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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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Read about the series.

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From the usual place:

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A grimoire is a textbook of magic. Books of this genre, typically giving instructions for invoking angels or demons, performing divination and gaining magical powers, have circulated throughout Europe since the Middle Ages.

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Magicians were frequently prosecuted by the Christian church, so their journals were kept hidden to prevent them from being burned. Such book contain astrological correspondences, lists of angels and demons, directions on casting charms and spells, on mixing medicines, summoning unearthly entities, and making talismans. “Magical” books in almost any context, especially books of magical spells, are also called grimoires.

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The word grimoire is from the Old French grammaire, and is from the Greek root “grammatikos”, “relating to letters”, from which grammar, a system for language, and glamour, influential appeal, are derived. In the mid-late Middle Ages, Latin “grammars” (books on Latin syntax and diction) were foundational to school and university education, as controlled by the Church—while to the illiterate majority, non-ecclesiastical books were suspect as magic, or believed to be endowed with supernatural influence. The word “grimoire” came over time to apply specifically to those books which did indeed deal with magic and the supernatural.

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Similar magical writings have existed from antiquity, and although these are not in the same genre of medieval magic, they are sometimes described as grimoires.

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The idea of a grimoire — a book endowed with magical powers — is one of the more constant elements of literature; and perhaps the single most hackneyed metaphor for the life in books. It seems that not a year goes by without the publication of some novel whose central idea is that of a mysterious book which changes our lives.

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Indeed, one could perhaps consider the grimoire a kind of literary genre in itself. Its different embodiments should perhaps be judged on how interesting and original the special powers ascribed to the Special Book are rather than the actual adventures in occasions.

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The most ordinary, and boring, grimoire is a book which leads (like the back wall of a wardrobe) to another world, into which one falls thereupon to experience the adventure of his life. This kind of grimoire is boring, because it is not in any sense original: falling into another world is precisely what happens to us when we read a book. And some of us, like yours truly, fall into another world some 200 times a year. One wonders how little the inventors of this kind of grimoire must read: it is not the falling that is wonderful; it is what we fall into, which is.

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But some grimoires are better than others. Here are two you may want to add to your library.

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In Edmund Niziurski’s Siodme Wtajemniczenie (which follows the hero as he advances through subsequent levels of arcane knowledge of a secret society, which would have been a serious business if the society were not one of – teenage boys) describes a grimoire entitled Niezwykłe przygody Anatola Stukniętego na początku – The unusual adventures of Anatole Bonkers at first.

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The special nature of the book lies in it being strongly written. This refers to the book’s ability to visit upon the bodies of its readers the effects of whatever they are reading about. And thus, some readers, while reading in it (on about page 7) about Anatole – its hero — being captured and tortured with white-hot irons suffer second degree burns just from reading about it; others, when reading the section in which Anatole escapes his tormentors and flees, barefoot, across ice and snow (on about page 9) suffer frost bite to their toes.

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The most important thing to know about this Grimoire is that it has never been read from cover to cover, because on about page 13 Anatole falls into sleep; and thereupon follow 320 pages of it. Not his dream, mind you, but dreamless, lifeless sleep. (Those who complain about Proust’s 30 pages of “trying to fall asleep” should take note). Naturally, everyone trying to read through Anatole falls asleep during this section and no ruse to beat this effect has yet been devised.

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(What makes Anatole even more interesting is the way Niziurski’s heroes put it to tactical use: neutralizing their enemies by giving them The Unusual Advetures to read).

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I have often had occasion to reflect on the special powers of this grimoire. Partly because we all know books with incredible soporific powers; and enjoy them. (Personally, I find Gibbons’ Decline and Fall a superb — and over the counter! — substitute for Xanax; and, like Anatole’s sleep, completely intraversible). But also partly because there really do seem to be strongly written books. For me, Mann’s Magic Mountain is just such a book.

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This has often been praised for its deep philosophical content and political discussion; but I have never found these all that interesting; but, on the contrary, have always found the book irresistibly spell-binding for another reason: on account of the way I am mesmerized by its various descriptions of the most ordinary things: the descriptions of the meals at the Berghof, of the flavor of Maria Mancini cigars, the sound of tuberculotic caugh. Mann’s writing has for me the strange, Anatolian power to fascinate me with the fact that the hero is walking in the street, or blowing his nose. In the former case, my feet seem to tremble, in the latter, my nose twitches. I put down the book with the sort of disorientation with which I might wake from an unusually lucid dream.

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In Aleksander Kosciow’s Swiat Nura (Loon’s World) a different grimoire appears, a book with the strange title Pielegnacja i tozsamosc drzew – The care and personal identity of trees; though this title is more of a nickname, since the title itself, like the body of the text, continues to mutate. (This too, is a rather common fantasy – pictures that begin to move, text which arranges itself before our eyes into new shapes, different each time we look). But hear the man explain it:

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(Having discovered that the title had changed) I put the book away and lived my life. But every now and then something tempted me and I took it up again. As if I had wanted to catch it – in the act. And you know? One day something did change. From the outside everything looked the same, but inside something was not right… I leaf through, looking for those white pages in the middle which I had discovered there once – but – they were gone! It’s not that the white pages disappeared and the text about care of trees became unified again. No! They were now covered with text! The drivel about care of trees ended on page, say, 100, and then there were a few pages, formerly white, now printed over, and the care of trees continued again from page 115. I thought for a moment that I was going nuts (which, in my neighborhood is not so rare after all). But I decided to lay and ambush: oh, no, this book will not make a fool of me! After about a week I looked and noticed that the pages with new text, the grown-in pages, have somehow increased in number, spilling over and pushing aside the neighboring pages of the original. There was a foreign text and it continued to grow. It was not just strange but also, somehow… evil. There were other changes: instead of the original names on the title page, some initials would appear; the number of pages of the new text increased; the book was somehow strangely hot. I admit I began to dislike the idea of keeping this book under my roof. It was no longer a bibliophile curio, but a metaphysical one. In the end, I put it at the bottom of a sack of old books, and I took it to the flee market in Le Mechiguenet, and I dumped it stealthily under a stall.

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But what was the foreign text about? Something having to do with the construction of some kind of a drum. Later, we learn in the book, a man who has stumbled on The Care and Personal-Identity of Trees became obsessed with it and, as a result became isolated from the society, began to spend much time in a certain clearing in the forest and, eventually, turned into a tree himself.

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Books of course do change us; and they do, temporarily, turn us into vegetables — a man lost in reading seems rooted to his arm-chair. And, as anyone who writes regularly and a lot knows, texts do sometimes arise spontaneously, of themselves, just the way tumors grow. But I am most touched by the idea that the book was strangely hot. Many of my books should be white hot. I am often surprised that a book which I have been reading last 6 hours remains cool to the touch.

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