Rêvenance #8 – NOW AVAILABLE!

Rêvenance: A  Zine of Hauntings From Underground Histories, No. 8

  

This magazine is the main printed venue for new research and translations concerning the Bouzingo, and the flagship journal of the Revenant Editions series, dedicated to the forgotten or untold histories of 19th Century avant-garde and other countercultures. It includes essays, translations, and many experimental forms of historical writing and research that connect those traditions to continuing radical communities today.

  

Jeunes-France/French Romanticist stuff in the new number includes a spread about Gérard de Nerval in prison (letter and poem), a Boulanger print of Paganini in prison, a frenetiuc poem by the female Romanticist Anaïs Ségalas, and an avant-Romanticist essay comparing a Hindu ceremony to local French peasant festivals.

This issue contains more recent and more early work than any yet, with a Dada review by Louis Aragon & Dada poetry by Tristan Tzara & Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes; Russian Futurist poetry by Aleksei Kruchyonykh and Vasilisk Gnedov, an anti-survey of mid-20th Century underground poetry by Jim Leftwich, and contemporary “revenant collaborations” between living and dead poets including Michael Dec, Volodymyr Bilyk, Dirk Vekemans, Retorico Unentesi, Olchar Lindsann, Nina de Callias, & more, an essay by John Wilkins on Con-Lang from 1668, texts by Gérard de Nerval on his stay in prison and his Louis Bouanger's lithograph of Paganini in prison, skeletal drawings & texts by Moloch and the feminist romantic Anaïs Ségalas, and an 1834 avant-garde attempt at comparative religion.

Featuring: 
The Dead: Gérard de Nerval / John Wilkins / Tristan Tzara / Anaïs Ségalas / Vasilisk Gnedov / Louis Boulanger / Alecksei Kruchyonich / Nina de Callias / Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes / Niccolò Paganini / Moloch / Louis Aragon / Auguste Bouzenot

& The Living: Jim Leftwich / Michael Dec / Gleb Kolomiets / Olchar E. Lindsann / Dirk Vekemans / Volodymyr Bilyk / Retorico Unentesi
   

  
25 pgs on folded 8.5”x14”. May, A.Da. 104/A.H. 189 (2020)
$4.50 + $2.00 s/h
   
Soft deadline for contributions to the next issue: Aug. 15.
send to monoclelash@gmail.com

Philothée O'Neddy, Preface & Epilogue to "The Enchanted Ring"

Here's the verse preface and afterward to Philothée O'Neddy's 1842 novel "The Enchanted Ring", which I reviewed in Rain Taxi awhile back.

One of my few reservations about the translation (which didn't make it into the published article) is that it does not include his long preface in verse, which is a key document in understanding O'Neddy's theory and practice as well as an odd and tongue-in-cheek text like the rest of the book, and includes the verse afterward only in a bare transliteration (a much lesser sin).
  
So here are both of those at last – if you take MY advice, you'll order the book and read these in the appropriate places – down the line I'll likely publish them as a chapbook with just that in mind. (It's like translation fanfic for another publisher – fantrans?):

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PREFACE

At the unwonted birth of a preface in verse,
kind reader, I wager, here you’ll sit quite morose:
–“Ha!” say ye, “if thus far these prefaces in prose,
in abusing their right to sedate the universe,
Fear not to join to their one thousand quirks
that of donning a tone lyric and grandiose,
to mount up to the heights to prognosticate,
to create, to explain the arcana, the lore,
to delimit[1] both man and god, both to abrade
in pointless eloquence, in limitless ardours,
What say now, what do now, what will this one dare!
Why, what will be the verse if the prose begins there!
Verse! . . . innate dialect of symbol and of dream,
whose most devoted goal, exclusive mission’s
to outrage, to exhaust, doubling hyperbole,
exaggerate the tip of exaggeration! . . .”

Hold on, dear reader, settle down, let me plead!
Your fear foundation lacks; on my alexandrines
deign to bind your eyes less sternly and less maudlin;
They act bourgeoisly, no aristocracy,
no formal chariots to drive some theory,
no triumphant tambourines, no noble clarions;
Abdicating at will their right to be rhapsodes,
naught in them imitates the lofty pomp of odes;
no resplendent robes burdeneth their kidneys.

Elsewise, wanting just to arm this peristyle
with a brief overview of the opus at hand,
I don’t think I could find here however I scan
motif of puffed-up noise in the data or style,
matter for monument; for all in question’s
just a fable, alas! quite flippant and futile,
just a humble novel whose whole narration
here in folly disputes its whole conception.

Ah! if this were, reader, a book puritanical,
one of those knights of justice and of verity,
whose eloquence files away tenaciously
cast-iron prejudice, the ancient manacle
which garrottes the corpus of society,
such great books as we call humanitarian
thinkers,[2] neo-christian, moral, utilitarian;
Were this one of those tomes where the gnostic cult[3],
within gothic tombs the slabs’ carved words consults,
resurrects the doctrine of feudal ways,
the blazon, the dagger, the sandals, tomes of praise,
the monk, the noble, the convent, and the rook;
Were this one of those tomes which, with a kindly look,
endeavouring to read in th’enigmatic book
of two sphinxes we call both the head and the heart,
construct for bourgeois taste the genre intimate,[4]
(that maudlin genre which the reviews in choral parts
refused the gift of their respect not long ago;)
Then indeed might you fear the prefacer arrogant,
I’d fashion myself a princely portico!

But no; let not your thought be so stupefied there;
Neither can I nor would I burst into fanfare,
for my tale boasts of no other pretension,
in its absurdity than common sense condemned,
than that of seeming, on the mould of Donkeyskin,[5]
A frivolous thing here spun from fiction.[6]
Yep, my goal, my intent, my oath, ’tis to amuse;
for no other concern did I pester my muse:
Modest, I wished quite simply to augment
the Thousand and One Nights with scraps of supplement.
Thus, ’tis a fanciful and off-the-wall saga,
’tis, this candid stunt, in full chimera[7],
an unrealistic work, a flight ebullient,
’tis a steeple-chase, no guide-line, no baluster . . .
May at least some small bit of vigour and talent
on the style and form have projected some luster!

Yet, if my pronouncement were made law, – I’d assert
when one shapes epic systems and uncanny art,
you’ll find that a hundred, a thousand more charms
does the steeplechase hold than the olympic course;
That it calls for a truer arm and surefire hocks,
that it must be graced with more impregnable heart
into arcane[8] of forests to hurl its horse,
over rocks girded round by an anemic fog,
all athwart the rough shrubs, all athwart fallow balks,[9]
along cramped gorges, aslide from a greedy scarp,
and amidst all the perils, the pitfalls of bogs,
– Than in tracks to make a chariot hurtle,
on the smooth arena, secure between the hurdles.
– And I think the audacity that spurs my speech
will leave all my contemporaries really pleased;
especially the sons you find by myriads
spoofing Alcibiades’ mood rash-spirited.

[The following sections were cut from the published version]

I should wrap this thing up: these remarks are drawn out.
But grant me one last word, if I may? I’ve avowed
nothing to you that’s true, dear reader, my master.
The things I’ve claimed to you may have been more than patter
when noising it abroad, while standing here smugly,
that the volume you hold holds nothing relevant.
Strewn across all its chatter of frivolous study,
Under its irreverence, scarcely malevolent,
a few tricks, I’ll admit, edify for brief moments
with altruistic thought and noble sentiments.
You’ll sense dwelling therein a bit of melancholy;
bits of reason mixed with the foundations its folly.

Among its teasing trifles there fain would gleam through it
unaffected amour that speaks its language sacred.
The volatile creases of its moorish tunic
conceal there a chivalric heartbeat’s palpitations.
At least (for I should here be a tiny bit shyer),
to keep it there concealed has been my utmost aim.
I desired, I aspired that an Ideal flame
should penetrate this tale and shape it like a soul.

[The published version resumes here:]

Little tome,[10] now what good’s all this clamour and fire?[11]
Why haggle with your life like this, ô little tome?
When I know well, alas! your life shall stay so low!
When I don’t even know that you merit your life!
The prelates, our elite criticism’s doctors,
Shall they admit you to their baptism benign?
Where are, to guide you there, your godparents, your sponsors?
If you must go without, you shall soon be a pariah!
suffocated to hush . . . or by abuse assailed!
O my wretched canoe[12], without your guiding stars
rely upon my reason’s upsetting prognosis
that never shall you last, with your so-feeble sail,
to reach publicity’s high seas you see afar.
It scarcely can descry one modicum of hope
that the port governors, relinquishing their bias,
might license you, so frail, to cruise a couple days
without the fear of feuds with covetous pursuers,
among the titanic competition of canooers
that ever check and block the harbour from your eyes.

~~~~~~~

NOTES TO PREFACE:
[1] réglementer. Modern dictionaries suggest “regulate,” but that sense of the term seems to have developed after Dondey’s time; not only does it seem contextually discordant, but the 1828 Boniface French-English dictionary available to me does not even include the word, suggesting that 14 years later when these lines were written, it was still new and in flux (thus seductive to Dondey’s Romanticist sensibilities). My rendering is based on the 1828 definitions of Règlement, règlementaire, and regler.
[2] The use of the noun penseur as an adjective seems to have been something of a Romanticist key-word; one of the few online dictionaries who list its adjectival sense gives as its examples, three Romanticist texts from the 1830s (two by Dondey’s acquaintance Balzac and one by his close friend Borel) and one by the proto-Romantic Chenier, a major influence on them all, plus one by the Oulipian poet Raymond Queneau, who later engaged in research into avant-garde Romanticism: http://www.cnrtl.fr/lexicographie/penseur
[3] A rather daring rendering of culte savant.
[4] A term kicked around a fair bit in the early 19th Century, whose precise definition seems to have been evasive even at the time, based on contemporary references. Likely novels based on the analysis of individual psychology, such as those of Stendhal and Balzac–the characteristic that has gone on to define the modern Bourgeois novel.
[5] A fairy tale first written down by Perrault in the seventeenth century, combining a Cinderella motif with that of threatened incest.
[6] or, “in fact of fiction” Une chose amusante en fait de fiction.
[7] O’Neddy employs the noun as an adjective, as he often does.
[8] O’Neddy employs the adjective profond as a noun.
[9] guérets, “balks”, the unplowed ridge between the furrows in a field.
[10] In O’Neddy’s manuscript revised post-publication; the published version reads: “O my tome”
[11] Line 107 ends with flamme / flame, this line with feu / fire, evoking the title of O’Neddy’s seminal collection of avant-garde poetry, Feu et flamme / Fire and Flame.
[12] canot, here and below in the neologism canotins (canooers). Though in contemporary french the word has a broader connotation of small boats in general, both the 1835 Dictionnaire de l’Academie (and all earlier editions to 1694) and the 1828 Boniface French-English Dictionary refer specifically and exclusively to the canoes of Native American tribes – rendering this extended nautical analogy considerably more odd (particularly as this canoe sports a sail!).
  
~~~~~~
  
EPILOGUE
  
There’s a golden-hued dream by which oft I’m consoled
for the void you’re to meet, ô my frivolous trifle!
for the void without waking you’ll live in tomorrow. –
– ’Tis on a summer’s eve, beneath a roman sky.
I conjure, within a marble villa’s Eden,
a Lady and her page beside some tree’s foot seated.
The page, thanks to the final fires of the day,
to his fay is now reading, to the Dame he loves,
my tale where is portrayed love and the land of fays.
Now they both, roused in soul and with voices be-hushed,
are rushed in their keen haste to lavish me with praise.
Such pampering is found in spheres fortuitous!
When they’ve lauded him well, well exalted the poet,
they are caught up by bliss – tis mute and luminous –
wherefore the lady-love – grips the finger of her lover
who exults on his knees – with magic ring bestows it.
Then between them hovers a flame, a mystery:
flame which must remain veiled, a mystery untold…
as one veils the gods, keeps their grace under cover,
for the Muse and the Priest share a like modesty.
  
Then, the cloud descends, – and the pair arise…
  
While respiring the vast forest’s balsamic sap,
at random through the shadowy paths they ramble.
All across the network of tenebrous brambles,
upon horizon’s edge the moon, who reclines,
looks down and smiles on them like a Lady in White.
Each with other enlaced, they’re blithely wandering…
Just like two seraphim who, – while briefly they deign
to tread our lowly soil – even yet feel their wings.
Unceasingly their eyes are interweaving beams.
On a whim – in her voice of azure – now the Dame
stitches a tune by Cimarosa or of Weber …
anon she falls quiet, quite delighted to hear
The page who then declaims this sonnet fond and grave:
   
“I’m owner of a ring whose gold, a mirror sacred,
assimilates my thought and heart and soul entire.
Tis a charming talisman of sympathetic fire
that’s mine by way of love from a dark-eyed fay.
“I’m owner of a ring whose jurisdiction chaste
makes any but my Lady strike my eyes as vile
while making her for me the only maid alive,
who only may be stirred by dint of my embrace.
“I’m owner of a ring whose sacred fairie keeper,
from all my reveries of love and chivalry,
has made it manifest the whole ideal proud.
“I’m owner of a ring! . . . – should it be snatched away then,
when in the coffin’s midnight I shall be laid out,
to make them give it back to me shall I awaken!!”
   
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This version based mainly on Philothée O’Neddy, Poésies posthumes, 1878, Charpentier: Paris, pp. 216-218, but retaining some elements from Théophile Dondey de Santeny, Histoire d’un anneau enchanté: Roman de chevalerie, Undated [1841], Boulé: Paris, pp. 45-46.

Emile Saladin, "The Fandango" (1834)

This poem describes the fandango being danced in a club or ball – a dance, it should be noted, still of dubious legality when this was published (along with the cancan and cachuca, see Rêvenance No. 5) which gives the piece a political edge that isn't apparent anymore. The poem emphasizes exactly the reason for the prohibition: the unrestrained sexuality that was practiced in dance halls and to which the dance gave expression. The Fandango had recently been imported from Spain, and was danced both by touring professional troupes and by hardcore Parisian dance-freaks (known as chicards, débordeurs, badouillards, etc.) at balls and dance clubs. It's Spanish origins were also in large part Arabic and Muslim origins, a heritage which Saladin emphasizes and attempts to celebrate in this poem.

   

It's an interesting and very musical poem by a very interesting poet who I'm very ambivalent about – and who does not seem to have been published or written about in any language since 1845. This intro's a bit long so feel free ton skip to the poem if/when you wish.

   

First the problematic aspects: orientalism and a heavy dose of the male gaze. A big focus of the poem (and part of what made his work in general difficult to publish) is the unrestrained sexuality that permeated underground dance culture, but almost inevitably given the time, it's a pretty unreflectively misogynist perspective of it. As so often in French Romanticism (cf. Delacroix) this is tied to an equally unrestrained appropriative Orientalism treating Andalusia (Muslim Spain) as a kind of wonderland for the European imagination. In fact its author, the obscure avant-garde poet Emile Saladin, seems on the basis of his seven surviving poems to have been one of the most fanatical and dedicated proponents of the self-declared "Orientalist" current within French Romanticism.

  

I have no intention of clearing him on any of the above charges, but he's complicated in other ways too. First, my sense is that despite all the problematic aspects of his orientalism (which seem obvious to us now, 190 years later, but would not have occurred to most Europeans a century after his time) I get the sense from all his work that he meant well, in his own head at least – that he was attempting to celebrate cultural difference; the centrality of these themes, as well as references to multiple non-European cultures at a time when such things were still difficult to track down, make this seem like more than a fashion (by 1860, that would be different) while there is a complete absence in his work of the degrading stereotypes available to him from mainstream French culture – barbarity, rapacity, greed, tyranny, dogmatism, etc. Sensuality, though equally problematic as a stereotype, is clearly a positive trait in his eyes. 

  

His poetry is so steeped in Orientalism that I had assumed his name was a pseudonym – but more interestingly, it is not. His family name of Saladin apparently derives from the Crusades, which while clearly an issue from the colonialist side of things raises the question (I hate to say this but...) of Templar history? There was another French Saladin family, possibly another branch of his own, who were prominent engineers for three generations after him, and all also orientalist scholars, explorers, and diplomats; so the tantalizing question is raised of whether he in fact grew up in a family micro-culture of relative or aspirationally multicultural nature.... 

  

Saladin was also a radical leftist, described in the only biographical notice I've found (written during his life) as a "democratic poet" which in our parlance would translate roughly to a proto-anarchist insistence on direct rather than representative democracy. In the early 1840s his poetic activity gave way to journalism, and the newspaper he co-edited published work by Fourierist-associated writers, raising the possibility that his emphasis on sensuality may have its roots in radical political theory. 

  

He's also an example of provincial Romanticism – he seems to have been based in Bordeaux throughout his career, and thus represents the less-spoken of Romanticist and underground communities outside of Paris, connected by networks of correspondence, and traded journals. He is also part of the smaller network of extremist/avant-garde writers pushing the more formally and thematically eccentric aspects of the movement into experimental territory. As the single notice referred to above notes, his poetry is "very difficult", partly through its often short lines which destabalize the metric structure of French verse (long story...) and which derive from Troubadour poetry which is in turn inflected by Muslim forms from Spain, partly because of the heavy interior sound-patterning which further destabilizes the metric effects while paradoxically creating an intensely rhythmic, musical effect, and finally the often fractured and fragmentary syntax and occasionally bizarre imagery. Not easy to translate! This poem appeared in the avant-leaning anthology Annales romantiques in 1834, one of the first books I bought for the Revenant Archive.

 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
THE FANDANGO
-Emile Saladin

Dance on! ô youthful girls!
Dance onward, youthful gents!
To your jubilant quadrilles
unite inviting trills;
Dance on, dance on, coquettes,
to pleasure ripened yet;
to din of castanets
may all your songs be wedded.

What bayadere’s[1] physiques!
And so divinely smiling!
As if each one was easy,
all these flirtatious Genies!
Do you perceive them, pining,
upon the fields verdant,
those Andalusians fervent,
to glide off, tawny Virgins…

Tis those of grenadines,[2]
of billowing bouquets,
of sugarcane in wreathes,
with such seductive moves;
of Andalusian blooms
so ravishing that Asia’s
poetry offers us
no thing as marvelous.

Detached indifferent
on pale naked necks,
their heads are gently bent,
and heaving are their breasts;
all humming with the rhythm,
all rush to take position,
the next fandango’s launched,
its surges and its vaults.

Ephemeral and sprightly,
you sylphs, as you are flying,
in your light-hearted stances,
evoke a love expiring.
Now just like supple branches,
you’re thrusting out your hips
As well as throats so pallid
from which the eye can sip.

What frisky merriment!
What eyes so dark and rending!
Now, alabaster and jet
are fluttering and blending.
Now how their skin is reddening,
their lissome waists are bending,
their breath is like perfumes,
and every sense confused!

O! You pearls of Spain,
how well you entertain,
beneath the flowering olive,
as you cavort and frolic;
to see you as you twist,
your sweaty bodies slick,
revealing as you leap,
til sapped, you take your seat.

Then, see the ball jam-packed,
complexions bright and burning,
when enervated dancers
back to their seats are dragged:
the Madonna out of view,
there, many a voice is purring,
and safe behind the fans
set amorous rendez-vous.

Go, you youthful band,
Go, and laugh forever;
this is the Age to gather
your blissful days and pleasures;
while life is acrobatic,
and on your roofs of clay
so frail and prone to stray
abide thee with the passions.

How fair it is my sweet ones,
in Alhambra far to spy
the myriad Moorish spires
dismembered by the seasons;
with grace they play and run
where multitudes of races
have printed fleeting traces
devoured by the sun.

Hard by Xenaralife[3]
engulfed in rushing breezes,
Caliph’s strongholds ancient
so doted on in dreaming;
hard by such fine dominions
and in the bracing shade
that Abyssinians
grant sanctuary in.

Dance on! ô youthful girls!
Dance onward, youthful gents!
To your jubilant quadrilles
unite inviting trills;
Dance on, dance on, coquettes,
to pleasure ripened yet;
to din of castanets
may all your songs be wedded.
 
          – trans. Olchar E. Lindsann
 

NOTES:

[1] Bayaderes: Hindu religious dancers. This reference reflects the intense interest in Hinduism then burgeoning within French Romanticism, as evidenced also by Auguste Bouzenot\’s description of the Hindu Durga Puja festival that was published in the same issue of the Annales romanrtiques anthology as this poem. Though Saladin’s Orientalism was focused on the Islamic world, he indicates here his engagement with a broad range of non-Western cultures – in both cases problematically promulgating the association with sexuality common in European colonial portrayals.

[2] “grenadines”: possible pun on “grenadine” as a loose silk garment. 

[3] Seems to be an archaic designation for the labyrinthine garden or park of Alhambra; see the 1833 description in an Orientalist novel serialized in the Romanticist Revue de Paris, which is likely to have influenced Saladin’s evocation: Le Duchesse Abrantès, “Hernandes.” Revue de Paris, Tome Quarante Sixième. Paris: 1833.