Translation: Romanesque by Tonino Benacquista

Pierre-Auguste Cot, L'orage, 1880

This is Bora Mici's original French to English translation of the ending of the novel Romanesque by the contemporary French author Tonino Benacquista. It tells the story of a couple whose love is so strong nothing can beat it. The novel focuses on all of the adventures and adversities that the couple must overcome from the Middle Ages to the current day, as it travels through space and time trying to find a niche but always being confronted by societal expectations and customs that seek to define it and which it always flees from and defies. The ending does not spoil the reading of the story. It only hints at it.

Romanesque by Tonino Benacquista, Ending, translated from French into English by Bora Mici

Whomever has been touched by the affair of the lovers hurries to share it with a person of their choosing, oh quite a person of their choosing, a modest way of sending them a romantic message in order to suggest the idea that they themselves could have been these two, having dreamed forever in dissatisfaction of living a tale at once moral and immoral, a reminder of what love was a long time ago, before the inextricable misunderstandings it evokes today, before we had extinguished it with rhetoric, before the fear of engagement had paralyzed it, before we had reduced it to statistics, before we had calculated its probabilities, before we had optimized its chances, before we had attacked its ideals, before we had commented on its limits. Before pragmatism, realism, empiricism, rationalism joined forces against it, before the fear of suffering made us suffer, before we chose the guarantee of solitude against all its risks. The power of that kind of love does not need speeches, sociology, conceptual analyses: it is rebellious, it has taken to the underground, it’s bitten into an entire system, scratched at an established power, walked all over an authority. And while they are on the run, we wish the fugitives a fate that is uncommon, wild and never revealed.
….

This time no one wanted them on Earth or in the Sky. There was no empire in the universe that was crazy enough to provide a refuge for the intransigent lovers. In order to make them disappear forever, they were sent to a world that was hardly known, immaterial and out of time, which terrorized both the partisans of good and the artisans of evil.

It was a world that no one had created by design, that no one could have even imagined, not the fruit of a will, but the opposite.

It was a renunciation, which wanting to establish its State, had found this faraway territory, inaccessible to all forms of desire. Indifferent to radiation as much as to chaos, the renunciation knew that it was much more powerful than gods and devils united, too involved in their exaggerated plans, while it possessed a supreme ability to be indifferent and sought the inertia in all things. Before such a redoutable enemy, we could finally measure how many things good and evil had in common, how they were impassioned, capable of fighting hand in hand faced with this cold infinity, which was strong enough to absorb them both. Gods and devils came to asking themselves the question they feared the most: did they really exist, or had they been created by mankind in order to fight against the terror of seeing everything end once and for all?

One ended up in this world at the very end, after all afters, when all sequels were exasperated, where man had finally decided to disappear forever, without any hope of return, without a single butterfly or toad to grant him its carnal envelope because nothing more would exist after him, even his ashes would disappear, and he would also disappear from the memory of his descendants, who would never doubt whether he had existed at all.

If men feared so much this realm of absence, it was because it already resided in them while they were alive. Capable of loving or hating, their greatest inclination was to forget, to show their endless detachment, their absolute lack of curiosity: there resided the prefiguration of their fate after death, not in the blessings or the punishments that we let them anticipate,

The lovers were reunited in this mouth of nothingness, neither tortured nor soothed but empty of soul, not even moved by the need to seek one another. For the first time, they no longer vibrated with the force of attraction, which had allowed them to overcome all adversities; they were discovering a state of unimaginable desolation, that of no longer desiring, no longer cherishing, no longer hoping, no longer fearing the loss of anyone, no longer fearing that he or she suffers since even suffering was abolished there.

Ah, if they had known of the existence of such a place, they would have loved even more, cherished even more, they would have pleaded with their kin to forsake all economy, all touchiness, all suspicion. They learned it there—and it was too late—that if Paradise rewarded the giving and the kind, if Hell punished the corrupted and the cynics, there was another territory which caught hold of those who had feared life and risk-taking, preferring avoidance to confrontation, prudence to temptation, giving in to engagement.

It was unimaginable for the lovers, who had been consumed by passion, who had refused to get over one another, and who, despite their insistance on wanting to be isolated from the world, had taught so many humans not to strangle their desire under the weight of customs. Those two did not deserve to find themselves in this realm of abandonment, similar to the purgatory of the unborn.

A thousand deaths would have been preferable to this end, without a morality, lacking meaning, as if the whole path they had traveled had been in vain, and nothing would ever come again to put an end to this ending, because time could well try to defend itself from eternity, eternity suddenly seemed as limited as human imagination.

Already their heartbeats had begun to become spaced out so that one could distinctly count them one by one.

The time had come to say goodbye, to let go, to dissolve and to accept that nothing left behind would recall their existence, that their escapades no longer would inspire legends, that this human adventure was but a dream.

But before the last heartbeat was gone, they would grant themselves a last memory.

A single one.

Also, they had to hurry because their memories were crumbling in large swathes.

The bad ones had been erased first. Only the more harmonious, the more just, remained.

A wild kid with amber skin offers a bowl of water…A working woman shares her blanket on an icy night…An Indian woman hides her distress behind a radiant smile…An executioner, the ax in his hand, whispers into the ears of the condemned: You will feel nothing…A monk is happy to pass on his teachings to these rustic beings…A master gives an unknown woman his two dogs without which she would not survive…An anonymous person offers the bread of reconciliation…A crazy person prefers freedom to wisdom…An old couple has forgotten all but the most important…A dying man wishes a long life to a travelling woman…An artist recreates a face without even having seen it…In the storm a sailor sings to chase away his fear…A tyrant regrets having forgotten his people…A prisoner treats his prison mate as a brother…At the theatre, the spectators show they have as much talent as the playwright…A mother is lost in tears of gratitude for she who has brightened up her son’s smile…

But as soon as remembered these memories start to be dislodged too. Soon only the most radiant will remain.

The first look exchanged that morning at the corner of the woods.

That one held on so well that it led to another heartbeat, unexpected, insolent.

Because how could one think of that moment without hoping for the next, and all the others that would come.

Suddenly, in the middle of nothing, before forgetfulness sucked them up completely, the lovers’ hearts got going again.

The Nothing, surprised by this unexpected but stubborn counterpoint, started fearing that it was losing ground.

And it sent them where they had come from.

Translation: Performance in Contemporary Art

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece 1964

Is performance essential to our understanding of contemporary art?

Link to original article in French: https://www.bonart.cat/fr/n/46537/la-performativite-est-elle-essentielle-a-la-comprehension-de-l39art-contemporain

Translated from French into English by Bora Mici

Contemporary art often makes us uncomfortable because it no longer suffices for it to reflect reality like a mirror. In many cases, it intervenes in the world and modifies certain things: it creates situations, influences behaviors and creates new perspectives for relating to others. In this sense, the notion of performance becomes central. It is however important to specify that we are not talking about the same thing as the performing arts, which can be understood as simple “performances” in front of an audience. Here, the main idea is different: the work of art does not only create, but it encourages others to create too. As part of a constitutive logic, it functions like an apparatus that puts into motion the actions, decisions and relationships between people and which creates the conditions that favor the emergence of these phenomena.

Therefore, a work of art is performative when it mobilizes another’s actions and decisions, when it generates unexpected audiences, when it turns spectators into participants, and when it redefines what it means to be a creator, a work of art and a community. This point of view helps us understand that the way a work of art functions does not only depend on the artist because the audience and its degree of involvement, an institution and its norms, a space and its apparatuses, as well as the protocols and languages that assign roles and orient possible actions, also play a role. In the same way, the sociopolitical context with its material and emotional tensions shapes its effects.

However, there are no neutral actors. Performative art, in as far as it involves people and generates relationships and situations, cannot ignore the consequences of its implementation: it has to accept its responsibility. It is precisely for this reason that it becomes necessary to monitor its application and the conditions under which it is produced because performance can degenerate when it becomes stereotypical through eventification, instrumentalized participation or predictable and domesticated transgression.

It is why we must redefine our concept of its effectiveness, no longer to be seen as an immediate impact or a mediatic buzz, but as the ability to mobilize learning processes, to create relationships and modify habits, while leaving a mark as a process and not as an object. At a time when everything tends to devolve into quick consumption and fleeting attention spans, the crux of the matter shifts elsewhere: we no longer ought to ask “what this work is about?” but rather what it activates, what it transforms, how it affects us and what it encourages us to do. In this sense, we can perhaps understand performativity as a poetics of consequence: a way of articulating forms and situations that not only have meaning but also produce effects and leave a mark on our way of perceiving the world, our way of interacting with it and acting within it.

Translation: Nathalie Sarraute Tropisms I

Gustav Klimt, The Sunflower, 1907

This is Bora Mici's original French to Albanian translation of the first tropism in Nathalie Sarraute's French language collection Tropismes, an array of very short fiction pieces that acutely zoom into a given mind space that is turning, like plants do toward light - hence the title Tropisms - toward an outside stimulus and interacting with it. This particular one describes a crowd of people looking at shop windows in an anonymous town by focusing on their physical movements in space as a group as well as the psychology of their temperament. My father Sokol Mici also contributed to this translation. 

Tropisms, I translated from French into Albanian by Bora Mici

Dukej sikur buronin ngado, sikur mugullonin në ajrin e vakët paksa të lagësht. Derdheshin ngadalë, sikur po rridhnin nga muret, pemët e rrethuara me gjerdhe, stolat, trotuarët e ndotur, sheshet.

Shtriheshin në grumbuj të gjatë dhe të errët midis fasadave të pajeta të shtëpive. Herë pas herë, përpara vitrinave të dyqaneve formonin bërthama më të dendura, të palëvizshme që dridheshin, duke të krijuar përshtypjen e mpiksjeve të vogla.

Rrezatonin një qetësi të çuditshme, një kënaqësi të pashpresë. Sodisnin me kujdes pirgjet e ndërresave në Ekspozimin e të Bardhave, që imitonin bukur malet e mbuluara me dëborë, ose ndonjë kukull, dhëmbët dhe sytë e së cilës ndizeshin në intervale të rregullta. Ndizeshin dhe shuheshin, ndizeshin, shuheshin, ndizeshin, shuheshin, gjithnjë në intervale identike, ndizeshin dhe shuheshin përsëri.

Vështronin për një kohë të gjatë pa lëvizur. Rrinin aty, duke ofruar veten përpara vitrinave të qyqaneve. Shtynin gjithnjë largimin e tyre deri në intervalin tjetër. Ndërsa fëmijët e vegjël të heshtur që i mbanin nga dora, prisnin me durim pranë tyre, të lodhur nga soditja dhe të shpërqendruar.

Translation: Gianni Rodari, A King without a Crown

Kazimir Malevich, Supremus 55, 1917

This is Bora Mici's original Italian to English translation of the very short story A Re without a Corona, or A King without a Crown, in the children's collection Il libro degli errori, or The Book of Errors, by the 20th-century Italian author Gianni Rodari. In this book, Rodari creates playful poems and little stories, which remain very relevant to this day, and gently mock society through fun plays on words. I know I had promised you another entry from André Gide's journal, but Gide was too serious in tone for today, so I chose something lighter and which is probably on everyone's minds lately. 

A Re without a Corona or A King without a Crown — Gianni Rodari, translated into English by Bora Mici

Nota bene: Re means both the musical note D or Re and king in Italian, so keep that in mind when you are reading the translation. And a corona is a form of musical notation that can be translated as fermata or corona in English. Its function is explained in the story.

Once upon a time there was a Re without a corona.

He was the second note on the musical scale. He lived just under the staff, and so above him, he could see a Mi that had a huge corona, like this. As you know, musicians put a notation called a “corona” above certain notes, in order to let the performer know: — You can hold this note with a corona as long as you wish, as long as you have enough breath…

And so, it can happen that a Mi has a corona, and it’s fine. It can also happen that a Sol has it, but this is understandable, because it is the fifth note on the musical scale, and the fifth note is also called the “dominant” one. And it can happen that a “Re” does not have it at all. Most of the musical “Re’s” have never had a corona and they never complained about it to anyone.

But this Re kept complaining, and he did not want to hear otherwise.

“The author” — he said, “has unfairly ignored me. I will resign.” And in fact, he resigned and went away. The musician had to put the pause sign in his place, which was now left vacant.

Now when I play that piece on my violin, when I get to that spot, I have to observe a moment of silence in memory of the discontented Re.

Translation: André Gide Journal 4

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Les hasards heureux de l'escarpolette, 1767-1769

Today's quote from the journal of André Gide dates from August 3, 1935. Tomorrow I will publish a longer entry on the same subject, written the following day, which delves deeper into the question of social class, poverty and the lust for life. As perhaps you have already understood from the entries I have published thus far that André Gide defied social categories and refused to align himself with any ideology other than that of pure creativity.   

"It would be good for the voice of the poor, which has been silenced much too long, to manage to be heard. But I cannot admit to only hearing this one voice. Man does not cease to be of interest to me when he stops being wretched: on the contrary. It goes without saying that it is important to help him, just like we first must water a plant; but in order to obtain the flower, and that is my concern." - André Gide