Isaac Babel Quotes

No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.

A well-thought-out story doesn’t need to resemble real life. Life itself tries with all its might to resemble a well-crafted story.

If the world could write itself, it would write like Tolstoy.

Even at the time—twenty years old—I said to myself: better to go hungry, to go to prison, to be a tramp, than to sit at an office desk ten hours a day. There is no particular daring in this vow, but I have not broken it and shall not do so. The wisdom of my grandfathers sat in my head: we are born for the pleasure of work, fighting, love, we are born for that and nothing else. (Guy de Maupassant)

No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.

Всеки интелигентен човек трябва да прочете през живота си, както следва, 8-10 книги. Какво именно? Тъкмо за да разберете това, прочетете петнадесет хиляди тома.

Russian short story master Isaac Babel put it, “no iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.

When a phrase is born, it is both good and bad at the same time. The secret of its success rests in a crux that is barely discernible. One's fingertips must grasp the key, gently warming it. And then the key must be turned once, not twice.

No iron can pierce the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time.

No one responds to the newness of new things like children.

Her sponge cakes had the aroma of crucifixion.Within them was the sap of slyness and the fragrant frenzy of the Vatican.

For me the whole world is like a gigantic theater in which I am the only spectator without opera glasses. The orchestra plays the prelude to the third act, the stage is far away as in a dream, my heart swells with delight—and you want to blind me with a pair of half-ruble spectacles?

You must know everything. The whole world will fall at your feet and grovel before you. Everybody must envy you. Do not trust people. Do not have friends. Do not lend them money. Do not give them your heart!

Оранжевото слънце се търкаля по небето като отсечена глава, нежна светлина припламва в клисурите на облаците, щандартите на залеза се веят над нашите глави. Мирис на вчерашна кръв и убити коне капе във вечерната прохлада.

Just forget for a minute that you have spectacles on your nose and autumn in your heart. Stop being tough at your desk and stammering with timidity in the presence of people. Imagine for one second that you raise hell in public and stammer on paper. You’re a tiger, a lion, a cat. You spend a night with a Russian woman and leave her satisfied. You’re twenty five. If rings had been fastened to the earth and sky, you’d have seized them and pulled the sky down to earth

The orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head, gentle light glimmers in the ravines among the clouds, the banners of the sunset are fluttering above our heads. The stench of yesterday’s blood and slaughtered horses drips into the evening chill.

We slept, all six of us, beneath a wooden roof that let in the stars, warming one another, our legs intermingled. I dreamed: and in my dreams saw women. But my heart, stained with bloodshed, grated and brimmed over.

The first time I read Isaac Babel was in a college creative writing class. The instructor was a sympathetic Jewish novelist with a Jesus-like beard, an affinity for Russian literature, and a melancholy sense of humor, such that one afternoon he even “realized” the truth of human mortality, right there in the classroom. He pointed at each of us around the seminar table: “You’re going to die. And you’re going to die. And you’re going to die.” I still remember the expression on the face of one of my classmates, a genial scion of the Kennedy family who always wrote the same story, about a busy corporate lawyer who neglected his wife. The expression was confused.

Consider this: Could it be true that, in all Russian literature, there isn’t a single clear and joyous depiction of the sun?

I imagined myself in the Jewish Self-Defence League,

Life is rubbish,” he muttered. “The world’s a bordello. People are swindlers…

Излязохме на улицата. Старецът спря, почука силно с бастун по паважа и впери поглед в мен. - Какво ти липсва?...Младостта не е беда, с годините ще мине...Липсва ти усет за природата. Той ми посочи с бастун дърво с червеникав ствол и ниска корона. - Какво е това дърво? Аз не знаех. - Какво расте на този храст? И това не знаех. Вървяхме с него през градинката на Александровския булевард. Старецът сочеше с бастуна всички дървета, хващаше ме за рамото, когато прелиташе птица, и ме караше да слушам отделните гласове. - Каква птица пее? Не можех нищо да кажа. Имената на дървета и птици, деленето им на родове, накъде летят птиците, от коя страна изгрява слънцето, кога росата е по-обилна - всичко това ми беше неизвестно. - И ти се осмеляваш да пишеш?...Човек, който не живее сред природата, както живее в нея камъкът или животното, няма да напише през целия си живот и два свестни реда....Твоите пейзажи приличат на описания на декори. За какво, по дяволите, са мислили четиринайсет години твоите родители?...

Вышла огромная ошибка, тётя Песя. Но разве со стороны бога не было ошибкой поселить евреев в России, чтобы они мучились, как в аду? И чем было бы плохо, если бы евреи жили в Швейцарии, где их окружали бы первоклассные озёра, гористый воздух и сплошные французы? Ошибаются все, даже бог

Навън, около камбанарията кипеше черно подпухнало небе, мокрите къщи се бяха огънали и смалили. Над тях с мъка се палеха звездите, вятърът се стелеше ниско. В антрето на къщата си Гапа чу монотонно мърморене, чужд пресипнал глас. На печката седеше, подвила под себе си крака, просякиня, влязла да пренощува. Алените нишки на лампите оплитаха ъгъла. В ошетаната къща беше просната тишина. От стените в преградките лъхаше на ферментирали ябълки.

Имало една жена, Ксения се казвала. В гърдите едра, в раменете заоблена, очите ѝ сини. Жена и половина. Де и за нас такава. Мъжът ѝ загинал през войната. Три години живяла без мъж, слугувала в богаташка къща. Господата искали готвено три пъти на ден. Дърва изобщо не се палели – само въглища. От въглищата става жега непоносима, във въглищата тлеят огнени рози. Три години жената готвела за господарите и се пазела от мъжете. Ама тези гърди топузи къде да ги дене, а? Хайде де!

So which theory did Lagos believe in? The relativist or the universalist?" "He did not seem to think there was much of a difference. In the end, they are both somewhat mystical. Lagos believed that both schools of thought had essentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning." "But it seems to me there is a key difference," Hiro says. "The universalists think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure of our brains -- the pathways in the cortex. The relativists don't believe that we have any limits." "Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that learning a language is like blowing code into PROMs -- an analogy that I cannot interpret." "The analogy is clear. PROMs are Programmable Read-Only Memory chips," Hiro says. "When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once and only once, you can place information into those chips and then freeze it -- the information, the software, becomes frozen into the chip -- it transmutes into hardware. After you have blown the code into the PROMs, you can read it out, but you can't write to them anymore. So Lagos was trying to say that the newborn human brain has no structure -- as the relativists would have it -- and that as the child learns a language, the developing brain structures itself accordingly, the language gets 'blown into the hardware and becomes a permanent part of the brain's deep structure -- as the universalists would have it." "Yes. This was his interpretation." "Okay. So when he talked about Enki being a real person with magical powers, what he meant was that Enki somehow understood the connection between language and the brain, knew how to manipulate it. The same way that a hacker, knowing the secrets of a computer system, can write code to control it -- digital namshubs?" "Lagos said that Enki had the ability to ascend into the universe of language and see it before his eyes. Much as humans go into the Metaverse. That gave him power to create nam-shubs. And nam-shubs had the power to alter the functioning of the brain and of the body." "Why isn't anyone doing this kind of thing nowadays? Why aren't there any namshubs in English?" "Not all languages are the same, as Steiner points out. Some languages are better at metaphor than others. Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Chinese lend themselves to word play and have achieved a lasting grip on reality: Palestine had Qiryat Sefer, the 'City of the Letter,' and Syria had Byblos, the 'Town of the Book.' By contrast other civilizations seem 'speechless' or at least, as may have been the case in Egypt, not entirely cognizant of the creative and transformational powers of language. Lagos believed that Sumerian was an extraordinarily powerful language -- at least it was in Sumer five thousand years ago." "A language that lent itself to Enki's neurolinguistic hacking." "Early linguists, as well as the Kabbalists, believed in a fictional language called the tongue of Eden, the language of Adam. It enabled all men to understand each other, to communicate without misunderstanding. It was the language of the Logos, the moment when God created the world by speaking a word. In the tongue of Eden, naming a thing was the same as creating it. To quote Steiner again, 'Our speech interposes itself between apprehension and truth like a dusty pane or warped mirror. The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass; a light of total understanding streamed through it. Thus Babel was a second Fall.' And Isaac the Blind, an early Kabbalist, said that, to quote Gershom Scholem's translation, 'The speech of men is connected with divine speech and all language whether heavenly or human derives from one source: the Divine Name.' The practical Kabbalists, the sorcerers, bore the title Ba'al Shem, meaning 'master of the divine name.'" "The machine language of the world," Hiro says.

Do you remember Zhitomir, Vasily? Do you remember the Teterev, Vasily, and that evening when the Sabbath, the young Sabbath tripped stealthily along the sunset, her little red heel treading on the stars? THe slender horn of the moon bathed its arrows in the black waters of the Teterev. Funny little Gedali, founder of the Fourth International, was taking us to Rabbi Motele Bratzlavsky’s for evening service. Funny little Gedali swayed the cock’s feathers on his high hat in the red haze of the evening. The candes in the Rabbi’s room blinked their predatory eyes. Bent over prayer books, brawny Jews were moaning in muffled voices, and the old buffoon of the zaddiks of Chernobyl jingled coppers in his torn pocket... ...Do you remember that night, Vasily? Beyond the windows horses were neighing and Cossacks were shouting. The wilderness of war was yawning beyong the windows, and Robbi Motele Bratzslavsky was praying at the eastern wall, his decayed fingers clinging to his tales. (...)

Никакво желязо не може да влезе в човешкото сърце така вледеняващо, както точката, поставена навреме.

Она увозила с собой воспоминания, не отягчавшие совести, и колье, выбранное со вкусом и стоившее не очень дорого.

Она читала, далеко отставив от себя книгу: упавшая на стол рука казалась неживой.

Павлин на плече Ивана Никодимыча уходил последним. Он сидел, как солнце в сыром осеннем небе, он сидел, как сидит июль на розовом берегу реки, раскалённый июль в длинной холодной траве.

Voi sapete tutto. Ma a che vi serve, se avete sempre gli occhiali sul naso e l'autunno nell'anima?

Then I started kicking Nikitinsky, my master, for an hour, maybe even more than an hour, and I really understood what life actually is. With one shot, let me tell you, you can only get rid of a person. A shot would have been a pardon for him and too horribily easy for me, with a shot you cannot get to a man's soul, to where the soul hides and what it looks like. But there are times when I don't spare myself and spend a good hour, maybe even more than an hour, kicking the enemy. I want to understand life, to see what it actually is.

Langeron is a popular Odessan beach, named after Alexandre-Louis Andrault de Langeron (1763–1831), who served as mayor of Odessa from 1816 to 1820.

Bolshoy Fontan (“Big Fountain”) is one of the largest and most popular coastal resort districts in Odessa.

People would ask him what a Gobelin was, why the Jacobins had betrayed Robespierre, how rayon was manufactured, what made a section caesarean. Grandfather had all the answers.

Father would have reconciled himself to poverty, but he couldn’t do without glory.

And have you ever run across a bright and enlivening sun in Gogol—a man from Ukraine?

Gorky is a forerunner—the most powerful in our time.

And I believe the Russian people will soon be drawn to the south, to the sea and the sun.

Yes, sir,” answered the boatswain, a pillar of red meat overgrown with red hair.

ISAAC BABEL was a short-story writer, playwright, literary translator and journalist.

He was murdered in Stalin’s purges in 1940, at the age of 45.

Youth isn’t the problem—it’ll pass with the years…

I watched the hoops of other people’s happiness roll past me.

Shuffling her manly feet, shaking her head, she listed off—at the top of her voice, for the whole street to hear—the names of women who were happy with their husbands.

ODESSA IS A NASTY PLACE. Everybody knows that.

philoprogenitive because loving your kids is just the right thing to do.

The Odessan is the polar opposite of the Petrogradian. As a rule, Odessans make a killing in Petrograd.

Cocaine did him in, or morphine—did him in, they say, after he fell from an aeroplane somewhere in the marshes around Novgorod.

While some distance from the wide sea, smoke rises from factories and Karl Marx does his usual work.

In Odessa, luftmenschen skulk around coffee shops, looking to earn a rouble and feed their families, but there’s no work to be had—and what kind of work could there be for a useless luftmensch?

The events in this story take place during the devastating Ukrainian famine of 1921–23, when more than a million people died of starvation and disease.

A man eager for answers must arm himself with patience

A pig won’t meet another pig halfway, but a man will meet a man.

An innocent bachelor, he lived like a bird on a branch

Foolish old age is no less pitiful than cowardly youth.

A heavy wallet is lined with tears.

What did our dear Joseph manage to see in life? Bupkis is what.

There are people in this world who are doomed to die, and there are people who have not yet begun to live.

Outside the wide windows soft snow is drifting. Nearby, on the Nevsky Prospekt, life is blossoming. Far away, in the Carpathian Mountains, blood is flowing. C'est la vie.

Hay una manera, una manera desesperada, de conocer el secreto: es el poder absoluto sobre otra persona; el poder que le hace hacer lo que queremos, sentir lo que queremos, pensar lo que queremos; que la transforma en una cosa, nuestra cosa, nuestra posesión. El grado más intenso de ese intento de conocer consiste en los extremos del sadismo, el deseo y la habilidad de hacer sufrir a un ser humano, de torturarlo, de obligarlo a traicionar su secreto en su sufrimiento. En ese anhelo de penetrar en el secreto del hombre, y por lo tanto, en el nuestro, reside una motivación esencial de la profundidad y la intensidad de la crueldad y la destructividad. Isaac Babel ha expresado tal idea en una forma muy sucinta. Recuerda a un oficial compañero suyo en la guerra civil rusa, quien acababa de matar a puntapiés a su ex amo: «Con un disparo —digamos así—, con un disparo, uno sólo, se libra uno de un tipo… Con un disparo nunca se llega al alma, a dónde está en el tipo y cómo se presenta. Pero yo no ahorro fuerzas, y más de una vez he pisoteado a un tipo durante más de una hora. Sabes, quiero llegar a saber qué es realmente la vida, cómo es la vida».

Senlin was dismayed to discover that Isaac the butler would eventually have to decide whether to support the mercurial mistress in her indiscretion or to reveal the potential affair to his employer, Mr. Mayfair. It was a nightmare.

God in the Hebrew Bible, as it emerged from its editing process, is almighty; he creates heaven and earth with a word, and he is above all other gods-but he creates a serpent who undoes all his creative work. Often he acts like a large and powerful and somewhat bad-tempered human being. Like any landlord, he walks in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day. He gets angry. He bargains with his people. He changes his mind. He falls into vindictive rages, as in the case of Noah's flood or the Tower of Babel or the unfortunate cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and he plays atrocious games, as in the case of his command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. He has a somewhat bizarre preoccupation with the length of Samson's hair. He performs prodigious wonders, such as slaughtering the first-born sons of Egypt and leading the Israelites to safety through the parted waters of the Red Sea-only to discover that those who have witnessed those stupendous miracles quickly forget them and turn to complaint and the worship of other gods. Like all of us, the God of the Hebrew Bible is a mess of contradictions.

Even in those days, at the age of twenty, I said to myself: Better to suffer hunger, prison, and homelessness than to sit at a clerk's desk ten hours a day. There is no particular daring in making such a pledge, but I haven't broken it to this day, nor will I. The wisdom of my forefathers was ingrained in me: we have been born to delight in labor, fighting, and love. That is what we have been born for, and nothing else.

Cure the disease and kill the patient

Aunt Pesya!" Benya then said to the disheveled old woman rolling on the floor. "If you want my life, you can have it, but everyone makes mistakes, even God! This was a giant mistake, Aunt Pesya! But didn't God Himself make a mistake when he settled the Jews in Russia so they could be tormented as if they were in hell?

Zo zijn we Chlebnikov kwijtgeraakt. (...) Hij was de enige in het eskadron met een samowar. Op stille dagen dronken we samen hete thee. We werden door eendere hartstochten gedreven. We keken allebei naar de wereld als naar een weiland in mei, een weiland waarover vrouwen lopen, en paarden.

Why him? Why not the others, you want to know? Well then, forget for a while you have glasses on your nose and autumn in your heart. Forget that you pick fights from behind your desk and stutter when you are out in the world! Imagine for a moment that you pick fights in town squares and stutter only among papers. You are a tiger, you are a lion, you are a cat. You can spend the night with a Russian woman, and the Russian woman will be satisfied with you. You are twenty-five years old. If the sky and the earth had rings attached to them, you would grab these rings and pull the sky down to the earth. And your papa is the carter Mendel Krik. What does a papa like him think about? All he thinks about is downing a nice shot of vodka, slugging someone in their ugly mug, and about his horses - nothing else. You want to live, but he makes you die twenty times a day. What would you have done if you were in Benya Krik's shoes?

Fornander says that from ancient times, the three genealogies he lists were considered as equal in authority and independent of each other. He considered them the most accurate of the many he received. The Kumuhonua and Pa‘ao genealogies were of the priests and chiefs of Hawai‘i. The Kumu‘uli genealogy was of the chiefs of Kaua‘i and O‘ahu. It is interesting that all three record the first man and his three sons, and Nu‘u (Noah) and his three sons. The Kumuhonua and the Pa‘ao genealogies both continue to include Lua Nu‘u who corresponds to Abraham and his two sons, Kū Nawao (corresponding to Ishmael) and Kalani Mene Hune (corresponding to Isaac). They also include the two sons of Kalani Mene Hune, Aholoholo (Esau) and Kinilau-a-Mano (Jacob), and Kinilau-a-Mano’s twelve sons. These genealogies end with Papa Nui, the legendary female progenitor of the Polynesian people. These genealogies are from the later comers to Hawai‘i, the people who came from Tahiti. The genealogy of Kumu‘uli includes Nu‘u (Noah) but does not include Lua Nu‘u (Abraham) or his descendants. This genealogy ends with Wakea, the legendary male progenitor of the Hawaiian people.29 One could speculate that the Hawaiian people are the joining of two different groups of Proto-Polynesians in the marriage of Papa and Wakea. One line, the line of Wakea, splitting off towards the east at the time of the Tower of Babel, and the other splitting off toward the east sometime after the Israelites entered Canaan.*

Russian short story master Isaac Babel put it, “no iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.” We’re

В мимолетната черупка, наречена човек, песента тече като водата на вечността. Тя отнася всичко и ражда всичко.

Баба се умълча. Самоварът свиреше. Комшийката не спираше да пее. Луната беше все така ослепителна. Мими завъртя опашка. Беше гладна.

Вечеряме мълчаливо. Ядем много, обилно и дълго. Прозрачните очи на баба са неподвижни и накъде гледат – не знам.

Isaac Babel’s controversial collection of stories, Red Cavalry, was put on trial in a Moscow club in 1926. Although the speeches against the book were passionate, Babel himself made an appearance to argue in his defense. The assembled crowd not only acquitted Babel, but also judged his work to be a real service to the revolution.61

Когато децата се събудиха, и те взеха да викат заедно с жена ми. Беня ми развали все пак толкова здраве, колкото според него трябваше да ми развали. Той остави двеста рубли за лекуване и си отиде. Мен ме откараха в еврейската болница. В неделя аз умирах, в понеделник се оправях, а във вторник имах криза.

Гласът на Селецки беше неестествено силен. Снажен мъжага, той беше от онези провинциални Шаляпини, каквито, за наше щастие са пръснати много из Русия. И лицето му беше като това на Шаляпин – дали на шотландски файтонджия или на екатеринински велможа. За разлика от божествения си прототип беше простичък човек, но огромният му глас се разширяваше безгранично, страшно, изпълваше душата с насладата на самоунищожението и с циганска забрава. В мигновената обвивка, наричана човек, песента тече като вода на вечността. Всичко отмива и всичко ражда.

- Дете – отговори ми той, - не си хабете барута. Рублата и половина за очила е единствената рубла и половина, която ще спестя. Не ми трябва вашата линия, пошла като действителността. Вие живеете не по-добре от учител по тригонометрия, а аз даже в Клязма съм обкръжен от чудеса. Защо са ми луничките по лицето на фрекен Кристи, щом въпреки че едва я виждам, долавям у тази девойка всичко, което искам да доловя? Защо са ми облаците на това финландско небе, щом виждам понеслия се над главата ми океан? Защо са ми линии, щом разполагам с цветове? За мен целият свят е огромен театър, в който съм единственият зрител без бинокъл. Оркестърът свири встъплението към трето действие, сцената е далеч от мен и сякаш насън, сърцето ми прелива от възторг, аз виждам пурпурното кадифе на дрехата на Жулиета, лилавата коприна на дрехата на Ромео и нито една изкуствена брада... А вие искате да ме ослепите с очила за рубла и половина...

hakol havel (Hebrew: “Vanity of vanities… All is vanity”): Ecclesiastes 12:8.