Cuốn này, Tại sao Homer phải mù ?, phải đọc cả hai, bản tiếng Anh, và bản tiếng Tây, thì mới thú vị, vì tác giả chơi chữ, trên hai từ ‘bookkeeper’ và ‘comptable’. Tếu thế.
Đọc lời giới thiệu, thì có vẻ như nó cũng nhắm trả lời câu phán hách xì xằng, "tôi là ai, tôi là thi sĩ", của nữ thi sĩ TMT.
Tin Văn sẽ post trong kỳ tới, cả hai bản tiếng Anh và tiếng Tây của lời giới thiệu.

Alberto Manguel's intellectual and literary connections to Northrop Frye are strong and evident in his writing. For the first epigraph in his Library at Night (2006), for example, Manguel chooses a citation from Robert Burton's famous book about books, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Burton admits at this point that he has "read many books, but to little purpose, for want of a good method." Manguel shares Burton's bibliophilia and, as significantly, Burton's lack of method or system, preferring rather to follow intuitive associations or chance in his reading. At work in these connections between Manguel and Frye is the serendipity between acts of reading and writing. When asked to name his favourite book, Northrop Frye responded slyly that it was Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, sometimes. On the page following the Burton epigraph, clinching one connection, Manguel cites none other than Northtop Frye, who writes, ''A big library really has the gift of tongues and vast potencies of telepathic communication." With a balletic symmetry between epigraph and citation, therefore, the telepathy Frye speaks of informs the reading and writing of Mr. Manguel, who is the third annual Antonine Maillet-Northrop Frye Lecturer.

Alberto Manguel takes his inspiration for his lecture from a fragment of an essay that Frye wrote in the spring of 1943, an essay that remained unpublished until it appeared in a volume of Frye's collected works in 2002. Its ambitious tide is "The Present Condition of the World." It seeks, on the one hand, to come to terms with the Western world at war and, on the other, to examine unacknowledged notions of spiritual and cultural bankruptcy common to both Germany and America, notions which led inevitably to the Second World War. Frye's essay is chillingly prescient if one considers how little our world has changed in the sixty-five years intervening. In a vigorously satirical attack, Frye singles out America's "Church of Deism" for scorn, since it reduces Western culture to a cult of the practical and useful, thereby impoverishing the mind to function as a "bodily organ." The world Frye describes is the world of Ulro, a name Blake uses for Hell. Frye's essay, we should remember, precedes the publication of his Fearful Symmetry by four years.

Against this backdrop, Manguel turns to Homer in his inquiry into the present condition of readers and writers of the world. The title of Manguel's lecture hinges upon the word bookkeeper, which Frye also uses in his essay. Manguel is sensitive, however, to the interlingual wordplay implicit between bookkeeper and the French comptable. 

Throughout the lecture, the wordplay winks at the ancient origins of writing as a rudimentary form of accounting while recognizing the bookkeeper or cornptable as the living memory and troubled rhapsode of our culture. The ledgers kept by bookkeepers expand to become accounts of cultural activity, since these accounts imply the stories, or comptes, of the complex lives which exist beyond the simple debits and credits listed. Manguel confers a heavy responsibility upon the writer as "the person in charge of tallying the sum of our follies."

Manguel, as the bookkeeper of this lecture, lists the many re-creations of Homer by subsequent writers. By tilting a linear chronology, as it were, he ponders how the imagined Homer of successive generations of readers has become the author of his epics. Manguel is not only a reader of Homer's stories, therefore; he tells us the stories of the Homer who exists beyond the epics. Such a perspective provides Manguel access to several important asides:

Homer's loathing of war, Homer's adoption of his name, and Homer's physical blindness, which is the metaphor of his interior illumination. Moving beyond Homer, Manguel asks, Who are our "sane and merciful bookkeepers," and how have we imagined them into being? In this way, the author is a creation of the reader's imagination. The author becomes part of a "history of conceived authorship," which might serve as a "parallel history of literature."

Using the metaphor of the book, Manguel states in his lecture that reading is the first and last chapter of the history of writing. Writing without a reader exists in some incomplete, pre-animate state. Such an elevation of reading has less to do with chicken-and-egg questions than it has to do with the recognition of the secret wonders reading produces in the mind. We turn to books, Frye once observed, to find what we can't find in reality. In the same way, Manguel the reader finds and lingers over the thrill of "the expression in words of a private, wordless experience hidden deep within us." Meditating in and through language on that which exists beyond the reach of language, moreover, is a formidable paradox of reading and of considerable interest to Manguel. If reading were an art, Manguel would be its artist.

Throughout the lecture, Manguel makes connections across the vastnesses of time and culture with limpidity and humility, both of which confer tremendous authority. The reader is in the presence of a literary mind whose language is that of the imagination and whose frame of reference is the library. Manguel ranges through books, regarding them as the archaeology of human consciousness. And since all books speak to each other, Manguel's lecture recalls (whisperingly) the previous Maillet-Frye lectures: Neil Bissoondath's insistence upon story as the key to identity and David Adams Richards's insistence upon remaining true to one's creative vision.

Within the context of Frye's unfinished essay, which insists upon the value of a revealed religion, comes the sharp contrast of Manguel's comment, "If there is a God who reads us, then his patience or indifference is certainly remarkable." Such a bleak comment, however, finds its origins in a profound humanism, akin to Frye's own. War is love gone terribly wrong, according to Frye; Manguel would agree. It is through contact with the poetic act of creation that the reader and writer alike might achieve a "positive blindness" with which to perceive a glimmer of the loveliness within.

Paul M. Curtis

Professeur titulaire / Professor Departement d'anglais

Faculte des arts et des sciences sociales Universite de Moncton