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I have tried to provide the reader with, so to speak, an improvised memory

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From the opening pages of Proust’s preface to his translation of John Ruskin’s Bible of Amiens. This translation is from the Yale press On Reading Ruskin. The French is available here

To read only one book by an author is to see that author only once. True, in a single conversation with someone we can discern particular traits. But it is only through repeated encounters in varied circumstances that we can recognize these traits as characteristic and essential . For a writer, for a musician, or for a painter, this variation of circumstances that enables us to discern, by a sort of experimentation, the permanent features of character is found in the variety of the works themselves. We meet again in a second book, in another painting, the peculiarities which we might have thought the first time belonged to the subject matter as much as to the writer or the painter himself. By comparing different works, we distinguish common traits which, taken together, reveal the moral character of the artist.

When several portraits by Rembrandt, painted from different models, are gathered in a room, we are immediately struck by what is common to all of them, what constitutes the very features of the Rembrandt face. By inserting a footnote to the text of The Bible of Amiens each time this text evoked, through even remote analogies, the recollection of other works of Ruskin, and by translating in the note the passage which had come to my mind, I have tried to put the reader in the position of one who would not find himself in Ruskin’s presence for the first time but who, having had previous conversations with Ruskin, would be able to recognize in his words what is permanent and fundamental in him. Thus I have tried to provide the reader with ,so to speak, an improvised memory in which I have arranged recollections of other works of Ruskin-a kind of sounding board against which the words of The Bible of Amiens will be able to ring more deeply by awakening fraternal echoes. But these echoes will undoubtedly not correspond to the words of The Bible of Amiens, as they penetrate a memory which is itself composed of horizons generally hidden from our sight and whose various distances our life itself has measured day by day. In order to come into focus with the present word whose resemblance evoked them, these echoes will not have to go through the gentle resistance of that interposed atmosphere which is the span of our life and all the poetry of memory.

Fundamentally, the first part of every critic’s task should be to help the reader appreciate these special traits by drawing his attention to similar traits that enable him to recognize them as the essential features of the genius of a writer.

If the critic is aware of this and has helped others to awareness, his function is almost fulfilled. Ifhe has not perceived it, he can write all the books in the world on Ruskin: the Man, the Writer, the Prophet, the Artist, the Influence of his Thought, the Errors of his Doctrine, and all these works may perhaps reach a very high level of excellence, but skirt the subject. They may exalt the reputation of the critic but, as regards the true understanding of the work, they will be of less value than the exact perception of a correct nuance, however insignificant it might seem.

The manure that has fallen on the barren soil of my dry wits

~ Walter Shandy ~ 1 Comment

From chapter 12 of the second part of Don Quixote:

“That’s a fine comparison,” said Sancho, “though not so new that I haven’t heard it many times before, like the one about chess: as long as the game lasts, each piece has its particular rank and position, but when the game’s over they’re mixed and jumbled and thrown together in a bag, just the way life is tossed into the grave.”

“Every day, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “you are becoming less simple and more intelligent.”

“Yes, some of your grace’s intelligence has to stick to me,” responded Sancho, “for lands that are barren and dry on their own can produce good fruits if you spread manure on them and till them; I mean to say that your grace’s conversation has been the manure that has fallen on the barren soil of my dry wits; the time I have served you and talked to you has been the tilling; and so I hope to produce fruits that are a blessing and do not go to seed or stray from the paths of good cultivation that your grace has made in my parched understanding.”

— ¡Brava comparación! —dijo Sancho—, aunque no tan nueva que yo no la haya oído muchas y diversas veces, como aquella del juego del ajedrez, que, mientras dura el juego, cada pieza tiene su particular oficio; y, en acabándose el juego, todas se mezclan, juntan y barajan, y dan con ellas en una bolsa, que es como dar con la vida en la sepultura.

— Cada día, Sancho —dijo don Quijote—, te vas haciendo menos simple y más discreto.

— Sí, que algo se me ha de pegar de la discreción de vuestra merced — respondió Sancho—; que las tierras que de suyo son estériles y secas, estercolándolas y cultivándolas, vienen a dar buenos frutos: quiero decir que la conversación de vuestra merced ha sido el estiércol que sobre la estéril tierra de mi seco ingenio ha caído; la cultivación, el tiempo que ha que le sirvo y comunico; y con esto espero de dar frutos de mí que sean de bendición, tales, que no desdigan ni deslicen de los senderos de la buena crianza que vuesa merced ha hecho en el agostado entendimiento mío.

Four Old English riddles

~ Walter Shandy ~ 2 Comments

Numbers 44, 47, 73, and 85 from The Exeter Book, in Michael Alexander’s translation from The Earliest English Poems (and following W.S. Mackie’s numbering). His introduction to this section is also worth repeating so it is given in part beneath the riddles. (Proposed) solutions are at the bottom.

44.
Swings by his thigh a thing most magical!
Below the belt, beneath the folds
of his clothes it hangs, a hole in its front end,
stiff-set & stout, but swivels about.

Levelling the head of this hanging instrument,
its wielder hoists his hem above the knee:
it is his will to fill a well-known hole
that it fits fully when at full length.

He has often filled it before. Now he fills it again.

47.
I heard of a wonder, of words moth-eaten;
that is a strange thing, I thought, weird
that a man’s song be swallowed by a worm,
his binded sentences, his bedside standy-by
rustled in the night – and the robber-guest
not one white the wiser for the words he had mumbled.

73.
I was in one hour an ashen crone
a fair-faced man, a fresh girl,
floated on foam, flew with birds,
under the wave dived, dead among fish,
and walked upon land a living soul.

85.
Many were met, men of discretion
wisdom and wit, when in there walked ….

Two ears it had, and one eye solo,
two feet and twelve hundred heads,
back, belly, a brace of hands
a pair of sides and shoulders and arms
and one neck. Name, please.

From Alexander’s introduction:

It will be remembered that in Genesis ‘ the Lord God, having formed out of the ground all the beasts of the earth and all the fowls of the air brought them to Adam to see what he would call them: for whatsoever Adam called any living creature the same is its name.’ This is literally true, for from this primordial Naming all modem nouns and hence the language we speak are descended. Language is the chief means o f human communication, and it is the gift of language that distinguishes us from the beasts. The novelty of the riddle is that by making a beast speak or depriving it of its name we render it unrecognizable. The subject of the riddle, animal, vegetable, or mineral, usurps the human prerogative of speech, and, naturally enough, takes a non-human point of view. The effect of this is a dislocation of perspective similar to that achieved in the modem theatre by the device known as alienation: a good riddle puzzles and can even be mildly frightening, simply because we do not know what it is that is speaking. The feeling o f bafflement grows when we are confronted by a riddle to which no solution has been found. The effect of being asked a riddle by someone who lived eleven hundred years ago is already disconcerting; but not to know the answer is frankly embarrassing. The riddle surprises by presenting the familiar through a non-anthropomorphic lens: the result is strange and beautiful, or delightful, or simply pathetic, but it almost always has the special, rather odd, intensity peculiar to the form.
People in Anglo-Saxon times, living uncomfortably close to the natural world, were well aware that though creation is inarticulate it is animate, and that every created thing, every wiht, had its own personality. Though the forces of earth, air, and water were not regularly propitiated or invoked, an awareness of the old methods of sympathetic identification seems to have lingered on, by habit and instinct, in the arts, and certainly in the art of poetry, as is clearly shown by the few charms that remain, corrupt though their texts may be.
The riddle is a sophisticated and harmless form of invocation by imitation : the essence of it is that the poet, by an act of imaginative identification to which Vernon Lee gave the name ‘empathy,’ assumes the personality o f some created thing – an animal, a plant, a natural force. Some element o f impersonation is involved in any creative act, but by performing this particular ventriloquism the poet extends and diversifies our understanding of – or at least our acquaintance with – the noumenous natural world , of whose life, or even existence, modern men arc becoming progressively more unaware. This operation is salutary, and may be said to have a religious value.

And solutions:
44. a key
47. a bookworm
73. unknown (Alexander proposes a Siren). Here’s commentary from Paull Franklin Baum’s Anglo-Saxon Riddles of the Exeter book:

One guess is Siren; another Water. If the latter, one would rather say Rain: a gentle shower, a heavy downpour, in the sea its natural form (its life) is lost; a little imagination can see it as hail walking on the ground. A third solution is offered by Mrs. von Erhardt-Siebold (Medium Ævum xv [1946], 48–54), comparing Frag. 117 of Empedocles:

Once I was a young man, maiden,
plant, bird, and mute fish cast ashore.

This, of course, is not a riddle, but an expression of cyclic metamorphosis. Just how an Anglo-Saxon came to know Empedocles is not clear.

85. a one-eyed garlic seller

And wandered off, bearing a winter sadness over the weft of waves …

~ Walter Shandy ~ 2 Comments

Two versions of the Old English The Wanderer. The first – given in full – is Michael Alexander’s from his Earliest English Poems (which was later reprinted in a Penguin edition, though I haven’t seen it to check for changes). It is here for comparison, representing the more straightforward traditional translation. The second – given in part only because I don’t feel like typing 120 lines – is Christopher Patton’s from his Curious Masonry: Three Translations from the Anglo-Saxon. I found it by chance this morning and immediately liked his work on this (which he renders literally as The EarthWalker), The Seafarer, and The Ruin better than any other efforts I’ve seen. He has a site here with posts about this plus a more recent translation of several other Old English works (Unlikeness Is Us: Fourteen from the Exeter Book).

The italicized lines from Alexander’s version are what I’ve given at bottom in Patton’s.

The Wanderer
Who liveth alone longeth for mercy,
Maker’s mercy. Though he must traverse
tracts of sea, sick at heart,
trouble with oars ice-cold waters,
the ways of exile – Wierd is set fast.

Thus spoke such a ‘grasshopper, old griefs in his mind,
cold slaughters, the death of dear kinsmen:

‘Alone am I driven each day before daybreak
to give my cares utterance.
None are there now among the living
to whom I dare declare me throughly,
tell my heart’s thought. Too truly I know
it is in a man no mean virtue
that he keep close his heart’s chest,
hold his thought-hoard, think as he may.

No weary mind may stand against Wierd
nor may a wrecked will work new hope;
wherefore, most often, those eager for fame
bind the dark mood fast in their breasts.

So must I also curb my mind,
cut off from country, from kind far distant,
by cares overworn, bind it in fetters;
this since, long ago, the ground’s shroud
enwrapped my gold-friend. Wretched I went thence,
winter-wearied, over the waves’ bound;
dreary I sought hall of a gold-giver,
where far or near I might find
him who in meadhall might take heed o f me,
furnish comfort to a man friendless,
win me with cheer.
He knows who makes trial

how harsh and bitter is care for companion
to him who hath few friends to shield him.
Track ever taketh him, never the torqued gold,
not earthly glory, but cold heart’s cave.
He minds him of hall-men, of treasure-giving,
how in his youth his gold-friend
gave him to feast. Fallen all this joy.

He knows this who is forced to forgo his lord’s,
his friend’s counsels, to lack them for long:
oft sorrow and sleep, banded together,
come to bind the lone outcast;
he thinks in his heart then that he his lord
claspeth and kisseth, and on knee layeth
hand and head, as he had at otherwhiles
in days now gone, when he enjoyed the gift-stool

Awakeneth after this friendless man,
seeth before him fallow waves,
seabirds bathing, broading out feathers,
snow and hail swirl, hoar-frost falling.
Then all the heavier his heart’s wounds,
sore for his loved lord. Sorrow freshens.

Remembered kinsmen press through his mind;
he singeth out gladly, scanneth eagerly
men from the same hearth. They swim away.
Sailors’ ghosts bring not many
known songs there. Care grows fresh
in him who shall send forth too often
over locked waves his weary spirit.

Therefore I may not think, throughout this world,
why cloud cometh not on my mind
when I think over all the life of earls,
how at a stroke they have given up hall,
mood-proud thanes. So this middle earth
each of all days ageth and falleth.’

Wherefore no man grows wise without he have
his share of winters. A wise man holds out;
he is not too hot-hearted, nor too hasty in speech,
nor too weak a warrior, not wanting in fore-thought,
nor too greedy of goods, nor too glad, nor too mild,
nor ever too eager to boast, ere he knows alL

A man should forbear boastmaking
until his fierce mind fully knows
which w ay his spleen shall expend itself.

A wise man may grasp how ghastly it shall be
when all this world ’s wealth standeth waste,
even as now , in many places, over the earth
walls stand, wind-beaten,
hung with hoar-frost; ruined habitations.
The wine-halls crumble; their wielders lie
bereft of bliss, the band all fallen
proud by the wall. War took off some,
carried them on their course hence; one a bird bore
over the high sea; one the hoar wolf
dealt to death; one his drear-cheeked
earl stretched in an earthen trench.

The Maker of men hath so marred this dwelling
that human laughter is not heard about it
and idle stand these old giant-works.
A man who on these walls wisely looked
who sounded deeply this dark life
would think back to the blood spilt here,
weigh it in his wit. His word would be this:
‘ Where is that horse now ? Where are those men? Where is
the hoard-sharer?
Where is the house of the feast? Where is the hall’s uproar?

Alas, bright cup! Alas, burnished fighter!
Alas, proud prince! How that time has passed,
dark under night’s helm, as though it never had been!

There stands in the stead of staunch thanes
a towering wall wrought with worm-shapes;
the earls are off-taken by the ash-spear’s point,
that thirsty weapon. Their Wierd is glorious.

Storms break on the stone hillside,
the ground bound by driving sleet,
winter’s wrath. Then wanness cometh,
night’s shade spreadeth, sendeth from north
the rough hail to harry mankind.

In the earth-realm all is crossed;
Wierd’s will changeth the world.
Wealth is lent us, friends arc lent us,
man is lent, kin is lent;
all this earth’s frame shall stand empty.’

So spoke the sage in his heart; he sat apart in thought.
Good is he who keeps faith: nor should care too fast
be out o f a man’s breast before he first know the cure:
a warrior fights on bravely. Well is it for him who seeks
forgiveness,
the Heavenly Father’s solace, in whom all our fastness stands

And starting around line 40 in Patton’s, covering the italicized section above:

Even so, and wretched with sorrow,
far from homeland and noble kinsman,
I have bound heart and mind in chains,
since years ago I covered a goldfriend
in the dark of earth and wandered off,
bearing a winter sadness over the weft
of waves, seeking, homesick, near or
far, some patron who knew my people,
who might in meadhall offer to comfort
a friendless wanderer, to draw him out,
delight him. Sorrow, all know who know,
is cruel companion to the one who holds
none dear, and none hold so. For him no
ring of wrought gold, nor earthly glory,
but an icy heart at the hearth of exile.
Sometimes he calls to mind hallfriends
of his youth, the giving of gifts, feasts
where his gracious patron would lavish
favours on all of them. Joy is a ruin.

As anyone knows who must go long
without the word of his beloved lord.
Then sorrow and sleep together bind
the wretched solitary, in his dream
he embraces and kisses his dear lord
once more, lays in his lap his head
and hands, as once he did in days
gone by, kneeling at the high seat.
Then the friendless one awakens,
sees the fallow waves before him,
seabirds splaying feathers, bathing
as snow falls shot through with hail,
the heart’s wounds are heavier now,
raw with a longing for loved ones
long departed. His sorrow deepens
when remembered kin pass through
his mind, as singing he greets them,
gazing on them in joy as they fly
away, floating spirits that bear no
familiar voices, as sorrow deepens,
to one who sends, across the weft
of waves, a weary spirit after them.

I cannot see, for all the world, why
my mind does not go dark entirely
when I think how the lives of men
give way abruptly, they leave the hall
bold warriors. The great earth itself
falls and decays each day, and no man
may be wise who has not passed many
winters on it…..

And beauty making beautiful old rhyme

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 106:

When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme,
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,
Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best,
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
I see their antique pen would have expressed
Even such a beauty as you master now.
So all their praises are but prophecies
Of this our time, all you prefiguring;
And for they looked but with divining eyes,
They had not skill enough your worth to sing:
For we, which now behold these present days,
Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

Multiple editors note similarities with Samuel Daniel‘s sonnet 46 but past the surface alignment of the openings I don’t much see it. And even the opening seems to move in two different directions – Daniel using a light priamel to launch a future-looking perspective, Shakespeare staying with the past and imagining how it looks forward to its future/his present.

Let others sing of knights and paladins
In aged accents and untimely words;
Paint shadows in imaginary lines
Which well the reach of their high wits records:
But I must sing of thee, and those fair eyes
Authentic shall my verse in time to come,
When yet th’ unborn shall say, “Lo where she lies
Whose beauty made him speak that else was dumb.”
These are the arks, the trophies I erect,
That fortify thy name against old age;
And these thy sacred virtues must protect
Against the dark, and time’s consuming rage.
Though th’ error of my youth they shall discover,
Suffice they show I liv’d and was thy lover.

Art is that Ithaca of green eternity, not of marvels

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From Borges’ El Hacedor / The Maker. The English translation is W.S. Merwin’s from, most recently, the Viking Selected Poems Borges collection. Merwin truly does pop up in the widest range of places.

Ars Poetica
To look at the river made of time and water
and to remember that time is another river,
to know that we lose ourselves like the river
and that faces pass by like the water.

To feel that wakefulness is another sleep
that dreams of not dreaming and that
the death that our flesh fears is that
death that comes every night,
which is called sleep.

To see in the day or the year a symbol
of the days of man and his years;
to turn the insult of the years
into a music, a murmur and a symbol.

To see sleep in death, in the sunset
a sad gold, such is poetry
that is immortal and poor. Poetry
returns like the dawn and the sunset.

At times in the evenings a face
looks at us from the depths of a mirror;
Art should be like that mirror
that reveals to us our own face.

They say that Ulysses, sick of marvels,
cried tears of love at the sight of his Ithaca
green and modest. Art is that Ithaca
of green eternity, not of marvels.

It is also like the endless river
that flows and remains and mirrors the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and is another, like the endless river.

Arte Poética
Mirar el río hecho de tiempo y agua
y recordar que el tiempo es otro río,
saber que nos perdemos como el río
y que los rostros pasan como el agua.

Sentir que la vigilia es otro sueño
que sueña no soñar y que la muerte
que teme nuestra carne es esa muerte
de cada noche, que se llama sueño.

Ver en el día o en el año un símbolo
de los días del hombre y de sus años,
convertir el ultraje de los años
en una música, un rumor y un símbolo,

ver en la muerte el sueño, en el ocaso
un triste oro, tal es la poesía
que es inmortal y pobre. La poesía
vuelve como la aurora y el ocaso.

A veces en las tardes una cara
nos mira desde el fondo de un espejo;
el arte debe ser como ese espejo
que nos revela nuestra propia cara.

Cuentan que Ulises, harto de prodigios,
lloró de amor al divisar su Itaca
verde y humilde. El arte es esa Itaca
de verde eternidad, no de prodigios.

También es como el río interminable
que pasa y queda y es cristal de un mismo
Heráclito inconstante, que es el mismo
y es otro, como el río interminable.

Some nonsense

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From ch 25 of part 1 of Don Quixote:

“Well, Sancho, by the same oath you swore before, I swear to you,” said Don Quixote, “that you have the dimmest wits that any squire in the world has or ever had. Is it possible that in all the time you have traveled with me you have not yet noticed that all things having to do with knights errant appear to be chimerical, foolish, senseless, and turned inside out? And not because they really are, but because hordes of enchanters always walk among us and alter and change everything and turn things into whatever they please, according to whether they wish to favor us or destroy us; and so, what seems to you a barber’s basin seems to me the helmet of Mambrino, and will seem another thing to someone else.

My Borgesian imagining of the day – a reading where Quixote’s claim here is taken seriously. We cease understanding the novel as satirical work by Cervantes and view it instead as the mocking product of enchanters determined to warp a true romance of the knight’s deeds. In order to restore events to their true form the reader must inhabit Quixote’s perspective – since the great cruelty of the enchanters was in leaving him able to see and speak the truth while altering everything around him. In essence, we must quixotize ourselves through the novel just as Quixote had transformed himself through his own reading. Only when we too take the flocks of sheep in ch.19 as the armies of Alifanfaron and Pentapolin have we escaped their spell and restored the text.

This may also tread somewhat into the spirit of Unamuno’s Life of Don Quixote and Sancho.

All we can do is to stand down here in the garden and take off our hats

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From Robert Louis Stevenson’s Will O’ The Mill. Online here

One day, when Will was about sixteen, a fat young man arrived at sunset to pass the night. He was a contented-looking fellow, with a jolly eye, and carried a knapsack. While dinner was preparing, he sat in the arbour to read a book; but as soon as he had begun to observe Will, the book was laid aside; he was plainly one of those who prefer living people to people made of ink and paper. Will, on his part, although he had not been much interested in the stranger at first sight, soon began to take a great deal of pleasure in his talk, which was full of good nature and good sense, and at last conceived a great respect for his character and wisdom. They sat far into the night; and about two in the morning Will opened his heart to the young man, and told him how he longed to leave the valley and what bright hopes he had connected with the cities of the plain. The young man whistled, and then broke into a smile.

“My young friend,” he remarked, “you are a very curious little fellow to be sure, and wish a great many things which you will never get. Why, you would feel quite ashamed if you knew how the little fellows in these fairy cities of yours are all after the same sort of nonsense, and keep breaking their hearts to get up into the mountains. And let me tell you, those who go down into the plains are a very short while there before they wish themselves heartily back again. The air is not so light nor so pure; nor is the sun any brighter. As for the beautiful men and women, you would see many of them in rags and many of them deformed with horrible disorders; and a city is so hard a place for people who are poor and sensitive that many choose to die by their own hand.”

“You must think me very simple,” answered Will. “Although I have never been out of this valley, believe me, I have used my eyes. I know how one thing lives on another; for instance, how the fish hangs in the eddy to catch his fellows; and the shepherd, who makes so pretty a picture carrying home the lamb, is only carrying it home for dinner. I do not expect to find all things right in your cities. That is not what troubles me; it might have been that once upon a time; but although I live here always, I have asked many questions and learned a great deal in these last years, and certainly enough to cure me of my old fancies. But you would not have me die like a dog and not see all that is to be seen, and do all that a man can do, let it be good or evil? you would not have me spend all my days between this road here and the river, and not so much as make a motion to be up and live my life?—I would rather die out of hand,” he cried, “than linger on as I am doing.”

“Thousands of people,” said the young man, “live and die like you, and are none the less happy.”

“Ah!” said Will, “if there are thousands who would like, why should not one of them have my place?”

It was quite dark; there was a hanging lamp in the arbour which lit up the table and the faces of the speakers; and along the arch, the leaves upon the trellis stood out illuminated against the night sky, a pattern of transparent green upon a dusky purple. The fat young man rose, and, taking Will by the arm, led him out under the open heavens.

“Did you ever look at the stars?” he asked, pointing upwards.

“Often and often,” answered Will.

“And do you know what they are?”

“I have fancied many things.”

“They are worlds like ours,” said the young man. “Some of them less; many of them a million times greater; and some of the least sparkles that you see are not only worlds, but whole clusters of worlds turning about each other in the midst of space. We do not know what there may be in any of them; perhaps the answer to all our difficulties or the cure of all our sufferings: and yet we can never reach them; not all the skill of the craftiest of men can fit out a ship for the nearest of these our neighbours, nor would the life of the most aged suffice for such a journey. When a great battle has been lost or a dear friend is dead, when we are hipped or in high spirits, there they are unweariedly shining overhead. We may stand down here, a whole army of us together, and shout until we break our hearts, and not a whisper reaches them. We may climb the highest mountain, and we are no nearer them. All we can do is to stand down here in the garden and take off our hats; the starshine lights upon our heads, and where mine is a little bald, I dare say you can see it glisten in the darkness. The mountain and the mouse. That is like to be all we shall ever have to do with Arcturus or Aldebaran. Can you apply a parable?” he added, laying his hand upon Will’s shoulder. “It is not the same thing as a reason, but usually vastly more convincing.”

Will hung his head a little, and then raised it once more to heaven. The stars seemed to expand and emit a sharper brilliancy; and as he kept turning his eyes higher and higher, they seemed to increase in multitude under his gaze.

“I see,” he said, turning to the young man. “We are in a rat-trap.”

“Something of that size. Did you ever see a squirrel turning in a cage? and another squirrel sitting philosophically over his nuts? I needn’t ask you which of them looked more of a fool.”

Because myth is at the beginning of literature and also at its end

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From Borges’ El Hacedor / The Maker:

Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote
Weary of his Spanish homeland, an aging soldier of the king’s army sought comfort in Ariosto’s vast geographies, in the lunar valley where lies the time that dreams squander away, and in the golden idol of Mohammed stolen by Montalban.

Gently mocking himself, he thought up an impressionable man who, unbalanced from reading fantastic tales, went forth to find feats of arms and enchantments in ordinary places with names like El Toboso and Montiel.

Defeated by reality – by Spain – Don Quixote died in his native village around 1614. Miguel de Cervantes briefly outlived him.

For both the dreamer and the man he dreamed, the story was about the clash of opposing worlds: the unreal world of chivalric fiction and the average, everyday world of the seventeenth century.

Neither imagined that with the passage of years the strife would diminish, nor did they imagine that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight’s scrawny physique would be no less poetic in the future than the adventures of Sinbad or Ariosto’s vast geographies.

Because myth is at the beginning of literature and also at its end.

Devoto Clinic, January 1955.

Parábola de Cervantes y de Quijote
Harto de su tierra de España, un viejo soldado del rey buscó solaz en las vastas geografías de Ariosto, en aquel valle de la luna donde está el tiempo que malgastan los sueños y en el ídolo de oro de Mahoma que robó Montalbán.

En mansa burla de sí mismo, ideó un hombre crédulo que, perturbado por la lectura de maravillas, dio en buscar proezas y encantamientos en lugares prosaicos que se llamaban El Toboso o Montiel.

Vencido por la realidad, por España, don Quijote murió en su aldea natal hacia 1614. Poco tiempo lo sobrevivió Miguel de Cervantes.

Para los dos, para el soñador y el soñado, toda esa trama fue la oposición de dos mundos: el mundo irreal de los libros de caballerías, el mundo cotidiano y común del siglo XVII.

No sospecharon que los años acabarían por limar la discordia, no sospecharon que la Mancha y Montiel y la magra figura del caballero serían, para el porvenir, no menos poéticas que las etapas de Simbad o que las vastas geografías de Ariosto.

Porque en el principio de la literatura está el mito, y asimismo en el fin.

Clínica Devoto, enero de 1955.

If truth be told, what I eat … tastes much better to me in my corner without fancy or respectful manners

~ Walter Shandy ~ Leave a comment

From ch 11 in Part 1 of Don Quixote, Edith Grossman’s translation. My adult self finds in Sancho here an image of anyone ineffectually resisting an unsought promotion.

“So that you may see, Sancho, the virtue contained in knight errantry, and how those who practice any portion of it always tend to be honored and esteemed in the world, I want you to sit here at my side and in the company of these good people, and be the same as I, who am your natural lord and master; eat from my plate and drink where I drink, for one may say of knight errantry what is said of love: it makes all things equal.”

“You’re too kind!” said Sancho. “But I can tell your grace that as long as I have something good to eat, I’ll eat it just as well or better standing and all alone as sitting at the height of an emperor. Besides, if truth be told, what I eat, even if it’s bread and onion, tastes much better to me in my corner without fancy or respectful manners, than a turkey would at other tables where I have to chew slowly, not drink too much, wipe my mouth a lot, not sneeze or cough if I feel like it, or do other things that come with solitude and freedom. And so, Señor, these honors that your grace wants to grant me for being a servant and follower of knight errantry, which I am, being your grace’s squire, you should turn into other things that will be of greater comfort and benefit to me; these, though I am grateful for them, I renounce now and forever.”

“Despite all that, you will sit down, for God exalts the man who humbles himself.”

And seizing him by the arm, he obliged Sancho to sit next to him.