Biografie - Română

Născut în 1911 în Carpaţi, la Răşinari, crescut sub autoritatea unui tată protopop şi unei mame cu tendinţe depresive, Cioran îşi scrie cele cinci prime cărţi în limba maternă, româna ; unele sunt culegeri de eseuri mici (între una şi trei pagini), altele, culegeri de aforisme. Din adolescenţă, pe care o petrece la Sibiu, începe să sufere de insomnii ; vine apoi la Bucureşti, unde studiază filosofia. Publicist prolific, Cioran devine o celebritate din « Micul Paris » interbelic, alături de Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noica, sau viitorul mare prieten Eugen Ionescu (cu Ionescu împarte Premiul tinerilor scriitori din Fundaţia regală, in 1934, pentru prima sa carte, Pe culmile disperării).

Influenţat de romanticii germani, de Schopenhauer, de Nietzsche, şi de Lebensphilosophie (Schelling, Bergson), precum şi de ruşii Chestov, Rozanov, Dostoievski, sau de poetul român Eminescu, Cioran scrie într-un stil liric, expansiv, meditaţii metafizice, temele recurente fiind moartea, disperarea, singurătatea, istoria, muzica, sfinţenia şi mistica (Lacrimi şi sfinţi, 1937) – iar toate aceste teme se vor regăsi în opera lui franceză. În cartea sa controversată, Schimbarea la faţă a României (1937), Cioran, care se recunoştea atunci în mişcarea legionară, îşi critică cu violenţă ţara şi compatrioţii, opunând « culturile mici », (dispreţuite pe plan istoric, precum România) « culturilor mari », ca Franţa sau Germania, naţiuni care dispun de propria lor soartă.

După doi ani în Germania, Cioran ajunge la Paris, în 1936. Mai scrie în româna pâna la mijlocul aniilor 1940 (în 1943 apar ultimul articol în româna şi primele în franceză), pâna la ruptura din vara lui 1946, atunci când Cioran încearcă să-l traducă pe Mallarmé în româna : se hotărăşte brusc să renunţe la limba materna, şi începe imediat să-şi scrie prima carte în franceză, ce va fi, după mai multe rescrieri intense, impresionantul Précis de Décomposition (1949) ; urmează zece cărţi, prin care Cioran îşi continuă explorarea obsesiilor dintotdeauna, cu o distanţă din ce în ce mai sensibilă, comparabilă cu cea a sofiştilor greci, a moraliştilor francezi, şi a înţelepţilor orientali. Vituperaţiile sale existenţiale, distrugătoare, le scrie într-o franceză clasică, resimţite de el ca antipozi la supleţea limbii române ; vorbeşte de limba franceză ca de o « cămaşă de forţă », care îl sileşte să-şi înfrâneze temperamentul extrem şi elanurile lirice. Cărţile lui de deziluzie radicală apar la un ritm descrescând, în timp de trei decenii, pe masură ce se izolează, împreuna cu însoţitoarea lui, Simone Boué, într-o mansardă micuţă din centrul Parisului, spectator din ce în ce mai retras în sine, din ce în ce mai îndepărtat de o lume pe care o neagă atât pe plan istoric (Histoire et Utopie, 1960), cât şi pe plan ontologic (La chute dans le temps, 1964), ridicându-şi mizantropia pe culmile subtilităţii (De l’inconvénient d’être né, 1973), dând voie în acelaşi timp unui umanism nelipsit de ironie, de amărăciune şi de preţiozitate (Exercices d’admiration, 1986 ; Cahiers, publicaţie postumă).

Interzis pe pământul României pâna la căderea regimului comunist, Cioran n-a cunoscut o consacrare internaţională decât într-un târziu. Moare în 1995 la Paris.

Nicolas Cavaillès

Cioran - Librariile Humanitas

Biografie - Nederlands

Emil Cioran werd geboren in 1911 in Rasinari, een klein dorpje in de Roemeense Karpaten. Hij werd opgevoed door een vader die priester was en een moeder die... depressieve neigingen had. Al vanaf zijn jeugd, die hij doorbrengt in Sibiu, kampt hij met slapeloosheid. Toch werkt hij dan al zijn eerste vijf boeken af in zijn moedertaal, het Roemeens. Enkele zijn bundelingen van kleine essay's (gemiddeld één à drie pagina's), andere zijn een verzameling korte gezegdes. De jonge Cioran studeert filosofie in Boekarest, oftewel het 'Kleine Parijs". Productief als hij is, groeit hij er snel uit tot een beroemdheid, naast Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noïca en zijn latere goede vriend Eugène Ionesco (waarmee hij de Prijs voor jonge schrijvers van de koninklijke stichting in 1934 deelt voor zijn eerste boek, Sur les cimes du désespoir.

Cioran wordt beïnvloed door de Duitse romantici, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche en de Lebensphilosophie (Schelling, Bergson), maar ook door de Russen Chestov, Rozanov en Dostoïevski en de Roemeense dichter Eminescu. Zo komt het dat zijn stijl lyrisch en extravert is en zijn overpeinzingen meestal abstract zijn. Dood, wanhoop, eenzaamheid, geschiedenis, muziek, heiligheid en mystiek (Des Larmes et des Saints, 1937) zijn vaak terugkerende thema's in zijn Frans werk. In zijn controveresieel boek La Transfiguration de la Roumanie (1937) sympathiseert hij met de IJzeren Garde en neemt hij zijn land en landgenoten zwaar op de korrel. Hij vergelijkt daarbij de 'kleine naties', die vanuit universeel en geschiedkundig oogpunt verwaarloosbaar zijn zoals Roemenië, met grote naties zoals Frankrijk en Duitsland, naties die hun lot in eigen hand hebben.

In 1936 belandt hij, na twee jaren Duitsland, in Parijs. Hij blijft in het Roemeens verder schrijven tot het midden van de jaren '40 (1943 is het jaar van zijn laatste artikel in het Roemeens, vanaf dan schrijft hij in het Frans). De definitieve breuk komt er in de zomer van 1946, wanneer hij Mallarmé in het Roemeens probeert te vertalen. Hij geeft ineens zijn moedertaal op omdat in Parijs toch niemand Roemeens spreekt en gaat verder in het Frans. Dat mondt, na heel wat bloed, zweet en tranen uit in Précis de Décomposition (1949), de eerste van een serie van tien boeken waarin Cioran zijn obsessies van altijd verder verkent. Iets meer afstandelijk nu, zodat zijn stijl te vergelijken valt met de Griekse sofisten, de Franse moralisten en zelfs de oosterse wijzen, met name boeddhisten. Hij schrijft zijn existentiële hevige verwijten en andere destructieve overwegingen op in een klassiek Frans, dat lijnrecht tegenover de souplesse van de Roemeense taal staat. Hij noemt het zelfs een verplichte dwangbuis, die zijn hevig temperament en dichterlijke vervoering in de weg staat en doet er de komende drie decennia almaar langer over om zijn boeken vol radicale wanhoop af te werken. Intussen isoleert hij zich, samen met zijn vriendin Simone Boué, steeds meer op een minuscule zolderkamer in hartje Parijs. Steeds meer in zichzelf getrokken en steeds verder verwijderd van een wereld die hij verloochent, zowel op historisch vlak (Histoire et Utopie, 1960) als op ontologisch vlak (La Chute dans le temps, 1964). Zijn mensenhaat bereikte het toppunt van subtiliteit (De l'Inconvénient d'être né, 1973), maar ook liet hij af en toe een humanisme vol ironie, bitterheid en gekunsteldheid bewonderen (Exercices d'admiration, 1986; Cahiers, postume publicatie).

Hij mocht Roemenië pas opnieuw binnen na de val van het communistische regime. Pas op zeer late leeftijd kreeg hij erkenning. Uiteindelijk sterft hij in 1995 in Parijs

Nicolas Cavaillès
Uit het Frans vertaald door Elke Vandendriessche

Biographie - Français

Né en 1911 à Rasinari, petit village des Carpates roumaines, élevé sous l’autorité d’un père protopope et d’une mère… à tendance dépressive, insomniaque dès son adolescence à Sibiu, Emil Cioran écrit ses cinq premiers livres dans sa langue maternelle, le roumain ; certains sont des recueils de petits essais (une à trois pages en moyenne), d’autres des recueils d’aphorismes. Le jeune Cioran étudie la philosophie dans le « Petit Paris » de Bucarest ; publiciste prolifique, il en devient une figure célèbre, aux côtés de Mircea Eliade, de Constantin Noïca ou de son futur grand ami Eugène Ionesco (avec lequel il partage le Prix des jeunes écrivains de la Fondation royale en 1934, pour son premier livre, Sur les cimes du désespoir).

Influencé par les romantiques allemands, par Schopenhauer, par Nietzsche et par la Lebensphilosophie (Schelling, Bergson), comme par les russes Chestov, Rozanov ou Dostoïevski, ou par le poète roumain Eminescu, Cioran écrit dans un style lyrique, expansif, des méditations souvent d’ordre métaphysique, dont les thèmes récurrents sont la mort, le désespoir, la solitude, l’histoire, la musique, la sainteté et les mystiques (Des Larmes et des Saints, 1937) – tous thèmes que l’on retrouvera dans son œuvre française. Dans son livre controversé La Transfiguration de la Roumanie (1937), Cioran, alors proche du mouvement légionnaire, critique violemment son pays et ses compatriotes, en opposant les « petites nations », méprisables du point de vue de l’histoire universelle, comme la Roumanie, aux grandes nations, comme la France ou l’Allemagne, nations qui ont leur sort entre leurs mains.

Arrivé à Paris en 1936, après deux ans passés en Allemagne, il continue tout d’abord à écrire en roumain, jusqu’au milieu des années 1940 (1943 est l’année de son dernier article roumain, et des premiers en français), la rupture défintive se produisant à l’été 1946, alors qu’il essaie de traduire Mallarmé en roumain : il décide brutalement de renoncer à sa langue maternelle, puisque personne à Paris ne la parle, et se met aussitôt à rédiger son premier livre en français, lequel, à force de réécritures intenses, va devenir l’impressionnant Précis de Décomposition (1949), premier d’une série de dix livres dans lesquels Cioran continue d’explorer ces obsessions de toujours, avec un recul croissant qui le rapproche à la fois des sophistes grecs, des moralistes français et des sages orientaux, notamment bouddhistes. Il écrit ses vitupérations existentielles et autres considérations destructrices dans un français classique, qu’il ressent comme aux antipodes de la souplesse de la langue roumaine, et dont il parle comme d’une « camisole de force » l’obligeant à contenir son tempérament extrême et ses envolées lyriques. Ses livres de désillusion radicale paraissent à un rythme décroissant, sur plus de trois décennies, tandis qu’il s’isole, avec sa compagne Simone Boué, dans une minuscule mansarde au cœur de Paris, en spectateur toujours plus replié sur son propre moi, et toujours plus distant d’un monde qu’il renie tant sur le plan historique (Histoire et Utopie, 1960) qu’ontologique (La Chute dans le temps, 1964), élevant sa misanthropie jusqu’à des cimes de subtilité (De l’Inconvénient d’être né, 1973), non sans laisser poindre ici et là un humanisme tout d’ironie, d’amertume et de préciosité (Exercices d’admiration, 1986 ; Cahiers, publication posthume).

Interdit de séjour en Roumanie jusqu’à la chute du régime communiste, n’ayant connu une consécration internationale que tardive, il meurt en 1995 à Paris.

Nicolas Cavaillès

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Le Corrupteur corrompu : Barbarie et méthode de l'écriture de Cioran

de Nicolas Cavaillès

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Cioran - Amazon France

Dubious Raptures

It’s always fascinating to witness the arrival of book that doesn’t exist. The publication of Exercises négatifs, which was E.M. Cioran’s original title for the manuscript that later became Précis de Décomposition (his first book to be written in french and doubtlessly his best known), amounts to an important event, an indication of the growing popularity of this Roumanian-born writer. Just ten years after his death, his readers (or leastwise his publishers) have such an appetite for new works beyond the fifteen that he published during his lifetime (which had already been followed in 1997 by the excellent one-thousand pages of his Cahiers 1957-1972). Clearly, despair and elegance are still greatly appealing these days.

A Warning

But the celebration is somewhat spoiled and our pleasure diminished. The problem arises primarily from the choice of a title – Exercise négatifs – that leads us to expect something that this publication does not, in fact, offer. What we do find is a collection of a certain number of unfinished passages that Cioran had included in his first version of Précis before deciding to delete them as work on this book progressed. In other words, we don’t (except for a group of passages that are gathered together in a chapter entitled “Variantes définitives”) find first-drafts of published texts or, for that matter, subsequent drafts. The title Exercises négatifs should, rightly, designate the first version of Précis as a whole. In point of fact, however, its use for the present publication suggests that it was a different book altogether, written apart from Précis, even though the real “Exercises négatifs” are the Précis in its embryonic form. In addition to this problem, the order in which the passages themselves are presented is regrettable. The editor has adopted the classification established by the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet, which is not, unfortunately, the one chosen by Cioran himself for the numbering of his texts.

In spite of its title, then, this volume does not really offer us Cioran’s Exercises négatifs; such is the warning that we do not receive from Ingrid Astier, who edited, introduced, and annotated this volume. These criticisms may seem like quibbles, but it is nevertheless true (think of Pascal’s Pensées) that unfinished work requires certain editorial precautions.

Exclamations of a Reprobate

These cavils aside (I expect that future editions will clarify things, even at the risk of confusing them even further…), the transcription and the publication of these manuscripts have the great merit of allowing us to read what Cioran deemed unworthy of being read, passages that he himself censured. These vigorous first drafts, supplemented by a chapter entitled “Vers les syllogismes de l’amertume”, overflow with vehement paragraphs : Cioran’s first, impetuous spurts, which are, indeed, excessive in their content. Their style, although not excessively awkward, has yet to undergo its later refinements.

Précis ; provocative statements on such themes as hope, love, and marriage (“a spasm blessed by the mayor and the priest”) ; anecdotes, alternating between the grotesque and the burlesque, of a metaphysician immersed, in spite of himself, in a vulgar world (a “Hamlet amidst the dressmakers” who, at a dance, reflects that “the hatred that one reads in the eyes of young girls whom no one has asked for a dance terrifies me more than does an operating room”); declarations of war against literary critics and, even more, against professors (whom he describes as “reading machines that transform the solitude of a few exceptional spirits into commodities for idiots”) ; lengthy flights around the theme of suicide, whose deletion from the Précis suggests, not that the somber moralist had a moral philosophy (!), but that he recognized the weakness of the idea that the thought of suicide was superior to suicide itself (“Suicide as a means of knowledge,” “Enlivening death,” etc.). Above all, one finds, in page after page, the aggressive skepticism of a thinker who has given up his earlier political enthusiasms and who invites us all (this is in 1946) to give up our certitudes as he did, to fight against all ideologies, and to imitate, if not the sage’s indifference, at least the philosopher’s doubt.

Beyond the obsession with death and Cioran’s trademark skepticism, the reader is struck by the “histrionic” triteness of some passages, which is only the bitter farce, bad intentions, idle fulminations, and abusive caricatures of a picturesque misanthrope.

All of this is not the best Cioran, or the most subtle, or the most poetic – but it is, to be sure, the most furious ; it is also continuously excellent. These one hundred and fifty rich, “unpublished” pages offer rewarding hours to their intrepid readers, including the philosophers among them (“The vogue of death in contemporary philosophy”), the historians (“Europe, a carrion-ridden land”), and writers (passages on the great Roumanian poet Eminescu and on “The importance of wickedness”).

A Wicked, Despairing Misanthrope

These chapters, which Cioran had rejected, should not diminish the growing world-wide reputation of this “écrivain maudit” who was born in a peaceful Transylvanian village. More than the purified style to come, these “trompe l’oeil” Exercises négatifs reveal the passionate, indeed the explosive temperament of Cioran with pen in hand. Although Ingrid Astier’s postface begins by quoting George Perros’s mitigating idea that “there cannot be a despairing work since the motive that gave birth to it is affirmative” and concludes with uplifting remarks about the author’s “fundamental respect for human beings,” Cioran does not seem to be especially full of hope when, for example, he says: “Any philosophy that sets out with the intention of finding reasons for hope is, by that very fact, forever disqualified” or “Has one ever heard a hopeful song that does not arouse a slight feeling of disgust?” Cioran, who was so elegant, shows himself here as also decidedly disrespectful, spiteful, and devilishly embittered. This is because, as he says, “Everyone has his model; I need one that is scornful, wicked, and lucid.”

Nicolas Cavaillès
Translated by Thomas Cousineau

October 2005
Extases frelatées - En marge du Précis de Décomposition
Nicolas Cavaillès

Biography

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Born in 1911 in Rasinari, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, raised under the rule of a father who was a Romanian Orthodox priest and a mother who was prone to depression, Emil Cioran wrote his first five books in Romanian. Some of these are collections of brief essays (one or two pages, on average); others are collections of aphorisms. Suffering from insomnia since his adolescent years in Sibiu, the young Cioran studied philosophy in the “little Paris” of Bucarest. A prolific publicist, he became a well-known figure, along with Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noïca, and his future close friend Eugene Ionesco (with whom he shared the Royal Foundation’s Young Writers Prize in 1934 for his first book, On the Heights of Despair).

Influenced by the German romantics, by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and the Lebensphilosophie of Schelling and Bergson, by certain Russian writers, including Chestov, Rozanov, and Dostoyevsky, and by the Romanian poet Eminescu, Cioran wrote lyrical and expansive meditations that were often metaphysical in nature and whose recurrent themes were death, despair, solitude, history, music, saintliness and the mystics (cf. Tears and Saints, 1937) – all of which are themes that one finds again in his French writings. In his highly controversial book, The Transfiguration of Romania (1937), Cioran, who was at that time close to the Romanian fascists, violently criticized his country and his compatriots on the basis of a contrast between such “little nations” as Romania, which were contemptible from the perspective of universal history and great nations, such as France or Germany, which took their destiny into their own hands.

After spending two years in Germany, Cioran arrived in Paris in 1936. He continued to write in Romanian until the early 1940s (he wrote his last article in Romanian in 1943, which is also the year in which he began writing in French). The break with Romanian became definitive in 1946, when, in the course of translating Mallarmé, he suddenly decided to give up his native tongue since no one spoke it in Paris. He then began writing in French a book that, thanks to numerous intensive revisions, would eventually become the impressive A Short History of Decay (1949) -- the first of a series of ten books in which Cioran would continue to explore his perennial obsessions, with a growing detachment that allies him equally with the Greek sophists, the French moralists, and the oriental sages. He wrote existential vituperations and other destructive reflections in a classical French style that he felt was diametrically opposed to the looseness of his native Romanian; he described it as being like a “straight-jacket” that required him to control his temperamental excesses and his lyrical flights. The books in which he expressed his radical disillusionment appeared, with decreasing frequency, over a period of more than three decades, during which time he shared his solitude with his companion Simone Boué in a miniscule garret in the center of Paris, where he lived as a spectator more and more turned in on himself and maintaining an ever greater distance from a world that he rejected as much on the historical level (History and Utopia, 1960) as on the ontological (The Fall into Time, 1964), raising his misanthropy to heights of subtlety (The Trouble with being Born, 1973), while also allowing to appear from time to time a humanism composed of irony, bitterness, and preciosity (Exercices d’admiration, 1986, and the posthumously published Notebooks).

Denied the right to return to Romania during the years of the communist regime, and attracting international attention only late in his career, Cioran died in Paris in 1995.

Nicolas Cavaillès

Translated by Thomas Cousineau

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