Je vous verrai demain, mais je veux vous écrire. Je veux arrêter ces moments fugitifs qui se termineront par ma perte. Je vous écris d’une main tremblante, respirant à peine et le front couvert de sueur.
· Camille Claudel à Auguste Rodin 1886
Je suis bien fâchée d’apprendre que vous êtes encore malade. Je suis sûre que vous avez encore fait des excès de nourriture dans vos maudits dîners, avec le maudit monde que je déteste, qui vous prend votre santé et qui ne vous rend rien.
· François Mauriac à Jeanne Lafon 1912
Autrefois, ivre de mes petits succès, dévoré d’orgueil, je vous eusse fait souffrir. Aujourd’hui, blessé par la vie, je me réfugie en vous. Je ne vis que de votre tendresse. Toute autre femme me paraît inexistante. Je vous aime.
· Juliette Drouet à Victor Hugo 1864
Bonjour, petit oiseau, bonjour et merci, porte ce baiser à mon Toto et dis-lui de venir tout de suite me voir et que je l’adore.
· Chateaubriand à Léontine de Villeneuve 1828
Mais si vous vous avisez d’aimer quelqu’un et de l’épouser, ma tête grise se présentera à vous la nuit, comme la tête de Méduse, et je partirai avec tous mes rhumatismes pour vous étrangler.
· Voltaire à Madame Denis 1745
Je vous embrasse mille fois. Mon âme embrasse la vôtre, mon vit et mon cœur sont amoureux de vous. J’embrasse votre gentil cul et votre adorable personne.
Comme je ne voudrais pas que vous disiez que je ne vous ai pas écrit, parce que je ne vous ai effectivement pas écrit, je vous écris.
Ce ne sera pas seulement une ligne, comme je vous l’ai promis, mais ce ne seront pas plusieurs non plus.
Je suis malade, en grande partie en raison d’une série de préoccupations et de contrariétés que j’ai eues hier.
Si vous ne voulez pas croire que je suis malade, évidemment vous ne le croirez pas.
Mais je vous prie de ne pas me dire que vous ne me croyez pas.
Il me suffit déjà d’être malade : il n’est pas nécessaire en plus que vous en doutiez ou que vous me demandiez des comptes sur ma santé comme si elle dépendait de ma volonté ou que je sois obligé de rendre des comptes à quelqu’un de quoi que ce soit.
Voilà ce que j’avais à vous dire et, par hasard, c’est la vérité. Adieu, petite Ophélia. Dormez, mangez et ne perdez pas trop de poids.
Et le texte portugais :
Ophelinha pequena:
Como não quero que diga que eu não lhe escrevi, por efectivamente não ter escrito, estou escrevendo. Não será uma linha, como prometi, mas não serão muitas. Estou doente, principalmente por causa da série de preocupações e arrelias que tive ontem. Se não quer acreditar que estou doente, evidentemente não acreditará. Mas peço o favor de me não dizer que não acredita. Bem me basta estar doente; não é preciso ainda vir duvidar disso, ou pedir-me contas da minha saúde como se estivesse na minha vontade, ou eu tivesse obrigação de dar contas a alguém de qualquer coisa.
Ora aí tem, e, por acaso é a verdade. Adeus, Ophelinha. Durma e coma, e não perca gramas.
· George Sand à Alfred Musset: une lettre qui se lit en sautant un vers sur deux… (cette pudeur serait-elle ridicule ?)
Je suis très émue de vous dire que j’ai bien compris l’autre soir que vous aviez toujours une envie folle de me faire danser.
Je garde le souvenir de votre baiser et je voudrais bien que ce soit là une preuve que je puisse être aimée
par vous.
Je suis prête à vous montrer mon affection toute désintéressée et sans calcul, et si vous voulez me voir aussi
vous dévoiler sans artifice mon âme toute nue, venez me faire une visite.
Nous causerons en amis, franchement.
Je vous prouverai que je suis la femme sincère, capable de vous offrir l’affection la plus profonde comme la plus étroite
en amitié, en un mot la meilleure preuve dont vous puissiez rêver, puisque votre âme est libre.
Pensez que la solitude où j’habite est bien longue, bien dure et souvent difficile.
Ainsi en y songeant j’ai l’âme grosse.
Accourrez donc vite et venez me la
faire oublier par l’amour où je veux me mettre.
· François Mitterrand à Anne Pingeot
Je ne vous ai pas dit mon secret:
Je ressemble à un coquillage de façon si troublante
Qu’on me prend pour un coquillage.
On me pousse du pied.
On me jette à la mer.
On me garde dans la poche.
On m’ajoute au décor, sur un rayon de livres.
Bref, on me traite en objet inutile.
Il arrive pourtant qu’un enfant me ramasse, me regarde et m’aime.
Et quand on m’aime,
Apprenez-le à tout hasard,
C’est comme si tous les océans du monde, tous les ciels, tous les
continents se donnaient rendez-vous.
Rendez-vous.
Où ?
J’allais écrire: dans mon cœur. Dans mon cœur ?
Ridicules ces lettres ?…
Mais si elles ne l’étaient pas, cela prouverait, selon Pessoa, que l’amour n’est pas là….
Connaissez-vous cette poésie du poète portugais Fernando Pessoa ? En portugais “Todas as cartas de amor são ridículas”
Dans cette vidéo, la voici dite en trois langues (superbement) par Maria de Medeiros
Álvaro de Campos, in “Poemas” . Heterónimo de Fernando Pessoa
La voici dite par Maria Bethania, avec son bel accent brésilien :
(*) Proparoxytonique :
s’applique à un mot dont l’accent tonique appuie sur l’antépénultième syllabe (ce qui constitue une exception dans une langue comme le portugais où il est le plus souvent marqué sur l’avant-dernière). Notons que l’adjectif portugais esdrúxulo qui signifie proparoxytonique porte justement l’accent tonique sur la syllabe drú. Ce mot est donc autoréférent.
Sous la plume de Pessoa, s’appliquant aux mots ou aux sentiments, l’adjectif esdrúxulo peut s’interpréter comme saugrenu.
After yoga, Narendra Modi has turned his soft power focus to Sanskrit. The Indian government is enthusiastically participating in the 16th World Sanskrit Conference in Bangkok.
Not only is it sending 250 Sanskrit scholars and partly funding the event, the conference will see the participation of two senior cabinet ministers: External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who inaugurated the conference on Sunday, and Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani, who will attend its closing ceremony on July 2.
Inexplicably, Swaraj also announced the creation of the post of Joint Secretary for Sanskrit in the Ministry of External Affairs.
How an ancient language, which no one speaks, writes or reads, will help promote India’s affairs abroad remains to be seen.
On the domestic front, though, the uses of Sanskrit are clear: it is a signal of the cultural nationalism of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Sanskrit is the liturgical language of Hinduism, so sacred that lower castes (more than 75% of modern Hindus) weren’t even allowed to listen to it being recited.
Celebrating Sanskrit does little to add to India’s linguistic skills – far from teaching an ancient language, India is still to get all its people educated in their modern mother tongues. But it does help the BJP push its own brand of hyper-nationalism.
Unfortunately, reality is often a lot more complex than simplistic nationalist myths. While Sanskrit is a marker of Hindu nationalism for the BJP, it might be surprised, even shocked, to know that the first people to leave behind evidence of having spoken Sanskrit aren’t Hindus or Indians – they were Syrians.
The Syrian speakers of Sanskrit
The earliest form of Sanskrit is that used in the Rig Veda (called Old Indic or Rigvedic Sanskrit). Amazingly, Rigvedic Sanskrit was first recorded in inscriptions found not on the plains of India but in in what is now northern Syria.
Between 1500 and 1350 BC, a dynasty called the Mitanni ruled over the upper Euphrates-Tigris basin, land that corresponds to what are now the countries of Syria, Iraq, and Turkey.
The Mitannis spoke a language called Hurrian, unrelated to Sanskrit. However, each and every Mitanni king had a Sanskrit name and so did many of the local elites. Names include Purusa (meaning “man”), Tusratta (“having an attacking chariot”), Suvardata (“given by the heavens”), Indrota (“helped by Indra”) and Subandhu, a name that exists till today in India.
Imagine that: the irritating, snot-nosed Subandhu from school shares his name with an ancient Middle Eastern prince. Goosebumps. (Sorry, Subandhu).
The Mitanni had a culture, which, like the Vedic people, highly revered chariot warfare.
A Mitanni horse-training manual, the oldest such document in the world, uses a number of Sanskrit words: aika (one), tera (three), satta (seven) and asua (ashva, meaning “horse”). Moreover, the Mitanni military aristocracy was composed of chariot warriors called “maryanna”, from the Sanskrit word “marya”, meaning “young man”.
The Mitanni worshipped the same gods as those in the Rig Veda (but also had their own local ones).
They signed a treaty with a rival king in 1380 BC which namesIndra, Varuna, Mitra and the Nasatyas (Ashvins) as divine witnesses for the Mitannis.
While modern-day Hindus have mostly stopped the worship of these deities, these Mitanni gods were also the most important gods in theRig Veda.
This is a striking fact.
As David Anthony points out in his book, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, this means that not only did Rigvedic Sanskrit predate the compilation of the Rig Veda in northwestern India but even the “central religious pantheon and moral beliefs enshrined in the Rig Veda existed equally early”.
How did Sanskrit reach Syria before India?
What explains this amazing fact? Were PN Oak and his kooky Hindutva histories right? Was the whole world Hindu once upon a time? Was the Kaaba in Mecca once a Shivling?
Unfortunately, the history behind this is far more prosaic.
The founding language of the family from which Sanskrit is from is called Proto-Indo-European. Its daughter is a language called Proto-Indo-Iranian, so called because it is the origin of the languages of North India and Iran (linguists aren’t that good with catchy language names).
The encyclopedic, Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, edited by JP Mallory and DQ Adams, writes of the earliest speakers of Proto-Indo-Iranian emerging in the southern Urals and Kazakhstan. These steppe people, representing what is called the Andronovo culture, first appear just before 2000 BC.
From this Central Asian homeland diverged a group of people who had now stopped speaking Proto-Indo-Iranian and were now conversing in the earliest forms of Sanskrit. Some of these people moved west towards what is now Syria and some east towards the region of the Punjab in India.
David Anthony writes that the people who moved west were possibly employed as mercenary charioteers by the Hurrian kings of Syria. These charioteers spoke the same language and recited the same hymns that would later on be complied into the Rig Veda by their comrades who had ventured east.
These Rigvedic Sanskrit speakers usurped the throne of their employers and founded the Mitanni kingdom. While they gained a kingdom, the Mitanni soon lost their culture, adopting the local Hurrian language and religion.
However, royal names, some technical words related to chariotry and of course the gods Indra, Varuna, Mitra and the Nasatyas stayed on.
The group that went east and later on composed the Rig Veda, we know, had better luck in preserving their culture. The language and religion they bought to the subcontinent took root. So much so that 3,500 years later, modern Indians would celebrate the language of these ancient pastoral nomads all the way out in Bangkok city.
Hindutvaising Sanskrit’s rich history
Unfortunately, while their language, religion and culture is celebrated, the history of the Indo-European people who brought Sanskrit into the subcontinent is sought to be erased at the altar of cultural nationalism.
Popular national myths in India urgently paint Sanskrit as completely indigenous to India. This is critical given how the dominant Hindutva ideology treats geographical indigenousness as a prerequisite for nationality. If Sanskrit, the liturgical language of Hinduism, has a history that predates its arrival in India, that really does pull the rug from out under the feet of Hindutva.
Ironically, twin country Pakistan’s national myths go in the exact opposite direction: their of-kilter Islamists attempt to make foreign Arabs into founding fathers and completely deny their subcontinental roots.
Both national myths, whether Arab or Sanskrit, attempt to imagine a pure, pristine origin culture uncontaminated by unsavoury influences. Unfortunately the real world is very often messier than myth.
Pakistanis are not Arabs and, as the Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture rather bluntly puts it: “This theory [that Sanskrit and its ancestor Proto-Indo-European was indigenous to India], which resurrects some of the earliest speculations on the origins of the Indo-Europeans, has not a shred of supporting evidence, either linguistic or archeological”.
As the Narendra Modi government celebrates Sanskrit, a look at the oldest known speakers of the language: the Mitanni people of Syria.
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Note: It is my conjecture that 12,000 years ago, most of the current land were under water and that countries with high plateau witnessed the first new human resurgence before it transferred to lower fertile lands.
Adonis Diaries 
