Turgenev, "Дай мне руку, и пойдем мы в поле"

A work ("Your hand in mine, we walk the field") by this Russian man of letters.  You can read the original here.

Your hand in mine, we walk the field,
My thoughtful soul's one dearest friend.
Our life today bears our will's yield,
How shall we choose this life to spend?

Without this passion we will die.
In jest we mark the day and night,
And all we love, and every sigh
We shall forget till later light. 

So let this day pass unreturned
Near bright and weary life above,
As pagan crowds have slowly learned
Of life as childish peaceful love.

Above the brook clumped lightest steam
As dawn burned bright in solemn shell:
O how I would descend this beam
With you, just you, as once we fell. 

"But what, if not the past renewed?"
Comes your response to my soft heart.
Forget, I say, to grieve and brood,
Forget, forget, that we're apart.

Believe me now bereft of pride
That all my soul to you bursts forth
Sad is it how the lake's blue tide
Cannot forgive the wave's rogue course.

Behold the sky's most wondrous stain
Look forth, look back, look all around,
No tremble wastes away in vain
Give thanks that peace and love abound.

And I admit a presence pure
To which no worthy slave am I.
No shame, no fear, no prideful lure
No sadness coats my soul's last cry.

So let us walk in wordless ways,
Or if our words begin anew,
Or passions sound in wavelike maze
Or if we sleep in moonbeam hue.

Eternally they resonate,
These wondrous moments we embrace
This day, perhaps, may save our fate
And then our mysteries unlace.

A Painful Case

This writer has come to be known, among other titles, as an innovator of the difficult, of the abstruse, of the unnecessarily and overindulgently literary. A judgment that renders his early works even more shocking if one considers their bluntness. They are not, it should be said, simple works. "Simple" in literature should only apply to books for children and young adults, where certain conventions are followed, or to the etiolated parcels that litter every convenience store and airport, the formulaic kitsch of which some people cannot get enough (explaining this type's everlasting appeal). Dubliners is blunt in the manner that a strong cordial does not get away from you: you know what it will do, you feel at once empowered and weakened, and yet you cannot but have another sip because even the most jaded among us are always impressed with quality. Yet our subject James Duffy, for whom life has been constructed as a fortress, is not impressed with much at all.

A bachelor and "for many years cashier of a private bank," Duffy is a resident of the Irish capital's Chapelizod "because he found all the other suburbs of Dublin mean, modern, and pretentious" (ironically perhaps, the protagonist of this very modern and very pretentious work hails from this same area). Duffy clearly does not desire much human kindness, milky or otherwise, and has shut himself up in a bourgeois bunker "as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen." A survey of his shelves does not dissuade us from the suspicion that James Duffy does not believe in anything finer or greater than himself, which some may call solipsism and others misanthropy. There is a reason why Duffy "had bought himself every article of furniture in the room," but it is not ours to discover. There is also a reason (perhaps the very same one) why "he allowed himself to think that in certain circumstances he would rob his bank," and why the probability of such a crime dissipated. Maybe a snapshot of our man will yield more clarity:

Mr. Duffy abhorred anything which betokened physical or mental disorder. A medieval doctor would have called him saturnine. His face, which carried the entire tale of his years, was of the brown tint of Dublin streets. On his long and rather large head grew dry black hair and a tawny moustache did not quite cover an unamiable mouth. His cheekbones also gave his face a harsh character; but there was no harshness in the eyes which, looking at the world from under their tawny brows, gave the impression of a man ever alert to greet a redeeming instinct in others but often disappointed. He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense. He never gave alms to beggars and walked firmly, carrying a stout hazel.

To paraphrase this author, you cannot know how ugly or beautiful a face is until you try and draw it (I will say that I initially read "not quite unamiable mouth," a dull bromide). But we have already sketched Mr. Duffy, so how should we presume? From this passage and his subsequent acts, there remains no doubt as to his character. Self-serving, arrogant, vain, and asocial, he is well-read but far too enamored with his own literary knowledge, which for him means absorbing a lot of 'important' books so as to be able to present them to lesser minds in a discreetly condescending manner. A person far unkinder than I might even suggest that Mr. James Duffy could represent the typical talentless literary critic ("ever alert to greet a redeeming instinct in others but often disappointed" seems to lean in that direction), but there is no need for such contumely. Which is why his sudden romance with a married woman, a certain Emily Sinico, takes everyone, Mr. James Duffy included, rather violently by surprise.   

What befalls the lonely coparcenaries of this little fling, and how the story won its title, will be left to the curious reader. The last paragraph of A Painful Case has been much discussed among people who like to discuss such things, undoubtedly because it forfends any hope for humankind and its sentiments. Similarities to another, far greater tale with an equally ambiguous ending are unavoidable, but Chekhov's masterpiece at least envisions the couple acting in unison, as two halves of a whole that, per society's conventional mores, is not permitted to endure. For all the effortless beauty of the prose that cages the two lovebirds, Duffy's affair with Mrs. Sinico must be considered nothing if not implausible. That is, unless we truly subscribe to his interpretation of her as an empty vessel, a hollow orb polished by his palms:

Neither he nor she had had any adventure before and neither was conscious of any incongruity. Little by little he entangled his thoughts with hers. He lent her books, provided her with ideas, shared his intellectual life with her. She listened to all. Sometimes in return for his theories she gave out some fact of her own life.

Whether Mr. Duffy has indeed squeezed the universe into a ball, and whether that ball will be rolled toward some overwhelming question, will be discussed by those who deem the identification of literary allusions the mark of a cultured mind. For some reason Mr. Duffy strikes one as belonging to that group, even if the only group he could ever imagine joining is some cenacle in which he obtained a lifelong presidency. One also has the distinct impression that the currency that Mrs. Sinico utilizes, a plain fact from her plain existence ("Her husband's great-great-grandfather had come from Leghorn"; "Her husband was captain of a mercantile boat"; "They had one child," and so forth), is not much valued by the recipient, who has assumed the far more generous task of imbuing her with ideas from books – as if life outside of libraries were entirely notionless. Is it because he has seen the moment of his greatness flicker? Much more likely that Mr. Duffy could not distinguish a mermaid from the eternal foam.    

La Môme (La Vie en Rose)

For a number of reasons the English-speaking world has been unable to rid itself of what it has been in love with since the beginning of the nineteenth century: a French goddess, fair and free. It has ruminated in drunken bewilderment on this obsession, and has gone so far as to take lovers from all ends of the earth, the more exotic the better; it has whiled away the hours in disavowal of France's strengths, its virtues, its breath, its scent; but it has returned to it again and again as the one woman it cannot deny. France has much of what we have come to admire about Northern Europe – science, philosophy, aestheticism, a precise sense of justice, and a taste for danger tempered with a greater taste for truth. If Germany is indeed the epicenter of all modern thought and disciplines, France is a muse lingering astride the battlements, a waifish reminder of a life less structured or, I should say, less ordinarily structured. It is still remarkable that France, awash in hedonism, art, and beauty, is still a Catholic country that has no qualms about praising something greater that it cannot understand. The average Frenchman may no longer be a churchgoer, but a sense of order – greater order – allows him to live his life with the knowledge that it is not all in vain (Russians adhere to a similar philosophy, which would explain the long and fertile relationship that intellectuals from those countries have enjoyed). Perhaps a better description of the feeling one gets patrolling the streets of Paris or Lyon or Marseilles is one of cultural gentility, of a confidence wrought through centuries of apprenticeship and mastery, a knowledge of the world based on principles, beliefs, and institutions. And for all of France's history and achievement, this feeling is refreshing. It is refreshing because our world today is still being assaulted by nihilists in the guise of cultural theoreticians who wish to posit relativism, contradiction, taboo, and irony as the lonely breakwaters in an ocean of nothingness and insignificance. Yet if these same theoretical men were to descend the ghat to the water they hope will flood everything civilized, proper, and beatific, they will espy in this blueness only their own loathsome specters. France, a resting place of many of these dullards, will always be the beacon of culture amidst the pagan hordes. And the songs it will sing in joyous abandon may very well resemble the soundtrack to this recent film.    

The story of Édith Piaf, née Gassion (Marion Cotillard) has the familiar ring of tragedy. Born in an immigrant-laden district of Paris to parents with Italian and Algerian blood, Gassion struggled repeatedly against hunger, destitution, and lack of respect – the plague of the poor – only to struggle later in life with alcoholism, drug abuse, embezzlement, and exhaustion – the plague of the wealthy. Along the way she would meet the usual passel of pimps, criminals, prostitutes, and other underworld surlies; some of her most tender moments are shared with a woman of ill repute named Titine (Emmanuelle Seigner) in the brothel run by her grandmother, a very convenient place for her father to abandon her. Once he finally returns and takes her away kicking and screaming (how a child can emerge with a semblance of security from such a setup is beyond conventional mores to guess) the waif Gassion (la môme of the original French title) has been sufficiently exposed to violence, cruelty, and lives without the possibility of change and improvement to know that she may not have much time on this earth and she'd best make good use of it. 

Thereupon, and at the behest of her father, a professional contortionist, Gassion begins to sing. She drifts away from family (her mother, whose alcoholism would be passed on to her daughter, makes a brief and jarring appearance) and into circles of people who care about her even less but are enamored with her potential. In time and for stage purposes, she is dubbed "Piaf," "sparrow" in the local argot and representative of her diminutive size and powerful voice. There is the usual assortment of backstabbings, blowups, organized criminals, and one passionate affair with the polar opposite of Piaf – a famous boxer who was world champion until he lost to this American prizefighter and subject of another well-known film. The last years slip by in a wicked haze of ill-advised cocktails, iller health, and failed concerts, none of which did much to diminish her fame in the eyes of the general public – the sign of a true icon. When Piaf cannot perform, there are always her records, passed around like some inexorable drug, and the masses stay satisfied. When she dies and is denied Catholic rites for, among other things, having had an affair with a married man, thousands gather at this famous cemetery to hum her songs until their notes turn to tears.

I have not detailed many of the film's twists and turns because they are all predictable yet, to the best of our knowledge, quite accurate. Given filmmakers' tendencies to romanticize and re-imagine their subjects' existence, one shudders to think of the misery and suffering that Piaf actually endured in her brief years, addled as she was by both fame and the contents of its barroom. That said, the real reason to see the film, apart from the music that may or may not have been part of your youth (it was certainly part of mine), is Cotillard. Thanks to skill, a constellation of genetic similarities, and clever cinematography, she transforms her very pretty self into the miniature cannonball that was Piaf with nary a seam or thread showing. The performance is extraordinary and utterly unexpected by us ignorant cinéastes who had only seen her work in some rather mediocre French films – the less said about them the better – and this adaptation of a book about southern France, its vineyards, and what can happen to people who actually take time to smell the roses. That's why "life through rose-colored glasses" (the English title and trademark song by Piaf) had as little to do with Piaf's life as the sentimental sweetness of her tunes has to do with many facets of our modern existence. But for a while, and perhaps longer, we can be convinced otherwise. There's nothing inherently wrong with that.

Akhmatova, "Ведь где-то есть простая жизнь и свет"

A work ("A simple world and life do wait") by this Russian poet.  You can read the original here.

A simple world and life do wait,  
Transparent, warm and joy-filled land ...              
The evening cloaks the soft debate        
Of fences, neighbors, girlish fate,                        
As gentle bees their hum expand.               

So hard and solemn are our days,         
The bitter moments worshipped rites;    
When suddenly a reckless gale            
Rips through our words before their flight – 

Yet never do we dream of more       
Than plush cement of woe and fame,
The bluest ice, wide river shores,    
The dark and sunless gardens torn,
The Muse's voice, though faint, untamed. 

Prefaces to The Flowers of Evil

Four introductions to this magnificent collection of poems. You can read the original here. 

I. PREFACE

France is passing through a phase of vulgarity. Paris, center and appeal of universal stupidity. In spite of Molière and Béranger, we would never have believed France to be marching on the path of progress. Questions of art, terra incognita. Great men are fools.

My book could have done some good; I’m not grieved by this possibility. It could have been harmful; this does not fill me with joy.

The aim of poetry. This book was not made for my wives, my daughters, or my sisters.

All the crimes I have recounted have been imputed to me. The base entertainment of hate and contempt. The elegiacs are blackguards. And the word became flesh. For the poet is of no faction. Otherwise, he would be a simple mortal.

The Devil. Original sin. Good man. You may be the Tyrant’s favorite if you so wish. It is more difficult to love God than to believe in Him; on the other hand, it is more difficult for people of this century to believe in the Devil than to love him. Everyone makes use of him and no one thinks him real. The sublime subtlety of that Devil.

A soul of my choosing. The decor. Hence novelty. An epigraph. Barbey D’Aurevilly. The Renaissance. Gérard de Nerval. We are all hanged or hangable.

I had incorporated some garbage to please the journalists. They turned out to be a bunch of ingrates.

II. PREFACE TO THE FLOWERS

It is not for my wives, my daughters, or my sisters that this book was written; nor for the wives, daughters, or sisters of my neighbor. I will leave this analysis to those who mistake good actions for beautiful language.

I know well that the lover fascinated by a rich, beautiful style exposes his body to the hate of the masses. But no human respect, no false prudishness, no coalition, no universal suffrage will restrain me from speaking the incomparable dialect of this century, nor from confounding ink with virtue.

Since time immemorial the best poets have shared the most flowered spaces of the poetic realm. To me it seemed pleasing, and more agreeable than difficult, to extract the beauty of Evil. This book, fundamentally useless and absolutely innocent, was made with no other goal than to provide me with some light entertainment and indulge my taste for obstacles.

Some have told me that poetry can do wrong; this does not fill me with joy. Others – good souls all of them – that it may do good; and I’m not grieved by this possibility. The fear of some and the hope of others surprised me in equal measure, and did nothing but prove yet again that this century has unlearned the classical concepts of literature.

Despite the assistance provided by some celebrated oafs to man’s innate predilection for humbug, I would never have thought it possible that our country could march on the path of progress with such speed. This world of ours has acquired a thick film of vulgarity that imbues a spiritual man with all the violence of passion. But happy are the shells which the poison has not and cannot enter.

Initially I had the intention of answering several critics and explaining at the same time some very simple questions totally obscured by modernity’s glare. What is poetry? What is its aim? What is the distinction between the Beautiful and the Good? What could be the Beautiful in Evil? I could have averred that rhythm and rhyme fulfill man’s immortal need for monotony, symmetry, and surprise. I could have spoken at length on the adaptation of style to the subject, of the vanity and danger of inspiration, and so forth and so on. But I suffered from the imprudence of reading this morning several papers. Suddenly an indolence not unlike the weight of twenty atmospheres came over me, and my actions ceased in the face of the horrific inutility of explaining anything to anyone. Those who knew me were able to guess why. And for those who cannot or do not want to understand, any explanations would accumulate in vain into a heap of misconceptions.

III.

How can an artist, through a sustained series of efforts, attain originality commensurate with his talent?

How can poetry become music through prosody whose roots dig farther into the human soul than any classical theory might claim?

How does French poetry possess a little–known and mysterious system of prosody like that of Latin or English?

Why are all poets ignorant of how words rightly incorporate rhyme unable to express any ideas?

How is it that poetry (in this way akin to music and mathematics) can imitate a horizontal line, a straight line ascending, or a descending straight line? How can it rise in steep path to the sky without shortness of breath, or fall perpendicularly towards hell with the velocity of all gravity? How can it follow a spiral, trace a parabola, or the zigzag of superimposed angles?

How does poetry relate to the art of painting, of cooking, of cosmetics by expressing every sensation of sweetness or bitterness, of beatitude or horror by the coupling of a certain noun with a certain adjective, analogue, or opposite?

How is it that every man, reliant on my principles and availing himself of the knowledge which I plan to teach him in twenty lessons, can compose a tragedy no more lustily booed than any other or structure a poem of sufficient length to be as dull and tedious as all other epic poems?

Quite a task, rising up against all this divine insensitivity! More so owing to the fact that I, despite numerous laudable attempts, could not resist the desire to please my contemporaries, as shown in various places highlighted like rouge, certain base flatteries addressed to her, Democracy, and even some other twaddle excusing the despondency of my subject matter. But my dearest gentlemen of the press were ungrateful of such caresses, and I omitted in this new edition the traces of this ingratitude as much as could be possible.

To verify once more the excellence of my method, I have suggested devoting myself in the future to a celebration of the joys of the dedication and intoxication of military glory, even if they are not known to me.

Notes on my plagiary: Thomas Gray; Edgar Allan Poe (2 passages); Longfellow (2 passages); Statius; Virgil (the whole part of Andromache); Aeschylus; Victor Hugo.

IV. PROJECT ON A PREFACE FOR THE FLOWERS OF EVIL
(perhaps to be incorporated with previous notes)

If there is some glory in not being understood or in being understood just a little, I can say unboastfully that with this slender tome I have obtained and deserved such fame in one fell swoop. Offered numerous times to a series of publishers, all of whom shoved it away in horror; harassed and mutilated, in 1857, following a rather bizarre misunderstanding, slowly rejuvenated, sharpened, and strengthened in the course of many years of silence; having disappeared yet again owing to my insouciance, this discordant product of the Muse of the last days, revived again by a few new violent strokes, dares today to confront the sun a third time with its inanity.

This is not any fault of mine. The person to blame is the publisher insisting that he thought himself strong enough to brave the public’s distaste. “This book will remain forever like a blemish on your life,” one of my friends, an important poet, said to me from the very beginning. As it were, all my misadventures up to that point had affirmed the correctness of his observation. But I possess one of those happy personalities which derive a certain pleasure from hate, and which are glorified in their contempt. My taste so wickedly bent towards stupidity coerced me into finding particular pleasure in the travesties of calumny. As chaste as a sheet of white paper, as sober as water, as devoted to devotion as a communicant, as inoffensive as a victim, I do not mind passing for a debauched drunk, an impious lout, or an assassin.

My publisher continues to pretend that I, like he, would gain some benefit from explaining why and how I created this book, what my means and ends were, and from detailing my design and method. A critical work in that vein would surely amuse those minds enamored with profound rhetoric. For those dear souls I will write something later, perhaps, and have it printed in about ten copies. But, upon further scrutiny, doesn’t this all seem superfluous and wasteful since some will know or guess its essence and others will never understand it? I am too afraid of ridicule to insufflate to the masses the intelligence of a work of art. And I fear that I too greatly accommodated those Utopians who want by some immediate and magical decree to render all Frenchmen rich and virtuous.

And then, my most important reason, that most important reason of all: such acts bore and displease me. Should one then lead the rabble into the dresser’s and decorator’s studio, or the actor’s box? Should one reveal the tricks and levers of our gadgetry to the crowd so impassioned today and so indifferent tomorrow? Should one explain to them the edits and daubs and the variants improvised at rehearsals, or to what extent sincerity and instinct combine under the banner of indispensable charlatanism? Should they know of all the wrecks, makeup, pulleys, chains, regrets, and smears – in short, all the horrors that compose the sanctuary of art?

Besides, I’m not in the mood for all this today. I have no desire to demonstrate, surprise, amuse, or persuade. I have my nerves and my erratic whims. My goal is absolute rest and endless night. Bard of the mad pleasures of wine and opium, I thirst for nothing but a liqueur unknown on earth which even the celestial pharmacy could not provide me. A liqueur containing neither vitality, nor death, nor excitation, nor nothingness. To know nothing, to teach nothing, to want nothing, to sense nothing, to sleep, and then sleep more, this is today my one and only pledge. An infamous and disgusting pledge, but a sincere one.

Nevertheless, as superior taste instructs us not to be afraid of contradicting ourselves a bit, I have gathered at the end of this abominable book testimonies of sympathy on the part of certain men whom I value most. In this way, the impartial reader may see that I am not absolutely deserving of excommunication and that, having learned to make myself loved by some, my heart, although I no longer know on what printed cloth, does not perhaps have the “horrific ugliness of my face.”

Finally, by unmatched generosity, whereby my dear critics ...

As ignorance, more and more so ...

I myself denounce all imitations ...