Thơ mỗi ngày

Love in a mist
Yêu trong sương mù

In May 1904, Guillaume Apollinaire crossed the Channel in pursuit of Annie Playden, an English governess (see right). He stayed with an Albanian friend in the London suburb of Chingford, near Epping Forest. He had first come to woo Annie the previous autumn, staying at 3 Oakley Crescent, off the City Road, not far from Angel, Islington. The house still stands, though it is known only to devoted Apollinaireans. Last week, we went for the first time to look at the even more obscure Chingford residence, 36 Garfield Road. Would it be a worthwhile monument to the first great avant-garde poet of the twentieth century? According to Leonard Davis of the Chingford Historical Society, a plaque was proposed in 1980 but never materialized.
    We regret to say it is just as well. Garfield Road - named after the American president James Garfield, assassinated in 1881 - is a dismal assortment of small ugly houses, with a huge vacant lot in the centre. No 36, modernized out of recognition, had blinds drawn, preventing us peeping into Apollinaire's living room. The expedition's sole mo1hent of cheer occurred as we returned to the railway station, where we spotted an oblong Victorian pillar box built into the wall. It was surely used by Apollinaire to post letters to Annie. His vain courting became the subject of one of his most famous poems, "La Chanson du mal-aimé" (Song of the poorly loved):

One foggy night in London town
A hoodlum who resembled so
My love came marching up to me -
The look he threw me caused my eyes
To drop and made me blush with shame.

Annie is also memorialized, kaleidoscopically, in "LeӃmigrant du Landor Road". Of Chingford, however, the poet left hardly anything besides his pleasure in watching the golfers on the nearby Links.
    A single publication is dedicated to the English adventure: One Evening of Light Mist in London by John Adlard, little more than a pamphlet, published by Tragara Press in an edition of l45. We located a copy at the Fortune Green Bookshop, a mysterious operation which has a shop front in West Hampstead but is closed to the public. On request, however, the proprietor kindly agreed to open up for us, and one evening of light mist we made our way there to take possession of the book: mint, numbered 26, a steal at £10.
*

Trên TV, độc giả đã từng 'chứng kiến' 'anh cu Gấu' chạy theo BHD nơi cổng trường Đại Học Khoa Học Sài Gòn.
Chưa ghê bằng Apollinaire, tác giả câu thơ mà GNV thuổng, "Ouvrez-moi cette porte où je frappe en pleurant", còn là tác giả Mùa Thu Chết, và còn là tác giả của cái cú chạy theo em nữ quản gia, suốt con kênh nối liền Pháp và Anh, để năn nỉ.
Thua, và bèn làm bài thơ trên, nguyên tác tiếng Tây, GNV sẽ lục tìm, và dịch sau…
[Hình, TLS Oct 1, 2010]

Trong cùng số báo, có bài điểm 1 cuốn sách mới xb, về Walter Benjamin, thật tuyệt. TV post sau đây, và nếu có thể, sẽ dịch sau.
*

Chỉ đến khi ra được hải ngoại, đọc Walter Benjamin viết về Kafka (1) thì Gấu mới thấm được, những dòng thư chấm dứt Bếp Lửa: 

Bạn chưa đủ. Buộc vào quê hương phải là những người cùng máu mủ với mình.
Anh yêu quê hương vô cùng và anh yêu em vô cùng.

(1) Không phải ngẫu nhiên mà Gregor Samsa thức giấc như là một con bọ ở trong nhà bố mẹ, mà không ở một nơi nào khác, và cái con vật khác thường nửa mèo nửa cừu đó, là thừa hưởng từ người cha.
Một chuyến đi

Mystic, Marxist, man of letters
NICHOLAS JACOBS

Jean-Michel Palmier
WALTER BENJAMIN
Lumpensammler, Engel und bucklicht Mannleinn -
Asthetik und Politik bei Walter Benjamin
Translated from the French by Horst Bruhmann
1,372pp. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. E64. 9783518585368
 

Despite George Steiner's consistently eloquent, scrupulous and committed advocacy of Walter Benjamin for over forty years in these columns, the British literary world has taken little notice of him, and he is only perhaps now even beginning to enter the world of German studies in Britain. And although he has been translated into over forty languages, including the substantial four-volume Harvard edition in English, it is primarily writers on media, film and photography, and some graphic artists, who have so far paid most attention to him in Britain. This is partly because Benjamin was first introduced here to a wide audience on the television screen, as far back as 1967, by John Berger in his Ways of Seeing (the book of which was recently reprinted); but it is also because Benjamin is strongly embedded in German and French culture and, however engrossing, original and exciting to read, is difficult to orient in the English-language literary world, with which he had little to do beyond a surprising weakness for Arnold Bennett and Somerset Maugham. However, the more we get to know the real Benjamin emancipated, though never completely, from the Jewish half-mystic, half-Marxist between-all-stools intellectual bequeathed us by Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno, the keepers of his flame after his early death (he was forty-eight) - the more he comes to resemble what we once knew as the individual homme de lettres, in the style of Edmund Wilson, or Cyril Connolly, whose own more pessimistic Unquiet Grave sometimes recalls Benjamin's One-Way Street not only in form, just as Connolly's Enemy of Promise sometimes recalls Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood. On the one hand, Connolly's hapless Palinurus; on the other, the "bucklicht Mannlein" (the little hunchhback), that imp of ill fortune which dogged Benjamin.
This massive book, partly a biography of Walter Benjamin, and partly a discursive/ descriptive commentary on his work, remained uncompleted on the author's death and was first published in French in 2006. The reader is not helped by the seventy-page foreword by its French editor, Florent Perrier, whose dazzling characterization of Benjamin, complete with its own virtuoso piece of research on Benjamin's chiffonier, is strictly redundant because it barely mentions Jean-Michel Palmier's book and tells us nothing about him. Not until an Editor's Note on page 1,205 do we learn the extent of the unfinished material included (two of the five parts), and that the editorial policy, in the case of these two unfinished parts, was to include everything possible, as a gesture of loyalty towards an author who sometimes drafted his texts up to five times. From the book's jacket we learn that Palmier taught aesthetics and art history at the University of Paris 1 and died aged fifty-four in 1998.
Palmier writes chronologically, with rich thematic diversions. His aim is not to synthesize but to "deconstruct" and bring out the tensions and make contemporary a work that "can only be read with a beating heart". The palimpsest of quotation and discussion of secondary literature that extends to myriad footnotes makes for demanding reading. The discussion of Benjamin's pampered childhood as the son of a wealthy antique and carpet dealer living in the smartest part of Berlin is particularly rich, drawing on the two great autobiographical texts, Berlin Chronicle and Berlin Childhood, the first providing the raw material (by no means all used) for the second; a characteristic 700-word footnote explains the significance of this. Palmier gives a detailed account, accompanied by quotation from Benjamin's rich correspondence, of his part in the Youth Movement, in which in 1913/14 he played a leading role, but in which he ended up isolated, between the more political (anarchist rather than socialist) radicals, including the later socialist, even Marxist, psychoanalyst Siegfried Bernfeld, and the romantic youth cultist followers of Gustav Wyneken, Benjamin's first inspiration in the Movement. All this came to an end with the outbreak of the First World War - celebrated by Wyneken - and the suicide of Benjamin's close friend, Fritz Heinle.
The three male friendships of the greatest consequence to Benjamin were those with Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht (in chronological order of their meeting). Palmier does justice to all three relationships. Most commentators on Benjamin have followed Scholem in accepting that the Jewish mystical element, particularly in his early thought and writing, greatly encouraged and influenced by Scholem, was a positive, necessary element in his work. For a long time it was difficult to deny this, particularly in Germany. Palmier lets the story speak for itself, in great scholarly detail, without judgment, but with scrupulous attention to the biographical dimension, including Scholem and Benjamin's close friendship which began in 1915 and never ended, but was subject to tension when Benjamin was caught between Scholem's increasingly urgent calls for him to move to Palestine and his own ambition to become the leading literary critic in Germany.
Palmier is unusual in giving a context to the question of the political censorship of Benjamin's work by Adorno, and the latter's criticism of Benjamin's use of Marx, at a time when Benjamin was financially and even existentially dependent on the Institute of Social Research. Palmier points out that the Institute was itself leading a precarious exile existence (in Paris, awaiting transfer to the USA), in the context of post-New Deal America and the Moscow Trials, and therefore had to proceed with political caution. He does not excuse Adorno's intellectually brutal treatment of his friend, but makes it comprehensible. Benjamin stood up remarkably well to the seemingly tactless tone of Adorno's censorious letter of November 10, 1938, which criticized and rejected his long article "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" (in Volume Four of the Harvard Benjamin), at one of the darkest moments of his life, when he most needed publication and support. Far from buckling under Adorno's criticism, he revised the article, aware that Adorno and the Institute were his only possible lifeline.
In March 1936, Adorno had written to Benjamin criticizing his "Work of Art" essay. "My own task is to hold your arm steady until the Brechtian sun has finally sunk beneath its exotic waters." Yet it was precisely to that sun that Benjamin had already turned, having spent considerable time living with the Brecht family in Denmark (for months at a time, from 1934 onwards).
Palmier does justice to the Brecht/Benjamin relationship, concentrating on Brecht's vital influence, through his work, on the literary theory which Benjamin developed in face of the rise of fascism. This strictly functional theory of art, expressed in Benjamin's essay "The Author as Producer", with its praise of the Soviet Russian Tretyaakov (albeit already a dissident, soon to be shot), makes Palmier a little uncomfortable, as does the famous call at the end of the "Work of Art" essay: "Such is the aestheticizing of politics cultivated by fascism; communism responds with the politicizing of art". This position was not a general aesthetic manifesto, but a response to a particular situation, even if it was - as Palmier points out - a little late in 1939 when it was published, when even the Popular Front had been and gone.
Palmier has written nothing short of an encyclopedic work from which every reader of Benjamin who can read French or German will greatly benefit. It is a pity that it remained unfinished owing to its author's early death. It is also regrettable that a great publisher like Suhrkamp is unable to give such an important book a proper index. A translation into English would be a luxury rather than a necessity.