Yoon Kim

Ian Monk’s monovocalic translation (from “The Exeter Text,” in *Three*):

“We seek the essence where the end meets the endless!”

recovering from a bath

recovering from a bath

Thinking this morning (for no particular reason I’m able to discern) about four books I found to be formative during my graduate training as a medievalist and which helped me understand and appreciate the history and politics of my academic field.

“Je cherche en même temps l’éternel et l’éphémère!”

[I seek at once the eternal and the ephemeral.]

— Georges Perec, Les Revenentes (1972)

Later used as the epigraph to the last chapter of *Life: A User’s Manual* (1978):

“To say the inside by describing only the outside: this could be a definition of Perec’s art and manner.”

— Claude Burgelin, Georges Perec (2023)

🖤 Georges Perec at his desk

(in his apartment on rue Linné, Paris, shortly after receiving the 1978 Prix Médicis for *Life: A User’s Manual*)

The violet hour grows later with every passing day.

(@avecsesdoigts.bsky.social 🌸)

and somehow, Proust again:

“…since each of us sees clarity only in those ideas that have the same degree of confusion as our own.”

(trans. Charlotte Mandell 🌸)

In the increasingly convincing darkness
The words become palpable, like a fruit
That is too beautiful to eat.

— John Ashbery (“The Explanation”)

“There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of each one to communicate its mental contents… We cannot imagine a total absence of language in anything.”

— Walter Benjamin (1916)

from “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” 1916; trans. Edmund Jephcott

(Currently rereading some of Benjamin’s early writings.)

“In all mourning there is the deepest inclination to speechlessness, which is infinitely more than the inability or disinclination to communicate. That which mourns feels itself thoroughly known by the unknowable.”

— Walter Benjamin

A great one.

And I was hoping he'd finally get his Nobel next year.

“Our real kin are those we have chosen.”

(from Guy Davenport’s journals)

“Writing is also bestowing a blessing on a life that was not blessed.”

(Lispector, Too Much of Life)

“I have never written any piece of fiction with the simple purpose of understanding what I might call the real world. I have always written fiction in order to suggest to myself that another world exists.”

— Gerald Murnane, “The Interior of Gaaldine”

Tried to organize my bookshelf…
ended up rereading this 🐰

My copy of Silence by John Cage - the front cover and the blank spine.

After moving house I spent a long time searching for this. It turned up yesterday. Missed it I believe because the spine is blank... blank...

“One misunderstanding casts us into the world of misunderstanding, which we must put up with as a world composed solely of misunderstandings and which we depart from with a single great misunderstanding, for death is the greatest misunderstanding of all…”

(Bernhard, The Loser)

“She preferred the largesse, so wide and free and without mistakes, of not-understanding.”

(Lispector, An Apprenticeship)

“Is my understanding only blindness to my own lack of understanding? It often seems so to me.”

(Wittgenstein, On Certainty)

An extract from The Deserters by Mathias Énard, translated by Charlotte Mandell | The Booker Prizes ‘He sets down his weapon, then with difficulty takes off his boots, their smell (excrement, musty sweat) adds even more to his exhaustion. His fingers on the frayed laces are dry matchsticks, slightly...

Read an excerpt from my translation of Mathias Énard's The Deserters at @thebookerprizes.com:

thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-l...

“Joy is not something that can be found and gathered up. Joy is in the mourning for joy.”

— Jean-Luc Nancy, “Hyperion’s Joy”

“I wanted what I wrote to be the pleasure concealed within misery. My debt of joy to a world I do not find easy.”

— Lispector, Too Much of Life

and that only in the inexperienceable can courage, hope, and meaning be given foundation? Then the spirit would be free. But again and again life would drag it down because life, the sum of experience, would be without solace.”

(from “Experience,” 1913; trans. Spencer and Jost)

even if no one has done so yet. Such will cannot be taken from us by experience.

Yet—are our elders, with their tired gestures and their superior hopelessness, right about *one* thing—namely, that what we experience will be sorrowful… (2/3)

Walter Benjamin, writing as a student at 21 (under a pseudonym):

“We, however, know something different, which experience can neither give to us nor take away: that truth exists, even if all previous thought has been an error. Or: that fidelity shall be maintained, (1/3)