I am stunned by the beauty of this prose

I have started on the task of translating the second volume of Bocheński's Roman Trilogy and, on my second day, I am struck dumb by the enormity of the task before me and the sheer beauty of the prose.

Listen:

"Summer heat, high noon. The hour when the heat was the greatest. The city seemed white-hot. All traffic in the streets had come to a stop. The sour smell of wine wafted from the taverns. Between the hot stones and the blinding light, the air became stifling. People locked themselves up in their homes: it was time for the noontime siesta.

There was always the question of whether the windows should be opened or closed. When closed, they protected against the heat, but when opened, they gave the pleasant illusion of a breeze. A brief moment of reflection before settling down on the bed. Lazy heaviness and an uncertain sense of reality. What about this window? The hand all by itself made a slight movement and pulled the latch with an unclear intention. Only then it turned out that one shutter would remain closed and the other slightly ajar.

The sun was shining through the opening between the shutters. The low light in the bedroom resembled the twilight in a forest. It had the intimacy of dusk or dawn, the mood of shameful concealment. Such conditions need to be created for a sensitive girl at the beginning of a relationship. Suddenly, this light seemed very favorably chosen in view of Corinna’s expected arrival.

She entered. In a thin tunic, not fastened with buckles, but worn loosely. She was nimble, light, and long-haired. She hadn't twisted her hair around her head or braided it into an elaborate knot but had loosened it so that it fell naturally and gracefully and revealed from time to time a flash of the white of her bare neck. She seemed unpretentious, fresh, almost girlish. And yet it was a stylish entrance, and the poet Ovid later wrote that it may well have been how Lais had looked when she visited her lovers. It was high praise indeed because the Greek Lais was regarded in that field as the most perfect ideal that the world could ever see. Ovid also made another simile. He wrote that Corinna, approaching the bed, seemed similar to Semiramis, which expressed not so much her charm as her sensuality. But that was what he wrote later, and when he saw her in that bedroom barely penetrated by the sun's rays from behind the slightly open shutters, he just thought that Corinna looked gorgeous.

So she entered as beautiful and as alluring as Lais and as lascivious as Semiramis, with the bewildering simplicity and confidence only possible in a queen or a very young person. In fact, it was not even self-confidence, but rather something unconscious and unintentional, the power of nature itself, the litheness of her figure, the ease of her stride, the freshness and openness of her entire existence. This appearance and manner so free of any planning and pretense were themselves an act of bold defiance. And if Ovid had been asked at that moment why he so vehemently desired to rip her tunic off her, he probably would not have come up with an ingenious association with Lais and Semiramis but replied: because she was Corinna.

Her sheer tunic accentuated this titillating presence. In fact, the rare muslin did not prevent the appreciation of the charms of her flesh, but Corinna wanted to keep it on nevertheless. Her lover thus met with soft resistance, not so resolute as to create an unpleasant impression of a clash or dissonance, but as natural as was required by the law of the sexes. Rather, this resistance shone through symptoms of gentleness and delightful weakness, and it consisted less in opposition to the lover and more in the inner confusion of the woman. She resisted and fought, wanting to lose as if there had been a lurking traitor in her fortress from the very beginning, who would eventually come to control the situation and—joyfully surrender. It was only years later that Ovid realized that such a course of the love game belongs to the canons of the art, but on that day, still very young, he felt that this way was the most pleasant and that Corinna was a wonderful girl.

Now the pulled-off tunic lay on the floor. The girl stood naked in the dim light coming through the shutters, and Ovid studied her for a while. She allowed herself to be studied, thereby satisfying another canon of the art, which neither of them knew at the time.

The young poet was stunned by her sight. He was overwhelmed by her flawless beauty—flawless beauty—or so he later described it in his first collection of erotica. He knew that a woman must be beautiful to affect a man, and the more beautiful, the better. He thought the perfection of beauty mattered most, and he had no doubt that that was what overwhelmed him. In reality, however, he was dazzled by Corinna’s defiant presence, that natural freedom and litheness of figure with which Corinna had entered. And perhaps the most important cause of his bewilderment was that she had entered so boldly upright, and now that he had stripped her bare, she did not dodge him. She did not bow down, did not sit down, was neither restrained nor ashamed and did not even lie down to cover her nakedness by quickly clinging to her lover; but stood there openly and proudly. A woman looks different lying down. It is a more specific and somewhat less realistic show. The mystery of a nude worthy of the canon is attained only when the naked woman appears standing. Ovid did not understand what bewitched him and thought it had to be something similar to the beauty of a statue: impeccable perfection."

Reading Divine Julius Then and Now

Jacek Bocheński Divine Julius, or, How to Become a God in Four Easy Steps Mondrala Press 2022

978-99987-937-4-3 (EPUB) 978-99987-937-5-0 (MOBI) $9.99

Imagine this.

The year is 1979. Eastern Europe groans under Russian occupation. All borders are closed, though each year, a few refugees manage to escape—some over the wild border, others with the help of some administrative crook. Those who do, know full well that their decision is final: once they make their escape, they will be branded traitors and enemies of the people and will never be allowed to return.

Now imagine this.

Somewhere in this Eastern Europe, a boy of 16 is packing his duffle bag for a trip to the West, a trip which he knows is a permanent and irrevocable abandonment of his native land. He leaves behind family, friends, girlfriends: people he will never be able to see again; why, he won’t even be able to write or call. He leaves behind old places he will never see. And his dog. He goes into a world he has never seen, to make a life for himself among people who will not understand anything he has lived through.

And—what does he pack in that duffle bag of his?

Not much. What does a boy of 16 own—or need? A change of clothes, a shaving set—this last really an aspirational thing.

And three books: The Odyssey—how appropriate; a novel he was reading at the time; and Jacek Bocheński’s Divine Julius. This last— for him is a book with the status of The Holy Writ, on par with Homer.

Going out into the unknown, dangerous, frightening world, he takes Divine Julius with him. Why?

2

It is hard to overestimate the importance of Divine Julius for the generation of men and women coming of age in Eastern Europe in the 1960s and 1970s.

The book started as a series of articles in a literary journal: something apparently politically innocuous: commentaries on Latin classics.

Asked recently why he decided to begin his commentaries on the classics with Caesar, Bocheński says the choice was accidental: Caesar’s De Bello Gallico was the book he happened to pick up from the shelf when he looked for something to read on a quiet afternoon. But the project soon became something more serious: a thoughtful reading of the entire catalog of literature from that period. And then: an effort to understand the times, the people in it, their passions, their ambitions, their fears, their compromises.

Both the style and the insights of the essays earned them an enthusiastic critical response, and soon the series of articles was re-edited as a novel. Suddenly, there was a lot of buzz about it: people discussed it and passed copies of the manuscript from hand to hand even before it appeared in print. Many critics pronounced it the book of the year. A prestigious literary award was preannounced.

Then: kaboom! Someone at the highest echelons of power read it and disliked it. A secret ukase came from on high: the book was to be killed. There would be no award. Those responsible would be sacked. The book would appear in a small bibliophile edition. It would make a brief appearance in bookstores and then disappear.

Copies were rare and became valuable. People tracked them down, bribed booksellers to get one from storage, then passed them secretly to each other like contraband.

Why?

3

Sometime in 1963, an article appeared in the American magazine TIME reporting that a book about Julius Caesar had caused a political stir in Eastern Europe and been as good as banned.

“Why?” the article asked. “Was it perhaps an attack on someone in power? But who?” Well, the journalists wrote, Caesar had been bald, so that must be our clue. Perhaps it is a lampoon of a bald East European politician. Who could that be? Cyrankiewicz? Or Gomółka? Or… Khrushchev?

Readers in Eastern Europe laughed and sadly shook their heads. Caesar had been a good-looking, cultured man: well-read, endowed with a healthy sense of humor, a literary star. Comparing any of those three brutal, primitive men to Caesar would have been a compliment, not a criticism.

We, in Eastern Europe, knew that the meat of the book, the thing that had caused its ban, was not the figure of ruthless Caesar (bald or otherwise) but all that stuff in parts two and four: 1) Caesar’s observation that one easiest overthrows a republic by gutting her institutions while maintaining their appearance for show; 2) the portraits of the also-rans, the smaller men, sometimes prominent, sometimes talented, who traded in their political principles for a cut of the proceeds; and 3) Cicero’s letter to Atticus in which he questions whether such a thing as a good social class can possibly exist.

(In his letter, Cicero referred to the Roman elites who called themselves Optimates, that is, “the best,” but who, in his experience, proved not to be. But a contemporary East European might well have extended this critique to the Marxist concept of “The Leading Role of the Proletariat”—the theory that a “good, revolutionary social class” did exist and that to the extent that the communist party represented that class, it was justified to hold absolute power within the state).

But Bocheński went further: following ancient usage, he claimed that the political choices faced by Caesar’s opponents were moral. That is, the decision whether to acquiesce in tyranny (as Nepos and Atticus did by simply choosing not to oppose it), or to cooperate (as Cicero did, then did not, then did again, the ever-flipping fish), or to flat-out oppose it (like Cato) was not merely a matter of convenience or pragmatism, but a matter of ethics. It is not clear what Bocheński meant by this—and maybe this ambiguity was especially important to us. Did he mean that an ethical person cannot accept any political system other than a republic? Or was his message more nuanced and relevant to us: that because an ethical person is not permitted to lie, he or she therefore may not participate in a conspiracy against truth? If a republic is not a republic, or an election is not free, or the ruler is not just, then an ethical person may not give them his moral acquiescence by saying that they are?

In other words, we in Eastern Europe read Divine Julius because it was a book relevant to our reality and our personal choices. Unlike Caesar and TIME, we didn’t care about the hairstyles.

4

Asked about it today, Bocheński says: “I did not intend the book to be a criticism of East European politics of my time. I meant it to be an analysis of all politics and all governments of all times.”

And indeed, the Soviet system has fallen, and yet, Bocheński’s analysis remains relevant today: look around you and see how educated and talented and prominent men today give up their principles and plot to overthrow their republic in the hope of advancing their careers in the process. For them today, as for Caesar’s men then, the republic is just so much antiquated nonsense ripe for the picking.

5

The subsequent publishing history of Divine Julius became a barometer of the political realities of the moment. Whenever the communist party thought it appropriate to allow a little freedom, the book would appear, usually in small print runs (which quickly sold out), only to disappear again when things swung back the other way, and the party decided that that had been enough freedom for the moment.

You see, tyrannies like to play with “the mood valve”: when the opposition becomes too dangerous to handle, and the situation starts looking like things are about to blow up, a smart tyranny releases some pressure by letting the opposition have a thing: a book or a play or some innocuous street demonstration. It then pronounces itself as liberally minded and in agreement with the aspirations of the opposition—and fires a particularly odious minister or two. And then asks: since everything is improving, why continue to rebel? Then, when the pressure eases, the tyranny arrests all those who have come to the fore and turns the screws down again.

6

Paradoxically, the fact that Divine Julius became embroiled in political struggles in Eastern Europe had a salutary effect on its criticism there. While American and West German critics were free to discuss the books’ political implications, this made their work easy and their output trivial: just talk about the way the book’s topic irritates the country’s leaders.

But literary critics in Eastern Europe, precisely because they were not allowed to mention the hairstyles of their leaders, or Cicero’s damnable sellout of his republican principles, had to write about the book’s literary qualities: the way its style emulates that of Caesar, for example; its deep—often hangman—irony; its hasty breathlessness; and—its profound sadness: in the end, Cato the Younger becomes god by losing the battle of his life; and Caesar becomes god but fails to vanquish his greatest enemy.

Divinity... is much overrated.

Tom Pinch

The Ardennes National Park

Luxembourg

Talking about Revolution

A dear multilingual friend wrote to me

I finally read The Leopard earlier this spring. I can't say it's a favorite, but it's certainly a masterful novel. Di Lampedusa makes keen psychological observations. It did leave me with the question of what was the source of the Prince's deep-seated discontent, and why his daughters never married.

To which I replied:

Ha, you put your finger on the central issue of The Leopard: the sadness of life. Some cultures elevate this to an aesthetic principle. When the French asked Chopin what it was in his music that they found so strangely and otherworldly moving, which they felt but couldn't name, he said (this is a real quote): "oh, that is a uniquely Polish feeling, we have a word for it, żal, there is no word for it in French." (Chopin grew up perfectly bilingual, so he would know about the absence of "żal" in French).

But he was wrong about this: certain other cultures do celebrate this feeling, too, not just Poles. The Japanese. The Turks. (Is it accidental that the nations that do are former great powers who have fallen?) It is a kind of sadness for something beautiful that passed away unfulfilled. It isn't "regret" (which is mainly for things that went wrong, or you wish hadn't happened). Rather, it describes a situation when you meet a gorgeous person in passing but life prevents anything from happening and years later you think about it, wishing it had happened.

And this is Fabrizio's position: his life is coming to a close and he reflects on all the things that could have been and weren't and never will come again. He is aging and now that he is old, beautiful women only pretend they find him attractive. They say this because he is cute, and they like him, but, truth be told, they would not bed him now. Likewise, his class is coming to an end and will become politically irrelevant and all the culture it has created will die and will be replaced by Andy Warhols and Banksys.

The novel is personal but also sociological and political. It describes events that usher in a dramatic change in Sicily, The world turning topsy-turvy. For generations, Don Fabrizio and his kind dominated the state. This was unjust and unfair to 90% of the population, but (a lame excuse, I know) it created all the classical art and architecture and poetry and music which we, the grunt successors cannot reproduce (for lack of time and resources), but can enjoy. And while he has obviously thought his class was stupid (he looks at them during the ball and calls them "monkeys", he recalls his King being a profound mediocrity) he loved the beauty of that life.

He recognizes that things must change. (Tancredi's remark that "for things to stay the same, everything must change" is way over-hyped in critical literature: for one thing, it is wrong; things did not stay the same; new men came to power; the culture has changed as a result; things are different now. Not the first time I am brought to think that literary critics are stupid). Don Fabrizio recognizes this, and is sad about it, but he accepts it because he knows that for most human beings in Sicily (and the world) the new order will be an improvement. So he does nothing to oppose it. He just reserves for himself the right to feel sad about it and not to be part of the revolution. His inactivity is the tithe of loyalty he pays to the old system.

As to your specific question about why his daughters never married, the answer should be blindingly obvious: stemming as they do from the ancient aristocracy, they refuse to marry beneath their rank; the problem is that men who "rank" with them (in birth, manners, culture) have become poor and irrelevant; and the relevant men are beneath them because they are a) low born b) uneducated c) uncultured. You see, Bunny, men marry down, women marry up. There was no "up" these girls could marry. So they didn't.

But now that you have read The Leopard, may I insist you should listen to the audiobook of Steven Price's "Lampedusa?" I never thought anyone could beat Lampedusa (or Death in Venice). But Steven Price did. Listen:

"Mirella Radice was slender, with small shoulders, and a long soft neck with a fuzz of brown hair at the nape. He had found her quiet and submissive when Giò had first brought her to meet them two years ago but soon he had come to recognize the quick arched eyebrow, the slight lift of her lip when Giò spoke outrageously, and he had liked both the discretion and the dryness of her company. She had a habit of taking in a room as if from the side of her vision, and of turning her face slightly as one spoke so she might seem to be listening more intently. Her voice was low, her laugh deep and rich as a laugh heard from underwater. When she smiled, he felt old but did not mind it, for there was such purity of emotion in her. He could not recall a time when his own pleasure had been untainted by loss, by sadness. Mirella was educated, but uncultured, and it was this he and Licy had set to correct in her. No life can be lived deeply, Licy told her upon their first meeting, if it is lived outside of art."

Like a laugh from underwater? This book is more gorgeous and more touching than the original. The audiobook version is also read absolutely gorgeously. (I listen to audiobooks while I fall asleep). May I send you a link to listen to it for free?