“Combat Writings”, by George Orwell, translated from English and prologue by Lucien d’Azay, Omnia pocket, 264 p., 14 euros.
“England, your England”, by George Orwell, translated from English by Françoise Bouillot, Payot, “Little Library”, 96 p., €7.
“Songs of Innocence. Songs of Experience”, by William Blake, translated from English by Marie-Louise and Philippe Soupault, Points, “Poésie”, 144 p., €9.90.
Just for the six pages of “A Hanging”its inaugural text, these eight formidable Combat briefsby George Orwell (1903-1950), written between 1931 and 1946, are worth reading. In his company, we witness an ordinary hanging at dawn, in the courtyard of a prison, in Rangoon, Burma, where Orwell was a policeman between 1922 and 1927. The director is there, in a hurry, hitting the ground with his cane and activating the execution sequence. “‘Put down the ferry,’ he said in an irritated tone. This man should be dead by now.” » As for the condemned man, on the way to the gallows he avoids a puddle so as not to get his shoes dirty. The man is hanged, the director checks the quality of the work by touching the body: “Your account is good.” (…) Everything will be fine by this morning, thank God. » Whiskey, laughter and cigarettes follow: you have to cheer up.
The facts speak for themselves, they say; “Good writing is like a transparent window.”Orwell declares later, in “Why I Write.” We will find this recourse to the sole nudity and truth of the act in “How I Killed an Elephant”, in “At the Bottom of the Mine”, a meticulous and terrifying material and medical description of the work of a coal miner, or in “ How the poor die”, a chilling memory from a Parisian hospital. Orwell assigns writing the function of a lighthouse, like that of a miner’s helmet: to be just a direct, raw, dry light on the world as it is. Which leads him to judge with a certain severity, as in the extensive text proposed in the second part, the moral philanthropism of Charles Dickens (1812-1870). Orwell or how to tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. Take your pen and say “I swear.”
When a socialist at hearta determined anti-colonialist, a veteran of the International Brigades, when George Orwell decides – this is 1940 – to greet his homeland, what will he find to write? This is what we discovered in England, your Englandpublished in the magazine Horizon. After a Bernanosian beginning (why didn’t Orwell and Bernanos meet), “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead trying to kill me.”Orwell tries to say, without playing the nationalist bard but with a tender grimace, a restrained love, what for him is the English soul, dispersed in a world of places and objects: “It has something to do with big breakfasts and dreary Sundays, smoky cities and winding roads, green pastures and red mailboxes. » As for the English, their “emotional unity”Orwell defines it as “a family, a fairly tense Victorian family, who doesn’t have many black sheep inside, but whose closets are full of skeletons. (…) “A family where the bad members are in charge: that’s perhaps as close as you can get to defining England in one sentence.”.
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