Glass Bead Game
In the General Introduction to The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse presents a model for a fictitious society of scholars, separated from the world, engaging, rearranging, and reformulating the inherited traditions of all the world’s knowledge. This process, called the Glass Bead Game, is defined as “a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette.” Not withstanding the utopian-dystopian machinations of the novel as a whole, as it explores the boundless nature of human potential and the implications of our attempts to bound that potential, the Glass Bead Game offers an excellent metaphor for the art of rearrangement. I have borrowed the title to demonstrate an aspect of artistic practice that focuses on thematic organization and expression of the world’s ideas. This is an ongoing project that offers models for multidisciplinary performance practice, playlist construction, and similar modes of organizing knowledge to help elucidate the threads running through discrete disciplines, and to support development of interdisciplinary consciousness.
Erasure Mosaic
1.
Στα πεύκα τριγυρίζω
Ψάχνω γλυκό Χάρο
Με βλέπει και χαμογελάει
Αρχίζω πια να σφίνω.
Le persone che passano per le vie non si conoscono.
Mille cose,
Un secondo, non si fermano.
Après mille et une nuits
Un seul mot
Mille et une nuits, pure.
تحت مسلات
تحت رماد
خلف القضبان
Bu kara mermerin altında
Bir çocuk gömülüdür.
Una vibrazione lussuriosa muove continuamente
Ogni fantasma
وحش
La giostra delle fantasie
Danse jusqu’aux transes
Una sombra de ciprés.
(Dejadme en este campo, llorando.)
2.
Passa una donna nerovestita
con gli occhi inquieti sotto il velo.
Qualcosa corre tra loro, stelle
Ripararsi dalla pioggia sotto il portico
Seduzioni senza dito,
quasi senza occhi.
El horizonte sin luz
Autour de l’œil.
(Ya os he dicho que me dejéis en este campo,
llorando),
أهلكن الطوفان
Jamais vous n’affaiblirez la tempête
Elle a brûlé la plus haute tour de votre ville
En toute conscience.
3.
Et de l’esprit?
Yanlış sorusu
Bir tek ve doğru karşılığı:
Ayaklanmasının kalbine!
Elle a brûlé
Elle a incendié
Elle ne croit pas à vos livres
Le pressoir de votre silence.
Les paroles à dire
Et les paroles à taire autour
Tout est dit sur le chemin à suivre.
Arkadaşları zakkumlarla örmüşlerdir şu şiiri.
No queda más que el silencio.
Μές στό σκοτάδι, κάποτε,
Οι καθρέφτες ψιθυρίζουνε αλήθειες.
***
Translation
1.
In the pine trees I wander
I am looking for sweet Death
He sees me and smiles
I start to fade away.
The people who move through the streets are all strangers.
A thousand things,
A second, never stopping.
After a thousand and one nights
Only one word
A thousand and one nights, pure.
Beneath the obelisks
Beneath the ashes
Behind the bars
Under this black marble
A child is buried.
A luxurious vibration moves constantly
Every phantom
A wild beast
The carousel of fantasies
Dancing into a trance
A shadow of cyprus.
(Leave me in this field, crying.)
2.
A woman in black comes along
her eyes restless beneath her veil.
Something runs among them, stars
Taking shelter from the rain under the portico
Seductions without a word,
almost without eyes.
The horizon without light
Around the eyes.
(I already told you to leave me in this field,
crying),
perished in the flood.
You will never undermine the storm
She has burned the highest tower of your village
Shamelessly.
3.
And of the spirit?
The wrong question
One correct answer:
To the heart of the uprising!
She burned
She burned
She doesn’t believe in your books
The winepress of your silence.
The words to say
And the words to be silenced
Everything is said about what road to take.
Her friends knitted this poem with oleanders.
Nothing but silence remains.
In the darkness, sometimes
Mirrors whisper truths.
***
Source Poems
Abdul Wahab Al-Bayati, “Reading from the Book of Al-Tawasin by Al-Hallaj” (Shiraz’s Moon)
Ece Ayhan, “Meçhul Öğrenci Anıtı”
Italo Calvino, “Le città e gli scambi. 2.” (Le città invisibili)
Federico García Lorca, “Ay!” (Poema del cante jondo)
Rachida Madani, “Premier conte, VIII” (Tales of a Severed Head)
Yannis Ritsos, Μονοχορδα, 239
“Μες της πεντέλης τα βουνά” (Road to Rembetika)