Friends and readers will know that I am quite the fan of chess and of the Spanish writer, artist, and chess aficionado Fernando Arrabal. Late last year I began translating his book Echecs et Mythe (Chess and Myth) in order to practice my poor French (this book has never been translated int0 English, as far as I know) and to study my chess a bit more, hopefully to return to the level I was at as a younger man.

I am doing some final edits on this translation as I work with Arrabal’s team on getting it published here in the United States. As I do these edits I will share selections from it. Here is the preface and first chapter. Enjoy!

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PREFACE

We achieve perfection through serenity in disorder.
–Tchouang-Tseu

In chess as in the I-Ching there is an infrastructure, an invariant (a norm or a pattern) and a superstructure resulting from the combinations due to the mastery of the champion. 

We could say somewhat summarily that players like Fischer, Kortchnoi, Steinitz, or Morphy grasp or understand, in the manner of the mystics, the essential dialect of the art of chess or the globality of the subject and the universe, which amounts to the same thing. At the same time, we could argue that champions like Capablanca or Karpov are the masters of mutations. 

When Kasparov aggressively asserts “Karpov is a cafe player,” he means that this champion ignores the essence of chess…even when he triumphs over the chosen one by grace.

But any transformation uses the frame as a basic element. Players of the first type know, like the mystic Tchouang-Tseu, that we achieve perfection through serenity in disorder. The latter flee chaos like the plague… because they ignore what, for the former, appears obvious: that all disorder arises from the immanent order of the fabric… of the norm… of nature . (Recall that the Chinese mystical book I-Ching is made up of 64 hexagrams constituting the actual plot.)

Fischer is an artist who internalizes the structures of chess and the world but who, when tackling tactical problems, acts like a technician. On the other hand, Karpov analyzes in an “objective” way by relying on statistics, but when faced with crucial situations he can only rely on a hypothesis. He therefore acts in this case in an irrational or mystical way.

The artist who devotes himself to chess, the champion, could say like Confucius, 23 centuries ago: “I transmit, I invent nothing.” Like the Chinese sage, the great masters “transmit ” the ultimate meaning of the play of reality conceived as a Whole. In this Everything are intertwined: spirit and matter, rules and adventures. Indeed, how can we invent in a world where there is nothing new under the sun “since the time of Solomon”?

If one “governs a big country as one cooks small fish,” one can play chess as one enjoys the peace and silence of one’s mind.

We see the issue thus defined by Confucius appear on the chessboard:

“When nature prevails over refinement of the spirit, man becomes a brute.
When refinement prevails over crude nature, man becomes a scribe, he loses himself in abstraction.
The Kiun-Tseu, “the accomplished man”, is the one who combines the crude nature and the refinement of the spirit, Tche and Wen.”

The alliance of firmness and the renunciation of violence is easily perceptible in the game of chess, an anarchist art par excellence. The artist suppresses his death instinct and at the same time acts with magnificent determination. The chess player, like the anarchist, does not remain passive and does not delegate the slightest particle of his sacred individuality. Neither accepts dependence.

I hardly believe that an anarchist can believe that a perfectly anarchist society is completely feasible, given “human nature” and his ferocious appetite for power, which does not prevent him from adopting a radical position vis-à-vis the State, whatever that may be. Failures can also constitute a utopia… which allows only one privilege: the spiritual enrichment of the artist.

This book is composed of columns published in the weekly L’Express.

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1
DUST, TIME, DREAM, AND AGONY

Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges wrote several poems on the subject of chess:

“God moves the player and he moves the piece.
Which god behind God is sketching the plot
of dust and time and dreams and agonies?”

How could the art of chess, in which one must pay attention to several distinct areas simultaneously and in which one cannot determine the “right choice”, not have interested the author of The Aleph? Indeed, does he not subscribe to this definition: “to live is to enter a strange dwelling of the spirit, whose ground is a chessboard on which we play the obligatory and unknown game against a changing and sometimes frightening adversary”? 

The Aleph: this “microcosm of the cabalistic alchemists”, “the first letter of the alphabet of the sacred language… the En-Soph, the limitless and purely divine”, which appears to the dazzled eyes of Borges on the 19th step of a cellar in Buenos Aires, while he says he is in the company of a certain Carlos Daneri…

If life is a dream and dreams are only dreams (as Calderon would say), chess, between infinity and ceremony, between eternity and ephemera, meticulously celebrates the liturgy of the everyday with its violence and its tenderness.

“When the players have gone,
When time has consumed them,
Surely the rite will not have.
In the East this war has been kindled
Whose ample theater is now the whole earth.
Like the other, this game is infinite.
(Borges)

The lines of the poem “Excelsior” (“Ever Upward”) by the American poet Longfellow impressed Korolkov so much that he composed the following problem to illustrate them (and when will we be offered a series of problems on Borges’ sonnets?)

White to play and win:

“The night shadows were falling quickly
On an alpine village where was passing
A young man carrying, through snow and ice,
A banner with the strange motto:
Excelsior!”

(The young man, at the beginning, is the pawn on b2, the old man, the white king, and the servant, the white queen: to win you have to continue… climb higher and higher.)

1. bxc3+ Kc5 (If…Kxc3 2. Qb3 mate. …. If 1. Kc4 2. Qb3+ Kd3 3. Qc2+ Ke3 4. Qd2+ Kf3 5. Qd3+ Kg2 et 6. Qxe2…) 

“In happy homes he saw the light
From the domestic hearth radiating warmth, clarity
Above, the ghostly glaciers shone:
And from his lips escaped a moan:
Excelsior!”

2. cxd4+ Kd6 (If 2. … Kxd4 3. Qb2+ Ke3 4. Qd2, etc. and 2. … exd 3. Qf5+ and Qxf)

“Do not cross the parade,” said the old man:
The darkness presses the storm on our heads,
The roaring torrent is deep, vast!”
And with force the brazen voice answered:
Excelsior!”

3. exf6+ Kf8 (4. … Kxf6 5. Qb2+; 4. … gxf 5. Qe4+; 4. … Kf7 5. Qb3+ Kg6 6. Qg3+).

“O stay,” said the maid, “and rest
your weary head on this breast!”
A tear remained in his shining eye,
But with a sigh he answered again:
Excelsior!”

4. exf6+ Kf8 (4. … Kxf6 5. Qb2+ ; 4. … gxf 5. Qe4 ; 4. … Kf7 5. Qb3+ Kg6 6. Qg3+).

5. fxg7 Kg8 6. gxc=Q+ KxQ 7. Qb2+ Kg8 8. Qxe (If 1. b7 Black mates in two moves: 1. … e1=Q et 2. …Qd2. Also not valid: 1. Kc2 e1=Q 2. bxc+ Kc5 3. cxd+ Kxd  and black wins. If 2. Kb2, instead, cxd, e1=Q 3. Nxd Kxd 4. Qc2 f1=Q, etc.).

The American poet Longfellow (1807-1882) is the American “national poet” par excellence, his verses have become classics and are studied in American primary schools, notably: Psalms of Life. He retraces the painful tragedy of the expulsion of the Acadians in Evangeline. He uses Indian legends and folklore in Hiawatha. He translated Dante, and was himself translated into French by Baudelaire. He is the only American poet whose name appears in the “Poets’ Corner” of Westminster Abbey.

Problem No. 1 by Benjamin S. Wash, Sunny South, September 1880.

Checkmate in two moves.  

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