Winter in Mallorca

In Palma de Mallorca I usually stay at Hostal Pons in the heart of the old town, in Carrer del Vi, Wine Street. It is a small hotel converted from an old aristocratic palace, with an Arab-Renaisance columned patio, so characteristic of the city. The owners – a young brother and sister – also live here, in the back. It offers beautiful views, especially in the morning and early afternoon, as sunlight passes through and breaks in a thousand different ways in the columned courtyard, the windows of the hall and the small rooms. The only problem is that the rooms have no heating. Of course, it is not needed for most of the year, as it is mostly hot, and fortunately the tourist season also falls on that period. But Palma can also be cold, especially in January. Most other hotels are therefore not open either, since there are no visitors. I am also alone in Pons. The owners don’t show up very often, so I feel like the last bachelor descendant of a baronial family in his mountain mansion, as described by Llorenç Villalonga in his Bearn, or a mansion in Mallorca. Fortunately, the brothers were attentive enough to set up a mobile gas convector in the hall for the evening, so I can work at one of the tables without the risk of freezing. I remember when living in Rome, where, in early March, central heating is already switched off but the heat of the sun is not yet turned on, so that cold radiates profusely from the damp walls, my landlord consoled me that a Swede lived there before me, who complained that he had never had a cold in all his life as he did here in Rome.

The windows of the bathrooms overlook the courtyard of the St. Alfonso Liguori School. The sound of children chirping wakes me in the morning. As I slowly get up, the second-stage wake-up call comes on, the bells of the medieval Church of the Holy Cross behind the block of the hotel. It is one of the best preserved medieval churches in Palma, but its beautiful interior can only be seen once a week, at eleven on Sundays, when a Mass is held in German. I once mingled with the priest after Mass, and it turned out that not only was he from Berlin, but we even had a common regular pub on Yorckstraße. Of course, it is understandable that I never see him there, since he spends all his time in Mallorca.

Leaving the hotel, I head to the beach for the first coffee at Plaçe Drassana, the place of the former shipyard. In January, most of the bars, restaurants and shops in Palma are closed, which is now also justified by covid. The Drassana, usually throbbing from the crowds in the bars around it, is now completely abandoned. Only two places are open, a curry eatery and the Bar Arenas 1951, the area’s popular pub. I sit in there. While working on my laptop, I am listening to the girl at the bar serving guests. Altough I said there were no tourists, nevertheless occasionally some English and Italian slips in: probably expats living here. She speaks in excellent English and Italian with them, besides Spanish and Catalan, obvious here. “Enhorabuena, how many languages you speak and how well,” I congratulate her when I pay. “Oh, I also speak German and French”, she adds modestly. “Where did you learn so many languages? Here, in the bar?” “No, at home.” It turns out that she was born in Verona, in an Italian family, but her grandmother was Romanian, and her grandfather German, apparently a Saxon from Transylvania, and then she worked in many bars all over Europe. “Here in Mallorca is the best”, she says, “the freedom is great, and the guests are relaxed. This is better than anything else. But it’s very important that you work,” she underlines seriously.

If they opened a window on the place of the giant poster, you would see more or less the same as on the poster: the Gothic cathedral of Mallorca:

On the way back, the “old gallery” almost opposite the hotel is also closed. Although I do not remember of having ever seen it open in the twenty years since I have been coming to Mallorca.

Its being a gallery is only confirmed by the ad hoc exhibition on the façade. To the left of the gate, a “found poem”, written in chalk:

I want to sleep a while. A while, a minute, a century. But all must know that I have not died, Federico is alive.

Federico García Lorca: Gacela de la muerte oscura (The ghazal of the dark death)

Quiero dormir el sueño de las manzanas Alejarme del tumulto de los cementerios. Quiero dormir el sueño de aquel niño Que quería cortarse el corazón en alta mar. No quiero que me repitan que los muertos no pierden la sangre; Que la boca podrida sigue pidiendo agua. No quiero enterarme de los martirios que da la hierba, Ni de la luna con boca de serpiente Que trabaja antes del amanecer. Quiero dormir un rato, Un rato, un minuto, un siglo; Pero que todos sepan que no he muerto; Que haya un establo de oro en mis labios; Que soy un pequeño amigo del viento Oeste; Que soy la sombra inmensa de mis lágrimas. Cúbreme por la aurora con un velo, Porque me arrojará puñados de hormigas, Y moja con agua dura mis zapatos Para que resbale la pinza de su alacrán. Porque quiero dormir el sueño de las manzanas Para aprender un llanto que me limpie de tierra; Porque quiero vivir con aquel niño oscuro Que quería cortarse el corazón en alta mar.

I want to sleep the dream of the apples, to withdraw from the tumult of the cemeteries. I want to sleep the dream of that child, who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas. I don't want to hear again that the dead do not lose their blood That the putrid mouth goes on asking for water I don't want to learn of the tortures of the grass Nor of the moon with the serpent's mouth that labors before dawn I want to sleep a while A while, a minute, a century But all must know that I have not died That there is a stable of gold in my lips That I am the small friend of the west wind That I am the immense shadow of my tears Cover me at dawn with a veil Because dawn will throw fistsful of ants at me And wet with hard water my shoes So that the pincers of the scorpion slide For I want to sleep the dream of the apples To learn a lament that will cleanse me of the earth For I want to live with that dark child Who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas. English version by Joan Baez

There are two small niches in the wall on each side. The installation arranged in them completes the experience. To the right is a distorted photograph of a child and a half-eaten apple, as if to hint at the poet’s dream.

And to the left, a peculiar association, the image of the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, who fought on the side of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, although she was only allowed to shoot once, because she was nearsighted, and her target unsure.

In the evening, as I am coming home, a candle burns in front of the photo. I stop, but I don’t have a camera, I cannot take pictures. At the gate opposite, two boys are just saying goodbye. The one who stays turns to him: “Do you like it? I have put there the photo, because it fits so well. And I light the candle in front of it.” Then it turns out he does not even know who Simone Weil was. The absurd genius of Spain continues to work. Federico is alive.

The lonely gazelle

Moorish tile with a gazelle in an Andalusian antique shop

“An anthology compiled from fragments of anthologies – that’s all we know from the poetry of al-Andalus”, writes Modest Solans Mur in his recently published volume, in which he collects the surviving Arabic poems of medieval Andalusia, and translates them in a beautiful style, addressed to the modern reader. The title of the volume, The Market Without Buyers comes from Abū Yaʿfar, who lived in 13th-century Ishbilia – today Seville –, whose ironic metaphor for poetry became a popular topos among Andalusian poets.

From the Andalusian Arab culture that flourished for eight hundred years, only fragments remain in present-day southern Spain, fragments of castles, palaces and mosques preserved by rebuilding, fragments of carvings and painted pottery, fragments of documents and poems, the remainders of a sunken Atlantis swinging on the surface of the sea. Even the most famous work, the impressive Alhambra Palace, is only a fragment of a former princely city. It is enough to let us sense the magnitude of this culture, but its details are no longer known to us.

And if we have so little left of the Arabic poetry of Andalusia, even less of the Jewish poetry in Judeo-Arabic that was born under Arabic influence in Cordoba in the 10th century, the largest Jewish city in the world at the time, which flourished in the Andalusian princely towns in the 11th and 12th centuries in the circles of poets such as Jehuda Halevi, Moses ibn Ezra or Salomon ibn Gabirol. This little was collected and translated by Peer Cole in his anthology The Dream of the Poem.

And if we know so little from Jewish poets, it is quite an exceptional coincidence that we are left with poems from a Jewish poetess as well. We know that women also wrote poems in Andalusia, and their contemporaries held these poems in high esteem, but we know only one medieval Jewish poetess, Qasmūna bint Ismāʿil – we know only her Arabic name, not the Jewish one – of whom only three poems survive. They were discovered by James Nichols in a 15th-century Arab poetic anthology by as-Suyūti from the Maghreb.

Qasmūna learned the craft from her father, Ismāʿil ibn Naghrilla, by his Jewish name Samuel ha-Nagid (993-1055), the grand vizier of the Zirid dynasty in Granada, and an acknowledged member of the Jewish poetry circle of Granada, which was presented by Ann Brener in her Judah Halevi and His Circle of Hebrew Poets in Granada. She also wrote her first surviving poem with her father. As narrated by as-Suyūti, Ismāʿil, in a playful spirit, usual among Arab poets, he recited two verses to his daughter, to be completed in the same rhythm and rhyme. The challenge was this:

Lī-ṣāḥibun dhū bahjatin qad qābalat nafʿan bi-ḍayrin wa-staḥallat jurmahā

A brilliant friend returned good with bad, considering his wickedness righteous.

To which Qasmūna promptly replied:

Ka-ššamsi min-ha-l-badru yaqbisu nūra-hu abadan wa-yaksifu baʿda ḍālika jirmahā

Just like the moon, which receives its light from the sun, but then it covers the sun with its body.

At which Ismāʿil – according to as-Suyūti, “as a madman” – jumped up, hugged his daughter, and said to her: “By the Ten Commandments, you are a greater poet than I!”

In addition to poetic greatness, a remarkable minor detail is that in 11th-century Andalusia, a woman was as aware of the nature of the eclipse, which was not so among of the erudite men in the Christian Europe of the period.

But Qasmūna’s talent, like that of other poets, was rooted in her solitude. This is what her other two surviving poems are about:

Ayā rawḍatan qad ḥāna min-ha qaṭāfu-ha wa-laisa yurā ḥānin yamudda la-ha yadā; fa-wā asafi yamdī-ššabābu muḍayyaʿan wa-yabqā-lladhī mā lanʿusammī-hi mufradā

Oh garden, the time of harvest has come but none stretches his hand to you. Alas! Youth passes and is wasted, and someone – I do not mention his name – remains alone.

In the Judeo-Arabic original, “someone” is masculine, which, according to Nichols, was a common form of hiding for a female author in Arabic poetry.

A knight chasing a gazelle in a flowery field, amidst the song of nightingales, a popular topos in Arabic love poetry. 14th-century fresco on the ceiling of the Alhambra’s royal banquet hall

And the third one, the most beautiful, most original and most touching, centered on a widespread topos in Arabic poetry, the gazelle symbolizing a beautiful woman. However, while male poets describe the gazelle from the outside, as the object of their desire, Qasmūna identifies with her, and shows how the gazelle sees herself.

Yā ẓabyatan tarʿa bi-rawdin dāʿiman innī ḥakaitu-ki fi-ttawaḥḥuši wa-l-ḥawari. Amsā kilā-nā mufradan ʿan ṣāḥibin fa-ʿitābu-nā abadan ʿalā ḥukmi-l-qadar.

Oh gazelle, always grazing here in this garden you are wild and bright black-eyed, like me and both of us lonely, forsaken: patiently bearing our fate’s decree.

Nasrid-era hand-painted, gilded vase from the Alhambra, with the gazelles chosen as the emblem of the palace

And the men of Persia

Ἐν ἰσχίοις μὲν ἵπποι Πυρὸς χάραγμ’ ἔχουσι. Καὶ Παρθίους τὶς ἄνδρας Ἐγνώρισεν τιάραις. Ἐγὼ δὲ τοὺς ἐρῶντας Ἰδὼν ἐπίσταμ’ εὐθύς. Ἔχουσι γάρ τι λεπτὸν Ψυχῆς ἔδω χάραγμα.

En ischiois men hippoi pyros charagm’ echūsi kai parthius tis andras egnōrisen tiarais. Egō de tūs erōntas idōn epistam’ euthys: echūsi gar ti lepton psychēs edō charagma.

On their hips the horses bear a burning brand and the men of Persia are recognized by their tiaras. As to me, I recognize the lovers at once: for they bear a secret brand burned in the soul.

At dawn, on the verge of dream and awakening, the verses of the old Greek memoriter snake out of my memory, with galloping iambs ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ¯, like Franz Marc’s dream-colored horses. It was Anacreon who wrote them in this serpentine way: at the brand of the horses in the first verse you don’t know yet what he is getting at, then with the Persian tiaras he bends away all the way ’round, to finally return to the burned property signs with the lovers at the end.

Between the horses and lovers who rhyme with each other, the Persian men continue to stand somewhat like cuckoo eggs, whose only rhetorical role is that their tiaras have as much of a distinctive character – that is, for a Greek –, as the burning brand for the other rôles.

The emotional missing link is provided by this tiny, perhaps fist-sized Persian head from the ancient exhibition at the National Museum in Tehran. With his tiara, he looks like an altertumswissenschaftliche illustration to the poem. But his face, his pensive, inward-looking gaze, his almost invisible delicate smile suggest that he, too, wears a secret brand burned in the soul.

It will take another thousand years for Hafez to write his love poems. The love poetry of Anacreon’s Persian contemporaries was incinerated by the Greeks of Alexander the Great and the Arabs of Caliph Omar. That there must have been such a poetic tradition is attested by the love episodes in the Book of Kings, in which Ferdowsi summarizes in the 10th century, after the Arab devastation and a hiatus of three hundred years, all that was left of ancient Persian poetry. And it is attested, too, by the mysterious facial expression of this little Persian contemporary of Anacreon.

Autumn

さびしさを問てくれぬか桐一葉 sabishisa o toote kurenu ka kiri hitoha Matsuo Basho (1644-1694)

Won’t you come and see loneliness? Only one leaf from the kiri tree

Adam’s children

Today’s issue of Haaretz offers a detailed report about the overcrowding of hospitals in northern Italy, and also reports on the great unexpected help that China is giving Italy in this difficult situation. “We, the Italian Red Cross, are not used to receiving donations,” they quote the head of the Red Cross, Francesco Rocca, “we usually donate.”

The Israeli newspaper also mentions in a paragraph that China is also providing assistance to Iran, the country most affected by the epidemic, with a fine local touch:

“China had also sent a medical team to Iran along with 250,000 masks and 5,000 test kits packed in boxes bearing a centuries-old verse by the Persian poet Saadi Shirazi: «The children of Adam are the limbs of one body, that share an origin in their creation.»”

Everyone in Iran knows this verse. This is the beginning of one of the most popular poems of one of the greatest Persian poets, Saʿdī Shīrâzī (1210-1291), the first poem taught in Iranian schools, which also figures in Persian and English (!) on the reverse of the 100,000 Rial banknote, depicting Saadi’s tomb in Shiraz:

بنی آدم اعضای یک پیکرند
که در آفرينش ز یک گوهرند
چو عضوى به درد آورد روزگار
دگر عضو ها را نماند قرار
تو کز محنت دیگران بی غمی
نشاید که نامت نهند آدمی

bani âdam aʿzâ-ye yek peykarand
ke dar âfarinaš ze yek gowharand
čo ʿozvi be dard âvarad ruzgâr
degar ʿozvhâ-râ na-mânad qarâr
to k’az mehnat-e digarân biqami
na-šâyad ke nâmat nahand âdami

Adam’s children are the limbs of one body,
of one essence since their creation,
and if one limb is hurt by a calamity,
the other limbs cannot remain at rest.
If the pain of others does not hurt you,
you do not deserve to be called human.

From the several recitations of the poem, let us hear the one read by Raha Mirzadegan before she sings the Persian song Dokhtare Boirahmadi, “Daughter of Boirahmad” in the concert of the early music ensemble Apollo’s Fire presenting the music of medieval Jerusalem.

It is understandable, that this poem is particularly suited to expressing solidarity between peoples. Just as China uses it to send a message to Iran, and the Iranian singer to the people of Jerusalem, so Obama used it to conclude his 2009 Persian New Year message. And the following classical Persian musical version, played by the Kermanshah musicologist, folk music collector and cultural center founder Yahya Ranaei and his family ensemble, was also performed across Iran to comfort and financially help the survivors of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami of Tōhoku.

Where is happiness?

Happiness is in the center of Saint Petersburg, at the corner of Malaya Morskaya Street and St. Isaac’s Cathedral Square. Three of its ground floor windows overlook the square, and two Malaya Morskaya Street, but on this side it also shines on the adjoining house – before the Revolution, the seat of the famous Marks publishing house, and today the Rolls-Royce showroom in Saint Petersburg –, because its entrance opens from there.


People are weird. Just as God’s address is not widely known, so the seat of Happiness is famous for something completely different. The white marble plaque stands in quite absurd contrast to the happily shining golden name of the pub.

“In the former Hotel Angleterre, on 28 December 1925, the life of the poet Sergey Yesenin was tragically broken.”

Hotel Angleterre/Англетер, in whose room no. 5 Yesenin hanged himself – or, according to some unlikely conspiracy theories, was killed – did not always bear this name. Napoleon Bocquin, who built it around the middle of the 19th century, openend the hotel in his own name. In the first photo of the area, made in 1859 from the dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, it still bears this name.


In the next photo, of 1908, the main entrance was moved to the façade in Isaac Square, and the place of today’s Happiness Bar is occupied on the corner by I. Grote’s bookshop and the signboard for the St. Isaac Pharmacy. And the hotel is already called Angleterre, taking that name in 1876, when Theresa Schmidt bought it. For a short while it was called Angliya, then Schmidt-Angliya, but it was soon replaced with the more elegant French version. After the revolution, it was renamed “Internatsional”, but in 1925 it was again renamed Angleterre, just in time for Yesenin to die and to immortalize the hotel under that name.






In the 1920s, in the NEP era, it was mainly a hotel for Western guests, along with the neighboring Astoria Hotel. In this period the renowned poet, children’s book author and translator Samuil Marshak wrote a poem mocking racist bourgeois money bags, which was the second reason to make the hotel widely known.

„Мистер Твистер, Бывший министр, Мистер Твистер, Миллионер, Владелец заводов, Газет, пароходов, Входит в гостиницу «Англетер»”, etc.

„Mister Twister former minister, Mister Twister, millionaire, who has plenty of factories, ships and newspapers, enters the hotel Angleterre.”

You can see the whole poem here as an animated film. However, in this post-WWII film, the hotel cannot be identified, for since 1948 it was called Leningradskaya, and it only returned to its original name in the early 1990s.


Renaming, however, was not the beginning of a new life, but the definitive ending for the old one. During the decades of socialism, the hotel decayed to such an extent that it only functioned as a low-cost worker hostel. The new investors found it impossible to save. Although there was a mass demonstration and a lifeline against its demise, it did not help. In 1991, the hotel was completely rebuilt with a façade imitating the old one, now part of the neighboring Astoria Hotel.

Building the new Angleterre, 1990s

The new Hotel Angleterre, with a sign on the left-hand side shop windows:
Скоро будет Счастье, “Happiness will soon be here”.

Room no. 5 does not exist any more, as no longer does the other room where Yesenin first met his femme fatale, Isadora Duncan, who stayed here in 1921.

Room no. 5. The photo was taken by photographer Presnyakov, just after Yesenin’s death, at the request of his widow Sofia Tolstaya. It is interesting that the curtain’s edges were retouched by the photographer’s hand, since without that, the window opening was similar to a contours of a person.

In the room, Yesenin left a short farewell, one of his most poignant and well-known poems:

До свиданья, друг мой, до свиданья. Милый мой, ты у меня в груди. Предназначенное расставанье Обещает встречу впереди. До свиданья, друг мой, без руки, без слова, Не грусти и не печаль бровей, — В этой жизни умирать не ново, Но и жить, конечно, не новей.

Goodbye, my friend, goodbye, my dear, you are in my heart. It was preordained we should part, and then be reunited again. Goodbye: no handshake, no word, no sadness, no furrowed brow – there’s nothing new in dying in this life, though living is no newer, of course.

Below, I also include its Hungarian translation with the beautiful musical version by Kaláka Ensemble, which drew inspiration from Orthodox church funerals:


Yessenin: Ég veled, barátom – Kaláka. From the LP Fekete ember: Dalok Szergej Jeszenyin verseire (Black Man: songs on Sergei Yesenin’s poems)

Ég veled, barátom, Isten áldjon, elviszem szívemben képedet. Kiszabatott: el kell tőled válnom, egyszer még találkozom veled.

Isten áldjon, engedj némán elköszönnöm. Ne horgaszd a fejedet, hiszen nem új dolog meghalni a földön, és nem újabb, persze, élni sem.

Of course, like all great Russian poems, this one also has a well-known Russian musical version. However, its text is not quite the same as Yesenin’s original. The melody comes from Alexander Vertinsky, the great magician of pre-WWII Russian chanson, and he found it more suited to his genre if he paraphrased the original poem with a hint to Yesenin’s memory:



Alexander Vertinsky: Последнее письмо – The last letter. Sung by Zhanna Bichevskaya (1st version) and by Vertinsky himself (2nd version)

До свиданья, друг мой, до свиданья. Мне так трудно жить среди людей. Каждый шаг мой стерегут страданья. В этой жизни счастья нет нигде. До свиданья, догорели свечи… Как мне страшно уходить во тьму! Ждать всю жизнь и не дождаться встречи, И остаться ночью одному. До свиданья, без руки, без слова… Так и проще будет и нежней… В этой жизни умирать не ново, Но и жить, конечно, не новей.

Goodbye, my friend, good bye, it’s hard for me to live among people. There’s no happiness in this life anywhere, every step just prolongs my suffering. Goodbye, the candles burned to the stump, how terrible to enter the darkness! to wait for a meeting for a lifetime and finally to stay alone in the night. Goodbye: no handshake, no word, it’s gentler this way and easier for me – there’s nothing new in dying in this life, though living is no newer, of course.

“В этой жизни счастья нет нигде” – “There’s no happiness in this life anywhere”, says Yesenin in Vertinsky’s paraphrase. But reality disproves it. After all, where is Happiness? In Saint Petersburg, at the corner of Malaya Morskaya Street and St. Isaac’s Cathedral Square.

Two monkeys

Bruegel’s smallest picture (only 19,8 × 23,3 cm, 1562, Berlin, Gemäldegalerie) depicts two monkeys. They are sitting in the window of a thick-walled building, chained to the windowsill, and beyond the window you see the port city of Antwerp. Next to them, on the windowsill, the empty shell of a crushed hazelnut.

If someone who usually expresses himself with two hundred figures, in one picture unexpectedly uses only two, that must mean something. But what?

According to some authors, the painting, like Bruegel’s many other small pictures, is an illustration of a Flemish proverb: “to go to court for a nut”. Whoever goes to court, should not be surprised for being arrested there. And if he went for nothing, then he himself was looking for trouble. The two free birds flying in the sky over the city form a sharp counterpoint to the two monkeys chained next to the hazelnut shell.

Andrea Alciato also imagines the courtier in chains, with freely flying birds above him. Los emblemas de Alciato traducidos en rimas españolas, Lyon: Roville-Bonhomme, 1549, «In aulicos» (on courtiers), p. 146.

In other opinions, the painting is only a study, in which the master depicted for later use two of the exotic animals regularly brought to Antwerp. However, we do not know any other similar sketch from Bruegel, and the detailed elaboration of the small painting also suggests a finished picture.

At the same time, it is a fact that Bruegel also produced two other pictures in the same year, where he used the lessons of this study. One is the painting Dulle Griet (Mad Meg, Amsterdam, Museum van den Bergh, inv. no. 788). In the picture, an uprooted, helmeted woman runs swiftly with a sword, with female soldiers behind her, who seem to want to lay siege on Hell. This hell is populated with the monster figures of Bosch, which Bruegel had imitated so many times; but this is the first time he also includes monkeys, and the two monkeys looking out of the round window of the castle are very similar to the two in the small painting. The interpretation of the picture is uncertain, but it might be an example of the carnivalesque swap of roles, so popular among Renaissance authors: here, women take on the role of warrior men. The monkeys emphasize this role change by playing a human role in the hellish castle.

The other picture is the print The monkeys rob the sleeping pedlar, made by Bruegel for the publisher To the four winds of his regular companion, Hieronymus Cock. In this, the monkeys take on the goods pulled out of the pedlar’s basket, and the human roles associated with them. The great number of small figures amounts to a complete study of simian movement. The monkeys’ round dance in the middle evokes a similar motif from Dulle Griet.



We do not know what piqued Bruegel’s interest in monkeys that year, and why it abated later. He may have found some inspiration in the unexpectedly seen exotic monkeys, and he painted them with the exclamation this will be good for something, but then one of his humanist friends begged for the painting for his curiosity cabinet. He may have wanted to dominate the genre of exotic animals sought by the Kunst- und Wunderkammers and encyclopedias, similarly to the other contemporary themes, such as landscapes, peasant scenes or Bosch’s devilries, that he tried and succeeded in, but this time it somehow did not come in. Nevertheless, the master never discarded anything he had created, so he also used the motif of the Two monkeys in the later painting and print.

And just as Bruegel created the genre of modern landscapes and peasant scenes, so these few monkey representations also had an impact on later art. In 1575, his popular monkey print inspired Pieter van der Borcht to publish a whole print series, where monkeys behave like human beings, thus emphasizing the comicality of a situation. With this series starts the genre of singerie, the monkey scenes parodying human society, which holds its popularity from the late Renaissance to the 20th century. Bruegel’s son and grandson, the Elder and Younger Jan Brueghel also took part in the early dissemination of this genre.

Pieter van der Borcht the Elder, The Quack, 1575

Pieter Feddes Harlingen’s version on Bruegel’s print, early 17th c

Jan Brueghel the Elder and the Younger, Monkey feast, c. 1620

Abraham Teniers, Monkeys arresting a cat, mid-17th. c

But the genre’s most touching representative is not a painter, but a poet, the Nobel Prize winner Wysława Szymborska, who wrote her ekphrasis on Bruegel’s painting shortly after 1981, the ban on Solidarność and the introduction of martial law in Poland.

Dwie małpy Brueghla Tak wygląda mój wielki maturalny sen: siedzą w oknie dwie małpy przykute łańcuchem, za oknem fruwa niebo i kąpie się morze. Zdaję z historii ludzi. Jąkam się i brnę. Małpa, wpatrzona we mnie, ironicznie słucha, druga niby to drzemie -- a kiedy po pytaniu nastaje milczenie, podpowiada mi cichym brząkaniem łańcucha.

Bruegel’s two monkeys This is my great dream about final exam: two monkeys in chains sit in the window, behind them, the sky is flying and the sea taking its bath. The exam is in the history of Mankind. I stammer and hedge. One monkey stares at me sardonically, silently, the other naps, but when the question is followed by silence, he prompts me with a gentle clicking of his chain.