from Pascal Quignard's *Albucius* (trans. by Bruce Boone)

from Albucius, by Pascal Quignard

translated by Bruce Boone

"Reader"

When the present offers little joy and the inevitable months ahead bring only the prospect of repetition, monotony can be avoided by raiding the past. The thighs of the dead open, their stomachs (sweet with the passage of twenty-one hundred years) join and heal again. Secrets, certain puzzles better left not spoken, are dug up, and from little wooden beams, and from bird’s down, a nest is fashioned for some older patrician woman, a nest of the ancient Hebrew type. It’s a protection.

Things that once were true provide greater protection for falsity, and for the wishes stirred up by falsity, than some simple anachronistic plot or other, pieced together, scavenged from god-knows-where. Caius Albucius Silus existed. So did his declamations. I invented the nest I plunked Albucius into, Albucius with whatever warmth he has, his little life, his rheumatism, the few greens I threw in for the salad, and his melancholy. His ghost may thereby be gratified with a few colors, pleasures, perhaps a death even—who knows? I love this world and the stories whose invention is made possible by their absence.

In June 1989, I was alone and I was tired. I had jotted down 60 of these pages while seated on a wooden bench. Huge solemn crows flew across the ramparts of the imperial gardens in Tokyo.

There was a little turtle in the pond below the ramparts. It stuck its head out of the water approaching a wooden post near the bank. Its head created a wake of waves. Over and over, the bulk of its body pulled it down. I looked down at the green, aged, implacable, and scaly head. “Now how about that! It’s Augustus!” But could it somehow have failed to be? Today it surprises me more. This country where the taxi doors shut by themselves and where you take your shoes off to eat has buried me in an imaginary Rome more alive and flushed with blood than the faces of these Zen monks I came to talk to.

To my mind nothing surpasses the translation made by Henri Bornecque of the work of Seneca the Elder—that is, Seneca the Great. I can add I also owe much to a version Du Teil came out with, one that contained Quintilian the Rhetorician’s stories. This was under Cardinal Mazarin in the first half of August 1658. It was rather hot outside. The Port Royalist solitaries hadn’t yet slipped from favor. This is how I came to know happiness in the cool of those trees. I beautified my life with days I never lived.

Grenoble, July 1989