A constant back and forth. Between French and English. Between events close by and events far away. Between teeny-tiny concerns and the huge questions no one has answered in anything close to a satisfactory way.

I look forward to my local bookstore receiving the other title I ordered by Asli Erdogan – Les oiseaux de bois. I wish more people would “get it” – “it” being love of life even in its most infuriating, despairing, unsolvable riddles. For instance, she ends the third article *translated and published by Kedistan with the words: “Le soleil de juin, avec compassion et magnificence, luit sur le chien qui a perdu ses couleurs.” (The June sun shines with compassion and magnificence on the dog who has lost his colors.)

Of course, everything she writes before this in the article  speaks of things utterly removed from compassion and magnificence.  And her evocation of the sun’s compassion doesn’t strike me as a cheap literary trick – you know the Romantic yearning for beauty contrasted with horror. It speaks to me of something else entirely. Something unflinching contained in poems by Mandelstam. Such as:

An apple drops to the ground,

toneless, precise

-and all around

the song of the trees, the forest silence.

Osip Mandelstam, Stone (1913)

Or:

In the courtyard, washing up, night

a sky rich with coarse stars.

Starlight like salt on an axe-head,

the full barrel frosting with ice.

The gates: locked, and stern,

frank, open soil all around –

no foundation anywhere, I think,

purer than the truth of fresh canvas.

Like salt, a star melts in the barrel,

ice-cold water gone blacker,

and death tidier, misery saltier,

and soil more truthful, more frightening.

Osip Mandelstam, 1921

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Tell me: how can you not balance back and forth, from one to the other, and attempt to keep as unwavering  an eye as you can ?

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On my very first blog, close to ten years ago, each entry was in French and English. Perhaps I’ll get back into doing that here.

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*The third of the four articles the Turkish government is using as “proof” of her membership in a terrorist organization – and the reason for keeping her in jail awaiting a possible sentence of life imprisonment. More about this here.