Recently read #1: Akhmatova meets Bashō (Vasil Bykaŭ, “The Wall”)

2008-05-19T00:00:00Z

(Introductory note: This post marks the beginning of a new series on this blog, aptly titled “Recently read.” Every now and then I will try to verbalize afterthoughts inspired by the books I happen to read, and post them here. I hope these recommendations or anti-recommmendations might turn out to be useful for someone.)

Give me
a kiss to build a dream on,
and my imagination
will thrive upon that kiss;
sweetheart,
I ask no more than this —
a kiss to build a dream on.

Thusly starts the Fallout 2 intro — a mini-movie that can be considered a piece of art in its own right. Louis Armstrong sings these words in an abandoned underground cinema, wherein a movie is displayed, touching on nostalgia for pre-War times as well as severe dangers that lurk on the surface of the earth. And then come these words…

“War, war never changes.”

Just like throughout the entire Fallout saga, these words reverberated in my mind as I read “The Wall,” a collection of short stories by Vasil Bykaŭ, the late Belarussian writer.

For the war indeed does not change. And wherever it appears, it carries around such an amount of destruction and utter wrongness that it is next to unimaginable for a generation grown up in a relatively peaceful place and time such as ours. In fact, even the words “utter wrongness” do not do justice to what was once an unescapable reality. There is only one way to find appropriate words: to show it, show it without overlooking anything, show it dryly and aloofly in all its hideousness.

And Bykaŭ does. There is not a single word of moralizing in these stories. There are no high words, and barely even a human thought beyond fear for life. There is pure depiction; and yet every word in this depiction stands firm and cannot be removed without losing the level of detail called for. This induces associations with Anna Akhmatova and her famous “Requiem,” which begins as follows:

Это было, когда улыбался
только мертвый, спокойствию рад.

“Это было.” “It happened.” These simple words are immensely powerful. And the same two words, unspoken, echo throughout the entire book. It happened, and it was like this. Nothing more can, or should, be told.

I’ve mentioned the level of detail; this aspect of these stories deserves longer comment. It is imminent that they would not be quite as powerful were it not for the detail. One can almost sense the chill of a dawn rising up above some godforsaken trench somewhere on the battlefront. Or shudder at the cold dampness of the soil inside it. Or smell the stench of decay rising above a corpse shot several days ago. Or feel the almost palpable fear floating in the crossfire of danger, one on the enemy side, the other shaped as one’s own commandment. Or the gloom with which a small group of soldiers sets out to dig their final resting place before committing suicide, lest worse fate befall them.

These stories are almost “haikuistic,” so to speak, in that each one of them resembles a very thinly cut and faithfully portrayed slice of reality from which there is no escape. This shows most strongly in case of the shortest ones, like “The Hill,” which are just several pages long, but it arguably holds even for the longest text in the book, the opening novella, “Love Me, Soldier.” (In which, by the way, Falloutesque associations are particularly strong: imagine a Belarussian sergeant who finds a fellow countrygirl hiding in a village in Austria, at the very end of the war, and falls in love with her. Doesn’t that sound like “a kiss to build a dream on?” Well, in Bykaŭ’s world, good dreams never come true.)

I quoted Akhmatova’s “it happened.” Yet, perhaps, the most striking and saddening impression from “The Wall” as a whole, and one that sets it apart from other war literature, is that this should really read “it still happens.” For the war has ended, but it takes long for a nation to recover from the scars it left; especially the Belarussian nation, who have been held captive by various regimes for too long and have never actually experienced freedom that we take for granted. Once a wound has been healed, it is all too easy to reopen it. And fear for speaking one’s own language remains the same, war or no war.

No wonder Bykaŭ’s writings are still censored in his homeland. Thanks to the Internet, though, the full Polish text of all the stories is available online. Highly recommended.

Inward ripeness

2008-05-05T00:00:00Z

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stol’n on his wing my three and twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth
That I to manhood am arrived so near;
And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
That some more timely-happy spirits endu’th.
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure ev’n
To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heav’n:
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great Task-Master’s eye.

John Milton is said to have composed this sonnet on his twenty-fourth birthday, and his thoughts (including, but not limited to, the criticism of the achievements so far) are very much in line with mine on my very own 24th birthday. One wonders what is the programming equivalent of “Paradise Lost.”

I’m not playing this stupid game anymore

2008-04-14T00:00:00Z

Not until the next tournament, that is. My achievements in the 12th Scrabble Championship of Warsaw can be described as “mediocre” at best; four won, one drawn and seven lost games mean that my general rating will drop down by two points or so. Oh well. Everybody knows it’s a stupid game. ;-) At least I’ve managed to get a decent small score, with an average of 377 points per game.

Random resolutions for the indefinite future:

Get a final draft of the C++09 standard when it’s ready and acquaint myself with it as closely as possible. I strongly dislike C++ (and I’m not alone in this — see the Frequently Questioned Answers about C++ for very detailed criticisms); however, I’ve long wanted to learn that language better just to know all the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy. The ideal moment for this will be when the new standard is out; this will give me the advantage of not having to unlearn the things changed by the standard, while staying on a cutting and competitive edge.
Get a copy of Federico García Lorca’s poems translated into Polish by Jerzy Ficowski. I have only a very vague knowledge of Lorca (just his Romance of the Spanish Civil Guard (Romance de la Guardia Civil Española)), but I very much like what little I know.

Daniel Janus – poetry

Recently read #1: Akhmatova meets Bashō (Vasil Bykaŭ, “The Wall”)

Inward ripeness

I’m not playing this stupid game anymore