Knots

measuring the speed of Rio Wang

To Saint Cecilia, patron of the musicians, on her feast

Trio Tzane: Bir evler yaptırdım (A house I’ve built). From the CD Gaïtani (2010)
The three members of Trio Tzane represent the three – Greek, Bulgarian and Turkish – branches of traditional Balkan music, and on this album they select songs from all three traditions in three voices, in their own arrangement. A house I’ve built is a Turkish wedding song of Slavic roots from Prizren of Southern Kosovo, but its lyrics is about the lovers who are forbidden to see each other.


Soheil Nafisi: همه فصلن دنیا Hame-ye faslân-e donyâ, “All seasons of the world”. From the CD تران های جنوب Tarânehâ-ye jonūb, “Southern songs” (2010)
“I wish every season of the world were springtime…” The text of this song was written by Ebrahim Monsefi (1945-1997), the popular Persian “bard” of the 60-70’s in the Hormozgani dialect of the Southern Persian port city of Bandar Abbas, and he accompanied it with guitar on his only published album ترانه های رامی Tarânehâ-ye Râmi, “Songs of Râmi”. Here it is sung by Soheil Nafisi on his recently published CD, to which he gave the title of “Southern songs” as a hommage to Monsefi, and even the style of the music is inspired by the port city’s Arabish music, a far away relative of Spanish Flamenco. This song accompanied our post on the old bicycles of Isfahan.


Deniz Kızı Eftelya: Kadıköy’lü. From the CD Kadıköy’lü (1998)
Born in a Greek family in Istanbul, Deniz Kızı (“Mermaid”) Eftelya (1891-1939), was a legendary singer of early 20th-century Istanbul. This CD by Kalan Music is a good selection of her early recordings. To the post on the Ottoman ephemera of Istanbul.


Lila Downs: El relámpago (The lightning). From the CD El cantina (2006)
On this CD the American - Mexican Mixtec Indian singer performs Mexican songs. This one accompanies our post on the early 20th-c. Mexican photos of the Casasola brothers. Lila Downs won a worldwide fame with the music of the film on Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera’s wife, who also figures on the photos of the Casasolas.


Facundo Cabral: The day that I go, and Carlos Di Fulvio (*1939): The chacarera. Music and song by Sebastiano Solis. From the CD El Gaucho, el Inca y la Nueva Música (1982).
The Argentine poet Facundo Cabral (*1937) grew up in an asylum. “I did not speak until I was nine years old, I was illiterate until the age of fourteen, at forty-six I first met my father. After escaping the asylum, I learned singing from peasants. On 24 February 1954 a tramp recited to me the Sermon on the Mount, and I discovered that I was reborn. Then I wrote the lullaby Vuele bajo. This is how it all started.” – The text and translation of the two songs can be read here.


Federico Lechner, Tango & Jazz Trio: Beboponga (2008) (5'06")
Recently we have expanded our jazz collection with three samples of Argentine jazz which seems particularly productive lately. To the CDs of Ernesto Jodos (El jardín seco, 2008) and Paula Shocron (Homenaje, 2009) found in Buenos Aires, is now added the album of the Federico Lechner Tango & Jazz Trio entitled Beboponga (2008). All the three discs are led by pianists, and on this one, Beboponga also feature Andrés Litwin (drums), Javier Moreno, Jorge Cerrato “Jato” and Pablo Martín Caminero (bass) as well as Gladston Galliza singing in track 10 (entitled “A mi madre”). In the first and last tracks Antonio Serrano whistles and plays the harmonica. Most of the compositions are by Lechner, but there are some versions of other musicians as well. The most striking is the one titled “Spike” on a Fantasy Impromptu by Frederic Chopin. The track quoted here is the first one of the disk which gives its title.


Masoud Bakhtyari (Bahman Alaeddin): Tey tum rah تی توم ره /Râh-e bârik راه باریک (Lane) (4'13"). From the CD Bahang بهنگ /Arus عروس (Bride) (2007).
The music of the Bakhtiari nomads in central Zagros, hence the bilingual, Bakhtiari and Persian titles. The lyrics are the poems of Ali Hafezi. Bahman Alaeddin begins his bilingual – Persian-Bakhtiari – blog with the presentation of this album, and also Delnavazha writes about it. Pulsating, repetitive melodies, like the ones sung by the friends of the bride while waiting for the bridegroom. Like the Sephardic Ya salió de la mar la galana was here below.


Photis Ionatos: Ithaca, on the poem Ιθάκη by Konstantinos N. Kavafis; and Verses, on the poem Στροφές by Kostas Karyotakis. From the CD Ithaque (1988).
Photis Ionatos in this CD set to music the poems of great 20th-century Greek poets. The Greek music is pervaded by the atmosphere of French chansons, which is no wonder, as Ionatos has lived in Belgium since the age of eighteen. This CD was one of our first, definitive encounters with true Greek music and modern Greek poetry. There was a time when we took very seriously this poem by Kavafis: as a memento, I have also woven it into a tale. Today the Verses already stay nearer to me. I will also translate them.


Savina Yannatou: Ya salió de la mar la galana (The lady has come out of the sea), El sueño de la hija del rey (The dream of the princess) and Los bilbilicos (The nightingales). Three songs from the CD Άνοιξη στη Σαλονίκη (Spring in Saloniki, 1995).
Savina Yannatou in her more than twenty CDs sings the traditional songs of the whole Mediterranean and even more distant lands (in one of them for example a Moldovan Hungarian – „Csángó” – song, in Hungarian). This first CD of her, presenting the results of an ethnomusicological research in Thessaloniki, was completely dedicated to the music of the once numerous and rich Sephardic population of Saloniki. We have quoted of it in three posts, also giving an English translation of their Sephardic (Ladino) text: here, here and here.


Azerbaijan Folk Ensemble: Bayati Shiraz (7'05") and Balkan Messengers, Çeçen kızı (Chechen girl) from the CD “Balkan Messengers 2”
The beautiful first piece could be also a traditional Hungarian violin solo from Transylvania, but it had been made more refined by the influence of the Persian culture to which also its title alludes. (Azerbaijan was from ancient times to 1833 a province of Persia, and its part laying to the south of the Caucasus still belongs to Iran.) We have included this on the blog margin as an illustration to our post written on Tanburi Cemil Bey’s song “The Chechen girl”, with the “Caucasian beauties” in mind. The above piece of the Balkan Messengers is the most beautiful version of this latter, but you are suggested to listen to the other versions as well in the same post.


Mohammad Reza Lotfi: Âvâz-e Bayât-e Esfahân (27'58"), tar; tonbak accompaniment by Nâsser Farhangfar, from the CD Parvâz-e Esgh (The flight of love); and Raghs-e Parandegân (The dance of birds) (7'07") tar solo from the CD Ramz-e Esgh (The mysteries of love).
I wanted to continue the bird thread, this is why I have chosen exactly The dance of birds by Lotfi, the great old man of Persian music who has long since been living and teaching in Los Angeles and only rarely goes home to give a concert which at these times becomes a national feast, like in this May in Tehran at which I was unable to attend, my heart was broken. Unfortunately, exactly this dance of the birds is only a low quality pirate registration of a Copenhagen concert, this is why you have to listen first to the improvisation in Isfahan mode, so that you could imagine its forcefulness also in the birds piece. Lotfi’s style is markedly different from that of Alizadeh, within the same traditional Persian lute music. And then you have not yet heard the other Persian lute players whose pieces I’m about to publish here for new knots.


Hossein Alizadeh: Horizon, setar solo; and Birds, on which Homa Niknam sings.
Here you are some more of Hossein Alizadeh, the first and second piece from the CD Birds (پرنده ها), recorded in 2006 together with Madjid Khaladj (Iranian drums: tombak, dayre, daf) and with Homa Niknam (voice). The apropos of its inclusion was this post with birds. You should listen to the two pieces one after the other, without interruption, as they also play it on the CD.


Taberna Mylaensis: Fammi ristari ‘nto menzu di to braccia (4'10")
The Taberna Mylaensis („Tavern of Milazzo”) has been researching and singing Sicilian folk music since 1975. In Italy they have become a legend, the synonym of Sicily. This beautiful love song, Let me rest in your arms is from their first disk of 1976. I will soon publish its original text together with its translation.

Soheil Nafisi: شهاب‌ها و شب‌ها – Shahâbhâ va shabhâ – Comets and nights
Of this song, the poem of one of the greatest modern Persian poets Mehdi Akhavan Sales (1928-1991) I have no mp3 version. You can only see and hear it in a video version here, where I also give an English translation and add some commentary on the subtleties of Persian poetry.


Dusán and Zorán Sztevanovity: There was a dance (from the CD Az élet dolgai, 1991) (5'46")
In the first post of our thread opened with the title “History sung” we included some songs by the Zorán Sztevanovity from the Hungary of the 70s and 80s, you are suggested to go over there and listen to all of them. The source of this There was a dance, the Take this waltz by Leonard Cohen and its flamenco version by Enrique Moreno have been presented here.


Wang Wei: 陽關三疊 Three variations of the Yang Pass - Wu Wenguang, guqin solo (5'35")
This famous song composed by Wang Wei – whose volume of poems from the times of the Tang Dynasty gave name to our blog – as a farewell poem to his friend Yuan Er leaving for a mission to the Western barbarians over the Yang Pass, was worked up several times, and it became a distinguished piece of the repertoire of guqin, the Chinese zither. The “three variations” refers to the fact that it was traditionally repeated in three different versions. We have recently published its text with translation and with some comments.
The Yang Pass border station stood only 70 kilometers from Dunhuang. Aurel Stein, when a thousand and five hundred years later arrived here from the West, explored the sand-buried settlements of those very barbarians visited by Yuan Er on his mission.


Kulin ban: Žali Zare da žalimo (Cry, Sara, cry for me), 2006 (2'08")
and N. Constantinopoulos: Εβράδυν παληοβράδυν κι ο ώλιος έδυσε (Evening, evil evening, the sun set down) (4'02")
The first one is a Serbian folk song from the Turkish period, in a beautiful a capella version. Here I also include its video clip and English translation, with the second song of the medieval Greek border guards as a footnote, and with a historical note on the Balkans where we live.


Bach: The Art of the Fugue, Contrapunctus 1 - Fretwork (3'09")
I have been trying to find a a good chamber music version of the Art of the Fugue. It is not easy at all. This piece – just like the Musical Offer – is usually performed either too mechanically, or too sentimentally. The Fretwork on this a CD managed to remain in the middle, in a very elegant way. Now I only need a similarly fine chamber version of the Musical Offer.


Klezmatics: Shnirele perele (6'11") (from the CD Rhythm & Jews) and Woody Guthrie: Come When I Call You (4'25") (from the CD Wonder Wheel)
I like very much the Klezmatics. The text of the first song can be read here (in Yiddish original and with an English translation), while that of the other here, both with some commentary.


Hossein Alizadeh - Kayhan Kalhor - Mohammad Reza Shajarian: Zemestan ast (“It’s Winter”), 3rd and 4rd movements (15'39")
From the Californian concert recording of 2001 of the three great performers of classical Persian music. The poem of the great modern Persian author Mehdi Akhavan Sales (1928-1991) giving the title to this CD is sung by Shajarian. You can listen to the rest of the CD here or also here, where the texts too are published in Persian. (I will translate them in a next post.) Another version of the introducing tune played by Alizadeh and Kalhor can be heard here in the performance of two other great masters, Parviz Meshkatian and Shahram Nazeri.


Bach, Gavotte I and II from the 3rd English Suite, played by András Schiff (3'21")
One of the several performances of these two Gavottes with which I have counterpointed the Rumi-CD by Davood Azad. It is worth to listen the other versions as well.


Le Vieux Gaultier: La Poste (the last movement of Suite in d minor) - Hopkinson Smith, lute (1'30")
Hopkinson Smith is one of the greatest living musicians. On this CD he plays the lute suites of the 16th-century Ennemond Gaultier. You can find his full discography here.


Hossein Alizadeh: Mahtâb / Esfahân (16'26")
Hossein Alizadeh is one of the best classical Persian musicians, playing on various Iranian lutes. In Iran his manuals are used in the teaching of saz and tar. On this CD he improvises in four classical Persian modes on the lute called sallâneh, designed by himself.

Un regalo para Bandi

Hemos conocido el odio cordial de nuestro amigo Bandi a los gatos. Le brindamos una manera de empezar a amarlos descubriendo en ellos alguna utilidad. El texto está sacado de la recopilación de Rupert de Nola (cocinero del rey Fernando I de Nápoles –1458-1494–, hijo de Alfonso el Magnánimo), Lybre de doctrina per a ben servir. De tallar e del art de coch (Libro de doctrina para bien servir. De trinchar y del arte de cocinero), Barcelona: Carles Amorós, 1520.

De menjar de gat rostit

Lo gat pendras e mataras ço es degollar lo: e quant sia mort leua li lo cap e guarda q[ue] nengu non me[n]jas p[er] la vida: car p[er] ventura tornaria orat: e apres scorxal be e netame[n]t e obrel e fes lo ben net: e quant sie net pren lo e met lo dins en vn drap de li q[ue] sie net e soterral deual terra de manera q[ue] stiga vn jorn e vna nit: e apres trau lo de alli e met lo en ast e vaja al foch a coure: e apres quant coura vntal ab bon all e oli e qua[n]t sia vntat bat lo be ab vna verga e aço faras fins q[ue] sia cuyt vntant y batent: e quant sia cuyt pendras lo e tallaras: axi com si fos vn conill e met lo en vn plat gran e pren del all e oli que sia destemprat ab bon brou de manera q[ue] sia ben clar e lançal damu[n]t lo gat: e apres menja d[e]ll e veuras vna via[n]da singular.

De comida de gato asado

El gato tomarás y matarás, es decir, lo degollarás. Y cuando esté muerto quítale la cabeza y vigila que nadie la coma ni por su vida, porque quizá podría volverse loco. Y después desuéllalo bien y limpiamente, y ábrelo y límpialo bien. Y cuando esté bien limpio ponlo en un trapo de lino que esté limpio y mételo bajo tierra de manera que esté un día y una noche. Y después sácalo de allí y ponlo en un espetón y que vaya al fuego a asarse. Y luego mientras se asa úntalo con buen alioli [ajiaceite], y cuando esté untado golpéalo con una vara, y esto harás hasta que esté asado, untando y golpeando. Y cuando esté asado lo tomarás y trincharás así como si fuera un conejo. Y ponlo en un plato grande y toma el alioli desleído en un buen caldo de manera que sea bien claro y échalo encima del gato. Y después come de él. Verás una vianda singular.

Bandi es un extraordinario sumiller, así que no tendrá problema en encontrar el vino que mejor cuadre. ¡Salud y que aproveche!

Kassa, Main Street 1.

Yesterday we were in Kassa (since 1920 Košice, in Slovakia).

I have been longing for a long while to go there. Because of Sára. To see the city where she had grown up.

I was especially curious of the famous Schalkház Hotel, founded in 1872 by Lipót Schalkház, Sára’s German-speaking grandfather.


The beautiful eclectic building at Main Street 1 was one of the important centers of Hungarian art and literature.

From the guide it turned out that today the hotel on the place of Schalkház is called Slovan. No matter, I thought. It must have been renovated. We will see it anyway.

We saw it.

In order to get to the downtown of Košice, one has to pass for kilometers through all the filth of a former Socialist industrial city. And then one arrives to an enormous square where, on the side of a gigantic monument erected to the Soviet army of liberation


one finds two immense parking place, with the ruins of an once working fountain between them, where now hastily discharged bitumen alternates with weeds reaching to the knees.


On the one side of the parking place a County Cultural Centre-type building, once erected in the megalomaniac style of the seventies and eighties but since then completely abandoned, is falling into decay. An enormous red counter is still imperturbably counting something on its facade.

And on the other side – on the place of Hotel Schalkház – stands the Hotel Slovan.


A Socialist monster from 1971. In those times the address was Leninová 1. It is that kind of a “by tomorrow we’ll turn over the whole word”-like block-building which simply cannot be maintained, and after ten years is already completely eroded both in- and outside.


Today the street is called Main Street again. The change of the times is characterized by the general devastation, a newly founded casino inside, and the gigantic poster covering both sides to the height of ten floors.

The background of the picture is offered by the historical downtown turned into a disneyland, and by recently arrived Western consumerism represented by clumsy music shouting everywhere, the shops of multinational companies, and the units of public catering functioning in an unreal number. The people is happily consuming.


This is the exact summary of the history of Hungary. Hotel Schalkház. Hotel Slovan. Gloria Palac Pepsi.


It was very, very sad.

I asked Sára to help me to somehow get out from the despair completely overwhelming me.

And then I began to feel with how much love she is present here. That God does not leave these people to themselves at all.

I began to see those small splinters of culture that either remained here or were somehow recovered – a refined bunch of flowers at the Main Street florist, the Slovakian translation of a good English historical series in the bookshop, a bathroom in a restaurant beautifully covered with tiles – which, by virtue of their authenticity, can offer a way of being saved by God to those who want to be saved.

And I was consoled.

Córdoba

...and besides, on a wise inscription found in Córdoba see our post in Mesa revuelta, the Spanish-language blog of Studiolum.

Hazards

This image of a Baroque inscription in the library of the Salamanca University was donated a while ago by Wang Wei to Pei Di (or vice versa), and now as it has been found among the images waiting for being framed, Pei Di (or Wang Wei) decided to scan it for the common good, before hanging it at the entrance of his library.


The text of the inscription is as follows:

Excommunication – with absolution exclusively reserved to His Holiness – is imposed on whichever person taking away, stealing or in whatever other way expropriating any book of paper or parchment from this library, without being able to be absolved until completely restoring them.

Weighty words. But not as weighty as those of the inscription which – as Mario Jaime Señoranis Durán writes it in his article „Maldiciones para los que roban libros” (Maledictions against book thieves) in the Boletín de la Biblioteca y Archivo Histórico del Honorable Congreso Nacional (La Paz, Bolivia), issue 5 (2005) 2 – some centuries earlier threatened the readers of the Monasterio de San Pedro in Barcelona – probably in Latin, although the author only reports its Spanish translation:

Para aquel que robare un libro de esta biblioteca, que en su mano se convierta en serpiente y lo desgarre. Que quede paralítico, y que estallen sus miembros. Que languidezca en dolor, aullando por misericordia, y que su agonía no cese hasta que se hunda en la disolución. Que los gusanos de los libros roan sus entrañas como el gusano que no muere, y cuando finalmente se vaya al castigo final que las llamas del infierno lo consuman por siempre y para siempre.

(Whoever would steal a book from this library, may it change in his hands into a snake lacerating him. May he be paralyzed and may his members burst apart in pieces. May he be tormented by an intolerable pain and howl for mercy, but may his agony not cease until his body is completely dissolved. May the bookworms fret his entrails like a worm that is unable to die, and when he finally goes to the last judgement, may the flames of hell consume him for ever and ever.)

“Has the world made any progress by means of the books?” Perhaps this much, yes.

Policacata

Translating the most recent book by Umberto Eco, La storia della bruttezza, in chapter 7 I run across this phrase:

Tale Berillon durante la prima guerra mondiale aveva scritto La polychesie de la race allemande dove dimostrava che il tedesco medio produce più materia fecale del francese, e di odore più sgradevole.

(A certain Doctor Berillon wrote during WW1 his La polychesie de la race allemande in which he demonstrates that the average German produces a larger amount of faecal matter than the average Frenchman, and which also smells more evil .)

Polychesie? Out with the French dictionary. This word, however, cannot be found in it. Then out with the Greek one, for the prefix ‘poly’ makes obvious the Greek root of the word. But the Greek dictionary does not have χήσις or similar word either.

Ultima ratio rerum: the Google, where this word can be found indeed (what is it that cannot be found in Google?) but in a suspiciously low number: only three hits.

The first two hits are two cries for help. In the forum „L’Amaca” of Finanzaonline.it it was “Roy Dantès” who sent in exactly the above phrase with the subject “Cerco disperatamente” (I’m desperately looking for it), to ask whether anyone knows more about the work mentioned. And in the Russian translators’ forum of Livejournal it was “viesel” who put this question only a couple of days before me:

Мне попалось в колонке Умберто Эко, которую перевожу:

Некий Берийон (приведенный как пример ученого, зараженного национализмом) в самый разгар Первой мировой войны (1915) пишет “La polychésie de la race allemande”, где доказывает, что средний немец производит больше фекальных масс, чем француз, и с более резким запахом.

Что это за слово такое - полишези? По смыслу - "многодерьмовость", но с каким корнем, на каком языке? Не знакомо оно кому?

(In a writing of Umberto Eco I’m just translating, I have found what follows:

A certain Berillon (mentioned by the author as an example of the scholar blinded by nationalism) writes in the middle of the first world war (1915) his book “La polychésie de la race allemande”, in which he demonstrates that the average German produces a larger amount of faecal matter than the average Frenchman, and which also smells more evil.

What does “polychésie” mean? I guess “multishitting”, but from which root and which language? Is it not familiar to someone?)

Russian inventiveness, as it is well known, is unlimited, and the question of Viesel immediately generates two gorgeous solutions:

может, от Scheiße (дерьмо, нем.)?

(possibly from Scheiße (German “shit”), isn’t it?)

But the other solution that majestically scrolls over the entire Indo-European language history, is even more captivating:

Deutsch: scheißen Englisch: to shit Französisch: chier de.wiktionary.org/wiki/kacken http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/chier (Familier) Diarrhée. J’ai la chiasse. от гл. chier (lat. cacare; Caco - "плохой" латинский префикс из греческ. "kako" - плохой, "kakos" = "зло". Цитата из www.mythography.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=983&st=20: This Greek term comes from the Indo-European root kakka - meaning "to defecate" - это греческое слово имеет индоевропейский корень со значением процесса дефекации. Корень слова Polychesie - из разговорного французского.

(German: scheißen English: to shit French: chier de.wiktionary.org/wiki/kacken http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/chier (familiar) Diarrhea. J’ai la chiasse. (I have diarrhea) From the word ‘chier’ (Lat. cacare; Caco - "bad", a Latin prefix from the Greek word "kako" - bad, "kakos" = "badly". Quotation from the site www.mythography.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=983&st=20: This Greek term comes from the Indo-European root ‘kakka’, meaning "to defecate". The root of the word ‘polychesie’ is thus from spoken French.)

It is not a freak of fortune that so many translators start to follow the scent of Doctor Berillon at the same time. In fact, La storia della bruttezza – as if we read it in some novel by Eco – is being translated at the same time by a host of translators from an unexisting original. It is obvious that the Master sold this book standing to the Italian publisher, which – like they did two years earlier with La storia della bellezza – distributed it to the foreign publishers with the condition that the translations would be printed together with the original work in Italy. However, at the beginning of the translation the original Italian text is not yet ready. The new chapters arrive week by week from Eco, and while the translators work on them, he compiles the next one, like the teachers of English of the ’80s the matter of the next lesson. Anyway, it is not worth to hurry with the translation, because it can be taken for granted that the same chapter will arrive again rewritten within a month.

The third hit of Google is, however, not a translator’s guess, but a riddle. The forum “La Guerre du Grammatovo” by François Parée in the Liste Murphypro displays French quotations, each of them including a deliberate error (missing accent does not count) to be hunted by the readers.

„Dans toutes les invasions anterieures, les hordes germaniques s’etaient signalees... par le debordement d'evacuation intestinale dont elles jalonnaient leurs marches... Deja, du temps de Louis XIV, on disait que par le seul aspect de l’enormite des excrements, le voyageur pouvait savoir s'il avait franchi les limites du Bas-Rhin.” – Docteur Berillon, La polychesie de la race allemande (1915)

(“In all earlier invasions, the German hordes were distinguished... by the flood of excrements they indicated their route with... Already in the times of Louis XIV it was told that the traveler could tell from the enormous amount of excrements that he already crossed the lower Rhine.” - Dr. Berillon, La polychesie de la race allemande (1915))

As in this quotation no error can be discovered, the suspicion arises that it is the title itself, and in the title the incriminated word that is mistaken. And in fact: searching for “Berillon+race allemande”, the catalog card of a long sold volume of the second-hand bookshop Galaxidion pops up:

BERILLON (Docteur). - La polychrésie de la race allemande. Das übertriebene Darmleerungsbedürfnis der deutschen Rasse. Superlienteria germanica. - Extrait des Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société de Médecine de Paris, séance du 25 juin 1915. P., Maloine & fils, 1915. 24 x 16 cm, 20 p. Broché. – 'La polychrésie est la manifestation d'une suractivité anormale de la fonction intestinale? Dans tous les cas, la polychrésie est la démonstration formelle de l'infériorité à la fois physiologique et psychologique de la race allemande'. – Cet ouvrage vous est proposé par la Librairie Solstices. Euro 150.00

Everything is illuminated. Polychrésie stems from Greek πολυχρήσις that can be translated as “increased peristaltic movement”. This is how I finally translated it in the above phrase, on page 190 of La storia della bruttezza.

Incidentally, this catalog card is the only occurrence of the title of this work in all the net, including French library catalogs as well, as this study is a separate print that is not cataloged by its title but by that of its journal. And this card – again as in a novel by Eco – like a message in a bottle, was cast up by the waves of the net in the last minute before my eyes, before they swallowed it once for all. I was only able to extract it from the cache of Google, and since then it has been deleted from there as well.

But if this is the case, and if “polychesie” (like this, without an accent) is a mere typo, then a new suspicion arises: is it possible that this rare work came to the knowledge of the Master not by autopsy, but by means of the same net quiz?

* * *

Epilogue. I delivered the translation – appropriately – on May 9, the Day of Victory. On May 11 La Stampa published in its supplement “Libri” the text of the “lectio magistralis” given by Eco on the Torino Book Fair. In this paper he repeats the above quotation by Berillon (still with “polychesie” in the title), and this time he also hints at his source, a catalog called “Cabinet de curiosités”, a veritable goldmine of medical curiosities of the age of Positivism.

The Master has thus justified himself, while letting the roots of the error ever deeper in the common knowledge of Italian literature. There is only one question left: in which form will the French translator of La storia della bruttezza report the title of Berillon’s work?

Český Krumlov

While planning our summer excursion to Bohemia, I have found the trilingual – Czech, English and German – information site of possibly the most beautiful part of Bohemia, the South Bohemian Region. Among the many useful infos the most spectacular one is this interactive map of Český Krumlov, where you can read the detailed description and history of each building by clicking on its image.


This detailed inventory of monuments – as I got to know from a volume that I found by chance some days ago in a bookshop in Vienna – was compiled in 1992 as a part of the legal documentation when the town was included in the UNESCO World Heritage list. Perhaps this is the reason that, although several Bohemian historical cities sell such beautifully designed 3D maps, unfortunately none of them are put on the web in a similar interactive edition.

Český Krumlov is a peculiar place not only because in spite of the deportation of the German population after 1945 and the massive devastation during the Communist era it still appears such an intact medieval town as if 13th-century masons, knocking the plaster off their trowels, said “well then, this is Český Krumlov” and the town has remained ever since like that. But also because the Vltava river, in a truly astounding way, describes a large S-crook in the middle of the medieval town with several meters of difference in level. If you stay at the bottleneck of the crook, on the side of the town theater at the beginning of the Horní Brána, you can see the same river flowing almost above you to the right side, and deeply under you to the left. Your sudden vertigo will be effectively soothed in the beer-house Barbakan right across the street.


Update: We have uploaded here the map of restaurants in Český Krumlov. We will update it soon.

Attila

It would be a guaranteed dropout question in any quiz: where does a statue of Attila the Hun stand today? One could only guess: in Transylvania? In ancient Upper Hungary? In Sopron? In Óbuda? In Mongolia? On the battlefield of Catalaunum? In China, in the former capital of the Huns?

The correct answer is: twenty kilometers from Vienna, in the tiny Austrian town of Tulln.

Nowadays the late descendants of the Huns only make expeditions to the Praskac of Tulln, the richest nursery of Kukania for English roses and other Western treasures unknown in Hunland. Ancient Huns, however, used to come here for quite different flowers.

According to the Nibelung Epic, Attila, the king of the Huns received here his bride Kriemhild coming by boat from Passau:

ein stat bi tvonowe / lit in osterlant
div ist geheizen tvln / da wart ir bechant
vil manich site vremede / den si e nie gesach
si enpfiengen da genvge / den sit leit von ir gesach
vor eceln dem chvenege / ein ingesinde reit
vro vnd vil riche / hoefsh vnt gemeit
wol vier vnd zweinzech fversten / tiwer vnd her
daz si ir vrowen saehen / davon en gerten si niht mer
zwene fvrsten riche / als vns daz ist geseit
bi der frvn gende / trvgn iriv chleit
da ir der chvenich ecel / hin engegen gie
da si den fvrsten edele / mit chvsse gvetelich enpfie

A city by the Danube / in Osterland doth stand,
Hight the same is Tulna: / of many a distant land
Saw Kriemhild there the customs, / ne’er yet to her were known.
To many there did greet her / sorrow befell through her anon.
Before the monarch Etzel / rode a company
Of merry men and mighty, / courteous and fair to see,
Good four-and-twenty chieftains, / mighty men and bold.
Naught else was their desire / save but their mistress to behold.
As is to us related, / did there high princes twain
By the lady walking / bear aloft her train,
As the royal Etzel / went forward her to meet,
And she the noble monarch / with kiss in kindly wise did greet.

Such a historical chance cannot be missed by a small Austrian town of ten thousand inhabitants. Although Tulln has just recently (2001) erected a statue – a copy of the equestrian statue in the Capitolium – to Marcus Aurelius – “in order it might recall the memory of several centuries of Roman presence at the banks of the Danube” –, as well as to the great son of the town Egon Schiele (2000) – whose memory until then was only recalled by the town prison, where he condescended to serve his sentence, and which was then transformed into a Schiele Museum with open air beer pub and a gorgeous vista on the Danube – but having been mentioned in the Nibelungenlied is a whole other story!

The town has therefore given commission to the Russian sculptor Mikhail Nogin – who happens to have been the creator of the previous two statues as well – to erect a monument, in the form of a sculptural group on the presumptive site of that historical encounter, the desolate bank of the Danube behind the monastery of the Minorites, to the marching in of Tulln into German epic poetry. With this “Projekt” – as Landeshauptmannstellvertreter Ernest Gabmann formulated it with untranslatable German perfection – “wurde ein wertvoller städtebaulicher Akzent gesetzt”, and furthermore – a hardly negligible point of view – “wurden rund 160 Parkplätze in der Innenstadt von Tulln geschaffen, wodurch das Zentrum attraktiviert und eine Erhöhung der Kundenfrequenz erreicht werden soll”.


The statue unveiled in 2005 which, instead of being trivially mentioned as a “Denkmal” – Österreich ist anders! – is called a “Bronzeskulpturen-Dokumentation,” consists of three parts. In the forefront one can read the verses of the Nibelung Epic about Tulln freshly written on the open page of a large bronze book placed on a rustic slab – the quill of the bronze goose is still laying on the bronze page. Behind the book, the jets of water of the fountain shaped by “Wasserbildhauer” (haben Sie’s mal probiert, Wasser zu hauen?) Hans Muhr, repeat on a larger scale the double arch of the open book, subliming it into an unmaterial and timeless metaphor as if it were, while from behind the vapour of the water, like from the mist of the past, the historical vision emerges. A straight talk. The citizen looks at it and says: “I got it. That one there comes out of this one here, as if it were. Art, isn’t it.” And thus having succesfully absolved the component “art” of his duty, with peaceful heart he goes on to behold the history.

Citizens interpreting art

Wundaschön!

A Rezeptions-Dokumentation of the Bronzeskulpturen-Dokumentation
from digicamfotos.de

Kriemhild, coming from the left, from the direction of Passau is accompanied by the Markgraf of Osterland – today’s Austria – Rüdiger von Bechelaren and by the other “high princes twain” mentioned in the epic, to Attila waiting for her on the right side, in the direction of Hunnia. Behind the Hun king there stands his brother Buda, as well as two German princes living in exile in the Hun court, Dietrich von Bern and Gibich. The queue is ended by the little child of Attila, Csaba – according to the inscription he is Aladár, but this latter will be actually the son of Kriemhild – swinging his wooden sword and peeping curiously from behind the cloak of Gibich at his future stepmother.







Finally, behind Csaba – rigorously from the direction of Hunnia – a shocked bronze rat is watching the never seen multitude.

From the sinking ship save us, O Lord!

Captains remain the last

The composition is a monumental postmodern gag which – following the widespread recipe of the postmodern gag – starts from easily identifiable traditional frame topoi just in order to deny and ridicule them in the details. This genre is the great encounter of the artist with father complex and of the snobbish petty bourgeois, where both find their pleasure in the systematic emptifying and caricaturing of the exalted topos of the past. And both of them gain an additional bonus as well: the bourgeois an art easy to consume but held in high esteem (“traditional forms in the individual orchestration of the artist”), while the artist the delight of jeering at the bourgeois who consumes and esteems his gag as art. The overdetailed hyperrealism, the affected gestures and the grotesque expression of the figures of the majestic sculptural group recall the characters of cartoons and comics, thus offering an easy clue to the reception of the work of art which is even more enhanced by the genre figures (already qualified as an “opium for the people” by Schopenhauer). The soul of Hundertwasser is hovering above the waters of the fountain.


Incidentally, in the same period Nogin created the statue of another Asian monarch as well, that of Heydar Aliev, President of Azerbaijan. Its erection in the same year of 2005 was heralded by such electronic media like the Day.Az, the Nash Vek (“He left a memory made not with hands...”), or the Azerbajdzhanskaya Izvestiya (“The love of the people is eternal”). The statue standing on a pedestal made of Chinese and Brazilian granite in the Aliev Park established for this purpose was modeled by Nogin in collaboration with Russian artist Salavat Scherbakov, and prepared in the foundry of Smolensk, as it was bitterly commented on the forum of the Azeri AzTop:

Выходит у нас нет гранита, нет скульпторов и нет местечка, где его можно изготовить. Радует то, что хоть деньги у нас на это есть.

It is evident therefore that we have no granite, no sculptors, and no place where it could be prepared. I’m happy, however, that at least we have money for it.

This is of course not entirely true for Tulln, for the Nibelung group was most probably moulded in the same workshop where the two previous statues, that is in the Walter Rom Kunstgiesserei of Tirol, whose professional website offers a flash presentation of the process of moulding well worth to watch.

Heydar Aliev is also renowned for being the first leader of a post-Soviet state that has managed to pass on his power to his son. Attila was not so successful. His son Csaba will be defeated precisely by the son of Kriemhild Aladár, who himself will remain dead on the battlefield.

Kriemhild here, in Tulln does not yet know anything about this, although her ambiguous face gives the semblance as if she already had some preliminary idea about that fatal nosebleed. Being au courant thanks to the Moscow tabloids we happily share with you the secret that this face was borrowed from Varvara, the popular estrade singer of Moscow. An issue of 2004 of the Megapolis-Ekspress has published in the column “Kaleydoskop” its true story that was “narrated by Varvara like a fairy-tale”:

“When my director Edik told me that the world famous artist Mikhail Nogin came to us to create a statue of me, my first thought was that we were in a scene of candid camera. What kind of a statue? But the sculptor persisted, and came personally to show the sketches of the monument to Eduard.” Varvara then accepted to visit Nogin in his impressive studio apartment. “Mr. Nogin then began: Every German knows the “Song about the Nibelungs”, whose last version was composed in the 12th century. The characters of this epic are historical figures like Attila, the knight-king of the Huns, his brother Buda, Dietrich von Bern, ambassador Rüdiger and king Gibich, and not least the queen of the Burgunds, the intriguing Kriemhild. However, we have no authentic portrait of any of these personalities. I have to join all these figures in a majestic composition that will stand in the Austrian crook of the Danube, in the town of Tulln, but until now I have not found any female face amongst historical portraits or my own acquaintances that could be the model of the queen. But then I saw a clip in the TV. I did not know the name of the singer, but I was touched by the music, because it somehow bore resemblance to this Celtic [!] epic. And then I looked at her face, and my heart gave a leap. I’ve found my queen! The figure has been finished for a long time, but her face is still temporary. – Mr. Nogin pointed at a monumental statue. – If you agree, let us fix an appointment. If you pose for me, the queen will bear your face. – What a strange proposal! the stunned Varvara said. We have recently married with my husband in an Orthodox cathedral on the bank of the Danube. And although I of course do not know the “Song about the Nibelungs”, but in all my life I felt an attraction to Gothic art and to old castles. ... Even in my songs I draw from the cults of the ancient hunters and fishermen, and I bear the clothes of the ancient Slavs. Precisely this makes Varvara different! And you have felt this! How peculiar! – What is peculiar is that coming home to Moscow I have seen precisely you on the TV. I do not work too much in Russia. I have one statue in the cathedral of Christ the Saviour, but all my major works are in Austria. For example, the statue of Marcus Aurelius ... But the monument in the crook of the Danube will be the main work of my life. We’ve designed an unusual illumination around it, and music will emanate from every part of the statue, the rumble of vehicles and clash of weapons – the illusion of full life. I’m sure that this work will survive for centuries. And the more than three meter high “Varvara” will stand there, looking far away, through ages, fogs and rains.”

The enthralling song – as it was made explicit in another interview by Varvara – was the Grezy lyubvi (Dreams of Love). Unfortunately we could not see the clip, but from the graphics of Varvara’s site we can imagine what was that visual world that Nogin felt akin to his own.

And if it was established that one of the main figures was a portrait, we cannot brush aside the idea that the other one was it as well, namely that of the creator himself – whom we see here on the small picture at the inauguration of his monument to Vrubel in Omsk –, in the main character of the main work of his life. Is it possible that in the figures of the Burgundian Kriemhild and Attila the Hun – or, to borrow the original metaphor of Landeshauptmannstellvertreter Gabmann, in the encounter of East and West – actually two celebrities of the Moscow art scene make a rendezvous in Tulln, on the bank of the Danube?

In the beginning there was the Tao

This is how the Gospel of John begins in the most widespread Chinese translation, the Chinese Union Version, achieved between 1890 and 1919 in the collaboration of several Protestant denominations.

太 初 有 道

tài chū yŏu dào
[in the] remotest / beginning / there was / Tao

This statement is embarrassingly unambiguous. True, Jesus himself says some chapters below (Jn 14:6) that “I’m the way” – in Chinese 道, tao as well –, but does this authorize us to identify the common noun with the concept carrying powerful historical and philosophical connotations, the Verb with the Tao?

In order to answer this question, first we have to clearly see what the Verb of the biblical tradition, the logos of the Greek original means.

Then we have to see what the Tao means for the Chinese Taoist tradition.

And finally: who, why and how attempted to reconcile these two concepts, and with what results.

This is what I will try to survey in the following months.

A Long March

The daughter of our Chinese friends was about three or four years old when I got to know her. She had arrived a week earlier from a far away borderland of China, where she had been guarded by her grandmother while her parents were working here in Hungary. She did not quite look like a little child. Instead, she looked as if she were a figure in a hundred years old photo. I at once felt love for her.

She was an extremely talented child. Within some months she fluently spoke Hungarian. One could have thought that she was just like all the other little Hungarian schoolgirls if one did not know that in certain respects she really lived like a figure in a hundred years old photo, spending all the summer with her grandmother in China, and learning with her Chinese language, literature and history from morning till night, ten hours a day, only having some minutes of a break in an hour.

In the second class of the high school she found an international high school network founded for preparing talented children from all over the world for admission to the best British and American universities. We helped her to write the application. She was admitted. Two years ago she began the third year of the high school more than ten thousand kilometers away from us. She quickly grew fond of the school, and they also loved her.

This spring she made her exams of admission to the university. I've rooted for her very much. I've prayed a lot, and we’ve also offered Mass for her. Yesterday I got to know the results. Six American elite universities sent notification that they welcome her among their students – the little Chinese girl who still some years ago looked like a figure in a hundred years old photo.

Province

Matthew Tree, who has lived “for exactly twenty years” (“fa vint anys que tinc vint anys”, as Serrat sings) in Catalonia, in his book Un anglès viatja per Catalunya per veure si existeix (An Englishman travels across Catalonia to see whether it exists) gives a cruel definition of ‘province’:

“What is a province? A province is a place that is not its own center. And the overwhelming majority of Catalans – for whatever reason – want their region to become its own center.”

Living in Hungary, I daily experience that there is one condition that is incomparably more sorrowful and hopeless than just being a province: when the province – for whatever reason – has finally become its own center.

Guts

Since MP Zapatero in a TV show a month ago – where the viewers could freely interrogate him – answered the simple and sneaking question of “how much does a cup of coffee cost nowadays?” like “about eighty cents”, which is in fact almost half of the actual price (the querying person has indeed commented: “that was in the times of uncle Pachi! * ”), the pueblo de España cannot run short of fun. In blogs, forums, cartoons, companies, trains and bars they keep creating a shower of daily new variations on the theme. Google gives 28,000 hits so far for “abuelo Pachi”, and 35,000 for “el café de Zapatero”, just to mention the least refined queries.

It was in Palma de Mallorca that I’ve recently found a nice new invention. This bar had a handwritten inscription:

„Zapatero no toma café aquí. Lo siento.”

And the coffee was one euro thirty indeed.

So far, so good. However, when I asked permission to take a photo of the paper, the owner refused.

When I asked why, he showed me a local newspaper where the illustration of a report on a manifestation had the door of the bar in the background. “These things do bad publicity to us”, he said.

This recalls to mind the old Soviet joke, where this person boasts of having shitted in the door of the Cremlin; but later, in a moment of sincerity he confesses that it was dark, that he looked around very carefully, and that... he did not even pull down his pants.

Nevertheless, in order we should not remain without any illustration, here you are at least an outside photo of this model institution of civil courage. Bar Es Petit, Palma de Mallorca, Carrer de la Pietat, if someone wants in the door... With pure goodwill, of course, as it is customary in Catalonia.

Tibet: Klöster öffnen ihre Schatzkammern

Exhibition, Dahlem, February 21 - May 28, 2007

As in Studiolum (this is the place of advertisement) we have just recently published the web presentation of the Tibetan collection of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the legacy of Sándor Kőrösi Csoma, the founder of Tibetan Studies, I decided to visit the Tibetan exhibition first. And there I stayed on until closing time. Dahlem only can be digested in small pieces.

This exhibition was organized at the end of the last year by the Kulturstiftung Ruhr Essen in Essen’s Villa Hügel, from where it has been transferred to Dahlem. The exhibition is of historical importance, as this is the first time that cult objects of active Tibetan monasteries are exposed outside of Tibet. Jeong-Hee Lee-Kalisch, head of the organizing committee relates in the introduction of the catalog that they have been engaged in field research in Tibet since 2003, in the course of which they managed to convince the largest Tibetan monasteries to allow their sculptures, paintings and liturgical objects being exposed, all in all 150 objects from the 5th to the 20th century. It is interesting to read that although the Tibetan monks – in spite of their best efforts – could not grasp the Western concept of “exhibition object”, nevertheless they understood that it was important to the Western scholars, and thus they readily collaborated in the interest of this unconceivable purpose.

The difference of the two visions is well attested among other things by the fact that the cult statues that are dressed in precious clothes in the Tibetan monasteries are exposed without these vestments in Dahlem, as if an allowance to the European concept of statue that considers them a superfluous addition. Just like the Gothic statues of Pietà wear rich Baroque robes on the altars of Marian pilgrimage shrines, but if they happen to get into museums, they are exposed without their vestments. Fortunately, the catalog of the exhibition also includes the “vested” images of these statues, as the Tibetan believers encounter them.

The objects are grouped by some basic themes of Tibetan monastery culture, and this is how they are explained on the summary boards in each room: portrait statues of monastery founders, the stupa, the mandala, musical instruments, healing and so on. By this they intend to offer some handle to the European visitor in his probably very first encounter with this unknown and complex culture. However, the result is that one is urged to behold the object as illustrations of this conception, and not as autonomous objects of art.

A flash presentation of the exhibition – still from its Essen months – that is worth an abbreviated catalog can be seen here. It puts less emphasis on the thematic conception, and presents the objects on independent pages and with separate explanations. And this is already enough to achieve what the exhibition was unable to do: the presentation of these objects as objects of art.

Dahlem

If you get in three or four hours from Mallorca to Csömör, you will not really grasp how far you were. Therefore – in the periods when there is no direct flight – it is not bad to have that day of sluicing in Berlin, so that you have enough time to feel the taste of being on the way.

I have been planning for a while to spend this sluicing day in Dahlem. It’s a long time since I have not been to Dahlem. It was Ernő Kunt who, in the year of my anthropological detour in Miskolc, drummed into me that visiting the museum of ethnography in Dahlem is a must, as they have distinguished objects exhibited in an intelligent way. And so it was indeed. At that time, some fifteen years ago, no other exhibition employed that point light which in the dark room of the gallery drew an individual space around each object, isolating it from the context of the room and of the other objects, endowing it with a life of its own and offering it in this way for reception, thus rendering visually perceivable the concept of “autonomous work of art”. I remember the first time I was there, I stopped in the room of the Buddhas of Gandhara, and spent there all the afternoon.

Another attraction of Dahlem is that it is a Gesamtkunstwerk organizing the whole space of the museum, and even its environment as far as to the metro station. Right now it houses a number of Eastern Asian special exhibitions. Therefore the museum coffee – the large central hall of the building, from where each exhibition opens and to where they all return – decorates its tables with Japanese ikebana, and in the vitrines set up in the space of the coffee a small exhibition of Eastern spices is installed. And in this period the museum bookshop is also dominated by Eastern Asian books, not only from their own stock, but also purchased from a large number of other museums of the world as well as from local antiquaries, so their offer is arguably better than that of a department library.

And at six o’clock when the exhibitions close, lectures begin for the visitors until eight, and during this period the bookshop and the coffee bar work as well. The lecture of the day was held by a lovely and well-prepared tiny Tibetan woman who reads ethnology in Berlin, dressed in a beautiful Tibetan garment. She gave a summary in a nice German about the Tibetan special exhibition, and when from time to time the adequate term did not occur to her, it also offered a good occasion for a little show of the repertoire of Eastern Asian apologizing smiles. At the end she was applauded, and I’m sure that the service she did to the cause of Tibetan culture through those hundred persons – and their friends as well as the readers of this diary – was not less than that of the exhibition itself.