El Boomeran(g)

Comentarios (20)

• He venido por aquí a recordar, es tan nostálgico hablar del 68 aunque por él anduvieran Pollock y el gigante Rothko...tan futuro, y al recordar se me ha hecho presente un libro divetidísimo y me levanto del ordenata a buscarle:"Los escenarios de la memoria" de Castellet, divertidísimo en alguna de sus partes, el resto interesante. Es en alguna escena con trasfondo religioso no recuerdo si con Aranguren o Damaso Alonso.Y aunque el libro tiene índice de nombres, un signo de elegancia y cortesía de autores y editores,ahora no tengo tiempo de comprobarlo, pero quiero que conste que Castellet no es un infeliz y un ignorante, a no ser que sea una broma cariñosa lo que dice castellito en el primer comentario de este post.

  Comentado por: palique & palique el 08/10/2008 a las 16:39

• A mí tambien me han llegado rumores sobre esa púrpura negra. En concreto que la iba a publicar una editorial de primera fila, pero la vetó la directora de narrativa al verse reflejada en un personaje de la novela, una editora catalana que se acuesta con sus autores a cambio de publicarles los libros. Lo que no se es de qué va exactamente la novela.

  Comentado por: Monday el 08/9/2008 a las 16:47

• Sí, es una novela que Rouco presentó a un concurso de la Caja de Ahoros de Soria cuando estaba en el seminario. Parece ser que al autor no le hace gracia que por fin salga a la luz; supongo que no le hace gracia el retraso... ¿o será por razones más profundas? No en vano se rumorea que es un misterio policíaco ambientado en El Pardo en torno a unas palabras tatuadas en el brazo incorrupto de una santa. Lo que no adelantan mis fuentes es si se llevó el premio o no. No me extrañaría, que hubiera sufrido la incomprensión habitual en las obras visionarias.

  Comentado por: Mari juana el 08/9/2008 a las 16:36

• ViaMagna va a publicar dentro de pocos días una novela titulada LA PÚRPURA
  NEGRA sobre la que me han llegado varias leyendas, entre ellas, que está escrita bajo seudónimo por un alto eclesiástico español y que intentaron prohibirla antes de ser escrita. ¿Alguien sabe algo de esto?

  Comentado por: LOREN el 08/9/2008 a las 10:38

• This article originally appeared on 19 August in the Frankfurter Rundschau 19 Aug.
  
  Ina Hartwig is the literary editor at the Frankfurter Rundschau.
  
  Translation: lp

  Comentado por: copia/pega el 07/9/2008 a las 19:15

• Gracias, copia y pega. Promete ser un epistolario fascinante. Habrá que esperar a la traducción en Inglés - para los que no leemos el alemán - parece que los derechos ya han sido adquiridos.
  Quién tradujo la reseña?

  Comentado por: me el 07/9/2008 a las 18:05

• Magic and guilt
  The electric and torturous correspondence between Germany's legendary poets, Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, has now been released in book form for the first time. Ina Hartwig on what was probably the most complicated love story in post-war Germany
  Take a deep breath and prepare to sweep away all the jargon and highfalutin that has built up around Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan over the years. It's a unique opportunity to start from scratch.
  
  The legendary correspondence between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan which was originally intended to be kept under wraps until 2023, has been released by their heirs and edited by Suhrkamp Verlag with appropriate thoroughness. And here they are - almost 200 documents, letters, dedications, telegrams, postcards which open the door onto a huge, difficult relationship between two individuals, who were nothing less than hurled into each others' arms by affinity, poetic calling, erotic attraction and mourning for events of the past. The documents date from the period before fame towered over the two poets in a way that seemed more destructive than protective. Indeed the need for protection and the feeling of woundedness thread through their letters like a leitmotif.
  
  "Glorious news" the 21-year old Ingeborg Bachmann writes in a letter to her parents, the "surrealist poet" Paul Celan has fallen in love with her. It is May 1948, Vienna. The 27-year-old Celan, whose parents, Leo and Friederike Antschel, died in a German concentration camp in Ukraine, had fled just a few months earlier from Bucharest, via Budapest, to Vienna. Bachmann, the daughter of a teacher and a former member of the Nazi party, is writing her PhD on Heidegger. Celan, of all people, will write in a letter to Bachmann several years later, that Heidegger's choking on his own mistakes is more agreeable to him than the solid Federal German conscience of someone like Heinrich Böll.
  
  The correspondence opens with Celan's poem "In Egypt", which he sends to his beloved, with the dedication "to one who is painfully precise", on her 22nd birthday. It contains a motif, so tantalising and uncomfortable, that it foreshadows the conflicts to come: "Adorn the stranger beside you most beautifully./ Adorn her with the pain for Ruth, for Mirjam and Noemie". This motif of "adorning pain" - the pain of the Jewesses adorns the Gentile - is close to the bone, and yet it constitutes something akin to the constitution of the love between the Austrian philosophy student, who stands before a precipitous career as a poet, and the stateless Jew from Czernowitz in Galicia, whose most famous poem "Death Fugue" has already attracted attention in literary circles.
  
  What is a young girl to do with a linguistic lasso like this, poised to catch both magic and guilt? She lets herself be seduced, pulled in. Spellbound she reads and marvels at his poems, responding to his linguistic dominance in her letters - don't forget she is six years his junior -with a mystifying tone that sounds like a sugary Celan pastiche: "Again I have felt the poppy, deep, so deep, your magic was so wondrous, I can never forget it." But this is also obviously an opportunity to talk about their shared sexuality.
  
  The two love birds spend a month together in Vienna then, as planned, Celan moves on to Paris, where he settles (he also briefly lived in France as a student), finding work as a school teacher. It is here, three years later, that he marries a French woman and becomes a father, where he is hit by the dreadful "Goll affair" and where, in 1970, after countless major psychological crises and numerous stints in clinics, he will throw himself into the Seine, before he even turns 50.
  
  The correspondence with his lover - who is soon to become his intellectual companion, until Ingeborg Bachmann, herself shaken by crisis, stops writing letters altogether in 1961 - shows only too clearly why these two people could never be together in the long term. Despite having infinite amounts to say to each other at times, despite their being such tremendous a inspiration and enrichment for one another, depending on the circumstances of their lives and work. What a relief it would be to blame this on sheer promiscuity. In August 1949, Bachmann writes self-assuredly: "As you will no doubt imagine, since we parted ways my time has not passed without relationships with other men. But there has been nothing binding, I never stay anywhere long, I am more restless than ever and I promise nothing to no one."
  
  We should not pretend that Bachmann did not have this vital, grabbing "manly" side, but it is only one side of a person for whom specifically female self-destructiveness was anything but foreign.
  
  In September 1950 she will mention her first "nervous breakdown" and tell Celan that she is "lost, desperate and embittered". She writes: "I have such desire for a little comfort" and she entreats him: "Please try to be good to me and hold me tight!" He obviously senses a good portion of stylisation here, in any case he soon cautions his now most sought-after companion to be "a little more sparing with your demands". Because, he continues, she has "had more from life" than most of her contemporaries. Jealousy? This is the astoundingly sober reply to a letter from June 1951, in which she admits: "I love you and I don't want to love you, it is too much and too difficult..."
  
  And yet the love affair will flare up again, in 1957. Celan, long married, doesn't omit, in a letter to Bachmann, to praise his wife, Gisele de Lestrange, for her fortitude. Meanwhile, his wife's diaries reveal how shocked she is at the betrayal. (This information comes from sources outside this book.) But things are different this time, not only because of the blatant adultery. Nine years have passed since their first meeting, and suddenly Celan recognises the poet in her, a colleague, a great writer. "Ingeborg, Ingeborg" he evokes the mature Bachmann: "I am so imbued with you. And I know, at last, what your poems are like."
  
  In this ecstatic phase of renewed happiness, Celan uses the word "herzzeit" (lit. heart time -ed.) in his poem "Köln, Am Hof" (where they met in a hotel). Herzzeit is also the title of the book. With all the energy he can muster, Celan abandons himself, mentally and amorously, but as irresistible as this might be, for the first time it is truly serious and dangerous for him. When he sees their books standing side by side on the shelf of a friend, he is deeply shaken. The imagination as poet pair, quite literally. The 'herzzeit" is undoubtedly the emotional highpoint of this collection.
  
  But more surprising and compelling are the letters from the period of separation, bitterness and disappointment. This applies to both of them. They both refrain from any high-flown language when imploring the other to see sense. As when Celan once tried to warn the aspiring, life-hungry, success-cosseted young woman, and now when Ingeborg Bachman distances herself from Celan.
  
  Not that she is incapable of understanding his misery, which was triggered acutely by what he saw as Günther Blöckner's anti-Semitic critique of his poetry volume "Sprachgitter" (speech-grille) 1959. But she thinks that he is losing himself in his despair, instead of steeling himself against criticism. In contrast to her usual portrayal of herself as damaged, in this letter she is resolute and pragmatic and demands that Celan develop a sense of his own fame. She argues, there's no other way to see it, against his psychosis, against his paranoia.
  
  But Celan is utterly defenceless against the attacks of his critics and at the same time, hugely demanding of his friends - cumulating in the Goll affair. Yet even in its darkest hour, Celan undoubtedly received support from Bachmann, Marie Luise Kaschnitz and others. They published a letter to the "Neue Rundschau" in response to the untenable charges of plagiarism which Claire Goll, herself of Jewish origin, maliciously put about in the world, saying that Celan had helped himself poetically to the work of her deceased husband, Ivan Goll. For Celan, this was a traumatic compounding of his persecution complex.
  
  On 27 September 1961 Bachmann writes a courageous letter to Celan which she never mustered the courage to send. Tragically, it was her last letter to him before she was seized by an inability to write letters. You also sense in it her exhaustion, and that she has long been entangled in other problems. The letters also reveal that her cohabitation with Max Frisch - which began in 1958 - was obviously put under significant strain by Celan's demands. She writes: "I really think that the greatest disaster is inside you. The wretched stuff that comes from outside - and you don't need assure me of the truth of this, because I am well aware of much of it - is certainly poisonous, but it can be overcome, it must be possible to overcome. It is up to you now to confront it properly, after all you see that every explanation, every event, however right it might have been, has not diminished the unhappiness inside you, when I hear you speaking, it seems to me as if ... it meant nothing to you that many people have made an effort, as if the only things that counted for you were dirt, maliciousness, folly. ... You want to be the victim, but it is up to you to change this..."
  
  This is no longer the voice of the young woman who was so captivated by Celan's pain-steeped language, these are the words of a poet with a lifetime's experience behind her, who is showing him the limits: her limits. None of it says anything about any possible guilt on her behalf, or neglect. It also says nothing about the abysses in which Paul Celan was genuinely trapped. It does show, however, that those closest to him were unable to endure his condition. This is certainly true for Ingeborg Bachmann, and even more so, for the robust Max Frisch, whose brief correspondence with Celan is also included in this book.
  
  The person who gave him the most, suffered the most and lost the most was Gisele de Lestrange, Celan's extraordinary wife, whose distraught correspondence with Bachmann is also documented. Twice Celan tried to kill his wife in his madness; and yet she remained committed to him with her very being, even after his death. Her letters to Bachmann complete the shocking impression which lingers after reading this collection of letters. Although they don't go into detail, perhaps out of timidity, the publishers talk convincingly about a "symptomatic correspondence". Indeed, it not only covers the love, friendship and poetic parallels (such as their shared use of "sand" and "hair" as metaphors for death) between this long mythologised poet duo; it is always also about their illnesses. Bachmann's illness, her overwhelming anxiety, her heavy addiction to tablets and alcohol, which also led to long stays in clinics, had not yet surfaced at the time when she was exchanging letters with Celan - it may well have been triggered by her separation from Max Frisch in 1962.
  
  And so it is all the more astounding and moving that after Celan's death, and almost a decade after breaking off her written exchange with him, Bachmann once again took up an intensive - purely poetic - correspondence with her former lover. In the manuscript of her novel "Malina" which would be published in 1971, two years before her own accidental death, she includes the fairytale chapter "The Secrets of the Princess of Kagran" - an homage to Celan, whom she loved more than anyone else. It also talks about the impossibility of being saved by someone who is incapable of being saved themselves (or unwilling).
  
  A direct line leads between Celan's first poem "In Egypt" which was dedicated to Bachmann, and Bachmann's "Malina", this fraught evocation of woundedness. Pain adorns, the great Viennese soul-doctor, Freud, knew that, but the poetic overemphasis on pain allows the borders to pathology to dissolve. This happened to Celan, probably not to Bachmann. And this is another thing that emerges from this torturous and electrifying correspondence: Ingeborg was stronger.
  
  *
  
  "Herzzeit" The letters of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan. Edited by Bertrand Badiou, Hans Höller, Andrea Stoll and Barbara Wiedemann. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/M. 2008,

  Comentado por: copia/pega el 07/9/2008 a las 11:06

• Pienso que Benet escribió Madrid influido por la muerte,prematura,de Luis Martín Santos. Como una necesidad de poner en orden ciertos hechos difusos en su memoria.
  También Benet desfila en La gallina ciega.
  
  " Benet es otra cosa. Se planta tras un biombo. No desconfiado pero si asomándose por posibles rendijas invisibles para observar y darse cuenta de lo que piensan los demás. Muy leído ya a primera vista y evidente sabedor de cosas que uno no sabe. Inteligente sin remedio : no hablamos mas que de literatura ".
  
  Sin duda,uno de los grandes maestros de la lengua desde Quevedo. Un privilegio el de Azúa haber gozado de su amistad. Nosotros nos conformamos con leerlo con cierta periodicidad.

  Comentado por: maleas el 06/9/2008 a las 13:16

• Observaciones sobre el lenguaje
  
  cada vez más me resulta más pobre la interpretación del significado como uso según unas reglas el segundo Wittgenstein, y la tesis de la autonomía de la gramática; porque en definitiva el fondo del significado es referencial y como existe, como decía, escribía Varrón en su libro (casi perdido) sobre la lengua latina, en el lenguaje la 'anomalía' de Crates de Malo pero también la 'analogía' de Aristarco de Samotracia; por qué no pensar que exista una relación, o por decirlo en terminos de W. el 'juego lingüistico de lo extra-lingüístico'; porque negar que el lenguaje forme significaciones, que si bien son intra-lingüísticas por su naturaleza, a partir de relaciones con lo de fuera, y que esto fuese la raíz del significa precismente este juego. Por tanto no se podría explicar completamente el significado sin echar mano de estas relaciones o de este juego aunque la gramática fuera autónoma. En último término la referencia se muestra irreductible, porque la analogía depende de un 'primer analogado', es según un orden, secundum prius et posterius; y la anomalía hace que la imposición de nombres no se atenga a 'reglas' de ningún juego previo, porque ella 'es' el origen del juego
  
  saludos

  Comentado por: vic el 06/9/2008 a las 11:24

• D. Pozo: No estoy seguro que si D. Félix escribiese sus memorias fuesen tan agradecidas como estos textos evocativos que desgrana en momentos especiales sin la opresión del quehacer periodístico ni académico. Cuando lo leí el jueves, viendo la vuelta en su terreno, tuve que mirar la fotografía que habían puesto los cutres del Cultural para percatarme que era él. No se me correspondían en principio texto y foto, pensando en los pestiños que suele escribir en el periódico de todos los bares, y lo bien que lo pasé con su lectura. Un saludo.

  Comentado por: Tipo Material el 05/9/2008 a las 18:34

• Qué bien se leen estos recuerdos, no nos deje con la miel en los labios. Nunca se es demasiado joven para escribir memorias. Mejor hacerlo cuando todavía la tenemos. La suya parece estar intacta. Lo felicito.

  Comentado por: me el 05/9/2008 a las 16:52

• Propuesta de texto de solapa para las memorias del Azúa:
  España vivía cuarenta años de dictadura comunista, a lo largo de la cual sólo A. y otros cuatro valientes osaron oír roncanrol (y dieron con sus huesos en la cárcel por ello). A fue expulsado de incontables universidades por oponerse al realismo socialista imperante (y echar a Fraga él solo, ¿era ya entonces un gallardonista inflitrado?), ninguneado en las editoriales progres de la gauche divine, subvencionada, como es sabido, por fidel, chavez (¿o chaves?) y la kommintern: ni tusquets, ni seix barral ni anagrama querían saber dé él, renegado.
  Es una buena muestra de la incultura progresista vigente que no se le honre como mártir de las artes y se le tome por un funcionario oportunista y trepa. Gracias a sus insultos y muestras de cinismo a diestro y siniestro (hoy le toca al pobre castellet ser un infeliz!) se está poniendo esforzadamente al nivel de lumbreras como umbral, hora es de que herede asquerosa columna y, exprimiendo su condición de héroe desengañado de batallas ajenas, un contrato vitalicio le libere por fin de su sufrida condición de publicista a destajo para prisa y medios afines. ¡Libertad para Félix, ninguneado durante tres décadas en triunfo, el país, babelia y el instituto cervantes de la era felipista, dios mío!Y además escribe tan bien...

  Comentado por: harto el 05/9/2008 a las 13:50

• Don Félix, si ‘Otoño en Madrid, hacia 1950’ era un buenísimo texto de un memorialismo inacabado (Don Juan siempre se negó a palabrear sobre sus Memorias), escrito con luminosidad, profundidad y elegancia; su entrega de ayer en ‘El Cultural’ no le va a la zaga. Pasa igual que con esos ejercicios memorialísticos superiores, de otro de los citados: Sarrión y su triple entrega.
  Creo que en usted está anidando ese proyecto de relatar sus años mozos con palabras clarividentes y un poco profanas. Algún intento de esas estampas brillantes, chispeantes y afortunadas se han visto ya en este espacio. Recuerdo la visita parisina a Calvino, con Salinas y Benet, por ejemplo ¿Para cuando sus memorias, don Félix? Las esperamos con impaciencia.

  Comentado por: El Pozo y el Numa el 05/9/2008 a las 13:16

• Azúa aún es joven para escribir sus memorias,genero por lo demás que no se suele dar mucho en España. Mientras las escribe y nosotros podamos leerlas,una escena contada por otro.
  
  " Comida con Sergio Pitol y otro joven,Azúa. Sergio lo ha ganado todo: más ancho parece mas alto;mas seguro,mas entero;su estancia en el extranjero le ha servido. Se quiere quedar,por ahora,a vivir aquí,traduciendo o a lo que salga.
  ... ( Perorata de Aúb sobre historia de la Literatura )...
  
  Pitol sonríe.
  -No digo que no.
  -Desde este punto de vista los comunistas son todavía más intransigentes.
  -No los defiendo.
  -Y los anarquistas se quedan sin nada.
  -!Ojalá!.
  Azúa se quedaría bastante sorprendido si,ahora que parece que no le hice caso,me levantara y gritara,señalando la puerta de la trattoria:
  -!Por ahí llega enfurecido el caballo de Kornilov !.
  ( O que amenazara a contarle la verídica historia de la apertura de la tumba de Tamerlán. Pero tiene que quedarse para otra ocasión por que solo me enteré de ella un par de meses mas tarde.)
  A mi,Félix de Azúa me gusta: algo sectario tal vez,pero corresponde a su edad. Y a su mujer da gusto verla."
  
  Max Aub
  La gallina ciega
  1968

  Comentado por: maleas el 05/9/2008 a las 13:15

• Pero... ¿cómo puede hacernos esto, Sr. Azúa? ¡Grabe ese DVD o váyase al infierno!
  
  (Y de paso, como lector suyo, gracias)

  Comentado por: rescoldo el 05/9/2008 a las 12:30

• Estaría bien que Azúa escribiese unas memorias, a ser posible suyas.

  Comentado por: Dafne Sia el 05/9/2008 a las 00:54

• Y de vez en cuando, robaría El Mundo.

  Comentado por: el mismo el 04/9/2008 a las 23:07

• Querido Félix:
  
  Si no existiera este blog, compraría el periódico de catulña todos los días.
  
  Saludos desde Madrid.

  Comentado por: uno el 04/9/2008 a las 23:06

• Sr. Azúa,
  
  Cuando en breve se jubile, ¿es posible que se ponga a trabajar en unas memorias?

  Comentado por: Mr Darcy el 04/9/2008 a las 19:19

• Ya era hora. Sí, Castellet es un infeliz (un ignorante), siempre ha estado en la higuera.

  Comentado por: castellito el 04/9/2008 a las 17:25