I give you hand and call to join the journey To go along the searching path together.
This story will begin one charming morning When the whole world will be the same as ever And any resident of Istanbul could lead His wife in evening to the theatre called "Konak" - In ancient city where the West meets East And where the sun hangs over sea like orange.
These narrow winding streets may match Damascus Where you were wandering to find your love for years. Do not forget to wear your old black glasses, You may believe you are bashaw or someone else.
You'll lose your way in maze of city streets Where you may feel some presence of, it seems, A person seeking you and soon you'll meet... No, it's just people rush for their things.
And if perspective is at least a little changed In this case you will see no symbols any more.
Remembering Ruya means remembering games Of your idyllic past in the ancestral home. The man is always woven from his past And wandering around his life museum, enchanted, Observes exhibits in a layer of silky dust.
Until you realize your wife has dumped you You'll joyfully discover secret hints Of hidden world where Ruya still exists, And only after this you'll start through tears To look at her abandoned empty seat.
A loving man sees everywhere reminders Of his sweetheart with whom he's separated. She's gone to man from her imaginary garden. . She'll stop to dream of someone when she's grey-haired.
Yet her indifference's deep as silent pit Which you may see from window of old flat. And scary thoughts that you want to get rid, All memories that you need to forget, Her stuff that's hard for you to look at still -
All things you burry deep into subconscious - You need to put in former pit that's filled With earth and turned in gap between the houses.
Then everything will happen like a dream And as surreal as forgotten book With you or with a man you'd like to seem Whose photos and news clippings you've just looked.
You'll look at scary shots in video reports Which seem you've already seen somewhere. The clock in house'll be forever stopped. Life'll be divided in "before" and "after".
Let's leave Galip with his unending woe Imagining the map of streets with souks And hearing the city sounds through window - We're just devoted readers of "Black book".
Galip felt love for Ruyya first while reading The ancient book together with his friend - In our thrilling trip sometimes we snuggled in Each other, getting closer in the end.
The heroes disappear, leaving stage. We hold back our tears, feeling sad. And now we may close the last page, Still thinking of the mystery just read.
I often see The Black Book is not so highly appreciated – perhaps this is due to some unevenness or blurred text, but, in any case, there is a certain captured drive in it.
From the very first line of his novel, Pamuk sets a certain tone for the entire narrative, immersing the reader into the unique Universe of this book – Universe that is at the same time touching and family one and Universe that is full of voluminous meanings. Into the Universe of the life of Galip, who is in love with his wife, which is always eluding him. And into the Universe of the history of Turkey of the 20th century, geographically located between the West and the East and trying to digest these diverse influences in its everyday life at the end of the 20th century, and here it is no wonder to stumble upon a description of the flawed dystopian reality of Soviet reality which is so familiar to us.
Pamuk seeks to add depth to the novel, prompting the reader to identify his characters with archetypes from Eastern culture. The theme of searching and wandering through the maze of streets is layered in the novel on the Eastern tradition of storytelling, sometimes taking a slightly more modern form – reading newspaper articles on a variety of topics, from Trying to be yourself to Rulers playing in dressing-up. And the path of the hero’s quest will miraculously repeat the path of the “cult” author of the Poem on the Hidden Meaning. And therefore, leafing through this book, one can feel both the diverse breath of the ancient city and the echo of bygone centuries, as well as the despair and insights of one particular person.
In my first blog entry more than two weeks ago, I promised to talk about my love for adventure books – more precisely, for those called “mystery books”.
In my book “Flirting over a Cup of Coffee” (this is the third book of the cycle “The Unbearable Longing of the Flesh”), in the chapter “The ticking of the clock” I write, “On weekends, Paul used to read out loud “Name of the Rose “book given to me by Dima, while I was lying on the bed with my eyes fixed on the opposite wall”.
Indeed, my discovery of Umberto Eco’s book “Name of the Rose” (“Il nome della rosa”) happened a long time ago. At that time, the movie of the same name by Jean Jacques Annaud was released. Umberto Eco probably studied medieval treatises quite diligently in order to construct the image of William of Baskerville, who has a ready-made answer to everything and who has a way with words. I remember I was extremely interested in why the book was named exactly that way – “Name of the Rose”? But it seems that a suitable ancient quote to answer this question has been found: “Rose as the previous name, having naked names henceforth.”
Some time later, I bought a book by the same interesting Italian author – “Foucault’s Pendulum” issued by the Kiev publishing house “Fita” with an unspecified name of the translator from Italian to Russian. It’s important that perhaps this very famous book marked the beginning of an era of fascination with the mysterious world of Templars history. Today, almost no novel in the style of an intellectual detective is complete without mentioning of this powerful order of the Templars and the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem.
For many years it was quite comfortable for me to live in the world, somewhere in the corner of which Umberto Eco lives. And I completely missed the sad media reports that this professor of semiotics of Bologna University died because of the cancer in February 2016. 🙁
Not lomg ago, while reading Voltaire’s Candide, I learned contemporaries called Voltaire simply “Philosopher” with a capital letter, and I remembered the similar honorable nickname Aristotle had in the Middle Ages. And then I again remembered the novel “The Name of the Rose”, in which much plot was built around the “secret” works of Aristotle.
There, the action takes place in the Italian Benedictine monastery in 1327. The entire detective story is construcred by the author around one book of Aristotle, banned by the Catholic Church. This book of Umberto Eco describes the kind of complicated way people of the Middle Ages could learn about the works of Aristotle.
“The staircase is over. Turning again, we entered the scriptorium from the north tower, and I cried out in admiration … The brightest places were given to antiqarians, the best miniaturists, columnists and scribes. The librarian introduced us to the workers. Malachi spoke about each of what he was working on, and I enthusiastically found in all them the deepest devotion to science and knowledge of the word of God. …So we met Venantius of Salvemeks, a translator from Greek and Arabic, an adherent of the very Aristotle, who undoubtedly was and will be the wisest of men. …Venantius said that even Aristotle speaks of jokes and word games as means of the best knowledge of truths and that, therefore, laughter cannot be a bad deed if it promotes the revelation of truths. But Horhe objected that, as far as he remembers, Aristotle writes about this subject in his book on Poetics as applied only to metaphors. And besides, there are two alarming circumstances. The first is that the book on Poetics, which remained – apparently, by the command of God – for so many centuries unknown to the Christian world, has come to us through the hands of unfaithful Moors … ” “But she was translated into Latin by one of the friends of the angelic doctor Aquinas,” Wilhelm interrupted. “So I said the same thing,” replied Bentz, instantly perked up. “I am poorly versed in Greek, and I was able to familiarize myself with this book precisely in the translation of Guilelmus Moerbekensis.”
We may learn from smart books that Guilelmus Moerbekensis is catholic archbishop, translator of scientific texts from Greek directly to latin language. He made the first translations of almost all the works of Aristotle, and before him translations of Aristotle into Latin were made from Arabic. It was Tommaso d’Aquino (called above “angelic doctor Aquinas”) who inspired Guillelmus de Moerbeke to translate the corpus of Aristotelian writings to Latin and used the results of translation in his comments.
And quite recently, when I accidentally forgot my password from Amazon, I remembered the Umberto Eco book “Foucault’s Pendulum” and remembered Kozobon cracking the password from Belbo’s computer:
“The machine behaved indifferently, it knew that a password was required, and, not receiving the password, it was bored. But at the same time, it seemed to be prompting:” That’s it! What interests you, I have here, in my belly, but only no matter how hard you are sweating, old mole, you still don’t know anything. ” It was most natural to take the Italian transcription of JEHOVAH as a basis. Six letters is already seven hundred and twenty permutations. Of these, he could use thirty-sixth or one hundred and twentieth for the password. … But since I was still drunk, I moved up to the computer again and typed SOPHIA. The machine politely asked, “Do you know the password?” Stupid machine, you don’t even care about the thought of Lorenz. … This time, from hatred of Abulafia, to his stupid harassment – “Do you have a key word?” – I barked: “No.” The screen shuddered and began to fill with letters, lines, lists, and an abyss of words poured out. I hacked Abulafia.” (written in 1988)
So, I liked the genre of action-packed novels, in which some mystery in the past in the past casts its shadow in the present.
Then I read several books by Arturo Perez-Reverte, who was called “Spanish Umberto Eco” by literary critics in book annotations. Some of his novels were screened by Hollywood studios- for example, The Ninth Gate by Roman Polanski.
Just in the book “Club Dumas or Shadow of Richelieu”, on which the film “The Ninth Gate” is based, I saw a kind of curtsey towards Umberto Eco, made by mentioning a very curious character among the members of the secret society of the Club Dumas.
Below I want to give you one quote. The story is narrated on behalf of the literary critic and specialist in the work of Alexander Dumas Boris Balkan.
I raised the candelabrum higher, and we moved down the corridor in the style of Louis XIII … “The castle is very old, it is full of legends”, I began to explain … “But still what are you doing here? The time is clearly inappropriate for excursions”. “Once a year an exception is made,” I explained. “After all, Meng is a special place. It is not in every city that the action of a novel like “The Three Musketeers” begin. We stopped in front of a locked door. Muffled sounds came from behind her – music and human voices. I put the candelabrum on the console. “Now let me introduce you,” I said, opening the door, “the members of the Dumas Club. Some faces were well known to him – from the press, cinema, television. “Are you surprised?” I asked, trying to determine by his appearance what effect all this had on him. I even introduced him to some of the guests, and did so with a kind of wicked pleasure, because he responded to greetings with embarrassment, clearly feeling out of place. “Let me introduce you to Mister Corso … Look there … You recognized him, right? .. Professor of semiotics from Bologna … Now a blonde lady is talking to him, this is Petra Neustadt, the most influential literary critic in Central Europe …”
Here is my own old rhymeless poem written in Russian in 2006, dedicated to Corso, the protagonist of the Dumas Club:
The Missing Link
And now you are to find the missing link. You’ll ask enormous fish about it, So big that she exceeds the size of island. And passing through the wilds of virgin woods You’ll find an ancient chest under a palm tree That indicated by the cross on map. You’ll threaten with the magic sword to dragon That watching all the time to guard the chest. And you will learn the password from the beggar, After you hearty open him your soul.
You’ll bring your customer the part of the mosaic. The bolts are locked and there is no exit. He’ll take it with his trembling hands, delighted. Within the bounds of the vicious circle Not able to go out, he will stand. And in the cherished language he will mutter The incantations by a strange changed voice. A fire will happen and the house will burn … He’ll meet any disaster, laughing crazy. A deaf-mute woman’ll knock over a candle Upon her lonely bed before the dawn.
In one of my next posts, I will write my thoughts on the novels of Dan Brown.
