enquanto me ponho a hipótese de nas idas a norte optar pela viagem de comboio (o mesmo que colheu a vida e os corpos de dois jovens polícias), leio a do jovem Marcel asmático para Balbec e alinho-a a outras: a de Karenina com o livro no colo, a entrada de Gustav em Veneza, a das crianças alemãs de Sebald, os pastores de Sepúlveda no Patagonia Express.
"strangeness in my mind, / A feeling that I was not for that hour, / Nor for that place."
“Their characters, habits and physiques are different … You cannot place a mother breastfeeding her baby on an equal footing with men. You cannot make women work in the same jobs as men do, as in communist regimes. You cannot give them a shovel and tell them to do their work. This is against their delicate nature,” he said to a summit in Istanbul on justice for women.
“Our politicians make thoughtless statements on this point as if they want to start a fight,” Pamuk told Hurriyet this week. “The worst thing is that there’s a fear. I find that everyone is afraid; it’s not normal … Freedom of expression has fallen to a very low level … Lots of my friends tell me that such and such a journalist has lost his job. Now, even journalists who are very close to the government are getting harassed.”
Tolstoi Dostoyevsky Thomas Mann Marcel Proust...
(como se não tivesse ido já)
"Tolstoy, said the new edition’s translator and editor Michael Katz, was setting out in the novella “to excoriate society for raising boys and young men to make use of prostitutes and then search for a virgin to marry. Women were trained to attract men by their clothes and demeanour so they could be married and fulfil their husband’s desires. Tolstoy was horrified by the situation and attempted to reveal it all in his story and advocate reform; eventually he came to embrace complete chastity and abstinence,” said Katz."
porquê ligar a Kreutzer de Tolstoy e aproveitar para develop the women's studies thing, neste caso, senão para vender mais. mais valia ler o texto.
Yaşar Kemal e entender que parte de Tolstoi foi deixada para trás por Pamuk.
exemplar, o terceiro conto, "The Drumming Out".
(qual o filme sobre a água que podia ser facilmente relacionado com este conto?)
assim entendo o drumming out de Erdoğan, mas em sentido diverso: não os poderosos a expulsar um funcionário não-corrupto mas o povo a expulsar o governante corrupto.
arroz - mosquitos - malária
outra imagem com história (ou a história que tomou a vida da ficção): outra tradição turca, a luta pelo direito a não ser expulso da sua casa.
"Sheberghan was the site of the Dasht-i-Leili massacre in December 2001 during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan where between 250 and 3,000 (depending on sources) Taliban prisoners were shot and/or suffocated to death in metal truck containers, while being transferred by American and Northern Alliance soldiers from Kunduz to Sheberghan prison." da wiki.
contrariedades ideológicas importam-me pouco. a realidade é muito mais barulhenta.
os túmulos colectivos, i.e., mass graves, depois do massacre de 2001:
he finds the same fascination in the laws of physics that i find in the sights of history and their weavings in words.
- -
"There is yet another race of people who inhabit the mountains in that quarter, and are called Kurds. Some of them are Christians, and some of them are Saracens; but they are an evil generation, whose delight it is to plunder merchants."
"Near this province is another called Mus and Mardin, producing an immense quantity of cotton, from which they make a great deal of buckram and other cloth. The people are craftsmen and traders, and all are subject to the Tartar King."
beautiful Mardin.
"Ivan Ilytch's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible."
Tolstoi em A morte de Ivan Ilitch.
"(...) a morte de Ivan Ilitch é (...) o retrato implacável da nossa condição: não há sentimento que nele não figure, não há emoção que não esteja presente. Tudo o que somos se acha em poucas páginas, escrito de uma forma magistral. Li-as, maravilhado, umas vinte ou trinta vezes, continuarei a lê-las, maravilhado, até ao fim dos meus dias. Maravilhado, exaltado, comovido, a perguntar-me como é que ele conseguiu. E conseguiu. Reparem no que Tolstoi faz com as palavras e como nos retrata, de corpo inteiro, no mais íntimo de nós mesmos."
António Lobo Antunes sobre A morte de Ivan Ilitch.
[Lobo Antunes diz que todos os sentimentos estão lá, mas claramente é um modo de dizer. a Ilitch faltou o primeiro dos sentimentos, aquele que justifica a humanidade, o amor, entendido no seu sentido mais vasto (à maneira mística cristã, à maneira muçulmana, à maneira oriental - o princípio de todas as religiões - a rendição e a oferta, sentimento do qual o amor amoroso faz parte.) Tolstoi é o mais coerente autor que já li, as suas ideias são as mais concretas, mais justificadas, mais sólidas, o seu pensamento e o seu modo de ser, de viver, são uma totalidade e mantêm-se ao longo da vida, ou seja, ao longo da escrita. peasants e o amor, toda uma mundivisão. um Ilitch sem este sentimento pergunta-se bem: para quê? esta é uma história de reconhecimento da necessidade de redenção. também é uma história de muitas outras coisas mas, acima de tudo, é uma obra prima, uma das mais perfeitas obras de sempre.]
"Estos días azules y este sol de infancia"(...)
de Antonio Machado, para ler todo aqui.
'somos' engraçado nas várias maneiras de manter a independência: o anti-vento espanhol também pela via de fechar os olhos literários. Antonio Machado em espanhol, em inglês, em francês e em português. mas não somos só 'nós'. (nas últimas páginas de Tolstoi, o que é a história - que segue o mesmo caminho da história dos museus, e que me transporta para os primeiros anos de faculdade em que se estudava isso mesmo, o que é a história, em que éramos obrigados a ler resmas de Trevelyan e de saber o que eram fontes primárias e etc.. por acaso não tinha pensado ainda na imensa piada que têm essas definições - fontes primárias, e tudo o que elas significam. por exemplo: é possível olhar para alguma coisa sem contexto? não, obviamente, e a história é toda ela interpretação. se fosse possível ser tão objectivo como é o meu gato quando dá um meio miau que eu conheço a pedir que lhe abra a porta. um casamento antigo atinge esse nível, o do meio miau, e ambos estão em Guerra e Paz.)
mas que interessa: fica Machado para estampar na paisagem de fronteira entre a Espanha e a França, e a sua última morada para visitar em Colliure. talvez seja uma hipótese de transposição dessa fronteira, num comboio nocturno, fugindo da península.
aos meus amigos poetas.
(na ilha deserta ou numa rua cheia de gente) não precisa de quase mais nada: pegar no Guerra e Paz e pôr na prateleira, está feita a biblioteca. agora é fácil: depois de ter feito meu o exemplar da biblioteca que tão generosamente me deixa entrar na porta Tolstoi, o plano é ter um próprio e tê-lo como um gato aos pés da cama. a tortura real que foi não dobrar páginas, não fazer rabiscos e não sublinhar como louca terá então acabado.
(vazio) de uma grande viagem. um analgésico: a morte de Ivan Ilitch. um vamos mudar de ares: os contos da montanha de torga; outro mudar de ares: sea wolf de jack london. e ainda os contos da anatólia. quem sabe tabucchi que serve sempre para limpar a alma. mas será doloroso.
ou melhor, as meias de Anna Makarovna em Guerra e Paz.
The melancholy silence that followed was broken by the sounds of the children’s voices and laughter from the next room. Evidently some jolly excitement was going on there.
“Finished, finished!” little Natasha’s gleeful yell rose above them all.
Pierre exchanged glances with Countess Mary and Nicholas (Natasha he never lost sight of) and smiled happily.
“That’s delightful music!” said he.
“It means that Anna Makarovna has finished her stocking,” said Countess Mary.
“Oh, I’ll go and see,” said Pierre, jumping up. “You know,” he added, stopping at the door, “why I’m especially fond of that music? It is always the first thing that tells me all is well. When I was driving here today, the nearer I got to the house the more anxious I grew. As I entered the anteroom I heard Andrusha’s peals of laughter and that meant that all was well.”
“I know! I know that feeling,” said Nicholas. “But I mustn’t go there- those stockings are to be a surprise for me.”
Pierre went to the children, and the shouting and laughter grew still louder.
“Come, Anna Makarovna,” Pierre’s voice was heard saying, “come here into the middle of the room and at the word of command, ‘One, two,’ and when I say ‘three’… You stand here, and you in my arms- well now! One, two!…” said Pierre, and a silence followed: “three!” and a rapturously breathless cry of children’s voices filled the room. “Two, two!” they shouted.
This meant two stockings, which by a secret process known only to herself Anna Makarovna used to knit at the same time on the same needles, and which, when they were ready, she always triumphantly drew, one out of the other, in the children’s presence.
- -
quem acha que tricô com combina com literatura engana-se. [e a pastora-leitora... podia chorar de comoção!]. a referência de Tolstoi às meias que são feitas em simultâneo em que, no final, uma sai de dentro da outra, deve ser a primeira referência jamais feita a esta técnica, longamente explicada aqui e aqui.
lindo.
a propósito de uns disparates anteriores, ou a despropósito.
troca de correspondência entre Flaubert e Turgenev sobre Guerra e Paz, o livro que o primeiro tinha recebido para ler com recomendações de Turgenev. [e não tinha Flaubert em tag, pecado]
Croisset, January 21, 1880
... Thank you for getting me to read Tolstoy's novel. It's first-rate. What a painter, and what a psychologist! The first two volumes are sublime; but the third falls-off badly. He repeats himself and philosophizes: you see the man, the author, the Russian, whereas hitherto there had been only Nature and Mankind. Sometimes he seems Shakespearean. I cried aloud with admiration as I read - and it's a long novel. Tell me something about the author. Is it his first book? In any case, he has balls! Yes! it's very strong! very strong!...
- -
e a resposta de Turgenev:
"Mon bon vieux,
You cannot imagine the pleasure I was given by your letter and by what you say about Tolstoy's novel. Your approval confirms my view of him. Yes, he is very strong, and yet you have put your finger on the spot. He has also conceived a philosophical system at once mystical, childish and arrogant: this has doubly spoiled his second novel (Anna Karenina), which he wrote after War and Peace, and which also contains some first-class things."
- -
Pamuk on Tolstoy:
"In the interview, Charlie Rose asked Pamuk what he thought was the greatest novel of all time, and Pamuk answered “Anna Karenina” without any hesitation. This interested me, since people usually pick War and Peace for the greatest novel of all time if they are into Tolstoy. To explain his love of Tolstoy, Pamuk retold an anecdote about Nabokov, who once explained Tolstoy’s writing style by simply opening a window in a dark classroom. His point: Tolstoy has a way of lighting up the entire room for you in every scene."
daqui.
and Nabokov on Tolstoy:
I hate tampering with the precious lives of great writers and I hate Tom-peeping over the fence of those lives — I hate the vulgarity of "human interest," I hate the rustle of skirts and giggles in the corridors of time — and no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life; but this I must say. Dostoevski's gloating pity for people — pity for the humble and the humiliated — this pity was purely emotional and his special lurid brand of the Christian faith by no means prevented him from leading a life extremely removed from his teachings. On the other hand, Leo Tolstoy like his representative Lyovin was organically unable to allow his conscience to strike a bargain with his animal nature — and he suffered cruelly whenever this animal nature temporarily triumphed over his better self.
(...)
The queer thing about it is that actually Tolstoy was rather careless when dealing with the objective idea of time. In War and Peace attentive readers have found children who grow too fast or not fast enough, just as in Gogol's Dead Souls, despite Gogol's care in clothing his characters, we find that Chichikov wore a bearskin overcoat in midsummer. In Anna Karenin, as we shall see, there are terrific skiddings on the frozen road of time. But such slips on Tolstoy's part have nothing to do with the impression of time he conveys, the idea of time which corresponds so exactly with the reader's sense of time. There are other great writers who were quite consciously fascinated by the idea of time and quite consciously tried to render its movement; this Proust does when his hero in the novel In Search of Lost Time arrives at a final party where he sees people he used to know now for some reason wearing gray wigs, and then realizes that the gray wigs are organic gray hairs, that they have grown old while he had been strolling through his memories; or notice how James Joyce regulates the time element in Ulysses by the slow gradual passing of a crumpled bit of paper down the river from bridge to bridge down the Liffy to Dublin Bay to the eternal sea. Yet these writers who actually dealt in time values did not do what Tolstoy quite casually, quite unconsciously, does: they move either slower or faster than the reader's grandfather clock; it is the time by Proust or the time by Joyce, not the common average time, a kind of standard time which Tolstoy somehow manages to
convey.
No wonder, then, that elderly Russians at their evening tea talk of Tolstoy's characters as of people who really exist, people to whom their friends may be likened, people they see as distinctly as if they had danced with Kitty and Anna or Natasha at that ball or dined with Oblonski at his favorite restaurant," as we shall soon be dining with him. Readers call Tolstoy a giant not because other writers are dwarfs but because he remains always of exactly our own stature,t exactly keeping pace with us instead of passing by in the distance, as other authors do.
And in this connection it is curious to note that although Tolstoy, who was constantly aware of his own personality, constantly intruding upon the lives of his characters, constantly addressing the reader — it is curious to note that nevertheless in those great chapters that are his masterpieces the author is invisible so that he attains that dispassionate ideal of authors which Flaubert so violently demanded of a writer: to be invisible, and to be everywhere as God in His universe is. We have thus the feeling now and then that Tolstoy's novel writes its own self, is produced by its matter, by its subject, not by a definite person moving a pen from left to right, and then coming back and erasing a word, and pondering, and scratching his chin through his beard.
- - -
museu panorama de Borodino em Moscovo.
para a tarefa de escrever um conto, gigantesca para quem, como ele, não gosta de deixar detalhes de fora por mais mínimos que sejam. mas leio Tolstoi e tudo o que pode ser dito (em escrita criativa---) tem de ser desdito. na segunda parte do livro 3:
(...) and in the same way the innumerable people who took part in the war acted in accord with their personal characteristics, habits, circumstances, and aims. They were moved by fear or vanity, rejoiced or were indignant, reasoned, imagining that they knew what they were doing and did it of their own free will, but they all were involuntary tools of history, carrying on a work concealed from them but comprehensible to us. Such is the inevitable fate of men of action, and the higher they stand in the social hierarchy the less are they free.
The actors of 1812 have long since left the stage, their personal interests have vanished leaving no trace, and nothing remains of that time but its historic results.
[ou seja: não é só no conto que cada frase conta mas também numa obra de 1400 páginas]
e tal como vi escrito em espuma. mais uma vez embirro com a tradução de men of action para agentes práticos e but its historic results com erguem-se os resultados históricos ou algo parecido. a tradução acima é a do Gutenberg, a que tenho é melhor e a minha preferida, o que significa que vou comprar o livro de novo nesta tradução que estou a ler.
(ohmygosh, i can access jstor for free, i could have a fit. finally!!)
English Counter Russian, o que eu queria ler, mas afinal vou poder ler os artigos de ERDAĞ GÖKNAR sobre Pamuk.
