奥克塔维奥·帕斯谈杜尚的“被她的光棍汉们剥光的新娘”
诗人帕斯是杜尚的朋友。他写杜尚是本经典。其中描写“被她的光棍汉们剥光的新娘”和这个做的笔记的“绿色盒子”的部分，非常精彩，让人有极大的阅读快感。这样的写作，是好的艺术写作，也是好的散文。而杜尚的这个作品，人们说是二十世纪最神秘的作品、最不可把握的作品，都有无奈的道理。无论如何，这个作品确实太好玩了。
我把帕斯这段文章的英译本打下来，这么令人有快感的文本，忍不住分享。文本后附有相关链接。
The Bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even is one of the most impenetrable works of our century. It is different from most modern texts - because this painting is a text - in that the author has given us a key: the notes of the Green Box. I have already said that, like the Large Glass itself, it an incomplete key: moreover the motes have no order except a chronological one and they are, in their own way, additional brain-teasers, scattered signs which we have to regroup and decipher. The Bride… and the Green Box constitute a system of mirrors which interchange reflections; each one of them illuminates and rectifies the others. There are numerous interpretations of this enigmatic work. Some of them are penetrating. I will not repeat them or offer a new one. My purpose is descriptive: preliminary notes for a future translation into Spanish. I will begin with the titles: La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même. It is not easy to translate this sentence that twists and oscillates. The first term mise à nu doesn’t exactly mean undressed or unclothed; it is a much more energetic expression: the implications are, rather, of stripping naked or exposing. The obvious associations are with a public ceremony or ritual as the theatre (mise en scène) or execution (miseà mort).The use of the world bachelor (célibataire) instead of what would seem to be the more normal term, fiancé or suitor, suggests an insurmountable separation between the male and the female: the bachelor is not even a suitor and the bride will never be married. The plural, bachelor, and the possessive adjective go to stress the inferiority of the males: one thinks of a herd rather than of polyandry. The word même - even, not excluding, right down to - underlines the action and converts it into a veritable ex-position, in the liturgical as well as the ordinary sense of the word. Almost all the elements of the work are already present in the title: the mythic or religious, the barrack-room joke, the erotic and the pseudo-technical or ironic.
The names of each of the parts also have a significance - sometimes more than one - which completes the meaning of the plastic composition. In fact they are sign-posts. The names of the Bride are Motor-Desire, Queen Been and Hanged Woman (which we could in turn, to continue the game, call Pendent: pendu and pendule). For H. P. Roché [Henri-Pierre Roché] the Bride is a mixture of dragonfly and praying mantis; Carrouges [Michel Carrouge] has discovered, for his part, that Mariée is the popular name in France for an insect: the noctuelle. The group of bachelors has a repertory of sombre names: Bachelor Apparatus, Eros Machine, Nice Malic Moulds (Neuf Moules Malic) and, finally, Cemetery of liveries and uniforms. In fact there are nice makes and they are only moulds, empty suits inflated by the fluid or gas which the Bride emits. They represent nine families or tribes of men: gendarme, cuirassier, policemen, priest, busboy, station-master, department-store delivery-boy, flunkey and undertaker’s assistant. The list couldn’t be more gloomy. The other parts have names which indicate their functions: Top Inscription, Slide (Sleigh or Chariot), Water-Mille, Scissors, Sieve, Chocolate-Grinder (composed of Bayonet, Necktie, Rollers and Louis XV Chassis) and Oculist Witnesses. There are four others which I will mention later. I should point out in passing the aggressively virile character of the Chocolate-Grinder - although it doesn’t have a head.
The Bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even is a double glass, two meters seventy centimeters high and one meter seventy centimeters wide, painted in oil and divided horizontally into two identical parts by a lead wire. A cloud of a greyish color floats through the upper part of the top half, the domain of the Bride. It is the Milky Way. According to Carrouges it is also a chrysalis, the previous form of the Bride-dragonfly; Roché, on the other hand, sees a sort of gaseous crocodile in the cloud. The Milky Way contains three boards, like those which are used in stadiums to mark up the score of the teams or, in airports, to announce the arrival and departure of the planes. These boards are the Top Inscription; their function is to inform the bachelors of the unloading of the Bride - her commands. Roché thinks of them as the “Original Mystery, the Cause of Causes, a Trinity of empty boxes”. The Bride appears on the extreme left, a little below the Top Inscription. She is a machine (an agricultural machine, Duchamp informs us - perhaps an allusion to Ceres). She is also a skeleton, a motor, a body that oscillates in space, a terrible insect, a mechanical incarnation of Kali and an allegory of the Assumption of the Virgin. Duchamp has said that she is the two-dimensional shadow of a three-dimensional object which, in its turn, is the projection of an unknown object of four dimension: the shadow, the copy of a copy of an Idea. Contiguous to this Platonic vision there is another: Lebel [Robert Lebel] thinks that the fourth dimension is the moment of copulation when the lovers fuse all the realities into one - the erotic dimension. I won’t bother to describe the complicated morphology of the organs which compose the Bribe, such as the receiving and transmitting part there is an area of dots: they are the discharges of the bachelors. Duchamp left two other parts unpainted: the equipment of the Bride above the lead wire and, towards the right and center, the Handler or Tender of Gravity.
In the lower half, to the left, one finds the group of the Nine malic moulds or the Cemetery of liveries and uniforms. They are “the archetectonic base of the Bride-Apetheosis”. The nice puppets stand “as if enveloped… by a mirror reflecting back to them their own complexity to the point of their being hallucinated”. Are they men who are driven mad by desire or by the vanity of desire? To the right of the Nine, there is a little cart with runners: it is the Slide. This apparatus contains a Water-Mill which propels it. Thanks to an ingenious piece of mechanism which includes, amongst other things, the spilling of some bottles of Benedictine (not painted), the Mill animates the Slide with a seesaw movement. As it goes to and fro,, the Slide recites interminable litanies: “slow life, vicious circle. Onanism. Horizontal. Junk of life…”. The Sieve, which is made of seven cones, is to the right of the Slide. It is connected with the malic mould by a system of capillary tubes - which are none other than the “capricious units of metrical length”, obtained by the method I describe earlier. Between the cones of the Sieve and the Chocolate-Grinder the Scissor open and close. The Chocolate-Grinder occupies the central part of the lower half of the Glass An adage of spontaneity defines its purpose: “the bachelor grinds his chocolate himself”, a formula which to some extent condenses the litanies of the ambulating Cart. The Oculist Witnesses are on the right hand side; they are geometrical figures which remind one of those of optics. They suggest, moreover, the witnesses who are present at the miracles of religious paintings and the “voyeur” of pornography. Below them, on the extreme right, is one of the areas which were not painted: the region of splashes.
I should complete this catalogue with a very brief description of the function of the Machine. The Bride transmits to her bachelors a magnetic or electric fluid by means of the Top Inscription. Aroused by the discharge, the moulds inflate and emit in their turn a gas which, after various vicissitudes, passed through the seven cones of the Sieve, while the ambulating Cart recites its monotonous litanies. The fluid, after it has been filtered through the cones and converted into a liquid, arrives at the Scissors which scatter it as they open and close: one part falls into the “region of the splashes” and the other, which is explosive, shoots up and perforates the glass (area of the cannon-shot). At this moment the Bride takes her clothes off (imaginarily). End of performance. The origin of all this erotico-meachanical movement is one of the organs of the Vrgrin: the Motor-Desire. Duchamp emphasizes that the Motor is “separated from the Bride by a water-cooler”. The cooler “expresses the fact that the Bride, instead of being merely an a-sensual icicle, warmly rejects (not chastely) the bachelors’ brusque offer”. So, between the Bride and the bachelors there is no direct contacts save at a distance and its is a contact that is at times imaginary and at other times electric. This new ambiguity reflects, I suppose, another verbal analogy: thought is electric and matter is thought. The operation ends when the Bride, stripped bare at last, experiences a threefold sensations of expansion of pleasure: a physical sensation (the result of the act of being stripped by her bachelors), another which is imaginary and a third which incorporates the other two, the erotic-mechanical, that is, and the mental reality. It is a circular operation: it begins and ends with the Motor-Desire of the Bride. A self-sufficient world. Nor is there any need of spectators because the work itself includes them: the Oculist Witness. Inevitably we are reminded of Velasquez and las Meninas.
The Large Glass is the design for a piece of machinery and the Green Box is something like one of those instruction manuals for the upkeep and running of a machine. The former is a static illustration of a moment of the operation and to understand it in its entirety we must refer to the motes of the Green Box. In actual fact the composition should have three parts: one plastic, another literary and a third sonic. Duchamp has made a few fragmentary notes for the last: the litanies of the Chariot, the proverb of the Chocolate-Grinder, the shots or explosions, the noise of an automobile engine as it changes gear and goes uphill, etc. Its is a transposition into the world of machines of the moans and sighs of love-making. On the other hand, the Large Glass is also a portable mural which represents the Apotheosis of the Bride, a picture of the Assumption of the Virgin, a satire on the world of machines, an artistic experiment (painting on glass), a vision of love, etc. Of all the interpretations, the psychoanalytical is the easiest and the most tempting: onanism, destruction (or glorification) of the Virgin Mother, castration (the Scissors), narcissism, retention (anal symptoms), aggression, self-destruction, etc. A well-known psychiatrist concludes his study, which is not without its brilliance, with the predictable diagnosis: autism and schizophrenia. The weakness of this kind of hypothesis lies in the fact that its advocates tends to treat works of art simply as symptoms or expressions of certain psychic tendencies; the psychological explanation converts the reality (the picture) into a shadow and the shadow (the sickness) into the reality. One only needs to talk to Duchamp to see that his schizophrenia must be of a very unusual nature since it doesn’t get in the way of his dealings with other people or prevent him from being one of the most open-minded people I know. Moreover, the reality of the Large Glass is in no way modified by the truth of falsity of the diagnosis. The realities of psychology and of art occupy different levels of meaning: Freud gives us a key to the understanding of Oedipus but the Greek tragedy cannot be limited to the interpretation of psychoanalysis. Levi-Strauss says that Freud’s interpretation of the myth is nothing more than another version of it: in other words, Freud tells us, in the language that is appropriate to an age which has substituted logical thought for mythological analogy, the same story as Sophocles told us. Something similar could be said of the Large Glass: is is a version of the ancient myth of the great Goddess, Virgin, Mother, Giver and Exterminator of life. It is not a modern myth: it is the modern version - or vision - of the Myth.
by Octavio Paz
resources:
The Green Box:
http://www.marcelduchamp.net/who-is-marcel-duchamp02/
http://www.dada-companion.com/duchamp/largeglass.php
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-the-bride-stripped-bare-by-her-bachelors-even-the-green-box-t07744
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2002.42a-vvvv/
http://www.centrevox.ca/en/exposition/la-boite-verte-marcel-duchamp/
From the Green Box to Typo/Topography: Duchamp and Hamilton’s Dialogue in Print
http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/03/from-green-box-to-typo-topography-duchamp-and-hamiltons-dialogue-in-print
http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_1/News/GreenBoxNote.html
http://www.christianhubert.com/writings/bachelor_machine.html
The Inventor of Gratuitous Time by Robert Lebel
http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_2/Art_&_Literature/lebel.html
我把帕斯这段文章的英译本打下来，这么令人有快感的文本，忍不住分享。文本后附有相关链接。
The Bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even is one of the most impenetrable works of our century. It is different from most modern texts - because this painting is a text - in that the author has given us a key: the notes of the Green Box. I have already said that, like the Large Glass itself, it an incomplete key: moreover the motes have no order except a chronological one and they are, in their own way, additional brain-teasers, scattered signs which we have to regroup and decipher. The Bride… and the Green Box constitute a system of mirrors which interchange reflections; each one of them illuminates and rectifies the others. There are numerous interpretations of this enigmatic work. Some of them are penetrating. I will not repeat them or offer a new one. My purpose is descriptive: preliminary notes for a future translation into Spanish. I will begin with the titles: La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même. It is not easy to translate this sentence that twists and oscillates. The first term mise à nu doesn’t exactly mean undressed or unclothed; it is a much more energetic expression: the implications are, rather, of stripping naked or exposing. The obvious associations are with a public ceremony or ritual as the theatre (mise en scène) or execution (miseà mort).The use of the world bachelor (célibataire) instead of what would seem to be the more normal term, fiancé or suitor, suggests an insurmountable separation between the male and the female: the bachelor is not even a suitor and the bride will never be married. The plural, bachelor, and the possessive adjective go to stress the inferiority of the males: one thinks of a herd rather than of polyandry. The word même - even, not excluding, right down to - underlines the action and converts it into a veritable ex-position, in the liturgical as well as the ordinary sense of the word. Almost all the elements of the work are already present in the title: the mythic or religious, the barrack-room joke, the erotic and the pseudo-technical or ironic.
The names of each of the parts also have a significance - sometimes more than one - which completes the meaning of the plastic composition. In fact they are sign-posts. The names of the Bride are Motor-Desire, Queen Been and Hanged Woman (which we could in turn, to continue the game, call Pendent: pendu and pendule). For H. P. Roché [Henri-Pierre Roché] the Bride is a mixture of dragonfly and praying mantis; Carrouges [Michel Carrouge] has discovered, for his part, that Mariée is the popular name in France for an insect: the noctuelle. The group of bachelors has a repertory of sombre names: Bachelor Apparatus, Eros Machine, Nice Malic Moulds (Neuf Moules Malic) and, finally, Cemetery of liveries and uniforms. In fact there are nice makes and they are only moulds, empty suits inflated by the fluid or gas which the Bride emits. They represent nine families or tribes of men: gendarme, cuirassier, policemen, priest, busboy, station-master, department-store delivery-boy, flunkey and undertaker’s assistant. The list couldn’t be more gloomy. The other parts have names which indicate their functions: Top Inscription, Slide (Sleigh or Chariot), Water-Mille, Scissors, Sieve, Chocolate-Grinder (composed of Bayonet, Necktie, Rollers and Louis XV Chassis) and Oculist Witnesses. There are four others which I will mention later. I should point out in passing the aggressively virile character of the Chocolate-Grinder - although it doesn’t have a head.
The Bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even is a double glass, two meters seventy centimeters high and one meter seventy centimeters wide, painted in oil and divided horizontally into two identical parts by a lead wire. A cloud of a greyish color floats through the upper part of the top half, the domain of the Bride. It is the Milky Way. According to Carrouges it is also a chrysalis, the previous form of the Bride-dragonfly; Roché, on the other hand, sees a sort of gaseous crocodile in the cloud. The Milky Way contains three boards, like those which are used in stadiums to mark up the score of the teams or, in airports, to announce the arrival and departure of the planes. These boards are the Top Inscription; their function is to inform the bachelors of the unloading of the Bride - her commands. Roché thinks of them as the “Original Mystery, the Cause of Causes, a Trinity of empty boxes”. The Bride appears on the extreme left, a little below the Top Inscription. She is a machine (an agricultural machine, Duchamp informs us - perhaps an allusion to Ceres). She is also a skeleton, a motor, a body that oscillates in space, a terrible insect, a mechanical incarnation of Kali and an allegory of the Assumption of the Virgin. Duchamp has said that she is the two-dimensional shadow of a three-dimensional object which, in its turn, is the projection of an unknown object of four dimension: the shadow, the copy of a copy of an Idea. Contiguous to this Platonic vision there is another: Lebel [Robert Lebel] thinks that the fourth dimension is the moment of copulation when the lovers fuse all the realities into one - the erotic dimension. I won’t bother to describe the complicated morphology of the organs which compose the Bribe, such as the receiving and transmitting part there is an area of dots: they are the discharges of the bachelors. Duchamp left two other parts unpainted: the equipment of the Bride above the lead wire and, towards the right and center, the Handler or Tender of Gravity.
In the lower half, to the left, one finds the group of the Nine malic moulds or the Cemetery of liveries and uniforms. They are “the archetectonic base of the Bride-Apetheosis”. The nice puppets stand “as if enveloped… by a mirror reflecting back to them their own complexity to the point of their being hallucinated”. Are they men who are driven mad by desire or by the vanity of desire? To the right of the Nine, there is a little cart with runners: it is the Slide. This apparatus contains a Water-Mill which propels it. Thanks to an ingenious piece of mechanism which includes, amongst other things, the spilling of some bottles of Benedictine (not painted), the Mill animates the Slide with a seesaw movement. As it goes to and fro,, the Slide recites interminable litanies: “slow life, vicious circle. Onanism. Horizontal. Junk of life…”. The Sieve, which is made of seven cones, is to the right of the Slide. It is connected with the malic mould by a system of capillary tubes - which are none other than the “capricious units of metrical length”, obtained by the method I describe earlier. Between the cones of the Sieve and the Chocolate-Grinder the Scissor open and close. The Chocolate-Grinder occupies the central part of the lower half of the Glass An adage of spontaneity defines its purpose: “the bachelor grinds his chocolate himself”, a formula which to some extent condenses the litanies of the ambulating Cart. The Oculist Witnesses are on the right hand side; they are geometrical figures which remind one of those of optics. They suggest, moreover, the witnesses who are present at the miracles of religious paintings and the “voyeur” of pornography. Below them, on the extreme right, is one of the areas which were not painted: the region of splashes.
I should complete this catalogue with a very brief description of the function of the Machine. The Bride transmits to her bachelors a magnetic or electric fluid by means of the Top Inscription. Aroused by the discharge, the moulds inflate and emit in their turn a gas which, after various vicissitudes, passed through the seven cones of the Sieve, while the ambulating Cart recites its monotonous litanies. The fluid, after it has been filtered through the cones and converted into a liquid, arrives at the Scissors which scatter it as they open and close: one part falls into the “region of the splashes” and the other, which is explosive, shoots up and perforates the glass (area of the cannon-shot). At this moment the Bride takes her clothes off (imaginarily). End of performance. The origin of all this erotico-meachanical movement is one of the organs of the Vrgrin: the Motor-Desire. Duchamp emphasizes that the Motor is “separated from the Bride by a water-cooler”. The cooler “expresses the fact that the Bride, instead of being merely an a-sensual icicle, warmly rejects (not chastely) the bachelors’ brusque offer”. So, between the Bride and the bachelors there is no direct contacts save at a distance and its is a contact that is at times imaginary and at other times electric. This new ambiguity reflects, I suppose, another verbal analogy: thought is electric and matter is thought. The operation ends when the Bride, stripped bare at last, experiences a threefold sensations of expansion of pleasure: a physical sensation (the result of the act of being stripped by her bachelors), another which is imaginary and a third which incorporates the other two, the erotic-mechanical, that is, and the mental reality. It is a circular operation: it begins and ends with the Motor-Desire of the Bride. A self-sufficient world. Nor is there any need of spectators because the work itself includes them: the Oculist Witness. Inevitably we are reminded of Velasquez and las Meninas.
The Large Glass is the design for a piece of machinery and the Green Box is something like one of those instruction manuals for the upkeep and running of a machine. The former is a static illustration of a moment of the operation and to understand it in its entirety we must refer to the motes of the Green Box. In actual fact the composition should have three parts: one plastic, another literary and a third sonic. Duchamp has made a few fragmentary notes for the last: the litanies of the Chariot, the proverb of the Chocolate-Grinder, the shots or explosions, the noise of an automobile engine as it changes gear and goes uphill, etc. Its is a transposition into the world of machines of the moans and sighs of love-making. On the other hand, the Large Glass is also a portable mural which represents the Apotheosis of the Bride, a picture of the Assumption of the Virgin, a satire on the world of machines, an artistic experiment (painting on glass), a vision of love, etc. Of all the interpretations, the psychoanalytical is the easiest and the most tempting: onanism, destruction (or glorification) of the Virgin Mother, castration (the Scissors), narcissism, retention (anal symptoms), aggression, self-destruction, etc. A well-known psychiatrist concludes his study, which is not without its brilliance, with the predictable diagnosis: autism and schizophrenia. The weakness of this kind of hypothesis lies in the fact that its advocates tends to treat works of art simply as symptoms or expressions of certain psychic tendencies; the psychological explanation converts the reality (the picture) into a shadow and the shadow (the sickness) into the reality. One only needs to talk to Duchamp to see that his schizophrenia must be of a very unusual nature since it doesn’t get in the way of his dealings with other people or prevent him from being one of the most open-minded people I know. Moreover, the reality of the Large Glass is in no way modified by the truth of falsity of the diagnosis. The realities of psychology and of art occupy different levels of meaning: Freud gives us a key to the understanding of Oedipus but the Greek tragedy cannot be limited to the interpretation of psychoanalysis. Levi-Strauss says that Freud’s interpretation of the myth is nothing more than another version of it: in other words, Freud tells us, in the language that is appropriate to an age which has substituted logical thought for mythological analogy, the same story as Sophocles told us. Something similar could be said of the Large Glass: is is a version of the ancient myth of the great Goddess, Virgin, Mother, Giver and Exterminator of life. It is not a modern myth: it is the modern version - or vision - of the Myth.
by Octavio Paz
resources:
The Green Box:
http://www.marcelduchamp.net/who-is-marcel-duchamp02/
http://www.dada-companion.com/duchamp/largeglass.php
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/duchamp-the-bride-stripped-bare-by-her-bachelors-even-the-green-box-t07744
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2002.42a-vvvv/
http://www.centrevox.ca/en/exposition/la-boite-verte-marcel-duchamp/
From the Green Box to Typo/Topography: Duchamp and Hamilton’s Dialogue in Print
http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/03/from-green-box-to-typo-topography-duchamp-and-hamiltons-dialogue-in-print
http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_1/News/GreenBoxNote.html
http://www.christianhubert.com/writings/bachelor_machine.html
The Inventor of Gratuitous Time by Robert Lebel
http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_2/Art_&_Literature/lebel.html
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