost none of them focused on the war between science and philosophy. They were almost all about the God-Science issue.

D. True. I noticed, too. That's typical, and I was amused at seeing that Eco discards the little journalistic debate concerning the "scandalous denial" of a Creator God expressed in the book and focuses instead on Hawking and Mlodinow's denial of the usefulness of philosophy, and the way they do it: through a work that's half-scientific and half-philosophical. Umberto Eco points out: if there is one point on which the book can be criticized, it is precisely this one, not the problem of God.

Hawking's book title: Not the main course

Of course, the very title evokes the "intelligent design," and calls into question this design, but it is more an editorial stunt than anything essential. The book confines itself to expounding on the thought shared by 99% of the scientists. And it's the millionth book to do so. If it has made some noise, it's just because of Hawking's reputation, not because it offers anything new about the denial of a Creator God.

In fact, God is an irrelevant argument in scientific and philosophical debates. It can be hard to swallow for American creationists and their European counterparts, but the Creator God rests in the archives, together with medieval catapults, bows and swords.

God and the Divine

Of course, all questions remain concerning the divine, the numinous--which is different from the God-super-wizard Merlin of popular religion. Several thinkers, believers and non-believers, are engaged in the debate, but this reflection, even among Christian philosophers, is infinitely more sophisticated and subtle than the vision of a one-dimensional God, vengeful or benevolent, the vision brought to us by the Bible. And the journalists that find Hawking's negation of God shocking, more often than not know nothing about the current philosophical debate about the Divine, particularly if the journalists are believers.

G. In the endgame, would you recommend The Grand Design?

D. Yes.

Obviously, the book has all the limits of popularization. Some scientists have accused it of being hasty and too superficial; but this is the eternal problem of popularization, which implies simplification. As I am no astrophysicist, I found it an interesting read, if you forget the claim about the death of philosophy.

(If you have just skimmed everything above) In Rabelais' words, this is the substantific marrow:

It's a book that deals with philosophy while denying the legitimacy of philosophy. I think that a more appropriate subtitle would be:

The Ancient Greek Philosopher Parmenides Re-read in the Light of M-theory – a Brief Compendium of Scientific-Philosophical ideas.

G. Book marketing was never your specialty, was it?

The Table of Content of "Bride of the Golem"

2011-04-20T20:28:00.011+02:00

Gus Ginsburg has posted the provisional list of stories: Mimetic Declination

Barry Rosenberg "Gershom's Golem"
Norman Rubin "Aunt Bessie and the It"
Sharon King "Feast of the Laughing Cow"
Jim Meirose "Deni-al"
Melissa Yuan-Innes "WWWJD"
Liz Coley "Till Death Does His Part"
Aaron Simon "My Dog the Dybbuk"
Adina Rosenthal "Succubus-in-Law"
E. Mitchell "I Was a Teenage Yeshiva Boy Werewolf"
Eric Joel Bresin "Pig"
David Hendrickson "Floater"
Tonia Brown "Zombie Golem"
Michael DiCristina "Mr. Met"
Ken Liu "The MSG Golem"
David Perlmutter "The Old Man and the Vampire"
David Naimon "Member"
Anna Taborska "Dirty Dybbuk"
A.B.S. Dudevant "The Gingerbread Golem"
Gio Clairval & Daniel Pasetti "Toytfoygl"
Gus Ginsburg "By Way of Explanation"

In the meantime, you can watch The Golem (Der Golem : Wie er in die Welt kam), directed by Paul Weneger and Carl Boese en 1920. The film is now in the public domain.

It can be seen here: Bloody Disgusting

Bride of the Golem

2011-04-14T21:18:00.007+02:00

Bronze, JAPAN
XVIIIth century, Edo

Daniel Pasetti and I sold a story to Bride of the Golem, an Anthology of Humorous Jewish Horror, edited by Gus Ginsburg.

Mythic creatures, birds and clocks, Danube, Moldau, two particular kinds of Jews, afflictions of the soul, and strange artefacts—what do these things have in common? All of them are in "Toytfoygl" (Bird of Death).

My accomplice Daniel Pasetti studied philosophy and history; his obsessions are the army of ancient Rome and Science Fiction.

The Bestiary anthology

2011-04-06T18:48:00.001+02:00

"Salvador Dali, From 'Les Songes Drolatiques de Pantagruel' (by Rabelais)

Pre-pimping (the ToC isn't complete):

Jeff VanderMeer has been putting together an anthology with his wife, Hugo-winner editor Ann VanderMeer.

Here's the Table of Contents (thus far):

Auricle – Gio Clairval
Bartleby’s Typewriter – Corey Redekop
Counsellor Crow – Karen Lord
Daydreamer by Proxy – Dexter Palmer
Enkantong-bato – Dean Francis Alfar
Figmon – Michael Cisco
Guest – Brian Conn
Hadrian’s Sparrikan – Stephen Graham Jones
Ible – Brian Evenson
Jason Bug – Joseph Nigg
Mosquito Boy – Felix Gilman
Pyret – Karin Tidbeck
Quintus – Michal Ajvaz
Rapacis X. Loco Signa – L.L. Hannett
Tongues of Moon Toad – Cat Rambo
Ugly-Nest Rat – Eric Schaller
Vanga – Rikki Ducornet
Xaratan – Rhys Hughes
Yakshantariksh – Vandana Singh
Zee – Richard Howard

Marcel Proust's Questionnaire

2011-03-31T17:11:00.015+02:00

A few writers use questionnaires to interview their characters. Today I am posting Marcel Proust's famous list of 32 questions, in a new translation, which, I hope, reflects Proust's answers better than what I have seen on line.

Questionnaires were à la mode in every 19th-century European salon; Marcel Proust filled at least two or three during social events spanning a decade (1880-1890).

Several versions of the questionnaire exist. The following is the "classical" version, which the writer filled when he was twenty-one (Proust did not write the questionnaire):

The foremost trait of your personality?

A craving to be loved, or, to be more precise, to be caressed and spoiled rather than to be admired

The quality you seek in a man?

Feminine charm

The quality you seek in a woman?

A man's virtues, and frankness in friendship

What do you most value in your friends?

Tenderness - provided they are exquisite enough to make their tenderness worth having

What is your worst flaw?

Lack of will

What is your favourite occupation?

Loving

What is your dream of happiness?

Not, I fear, a very elevated one. I don't have the courage to say what it is. I fear I would destroy it by the mere action of putting it into words.

What would your greatest misfortune be?

Never to have known my mother or my grandmother

What you would like to be?

Myself - as those whom I admire would like me to be

In which country would you like to live?

One where certain things that I want would come true - and where feelings of tenderness would always be reciprocated. [Proust's underlining]

What is your favourite colour?

Beauty lies not in colours but in their harmony

What is your favourite flower?

The one my friend loves - but apart from that, all

What is your favourite bird?

The swallow

Who are you favourite writers?

At the moment, Anatole France and Pierre Loti

Who are you favourite poets?

Baudelaire and Alfred de Vigny

Who are your favourite fictional heroes?

Hamlet

Who are your favourite fictional heroines?

Berenice

Who are your favourite composers?

Beethoven, Wagner, Schumann

Who are your favourite painters?

Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt

Who are your heroes in real life?

Monsieur Darlu, Monsieur Boutroux (professors)

Who is your favourite heroines of history?

Cleopatra

What are your favourite names?

I can only have one at a time

What do you most dislike?

Whatever is wrong in me

What historical figures do you most despise?

I am too ignorant to say

What event in military history do you most admire?

My own enlistment as a volunteer!

What reform do you most admire?

(no response)

The natural gift you would most like to possess:

Will power and irresistible charm

How would you like to die?

A better man than I am, and much beloved

What is your present state of mind?

Annoyance at having to think about myself in order to answer these questions

To what faults do you feel most indulgent?

Those that I understand

What is your motto?

I prefer not to say, for fear it might bring me bad luck.

Story up at Fantasy Magazine

2011-02-14T15:42:00.000+01:00

Waltzing Lizards - Sheppard Hill

Read my story The Lizard Dance, written with Jeff VanderMeer, Fantasy Magazine, 02/14/2011.

Italo Calvino on Writing

2010-08-15T14:37:00.000+02:00

The idea of this post came to me from the image of a floating city, a poster by French artist Stephan Muntaner (not the artwork displayed here), to be inserted in the forthcoming Bible of Steampunk brought to you by the master of this blog. The poster depicts an industrial city yanked away from earth along with a cushion of soil. An aerial impossibility.

Steampunk is often—not always, but often—set during the industrial revolution, a time that revolves around the heaviness of steel. A weighty century, indeed. Too-heavy ships crossed the oceans. Eiffel’s tower represented Man’s victory over iron. The ponderous consciousness of matter—inevitable—dominated until the late eighties. Asimov imagined immense computers. Arthur C. Clarke let enormous steles fall from the sky.

But today, what fascinates us most in Steampunk? Airships pulled upward by light gasses. Impossibly floating cities.

Calvino’s working method for writing

Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988) is based on a series of lessons by Italian writer Italo Calvino (1923-1985) for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. We only have five of the planned lectures because Calvino never completed the sixth. He died before leaving Italy.

In the first of the five memos, Calvino says about his writing: “[…] my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.”

Calvino describes “lightness” as a “lightening of language whereby meaning is conveyed through a verbal texture that seems weightless, until the meaning itself takes on the same rarefied consistency.”

Our current world invites us to lightness.

“Today every branch of science seems intent on demonstrating that the world is supported by the most minute entities, such as the messages of DNA, the impulses of neurons, and quarks, and neutrinos wandering through space since the beginning of time . . . . .

Then we have computer science. […] The second industrial revolution, unlike the first, does not present us with such crushing images as rolling mills and molten steel, but with “bits” in a flow of information traveling along circuits in the form of electronic impulses. The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits.”

Modern science goes beyond the idea of gravity

According to Erik Verlinde, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, gravity is an illusion. In a recent paper (January 2010), titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” he affirms that gravity is a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases. His point of view, he says, explains the existence of the dark matter that is supposed to hold galaxies together (from an article by Dennis Overbye for the New York Times).

Verlinde’s view: Your hair frizzles in the heat and humidity, because there are more ways for your hair to be curled than to be straight, and nature likes options. So it takes a force to pull hair straight and eliminate nature’s options. The force we call gravity since Isaac Newton is simply a by-product of nature’s propensity to maximize disorder. For Verlinde, gravity is an “entropic force.”

A few scientists disagree; others say that Verlinde is stating what we already know after the works of Ted Jacobson of the University of Maryland.

Before Jacobson, Jacob Bekenstein of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University, among others, described a mysterious connection between black holes and thermodynamics, culminating in Dr. Hawking’s discovery in 1974 that when quantum effects are taken into account black holes would glow and eventually explode.

Black holes, in effect, are holograms. All the information about what has been lost inside them is encoded on their surfaces.

Physicists have been wondering whether we are all maybe just shadows on a distant wall. Like in Plato’s famous metaphor of the cavern.

What are shadows if not a substance made of lightness?

The Irresistible Lightness of Metaphors

Going back to Calvino’s lesson: “For Ovid […] everything can be transformed into something else, and knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world. […] He tells how a woman realizes that she is changing into a lotus tree: her feet are rooted to the earth, a soft bark creeps up little by little and enfolds her groin; she makes a movement to tear her hair and finds her hands full of leaves. Or he speaks of Arachne’s fingers, expert at winding or unraveling wool, turning the spindle, plying the needle in embroidery, fingers that at a certain point we see lengthening into slender spiders’ legs and beginning to weave a web.

“In […] Ovid, lightness is a way of looking at the world based on philosophy and science: the doctrines of Epicurus and those of Pythagoras for Ovid (a Pythagoras who, as presented by Ovid, greatly resembles the Buddha). In both cases the lightness is also something arising from the writing itself, from the poet’s own linguistic power, quite independent of whatever philosophic doctrine the poet claims to be following.”

In one classic story I recently translated, a man becomes an axolotl, a silent being that remains stock still at the bottom of its aquarium but can move with incomparable nimbleness (Julio Cortazar, “Axolotl”). In another, which I haven’t translated, a woman is metamorphosed into a salamander (Mercé Rodoreda, “The Salamander”).

The first protagonist is a foreigner, an alien (a South-American) who lives in Paris. The story compares the axolotls of the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle to the Aztec, whose civilization is destroyed, its members enslaved and forgotten. The man becomes one of them, an Axolotl. In the second story, a woman who loves a married man is accused of witchery and burnt at the stake but escapes death by transforming into a creature that walks through the fire. In both cases, the outsiders refuse assimilation and become different. Lighter.

Both stories dress metaphors in robes of sensory details.

For Calvino, the metaphor is a vehicle of lightness against verbosity. As Ryan Werner puts it: “As most descriptive power comes from the truest metaphor, Calvino ends up echoing the Aristotelian idea that the essence of a riddle is to express true facts under impossible combinations. Because word-soup won’t do, metaphor will have to.”

Lightness as a program

Calvino states that unless it is avoided, weightiness will be present—always. Therefore, the writer must seek out lightness. Lightness is a subtraction of weight rather than the pursuit of a pre-existing quality of lightness.

One must chisel away the weightiness.

The ultimate goal is to portray a message in its simplest form while still maintaining emotion, clarity, personality, and above all a world of lightness.

Calvino likens heaviness to the stare of Medusa, which turns us into stone. Perseus of the winged sandals, a creature of the air, defeats the monster of stone and uses Medusa’s head with its terrible, petrifying stare, to overcome his enemies. Lightness dominates gravity.

For Calvino, language is made up of “a fine dust of atoms, like everything else that goes to make up the ultimate substance of the multiplicity of things.”

Nothing new, maybe, but I wonder whether our century is heeding the advice. Simple ideas need to be reminded from time to time.

I’m not saying that I always follow Calvino’s invitation to lightness, but I would like to try.

Comments on this post can be seen at Ecstatic Days - Jeff VanderMeer.