Alfred Jarry en Esperanto (9)

 

Jarry, Alfred. Reĝo Ubuo: Teatraĵo / Tradukis el la franca Thomas Larger, Thiery Tailhades. – Paris: Espéranto-France, 2023. – 110 p. – (Serio Oriento-Okcidento, № 62).

Recenzas Paulo Sergio Viana en La Ondo de Esperanto (2023, № 3 [317], Septembro):

Reĝo Ubuo (20 Oktobro 2023)

Magritte, patafiziko, ars combinatoria

"Magritte diris, ke oni ne povus provizi validan eksplikon de afero ĝis oni eksplikus tiun eksplikon." — Bernard Noël

Eble vi scivolas, kial mi afiŝas pri Magritte, ankaŭ krokodile, sen konekso kun Esperanto. Nu, la daŭra fadeno estas ars combinatoria (arto de kombinaĵoj), kiu rilatas al interlingvistiko, specife rilate al la epoko de aprioraj filozofiaj lingvoj. Analizado de la motivoj, logiko, kreivo, kaj limoj de la koncepto de kombinado estas stimula, esplorenda kampo.

Kiel vi vidos en antaŭaj afiŝoj, Magritte havas propran perspektivon pri kombinaĵoj, kiu komparendas kun aliaj. Do jen, el liaj Écrits Complets (jen la enhavtabelo kaj indeksoj de ĉiuj temoj kaj personoj pri kiuj Magritte komentis) estas la kolektitaj komentoj de Magritte pri la patafiziko de Alfred Jarry (kiu alimaniere rilatas al ars combinatoria):

 Magritte, la Pataphysique et son Collège

Magritte: invention, imitation, meaning, ars combinatoria

René Magritte to Harry Torczyner

on Imitation, Invention, & Meaning

[. . .] I can state categorically that the cultural offensive I have in mind should be viewed “positively,” that is, not consisting in such “comparisons” as, for example, the one that I used in conversation with you, casually, when I merely noted that the imitated is being taken for the imitator. That refers to a kind of anecdote, amusing to us, but likely to be taken too seriously by the public. Indeed, the public has a habit of zeroing in on the anecdotal side of History. It is best not to cater to such habits if one means to “work” in a less mechanical manner. If one goes on the offensive, then one must truly attack such habits by stressing the things that are usually ignored. When I think of painting, it is, de facto, opening an offensive against such habits, even though I don’t actually have that in mind. De jure, it’s solely a question of ideas that, by their nature, cannot really be discussed.

As illustration, an isolated example, I take one of my pictures: “La Découverte du feu” [The Discovery of Fire], which depicts a burning iron key (another picture shows a burning trumpet). Nobody had ever thought of that before, or, at least, nobody had ever mentioned it in writing, speaking or painting. The “anecdotal” history might reveal that a few years after the birth of this picture Dalí painted a burning giraffe, and that owing to an intensive publicity campaign he is the one who is believed to have invented the notion of an unusual burning object. Thus, the “anecdote”' misses the point, it is ignorant of the invention in its purity, its measure, it only takes into account a superfluous exaggeration that waters down the precise vigor of the original invention. To avoid falling into this error, any “positive” offensive—in the case of “La Découverte du feu”—must only aim to enlighten, it must not concern itself with what happens elsewhere, with the clumsy uses to which the notion of a burning object may be put. This clumsiness, or, rather, this unintelligence, reduces great things to small things, the unknown to the known, following a practice that is the opposite of any true act of Mind. In confirmation of this, the public’s interest in current plans to inspect the Moon is right in line with this habit of reducing and mixing things up: people want to reduce the mysterious to something knowable and the familiar feeling we have with regard to things of which we are ignorant (for example: the mystery of the exact number of fleas on the youngest lion in the bush or the complete “lunography”) then gets confused with the non-familiar feeling of mystery (for example, the mystery inherent in the comfortable room in which one sits to smoke one’s pipe).

“Anecdote” interests the good folk who learn from it that Racine was unpopular in his day and that another so-called poet who is forgotten today was greatly admired. However, those good persons do riot know Racine any better (I am not Racine, notwithstanding the tacit obligation to be).

As for the munitions our armies require, I must admit that the only kind I can provide are . . . the pictures I can paint. These are demanding, and I have just enough strength to satisfy them, + or  .

SOURCE: Magritte, René. Letter to Harry Torczyner, 24 January 1959 (excerpt), in Magritte/ Torczyner: Letters Between Friends, translated from the French by Richard Miller, introduction by Sam Hunter (New York: Henry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1994), pp. 35-36.

Stéphane Mallarmé en Esperanto

"Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre."

Jen miareteje:

Stéphane Mallarmé en Esperanto: Bibliografio & Retgvidilo

Mi celas dokumenti ĉiujn tradukojn kaj pritraktojn de Mallarmé en Esperanto. Se vi povas aldoni informojn aŭ dokumentojn, bonvolu min informi.

Mi kompilas ankaŭ anglalingvan gvidilon kun emfazo pri la konceptoj de Mallarmé pri la lingvo, scio, la 'Granda Verko', konstruado de la Libro, kiu enhavos ĉion:

Stéphane Mallarmé, Grand Oeuvre, Le Livre: Selected Resources in English

Victor Martin, Romanian science fiction, & Esperanto

Romanian science fiction author Victor Martin (1954 - ) turns up in some but not all articles in English on Romanian science fiction:

Romania (The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction)

Here Martin is only mentioned in a list of Romanian SF writers. Martin is not mentioned at all in these sources:

Science Fiction in Romania since the 1990 revolution

A brief history of Science Fiction in Romania up to 1990

On Romanian speculative fiction

To learn more about him, you will have to read in Romanian. Here is the Wikipedia entry on Victor Martin. In the online Romanian science fiction journal Revista Societăţii Române de Science Fiction şi Fantasy you can read, in Romanian, this interview:

Victor Martin, Oct 3, 2009 de Marian Truta

I have not found any English translations of Martin, but there is a translation of one of his stories in Esperanto, in Beletra Almanako #4 (feb 2009), a special issue of this literary magazine devoted to fantasy and science fiction:


Victor Martin: Ĉio en ordo (trad. Ionel Oneţ) ( = Everything in Order, or Everything OK)

Ionel Onet, who translated this story, is a Romanian Esperantist who has translated Romanian surrealist and other avant-garde writers and writings of sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Via translations such as this, I can get access to literature which may not turn up in English, as well as literature that does.

André Breton, Ramón Llull, & surrealism revisited

"Lully is surrealist in definition." — André Breton

This is one item in a list of persons characterized as surrealist in a particular way. This can be found in Breton's "What is Surrealism?", a lecture in Brussels on 1 June 1934. Breton here recapitulates what he wrote in the first Manifesto of Surrealism of 1924. I just realized that I've already blogged about this.

But here is an additional reference, a post on Breton's penchant for composing lists:

Alphabet of the Magnetic Field: Breton Lists his Surrealists, March 10, 2013.

Breton was indeed were very adept at making lists and canonizing various figures on the basis of a perceived common characteristic conducive to surrealist preoccupations, a practice predicated on an arbitrary, authoritarian, and intellectually undisciplined mode of thinking. This surrealist taxonomic imperative is sometimes useful in archiving the curiosa of the past, but it is ultimately simple-minded, unsystematic, self-indulgent, and dogmatic, as the organized surrealist movement ultimately was. The Chicago surrealists were even worse than Breton, but they did dredge up some interesting material in their anthologies. Surrealism, as I've written elsewhere  (no revelation there), thrived on juxtapositions and novel combinations, hence my relating it to the ars combinatoria. List-making doesn't quite measure up even to that, but there is implied taxonomy in making lists, and hence that too relates to the topic.

See also my essay Walter Benjamin and Ars Combinatoria.  Also "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" by Walter Benjamin, 1929.

Magritte, ars combinatoria, Borges

Les affinités électives (1933)

Written 5 September 2011:

One should not be hasty in assuming that all surrealists held to the party line of the movement. Magritte was more circumspect about the arbitrary juxtapositions that Breton celebrated in Lautréamont. Here's an excerpt from a piece [On “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” by Jorge Luis Borges] I wrote recently on Borges & his tacit attitude towards surrealism:

I mentioned the propensity of surrealism to capitalize on exotic juxtapositions. Shock effects can easily be produced by juxtaposing two incongruous objects. But how original is this? René Magritte had caveats about such casual juxtapositions, and he considered his artworks exercises in problem-solving, exemplified in his Les affinités électives (1933). In addition to how he solved the particular problem of this work, Magritte in a lecture of February 1937 contrasts arbitrary and essential juxtapositions:

There is a secret affinity between certain images; it is equally valid for the objects which those images represent . . . We are familiar with birds in cages; interest is awakened more readily if the bird is replaced by a fish or a shoe; but though these images are strange they are unhappily accidental, arbitrary. It is possible to obtain a new image which will stand up to examination through having something final, something right about it: it’s the image showing an egg in the cage.

Surrealismo/Superrealismo en Esperantujo

En antaŭa afiŝo pri surrealismo, mi registris kelkajn retligojn pri la temo. Nu, Superrealismo (surrealismo; en Vikipedio v. ankaŭ Kategorio:Superrealismo) lasis spurojn en Esperanta literaturo, sed estas malfacile elsarki tian materialon interrete. Rimarku denove la artikolojn pri Manifesto de la Superrealismo (1924), André Breton, kaj  René Magritte. Krom la vikipediaj artikoloj, estas la amuza Salvador Dali - Neciklopedio.

Estas kelkaj mencioj de "surrealism" en la anglalingva Concise Encyclopedia of the Original Literature of Esperanto by Geoffrey H. Sutton, en konekso kun Baldur Ragnarsson, Þórbergur Þórðarson, Sara Larbar, kaj Mao Zifu.

Ars combinatoria, Ramón Llull, & surrealism

"Lully is surrealist in definition."

     — André Breton

First, a note in Esperanto, and then back to English.

---

"Llull estas surrealisma je dinifado." — André Breton

Mi ne scias ĝuste, kiuj surrealistoj aperas (traduke) en la Esperanta medio. Ekzistas tradukitaj du verkoj de rumano Gellu Naum: Patro mia laca kaj L’ekzakto de l’ombro. Cetere, mi konas nur vikipedierojn, plej gravaj ĉi-momente:

Superrealismo
Manifesto de la Superrealismo (1924)
André Breton

Ekzistas almenaŭ kelkaj ligoj inter surrealistoj kaj ars combinatoria, notende Ramón Llull.

---

In my previous post on Jorge Luis Borges, I connected Borges, the ars combinatoria, and surrealism. As it happens, Breton lists Lull (spellings vary) as a surrealist predecessor at least as early as his Manifesto of Surrealism of 1924. Breton reiterates this in What is Surrealism? ("a lecture given in Brussels on 1st June 1934 at a public meeting organised by the Belgian Surrealists, and issued as a pamphlet immediately afterwards"). Aside: In 1934 you see Breton reiterating his earlier principles but now with a shift of emphasis and concern with the fascist threat.

Borges, Menard, Quixote, Ars Combinatoria

Iam mi devos verki ĉi-teme en Esperanto. Jen plu en la angla. Sed "Pierre Menard, aŭtoro de Donkiĥoto", "La Alefo", kaj "La Analiza Lingvo de John Wilkins"  troveblas en la antologio La Sekreta Miraklo. De Borges haveblas miabloge Hajkoj kaj Tankaoj, La Sudo, kaj La Biblioteko de Babelo. En Vikipedio vidu Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz kaj René Magritte.

Here is my latest piece on Jorge Luis Borges:

On “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” by Jorge Luis Borges, by Ralph Dumain

Here again we find several references and allusions to the ars combinatoria and to its limitations. See also my essay On “The Aleph” by Jorge Luis Borges: Observations and Questions. And of course there is my web guide:

Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Study Materials on the Web

The question of mechanical combinatorialism leads to more general considerations on the fruitfulness of juxtapositions, and to the evaluations of Borges and others on the theory and practice of surrealism. Note my links to René Magritte at the bottom of my web page. (See also René Magritte in Wikipedia, kaj en Vikipedio en Esperanto). See also my other links on juxtaposition, in art, fiction, and poetry.

Note this comment by Michael Theune in "Writing Degree ∞ (on Recent Haiku)", Pleiades Book Review, January 2008:

"Haiku has suffered more from Surrealism than from any other theory or aesthetic."

Theune has much more of interest to say.  He also refers to this web site:

Computerized Haiku

Magritte comes out as a positive in Theune's deliberations, which concern poetry in general, of which haiku provides just one telling form. This should enhance our appreciation of Borges' imaginative oeuvre.

Bizarro Lit / Strangega Literaturo

" . . a chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella!"

— Lautréamont

Here is a literary genre I did not know existed, Bizarro Lit, as reported by Cracked.com. (I presume this web site has its origins in Cracked Magazine, a lesser-known competitor to Mad Magazine in my childhood.) Here we see perverse hybrids of other pulp genres.

This itself is hardly surprising. I cannot fix offhand when explicitly combinatorial or self-conscious genre-bending came into existence, but one can trace this tendency as least as far back as the last third of the 19th century. Consider various movements and genres over the past century and more— 'pataphysics, surrealism, Oulipo, alternate history,  steampunk . . . All are outgrowths of certain time periods and social circumstances. Individual authors such as Hermann Hesse and Jorges Luis Borges also come to mind. I think also of Richard Brautigan's genre experiments in the 1970s.

Yet, it seems to me that, for those not entirely immersed in popular culture and its attendant historical amnesia, we live in a markedly retrospective time, returning to and reexamining the past, especially of the 20th and late 19th centuries. We live in a combinatorially self-conscious period. I suppose this is usually termed postmodernism. But whatever you call it, there is a looking backward and a self-conscious comparison with the different presuppositions and norms of the present. I'm guessing this is where steampunk came from. I'm also guessing that the appearance of Esperanto and Volapük in historical and alternate history novels at this time is no accident; this also reflects our self-conscious exploration of the social/cultural past. (I know an English professor and Esperantist who agrees with me on this.)

What we cannot know, if there is to be any future at all, what to look forward to that is qualitatively new. But then, we're in a situation at least partly described by Hegel:

". . . the Owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk begins to fall."

'Pataphysics & ars combinatoria

The combination of these two concepts just occurred to me. Why now, or why not earlier? Why now? Here's my guess. First, there was my recent reading of Borges' "The Aleph". Then there was reading about Novalis' Romantic Encyclopedia. All of this recapitulates in some way the earlier history from Raymond Lull to Leibniz, but in each epoch the ars combinatoria play a different role. Now, divorced from "serious" purposes, it becomes a device of self-conscious art for making a point without taking the enterprise literally, i.e. for what it purports to be. The ars combinatoria has historically become playful with the delineation between reality and the artifice of imagination. It finally popped into my head to combine one aspect of avant-garde literature with another.

'Pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions, a playful notion concocted by Alfred Jarry. Once science itself has been solidified and differentiated from myth, poetry, and the symbolic use of language, we not only have the possibility of creating symbolist poetry in a secularized environment, and avant-garde play with language and myth (to culminate in Joyce), but play with science and other systems of thought, eventually surrealism and surrationalism (Gaston Bachelard) and Borges, and Oulipo, and now virtuality of all sorts, but first Jarry. Once it occurred to me that Jarry might be engaged in combinatorial play, I connected 'pataphysics to ars combinatoria. Has anyone else made that connection? (Or Jarry himself? I don't recall Jarry's own work.) Well, Oulipo, which is founded on combinatoric play, is a descendent of 'pataphysics, so a connection is obviously there.

Here's what I've found, mostly classifiable under the rubric of avant-garde arts.

Speculative Computing: Instruments for Interpretive Scholarship (2004) by Bethany Paige Nowviskie

Oulipo packet (several works by noted authors: Calvino, Queneau, Motte, Mathews, et al)

Deformography: the poetics of cybridised architecture (2005) by Neil Spiller

The Clinamanic Medusa, with a hole for its face causes the first order aesthetics of form finding to coagulate into stone and seduces the viewer into a world of vicissitudes and attitudes of chance, of joy, of sweet and sweaty embrace of an ars combinatoria, so dear to Jarry, Roussel and Ramon Lull. Here ‘Pataphysics joins with the mathematic of Oulipo to construct an all too few example of Ouarpo - a miniature architecture of potential.

Recombinant Poetics: Emergent Meaning as Examined and Explored Within a Specific Generative Virtual Environment (1999) by William Curtis Seaman

The Aesthetics of Paradoxism (2nd ed., 2002) by Titu Popescu, translated from Romanian by P. Georgelin, F. Smarandache, and L. Popescu

[+Kanexfaucher + Matinastamatakis + Johnmoorewilliams+] [Lysicology /. See also @ Scribd.com.

kinema ikon

Miscellanies (2008) by Raymond Belluga

At some point I think these exercises become pointless and excessively self-indulgent, but this is what happens when society, not just art, becomes more abstract. Now, in the Internet age, we become fully conscious or completely disoriented.