Andalusian Holy Week

A nagyheti körmenetek plakátja, 2007, Úbeda, Spanyolország
On the El País web forum in which I also participate, this is already the second year that web guru and olive planter porrozillo has published the photos of the Holy Week processions in Úbeda. This year he only sent a short video, but it reminded me to publish here the photos of the previous year to demonstrate that there are places where they still do it properly.

The Andalusian Úbeda, on Unesco’s World Heritage list, is famous for its olive plantations and its Holy Week processions. These latter have been organized by the city’s eighteen religious confraternities active since the Middle Ages. The ceremonies start already at the beginning of Lent with posters, advertisements and publications, daily festive Stations of the Cross, pageants presenting the holy images and statues with the partecipation of thousands of persons, as well as public rehearsals of the bands on the main square. The common blog of the confraternities publishes illustrated daily reports on all that. By the way, the series of Lenten and Holy Week feasts is only the biggest among the ten similarly generous feasts organized throughout the year by the confraternities, and in addition there are also yearly four flamenco and old music festivals in the city. After all, one has to fill out with something the dead time between the pruning of the olives and the harvest.

The Holy Week ceremonies start on Palm Sunday with the entrance of Christ in Jerusalem. This is organized by the Borriquillo (Ass’s colt) confraternity from eleven in the morning until the fireworks of nine in the evening.

Krisztus bevonulása Úbedába, 2007, Úbeda, Spanyolország
On Monday the confraternity of Our Lady brings forward with all solemnity the statue of the Virgin from the church of Santa María de los Reales Alcázares, so that she would also start her all week long way to the Golgota, accompanying the image of Jesus in every other procession.

Krisztus bevonulása Úbedába, 2007, Úbeda, Spanyolország
On Tuesday night from ten o’clock celebrations of Tenebrae, and then a night procession with the Cross throughout all the city.

Krisztus bevonulása Úbedába, 2007, Úbeda, Spanyolország
The Wednesday procession on the vigil of the Last Supper was washed out by a downpour, but the commemoration was nevertheless celebrated.

Krisztus bevonulása Úbedába, 2007, Úbeda, Spanyolország
Krisztus bevonulása Úbedába, 2007, Úbeda, Spanyolország
On Thursday morning, prayer on the Mount of Olives.

Krisztus bevonulása Úbedába, 2007, Úbeda, Spanyolország
Then a series of processions follow throughout all the day, each celebrated by a different confraternity: that of the Column, of the Flagellation, and, already at the dawn of Friday, the Sentence.

Krisztus bevonulása Úbedába, 2007, Úbeda, Spanyolország
Krisztus bevonulása Úbedába, 2007, Úbeda, Spanyolország
Krisztus bevonulása Úbedába, 2007, Úbeda, Spanyolország
Krisztus bevonulása Úbedába, 2007, Úbeda, Spanyolország
Krisztus bevonulása Úbedába, 2007, Úbeda, Spanyolország
On Friday, at sunrise starts the procession of the Road to the Calvary, organized by the Jesus Nazareno confraternity of the guild of the oil pressers since the 1400s. The commemoration of each of the three Falls under the Cross are taken over from them by other processions. At three o’clock in the afternoon starts the procession of the Death on the Cross.

Krisztus bevonulása Úbedába, 2007, Úbeda, Spanyolország
Krisztus bevonulása Úbedába, 2007, Úbeda, Spanyolország
Krisztus bevonulása Úbedába, 2007, Úbeda, Spanyolország
Krisztus bevonulása Úbedába, 2007, Úbeda, Spanyolország
After the procession of the Descent from the Cross, at seven o’clock in the evening starts that of the Vigil or of the Pietà. This is the largest one among all, organized with the participation of all confraternities, twenty processions with forty-nine images all in all.

Krisztus bevonulása Úbedába, 2007, Úbeda, Spanyolország
Krisztus bevonulása Úbedába, 2007, Úbeda, Spanyolország
Krisztus bevonulása Úbedába, 2007, Úbeda, Spanyolország
Krisztus bevonulása Úbedába, 2007, Úbeda, Spanyolország
Finally, the series of Holy Week commemorations is closed on Sunday morning with the High Mass and the procession of the Resurrection.

Krisztus bevonulása Úbedába, 2007, Úbeda, Spanyolország
If you are curious of videos and more photos, have a look at the blog of the Úbeda confraternities, where you can also read the reportages on the Holy Week of this year.

Dilemma

where there is discord, I may bring harmony;
where there is error, I may bring truth

I am standing in the queue for the Easter confession at the Franciscans, reading the verses of the prayer of Saint Francis on the wall of the corridor, and I realize that these two things are so much contrasting to each other that in fact only God can realize both simultaneously. At least this is my experience, especially recently. When one stands for truth where there is error, be sure that soon there will be discord as well. “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. A man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.” (Mt 10:34-36)

On the other hand I see that most people I know – unfortunately especially the Christians – aspire at any cost to the appearance of harmony, and in exchange they give up without hesitation the representation of truth, the clear distinction between good and bad, the straight speaking. “Let there be peace above all.”

I am still ruminating on this when – tolle, lege – I read this in Augustin, chapter 1.8. of The City of God, as if he wrote it as an answer for me:

For often we wickedly blind ourselves to the occasions of teaching and admonishing them [who do wrong], sometimes even of reprimanding and chiding them, either because we shrink from the labor or are ashamed to offend them, or because we fear to lose good friendships, lest this should stand in the way of our advancement, or injure us in some worldly matter, which either our covetous disposition desires to obtain, or our weakness shrinks from losing. ... Because it is a sin, that they who themselves revolt from the conduct of the wicked, and live in quite another fashion, yet spare those faults in other men which they ought to reprehend and wean them from.

At the same time I also experience that all the odium – losing people, doors being closed, being branded as “unloving” and “hating” or, in another dialect, “intolerant” and “fanatic” and the rest – that accompanies the representation of truth, is not just an accidental “risk” that can be avoided with some tact and sense of diplomacy, but a necessary consequence of this behavior. The more so the more straightforwardly and consequently one represents the truth. In an extreme case, to the point that was foretold by Plato in his Republic (361e) four hundred years before Christ:

The just man with this kind of soul ... will be scourged, racked, bound, will have his eyes burnt out; and, at last, after suffering every kind of evil, he will be crucified: Then he will understand that one does not have to aspire to be a just man, but to seem only.

And with this we are here at the object of the feast of today. Blessed Easter!

Khayyam’s Russian illustrations

The monumental Russian edition of the quatrains of Omar Khayyam translated by Igor A. Golubev (Омар Хайяам, Рубаи. Перевод И. А. Голубева, Москва: РИПОЛ Классик 2007, 528 pages, 1305 rubaiyat), just quoted by us, is also decorated by eighteen full-page illustrations by V. N. Belousov. I cannot resist publishing them. The nice symmetric grid of four times four has room only for sixteen of them. On the two images left out I will write in two next posts (the first is here).

V. N. Belousov: Omar Khayyam illusztrációi, az I. A. Golubev-féle orosz fordításból
These images recall a beautiful slice of my childhood, the enchanting illustrations of those cheap Russian booklets of fairy tales sold at those times in the late Gorkij bookshop that endeared to me the Russian language. This magic and naive visual world that emerged, in the last instance, from the cloak of the great Russian Art Nouveau fairy tale illustrator Ivan Bilibin, at that time completely dominated and made unmistakably Russian not only the graphics of these books, but also the envelops printed with small naive pictures of the letters coming from the Soviet Union, the wrapping papers or the decorations of the pioneer feasts as well. I am delighted to see that it has not completely disappeared in its native land. And also that I am not alone with this nostalgy. When I asked for this book in the library, the Mongolian librarian dipped into it and then she screamed: “How beautiful!” I think she probably grew up on similar illustrations in the Mongolian People’s Republic.

At the same time there is in these pictures something anguishing, something tight and determined as well – just like in my childhood. Something so coarsely earthy and material, so self-satisfied and suffocating as in the whole popular literature, journalism and the complete mentality of that period.

It is worth to compare how different traits of Khayyam’s poetry are highlighted by the illustrations made by Endre Szász for the Hungarian translation of Lőrinc Szabó. The Russian illustrator is captivated by the “carpe diem”-motif in Khayyam, the satisfaction with wine, embraces and music. It is interesting that, as we have seen, the Russian translation too shifts the message of the poems in this direction. In contrast, the illustrations of Endre Szász, just like the translations by Lőrinc Szabó, emphasize the existential doubts and struggles of Khayyam.

These attentive and bitter old men are totally different from, let us say, that laughing old man playing the philosopher with a glass of wine in his hand on the second image in the lowest row of the Russian images. This latter keeps reminding me the vulgarly jovial paternalism of the corpulent provincial party functionaries of the eighties. I even have a fancy of hearing that well known, unnaturally drawling, orotund apparatchik tone. To my great surprise, I have recently heard this voice again in a collection of jokes that I received on a Russian audio CD. It seems that it has not completely died out in its native land either.





Through a veil, darkly. Translations of a poem by Omar Khayyam


Asrâr-e azal-râ na to dâni o na man
win harf-e mo'ammâ na to khâni o na man
hast az pas-e parde goftogu-ye man o to
chun parde baroftad na to mâni o na man


Recited by Ahmad Shamlou (1'03")

In my own literal translation:

The mysteries of eternity are known neither to you nor me
the enigma can be read neither by you nor me
behind the veil a discourse goes on about me and you
when the veil disappears there remain neither you nor me

The untranslatable beauty of the Persian original comes in the first place from its refined musical structure. A solid frame is set by the rhymes dâni - khâni - mâni “[you] know – read – remain” alternating in the construction na to... o na man, “neither you... nor I” repeated in three lines. These lines are dominated by the vowels “a” and “â” (long closed ‘a’) and by the consonants “r, l, m, n” which give the poem a deep, resounding and fatal tone, as if we were listening to the lines of the One Ring (by the way it seems to me that Tolkien borrowed a lot from Persian to create the language of Mordor). The third line stands in sharp contrast to the other three, its vowels abruptly becoming high and sharp and its consonants hissing and pattering, and also the construction “neither you nor me” becomes the opposite “me and you” (man o to).

There are two problematic points in the interpretation of this poem. A minor problem is that in place of harf-e mo'ammâ (“enigmatic writing/word”), appearing in the second line, several versions have hall-e mo'ammâ (“the solution of the enigma”). This is how we hear it in Shamlou’s voice in the above recital. The verb that follows, khândan (“read” or “recite”) allows for both possibilities. Recent editions prefer harf, so I follow them. However, the translation of this expression is also ambiguous: it can mean both “reading the enigmatic script” and “reciting the secret word.” Francesco Gabrieli, Khayyam’s Italian translator (1944, in his edition, the poem is numbered 193), for example, opts for the latter:

I segreti dell’eternità né tu né io conosciamo
Quella parola misteriosa né tu, né io sappiam profferire
Di dietro un velo si svolge il tuo e mio parlare:
quando cade il velame, né tu né io ci siam più.

(The laws of eternity are not known either by you or me
That mysterious word cannot be pronounced either by you or me
From behind a veil goes our discourse:
when the veil falls, there are neither you nor me any more.)

In the note appended to this expression he even explains that “that mysterious word” is „la chiave del mistero dell’universo”, that is, the key to the mystery of the universe. This idea is interesting, but entirely groundless. In the Sufi tradition no reference is made to such an all-powerful word. This is why I translated it rather as “reading the secret script,” but I have yet to verify the tradition of this metaphor in Sufi poetry.

However, the real difficulty lays in the third line. In fact, this can be translated in several ways, but with each translation there is some problem.

A literal translation of this phrase would be: “from behind a veil is the discourse of me and you.” So the simplest way would be to translate it as “you and me speak with each other from behind a veil.” This is how we find it in Gabrieli who immediately attaches a second misleading commentary to the word “veil,” identifying it with human body: as if after discussing the mysteriousness of the universe, Khayyam switched to the problem that we cannot even understand each other while living in the flesh here on earth. This Wittgensteinian problem, however, did not interest the Sufis. We find no allusion to it in their writings. They are concerned only with the possibility of a direct relationship with God and the this-worldly limits of such a relationship. Such limits were referred to by them with the topos of the “veil.” The widespread use of this topos is highlighted by the fact that the recently deceased (2003) great Islamic scholar Annemarie Schimmel also gave the title As through a veil: mystical poetry in Islam to her standard work on Sufi poetry.

However, this metaphor assumes that we are in front of the veil hiding the mystery from us. How can our discourse then come from behind of the veil?

One of the most recent and most exact English translations of Khayyam was published in 1979 by Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs. According to the foreword, it is “as literal an English version of the Persian originals as readability and intelligibility permit”. The third line of poem number 7, in the spirit of this compromise, strives to reconcile the “behind” of the Persian original with the “in front” of the traditional veil metaphor by attempting to translate “from behind” as “this side”.

Neither you nor I know the mysteries of eternity,
Neither you nor I read this enigma;
You and I only talk this side of the veil;
When the veil falls, neither you nor I will be here.

Igor A. Golubev, in his monumental Russian edition of 2005 – where he collected and translated from Persian more than 1300 quatrains of Khayyam – allows himself an even larger poetica licentia. In this poem, numbered 996 in his edition, we do not speak behind the veil, but about the secrets hiding behind the veil. A more reassuring, more sober and more materialistic solution indeed, with the only flaw is that it is not supported at all by the Persian original.

Покрова с вечных тайн ни ты не снял, ни я:
Неясным письменам ни ты не внял, ни я.
Гадаем мы с тобой о скрытом за покровом...
Но упади покров – ни ты б не встал, ни я.

(Neither you nor I pulled down the veil from the eternal secret
Neither you nor I understood the unclear script
We are just guessing about the secrets behind the veil,
But drop the veil – and neither you will stand up, nor I.)

Another solution to the dilemma is that it is not we who speak behind the veil, but that there is something spoken about us, it’s only that Khayyam left out the preposition دربارۀ darbâre-ye “about” from before man o to for the sake of a flawless rhythm. On this presupposition are based a number of authoritative versions, like the English Khayyam-translation (1882 and 1883, where this poem is number 389) by the eminent Persian philologist Edward Henry Whinfield (1836-1922), who also composed the first copiously commented translations of Hafez and Rumi:

Nor you nor I can read the etern decree
To that enigma we can find no key
They talk of you and me behind the veil
But, if that veil be lifted, where are we?

Such ellipsis is also supposed by the Persian poet and homme de lettres Karim Emami (1930-2005). His anthology of Khayyam, published in 1988 under the title The Wine of Nishapur, accompanied by the calligraphy of Nassrollah Afje'i and the photography of Shahrokh Golestan, is the first English translation of Khayyam undertaken by a Persian translator.

Eternal secrets are not for you and me to share
Cryptic letters are not for you and me to read.
Behind the curtain there is a muffled discussion of you and me,
And when the curtain falls, there will be no longer a you or I.

Ten years later, another Persian man of letters, the Vancouver-based Shahriar Shahriari, prepared some nicely ringing and faithful English translations which he published together with the Persian original, together with the English version by Fitzgerald, and an anonymous German translation on the site okonlife.com. What is more, in the vein of a charming medieval Persian custom, he also added a short quatrain to each poem to unfold their respective moral lessons. In the third verse of this poem, he also endorses the interpretation of Whinfield and Emami, while in the second verse, in contrast to them, he accepts the alternative hall-e mo'ammâ. Comically enough, the German translation published in parallel with this poem follows the pedestrian solution of Golubev.

The secrets eternal neither you know nor I
And answers to the riddle neither you know nor I
Behind the veil there is much talk about us, why
When the veil falls, neither you remain nor I.

Meaning:
In vain we scream, in vain shout
And try our best to find out
And when it’s end of our route
What’s left is simply naught.

Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883), who was the first to publish, in four editions between 1859 and 1879, an English translation of altogether 114 quatrains, thus launching the European cult of Khayyam, admittedly treated his material in quite a free manner. His translations reflect much more his own taste and that of his Victorian age than the original message of the poems. In this quatrain (number 32 in the first, third and fourth editions, but number 35 in the second one) he gets around the problem of the interpretation of the third line by isolating the topos of the veil and shifting it up in the second line – omitting from there the “enigma,” and also replacing the “secrets of eternity” in the first line with a self-coined metaphor. Thus he separates from it the obscure discourse about “you and me,” as if it were whispered by marsh-fires around us on the moorland right before retribution overtakes us. A nice gothic solution indeed, but has not much to do with its original.

There was a Door to which I found no Key
There was a Veil past which I might not see:
Some little talk awhile of ME and THEE
There seem’d – and then no more of THEE and ME.

At this point I badly needed a thorough Persian commentary of Khayyam. I only managed to get a relatively laconic version – but even so about 500 pages long – in Tehran, with the title ترانه های خیام Tarânaha-ye Khayyâm, that is “Songs of Khayyam,” compiled by Mohammad Baqer Najafzadeh Barforush (Amir Kabir Publisher, 2004). Even this was not easy to obtain, because most bookshops only have pocket editions of Khayyam. Finally I found this one in the shop of the ثالث Saless publisher on Kharimkhân-e Zand Avenue, where the bookshops with the richest choice line up: the outstanding edition of Hafez by Mohammad Estelami was also on sale only here. This commentary quotes from the discussion written by the Rumi scholar Mohammad Taqi Ja'fari (1923-2007) on the last two verses of this poem. He too interprets this line by assuming that the discourse goes about us behind the veil:

با دقب کافی در این رباعی، می بینیم، چند علم در این رباعی ادعا شده است: علم یکم: واقعیات در معرفت بشری بر دو نوع است. نوع اول، روشن، آشکار و قابل فهم. نوع دوم، تاریک و معما و غیر قابل فعم، علم دوم: عالم هستی بر دو رویه تقسیم می گردد: ۱) رویۀ پشت پرده. ۲) رویۀ ظاهری پرده. علم سوم: گفتوگویی دربارۀ من و تو در پشت پرده در جریان است. علم چهارم: اگر پرده برداشته شود نه تو خواهی ماند و نه من (که البته این علم چهارم دارای احتمالاتی است.) ی

Let us observe how many experiences [Khayyam] gives account of in this rubai. The first experience is that reality is present in human knowledge in two ways: in a clear, obvious and understandable form on the one hand, and in a dark, mysterious and unintelligible form on the other hand. The second experience is that the wise man distinguishes two faces of the things: 1. the face behind the veil and 2. the one outside the veil. The third one is that the discourse about us goes on behind the veil. And the fourth one is that if we draw the veil away, there remains neither you nor I (this fourth experience is of course only of a contingent nature).

But who might speak about us behind the veil? The God of Islam is a lonely God, not the Christian Trinity between whose Persons an eternal dialogue goes on. His absolute majesty excludes His “conversing” with His creatures. He gives commands only to spiritual beings of the highest rank, and he also contacted Mohammad only through the medium of an angel. Even the Sufi who strives after the most complete proximity to Him can only speechlessly dissolve and lose himself in Him “as the butterfly in the flame of the candle.” And it would be in fact quite pretentious to think that such a God, even if conversing with someone, converses precisely about us, however great a satisfaction this would give the Pascalian reed.

I hope that by the time I know better the mystical poetry of Islam, and perhaps also will have found a more detailed commentary to Khayyam, I will understand more profoundly this line as well.

In the meantime let us see for a moment how the Hungarian translators of Khayyam coped with this quatrain.

József Rippl-Rónai, Portrait of Lőrinc Szabó (1923)The Hungarian tradition of Khayyam was established by the renowned poet Lőrinc Szabó (1900-1957) who translated his quatrains from the English of Fitzgerald in three versions, in 1920, 1930 and 1943. He introduced the first edition of 1920 with a foreword (also published in another version in the prestigious literary review Nyugat), in which he exalts the discovering and pioneering merits of Fitzgerald – and thus, indirectly, himself – who has wiped the dust of seven centuries’ oblivion off the – rather unworthy – poems of Khayyam:

Because there lived an Omar Khayyam, far, far away, somewhere in Persia, a long, long time ago, at the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries [...] completely abandoned and misjudged, in great misery, until he finally died in Nishapur. His tomb is exhibited there even today. [...] His poems have not survived. I mean there are some thousand rubaiyat left under his name, but who knows whether it was really he who wrote them. Some of them probably yes, but even this part is impossible to identify. [...] It produced no effect when these short poems were deciphered on the recently discovered papyrus rolls. [sic!] It seemed as if Omar Khayyam was definitely lost for the world. The forgotten poet was waiting in vain for being discovered right until the middle of the last century. It was then, in 1859 that the English translation of Edward Fitzgerald saw the light of day.

However, if he already knew about the tomb of Khayyam in Nishapur, it would have not been a great effort to look up the chapter on Nishapur in the highly popular travelogue of the Hungarian Islam scholar Ármin Vámbéry (1832-1913), Vándorlásaim és élményeim Perzsiában (My wanderings and experiences in Persia). Vámbéry, who traveled extensively all over Persia in the same years of the publication of the first translations of Fitzgerald, wrote this note on Nishapur:

The other poet whose corpse lays in Nishapur, Khayyam, stands in sharp contrast to the other [Attar]. [...] Nevertheless, the poems of Khayyam are just as widely read as those of the other.

And the situation is the same even today, more than a hundred years later. Whoever saw the film The wind will carry us, by Abbas Kiarostami, will certainly remember the episode when the old district doctor of the tiny Kurdish village and the engineer visiting the village rush off on a shaky small motorbike on a white dirt road meandering in the wonderful Kurdish landscape, reciting in unison by heart the poems of Khayyam.

Abbas Kiarostami, The wind will carry us - the doctor and the engineer recite the poems of Khayyam while riding a motorbike in Kurdistan
In the editions of 1920 and 1930, Lőrinc Szabó translates the quatrain like this (with numbers 30 and 33, respectively):

Volt egy Kapu: de kulcsa elveszett;
volt egy Fátyol: nem tépte szét kezed;
ma még miénk a hír s holnapra már
kiejt rostáján az Emlékezet!

(There was a Gate: but its key was lost
there was a Veil: your hands did not tear it
the fame is still ours today, but by tomorrow
Memory will let us fall through her sieve.)

It is quite understandable that the young and ambitious Lőrinc Szabó was much more concerned about the problem of the transitoriness of fame than either Khayyam or Fitzgerald in their original versions. However, by transposing the subject of the “discourse about us” from behind the transcendent veil into the world, he extirpated from the rubai even the last remnants of the Sufi mystics left behind by Fitzgerald, making it just as materialistic as Golubev’s version. I don’t know whether he realized this, his thirst for recognition abated in the following twenty-three years, or he just simply gave a more attentive reading to Fitzgerald’s original, but the fact is that in the third edition of 1943 with number 32 already this version figured:

Volt ott egy Kapu, kulcsa elveszett;
volt egy Fátyol, látni nem engedett;
mondták, hogy ÉN meg TE, de azután
a TE meg ÉN elnémult, vége lett.

(There was a Gate there, its key was lost,
there was a Veil that did not let to see
they told ME and YOU, but then
the YOU and ME fell silent, came to an end.)

Apart from Lőrinc Szabó it is worth mentioning only one more Hungarian translator of Khayyam, Dezső Tandori (1938-), and even him only because he made his translations not from the English of Fitzgerald, but on the basis of the rough translations made from the original Persian by the Islam scholar Róbert Simon (1939-). However, he could have prepared them from anything else; the result would have been the same one hundred percent Tandori instead of Khayyam, just like any other translation by this genius of contemporary Hungarian literature.

Titkát az örökvalónak éljük – s mire van?
Rejtély ez az írás, sose értjük, mire van.
Színmű, hol a függöny épp a lényeg veleje,
felmegy, lemegy, és bár soha nem kérjük – van.

(We live the secret of eternity – but what is it for?
This writing is a mystery, we never understand what it is for.
A drama where the curtain is the nub of the essence,
it rises and it falls, and although we never ask for it – it is.

The first two lines he could bear with some attention, but by the beginning of the third, he has arrived at the end of his tether. Until that point there was no sparrow, horse or bear – the obligatory topics of the Master – in the poem, on hearing the word “veil” or “curtain,” he nervously snorted: “from here I will continue.” And he has. True, Khayyam would not thank him for this, but Hungarian literature will thank him for the idiom “the nub of the essence” which cries out to be cast in bronze. It is just as worthy a match of the genial trouvaille “the secret of the enigma”, coined by the Hungarian humorist Frigyes Karinthy (1887-1938) in the title of his parody of Stephen Leacock, as is Tandori’s entire translation a match for that famous quote from another parody by Karinthy where the poem of Endre Ady, which begins with “I came from the shore of the Ganges”, is transformed in the hands of a number of translators into “In the salami by Herz the salt is extremely dense.”

Nevertheless the blunder of Tandori is crowned by the anthology of Khayyam A mulandóság mámora (The rapture of transitoriness, Terebess 1997) selected by Ágota Steiner from several Hungarian translators. Steiner in number 47 – obviously attracted by the buzzword of “curtain” – hastily included Tandori’s version as a translation of that quatrain which figures in the 1943 edition by Lőrinc Szabó with number 52 like this:

átvillan az Örök Színpadon és
megint a Homály Függönyébe vész,
mely körülömli a Drámát, mit Ő
maga rendez, játszik és maga néz.

(Flashing through the Eternal Stage and
getting lost again in the Curtain of Darkness
which surrounds the Drama that is
directed, played and watched by Himself.)

Curtain, curtain. Anyway, every poem of Khayyam speaks about one and the same thing, wasn’t this already stated by Fitzgerald? But the intricate question of how any curtain or director comes to a Persian stage of eight hundred years ago, should yet be the object of the translation and analysis of another quatrain of Khayyam.

Each has spoken according to his humor
No one can define the face of things.

(Khayyam)


Yerros de imprenta medievales

Acabamos de publicar en Studiolum la edición digital de un hermoso códice medieval como segundo volumen de la serie Tesoros de Kalocsa, siempre en colaboración con aquella impresionante biblioteca húngara. Se trata de un manuscrito parisino del siglo XIII con las epístolas de San Pablo acompañadas de los comentarios, línea a línea, de Pedro Lombardo: trescientas hojas de pergamino en total.

El grueso volumen se elaboró por el procedimiento de pecia, por entonces ya habitual en la Universidad de París. El ejemplar conservado en la biblioteca de la Universidad se dividía en grupos de hojas y repartía simultáneamente a varios copistas. Así, en un lapso de tiempo bastante breve podía contarse con una nueva copia completa. Luego se reunían los pliegos y los miniaturistas decoraban los espacios en blanco con grandes iniciales, alternando los colores rojo y azul.

Este procedimiento, según la magnífica Histoire de la lecture dans le monde occidental editada por Chartier y Cavallo —que tuvimos el honor de traducir al húngaro— ya presagiaba el método de trabajo del libro impreso, donde las hojas individuales podían ser preparadas por diferentes componedores y luego —al menos en las primeras décadas de la imprenta— un miniaturista rellenaba a mano los espacios dejados para las iniciales. Pero este sistema también dejó entrar —como veremos ahora— a un abuelo del diablo de la imprenta, a casi doscientos años de distancia del nacimiento de la propia imprenta.

En principio, este método presuponía que los miniaturistas conocieran el texto y pintaran en el blanco la inicial justa. Sin embargo, no era siempre así. El miniaturista podía echar una fugaz ojeada al texto y pintar corriendo la letra que le parecía más lógica, aunque a veces no fuera ésta la que le pedía el texto sacro.

Así ocurrió, por ejemplo, en el fol. 264r (Heb 2:7), donde el artista echó un vistazo y completó la primera palabra del versículo como «Innuisti» (consentiste). Inmediatamente después, no obstante, se debió apercibir del error al iniciar correctamente el comentario, a la derecha, con un «Minuisti» (disminuiste).

En algunos casos recaía sobre el stationarius —el bibliotecario encargado de la distribución de los pliegos y de revisar las copias— la responsabilidad de la corrección final. Así pasó, por ejemplo, en el fol. 233v (2Cor 16:21), donde el miniaturista erró tanto en el versículo como en el comentario la inicial de «...alutatio» porque había entendido «Laudatio» –voz tan frecuente en los textos litúrgicos–, dando lugar a una imposible «Lalutatio». En último extremo, el corrector logró escribir la 'S' en negro en medio de la 'L' roja resucitando la «Salutatio» original.

Lo mismo hizo en el fol. 286r (Heb 10:7), donde tuvo que colar una pequeña 'T' negra en medio de la 'N' roja del comentario (y también entre los arabescos de la inicial) para cambiar la errada «Nunc» (ahora) en «Tunc» (entonces).

Pero en ocasiones también la atención del corrector andaba floja. Es el caso del fol. 247v (2Tim 1:16), donde el miniaturista imaginó, y creó, un «Sed» (pero) en lugar de un relativamente más raro «Det» (dé). Este ejemplo, junto con la anterior lectura equivocada de «...alutatio» como «Laudatio» nos permite arriesgar la hipótesis de que quizá el miniaturista no fuera muy sensible a la diferencia entre los fonemas 't' y 'd'.

Y, finalmente, un caso más sutil (que la crítica textual definiría como de intercambio de pericopas). En el fol. 292r (Heb 11:22), a la derecha del versículo que empieza por «Fide Ioseph», la palabra inicial del comentario fue completada como «Mosep» en lugar de «Iosep». ¿Por qué?

En este pasaje de la Epístola a los Hebreos, el Apóstol enumera ejemplos de fe desde el patriarca a los profetas. El versículo que empieza por «Fide Ioseph moriens» va precedido —en la página anterior— por un versículo de inicio muy similar: «Fide Iacob moriens», que también menciona a «Ioseph», y le sucede otro que empieza por «Fide Moyses». Quizá el miniaturista, al llegar a la línea «Fide Ioseph», se despistó por un momento y, recordando que ya había pintado una inicial para esta frase en la página anterior, competó la inicial «...osep» del comentario como un «Mosep» que casi correspondía a la palabra inicial del versículo siguiente. Más tarde, esta letra también sería corregida con una pequeña 'J' negra entre las patas de la gran 'M' roja.

¿La moraleja? Pues, quizás, que errare era tan humanum hace ochocientos años como hoy. Y esto, por descontado, tampoco será de otro modo en nuestra edición. Solo queda esperar que los errores de hoy no le causen demasiado enojo al Benevolente Lector del futuro, y que los acoja con el mismo ánimo sereno con que nosotros hemos señalado los de aquellos copistas.

Medieval Typos

In studiolum we have finally published the digital edition of a medieval codex to be published together with the Cathedral Library of Kalocsa as the second volume of the “Treasures of Kalocsa” series. This beautiful 13th-century Parisian manuscript contains the epistles of Saint Paul, accompanied by the detailed verse-by-verse commentaries by Petrus Lombardus, in 300 parchment leaves all in all.

This voluminous codex was produced with the working method of the pecia, already widespread at the Paris university at that time. The exemplar kept in the library of the university was divided in sheets and distributed among several copyists at the same time, so that a complete new copy could be produced in a relatively short time. The copied sheets were then collected, and miniators painted large initial letters with alternating red and blue colors in the spaces left blank at the beginning of the biblical verses commented.

This procedure, according to the glorious Histoire de la lecture dans le monde occidental edited by Chartier and Cavallo – that we had the honor of translating into Hungarian – already foreshadowed the working method of the book press, where single sheets were prepared by different compositors, and – at least in the first decades of the printing era – the initials were painted by miniators in the spaces left blank. The more so, because – as we will see below – together with this new method apparently the printer's devil was born as well – some two hundred years before the very invention of printing itself!

Namely, this method assumed that the miniators knew the text, and always painted the appropriate initial in the given space. However, this was not always the case. Apparently the miniator often just casted a short glance at the text to be complemented, and then quickly painted the letter he felt most logical – but which sometimes in fact differed from the sacred text.

So he did, for example, on fol. 264r (Heb 2:7), where he read and complemented the initial word of the verse as “Innuisti” (‘you consented’). Right after that, however, he realized his error, and initialized the commentary at the right of the verse with the correct word “Minuisti” (‘you diminished’).


In other cases, however, it fell to the stationarius – the librarian responsible for the distribution of the sheets and then for the revision of the copies – to correct the error afterwards. Thus for example on fol. 233v (2Cor 16:21), where the miniator complemented the initial word “...alutatio” as “Laudatio” – a frequent initial word in liturgical texts – both in the verse and in the commentary. In the latter it was the corrector who wrote the black ‘S’ in the middle of the red ‘L’, thus changing the word in the correct “Salutatio”.


The same he did on fol. 286r (Heb 10:7), where a little black ‘T’ got into the initial red ‘N’ of the commentary, thus changing the erroneous “Nunc” (‘now’) in a correct “Tunc” (‘therefore’).


In some cases the attention of the corrector grew slack too. Thus for example on fol. 247v (2Tim 1:16), where the miniator had imagined – and created – a “Sed” (‘but’) in place of the relatively rare “Det” (‘let him give’). This example, together with the above quoted misreading of “...alutatio” as “Laudatio” permits us to hypothesize that the miniator did not feel a sharp difference between phonemas ‘t’ and ‘d’.


And finally a very subtle case. On fol. 292r (Heb 11:22), at the right of the verse beginning as “Fide Ioseph”, the initial word of the commentary was complemented as “Mosep”, instead of “Iosep”. Why then?


In this passage of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Apostle enumerates the examples of faith from the patriarch to the prophets. The verse beginning with “Fide Ioseph moriens” is preceded – on the previous page – by a very similar verse beginning with “Fide Iacob moriens” but mentioning “Ioseph” as well, and is followed by another one beginning with “Fide Moyses”. Perhaps the miniator, arriving to the line “Fide Ioseph”, lost track for a moment, and remembering that he had already painted an initial to such phrase on the previous page, he complemented the initial word “...osep” of the commentary as “Mosep” that almost corresponded to the initial word of the following verse. Later this typo was corrected as well with a small black ‘J’ written into the large red ‘M’.

Any moral? Perhaps that errare was humanum already eight hundred years ago. This certainly will not be different with our edition either. We can only hope that the errors of this one will not cause annoyance to the Benevolent User, only some lenient serenity, just like those of the medieval miniator did to us.

Adiós

Ibn al-Labbâna (11th c.):   Mallorca


مدینة میورقة     


بلد اعارته الحمامة طو قها
      وکساه حلة ریشه الطاووس
وکانما تلك المیاه مدامة
      وکان قیعان الدیار کئوس


Medina Mayurqa

This city has taken from the dove her collar
       and the peacock clothed her with her feathers.
The water of her fountains is like wine
       and her courtyards are similar to goblets.


Espacios en blanco

En una vieja arca llena de papeles familiares acabamos de encontrar un pequeño legajo con tres documentos manuscritos firmados en el pueblo de Canales de la Sierra, dos de ellos son escrituras públicas fechadas en 1683 y otro, de carácter eclesiástico, en 1763; y hay también otro documento eclesiástico fechado en Pamplona en 1688 pero con asuntos relativos asimismo a la villa de Canales. Ignoramos completamente cómo llegaron hasta nuestra casa y qué relación guarda aquella lejana zona con nuestros antepasados. Intentaremos averiguarlo.

Pero el legajo, además, guarda un impreso curioso. Se trata de una «Carta de Esclavitud» o declaración de ingreso en la Cofradía de los Esclavos de la Virgen. Aún hoy, en ese hermoso pueblo de Canales, en el que solo quedan unos 80 habitantes censados, se celebran fiestas a su patrona, la Virgen de la Soledad, el último sábado de agosto. El eje de la celebración es la romería a la Ermita de La Soledad, allí donde debió haberse firmado el documento que reproducimos y que por su aspecto parece de inicios del siglo XVIII. Quizá alguno de nuestros ancestros se sintió atraído por la Cofradía y acarició en sus manos este papel cuyos blancos tenía que rellenar con su nombre, el de los santos de su devoción, y luego fecharlo y rubricarlo. No lo hizo. El papel quedó olvidado en un arca que por casualidad hoy hemos abierto. Un pequeño misterio entre tantos. Como decía la buena de Dorotea en el capítulo 30 de la primera parte del Quijote: «Todo es milagro y misterio el discurso de mi vida».

Smokescreen

Zoltán Móser: Mondottam, ember... Képek Madáchhoz [Man I have spoken... Photos to Madách], Budapest: Masszi Publisher, 2002. With the foreword of István Jelenits

Coincidence that connects far away worlds” has arranged it so that just one day after I have reported on the visit of Rodin’s statues in Mallorca, the same burgher of Calais, Jacques de Wissant whom I had photographed in Palma looked back at me from a title page at a book sale. This photo album is signed by Zoltán Móser (1946), author of thirty books, photo illustrator of fifty other ones, participant of two hundred exhibitions, professor of theory, practice and aesthetics of photography at the Péter Pázmány Catholic University, and guest professor of the Sapientia University in Kolozsvár (Cluj). Besides the photo on the title page it includes thirty-six more portraits of men, women and statues of angels, apparently from Transylvania, accompanied by quotations from the renowned 19th-century drama by Imre Madách, The tragedy of man.

When dipping into the book, the first thing I notice is that these photos, in the majority representing beautiful, sharp-featured and often upsetting faces of old peasant men and women, absolutely do not move me. They leave me cold. These faces in real life would stir up definite feelings, interest, sympathy or antipathy in me, but while browsing through their photos I only feel bored. This contrast is so strong that I’m constrained to think about its reason.

When glancing over the book the second time, I discover that the photos are unfocused. They are slushy. Without exception. The details of the faces, of the hair and of the clothes are fuzzy, they get lost. Thus some powerful elements – the eyes, some deeper wrinkles, but principally the nose and the mouth – dominate the impression. The face becomes a mask. Its individual traits are eclipsed, it becomes schematic.

On a third glance I have to establish that this effect is not accidental, but intentional. Each image is pointed to a small morality, just like the “little colored articles” of the newspapers of the seventies. The photographer did not intend to photograph persons, but rather roles and clichés. Genre figures. Sentimental photographic commonplaces, whose theatrical compositions rise from the peasant romanticism of the late nineteenth century, spanning without rupture (occasionally with some Socialist by-paths) to the nostalgic Transylvanian photo albums at the end of the twentieth century.

When a photo moves me, when I find it a good picture, it usually comes from the impression that the photographer is interested in reality, he is able to look at it in astonishment, he permits it to touch him personally, and it is this unique encounter that he is photographing.

This is not what I see on these pictures. This person is not interested in reality, but in finding some matter for his well-trained sentimental clichés. He is photographing such commonplaces in a row that have been photographed by many others for the past fifty years. He avoids encounter. This is not what he sees. This is what is customary to see.

And, in addition, his clichés are but limited to a well-defined stock of the several clichés in circulation. To those ones that represent their subjects from outside and from above. With aloofness, in a stiffened posture, degraded to objects, as simplified figures reduced to their momentary role. Without love. For the consumption of the petty bourgeois who is filled with satisfaction by the easily receivable anecdotal, populist tone on the one hand, and on the other hand by the safety that he stands above the subject of the image, that it is him who looks at the person represented while it does not look back at him, and that he does not have to enter into relation with it as a person. That he can avoid the encounter.

And the murkiness, fuzziness, lack of sharpness of the images – well, that is Art. The feeling of “cloud of unknowing” and of “seeing but a poor reflection as in a mirror” added afterwards to camouflage its triviality. The three points quivering for a long time after an empty phrase. A smokescreen.

With the examples below I have also juxtaposed some images comparable with them. I had no large pool to choose from, only a few albums I had within reach at home. The photos in them were mostly small-sized, so they get somewhat grainy when enlarged, while the album of Móser is of large format, thus its images come in a better quality.

Besides, the images of Móser become sharper when reduced in size, thus for the original impression you should enlarge them by clicking on them.

Left: Irén Ács, Meeting in the cooperative, Kondoros, 1959 (from the album Magyarország Otthon (Hungary at home), detail, below it the full image. – Right: Zoltán Móser, „Do I not feel the blessed daylight, The sweet delight of being alive...”

Left: Irén Ács, Couple, Füzesgyarmat, 1963. – Right: Zoltán Móser, „And even when imagination raise me Mere hunger plucks me down and humbles me, And makes me descend once more into base matter.”

Left: Irén Ács, The dustman, 1970, detail, below it the full image. – Right: Zoltán Móser, „...is life more than a dream?”

Left: Irén Ács, Mosonmagyaróvár, 1965, detail, below it the full image. – Right: Zoltán Móser, „A broken heart is quickly enough mended...”

Left: Irén Ács, István Hunya, a leader of the movement of Hungarian construction workers, 1972 - Right: Zoltán Móser, „...I have been racked by fearful visions, And I cannot tell which of them is true” (detail)

Left: Péter Korniss, Christmas, Tiszaeszlár 1985 (From the album The Guest Worker) - Right: Zoltán Móser, „Let us be wise, like god [sic]

Left: Photo taken in Ladakh by Zsolt Sütő, 2007 (detail) - Right: Zoltán Móser, „All earth can know of joy is in my smile...”

Below: Zoltán Móser, „See there, the eagle circling in the clouds...” - Below it: Ferenc Olasz, Galgó (from the album Dicsértessék [Glory be to Him], 1989)


The smokescreen covering the angels even sends forth stink of sulphur. It would come in handy to the author if he could divide the book in a perfect symmetry to three times twelve images, by illustrating the male portraits with verses pronounced by Adam, the female ones with quotations from Eve, and those of the angels with verses sung by the angels in The tragedy of man. However, the angels have but limited opportunity to speak in the Tragedy. The one who in turn speaks profusely is Lucifer. Therefore the author tacks a tiny bit of an epilogue onto the images with the subtitle “whether it is permitted to tease the angels” in which he, after a ritual act of touching every holy cow from Tamási to Rilke and Klee declares that he will illustrate the photos of angel statues – photos that are even more wasted, inexpressive and taken without love than those of the persons – with quotations from the Satan. A gruesome blasphemy indeed, which is nevertheless assisted by the Piarist professor István Jelenits who authorized the book with his foreword.

By the way, the work of Madách is a true classical collection of sentences, of which any verse selected at random can be used as a motto for anything, as it is well attested by the above captions of Móser’s photos. The album of Móser, for example, would perfectly match those verses from the twelfth scene:

Thou hast been sunk in dreaming phantasies,
And left to stray the herd thou shouldest watch.

But even more those sentences of Péter Korniss from his Transylvanian photo album Inventory:

Robert Capa, the legendary photographer of Hungarian origin used to say, “If your picture is not good enough, you were not close enough to your subject.”

I changed this motto to “If your picture is not good enough, you were not close enough to the person.”

Rodin in Mallorca

The Caixà Bank has brought from the Rodin Museum in Paris to Palma, and installed on the promenade leading to the seaside cathedral seven masterpieces of Rodin, the six figures of the Burghers of Calais and the Thinker. A gesture of grand seigneur, the more so because at this time, in January there are hardly any visitors in Mallorca: this gift is addressed to the city. As on the way from the airport at the cathedral we wind upwards on the Passeig des Born, the seven statues are standing there on the promenade, so naturally as if they had been intended for here, mingling with the burghers of Mallorca. Their black surface that after moulding had been polished to mirror-like finish through weeks by Rodin, comes into such a new life in the light of the early spring Mediterranean sunshine that has never been suspected in cloudy Paris.

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais and The Thinker on the Passeig des Born of Palma de MallorcaAt four o’clock in Saturday morning I cut across the promenade on my way to the fish market in the port. As a guest coming from a country without a sea, I am irresistibly attracted by the spectacle as the boats arriving from the night fishery sail in on the oily black water, the dripping cases are taken out on the quay, and in the building of the wholesale fish market the early rising commissaries of the restaurants and supermarkets survey the catch spread out, the greatest part of which has even no name in our language. The only bar of the city that is open at this time is the sailors’ pub in front of the fish market where the exhausted fishermen draw up the balance of the night while nursing a drink. Disciplined sailor dogs are lying at the feet of some of them, wiry creatures with weather-beaten skin like their masters.

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais and The Thinker on the Passeig des Born of Palma de MallorcaThe city is still sleeping, the statues stand solitarily on the promenade. Lampions have already been stretched out between the trees and stages have been erected at the two ends of the esplanade for the three days feast of Saint Sebastian, the saintly protector of the city. This night light softens the statues, their surface becomes oily and slippery like that of the sea and of the freshly caught fishes.

Rodin, The Burghers of Calais and The Thinker on the Passeig des Born of Palma de Mallorca in the nightSunday evening, at five o’clock the parade begins. The burghers of Mallorca who in the previous night lit a bonfire on the main square and roasted meat at the free braziers set up throughout the city, and kept eating, drinking and dancing until early morning while each square gave home to a different concert, have already had a rest in the morning, and now they gather with renewed strength for the continuation. The crowd swarms onto the square and is looking forward with excitement to the arrival of the flaming charriots.

From the whole Mallorca, but even from continental Catalonia several groups of dimoni who usually play the role of tempters at the feast of Saint Anthony of the various settlements have come together in Palma. Each of them marches with their fire-vomiting monster-charriots, drummers and dancers from the center of the city to the cathedral on the sea-front where they will launch the festive fireworks.

The nearly five thousand dimoni march for four and a half hours through the host of a hundred and thirty thousand spectators. The square illuminated in a ghostlike manner by the fires and torches is dominated by the dark marble obelisk topped by the bronze bat with outspread wings, the heraldic animal of King James I who had conquered this island from the Arabs. The Thinker – the figure of Dante looking in the gate of Hell and the 19th-century icon of rationality – is sitting sunken into himself in the middle of the crowd.

Rodin's Thinker during the feast of San Sebastià in Palma de Mallorca
Goya, Caprichos 43, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters