Igitur ya da Elbehnon'un Çılgınlığı

by Stéphane Mallarmé, Ayberk Erkay (Translator)

Gecenin bir yarısında kendisine bir anlığına görünen ve zihnini ele geçiren bir imgeden, ya da bir ses, bir ürperti, bir hayalet belki de, yakasını kurtaramamış belli ki Mallarmé, varlık, yokluk, delilik, ölüm gibi temalarla oyalamaya, yatıştırmaya çalışmış o şeyi, ama başaramamış. Attığı zarları karanlık bir ağız yutmuş hep, tamamlayamamış metnini. Ölümünden sonra doktoru tarafından yayınlanıyor Igitur.

“Ve sonra (bu olayın mutlak rastlantısıyla şekillenen zihni) bütün bu uğultuya diyor ki: burada bir hareket var, şüphesiz – bunu ilan etmek benim ödevim: bu çılgınlık var. Haklıydınız (çılgınlığın sesi) onu meydana getirmekte; sanmayın ki sizi tekrar gömeceğim hiçliğe.”

Igitur insana musallat olan bir metin, bir muamma çukuru.

(Tanıtım Bülteninden)

Genres: Poetry

47 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1925

About the author

Stéphane Mallarmé (French: [stefan malaʁme]; 18 March 1842 – 9 September 1898), whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 5 out of 5]

“HE KILLED ALL HIS PUPPETS.”
- Mallarme’s friend and protégé, Paul Valery, speaking after his death.

R.D. Laing once said the beginnings of our anguish and disquiet arise in our infantile attachment to the placenta we were born with, echoing Freud’s pinpointing of the anxiety which follows maternal separation at birth.

But what of the Trolls - those Wise guys who have successfully overcome this anxiety in the easy gregariousness of the power games of ‘well-adjusted’ adulthood?

That’s an attachment, too, isn’t it?

Yes! said Mallarme - and one we must Overcome on our personal road to living freedom.

Mallarme’s verse always celebrates “La mort du poète.” The killing of ALL our personal and public “puppets” - the whole possible array of our personas.

Ending in our Leading an entirely SIMPLE and NATURAL Life.

How is this possible?

By insight - and by forcing our puppets’ lifelong “starvation” in pure act and thought. And that sums up Mallarme’s battle with le Néant in a nutshell.

“0=0.” A quantum-type concept. Not so scary after all, is it? But for Mallarme, the process of formulating the equation was terrifying.

For when Stéphane Mallarme walked into his personal Dark Night of the Soul in 1867, he had no clue then if he could ever escape from it.

It was the time of his dark, barely-finished Herodiade, a time of intense brooding agony. This cradle Catholic, whose childhood verse reveals an innocent faith, was in the midst of a spiritual crisis.

He felt he was banished - not only from the Eden of his early youth - but as well from the ribald rank of his everyday teacher associates.

As the Beatles sang, he was a Nowhere Man.

His close friends worried that he was altogether losing it, but three years later, in 1870, he surprised them all by saying he had Won his battle against Darkness.

That year, working with renewed vigour on his Afternoon of a Faun, he wrote that he had “emerged triumphant - for Eternity is now the most impure region in which my soul may wander.”

He had discovered the immense truth of the Disinterested Thought of Pure Act.

But to the end of his life he thenceforth shrouded his life and work in mystery.

Now, you can say Mallarme was a nonbeliever. Certainly, his letters and conversation give credence to that side of the coin.

But do you remember William Empson’s famed Uses of Ambiguity? Mallarme, whatever else you may say, was a man of rarified spiritual discernment, honed by countless Celan-esque encounters with the Void.

And in rarified lives, ambiguity thrives. Which is why artists as diverse as Marcel Duchamp and T.S. Eliot so revered Mallarme.

Could the man who referred to himself as ‘moi, sylphe du froid plafond’ - Spirit of the cold ceiling, perched dangerously high above mortal ken, have secretly perhaps THRIVED on the ambiguity his words provoked?

Because EVERY word has Multiple Meanings to a mind that sees Objectively.

You know, every reclusive hermit must at times come to the mouth of his cave for a breath of fresh air - the fresh Pneuma of the soul!

No one has ever suspended themselves in midair forever.

And it’s a very short distance from living your life as a disembodied spirit to believing that Heaven is the maturation of goodness, and Hell, of evil.

But what if the struggle between the two is a vain taking “arms against a sea of troubles” - because the end of War is always Peace?

And isn’t the battle itself a “unanime blanc conflit d’une guirlande avec la même” - a succession of a disappearing piece of lace by yet another white embroidery?

Mallarme continually raises his own bar...

This is where Hegelian absolutism becomes existential poetry!

So multiple meanings, objectively seen by such an enlightened spirit as Mallarme - as in the Paradiso of Dante - are all embodiments of Free Choice, stripped of good or evil intent by objective awareness.

So the vision of Heaven in Paradiso potentially includes ALL citizens of the planet, seen as separate Aristotelian expressions of pure act.

And the freedom of the selfless, objective act, after this key insight, is quite simply impervious in its concreteness and ontological primitiveness to subjective taunts...

Thoughts like these acted as an impulse to Edmund Husserl in conceiving his famous epoche.

Always the Cartesian - and remember that Rene Descartes was a confirmed believer - Mallarme’s thought processes had emerged from his private storm, lucid and clear as a bell.

Take Igitur, for instance. It’s Cartesian par excellence...

Its very argument is based on that tired old warhorse: Cogito ergo sum!

I think - therefore I am.

And it’s no accident that ´igitur’ is another Latin word for ´therefore’, like ‘ergo.’

It’s no accident, either, that in this prose poem, the final ‘I am’ is missing...

Because this ‘I am’ is purposefully shrouded in a Symboliste mystery. It has to be that way, because it is part of the sacramental mystery of Rebirth.

And that symbol, of course, refers to Mallarme’s own triumphant spiritual ‘rebirth’, years earlier, in 1870 - which could never have been accomplished without making peace with his past.

For in Igitur the poet falls asleep peacefully - ´lying on the tomb of his ancestors’ , and ´blowing out the candle’ (of his old self).

OK.

And the ‘I think’? Where does that come in?

That’s Igitur’s dice throw, near the beginning of this work...

For as Mallarme’s final poetic lines would later say, in his last poetic utterance:

“Every THOUGHT is a throw of the dice!”

WE are in charge of our thoughts, and can become renewed, if we believe. For God - or Pure Being - can make that happen.

And you know, the day we find our real self, we’ll NEVER lose it again. Because our self will be only pure Act, without that gloomy Shadow we always carried with us in the past.

And from that moment on, like Mallarme, our self-renewal will be PERPETUAL, like the day always follows night. Because with faith in the Spirit all things are possible.

Even destroying ALL our phony puppets!

[Xenia Germeni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Πρώτο ρουμπινί δώρο της νέας χρονιάς !
"Σαν εξαφανίστηκε η σκιά στο σκοτάδι, η Νύχτα απόμεινε με μια αμφίβολη αίσθηση εκκρεμους που πάει να φτάσει και να ξεψυχησει στον εαυτό του• μα ο,τι λάμπει και πάει, εκπνεοντας στον εαυτό του, να αποσβεστει, ο εαυτός της αντιλαμβάνεται να το σηκώνει ακόμα• λοιπόν, αυτηνης είναι δίχως αμφιβολία ο χτυπος που είχε ακουστεί και ο θόρυβός του ο ολοκληρωτικος που ανεπιστρεπτί κατέπεσε στερημενος στο παρελθόν του." -Stephane Mallarme, Ο Ιγκοτούρ ή Η τρέλα του Ελβενόν, μτφ., δοκιμιο και επίμετρο Νίκος Γαβριήλ Πεντζικης, Άγρα (1983) ΥΓ και η σιωπή, τα ζάρια του Ιγκοτούρ και οι ήχοι των αόρατων εγχορδων αγκάλιασαν την καμαρη και η "Διανόηση του αναγνώστη" λύθηκε στη μεταφραστική μελωδία του Πεντζικη και στην προσταγη του S.M. "Τούτο το Διήγημα απευθύνεται στη Διανόηση του αναγνώστη που, μόνη της, σκηνοθετεί". Μοναδικό