Aug 012014
 

Here are a few paragraphs from the opening of my essay on Witold Gombrowicz’s novel Cosmos. The essay was just published this morning at 3:AM Magazine.  A great magazine, a pleasure to appear there.

Note my amazing coinage “onanomaniacal.”  I was asked to explain what the word meant. I wrote:

Onanomaniacal is my coinage. It combines Onan (Genesis, Chapter 38) and “maniacal”. God smites Onan for “spilling his seed” on the ground. This is most often construed as masturbation (although some biblical critics are more precise and suggest it might just be coitus interruptus). In any case, Onan is the great masturbator of the Bible and hence Onanomaniacal means something like the adjective form of frenzied masturbator. So it’s a joke, of sorts. And there is quite a lot of talk of masturbation in Cosmos.

I used to drive by a warehouse in Guelph, Ontario, which bore the sign “Onan Generators” — this always seemed hilarious to me.

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In Cosmos — the title makes it obvious — Gombrowicz is satirizing the phenomenology of world creation, the mental process by which we construct a frame of meaning for ourselves. Not the world (whatever that is), my world. Both inside and outside the novel (that is, in so-called real life), the modus operandi of consciousness is comically super-rational and simultaneously self-defeating (Husserl demonstrated that reason was never going to get where it said it was going). You (a subject, a consciousness) begin to notice hints of repetition and pattern; you look for other instances of the pattern in the chaotic flux of sensation; and eventually you decide the pattern is real. This is the procedure of reason and science. But, of course, in Cosmos what seems real to the narrator is in fact utterly contingent and often ridiculous or even murderous.

Form cannot enclose reality, but form always threatens to become reality. That is the antinomy of the novel: you can’t fit the world into a book, and yet form (read: custom, tradition, ideology, inter-personal expectation, etc.) is always threatening to derail the life of the individual, that is, there is always someone or some thing trying to fit you into his book. Cosmos is, in part, a horror story in which the monstrous evil is a form (in this case, a literary device) that haunts the narrator and eventually takes over his life. Instead of Godzilla or the mad slasher moving ineluctably toward its victim, the villain of Cosmos is an image pattern.

There are two other forces working on the human mind besides reason. One is the dark and unknowable current of desire; the narrator, whose name is Witold, can’t sleep with the girl he’s attracted to so he suddenly and incomprehensibly kills her cat (it’s a sick joke, right? He orgasmically strangles her pussy). The other force is the desire or gaze of the other. As soon as you enter a relationship (however trivial), you begin to bend yourself to fulfill, oppose or circumvent the desire (expectation, form) of the other. Even if you resist, the purity of selfhood has been corrupted. So you construct another self in secret, the masturbatory self, the self who doesn’t have to relate or unmask himself before the eyes of the other (but who is corrupt, seedy, infantile, trivial and evasive in any case).

Out of this triangle of forces, Gombrowicz creates a truly awe-ful, hilarious novel. The narrator discovers patterns and deduces meaning; his own sexual violence betrays reason; he discovers that the secret life of the adult male patriarch is one of chronic secret masturbation (the creation of private, obsessive cosmos).

Read the rest at Consciousness & Masturbation: A Note on Witold Gombrowicz’s Onanomaniacal Novel Cosmos » 3:AM Magazine.

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Jan 092013
 

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The minimalism of Absurdism is tautological, taking a perverse, morbidly dry pleasure in stories that, like much of life, go nowhere, a very literal practice of the idea that art, poetry “makes nothing happen” (of course not taken from Auden, but a product of a similar historical disenchantment). The artlessness of Daniil Kharms, in accord with his age (in the wake of Satie, and Duchamp and Ernst, Kokoschka and the German Expressionists, yet almost certainly unaware of them and without precedent other than say Gogol in Russian) is Anti-art. (The designation of the Russian Absurdists for themselves was Oberiu, short for Ob’edinenie real’novo iskusstva, the tongue-in-cheek “Association for REAL Art”.) Minimalism as insufficiency of the word qua communication was already in the air when Kharm’s came of age in the 1920s, during the end-stage of Russian Futurism (particularly notable are Vasilisk Gnedov, whose logical conclusion was his “Poem of the End” (a blank page), and the Constructivist poet Ilya Selvinsky; see my tribute to the centennial of Russian Futurism at www.em-review.com.)

Thumb-twiddling boredom, repetition, hoaxes, and other violations of expectations in evidence here are dissonant and discomfiting in themselves. Elsewhere, Kharms strikes a more distasteful, even offensive pose, an epatage that practically wallows in degradation and self-degradation. Explaining his “program” he wrote: “I am interested only in absolute nonsense, only in that which has no practical meaning. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestation. I find abhorrent heroics, pathos, moralizing, all that is hygienic and tasteful … both as words and as feelings.” In his other work we may find a precedent, for example, for The Theater of Cruelty, but also in its minutia of daily life for the post-modernist, documentary yet ironic and paradoxical approach of the Moscow Conceptualist artists and poets of the 1970s who acknowledged Kharms as an essential influence.

One of them, Ilya Kabakov, wrote: “…Contact with nothing, emptiness makes up, we feel, the basic peculiarity of Russian conceptualism….” Kharms was similarly central for the non-conformist poets of the 1950s and 60s (Yevgeny Kropivnitsky, Vsevolod Nekrasov, Jan Satunovsky, Igor Kholin, Genrikh Sapgir, Alexei Khvostenko) and the Minimalist poets of the 1970s and 80s.  Just to enumerate some of the aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) values: plain speech, written as it is spoken, folksy simplicity, daily life or byt, but also the spiritual values of Absurdism: the ridiculous as a reaction and an alternative to revulsion and resignation before an Absurd age.

As I believe is true of all minimalist practice, the above not only doesn’t preclude a spiritual dimension, but makes it necessary. This particularly (also Kharms’s silly rhyming) is what is likely most incomprehensible to Anglophone readers of Kharms, and of the work of his colleague and friend, the proto-existentialist poet Alexander Vvedensky. How may their seeming nihilism (I would argue they were not) be made coherent with and even motivated by their conceptions of God? While the specifically Russian Orthodox context, particularly evident in Vvedensky’s writings (he was a genuinely religious person and writer,) but also in Kharms’s irreverence (he was the son of a religious mystical philosopher Ivan Yuvachev and seemingly an irrepressible person) is outside our scope, it may be fitting to end by noting that Kharms falls squarely within the Russian tradition of the yurodivy, the “holy fool,” even to the point of feigning insanity to avoid arrest. Daniil Kharms died in 1942, of starvation, in a psychiatric hospital during the Nazi siege of Leningrad.

—Alex Cigale

***

 

King of the universe,
dearest king of nature,
king who is nameless,
who hasn’t even a definite frame,
come over to my house
and together we will down vodka,
stuff ourselves with some meat,
and then discuss acquaintances.
Perhaps your visit will bring me
the Lord’s on high autograph,
or perhaps your photograph,
that I may your portrait depict.

(27 March 1934)

 

How strange it is, how inexpressibly strange, that behind this wall, behind this very wall, a man is sitting on the floor, stretching out his long legs in orange boots, an expression of malice on his face.

We need only drill a hole in the wall and look through it and immediately we would see this mean-spirited man sitting there.

But we shouldn’t think of him. What is he anyway? Is he not after all a portion of death in life, materialized out of our conception of emptiness? Whoever he may be, God bless him.

(undated)

.

Olga Forsh approached Alexei Tolstoy and did something.

Alexei Tolstoy did something too.

Then Konstantin Fedin and Valentin Stenich ran out into the yard and began searching for an appropriate stone. They didn’t find a stone, but they did find a shovel. With this shovel, Konstantin Fedin smacked Olga Forsh across her mug.

Then Alexei Tolstoy stripped off all his clothes and completely naked walked out onto the Fontanka and began to neigh like a horse. Everybody was saying: “There neighing is a major contemporary writer.” And no one even lay a hand on Alexei Tolstoy.

 (1931)

 

At 2 o’clock past midday on Nevsky Prospect or, more precisely, on the Prospect of the 25th of October, nothing in particular happened. No no, that man standing by the Coliseum store stopped there purely by accident. Perhaps the shoelaces of his boots became untied, or maybe he stopped to light a cigarette. Or no, not that at all! He’s simply new in town and doesn’t know the way. But where then are his things? Well no, wait, now he is lifting up his head, as though wishing to look up at the third floor, or even the fourth floor, even the fifth. No, look again, he only sneezed and is now walking on. He is a bit hunched and holds his shoulders hiked up. His green greatcoat is blowing open in the wind. And now he just turned off onto Nadezhinskaya and disappeared behind a corner.

A man of Eastern extraction, a boot polisher, looked up in his wake and with his hand brushed smooth his luxurious black mustaches.

His coat is long, tight-fitting, and lilac in color, either checkered or, perhaps, stripped in pattern, or is it, the devil take it! all in polka dots.

(1931)

.

A little old man was scratching himself with both hands. Where he could not reach with both hands, the old man scratched with one hand only, but quickly-quickly and then, the whole time, while rapidly blinking his eyes.

 (1933-34)

.

The window, shuttered with a curtain, was growing lighter and lighter, because the day had begun. The floors had began to creek, doors to sing, and chairs were being shuffled in the apartments. Ruzhetskii, climbing out his bed, fell on the floor and cracked open his face. He was in a hurry to get to work and therefore went out on the street having only covered his face with his hands. His hands were making it difficult for Ruzhetskii to see the way, and for this reason he twice collided with an advertising arcade and shoved some old man who was wearing a felt hat with fur ear flaps, which brought the geezer into such a state of rage, that a street sweeper who had just happened to be nearby and was attempting to catch a tomcat with a shovel, had to calm the old man down: “Aren’t you ashamed, grampa, at your age to be behaving like a teenage hooligan.”

 (1935)

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Kulakov squeezed himself into a deep armchair and immediately fell asleep. He fell asleep sitting up and several hours later woke up lying in a coffin. Kulakov realized right away that he was lying in a coffin and was seized with a paralyzing terror. With his clouded eyes he looked around, and everywhere, in every direction he could cast his gaze, he saw only flowers: flowers in baskets, bouquets of flowers, wrapped in ribbons, wreaths of flowers, and flowers scattered separately about.

“I am being buried,” Kulakov thought to himself, filling with horror, and suddenly felt a sense of pride, that he, such an insignificant person, was being buried with such pomp, and with such a quantity of flowers.

 (1936)

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I can’t imagine why but everyone thinks I’m a genius; but if you ask me, I’m no genius. Just yesterday I was telling them: Please hear me! What sort of a genius am I? And they tell me: What a genius! And I tell them: Well, what kind? But they don’t tell me what kind, they only repeat, genius this, genius that. But if you ask me, I’m no genius at all.

Wherever I go, they all immediately start whispering and pointing their fingers at me. “What is going on here?!” I say. But they don’t let me utter a word, and any minute now they will lift me up in the air and carry me off on their shoulders.

(1934-1936)

.

One man went to sleep with faith, and woke up faithless.

As luck would have it, in this man’s room stood very precise medical scales, and the man was in the habit of weighing himself daily, every morning and every night.

And so, before going to bed the previous evening, having weighed himself, the man determined that he weighed 4 stone and 21 pounds. And on the next morning, having woken up without faith, the man weighed himself again and determined that he now weighed only 4 stone and 13 pounds. “It may thus be determined,” the man concluded, “that my faith had weighed approximately eight pounds.”

 (1936-1937)

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Two men were talking animatedly. As they were speaking, one of them was stammering on the consonants, and the other one on the consonants and the vowels both.

When they stopped speaking, everything suddenly felt incredibly pleasant – as though the hissing of a gas stove had been shut off.

 (1936-1937)

.

The Adventures of Mr. Caterpillar

Mishurin was a caterpillar. Because of this, or perhaps for another reason, he loved to wallow under the sofa or behind the dresser sucking in the dust. Because he was a somewhat slovenly person, sometimes for an entire day his mug would be covered in dust, as though with eider down.

Once upon a time he was invited as a guest to someone’s house, and Mishurin decided to give his countenance a light rinse. He filled a bowl with lukewarm water and added some vinegar to it and immersed his face in this water. As it turns out, this mixture contained too much vinegar, and for the rest of his long life Mishurin went blind. Into his deep old age, he walked around feeling his way about with his hands and for this reason, or perhaps another, he came to resemble a caterpillar even more.

(October 16, 1940)

 

The streets were becoming immersed in silence. At the intersections, people stood waiting for trolley buses. Some of them, having given up hope, set off on foot. And so at one of the intersections on the Petrograd side of town, only two people remained. One of them was particularly short in stature, with a round face and protruding ears. The other was slightly taller and, as was apparent, lame in his left foot. They were not acquainted with each other, but their common interest in the trolley bus forced them into conversing. The conversation was initiated by the lame one.

I don’t know what to do, he said, as though directing himself to no one. It’s probably not even worth waiting here.

The round-faced man turned toward the lame one and said:

I don’t think so, it might still come.

(1940)

 

I’m sitting here on a stool. And the stool stands on the floor. And the floor is part of the house. And the house stands on the ground. And the ground extends in all directions, to the right, and to the left, forwards and backwards. Is there an end to it anywhere?

It isn’t possible, that it doesn’t end somewhere! It must end at some point or other! And then what? Water? And the ground floats on water? That’s what people used to think. And they thought, that there, where the water ends, there is where it and the sky meet.

And indeed, if you stand on a steamship at sea, where all around nothing interrupts your vision, then that is what it seems, that somewhere very far away the sky descends and unites with the water.

And the sky appeared to people as a big solid cupola, made of something transparent, like glass. But that was before anyone knew about glass and they said the sky is made of crystal. And they called the sky firmament. And people thought the sky or firmament is the most solid thing there is, the most consistent. Everything may change, but the firmament will never change. And to this day, when we wish to say of something, that it will not change, we say: this must be confirmed.

And people saw how upon the sky the sun and the moon move, but the stars stand immobile. People began to pay closer attention to the stars and they noticed that the stars are distributed in the sky in the shape of figures. Here are seven stars placed in the form of a pot with a handle, here are three stars one following right upon another as though on a ruler. People learned to distinguish one star from another and they determined that the stars are also in motion, only all together, as though they are fixed to the sky and they move together with the sky itself. And people decided that the sky circles around the earth.

The people then divided the entire sky into distinct figures consisting of stars and each figure they called a constellation and each constellation they gave its own name.

And then people saw that not all stars move together with the sky but that there are some which wander among the other stars. And people called these stars planets.

(1931)

 

One man was chasing another, and the one running away was, in his turn, chasing a third one who, unaware he was being chased, was simply striding along on the pavement stones at a moderate pace.

(1940)

.

A Northern Fable

An old man, for no particular reason, went off into the forest. Then he returned and said: Old woman, hey, old woman!

And the old woman dropped dead. Ever since then, all rabbits are white in winter.

(undated)

.

Yes, I’m a poet forgotten by the sky.
Forgotten by the sky from days of old.
But once upon a time Phoebus and I
made a racket joined in a sweet choir.
Yes, there was a time when I and Phoebus
joined in a sweet choir and made a squall.
And there were days when I and Geb were
tight as drops of water and in clouds above
the thunder in its youth rang with laugher.
The thunder rolled flying after Geb and I
pouring from the heavens a golden light.

(1935-1937)

—Daniil Kharms translated by Alex Cigale
—————–

Alex Cigale has had his poems appear in Colorado, Green Mountains, North American, Tampa, and The Literary Reviews, and online in Drunken Boat and McSweeney’s. His translations from the Russian can be found in Ancora Imparo, Cimarron Review, Literary Imagination, Modern Poetry in Translation, Brooklyn Rail InTranslation, The Manhattan, St. Ann‘s, and Washington Square Reviews. Other Kharms translations by Alex Cigale have appeared in PEN America and Gargoyle, and online in Eleven Eleven (California College of the Arts), Offcourse (SUNY Albany) and Mayday Magazine. He is currently Assistant Professor at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

 

 

Feb 172012
 

Marilyn McCabe has a new book of poems —Perpetual Motion— just out in the Word Works Hilary Tham Capital Collection selected by Gray Jacobik. But today we feature another of her gorgeous translation and performance pieces. It became something of a tradition for French composers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to set lyric poems by their poetry contemporaries to mélodies for solo voice and piano. Inspired by the poetry of the likes of Verlaine and Baudelaire, composers from Berlioz to Saint-Saens created these musical settings, attempting to “translate,” in a way, the lyric into a musical format that created a form greater than the two elements. This time Marilyn sings a little surrealist poem by the highly eccentric (he abandoned surrealism, eventually, for communism and revered Joseph Stalin) French poet Paul Éluard (1895-1952), set to music by Francis Poulenc (1899-1963).

See also Marilyn McCabe Sings (& Translates) a Guillaume Apollinaire Poem and Marilyn McCabe Translates (& Sings) a Paul-Armand Silvestre Poem. Marilyn’s chapbook Rugged Means of Grace was published by Finishing Line Press, 2011. She earned an MFA in poetry at New England College.

dg

 

Click the player and listen to Marilyn’s voice while you read the poem.

 

Une Ruine Coquille Vide
By Paul Éluard

Une ruine coquille vide
Pleure dans son tablier.
Les enfant qui jouent autour d’elle
Font moins de bruit que des mouches.

La ruine s’en va à tâtons
Chercher ses vaches dans un pré.
J’ai vu le jour, je vois cela
Sans en avoir honte.

 Il est minuit comme une fleche
Dans un coeur à la portée
Des folâtres lueurs nocturnes
Qui contredisent le sommeil.

 

A Ruined Empty Shell
Translated by Marilyn McCabe

A ruined empty shell
weeps in her apron.
The children who play around her
make less noise than the flies.

She goes groping
to search for cows in a meadow.
I saw the day; I see it here
without shame.

It is midnight like an arrow
in the heart open
to the folly of night’s gleams
that deny sleep.

—Translated and sung by Marilyn McCabe

————————————————————–

 

 

Sep 112011
 

To write false novels

Whoever you may be, if the spirit moves you burn a few laurel leaves and, without wishing to tend this meager fire, you will begin to write a novel. Surrealism will allow you to: all you have to do is set the needle marked “fair” at “action,” and the rest will follow naturally. Here are some characters rather different in appearance; their names in your handwriting are a question of capital letters, and they will conduct themselves with the same ease with respect to active verbs as does the impersonal pronoun “it” with respect to words such as “is raining,” “is,” “must,” etc. They will command them, so to speak, and wherever observation, reflection, and the faculty of generalization prove to be of no help to you, you may rest assured that they will credit you with a thousand intentions you never had. Thus endowed with a tiny number of physical and moral characteristics, these beings who in truth owe you so little will thereafter deviate not one iota from a certain line of conduct about which you need not concern yourself any further. Out of this will result a plot more or less clever in appearance, justifying point by point this moving or comforting denouement about which you couldn’t care less. Your false novel will simulate to a marvelous degree a real novel; you will be rich, and everyone will agree that “you’ve really got a lot of guts,” since it’s also in this region that this something is located.

Of course, by an analogous method, and provided you ignore what you are reviewing, you can successfully devote yourself to false literary criticism.

via Manifesto of Surrealism.

Jan 162011
 

Pierre Joris. Photo by Joseph Mastantuono

 

Pierre Joris is a poet and translator who teaches at the University at Albany-State University of New York. I got to know him in the mid-1990s when I taught graduate creative writing students at the university and did a weekly radio show called The Book Show (two years, over 80 interviews with famous and infamous writers from Europe, Canada and the United States) at WAMC, the Albany Public Radio affiliate. One of my  interviews was devoted to Pierre who is not just a poet and teacher but a protean dynamo of translation, theory, criticism, editing, and international literary promotion. One of his many accomplishments is the massive multi-volume Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry which he co-edited with Jerome Rothenberg. In 2005 he won the PEN Poetry in Translation prize. Later this year ‘Exile is My Trade:’ The Habib Tengour Reader, edited, translated & introduced by Pierre Joris will be published by Black Widow Press.

Tengour is an Algerian poet, novelist and ethnologist, a post-colonial, surrealist, and self-described mestizo writer who has lived, worked and studied in Algeria and Paris. As Pierre Joris writes, Tengour is “one of the Maghreb’s most forceful and visionary francophone poetic voices of the post-colonial era. The work has the desire and intelligence to be epic, or at least to invent narrative possibilities beyond the strictures of the Western / French lyric tradition, in which his colonial childhood had schooled him.” Few of Tengour’s works are available in English, but a Joris translation of the narrative poem “The Old Man of the Mountain” was published in 4X1: Works by Tristan Tzara, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Pierre Duprey, and Habib Tengour by Pete Monaco & Sharul Ladue (a former student of mine) at Inconundrum Press (which was subsequently taken over by another former student and NC community member Nina Alvarez). Herewith I am pleased to present two new Tengour works translated by Pierre Joris.

dg

 

“Five Movements of the Soul” and “Hodgepodge”

By Habib Tengour

Translated by Pierre Joris

2 Sections from: Etats de chose suivi de Fatras.

 

 

Five Movements of the Soul (new version)


Gray this voice

goes to earth

worried

oh

has sung

has taken

body of evocation






In silence
at
threshold



at a loss

to stretch



stone                                river
a door



clear

this did not last

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