Memory Green / Emlékvirágzás: December 2013

December 3, 2013

R.I.P. Peter Zollman (1931-2013)

ONE DAY

by Sándor Kányádi

silence becomes

a giant bell

without a tongue

somebody slowly

lowers over me

1974

Translated by Peter Zollman

(Sándor Kányádi, There is a Land,

Selected and translated by Peter Zollman, Corvina, 2000)

MAJD

nyelv nélküli
nagy harang
lesz a csönd
s valaki lassan
leborít vele

1974

Dr. Peter Zollman (1931-2013)

Nyugodjon békében!

R.I.P.

WORDS

by István Baka

Just words nothing except for words
words have remained the only things
I’m swimming in the word of lake
in which a reed-grass sentence clings

to my body and drags me down
but down is a word too nothing more
call me by name and free that word
and it will safely reach the shore

nothing remains except the words
I cannot live on bread and wine
I am a soul and burdened by
my body I stumble on the line

between existence and the void
though line is but a word again
and straggling lost among the words
I’m frightened by this strange terrain

it may be good to stay alive but
what if Im taken off the list
please put me in your book of words
then look me up and I’ll exist.

Translated by Peter Zollman

Baka István: CSAK A SZAVAK

Csak a szavak már nem maradt más
csak a szavak csak a szavak
a tó szavában úszom én hol
a hínár mondata tapad

testemre és a mélybe húzna
de hát az is csak szó a mély
nevezz meg és a név a szó majd
kiszabadulva partot ér

csak a szavak már nem maradt más
nem táplál a kenyér s a bor
lélek vagyok ki test-koloncát
hurcolva folyton megbotol

a semmi és a lét közötti
küszöbben bár ez a küszöb
szó maga is csak és riadtan
tévelygek a szavak között

jó volna lenni még talán de
mit is tegyek ha nem lehet
a szótáradba írj be s néha
lapozz föl engem és leszek

.

Jean-Luc Godard (born 3 December 1930)

Jean-Luc Godard, Berlin 1961. Photo by F.C. Gundlach

A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.

Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.

You don't make a movie, the movie makes you.

I make film to make time pass.

To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body - both go together, they can't be separated.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.

It's not where you take things from — it's where you take them to.

In my cinema, there are never any intentions. It's not me inventing this empty auditorium. I don't want to say anything, I try to show, or to get feeling across, or to allow something else to be said after the fact.

The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.
*
All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.

I consider myself as an essayist, I make essays in the form of novels or novels in the form of essays: only I film them instead of writing them. If the cinema were to disappear I would move on to television, and if television were to disappear, I would go back to using pencil and paper. -- Jean-Luc Godard