English
In early 1998, as if foreseeing his own death, which occurred just a few months later, the English poet Ted Hughes gave the press a collection of letter-poems written in first person over a period of more than 25 years directed almost entirely to his first wife, American poet Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide 35 years earlier.
It´s called Birthday Letters, a book of breathtaking beauty where Hughes first addressed, since the time that perhaps he first saw her in the Strand in London in a group photo of Fulbright Scholars, the question of death and absence of Plath and the tense, beautiful and dramatic life they shared.
Through this collection we know that behind his modest wedding in Joycean Bloomsday (June 16, when Ulysses passes) in the parish of St George of the Chimney Sweeps in the district of Holborn in London, on whose altar, where Plath saw “the sky open and show ripe riches to fall on us, Hughes, levitating at her side, saw himself subjected to a strange time: the bewitched future”, both went to a Paris honeymoon.
There, while Plath enthusiastically revived the myth of the city that we owe to Stein, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Miller and other Americans of the Lost Generation, for Hughes, secretly, there was only “the capital / Of the occupation and the old nightmare. / He read each bullet scar on the Quai stones / With a familiar sinister feeling, / And stared at the afflicted way in which the sun exposed the sidewalk / Below…”
It isn’t difficult to share the feelings of the English poet when visiting the French capital. In the end of the day in the imagination of the West, the city has always been linked somehow to revolution and war, whether it be bourgeois revolutions that erupted with the events of 1789, the Paris Commune of 1871 – we already reported here how Oscar Wilde liked walking through the burned ruins of the ancient palace of the Tuileries and each one of those blackened stones was for him a chapter of the Bible of democracy -the two world wars, the bright, hopeful, vibrant week of May of ‘68 or the more recent riots in the banlieues.
That precisely seems to be the aim of the exhibition Fears in the city that can be seen until April 17 at La Monnaie of Paris http://www.monnaiedeparis.fr/, in the words of scholar and journalist Max Gallo, manager of the presentation of the sample, which shows real and fictional images of the city at war-“to blow up the scenery that is Paris” and remind us in these particularly aseptic and amnesic times when Paris was a battlefield.
Paul Oilzum
Distributed in three groups of images (photomontages of war reporter Patrick Chauvel, documentary photographs of Paris Match and a compilation by Michael Wolf of city images taken by Google Street View) is a disturbing and exciting exhibition. You shouldn’t miss it when you rent apartments in Paris?
