We watch the fires of Port Said gleam,
As the Jews gazed at the Promised Land:
For we cannot disembark; it’s forbidden
— Apparently — by the Venice Convention
To those in the yellow quarantine pavilion.
We will not go to land to calm our anxious senses
Or stock up on obscene photos
Or that excellent tobacco from Latakia . . .
Poet, we’d have liked, during the short stopover
To tread for an hour or two the ground of the Pharaohs
Instead of listening to Miss Florence Marshall
Sing “The Belle of New York,” in the salon.
It would be nice to discover someday, in a forgotten trunk, a score by Fabre set to the verses of Levet — poor Gabriel Fabre, who sank into madness; he spent his last ten years in an asylum, abandoned by everyone. He had set to music Mallarmé, Maeterlinck, Laforgue, and even some Chinese poems, very old Chinese poems — one likes to imagine it was Henry Levet his neighbor who had offered to translate them for him. Musical settings without any genius, unfortunately, pale melodies — that should please the poets: the words were more important than the song. (We can very easily imagine that this generous modesty cost Gabriel Fabre his share of posthumous fortune, too concerned as he was to ensure the fame of others.)
For Sarah, the Cartes postales was a treasure as precious as the works of Pessoa — what’s more, she claims that the young Álvaro de Campos took his inspiration from Henry Levet, whom he had read in the Fargue and Larbaud edition. The figure of Henry, a dandy and traveler who died so young in the arms of his mother, moves her — one can understand why. In Tehran, in the deep Havana brown leather armchairs at the French Institute for Research in Iran, she told how as a teenager in Paris she loved ocean liners, the reverie of ocean liners, the Messageries Maritimes and all the colonial lines. Faugier would tease her by saying this was a boy’s passion, that boats, as well as trains, had always been the playthings of boys, and that he didn’t know a girl worthy of that name who was passionate about such things, steamships, heliographs, wind socks, buoys, the fat gold balls of compasses, embroidered caps, and the proud lines of a ship’s bow. Sarah admitted that the technical aspects were of only moderate interest to her (even though she was capable, she stated, of remembering the specifications of each ship, its size, tonnage, draught, speed), she loved above all the names of the liners, and especially their routes: Marseille–Port Said–Suez–Aden–Colombo–Singapore–Saigon–Hong Kong–Shanghai–Kobe–Yokohama in thirty-five days, twice a month on Sunday, on board the Tonkin, the Tourane or the Cao-Bang, 6,700 tons at the time of its shipwreck in foggy weather in front of the island of Poulo Condore, where it was headed to relieve the wardens of an atrocious penal colony off the coast of Saigon. She dreamed of those slow maritime itineraries, of discovering the ports and the stopovers; the luxury dining rooms with their mahogany woodwork; the smoking rooms, the powder rooms, the spacious cabins, the gala menus, which became more and more exotic with each port of call, and the sea, the sea, the original liquid moved without qualms by the stars, the way a bartender shakes a silver shaker.
The Armand-Béhic (of the Messageries Maritimes)
Sails at fourteen knots on the Indian Ocean . . .
The sun sets in the pulp of crimes,
In that sea flattened as if by a hand.
For there is an East beyond the East, that was the dream of the travelers from long ago, the dream of colonial life, the cosmopolitan, bourgeois dream of wharves and steamers. I like to imagine Sarah as a girl, in an entirely earth-bound apartment in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, dreaming, lying down with book in hand, eyes on the ceiling, dreaming she’s leaving for Saigon — what did she see in those illusory hours, in the room that one would’ve liked to enter like a vampire, to settle, like a seagull or kittiwake, on the bedframe, the rail of an ocean liner rocked by the evening, between Aden and Ceylon? Loti in Turkey, Rimbaud in Abyssinia, Segalen in China, those end-of-French-childhood readings, which call up the vocations of Orientalists or dreamers like Hesse’s Siddhartha or Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet — we always have the wrong reasons for doing things, our fates, in youth, are as easily swayed as the tip of a fishing float above its hook; Sarah loved reading, studying, dreaming and travel: what do we know of travel when we’re seventeen, we appreciate the sound of it, the words, the maps and all our lives, afterward, we seek to rediscover, in reality, our childhood illusions. Segalen the Breton, Levet from Montbrison, or Hesse from Wurtemberg dreamed, in turn fabricating dreams the way Rimbaud had before them, Rimbaud that demon traveler about whom one senses that life, throughout, sought to wrap him in chains to prevent him from leaving, even amputating a leg to be sure he would no longer move — but even as a one-legged person he would buy himself an infernal Marseille–Ardennes round-trip, with a horrible stump that made him suffer terribly, on the jolts of those roads in France, so many divine ruts where he hid poems that exploded into memories at each turn of the wheels, at each grinding of metal against metal, at each steam-encased breath of mold. Terrifying summer of pain, from which the seer with a convict’s face would die — he would be granted the aid of both morphine and religion; the first poet of France, the man of mad escapes, from the Northern hills to Java the mysterious, passed away on November 10, 1891, at the Conception Hospital in Marseille, at around two p.m., missing one leg and with an enormous tumor in his groin. Sarah pitied that thirty-six-year-old child (four years older than Levet, hundreds of poems, many kilometers, and ten years spent in the Orient older) who wrote to his sister, from his hospital bed: “Where are the races through mountains, the cavalcades, the promenades, the deserts, the rivers, and seas? Now the existence of Stumpy!”
I should add one more volume to our Great Work,
On the Divers Forms of Lunacie in the Orient
Volume the Second
Gangrene & Tuberculosis
and establish the catalog of the afflicted, consumptives, syphilitics, those who would end up developing an atrocious pathology, a chancre, rosacea, pestilential fungi, purulent bubos, bloody spittle, amputation, or asphyxia, like Rimbaud or Levet, those martyrs of the Orient — and despite my denial, I could devote a chapter to myself, or even two, “Mysterious Maladies” and “Imaginary Maladies,” and grant myself a mention in the paragraph on “Diarrhea and the Runs,” which, more than any other affliction, are the true companions of the Orientalist: today, under Dr. Kraus’s orders, I’m condemned to drinking yogurt and eating greens, a mess of greens, from spinach to Iranian sabzi, which is just as unpleasant, but less spectacular than an attack of the runs: once on a bus between Tehran and the Caspian Sea, at night, in the middle of a snowstorm, Faugier was forced to argue vociferously with the driver who had refused to stop by the side of a mountain road bordered with snowdrifts and who insisted he wait for the rest stop, planned for a little later — Marc, pale as a sheet, contorting his lower half, gripped the driver by the collar, threatened to empty himself on his floor, and convinced him to stop. I can clearly see Faugier running in the snow, then disappearing (falling) behind a drift; a few seconds later, in the snowflake-streaked light of the headlights, we had the surprise of seeing a fine cloud of vapor rise up, like the smoke signals in cartoons, which made the driver burst out laughing. A minute later poor Faugier climbed back in with difficulty, shivering with cold, pale, soaking wet, a faint relieved smile sketched on his face. In fact, a few kilometers further on, the bus stopped to let the passengers out at a crossroads in the middle of the mountains — behind us, the great shoulder of the Damavand massif and its six thousand meters of rock darkened the winter a little more; in front of us, forests of oak and hornbeam, dense and steep, descended down to the coastal plain. The driver insisted that Faugier drink a cup of tea from his thermos; tea cures everything, he said; two sympathetic women passengers offered the sick man some preserved sour cher
ries, which he refused with a holy terror; an old gentleman absolutely insisted on giving him half a banana, supposed (at least that’s how we understood the Persian expression) to slow the stomach down — Faugier ran to take refuge for a few minutes in the service station’s bathroom, before tackling the descent to Amol, a descent he bore bravely, completely rigid, sweat on his forehead, teeth clenched.
Instead of tea, preserved fruit, or bananas, he treated his runs with opium, which ended up producing spectacular results: he joined me a few weeks later on the dark side of defecation, that of the chronically constipated.
Our Orientalist illnesses were of course only slight inconveniences compared to those of our illustrious predecessors, compared to the bilharzias, trachomas, and other eye diseases of the Egyptian army, compared to the malaria, plague, and cholera of ancient times — on the face of it, there was nothing exotic about Rimbaud’s osteosarcoma, it could just as easily have afflicted him in Charleville, despite the fact that the poet attributed it to the fatigues of the climate and to long walks on foot and horseback. The sick Rimbaud’s descent to Zeilah and the Gulf of Aden was quite a bit more difficult than Faugier’s to the Caspian Sea, “sixteen black porters” for his stretcher, three hundred kilometers of desert from the mountains of Harar to the coast, with horrible suffering, in twelve days, twelve days of martyrdom that left him completely exhausted at his arrival in Aden, so exhausted that the doctor at the European Hospital decided to cut off his leg immediately, before reversing his decision and preferring that Arthur Rimbaud go get amputated elsewhere: Rimbaud the sailor, as his friend Germain Nouveau nicknamed him, caught a steamship headed for Marseille, the Amazone, on May 9, 1891. By the explorer of the Harar and of the Choa, that “man with soles of wind,” Sarah would recite entire passages —
The storm blessed my sea-time awakenings.
Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves
Which they call eternal rollers of victims,
Ten nights, without missing the inane eye of lanterns!
And everyone would listen, in those deep Iranian armchairs where Henry Corbin himself had conversed with other authorities on Oriental enlightenment and Suhrawardi; we would watch Sarah transform herself into a Boat, a Rimbaudian Pythia —
And then, I bathed myself in the Poem
Of the Sea, infused with stars, and milky-white,
Devouring the green azures; where, pale, delighted
Float, a pensive drowned man sometimes descends
Her eyes shone, her smile became even more brilliant; she gleamed, she was resplendent with poetry, which slightly frightened the scientists present. Faugier would laugh, saying they should “muzzle the muse in her” and would gently warn her against those “assaults of Romanticism,” which would in turn make her burst out laughing. Many, though, were the European Orientalists whose calling owed much to dreams of colonial life: punka fans with wooden blades, strong drinks, native passions and dalliances with servants. Those sweet illusions seemed more present among the French and English than the other Orientalists; the Germans, as a whole, had Biblical and archaeological dreams; the Spanish, Iberian fantasies, of Muslim Andalusia and celestial Gypsies; the Dutch, visions of spices, pepper plants, camphor trees and ships in storms off the Cape of Good Hope. Sarah and her adviser and director of the Institute, Gilbert de Morgan, were in this sense entirely French: they were passionate not just about Persian poets, but also about those whom the Orient in general had inspired, the Byrons, Nervals, Rimbauds, and those who had sought, like Pessoa through Álvaro de Campos, an “East to the east of the East.”
An extreme Orient beyond the ardors of the average Orient, one begins to think that the Ottoman Empire used to be “the sick man of Europe”: today Europe is its own sick man, aged, an abandoned body, hanged on its gallows, which watches itself rot thinking that Paris will always be Paris, in about thirty different languages, including Portuguese. “Europe is a recumbent figure leaning on its elbows,” writes Fernando Pessoa in Message, those complete poetic works are an oracle, a somber oracle of melancholy. In Iran there are beggars in the streets armed with birds, they wait for a passerby to predict his future: for a little cash the bird (yellow or green parakeet, the cleverest of birds) points with its beak at a folded or rolled-up paper that is handed to you, a verse by Hafez is written on it, this practice is called fal-e Hafez, the oracle of Hafez: I’ll try the oracle of Pessoa, see what the Portuguese world champion of anxiety is reserving for me.
A few pages after the “Opiary,” I let my finger glide at random, closing my eyes, then opening them: “Great are the deserts and everything is desert,” oh Lord, the desert again, by chance page 428, by chance still Álvaro de Campos, so one begins dreaming for a while that everything is in fact connected, that every word, every gesture is connected to all words and all gestures. All deserts are the desert, “I light a cigarette to put off the journey till later / To put off all journeys till later / To put off the entire universe till later.”
The entire universe is in a bookcase, no need to go out: what’s the point of leaving the Tower, said Hölderlin, the end of the world has already taken place, no reason to go experience it yourself; you linger, your fingernail between two pages (so soft, so creamy) where Álvaro de Campos, the engineer dandy, becomes more real than Pessoa, his flesh-and-blood double. Great are the deserts and everything is desert. There is a Portuguese Orient just as all European languages have an Orient, an Orient inside them and an Orient outside — one would like, the way in Iran on the last Wednesday of the year you jump over a campfire to bring yourself good luck, to leap over the flames of Palestine, Syria, and Iraq, the flames of the Levant, to land feet together in the Gulf or in Iran. The Portuguese Orient begins in Socotra and Hormuz, stages on the road to the Indies, islands captured by Afonso de Albuquerque the Conqueror in the beginning of the sixteenth century. You are always in front of your bookcase, Pessoa in hand; you are standing at the prow of a thirsty ship — a ship of regrets, hungry for shipwrecks, once the Cape of Good Hope is passed nothing stops it anymore: the ships of Europe climb northward, Portugal in the lead. Arabia! The Gulf! The Persian Gulf is the trail of spittle of the Mesopotamian toad, warm, smooth sweat, barely disturbed on its edges by the clumps of oil, black and sticky, the dung from the tankers, those ruminants of the sea. You sway; you catch yourself with a thick book, a wooden post, your feet got caught in the rigging — no, in your bathrobe, old corsair’s cape, tangled around the lectern. You contemplate your treasures on their shelves, forgotten treasures, buried under the dust, a wooden camel, a Syrian silver talisman engraved with ancient symbols (you think you recall that this illegible amulet was supposed to have calming properties, maybe even cure dangerous madmen, long ago), a miniature on wood, little diptych with brass hinges tarnished with verdigris, depicting a tree, a fawn, and two lovers, but you can’t really remember to which romantic novel this pastoral scene belongs, bought at one of the antique shops on Manuchehri Avenue in Tehran. You imagine returning to Darakeh or Darband, high up in the mountains north of the city, a Friday excursion, by the edge of a stream apart from the crowd, out in the middle of nature, under a tree, with a young woman with a gray scarf and a blue coat, surrounded by poppies, flower of martyrdom, flower that likes these rocks, these ravines, and that every spring sows afresh its tiny seeds — the sound of the water, the wind, the smells of spices, charcoal, a group of young people nearby but out of sight, down below in the valley, from which only laughter and the smell of their meal reach us; we stay there, in the thorny shadow of a giant pomegranate tree, throwing pebbles into the water, eating cherries and candied plums hoping, hoping for what? A deer, an ibex, a lynx, none of those come; no one passes by aside from an old dervish with a strange hat, straight out of Rumi’s Masnavi, who is climbing up to God knows what summit, who knows what refuge, his reed flute slung over his shoulder, stick in hand. You greet him, saying “Ya Ali!” slightly frightened by this omen, the
invasion of the spiritual into a scene you’d much rather be extremely temporal, tender. “Listen to the flute, how it tells stories, complains about separation, when you cut it, in the reed bed; its cries sadden men and women.” Is there a complete translation of Rumi’s Masnavi in German? Or in French? Twenty-six thousand rhymes, thirteen thousand couplets. One of the monuments of literature. A summa of poetry and mystical wisdom, hundreds of anecdotes, stories, characters. Rückert unfortunately translated only a few ghazals, he didn’t tackle the Masnavi. Rückert is in any case so poorly published these days. You find either cheap, slender contemporary anthologies, or else editions from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, without any notes or commentaries, riddled with mistakes; the scholarly edition is underway, apparently, “the Schweinfurt edition” (“Good place, horrible name,” said the poet), slowly, in ten or twelve volumes, impossible to find, exorbitantly priced — a luxury for academic libraries. Why is there no Pléiade collection in Germany or Austria? There’s an invention that we could envy France for, those soft collections with the supple leather covers, so carefully edited, with introductions, appendices, commentary by scholars, where one finds all of French and foreign literature. A world away from the luxurious volumes of the Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, much less popular, I don’t think many people get them for Christmas. If Friedrich Rückert were French, he’d be in the Pléiade collection — there are three volumes of Gobineau after all, the racist Orientalist who specialized in Iran. The Pléiade is much more than a collection, it’s a matter of State. The entrance of such-or-such author under the protection of the rhodoid dust jacket and the colored leather cover unleashes passions. The acme for a writer being of course to become part of the collection during his lifetime — to have the pleasant experience of posthumous glory before you’re pushing up the daisies. The worst (but I don’t think there’s a proven case) would be, after entering la Pléiade, to be kicked out of it during one’s lifetime. A banishment ad vitam. For one does leave it, this divine collection, and in Tehran, that gave rise to a scene worthy of Jahiz’s Epistle on the Wonders of Professors: the director of the French Institute for Research in Iran, an eminent Orientalist, fumed in his office before leaving it, striding up and down the vestibule shouting “It’s a scandal!” “A shame!” and causing immediate panic among his employees: the gentle secretary (greatly frightened by her employer’s mood swings) hid behind her files, the tech guy dove under a table, screwdriver in hand, while the debonair general secretary found a cousin or an old aunt to call urgently, spewing out endless polite phrases, very loudly, on the telephone.
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