They lived comfortably, enjoying worldwide fame for their scholarly contributions, but were never forced to explain why they had embraced the cancerous ideals of the Iron Guard. Among its members, known as Legionnaires, were not only alienated peasants, street thugs and working-class poor people but also prominent intellectuals who enthusiastically endorsed mystical jingoism and xenophobic rage.Īfter the war, many of those scholars, who included the philosopher Emil Cioran and the historian Mircea Eliade (with whom my great-grandfather briefly shared a prison cell), fled Communism for the West, where they built new lives in cities like Paris and Chicago. There, the late 1920s and ’30s saw the emergence of the Iron Guard (also known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael), one of the most violent and virulently anti-Semitic organizations in that part of Europe. Specifically, the play borrows from Ionesco’s own youth in Romania. The mass conversion of humans to rhinoceroses functions as a metaphor for the contagious rise of European fascism throughout the interbellum decades. But after the inexplicable appearance of a rhinoceros raging through its streets, the unassuming villagers begin to metamorphose, one by one, into the very same brutish and unthinking beast. They're shrewd for their own ends, & impure.Eugène Ionesco’s 1959 absurdist play “Rhinoceros” begins in a sleepy, unnamed provincial village where nothing of note ever happens. Living as a conqueror, the king of beasts. Intent on the ending of craving & heedful, With mind unenmeshed in this family or that,įirm in effort, with steadfastness & strength arisen, Showing no greed for flavors, not careless, Taking off the householder's marks, like a coral tree Like a fire not coming back to what's burnt, In the world's sport, love, or sensual bliss, Seeing this drawback in sensual strands. There would be careless talk or abusive."īewitch the mind with their manifold forms. The prudent one, cutting all household ties, Without resistance in all four directions,Īs well as those living the household life.Ĭutting off the householder's marks, like a kovilara tree Keep in mind, though, that the singularity of the rhinoceros' horn reinforces the image.Īs noted under I.1, there is evidence suggesting that the verses here were originally separate poems, composed on separate occasions, and that they have been gathered together because of their common refrain. Thus, because wandering "like a rhinoceros" sounds more natural than wandering "like a horn," I have chosen the former rendering. However, in a translation, it's necessary to choose one reading over the other. Thus, for example, in Dhp 329 (repeated below), one is told to "wander alone like a king renouncing his kingdom, like the elephant in the Matanga woods, his herd." It's possible that the rhinoceros was chosen here as an example of solitary wandering both because of its habits and because of its unusual single horn. Still, some scholars have noted that while the Indian rhinoceros is a solitary animal, rhinoceros horns don't wander, and that in other verses in the Pali canon, the phrase "wander alone like." takes a person or an animal, not an animal part, for its object. The commentary, however, insists that this term refers not to the animal but to its horn, for the Indian rhinoceros, unlike the African, has only one horn. The text literally says, "Wander alone like a 'sword-horn,' which is the Pali term for rhinoceros. Translator's note: The refrain in this sutta is a subject of controversy.
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