Tuesday, June 23, 2009

THE MASK OF ANTON PANN

Below are some fragments from a wonderful essay by Marin Sorescu, on the great folklorist and writer Anton Pann .
Anton Pann sprouted on the heap of Balkan stones ready to speak.
And at the same time as Anton Pann it was not only the stones that began to speak, the rivers, the trees, the villages with their bees, fairs, everyday's life events, deaths, weddings, graves and craddles - all were seized with an unheard of loquacity.
He wore his hair long like Eminescu. A kamelavkion like Ion Creanga. He had a moustache (this is where Ion Barbu's moustache came from). He could speak Greek, Slavonian, Bulgarian, Turkish, he had studied with scholars and, being modest, he considered that his knowledge was but ankle-high as man studies all his life and dies ignorant. He behaved childishly and was as old as time. As old as the hills.
He buried all the authors of anecdotes, all the sages, the writers of "doinas", and riddles, all the ballad-composing shepherds, he supped full of proverbs and wept on the shoulder of folk literature, shedding burning tears on Aesop's Fables, Florilegia of Virtues, The History of Alexander, The story of Arghir.
With Anton Pann a second golden grove opened in Romanian literature. A golden grove where thoughts can really graze, like sheep.

A white field,
And black ewes
If you look at them
You don't believe them
If you graze them
You understand them

Here too there is a drama of existence as in the ballad Miorita, but at the level of the shadows in the cave, at the level of words. Anton Pann was a structuralist before structuralism. He was fond of words as if they were women and loved them as a woman dangler loves women. Some are beautiful because they wear queer necklaces round their necks, others because they have damnedly fine eyes, others because they are brazen hussies and stir him up, and others because they play the prudes... And all together... a long tale of words...The arabian Nights is not more gorgeous. When the oriental spirit advanced towards the West it lost, at the mouths of the Danube, its most beautiful gems.
AND YET,
He considered himself a rhymester (even when creating "Down the Arges" the popular author did not consider himself anything else). Nastratin Hogea's Extraordinary Pranks are "collected and versified". He "composes" at most, and for the Hospital of Love he wrote the music too, mentioned the "modes of the songs", the notes. He dreamed to be really sung.
... he would knock at the gates and plant the "tale" into your arms.

"There you are!"

He would have been quite capable of saying about his tale: "I've taken it to bits, but now it's mended". He forgot that what he did take to bits would be mended for ever. His knapsack strapped on his back, he, a townsman, would put up for the night at inns, go hungry, living as one might say on his writing. He says it himself:

A man who in his books
Called himself Anton Pann,
He shifted to this mournful abode
In the last year of his life.
Now his hand has stopped its toil
It used to write unceasingly
For nights on end; and now it's idle
And brings out books no more.
By fulfilling his duty
And without burying away his talent
He came to his journey's end
Leaving others to have their turn in the world

DON'T HASTEN ON EASTER

We think that the proverbs, gathered in small thematic groups, have a dialectic structure, very much like the hegelian one, thesis, antithesis, synthesis. We shall illustrate this with the chapter the author called "Again on Boorishness". Boorishness (in a contemporary term we might call it lack of urbanity) was a literary subject in the past just as it is today, and especially a problem of life.
How can you recognize a bird ? By the way it sings
and
How can you recognize a boor ? By the way he speaks;
For
He is as civil as a hedge and will skin your face
A boor
Never knows his place
As
How can a sheperd tell a good thing from a bad one?
An uncouth man is like wood unplaned,
You suddenly find
He raps out something at you like a whack
Saying:
Don't think of what I was, better look at what I am.
And
Don't look at the coat, see what's under it,
And don't scurb every pig you see or you won't long be clean yourself
But
Beware of a gipsy turned a Turk or of a boor turned a Greek
Beware of God's wrath, of a king's ire and a boor's squeal.

The many people with which "The Story of the Word" is teeming like in a vast epic, live in an ethical stage. They are inclined to seek for the truth and to discover it by sylogizing. Interminable arguments are carried on with Socratic patience. Like in dialogues, everything proceeds by degrees, is acted on a stage. And the truth is revealed by confrontations.
Two wayfarers put up for the night at a peasant's house and ask for some food. Left one after another, alone with their host, they start miscalling one another: "He only has a human face and body, but you could feed him on straw like an ox", one of the men says of his companion. "He is such a donkey that if you give him bran he's sure to eat it", whispers the other one. The host laid on the table straw and bran and the men understood the lesson they were given.
One might write a philosophical treatise on Anton Pann's proverbs. With their help the poet - as times were troubled - defended himself against fools saying: "Don't hasten on Easter", for "All the dogs that barked at me went mad".

source: The Little Vlach Corner

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