Translation: Gianni Rodari on Humility

Today I was looking for some simple fun, but since I am incapable of having complete simple fun without a lesson to learn or to impart, I have translated two texts from The Book of Errors, Il libro degli errori in Italian, so this is Bora Mici's original translation from Italian into English of The Best Man in the World and Who Is In Charge? by the famous Italian children's author Gianni Rodari. His texts often feature plays on words and little lessons in morality or grammar, or sometimes both, dispensed with great humor. Both of these stories spoke to me on this cloudy day at the end of October, the first truly chilly day, as the leaves turn bright reds and yellows, the colors of rust. I thought we could all take a moment to gather our thoughts and reflect on what truly matters in life.  

Oscar Kokoschka, Self-Portrait of a "Degenerate Artist" 1937

The Best Man in the World, L'uomo più bravo del Mondo in Italian language, translated by Bora Mici

I know the story of the best man in the world, but I don’t know if you will like it. Should I tell it to you anyways? I’ll tell it.

His name was First, and ever since he was little, he had decided, "First in name and in actuality. I will always be the first in everything."

And instead he was always last.

He was the last one to be afraid, the last one to run away, the last one to speak lies, the last one to do mean things. In fact, he was so behind everyone that he did not even do anything mean.

His friends all came in first at something. One of them was the best thief in the city, another one was the best at being arrogant, a third was the most inane on the block. He, on the other hand, was the last one to say silly things, and when it was his turn to say something senseless, he kept quiet.

He was the best man in the world, but he was the last one to get wind of it. He was so behind that he did not even know it at all.

Pablo Picasso, The Happy Family, 1917

Who Is In Charge? Chi commanda? in Italian language, translated by Bora Mici

I asked a little girl, “Who is in charge at home?”
She keeps quiet and looks at me.
“Come on, tell me, who is in charge at your house, mommy or daddy?”
The girl just looks at me and does not respond.
“So, will you tell me? Tell me who is the boss.”
Again, she looks at me perplexed.
“Don’t you know what it means to be in charge?”
Yes, she does know.
“Don’t you know what boss means?”
Yes, she does know.
“What’s the problem then?”

She looks at me and keeps quiet. Should I get angry? Or maybe she is mute, the poor thing. Now she runs away, indeed. She runs all the way to the top of the field, and from up there, she turns around, sticks her tongue out and shouts toward me, laughing, “No one is in charge because me love each other.”

Translation: Alberto Moravia, The Disobedience

The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymous Bosch, 1490-1500

This is Bora Mici's original Italian to English translation of an excerpt from Alberto Moravia's novella La disubbidienza, or The Disobedience in English. An adolescent boy goes through a crisis of metamorphosis that leads to a prolonged period of convalescence. Luca slowly rejects everything he has been given and taught by his parents and his teachers only to be reborn and to relearn to live through an acceptance and a newfound sense of belonging. His morose dejection and symbolic suicide, which he initially conceives as a game of progressive material renunciation, give way to a transformation in which he learns to trust and take pleasure in life. It's interesting to me that Moravia devotes the greatest part of his text to the unraveling of his character, describing it in great symbolic detail through his rejection of the rituals of the everyday life of a schoolboy, born into a well-to-do, loving, bourgeois family. The end of the novella, when the character finally begins to experience the joy of being alive, reads more as a resolution than as an important step in Luca's transformation journey, even though the author does stop to examine it over a few pages. I think it's important to describe what makes for a happy existence in just as much detail as what causes internal crises because both are significant and real parts of life. Is beautifully rendered suffering the only realm of great literature, leaving the rest to self-help books and religion? Or can literature reinvent itself to incorporate these other aspects of being in this world more than just symbolically or momentarily? 

Excerpt from The Disobedience by Alberto Moravia, translated from Italian into English by Bora Mici        

It was the beginning of December. One afternoon, Luca left home carrying all the money he had in his coat pockets, silver coins and small bills. The rain had stopped after many days. The sky was clean but dark, a smoky and even color, as if the usual blue had been replaced not by the shifting gray clouds that liquefy themselves into rain or are pushed away by the wind, but by another, more still, and gloomier hue that would last forever. There was that sense of depletion that follows storms in the fresh, windless air; but crows were flying low, seemingly warning with their aquatic caws, that it would rain again. Looking up a the sky and fiddling around with the money in his pocket, Luca headed toward the public garden, located not too far from his home. He knew that at that hour no one would be there and that he could carry out his plan without worrying about being observed. He went through the gate and started making his way into the garden. He knew where he was headed, a place which was tied to a kind of childhood obsession in his memory. It was a small plaza surrounded by tall leafy oak trees on three sides and, on the fourth, by an ornate wall with nooks, columns and and roman epitaphs. On the other side of the wall stretched out the zoo, and the roaring of the hungry beasts could often be heard. When he was a child, his governesses had frequently brought Luca to walk in that melancholy and lonely plaza, with white gravel framed by the dark fronds of the bronzy oak trees. While his governess sat on an overturned capital and read a book, Luca climbed all the way to the iron grille of the fake windows and tried to look down at the zoo. Otherwise, he thoroughly searched the wooded area at the margins of the plaza; it was very shady, with its blanket of many layers of dead leaves on the surface, shiny and wet underneath; here and there grew nettle bushes that seemed to nourish their light green color with all that rotting stuff, which filled Luca with a great disgust. One day, at his house, the governess and the maid had begun discussing a crime. A young man had been killed, and his body had not been found; but some bloody clothes and and the place where they had been located made people think that the dead body had been buried in one of the many gardens in the city. Luca had listened to the maid’s comments for a long time without saying anything, pretending to play, and finally had asked her: “Why did they kill him?” The woman had responded in a sententious and bitter tone: “Because he was nice and good…that’s why…because he was not made for this world.” And since this phrase had made an impression on him, Luca asked nothing further. But later, he could not tell why, he had gotten it into his head that the young man’s dead body had been buried in that same plaza where he went walking so often with his governess. This conclusion did not have any basis in reality, not even a far-fetched or tiny one; but maybe, it was precisely because of that that it seemed irrefutable. His mind fixated on this terrible but fascinating secret, and as he walked around the plaza, he liked being able to look at the precise place where the dead body was decomposing underground. It was a corner between the ornate wall and the woods at the foot of a tall oak tree; and Luca would often stop to look at that place, searching with his foot through the dead leaves or digging up the soft dirt with a stick. He knew that the dead man lay under there and would not have given up his conviction for anything. On the other hand, by turning it over in his mind, he had reconstructed the crime in his own fashion and had even imagined what the victim and the killers looked like. The former must have been a nice and good young man, just like the woman had said, but of a special kind of goodness and niceness, which were not at all ostentatious but secret, invisible to most; as for the latter, Luca saw them exactly in the same way he saw the people on the street, normal and anonymous pedestrians. Maybe they had killed him to steal his possessions, as the newspapers wrote; but in reality, according to what the woman had said, it had been because of his goodness and niceness, in order to remove him from this world, to which he did not belong. Thinking about the young man and his death, he felt a horrifying attraction and a great pity at the same time. Then, with the passage of time and nearly without realizing it, he had imagined that he was the victim and that the body buried under the oak tree was his own. This doubling, inspired by an unknown fantastical infatuation for the person and destiny of the victim, seemed natural to him and was not the first. At other moments, while reading adventure books, he had dreamed of being a heroic and fortunate character. What was exceptional was that this was the first time he had fallen in love with such a lugubrious fate; and he darkly sensed that, unlike in other similar doublings, this was due to deep reasons, to an obsession that expressed everything to which his life was devoted. As often happens, such an obsession had gradually become lighter over the years, just like the fog that dissipates in the sun, and had changed into a desolate memory that had finally vanished into forgetfulness.

But now, having gone back to the plaza, the obsession was coming back, though in a different way. He knew now that no one had ever been buried in the plaza; but sacralized in his imagination, the plaza still remained that place where something dead had to be buried. He would bury his money in the very place where he had once thought the victim lay; and in burying the money, in a certain way, he would also bury himself; or at least that part of himself that was attached to money. Also, memories of buried treasure in adventurous settings combined themselves vaguely with these more grave resolutions, echoes of the things he’d read in early adolescence.

He mainly had in mind The Gold-Bug by Poe. But as a kind of alibi, destined to remove any tragedy from the sacrifice, and keep it within the limits of the game. Besides the money, he had also brought with him a little blue glass bottle, inside of which he had placed a map with the directions for finding his small buried treasure. Not knowing much about cryptography, Luca had contented himself with writing the directions in academic jargon, adding an f to every syllable. Just like in the short story, he would hide this vial in the hollow of one of the oak trees that surrounded the plaza.

Looking ahead, he crossed a big square meadow. The oak trees in the wooded area swayed back and forth at the end of this opening, their dark trunks resembling a crowd about to go into a panic, undulating before dispersing. Beyond the oak trees, in the pale whiteness of the gravel coursed by the daylight, you could glimpse the plaza with the decorative wall. He entered the wooded area, enjoying walking on the upright layer of dead leaves. In the underwood’s silence, he heard a subtle bird’s call; and then, turning around, he saw the bird itself, big and black, jumping up and down on the ground and then taking flight to hide among the leaves. He even noticed that, while he was making his way through the woods, he felt a sense of liberty; and he thought that it was nice to be able to act, even if it meant destroying his own life; this is precisely what acting meant; doing things according to our ideas rather than out of necessity.

There was no one in the plaza. He walked up and down it for a while thinking about the time when he had been certain about the buried dead man, and it seemed to him that the lonely and slightly sinister atmosphere that had seduced him when he was a child was intact again. There was the decorative wall with its empty nooks, the broken epitaphs, the cornices that were coming apart. There were the large windows, with their alcoves, and the big iron bars. He climbed up to one of those windows and looked at the other side into the zoo. He saw the thick foliage of a bay leaf bush, but through the leaves, it seemed to him to glimpse the green and golden plumage of a large exotic bird. A faraway roar startled him; then, as always, the beasts were hungry. He climbed down from the window and approached the designated place. The same oak tree was still there, old, hollowed out with a gaping hole, with the main branch hanging out over the plaza and leaning onto a brick support wall, like the arm of a cripple leans on a crutch. The dead man lay under the oak tree. All of a sudden, the cruel and pathetic sentiment of having been buried himself came back to him, him, killed without any pity.

He went on his knees under the tree and started digging a hole with his pocketknife. Under the dead leaves, the ground was light and wet, full of rotting pieces of bark. He displaced the dirt and then removed it with his hand and put it to the side in a small hill. When he had finished digging the hole, he slowly removed the bills from his pocket and started tearing them one by one, letting the pieces fall to the bottom of the hole. He realized that he felt a deep hatred for that money, like you hate someone who has oppressed you, and against whom you have rebelled. The idea that his parents had so much respect for money and that, without knowing it, for so many years, he had prayed in front of a safe full of that money, also contributed to his resentment. He felt that he was vindicated for all those prayers in tearing up the money, making reparations. But money was sacred too; even if in an entirely different way from the sacred image it was hiding behind while he was praying. It was sacred because of those royal effigies and those symbols that guaranteed its value; and it was sacred because it could have meant happiness for so many people. For example, for the poor man on the street, who always extended his hand toward him when he was going to school in the morning. But giving it to a poor man would have ultimately meant respecting it, reaffirming its value. And instead, Luca really wanted to destroy it, not just in his own desires, but also in reality. Loathed idol, as he felt, nothing further was necessary beyond that degrading tearing up to desacralize it forever.

When he had finished ripping up the bills, he mixed up the pieces and then, he pulled an envelope full of silver coins out of his pocket and shoved it at the bottom of the hole on top of the bills. He carried out these actions with a sense of grave and aware rigor, even if tinged by a mortal sadness. The man who had been killed and buried came back to his mind and once again that strange pity for himself overcame him. In the meantime, he filled the hole with dirt. When he was finished, he evened out the ground and covered everything with the carpet of dead leaves.

He stood up, cleaning his wet and dirty knees, and then he remembered the turquoise glass bottle and Poe’s short story. But this time, he did not have the courage to carry out that part of the plan. He felt a lugubrious and enchanted sadness, and he could understand that, after all, it had not been a game. He was not the bloodthirsty and insensitive pirate at the end of a life of adventure and freedom; that plaza was not the deserted coastline of a savage land; ultimately, no one would have ever discovered his meagre treasure of torn up bills and coins with joy. His own mediocrity, that of the place and of the treasure, all of a sudden seemed to him like the best proof of the strenuous seriousness of what he was doing and of the impossibility to delude himself by attributing to it the value of a game. He took the little bottle out of his pocket, opened it, took out the piece of paper and tore it into tiny pieces. He crushed the bottle under his heel. As he was leaving, it seemed to him that he had acted like a madman, he was just unable to understand it out yet.

….

The train lunged forward, and this thrust seemed to him like a delightful contrast to his own inertia. What else was the train to him but that which had a direction, a goal, a will, just like the nurses’s passion and his parents’ concern? All of a sudden, he thought that it would have been nice to keep going like this for all of his life. Greater, if not more mysterious forces would have followed the train, the nurse, his parents, and he would have believed in them with the same trust and the same delight. He saw himself as a soldier in torn up clothes, wounded and hungry, part of an army, whose leaders and whose war, he knew nothing about, a beggar thrust into a poverty he was neither responsible for nor aware of; rich of a wealth of which he had not earned a single penny; elevated to a power he had not sought out; a priest in a church whose rites he did not know; dead in the end because of a catastrophe he had neither foreseen nor wanted to avoid. The noisy shifting of the train on the switches, the regular and fast beating of the wheels, the whistle that tore through the silence of the countryside, the very landscape fleeting backwards on the other side of the glass windows, stimulated the rhythm of his thoughts. Yes, now he had become part of a vast, whirling and powerful current in which he was just a blade of grass that could do nothing but allow itself to be dragged along, barely hoping to float all the way to the end. And he abandoned himself to it trustingly, with his eyes closed, like he had abandoned himself a few days ago into the nurse’s arms.
….

But the train, always following the slope, came out into an opening and, at the bottom of the gorge, above two smaller mountains completely covered by forests, Luca saw the towering summit of a mountain, snow white, that seemed very tall to him. The clouds had dissipated in the sky, and the sun was shining on that faraway snow making it glow. At that time, he did not even know why, at the sight of that intact whiteness, majestic and solitary, a sudden exaltation took over him. The idea of being transported and allowing himself to be transported trustingly toward an unknown destination came back to him; but this time, it was partially modified by the new sense of being transported and allowing himself to be transported toward that snow that was so high and so white. He started looking at the mountain with his eyes wide open; and the more he looked at it, the more he felt grow in him that trusting drunken exaltation. He understood that there was no objective reason to feel so happy just because he could see the snowcapped summit of a mountain; and yet, he could not help but realize that it was precisely that view that was putting into motion the mechanism of his deepest hope, which had been blocked for so long. Almost without intending, he turned to his mother and asked, “And the nurse?”
….

Luca closed his eyes. At that same instant, the train entered into a tunnel, letting out a long mournful whistle. When Luca reopened his eyes, he only saw darkness, while a wet wind blew into his face from the tenebrous walls, mixed with spraying water and vapor clouds. Echoing in the tunnel’s vault, the clanging of the wheels seemed to him like a monotonous and exalted voice that was always repeating the same words. It also seemed to him that he could make out these words. They were the same ones, full of hope, that had accompanied him day after day in his slow healing after he had woken up from his delirium; and he understood that, from now on, not just the bustling of a train in a tunnel or the whiteness of the snow on top of a mountain, but all things, would have a meaning for him and would speak to him in their mute language. Then, with another whistle, the train reemerged into the light of day.

Translation: Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day

A rainy evening in NYC, Marion Wolcott Post, 1939

This is Bora Mici’s original French to English translation of the end of Simone de Beauvoir’s travel journal America Day by Day, or L’Amérique au jour le jour in French. In 1947, Simone de Beauvoir spent four months travelling around the US, and she was most impressed by New York City, where she spent most of her time. She was struck by how intellectuals and artists in the US were so marginalized and so lonely. And American idealism is something she muses over, both praising it and criticizing it in this particular passage and throughout the book. In light of a philosophy podcast (Parole de philosophe) I recently listened to about George Orwell’s 1984 and the importance of Newspeak and thought crimes in explaining the current climate of irresolvable contradictions, in which the crises of individual privacy and the culture wars are slowly eroding factual reality and the reliability of science, I reflected on Simone de Beauvoir’s text and how American idealism has created a post-truth society where individuals are more and more disenfranchised by rising new technologies, social media and clickbait political messaging. In wanting to impose our will upon the facts, we have created a grand illusion of persistent denial and have lost our grasp on what is a shared reality. Are we all being brainwashed or can we think for ourselves? Do we still have a commitment to truth or do we think everything is relative and open to interpretation? How do we distinguish trends from what really matters? What kind of a world do we want to live in and what values do we want to impart to each other and to future generations?

L’Amérique au jour le jour, excerpt translated from French into English by Bora Mici

Columbus Circle, Broadway, Times Square. Four months have gone by. It’s the same crowds, the same taxis, cars, the streaming of the lights. The drug-stores and the high-rises have not lost any of their magic. I know why I love them. There is a fascinating mirage that takes shape through the conveniences and generous abundance of this civilization: that of an existence that is not consumed through its maintenance and that could be entirely used with the goal of surpassing it. Eating, commuting, clothing oneself, all this is done without any effort and without spending too much time: starting from there, anything could happen. My dizzying attraction to America, where the nearby memory of the pioneers still roams, is that it seems like the realm of transcendence; contracted in time, magnificently expansive across space, its history is that of the creation of a world. That’s what moves me in the high-rises: they shout out that man is not a stagnant being, but that he is momentum, expansiveness and conquest; and in the shameless profusion of the drug-stores, there is a poetry that is just as hopelessly passionate as in a baroque church; crude being has been caught in the trap of man’s desires; he affirms the power of his imagination upon matter. New York, Chicago reflect the existence of this demiurge with imperious dreams, and that is why they are the most human and exciting cities that I know. There is no room here for the gloomy wisdom of the petit-bourgeois in his slippers whose only project, as he expresses it for example in the famous sonnet on happiness “is to wait for death pleasantly at home.” Dedicating yourself to such a wait is already death. In this way, Americans are very much alive: they live with life in mind and not death; they are not satisfied with inertia; everyone is judged based on their actions; in order to be you have to do. The large metallic bridges, the buildings, Grand Central, Park Avenue, the airports, the roads, the mines are the confirmation of this faith.

It will be difficult for me to be separated from these great visions of hope; however, I also know their false attraction. Life is exhausted through its maintenance in this country too. “I have been out since 6 a.m.,” a taxi driver was telling me around 10 p.m. yesterday. “Imagine how badly I want to go home.” I remember the rush towards the New Jersey ferryboat. All of my friends have told me how difficult the workdays are in this city where the distances are so great; particularly women who have to keep up a job and a household and are worn out when evening comes; often I have seen them too exhausted to say yes to going out or to enjoy it. I have also understood that people don’t drink so much out of obsession; they need a pick-me-up at the end of the afternoon. And the most common cause of death in New York is heart disease.

That’s not all. One has the exciting feeling that anything could happen. But what happens in reality? What do people do with their time and the money they’ve earned? It goes without saying that I have not met any of the leading classes, those that study, invent, go into business, fight; but they only make up a small minority. Most Americans are similar to the ones with whom I have rubbed shoulders: they allow their life to go round in circles. They have neither the taste nor a feeling for collective life; they are not concerned about their individual fate either. That is where the sadness I have felt among them comes from: this world full of generous promise crushes them; and its splendor soon becomes sterile because there are no men to dominate it. All civilizations offer man the diversion of “the banality of daily life,” but what is specific here is the extent to which this diversion is systematically organized. Neither his education nor the social setting in which he grows exist in such a way as to enable the individual to discover his interiority. He becomes conscious of himself not only as a body made of flesh and blood but as an organism that protects and prolongs an arsenal of mechanical devices: he goes from one floor to another in an elevator, he commutes on the subway, speaks on the phone, writes with a typewriter, sweeps with a vacuum cleaner; canned food factories, refrigerators, electric stovetops come between his food and his stomach; between his sexual desires and their satisfaction, there’s a whole paraphernalia of moral principles and hygienic practices. Society gets a hold of him as soon as childhood. He learns to look outside of himself, in the other, as a model for his behaviors; that’s where what’s called American conformity comes from. In reality, individuals are just as different, just as separated from one another in the new as in the old world, but for the former, it is easier to find the means to escape their singularity and to avoid the sentiment of the “original abandonment;” or maybe they don’t find it, but they look for it more obstinately. Like everyone else, they experience boredom, dissatisfaction, doubt, but they try to rationalize their anxiety by setting out their “problems;” instead of relying on their solitude, trying to surpass it by deepening it, they cling resolutely to what’s given; they see the source of values and truth in things and not in themselves; their own presence is just a fluke to which they don’t want to attach any importance. That is why they are interested in the crude result, not in the mental process that begets it, just like professor T’s students who did not want the proof of a formula. In the same way, they think they can isolate the part from the whole, as shown by the investment in specialization that is prevalent in technology, science and culture. In Hegelian terms, we can say that the negation of the subject leads to the triumph of the understanding on the Spirit, that is to say the triumph of abstraction. And that is why in this country that seems so inclined toward the concrete, the word abstraction has so often been on my lips; the idolized object loses its human truth and becomes an abstract thing, for concrete reality is that which includes both an object and a subject. That is the paradox of all positivisms, of all pseudo-realisms that depart from man in order to affirm things; they miss the thing itself and only produce concepts.

What I have often felt in listening to their jazz, in talking with them, is that the time itself in which they live is abstract. They respect the past, but as an embalmed monument. The idea of a living past that is integrated in the present is foreign to them. They only want to know a present that is cut off from the flow of time; and the future in which they project themselves is one that can follow mechanically, not one in which a slow maturation or sudden explosion implies unpredictable risks; they believe in the future of a bridge, of an economic plan, but not in that of an art or a revolution. Their time is “the time of the physicist,” a pure exteriority that is coupled with that of space. And because they refuse duration, they also refuse quality; it’s not just for economic reasons that “artisanal arts” don’t exist in America; even during free time as part of domestic life, one does not seek a qualitative achievement; one cooks food and conserves fruits as quickly as possible; in all fields of life, you have to hurry up out of fear that the result is already out of date at the moment it has been attained. Cut off from the past and future, the present is without substance; there is nothing more foreign to Americans than the idea of seeing the moment as compounded time, a mirror of eternity, and of grasping it in order to understand eternal values or truths; the content of a moment seems precarious to them just like the moment itself. Because they do not accept that truths and values become, they also don’t know how to preserve them in the movement that surpasses them; they disown them. History is a great cemetery here; men, works and ideas die almost as soon as they are born. And every individual existence also tastes like death; from one minute to another, the present is just an honorary past; you have to constantly refill it in order to hide this curse upon it; that’s why Americans like speed, alcohol, thrillers, sensational news; they feverishly ask for one thing after another because they don’t rest on anything. But here, like everywhere else, life repeats itself day after day; so people have fun with gadgets, and because they lack real projects, they cultivate hobbies; through this obsession, they pretend to make daily habits their own by their own choice. Sports, movies, comics offer diversions. But ultimately one has to contend precisely with what one was trying to escape: the dry crux of American life is boredom.

Boredom: loneliness too. I’ve mentioned it a thousand times and it’s true: the people I rub shoulders with are alone. Because they are too afraid of and run away from their original solitude, because they run away from themselves, they do not really have a good grasp of themselves; so how could they give of themselves? How could they receive in return? They are, however, open and welcoming, they are capable of tenderness, passion, sentimentality, politeness; but it is rare for them to know how to build a deep love, a lasting friendship. They are far from being heartless, and yet, their relationships remain superficial and cold. They are far from lacking vitality, momentum, generosity, and yet, they still don’t know how to dive into the enterprise of their lives; it’s for the same reasons. Being Julien Sorel or Rastignac requires taking charge of oneself and not looking away from oneself; there are very few real ambitious people here; they idolize heroes, capriciously by the way, but when it comes to oneself, one does not wish to do more than rise one or two steps in the social hierarchy; at most, if a young man wishes to distinguish himself, it will be as a citizen and not as a man; he will not dream of standing out from the given world, a dream that is symbolized by the treetop on which Julien Sorel is perched, the summit from which Rastignac arrogantly looks down at Paris. These desires of grandeur are a source of many disappointments and often underscore petty faults, which Americans do not have; they possess the virtues that come from an indifference as to themselves; they are neither bitter, nor haunted, nor mean, nor jealous, nor egotistical. But they do not have an internal fire. As much as they have gotten lost in the object, they find themselves without an object. They experience the “original abandonment,” which their civilization pretends to mask, in a different way. It is even this contrast between their secret fragility and the things they’ve build with so much pride that makes them so pathetic.

It seems to me that it is because of the abstract atmosphere in which they live that money assumes such a disproportionate importance here. These people are neither miserly, nor petty; on the contrary, these are the faults for which they criticize the French; they do not desire money in order to accumulate it, they spend easily, and for the sake of others as much as for themselves; giving comes naturally to them; they are not materialists either; they do not go after great fortunes in order to satisfy extravagant appetites. If money is for many of them the only goal, it’s that all of the other values have been reduced to this common denominator; it has become the measure of all human accomplishment, when it is only an abstract sign of real wealth. It is because they do not know what makes up and affirms concrete values that Americans are satisfied by this empty symbol. In reality, they are not satisfied by it; excepting the high-flying capitalists, they are as burdened by their dollars as by their free time activities. I guess it’s one of the reasons why American women have come to stand in for idols: the dollar is too gloomy of a god. Man is not unhappy to justify his work and his earnings by dedicating them to another being of flesh and blood. But the cult of the woman, just like the cult of money, is nothing but a stand-in. The destiny of the American man would not be meaningful unless he were able to give a concrete content to the abstract entity that is his freedom. Here we have a vicious cycle because, in order to fill this empty freedom, it would be necessary for him to change the political and social conditions in which he lives and which are the ones that beget his inertia. Certainly, thousands of Americans work toward breaking this cycle. And of course there are also thousands of other Americans to whom my reflection here do not apply at all or only a little. But as long as we can allow for generalizations, most of them are victims of this machinery: running away from boredom and loneliness gets them stuck in boredom and loneliness; because they wanted to get lost in the world, they have lost their grasp upon it.

One of the characteristics that has most stood out to me is to what extent they refuse to question both the world and themselves. They need to believe that Good and Evil are clear-cut categories and that the Good will easily be achieved. I had sensed this from the beginning of my stay. But recently, I have had clear confirmations of it. Among other things, I caused a scandal among practically all of the students, without exception, at Columbia, Yale, Harvard, when I spoke to them about the dilemma presented in Rousset’s book, les Jours de notre mort. On what criteria should rely those who are in a position of responsibility for saving the lives of two or three of their friends who have been deported to a concentration camp? They stubbornly responded: “No one has the right to decide on the life of human beings” or “What right do they have to choose?” If one retorted that not choosing would have meant not saving anyone, that at any rate, the positive act of saving two lives was more valuable than a murderous abstention, they would shut down; I believe that, as for them, they would have preferred to let the whole group perish instead of taking up a difficult initiative. Or rather, they could not even imagine a situation where they would have had to admit evil, which, however, is the only way to fight it. One refuses, for example, even when one shows good will, to establish clearly the current conflict between justice and freedom and the need to come up with a compromise between these two ideas; one prefers to deny the existence of injustice and the lack of freedom. One does not want to admit that the complexity of the factors in action creates problems that go beyond all virtuous solutions. Evil is just a residue that we will be able to eliminate gradually through a more rigorous application of institutions which are healthy in themselves. That’s what so many idealistic souls believe; and if this optimism seems too easy, then we will choose to create an obsession that must be eradicated: the Soviet Union is Evil. All we have to do is destroy it, and we will find ourselves again within the realm of the Good. This is what explains that these very students, who were so respectful of human beings, quietly discuss nuking Russia.

If I have formulated so many criticisms while thinking again about all these things, why is it still so painful for me to leave? First of all, one could formulate the same criticisms about our European civilization, about the French civilization, which I will return to, other, different criticisms but equally depressing ones. We have other ways of being unhappy, inauthentic, that’s all: my judgements about Americans during this journey are not at all accompanied by a feeling of superiority. I see what they are lacking, I do not forget what we are lacking. And beyond what I love and what I hate about it, there is something fascinating about this country: it’s the innumerable chances and risks it runs after, and the world with it. All human problems are at play at a mind boggling scale: and it’s largely the solution that will be found here that will retrospectively shine a light of pathos upon them or drown them in the night of indifference. Yes, I believe that is what moves me so much just before my departure: here is one of the places in the world where the future of mankind is being played out. To like or not to like America: these worlds have no meaning. America is a battlefield, and we can only become passionate about the fight it wages within itself and its stakes would have us forego all measure.

Translation: Excerpt from Zeno's Conscience, Part 1

René Magritte, Le donateur heureux, 1966

This is Bora Mici's original translation from Italian into English of an excerpt from the 20th-century novel La Coscienza di Zeno, Zeno's Conscience, by Italo Svevo. The following are actually two excerpts published as one continuous reflection on life, whether it is fair or unfair, good or bad, and all the things in between. The main character, Zeno, is a person full of good resolve, who has lived his life in between the extremes he describes and who eventually comes to the conclusion that he has always lived according to love and that has saved him, despite his many vacillations, distractedness and little jealousies. The novel is a somewhat picaresque journey into Zeno's reflections as he finds himself in quirky and pathos-laden situations which he manages with improvised dexterity.

Excerpt from La Coscienza di Zeno, Part 1,  translated by Bora Mici   

The next day, the obstetrician who was taking care of Ada asked for the help of Dr. Paoli, who immediately pronounced the word that I had not been able to say: Morbus Basedowii. Guido told me about it, describing the illness in a learned fashion and sympathizing with Ada who was suffering a lot. Without any ill will, I thought his compassion and science were not great. He assumed a heartfelt look when he spoke of his wife, but when he dictated letters for Carmen, he displayed all the joy of living and imparting lessons; he also thought that the man that had lent his name to the illness was the Basedow who had been Goethe’s friend, while when I looked up that illness in the encyclopedia, I immediately figured out that it was someone else.

What a greatly important illness that of Basedow! For me it was most important to have learned about it. I studied it in various monographs and thought I had just discovered the secret of our organism. I think that in many people, just as with me, there are periods of time when certain ideas occupy and encumber the whole mind, shutting out other things. But the same thing happens to society too! First it lives on Darwin, after having lived on Robespierre and Napoleon, and then on Liebig or maybe Leopardi, when it’s not Bismarck that rules over the whole cosmos!

But I am the only one who lived on Basedow! It seemed to me that it had brought to the fore the roots of life, which is made in the following way: all organisms can be distributed on a line, on one end of which is the illness of Basedow, which implies the most ample, crazy consumption of the vital force at a precipitous pace, a rapid heartbeat, and at the other end are the organisms who are impoverished because of an organic avarice, destined to perish of an illness that would seem to be exhaustion but in fact is sedentariness. The right balance between the two illnesses is at the center and is improperly designated as good health, which is nothing but a stopover. And between the center and one extremity—that of Basedow—fall all of those who are exasperated and whose lives are consumed by great desires, ambitions, pleasures and work too, and on the other those who only put crumbs on their plate and save in preparation for that abject longevity that would seem a burden to society. It turns out that this burden is also necessary. Society goes forth because the Basedowans push it forward, and it does not fall because the others hold it in place. I am convinced that if we wanted to build a society, we could have done so in a much simpler way, but this is how it’s made, with the goiter at one of its ends and edema at the other, and there’s no fixing it. In the middle are those who are starting to develop either a goiter or an edema and along the whole line, for all of humanity, absolute good health is missing.

…………………………

“Life is hard and unfair!”

It seemed to me that I was not allowed to say a single word that might suggest any kind of judgement on my part about him and Ada. But it seemed to me that I still needed to say something. He had ended up speaking about life and had saddled it with two predicates that were not guilty of excessive originality. I was able to come up with something even better precisely because I had decided to criticize what he had said. So many times we say things following the sound of the words, as they relate to each other by chance. Then, as soon as you try to see if what was being said was worth the breath expended, sometimes you discover that the random association has given birth to an idea. I said, “Life is neither good or bad, but original!”

When I thought about it, it seemed to me like I had said something important. Labeled in such a way, life seemed so new that I began looking at it as if I had seen it for the first time with its gaseous bodies, fluids and solids. If I had described it to someone who was not used to it and therefore lacked our common sense, he would have been breathless before the enormous structure without a purpose. He would have asked me, “But how do you put up with it?” And having been informed about every single detail, from those celestial bodies hanging up there so that they can be seen but not touched all the way to the mystery of death, he would have certainly exclaimed: “Very original!”

“Life is original,” laughed Guido. “Where did you read that?”

I did not think it was important to reassure him that I had not read it anywhere because otherwise my words would have been less significant to him. But the more I thought about it, the more original I found life. And it was not even necessary to look at it from the outside to see that it was put together in such a bizarre way. It was enough to remember all the things us men expect of life in order to see it as so strange as to arrive to the conclusion that maybe man ended up inside of it by mistake and that does not belong there.

Without having colluded about the direction our walk would take, we came to the incline of via Belvedere just like before. Once he had found the short wall on which he had laid down that other night, Guido climbed on it and lay down just like before. He was singling softly, perhaps always oppressed by his thoughts, and he certainly meditated on the inexorable numbers of his accounting. As for me, I remembered that I had wanted to kill him in that very place, and comparing my feelings then with my current ones, I was admiring once again the incomparable originality of life. However, I suddenly remembered that just a little while ago, our of an ambitious whim, I had railed against the poor Guido, and on one of the worst days of his life. I dedicated myself to a search: without great pain I was witnessing the torture that my careful accounting was inflicting on Guido, and a curious doubt came over me after a curious memory. The doubt was whether I was good or bad. The memory was provoked suddenly by the doubt, which was not new: I saw myself as a child and I was dressed (I am certain) in short skirts, and I raised my face to ask my mother who was smiling: “And I good or bad?” At that time, the doubt must have been inspired in the child’s mind by many of those who had called him good and the many others whom, jokingly, had qualified him as bad. There was no reason to wonder why the child had been burdened by that dilemma. Oh, the incomparable originality of life! It was amazing that the doubt that had already been inflicted on the child in such a puerile way had not been resolved by the adult, who had already crossed into midlife.

In the foggy night, exactly in that place where I had wanted to kill him once, that doubt deeply anguished me. Certainly when the child had felt that doubt err in his mind, his head only recently liberated from the bonnet, he had not suffered much because children are told that one can be cured from being bad. In order to free myself from so much anguish, I wanted to believe it again, and I succeeded.

If I had not succeeded, I would have had to cry for Guido and for myself, and for our most sad life. The resolution renewed the illusion! The resolution was to stand by Guido’s side and to collaborate with him in the growth of his business, on which his life and the life of his family depended, and all this without any kind of profit for myself. I glimpsed the possibility of rushing, desiring and studying for him, and I accepted the possibility of becoming, in order to help him, a great, an enterprising, a brilliant negotiator. That’s what I thought on that foggy night of this very original life!

The Man Who Wore the News

Barbara Kruger, We don't need another hero, 1987

This is Bora Mici's original text, written in Italian, which may or may not contain a few minor mistakes, and which will be difficult to translate with an AI translator. It presents a parody of a person who does not exist in real life by employing vocabulary learned while listening to the news in Italian and to Italian-language podcasts. As a result, it might give you the impression that the character the story describes is modeled on real-life characters, since he embodies the spirit of the times, but I assure you he does not exist. The text began as a mere vocabulary-learning exercise and transformed into an endeavor of literary ambition. I had tried this kind of exercise once before using French vocabulary on a French test at the University of Maryland, and I found that it gave me a great amount of playful liberty with words. For this particular piece of writing, I just used the words in the order they appeared in my notes, which also represents a certain kind of underlying logical structure, since the sources I drew the unknown vocabulary from mostly discussed current events from around the world.  

Giovanni è una persona smaccatamente attendista. Il suo attendismo è inviso ai suoi amici che non vogliono più fare da sponda per lui. Hanno cercato di ricompattarsi come gruppo, ma in fin dei conti, Giovanni pensa soltanto a se stesso. Una volta ha fatto costruire uno striscione sul quale era scritto “Giovanni prima di tutti gli altri”, proprio come quei leader populisti che vogliono mettere in avanti la priorità del proprio partito e di conseguenza del proprio paese. Gli amici di Giovanni hanno deciso di fare un piccolo smistamento e provare di toglierlo dal gruppo. Hanno deciso di andare al mare con lui, di metterlo su un gommone col maglioncino giallo che gli aveva confezionato la nonna, molto amata da lui, di dargli alcune zucchine grigliate per poter nutrirsi durante lo smarrimento meritato, ma lui ha capito subito il tranello in cui lo cacciavano ed ha intimato che non fosse coerente con la loro amicizia disinteressata e che non valeva. E poi sarebbe stata una soluzione contingente. Invece di andare al mare, Giovanni ha intrapreso di leggere un testo ostico, ad alta voce, e farne una carrellata per gli amici e mandarli a quel paese perché potessero scovare dalla sabbia della sua coscienza un tesoro facoltoso di cui lui era già prettamente assuefatto. E doveroso menzionare che si rifaceva ai suoi maestri più colti di scienze umane, compresa la psicologia e la letteratura. I suoi amici avevano pensato di proporgli così un capestro da cui non poteva più slegarsi, ma lui si dimostrò propositivo, al netto, dobbiamo aggiungere, di voler sempre ribaltare le carte in tavola. Non si sapeva più dove lo avesse celato quel gruzzolo di sapienza che aveva acquisito col tempo adagio adagio, e forse sarebbe stato il caso di fare appello ad un umarell per dare le istruzioni che occorrevano ai ragazzi. Per forza, si trovavano costretti ad edificare il loro baluardo di avanguardia contro la sapienza faticosa e preponderante di Giovanni. Di recente, lo ritenevano piuttosto istrionico e non del tutto canonico, anche se Giovanni gli esortava di appuntare senza barare tutto ciò che cercasse di trasmettere a loro. Perorava che, dopo tutto, la resilienza vuol dire piegarsi senza spezzarsi, e Giovanni se ne intendeva di queste cose. Puntava la distensione e la riscossa del gruppetto, anche se era chiaro che allargava le maglie della giustizia a suo compiacimento. Era un furbo che faceva finta di andare alla volta dei suoi addetti, ma forse non se ne accorgeva nemmeno della sua duplicità. Al netto del suo atteggiamento protagonista, li considerava i suoi soci più cari e voleva plasmare la loro amicizia, adibirla, senza però millantare, mi raccomando, in un ateneo. Auspicava la loro adesione, e d’acchito, non sembrava troppo esigente. Purtroppo agiva sempre a scapito degli altri e intasava le loro vie d'uscita. Li faceva intrappolare nel suo gorgo ai prezzi stracciati, che campeggiavano in bella mostra su un affiche con una dicitura sgradevole annunciando la degenza, semmai non gli si fosse dato retta. Brandendo il cartellone dal balcone che dava su un piccolo spiazzo fuori casa sua, invocava i suoi discepoli, cercando come sempre di accreditarsi con loro, intercalando nei suoi discorsi gustosi ed espansivi questioni di atteggiamenti sindacabili da parte dei suoi rivali. Siamo lì, diceva, tutto fiero di sé, dobbiamo accendere un faro su queste velleità raffazzonate di quel tizio che sempre ordisce ai danni della buona giustizia, di cui noi stessi abbiamo fatto le lodi, pensando di aver imbroccato l’argomento anche se tutti sospettavano che non fosse altro che una macchietta bislacca e se la ridevano sotto i baffi. Aveva un’ossessione morbosa col delitto dell’appropriazione indebita, cercava sempre aggravanti, ma siccome non voleva essere percepito nemmeno come un foriero di verità indiscutibili, era chiaro o no, che si trattasse di un fifone che incollava la propria immagine di sé, come uomo da bene, sulla realtà poco gradevole. Così, si era ritagliato un posticino sicuro in mezzo al caos quotidiano della sua città e badava sempre ad appropriarsi una quota di mercato che andava sempre incrementando, accolta in sottintese scoppiettate di riso. Seppure la sua casa si trovasse vicino alla Borsa e potesse essere informato da subito di potenziali flessioni, lasciava intendere di collocarsi dall’altra parte della barricata per far sì che fosse caldeggiato da quelli che curiosavano nei suoi affari. Spesso con i suoi soci intavolava discorsi a far tremare i polsi, scattenandosi delirante come se fosse in procinto di vedersi costretto a firmare un accordo svantaggioso. Che stramboide, diceva la gente. Altri ammiravano il suo impeto dilagante e dicevano sottovoce, ma che figo, ammazza! La calca si faceva sempre più fitta quando saliva in cattedra anche se non gli riusciva mai di fare altro che scalfire la superficie dell’argomento prescelto, conseguendo così di trovarsi conciato male davanti alla ciurma, che comunque si beveva le sue parole come vino sfuso. Si era messo in testa di debellare la reputazione dei suoi nemici, inalberandosi e squadernandosi, spalancando le braccia per far intravedere le sue ascelle sfrangiate e sbiadite dal tanto sudore che ci metteva per confutare le menzogne sulla sua persona, tra cui si potevano annoverare quelle sul afflato fatiscente dei rivali. Perorava spesso della sua impresa, che beninteso, non mirasse il tornaconto, bensì si impegnasse a non lasciare le cose andare in tilt, che si desse per spacciato lo sforzo quotidiano della gente per edificare quel tempio alla sapienza. Dal suo leggio che fungeva da posto investito dell’autorità suprema, quasi quasi si potrebbe dire che avesse raggiunto il prestigio del papa quando professava la carità e l’umiltà dal balcone della San Pietro, rivolgendosi alle masse nel suo discorso famosissimo dell’urbi et orbi. Insomma, Giovanni non cercava di tirare le somme di quanto fossero divenuti colti i suoi coetanei, bensì raccomandava loro un cambio di marcia per ottenere quella margine risicata in più, che avrebbe permesso loro di bollarsi gente di cultura. A questo proposito faceva aleggiare una nube florida di speranza che somigliava, se esaminata da vicino, ad una spocchiosa avvampata che sbaciucchiava in aria, che col passare del tempo, sarebbe poi divenuta una rimbambita bitorzoluta che nessuno avrebbe più adorato, ma che tuttora sbottava di scatto i suoi rincari e sbuffava di non essere riconosciuta a pieno titolo come la guida suprema per antonomasia. Non si sapeva a chi dovesse questa sua convinzione, quale mutuato nascondesse nel cassone della sua macchina con una marcia in più. Tuttavia era calzante la sua passione senza fronzoli, come lui credesse, che riusciva comunque a gasare la folla. Però come ve lo potete immaginare, si diceva intorno, che fosse un bacchettone, che avesse un pallino per la mistificazione, che esercitava tramite grossolani strafalcioni sui propri pargoli, costringendoli a farsi il mazzo. Siccome nessuno voleva che si riprendesse dallo smacco cagionato dalla loro andatura a rilento, si stipulava il conclamato divieto di impicciarsi platealmente nei affari del capo, che tra l’atro, si deve riconoscere una volta per tutto, portava i vestiti nuovi del re. In ultima istanza siamo costretti anche a dargli retta, tirando un grandissimo fiatone di sollievo, perché il suo indole non era del tutto congeniale al coinvolgimento in malefatta. Si vedeva chiaramente che aveva soltanto bisogno di convincersi che poteva portare a termine le sue illusioni, frutto di un farneticare sfizioso, per poi defilarsi con un’umiltà sentitissima e dare spago allo stuolo ferale che gli pareva dignitoso e bonario, quando invece si trattava di arraffoni disillusi, che ormai si potevano perfino vantarsi di essere colti come lui.

Translation: Com'è profondo il mare by Lucio Dalla

Lucio Dalla, Com'è profondo il mare, Album Cover, 1977

This is Bora Mici's original Italian to English translation of the 1977 Italian song Com'è profondo il mare, How deep is the sea or The sea is so deep by the Italian signer-songwriter Lucio Dalla. This song tells the story of humankind from antiquity to nowadays evoking the sea as the immovable guardian of its secrets. You can listen to the original song here.

Com'è profondo il Mare, Lucio Dalla, translated by Bora Mici

It’s us, we are many beside

We hide at night
Afraid of the motorists, the journalists
We are the black cats, the pessimists
We are the dark cracks
And we have nothing to eat
The sea is so deep
The sea is so deep

Dad, you once were a great shot
Of quail and pheasant
Drive away these flies
They drive me mad
They won’t let me sleep
The sea is so deep
The sea is so deep

It’s useless, there’s no more quorum
There’s no more decorum
God or whoever in his name
Is trying to divide us
To hurt us, to make us sink deep
The sea is so deep
The sea is so deep

Through the power of a bribe
Man became someone
Brought the dead back alive, unlocked prisons
Blocked six trains with their wagons
Uplifted the poor man for a moment
To a role that was hard to maintain
Then he let himself fall again, shout and weep
Alone in the middle of the sea
The sea is so deep.

Then by itself the shout became a drumbeat
And the poor man like lightning in the sky ready to meet
Began a war to conquer
That joke of the land
That his great heart was going to till deep
The sea is so deep
The sea is so deep

But the land was taken away
Including that still on his britches
He was thrown into houses, into ditches
I don’t really remember
Then a story about manacled members, beatings
And experimental surgery
How deep is the sea
How deep is the sea

In the meantime a mystic, maybe an aviator
Invented sympathy
And everyone got along newly
The beautiful and the ugly
With some damage to ugly
Who on a piece of glass
Were given the opportunity
Themselves to see
How deep is the sea
How deep is the sea

In the meantime the fish
From whom we are all descended
Looked on with curiosity
At the collective drama of this world
Which undoubtedly seemed wicked to them
In their great sea
How deep is the sea
In their great sea
How deep is the sea

It’s obvious that thinking bothers some
Even if who thinks is mute like a fish
Actually a fish
As a fish is hard to seize
Because he is protected by the seas
How deep are the seas

Obviously those who command
Are not inclined to poetic distinctions
Thought like the ocean
Cannot be seized
It cannot be fenced with ease

So they are burning the seas
So they are killing the seas
So they are humiliating the seas
So they are bending the seas

Translation: Michel de Certeau Vocal Citations

The Little Mermaid, Copenhagen, by Edvard Eriksen, 1913

This is Bora Mici's original translation from French to English of Vocal Citations from Michel de Certeau's theoretical work, The Invention of Everyday Life, L'invention du quotidien. In this text, Certeau distinguishes strategies from tactics, with strategies belonging to an institutional authoritative and closed framework, while tactics are the unpredictable moves that individuals effect within these prescribed systems, individualizing their experience of them and turning them upside down on their heads. The translated passage discusses the evanescence of vocal interventions within a codified system of language and writing by taking inspiration from Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe and the protagonist's first encounter with Friday. Whose voices are we going to hear? This argument is especially pertinent in the current social-media- commentary-dominated landscape where anyone can create their own glose but an invisible algorithm chooses which ones become prevalent.   

Citations de voix, Michel de Certeau by Bora Mici

Vocal Citations

Robinson Crusoe indicates himself how a fault was introduced into his scriptural empire. In fact, for a period of time, his enterprise was interrupted and haunted by an absence that returns to the island’s shores, a man’s naked footprint on the beach. The border line cedes to the stranger: the instability of the marker. On the margins of the page, the trace of an invisible fantom (an apparition) comes to upset the order built by a capitalizing and methodical labor. It makes Robinson experience “fluttering thoughts, whimsies, and a terror.” The bourgeois conquerer is transformed into a man who is “beside himself,” becoming a savage himself by way of this “wild” index that reveals nothing. He dreams and his dreams are nightmares. He loses his certainty in a world governed by the great clockmaker. His reason abandons him. Ousted from the productive asceticism that stood for meaning, he experiences diabolical days on end, possessed by the cannibalistic desire to devour the stranger or by the fear of being devoured himself.

So a stain appears on the written page—like the scribble of a child on the book that represents the authority of a place. A lapsus insinuates itself into language. The appropriated territory is altered by the trace of something that is missing and is placeless (like the myth). Robinson will reassume the power of dominion when he has the ability to see, that is to say to substitute the index of a lack with a tangible being, a visible object, Friday. Then he will find himself within his order again. The disorder is due to the index of a past and passing thing, to the “near nothing” of a passage. The violence that oscillates between the impulse to devour and the fear of being eaten, according to Hadewijch d’Anvers, is born out of our ability to name “the presence of an absence.” Here, the other does not constitute a system that is hidden below the one written by Robinson. The island is not a palimpsest where it is possible to reveal, decrypt or decode a system covered by an order superimposed upon it, but that’s of the same type. The passing trace does not have its own text. We cannot enunciate it other than through the discourse of a proprietor, and it does not live anywhere else but in his space. The only language of difference is Robinson’s own interpretive delirium—dreams and “whimsies.”

The novel dating from 1719 already points to the non-place (a trace that eats away at the edges) and a fantastic modality (an interpretive insanity) of that which will interject as a voice in the field of writing, even though Daniel Defoe deals with the silent marking of the text by a body part (a naked foot), and not the voice itself, which represents language marked by the body. A name is already given to this form and these modalities: they speak, says Robinson, of something “wild.” The naming, here like everywhere else, is not a mere depiction of reality: it’s a performative act that organizes what it pronounces. It means in the same way that we mean for someone to go away. It does what it says, and constitutes the savageness that it declares. Since we excommunicate by naming, the name “savage” simultaneously creates and defines that which the scriptural economy situates outside of itself. And its essential predicate immediately comes to affect it: the savage is evanescent; he is marked (by stains, lapsus, etc.) but he cannot be written. He changes a place (he upsets it), but he does not establish one.

In such a way, the “theoretical fiction” invented by Daniel Defoe points to a form of alterity as it relates to writing, a form that will also impose its identity upon the voice, since, later, when he appears, Friday will be faced with an alternative due to a long history: either cry out (a “wild” outbreak that calls for the interpretation or the corrective action of a pedagogical or psychiatric “treatment”) or turn his body into an instrument of the dominant language (by becoming “his master’s voice,” a docile body that implements the order, embodies a reason and obtains the status of being the substitute of enunciation, no longer the act but the doing of another’s “saying.”) As for the voice, it will also insinuate itself as a trace in the text, as an effect or a metonymy of the body, a fleeting citation like the “nymph” of G. Cossart—Nympha fugax, a passing fugitive, an indiscreet revenant, a “pagan” or “wild” reminiscence in the scriptural economy, an unnerving noise from another tradition, and supplying a reason for the production of interminable interpretations.

We still need to define some of the historic forms imposed upon orality as they relate to its ousting. Because of this exclusion, for reasons relating to neatness and economic efficiency, the voice essentially appears as the figure of citation, which is analogous, in the field of writing to the trace of the naked foot on Robinson’s island. In the scriptural culture, the citation unites effects of interpretation (it allows for the production of a text) with effects of alteration (it disturbs the text). It plays between these two poles that, in turn, characterize these two extreme figures: on the one hand, the pre-text-citation, that serves to produce text (a presumed commentary or analysis) from relics chosen from an oral tradition that functions as an authority; on the other hand, the reminiscence-citation that traces within language the unusual and fragmented return (like a breaking voice) of structuring oral relationships but which are suppressed by writing. It would seem these are borderline cases outside of which we can no longer speak of the voice. In the first case, citations become the means of the proliferation of the discourse; in the second case, they escape it and cut it up.

If we were to only keep in mind these two options, I would call one of them the “science of the fable” (from the name that has so often been attributed to it during the 18th century), and the other “returns and turns of the voice” (since its returns, like swallows in springtime, are accompanied by subtle modalities and procedures, in the same way as the turns and tropes of rhetoric, and can be translated into paths that squat in unoccupied places, into “movies for voices” says Marguerite Duras, into ephemeral tours—“a little walk and then we’ll go.”) The sketch of these two figures can act as an introduction to the examination of oral practices, while specifying some of the aspects of the framework that allows for voices to still speak.

Translation: Michel de Certeau The Machinery of Representation

Edouard Manet, Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1863

This is Bora Mici's original translation from French to English of The Machinery of Representation from Michel de Certeau's theoretical work, The Invention of Everyday Life, L'invention du quotidien. In this text Certeau distinguishes strategies from tactics, with strategies belonging to an institutional authoritative and closed framework, while tactics are the unpredictable moves that individuals effect within these prescribed systems, individualizing their experience of them and turning them upside down on their heads. The translated passage discusses how the law and customs write themselves on other bodies only to reproduce themselves and make believe. In seeking a socially acceptable identity, people become signs and sacrifice their bodies to these systems of representation that precede them. I am not yet sure if this discussion is useful in order to describe a reality that is inescapable or if it hints at a system of transmission that we can transcend. The tone of the passage certainly seems critical but it seems to ignore the human aspect of this experience. Stay tuned for Les machines célibataires, a commentary on Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors.   

La Machinerie de la Representation, Michel de Certeau by Bora Mici

The Machinery of Representation

Two main operations characterize these interventions. The first one aims at removing from the body a superfluous element, deemed unhealthy or not aesthetic; the other adds to the body what it is missing. Therefore, the instruments in question can be distinguished according to the actions they carry out: cutting, pulling out, extracting, removing, etc. or inserting, placing, attaching, covering, assembling, sewing, articulating, etc.—not to mention those that substitute missing or defective organs, such as valves, pacemakers, limb prosthetics, screws implanted in the femur, artificial irises, bone substitutes, etc.

Either from the outside or from the inside, they correct an excess or a deficit, but compared to what? Just like when we remove leg hair or paint our eyelashes, cut or implant hair, this subtractive or additive activity goes back to a code. It keeps bodies within a norm. In this sense, clothing itself could be considered the instrument thanks to which a social law secures bodies and limbs for itself; it regulates and trains them through changing fashion trends as in military maneuvers. Cars, just like corsets, mold bodies and make them conform to a postural model. These are orthopedic as well as orthopraxic instruments. The foods a cultural tradition chooses to sell in a given society’s markets model just as much as they nourish bodies; they impose a form upon them, a tonality that has the value of an ID card. Glasses, cigarettes, shoes, etc. in their own way reconstitute a physical portrait. Where do we draw the line between the machinery through which a society’s living members represent themselves and when they become its representations? Where does this disciplinary apparatus that displaces and corrects, adds to and removes from malleable bodies, subjected to the instrumentalisation of so many laws, end? In reality, bodies become bodies only when they conform to these codes. Because in what circumstances does a body exist when it is not written upon, reconstituted, cultivated, identified by the instruments of a social symbolic? Perhaps, at the extreme confines of these indefatigable writings, punching holes in them through lapsus, there remains only the cry: it escapes us, it escapes them. From the first to the last cry, something else bursts out, which makes up the other of the body, at times badly brought up and in-fans, which we find intolerable in the child, the possessed person, the madman or the mentally ill—a lack of self-control like the baby’s shouting in Jeanne Dielman or that of the vice-consul in India Song.

This first operation of removing or adding is therefore just the corollary of another, more general one, which consists in making the body say the code. As we have seen, this work “realizes” (in the English sense of the term) a social language; it gives it effectivity. What a great task it is to make bodies spell out an order through “machinization”! The liberal economy is no less efficient than totalitarianism in carrying out this articulation of the law through bodies. It just uses other methods. Instead of oppressing groups in order to better mark them with the hot iron of a single power, first it atomizes them and then multiplies the tight exchange networks which make individual units conform to the rules (or the “trends”) of socio-economic and cultural contracts. We can ask ourselves why this works, whether in one instance or in the other. What desire or what need leads us to make our bodies into the emblems of a law that serves to identify? The hypotheses that respond to this question demonstrate in yet another way the strength of the bonds that tools construct between our childish “natures” and social discourses.

The credibility of a discourse is what makes believers get going. It produces practitioners. Making believe is making do. However, through a curious circularity, the ability to make—to write and mechanize bodies—is precisely what makes believe. Because the law is already applied through and on bodies, “incarnated” in physical practices, it can be approved and make believe that it speaks in the name of the “real”. It becomes believable in saying, “Reality itself dictates this text to you”. We believe what we think is real, but this “real” is assigned to the discourse by a belief that provides it with a body marked by the law. The law constantly needs an “advance” of bodies, a capital of incarnation, in order for it to make believe and be practiced. Therefore, it becomes inscribed because of what has already been inscribed: it’s the witnesses, martyrs or examples that make it believable to others. It imposes itself in this way as the subject of the law, “The ancients have practiced it,” or “others have believed it and done it,” or “you already carry my signature in yourself.”

In other words, the normative discourse does not “work” unless it has already become a narrative, a text articulated upon a reality and speaking in its name, that is to say, a storied and historicized law, told by bodies. Its implementation as a narrative is the necessary presupposition for it to produce other narratives and make believe. And tools ensure the passage from discourse to narrative through interventions that embody the law by making bodies conform to it, and in such a way, accredit it with the ability to be recited by the real itself. From initiation to torture, all social orthodoxy makes use of instruments in order to give itself the form of a history and to produce the credibility attached to a discourse articulated by bodies.

Another dynamic completes the first and becomes entwined with it, that which pushes living beings to become signs, to find in a discourse the means by which to become a unit of meaning, an identity. From this opaque and scattered flesh, from this outstanding and murky life, transitioning finally to the clarity of a word, becoming a fragment of language, a single name, readable to others, citable: this passion lives in the ascetic who is armed with instruments against his flesh, or the philosopher who does the same through language, “losing his body,” as Hegel used to say. But everyone is a witness, thirsty to have or to finally be a name, to remain one who is called, to transform into a saying, even at the cost of his life. This textualization of the body corresponds to the incarnation of the law; it supports it, it even seems to be its foundation, at any rate it serves it. Because the law puts it into play: “Give me your body and I will give you meaning, I will make you the name and the word of my discourse.” The two problems are related, and maybe the law would have no power if it did not rely on the obscure desire to exchange one’s flesh with a glorious body, to be written, even if mortally, and to be transformed into a recognized word. Only the cry, apart or ecstatic, rebellion or inner fire of that part of the body that escapes the law of named things, stands in opposition to this passion for becoming a sign.

Perhaps all experience which is not a cry of joy or pain can be assembled under an institution. All experience which is not displaced or undone by this rapture is captured by the “love of the censor, “ collected and used by the discourse of the law. It is channeled and instrumentalized. It is written by the social system. We ought to also look at cries in order to find that which is not “reconstituted” by the order of the scriptural toolbox.

Translation: Salvatore Quasimodo, Alleyway

Alleyway in Talin, Estonia by Bora Mici

This is Bora Mici's original translation from Italian into English of the 20th-century Italian poet, Salvatore Quasimodo's poem Vicolo, or Alleyway. I chose to translate this poem because of its evocative imagery, which I found to be almost painterly in its choice of descriptive elements. I also enjoyed its simplicity, which is characteristic of Quasimodo. He marries an emotional rendering with a visual one, which all great artworks achieve. The alleyway is both typical and personal in this poem. We can all imagine what it is like to have been there. 

Salvatore Quasimodo, Vicolo by Bora Mici

Alleyway

Sometimes your voice calls me back,
and I don’t know what skies and waters
awaken within me:
the sun’s web that comes apart
on your walls which at evening were
a swinging back and forth of lamps
from the shops open late
full of wind and sadness.

Another time: a canvas cloth flapping in the courtyard
and at night a cry could be heard
of puppies and children.

Alleyway: a cross of houses
that softly call to each other,
and don’t know it is frightening
to be alone in the dark.

Art and Chemistry, A Reflection on Life and Energy

Bora Mici, oil paints palette and turpentine, 2014

This is Bora Mici's original text, written in Italian language, which may or may not contain some minor mistakes, since I am still learning this language. The text itself reflects on a thought my chemistry professor in high school shared with me about how artists are impressive because they create something out of nothing. At the time, I did not think much of it but over the past few days, I have challenged myself to use the subjunctive mood as much as possible, and this reflection on art, chemistry and added value is what emerged. You will follow my line of reasoning as to why we need to come up with a sustainable energy model for a better future. 

Ho una pagina bianca davanti a me e la devo riempire. Direi che si tratta già di una sfida di per sé. Una volta, dopo la lezione, il mio professore di chimica al liceo mi ha fatto un complimento e malgrado le sue parole incoraggianti e meravigliate non ne fossi rimasta convinta. All’epoca io ero molto impegnata negli studi, ed ero una brava studentessa in tutte le materie, anche se la pittura era la mia preferita. E tutti se ne accorgessero tranne di me. Dunque, un giorno, dopo che avessimo terminato le ore di classe, il mio professore di chimica, che era uno di quei tizi che cercavano sempre di star simpatici agli studenti, mi ha confessato che fosse rimasto sbigottito da una realizzazione dirompente. Aveva capito che i chimici non partono mai dal nulla per creare cose nuove, mentre gli artisti sì.

Allora, io direi che abbia ragione e no al contempo. Sebbene gli artisti partano da uno sfondo svuotato e ci mettano tutta la loro creazione sopra, che supponiamo, si inneschi dalla loro più profonda interiorità, non è che non godano di un supporto già esistente. In primis, benché possano essere convinti della loro sola autorevolezza, di essere un sistema autarchico a sé stante, gli artisti, come tutti quanti, si ispirano a un input, suscitato per forza da un fattore esteriore a loro, ad esempio un paesaggio oppure anche un sogno. Anche i sogni e le cose che ci immaginiamo non sono ermeticamente isolati dal mondo che ci circonda. Quindi gli stimoli esteriori si mescolano all'individualità di un'artista per far nascere un'opera d'arte che solo quella persona avrebbe potuto creare. 

Per non confonderci le idee, propongo che ci limitiamo ai pittori, quelli che dipingono un quadro sopra una superficie che consideriamo a prima vista priva di contenuto. E in questo non avrei risposto al mio professore di chimica che non avesse ragione. Però, in quanto chimico, avrebbe dovuto rendersi conto dell'importanza delle attrezzature di cui si servono i pittori per realizzare i loro dipinti. Non si può negare che troviamo tra di loro parecchi materiali creati con l’aiuto della chimica e della scienza e la sperimentazione, tra cui i pennelli con i peli naturali e quegli artificiali, le tele di cotone o lino ricoperte di uno strato di gesso liquido che fa in modo che la tela non assorbisca i colori, e non dimentichiamo i tubi dei colori stessi che vengono confezionati per la massima pigmentazione e perché la pittura possa perdurare attraverso i secoli. Forse il mio professore di chimica mi stava spingendo a riflettere proprio su questa interdipendenza tra artisti e chimici. Sara contento di sapere che ci sia riuscita vent’anni dopo e che la sua incitazione non sia andata sprecata. Quando mi ha condiviso la sua riflessione, per quanto l’avessi considerata con occhio scettico, non mi ero spinta fino alla conclusione dove sono arrivata oggi.

Adesso complichiamo un po' l'argomento, per inoltrarsi nel cuore del problema. Se prendiamo la teoria del valore aggiunto in termini economici, chi tra i chimici e gli artisti creano più di valore partendo da una basi materiale che poi trasformano per ottenere un nuovo prodotto? Sarebbe avventato pensare che non esistano anche artisti che scelgono di sfidare i limiti stessi degli attrezzi che impiegano, oppure quelli che ne inventano di nuovi. Per quanto possiate insistere che i chimici svolgono un lavoro essenziale e a fini pragmatici, perché appunto manipolano le sostanze e i componenti della vita, e forniscono gli ingredienti di altri prodotti più finiti, gli artisti e le persone creative sono i loro clienti più fedeli e non si stancano mai di mettere a frutta e di mostrare il potenziale del lavoro scientifico in ambiti diversi, dalla tecnologia all'uso innovativo di materie prime. 

Finalmente affronteremo un altro problema di tenore economico che in qualsiasi modo mi sembra difficile a dipanare e che ci permetterà una riflessione sulla totalità dell'esistenza umana sul pianeta terra. Mettiamo che il valore aggiunto sia un’invenzione umana molto importante per il nostro equilibrio psicologico che ci aiuti a sentirsi valorizzati e ci dia l’impressione di poter crescere questo valore che portiamo anche agli altri, insomma che ci permette di sviluppare le ricchezze e fare progressi. Come facciamo a bilanciare l’equazione che pone da un lato le risorse limitate del pianeta e dall'altro questo valore aggiunto che ci dà l’illusione di poter progredire indefinitamente? Possiamo veramente creare qualcosa dal nulla come ha accennato il mio professore? 

Affinché questo si verifichi dobbiamo essere in grado di arginare a seconda della nostra volontà i poteri immensi della fisica quantica e far sicché una particella subatomica liberi un'energia tremenda che riusciamo a canalizzare, a conservare e a mobilitare a nostro volere. Perciò dobbiamo riuscire a creare più energie di quanto ne usiamo senza sprecarle. Però per quanto ne capisca io, e non sono un'esperta, secondo le leggi della termodinamica, l’energia si può soltanto trasferire, non si può ne produrne di più che ce ne sia già presente nell’universo, ne cancellarne o far sparire una parte. Dunque la realtà è che non possediamo mai niente ma prendiamo in affitto oppure prestiamo al mondo tutto ciò che riceviamo da lui durante la nostra vita per un intervalle limitato. Niente ci appartiene davvero a eccezione del tempo che abbiamo a disposizione. Dobbiamo capire come fare in modo da conservare lo stile di vita che vogliamo sia la norma e che ci possa permettere la convivenza più pacifica possibile come società unita.

Translation: Francis Jammes, It's going to snow

Edvard Munch, New Snow in the Avenue, 1906

This is Bora Mici's original French to English translation of the poem "Il va neiger" or "It's going to snow" by the French 19th- to 20th-century poet Francis Jammes. Even though it is currently the beginning of spring in the Washington, DC area, I was feeling somewhat nostalgic for winter's silence and was drawn to this poem in Georges Pompidou's anthology of French poetry. What I like about this poem is its background of snow falling and the constant and enduring everyday quality of the objects it describes. It evokes a sense of peace and comfort and quiet and eternity, and a reckoning with our innermost strivings to change the world around us by labelling things and thus seeking to possess them and make our imprint on them.  

Francis Jammes, Il va neiger... by Bora Mici

It’s going to snow…

It is going to snow in a few days. I recall
a year ago. I remember my sad thoughts
by the fire pit. If you had asked me though: what is it?
I would have said: let me alone. It’s nothing at all.

I have thought long, last year, in my room, I remember
whilst the heavy snow fell out the door,
My thoughts were naught. Now as before
I am smoking a wooden pipe with an end piece of amber.

My old chest of drawers still smells good of oak,
I was stupid because so many things

could not change and it’s just posing
to want to estrange the things we cannot stoke.

So why do we think and speak? It’s
our tears and kisses, they, don’t speak, [funny thing;
and yet we understand them, and the steps
of a friend are sweeter than sweet words linked.

We have baptized the stars without much thought
and they did not need a name, and the numbers,
which prove that the pretty comets in dark slumbers
will pass, all the same, will not make them change their lot.

And even at this moment, where are my sad fits
from last year? I barely remember them.
I would persevere: Leave me alone, it’s nothing ahem,
if you came into my room to ask me: what is it?

Message to the World, An Existentialist Meditation

This is Bora Mici's original short analysis in French of the reason why people like to imitate each other and want the same things. The conclusion indicates a different, more subtle, approach to life.

Un soupçon

Je voudrais expliquer ici les causes latentes du désir mimétique, identifié comme concept par René Girard dans son livre éponyme. Le désir mimétique nous pousse à vouloir imiter les autres. A titre d’exemple, dans le cas de l’engouement pour les smartphones, on dirait que tout le monde a voulu le même produit en même temps, ce qui a explosé les ventes et a fait du smartphone un objet à la fois indispensable, pour les consommateurs, et rentable, pour les créateurs. Mais qu’est-ce qui se cache derrière cette impulsion de briguer tous les mêmes choses en même temps, de se ruer comme des moutons de Panurge pour avoir du dernier cri? Tout d’abord il y a la vanité. Notre vanité et par conséquent notre estime de nous-mêmes dépendent du regard d’autrui, comme l’a défini Jean-Paul Sartre au sein de sa philosophie existentialiste, qui veut que l’existence précède l’essence.

Tout simplement, on tire l’idée qu’on se fait de notre propre valeur de ce que nous pensons les autres pensent de nous. Au cours du déroulement de ce mécanisme subtil intersubjectif, on se plie à notre nature innée en tant qu’êtres sociaux, qui ont besoin de s’accorder pour mieux vivre ensemble et pour donner un sens aux choses de la vie. Donc, on essaie de nous cerner nous-mêmes à travers la façon qu’on perçoit que les autres nous cernent à leur tour, et comment ils cernent d’autres personnes encore. Cela fait un effet domino, et tout d’un coup, on se retrouve tous avec la même idée.

C’est en établissant des normes en commun et définissables qu’on est mieux placés pour réussir notre coexistence. En conséquence, on joue des rôles prédéterminés qui nous aident à établir et maintenir un ordre et souvent une hiérarchie sociale, c’est-à-dire on assigne des essences préalables à notre identité sociale. Ces rôles, selon Sartre, relèvent de la mauvaise foi. Par exemple, nous nous disons qu’on est des employés de banque, alors qu’avant tout, on devrait revendiquer notre liberté radicale et ne pas se conformer à l’ordre établi sans réflexion.

En même temps que nous souhaitons épater nos collègues par notre adhésion bien adaptée aux règles sociales, on reste aussi des êtres foncièrement individualistes qui veulent surpasser nos homologues. On assure donc notre primauté aux yeux de nos semblables en empruntant des chemins qui sont socialement acceptables, soit la concurrence sous-entendue et bien valorisée. Donc on va tout faire pour garder ou améliorer notre statut social parce que ça nous permet une meilleure situation économique et aussi un meilleur contrôle sur comment on est perçus, par les autres, mais surtout par nous-mêmes. Un tel atout fait en sorte qu’on puisse mieux s’intégrer et donc satisfaire notre besoin social, et en même temps de se distinguer pour mieux nourrir notre envie de vaincre. On dit qu’on est notre pire critique, mais en même temps on est notre meilleur agent de pub, engendrant chez autrui le désir d’être comme nous, de vouloir ce qu’on possède, de se voir à travers nos yeux.

C’est pour toutes ces raisons qu’il faut plus se laisser absorber par le moment présent. On a moins d’attentes et on anticipe moins, deux façons d’exister qui sont anxiogènes, et que les smartphones par exemple suscitent en nous demandant d’être toujours connectés à un monde virtuel. On devrait par contre profiter pleinement de la vie, qui se déroule au présent. De toute façon, il faut aussi apprendre du passé et se projeter dans l’avenir parce que la vie en société l’exige, mais je pense qu’on devrait minimiser ces deux aspects de vivre et être plus sereins. Ce sont les querelles du passé qui nous hantent dans l’avenir et ce sont nos aspirations pour protéger notre propre avenir qui peuvent conduire à des guerres insensées. On devrait être moins rancuniers, moins égoïstes et plus généreux et indulgents. On doit comprendre que lorsque nous regardons dans les yeux d’autrui on cherche avant tout l’amour. Mais comme on ne sait pas aimer parfaitement puisque on est tous différents et avons vécu des expériences divergentes, on est toujours obligés de pardonner à autrui et de faire de notre mieux pour communiquer avec honnêteté. Après tout, la vie en société est une projection en continu.