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หัวเรื่อง: when an executioner kills, that is after all normal; but when a poet sings in accompaniment,
ขณะที่บรรดากวี (บางท่านเป็นถึง มหากวี) ในเมืองไทย ร่วมกันแต่งกวีนิพนธ์ให้กลุ่มพันธมิตรฯ
ชวนให้นึกถึงบทความสั้นๆ ของมิลาน คุนเดอรา ที่ได้เล่าความรู้สึกจากความทรงจำช่วงหนึ่งในชีวิต
จากบทความท้ายเล่มนวนิยายเล่มหนึ่งของเขา Life is elsewhere
“Life Is Elsewhere” is a celebrated sentence of Rimbaud. It is cited by André Breton at the conclusion of his Surrealist Manifesto. In May 1968, Paris students scribbled it on the walls of the Sorbonne as their slogan. But the original title of my novel was “The Lyric Age”. I changed it at the last moment when I saw anxiety on the faces of my publishers, who doubted anyone would buy a book with such an abstruse title.
The lyric age is youth. My novel is an epos of youth, and an analysis of what I call “the lyric attitude”. The lyric attitude is a potential stance of every human being; it is one of the basic categories of human existence, Lyric poetry as a literary genre has existed for ages, because for ages man has been capable of the lyric attitude. The poet is its personification. Starting with Dante, the poet is also a great figure striding through European history. He is a symbol of national identity (Camões, Goethe, Mickiewicz, Pushkin), he is a spokesman of revolutions (Béranger, Petőfi, Mayakovsky, Lorca), he is the voice of history (Hugo, Breton), he is a mythological being and the subject of a virtually religious cult (Petrarch, Byron , Rimbaud, Rilke), but he is above all the representative of an inviolable value which we are ready to write with a capital letter: Poetry.
But what has happened to the European poet in the past half century? Today his voice is barely audible. Without our being quite aware of it, the poet has passed from the great, noisy world scene. (His disappearance is apparently one of the symptoms of that dangerous time of transition in which Europe finds itself and which we have not yet learned to name.) Through a kind of satanic irony of history, the last brief European period when the poet still played his great public role was the period of post-1945 communist revolutions in Central Europe. It is important to stress that these peculiar pseudo-revolutions, imported from Russia and carried out under the protection of the army and the police, were full of authentic revolutionary psychology and their adherents experienced them with grand pathos, enthusiasm, and eschatologic faith in an absolutely new world. Poets found themselves on the proscenium for the last time. They thought they were playing their customary part in the glorious European drama and had no inkling that the theatre manager had changed the program at the last moment and substituted a trivial farce.
I witnessed this era “ruled hand in hand by the hangman and the poet” (p. 270) from up close. I heard my admired French poet Paul Éluard publicly and ceremonially renounce his Prague friend whom Stalinist justice was sending to the gallows. This episode (I wrote about it in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) hit me like a trauma: when an executioner kills, that is after all normal; but when a poet (and a great poet) sings in accompaniment, the whole system of values we considered sacrosanct has suddenly been shaken apart. Nothing is certain any longer. Everything turns problematic, questionable, subject of analysis and doubt: Progress and Revolutionary. Youth. Motherhood. Even Man. And also Poetry. I saw before me a world of shaken values and gradually, over many years, the figure of Jaromil, his mother and his loves took shape in my mind.
Don’t say that Jaromil is a bad poet! That would be too cheap an explanation of his life’s story! Jaromil is a talented poet, with great imagination and feeling. And he is a sensitive young man. Of course, he is also a monster. But his monstrosity is potentially contained in us all. It is in me. It is in you. It is in Rimbaud. It is in Shelley, in Hugo. In all young men, of all periods and regimes. Jaromil is not a product of communism. Communism only illuminated an otherwise hidden side, it released something which under different circumstances would merely have slumbered in peace.
Even though the story of Jaromil and his mother takes place in a specific historic period which is portrayed truthfully (without the slightest satiric intent), it was not my aim to describe a period. “We did not choose that epoch because we were interested in it for its own sake, but because it seemed to offer an excellent trap for snaring Rimbaud and Lermontov, lyricism and youth.” (p. 271) In other words: for a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence? In the case of this novel, several related questions also presented themselves: What is the lyric attitude? What is youth? What mysterious role does a mother play in forming the lyric world of a young man? And if youth is the time of inexperience, what is the connection between inexperience and a longing for the absolute? Or between a longing for the absolute and revolutionary fervor? And how does the lyric attitude reveal itself in love? Are there “lyric forms” of love? And so on, and so on. The novel, of course, does not answer any of these questions. The questions are already an answer in themselves, for as Heidegger put it: the essence of man has the form of a question.
The first idea for this novel arose long ago, in the middle of the nineteen-fifties. I wanted to solve an aesthetic problem: how to write a novel which would be a “critique of poetry” and yet at the same time would itself be poetry (transmit poetic intensity and imagination). I finished the novel in 1969. It never came out in Bohemia. It was first published In France, in 1973, and a year later in America in Peter Kussi’s excellent translation which won him a National Book Award nomination. Kussi is by far the best American translator from the Czech. The fact that he returned to this novel after many years in order to revise it and make it even more faithful to the original shows that he is possessed by a longing for perfection; in other words, that he is a true artist among translators. I thank him from my heart for his beautiful piece of work and clasp his hand as a friend
Milan Kundera
ชวนให้นึกถึงบทความสั้นๆ ของมิลาน คุนเดอรา ที่ได้เล่าความรู้สึกจากความทรงจำช่วงหนึ่งในชีวิต
จากบทความท้ายเล่มนวนิยายเล่มหนึ่งของเขา Life is elsewhere
“Life Is Elsewhere” is a celebrated sentence of Rimbaud. It is cited by André Breton at the conclusion of his Surrealist Manifesto. In May 1968, Paris students scribbled it on the walls of the Sorbonne as their slogan. But the original title of my novel was “The Lyric Age”. I changed it at the last moment when I saw anxiety on the faces of my publishers, who doubted anyone would buy a book with such an abstruse title.
The lyric age is youth. My novel is an epos of youth, and an analysis of what I call “the lyric attitude”. The lyric attitude is a potential stance of every human being; it is one of the basic categories of human existence, Lyric poetry as a literary genre has existed for ages, because for ages man has been capable of the lyric attitude. The poet is its personification. Starting with Dante, the poet is also a great figure striding through European history. He is a symbol of national identity (Camões, Goethe, Mickiewicz, Pushkin), he is a spokesman of revolutions (Béranger, Petőfi, Mayakovsky, Lorca), he is the voice of history (Hugo, Breton), he is a mythological being and the subject of a virtually religious cult (Petrarch, Byron , Rimbaud, Rilke), but he is above all the representative of an inviolable value which we are ready to write with a capital letter: Poetry.
But what has happened to the European poet in the past half century? Today his voice is barely audible. Without our being quite aware of it, the poet has passed from the great, noisy world scene. (His disappearance is apparently one of the symptoms of that dangerous time of transition in which Europe finds itself and which we have not yet learned to name.) Through a kind of satanic irony of history, the last brief European period when the poet still played his great public role was the period of post-1945 communist revolutions in Central Europe. It is important to stress that these peculiar pseudo-revolutions, imported from Russia and carried out under the protection of the army and the police, were full of authentic revolutionary psychology and their adherents experienced them with grand pathos, enthusiasm, and eschatologic faith in an absolutely new world. Poets found themselves on the proscenium for the last time. They thought they were playing their customary part in the glorious European drama and had no inkling that the theatre manager had changed the program at the last moment and substituted a trivial farce.
I witnessed this era “ruled hand in hand by the hangman and the poet” (p. 270) from up close. I heard my admired French poet Paul Éluard publicly and ceremonially renounce his Prague friend whom Stalinist justice was sending to the gallows. This episode (I wrote about it in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) hit me like a trauma: when an executioner kills, that is after all normal; but when a poet (and a great poet) sings in accompaniment, the whole system of values we considered sacrosanct has suddenly been shaken apart. Nothing is certain any longer. Everything turns problematic, questionable, subject of analysis and doubt: Progress and Revolutionary. Youth. Motherhood. Even Man. And also Poetry. I saw before me a world of shaken values and gradually, over many years, the figure of Jaromil, his mother and his loves took shape in my mind.
Don’t say that Jaromil is a bad poet! That would be too cheap an explanation of his life’s story! Jaromil is a talented poet, with great imagination and feeling. And he is a sensitive young man. Of course, he is also a monster. But his monstrosity is potentially contained in us all. It is in me. It is in you. It is in Rimbaud. It is in Shelley, in Hugo. In all young men, of all periods and regimes. Jaromil is not a product of communism. Communism only illuminated an otherwise hidden side, it released something which under different circumstances would merely have slumbered in peace.
Even though the story of Jaromil and his mother takes place in a specific historic period which is portrayed truthfully (without the slightest satiric intent), it was not my aim to describe a period. “We did not choose that epoch because we were interested in it for its own sake, but because it seemed to offer an excellent trap for snaring Rimbaud and Lermontov, lyricism and youth.” (p. 271) In other words: for a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence? In the case of this novel, several related questions also presented themselves: What is the lyric attitude? What is youth? What mysterious role does a mother play in forming the lyric world of a young man? And if youth is the time of inexperience, what is the connection between inexperience and a longing for the absolute? Or between a longing for the absolute and revolutionary fervor? And how does the lyric attitude reveal itself in love? Are there “lyric forms” of love? And so on, and so on. The novel, of course, does not answer any of these questions. The questions are already an answer in themselves, for as Heidegger put it: the essence of man has the form of a question.
The first idea for this novel arose long ago, in the middle of the nineteen-fifties. I wanted to solve an aesthetic problem: how to write a novel which would be a “critique of poetry” and yet at the same time would itself be poetry (transmit poetic intensity and imagination). I finished the novel in 1969. It never came out in Bohemia. It was first published In France, in 1973, and a year later in America in Peter Kussi’s excellent translation which won him a National Book Award nomination. Kussi is by far the best American translator from the Czech. The fact that he returned to this novel after many years in order to revise it and make it even more faithful to the original shows that he is possessed by a longing for perfection; in other words, that he is a true artist among translators. I thank him from my heart for his beautiful piece of work and clasp his hand as a friend
Milan Kundera