Vita da pollo

http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-images-white-chicken-image10409889Giuseppe A. Samonà

Corro in moto, è sera, l’aria mi accarezza fresca, piacevole, profumo di campagna. Mi inebria, forse vado troppo veloce – l’ho vista all’ultimo momento, quell’ombra. Freno, cerco di deviare, e quasi ci riesco: ma come di striscio colgo qualcosa, e la moto sobbalza, colpita, ed io la trattengo, per non cadere. Mi fermo, due metri più in là, mi volto: per terra, piano, la “cosa” respira ancora, si muove. Dev’essere un gatto, penso – borbotto…-, e mi avvicino. Invece è un pollo, e vive, per fortuna. Vive: e mi guarda ansimando. Lo raccolgo (e lui trema), con le due mani, me lo porto al petto, per riscaldarlo, e mi sembra che i suoi occhi, rassicurati,  dicano: grazie. Già, ma che fare? La sua ala destra si è come dislocata, ed io con dolcezza provo a rimettergliela in posizione: funziona (glielo leggo, di nuovo, negli occhi). Pure, ancora, non riesce a camminare, zoppica, ché l’ala gli pesa. Così, decido di riportarlo alla fattoria – la s’intravede in lontananza (cioè, non s’intravede, ma una freccia lo dice: a due chilometri…). Di nuovo, lo raccolgo (docile, lui, si lascia raccogliere) e me lo raccolgo nel bavero, amorevolmente, solo la testa resta fuori. Poi, riprendo la moto, e timido, per non spaventarlo, mi avvio. Torniamo a casa, che gli dico (sì, oramai mi sono affezionato a quel pollo ferito). E lui, come fosse felice, mi guarda, si guarda intorno, assapora l’aria fresca, piacevole, profumo di campagna. Siamo amici.

La donna che mi accoglie, un donnone, ha gote rubizze, collo tozzo, e gambe e braccia, come il seno, robuste: È – penso – di selvaggia bellezza. E le dico: Si dev’essere perso…, forse vi appartiene.  Mentre, con gesto amorevole, le porgo il mio pollo ferito.

Eccolo, finalmente – dice lei, allungando amorose le mani. E raccoltoselo al seno con gesto sapiente rapida gli tira il collo. E lo uccide.

Heurs et malheurs d’un poulet

http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-images-white-chicken-image10409889 Giuseppe A. Samonà

C’est le soir, je roule en moto, l’air frais me caresse agréablement. Je suis comme enivré par les parfums de la campagne, je vais peut-être trop vite – cette ombre, je l’ai vue au dernier moment. Je freine, j’essaie de dévier, j’y parviens presque: mais je touche quelque chose sur le côté, la moto fait une embardée, je la retiens pour ne pas tomber. Je m’arrête deux mètres plus loin, je me retourne: par terre, doucement, la “chose” respire encore, elle bouge. Ce doit être un chat, me dis-je, et je m’approche. Mais non, c’est un poulet, et il est vivant, par chance. Il est vivant et me regarde, haletant. Je le soulève des deux mains (il tremble), je le serre contre moi pour le réchauffer, et il me semble que ses yeux, rassurés, me disent: merci. Mais que faire? Son aile droite paraît disloquée, j’essaie délicatement de la remettre dans sa position: ça marche (de nouveau je le lis dans ses yeux). Mais il n’arrive toujours pas à se mettre sur ses pattes, son aile lui pèse. Alors je décide de le ramener à la ferme qu’on entrevoit au loin (en fait on ne l’entrevoit pas, mais une flèche l’indique: à deux kilomètres…). Je le soulève à nouveau (et lui, docile, se laisse prendre), je l’enveloppe dans mon écharpe, amoureusement, seule la tête reste dehors. Puis je reprends la moto, et timidement, pour ne pas l’effrayer, je me mets en route. On rentre à la maison, lui dis-je (oui, je me suis désormais attaché à ce poulet blessé). Et lui, comme heureux, me regarde, regarde autour de lui, il goûte l’air frais, agréable, le parfum de la campagne. Nous sommes amis.

La femme qui m’accueille est grande et forte, elle a les joues rubicondes et le cou épais, les bras et les jambes, comme la poitrine, robustes – une beauté sauvage, me dis-je… Et je bredouille: il a dû se perdre… il est sans doute à vous… tout en lui tendant d’un geste amoureux mon poulet blessé.

Le voici, enfin – dit-elle en avançant amoureusement les mains. Elle le saisit, le serre contre elle et d’un geste sûr, rapide, lui tord le cou. Et le tue.

(GS/SJ)

OPEN LETTER to Stephen Greenblatt

John FlorioLamberto Tassinari  www.johnflorio-is-shakespeare.com

You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. Franz

OPEN LETTER

Dear professor Greenblatt, Yes, this is the incipit of Kafka’s letter to his father. Why do I quote here this powerful, cruel confession? Because my little letter too is about authority, power, fear and love of art. You are the indisputable authority of the Shakespearean studies and ipso facto, the keystone of the grand, albeit crumbling Stratfordian edifice. Thirty years ago, when the majority of English literature teachers in schools and universities were traditionally dealing with the romantic image of the isolated, universal genius, you started, to paraphrase the title of Duff Cooper’s book, a “saving sergeant Shakespeare” campaign, a literary operation aimed to sustain the Stratfordian identity of Shakespeare which was in peril. Within a few years, with the contribution of a handful of scholars, you dramatically reshaped the Shakespearean aura in order to save the identity of the author. Your strategy consisted essentially in imagining and portraying the “real” world in which Shakespeare, the mystery man, lived and wrote. A diminished Bard emerged from this operation, an almost surreal author candidly described by the critic Harold Bloom in the following terms … it is as though the creator of scores of major characters and hundreds of frequently vivid minor figures wasted no imaginative energy in inventing a persona for himself. (…) At the very center of the Canon is the least self- conscious and least aggressive of all the major writers we have known With the new Shakespeare, everything important and meaningful had to be newly imagined, and you were fantastic at that as your 2004 best seller biography Will in the World. How Shakespeare became Shakespeare shows. As a kind of postmodern Fernand Braudel, you knead the history of the English Renaissance you master perfectly with an extraordinary intimate knowledge of Shakespeare’s works, then transplant the anemic man from Stratford within that historical- literary compound, shamelessly using the glue of the numerous may well’s, could have’s, perhaps’, no doubt’s, evidently’s and likely’s. To perfect your revisionist labour you craftily called your product, Will instead of the canonical William. Such a familiarity with an author considered until recently a god, helped seduce your readers and the media, convincing almost everyone that you had brought to life the real Shakespeare. Thanks to some subtle manipulations, and mainly omissions, the Bard became the impure, plagiarist, collaborative playwright we now know: a perfect, postmodern Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. Soon though you realized that the downsizing wasn’t sufficiently safe. Indeed, your 2004 Will in The World has several flaws, the more serious and inexcusable is your total lack of consideration of Montaigne’s influence on Shakespeare. Obviously you were aware of Montaigne’s fundamental contribution to modernity and to Shakespeare’s works, but you refused to acknowledge his importance. I strongly believe you did so because admitting the French philosopher’s influence on the plays, would have been too risky a concession for the already shaky Stratfordian mythology. Therefore you decided to name Montaigne only once while referring, quick as a flash, to John Florio: Born in London, the son of Protestant refugees from Italy, Florio had already published several language manuals, along with a compendium of six thousand Italian proverbs; he would go on to produce an important Italian-English dictionary and a vigorous translation, much used by Shakespeare, of Montaigne’s Essays. Florio became a friend of Ben Jonson, and there is evidence that already in the early 1590s he was a man highly familiar with the theater.(p.227) Which is a bold statement indeed for Florio albeit with no interpretive consequences on your theory. Of course, none of the thousands Shakespearean critics denounced your omission, not on account of respect or fear of you but because they wanted to avoid a dangerous, internecine war which could have jeopardized the object of your common study and careers. In the years following your biography, the Stratfordian mythology crisis worsened with more attacks from all sides: several books by Oxfordian scholars, the good scholarly reputation earned by Diana Price’s Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt about the identity of William Shakespeare, the movie Anonymous, just to mention the more significant blows. There was also, in 2008 and 2009, my book and my website on John Florio, pounding at the periphery of the Shakespearean universe. As your revisionist Shakespeare became a baroque, bizarre writer, an unsatisfactory Bard in the long run, you judged that a bolder sortie was inevitable and in April 2014 you dared to publish Shakespeare’s Montaigne, a dense anthology of John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays. So, you did jump from zero Montaigne in 2004 to a book on Florio’s Montaigne in 2014: a really dramatic veer! Why? I believe it was because the postmodern Shakespeare you created was insufficient to stem the growing doubts about Stratford. Omission is your key-tool: in your introduction to Shakespeare’s Montaigne, as well as in Peter Platt’s biographical note, there is no mention of the historical discussion on the Montaigne-Shakespeare rapport, just a hurried admission: “Scholars have seen Montaigne’s fingerprints on many other works by Shakespeare whether in the echoing of words or ideas” . Your readers are not aware that Montaigne’s influence on the bard has always been a conflicting issue amongst scholars. One more omission, particularly nasty, concerns a book traditionally “censured” by Shakespearean scholars, Shakspere’s (sic) Debt to Montaigne the fundamental 1925 book by George Coffin Taylor who demonstrated ninety years ago the extent and depth of Montaigne’s influence on Shakespeare! Your rapport to John Florio too is, unsurprising, ambiguous as you try to repress what, I suspect, is your persistent, hidden doubt that Florio is more than a translator… Of the Italian Jewish writer you say this: “Montaigne was Florio’s Montaigne. His essays, in their rich Elizabethan idiom and wildly inventive turns of phrase”; and “the brilliance of Florio’s achievement”; “[Florio’s] translation seemed to address English readers of Shakespeare’s time with unusual directness and intensity”; “Shakespeare is mining Florio’s Montaigne not simply for turns of phrase but for key concepts” but at the same time you maintain that “there was a huge gap between them” [Montaigne and Shakespeare]. Your mind swings over and over as you seem to conclude that there was no real need for Shakespeare to have read Montaigne because they are “two of the greatest writers of the Renaissance” and somehow telepathically connected, two twin souls! And again: “But if Montaigne and Shakespeare were diametrically opposites in these and other ways (…) nonetheless there is a whole world that they share.” Which is a quite ambiguous position. An ambiguity though which reflects Florio’s own ambivalence towards Montaigne. Florio’s Essays are an immense, open source for the playwright but Shakespeare’s diversions from Montaigne on many points are already contained in Florio’s translation. For instance, Florio’s “politico-religious bias appears from time to time (…) ‘les erreurs de Wyclef’ become ‘Wickliff’s opinions’ as Frances Yates pointed out in her 1934 biography. Shakespeare’s religious, political, cultural, psychological variations from Montaigne that you track down in King Lear, Hamlet, The Tempest and elsewhere belong to Florio’s Montaigne which in the opinion of many scholars is almost an original book rather than a mere translation. As for your collaborator Peter Platt, he calls John Florio: the extraordinary Florio. One fundamental question remains unanswered: which other dramatists of Shakespeare’s time were influenced so profoundly by Florio’s Montaigne? Isn’t it bizarre, that amongst all the Montaigne’s readers in Renaissance England, only the uneducated, untraveled, monolingual Shakespeare bore the marks of the French thinker’s influence? With John Florio as the true Shakespeare you don’t have to suppose, as you unbelievably do, that Shakespeare looking over Florio’s shoulders read Montaigne’s translation “well before the first printing” in 1603! Today the sudden landing of Montaigne on your desk, dramatically exposes your personal, private will! What could happen now, professor Greenblatt, should you unearth more of previously undetected or overlooked influences on Shakespeare? What would be the new face of Shakespeare if you would suddenly “discover”, for instance, that Giordano Bruno who spent two years with Florio at the French embassy, has a strong presence in Shakespeare’s work? In your biography Bruno, alike Montaigne, is mentioned only once. You don’t ignore that the strong influence of Giordano Bruno on Shakespeare is hardly a recent discovery. Actually it was demonstrated by a host of scholars, from the German Falkson and the French Bartholmess in 1846 throughout Tschischwitz, König, Carrière, to Sacerdoti and Gatti-Cox in the 1990s. And what about the powerful influence that all things Italian, language and culture, had on Shakespeare? Lastly, what do you think of the hypothesis advanced by Saul Frampton in 2013 – and recalled by Peter Platt – that John Florio was the editor of the First Folio ? The real purpose of your rushed anthology, I suppose, is to freeze Florio in the role of Shakespeare’s almost involuntary helper. But, remember, in doing so you are just delaying Florio’s revelation. Actually, thanks to your initiative John Florio, until now completely unknown by Shakespeare’s lovers, is exposed worldwide to your readers, becoming the most intriguing figure of the English Renaissance, the closest to Shakespeare! By igniting people’s curiosity you provoke new doubts about the Stratford man and in doing so hasten his vanishing. How long, professor Greenblatt, till you’ll give us a book on Shakespeare’s Bruno or, why not, on Shakespeare’s Florio?
Best regards,
Lamberto Tassinari

LES RÉFUGIÉS SYRIENS DE LA PORTE DE SAINT-OUEN (1)

 Olivier Favier

Un-dispositif-d-urgence-pour-les-Syriens-de-Saint-Ouen_article_popin

Voici la contribution  d’Olivier Favier, italianiste et journaliste militant, qui a vient de consacrer  une série de reportage  sur les réfugiés syriens à Paris. Vous pourrez voir l’intégralité de ses contributions sur son site www.dormirajamais.org  

Au 4 de la rue Doudeauville, à deux pas du métro Marx-Dormoy, les migrants se pressent dans des locaux de fortune où sont traités les dossiers de domiciliation et d’hébergement. Mohamed Majidi est en charge des seconds, c’est-à-dire des logements temporaires en hôtels sur le territoire parisien. Il me reçoit dans son bureau, au premier étage. Tout l’été, l’association France Terre d’asile a tenté d’alerter, sans écho médiatique ou presque, sur la situation d’un nouveau groupe de Syriens arrivé courant juillet Porte de Saint-Ouen. Une enquête menée le 28 juillet a permis de dénombrer 453 personnes, 19 isolés et 62 familles. Parmi elles, 59 sont arrivées du Maroc via l’Espagne. Le recensement a surtout permis de signaler la présence de 79 enfants de moins de 6 ans. Le 25 avril déjà, après trois mois d’incurie, un premier groupe de 168 personnes avait bénéficié d’une procédure d’urgence et de l’ouverture d’un bureau dédié.

Le HCR l’a annoncé le 29 août dernier: le nombre des réfugiés syriens dans le monde atteint les 3 millions -1 million de plus que l’an dernier, auxquels s’ajoutent plusieurs centaines de milliers de ressortissants non déclarés. Selon Mohamed Majidi, ils seront probablement autour de 3 000 à arriver en France cette année, une majorité de visas D -long séjour- attribués pour l’essentiel au Liban à des notables, des intellectuels. Le tout venant, lui, doit se contenter des camps du Liban, de la Turquie et de la Jordanie. Il faut ajouter à cela une dizaine de millions de personnes en situation de grande précarité dans un pays en conflit depuis mars 2011. On considère que désormais la moitié de la population syrienne a dû quitter son domicile d’avant-guerre.

Au cours de l’été, le groupe présent aux abords du périphérique parisien s’est en partie déplacé, faute d’attention des autorités françaises. Cette absence de réaction est cohérente avec la fin de non recevoir signifiée par le ministre de l’intérieur socialiste Bernard Cazeneuve, le 28 août dernier, à la décision pourtant timide et tardive de la mairesse de Calais -droite forte- d’ouvrir un camp de 400 places pour les demandeurs d’asile en transit sur sa commune. Pour Mohamed Majidi cependant, si un appel d’air se crée quand une solution se fait jour dans un quelconque endroit du continent européen, son ampleur est très largement fantasmée.

Les Syriens qui se sont donnés rendez-vous à Paris afin de décider de leur installation en France ou dans un autre pays d’Europe appartiennent en effet à un groupe bien précis, homogène et limité. Il s’agit de Kourbates, des tsiganes récemment sédentarisés, qui vivent pour la plupart du commerce et de professions libérales -on compte par exemple plusieurs dentistes. Habitués aux voyages professionnels, parlant parfois plusieurs langues, ils disposent de réseaux familiaux solidaires autour de la Méditerranée. Ce sont ces liens, et la solidarité des mosquées de Paris, qui leur ont permis de venir jusqu’ici, et pour l’instant d’y survivre, tant bien que mal.

D’autres ressortissants syriens se sont ajoutés à ce groupe mais ils n’ont pas été comptabilisés par l’association. Ce sont des personnes qui avaient déjà des papiers dans des pays du sud de l’Europe (Italie, Espagne, Portugal), mais qui, faute d’aide et de travail, se sont joints aux demandeurs d’asile avec l’espoir de trouver une vie meilleure dans un pays du nord, moins touché par la crise. Les demandeurs d’asile ont pour leur part dépensé leurs économies dans de longs voyages semés d’embûches, parfois durant plusieurs années. Tout retour en arrière leur est désormais impossible, d’autant que beaucoup ont fui l’enrôlement dans un camp ou dans l’autre. La communauté kourbate n’a pris aucun parti dans ce conflit, qui a détruit en revanche son économie et sa sécurité.

« Il faut que l’état comprenne », conclue Mohamed Majidi de manière plus générale, « qu’on ne peut rien contre la volonté de gens qui ont traversé des pays en guerre et la Méditerranée au péril de leur vie ». La demande des réfugiés kourbates est légitime, et leur nombre ne représente jamais, en y ajoutant tous les autres Syriens arrivés en France cette année, qu’une proportion dérisoire d’un sur mille pour l’ensemble des réfugiés déclarés.

(suite du reportage)

Bon voyage par Tammam Azzam. L'œuvre a servi d'affiche à l'exposition "Et pourtant ils créent (Syrie, la foi dans l'art)"  présentée au centre des cultures d'Islam à Paris d'avril à juillet 2014.

Pour aller plus loin: