![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Folly.jpg\")
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[Because of the Brett Stephens\u2014NYT stuff, I put this post on back burner, so it is 4 days late. But here goes:]<\/p>\n
Today in 1895 \u2014 no, yesterday, by the time you’ll read this,\u00a0i.e. on 29 April \u2014 Joseph Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly,<\/em> was published in London. As another continental European & nomad who decided to write in English rather than in his mother-tongue, Conrad has always been an important figure (& writer) for me. A couple years ago I gave a keynote address at the University of\u00a0Glasgow (unpublished in English, though it is coming out in Chinese later this year)\u00a0the opening section of which is a \u00a0short meditation on the epigraph of Almayer’s Folly<\/em>. Here’s an edited version of this intro:<\/p>\n 1. \u201cWho among us has not had his promised land, his day of ecstasy and his end in exile?\u201d \u2014 signed: Amiel … Thus begins or rather pre-begins Joseph Conrad\u2019s novel Almayer\u2019s Folly: A Story of an Eastern River<\/i> (1895). The epigraph comes from Henri-Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Amiel\u2019s collection of poems & prose meditations Grains de Mil (Grains of Millet)<\/i> (Paris 1854). This exergue stands at the head of, or, more accurately, stands before his first novel, thus before the vast oeuvre<\/i> to come. Intro\u00efbo ad altarem Conradi<\/i>.<\/p>\n The world-weary and wandering sailor from Poland whom I often confuse with my own grandfather, Joseph Joris, also a sailor, though in the early parts of his life & of the 20C when Conrad had already abandoned ship to take up the pen. Joseph Joris\u2019 writings \u2014 mainly a large correspondence with major scientists & politicians of his era, or so my father told me, and some notations of which only one 3 by 4 scrap of astrological calculations remains \u2014 went up in flames during the Rundstedt offensive when his house in Ettelbruck, Luxembourg \u2014 living quarters plus confiserie fine<\/i> plus the ineptly, for its time, named Cin\u00e9ma de la Paix<\/i> \u2014 was shelled & burned out by advancing US troops liberating us from the Germans. Joseph didn\u2019t live to see this: he had died 2 years earlier from an infected throat \u2014 but that too is another story.<\/p>\n So why do I begin here? Because this epigraph I came across a few days ago as I sat down to redact this keynote came into my mind \u2014 maybe because as I was thinking about what to say today I was looking out of my window, idly, and through the red & falling autumn leaves saw the flowing waters of the Narrows, where Hudson river and East river (tho not Conrad\u2019s \u201cEastern River\u201d \u2014 & yet?) mingle with the encroaching ocean in a daily tug-of-war, ebb & flood, riverrun riverrun \u2014 if I wanted to link elsewhere in modernism, but I don\u2019t want to right now.<\/p>\n So, Conrad\u2019s epigraph was suddenly there & I saw it not as something that stands before one book, but as something that stands before, above, in front of a whole oeuvre<\/i>, a life\u2019s work. A door all of a sudden \u2014 a gate, as in Kafka\u2019s story. (But Kafka, remember, couldn\u2019t go to sea as my two Josephs did, but maybe he didn\u2019t need to do so, for as he puts it in his Journals<\/i>, he had the experience of being \u201cseasick on firm land.\u201d) This door or gate is not one to be waited in front of, as it is open & indeed meant for who is in front of it, & thus meant to be gone, strode through, though the going through is fierce & fearsome because as Amiel points out, the promised land is in the past. (\u201cn\u2019a pas eu\u2026\u201d in the original even if Ian Watt in his excellent comment on the novel translates \u2014 or uses someone\u2019s version who translates this as \u2014 \u201cwho among us does not have<\/b> a promised land…\u201d present tense. Even Conrad in the 1895 first edition misquoted the lines from memory as \u201cLe quel de nous n\u2019a sa terre de promission, son jour d\u2019extase et sa fin dans l\u2019exil,\u201d though he corrected it for the 1914 edition).<\/p>\n Thus: promised land in the past, while ecstasy may be back there too or in the present \u2014 let\u2019s keep that ambiguity going & locate ecstasy also in the present day\u2019s labor leading (after of the promised land has long vanished) into the exilic future \u2014 through the gate, the door, the pre-text, that is the text \u2014 yes, I\u2019ll own up to it \u2014 through writing, the act thereof. Writing is this exile, h.j.r, hejr, hejira, Hagar, she, me, wandering in desert or city, that nomadicity. I am certainly staying with that concept, or better, that process.<\/p>\n And so I\u2019m home again, in the present-future (thus not the future perfect or futur ant\u00e9rieur<\/i> of the French), no, in the present-future that is the tense of writing, an ecstatic-exilic tense. I am formulating it this way now & wouldn\u2019t mind leaving it at that, but this is a keynote, so let me go there now. (…)<\/p>\n [Because of the Brett Stephens\u2014NYT stuff, I put this post on back burner, so it is 4 days late. But here goes:] Today in 1895 \u2014 no, yesterday, by the time you’ll read this,\u00a0i.e....<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15342"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15351,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15342\/revisions\/15351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nA Nomad Poetics Revisited: Poetry and Translation in a Global Age\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/Almayers.jpg\")
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