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Amazon has put Naso the Poet by JacekBocheński on sale. Get it here.

Like many young men who experienced World War II under the German rather than Russian (“Soviet”) occupation, Jacek Bocheński (born 1926) experienced an early enthusiasm for the “communist” political system installed in Poland by the conquering Russian (“Soviet”) armies. And, like most such young men, by 1960, he finally realized that what had been promised by the regime to be “just a temporary phase of proletarian dictatorship” was really intended to be a permanent feature of the system and a return to democratic principles of governance was not really part of the communist plan. Disillusioned, he decided to disengage politically. He turned in his work to something that he thought would be completely apolitical: the writing of commentaries on ancient Roman classics.

Alas, the first book he wrote on the topic, Divine Julius, documenting the rise to power of Julius Caesar and the corrupt, craven, and cowardly response to it by the Roman elites (which made that rise possible), attracted the communist censor’s ire: the communist party perceived this picture of how a dictatorial regime might choose to mascarade as a republic to be a form of veiled criticism of itself. The book, published to resounding critical and commercial success in 1961, was promptly banned, and Bocheński himself found himself under a publishing interdict.

Paradoxically, the popular protests of 1968 and their violent suppression by the communist party opened a chance for Bocheński’s books to be published in Poland again. In fact, the publication of Naso the Poet became politically unavoidable: the Communist Party was eager to prove that the period of repression was over and Poland was once again the land of the free (and merely lovingly guided by the fatherly party). Yet, given the brouhaha around the publication of Divine Julius, the censorship office of the Polish People’s Republic was bound to go over Naso the Poet with a very fine tooth comb. They did. They made several thousand cuts and corrections in the text.

The censors adopted a seemingly rational attitude: unlike Divine Julius, which got in trouble precisely because readers found in the Roman story numerous allusions to the Communist present (such as the fake pretense of preserving the institutions of a Republic or members of the elites cravenly propagating the Big Lie—i.e., that pretending that they believed the system to be democratic), Naso was going to contain no such references.

Some interventions were understandable—a book about ancient Rome should not contain references to Warsaw (as the original text did); nor should one read in it direct quotations of the Polish communist leadership put in the mouth of Emperor Augustus; but others verged on the paranoid. For example, in a sentence in which Naso says, “My books have been banned,” the word “book” had to be replaced with “scrolls.” Obviously, said the censors, there were no books in Rome in 22 A.D. and therefore no books could have been removed from Roman state libraries.

A long period of negotiations followed between the publisher and the censorship office, during which many “interventions” had been reversed—sufficiently many for the author to allow the book’s publication in its new, emasculated form.

Interestingly when, following Poland’s independence (1991) and the abolition of the office of the censor, Bocheński sat about preparing Naso for the first uncensored publication of the work, he found to his surprise, that a few of the edits undertaken under pressure, turned out better than the original phrasing. This only applied to a minority of the “interventions” and yet illustrated an interesting point: that a very careful reader does force the author to improve his craft.

The text you are about to read follows the text of the first post-communist edition of the book, removing most of the censor’s edits, but retaining those the author decided to be advantageous.

Tom Pinch

Ardennes National Park

Luxembourg

The ebook launches on Monday 23/10/2023.

The print version should be out today or at the latest, tomorrow.

And now I experienced the incredible, astonishing thing that our jungle was. In the north, my native Virginia forest was full of all sorts of trees, but what was that to the mad luxury, to the unbridled variety of plants here? I was used to the Virginia thicket, but how to compare it with this wild tangle, this green fury, this mass of inexorable branches, leaves, vines, thorns, where it was difficult to take a step, where everything imprisoned a man, weighed down his body, suffocated his mind and soul? Yet, when you experienced it more closely and regarded it carefully, this mindless, mind-numbing confusion revealed its internal logic and order, and this made me see the jungle’s wild beauty and take profound pleasure in it. But I never knew what the jungle was to me or to any man: was it a kind friend or an implacable enemy?

There were many animals in this forest, but they were difficult to spot and even harder to hunt. A green veil covered them, and at the same time, their alert senses warned them from afar of the approach of a hunter. Yet, in this wilderness, there were paths, both human and animal, and they made it easier to sneak quietly and approach the game.

If the great fascination of hunting is the surprise that awaits the hunter behind every bush, and the source of its magic is the possibility of an unforeseen development, then the forest of Imataca could be called the perfect hunting ground, a hunter’s paradise, a cradle of all unlikely encounters. What varied beasts ran through this forest, what wonders wandered here!

In addition to the jaguar, other predatory cats might jump out in front of the hunter, one of which, as fawn-colored as a lion, Pedro called a puma. Guasupita deer and wild saguino pigs in the depths of the woods, water pigs on the banks of the rivers, and mashadis, huge animals with skin as hard as a shield and noses elongated like a bizarre elephant trunk. And monkeys. Countless flocks of monkeys. Or, one could encounter hateke—a beast completely covered with armor plate, and another freak, tamanoa, a devourer of ants with a ridiculous long snout and front claws so robust that it could tear a man apart, or meet an even greater freak, unau, a quadruped completely docile, hanging like fruit under a tree branch and, all the more surprising, almost motionless.

And a variety of water and forest turtles and lizards, among which the iguana were real dragons, both in appearance and disposition, only more modest in size; and a numerous tribe of venomous snakes and giant constrictor snakes, and the treacherous caymans—crocodiles lurking in still waters. And in these waters, apart from the swarms of edible fish, what monsters: the flat sipari with a poisonous spike in the tail, the small huma of maddening bloodthirstiness, jaringa, the Indian stories about which at first seemed to me a fairy tale, because the little monsters, quite unassuming to look at, when touched by a man supposedly struck him like a thunderbolt and paralyzed him. And the immeasurable, colorful world of millions of birds on the ground and in the air, a world garrulous, gorgeous, cheerful, above which, however, circled the gloomy ruler of the sky: the crested giant eagle, the semi-legendary mezime, the invincible killer of monkey, a giant said to be able to lift a fifteen-year-old boy into the air.

From Jacek Bocheński’s Divine Julius, Part III: Love

It proved impossible to secure Cleopatra’s interests without spilling blood. Caesar fought the Egyptian War for her sake. There are reports that he nearly drowned at some point when he jumped into the sea while holding some documents high above his head so that they would not get wet. Another time, he suffered from thirst because sneaky Egyptians filled in a canal and pumped sea water into his water tanks. He burned seventy-two Egyptian ships and a goodly part of the Alexandrian Library—he does not mention that last thing in his memoirs. In time, he broke up Ptolemy’s army, and when Cleopatra’s brother drowned in the Nile, Ceasar was finally free to experience the raptures of love. Cleopatra proposed a cruise up the Nile to Upper Egypt. Caesar had never seen the country, had known only the descriptions of Herodotus. They sailed upriver.

The landscapes they saw along the way are among the most gorgeous in the world. At first, the country was flat, the sky cloudless. For a long time, that was all they saw. So they spent their time in the royal apartment, furnished with oriental splendor and such refinement that Caesar, used to European restraint, had to feel a little abashed. That fairy-tale love nest made an impression on the conqueror of the world. He had never seen anything like this, not in Greece, not in Asia Minor. The young queen, one part Isis, one part Mut and Hathor, gave herself to him like a goddess. He had set her on the throne and never forgot that she owed it to him. And yet, this half-goddess made him feel divine.

This was funny business, of course, because how can anyone take such love-religious production seriously, and yet… one could not help falling under its spell. She created this very strange illusion aboard the ship. “They often feasted until dawn,” writes Suetonius discreetly.

As they sailed upriver, the views shifted. They left the lowlands, and now there were only narrow lines of greenery on both sides of the river, isolated clumps of date palms, here and there white temples raised by pharaohs millennia ago, flocks of ibis in the sky. Then this landscape changed, too, when massive rocks, which had for a long time only showed up at the far horizon, now multiplied and came closer until, until, eventually, they reached the very edge of the water. Your antiquary has no special insight into what Caesar was thinking about then, but he suspects he thought about—monuments. Any look at topographical maps suggests as much. By the time one reaches the Elephantine and the First Cataract, the lay of the land is such that one is forced to think about monuments, especially if one has seen the enormous statues of Ramses II in Thebes.

And by the time one reaches the First Cataract, the mystery of those statues becomes suddenly transparent to all who sail that way, all the more so to a mind like Caesar’s. One can resist the magic of lights reflected on the river; one can even ignore the coquettish way in which the naked rocks bathe in the water, but even the world’s coldest realist cannot escape the impression that stone Ramseses exist in nature. And thus, Caesar, who, of course, had a very broad interest in monuments, suddenly realized why the pharaohs had been unable to resist the urge to carve monuments out of this incredibly rich material lying about in readiness, in every direction, as far as the eye could see. He sailed past gigantic black granite rocks and saw how strikingly similar they were to super-human giants. One did not even have to do much carving. Just pick the right stones and set them up on plinths.

With his beloved half-goddess at his side, himself an equal of the gods, surrounded by the stony giants who would serve as his future monuments, he rose higher and higher. Besides, everything was gigantic in Upper Egypt, and one has to take this into account when trying to understand Caesar’s extraordinary love for Cleopatra. Only at the very end of their trip, as they approached Kush, which was the name of the mysterious land to the south, did something unpleasant happen: signs of displeasure among the troops.

Because the army marched right behind them, but the men were eager to get back to Italy, where they were to be paid. It was their ninth month in Egypt already, and it seems that songs about the “bald whoremonger” suddenly resounded at the First Cataract, completely spoiling Caesar’s exalted mood. Urged by his men, the commander decided to turn back.

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