Please translate "Le Marteau sans Maitre"
norman...@comcast.net
Thanks,
Norm Strong
Larry Friedman
therefore do not know the title's significance. Perhaps, The Hammer that
Wields Itself??
-Larry
<norman...@comcast.net> wrote in message
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Matthew B. Tepper
typed in news:55udnbgp87F...@comcast.com:
> What would be the most descriptive translation of this title?
I've always seen it translated as "The Hammer Without a Master," which makes
about as much sense to me as "The Bull on the Roof."
--
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Dan Koren
>
GWB w/o Karl.
dk
Kirk McElhearn
> > What would be the most descriptive translation of this title?
>
> I've always seen it translated as "The Hammer Without a Master," which makes
> about as much sense to me as "The Bull on the Roof."
The latter is a typical surrealist title. The former is a typical
IRCAM-esque title; the kind that speaks to intellectuals, but really
means nothing... They were big on one word titles as well.
Kirk
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Juan I. Cahis
The same as Copland's "El Salon Mexico". I would understand "El Salon
Mexicano" or "El Salon de Mexico", but why "El Salon Mexico"?
Note, I wrote all the words without the needed accents.
"Larry Friedman" <dis...@adelphia.net> wrote:
Thanks
Juan I. Cahis
Santiago de Chile (South America)
Note: Please forgive me for my bad English, I am trying to improve it!
Christopher Webber
>The same as Copland's "El Salon Mexico". I would understand "El Salon
>Mexicano" or "El Salon de Mexico", but why "El Salon Mexico"?
>
>Note, I wrote all the words without the needed accents.
Whilst wandering through a small, Mexican town the composer came across
a bar called "El Salon Mexico". It's a proper name, not a description.
--
___________________________
Christopher Webber, Blackheath, London, UK.
http://www.zarzuela.net
Christopher Webber
>Whilst wandering through a small, Mexican town the composer came across
>a bar called "El Salon Mexico". It's a proper name, not a description.
bar, where he heard a mariachi band playing folk song arrangements which
inspired his piece.
record...@gmail.com
Christopher Webber wrote:
> Juan I. Cahis <jiclbchS...@attglobal.net> writes:
> >The same as Copland's "El Salon Mexico". I would understand "El Salon
> >Mexicano" or "El Salon de Mexico", but why "El Salon Mexico"?
> >
> >Note, I wrote all the words without the needed accents.
>
> Whilst wandering through a small, Mexican town the composer came across
> a bar called "El Salon Mexico". It's a proper name, not a description.
> --
Down the street from me, there's a restaurant called "Taqueria Mi
Mexico," about which I've wondered the same question.
david...@aol.com
suggested it means: the hammer without a master, although I rather
liked the translation suggested by one poster, "the hammer that wields
itself." "Le marteau sans maitre" is the title of a collection of
surrealist poems by the French poet Rene Char (1907-1988) published in
1934. Boulez selected three very short poems from this collection and
retained the title for his cycle based on the poems.
Char was one of the many French (and non-French, particularly Spanish)
poets, painters, and film directors of his generation who initially
fell under the spell of surrealism, and Le marteau sans maitre dates
from surrealism's most doctrinaire period: Char's poems from the
1930's are the most concentrated and resistant to direct common
sensical reading that he ever wrote. Rimbaud was the principal
stylistic influence on Char, and there's more Rimbaud and less
doctrinaire surrealism in Char's later poetry. Char's poetry reached a
larger audience after the second World War when Camus, the man of the
hour, discovered his poetry and wrote enthusiastically about it. (Char
had fought with the Resistance in World War II.) During the same
period Paul Celan made the first translations into German of some of
Char's poems. Boulez discovered Char during the same period, and
he's written three cantatas based on Char's poetry, Le soleil des eaux
(the sun of the waters), Le visage nuptial, and Le marteau sans maitre.
Surrealism exploited or aimed to exploit the logic of dreams and the
"unconscious," relying on "free association." Despite the
experiments with automatic writing attempted by some of the
surrealists, though, the "associations" were anything but
"free," the bizarre juxtapositions characteristic of surrealist art
obviously having been chosen to suggest and provoke. The surrealists
sided with the inner man with his dreams and appetites against the
repressions of reason and convention, and in much of the art of
surrealism, sexuality and Roman Catholicism are at odds, mutually
deforming themes.
The sacred texts for the Surrealists included everything from Sade and
Freud and Dostoevsky to Gerard de Nerval, Lautreamont, and children's
stories, and "The Hammer without a Master" deliberately takes the form
of a title like, say, "The Little Engine that Could," while suggesting
something like "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." One gloss is that
the hammer represents industrialized civilization, which has spun out
of human control. I think this is too egregiously specific. Better to
let each reader free associate for himself. In any case, Le marteau is
not an integrated cycle of poems like Le visage nuptial, but the
fanciful title for a miscellaneous collection.
The short poems in Le marteau are far from nonsensical, and it
shouldn't be difficult for any reader of poetry--especially for any
reader familiar with a range of French and/or 20th-century lyric
poetry--to tease meanings out of Char's lines. For example, in one of
the poems that Boulez set, "two pure eyes, weeping, seek a head to live
in." This is obviously metaphorical language, and what Char's line
suggests is straightforward enough, but we can't avoid noticing the
literal meaning at the same time and imagining those two poor eyes in a
scene like something out of The Andalusian Dog or a surrealist
painting. In some surrealist paintings the metaphorical is dramatized
by a literal rendering. Or a point is made metaphorically by a literal
rendering.
Here is the complete poem, "L'artisanat furieux" (furious
artisanry or handicraft):
I hear walking in my limbs,
The waves of the dead sea over my head.
Child the savage jetty promenade,
Man the imitated illusion.
Two eyes, weeping, seek
A head to live in.
Another poem set by Boulez, Bel edifice et les pressentiments
(beautiful edifice and premonitions), more thoroughly depends on the
juxtapositions of oneiric images characteristic of so much surrealist
art:
The red caravan at the edge of the nail
And corpse in the basket
And workhorses in the horseshoe,
My head at the point of a knife, I dream Peru.
It is absurd to demand a straightforward description of what this
means. Char's images are meant to work on us not unlike the images
in a disturbing dream the meaning of which we can't quite understand.
-david gable
Ian Pace
<david...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1136252809....@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com...
>
[general stuff about Char snipped]
>
> Surrealism exploited or aimed to exploit the logic of dreams and the
> "unconscious," relying on "free association." Despite the
> experiments with automatic writing attempted by some of the
> surrealists, though, the "associations" were anything but
> "free," the bizarre juxtapositions characteristic of surrealist art
> obviously having been chosen to suggest and provoke. The surrealists
> sided with the inner man with his dreams and appetites against the
> repressions of reason and convention, and in much of the art of
> surrealism, sexuality and Roman Catholicism are at odds, mutually
> deforming themes.
>
> The sacred texts for the Surrealists included everything from Sade and
> Freud and Dostoevsky to Gerard de Nerval, Lautreamont, and children's
> stories, and "The Hammer without a Master" deliberately takes the form
> of a title like, say, "The Little Engine that Could," while suggesting
> something like "The Sorcerer's Apprentice." One gloss is that
> the hammer represents industrialized civilization, which has spun out
> of human control. I think this is too egregiously specific. Better to
> let each reader free associate for himself. In any case, Le marteau is
> not an integrated cycle of poems like Le visage nuptial, but the
> fanciful title for a miscellaneous collection.
>
communist movements. Andre Breton, leader of the movement, co-authored a
work with Trotsky, called 'Manifesto for an independent revolutionary art').
Here are some juicy quotes of his:
'The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street,
pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger,
into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of
thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in
effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel
level.'
[Andre Breton - 'Second Manifesto of Surrealism', in 'Manifestoes of
Surrealism', translated Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, 1969),
p.125]
'Everything remains to be done, every means must be worth trying, in order
to lay waste to the ideas of *family*, *country*, *religion*. No matter how
well known the Surrealist position may be with respect to this matter, still
it must be stressed that on this point there is no room for compromise.
Those who make it their duty to maintain this position persist in advancing
this negation, in belittling any other criterion of value, They intend to
savor fully the profound grief, so well played, with which the bourgeois
public - ineviably prepared in their base way to forgive them a few
"youthful" errors - greets the steadfast and unyielding need they display to
laugh like savages in the presence of the French flag, to vomit their
disgust in the face of *every* priest, and to level at the breed of "basic
duties" the long-range weapon of sexual cynicism.'
[ibid, pp. 128-129]
'I doubt that anyone will be surprised to see Surrealism turn its attention,
in passing, to something other than the solution of a psychological problem,
however interesting that problem ay be. It is in the name of the
overwhelming awareness of this necessity that I believe it impossible for us
to avoid most urgently posing the question of the social regime under which
we live, I mean of the acceptance or the non-acceptance of this regime.'
[ibid, p. 139]
'It is, I think, the fate of all those for whom reality is not only
important theoretically but for whom it is also a matter of life or death to
make an impassioned appeal, as Feuerbach desired, to that reality: our fate
to give as we do, *completely*, without any reservations, our allegiance to
the principle of historical materialism, his to thrust into the face of the
shocked and astounded intellectual world the idea that "man is what he eats"
and that a future revolution would have a better chance of success if the
people were better nourished, in this specific case with peas instead of
potatoes.'
[ibid, p. 142]
The relationship between surrealism and Marxism was troubled, certainly, but
the links ran deep. Like most radical artistic movements, surrealism sought
to liberate the imagination not just on an individual level but from the
play of social forces that otherwise seek to constrain it. This is
fundamentally a political act.
Ian
Allen
david...@aol.com wrote:
<snip>
Thank you for your very interesting post! I printed it and will file it.
Allen
Ian Pace
<david...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1136259607.0...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
>
> Ian, I am so glad that Char's title has offered you the opportunity for
> yet more political grand standing from your soap box. Unfortunately,
> what you have to say has zero relevance to Char, his title, or the
> poems Boulez set,
This was in response to your more general comments about surrealism.
By the way, how about Boulez's one-time description of himself as a '100%
convinced Marxist-Leninist'?
> and the fact that Breton himself became a Communist
> at a certain point says very little about surrealism itself especially
> as it was originally constituted. Indeed, the embrace of communism
> occured during a period when surrealism lost much of its initial force,
> and many of those artists who had flirted with surrealism changed
> direction at the same time Breton changed direction himself and
> embraced communism. The concept of a rational political solution was
> inherently un-surrealistic.
>
Au contraire, surrealism was at heart a political movement - what it was
expressing had clear political connotations. This is, I believe, what led
not just Breton but also Eluard, Aragon, Peret and various other fellow
travellers towards communism and the Fourth International. Also why the best
surrealism is anything but narcissistic (Dali excepted, but I don't rate
him).
Ian
Ian Pace
<david...@aol.com> wrote in message
>
> Ian, I am so glad that Char's title has offered you the opportunity for
> yet more political grand standing from your soap box. Unfortunately,
> what you have to say has zero relevance to Char, his title, or the
> at a certain point says very little about surrealism itself especially
> as it was originally constituted. Indeed, the embrace of communism
> occured during a period when surrealism lost much of its initial force,
> and many of those artists who had flirted with surrealism changed
> direction at the same time Breton changed direction himself and
> embraced communism. The concept of a rational political solution was
> inherently un-surrealistic.
>
about it, not really convinced he's one of the really great surrealist
poets. It seems to lack that last ounce of really demonic passion and
incisiveness in both language and content. But I'd like to copy a few choice
bits, specially for David! :)
From Moulin premier:
XXXIII
L'oscillation d'un auteur derriere son oeuvre, c'est de la pure toilette
materialiste.
(The oscillation of an author behind his work, nothing other than
materialistic grooming)
XXXVII
Il advient au poete d'echouer au cours de ses recherches sur un rivage ou il
n'etait attendu que beaucoup plus tard, apres son aneantissement. Insensible
a l'hostilite de son entourage arriere le poete s'organise, abat sa vigueur,
morcele le terme, agrafe les sommets des ailes.
(The poet happens to land during the course of his seeking on a shore where
he was not expected until much later, after his extinction. Insensitive to
the hostility of his backward companions, the poet makes preparations, fells
his vigor, divides the term, fastens the summits of his wings.)
Quatre fascinants
III. Le serpent
Prince des contresens, fais que mon amour
En exil analogue a ton bannissement
Echappe au vieux Seigneur que je hais d'avoir pu,
Apres l'avoir trouble, en clair le decevoir.
(Prince of anti-order, make my love
In some exile like you banishment
Escape the old Lord I hate because he could
Stir it first, then openly disappoint.)
david...@aol.com
>To move more specifically to Char's work - I have somewhat mixed feelings about it, not really convinced he's one of the really great surrealist poets.
Thank God he wasn't! I'm relieved that he fails your litmus test.
Char was only a card carrying surrealist as a very young man, and like
many others including all of the very most extremely talented artists
who briefly considered themselves surrealists, including Joan Miro, he
moved away from it and from Breton. Char's later post-surrealist
poetry is better than the poems in Le marteau sans maitre. Most
surrealist poetry is badly dated simple-minded nonsense, and Andre
Breton was never a writer on the level of say, Proust.
As for Boulez the so-called Marxist-Leninist, you quote him out of
context. What Boulez actually said was not "I am 100%
Marxist/Leninist," which is a bald statement of political position.
Rather, in discussing the variety of changing approaches necessary to
complete a work of art, he said about one single element of his
approach, "and in that respect I am 100% Marxist/Leninist,"
deliberately using a provocative concept to dramatize his point. In
other words, you could almost paraphrase what he says as follows:
"Marxism/Leninism may be a bad thing, but, in approaching a work of
art, I am one in this single isolated respect." In short, Boulez was
very far from stating a political position. (There would be nothing
more difficult to find in Boulez's published letters, articles, and
interviews than the slightest betrayal of any political tendency
whatsoever.)
In Penser la musique au'jourd'hui, Boulez quotes some of the same
nihilist/anarchist garbage from Breton/Trotsky that you quote so
enthusiastically only to trash it. I'll find it and quote what he
says.
-david gable
Richard Schultz
: Whilst wandering through a small, Mexican town the composer came across
: a bar called "El Salon Mexico". It's a proper name, not a description.
Kind of like how "Le Boeuf sur la Toit" doesn't refer to an actual bull on an
actual roof, but the name of a bar in Brazil. Are there any other pieces
of music named after bars or pubs? (The finale of Beethoven's 2d piano
concerto, which sounds like -- and I personally am convinced must be based
on -- a German driking song, doesn't count.)
-----
Richard Schultz sch...@mail.biu.ac.il
Department of Chemistry, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel
Opinions expressed are mine alone, and not those of Bar-Ilan University
-----
It's a bird, it's a plane -- no, it's Mozart. . .
LJA
> The words mean The Masterless Hammer, but I don't know the work and
> therefore do not know the title's significance. Perhaps, The Hammer that
> Wields Itself??
How about: "The Hammer Unleashed".
--
LJA
Bob Harper
that he is familiar with Boulez's music.
Bob Harper