Category: Translations

Associations and Reflections around Tradition and Future Shock

Associations and Reflections around Askr Svarte’s Tradition and Future Shock: Visions of a Future that Isn’t Ours (PRAV Publishing, 2023).

By Sergei Zhigalkin

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“The overwhelming majority.” The overwhelming majority is that mass of people that turns the modern, materialistic myth of the universe, ourselves, and being — everything in general — into a reality. In other words, this “majority” just adds an earthly element, thanks to which flimsy dreams, absurd theories, strange mirages, as well as deep metaphysical concepts become stable, inescapable, ineludible, and hold their own weight, i.e., they take on reality. The more often we look at one and the same object, picture one and the same image, and repeat the same thought, the more significant they seem to be to us, until, finally, they turn into something absolutely indubitable, into an inalienable part of our external and inner world.

What makes technogenic civilization and the era of Modernity and Postmodernity so attractive to the ordinary person, to the overwhelming majority? Why do they assume such to be the pinnacle reached by mankind, and drawing on the “indubitable” ideas of progress and evolution, why do they draw out its prospects to even greater, happy heights, in contrast to the point of view expressed in this book, Tradition and Future Shock: Visions of a Future that Isn’t Ours, according to which these heights are but nightmarish abysses and infernal darkness?

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Geydar Dzhemal – “A Word on Dugin”

The seventh day of January is not only Orthodox Christmas according to the Julian calendar, but also the birthday of the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. This 7 January marks Dugin’s 60th birthday, on which occasion Continental-Conscious presents for the first time in English translation an editorial by the Russian Islamic thinker and Dugin’s former Yuzhinsky Circle mentor, Geydar Dzhemal (1947-2016), authored for Dugin’s 50th birthday and published in the newspaper Zavtra (“Tomorrow”, formerly Den – “Day”) in 2012.

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Eurasian Myth, New Dawn – 3 Translations of Boris Nad

Over the past several months, fruitful collaboration with “the world’s most unusual magazine”, New Dawn, has furthered the endeavor of bringing the works of the Serbian author Boris Nad into the English language. (See “(Re-)Writing Myth: An Interview with Boris Nad”)

To date, three texts by Boris Nad have come to light on the pages of New Dawn:

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(Re-)Writing Myth: An Interview with Boris Nad

Athena Appearing To Odysseus To Reveal The Island Of Ithaca by Giuseppe Bottani  

There is an often-quoted saying about books whose attribution is unknown (perhaps rightfully so): “A book is a magical portal to another dimension.” Of course, this is usually taken to refer to exercises of the sensuous imagination imitated by profane fiction… There are some books, however, belonging to neither of the modern categories of “fiction” or “non-fiction”, that are not merely portals to another dimension, but initiations into whole worlds – worlds which reflect back upon the reader the fragility, relativity, and even illusions or “non-reality” of their apparent present own. Such works embody the genuine “danger” of books that has served as the pretext for censorship for centuries: opening an unknown book, one can have their entire world and worldview shattered and transformed, entire worlds discredited or revealed… And such books, as is well known to those who should know, rarely lie waiting out in the open (if they do, then such is only one aspect of their concealment), and they and their authors’ names pass hands at first only between small circles, often exerting their impact and worlding long before they ever enter the “public bibliography”, the “general market”, or the sights of critics and scholars…

These observations outline at least one of the possible paths leading to the works of Boris Nad. 

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The Aphorisms of Dragoš Kalajić – Part I

“Wolfgang”, from the series “Portraits of European Nations”, 1993, by Dragoš Kalajić [dragoskalajic.com] 

The Aphorisms of Dragoš Kalajić – Part I 

Translated by Jafe Arnold

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Presented below for the first time in English translation are 26 of the 42 posthumously selected “Thoughts” of the great Serbian intellectual Dragoš Kalajić (1943-2005), one of those monumental figures of the “alternative 20th century” whose life and works are impossible to encapsulate with any single generic term. Philosopher, artist of “Hyperborean Realism”, author of multiple genres, TV-speaker, cultural critic, graduate cum laude of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome who reportedly received praise from Julius Evola, geopolitical activist and visionary, Traditionalist (credited with introducing Traditionalism to Yugoslavia), Serbian patriot with a pan-European (and, indeed, Eurasian) agenda, “the man who had his own Center” – all and none of these prevalent descriptives are capable of conveying a sense of the immense engagements, works and legacy of this thinker who, while famous in his native Serbia and to limited extents known in Italy and Russia, remains largely unknown in the English-language world. The revelation of Kalajić’s works remains a task of the future. For now, Continental-Conscious presents in translation a number of Kalajić’s “aphorisms” which the curators of dragoskalajic.com, the only archive and resource dedicated to Kalajić known to us, unveiled as “a small, subjective selection, for starters.” The anonymous, volunteer compilers of these passages remark:

“We shall refrain from big words here. But we cannot help but remark that in the 20th century, in Serbian culture, art, and thought, there is no voice and phenomenon comparable to Kalajić. If he had written in one of the great European languages, hardly anyone today would question his place among the greats…We will not speak of fame, because our notion of fame [glory] is infinitely far from the banality into which such is plunged by the noisy and vain ‘civilization of the spectacle.'” 

*** Continue reading “The Aphorisms of Dragoš Kalajić – Part I” →