just a thought

"tu es un cerf-volant, je tiens la ficelle !"
Lucia said this dreamlike sentence to her beloved husband Rolando!
And that came to my mind because of Teresa's latest page on her blog, Rolando and his passion for books. He is a hungry bookworm.
Dominique Fernandez ( I have a passion for his books, his book on baroque music is so good) wrote such a witty article on Rolando and literature in 2005 in the Nouvel Observateur.
I would not be surprised to see (after this silent period) a book written and illustrated by Rolando Villazon in my bookshop window! may be a sweet and poetic children's book? or something funny about opera life? or a thriller, inspired by all these dreadful plots on the operatic stage!
(all links are in French ,but could be translated easily if necessary).


Marguerite Yourcenar. born in Brussels in 1903, first woman writer to be elected at 'l'Académie Française'on March the 6th 1980, died in 1987 on the north-eastern coast of the United states at Mount-desert, not far from Canada, where she settled and acquired American citizenship in 1947.


Why was I impressed and conquered by Rolando's personality the day I heard him say on the radio that he was reading 'Mémoires d'Hadrien' by Marguerite Yourcenar?
Just because she is my reference as a free intellectual , artist, woman writer. She is of no age and fashion, modern and classic , so keen on art that she has educated me many times . I have read her novels and lately her letters. (I got her' letters to her friends and some others' in 1995 when the folio book was published). I did a trip to Granada and Seville in 92.
In Granada I went to Lorca's house ,' nestled deep inside the Federico García Lorca park in the south-eastern tip of Granada city centre, Lorca's house is now a museum that has been so faithfully maintained, it feels like the author may appear at the door at any moment.' It was a visit in Spanish with only a few Spanish people and it was very friendly, as the elderly man who guided the visit seemed to be of the family. What I did not realise is that the ravine where Federico Garcia Lorca was shot by the Franquists was not far from that southern part of Granada.
Marguerite Yourcenar led me to this tragic ravine in one of her letters in that precious and thick book of hers. ( first letter dating from 1909-10, until three years or so before her death 1987).


The first letter is addressed to her aunt, her mother's sister. Her mother died giving birth to Marguerite, this is the key to her extraordinary education as a solitary child with servants and private teachers among them her father, Michel de Crayencour, and then as a teen-ager she shared his aristocratic, nomadic life in Italy, Switzerland, Greece, England, the French riviera. Ancient greek and latin had no secrets for her and English was nearly her mother tongue, that explains also her translations of Henry James (Ce que savait Maisie 1947) James Baldwin( Le coin des 'amen' 1983) Virginia woolf (les vagues 1937), among the most important translations from English into French that she did . She also translated blues and Gospels.
It is touching to read the end of that first letter:'Dear aunt Jeanne,my poor Trier is
indeed very ill, he no longer knows how to walk; He is completely paralysed. I am really sad'. This six year old child is facing despair as her dear Mother's dog isdying. Probably this affection for Trier was a strong link to her mother.
When I discovered the letter on May the 10th 1960, addressed to Federico's sister: Isabel Garcia Lorca, about the trip she made to this fatal ravine at Viznar, I was very moved and somehow regreted my ignorance of this text when I made my trip to Granada.
As it is, it is perhaps better to keep in mind her words not connected to my reality . I can see this spot through her eyes and feelings.
Marguerite and her compagnon Grace booked a taxi to make this excursion. The man at the travel agency said in English'it is not a good memory for us' and confronted to the mute reaction of some villagers when they enquired about this particular spot,they decided to take two younsters with them in the taxi because they finally gave information with gestures' up there' and managed to say they knew where it had happened.
(...)"The road was in such a bad state that we had to get out of the taxi and push it. Soon the path leaves the plots planted with olive trees, then penetrates into the great solitude between the grey and bare mountain it follows on the left and the sheer drop(...)About three kilometers from the village, directly below the highest peak of the mountain( " la cruz de Viznar"),the boys asked the driver to stop, 'it's here',so the five of us came out of the car and went down the slope below the road, less than a hundred meters,in that desert landscape without trees to one spot where four of five young pinetrees grew strongly. To their belief it was that precise spot, and to be sure to be understood they made the gesture of pulling the trigger without any dramatic exaggeration.So they believed your brother and five other men were killed here and were buried under the young trees at this very spot, but I did not understand if it was on the same day or several days later.They believed the earth had been consolidated and some trees had been planted (to hide the place or to mark it or simply to prevent the soil from falling into the ditch )"trees grow fast in cemeteries" said one ot our guides.(...)
Leaving that spot(...) I turned back for a last look at that bare mountain, that desertic land, those few pinetrees growing vigorously in this solitude, those large pependicular folds of the ravine through which must have flown ancient torrents of prehistoric times, the Sierra Nevada displayed on the horizon in all its majesty, And I said to myself that such a place makes me feel ashamed of the trash marble and granite of our cemeteries, and that your brother 's death could be envied in such a landscape of eternity(...)
But it is obviously difficult to imagine a better tomb for a poet.(...)

That is one reason to listen twice to the radio when a young tenor born in Mexico
who has decided to live in France (and I did not know at that time he would become French) says he loves reading Marguerite Yourcenar.
I did look for Antinoüs at Palazzo Massimo alle terme because what she wrote about Hadrien 's love for him is unforgettable.
Her books are an insight in art and soul.
And I am always surprised by her thoughts, her approach to feminism is more advanced than what is meant to be modern.
I am sure to come back to her if I keep this blogging business!