{"id":9424,"date":"2012-12-07T10:11:04","date_gmt":"2012-12-07T14:11:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=9424"},"modified":"2012-12-07T10:11:04","modified_gmt":"2012-12-07T14:11:04","slug":"jean-bollack-1923-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/jean-bollack-1923-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"Jean Bollack (1923-2012)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When I think of Jean Bollack\u00a0<\/strong>\u2014 philologist, philosopher, hermeneut, translator, commentator, friend to\u00a0Paul Celan & irritant to many \u2014\u00a0<\/strong>the first word that comes to mind is “d\u00e9crasser,” a French term that means to clean, to scrub or more powerfully, to scour, even dip into a bath of acid to remove the accumulated \u00a0gangue of lazy thought & language. He did this mostly to the Greek tragedies and the pre-socratic philosophers, both in translating them and in rethinking their thought \u2014 two linked activities as his focus on language, on the word itself, buttressed his approach. Charles Olson would have loved this near-monomaniacal \u00a0but polyvalent insistence on the texts of Heraclitus<\/a>, Parmenides<\/a> and Empedokles<\/a>, among others, that loudly demand that the pre-Socratics be read exactly as if they were new, i.e. not yet en-gangued by two millennia of Platonic and Aristotelean (Ari-stottle: Bollack would have loved Olson’s play) impositions of discourse as\u00a0logos<\/em>. Though Bollack was also, and accurately so, weary of the possible “other” of logos<\/em>, namely the Heidegerrian idea of Being<\/em>. (Bollack has an excellent essay on Celan’s poem Todtnauberg<\/em>, the conclusions of which \u2014 if not the argument or reading of the poem itself \u2014 are close to my own in my essay “Translation at the Mountain of Death”). His work has remained essentially untranslated, as far as I am aware, which is a shame, though understandable, for one because so much focuses on bringing the Greeks into French (translations of translations being considered redundant \u2014 but why should that be, in a polylingual world no longer divisible between the binary of les anciens<\/em> \u2014 Greeks & Romans, no one else \u2014 and les modernes<\/em> \u2014 those Northern imperial nations claiming logos & techn\u00e9 as their own?). Secondly, I think, in the case of his very important work on Paul Celan, it is because no one has as yet had the courage to go at what are highly complex, idiosyncratic texts. His time will come, I hope \u2014 it has to, malgr\u00e9<\/em> the man’s pigheadedness, for he did do major work, and two of the great 20C poets approved: Celan thought well of both their friendship and Bollack’s thinking about poetry, and Henri Michaux thought Bollack’s translations of Empedokles excellent. Here is an extract of the latter:<\/p>\n

\n

\u00abDouble ce que je vais dire
\nPlut\u00f4t l\u2019un cro\u00eet pour seul \u00eatre de plusieurs qu\u2019il \u00e9tait
\nPlut\u00f4t il se s\u00e9pare et devient pluriel d\u2019un qu\u2019il fut
\nDouble la naissance des choses mortelles, double leur d\u00e9p\u00e9rissement
\nSi une, la rencontre de tous l\u2019enfante et l\u2019emporte \u00e0 la fois
\nL\u2019autre, dispersant, se disperse quand ils se s\u00e9parent \u00e0 nouveau
\nEt jamais ils ne cessent d\u2019\u00e9changer leur chemin
\nTant\u00f4t par amour se rencontrant tous dans l\u2019un
\nTant\u00f4t emport\u00e9s chacun au loin par la haine de Discorde
\nEt quand l\u2019un se s\u00e9pare encore le multiple s\u2019accomplit.\u00bb<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I think of Jean Bollack\u00a0\u2014 philologist, philosopher, hermeneut, translator, commentator, friend to\u00a0Paul Celan & irritant to many \u2014\u00a0the first word that comes to mind is “d\u00e9crasser,” a French term that means to clean,...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,37,42,1114,55,62,64,76,83,103],"tags":[1317],"class_list":["post-9424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criticism","category-cultural-studies","category-essays","category-homage","category-intellectuals","category-language","category-literature","category-obituaries","category-paul-celan","category-translation","tag-jean-bollack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9424","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=9424"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9431,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9424\/revisions\/9431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}