Words inside words – by Ouyang Yu
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A book is a suicide postponed.
EM Cioran
By the same knowing poison.
Laura (Riding) Jackson
While living, when dead.
Thomas Hardy
teach
yourself to fold & fold another day
may find you fitting neater into it
Jordie Albiston
It’s 7.30am. Dark, becoming light. Lighter. Had a dream last night. Several. Only one that I can remember. Driving a vehicle several storeys high. Through the city. Lost on the way.
For years, I have been living like a shadow. A shadow critic. A shadow novelist. A shadow poet. Living like a word inside a word. A shadow word.
I once did a translation for a client and delivered it in my usual fast and efficient manner. But she refused to pay, suggesting that my work could have easily been done by Google Translate. Instead of asking for money, I got a debt collector to act on my behalf without first prompting her. Soon enough, I got my money back, minus the collector’s commission.
All those translations I have done, commercial or literary. Commercial and literary. Until a voice says: No. We don’t need you anymore. We have Google Translate. From that moment on, I am wiped out from existence. And that seems to coincide with the coming of Coronavirus, and the coming of Cioran, too.
Lately, no books have been holding my attention like EM Cioran’s. This is a Romanian author I found in an anthology of foreign literature in Chinese translation. Back then, his translated name in Chinese was Qi Ao Lang, and the number of essays he’d had translated was extraordinary. The work was dark and powerful, with such a will to break with the rest of the world, to say no to all, that I remembered his name straight away.
Then, he became another man, translated as Xiao Hang. But the book translated, A Short History of Decay, was unreadable, not because of his writing, but because of the translation.
It was in early 2007 when I worked as a translator in a company in Fawkner that I found him. I had the kind of job in which I had nothing to do for weeks, till my manager came and handed me a piece of paper with a list of technical terms that required translation from Mandarin into English. It took me less than an hour to finish. There was nothing else to do except wait for the day to end at 5pm. Or go to the loo. Or go to the staff room for coffee or tea. Or contemplate what other kinds of tea to drink for a change. Or trawl through the internet to find things that interested me. No porn, of course. I avoided that at any cost. On the contrary, its utter opposite, philosophy, provided a constant impetus for me. Apart from my old favourites, I found someone in New Zealand, a migrant philosopher originally from Europe, and I bought his book. I have since searched in vain for his name and the title of the book – a pity at this stage of my life when memory is hardly there.
But one name that was missing from such Google lists as the 50 Most Influential Living Philosophers, or the 17 Most Influential Contemporary Philosophers, or the 50 Famous and Greatest Philosophers, was one that I had never heard of, but that immediately aroused my interest. That was EM Cioran. Words like suffering, decay, nihilism, and particularly pessimism, drew my attention. In fact, my search had been focused on pessimism-related philosophers because I wanted to find someone new, apart from my old favourites like Frederick Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer, to fuel my insatiable hunger for the dark and the bad and the impossible – nothing optimistic moves me in the least as it smells of false hopes, false promises, dishonesty, and impositions.
As a result, I bought his first book, On the Heights of Despair (1934), written at 23. A thin book, at times much impenetrable, it never ceases to move me. Over the years, I bought book after book by him, A Short History of Decay (1949), All Gore Is Divided (1952), The Temptation to Exist (1956), History and Utopia (1960), The Fall into Time (1964), The Trouble with Being Born (1973), Drawn and Quartered (1979), although one of his works that I really want to buy, The Notebooks (1997) is nowhere to be found. However, thanks to a friend who discovered the best Russian pirate website on which even a number of my books are freely downloadable, I was able to download a copy of Qi Ao Lang or Xiao Hang’s Cahiers (1953 to 1972), or The Notebook written in the original. And because it exists in an electronic format, I was able to enlist the support of Google Translate to collaborate with me in an effort to understand Cioran.
Every night, close to the time when I go washing my feet or my body, I stop to read him, copying one passage into Google Translate and reading the text immediately rendered in English. Then I copy the ones I like and save them in a file for my future use, not really knowing what to do with them. Although someone calls him ‘too quotable’[i] I am not into quoting everything or translating the entire book of 994 pages, despite the free-of-charge service by Google Translate.
I am lucky enough in that I have survived the dark age of paid translation to be able to enjoy the benefits of free translation. It feels like communism. What I’m proposing to do is include all those excerpts as they are found, with no page numbers, as the sequence of my storing is not always that neat and that organised. I do so knowing that one could do a keyword search and easily pin down any passages or paragraphs one wants to find in that pirate edition of the book. And I love the way fragments present themselves without being easily traced, like memory. I mean, who can fix a footnote in memory?
忧
Je ne m’intéresse pas à mes expériences, mais à mes réflexions sur elles.
I am not interested in my experiences, but in my reflections on them.
忧
Plus je vieillis, plus je me sens roumain. Les années me ramènent à mes origines et m’y replongent. Et ces ancêtres dont j’ai tant médit, que je les comprends maintenant, que je les «excuse» ! Et je pense à un Panaït Istrati qui, après avoir connu une gloire mon- diale, est retourné mourir là-bas.
The older I get, the more Romanian I feel. The years bring me back to my origins and plunge me back there. And these ancestors of whom I have spoken so much, that I understand them now, that I ‘excuse’ them! And I am thinking of Panaït Istrati who, after enjoying world fame, returned to die there.
忧
L’indifférence – idéal du forcené.
Indifference – ideal of the madman.
忧
Les penseurs de première main méditent sur des choses; les autres, sur des problèmes. Il faut vivre face à l’être, non à l’esprit.
First-hand thinkers meditate on things; the others, on problems. We must live facing the being, not the spirit.
忧
Je juge les êtres d’après ce qu’ils sont, non d'après ce qu’ils font. Un homme qui n’a rien écrit peut m’inspirer plus d’admiration que tel ou tel auteur connu que j’ai approché et méprisé.
I judge people by what they are, not by what they do. A man who has written nothing can inspire me with more admiration than such and such a well-known author whom I have approached and despised.
忧
Je disais, à un déjeuner, à un Italien que les Latins ne valaient pas grand-chose, que je leur préfère les Anglo-Saxons, que la femme italienne, française ou espagnole, quand elle écrit, n’est rien à côté de l’anglaise. «C’est vrai, me dit-il. Quand nous narrons nos expé- riences, cela ne donne rien, car nous les avons racontées devant témoins vingt fois au moins.»
I said, at a lunch, to an Italian that the Latins weren’t worth much, that I prefer the Anglo Saxons to them, that the Italian, French or Spanish woman, when she writes, is nothing next to the English. ‘It’s true, he said to me. When we relate our experiences, it doesn’t come to anything, because we have related them in front of witnesses at least twenty times.’ ▼
[i] Doyle, Rob ‘Winter in Paris’ The Dublin Review 2015. https://thedublinreview.com/article/winter-in-paris/
Image: Patrick Tomasso - Unsplash
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