end of the road
“When I changed my language, I annihilated my past. I changed my entire life,” said Cioran. I do not share such an acute feeling, since I was active as an academic writing in French and Portuguese since very early in my intellectual life; what I experience is rather a melancholy of leaving a homeland.
I closed my Polish writing workshop for good. Nothing forced me to do so, except the inconvenience of presenting an academic outcome few people would read and acknowledge after I left Polish university. Undoubtedly, a lot of my past has been annihilated, although not in such a radical way as it might seem in a Romanian case several decades ago. The frontiers, any frontiers, are much more permeable today. As a consequence, the experience of shutting a door is less dramatic.
Be that as it may, at the present moment, my Polish drawer is empty. For several years, I have published in Polish assiduously with the clear purpose of saying whatever I had to say before I give my "Polish period" for closed. There is one important omission: I never published my book on relations between Europe and Islam, Natrętny duch pustyni. I never found the tone, the language in which I could address Polish Islamophobia. I recon that, in a way, there was no place for such a book in Polish cultural context. More recently, I have also submitted two editorial proposals concerning books on Moroccan and Lusophone African literatures, in the wake of my Portuguese Mgławica Pessoa. But I believe there is no interest in such topics in Poland; those realities are too distant, too alien from the perspective of a nation suffering from what I used to call a "world blindness". This is why I believe there is little to regret here; these three books will be better off published in English.
Certainly, I do regret the language in which I created my roots; it is a pity to stop writing in it precisely now, when I truly learned how to do it. Yet the sense of precariousness accompanied me long before the political and social crisis that started in 2015. What I answered was a positive calling of being one with the world, beyond a local homeland. The idea returns over and over again since the Renaissance, but perhaps it can be filled with actual emotional content only in our times.
I have other roots, perhaps shallower, but they do exist and live. I have built myself an intimacy in English, writing also my autobiographical texts in it. I am not only an intellectual refugee like those running away from the 20th-century fascisms; certainly, I am honoured to be among them, rather than comply with the exigences of the ever-returning history of Middle Europe. But in my exile, I do not feel pushed toward the margins of being; rather, I feel my being multiplied and expanded.
This is how, between mild melancholy and hope, I close a list of some 160 contributions such as academic papers, essays, comments, book reviews, encyclopedia entries, various manuals and translations that I produced in my native tongue. I am glad to say that currently I have no pending texts, nothing unfinished to return to. And little shame of what I wrote; the only publications I might like to disavow are certain translations of Catholic books I produced between 2000 and 2008. At the time, I believed it was my religious duty to be patient with other people's religious mistakes, and to maintain a collaborative attitude toward other denominations. As I see today, that was, in a sense, a much bigger mistake than any of theirs, since it was a misjudgement of an intellectual. I do regret having made those books; minor as they were, they did not serve my nation well.
Leiden, 26.10.2019
I closed my Polish writing workshop for good. Nothing forced me to do so, except the inconvenience of presenting an academic outcome few people would read and acknowledge after I left Polish university. Undoubtedly, a lot of my past has been annihilated, although not in such a radical way as it might seem in a Romanian case several decades ago. The frontiers, any frontiers, are much more permeable today. As a consequence, the experience of shutting a door is less dramatic.
Be that as it may, at the present moment, my Polish drawer is empty. For several years, I have published in Polish assiduously with the clear purpose of saying whatever I had to say before I give my "Polish period" for closed. There is one important omission: I never published my book on relations between Europe and Islam, Natrętny duch pustyni. I never found the tone, the language in which I could address Polish Islamophobia. I recon that, in a way, there was no place for such a book in Polish cultural context. More recently, I have also submitted two editorial proposals concerning books on Moroccan and Lusophone African literatures, in the wake of my Portuguese Mgławica Pessoa. But I believe there is no interest in such topics in Poland; those realities are too distant, too alien from the perspective of a nation suffering from what I used to call a "world blindness". This is why I believe there is little to regret here; these three books will be better off published in English.
Certainly, I do regret the language in which I created my roots; it is a pity to stop writing in it precisely now, when I truly learned how to do it. Yet the sense of precariousness accompanied me long before the political and social crisis that started in 2015. What I answered was a positive calling of being one with the world, beyond a local homeland. The idea returns over and over again since the Renaissance, but perhaps it can be filled with actual emotional content only in our times.
I have other roots, perhaps shallower, but they do exist and live. I have built myself an intimacy in English, writing also my autobiographical texts in it. I am not only an intellectual refugee like those running away from the 20th-century fascisms; certainly, I am honoured to be among them, rather than comply with the exigences of the ever-returning history of Middle Europe. But in my exile, I do not feel pushed toward the margins of being; rather, I feel my being multiplied and expanded.
This is how, between mild melancholy and hope, I close a list of some 160 contributions such as academic papers, essays, comments, book reviews, encyclopedia entries, various manuals and translations that I produced in my native tongue. I am glad to say that currently I have no pending texts, nothing unfinished to return to. And little shame of what I wrote; the only publications I might like to disavow are certain translations of Catholic books I produced between 2000 and 2008. At the time, I believed it was my religious duty to be patient with other people's religious mistakes, and to maintain a collaborative attitude toward other denominations. As I see today, that was, in a sense, a much bigger mistake than any of theirs, since it was a misjudgement of an intellectual. I do regret having made those books; minor as they were, they did not serve my nation well.
Leiden, 26.10.2019
