Jiří Šalamoun's Tristram Shandy (2)

Here a Devil of a rap at the door snapp’d my father’s definition (like his tobacco-pipe) in two,---and, at the same time, crushed the head of as notable and curious a dissertation as ever was engendered in the womb of speculation.

Vol. II, Chap. VIII

My uncle Toby had scarce a heart to retaliate upon a fly. 

—Go,---says he, one day at dinner, to an over-grown one which had buzz’d about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all dinner-time,—and which, after infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by him,---I'll not hurt thee, says my uncle Toby, rising from his chair, and going a-cross the room, with the fly in his hand,---I’ll not hurt a hair of thy head:---Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape,—go poor Devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?----This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.

Vol. II, Chap. XII 

“May he be damn’d in his mouth, in his breast, in his heart and purtenance, down to the very stomach. May he be cursed in his reins, and in his groin,” (God in heaven forbid, quoth my uncle Toby)—“in his thighs, in his genitals,” (my father shook his head) “and in his hips, and in his knees, and feet, and toe-nails.”

Vol. III, Chap. XI

He consider’d rather Ernulphus’s anathema, as an institute of swearing, in which, as he suspected, upon the decline of swearing in some milder pontificate, Ernulphus, by order of the succeeding pope, had with great learning and diligence collected together all the laws of it;——fir the same reason that Justinian in the decline of the empire, had ordered his chancellor Tribonian to collect the Roman or civil laws all together into one code or digest,—lest through the rust of time,—and the fatality of all things committed to oral tradition, they should be lost to the world for ever.

Vol. III, Chap. XII

“Good God!” cried my uncle Toby, “are children brought into the world with a squirt?”

Vol. III, Chap. XV

“Nihil me poenitet hujus nasi,” quoth Pamphagus;——“My nose has been the making of me.”—“Nec est cur poeniteat,” replies Cocles; that is, “How the duce should such a nose fail?”

Vol.III, Chap. XXXVII

With all this learning upon Noses running perpetually in my father's fancy—with so many family prejudices—and ten decads of such tales running on for ever along with them—how was it possible with such exquisite—was it a true nose?—

Vol. IV, Chap. I

My father instantly exchanged the attitude he was in, for that in which Socrates is so finely painted by Raffael in his school of Athens; which your connoisseurship knows is so exquisitely imagined, that even the particular manner of the reasoning of Socrates is expressed by it—for he holds the fore-finger of his left-hand between the fore-finger and thumb of his right, and seems as if he was saying to the libertine he is reclaiming—“You grant me this—and this: and this, and this, I don’t ask of you—they follow of themselves in course.”

 Vol. IV, Chap. VII

Though man is of all others the most curious vehicle, said my father, yet at the same time ’tis of so slight frame and so totteringly put together, that the sudden jerks and hard jostlings it unavoidably meets with in this rugged journey, would overset and tear it to pieces a dozen times a day—was it not, brother Toby, that there is a secret spring within us—Which spring, said my uncle Toby, I take to be Religion.

Vol. IV, Chap. VIII

There is something, Sir, in fish-ponds—but what it is, I leave to system builders and fish pond diggers betwixt ’em to find out—but there is something, under the first disorderly transport of the humours, so unaccountably becalming in an orderly and a sober walk towards one of them, that I have often wondered that neither Pythagoras, nor Plato, nor Solon, nor Licurgus, nor Mahomet, nor any of your noted lawgivers, ever gave order about them.

Vol. IV, Chap. XVII

Jiří Šalamoun's Tristram Shandy (1)

Laurence Sterne, Život a názory blahorodého pana Tristrama Shandyho [The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman], translated by Aloys Skoumal (1904-1988), illustrated by Jiří Šalamoun (1935-), Odeon, Prague, 1985, 552pp.

Nor does it much disturb my rest when I see such great Lords and tall Personages as hereafter follow;---such, for instance, as my Lord A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, and so on, all of a row, mounted upon their several horses;--some with large stirrups, getting on in a more grave and sober pace;----others on the contrary, tuck'd up to their very chins, with whips across their mouths, scouring and scampering it away like so many little party-colour'd devils astride a mortgage,——and as if some of them were resolved to break their necks.—So much the better—say I to myself;—for in case the worst should happen, the world will make a shift to do excellently well without them;—and for the rest,----why,----God speed them,----e'en let them ride on without any opposition from me; for were their lordships unhorsed this very night,——'tis ten to one but that many of them would be worse mounted by one half before to-morrow morning. 

Vol. I, Chap. VIII

Yorick's last breath was hanging upon his trembling lips ready to depart [...] Eugenius could perceive a stream of lambent fire lighted up for a moment in his eyes;----faint picture of those flashes of his spirit, which (as Shakespear said of his ancestor) were wont to set the table in a roar! Eugenius was convinced from this, that the heart of his friend was broke; he squeez'd his hand,——and then walk'd softly out of the room, weeping as he walk'd. Yorick followed Eugenius with his eyes to the door,----he then closed them,—and never opened them more. 

Vol. I, Chap. XII

Mr. Tristram Shandy's compliments to Messrs. Le Moyne, De Romigny, and De Marcilly, hopes they all rested well the night after so tiresome a consultation.—He begs to know, whether, after the ceremony of marriage, and before that of consummation, the baptizing all the HOMUNCULI at once, slap-dash, by injection, would not be a shorter and safer cut still; on condition, as above, That if the HOMUNCULI do well and come safe into the world after this, That each and every of them shall be baptized again (sous condition.)——And provided, in the second place, That the thing can be done, which Mr. Shandy apprehends it may, par le moyen d'une petite canulle, and, sans faire aucun tort a le pere. 

Vol. I, Chap. XX.

 

 

The strange mine workings of the soul

. . . der Seelen wunderliches Bergwerk . . . Felsen waren da und wesenlose Wälder. Brücken über Leeres . . . 

. . . the strange mine workings of souls . . . Cliffs were there and spectral forests. Bridges over vacancies . . .

  

'"Orpheus. Euridice. Hermes" (...) has the quality of an uneasy dream, in which you gain something extremely valuable, only to lose it the very next moment. Within the limitation of one's sleeping time, and perhaps precisely because of that, such dreams are excruciatingly convincing in their details; a poem is also limited by definition. Both imply compression, except that a poem, being a conscious act, is not a paraphrase or a metaphor for reality but a reality itself. (...) a poem generates rather than reflects. So if a poem addresses a mythological subject, this amounts to a reality scrutinising its own history.'

Joseph Brodsky, 'Ninety Years Later' (Torö, Sweden, 1994), On Grief and Reason: Essays (1995)

The Land of Papagosse

Ils sont prins s'ils ne s'envolent,(*) ces pourceaux qui vestus à la Turque,(†) le Turban sur la teste, le halebarde sur l'espaule, vont s'embarquer dans un panier percé, pour faire une grande guerre navalle(‡) sur l'aisle d'un moulin à vent, aux pays de Papagosse,(§) où les chiens chient la poix, les chats gosillent(‖) le diamerdis,¶ les femmes enceintes pissent un pucelage gros comme le bras, & les grenoüilles crachent les oysons touts cuits & farcis.

Bruscambille, "En Faveur du Galimathias", Les Plaisants paradoxes de Bruscambille, & autres discours Comiques, 1617

They're snared if they don't fly away, these swine dressed up Turkish-style, with turbans on their bonces, halberds over their shoulders, who are off to board a holey basket so that they can wage a big naval war, on the windmill isle in the lands of Papagosse, where the dogs shit pitch, the cats disgorge pulvilio of turds, the pregnant women piss virginity as thick as your arm, and the frogs spit out goslings ready stuffed and roasted.

* Ils sont prins s'ils ne s'envolent - Antoine Oudin, who in his Curiositez françoises, pour supplement aux Dictionnaires, ou Recueil de plusieurs belles proprietez, avec une infinité de Proverbes & Quolibets, pour l'explication de toutes sortes de Livres (1640) draws heavily on the works of Bruscambille, defines this expression as "une façon de parler, pour desapprouver ce qu'un autre dit."

† pourceaux - possibly an allusion to the Pugna Porcorum per Publium Porcium Poëtam (1530), a comic epyllion whose every word begins with the letter p, which for more than two centuries was widely reprinted in Latin collections of facetiae.

‡ grande guerre navale - possibly an allusion to the Battle of Lepanto (1571), thitherto the largest naval battle since Antiquity, in which the Holy League defeated the Ottoman fleet.

§ Papagosse - imaginary region whose origin lies in mediaeval Provençal folklore, also called Pampérigouste, by which name it can be found in Alphonse Daudet's Lettres de mon Moulin (1869), and Papeligosse, which Randle Cotgrave, in his A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611) defines as the "countrey of the Butterflyes".

‖ gosillent - the verb gosiller derives from gosillier, gosier 'gullet, gorge', and means 'to vomit', figuratively 'to talk, speak' (see: Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française). Bruscambille's series of images encompasses all the possible bodily evacuations: defecation, vomition/regurgitation, urination, sputation.

¶ Diamerdis - Cotgrave defines this as a "confection of turds, pilgrims salve". Desiccated and blanched faeces (album graecum)  were widely used as medicinal preparations up until the eighteenth century. See, for example, Christian Franz Paullini, Heilsame Dreck-Apotheke: Wie nemlich mit Koth und Urin Fast alle ja auch die schwerste gifftige Kranckheiten und bezauberte Schaden vom Haupt biß zun Füssen inn- und äusserlich glücklich curirt worden (1696), a textbook on the pharmaceutics and curative properties of human and animal faeces and urine. In Rabelais, Pantagruel, Chapter 30, Panurge revives the decapitated Epistemon using diamerdis.

 

Sterility

Les grands désastres ne rendent rien sur le plan littéraire ni religieux. Seuls les demi-malheurs sont féconds, parce qu'ils peuvent être, parce qu'ils sont un point de départ, alors qu'un enfer trop parfait est presque aussi stérile que le paradis.

Cioran, De l'inconvénient d'être né, Éditions Gallimard, 1973

The great disasters yield nothing on the literary or religious level. The semi-adversities alone are fruitful, because they are able to be, because they are a point of departure, whereas too perfect a hell is almost as sterile as heaven.

Seelengrund

 Sunt in anima perceptiones obscurae. Harum complexus fundus animae dicitur.

Baumgarten, Metaphysica §511

There are in the soul obscure perceptions. The combined whole of these perceptions is called the lowermost part of the soul. 

 Cf. The Unconscious Life of the Mind 

La rêve éveillé

Contingencies

Daniil Kharms, Sluchai, edited by Vladimir Glotser, illustrated by Leonid Tishkov, 

Assotsiatsiya "Mir Kul'tury" Fortuna-Limited, Moscow, 1993, 32 pp. 

Urmuz

 

 

Urmuz, Pagini bizare, illustrated by Ion Mincu, Editura Minerva, Bucharest, 1983

 

Neurospasts

(...) But the shows went on.

At length a voice out of the Void explained things. ‘You see,’ it said, ‘that—over there—you were not remarkable for a sense of humour, but you were distinguished by a marked business capacity. And business capacity consists, if you come to think of it, in treating your fellow creatures, not as if they were sentient beings, but as if they were puppets. The result is that the living beings who come here do not care to associate with you. We are trying to find what amusement we can for you. This is really the best we have to offer.’

Here Gribble lost his temper. ‘How long, confound it, am I to go on looking at the infernal things?’ he said, getting purple.

‘You might be more polite. I said we were doing our best.’

‘How long—that’s what I want to know—am I to go on looking at the conf—the toys? It seems an age already since—’

‘It is an age. It’s exactly a hundred years.’

From purple Gribble turned ghastly pale. His teeth chattered. ‘A hun—a hundred years! Good God! . . . And to—how long must I go on still?’

‘Ah! That I can’t say. Possibly for eternity. If so it can’t be helped.’

Charles Francis Keary,  ‘The Puppet Show’, ’Twixt Dog and Wolf (1901)

 

They that are acted onely by an outward Law are but like Neurospasts,* or those little Puppets that skip nimbly up and down, and seem to be full of quick and sprightly motion; whereas they are all the while moved artificially by certain Wires and Strings from without, and not by any Principle of Motion from themselves within; or else like Clocks and Watches, that go pretty regularly for a while, but are moved by Weights and Plummets, or some other artificial Springs, that must be ever now and then wound up, or else they cease. But they that are acted by (...) the Law of the Spirit, they have an inward principle of life in them, that from the Centre of it self puts forth it self freely (...) a kind of Musicall Soul, informing the dead Organ of our Hearts, that makes them of their own accord delight to act harmoniously to the Rule of God's word.

Ralph Cudworth, A Discourse Concerning the True Notion of the Lord’s Supper (1670) 

 

* Greek νευρόσπαστον, a puppet moved by strings; νεῦρον sinew, string + σπᾶν to draw, pull. Cf. Henry More, Psychathanasia, Book 1, Canto 2, Stanza 33: That outward form is but a neurospast; / The soul it is that on her subtile ray, / That she shoots out, the limbs of moving beast / Doth stretch straight forth, so straightly as she may. / Bones joynts, and sinews shap’d of stubborn clay / Cannot so eas’ly lie in one straight line / With her projected might, much lesse obey / Direct retractions of these beames fine: / Of force, so straight retreat they ever must decline.