Eva Mozes Kor, an Auschwitz survivor, publicly forgave one of her former captors before he died last year—at the end, a convicted war criminal. On the seventy-fourth anniversary of the camp’s liberation, the long journey to bring one of its SS officers to justice raises questions about the power of forgiveness and the importance of historical memory.
Look at this picture: she is Eva Mozes Kor, an Auschwitz survivor, extending her hand to Oskar Gröning, a former SS officer in the camp. The setting: a district court in Lüneburg, Germany, where Gröning was accused of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews. Date: April 2015.
The picture is a conundrum: why would an Auschwitz survivor extend forgiveness to her former captor? Kor’s parents and two of her siblings had perished there. She and her twin sister Miriam had endured the deadly human experiments of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, known as the “Angel of Death.”
During his trial, Gröning accepted “responsibility in front of God” for what he did at Auschwitz, but he rejected any criminal responsibility. Perhaps so as not to implicate himself further, he refused to show remorse or apologize.
For this and other reasons, none of Kor’s fifty-two co-plaintiffs in the case against the former SS officer followed her lead in publicly forgiving him. Many condemned her for the act.
When I chanced upon the photograph, though, I knew right away why Kor had forgiven Gröning. For I had heard her explain, years earlier, why.
Best of In The Fray 2012. Long before he was a dissident or president, Václav Havel was a playwright. His plays offer the fullest picture of the late Czech writer’s moral vision, which cast aside ideology in favor of a more authentic, more personal “truth and love.”
Václav Havel in front of his favorite painting, Master Theodoric’s portrait of St. Matthew, at Prague’s National Gallery in 1992. Pavel Štecha
One has to be careful quoting Václav Havel’s plays: his characters lie through truths. The meaning of what they say invariably depends not on the words themselves, but who says them, in what circumstances. “The word is insidious,” Havel writes in his comments to the 1972 play Conspirators. “One moment it means a lot, an instant later it means nothing. There are people in whose mouths even the most beautiful word may mean the ugliest thing. The more a person loses his self, the more deftly he can transform truth into lie, and—paradoxically—through truth … deceive the world and himself.”
Havel’s state funeral last month at Prague’s St. Vitus Cathedral resembled, as the Czech foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg had anticipated, “a grotesque situation” from one of the writer’s absurd plays. Presiding over the memorial was none other than Václav Klaus, the current Czech president and Havel’s political nemesis.
Grief over Havel’s death had brought the country to a standstill, as anyone who approved of the changes in 1989—the Velvet Revolution that brought a peaceful end to communist rule over Czechoslovakia—suddenly realized the degree to which Havel personified those changes and the once inconceivable possibilities they had opened. Into this national outpouring of warmth and nostalgia stepped Klaus, who had not said a good thing about Havel in fifteen years.
The first words of remembrance spoken at Havel’s funeral came from the mouth of his old foe. “Undoubtedly much is leaving with Václav Havel,” Klaus said. “At the same time, and in particular thanks to his consistent attitudes in life, there is much that is not leaving, and it is now incumbent upon us not to let it go. What is not leaving is the idea that freedom is a value worth sacrificing for, and that it is meaningful to engage in a struggle for truth, when one is convinced of it, even if it includes personal risks.” (A reader of Havel could not help but detect in Klaus’s eulogy echoes of the death speech delivered in his 1987 play Revitalization, conventionally translated as Redevelopment, an allegory about architects charged with the task of bringing an unplanned historic town in line with ordered modernity. “For only we can breathe meaning into this death by interpreting it as a challenge,” goes the sincere but self-deluded lament of the chief architect, Bergman—an exceptionally dubious character on Havel’s long roster of loathsome protagonists.)
It was left to Karel Schwarzenberg, Havel’s former chief of staff, to question the ways that the playwright’s own “struggle for truth” was, in death, being twisted to fit other agendas. His eulogy, which followed Klaus’s, was a deliberate answer to the current president. “Václav Havel, of course, knew that the word ‘truth’ can have a very narrow sense,” Schwarzenberg said. “He also knew that truth, seen in a narrow, self-centered way as the one and only truth, is the cause of discord and intolerance. That is why he took ‘Truth and Love’ as his motto, as only love can make us listen to the truth of another person, to the truth of others. Such love teaches us to be humble, and Václav Havel had more humility than we all do.”
‘Truth Will Touch Us’
Ever since the Czechs came together as a modern nation, the significance of the word pravda—truth—has been pitched to the life and death of Jan Hus, a Czech priest and scholar who sought to reform the Catholic Church a century before Martin Luther. “Truth … will prevail,” the last words Hus uttered before being burned at the stake, became the motto of the newly born nation of Czechoslovakia in 1918 and are still inscribed on the presidential banner of the Czech Republic. While staring down the communist regime at the end of last century, Havel and his fellow revolutionaries took to the streets with the chant, “Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred.” Unlike most of his compatriots, Havel knew firsthand of the martyrdom that came with speaking truth: in 1977, his mentor and fellow spokesman for the dissident Charter 77 movement, the philosopher Jan Patočka, died from a stroke following a protracted police interrogation.
Havel saw love and truth not just as political slogans, but as principles of everyday conduct. His ability to listen with empathy to people of divergent opinions allowed him to draw together disparate groups and individuals opposed to the collaborationist regime that enveloped Czechoslovakia following the 1968 Soviet invasion. The nonpartisan Charter 77 movement, which Havel unassumingly led, began as a defense of the right to freedom of expression— specifically, a defense of the Czech rock group Plastic People of the Universe, put on trial essentially for having long hair and being apolitical. In that campaign, Havel found a platform for everyone: when one person’s freedom is violated, everyone’s freedom is violated. Many of Havel’s associates at the time criticized him for reaching out to staunch communists, who, following a takeover by the more pragmatic members of the party, found themselves ostracized for their beliefs. Havel fundamentally disagreed with those beliefs, but some of the communists, such as the writer Pavel Kohout, became Havel’s closest friends. On the other hand, colleagues of a similar political persuasion who compromised themselves for the sake of career became “former acquaintances.” (For a generation that came of age in the 1980s, kariéra had become the Czech word tinted with the most negative of connotations.)
As his friend Schwarzenberg pointed out, love in this way allowed Havel the dissident leader to listen to the truth of other people and build a broad-based movement. But what did an abstract term like “truth” actually mean to Havel? His decades of published writings provide some answers.
“It has been eighteen years since The Memorandum was first staged. I have not read it since then,” writes Havel in a 1983 note on the opening of his play at Vienna’s Burgtheater.
The Memorandum is, of course, not a play about Czechoslovak history, but a broader parable that aspires to say something about the human being and society in general. It is, however, rooted in—what else than?—the experiences that its author had in this tiny part of the world into which he was born and in which he was destined to live. That he at the same time—without suspecting this—predicted the future is not the work of his clairvoyance, but issues from the very miracle of what we mean by art, literature, drama, in which the author is always only the medium through which—in certain fortunate constellations—something speaks that is beyond him: that is to say, truth. The author does not discover this truth; truth reveals itself. He only opens himself to truth’s revelation by serving his cause. He allows himself to be carried by its inner logic and does not attempt to brazenly dominate it. It is therefore not the gift of absolute confidence, but more of stunned resignation that gives us the chance that we will touch truth, or, to be more precise, that truth will touch us.
According to Havel, chance and humility determine whether an author will be touched by truth. The two coincide. Not only does a writer need to be blessed with “fortunate constellations,” he also has to be humble enough to surrender himself to chance, to give up the consistencies he imposes on his subject, to be instead “carried by its inner logic.”
Truthful art must also arise from experience. What Havel does not stress here, but what seeps through his early writings, is his belief in the authenticity of that experience. Havel the young playwright idealized the heroic artist who was uncompromising in deed, word, and character, living his life boldly, with a deep knowledge of self. (Not surprisingly, Walt Whitman was Havel’s poet of truth in his teenage years.)
Havel clarified what he meant by artistic authenticity in his 1957 remarks on Bohumil Hrabal, later to become one of the greatest Czech novelists, but at that time an unpublished writer. Hrabal had a law degree, but had gone on to work all sorts of industrial jobs—at a railroad, a steel mill, a recycling plant. Havel was among the first to discern that Hrabal was blazing a new path for other Czech writers to follow, and he credited it to Hrabal’s authentic way of life:
Hrabal is not a writer who lives a rich life so that he has something to write about, but, on the contrary, a writer who writes because he is living this life, and this life again and again urges him to write. Hrabal is an ordinary person who writes, not a writer who lives like an ordinary person…. What sets him apart from other railroad or steel mill workers is the intensity with which he lives his life…. And this intensity of existence demands that he be distilled to the grain [projadřovat, a neologism] through writing.… [Hrabal] is not a writer-spectator … not a social novelist … not a beatnik … not a Hemingway type who deliberately and at great expense seeks out dangerous, make-or-break situations so that he can verify in them the authenticity of art. He is a type of artist … who realizes all his singularity in the intensity with which he carries out his fate.
Havel, who was born into a family of daring and wealthy entrepreneurs penalized by the communist regime for their success, never had a chance to be an ordinary person. He was a child of privilege, a writer-critic at heart, propelled by circumstances into (not so) ordinary walks of life—in other words, precisely everything that Hrabal was not. But Hrabal’s intensity, a stark contrast to the timidity of the country’s establishment writers, made an impression on Havel and a few others of his generation. Twelve years later, when he had become an enemy of the communist state and public channels of expression were closed to him, Havel would recast himself as an ordinary (and herein lies a crucial difference) citizen who writes. The writer’s vision shaped—and fortified—the ordinary citizen seeking justice.
The Devil’s Truths
The conduit through which Havel opened himself to truth was absurd drama. In 1963, his play The Garden Party, hailed by critics as the first Czech absurd play, premiered at the avant-garde Theater on the Balustrade, where Havel then worked as a stagehand. In a postscript to the published play, Jan Grossman, the theater’s artistic director, explained the appeal of absurd theater:
Absurd theater unmasks evil in its wider context, as an evil that is more dangerous because it has become “ordinary.” It filters into life without warning, furtively; it works through, at first sight, trivial means—the habitualized template, stock phrase, convention, dogma.… Absurd theater is analytical, and, if you want, coldly diagnosing. By principle it does not provide solutions. But this adherence to principle, I would say, does not stem from the certainty that a solution does not exist, but more from the conviction that a solution will never and nowhere, by nobody and by no means, be given. If theater aims to be a physician, it does not want to cure through conventional recipes, but by confronting the patient in the most drastic way with his always feasible annihilation. Not to conjure this annihilation, but to prevent it.… It assumes the role of the devil’s advocate. It takes the devil’s side, so that it may uncover the devil “who has concealed himself.”
In Temptation (1985), Havel’s agonizingly personal variation on the Faustus legend, the devil hides in plain sight. Foustka, a scientist at a research institute, comes to suspect that Fistula, a limping pensioner, is actually a visitor from the netherworld—one clue is the old man’s stench. Fistula explains that he suffers from athlete’s foot, which he treats with sulfur, and on each visit to Foustka’s home ostensibly changes in and out of slippers, which he brings along in a paper bag. Foustka never fully accepts this explanation. Bit by bit he arrives at the conclusion that Fistula’s disturbingly detailed knowledge of his personal dealings is due to preternatural powers, rather than utterly mundane connections. Yet the true cause of Foustka’s eventual downfall is not the devil’s trickery, but his failure to recognize and hold onto the one true relationship in his life. He begins to suspect his lover Vilma, a colleague at the institute, of divulging details from earlier conversations to their boss, who is bent on destroying Foustka. By doubting Vilma’s loyalty, Foustka loses her, the game, himself.
In Havel’s plays, the devil deceives through truth. Characters fixate on the abstractions of various pedestrian “truths” while forgetting their moral obligations to themselves and other people. “These are all truths that have ceased to be human truths—somebody’s truths,” he writes in a commentary on his play Conspirators.
These are truths which are not the result of authentic human realization and of authentic human experience, and which are therefore also not existentially guaranteed by the credibility and identity of their carriers, and by their courage to stand behind them even when they are not in accordance with immediate interest. These are all simply deadened, conventionalized “truths in themselves”—that is to say, truths in which contact with reality has been replaced by something more important: contact with ideological convention.
For people who embrace these external truths, Havel continues, “life moves from the real world of human existence into the semifictional world of stock phrases.” In this politicized environment, “words do not serve reality; reality serves words.” Human communication deteriorates to become a soulless exchange of “ideological stands,” and the flesh-and-blood human being, Havel concludes, ultimately transforms into a “thesis.”
(While his analysis here drew from his experiences living under totalitarianism, Havel saw communism as only a particularly obvious incarnation of the kind of modern society that corrodes moral principles. Consumerist culture, too, was one of his targets.)
In Havel’s view, truth in its fullest sense does not reside in objective facts, or logical propositions, or political ideologies. It is deeply personal: a way of life that upholds the authentic parts of our identities. Love, in turn, is how we authentically relate to other human beings. It is therefore the foundation of truth, rather than a consequence of it. If we as individuals are not rooted in a stable core of belief and relationships, we become caricatures of human beings—not unlike the characters in Havel’s plays.
Their lack of a vital sense of self does not prevent Havel’s characters from seeking out other, ersatz versions of love and truth to sustain them. But these attempts only further their estrangement. In the 1968 play The Increased Difficulty of Concentration, Huml is an inveterate womanizer, married with a mistress and lusting after more, unable to be true to any one relationship. Like Foustka, he is a scientist, but he rejects the scientific validity of an experiment to isolate the essence of the human being. In Huml’s view, science cannot quantify the human heart:
And I am afraid that the key to a genuine comprehension of the human self does not lie in a better or worse understood complexity of man as an object of scientific inquiry, but only—and only—in his complexity as a subject of human approximation, because the infinity of our own humanity is so far the only thing that can—however imperfectly—approximate the infinities of others. In other words, the personal, human, unique relationship that arises between two human selves has been up to now the only thing than can reveal—at least partly—the enigma of those mutual selves, while values such as love, friendship, empathy, compassion, and the unrepeatable and unsubstitutable human resonance—or, conversely, dissonance—are the only tools that this human touch employs. Through everything else we can more or less explain the human being, but we can no more than partly understand it, and therefore, no more than partly comprehend it.
Huml understands that the only truth worth knowing about another human being must be found through love, and yet his flawed nature prevents him from doing so.
Havel the playwright also knew to take a break from serious truths, should they become an obsession. He poked fun at himself in his plays—for example, in Audience (1975), through his alter ego, Ferdinand Vaněk, a dissident writer forced to work at a brewery (Havel had worked for a year rolling barrels at a small-town brewery). The brewmaster promises Vaněk a better job if he will write reports on himself to the secret police in the brewmaster’s name. The absurd situation culminates in this exchange between the two:
Vaněk: Sir, I am really thankful for all you did for me. I appreciate it because I know how rare such a stance is today. You, as they say, pulled a thorn out of my heel. I really don’t know what I would do without your help. That posting in the storage room would be a bigger relief for me than you may think, but I—excuse me—I surely cannot report on myself—
Brewmaster: What reporting? Who the hell is talking about reporting here?
Vaněk: It’s not about myself—it cannot hurt me—it’s about principle! Out of principle I surely cannot participate in …
Brewmaster: In what? Just say it! In what can’t you participate?
Vaněk: In a practice that I disagree with.
(Short, intense pause)
Brewmaster: Hmm. So you can’t. In the end, you can’t. That’s great! Now you really showed yourself! Now you proved yourself! (He gets up and excitedly walks around the room.) And what about myself? You will dump me in this, won’t you! You will sneeze in my face! I can be an asshole! I can waddle through the mud, I am not important, I am only your typical brewery idiot—but his lordship, he cannot participate. I can dirty myself, so that his lordship may remain clean…. Principles! Principles! … You always have a chance, but what chance do I have? No one will look after me, no one is afraid of me, no one will write about me. I am only worth being the dung from which your principles grow, looking for well-heated posts for your heroism, and, in the end, being ridiculed for all this! One day you will return to those actresses of yours, you will be bragging there about how you were spinning barrels, you will be a hero, but what about me? Where can I go back? Who will notice me? Who will appreciate what I did? What do I have from life? What awaits me? What?
Havel recognized the privilege that set him apart, the talent that made him more than just an “ordinary citizen.” To the end of his life he railed against the dangers of an inauthentic, estranged existence: his last play, Leaving (2007), skewered the cloistered egotism of politicians.
The idea that so inspired the martyr Jan Hus and his fourteenth-century followers was the heretical realization that each human being has an intrinsic capacity to know what a just, free, and beautiful life is. Six centuries later, Václav Havel used the medium of absurd plays to explore what happens to a human being who rejects the guidance of this inner compass. That real people all too often come to resemble characters in those plays, while their author was catapulted by life into roles he had not scripted, “issues from the very miracle of what we mean by art.”
Correction, March 31, 2012: Revised several passages in the essay, to clarify and correct the descriptions of the plays Revitalization and Temptation, to remove a claim that Havel wrote the “truth and love” motto “in homage to Hus,” to insert a brief discussion of the anti-career sentiment of Havel and his generation, to correct the timeframe when Havel became an “enemy of the communist state,” and to improve a few word choices. We regret the errors.
Na nebes oltáři
hvězda zazáří
a touhou naší plane.
A čas, jak hajný na čekané,
na nebi počítá,
srdce dotluče,
hvězda skane.
…
Osud je jen ozvěna,
jiný křičí,
já jak pěna.
…
Život je jen hodina,
nikdo ale neví,
kdy končí
a kdy začíná.
~listopad 2004~
About the poem: Although Admiral Babočka would have never authorized these lyrics for publication, the weight of the occasion, I trust, justifies my snatching them from the academician’s scratch book.
A word defective in accent or phoneme is a sound used incorrectly; it does not convey its purpose. Speech is like a thunderbolt, striking at the sacrificer who mistakes “who is slayer” for “whose slayer.”
The asuras, shouting “Ememies, ememies!” were overpowered. Therefore, a wise man will not speak a language that is not his own or pronounce words incorrectly.
—translated from the Sanskrit by Motýlí Voko
The sacrificer is Tvashtr the Creator whose three-headed son Vishvarupa the Multiform had been killed by Indra the Conqueror. As a punishment, Tvashtr excluded Indra from drinking soma, the magic juice, during the sacrificial rituals. Indra, nevertheless, sneaked in and drank most of the soma. The magic juice made him sick and gushed from all of his openings. Tvashtr, livid with rage, took the juice that was left and poured it into the sacrificial fire chanting “May the one whose slayer is Indra grow!” (The correct formula would have been “May the one who is slayer of Indra grow!”)
When the juice reached the fire, a being possessed of the powers of fire and juice sprang into existence. Since he developed while rolling (vrt), he was called Vrtra the Roller, and since he had no feet, he became a snake. Because Tvashtr said “grow!” Vrtra indeed grew, consuming food wherever he extended, pushing the oceans back. Indra bribed fire and soma with cakes to come over to his side. Powerless, Vrtra lay shrunk like a leather bag emptied of its contents. When Indra rushed forth intent on killing him, Vrtra pleaded with him: “Do not kill me, for you are now what I was before. Only cut me into pieces, do not make me disappear.” Indra replied: “Okay, you will become my food.”
The asuras and the devas were offsprings of Prajñāpati, the Lord of Wisdom. When it came to dividing the inheritance, the asuras claimed speech, the devas asked for mind; the asuras received the earth, the devas got the sky. The devas plotted against the asuras, asking Mind (he) to make a move at Speech (she). Despite initial failures, Mind seduced Speech, who came over to the side of the devas. The asuras, cut off from their chief weapon, babbled “Ememies, ememies!” and were crushed by the devas.
—adapted from the Brahmanas by Admiral Babočka
About the lines and the stories they refer to: The science of grammar, the principle branch of Indian linguistics, builds on the ancient Vedic distinction between correct linguistic usage, which produces sounds that have the power to bring about reality, and incorrect usage, which reduces language into an impotent tool of daily communication. The Brahmanas are fascinating texts that, through a vast range of interpretative techniques, attempt to make sense out of the magic juice-driven creations of the Vedic seers.
Books are no better than talking. In talking there is something precious: the intention. Intention tunes to something, but what it tunes to cannot be passed down through words. Yet, because they treasure words, people transmit books. Let them treasure it! For me there is nothing worth treasuring there. What they value in words is not what they are precious for.
…
Duke Huan was reading a book in the hall. Wheelwright P’ien was carving a wheel nearby. Putting down his chisel, the wheelwright went up to the duke: “May I ask what words my lord is reading?”
“The words of a wise man.”
“Is the wise man alive?”
“He is dead.”
“Then my lord is only reading the dregs of a dead man.”
“How do you, a wheelwright, dare to pass judgments when your master is reading? If you can justify yourself, good for you; if not, you die!”
“I look at it from the point of view of my own work. When I pound the chisel too softly, it does not hold on to the wood; when I pound too hard, it does not incise. Not too soft, not too hard—my hands find the way, and the mind follows through, but the mouth cannot explain it. There is a measure in it I cannot relate to my son, and my son cannot learn from me. I have been doing this for seventy years, growing old carving wheels. The men of the past are dead, along with what they could not pass down. Thus all my lord is reading are the dregs of dead men.”
…
The point of the net is the fish. When you get the fish, you can forget the net.
The point of the snare is the hare. When you get the hare, you can forget the snare.
The point of the words is the intention. When you get the intention, you can forget the words.
Where do I find a man who has forgotten words, so that I can have a word with him?
—translated from the Chinese by Motýlí Voko
About the piece: Anecdotes like this one circulated through China’s central states for centuries, attributed to the semifictional character Chuang Chou. Linked by a playful poetic language, they poked fun at conventional wisdom. They were later collated into the definitive book of Master Chuang by the Taoist scholar Kuo Hsiang (who died in the forty-seventh year of the Western Chin, i.e., 312 AD).
She has not yet been born,
she is both the music and the words,
and thereby the unbreakable bond
between all the living.
The ocean’s chest serenely respires,
but like mad brightened the day
and the foam’s lilac pale
in the dark lazurite vase.
May my mouth attain
primordial muteness,
as the crystal-clear note,
that from birth is pure!
In foam remain, Aphrodite!
Words, into music return!
And, hearts, from each other shy away,
merging with the source of life!
—translated from the Russian by Motýlí Voko
Она еще не родилась,
Она и музыка и слово,
И потому всего живого
Ненарушаемая связь.
Спокойно дышат моря груди,
Но, как безумный, светел день,
И пены бледная сирень
В черно-лазоревом сосуде.
Да обретут мои уста
Первоначальную немоту,
Как кристаллическую ноту,
Что от рождения чиста!
Останься пеной, Афродита,
И, слово, в музыку вернись,
И, сердце, сердца устыдись,
С первоосновой жизни слито!
~1910, 1935 by Osip Mandelshtam~
About the poem: The name of the Greek goddess of passion, Aphrodite, literally means “arisen from foam.” She is the origin of both life and madness, and thereby the ceaseless inspiration of poets.
Now I see you, damned house builder!
You ain’t building no house no more!”
All your rafters busted,
the roof has collapsed.
And the mind, set loose
from the quagmire of its own making,
scores a major victory:
no more thirst!
Gahakāraka dittho’si
puna geham na kāhasi
sabbā te phāsukā bhaggā
gahakūtam visamkhitam
visamkhāragatam cittam
tanhānam khayam ajjhagā.
About the poem: According to the Indian commentator Buddhaghosa, the son of Māyā uttered these precise words at the crack of dawn, under a tree on a river bank, to express the intense joy he experienced in the split second of awakening.
Sing with me: “Knowing we understand nothing,
from an eerie ocean we come, to an inscrutable sea we go.”
And between the two mysteries lies the profound puzzle:
an unfamiliar key locks three coffers.
Light illuminates nothing and the wise man does not teach.
What do words say? And what about the mountain stream?
…
Wayfarer! Your own footprints
are the path and nothing more.
Wayfarer! There is no path,
the path is made as you walk.
As you walk you make the path,
and looking back
you see a trail you may never tread again.
Wayfarer! There is no path,
only wakes in the sea.
…
Everything passes and all remains,
but ours is the passing,
passing making paths,
paths over the sea.
—translated from the Spanish by Motýlí Voko
“Proverbios y cantares”
XV
Cantad conmigo a coro: Saber, nada sabemos,
de arcano mar venimos, a ignota mar iremos …
Y entre los dos misterios está el enigma grave;
tres arcas cierra una desconocida llave.
La luz nada ilumina y el sabio nada enseña.
¿Qué dice la palabra? ¿Qué el agua de la peña?
XXIX
Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.
XLIV
Todo pasa y todo queda,
pero lo nuestro es pasar,
pasar haciendo caminos,
caminos sobre la mar.
About the poem: With these proverbial limericks Antonio Machado forever changed the way Spaniards walk: while caminar is to walk as if passively following a path, andar is to walk in an active sense—to walk making paths.
A sound, alert and dull,
of a fruit, ripping itself from the tree,
amid the speech-like tuning
of the deep silence of the woods …
—translated from the Russian by Motýlí Voko
Звук осторожный и глухой
Плода, сорвавшегося с древа,
Среди немольчного напева
Глубокой тишины лесной …
~1908~
About the poem: In a famous essay, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva makes a distinction between poets with history and poets without history. In poets with history, one can detect development over time—the voice matures, the idea grows. Poets without history, on the other hand, are complete from the first word they utter. To read Osip Mandelshtam’s earliest published poem, written when he was only seventeen, is to witness the birth of a timeless mind.
Why, every night, do I only dream
of my lucky and dazzling star?
Why, every night, do I only dream
that this star will bring me the happiness
of which, during the day,
I never dream?
Guise deceives,
and every dream
that during the night we dream
the next day chases away.
Life happens only by chance,
one moment you’re up, one moment you’re down.
Life flows like a stream,
and death is like the sea.
Everyone will reach the sea,
some sooner, some later.
Still, the one who loves
shouldn’t lose hope.
When you see miracles in life
only love is capable of—
goldfish soaring above the clouds—
then you will understand.
That life is like water
which love turns into wine,
that love happens by chance,
and there is no happiness without it.
—translated from the Czech by Motýlí Voko
Život je jen náhoda
Proč že se mi každou noc
o tom jen zdá, o tom jen zdá,
jak v mém životě vyšla
má tak šťastná a krásná hvězda.
Proč že se mi každou noc
o tom jen zdá, že ta hvězda
mi dá to štěstí,
o němž se mi ve dne nezdá.
Zdání klame,
mimoto každý sen,
který v noci míváme,
zažene příští den.
Život je jen náhoda,
jednou jsi dole, jednou nahoře.
Život plyne jak voda
a smrt je jako moře.
Každý k moři dopluje,
někdo dříve a někdo později.
Kdo v životě miluje,
ať neztrácí naději.
Až uvidí v životě zázraky,
které jenom láska umí,
zlaté rybky vyletí nad mraky,
pak porozumí.
Že je život jak voda,
kterou láska ve víno promění,
láska že je náhoda
a bez ní štěstí není.
About the poem: First performed in 1932 by the theater trio Ježek, Voskovec, Werich, the song has had such an impact on the Czech language that native speakers cannot think of život (“life”) without the remainder of the line (“happens by chance”).
Listen to the Old Man without the Sea playing the tune.
Listen to the Prague Castle Orchestra interpreting “life.”
Wavering, barely discernible, language awakens. She seems never able to find her bearing in the human space that is taking hold of the creature who wakes slowly, or at once. When her awakening is sudden, space strikes at man as if it had been waiting to overwhelm him, to make him know he is only a human being and nothing more.
Meanwhile, the flow of time, always delayed, kindly takes to the creature who wakes wrapped in his own time. This time he treasures and will not surrender, lodged in it as he is with confidence. And language awakens amid this vital confidence that nests in the human heart and without which man would never speak. One could even say that this vital confidence and the source of language become mingled, or link up into a union that allows the human lot to improve.
Language is of a tame disposition. This she manifests in her awakening. Wavering, she murmurs, she babbles in broken, barely audible words. She is like a foolish bird who does not know where she ought to go, as much as she tries to rise in her feeble flight.
This nascent, wavering language comes to be replaced with words arrayed by the conscious intellect that articulates them. As if the intellect, too, were taking hold, challenging the space that relentlessly pushes into sight, confronting the day that calls for an immediate action, a single doing comprised of a whole series of deeds. Words loaded with purpose.
And so the first language retreats, returns to her silent, hidden meandering, leaving behind the imperceptible trace of her own opacity. She is not lost. As babble, as the murmuring of the indelible confidence, she will cross the range of words dictated by purpose, releasing them one by one from their chains. And during this brief dawning, one feels how language slowly grows in silence. In the soft glow of being reborn, language, at last, disentangles herself, all the while leaving her seed intact. The seed that in the pale dawning of freedom always made itself known a moment before reality broke in.
And reality remained such, nourished by freedom and propped up by language, being spoken and taking shape. For language and freedom come before reality, foreign and intrusive as it is to the creature who has not finished waking into being human.
—translated from the Spanish by Motýlí Voko
El despertar de la palabra
Indecisa, apenas articulada, se despierta la palabra. No parece que vaya a orientarse nunca en el espacio humano, que va tomando posesión del ser que despierta lenta o instantáneamente. Pues que si el despertar se da en un instante, el espacio le acomete como si ahí le hubiere estado aguardando para definirle, para hacerle saber que es un ser humano sin más. Mientras el fluir temporal, en retraso siempre, se queda apegado al ser que despierta envuelto en su tiempo, en un tiempo suyo que guarda todavía sin entregarlo, el tiempo en el que ha estado depositado confiadamente. Y la palabra se despierta a su vez entre esta confianza radical que anida en el corazón del hombre y sin la cual no hablaría nunca. Y aún se diría que la confianza radical y la raíz de le palabra se confundan o se den en una unión que permite que la condición humana se alce.
Es de dócil condición la palabra, lo muestra en su despertar cuando indecisa comienza a brotar como un susurro en palabras sueltas, en balbuceos, apenas audibles, como un ave ignorante, que no sabe dónde ha de ir, mas que se dispone a levantar su débil vuelo.
Viene a ser sustituida esta palabra naciente, indecisa, por la palabra que la inteligencia despierta profiere como una orden, como si tomara posesión ella también, ante el espacio, que implacablemente se presenta y ante el día, que propone acción inmediata que cumplir, una en la que entra toda la serie de acciones. Palabras cargadas de intención. Y la palabra primera se recoge, vuelve a su silencioso y escondido vagar, dejando la imperceptible huella de su diafanidad. Mas no se pierde. Como un balbuceo, como un susurrar de la inextinguible confianza atravesará las series de las palabras dictadadas por la intención, soltándolas por instantes de sus cadenas. Y en esta breve aurora se siente el germinar lento de la palabra en silencio. En el débil resplandor de la resurrección la palabra al fin se desprende dejando su germen intacto, que en el débil clarear de la libertad se anunciaba un instante antes de que la realidad irrumpiese. Y quedaba así luego la realidad sostenida por la libertad y con la palabra en vías de decirse, de tomar cuerpo. La palabra y la libertad anteceden a la realidad extraña, irruptora ante el ser no acabado de despertar en lo humano.
About the piece: Composed in exile, in between journeys from a village under the French Alps to Rome and back, Clearings in the Wood (Claros del bosque, 1977) is the most mature work of the Spanish poet/philosopher María Zambrano.
Clearings in the Wood stands out among those of my thoughts that spilled into print, for it comes out of the writing’s own irrepressible surge that resulted in notebooks and pages no one is aware of, not even I, reluctant as I am to reread myself.
I believe this book most resonates with the “idea” that “thinking is above all—as a source and as an action—the making sense of what is being felt,” understanding by experience the “inborn feeling (el sentir originario),” a term I have been using for years.
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