C A L Q U E

"Blinding Moment" by Gert Jonke, translated by Vincent Kling; reviewed by Hans Gabriel

2010-02-15T18:44:00.003-05:00

New literary translations inevitably make several implicit assumptions. Aside from the artistic value, or at least the uniqueness or originality, of the original work, a translation implicitly assumes that there is an audience that would or should be interested in the sort of work being translated and yet remains unable to appreciate or even access it in the original language. And of course, there is the implicit assumption, despite the usual variety of acknowledgments of inadequacy, that the translator is able to capture enough of both the spirit and the letter of the original to make the endeavor worthwhile. Blinding Moment, Vincent Kling’s new selection and translation of Gert Jonke’s work (Ariadne Press, 2009), offers satisfying justification and support for each of these assumptions.

The volume is subtitled “Four pieces about composers.” The formal range of the selections alone from dramatic to lyric to narrative prose justifies the generality of the term “pieces,” but this designation also implicitly links Jonke’s “pieces” - his linguistic composition(s) - with the pieces of music they treat. None of them, in any case, “is [very] likely to be mistaken for a standard biography” (172), as Kling makes clear in his detailed discussion of these texts in the Translator’s Afterword. Instead, this designation prepares the reader for what Kling describes as “Jonke’s comic vision,” for his “resolutions [that] are often lyrically heightened apotheoses” (151). In other words, Jonke’s “pieces” unite his protagonists’ timeless, idealized musical composition(s) with strictly defined historical moments in their real lives. The resulting “madcap exaggeration” (151) reminds Kling of Bakhtin’s “carnival humor” (176). But the unabashed mixing of the sublime and/or ridiculous with a recognizable historical or biographical moment is perhaps more reminiscent of the preoccupation with the tragi-comic or “grotesque” of Jonke’s late European neighbor Friedrich Dürrenmatt. Or one could perhaps speak of a hyperbolic enactment of the Schillerian aesthetic state, in which the real and the ideal aspects of these composers’ lives and artistic productions are captured in an aesthetic moment of extreme interaction and coexistence in Jonke’s own blatantly artistic/artificial, musically structured literary composition(s).

The first such moment, “The Head of George Frederick Handel,” is the most difficult to categorize in traditional terms. Kling does well to characterize it as “transmuting more or less standard biography into a dazzling monologue of Handel’s last moments as woven around the facts of his life” (171). The second “piece” is lyrical, and is the only one that does not treat a biographical moment per se. Instead, the real and the ideal interact more broadly as heaven and earth, as nature / the gods and humankind. It is the birds, borrowed from Messiaen’s musical “catalogue,” that provide the aesthetic glue. Kling describes quite nicely how Jonke “transmutes” Messiaen’s original musical material into his own linguistic composition. But Jonke’s use of the birds for his “madcap” interweaving of ideal and real also has interesting literary echoes. Situated almost perfectly between the birds’ soothing reassurance of the wanderer in Goethe’s Über allen Gipfeln and the bird’s brusque rejection of the wanderer in Nietzsche’s Der Wanderer, Jonke’s linguistic (re-)composition of Messian’s musical “Catalogue D’Oiseaux” oscillates exuberantly and lyrically between these two extremes, ironically reversing the transformation of these two literary predecessors from written works to musical compositions by Schubert and Schönberg, respectively.

The final piece, and the one that gives the collection as a whole its title, illustrates just how integral a part of the fun this exuberantly ironic (re-)compostion is for Jonke. “Blinding Moment” not only recomposes the historical final moment of Anton Webern’s life as a musical one. It also simultaneously (re-)composes the opera Wozzeck of Webern’s close friend and fellow composer Alban Berg in narrative form. Thus, when Jonke’s narrator opens the “Novelle” with the words “Langsam, Raymond, langsam,” we are hearing the opening words of Berg’s opera as well. By repeating the words in this real biographical setting, Jonke’s text simultaneously intertwines real and ideal in exuberantly “grotesque” fashion and reverses the transformation by Berg’s opera of Georg Büchner’s play, itself a “grotesque” retelling (as the Captain acknowledges in one of Büchner’s scenes) of a real biographical moment from the life of the soldier Johann Christian Woyzeck.

In other words, Jonke appears to be striving for a sort of “real-ideal” “sympoesie” a la German Romanticism, a sort of formal synesthesia in which musical (re-)compositions of literary and real-life historical moments are themselves linguistically (re-)composed into literary and real-life historical moments, so that the formal distinctions are both upheld and transcended in a heightened euphoric aesthetic apotheosis, to use Kling’s description. This aim is perhaps most evident in the third of the four pieces, the “Theater Sonata” on Beethoven entitled Gentle Rage or the Ear Machinist. As the title already suggests and as Kling observes, “Synesthesia, the bewilderment of perception by the displacement of one sense function to another, becomes for Beethoven, as it does for Handel, a kind of higher awareness, not a confusing muddle” (182-3). “And if the watcher can watch the watcher in infinite regress,” Kling continues, essentially describing German romantic irony as it applies to Beethoven’s increasing deafness, “[…] then this potentially disorienting mise en abime […] becomes a means of heightened awareness for Beethoven, giving him additional resources to overcome impairment” (183).

One could argue after reading these four pieces that Jonke intends his compositions to serve the same function for his (ideal) readers. Of course, for these pieces to do so completely, such readers need to know not only their Messiah and their Messiaen, but also their Austrian and German literature. It is no small praise for Kling’s translation to add, however, that with the appearance of this collection, Jonke’s readers no longer have to know German. Kling’s translator’s afterword illustrates his critical sensitivity to what is at stake in Jonke’s pieces and to their musical, literary and political context. The intertextuality of Jonke’s work extends beyond the formal parallels to German romanticism and to the musical composition(s) they treat, however, to specific verbal connections such as the opening words of Blinding Moment and Berg’s opera and the title of Gentle Rage and Adalbert Stifter’s Gentle Law. Here, Kling’s Praxis matches the sensitivity of his theoretical treatment. His translation walks convincingly the fine line between forcing Jonke’s text into an unconventional English that makes these connections explicit on the one hand, and rendering the German into a completely unassuming and apparently self-evident English that effaces them on the other.

Jonke often seems determined in his writing to deny the possibility of any such delicately balanced translation. The fact that Kling is able to maintain this balance through the variety of prose, lyric and dramatic dialogue that he selects only adds to his accomplishment. Most notable in this regard are his renderings of Jonke’s gleefully exaggerated word agglutinations that, however improbable in the original, are still theoretically possible according to German word-formational convention. In these instances, Kling opts for an effective and playful variation as opposed to consistency. He sometimes follows Jonke’s lead with impossible but still comprehensible English agglutinations, but he also takes the more standard English route, and in some cases, he even opts for both. Perhaps the most extreme example, itself a sort of linguistic “Blinding Moment” from the piece of the same name, illustrates Kling’s skill in mixing it up. When Jonke’s exuberance produces Militärgetriebewindhosenüberlandverwirbelwinddetonationssprengstoffzerstörungsfanatikern, Kling counters with “world-subjugating vortexbylandproducing, military gearandmeshdriven, detonating explosivedevices outfitted fanatics” (111). This both is and is not English. But it is this very balancing act on the edge of the language that allows Kling’s translation to communicate the “grotesque” uniqueness and interest of Jonke’s original pieces. After all, they themselves are and are not German, are and are not merely linguistic texts, are and are not “standard biography.” Whatever one chooses to call Jonke’s “pieces,” Kling’s translation remains admirably faithful to their difficult spirit and letter. This collection therefore allows English-speaking audiences to experience the quintessential “entweder und oder,” to use a particularly Austrian turn of phrase – the quintessential “either and or”- of both Jonke’s composition(s) and of the composition(s) they treat.

Hans Gabriel The University of North Carolina School of the Arts

Sherlock Holmes in the Prism of Borges

2010-02-08T08:01:00.003-05:00

by Suzanne Jill Levine

I couldn’t help viewing with Borgesian bifocals Guy Ritchie’s latest “avatar” of super thinker Holmes played by a louche neurotic Robert Downey Jr. whose dependable sidekick Dr. Watson is updated by an edgy Jude Law, the best looking Watson to-date. The good doctor in this version threatens out of exasperation to abandon but still stands loyal (like his staunch original) to his cocaine-addicted comrade. These current reincarnations of the famous pair are far sexier and more physical—veritable James Bonds of the fist and the gun, with a taste for the ladies—than Conan Doyle’s restrained if jocular Victorian duo. There is also an explicit homo edge—Downey interprets Holmes as a rakish dandy when he’s not hallucinating or fiddling—as when the two men meet with the doctor’s fiancée (whoever thought of Watson as the marrying kind?) whom Downey succeeds in alienating. After all, she gets between him and his handsome pal at the Royale, Oscar Wilde’s favorite Cafe.

In his own stories Borges improved on the mechanical duality of Conan Doyle’s complementary doubles who, in Borges’ view, were merely replaying another gimmicky twosome, idealistic Don Quixote and earthy sidekick Sancho Panza. Interestingly, Guy Ritchie’s version (Holmes’s nemesis played by a sinister Mark Strong has a Draculesque touch) dilutes the complementarity by making hero and sidekick more identical, adding a dab of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The doubles multiply with the chick-flick addition of two ladies, the doctor’s aforementioned fiancée and Holmes’s love interest, a seductress/villain played by Rachel McAdams (at the service of evil Moriarty) who is a double agent, obeying her menacing employer yet yielding to the charms of Downey’s Holmes, taking her cues perhaps from Bond’s Pussy Galore in Goldfinger.

Getting back to Borges: the film is a veritable amalgam of the detective genre so dear to Borges who paid homage to it with his ‘Death and the Compass’—a tale of two with one homo-suicidal mind. Indeed its most Borgesian dimension is its borrowings from Poe, Christie and most especially G.K. Chesterton’s ‘nightmare’ titled The Man Who Was Thursday: the film’s climactic scene occurs in Parliament, suggesting Chesterton’s vast political conspiracy which turns out to be the work of one man with many masks. Chesterton’s Catholic touch doubtlessly helps paint a dark foreboding London as a nightmarish labyrinth whose center is occult.

The match between Holmes and Moriarty is between reason and magic: science battles against the supernatural as rapid fire foreshadowings and explanations incessantly sweep the narrative back, forth, and around each crime. Endless repetitions of plot and characterization, spiraling variations transcend the individual—detective and criminal are potentially interchangeable in an ongoing cycle that also transcends this film. Whether or not they recognize it, Borges has possessed the unconscious of filmmakers and spectators alike, this spectator, certainly.

Suzanne Jill Levine is a leading translator and scholar of Latin American literature, whose publications include The Subversive Scribe, Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman, and hundreds of contributions to major anthologies and journals including the New Yorker, and over 20 volumes of translations of the most original writing from Latin America. A professor at the University of California, her many honors include National Endowment for the Arts and NEH fellowship and research grants, the first PEN USA West Prize for Literary Translation, the PEN American Center Career Achievement award, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. She is currently general editor of five volumes of the works of Borges for Penguin Classics.

Between the Museum and the Zoo: Sébastien Smirou

2009-11-23T19:34:00.004-05:00

Sébastien Smirou emerged in 1993 with the publication of his “La quoi?” in Action Poétique, followed by the appearance of “Bubble” in the second number of Revue de Littérature Générale, a massive 1996 magazine/anthology edited by Olivier Cadiot and Pierre Alferi that forced the collective gaze in contemporary French poetry toward new aesthetics and revised ambitions. Less metaphysical or purely lyrical in orientation, experimental French poetics of the past decade and a half has been propelled by pop culture, a vertiginous shuttling between theoryspeak and speakeasy slang, the liberties afforded by mathematical and other constraints, suspicions of all self-proclaimed official discourses, including formal grammar, and a global splay of signifiers and languages, identities and politics. Alongside further publications in BOBOBO, Nioques, and IF, Smirou released a chapbook, Simon aime Anna, in 1998. A couple of his poems, translated by Erin Mouré and by Stacy Doris, appeared in the American journals Raddle Moon (#16: Modern French Poetry in Translation) and Double Change several years ago.

Mon Laurent, his first full-length volume, appeared in 2003 from Éditions P.O.L., the leading Parisian experimental poetry house. Divided into eight distinct sections, each containing sixteen quatrains, Mon Laurent is an elegant, funny, often sad meditation on the fifteenth-century Italian statesman, art patron, and poet Lorenzo de Medici. Obliquely and eccentrically narrated, as concerned with physical arrangement and fractal symmetry as it is with high-voltage linguistic ambiguity and ruminations on matters philosophical, political, and sentimental, Mon Laurent is striking visually not least for the full justification of its stanzas. Reading the book is quite intentionally akin to touring the Uffizi, its Renaissance paintings hung meticulously along otherwise adamantly blank walls, and the book itself, its width measuring twice its height, is purposefully tableau-like in dimension and shape. Smirou is obsessively attentive even to the spacing between individual words: insisting that the type be set in Gill Sans, he stipulates that the gaps separating words, inevitably variant on account of the strict margins, be nonetheless as regular and inconspicuous as possible.

A blatant logic governs this conceptual layout, while a legitimate lineage is also at play. Pierre Alferi’s Kub Or (1994), to take one example, is split into seven sections of seven poems, with each poem containing seven lines, each line seven syllables. Similarly, though written in prose, Suzanne Doppelt’s Quelque chose cloche (2004) fractures into eight segments, each containing ten photographs, which are themselves reprised in a ninth chapter, or “résumé,” of eight large and eight smaller images culled from earlier sections. Both of these works—published in France by P.O.L. and in English translation in the United States by Burning Deck—can, in turn, be traced to a pair of earlier books written according to numerical constraints. One is Louis Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers (1978), in which all eighty poems break into octets, with five words to the line; the other is Jacques Roubaud’s Trente et un au cube (Gallimard, 1973): thirty-one poems of thirty-one lines of thirty-one syllables.

The amazing mélange of traditional form (or format) with an unapologetically modern idiom accounts, in part, for why Mon Laurent was so well received, garnering reviews and author interviews in Action Poétique, in Regards, in Cahier Critique de Poésie (organ of the Centre international de poésie in Marseille), and on numerous radio shows.

Smirou’s second full-length book, Beau voir, was published last year by P.O.L. Like its predecessor, Beau voir is divided into eight sections, each containing as many poems, with each poem comprising an octave of lines. Moreover, the last line, or a portion of it, is repeated in each poem within a chapter, if not verbatim then with a ghazal’s variegated reiterations. All eight sections of “The giraffe,” for instance, conclude, “si tu vois ce que je veux dire” (“if you see what I mean”), a phrase that, in addition to highlighting Smirou’s impish desire to marry seeing and saying, happens to be the title of his blog. The title Beau voir itself, of course, contains eight letters—no inadvertent or contingent detail.

Subtitled “Bestiaire,” with a pencil sketch by celebrated artist François Matton of an unfinished beast on its cover, Beau voir contains chapters that each address a different animal: lion, giraffe, chamois, cow, cat, turtle, glowworm, and dodo. In this context, one may hear the title as an echo of mirabile visu, “wonderful to behold,” with the reading experience figured like a day spent wandering around a somewhat unusual zoo: the animals here are hardly in captivity, few zoos feature glowworms or, for that matter, cats, and the dodo, of course, is extinct. On the other hand, “beau voir” is also a set expression in French, indicating cynicism: “oh really? I’d like to see that,” or even, “oh yeah, we’ll see about that.” Poised between exhibition and exhibitionism, between inventory and invention, Beau voir is a kind of kids’ book for grownups, those featherless bipeds who live behind figurative bars but are sometimes freed by rhyme, or nonsense, a run-on sentence, a sing-along. Reading it, one might keep in mind that bête is not only a noun for “creature”—it can also be an adjective meaning “stupid,” even “silly.” Just as “vache” is an adjective for “nasty,” while “La vache,” the title of Smirou’s fourth chapter, is a cow—but “la vache!” an exclamation of surprise.

Smirou published the chapbook Ma girafe in 2006 with Contrat maint, who have just released his latest work, Je voudrais entrer dans la légende. The latter has been translated into English by Jean-Jacques Poucel and was published as part of this summer’s binational FACE (Franco-American Cultural Exchange) program. Smirou visited Connecticut for a week in June to participate in that festival along with six other prominent French poets, including Anne Portugal and Michele Métail.

In the late 90s, Smirou founded and directed éditions rup&rud (the press name an inversion of dur&pur, or “hard and pure”), which published seven authors, including American poet Peter Gizzi (in Smirou’s translation), over as many years. In a spirit of noncommercial circulation, rup&rud printed twenty-five handmade copies of each booklet, designed in cooperation with its author. The chapbooks were presented to readers of the writers’ own choice, as a way of “inverting the cycle of reading by choosing its destination,” as Smirou put it, “to truly write for.” Recently, the complete series has been reprinted in a single volume by Éditions de l’Attente as rup&rud: l’intégrale, 1999-2004.

Smirou was born in 1972 in Niort, France. After earning his undergraduate degree from the École Supérieure de Journalisme in Paris, he studied at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he enrolled in Roubaud’s course in formal poetics. He received a “Bourse de découverte” from the Centre national du Livre in 2007. The following year, Smirou benefited from a writers’ residence sponsored by the Conseil Régional d’Ile de France, and in 2009, with the support of the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, he traveled to Pamplona, Spain, as part of the “Mission Stendhal,” to attend the bullfights that serve as the subject of his latest writings. Smirou is a psychoanalyst, with a specialization in working with troubled children. He lives in Montrouge, on the outskirts of Paris.

—Andrew Zawacki

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Editor's Note: Because of the typographical specifications of the poems, we've decided to publish these translations as PDFs. View them directly below or download from Scribd.

smirou-thefalconhunt

"Prairie's powers" by Gustave Roud; translated from the French by Alexander Dickow

2009-10-17T19:09:00.004-04:00

photo copyright Fonds Gustave Roud, BCU, Lausanne

Prairie's powers

Who would think to question a vast and ordered landscape’s irresistible ascendancy, at once over our gaze and, piece by piece, over our total being? It enslaves us gently, in the manner of a symphony. The sky, vacant or pasture to the clouds; the lands drawn out to their horizons with their naive features intact, or molded by the hands of men, offer to the eye their grand themes, in no way bound to any temporal progression, but pronounced across space in unison, where they forever secure the paradox of a simultaneous and immutable counterpoint. It is rather our vision that follows the length of each motionless phrase, enmeshed in the lace of shapely melody, the magic net, the relentless snare that every season, every day, nearly every hour bends, with the weight of so much fresh bait, beneath new harmonies. And the spirit eagerly suffers the delights of an expert capture: in an even more startling paradox, these delights teach the spirit its most secret, most essential strengths. More than Amiel’s celebrated remark, every landscape is an emotion, Brulard-Stendhal translates this mystery perfectly to my mind: the landscapes drew their bows across my soul, for this expression highlights the lasting likeness of landscape and lullaby.

A mysterious power plays indeed in the case of those grand, ordered spaces whose virtues surpass those of a mere soul-stirring bow to attain those of an immense orchestra, laying its plies from total silence to pure fury into a sheer universe of variegated inflections, and which, merely to interpret a few eternal themes, keeps at hand the sorcery of notes a thousandfold. A power still more mysterious in the case of an isolated fraction embedded in the larger landscape, whose welcoming gesture, by the secret virtue of a single clump of trees, of a liquid glint below a dark cluster of leaves, likewise draws us softly towards our finest self.

There I daydream, laying in a balmy October prairie where the encroaching evening spreads the ash and the oak trees’ shade alongside me – a fleeting prairie, bounded by a screen of trees and a creek of little violence; one of those ennobling sites where the most rehearsed gesture, the most everyday thought, divested, as it were, of its contingency, reaches toward a simplicity serene and near to greatness. My friend and his cart, some weeks ago, were here loading the soft aftermath with which the wind delights to mix the mower’s hair, or to cling to his scorched and naked shoulder. And this familiar labor, these always identical movements; the horses’ halt, their advance; the pitch, the draw of the rake; the pitchfork empty, the pitchfork full and in full swing; it all unfolded against the dark and leafy backdrop like a sort of dance, steady and flawless, from which were banished any rhythmic misstep. Then like a rash of angry hives across the mown ground the meadow saffron lit their tufts of flame. There was no one left. On Sunday, occasionally, the sound of laughter and brushing against leaves along the hedge: little girls were shaking the high hazel boughs. The grass grew green again, little by little, from one dew to the next. One morning, from up in the village, a herd hurtled down in a great tumult of cries and cowbells, immediately hushed. Only one shepherd led the herd, yet the beasts, their muffles lowered to the chill forage, proceeded at an even pace, as though the strange calm of this place had dimly arrested them. I remember it. A rain as soft as mist began to descend; the boy, kneeling, was trying to coax a blaze from smoke beneath an enormous ruined umbrella as blue as his damp overalls. Already I could no longer hear the bells; they were themselves the thoughts they punctuated in perfect time, muffled or clear, and in the tempo of my step I also felt this tranquil cadence, as though recovered in it, and once again overhead, in the lovely sprays of branches dark against the sky in sequence. What is called plenitude is perhaps less abundance than concordance; it is a call and response, a concert in which each voice sings itself alone, yet nourished by the songs of others in its ear.

And poetry, which I had not dared to invoke for such a long time, was suddenly present as if it had obeyed some mysterious summons. Poetry, or a poet, rather. A lifeless stanza that had haunted me for hours sings suddenly in its fullest wealth and in the searing reality of its music:

If only
My very courage does not expose me. This first we
Must understand. For like morning air are the names
Since Christ. Become dreams. Fall on the heart
Like error, and killing, if one does not
Consider what they are and understand.
But the attentive man saw
The face of God...(1)

I can see this Hölderlin, once he had taken leave, at the time of the hymns, from that which men call “life”; Diotima dead, Schiller cruelly silent, I can see him plunging alone into his grand prophetic Night, where, as lord over time and space, poring over the “immeasurable fable” of Earth and of humankind, he senses his imminent defeat, prepared to lose heart before the surge of presences conjured, gradually stronger than his expiring voice; casting ever rarer lightning-strokes across the centuries, and ceaselessly repeating this despondent cry to stave off the threat of silence: Ah! I have so much, so much left to say! – knowing full well he shall never say it.

My prairie listened then just as it listens now to this still resounding lament. It even seems to me, at certain moments, that the prairie makes that lament its own, and grieves too, wherein each tree, each leaf, each clump of grass signifies in the face of an imminent winter that shall rob the prairie of its voice. Now the prairie too is alone, and like the poet, sovereign in its solitude. Before late autumn’s final farewell, it rehearses its farewell daily, its welcome to the night. How may one abandon this place without secret affliction, as it sinks majestically into shadow, overrun little by little by the chill of hidden water; the green of the ash dwindling to ashes, their own high, blind bulk burdening the feeble daylight; while around them evening draws out and distils a sky forever more akin to crystal?

(1) Friedrich Hölderlin, trans. Jeremy Adler and Michael Hamburger, Selected Poems and Fragments (New York: Penguin Books, 1998) 247-249.

Gustave Roud (1897-1976) was a Swiss poet and translator of Novalis and Hölderlin into French. Rarely overblown and never pompous, Roud successfully fuses Romantic sublimity and classical restraint. Because of his repressed homosexuality and self-imposed seclusion, Roud’s landscapes bristle with sexual energy even in the absence of the masculine silhouettes that occasionally appear. The desire to envelop and possess the object of the gaze lends unparalleled intensity to a contemplative attitude suddenly bereft of detachment. Prairie’s Powers (Pouvoirs d’une prairie) was published in Air of Solitude (Air de la solitude) in 1945 (now published with other selections by Editions Gallimard as Air de la solitude et autres écrits, Paris, Collection Poésie Gallimard, 2002). Roud was Philippe Jaccottet’s mentor and direct literary ascendant, and is now considered one of the most important Swiss writers of the Twentieth Century. But because of his seclusion and natural distaste for literary promotion, Roud remains a discrete presence in France and elsewhere. Prairie’s Powers is one of Roud’s most visibly Romantic texts, while others, such as Requiem (1967), extensively reinvent familiar forms.

Alexander Dickow is a bilingual poet and translator who writes in French and English. He has translated poems by Aaron Belz, Amy King and Ana Bozicevic-Bowling into French, and is currently preparing a book-length selection of Gustave Roud’s works. He is also the author of a book of poems in French and English, Caramboles (Paris, Argol Editions, 2008), and irregularly maintains a weblog, Voix Off. He currently lives in Châtillon, France. Child, cowritten with his wife, is forthcoming in December 2009.

I hear The Armies charging across the land

2009-10-01T22:19:00.006-04:00

Special Feature: The Armies by Evelio Rosero, translated by Anne McLean, published by New Directions (jacket design by Erik Rieselbach)

It seems like all this book does is go around winning prizes and knocking readers over the head. And rightfully so, on both counts. I myself read it in about a day and a half, my pace quickening as I went, snapping at anyone who interrupted me. Relevant comparisions: Heart of Darkness, Moby Dick, maybe Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone. Rosero is Colombian, and he likes García Márquez a lot, but comparisions between the two are misguided, in my opinion. The Armies is Macondo become hell itself, then made into a four-hour movie by a half-mad director and a cast of drug-crazed actors shooting at each other with live ammunition. Or better than that: The Armies is basically real, and that's what's so horrifying about it. It also happens to be an anti-war novel that makes its point without being didactic, and without irony or sarcasm. Catch-22 narrated by the people getting bombed, for once. What follows are interviews I did over email with the book's author, Evelio Rosero, and its English translator, Anne McLean. Thanks to them both, and to Renato Gomez, who somehow managed to make me sound polite when he revised my questions for Mr. Rosero. And apologies to all and sundry for the Joyce pun headline above. I couldn't help it. —Brandon Holmquest

EVELIO ROSERO

photo by Sandra Páez; courtesy New Directions

Calque: The Armies is obviously an antiwar novel. Why did you decide to write a novel, specifically, instead of maybe a piece of journalism or a report on these issues?

Rosero: I'm a novelist. With fiction, I feel like a fish in the water. Journalism for me was just a way to earn a bit of money to pay the rent or the bills. Any work other than ficiton, however related to literature it might be, causes me a sort of intimate discomfort. The novel is definitely my spiritual resource for saying what I want to say to the world, for shouting.

Calque: I've read that you used journalistic methods to gather material for the novel. Can you tell us something about this process and what interested you in these investigations?

Rosero: They weren't really “journalistic methods.” There were simply news reports on the radio and television (during the writing of The Armies) that began to affect me in a very different way than they had before, that made me lose all hope for the country, but also made me rebel, with my writing. These reports and events, which I call reports from reality arose in such a way that they incorporated themselves into the novel I was writing as though the novel itself had been waiting for them. The trick was to elevate these motifs from raw reality to literature. I've always thought that a finished novel is more real than the very reality from which it originates. This assembly and purification of reality is the novelist's principal task. Then, when the novel was almost finished, to corroborate certain atmospheres, I spoke personally with some of the “desplazados,” those displaced by the violence, in Calí. But these weren't formally investigative, journalistic conversations. They were spontaneous, human, like a conversation between two strangers on the bus.

Calque: The Armies is in first person, in the voice of Ismael Pasos. Why did you choose first person, and why a character as advanced in age as Ismael?

Rosero: The first draft of the novel was worked out in the third person; I haven't discovered what internal mechanism moved me to put it into first. Something similar happened to me with other novels, but in reverse: I started them in the first person, and wound up switching to third. I've never worried about finding out the reasons, but I think these changes of perspective, the attributes of the narrative voice, remain in the background of the work all the same, and maybe give it a certain originality and even a double objectivity.

Calque: Is the use of the name Ismael an allusion to Herman Melville?

Rosero: The protagonist's name came to me very quickly, unpremeditated, the way I prefer to name my characters. Of course, I instantly thought of Melville and of his extraordinary opening line, still unequalled in literature: “Call me Ishmael.” I immediately wanted to change the character’s name, but just as quickly decided not to. In the end it seemed to me that the old teacher Ismael Pasos was another Ishmael, confronted with “another” monster of the most fearsome proportions, though not managing to survive.

Calque: Although The Armies expresses a moral horror for the war, it's not exactly an ideological novel in the manner of some of the later Cortázar, for example. Do you think this is because you prefer to remain outside of ideology, or is the role of ideology in Latin American literature changing?

Rosero: The way I see it, the novelist should situate himself outside of ideology. Of course a novelist has an ideology, which is permanent, which obeys his principles and his culture, his particular interpretation of reality, etc. But to directly wield an ideology, its aims, questions, solutions and puzzles, is more appropriate for an essay or a study, I think. Obviously the novel can let you do anything, and for this very reason it is a great genre, but also a dangerous one. Ultimately, the novel is art. It's humanism. As a reader I'm no great friend of the novels you refer to as ideological. As soon as a writer voluntarily proposes to advance an explicit ideology in his work he commits the worst error: he forgets the human being, which is essentially he himself, who loves and feels fear, hatred, hunger and loneliness without need of ideologies, whatever his race or creed. To try and exceed reality, to impose a reality by means of the novel, is already truth enough.

Calque: It seems to me that The Armies can be read allegorically, did you write it with that intention?

Rosero: No.

Calque: You've spoken of Colombian indifference toward the violence in the country. Do you think your book has affected that indifference? Do you think a novel is capable of doing such a thing?

Rosero: Yes, I believe a novel can change things. Not in an immediate way, the way a film can, or a television program or a piece of journalism. But the novel's ability to change things is, it seems to me, deeper, it sticks in your memory. It transforms consciousness. I myself have felt this transformative effect of the novel as a reader: I was not the same boy after reading Robinson Crusoe. I wasn’t the same teenager after Don Quixote and Crime and Punishment. I know the United States through its poets and writers. I think my book—as various readers have confirmed—has chipped away at the indifference people feel toward this horrible daily custom of death and massacres in my country, of fathers, sons and brothers chained up for years. It's humanized their perception of reality, through the novel. But this was not my goal when I sat down to write. I only wanted to write about what was affecting me deep down, as a human being, not as a sociologist or a journalist or a historian: my reality, my country. Death and fear very near to desire and love.

Calque: Are you surprised by the success that The Armies has had outside of Colombia, especially in the English-speaking world? Why do you think it's had such success?

Rosero: Something strange has happened to me with the success and translations. It always seems like it's happening to someone else, some other writer. It's not about me. I'd like it, but I am still here and he is still over there.

Calque: Which writers have been the most important for you? Which contemporary Colombian writers do you like the most?

Rosero: The 19th Century Russian writers are my masters. I reread them and find them stirring every time. Not long ago I read The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing, and I thought it was a tremendous, disturbing book, the kind of thing I haven't come across for a long time. Coetzee is another great writer. Now I'm reading a lot of histories of Colombian independence, which I have to force myself to read, joylessly, because it's the background for my next novel. But I long to read a good novel, discover another great writer. Reading is the best excuse for not writing, it's better than traveling, or the same, but you go farther. The only thing comparable to a good book is making love. I hope, therefore, that García Márquez hasn’t stopped writing. We could still get one more book out of him, I think. Among Colombian authors, I always keep an eye on Gabo. He's the best.

ANNE MCLEAN

Calque: Like most Spanish-English translators, you work with books from all over the Spanish-speaking world. Was there anything about Los ejércitos, which is so Colombian, that took an adjustment, or a different kind of approach? Did you have to do any research?

McLean: I always have to do lots of research. Los ejércitos was my second Colombian novel so I already had a great diccionario de colombianismos and was already paying attention to the place, reading around the novels in English and Spanish. I don’t think I really took a different approach than with any of the other things I’ve translated.

Calque: Evelio's prose style is rather poetic, taking full advantage of the greater flexibility in terms of word order within the individual sentence that Spanish offers, as opposed to English. How did you go about trying to capture his style without making him sound like a demented Romantic poet?

McLean: This is something I try not to think about while I’m doing it. When I first read, and was blown away by, Los ejércitos, my gut reaction to the prose style was: intraducible. To tell you the truth, I found the prospect of attempting to translate this book terrifying.

But in the end I just tried to follow Evelio’s lead and stick as close to his word order as I possibly could in English, whenever possible. And, as I’m sure he did, I pared down the prose with each successive draft. And then, as usual, read it aloud to see if I’d recaptured, or could recreate, any of the rhythms of the writing.

Calque: Judging by the prizes and reviews, this book seems to have struck a chord in the Anglo literary world. Were you surprised by that, and would care to hazard a guess as to why people are so into it?

McLean: I was very surprised. I suppose it could be because the book’s a surprise in itself: an artful treatment of an age-old subject, a beautifully told depiction of an ugly reality, and not at all what the opening pages might lead the reader to expect. I think it’s an almost inexplicably moving book and it speaks to our times. You don’t need to know anything about Colombia and its current conflict to understand these characters: defenseless civilians caught in a crossfire.

Months after the book was published here in the UK I heard a news reporter on the radio say, “The Americans are keen to tell us the villagers don’t want the Taliban here, and it’s true. The villagers don’t want the Taliban, but they don’t want American soldiers either. They don’t want Afghan soldiers. They don’t want men with guns in the village.” And I thought just change a very few words and he could be talking about rural Colombia.

Calque: How much interaction do you tend to have with an author you translate, and what kind of questions, problems, etc. do you turn to author for help with?

McLean: It varies enormously depending on how well I know an author. I didn’t meet Evelio until The Armies was published in London last October so I tended to only ask him questions I couldn’t figure out from other sources. I had pages of vocabulary and usage queries but I was also in touch with the German translator of the novel, Matthias Strobel, whose deadline was very close to mine, and we discussed some of the thorny issues like the shifts in verb tenses, and lots of specific difficulties to do with the demands of our languages (and publishers) when trying to recreate Evelio’s style.

My other great stroke of luck was that the other two Colombian authors I translate, Juan Gabriel Vásquez and Héctor Abad Faciolince, happen to be the only two writers I’ve ever met in person before translating their work, so they were already friends, and already forgiving of the huge gaps in my understanding of their language. They both reviewed Los ejércitos and admired it and were both enormously helpful with specific vocabulary and usage and context. Now that I know Evelio, I won’t be so shy about asking him stuff the next time I translate one of his books.

But that’s how it goes. When I translated Soldiers of Salamis, for example, I think I asked Javier Cercas three questions after I’d been through several drafts and maybe three or four more during the copyediting. When I was working on his novel The Speed of Light, a few years later, I asked him hundreds, probably lots of stupid little things…

But most of my questions are along the lines of “What does that mean?” or “How unusual is that in Spanish?” I expect their usual first reaction is “Why doesn’t she know that?!”

"Trimurti" by Pravinsinh Chavda; translated by Mira Desai

2009-09-14T17:07:00.005-04:00

Note: this is the third (and final) of three Pravinsinh Chavda stories translated by Mira Desai. To read the introduction to the series and the first story, click here; the second story can be clicked toward here.

Mira adds the following: "The title 'Trimurti,' literally 'three facets,' is from the triumvirate of Hindu Gods—Lord Brahma, the creator; Lord Vishnu, the nurturer, and Lord Shiva, the destroyer."

Trimurti

And in my minds eye, I can still see the two women seated comfortably on the sofa or on the kitchen floor. Breaking darning thread between her teeth with practiced ease, one asks, "Do you see it? Near my temples, behind my ear.. white.."

The other reflective, with an artist’s perspective "Not at all. Anyways, some white is like a badge of honor, proudly worn."

In a manner entirely womanlike, their talk meanders to matters of greater import.. "Get me some areetha from Gandhi Road when you go there next. Don’t you ever think of your ben in all this gallivanting about that you do? Spare some attention for ben, otherwise saheb is all that holds your interest!"

The hidden nuances, the numberless shades in this conversation did not remain unnoticed or un-understood by the younger woman. She straightened for a moment, thought deeply, then cursorily said "Oh yes! What you say is right."

And after this break the talk veered towards cooking soda or sweet neem or some such.

While folding and keeping away Bapuji’s clothes or arranging the books on his study table, while addressing envelopes or making tea to his taste, four hands blur in my sight, strangely interweave and emerge as two.

Oneness, identification, merging of souls.

They’re fine, as far as religious fervent, bhakti, is concerned.

But these begin separating out, assuming separate identities, when one looks at details.

The elder, aware of each subtle stanza of like and dislike, like the language of a gentle touch says, "He can’t tolerate oil and chilies, not at all. Sprouted moong. Khichdi. An apple or perhaps a chicku. His tea and cigarettes for sure! Fueled by these, he transcribes history, brings centuries to life."

The younger, with a hint of a temper tantrum, "D’you wish to belittle saheb? He is an authority, not an ascetic. Chilies and oil aid temper, they bring qualities to light."

And giving credence to the tone of this conversation, Ba would sometimes say, "Ah lo the equations of destiny! Such a well- known man, respected, looked up to. Wherever he goes, a hundred rush forth to meet him! Wouldn’t a half of these be women? Several of these traipse all the way home. Hordes! Some journalists. Some professors. Truly, there is no shortage of jesters in our land. Some swing outside, some gather in his room for hours without end. They interview him, take notes, tape conversations. Each valued guest shares our dinner table.

All of these came, and they went their separate ways. Only this one held tight to the thread of this relationship. This, for sure, one can’t find fault with."

The crux of this story is Bapuji’s grief.

But Ba’s behavior and thoughts filter past memories and crowd the foreground of my mind.

Ba certainly was not as simple, naïve or dumb, as she appeared to be.

It’s only now that I recollect, at certain times, a stilling, stiffening of lip.

Ba would perhaps be in the kitchen, testing the sharpness of the seasoning, she certainly would have read the tones, said and unsaid; of the arguments and discussions that ensued in the incense-scented room on the first floor.

Ba was not a village bumpkin. No. She was not dumb.

A stillness, a capacity to view life in its entirety, an endearing simplicity- these qualities defined Ba.

When a vision is quiet and unwavering, a lot can be seen. A great deal observed. And when such sight is moist everything is understood, everything taken in, accepted.

Truly, oneness does seem to find expression in strangely different ways.

Sometimes I’d be at my books, studying, and Anuradha would suddenly appear from nowhere to sit by my side. I’d ask, "Anuben, why are you crying?" And pulling my book away she’d say, "You do your work!"

And a certain sternness would be written over Ba’s face, for Ba would have followed her to my room to stand by the doorframe, with hands folded, a disciplinarian.

"You’ve become very smart now! No respect! No regard at all for the difference between the old and the young! Talking back, answering back at will?! Someone older can, quite correctly too, tell you a few things, teach you a word or two and..." After this one-sided dialogue she’d soften and implore, "Make amends...!"

What were these arguments about? These tiffs, misunderstandings? What were the steps that defined an amend? All this was far past my ken, and as far as I was concerned the discussion ended then.

The myriad whirlwinds that decorated the margins of the writing paper - these were things that I did not understand. No, not at that time.

Chili powder had become a symbol, a representative of the battle. Ba would be cooking, adding her usual spices to the vegetables and dal; Anuradha would rush in with a huge pinch of chilies and say, "An expert historian, an authority he may well be for universities and conferences! Do we give a damn? Someone like me would drag him to the kitchen and force him to hold a kitchen knife, and I’d tell him “Stand right here! I’ll prepare the dough for rotis and you cut vegetables! When I temper the seasoning, rush to my assistance with the stirring spoon!" Sometimes she’d softly add, "And when I weep, sit by my side, gather my tears..."

And sometimes she’d scold Bapuji. "Don’t you think sometimes you could take us out, to some park or garden, and then treat us to a meal which is decent, but not expensive?"

Bapuji would glance at Ba and comment: "See! She wants us to go to war over this!"

Ba would retort, "Well! Grumbling is not part of my nature, but what she says is entirely right! I don’t speak up. She doesn’t shut up. That’s the basic difference between us."

At this point all three would laugh together, a similar kind of laughter, and the seriousness of the moment would take flight. Although a feeble trickle, a remnant, would find its way ahead. Perhaps Ba could not see this.

This gala laughter would make the moment lighter, fluffier. Lifting, for a moment, this veil of lightness Anuradha would look up and say, "Do you wish to ask me something directly?"

One evening I noticed a shift in tone and a variant of shade in the up-down scale of questions and replies that reached my ears from the garden as I sat at my desk, and my hands stilled. I stared at the slowly approaching dusk. Suddenly I could hear Anuradha speak up, "If I had a husband like this I wouldn’t tolerate him for a day!"

In a low tone, Bapuji replied, "Anurag, is that right? You wouldn’t tolerate him for a day?"

Where was the irritant in this dialogue? Was there something hurtful that would drive someone to tears?

Suddenly I could hear the sound of a chair being pushed aside, as Anuradha swiftly got up and rushed indoors. Looking at me as though I was a complete stranger, she stood wide -eyed in the center of the room staring at me, until Ba led her away quietly into her domain, the kitchen. "Here, take a sip of water. I won't let you leave without dinner. Not today."

To all problems and conundrums, a simple homemade solution.

In due course Anuradha completed her PhD, her thesis was received well by a publisher in Delhi, and she got a job as a city college lecturer; however, there was no change in her standing in my home despite these accomplishments.

Some arrangements, however, did change.

Some activities were added.

Annual visits to Jaipur, Kanpur or Madras, or wherever the historical society convocation would be held that year. Other than that, visits to the history societies in Calcutta or Delhi every now and then. Or if they’d hear about some private collection or library that held a rare document, in Junagadh, Palanpur or Navsari, they would rush there, eager and enthusiastic, bursting at the seams with childlike glee.

The woman at home would dutifully fill containers of thepla and sukhdi.

About the staying arrangements, about accommodation and bedding perhaps she was not overly curious.

Bapuji’s book on the princely states of preindependent Gujarat, entered its 3rd volume of narration. The intensity of his concentration was nearing its peak. His involvement –no- his oneness, ownership, was total. All absorbing. His discussions were measured and well considered, free of an argumentative undercurrent.

Blissfully ignorant of being the fulcrum for two pans swinging first one way and then the other, the distinguished authority worked, engrossed at his task.

If a drop of perspiration was visible on his furrowed brow, two hands would appear from two different directions and proceed, with a gentle finger each, to soothe the drop away, calm his forehead.

Ideas, thoughts, principles, details, and shadowy crowds- all this and more, his vision struggled to capture and race past.

The intensity of his happiness had increased apace in the last few days. I remember Anuradha’s visits had also intensified. She would run to and fro between kitchen and study, connecting the two.

I distinctly remember the Uttrayan festival (kite flying festival) that year. Clad in jeans and a blue round necked t shirt, with glares and a white cap perched atop, this vision ran fleet footed from spot to spot, as though at whim she’d merrily follow a kite into the blue sky up above.

Her tresses, escaped from the confines of her cap, flew in the wind, master of their will. Bapuji shaded his eyes against this glare as that of the sunlight.

Two eyesights, two lines of vision. Meeting at some distant point far away in the sky.

The third person, in charge of domestic matters, was setting forth a volley of orders from her ground floor domain.

"O! Tea’s ready"

"One of you come and fetch these chikkis (puffed rice sweet)"

When we ran out of drinking water and I rushed for a refill, Ba was patiently rolling chikki at the kitchen counter.

A peace, very different from the chaos on the terrace, percolated the kitchen, a look of quiet satisfaction marked Ba’s face.

This instance has been imprinted, nay, burnt deep, in my memory.

The festival of crisscrossing kite strings against the blue skies would mark the end of Shantiparv, the season of truce, of peace.

A new chapter was soon to begin.

But who amongst us knew about this cataclysm at that point in time?

And I wonder at the girl jumping about on the rooftop, shouting gleefully … did she not have any inkling of a chapter’s ending?

This happened the third day after Uttrayan.

Two experts from Rajasthan were visiting on a study tour of the sculptures of North Gujarat. They had been invited home for dinner. Ba, at peace after having completed the dining arrangements, commented, "Hasn’t she come as yet?"

Bapuji was speaking in a slightly raised tone, he was restless, and every now and then would step to the front porch.

When this happened thrice, Ba called him into the kitchen on some pretext, and in a muted voice scolded him, "Perhaps some task cropped up at the last moment! Why are you causing such havoc?"

Perhaps what she left unsaid was, "What is it that you’re yearning for anyway? To meet a householders duty to his guests, I stand by your side, stalwart, steady and shoulder to shoulder, in a manner that’s befitting..."

That day passed somehow, but the transformation that it caused in its wake was difficult to understand. Anuradha’s absence that day was an error, there was no way it could be termed a flaw in character or a life-threatening fault.

Perhaps something that I was unaware of had happened.

At any rate, I was no more than a chit of a girl. And in matters of import, matters that concerned elders I could not gain an entry.

I could not understand their language. Perhaps I could look at this behavior. How could I unscramble this code of silence?

A dull, heavy tread took the place of swift feet, and laughter vanished.

Anuradha would come home. But she’d remain by Ba’s side. The learned authority would remain aloof within his castle of anger. Ba would command, "Here- take this draught to your Saheb."

Anuradha would return with an untouched cup.

"Why?"

"He refused it"

"Why did he refuse it?"

"He says he doesn’t wish to drink it."

And I’d wonder at this conversation. What an uncouth way to refuse something.

Was it so difficult to reply with a sensible excuse?

"I just don’t understand any of this. You know and your saheb knows the best."

But it was obvious she was not sad. At dinnertime, she’d settle her unwavering glance upon Bapuji, "Is this some way to behave? Is it the done thing, to push away someone in this brusque manner?"

The learned authority whose expertise was the deployment of language, at that point used another equally powerful weapon, the weapon of silence.

Amidst that mist of chaos and hurt and sullen silence, Shri Seshadri emerged, pleasant faced and nodding his head, like his namesake…

Whether or not I understood what was happening, Ba worked hard to solicit my support. One afternoon she recited a list of complaints. Since she lacked the impartiality of a judge, half her case would be for the accused, and half for the defendant. In the manner in which she junked the case, it was difficult to say who the accused was, and who the defendant.

"Look at her, the shameless girl! Shouldn’t she have been ashamed of roaming about openly in this fashion with someone? That too, on the strength of a piddly University job? And lo! Look at him! Shouldn’t he even show basic concern about the person on the opposite side? How uncaring." When I asked several unrelated questions in a crisscross fashion, I could unearth pertinent but disjointed clues. That Seshadri was a man of management. That he had no connect, whatsoever, with history. God alone knows how they had met. But now he made several trips to Ahmedabad, ostensibly on work. He must be a good catch. Our one, that girl is fairly pretty too.

And if both are happy, and the families have no objection...The judge’s final statement placed the blame fairly on the woman’s head. "That one, she’s shrewd, deep, difficult to fathom…"

Grief is an independent, isolated nation.

It has its own sky, its own weather, and the laws and regulations that normalize life outside its boundaries do not govern the inhabitants of this land.

When I stand in that no man’s land with Bapuji I see the wise historian, the authority and the man of letters transform into a mere child in this land. Where have the pride of learning and the distinguished veneer of knowledge gone? All this expertise, all this wisdom about humankind, the individual, the universality of nature, the pervasiveness of human emotions…why did all this not help him in his own case? I used to firmly believe that a learned man, an authority stays aloof from sorrow and grief; he stands beyond the pale of mundane human emotions.

A wife’s untimely death, a son lost in the prime of youth…but so what? After thirteen days of quiet, he returns to his realm of books, his domain, and says firmly, without this sustenance, there is no go, for life has to go on.

But Bapuji could not do this.

He could not lose himself on some meandering path related to his subject, and follow where the trail would lead, step after step in uncharted land. The very words that once raced like a horde of gleeful schoolchildren were vanquished and bloody, defeated.

The requests and pleading from his publishers in Delhi continued but work on the prestigious 3rd volume of history was at a standstill.

Time was frozen. All I can see is a picture of a man cut off from time. Regardless of how long that time span must have been in reality, in my memory it has become dense, like a condensate. With a pen in hand, a skeletal structure sits at a desk, listless and vacant eyed, hour after hour. And moves as limply to the adjoining balcony.

Ba would say, slowly, "Go up, see what he is doing..."

And quiet footed I would creep up the flight of stairs, hide behind the curtains and keep watch.

I couldn’t see, but I could hear a subdued, broken wail

How could I go downstairs and report this to Ba, and which language should I pick the words from, to tell her that my father was weeping?

Ba was his better half, his wife. She had wed a distinguished and proud man of letters and she had supported his brilliance. Even in these circumstances, she could not bear to see him broken, lost, a shadow of his previous self.

One evening as he was seated in the dark gloom, she spoke to him.

"Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? This behavior, shedding tears in the dark- this doesn’t befit you! Someone doesn’t care for us, doesn’t quite give a damn, and we sit here, broken, lost, in pain. If nothing else, don’t you have any self-respect left?"

If a picture of an old man bereft, dead and frozen in his sorrow marked our home, at the other end, time was prancing in all its extravagance, finery.

Although Ba did not completely understand the words “Simple wedding” she struggled hard to translate these words, unravel them.

A simple wedding means only a few invitees. Immediate relatives and close associates. We can’t comment on this, or choose to be happy or hurt that we were not invited.

I was after all an intrinsic part of this household, brought up and weaned on its breath. This brutal attack left me dizzy, disjointed, and unable to see reason.

Pointing to the floor above, I asked, "Does he know?"

"Do matters like these remain a secret? He’s known for long."

The next evening, unannounced, the newly weds arrived at our threshold. I had opened the door, and I stood still at the spectacle on my doorstep.

The newly weds had come to seek blessings from their elders.

The bride? Well she seemed taller than usual, in a heavy silk sari and was reflecting such dazzling brilliance that one would have to shade eyes from the glare. Was marriage a parasmani? Just a fleeting touch bestowed shining radiance?

Ba beckoned "O! Do step down! See who’s here!"

That evening was an exam, and one that all of us passed with distinction.

Bapuji stepped down swiftly, he did not seek extra time to reconcile, cover up or splash the make up of laughter on his face.

No one and not certainly Mr Seshadri caught any inkling of the prevailing undercurrents of sorrow and pain.

No gaps or awkward silences marred the conversation; no dialogues with two shades of meaning were uttered.

I did not possess a camera, or else some moments deserved to be preserved for posterity, framed and displayed on the wide skies.

On her arrival Anuradha stepped forward to touch Bapuji’s feet for blessings, and her jet black mane, a curtain of black silk touched the great historian’s feet. For a fraction of a moment both were statue-still.

And then Bapuji broke free of the spell and exited that moment.

"Are arre! sukhi thao!"

Then he seated himself next to Seshadri and the talk pranced past diverse topics like national associations, design, french films. On each of these topics Bapuji held revolutionary, long cherished opinions, but that evening he agreed with everything that Seshadri said. He would not fault courtesy, not fall amiss of the norms of give and take characteristic of worldly interactions. Retrieving a wrapped sari from its hiding place in some cupboard, he blessed them, "Be happy, what else should we say?" An envelope was handed over to the prize winner. No rules of propriety were breached, no ritual left undone. A cloud of fluffy happiness gathered everyone in its folds. Since I did not have a role to play in this final act, I stood by a wall, and watched.

When Anuradha swept by with a swish to sit next to Ba, the pallav of her sari touched Bapuji’s cheek. Finally it was my turn to benefit from her grace. I was looking at Bapuji, conscious only of his tone laced with enthusiasm, when the silk whirlwind enshrouded me, and a voice with a gentle fullstop, a hand placed on my head said "Goodbye!"

Long after the couple left, these words rang loud in the air.

"Goodbye goodbye"

"Be happy be happy"

It is not easy to erase the presence of a learned man from a home. One cannot simply dust free and mop away his identity. If nothing else, cupboards, storage attics and corners occupied by the physical manifestations of knowledge –books and volumes- cannot be scoffed at, ignored easily. Sheets of foolscap paper filled diligently in fine writing, getting yellower by the day, but why should foolscap sheets folded at the margins display such anguish?

The doctor said it was a stroke, but given the manner in which he died, sitting emptily in his armchair, this medical term failed to capture this physical assault. A gentle tap, nay a nudge, that too from so far away- for when this happened, the newly weds were ensconced in Dalhousie, partaking of the night.

And in this manner the Trimurti broke apart. Two individuals, who swam deep in the rarified air of the study, now swam in directions that took them far far apart, in differing dimensions of light.

The third person of this triumvirate was left behind, along with the spices in her kitchen.

The task of converting our home to a learning–less, expert-less state, fell on our shoulders. Books were gathered up and sent to school and college libraries. Some were sacrificed in Diwali maha-cleaning, and some were thrown out in lots one after the other, along with used up batteries and long silent transistors.

Ba’s scalp was now completely white.

No one could look at our home and state that here, once upon a time; a man of a different mettle resided, and in this very balcony, in this very chair, an old man broke down and wept like a child.

No one could ever imagine that a woman, accused and held guilty of unstated betrayal and treachery, once spread a cape of jet—black silk in pleading, at someone’s feet.

The past does not exist in my memory as a continual chain. Some events, some instances, some expressions—this is the residual. And these events kaleidoscopically morph of their free will, fragments rearrange to create new shapes, memories. Old memories are not faithful to what actually happened. Of their own fancy they form new stratagems. New plots, and that instance of touching feet seems elongated into eternity.

The woman who bent in submission and beseeched for forgiveness with a cape of black silk does not move past that freeze frame.

And I tell her, get up! Get up, Anuradha, get up and go….

Remembering Gert Jonke (1946 – 2009) by Vincent Kling

2009-07-10T23:36:00.003-04:00

Seven Years of Good Luck

David Foster Wallace and Gert Jonke died a few months apart, at different ages and in different ways, but the grief beyond sadness and the personal impact of the loss in both cases make it clear that something more valuable than even their distinguished writing alone had ceased. As with Wallace, Jonke’s audiences, readers, admirers, and friends are acting six months later as if their compass weren’t working quite so reliably any more, as though they were slightly adrift in a world that needed not just the order and affirmation of their technical virtuosity but their visions of hope and compassion in the teeth of a human isolation rampant consumerism and waste can only intensify. Simply by being the artists and men they were, both Wallace and Jonke revived the old-fashioned ethos of the good writer as a good person advancing good aims.

Readers over forty will recall how John Gardner was ridiculed in the late 1970s for advocating moral fiction, but literature has moved back to the return of the author with its attendant ethical positions and affective appeals, as Vivian Laska observed in an essay accounting for the recent renewal of interest in Stefan Zweig. Far from objecting, then, readers revered Wallace for his efforts, more and more pronounced in his last years, “[. . .] to show readers how to live a fulfilled, meaningful life,” quoting D. T. Max in the New Yorker in March 2009. Good writing, said Wallace, should help readers “‘to become less alone inside,’” and his explicit desire was to “‘write morally passionate, passionately moral fiction,’ as he put it in a 1996 essay on Dostoyevsky.” Dying for the reader sounds like an act of grandiosity or drastic masochism, but it formed a stated movitation for Wallace from which many readers have come away the better.

Jonke followed a zanier path to ethical integrity, depicting with grace and mad humor what his fellow Austrian Hermann Broch once called the “jolly apocalypse” (“die fröhliche Apokalypse”) that accompanied the collapse of Europe from 1914 to 1945 and that’s anything but past and gone in the era of the European Union. Armed attacks on Roma and Sinti, a renewed romance with fascistoid ideologies, demagogic appeals to hatred of foreigners, rampant capitalism as the third wave of totalitarianism – even or especially after the financial crises of the past year – are being confronted seriously and conscientiously throughout Europe, but the Austrian weapon is often deceptively absurd comedy or humor. Parody is alive and well: a rough parallel from the 2008 election in the United States is found in the considerable part Tina Fay played on Saturday Night Live in focusing opposition to Sarah Palin – rough because Jonke was a master at making political points without such direct reference. In one of his last plays, for instance, a character laments that the national assembly has sold all the air space over the country to a monopolistic advertising agency, which will erect huge banners to blot out the sun, moon, stars, the birds in flight, and the wind. Too buffoonishly over the top? Not when people in Vienna recall that the tower of the cathedral and other landmarks were long draped by scaffolding over which advertisements for insurance companies were hung and that one firm has in fact recently been granted exclusive legal rights to all the billboards in the city.

Jonke’s coding this or that specific piece of corruption with droll inventiveness was one part of a broader moral vision grounded in hope. His attitude illustrates a famous proverbial difference between Germans and Austrians; war news from Berlin supposedly often used the phrase, “The situation is serious but not hopeless,” while the broadcasts from Vienna allegedly were summed up with, “The situation is hopeless but not serious.” Joachim Lux wrote when Jonke died this past January, “We have him and his work to thank for the greatest of gifts: the illusion that we can fly, can overcome death and every other adversity,” and a few months earlier, in November 2008, as he conferred the much-coveted Nestroy Prize on Jonke for the third time, Lux had addressed him as an especially deserving laureate, “[. . .] because you go on dreaming the dream of flying. You give us glimpses of a freedom that perhaps may never have existed but that we cannot live without.” Jonke had the full measure of this world, but he loved it anyway and taught us to do the same, as Lux further stated. Memorial tributes by artists like Elfriede Jelinek and Friederike Mayröcker referred to Jonke as a great magician of language, the last-ever Don Quixote, a virtuosic jazz-like improviser, but this true original might have been even more touched by the many memories of him as a kind, modest, and genuinely good man who, like Wallace, was never known to be anything other than gracious and considerate to students, readers, fellow writers, editors, and scholars. A man whose constant advice to the students in his writing classes was that they had to let themselves go crazy was also the sweetest of human beings.

The five short works here are a farewell tribute meant to show various related aspects of Jonke’s art. The writing is a much more enduring monument than anything said about it, but since Jonke is pretty much unknown outside the German-speaking world still (reader, please note: Dalkey Archive Press and Ariadne Press have been publishing him in translation, and there’s an extensive article about him in Review of Contemporary Fiction), some discussion of these pieces might help. With one exception, the “Letter to Hans,” they are taken from the volume of all his plays published in August 2008. The title of that handsome book, Alle Stücke, was meant to be read as meaning all the plays up to that time, but it became sadly, inadvertently prophetic in including all the plays Jonke was ever to write – unless, as appears unlikely, posthumous work shows up.

The letter to his baby son Hans, who died suddenly at age four months, is taken from a book that mingles fiction, autobiography, reminiscences, tributes to friends, and brilliant essays on music. It might be a good place to start for anyone who doubts that the exaggerations of comedy can dwell with and augment understated poignancy. Jonke’s wild fantasy projections are always transforming documentary reality into something rich and strange. He owed a good deal of his fantasy to the Romantic movement, but for its tendency to solipsism, with attendant isolation, he substituted a faith in the ability of the perceptual act to apprehend a real world outside of us, only to ring changes on that world rooted in synesthesia, the displaced perception of one sense through the organs of another, a favorite device of mystical Romanticism for heightening reality by blurring its contours. Dozing with the baby at noon, he hears midday bells that sweep sunlight into the room and wash sleep away from him. Alarmed at the onset of Hans’s seizures, he thinks the ceiling is casting mortar down on him and frowning at him in hatred. It isn’t that the tenderness and the sorrow emerge despite the disconcerting jumble of mixed sense impressions but because of it. Everywhere in Jonke, streetcar tracks get fed up with immobility and leap into the air, statues take it upon themselves to stride back to the quarries from which their stone came, buildings expand or contract by whole floors depending on their mood. Reality as we live it is much deeper and richer, even when it hurts, as in the baby’s passing, than conventionally ordered perceptions can account for.

Ordered perceptions are a sometime thing anyway. “Hyperbole 1,” from a series of snapshots or vignettes in drama form called Insektarium, is one of several studies by Jonke showing the social origins of perception and memory. That process forms the basis of his Geometric Regional Novel. If the difference between how the human eye and the insect eye perceive their surroundings is a marvel of nature, it might be even more miraculous to ponder how different the outside world can appear to any two human observers. The man and the woman are watching the same circus performance but placing opposite meanings on the same phenomena. Even as the show is taking place, not after it, the observers are “distorting” reality by negotiating an understanding of what they’re seeing and then storing those “distortions” in their memory. Almost all the famous investigations of recovered memory (Elizabeth Loftus, “Remembering Dangeously”; Maryanne Garry, “A Few Seemingly Harmless Routes to a False Memory”; or the classic David Rapaport, “Organization and Pathology of Thought”) make exactly the point that emotion plays a major part in shaping memory, especially the desire to accommodate what others are suggesting is the reality they see. Jonke shows us that process from a you-are-there standpoint, intuiting through art what psychologists ascertain through research (as Freud once wrote to Schnitzler about their pursuits). There’s no harm done in the Jonke piece, unlike some of the more sensational real-life cases of people’s lives being destroyed through false memories, but the volatility and uncertainty of the memory being formed even as the action forming it is still occurring, the very factual basis of the memory being transformed by commenting on it, give this two-minute playlet its dynamic.

Preserving or fortifying memory is also a theme of “The Projector,” a piece holding more than its brevity would seem to make possible. It was most recently published as the preface to Jonke’s last play, Freier Fall (Free Fall). The sci-fi, fantasy premise of erasing memory of a film by showing it backwards seems a comical variation on popular stories and films about “brainwashing,”so we have here a kind of domestic, trivial Manchurian Candidate in clowning mode, except that the migraine-inducing hollows where the memories were call to mind all too effectively the paralysis, grief, and bewilderment recorded by children of Holocaust victims who are partly or fully deprived by traumatized relatives of memory or even basic information. “The Projector” is thus a shorter, funnier, but not less powerful version of stories like George Perec’s W or The Memory of Childhood, Doron Rabinovici’s The Search for M., or W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, right down to the realization that restoring memory, or being provided one in the first place, starts the process of resolution almost regardless of how dreadful the events were. Not knowing what one intuits is worse, because the horror is present in sublimated but damaging form, unavailable for processing. The spotless mind does not experience eternal sunshine, to cite another film about memory, for it isn’t spotless; its blankness is already a taint. Nor is the conferring or denying of memory unconnected here with rewarding or punishing consumer behavior; the owner of the movie theater reserves the right to make the audience happy or miserable based purely on payment, so the tensions of capitalist structures, always present in Jonke and always reduced to their logical absurdities, make up another theme. Finally, “The Projector” encompasses a subtlely found often in Jonke, one that places the reliability of narration into further playful but searching doubt. The piece begins as a personal recollection, a realistically documented memory vouched for as accurate by the presence of the narrator at the events he’s describing. “I was there; I saw this with my own eyes” is the tone and stance of the first part, but just when we’ve settled into taking the narrator’s account fully for granted – if we ever called it into question to begin with – we stumble over the qualifier “They say” toward the end, so the unshakable eyewitness quality of the account turns out to be perhaps not quite so certain after all. Again, Geometric Regional Novel, published by Dalkey Archive, is a book-length study in the relativity of perception and memory, as participants in various actions are never quite able to pin down whether they were in fact present, or just heard about the events, or read an account of them in a book, or all or none of the above.

Male-female conflict doesn’t end quite so harmoniously in “Praying Mantis” as in “Hyperbole 1,” likewise from Insektarium. Jonke wouldn’t be a good citizen of Freud country if he weren’t keenly aware of the battle of the sexes or, more generally, of the roots of all social interaction in more or less sublimated hostility. And if a smile, accompanied by a thin veneer of courtesy, can both mitigate and advance the aggression growing out of the hosility, all the more validly is the experience captured in art. Jonke never worried about being politically correct, but he was too much a realist in his fantasy not to give equal opportunity to the primal fury of devouring rapacity through the need for dominance. Nature books and TV shows tell us that it’s always the female praying mantis who bites the head off the male – after sex, by the way – but “Praying Mantis” (and the word itself if feminine in German – “Gottesanbeterin”) makes it purposely, skillfully unclear which partner is attacking the other, for the instinct to devour is not a confined to one gender, at least not once we reach a certain level of biological organization. Jonke exploits the discrepancy between a relatively “primitive” organic structure and an all-too-sophisticated psychological makeup. What emerges is an encounter as formally polite as a conventionalized “limits-respecting” S-M negotiation guaranteeing a pleasurable encounter. After all, Jonke came from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch territory as well.

In his last few years, “Leavetaking” became Jonke’s much-anticipated signature piece. Like so much of his work, it has appeared in different contexts and configurations, last seen as another vignette in Insektarium, but Jonke had long since made it a practice to end his energetic, madcap readings with some improvisation on the published text, changing it up like a fine jazz musician on the spur of the moment, the audience, and the mood. Klaus Amann was the host at a reading Jonke did in November 2008 at the Musil House in Klagenfurt. It was his last appearance ever, and Amann reminisced with me at a conference in Linz in early June 2009. Much marked by the pancreatic cancer that took him mercifully fast, Jonke glowed with happiness at once more, to the audience’s joy, closing with “Leavetaking,” adding even more outrageous contrasts of phony cordiality and control needs. The pompous, bloated rhetoric, the fake, manipulative warmth, the wallowing in cliché, overstatement, and compulsive repetition work brilliantly to create a portrait of smarmy monstrosity and the self-satisfied insanity of loving humanity but hating humans. It would be hard to imagine any way of abusing of language by people seeking power through crass, demagogically motivated camaraderie – from the “down-to-earth” CEO to the nicknamed politician in shirt sleeves, from the “understanding” teacher to the falsely “open” social worker, from the reactionary “graciously condescending” to the lower orders to the smiling liberal who’s good friends with all the downtrodden – that isn’t skewered by Jonke’s brilliant exploitation of the discrepancies between the rhetoric and the reality. And when the reciter or speaker of “Leavetaking” is a good performer – Jonke himself knew how to put on a show – then the growing nastiness, the sneaking insistence, the increasing shrillness and tightness of the voice make the whole conflict in the speaker unforgettably urgent, all the more when the whole series of donts and prohibitions and threats gives way to the revolting oiliness of happiness at the next gathering. The speaker is disgusting and frightening, but not more so, as exaggerated to transparent insanity here, than many a demagogue only a shade more subtle.

I met Jonke in Vienna in 2002, after I’d agreed to edit a casebook of essays about him. As if in a story by him, he got onto a bus I was on just as I was trying to figure out how I could meet him. The rest was history, a seven-year history of admiration, respect, and joy at the work it has been my privilege to translate and that has deepened my understanding of what literature is. That joy was only increased as I got to know Jonke the man as well and found in him a gentleness and a gentlemanliness anyone would benefit from emulating, a complete refusal to indulge the gossip and buzz of literary show-biz, a generous, open demeanor toward everyone, an emotional discipline that spoke only positives, and a spiritual alertness that saw the bad but prized the good, calling this broken world to heal itself through the repentance of laughter and comedy. The man is gone, but the work endures, and many of us are very grateful for both.

Letter to Hans

You probably don’t remember much about when you went away, took “French leave,” as they call it. Who could have even explained to you then, in any way that would have fit inside your head, that you’re really not supposed to do it like that? Besides, it wouldn’t have been worth asking about, and the question wouldn’t have deserved an answer, if you had reached the age where you could have slowly learned to read these few belated lines, the first and last ones ever addressed to you; be happy, though, that the people who know everything and have all the answers never got you into their clutches and started trying to get you to answer questions you would find completely incomprehensible – not because these people were looking forward to your answers with burning anticipation but only because they were demanding you should be burned – burned up or burned out – by their highly drilled activity of rote memorization and constant repetition, parroting material in every one of their mandatory school subjects for endless hours and weeks until all the imagination is burned out of children’s heads. You were spared that, anyway, along with everything inevitably following from it, when you were four months old and began moving away from us, something all of us around you at first very steadfastly tried to prevent. And oh yes, it was a true liftoff of your little body, good and slow – not from the floor, no, not from the ground, but directly away from me; the time was noon, because I remember the bells being shaken through the window into the room by the sun at the height of summer and their washing the remains of the drowsy morning from my temples; I remember the hollows behind the walls of my sinuses suddenly being rinsed clear so that my skull bolted upright into the midst of the hollow room, from the highest corners of which the walls began flinging down on me a glittering, moist storm of mortar with all the crumbling ridicule of its wallpaper tatters loosened by laughter; that was when I first saw how you had lifted yourself off me and were trying to get completely away from me. You had slept next to me all morning, on me, really, lying on my chest, which you liked; you always did like it, except that day – apparently not any more, at least not that day, anyway, and then all I saw was how you had lifted yourself quite far off me by now, how you’d raised yourself really high and had drifted up, the distance growing and growing until your little body had practically soared up to the ceiling, fled away as if dissolving into the air of the room, become as good as “transparent,” though I succeeded at the very last minute, seemingly at least, in bringing you back down, getting hold of you again, intercepting you in flight, retrieving you, and so then I had you again and was holding you fast before you could slip away completely – no wonder, either, for the storm that had broken loose in the room had probably frightened you very much, and the whole room still had a totally frowning, wrinkled, furrowed, creased, beetle-browed, furiously enraged-looking ceiling! Anyone would become afraid! Still, I had been able to get you back at the last minute and hold you fast, as I said, and so it seemed things were turning out at least halfway right in the end. But then when I tried to wake you, your head started falling back and kept on just hanging down – for such a long time; it’s still going on today – even though I was trying to feed you some warm broth so you’d gain strength. Things kept on like this for some time, though, and that’s when I got scared. I called a taxi and dashed off with you to the nearest hospital, where I asked them to take us both into their care. The only thing they knew to do was to wrap you up in a tangle of tubes, because they thought you must be cold. Or did they want you confined in a labyrinth like that because they were thinking they could resolutely prevent your going away, your lifting off from the globe in this way? Dear Hans! It’s already frightening enough to see an adult locked inside one of those heart-lung machines, but when it’s an infant – I only hope you didn’t even notice what was happening, and I’m assuming that in the course of the thunderstorm inside the room earlier a couple of lightning bolts hit you hard enough that you never felt a thing after that. Later on they requested me to bring some decent clothes for you, and when I gave the morgue official the overalls you’d embellished a few weeks before with a huge strawberry stain, his deeply reproachful look – it stayed with me for a long time – held a strong reprimand after the fact for your untidy manners . . .

Later, at the grave, a very sweet, very aged clergyman said I shouldn’t be too sad about your untimely disappearance, because in all probably you hadn’t really and truly disappeared at all. For the fact was that in times to come, in future days and years, you would be with me, even though I wouldn’t be able to notice it very clearly – and, he went on, the way I’d see that you were with me is in how you would sometimes help my eyes to go flying very swiftly out of my head like a pair of darting wrens, circling the globe once and then telling me all about the world in great detail without my having to take the trip myself. And how nothing bad would happen to my eyebirds on their travels; they wouldn’t go and drown in the very first waterfall of light they came to, if maybe you’d look after them, keep an eye on them a little so they’d come back safe and sound and able to give dependable reports on all the latest going on in the world; you’d see to it and you’d help in many other ways as well – is this what he meant, that aged clergyman? Anyway, you can believe me when I tell you my eyesight has grown much sharper since then. Because I trust my eyes more and more since then, entrust more and more to them, so that their absence from my head is more frequent. Even so, I’m not anywhere nearly as blind as I was then, because the memories of the stories my eyes tell during their moments of absence convey so keen a sense of things to me that I can never again allow this globe, this earth of ours, simply to drift into forgetfulness.

Thank you so much for everything.

Hyperbole 1

He and She are sitting as if on raised audience benches and looking out into the auditorium, as if they were watching a circus performance.

He: Now comes the standard tightrope walk. I don’t envy the man doing it.

She: He’s already reached the middle of the rope. How daring! It’s amazing that some eyes are tossing blank looks of contempt right between his legs to make him stumble and falter. But he’s defending himself tooth and nail, or arm and leg anyway; he’s making every effort to thrust away the air behind him like a mule kicking backwards.

He: No he’s not, he’s giving a sign, a forceful slipping and sliding backwards with both his heels; he’d doing it on purpose to give his assistant down below a very specific sign. Do you understand?

She: Yes, because this sign results in both rope walkers’ freeing themselves altogether unexpectedly, suddenly, and simulaneously, so that the rope, even without being attached, nonetheless hangs in air like a straight line that can bear the weight of the one artist still traversing it, like a horizontal pole, without his plunging to the ground at once.

He: Now the rope has turned into a gigantic snake and is wrapping itself around the artist’s body, preparing to squeeze him to death.

She: No, you’re mistaken. Don’t you see that the rope is wrapping itself in a loving embrace around the body of the dancer in air and trying to protect him, to help cushion his body from the plunge down to the ring, no doubt left filthy on purpose, that’s now about to take place; do you see?

He: You’re right. I bet he won’t even mess up his hair.

She: But where’s the artist now? He probably wanted to do nothing but just slip away with his failure.

He: No, no, this is something different now. This next act is what’s known as the “escape number.”

She: It looks now as if he’s trying with all his heart to work free of his entanglement in that cumbersome, gigantic mass of colossally piled-up, coiled ship-towing cable. And in fact, he’s becoming more and more visible all the time, as if he were an emerging pupa. But no, not quite yet, but still you can see him, yes, there he is; maybe he’s being just a little too brash now, simply popping out that way right in front of our eyes so he can complete his transformation within full sight of us, just like that.

He: Yes, exactly like a sphinx moth coming out of its cocoon, isn’t he?

She: The audience doesn’t know what to think. No real tightrope walking, no dancing in air. Not even a botched act or an injured artist. The audience is finding this escape number pretty feeble, even if it is placed on purpose under the guise of a botched tightrope walk, because he wasn’t even the one who untied the knots.

He: There he is, the artist. Listen to the ovations! He’s simply allowing all the laughter to enter the arena of his face and then to exit, and then bowing once more, then exiting again and making another entrance and radiantly bowing to the audience. If we weren’t to tear ourselves away, if we were to keep looking on to this laughter he’s conjuring up so artfully, well, for the next few hours or maybe even all night or for days and days after this we’d . . .

She: But isn’t that why we came here in the first place?

He: Yes, of course. And now all of a sudden the audience is really thrilled and is starting to go berserk. And even if you’d never in your life seen all these smiles before, you’d think right away you were seeing them again and are being recognized on a personal basis. Fantastic! Amazing.

She: Come on. Let’s go down to see the artist and request his autograph. Then maybe we can bask in his smile from close up. Like a little sun. Come quick.

The Projector

I was just about thirteen or fourteen when I first started wanting to go to the movies on a regular basis. That wasn’t easy, because either I didn’t have the money to buy a ticket or the film was prohibited for young people.

The owner of the movie theater had a certain quirk – he couldn’t stand it when somebody would sneak into the theater behind his back without paying.

After the main feature started, he would vanish from the theater into the lobby, to the ticket seller’s glass booth, so he could compare the number of people sitting in the audience with the number of tickets sold. For the rest of the show he would take a seat up in the projection room behind the projectionist, who would be standing next to the projector.

It sometimes happened, when the movie was over, that the projectionist would immediately rewind the rolls of film, this reverse motion replaying the whole film within a few seconds at an immensely speeded up rate and creating an ear-splitting racket from the dirty, flickering screen. Everybody would then feel gloomy and empty, as if they hadn’t even been to the movies in the first place.

This happened because the projectionist had somehow found a way, while rewinding the rolls of film, not only to play them in reverse at that insanely rapid pace, but also, as aided by the projector now running the movie backwards in full length on the screen, to edit out the entire film from the minds of the audience that had just finished watching it, to draw it right back out of their brains completely, and in the minds of the audience, which should have been occupied by the memory of the film that had ended just a moment before, there opened up instead a migraine-inducing cavern. All because someone hadn’t paid, and this was the theater owner’s revenge, his way of taking it out on everybody.

They say that almost always, however, the guilty party – or someone else in his stead, someone who hadn’t done anything wrong – would then voluntarily step up and offer to pay, even after the damage was done, whereupon the owner would cheerfully request the audience to resume their seats and the projectionist to show the entire film at full length once more, from beginning to end, but in that insanely rapid span of only a few seconds, thereby propelling it back into the people’s heads.

They would then go home, or to the coffee house next door, or to a bar – whatever they ordinarily did – very much happier than usual, as if they’d seen an especially fine film. And it made no difference whether they’d just seen the worst trash ever or a really wonderful movie.

The Praying Mantis

As He and She draw closer, either He with His mandibles, or She with Hers, both at the same time or one after the other, lunges at the other’s neck, wrenching the other’s head up and back, toward the sky, or at least in that general direction, either simultaneously or in succession or several times or only once, thereby practically choking off the following sentences.

She or He (to Him or Her): I’m so sorry, but just now I have to bite your head off, you know, but don’t be afraid, because it won’t hurt a bit, so please just hold still now!

He or She (to Her or Him): Yes, you’re absolutely right, because I do notice that right now my head is being bitten off by you – but it’s so exciting and wonderful, and I can tell it will now and forevermore, as time goes by, remain everpresent as the most wonderful event I will ever have experienced.

Leavetaking

Farewell Speaker: Now before we arrive at the point of general dispersal, I would very much like to convey to all of you, to each and every one of you, that is, meaning all and sundry without exception, my express admiration at how you all – “all” referring to an entirety, a collective entity – have borne with me for so long, right up to this present moment, that is. You see, I ordinarily, which is to say as a general rule, can’t bear with anyone for very long, certainly not as long as you, each and every one of you, have borne with me. In the place of any and all of you I would normally have long since been up and gone by now. In the place of any or all of you, I would normally not even have turned up here to begin with, in fact, all the more not had I known that I were to be in any way involved in any of the present proceedings. But while sharing this time together amongst or amidst – that is simply to say with – each and every one of you, I have felt so very happy as to be entirely unable to tell you, at least not at this point, the last time I felt so happy being together with anyone – whether it be one person or several people, or animals, vegetables, or minerals – as I now feel with you.

It strikes me as totally absurd that you and I – you as a communal or collective entity, encompassing all and sundry – should have gathered together for the first time only today and hence not have made one another’s acquaintance until just now.

It quite simply surpasses my powers of comprehension that I should never have gathered together with you, all and sundry considered collectively, at any point in time before today’s date, as of which moment – the present one, of course – we are indeed and in fact gathered together, “we” meaning I with you, aggregately and collectively! It’s my stated belief that we – you as a collective aggregation and I – would have had no need to gather together for any such thing as a “first time” with a view toward establishing mutual acquaintance.

As of now, however, we’ve been sitting together for quite a long while.

We really must meet again soon.

For the time being, let’s say that we, taken all together – you in the collective or aggregate and I – will meet once every two weeks. All of you together with me. My hearing is very sharp, incidentally, and it’s telling me now that there is no desire you – meaning each and every one of you – harbor more keenly than to meet and gather together with me.

Let’s say once a week at the tavern here, where your association convenes, and why not right away next week, as I’ve said, whereupon, having proposed which, I would like now to extend an invitation for you all to come – for each and every one of you, that is – to come visit me at home. Please come and enjoy my hospitality, but you all need to come, all and sundry, without exception, and everyone please needs to be on time!

Only if all of you, excluding not one single soul, shall have assembled not only on time but all together, as a complete contingent, without one single person being absent, as you have done today in this hall, would I be in a position to put in my own appearance, as I have done today, so that all of us, you and I considered as a collective and aggregate assemblage, might meet once again.

And when you come to visit me in my penthouse apartment, to which, as I’ve said, I am herewith inviting you, aggregately and in your full number, to gather together on my roof terrace – on which there is more or less room for just about as many people as you are when all present and accounted for in full contingent without anyone falling over the edge, or at least not very often – when you come to visit me, at any rate, all and sundry fully assembled, I must insist that you all arrive at the same time, all together as a full contingent. If you should wish to come visit me and should not be able to come as a numerically complete contingent, I simply will not be able to admit you. You can also at any time, whenever you wish, come to pay me a visit on the terrace of my penthouse, and you needn’t give any notice in advance; feel free to come at any hour of the day or night, at four in the morning or any other time, as far as I’m concerned, but only under the proviso that you all arrive and present yourselves, collectively and aggregately assembled, all present and accounted for, as a full contingent.

For that matter, moreover, we can gather together at any time or any place, in any location anywhere, for as long as you like, and all of you – each and every one, all and sundry – and myself, could stay together throughout the complete span of the remainder of our lives, anywhere at all, if you taken all together and I should happen to want it that way, but then only if you are always all together in your entirety. For if even one of you is absent, then we – you and I considered as an aggregation – would simply no longer be what we now are.

My wish, then, is always and ever to engage with all of you only as a corporate, collective entity and aggregate assemblage.

All of you – meaning each and every one, all and sundry, said collective entity – are most heartily and cordially welcome to come visit me at any time, always and everyone, but there is at no time ever to be any engaging with any single one of you separately, as an individual.

For various reasons I simply cannot do that.

In addition, I would not recognize or acknowledge any single, individual one of you by yourselves, as a distinct and separate entity, should I happen to encounter you on the street, and why indeed should I, since I know you all as a complete assemblage, not on any isolated, single, separate, individual basis.

Accordingly, I take no interest whatever in any individual one of you viewed as a single or separate entity, meaning that I am altogether indifferent to any or each one of you considered singly or individually, which is, furthermore, how it must be.

Only if all of you, the collective entity or assembled communality, should happen to encounter me on the street would I be able to acknowledge you. All of you together, in your entirety, the aggregate assemblage, you understand. That should be clear, I think. Were any individual one of you to come visit me alone, singly, on an isolated or separate basis, I would be entirely unable to place you, the individual, single visitor, into anything even approaching the context of “us,” meaning the aggregate assemblage of the collective, communal entity. You do understand me, I hope?

After all, I have always understood all of you perfectly well, even though not a single one of you has ever uttered one single word.

Accordingly, I would therefore advise every single one of you not to turn up under any circumstances on a separate or individual basis at my place of residence. I would have to slam the door right in the face of any stranger, which is of course what you would be, or would have to have such a person thrown out like a panhandler or peddler before a single word could be uttered. I also feel constrained to recommend to each and every one of you that no individual, separately or in isolation, make any solitary effort, in any manner, shape, or form, even to think of growing argumentative or pugnacious with me.

I simply cannot allow rumors to begin spreading to the effect that I at any time ever went cow-tipping with any individual one of you as a solitary or separate entity. I would not at all mind, on the other hand, if rumors were to be bruited abroad that it’s long been my practice to go cow-tipping with all of you as an aggregate or collective assemblage, whether occasionally or fairly often, or very often, or even constantly, for that matter, provided rumor has it that I’ve been doing it with all and sundry, communally; nay, I would even relish the spread of a rumor – so what if just as a matter of idle gossip or on the basis of common hearsay? – to the effect that I have never preferred to do anything more with all of you as an aggregate communality, that I indeed have never in fact done anything other than engage with all of you taken together and collectively in the activity of cow-tipping.

All of you together, the whole aggregation, and myself.

I’m prepared at any time to do anything whatsoever for you all as a collective entity, a group taken together, whereas for any single or individual one of you in isolation I would quite unable even to lift my little finger.

So now we can begin meeting fairly often and on a regular basis.

We’ll proceed from gathering once every two weeks to gathering once a week.

Then we’ll start meeting several times a week.

And every now and then perhaps even every day.

Sometimes here, sometimes there, sometimes here where you all are now, all and sundry in full aggregate assemblage and sometimes up on the terrace in my penthouse. I know we’re all looking forward to it a great deal.

"The Neighbors" by Pravinsinh Chavda, translated by Mira Desai

2009-06-24T16:22:00.003-04:00

Note: This is the second of three Pravinsinh Chavda stories Mira Desai has been kind enough to send our way. To read the first one, "Instantly" and/or Mira's introduction, click here.

The Neighbors

Both families lived in similar, adjacent houses, but Kanchanben believed that the similarity was forced by circumstance. She, for one, had climbed down several flights at the large bungalow near the polytechnic to reach this two-bedroom tenement. While they had probably vacated a nameless chawl or a tiny, single-room dwelling in the area across the river to reach this humble rowhouse, climbing up not merely a step or two, but several floors in the process. The first few days passed in a daze-as if after a serious accident- but later they began to revel in their circumstances after a fashion. New surroundings and new people seemed to bring the same kind of delight as reading a book with a different literary style. She’d drag Isha from whatever she was reading, and place her before the kitchen window. See! The appearance of a guest retinue at that house nearby. Watch quietly. A couple riding double-seat on a cycle, but just see their enthusiasm! That woman’s worn her saree in the marwari style. Ok! Now here’s an exam. Without asking anyone, just by observation, decode which of the camel’s eyes is missing?

These brief moments of hilarity were not limited to that family alone. She had become happy-go-lucky; every night she’d recount the day’s tales and make Isha laugh. She’d get off the bus and take a dusty route through the fields, wiping a trickle of sweat, and watching this, some village woman standing by the fields would smile and say, “Lo, the lady is drenched without a drop of rain”. Far from the city, small houses had been arranged in a grid amidst fields- but in the way that even a paper tree implanted in the ground bears root, a few essential services had cropped up. At the corner where the housing society began, a tea stall and panwallah had surfaced, and some vest- clad men could be found there, all hours of the day. Right from dawn, guttural sounds like that of the buffalo family could be heard. Every afternoon, when hawkers would drop by to sell fifty-paise or a rupee worth of red-yellow ice fruit, doors and windows would quickly open and unkempt women dressed in a blouse-skirt attire would rush out to relish this modern fruit. The bangle seller, the balloon seller- each had their schedules. Kanchanben would gravely explain the economics of these, and also explain the meaning of candy floss. Everything is in a state of transition in this country. The wheels of fortune surely turn, but here they turn with a little more energy. See that? That old man is seated on the porch outside his son’s tiny bungalow, but in the same way that he’d sit outside his mud home in the village, dhoti clad, languidly drawing upon a hookah. The son may, for all we know, now be a conductor or a section clerk in the municipality-is that a small feat? He must be a man of some measure in the village; looked up to in the community. That’s perhaps why that proud white turban worn with a flourish, adorns his head.
His wife- she must be pushing seventy! Yet she draws a respectful half-veil before her man. Her name must be Samthaben or Chanchalben. No third choice.

It was a time of freedom. She had reached this spot free of encumbrances, completely light. If we don’t laugh, don’t you know what’ll happen, o’ lass? When she’d feel particularly affectionate, she’d desert civilized language and use this word. So laugh, for you must! Let me tempt you with fresh reasons for laughter. For instance, just consider our next door neighbors. Based on whatever we spy from this window- tail, trunk or pillar-like feet- guess the animal’s shape, its nature and state of mind. You say you’ve studied deductive logic, now solve this simple puzzle-outside a home stands a Fiat circa 1962, neither can it babble nor can it hobble, what do the eyes of the lady of the house look like?
Isha would chip in with the expected reply-like a cat’s!
“Bravo!”

Every time the girl would be tempted to turn and look back, she’d lift her away with a surge of such tales. The girl was good. She wouldn’t speak about certain events. She had once stood on a chair to affix her father’s portrait on the wall, but had not waited there to weep. Sometimes in a state of stupor this wisdom would slip, and she’d remind her mother of some instance, quite unaware of the blow that she delivered. She couldn’t, for instance, get over the lemon tree in the old bungalow. It was her favorite study spot, and everything that she read there, would be magically retained. When they shifted, they’d deserted a cat and her brood of kittens. It was a precarious balance-the works of Robert Frost at one end of the fulcrum, hapless kittens at the other. Her daughter’s penchant for corners to inhabit and nest in, often tired her out. And so she’d sometimes say, even though this was somewhat exaggerated; in our days a girl your age would be a mother of four children. She’d be way too busy with her own brood to be concerned over a litter of kittens!

The kitchens of the two homes stood opposite each other. She’d pull the lines that were visible from her window, and gently tie a few knots. Until now, a total of four characters had cropped up in this television serial. There was a man and a woman, and for ease of characterization one would only have to assume that she was his wife, because her behavior was free of any wife-like devotion. Clad in a pajama and vest, the man always seemed to be pleading, or so it seemed. Would you term the woman overbearing or imposing? Think about it and give me a reply. She must have learnt to wear her hair open from those TV serials. There is a third actor- a girl of about 18- I’ll leave that one to you. Some day if you feel like playing with her, climb the compound wall and whistle to the pet. That girl seems to have inherited her façade of beauty from her mother, and everything else from her father. Whether or not she has a tongue- there is no evidence of this or the contrary. The director hasn’t allotted her any lines to speak. Whenever one spots her, she is cutting vegetables, filling water or at the clothesline.

Then she’d lower her lower her voice and say, you can’t build a play on these characters alone. There must be a fourth character in this play act. I can hear the growl of an ogre, stomping in anger, “I smell a man, I shall eat him”.

One fine day an arm reached out across the wall. Do you happen to have a lemon to spare? Kanchanben said, “Why only one lemon, help yourself to the entire grove!”.

Then the two hands played about the lemons in interesting gestures. “My sister-in-law’s husband is visiting us. He’s in the diamond trade in Navsari.” With a grimace she continued, “Our practice of gifting and largesse for sisters and daughters is never ending. We just don’t seem to be done with it! Here the quality of the water is good. I’ve just washed my hair. You, ben, teach at an English school? I had to leave school after SSC, else like you, wouldn’t I be working too? If at all you need anything, just call out. Jeera, honey, saunf- we get supplies of all of these from the village. If you’ve not stocked jeera already, shall I send across a kilo? Viraj has been telling me for long- Mummy, talk to Aunty. Mummy, introduce me to Didi, can I go and study with her? I told her, of course you can go, why not? Just to ask-if one starts a beauty parlor here, how do you think it would do? You know how it is with me. Viraj goes to college. Her father goes to the office, and Bapuji has his temple and visits to religious shrines.”

Kanchanben interrupted this tirade, “I liked the girl’s name a lot. And yours?”

“Kashmira! But her father’s name tips the balance- Chaturdas!”

Kanchanben repressed a smile and changed the topic. “What’s wrong with that name? It’s just the way you said it, that made me smile. Since you’re so beautiful and fair, it is right that your name is Kashmira, but my brother must truly be sharp to have spirited you away.”

That evening she expressed her disquiet to her daughter. “Lips, eyes, the tone, there is a great deal that is captivating about her, but that fellow Chaturchand is a simpleton- which is why the accounts don’t quite tally.”
“Ma, which accounts are you trying to balance out?”

They were exiles from their homeland and were forced to seek refuge here, but Kanchanben was clear on policy. We are different from these people. We have a higher standard of education. Our values are different. She’d forcibly light a lamp to the Gods. She’d perform rituals, and fill up the home with the fragrance of dhoop and incense. On the doorplate outside the home, large letters stood out-MA B.Ed. She’d laugh and comment. Even ghosts and dervishes would be scared if they read these. They’d not dare step in this direction. An English newspaper was an indulgence on that budget, yet it had been accommodated, and she’d hold the paper aloft and read it on the porch. There were a few books in the house, yet these had been carefully arranged so that they’d be seen from the road. There were curtains at the window, but these were not ironclad, so sometimes it was difficult to keep score, and sometimes on a holiday afternoon, a group of women would sweep in, saying, “Today we decided to have tea with you”. Like a priest officiating at a ceremony, Mummy would look very pleased with herself. This was something that Isha could see. Not far from this was another land, but that secret chamber would never be opened in the girl’s presence. Sometimes when she’d take a break from reading perhaps past one or two in the night, and come downstairs for a drink of water, she’d find the bed empty and her mother sitting on the dark porch. Isha would see this from the grill door and tiptoe away. She’d return thirsty, afraid of the interruption the clattering vessels would make.

She didn’t have to summon with a gesture. The little kitten crept over the kitchen wall one afternoon of her own accord. They fussed over her as if she were something to be wondered at. Isha stood in the center of the room, touching the statue-like girl. Mummy just look at her hair! Just look at her skin! She doesn’t speak at all. Does she have a tongue? See here! Look up- this way! When she looked up, large blue eyes could be seen. The mother and daughter duo were laughing, but at some stage their smiles slipped away. The girl was dripping with something, as if she’d just jumped out of the shelter of a pond and was standing all alone amidst the elements of nature. She stood still, not even moving her eyelashes. She had to be led to the sofa and made to sit. To explore whether or not she indeed possessed a tongue, very cleverly, insignificant questions were asked, in reply to which she made slight eye movements. C’mon say something, she was cajoled, and after a great deal of such wheedling, sounds like hmm and mmm emerged, fashioned with lips and throat.

After a few days Kanchanben was forced to announce, “Kashmiraben, we’ll have to bring down the wall! She springs across with a hoop ten times a day, and if she breaks a leg you’ll find fault and pick a fight.”

“I’m going to study with Ishaben,” she says, and rushes here. I tell her, “Go! If one sits with good people, one learns good things and picks up good values.”

Viraj would get into a bus everyday and go to study commerce in a college in some winding lane in the city. She didn’t know how to ride a cycle. She’d be surrounded by a gaggle of aunts and escorted to maybe a movie or two a year. Isha was doing her MA at the University. On her face, along with humor-lines, sometimes a line or two of sorrow would spring up, her eyes were always moist. In the home that she lived in, there were more rooms than could be physically counted or seen, and in these, she walked about, all alone. When she was studying in the 12th grade, she’d completed her arangetram. She had been to Jaipur and Bangalore with the Girl Guides. On Sunday mornings, when she’d dress for flying lessons, it would seem as if she were readying for battle.

No clash broke out between Commerce and English literature. Isha only had a small complaint. “Mummy! She doesn’t study, and doesn’t let me study. She brings in a pile of books and flings them in a corner, Ishaben your nails, Ishaben your hair, what do you wash your hair with,what do you put on your lips? What should I do to be like you? I tell her, it’s so simple, stand for a month in the glare of the sun and perform a penance so that your skin takes on a dark purple stain like mine! Mummy, she doesn’t even know about Geeta Dutt or Talat Mehmood! She asked me, “The promise of the fragrant night? What does that mean?” Now if I hear such a thing, what should I weep about? Even I wish to weep, the scented night is my head, I tell her. The scented night is my left foot. My mother starves me and thrashes me with a cane- so I weep. If you had a mother like mine, even you’d say, “Dear heart, take me far away…”. ”

Sometimes, Viraj would pull Isha’s hand- “ Ishaben, c’mon! Lets go away someplace”- quite unmindful of Kanchanben sitting there.

With a great deal of motherly affection, Kanchanben would force some snacks on Viraj’s plate. “One can count the bones on your face. I’ll have to tell Kashmiraben about this. Does she feed her daughter anything or not?” Isha would feign anger and say “Mummy, don’t keep butting in, just go! We’re reading the poetry of Robert Frost.” Kanchanben would counter, “What will this rose understand of a poem?” And Viraj would say, “This rosedey* understands everything. Don’t repair the walls. Break them down.”

After the girl would go home, she’d tell Isha, “This poor girl does not get a chance to laugh in her home”
“Why do you suppose that is so, Mummy?”
“Keep quiet. You won’t understand these things.”

Sometimes loud voices could be heard from that home. Doors would be slammed and in the kitchen, sounds of flying metal, of serving spoons and cups, could be heard. Toned muscle could be seen past the thin vest. Kanchanben would say, “It’s ok that the hair on his head is white, else Dada seems younger than Chaturbhai.” Kashmiraben would say, “All these prayers- pilgrimages. does he have an option but to work? Some deal in land here, or a flat bought and sold there- that’s how the household expenses are covered. D’you suppose this house runs on his salary?”
Bapuji could often be seen carefully wiping the motorcycle clean, rubbing it to a shine, then he’d kick it to a start and smartly drive away, Kanchanben would watch thoughtfully. Shining shoes, specs, sometimes even a T-shirt. Would any one say the old man was 62 years old?

The loud and blunt residents of the society did not believe in polite niceties. And that is why, on behalf of the entire society, the lady from house no 11, Bhavnaben, cleared the air with a minute or two of admission. I have guests at home, can I borrow half a cup of milk? And on her way out, she paid back the debt-Oh you live right next door and you don’t know?! The whole world knows this- will you believe this after its printed in the newspapers? Can’t you deduce based on the view from this window? She puts such a large vermilion mark on her forehead- as large as a rupee coin- mark me! She prances about the house with her hair worn open, whom does she do all that for, that Chaturbhai? Poor Chaturbhai lost his senses. Was that all unprompted? And the old woman- she died of a paralytic stroke- did that happen on its own?
No! I don’t have the time. No I cannot possibly sit right now, she said; and spinning around merrily she raced away and left Kanchanben leaning by the wall. “No! How can that be?”

The girl laughed loudly. And Kanchanben turned suddenly and barked, “What on earth did you find so funny?” “And what should I do if I find something funny?” Isha countered. “You don’t understand anything!” “Oh I understand everything for sure!”
“Shameless one!” she angrily grumbled, and sat by Isha. “Throw away that book. You’ve become a scholar, everyone knows that”. Then mother and daughter held each other and sat benumbed. The silent calls of the night-thieves must be chasing the girl about all day…

When Isha’s friends dropped in, their loud raucous laughter and raised voices would scare Viraj away. Kanchanben would push her into the living room. Everyone was intrigued by this quiet girl from the neighborhood. As if it were a wild multicolored bird caught from the jungle, all the girls and boys would gather surround and examine her. Did you see her hair? Look at her eyes! How cute! The boys would touch and examine her red palms and fine fingers. When she’d reach the verge of tears Isha would shoo everyone into silence, grab hold of the girl and lead her to the room upstairs. In the quiet of the room no language was necessary. They would hold on to each other and the words that emerged after the sobs would sound something like “You will take me away, won’t you, Ishaben?”
A small plot was being formulated with much intrigue by the mother-daughter duo. Sunil was a senior at Isha’s flying club. Like his compatriots, he too had scientifically examined the quality of Viraj’s hair and nails. For this research, it had been necessary to smell the girl’s head frequently. He had announced-that a human can smell so fragrant- this is something that I’ve learnt for the first time! When Sunil would visit, Viraj would rush upstairs or hide behind the door; then she’d be caught and produced like a prisoner and made to recite a few memorized lines-say that you’re not afraid. Say that you’re very confident. Sunil’s behavior was gradually moving away from laughter and teasing.

Just as suddenly, the barter of a lemon or two, of the half cups of milk stopped and the kitchen door remained shut for days on end. The ravine opposite was shrouded in mist. Viraj was not to be seen. If Kashmiraben had to visit that part of the house on some chore, she’d avert her gaze and quickly walk away. It was impossible to fathom these people. Kanchanben thought to herself with some irritation, “Why does she have to move about with such a sullen face?” The world refuses to be conquered and grovel at her feet, that’s why she is offended. Muffled voices could be heard from behind closed doors. Sometimes, Chaturbhai’s shouts could be heard. At times such as these, without any pretence at disinterest or lack of curiosity, all the neighbors would take prime positions on their porch to witness the event, and discuss openly, “The father-in-law and wife duo are mercilessly caning poor Chaturlal”.

Both the bungalows were physically identical, but the other home had many secret storage spaces and basements. Obscene animals would periodically emerge from that ugly darkness. After finishing their romp of classical dance, they’d cackle in glee, return to their dens, and then the monkey man would sweep the ground, wash his face and step out.

“Ben can you give me a 50 rupee note. I don’t have any change in the house.”

No other words were exchanged. The note was handed over. After the door closed, Kanchanben told Isha, “Did you see the layers of powder? Does she have any shame or remorse? Greed prompted that mother to come begging. But that other one? Your girl? She’s become very arrogant!”

Isha broke into a laugh. “Mummy! What are you talking about! That poor girl! What kind of pride can she have? Come, let’s take the window seat to this spectacle. See- that’s your pet there! But her eyes are red. And there’s a bruise on her face…”

Two incidents happened at about the same time. The other house had grown high walls, it was difficult to guess what was happening there. But the neighbors carried the news - they are scheming to marry off the girl, turn her out. Isha thought - it can’t be like that. In this day and age, in these times, this can’t possibly be true. She’d rush about, pace on the terrace, while away time at the kitchen door, find any excuse to loiter about on the main road, spend the entire afternoon waiting at the main bus stop. There’d be a million chores in a house with wedding festivities. There’d be shopping to do. The bride would have no option but to go out someplace, sometime! One afternoon as she was returning home after waiting for an hour and half with sweat dripping off her forehead, a postman appeared, swimming on the heat wave, and handed her a letter. Reading the words “British Council”, she almost fainted. She stood still and read the letter. Celebrations! Congrats! She’d won a British Council scholarship to do her Phd at Edinburgh University. She placed the letter in Kanchanben’s hands, “Mummy, see what a clamor life is making! She isn’t giving me time to arrange things in order, or to tie up loose knots, she’s dragging me by the hair and yanking me away from the space between the adverb and noun mid-sentence…”

Similar activities were scheduled at both the homes. After Isha returned from Bombay with her visa, preparations were in full force. In the other house, the prospective groom dropped in for a visit and the people in the society were heard muttering, he is as coarse as the trunk of a babool tree…He failed the 12th class exams and dropped out of school. His father has a business buying and selling land, where is the need for the boy to study! These people have been slandered everywhere, who would accept this girl then? Isha would softly say, “Mummy, is life? Like this?” Kanchanben would say, “We do our work.The darlings! Will they send us an invite or not?” Every evening, crowds of relatives and friends would gather. They would speak of that faceless statue. Isha watched with wonder. The marriage of a girl still studying in college was an ill custom. It did not seem as if anyone else was interested in the matter. Once she prompted Sunil, “Tell me! Do you dare? All it needs is a pebble! Hit a pebble at her window past midnight. She’ll grab the pebble like a lifeline and climb down”. Sunil shook his head and sat dumbstruck. Maybe a pebble felt like a mountain. Isha would sit, numbed, in front of the packed suitcases. Kanchanben would push her, “C’mon girl, what can I get you?” “I don’t need anything, Mummy” then she’d look up with huge tears in her eyes and say,“You won’t be able to give me what I need”.

No shamianas were built, nor did festive drums ring out, but a small packet of sweets was handed over the next day. The walls were drawn down and a delicate hand stretched out,“Some sweets, ben”.

Kanchanben stood quietly near the kitchen door, head lowered. Watching her quivering face, Isha nudged her on and said, “Take it, Mummy”.She reached for the packet.

“We did everything so simply. Bapuji believes in modern views, you know. Twenty-five people and not a person more! I hear Ishaben is going abroad?”

Isha said, “Mashi, I don’t understand these matters that you older people talk about but…”

“To hell with our older people’s talks. That’s one chore over and done with. One that we’re free of, that’s all. Those people are simple, like us. They have a house in Chanakyapuri although mostly they live in the village. They own a lot of land. Ishaben will study heavy tomes abroad and Viraj will gather dung and droppings in a farm. To each his own. Its a farm that she’d come from, to a farm that she’s gone.”

The last sentence was a like a burning rod and Isha felt dizzy. The only consolation was that these words had not been spoken by her mother.

It was the last night before she had to leave. It was about one, everyone who had dropped in to wish her had left. She spoke to her mother, who was looking at her, and at the empty home, “No mummy! Don’t say anything!” She switched the lights off, and ordered her mother to sleep. Riding on a wave of incredible lightness, she floated into her room. There was nothing left to be done. Just a few hours of the night to while away. She stood holding to the window bars in the dark. Then, knowing well that no one was going to come, she reached out and said, “Here, kitty…”

(* wild mare)

Lorca Party! starring a book review and a translation by Brandon Holmquest

2009-05-29T15:30:00.006-04:00

Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch
by Jonathan Mayhew
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. I justify the use of the adjective “amazing” as follows. First, as an extended case study in the uses, abuses and consequences (intended and otherwise) of the practice of translation, the book is almost without precedent or parallel and will, if the world has any sense in it, serve as a practical model to other scholars. Secondly, this examination of the American afterlife of a prominent Spanish poet is also one of the most perceptive readings of 20th century American poetry that I have ever read, refreshingly light on the kind of partisanship and weirdness that characterizes such discussion in the poetry world proper. Thirdly, throughout the book Mayhew works with a transparency that verges on suspicion of his own motives, with no claim to objectivity or ultimate truth, thereby avoiding the many traps and pitfalls that confront the professional academic Hispanist in a work of this kind.

The basic structure of Apocryphal Lorca is relatively simple. Mayhew openly declares “I resist the uncritical, hagiographical treatment to which [Lorca] has often been subjected and am skeptical of approaches that rely too heavily on the romantic idea of the 'genius' or...the duende.” He then says his goal is to examine how “Lorca in English translation and adaptation has become a specifically American poet.”

Chapter 1: Federico García Lorca: Himself. Chapter 2: The American Agenda. From there the conversation moves into specifics, as Mayhew follows Lorca's path into the center of the American canon as a central preoccupation of postwar American poetry. That this discussion requires knowledge of the relevant poetry is obvious. The impression one gets from reading the book is that Mayhew was already deeply familiar with this poetry before the idea of writing this book ever occurred to him. It does not play like he's gone and done a bunch of reading simply as research, but rather as though he's been quoting people like Robert Creeley off the top of his head since the mid 1970s. This facility with the material serves him well because, combined with his knowledge of Lorca's work, it enables him to make difficult distinctions in the evaluation of the various American uses of Lorca.

Mayhew identifies the 1950s as the beginning of Lorca's penetration into American poetry, beginning with the 1951 publication of Langston Hughes's mostly forgotten version of Romancero gitano. This was published as a chapbook on a very small press and quickly went out of print, seeming to influence or even be read by almost no one but Bob Kaufman. The fact that Hughes's translations were largely forgotten means that “the Lorca boom of the 1950s often drew its inspiration from translations of indifferent quality,” which is not intended as a general statement, far from it.

Those “translations of indifferent quality” are to be found in two books. The first was a Selected Poems edited by Lorca's brother Francisco and Donald Allen, published by New Directions in 1955. The editors assembled what they considered the best available versions of Lorca's work from a total of eighteen translators. Many of them, Mayhew says, “can still hold their own against more recent work.” The book's “most notable weakness” is the translations by Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili that make up “more than one quarter” of its length. Mayhew finds that they take a “flat-footed, literal approach,” then proceeds to back this claim up with a detailed examination of their work.

Mayhew's critiques of specific translators, here and throughout the book, are of an entirely different order than the usual armchair quarterback second guessing that translators rightfully fear and loathe. What he's doing is looking for the roots of those later “uncritical, hagiographical” versions of Lorca, for the point of departure where Lorca ceases to be himself and starts to become someone, or something, else. He does not lay all the blame for this process at the feet of Spender and Gili, or anyone else, but finds that in general there is plenty of responsibility to go around.

Some people, though, are more responsible than others. The second of the two books that, according to Mayhew, put Lorca in the American poetry mainstream is the 1955 Grove Press edition of The Poet of New York, translated by Ben Belitt. In a subsection titled “The Translator's Ego,” Mayhew thrashes Belitt, whose “infractions include verbosity, ennoblement, awkward syntax and punctuation, outright obfuscation, the erasure of poetic devices like metonymy and syntactic parallelism, wildly inappropriate shifts of register and tone, inexplicable lexical choices, and the dilution of metaphors and sensory images.” Is that all? No. Mayhew then provides six specific examples to back up these assertions. “Where Lorca has a single vaso, Belitt requires both a jigger and a tumbler. Turning a cuttlefish inside out takes Belitt thirteen words, to Lorca's six.” Mayhew is not just scoring points, his analysis of Bellit's “vandalistic approach” serves his broader argument about the distortions Lorca has undergone.

I can well imagine that it will seem, then, paradoxical to some people that Mayhew has much in the way of praise for Paul Blackburn, a notorious changer of the literal form and meaning of the texts he translated. What makes the difference for Mayhew is that Blackburn “works explicitly to translate Lorca into the Pound-Williams tradition,” which is to say that Paul openly declares his intentions and is transparent about his many, drastic alterations, as opposed to Bellit, for example. While he finds that “Blackburn's experimental translation practice produces predictably mixed results” Mayhew also affirms that such practice, when successful, leads to “high points” of “colloquialism and musicality.” It is my own opinion that these “high points” are not likely to be reached another way. In the end Mayhew's view, as well as my own, is that “the ultimate justification for the poet-translator is the creation of new poetry in the target language,” a premise which, if accepted, shifts the critical basis from which such texts can be evaluated.

Mayhew's next topic is a thorny one, the “Deep Image School”, which may in fact be two separate groups, each claiming the name for themselves and denouncing the other. Or, one of them is the true “Deep Image School” and the other is not worth even mentioning. This is the sort of territorial mess that's typical of the last fifty or sixty years of American poetry, and it's further complicated by who makes up these rival camps. On the one hand, decidedly avant-gardist poets like Jerome Rothenberg, Clayton Eshleman and Robert Kelly. On the other, decidedly mainstream poets like Robert Bly and James Wright. Yeesh. Mayhew has to devote five full pages to sorting through the attempts by various partisan critics to erase one group or the other before he himself can even begin his discussion.

What finally emerges in Mayhew's telling is a two-part movement, invented by Kelly and Rothenberg, et al., and then taken over (some would say co-opted) by Bly and Wright et al. as the Kelly-Rothenberg group distanced themselves from it, both in the course of their natural poetic development and as a response to the Bly-Wright contingent. It is unfortunate for Mayhew that his subject necessitated his entry into this matter, because there's almost no way he can avoid pissing off everyone involved and thereby reducing the likelihood that any of them will listen to what he has to say specifically involving Lorca. But, given the importance of both Rothenberg and Bly to the American take on Lorca, the topic was in fact totally unavoidable. The basic conclusion Mayhew reaches as regards Rothenberg and Kelly is that they were not quite as influenced by Lorca as has been asserted. Rather, he finds that the greater portion Lorca's supposed influence on them has been one effect of Bly's efforts to link his own practice of the deep image with something that Bly calls “Spanish surrealism.”

Upon examination, this “Spanish surrealism” of Bly's turns out to be more or less chimerical. It encompasses many poets, such as Antonio Machado, who were neither proper Surrealists (in the sense of belonging to the group headed by André Breton) nor particularly “surrealistic” in their poetic practice. It also includes many poets, such as Pablo Neruda, who were not Spanish. Bly is over-generalizing, imprecise, and basically doesn't know what he's talking about, which should come as no surprise to anyone. The man is, frankly, as big a windbag as any American who ever put pen to paper, and I hope to get some other work done this afternoon, so I am moving on. Suffice it to say that Mayhew leaves little of Bly's “Spanish surrealism” standing.

The next three chapters of Mayhew's book are where the real action is anyway. First comes a brief discussion of a poem by Robert Creeley called “After Lorca,” and then 15 pages on Jack Spicer's 1957 book After Lorca. With the recent publication of his Collected Poems, Spicer is naturally enough a hot topic of discussion these days. I expect to spend the next two or three years hearing poets all over New York breathlessly recite the Spicer epigraphs they've attached to their poems. After that, I expect a backlash. This is literary fashion, all well and good but basically independent of Spicer's texts in and of themselves. Mayhew's analysis is of a different order, much more focused on the text of one book in a very specific, Lorca-centered way. As was the case with Blackburn, given the aggressive use to which Spicer subjected the idea of Lorca, Lorca's poems and translation itself, one might expect a professional Hispanist to be a bit taken aback, but that is not the case. Mayhew's reading of After Lorca is extremely interesting and far too complex to accurately summarize. Suffice it to say that since “the ultimate justification for the poet-translator is the creation of new poetry in the target language,” Mayhew has high praise for Spicer, saying that “[o]f all the U.S. poets who took inspiration from Lorca...Spicer had the deepest and broadest response.” The only reservation Mayhew has is as regards the poem “Oda a Walt Whitman,” about which more later.

Then we come to what is, to my mind, the most interesting section of Apocryphal Lorca, two chapters, one on Frank O'Hara and one on Kenneth Koch. The conventional wisdom on the “New York School” to which both are assigned by critics, is that they were primarily influenced by French modernist poets such as Pierre Reverdy. And it is indisputable that French modernists were a huge influence. That said, anyone with eyes in their head should be able to look at Poet in New York by Lorca, compare it to a great deal of New York School writing and see obvious, strong similarities. Lorca's book is prototypical of the majority of O'Hara's own poems, particularly as regards the use of the city and the role of the poet in it. I am overgeneralizing here where Mayhew goes into deep specifics, in a chapter that makes a strong case for the re-evaluation of O'Hara's relationship to Lorca and other Spanish poetry.

The following chapter on Kenneth Koch centers mainly on his poem “Some South American Poets,” originally published in 1969's The Pleasures of Peace. The poem purports to be a handful of translations from the Spanish, but is in fact a parody of, mostly, Argentine poetry in translation. Mayhew is a little more charitable as regards Koch's intentions than I myself have ever been. That poem looks for all the world like condescension to me, but Mayhew sees a “parody-homage.” The essential question here being how you take Koch's idea of hasosismo, as a parody of a perceived (by Koch) Hispanic pseudo-profundity or as a parody of the American perception of a “deep” “primitive” profundity in Hispanic culture. Basically this is eye-of-the-beholder.

But the central argument these two chapters make, for a re-evaluation of Lorca's influence on the New York School, is very strong. It is also common sense. If there should be someone out there who feels compelled to argue that a group of poets who were voraciously reading everything while at Harvard in the late 1940s would not have been likely to encounter the 1940 edition of Poet in New York translated by Rolfe Humphries, go ahead. If someone wants to deny the overwhelming similarity between Lorca's New York poems and those of O'Hara and company, feel free. But you're going to have to talk over my derisive giggling.

The final chapter, on Jerome Rothenberg's Lorca Variations, I will have to skip because I have not read Rothenberg's book, and am therefore in no position to evaluate Mayhew's criticisms of the poetry therein contained.

Mayhew's conclusion casts an eye back over the arguments and examinations made, and essentially concludes that there is little in the way of hard and fast answers. Lorca's influence has been handled in a variety of ways. Some of these have been productive of new achievements, others merely exploitative. All of them are problematic to some degree. Those who appear to respect the letter of Lorca the least get the best poetic results, while those who would appear to respect him more wind up warping him into a duende-soaked caricature. This is the natural conclusion to draw, I think, from a book which is oriented more toward a process of critical investigation than toward setting forth a programmatic theoretical scheme, based on the case of Lorca, for future approaches to translation generally or Lorca specifically. It is another point to Mayhew's credit that he avoids, in this way, anything resembling a disembodied theory.

On the the whole, Apocryphal Lorca offers anyone interested in poetry and/or translation a vast array of things to think about as well as a thorough education in the way Lorca has passed into American poetry, one project at a time. I have only two problems with the book, one of which is rather minor, the other a little less so.

The first concerns the distinction Mayhew makes between those who put the accent on the “García” in Lorca's name and those who do not, placing a [sic] after usages that lack the accent. In a note Mayhew explains that he does this “not out of a desire to be pedantic, but because Garcia represents an Americanization of Lorca's paternal surname: it is important to distinguish between poets familiar enough with the conventions of Spanish orthography to include the accent, and those who are not.” And no doubt Mayhew's desire “not to be pedantic” is completely sincere. I wonder, however, if he considered that, given the time period when most of the books he looks at were published (the 1950s and 60s) and the many, many instances of printer's errors in the more avant-garde poetry of that period, the omission of the accent might be attributable as much to the printers as the poets. In the first edition of The New American Poetry, for example, Stuart Z. Perkoff's poem about the Spanish director Luis Buñuel is titled "Flowers for Luis Bunuel" without the diacritic mark. Donald Allen edited Lorca's Selected Poems as well, and surely would have been familiar with Spanish orthography. Maybe the printers in those days just didn't have the proper type, or simply didn't think it mattered very much.

The other concern I have regards Mayhew's reading of Lorca's Oda a Walt Whitman as a “homophobic” poem. He is hardly alone in this. Reactions to this poem tend to break one of two ways, considering it to be either homophobic or celebratory of homosexual life. Neither are very convincing to me, personally. The poem is altogether too negative toward those who Lorca calls los maricas for the celebration argument to be convincing, while at the same time confining its attack exclusively to los maricas, which Lorca himself translates as “faeries” at one point in the poem.

The question here is: how to define the term los maricas? If we define it as 1: being an epithet and 2: meaning “homosexuals” in a broad sense, then the homophobic argument logically follows. If we define it as 1:being an epithet and 2: referring to a subset of homosexuals (in this case probably effeminate homosexual men) then the homophobic argument weakens considerably and the whole thing takes on the tone of in-fighting.

Of course, little is known about how the word marica was used within the gay culture of Spain in Lorca's own time, so it's difficult to say how the word ought to be defined with any certainty. And even less so when Lorca's own rather tortured relationship with his sexuality is taken into account. My point is that there's a lot of ambiguity inside the poem as well as in its backgrounds pertaining specifically to the term los maricas, and therefore to the nature of the argument in poem as a whole. Not that you would know it from reading translations of that poem, where maricas is rendered as everything from “faggots” to “cocksuckers” to “queers.” In every case, the word choice says more about the translator than it does about Lorca. With that in mind, what follows is my own version of Oda a Walt Whitman, which attempts to make some profitable poetic use of the ambiguity I find in the poem itself.

Ode to Walt Whitman

Along the East River, in the Bronx
boys sang showing their waists,
with wheel, oil, leather and hammer.
Ninety thousand miners took silver from rocks
and kids drew staircases and perspectives.

But no one slept,
no one wanted to be a river,
no one loved big leaves,
no one the beach's blue tongue.

Along the East River, in Queensborough
boys fought against industry,
and Jews sold the rose of circumcision
to river fauna
and the sky flowed through bridges and the roofs
bison herds pushed by the wind.

But no one stopped,
no one wanted to be a cloud,
no one looked for ferns
or the tamboril's yellow wheel.

When the moon comes out
pulleys will spin to shock the sky;
a needle border will besiege memory
and coffins will come for those who don't work.

Mud New York,
wire and death New York.
What angel do you carry hidden in your mouth?
What perfect voice will tell the truths of wheat?
Who the terrible dreams of your stained anemones?

Not for one single moment, beautiful old man, Walt Whitman,
have I ceased to see your beard full of butterflies,
or your shoulders of corduroy worn thin by the moon,
or your virgin Apollo thighs,
or your voice like a column of ash;
old man beautiful as fog,
you who moaned like a bird
sex pierced by a needle,
enemy of the satyr,
enemy of the vine
and lover of bodies beneath rough cloth.

Not for one single moment, virile beauty
who in coal mountains, billboards and railroads,
dreamed of being a river and sleeping like a river
with that comrade who would put a small
ignorant leopard pain in your breast.

Not for one single moment, blood Adam, Masculine,
man alone on the sea, beautiful old Walt Whitman,
because on azoteas,
gathered in bars,
coming out of sewers in bunches,
trembling between the legs of cabdrivers
or spinning on absinthe platforms,
the maricas, Walt Whitman, point to you.

Him too! Him too! And they fall
onto your luminous chaste beard,
blonds from the north, blacks from the sands,
crowd of cries and gestures,
like cats and like serpents,
the maricas, Walt Whitman, the maricas,
misty with tears, flesh for the whip,
boot or bite of masters.

Him too! Him too! Painted-nail fingers
point to your dream's shore
when that friend eats your apple
with a faint taste of gasoline
and the sun sings on the bellies
of boys playing beneath bridges.

But you didn't look for the spidered eyes,
or the darkest sunken children marsh,
or the frozen spit,
or the wounded curves like a toad's belly
that maricas wear in cars, on balconies
while the moon whips them on corners of terror.

You looked for a naked man who was like a river,
bull and dream who'd join the wheel with the weeds,
father of your agony, camellia of your death,
who would moan in your hidden equator's flames.

Because it's right that man seek not his delight
in the blood jungle of the morning after.
The sky has beaches where life can be avoided
and there are bodies that shouldn't be repeated in the dawn.

Agony, agony, dream, ferment and dream.
This is the world, friend, agony, agony.
The dead decompose under clock cities,
war passes crying with a million gray rats,
the rich give their loved ones
small dying visionaries,
and life is not noble, or good, or sacred.

Man can, if he wants, drive his desire
through a coral vein or heavenly naked man.
Tomorrow loves will be rocks and Time
a breeze that comes sleeping through branches.

That's why I don't raise my voice, old Walt Whitman,
against the little boy who writes
a girl's name on his pillow,
or against the boy who dresses as a bride
in the closet's darkness,
or against the lonely men in casinos
drinking prostitution's water with disgust,
or against men with that green gaze
who love men and their lips burn in silence.
But I do against you, city maricas,
with swollen flesh and filthy thoughts.
Mud mothers. Harpies. Dreamless enemies
of Love that hands out crowns of happiness.

Against you forever, who give boys
drops of dirty death with bitter poison.
Against you forever,
Faeries of North America,
Pájaros of Havana,
Jotos of Mexico,
Sarasas of Cadiz,
Apios of Seville,
Cancos of Madrid,
Floras of Alicante,
Adelaidas of Portugal.

Maricas of the world, murderers of doves!
Slaves of woman. Their dressing table bitches.
Openly in plazas with a fever of fans
or ambushed in stiff hemlock landscapes.

No quarter! Death
pours from your eyes
and gray flowers gather on the muddy banks.
No quarter! Look out!!
May the confused, the pure,
the classical, the celebrated, the supplicants
close the orgy's doors to you.

And you, beautiful Walt Whitman, sleep on the banks of the Hudson,
with your beard toward the pole and your open hands.
Soft clay or snow, your tongue is calling
comrades to watch over your unbodied ghazal.

Sleep: nothing's left.
A dance of walls shakes the prairies
and America is flooded with machines and weeping.
I want the strong air of the deepest night
to strip flowers and letters from the arch where you sleep
and a black child to announce to the golden whites
the coming of the kingdom of wheat.

"Instantly" by Pravinsinh Chavda, translated with an introduction by Mira Desai

2009-05-16T14:13:00.005-04:00

Introduction: Giving shape to the silences

Translations. How did I stumble upon the art? Neither education nor work prepared me for the skills or perseverance that this work requires. I trained as a pharmacist, and in the course of a working day, have little to do with words of a literary nature. Till I tried, I lacked acquaintance with this tantalizing form, that of looking for the right words to match, stretching one’s vocabulary to give a tale a new life in another language, yet staying loyal to the essence of the original work. I’d had missed out on the thrill of respecting the bounds of both tongues, deciphering their cadences. The joy of creating the same mood and temper in another language, one with completely different social nuances, for an audience that lacks the background which, in the original, is a “given”. Conveying the same meaning- despite these limitations. I guess I got lucky.

Gujarati is one of the 1600-odd Indian languages, of which 22 are officially recognized. Like most Indians, I am multilingual. I wish I had a well-argued theory as to why I chose Mr. Chavda’s works in particular. I wish I had a rationale based on a comparative study of published authors, and selection of the best in class. But I don’t. Perhaps his unusual style drew me in-more often than not, the story is inspired by events typical to middle-class Gujarati families, the stories are free of spectacular events, they are free of a sunshine-and-happy-endings sentimentalism that is the norm in Gujarati stories. His work is outside the box, it sounds authentic. At times, he sounds harsh, but this is the way it is.

There is silence between the lines in Mr. Chavda’s stories. His stories are real, drawn from life. The setting is traditional, even conservative. The background is typically Rajput, a warrior clan from the Western India with its own code of honor. This is the background the author is most familiar with. But instead of the clamor of war, his work gently hints at what I choose to call the silences, the spaces between the lines. To quote from his signature work, Trimurti;

When I stand in that no man’s land with Bapuji I see that the wise historian, the authority and the man of letters transforms into a mere child in this land. Where have the pride of learning and the distinguished veneer of knowledge gone? All this expertise, all this wisdom about humankind, the individual, the universality of nature, the pervasiveness of human emotions…why did all this not help him in his own case? I used to firmly believe that a learned man, an authority stays aloof from sorrow and grief; he stands beyond the pale of mundane human emotions.
A wife’s untimely death, a son lost in the prime of youth…but so what? After thirteen days of quiet, he returns to his realm of books, his domain, and says firmly, without this sustenance, there is no go, for life has to go on.
But Bapuji could not do this.

Translating his work into English was like putting together a giant puzzle, making sure that all the pieces fitted into a cohesive, near seamless whole that did justice to the original finished work. His stories are admired for their economy of words. A trademark polish and flow set these tales apart. Mr. Chavda is a feted author with half-a-dozen novels and story collections. There was always the pressure of trying to do justice. Translating to a clarity that was fair to the original, took up hours. It demanded a fluid switch between languages, and this is particularly difficult when patois is used. In the story The Neighbors, there is a hint at the obsessive shyness observed in the girl next door, the word “wild mare” doesn’t really capture that mad, colt-like scared skittishness that the original “rosedey” represents. Working on his stories required words to be pulled out from the far reaches of one’s vocabulary, and much internal debate before any form close to acceptance could be cobbled together, and sometimes the original word stayed. There were many drafts.

With a great deal of motherly affection, Kanchanben would force some snacks on Viraj’s plate. “One can count the bones on your face. I’ll have to tell Kashmiraben about this. Does she feed her daughter anything or not?” Isha would feign anger and say “Mummy, don’t keep butting in, just go! We’re reading the poetry of Robert Frost.” Kanchanben would counter, “What will this rose understand of a poem?” And Viraj would say, “This rosedey understands everything. Don’t repair the walls. Break them down.”

It was not easy, there are so many equivalents to a word. For most Indian languages the choices are vast, there are equivalent words that have a different weight, each with a different nuance. Yet the translation must look seamless, it must not seem patchworked, the story must stay true to its roots and sound the same, pitch wise, it must capture the silences and abruptness of the original.

Gujarat is a conservative state, even though it borders the sea, and has had a history of trade and immigration. New ideas are tempered, they are made to fit the existing social mores, but the underlying thread is patriarchal and conforming.

Then again, most of Mr. Chavda’s stories are set in a Rajput background, and this presents its own set of challenges for a translator. Rajputs are the warrior clan, with their own mores and protocol. This is the clan that princes and statesmen once belonged to, and their behavior reflects this.

To quote from Wikipedia:
The Rajput ethos is martial, in spirit, and fiercely proud and independent, and emphasizes lineage and tradition. Rajput patriotism is legendary, an ideal they embodied with a sometimes fanatical zeal, often choosing death before dishonour. Rajput warriors were often known to fight until the last man.

The women stay veiled, they stay quiet. The women exert their influence from the shadows, and their silences. Perhaps in their collective memories they still carry the memories of self-immolation before dishonor. Centuries of conditioning, of expected behavior influences their reactions. A reader who’d be reading the original story would be aware of the culture expectations, the backstory. He would not need an explaination in fine print. He would know how inappropriate it is for an adult son to question the authority of an elder, and that when the author shows this, it is close to a polite rebellion.

But how can a translator capture this influence in a story that will now be read by those from a completely different context? After all, it is a story one is translating, it cannot have a history lesson as a preface!

How does one do justice to the background in a language that is far angular, even strident? How does one capture the essence of the unspoken in a foreign language with its peculiar blunt edges, where so much is stated upfront, even blatant? This is a cross I’ve had to live with.

For instance, consider this exchange from The Battle of Manekgadh:

The next evening, Father said, “He has ruined his health and come here, he should rest, take medicines, it’s his home…”

Grandfather cleared his throat thrice in a row. Whenever he did this, the silence that followed was scary. Father stiffened and stared at him.
“Was it necessary to clarify that it is his house? Is that a matter of some argument?” Grandfather asked.

Father laughed. He quickly moved to Grandfather’s armchair and sat by it, pressing his feet, “I liked this a lot, Father.”
Grandfather laughed. “You’ve become quite the businessman, I must say. I’ve been watching for some time…”
“All I’m asking - is this an auspicious hour to begin inscribing history?”
Grandfather laughed, “He is a free spirit.”

Getting the uniformity of the words- ensuring all the words and lines and the dialogue are in the same plane, in the context that they belong, was one of the key challenges.

I was fortunate in having Mr Chavda vet these stories, and in a few instances guiding me to a clearer interpretation, particularly if a layered meaning was involved. But largely his approach has been hands off and trusting, which puts even greater pressure on the translator to give her best. His emphasis has been on meaning, at times liberty has been taken with the language to bring in the right shade of understanding, to color the words so that they flow with the story seamlessly, and issues that have a cultural bearing, are addressed fairly. In the story “ the Battle of Manekgadh,” a single word in acceptance “ji” has been free form translated to a crisp, acquiescing “ Yessir” While the starting point is the base story, the translated story has a form and cadence that is completely new, true to the target language.

Issues of sentence structure and expression have often been a stumbling block, particularly if a subtle satire were involved. Gujarati tends to be liberal with adjectives, the lyricality of the language is different. English is direct and to the point, blunt. How does one capture the essence and still keep the flavor of the original?

These are some of the challenges I’ve worked with. I hope these stories bring you a whiff of the flavors of Gujarat.

INSTANTLY

Devshankar Maharaj’s lips, cheeks and nose were made of rubber, and when he took a pinch of snuff, his nose would stretch to his left ear. Today is Sunday, and sadly there is no auspicious hour for a discourse before Thursday, my dear disciples- this is the manner he’d address a gathering of sundry shepherds and farmers, they’d flash their teeth and gratefully listen to his words. Lifted on this effusive wave of words someone would ask- Oh really Devshankar bapa, all creation emerged from Lord Brahma’s navel, is that true? And long ago, in ancient times they say an enormous ocean covered the earth? In our times will everything be submerged again? The space outside shops or the benches of tin-roofed wayside hotels were not deemed inappropriate for such philosophical discussions. Stimulated by the questions of the inquisitive, that rubber mass would tremble and erupt in laughter. His reply would be prefaced with- you fools!

When such heated exchanges of knowledge were in progress, the listener’s faces would show a sense of wonder, but they’d smirk as well, because they knew of a major problem. Devu Maharaj, what you say is true. The saga you’ve shared about the creation and destruction of the universe is of the highest order and above all dissent, the printed language is the highest truth, but in all this where do we fit in Vasu- misshapen, bent and dark-skinned- do let us know. If you don’t unravel one or two mysteries of the universe, it will do.

Vasubhai! Oh Vasudev Maharaj!

People treat the junior maharaj with great respect. Kindly grace this seat. Someone pulls his brahmin’s knot and questions- you want tea? Someone prods his navel with a finger. Sing that one Vasu Maharaj- my begging bowl is dry, no one cares to fill it, oh why…. Suddenly Vasudev Maharaj asks- can I get a steel dish or an empty case? After the instrument is produced, he closes his eyes, sways, and sings in a tinny voice - Oh my love, he is a wanderer… He sways like a dervish and all the people assembled there fold their hands with devotion at this spectacle. The junior and the senior Maharaj, praise upon them! When the song is complete, the balladeer wipes sweat and demands his prize. That tea you were talking about- where is it now? Give me half a cup. This demand for tea too, prompts a song request- I am mad after tea, I cannot do without tea - sing that one, and then you’ll get your tea.

In the meanwhile, a fight has cropped up in the last row of spectators. Oye there- don’t serve him tea in a cup which someone else has previously used- no matter what, but his body is still that of a Brahmin. Half a cup of tea is rotated before the statue like a prayer offering. Vasudev Maharaj reaches out to grab the cup, but the offering is moved away. First tell us about that one, the silken one. Maharaj forgets his tea and his entire being is preoccupied with being shy, abashed.

Have patience, scriptures! For a while let us attend to worldly matters - whenever someone mumbles and mentions Vasudev to Devshankar Maharaj, he pulls his pouch-like nose to his knee, wipes it clean with his dhoti edge, and says- he’s a child, he’s immature….

Oh behold and the one thought to be omnipotent, turned out to be omnipresent too! What is he upto in this old house in Kalupur, in the old part of the city in far away Ahmedabad? He sits in a yogic posture, ardhpadmasana, with one leg lifted and placed on the other, his white cap has been folded and placed carefully on his knee; since his turban has been taken off, his topknot is askew- like a cobra’s hood- and he is speaking to the ill-witted widow seated before him. Then I do not see any need for further discussion in this matter! He had this knack of conveying a tone of conclusion at a discussion’s start. In a corner of the room, a young girl sits with an array of books, her eyes are closed and she mumbles as if she is casting a magic spell, then she quickly records the notations she remembers into a book. Her mother signals to her, and whisks her to the kitchen. Look at me! Listen- says the mother, as she pats her daughter’s face and arranges strands of hair by her ear. Do you think you look good this way in front of your father-in -law, dressed in just a frock, running about with your head uncovered, flinging your braids like a hedgehog? The girl abandons an essay on the benefits of democracy, stops reciting half-learnt sentences about equality and absentmindedly asks- whose father-in-law? Her mother is greatly amused at this naiveté. “My little dove. My little one. You sit in the kitchen. I’ll go and get your books. You can read them prettily for a few days.”

After she returns to the other room the mother sits by the wall, draws her veil, and complains.
“She’s a little childish.”
Devshankar Maharaj adds to this litany of complaints about offspring. Moving his trunk about, he says, even our Vasubhai is, you know, what you’d call unconventional.

After he says this, he pleads defense - I must admit he didn’t care much for education- but he’s free of an iota of laziness. He’s constantly occupied.
Hai hai!
Devshankar Maharaj got a girl for his Vasuda all the way from Ahmedabad, did you see her? Oh ho ho what beauty! A linguistic correction is called for. She can’t be called Vasuda’s wife. Whatever it may be, she is Gorani- the priest’s wife. The entire village chants, Gorani. Gorani steps about the village with her veil pulled low, sits beneath the awning, scrubs vessels, fills water from the village well, and traipses through the bazaar. The awe that this beauty inspires, wipes out the impression of the scriptures and the clowning of the fool. Devabapa’s home has been blessed with light after all these years.

Well it was possibly true that the day was brighter, but what about the night? At night, Devshankar bapa leads Vasudev by the hand and sits by him in the courtyard. Sit here and listen carefully to what I’m saying. Now, both of us are of the same age. Now, you no longer are a child. You’re a man, and you have to abide by your duty as a man. Covering the language of the scriptures with a cloak of worldly wisdom he ladles several pieces of advice, after imbibing these, his son opens the door to his room. He does enter, but stands in the dark doorway watching his wife by lantern light. Both are curious. The Gorani sits with her head uncovered on the bed in the corner, she watches her lord and master with a shy smile. She too, has been gifted a bundle of advice by her widowed mother, so she remembers her duty, and with sundry gestures of her eyes and hands invites her master. She shows self-confidence. In school prayer assemblies she has driven home many a debating sword with an impatient toss of her head . That energy will help her pierce this darkness and bridge the ocean of life, of that she is sure. Sleep has eluded a tottering Devshankar Maharaj who sits on the dark verandah. As an alternative, he pines for a maiden named sleep from some story. Oh sleep, come to me! Ashamed at his condition, he wipes sweat and introspects. Does such frivolity befit a learned man? What are the reasons; and if the reasons may not be disclosed, what is the solution? The solution strikes him at about midnight. A scared Vasu sneaks out from his room. In accordance with some law of motion, that very instant Devshankar Maharaj morphs into a tiny infant and slips into the bedroom. Sounds of lip-smacking wisdom are heard from different corners of the room.
Gorani’s days are not dull either. A troop of young village women swoops down. They examine the redness of her city-bred palms. They caress the beauty’s face with their coarsened hand and chipped nails. The entire village is content. The old women of the village say- just the mirror image of our late Goranima. Exactly the same beauty. The ones who’d earlier stop Vasu Maharaj, lead him to overturned crates of lemonade and beguile him to sing songs that are usually sung by women; they’d now drench their locks with oil, shape it in a question or exclamation mark; and smooth-shaven, loiter about the pond or village well . Oye there! You can’t whistle! Whatever it may be, she is Gorani, a Gorani, right? Sparkling eyes that pierce the veil are curious and bright. She beckons to Vasu some afternoon. Come here, O’ master. Sit here a while. Why are you shy? You’re my lord, why are you afraid? C’mon, lets run away to Ahmedabad. Hold my hand, I’ll tie a lifeline and steer you past the ocean.

This speech has to be halted mid-sentence because the person to whom this is addressed has slipped away to the bazaar with a hay hay. His friends drag him to the village pond and begin negotiations. Tell me, Vasiya, how about an exchange deal?

During this period in her married home, a total of two messages reach Gorani from the world outside. The widowed mother has scribbled an original message on a post card addressed to her daughter and son in law Vasudevkumar- live happily. The other letter is cruel. A friend named Komal writes- we’d just been to Bangalore with the Girl Guides. From Bangalore, we went to see the palace of the Mysore Maharaja. Since we’d gone all the way there, how could we resist the famous garden? We were a bit tense about exams, else this tour was fun and we learnt a great deal. During the journey everyone remembered you a lot, we all imagined what would you be doing now. If you’d been with us, we’d have had such fun! Please convey our regards to Jijaji.

The letter had drawn to a sudden end about here. Perhaps a wall stretched across further comprehension.

But as such, there was no reason for concern. Preparations for fleeing this prison had been put into place. Banesang had decorated his tractor. He would pat his huffing tractor affectionately. A room had been decorated in the berry farm. A new bed had been made to order. The hedge that enclosed the farm had been sealed, made opaque. Furthermore, for added protection, three dogs had been let loose. When Banesang crisscrossed Devshankar Maharaj’s home, the village well, and pond a good seven times or more, his tractor would shamelessly stick its tongue out - tell me, what have you decided? His tractor was a bird. Amongst birds, it was an eagle. Boards with freedom slogans were affixed on its wide wings. What are you waiting for, Gorani? Get up!

One afternoon, as if it were scratching at the ground, the tractor slowed down near the banyan tree near the village well. Gorani quietly put aside Devumaharaj’s brazen dhoti and Vasudev’s lame pajamas, wiped dry her soapy hands on her saree edge, pulled her veil low over her chest , strode barefoot with dignity, and climbed on the tractor. No goodbyes or farewells were exchanged in any direction, to anyone, or to the village pond or well. As the tractor took flight, her veil flew askew, off her face and chest.

Not a city, not even a village, but a farm. In such natural habitat, what is Gorani’s life like? Far from the main road, by the river bank, a double fence of wire and cactus enclose sixty bighas. There is a horse on the farm, then there are dogs and the tractor. A maid is in place to protect and serve Gorani. Whenever he has the time Banesang sits on a charpoy in the courtyard and cleans the barrel of his gun. Out of respect to the smooth -skinned Gorani, on alternate days he rides his horse into the village and defies the village folk, then he orders Ganpat the barber to give him a shave. Every two or three days he goes into Patan and brings home a mountain-load of shikakai soap, herbal oil and such other accessories for his city-bred woman. He also orders a parcel of dabeli, or pau bhaji or such other fast food. You rest easy, Gorani, no one dare look this way! When other people are present and even when they’re not, Banesang addresses her with respect. Feel completely free to move about. Don’t care about anyone. Your reign extends till the river and in that direction to the jambu tree. Gorani hides a smile surveying her domain. That student’s sense of humor is now sharper. She can imagine Devu Maharaj sitting amid a crowd, clenching fists and hitting his head against a wall.

The maid’s name is Sharda. As such, there is no practice of hiding anything, so Gorani learns about her history too. Three years ago, Banesang had abducted her on horseback from the bazaar in Deesa. After wear and tear in the ensuing years, from a beauteous maiden she’d turned into a maid. In this farm, free of the limitations of time, she lacks a history past her Deesa origins.

When Banesang is away, Gorani sits by the window on the upper floor. Else, with Sharda, she loiters in the chicku orchard or in the wheat-rayda fields. She shivers as she moves her palms over the dried wheat-ears.
“Sharda.”
“Yes, Gorani-ma.”
“Where does this dry river lead to?”
“The desert of Kutch, Gorani-ma.”
“How far d’you reckon the sea is, Shardi?”
“Oh, that’s rather far, Gorani-ma.”

Thinking that she still has something to add, Sharda says- Thakor is a gentleman. He stands by his word. He can take on the Congress government; such is his valor.
Gorani says- right, Sharda, right.
A jeep brakes to a standstill. “Where is Thakor? Who are you?”
The police inspector is energetic. He does not take the seat offered. He paces the courtyard. Out of respect to this government authority the dogs stand at a distance and bark. “Where is Banesang ?!” He is middle-aged. His belly is held in with a leather belt. His eyes dance with authority.
Gorani looks dignified as she sits, and smiles, “Shardi, serve tea, snacks to the visitor. Shardi, tell sir that the Thakor does not inform us where he is going.”
“When will he return?”
“He does not consult us about his return either. Tell me, constable, who put in a complaint? Who felt shortchanged by our departure? Who ordered you here, wagging your tail this manner…”
The inspector swirled his baton “This girl chatters too much!”
Gorani got to her feet, her head held high, “Watch your tongue, constable. Call me Gorani. Gorani.”
The inspector laughs and folds his hands, “I bow to thee, Gorani-ma”
The next time that he visits after four days or so, he’s put on a yellow T-shirt. He plays with a shining red apple as he talks. As he talks, he takes turns licking the apple and biting it. Gorani, you are difficult to fathom. I can’t understand you- but this inspector has ripped off masks of experts. Tell me, what do you think? You must be missing Ahmedabad. When is Thakorsaheb likely to visit? As such my hometown is Idar.
“When Thakorsaheb is not here, is that the only time your government machinery wakes up? What will happen the day the two of you encounter each other? Where will the scuffle break out, in the courtyard, or the river bed? When the swords ring out and there are cloud-showers of blood, will I stand between the two heroes and get drenched?”
One afternoon, a swarm of locusts attack. Gorani sits under a mango tree, looking through some book. She rushes, “This is too much! Shardi, these will destroy the entire crop.” The horde is in after creating or sniffing out cracks in the hedge, it is devouring green pods. Half of them brandish dark glasses. Dupattas are wrapped around their heads for protection against the sun. The mob rushes, it encircles Gorani and Sharda. “What is your name, sister?” Bean clumps are stuck between their teeth. ”Where is that horrid rascal? Just see, how miserable the poor girl looks!” Gorani replied, “Thakor does not ask anyone where he goes, but who are all of you ladies?”

Someone opens up a ledger. Someone opens a file.”C’mon, tell us your name”
“Women’s shelter. What is that?”
All of them speak, explain its objectives and activities.
Shardi, all these kind women have come from afar. And see how they talk of such good, lofty matters! Shall we offer them some tea? After tea is served, Gorani stands and stretches. Upliftment and all that is fine, but you must have not seen ears of wheat and tender chickoo leaves. C’mon, I’ll give you chickoo, eat as much as you want, pack the rest in your clothes, and get going. Run! Thakor is away on a hunt- he’ll return thirsting with anger, anytime now.

Without any niceties of departure, these heavy bodies leave a dust trail as they flee, and in a race to rush headlong from the hedge cracks, they tear each other’s clothes - Shardi bursts out in laughter at this spectacle.

When he visits, the inspector is in a state of surprise. “Gorani rani, you laugh a great deal!”
“Do I? Oh I didn’t know that!”
“You’re still as impish as a child.”
“Inspector, where does this river lead?”

The fifth time that he drops in to meet her one afternoon, the car is not a government vehicle, nor is he accompanied by a policeman. He parks the car near the well. “Sharda, pick me some ripe chickoos from the orchard.”
“Are you in a hurry Inspector? Are you afraid? Are you looking for something?”
“In Ahmedabad, in the Bopal area I have a 250 sq yard, 3- bedroom apartment on the eighth floor. Here is the key. My family is in Kalol. Tell me, what do you think?”
Gorani stands up, lifts an arm in farewell to the slender Sharda visible in the far distance with armfuls of fruit, and sits in the car. She touches the fields of wheat and rayda with her eyes and she says, “Let’s go.”
That night, Gorani sits by the window of the flat in Bopal.
Several miracles have happened after she has left her mother’s home. That last bit of magic happens as soon as she enters the flat- she’s seen this herself. The prince who swirled a baton, spirited the woman from the fields, drops her in his cave, dons a pair of Bermudas and a T- shirt-and transforms into an aging court jester. As she looks upon a sagging belly, a face lined with wrinkles, and jowly cheeks, Gorani feels like clapping. It is now past midnight. The inspector, sits naked, preparing a whisky-soda mixture with great concentration, and Gorani stands by the window trying to determine which part of the sky could possibly be right above a certain locality in the east part of Kalupur.

If the episode with Devshankar Maharaj and Vasu are counted as one event, then those make forty-four, add to them Banesang’s thirty-six days, so all in all that takes the total to eighty; and in this span she’s stepped out from a hemmed-in valley in Kalupur, and reached the high eighth-floor luxurious apartment in Bopal.

She was swift; now she must have raced far ahead.

Pravinsinh Chavda is an established author in Gujarati, with six short story collections and a novel to his credit. A literary autobiography and a travelogue are currently at the press. A few stories have been translated into Hindi and Marathi as well. He has been a member of Gujarat Public Service Commission, has worked in the Gujarat Educational Services, and has taught for about a decade at the undergraduate level. His began writing when he was at school and about fifty short stories and essays were published in reputed Gujarati magazines.

Mira Desai writes,works and lives in Bombay. As a translator, she has been published in Indian Literature, Pratilipi and Muse India. As austere, she has written for Six Sentences Vol 2, and on sixsentences.blogspot.com. She is an active member of the internet writing workshop. Reach her at: miradesai@gmail.com

Osip Mandelstam: Octaves; translation by Ilya Bernstein

2009-05-07T03:33:00.002-04:00

Editor's note: For the foreseeable future, Calque will be periodically offering selections of Ilya Bernstein's extensive Osip Mandelstam translations. This is the second post of the series. The first can be found here. This poems are presented in English only, due to their length and the wide availability of Mandelstam's work in Russian online.

Introduction
In 1933-1934, Mandelstam wrote a sequence of philosophical eight-liners about creativity — creativity as it emerges in writing, in culture as a whole, in biological evolution, and in being in general. Ironically, for poems concerned with the precise manner in which the creative gesture unfolds, their own order was left undetermined by the poet. They are arranged here after the fashion of Russian dolls, starting out in the small world of the poet, passing through the intermediate realms of culture and biology, and ending up in the big world of space and time.
—I.B.

1.

I love the formation of tissue
When after two, after three,
Or after four attempts at inhaling
I draw an unbroken breath.

And tracing the arcs of racing
Sailboats and sketching green shapes,
Like a child that has never known a cradle,
Space sleepily plays with itself.

2.

I love the formation of tissue
When after two, after three,
Or after four attempts at inhaling
I draw an unbroken breath.

And I feel so sweet and tormented
When that moment arrives
And suddenly an arc is extended
Through this muttering of mine.

3.

When, after destroying the sketches,
You diligently hold in your mind
A period without heavy glosses,
Intact in interior dark,
And shutting its eyes, it is resting
On its own momentum alone,
It stands in the same relation to paper
As a dome to the empty skies.

4.

O butterfly, O Muslim maid,
Wrapped in the shreds of a shroud,
Lady Alive and Lady Dying,
So large — so you as you are!

A big biter with large whiskers
And your head inside a burnoose —
O shroud unfurled like a banner!
Fold your wings — I dare not look!

5.

The toothed paw of the maple
Is bathed in rounded angles.
Out of butterflies’ speckles
Pictures are made on walls.

Certain mosques are alive
And I can now surmise:
Perhaps we are Hagia Sophia
With countless numbers of eyes.

6.

Tell me, draftsman of the desert,
Geometer of the Arabian sands,
Can unbounded lines really prevail
Against the blowing wind?
“Its Judaic tremor
Never enters my thoughts!”
His memory mirrors his murmurs,
Murmurs from memory wrought...

7.

Schubert in water, and Mozart in birdsongs,
And Goethe whistling on the winding path,
And Hamlet reasoning with timid footsteps,
Measured the pulse of the crowd and believed the crowd.

Maybe before there were lips, there was already a whisper,
And leaves circled around in treelessness.
And those to whom we dedicate our learning
Prior to any learning acquired their traits.

8.

The sixth sense in a tiny appendage
And the lizard’s parietal eye,
The snails and bivalves in their cloisters,
Or what the shimmering cilia say —

The inaccessible, at such close distance!
And you cannot untie the knot, you cannot look —
As if you have been handed a message
That must be answered without being read...

9.

Overcoming the rigidity of nature,
The hard-blue eye penetrated into its laws.
Minerals riot in the earth’s crust
And the cry strains at the breast like ore.

And the blind preformation struggles,
As if along a road that curves like a horn,
To grasp space and its inner surplus —
The implied petal, the implied dome.

10.

And into the overgrown garden
Of magnitudes, I step out of space,
And I tear the unreal consistency
And self-consciousness of causes.

And your textbook, infinity,
I read without people, on my own —
A leafless, wild medical manual,
The problem book of enormous roots.

11.

Out of pin-like, poisonous goblets
We drink the delusion of causes,
And our hooks touch magnitudes
As infinitesimal as easy death.
And where the jackstraws have coupled
The child says not a word —
In little eternity’s cradle
Slumbers a big universe.

November 1933 - July 1935

Gerhard Fritsch: 5 Poems, Translated by Vincent Kling

2009-04-22T12:28:00.004-04:00

Even specialized histories and handbooks of Austrian literature overlook Gerhard Fritsch more often then they mention him – and if at all, perfunctorily. Yet he was no footnote figure in his day. Highly regarded as a novelist and lyric poet from 1952 almost to his death in 1969, he was a kingmaker on the cultural scene, working as radio commentator, editor or co-editor of influential journals (Wort in der Zeit, Literatur und Kritik, protokolle), translator, and committed promoter of new writers. A peacemaker as well as a kingmaker, he embraced conciliation and compromise in an era of ideologically shrill culture wars, seeking the center by endorsing traditionalism and continuity and balancing what extremes he could not reconcile.

Robert Menasse notes in an appreciation that Fritsch applied in the literary realm the mindset of the political coalition prevailing in Austria until 1966, mediating between writers eager to adhere to all the time-honored topoi about Old Austria and the young experimenters and rebels, harmonizing polarities, negotiating among groups of authors who couldn’t even talk to one another. It’s as if he had persuaded the Black Mountaineers or the Beats to share a meal with mandarins like Anthony Hecht or James Merrill, and nobody ever did that. So there was nothing bland or gutless about Fritsch’s quest for harmony, but some writers whom he’d helped launch – mainly the ferociously uncompromising Thomas Bernhard, to no one’s surprise – pilloried him for allegedly weaseling and betraying his integrity.

Hardly. Fritsch had published a novel in 1956, Moos auf den Steinen (Moss on the Stones), praised as a skillful synthesis of tradition and novelty in its ability to represent Austria after 1945 through the conventional but beautifully deployed image of a castle fallen into decay. The novel was esthetically polished and socially critical without posing any threat or confrontation. Yet Fritsch eventually had to choose sides as the 1960s created greater polarization. Writing in the Canadian journal Seminar (38:1, 2002, 47), Augustinus Dierick points out that Fritsch went from being “. . . a critic who had preached a kind of pragmatic pluralism in the 1950s . . .” to one who “. . . became a vehement protector of . . . controversial authors . . .” and fearlessly espoused positions that led to scandals and his expulsion from the editorial board of at least one journal.

This change in Fritsch’s attitudes was great enough that readers don’t know yet today quite where to place him or what to make of him, especially since his writing underwent similar shifts. That is why the usual reference works overlook him. Nine years after Moos auf den Steinen, and after several complete redrafts and rewrites, Fritsch published a new novel, Fasching (Carnival), to immediate fury and rejection. Its transgressive atmosphere of blasphemous, feverish carnival, its disconnection between outside nature and human nature, its revelation of how deep-seated the romance with Nazism still was twenty years after the war, its concentration on exploitative sexual encounters, its fascination with degradation and violence, scapegoating and victimization made Fasching temporarily famous only through the outrage it provoked. Then it suffered the characteristic Austrian fate of being ignored out of existence. Menasse makes the excellent point that although the words “Fasching” and “Fascism” have nothing in common etymologically, Fritsch’s novel makes them seem to.

All the hubbub about the fiction and editorial work has helped obscure the poetry in both German and English. Fritsch began as a poet, publishing a volume in 1952 based on his wartime service and experience, and two more collections in 1954 and 1955. His Gesammelte Gedichte (Collected Poems) appeared in 1978, nine years after his early death by suicide (Fritsch was born in 1924), and the volume garnered little notice. Pretty much consigned to fossildom by then, Fritsch’s poems had scant reviews, though these were admiring estimates by such competent fellow lyricists as György Sebestyén and Rudolf Felmayer. Beth Bjorklund includes, in her own translations, a generous handful of Fritsch’s poems, all taken from the Gesammelte Gedichte, in her anthology of Contemporary Austrian Poetry (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986), but with a very few scattered exceptions, the rest is silence.

Fritsch’s poems deserve better, though, at the least an attentive reading on the terms in which he composed them. He would never be mistaken for an experimenter, but it would be wrong to misjudge him for failing to do something he clearly never intended. After all, experimentation is not a value in itself, and his temperamental drift toward polished, quiet conventionalism is apparent in the selections offered here and in Bjorklund’s anthology. Fritsch’s tone is almost always muted, his castigation gentle. What stands out – if so assertive an expression could be used for the concentrated serenity evident here – is a development not so much by situation as by metaphor, a refusal to indulge the pathetic fallacy in any facile way while still generating images of nature from the interior state of the observer.

Like his fiction, Fritsch’s poetry underwent a change over the years, too, though not as radical. To compass the combined boredom and horror of war with any degree of coherence, he needed to rely at first on rhyme. He uses it with polished mastery, even as a young poet, but it becomes a constriction without the reward of a corresponding liberation, prefab craft sometimes dictating to the vision instead of the other way around.

Fritsch allowed himself greater trust of metaphor as a shaping force, paying greater attention to the shape of line as it contours the terms of the comparison. His lyric soon starts to crystallize in a way exactly opposite to the English “metaphysical” poets, famously characterized by Samuel Johnson as indulging in the far-fetched, the disconcertingly unexpected, the wildly improbable comparison that startles as it goes its tortured, ingenious way. Fritsch’s poems do not seek overt effect, and they hardly ever raise their voice – indeed they couldn’t, because they stand in the classic meditative tradition. They are almost insistently non-assertive in any rhetorical sense. The comparisons are so unforced as to seem inevitable, handled so calmly that they appear to have been there before the poem was written, spontaneous and premeditated at the same time. A Gerhard Fritsch poem, like the fruit of any careful meditation, is likely to make its full effect a good while after it’s been read, quietly echoing in the mind and bringing the reader back for a second and a third look at how the unassertive, elegant lines manage to contain all that they do while achieving balance and grace. The same lyricist who as an editor could champion the linguistic experiments of the Vienna Group shows a sovereign mastery of older approaches, ones he proves are far from exhausted.

—Vincent Kling

Mexican Belief

Sweet Judas your gall
your toes your entrails
we so love eating them that
every year we create you
by the thousands from the
almond paste of revenge
soft host sweet Judas
of our fury.

Mexikanischer Glaube

Süßer Judas deine Galle
deine Zehen dein Gedärme essen
wir so gerne daß wir jedes Jahr
tausenfältig dich erschaffen
aus dem Marzipan der Rache
weiche Hostie süßer Judas
unsrer Wut.

In an Oppressed Country

They turn stiff as scarecrows,
angry, bent, in the middle of the field,
if someone drives past along the road.
One of them, the
people in motion.

Scarecrows standing silent,
crooked in a field
that isn’t theirs.
Their hats sit firm
on heads with no faces.
Someone drives past.
One of them.

Sometimes the wind
changes abruptly.
Sometimes scarecrows
can march. Sometimes
they fertilize with overseers.

When the scarecrows
don’t have faces any more,
the wind will soon
change.

In einem unterdrückten Land

Wie Vogelscheuchen erstarren sie,
bös, krumm und mitten im Acker,
fährt auf der Straße einer vorbei.
Einer von denen, die
beweglich sind.

Stumm stehn Vogelscheuchen
windschief im Acker,
der nicht ihnen gehört.
Fest sitzen die Hüte
auf den Köpfen ohne Gesicht.
Es fährt einer vorbei.
Einer von denen.

Manchmal ändert sich
jählings der Wind.
Manchmal können Vogelscheuchen
marschieren. Manchmal
wird mit Vögten gedüngt.

Wenn die Vogelscheuchen
kein Gesicht mehr haben,
ändert sich der Wind
bald.

Nicaea

From the Council the Creed.
From the Emperors the wall.
From the Seljuks tiled mosques.
Space in between, plenty of
space for clay and grass.

I believe in walls,
in shrill, high voices coming down from towers
over herds of sheep, who never grow
distracted from grazing and from being
shorn and slaughtered.

Nicäa

Vom Konzil das Credo.
Von den Kaisern die Mauer.
Von den Seldschuken Kachelmoscheen.
Dazwischen Platz, sehr viel
Platz für Lehm und Gras.

Ich glaube an Mauern,
an Fistelstimmen von Türmen herab
über Schafherden hin, die sich nicht
stören lassen zu weiden, geschoren
und geschlachtet zu werden.

The Power of Legend

In every house
we are happily building
its ruins.

And what else should we be doing,
we who need a roof
and have hands to build
and mouths to sing?

With every house
we are atoning for building
the Tower of Babel.

Die Macht der Legende

In jedem Haus
erbauen wir fröhlich
seine Ruine.

Aber was sollten wir sonst tun,
wir, die ein Dach brauchen,
und Hände haben zu bauen,
Münder zu singen?

Mit jedem Haus
sühnen wir den Turmbau
von Babel.

Columbus

A sea of nettles heaving in the sun
is hampering Columbus, on his way
westward with a sickle.
Toward evening he discovers
the continent of mice
and converts them to grain.

In the east
meantime the morning star
got lost.

Kolumbus

Ein Meer von Disteln, das wogt in der Sonne,
bedrängt Kolumbus, der mit der Sichel
unterwegs ist nach Westen.
Gegen Abend entdeckt er
den Kontinent der Mäuse
und bekehrt sie zum Korn.

Im Osten
ging indes der Morgenstern
verloren.

Vincent Kling teaches German and comparative literature in Philadelphia, between which city and Vienna he shares his time. He has translated Gert Jonke and Heimito von Doderer as well as Gerhard Fritsch and has written scholarly articles on Jonke, Doderer, Ödön von Horváth, W. G. Sebald, the Viennese master criminal Johann Breitwieser, and on literary translation. He is at work on a structural study of Doderer’s Divertimenti and an essay that interprets Max Ophüls’s film adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s La ronde as a tribute to the Viennese tradition of folk theater.

Osip Mandelstam: Ode to Stalin translation by Ilya Bernstein

2009-03-28T19:50:00.002-04:00

"Any unit of poetic speech," wrote Osip Mandelstam, "be it a line, a stanza, or an entire lyrical composition, must be regarded as a single word." And in the 1930s he wrote poems each of which reads like one long word, all of its parts held together by some mysterious force. The one exception to this rule is his Ode to Stalin, written in 1937, which is held together by no force at all, but is composed heterogeneously of great lines that are completely Mandelstam's own and expressions that are completely alien to the rest of his work. The result is "a combination of poetry and untruth," as the poet Vladimir Gandelsman has called it, which is impossible to forget because of the seriousness of the poetry and impossible to like because of the loathsomeness of the untruth.

My translation belongs to the genre of "simultaneous translation of poetry," which involves translating a poem as quickly as possible—come what may—while sticking as closely as possible to the rhyme and meter scheme of the original.

—Ilya Bernstein

Ode to Stalin

If I were to employ charcoal for highest praise —
For the unalloyed gladness of a picture —
I’d cut up the thin air with the most subtle rays,
Feeling of care and of alarm a mixture.
So that the features might reflect the Real,
In art that would be bordering on daring
I’d speak of him who shifted the world’s wheel,
While for the customs of a hundred peoples caring.
I’d raise the eyebrow’s corner up a bit,
And raise it once again, and keep on trying:
Look how Prometheus has got his charcoal lit —
Look, Aeschylus, at how I’m drawing and crying!

I’d make a handful of resounding lines
To capture his millennium’s early springtime,
And I would tie his courage in a smile
And then untie it in the gentle sunshine;
And in the wise eyes’ friendship for the twin,
Who shall remain unnamed, I’ll find the right expression,
Approaching which, you’ll recognize the father — him —
And lose your breath, feeling the world’s compression.
And I would like to thank the very hills
Which bred his hand and bone and gave them feeling:
Born in the mountains, he knew too the prison’s ills.
I want to call him — no, not Stalin — Dzhugashvili!

Painter, guard and preserve the warrior with your paint:
Surround him with a blue and humid forest
Of damp attention. Not to disappoint
The father with images that are unwholesome, thoughtless.
Painter, help him who’s everywhere with you,
Reasoning; feeling; always, always building.
Nor I nor anyone else, but all mankind, that’s who —
Homer-Mankind will raise his praise’s ceiling.
Painter, guard and preserve the warrior with your paint;
The woods of humanity sing after him, growing thicker —
The very future itself, the army of the sage —
They listen to him ever closer, ever quicker.

He leans over from the stage, as from a mount on high,
Into the mounds of heads. The debtor far surpasses
The suit against him: strictly kind the mighty eyes;
The thick eyebrow at someone nearby flashing;
And I would draw an arrow to point out
The firmness of the mouth — father of stubborn speeches;
The plastic, detailed eyelid, and about
Its outline, framing it, a million ridges;
He is all frankness, recognition, copper, and
A piercing earshot, which won’t tolerate a whisper;
At everyone prepared to live and die like men
Come running playful somber little wrinkles.

Squeezing the charcoal in which all has converged,
And with a greedy hand seeking only a resemblance —
Trying to find only the resemblance’s hinge —
I’ll crumble up the coal, pursuing his appearance.
I learn from him, not learning for myself.
I learn from him to show myself no mercy.
And if unhappiness conceals the plan’s great wealth,
I will discover it amid chaos and cursing.
Let me remain as yet unworthy to have friends,
Let me remain unfilled with tears and with resentment;
I still keep seeing him in a greatcoat, as he stands
In an enchanted square, with eyes full of contentment.

With Stalin’s eyes a mountain is pushed apart.
The squinting plain looks far into the distance:
Like a sea without seams, the future from the past —
From a giant plow to where the sun’s furrow glistens.
He smiles a reaper’s smile, the smiling friend,
Reaper of handshakes in a conversation
Which has begun and which will never end
Smack in the middle of all of Creation.
And every single haystack, every barn
Is strong and clean and smart — a living chattel,
A mankind miracle! May life be large.
Listen to happiness’s axis roll and rattle.

And six times over in my consciousness I keep,
Slow witness to the labor, struggle, and harvest,
His whole enormous path — across the steppe,
Across Lenin’s October — to its kept promise.
Into the distance stretch the mounds of people’s heads:
I become small up there, where no one will espy me;
But in kindhearted books and children’s games, instead,
I’ll rise again to say the sun is shining.
The warrior’s frankness: there exists no truer truth.
For air and steel, for love and honor,
One glorious name takes shape on reader’s tongue and tooth,
And we have caught it and have heard its thunder.

January-March 1937

The Wagging Tongues, Vol. 1

2009-03-20T11:58:00.002-04:00

Lost in...oh, you know

There's an international baseball tournament going on right now. Called "The World Baseball Classic," it's basically a marketing device for Major League Baseball. Like most of Bud Selig's ideas, the WBC is basically a good idea that's slightly marred by poor planning, but saved by ball players. The games have been great. Japan and Korea in particular are playing at a very high level. Cuba, however, has been eliminated, the first time since the Revolution that they haven't placed either first or second in an international competition. I mention this at all because translation, or the lack of it, played a role in the Cuban failure.

There were 16 countries competing in the first round, speaking perhaps ten or twelve different languages between them. The WBC has a number of odd rules governing the way players can be used. These rules exist basically to placate big league teams, most of which would prefer that their players not participate. They are fairly complicated and asinine rules. So you'd think that MLB would have made an effort to communicate these rules clearly. Not so much. Apparently they just gave every team a copy of the rules in English and left it up to the teams to take care of getting whatever translations they needed.

So Cuban manager Higinio Velez (arguing above) thought, based on a poor translation, thought that the rule said: If a pitcher throws more than thirty pitches he is ineligible the following day. So he pulled his two best relievers from an important game against Japan when they got to thirty pitches, to keep them available to pitch the following day. That night someone told him he was mistaken. A pitcher was ineligible if he threw thirty pitches or more. So Cuba's two best relievers were not available the following day, and had also been removed from a game that Cuba needed badly to win, which they lost. This translation hiccup was typical of the Cuban team's general bad luck this time around. It's not why they lost, but it did screw Velez's bullpen up, which had a lasting effect. They went on to lose to Japan again a few days later, and are now back in Cuba, where Fidel thinks he knows why his team was made to play against Japan and Korea so often in this American-planned tournament.

What was important to the organizers was eliminating Cuba, a revolutionary country that has heroically resisted and has not been defeated in the battle of ideas. Nevertheless, we shall one day again be a dominant power in the sport.

Which is only the second most incredible, poetic thing that's been said so far in the tournament. First prize goes Japanese outfielder Ichiro Suzuki, who failed to get a bunt down against Cuba, and didn't feel very good about it.

That failed bunt put another crack in my already tattered heart. It was as though I was the only person on our side wearing a Cuba jersey.

In other news

Garfield finally carried through on his threats to mail Chad Post to Abu Dhabi.

Monica Carter at Salonica is thinking a lot about WWII.

Will at A Journey Around My Skull has some amazing illustrations from Iranian children's books.

Javier Cercas has a new novel coming out.

Rose Mary Salum's interview with a handful of editors rolls on, nearing the end.

And I've got a new blog focusing on literature, not necessarily in translation.

—Brandon

The Plan

2009-03-09T23:02:00.001-04:00

Many of you will by now have heard that Calque is ceasing publication. This is both true and not strictly accurate. What we're doing is ceasing publication of our journal. We're doing this for the following reasons.

1.It's too expensive.
2.It's a hell of a lot of work. We've been in production every day for more than two years.
3.We've begun to feel somewhat constricted by the journal format.
4.We feel like it.
5.We think we can do what we do better, faster and cheaper in another way.

Which brings us to the question of what we plan to do. We've gotten fond of these lists, so here's another one:

1.All of the critical functions of our journal, the book reviews, essays, interviews, and whatever else, will be moved to our website, which will continue to host stories and poems, etc. The website will therefore function more or less as a blog. This development is sure to please Adam Sorkin, who's always called it a blog. Hi, Adam!
2.Starting this summer, we will commence publication of chapbooks, with trade paperbacks to follow not long after. We figure on doing one of each the first year, then ramping that up to the point where we'll be doing five or six chapbooks and one or two trade books every year.

So much for what. Now for the why. ANOTHER LIST!!!

1.A blog is, by it's very nature, much faster than a journal. Moving our criticism onto the web will make it much more responsive to events as they happen. This will eliminate such unfortunate events as our having to pass on a book review because, by the time our next issue's ready, the book will have been out for months. It will also enable us to do smaller projects that might not have made it into a print issue for whatever reason.
2.As for the chapbooks and trade editions, they'll enable us to go into greater depth with each thing we publish. Rather than one story, four or five. Rather than ten poems, thirty. Longer introductions.
3.The hope is that this will allow us to apportion our resources where they're actually needed. Rather than spending money printing excerpts of books that are already being published by other houses, we can spend that same money finding new writers and translators. Hopefully, some of these will go on to work with the larger houses, who first heard about them through us. Call this the Farm System Theory.

So that's the plan. Eminently sensible, don't you think? We certainly do, though it's going to fail dismally if we're the only people writing for the blog, so we'd like to take this opportunity to issue a formal call for submissions: SEND US WORK!!!! Seriously: reviews, essays, interviews, criticism of any kind, translations, etc. etc. The crazier the better. We'll put it up, people will read it, you'll get famous, we'll all die happy. It's win-win, really.

We'd also like to take this opportunity to thank every single person who worked with us over the life of our journal. Seriously. All the translators, the poets and writers, the people we interviewed and who wrote reviews for us, the publishers and publicity reps, our subscribers and the people who gave us money and encouragement, and the people who put up with us day-to-day throughout the last few years. To all of you: thank you. We'd have been bussing tables and feeling like shit this whole time if it wasn't for you.

Alright, enough sentiment. Back to work.

—Steve Dolph and Brandon Holmquest

Jorge Hernández PieldivinaTwo PoemsTranslated from the Spanishby Brandon Holmquest

2009-02-11T08:12:00.003-05:00

***

Díles quién eres
un buzón rojo con la mandíbula destrozada
un hoyo transparente expuesto al sol
que a veces habla con los psiquiatras
deja mensajes urgentes en las esquinas
el zigzagueante fantasma de esta ciudad
que saluda los tranvías y los escarabajos
el caballo dulce el pájaro triste
doblado desdoblado por la sorpresa y los hechos imprevistos
el chevrolet 1945 sin ruedas y sin placas
el televisor en blanco y negro
con el cinescopio alrevés
el que piensa con los zapatos a bajas y altas temperaturas
y desperdicia su tiempo
como un semáforo bajo la lluvia
y no es por gusto que amontona papelitos
polvo humo briznas de ternura en esta época
cuando Karl Marx está muerto
y hay que ser caníbales-dialécticos racionales-clandestinos
para que la neurosis no nos bombardee en las calles abandonadas
esta es tu tarea music hall de las catastrófes
ya no es suficiente tu paraguas oxidado
para los aullidos radioactivos
las barricadasprostíbulos no detienen nada
no detienen nada
ni la ternura
ni la muerte que nos espera masticando cebolla plomo pólvora
ahora juegas con tus ojos a las canicas
y retuerces tu monotonía buscando una salida
que te sorprenda como un espatasuegras fatal.

/

Untitled

Tell them who you are
a red mailbox with a shattered jaw
a transparent hole exposed to the sun
that talks at times to psychiatrists
leaves urgent messages on corners
the zigzagging ghost of this city
that greets streetcars and beetles
the sweet horse the sad bird
bent unbent by surprise and unexpected facts
the 1945 chevrolet with no wheels and no plates
the black and white television
with a backwards tube
the one who thinks with his shoes at low and high temperatures
and wastes his time
like a traffic light in the rain
and it's not for fun that he piles up scrap paper
dust smoke strands of tenderness in these days
when Karl Marx is dead
and there must be rational-clandestine cannibal-dialectics
so neurosis won't bombard us in empty streets
that's your job catastrophe music hall
your rusted umbrella isn't enough for the
radioactive howling anymore
the brothelbarricades don't stop anything
they don't stop anything
not tenderness
not death that waits for us chewing onion lead gunpowder
now you play marbles with your eyes
and twist your monotony looking for an exit
that surprises you like a fatal noisemaker.

//

ABRIREMOS NUESTROS PULMONES A UN AIRE SIN VENENO

Frente a cualquier frontera,
frente a cualquier comedia o pantomima
la belleza y los ojos lúcidos.
Los hombres de la mentira cambian como los días.
Frente a eso, las pinceladas-cuchillo amasadas con carne viva;
entonces la llaga sobre la piel desnuda
hasta que nazca un Nuevo Tiempo relampagueando entre dos o más nubes,
cantarlo desde nuestras gargantas: ¡no más coágulos, que la sangre fluya!
Sólo nuestros sueños como tormenta galopando.

El Sol se desbarata cogiendo con tus ojos.
El crimen es breve en el umbral del tiempo
y en los pliegues de primavera
la línea resinosa de la vida guarda sus secretos.
Inmensas coincidencias,
codicia de frutos resquebrajados,
rescate de la eterna agitación --hervidero de sangre-- luz que nos une
y el amor seguido de soles hechiceros mordiendo el camino que se deja.

Tomo de los latidos de tu corazón el grito de los ángeles.
Para empezar el día te regalo mi canto,
mis caderas constructoras,
el aullido de mis verdades de acero.
La vida la vida la vida ¿quién dijo?

/

We Will Open Our Lungs to an Unpoisoned Air

In front of any border,
In front of any comedy or pantomime,
beauty and lucid eyes.
The men of the lie change like the days.
In front of that, knife-brushstrokes kneaded with living flesh;
then the sore over naked skin
until a New Time is born flashing among two or more clouds,
to sing from our throats: no more clots, let the blood flow!
Only our dreams like a galloping storm.

The Sun ruins itself fucking your eyes.
Crime is brief on the threshold of time
and in the folds of spring
life's resinous line keeps its secrets.
Vast coincidence,
greed for cracked fruit,
rescue from eternal agitation—swarm of blood—light that unites us and
love followed from spellbinding suns biting the road left behind.

I take angel screams from your heartbeats.
To begin the day I give you my song,
my contractor hips,
the howl of my steel truths.
Life life life who said?

//

Jorge Hernández Pieldivina was born in Pochutla, Oaxaca, México in 1953. He was, in the 1970s, a member of the Mexican poetry movement Infrarealism, founded of course by Mario Santiago Papasquiaro and Roberto Bolaño. English-readers will likely be familiar with Bolaño's highly fictionalized version of him in The Savage Detectives, a character named Piel Divina in the Spanish, translated by Natasha Wimmer as Luscious Skin. That character is only loosely based on the real man, who in fact did not die a singularly depressing death of a brain tumor. The Infrarealist poet Edgar Altamirano has this to say about his friend: "He's lived in Paris for a long time, married to a French woman, a painter and college professor. He comes to Mexico once a year to see his father. He is in fact separated from Infrarealism and dedicates himself to sculpting in wood, giving classes for children and painting a little." The poems presented here date, I assume, from the mid to late 1970s, and are fine examples of Infrarealism's general style and principle concerns, as well as of the sheer quality of a great deal of Infrarealist poetry.

Brandon Holmquest co-editor of this journal and will be reading extensively from Infrarealist poets this Valentine's day in Philadelphia.

Manuel Rivas, "Ferrol"Translated from the Galician by Jonathan Dunne

2009-02-02T19:56:00.004-05:00

Ferrol

A Rafael Bárez

Dóeme o silencio da ría
sen o tambor do home.

Abebera o sol nas fontes,
de rego en regodela brinca a luz
e rola a montaña de infancia e herba brava.
Mas dóeme o silencio da ría
sen o tambor do home.

Entre cima e ceo vai a aguia do mar,
o ronsel dunha nave irredenta:
non hai perda no inmenso.
Mas dóeme o silencio da ría
sen o tambor do home.

Penso no norte, sen cazador
nin lei que protexa a morte.
Penso nas vidas que non fun e que me agardan ao norte.
Mas dóeme o silencio da ría
sen o tambor do home.

Feliz, felices tempos!
Eu sei onde atopalos.
Ninguén bailará sobre as cinzas dos tempos felices.
Mas dóeme o silencio da ría
sen o tambor do home.

Sen o tambor do home,
sen a lenda tecida a carón do lume,
sen o alento garimoso da tribo,
sen o deus dos pequenos que canta contra o escuro,
sen o mal, sen bondade,
dóeme o silencio da ría.

/

Ferrol

for Rafael Bárez

The estuary’s silence hurts me
without man’s drum.

The sun drinks at the springs,
the light leaps from brook to stream
and childhood, wild-grass mountain rolls.
But the estuary’s silence hurts me
without man’s drum.

Between peak and sky the sea-eagle goes,
the wake of an unrepentant ship:
nothing to lose in the vast expanse.
But the estuary’s silence hurts me
without man’s drum.

I think of the north, no hunter
or death-protecting law.
I think of the lives I was not, waiting for me in the north.
But the estuary’s silence hurts me
without man’s drum.

Happy, and happy times!
I know where to find them.
No one will dance on the ashes of happy times.
But the estuary’s silence hurts me
without man’s drum.

Without man’s drum,
without legend woven next to the fire,
without the tribe’s warm breath,
without the god of little ones singing against the dark,
without evil, without goodness,
the estuary’s silence hurts me.

//

Manuel Rivas (Coruña, Spain, 1957) has published six collections of poetry: Carnival Book (1980), Anisia and Other Shadows (1981, with Xavier Seoane), (1985), Mohicania (1987), Ballad on the Western BeachesNo Swan (1989) and Death Coast Blues (1995). His collected poems were published under the title From Unknown to Unknown by Espiral Maior in 2003. He has also written a play, The Hero (2005), six novels and six collections of short stories, three of which have appeared in English: The Carpenter’s Pencil (2001), In the Wilderness (2006) and Vermeer’s Milkmaid & Other Stories (2008). His latest novel, Books Burn Badly, an epic of some 700 pages, is due out in English translation in 2010. His poems have appeared in Absinthe, Modern Poetry in Translation and Poetry Wales. He is a regular contributor to the Spanish daily El País. Rivas is also an active environmentalist, helping to found Greenpeace in Spain and spearheading the protests in Galicia over the oil spill and subsequent sinking of the Prestige in 2002 and the Spanish government’s handling of the catastrophe. This culminated in 100,000 protesters congregating in Santiago de Compostela’s main square with empty suitcases.

The poems in this selection are taken from a forthcoming anthology of Manuel Rivas’ poetry in English translation, also entitled From Unknown to Unknown and to be published in early 2009 by Small Stations Press (www.smallstations.com).

Jonathan Dunne studied Classics at Oxford University and holds advanced diplomas in Spanish and Galician from Barcelona and Santiago de Compostela Universities. He has translated five books by Manuel Rivas: The Carpenter’s Pencil (2001), In the Wilderness (2006), Vermeer’s Milkmaid & Other Stories (2008), From Unknown to Unknown and Books Burn Badly (both forthcoming). The Carpenter’s Pencil was nominated for the 2003 International IMPAC Award, In the Wilderness for the 2004 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. He also translates from Spanish (Montano by Enrique Vila-Matas was nominated for the 2008 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize), from Catalan and from Bulgarian. His study of word connections in the English language, The DNA of the English Language, in effect a translation of English, came out in 2007. More information can be found on the website www.smallstations.com.

from Calque 5 Roberto Echavarren, "AMOR DE MADRE" Translated from the Spanish by Ben Bollig

2009-01-26T19:59:00.006-05:00

AMOR DE MADRE (1988)

Roca, eco, arena seca;
corre del barranco
agua candente: cada grano
de mica al sol, papila, broto, piedra,
lengua reseca, recoge polvo
del talud que baja. Llaga removida
sube a la nube, vapor hoy,
chubasco, quién sabe. Lamo salpicaduras.
A pleno sol un soldado cruza la calle;
tuvo más paciencia que yo:
arrastraba el uniforme (paso a paso).
El sol nació en mi corazón (por un momento).
Relegado por la madre a una vida subalterna,
nació lejos de su corazón reservado a otro.
El caso (no obstante) vuelve disponible
una fresca aventura: árboles sobre piedras
al costado del camino dan sombra;
agua murmura en la bomba.

//

MOTHER’S LOVE

ROCK, echo, hard sand;
from the ravine runs
white-hot water: each grain
of mica in the sun, bud, shoot, stone,
sere mouth, collects dust
from the sloping screen. Gouged wound
rises to the sky, vapour today,
downpour who knows when. I lick the splashings.
A soldier crosses the street in full sunshine;
he had more patience than I have:
he dragged his uniform (step by step).
The sun was born in my heart (for a moment).
Cast down by the mother to a subaltern role,
born far from its heart saved for another.
The case (however) makes available
a fresh adventure: trees among stones
alongside the path cast shadows;
water murmurs in the hose.

//

Roberto Echavarren was born in Uruguay, and studied in Germany and Paris, before taking posts teaching Latin American and Comparative Literature at London and then New York University. Currently, he divides his time between Montevideo and Buenos Aires. He has published a series of books of poetry, as well as novels and essays, including important texts of the neobarroco, art, and androgyny. He wrote and co-directed the film Casino atlántico (1989). He was one of the editors of the key anthology of contemporary Latin American poetry, Medusario (1996). He is also an accomplished translator.

Ben Bollig is Lecturer in Spanish at the University of Leeds. His books include Néstor Perlongher. The Poetic Search for an Argentine Marginal Voice (University of Wales Press/ University of Chicago Press, 2008) and, edited with Pablo San Martín, 31. A Bilingual Anthology of Saharawi Resistance Poetry in Spanish. He is an editor of Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and is one of the coordinators of the Poetics of Resistance research network.

Evgeny Baratynsky, "The Skull"

2009-01-13T09:58:00.000-05:00

ЧЕРЕП

Усопший брат! кто сон твой возмутил?
Кто пренебрег святынею могильной?
В разрытый дом к тебе я нисходил,
Я в руки брал твой череп желтый, пыльный!

Еще носил волос остатки он;
Я зрел на нем ход постепенный тленья.
Ужасный вид! Как сильно поражен
Им мыслящий наследник разрушенья!

Со мной толпа безумцев молодых
Над ямою безумно хохотала;
Когда б тогда, когда б в руках моих
Глава твоя внезапно провещала!

Когда б она цветущим, пылким нам
И каждый час грозимым смертным часом
Все истины, известные гробам,
Произнесла своим бесстрастным гласом!

Что говорю? Стократно благ закон,
Молчаньем ей уста запечатлевший;
Обычай прав, усопших важный сон
Нам почитать издревле повелевший.

Живи живой, спокойно тлей мертвец!
Всесильного ничтожное созданье,
О человек! Уверься наконец:
Не для тебя ни мудрость, ни всезнанье!

Нам надобны и страсти и мечты,
В них бытия условие и пища:
Не подчинишь одним законам ты
И света шум и тишину кладбища!

Природных чувств мудрец не заглушит
И от гробов ответа не получит:
Пусть радости живущим жизнь дарит,
А смерть сама их умереть научит.

1824, 1826

//

The Skull

Departed brother, who has disturbed your sleep
And trampled on the sanctity of the tomb?
Into your house, all dug up, I stepped down —
I took your skull in my hands, dusty and yellow.

The remnants of your hair — it wore them still.
I saw the slow course of decay upon it.
Horrible sight! How powerfully it struck
The sensible inheritor of that ruin.

Along with me a crowd of mindless youths
Above the open pit laughed mindlessly.
If only then, if only in my hands
Your head had burst forth into prophecy!

If only it had taught us — rash, in bloom,
And menaced hourly by the hour of death —
The truths that lie within the ken of tombs,
Uttering them in its impassive voice!

What am I saying? A hundred times is blessed
That law which has embalmed its lips in silence.
And righteous is that custom which demands
Respect for the solemn sleep of the departed.

Let the living live! Let the dead decay in peace!
O man, worthless creation of the Almighty,
Recognize finally that you were made
Neither for wisdom nor for omniscience!

We need our passions as we need our dreams.
They are the law and nourishment of our being:
You will not bring under the selfsame laws
The noise of the world and the silence of the graveyard.

Wise men will not extinguish natural feelings.
The answer they search for no grave shall supply.
Let life bestow its joys upon the living —
And death itself will teach them how to die.

1824, 1826

///

Ilya Bernstein is a poet, translator, and editor of Osip Mandelstam: New Translations (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006).

Evgeny Baratynsky (1800-1844) was, next to Pushkin, the brightest light in the Golden Age of Russian poetry and the most thoughtful of all Russian poets.

from Calque 4Lawrence Venuti, Introduction to Five Poems by Ernest Farrés

2009-01-13T09:17:00.007-05:00

This introduction was published in Calque 4, and included the text, "An Edward Hopper Lexicon." Lawrence Venuti's translation of Edward Hopper was recently awarded the 2008 Robert Fagles Translation Prize.

Please click on the images below to enlarge.

Lawrence Venuti is a translator as well as a translation theorist and historian. He translates from Italian, French, and Catalan into English. Recent translations include Antonia Pozzi's Breath: Poems and Letters (2002), the anthology Italy: A Traveler's Literary Companion (2003), and Massimo Carlotto's crime novel Death's Dark Abyss (2006). He is the author of The Translator's Invisibility (2nd ed., 2008) and The Scandals of Translation (1998) and the editor of The Translation Studies Reader (2nd ed., 2004). He is professor of English at Temple University.

Ernest Farrés (Igualada, 1967) is a journalist in Barcelona and the author of three volumes of poems in Catalan: Clavar-ne una al mall i l’altra a l’enclusa (1996), Mosquits (1998), and Edward Hopper (2006). He has also edited an anthology of young Catalan poets, 21 poetes del XXI (2001).

//

A Conversation with Dwayne D. Hayes,editor of Absinthe

2009-01-05T20:43:00.003-05:00

A couple of months ago I started a conversation about magazine publishing with Dwayne D. Hayes, editor of the excellent biannual, Absinthe: New European Writing. Here goes a record of some questions exchanged:

-Steve

•••

Steve Dolph: Describe the history and purpose/mission of Absinthe.

Dwayne Hayes: Absinthe started as a crazy idea over six years ago when I discovered there was not a print publication exclusively dedicated to presenting contemporary European writers. I’ve been greatly influenced by my reading of the Europeans and the Russians and envisioned Absinthe as a way to present the 21st Century Dostoevskys, Becketts, Joyces, Akhmatovas, etc., to English-speaking readers.

SD: Reading Absinthe has made me think a lot about what a magazine devoted exclusively to Latin American literature would be like, and what it would do for readers here–maybe it would have saved a few people from having to find out about Roberto Bolaño from Jonathan Lethem, who knows. But one thing I know they’d see is how incredibly diverse the literature is, and this is something I have noticed in Absinthe–the diversity of the work. What are some of the things you’ve learned about European literature that you didn’t know six years ago?

DH: Well, you mentioned diversity and I think that’s the main thing I’ve learned. We’re not publishing “European literature” as if there’s some simple, single classification for this work in terms of style, themes, etc. We’re publishing literature from Europe in all its diverse forms and we don’t have a specific aesthetic that we’re trying to present or fit this work into. And, of course, I’ve been introduced to so many fantastic writers that I’d never read before and that’s what I particularly enjoy about producing Absinthe. I never know what exciting piece of writing might be in the mailbox today for me to explore.

SD: What are your personal goals in publishing literature in translation? How did you come to it?

DH: Our personal goals with Absinthe are very humble … to become the biggest-selling literary magazine in the world. Actually, we simply want to continue to present the work of the best European writers and provide an opportunity for their work to be read and recognized. We publish writers we enjoy reading but our interests are broader than literature and we’ve started to feature full-color inserts by European artists and filmmakers. Our plan is to continue to expand that coverage as we move forward. We hope our readers discover great writers and seek out additional work by these writers, maybe by ordering a book that’s been published by Open Letter or Archipelago or by seeking out their work at Words Without Borders or Two Lines.

SD: Would you say your editorial goals are opening up? Like soon you’ll have to replace the word “writing” from your subtitle with “art”? I loved the Zines Series piece by Alexander Egger in Absinthe 9 and (in addition to wondering if it had been translated) it made me think about connecting visual artists to literature in translation, and the general overlap between translated literature and text-based visual media, where there is a different kind of translation happening–though an eerie shudder runs up my spine whenever the editor of a poetry magazine prefaces her “translation issue” with something like “all communication is translation…we translate our thoughts into words” etc.

DH: I wouldn’t say that our editorial goals are opening up. Our “master plan” (aside from taking over the world) was for Absinthe to become a journal/magazine of European literature/art/culture, etc., and we’ve finally been able to expand on that a little in these last two issues. There will be more of that happening but we’ll always maintain an emphasis on presenting writing in translation. As far as replacing “writing” from the subtitle and replacing it with “art” we’re far more likely to remove the entire subtitle, especially the word “European.” For some people the idea of “European lit” closes them off to experiencing the great work in Absinthe.

SD: What do you tend to look or from literature in translation that is different from what you seek in American literature?

DH: I think we’re looking for humor, seriousness, a grappling with the “big ideas”, a dismissal of the “big ideas”, a good plot or no plot, a good story, or line, a creative use of language, an understanding of what it means to live in the world today or yesterday or in the future … really I think we’re looking for the same things we seek in American literature: great art. We want to approach the work with new eyes to see and new ears to hear and that requires openness and curiosity on the part of the reader.

SD: Much ballyhoo has been tossed around recently about the notorious 3% statistic for the percentage of books published in translation here in the states. To wit, John O'Brien's blistering piece in CONTEXT 21. Is this merely a publisher/translator cold war, or are there larger cultural issues at stake in this discussion?

DH: Well, there’s probably some other dynamic at play in John O’Brien’s essay and I can’t comment on that but regardless of the validity of the 3% statistic it does seem to reveal a woeful lack of curiosity about the world among American readers and publishers. And this is backed up by our inability to speak other languages or to even possess a passport. It’s interesting that every year at AWP, without fail, we’ll have a lot of people walk by our table, pick up Absinthe, see that it features European writers, and put it back down as if they’ve picked up a virus. I’ve had people seem offended, “why on earth would you publish a journal of European writers?”

SD: I’ve received identical reactions when selling CALQUE. I say we publish literature in translation and they give me this look like “what for?!” My gut response is to say this reaction is xenophobic, but is that too simplistic?

DH: It’s possible that in those situations the response is xenophobic but I think it again points to some failures in the way we educate. I’ve seen statistics indicating that only 9% of Americans are fluent in a second language and just over 40% of high school students study foreign languages. We’re probably just not that interested in the rest of the world, unfortunately.

It would be wrong to suggest there is some ideal percentage of books that should be translated into English, as if once 10% of the books published in the US are translations then there will be world peace. I don’t know any of these people that O’Brien claims believe “translations, de facto, are good because they are translations” or the “rubbish about translations saving the world.” Obviously, we, along with all the other publishers I know, reject work in translation that is just not good writing. Yet we can cultivate an interest in the world, in the views and opinions of the “other”, and make publishing decisions that take this into consideration without sacrificing the quality of our efforts. But this won’t happen among the large corporate publishers because their focus is on the bottom line. So again, smaller literary enterprises (usually non-profit) like the ones we’re talking about and the small presses like Open Letter, Archipelago, Ugly Duckling, Dalkey Archive, Zephyr, etc. are incredibly important.

SD: Possibly a related question: What is your response, as a periodical publisher, to the fact that literary translation, can rarely put all your bread on the table, and even prolific translators tend to rely on professorships? Should this come with the territory?

DH: Well, it’s the same plight that other writers face, unfortunately, and it’s a reflection of what we value. It would be great if there was a way for translation to be more respected and for there to be dollars available for translators to spend their time translating. But, sadly, at Absinthe we’ve not been able to come up with a way to pay our translators yet. It’s been difficult to find consistent financial support for a journal of European writing and so we often struggle just to survive until the next issue.

SD: And yet the practice of literary translation seems, at least to me, very strong. Not a day goes by when I don't discover a new translator or a group of people publishing interesting work. Is there a connection among these phenomena? Or do you think it not that strong at all?

DH: It does seem strong to me but then again that could just be related to the company I keep. When I started Absinthe some of the other projects like Words without Borders, Circumference, and CALQUE, and publishers like Archipelago and Open Letter were either new or just getting started so there’s been a lot of movement recently and everyone seems to be generally very supportive and encouraging of the work that’s being done. We’re excited to find that after we publish an issue we’ll receive a few emails from other journal publishers who want to get in contact with a writer or translator we’ve featured in order to publish more of their work. So, despite the discouraging statistics and anecdotal evidence, there’s a lot to be optimistic about.

SD: I agree; I feel a great sense of optimism each time the catalog for a press like Archipelago, UDP, or Open Letter is announced. But going back to your last response–and this is something I am obviously thinking about constantly–what are some ways magazine publishers can interest more people in what we do?

DH: Good question and something I, too, think about a lot. To generate interest in magazine publishing, particularly those focused on translation, will require some creative ideas and some failures. Partnerships are important to this and I look at what is done at the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia University as a model, with there affiliation with Words Without Borders and Circumference. There are collaborative opportunities between literary magazines that should be explored and, of course, publishers need to view themselves as more than publishers. Last spring we co-hosted a festival of European film and writing here in Michigan and that generated some interest and is something that we plan to continue on an annual basis.

SD: Tell us about new work coming out from your publication that you're particularly excited about.

DH: Absinthe is published biannually and we recently published our 10th issue so we’re quite thrilled to have reached that milestone. The issue features some great work from Turkey and Poland, and elsewhere. We’re also in the planning stages on a special feature on Romanian fiction that’s planned for fall of 2009 and since we’re early in the process I can’t say much about it but it’s something we’re quite excited about.

Personality Without Ego A Review of ALTA’s 31st Annual Conference, October 15 – 18, 2008, Minneapolis / St. Paul

2008-10-27T19:36:00.013-04:00

By Lucas Klein

//

Translators are, by definition, interested in more than one thing. This makes them great people to talk to, and marks a distinction between translators and academics, who are often interested only in one thing.[1] Translators are also different from writers, many ALTA participants reminded me, who also tend to talk about one thing: themselves.[2] You can’t be a translator and be egocentric. While we all bemoan what Lawrence Venuti calls "the translator’s invisibility," the benefit of being under-noticed is that as a group we’re generous, considerate, and, because we’re conscious of how much we haven’t read and grateful for what we have, very warm to each other. Of course, we all enter this profession for money and fame, but somehow in pursuit of that we have learned the value of listening to others before we speak, and of incorporating the viewpoints of others into our self-expression. With translators, you get lots of personality without lots of ego.

This also means that, as opposed to an academic conference, where people go not to learn but to cherry-pick, and where possibilities for discussion boil down to possibilities for one-upmanship, at ALTA the panels are very well attended and discussion is fruitful. People actually want to go to panels at ALTA, and this year’s panels drew large audiences. I showed up too late on Thursday to hear the panels “Translating Poetic Form,” “Talking Shop: How to Workshop a Translation,” “Retranslation: Influence, Interference, Infraction,” and “Translation in Every Classroom,” which I remain curious about. But the first Plenary[3] lecture by Peter Theroux on “Arabic Translation in English: Be Careful What You Wish For,” which critiqued America’s failure and resistance to representing Arabic literature in English embodied the spirit of agreeable and constructive contradiction exemplified by the ALTA conference year after year

Friday morning I attended the tail end of Cris Mattison’s panel on “The New Collectivization,” which asked whether anthologies helped introduce foreign literature into English or else stopped single-author projects from finding publication; the discussion ended up looking for new ways to bring translators into the marketing of anthologies so that they could be starting points, rather than endpoints, of international writing. Then, unable to decide between attending a panel on the complexities of translating punctuation and one on “Forming the Literary Translator and the Critic of Literary Translation: International Perspectives,” I stopped by the buffet to grab a coffee and pastry and found myself in conversation with Richard Jeffrey Newman, translator of Persian poetry, before a truncated meeting with a publicist from Penguin Books.[4] Early that afternoon I was on the “Reviewing Translations” panel, chaired by Rain Taxi editor Eric Lorberer. The panel began with Martin Riker bemoaning a state of translation reviewing where [this] passes for praise.[5] Daniela Hurezanu echoed, noting the problem with reviews based on the premise that we all know—and agree about—what literature is. Johannes Görannson, quoting Slavoj Žižek, followed by challenging us all even further by dis/agreeing with Martin’s notion that translation was good for the health of American literature, saying instead that he wanted to destroy American literature. Somehow, we were all nodding along. I spoke last, and mentioned a few of my standards for judging translation while reviewing translation, followed by a synopsis of a review’s afterlife in preparing it for translation into Chinese.

Saturday morning began with Esther Allen’s Plenary lecture, “Pastiche, Imposture, or Commentary? Thoughts on the Scholarly Status of Translation,” focused on the problem of tenure-review committees ignoring translation. More than just preaching to the choir, her plea for literary translation to count toward promotion passed through a sociology of our culture’s academic sphere as well as a number of new approaches to understanding translation as scholarship and commentary. She says she hopes her talk will be published in the PMLA, and I hope to have a chance to read it. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that if they do not print it, we should all withdraw our subscriptions in protest (by a show of hands, the vast majority of her audience at ALTA were academics of some stripe).

The panel Art Beck and I co-chaired, “Versions, Forgeries, Colonizations: Deliberate Departures from the Text,” followed the lecture, and Art and I managed to come down on opposite sides of the ethic that says the translation of a good foreign-language poem should be a good English poem (him for, me against), but again, our opposition came from a fundamental agreement. On the same panel, Silvia Kofler mapped the ways that a paragraph of Goethe’s from The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers) has been translated over time; by the end of her talk, I found myself changing my mind about my preferred translation. Steve Bradbury closed the panel with a take on the colonized writing back, focusing on how the new work of Taiwanese avant-garde celebrity poet[6] Hsia Yü 夏宇 uses translation as a condition of its creation, and how he goes about trying simulate its effects in English to create its translations.

That afternoon, I also made it to the second half of Becka McKay’s panel on “Comparative Translation: A Teaching Toolbox,” where she, Emily Goedde, Jason Grunebaum, and Diana Thow looked at how to teach translation in the literature class, the English class, the creative writing class, and the foreign language class. The discussion afterwards pointed to different ways of teaching translation—one memorable comment was for students to translate between different modes of discourse, in English—with an overall sharpening of knowledge of why we need to explore ways of teaching translation.

Any conference is a wrestle between professional and social obligations, and while at ALTA the two seem to blend more easily than anywhere else, my review should focus at least as much on the liquor & conversation as on the coffee & discussion. Yes: translators translate In vino veritas, or Ἐν οἴνῳ ἀλήθεια, or 酒後吐真言 into action. And while not everyone is friends with everyone, I noticed no cliques or camps, no divisions or partitions. Everyone seemed to be united by an uncommon common interest, and many were sharing their books along with their stories. Tying these ends together, I heard Willis Barnstone and Suzanne Jill Levine each get asked about their memoirs. The common interest was palpably political, too: Barbara Harshav wore a pin with Obama spelled out in Hebrew, but don’t tell Fox News that Russian translator Peter Golub was wearing a pin from the USSR (in fact, don’t tell Fox News about this sentence at all). When Lisa Rose Bradford organized a Salsa dance outing, half of ALTA showed up, without even knowing that the restaurant used to be home to Bob Dylan, where he wrote “Positively 4th Street.”

Bob Dylan also made an appearance at Declamación, where “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” was recited in Portuguese. Belgian singer Jacques Brel, via Arnold Johnston, turned up alive and well to sing “Ne me quitte pas,” first in French and Flemish and then in Johnston’s rhyming, faithful English. Declamación invites translators to recite or perform songs, poems, and rhymes from around the world, and its only rule forbids reading from a script. The only rulebreaker was Taiwanese poet Ye Mimi 葉覓覓, who read her five-minute poem 蛾在腋下產卵，然後死去, but only because she had been roped into reading by her translator, Steve Bradbury, following his recitation of his translation, “A Moth Laid Its Eggs in My Armpit, and Then It Died” (Steve was displeased, but everyone else agreed that his performance would have been nowhere as moving if he hadn’t forgotten his lines and scurry for his notes). Later, Chaucer showed up to recite from The Canterbury Tales.

Not all was fun and pleasant or marked by solidarity, evidently. Driving home from the airport, an ALTA board member told me about the members’ meeting, which I hadn’t attended.[7] She said the meeting had been acrimonious, that an argument erupted over the requirements of the ALTA National Translation Award: to encourage recognition for translators, a new rule stipulated that publishers could only nominate translators for the award if the translator’s name appeared on the book’s cover; as a result, submissions dropped from 90+ last year to 20+ this year. The debate was over whether to hold onto the requirement and keep pressuring publishers to recognize our work on the cover, or else to take a step back because our rule is, in the short term at least, only harming translators. I’m all for pressuring publishers, but are the terms of the award serving us? Should we instead work for other ways to compel publishers to put our names on the cover? Of course, that would mean nothing if we aren’t also well paid for our work. The point is money and fame, remember.

While this debate was evidently unpleasant, I have no doubt that it was but an uncomfortable moment amidst a festivity marked by camaraderie. Translators—translation—make people uncomfortable: in wartime we may be spies, and we have a menacing habit of seeing things from someone else’s point of view. But while the rest of the world may have trouble trusting us, we excel at trusting each other. This trust is essential if we’re going to find ways to expand translation, to push for greater recognition of our work from the book industry, and to increase understanding of what we do amongst the greater public. In short, we have to trust each other before anyone else can trust us. We’re far from attaining wide trust and recognition, but from what I saw at ALTA Minneapolis, we’re not off to a bad start.

//

[1] At a conference in my academic field, the often hierarchical Chinese studies, convention seems to disallow anything but progress reports on research, and that everyone wants to be talking to someone else: grad students want to talk to the young professors who seem to have “made it,” young professors want to talk to senior professors, and senior professors want to talk to their friends and elders, whom they may only have a chance to see once a year.

[2] I’ve never been, but see Brandon Holmquest’s review of AWP New York, “Editor Battles Stomach-flu to a Draw,” parts I and II.

[3] Aside from the ALTA program, I have nowhere else encountered the word “plenary.”

[4] I’m not sure how he found me or what he got out of the conversation. I left the meeting feeling good that Penguin was reinvigorating its desire to print translations and overcoming its history of bad work and low pay, but also that my areas of expertise are probably not right for the direction they’re headed.

[5] Martin quoted the second to last paragraph of Er and Beau Friedl’s LA Times review of The Temple of the Wild Geese and Bamboo Dolls of Echizen, by Tsutomu Mizukami, translated from the Japanese by Dennis Washburn (Urbana-Champaign: Dalkey Archive, 2008), the only paragraph to mention the translation:

Fiction in translation can sometimes be a painful slog. Not in this case. Even the best translations put a pane of glass between author and reader, but while some lines here buzz with what seems the white noise of an interloper, most of Dennis Washburn’s translation is imperceptible.

But how would that be received if we translated it into a discussion of fiction in general?

Fiction can sometimes be a painful slog. Not in this case. Even the best novels put a pane of glass between story and reader, but while some lines here buzz with what seems the white noise of an interloper, most of Philip Roth’s writing is imperceptible.

[6] Perhaps only in Taiwan can these terms string together without resulting in oxymoron.

[7] I had forgotten to pay my dues, so I’m technically not a member.

//

Lucas Klein is a union organizer and editor of the online journal of creative translation, www.CipherJournal.com. After living in Beijing and Paris, his current home is in Connecticut, where he slouches towards a PhD in Chinese Literature at Yale. His translations, essays, and poems have appeared or are forthcoming at CipherJournal, Frank, Mānoa, Composite Translations, Big Bridge, and Jacket, and he regularly reviews books for Rain Taxi and other venues.

Diaspora in Translation A Happy Correspondence

2008-10-18T13:43:00.020-04:00

An Interview with
Joshua Ellison
editor of Habitus:
A Diaspora Journal

A release party for Habitus 04: New Orleans
will take place at
Gowanus Studio Space
119 8th Street in Brooklyn
on Saturday, Oct. 25
8pm - 12am

//

About a month ago I was invited by Will Schofield to attend the Brooklyn Book Festival (my first). I would give him a ride in exchange for a spot at his table with Paul Dry Books. Fair deal, I thought, and printed up a batch of spiffy 3x5 business cards. We left Philadelphia at 6:15 or so and drove like crazy for ninety minutes in order to beat the Jersey traffic into the city. After setting up and getting some rations, we settled down among our books. A few minutes later an uncombed middle-aged couple approached the table and the woman picked up a copy of Calque 3. "Oh! Swedish poetry," she warbled to her companion, who was absent-mindedly picking at food particles stuck to his oversized sweater vest. I held my breath as the woman flipped to Jennifer Hayashida's elegant, spare translations of Fredrik Nyberg's even sparer poems.

After reading two or three lines from the middle of one of the poems she slapped the book shut with a snort. "No no no no no!" she said. "A terrible translation! The original Swedish is just so much more....po-e-tic." My lips curled back into a painful sneer. Sensing the imminent danger to the bodily safety of this woman, Will interjected in a friendly tone, asking her if she was a Swede. "Yes I am," she said, turning over the copy she held, and continued with "Ah! Here's the problem! Hayashida! You've got to be a native speaker to translate PO-E-TREEE!!!" I attempted to explain that Jennifer Hayashida is, in fact, a native speaker of Swedish, and that she had worked closely with Nyberg over many months to produce English versions of the poetry. Deaf ears received this, and I stewed. So this is Brooklyn literary culture, I thought, poorly-concealed xenophobia and willful ignorance bordering on militant illiteracy.

Thankfully I was dead wrong. As the day picked up, dozens of people stopped by to talk translation and swap books. The best trade of the day was for issues 2 and 3 of Habits: A Diaspora Journal, a Brooklyn-based international literary magazine edited with envious skill by Joshua Ellison, and beautifully designed by Daniel Sieradski. Their 4th issue, New Orleans, is now on sale, and Joshua was kind enough to answer some questions.

//

CALQUE: Describe the origins of Habitus. How and when did it come to be?

HABITUS: Starting in 2004, I spent a few years in Israel, and it was a transformative time for me. I had a fellowship from The Dorot Foundation, and that time was a gift of almost unimaginable freedom and constant discovery. In some ways, I've been trying to recreate and expand that experience through the journal--a lifetime of travel, reading, conversation, grappling with complicated histories and impossible contradictions. More importantly, I'm trying to make that experience open to others, in a small way, and share some of the benefits.

There's an obvious irony in founding a "Diaspora Journal" in response to living in Israel, because the idea of homeland is so central to that country's self-understanding. It's only part of the story, though. Israel also is an incredibly diverse country, and its citizens have roots in almost every corner of the world. I felt the way that all those places had shaped the landscape of the culture, how those distant places stayed alive in the people who came there. Over time, I learned to feel at home. But it wasn't so much an experience of completeness or closure; it helped awaken me to some really big questions about my place in the world.

The journal has become a way to process those questions--in public and in dialogue with others--because I know that these concerns aren't mine alone. It was also through the fellowship that I first visited Budapest and Sarajevo, which became the first two issues of the journal. I encountered things in those cities that I desperately wanted to understand better. It was in all these places---Budapest, Sarajevo, and Jerusalem--that the form in the journal began to coalesce and take shape.

CALQUE: Tell us about what has motivated your specific choices for geographic themes thus far?

HABITUS: There are so many places that are worthy and exciting. The cities we've picked are all radically different, but they have some things in common: they are messy, polyglot, diverse places; they are places that have wrestled with history and memory; they are also places with the possibility to confound a reader's expectation. A city like Sarajevo, for example, has a dramatic and tragic narrative that people are familiar with, because of the war. But we were able to show some very different sides, like its unique cosmopolitan history, or the really unusual Muslim-Jewish relations that have existed there (much of that issue featured Muslim writers addressing Jewish themes; there are few other cities that can offer that, and even fewer magazines that could really explore it).

One of the really exciting things about our city-by-city format is it demands that the journal reinvents itself with each issue. We are learning to approach each new place with an open mind and heart, to listen carefully, question critically and respectfully, and to read diligently. To let the story unfold and resist the temptation to fit the place into a preconceived idea. If we get it right, the contributors and advisors tell us where we need to go.

CALQUE: How does the idea of a global Jewish diaspora influence your choices as editors? Which comes first when you select work, the Jewish or the Literature?

HABITUS: Jewishness and literature, as I understand them, are inseparable, because they make the same moral demands: curiosity and empathy. Jewishness is built on questions, dialogue, storytelling and language: in that way it is profoundly literary. So I look for writers and pieces that hold up to the seriousness of those values: that meet the world with curiosity and attention, with empathy and imagination. Many of our writers are Jewish and address Jewish subjects, and many others do not. We are trying to capture each place in its fullness and complexity, and we want to enlist every possible voice that has something to offer.

In our first issue, the Hungarian writer George Konrad talked about "the legacy of humanistic engagement with the world" as one of the pillars of Jewish civilization. The Jewish experience is where our investigation starts, but it can't be where the journey ends: otherwise we're not living up to those core values. That is also why the notion of Diaspora is so important. I understand Diaspora as a process of creating proximity across distances, which is also an imaginative act, and that is also how I understand literature. The idea of exile is as old as Judaism itself--going all the way back to Abraham--but what excites me even more is that it is also a profoundly modern experience, something that defines the state of humanity today. In some way or form, we all start in one place and end in another. At the same time, I think that a sense of belonging is just as important to the idea of Diaspora as a sense of displacement.

I think part of what makes Habitus unique is that we don't assume that Diaspora is the same as homelessness or rootlessness. These writers, in each city, have a profound relationship with their homes, cultures, and languages--we don't experience the world in a narrow way, through a single lens or identity. We need to understand this better if we are going to have a meaningful way to interpret the world we live in today.

CALQUE: In four issues you've published an astonishing variety of art and critical matter. What are you trying to show about the world that is unique to Habitus and that makes you different from, say, World Literature Today or the Virginia Quarterly Review?

HABITUS: I have a lot of respect for those magazines, and all the other publishers (including Calque) who are doing the hard work of bringing international voices to new English-language readers. It's an important and largely thankless job; if we had no other goals than that, it would still be very worthwhile. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum said something I really love: that literature is our best tool to understand those who don't share our fate. I think that speaks directly to this magazine's goals, and to our reason for being.

We are also, alongside that, trying to offer an alternate vision of Jewish literature: as something fundamentally hybrid, shaped by contact with other cultures, languages, religions. Something inclusive, with room for many new contributions. We want to show a Jewish literature that is engaged with history in a creative way, that is open to the world-at-large, and can address some of the pressing issues for humanity through a Jewish lens. I think, in our first four issues, we have made a strong case that this literature is out there, and deserves more attention.

CALQUE: Highlight Issue 4: New Orleans.

HABITUS: So much has been written and said about New Orleans in recent years that we had a very interesting challenge offer a unique perspective. New Orleans is a great Diaspora city. It's a place where people from all over the world once met to lay the foundations of American culture. Today, after Katrina and the mass dispersal that followed, the Diaspora saga of New Orleans also extends in a new direction. Katrina still looms large, but this issue of Habitus isn't just about the storm. It's about the city in all its richness--past, present, and future. A city that's loved more passionately--by it's citizens, by visitors, by people who've never even been there--than almost any place I've ever been.

Some highlights include: • A remarkable personal essay abut the conflict between restoration and renewal from Rodger Kamenetz • Poetry from Andrei Codrescu and Maxine Cassin, fiction from Nancy Lemann and Moira Crone • A guide to disaster and memory from environmental historian Ari Kelman • L.J. Goldstein's photo essays on the city's singular and dynamic street culture • Ronne Hartfield's extraordinary memoir about the intersection of African-American and Jewish roots in one New Orleans family • Interviews with musician-historian Ned Sublette and the Brazilian urban planning innovator Jamie Lerner

CALQUE: What's next?

HABITUS: Our next issues are Moscow and Mexico City, and they are already starting to take shape. We are also working on a new website that will dramatically expand our content and scope. We are also developing our in-person events and programs as an essential complement to the print journal. It's the next step: to give readers a chance to interact directly with some of our contributors, to have the pleasure of discovery first-hand. In November, we will be visiting a few college campuses with Marcelo Brodsky, an extraordinary photographer and activist from Buenos Aires who was featured in our last issue. He's a great talent and a fantastic personality, so I'm sure people will really enjoy learning about him and hearing from him.

//

Obsessive Editorializing: A Roundup

2008-10-10T13:24:00.013-04:00

Eyeseas (Les Ziaux)
By Raymond Queneau
Translated from the French by
Daniela Hurezanu and Stephen Kessler
$18.95, Black Widow Press
Reviewed by Brandon Holmquest

Long-time friends to this publication, Daniela and Stephen's new book attempts the practically impossible, translating Queneau's poetry, and pulls it off as well as anybody could. Toss out any sort of hard, fast rules and take every poem on its own terms and do the best you can, getting what you have to get into English and sighing over what gets lost in the process. They do a good job of catching the tone of these poems, which range from the glibly playful to the very very French, and their English versions never sound corny, no small feat when the poems are full of oh's and ah's and references to the soul, etc.

//

The Poems of A.O. Barnabooth
By Valery Larbaud
Translated from the French by Ron Padgett and Bill Zavatsky
$19.95, Black Widow Press

Reviewed by Brandon Holmquest

Every time I see Ron Padgett at the Poetry Project I think about going up and tickling him. I have no idea why. Seems like a nice enough guy, he might not take it that badly, but still, he's Ron Padgett. Can you really just go up and tickle a guy like that? Anyway. These poems were published under a pseudonym in the now familiar fashion of Pessoa, etc. Fake biography and all of that. It was a few years before Larbaud copped out to having been the guy behind it all. Padgett and Zavatsky's introduction is really good, so go read that if you want to know why Larbaud did it and how it all went. The poems are a little Ro-man-tic for my taste by they do suit the idea of Barnabooth that was originally put forward. This edition also include the original illustrations, photos from postcards and advertisements. It's neat and really fleshes out the general aesthetic, like the photos in Sebald's books.

By the way, I can't be the only one who noticed that Black Widow has been putting out some amazing books lately. Desnos, Breton, Tzara, and Eluard, yeah sure, but Joyce Mansour? Hell yes Joyce Mansour. Have you read that book? Listen, I get a free book in the mail almost every day and you know what, I paid retail for that thing.

//

Lands of Memory
By Felisberto Hernández
Translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen
$14.95, Paperback, New Directions

Reviewed by Bela Shayevich

If you are wondering why your private bird of fey obsessions has been singing since July, this story will come as a relief. The fact is that Esther Allen’s translation of Felisberto Hernández’s Lands of Memory has been out in paperback for several months now: the Joseph Cornell box on the cover and the cartoonish Cortázar quote on the back (“Felisberto, I will always love you!”) is awaiting your hot little hands on many a bookstore shelf. I repeat: right this minute, Felisberto Hernández is widely available in paperback. If you are like me, you will buy multiple copies in order to finally prove to yourself and your long-tormented friends that this man exists. If you are not like me and getting impatient with this review:

Felisberto Hernández was born in 1902 in Montevideo, where he died in 1964. Though at one point he too traveled the secret tunnel between Montevideo and Paris that brought the world Laforgue and Lautréamont , he spent most of his life in Uruguay. One of the more enchanting stories about him is how for some time, to support his family, he traveled the country as a piano accompanist for silent films. His rather small literary output holds writers like (the ebullient) Julio Cortázar, Italo Calvino, and Gabriel García Márquez in its debt; however, he is a quintessentially minor writer. And therein lies his charm.

His great longing grasps at the minute. His most wildly eccentric loners possess only the most privately manifested and ultimately inconsequential manias. The mystery of the defamiliarized mundane is in itself mundane—and yet, the timbre of Hernández’s lyric voice elevates the Minor Mystery with its true reverence of small intangibles. While Brechts and Tolstoys shine their beacons on the marble pillars of existence, Felisberto illuminates the space around pockmarks of stone shadows. You lay awake in the dark feeling strange and special in your loneliness. You are not special, and if you’re strange, you’re not alone: this is the place of Felisberto.

Esther Allen does a much better, in fact, fantastic job of introducing him. Her prologue to Lands of Memory is earnest and nearly ecstatic. Uncrowded by academicish justifications, it is a work of genuine appreciation. This refreshing essay alone makes the book remarkable. The only other Felisberto Hernández available in English is Luis Harss’ 1993 Piano Stories, which presents a better selection of stories, though in spottier translation. All in all, this glimpse of Felisberto is a supremely poignant addition to the library of regretting you don’t know Spanish. Get it before it disappears.

//

Vermeer’s Milkmaid and Other Stories
By Manuel Rivas
Translated from the Galician by Jonathan Dunne
$21.95, Clothbound, Overlook Press

Reviewed by Steve Dolph

For a while now I’ve only known of Manuel Rivas as a writer of poems, having seen these here and there, and stupidly pinning him exclusively to this company. I’ve also known the work of translator Jonathan Dunne for some time—I gleefully read his translation of Enrique Vila-Matas’s Bartleby and Co. over a year ago and stickynoted: solicit work for Calque. It wasn’t until I actually corresponded with Jonathan Dunne and discussed publishing some prose poems by Rivas in the forthcoming Calque that I finally managed to slouch downtown and pick up a collection of his stories. Vermeer’s Milkmaid is an excellent grouping, at once sensitive and disorienting. Fantaticism for Iron Maiden and Aerosmith pages apart from allusions to Vermeer and Yeats? You betcha. And Dunne’s translations from the Galician are nicely pitched, reaching for obscure Britishisms infrequently and tactfully in a way that captures the disglossia of Galician for what I suspect is Rivas’s largest audience, the Spanish. Here’s a taste from the eponymous story, a passage that flirts with the way Rivas sounds in his prose poems:

I am three. I remember it all very well. Better than what went on today, before I started this story. I even remember what the others maintain did not happen. For example. My godfather – and I don’t know how he got it – brings a turkey for Chrismas. On Christmas Eve, the animal escapes up the hill for Hercules Tower, pursured by all the neighbours. When they’re just about to catch it, the turkey spreads its wings impossibly and flies out to sea like a wild goose. That was one of the things I saw that did not happen.

Whatever kept me from realizing until very recently that Rivas is a storyteller, and that Dunne has translated his prose with aplomb again and again is beyond me. It strikes me as alarming evidence of my drifting taste under the criminal influence of shady people like Bela and Brandon.

//

Croatian Anticharlatanism

2008-10-05T17:46:00.013-04:00

Nobody's Home
by Dubravka Ugrešić
Translated from the Croatian by
Ellen Elias-Bursać
Open Letter Books,
Hardcover, $13.55

Introduction

On her website Dubravka Ugrešić describes herself as possessed by the spirit of Dorothy's Toto from The Wizard of Oz, who is always daring Ugrešić to tug back the curtain and expose the Wizard for the charlatan that he is. The Toto factor combined with her fascination with the issues associated with the transnational movements of people, displacement and exile, and the resulting interplay and mingling of cultures propel her newest book of essays, Nobody's Home.

Her interest in displacement ranges from human trafficking to the trend of Western Europeans snapping up vacation homes for a song in what used to be Eastern Europe. The Toto factor keeps her showing us that things are not as they seem.

Dubravka Ugrešić comes by her interest in displacement honestly. After the breakout of war in the early 1990s, Ugrešić moved into voluntary exile from Croatia, spurred by her defiance of the nationalist regimes dividing Yugoslavia. She spent this decade as a visiting lecturer at universities in Europe and the United States, until she finally settled to live and write in Amsterdam. Nobody's Home is her fourth book of essays. She has also published three novels and two books of short stories in English.

After Yugoslavia was patched together in 1918 the country oscillated between a more liberal system and repression. Any swing toward greater democracy was followed by an upsurge in separatist nationalist movements. In 1971, for instance, when Dubravka Ugrešić was a student at Zagreb University, there was a push toward a more liberal socialist regime in Croatia coupled with vociferous Croatian nationalism, immediately repressed by Tito's government. The same happened in Serbia in the 1980s during the liberalization that followed Tito's death, leading this time to the wars of the 1990s.

In her work published before the outbreak of war in 1991, three collections of short stories and a novel, Dubravka Ugrešić's poetic was one of a cosmopolitan post-modernism. The virulence of the nationalist rhetoric was antithetical to everything that mattered to her, nor was she of any use as a voice to the rising regime. The essays that she wrote at the start of the war, sharply critical of the harnessing of literature and culture to the nationalist cause, quickly made her a scapegoat in public life. Her telephone number was even published four times in the press as active encouragement for people to hound her, which they did.

Dubravka Ugrešić has always written in Croatian, and, with the exception of a few titles which came out first in translation during the early 1990s, she publishes her work first in Zagreb before it appears abroad. Even while she was still a public anathema her books sold as soon as they appeared in the Zagreb bookstores, though the titles seldom appeared on the bestseller lists.

The essays in Nobody's Home are wry, and peppered with little stories. In fact the stories and anecdotes she uses to make her point take her essays to the brink of fiction. For instance in a short piece, "Identity", the narrator claims a powerful allergic reaction to the word "identity", probably due to over-exposure. Her community as it embarks on war calls on her to commit to an identity. She refuses to change her self-definition from "Yugoslav" to "Croatian" or "Serbian" or anything else. Ironically, to flee these demands she needs a passport, yet another label. And she cannot get away by simply being a writer; she is quickly labeled by the rest of the world a Croatian writer. In quick succession she juxtaposes four identity-related stories: a hairdresser whose identity it is to cut hair in the nude, Madonna with her mantra Express yourself!, a Japanese bestseller with the sentence: Come let me introduce you to my mother who used to be my father!, and Linda Evangelista whose sentiment: I have no Identity! was referring, it turns out, to a perfume. She concludes that people hold on fiercely to their identity precisely because they know that it can easily be changed, and she calls for a shift to the notion of: integrity. While identities, as she explains, are interchangeable like passports, integrities are not.

Nobody's Home is organized in five parts. The first part consists of shorter essays such as "Identity". The other sections have longer pieces, which interweave a complex palette of narrative voices, some tender and humorous, others cutting and critical.

In "Amsterdam, Amsterdam" Dubravka Ugrešić examines Dutch life with affection interlaced with the occasional mildly critical observation. Cities are like coats, the protagonist explains, then describes Amsterdam as a doll's house, a city of diminutives. When the fog rolls in, says the protagonist, Amsterdam is in the thrall of cats. She describes the perils of being a pedestrian in Amsterdam with the ubiquitous cyclists, and describes the moment when after many years of living in the Netherlands she finally understands the importance of the bicycle to the Dutch. She is on a plane, coming in to land at Schiphol Airport. She looks out the window and is struck by the fragility of the Netherlands. Only the bicycle is light enough not to harm it. She is choked with sadness and has ever since been tiptoeing around on the Amsterdam streets as if walking on eggs. On a more sober note she realizes with a shock, after visiting the Anne Frank Museum, that in the version of the Diary that she read as a child it was never clear that Anne had actually died in the camp where she was incarcerated. The protagonist offers her final metaphor for Holland as a homely Dutch treat, the gevulde koekje, which, with its plain exterior hides a rich marzipan heart.

At the other end of the spectrum are her biting, Toto-driven essays such as, "A Postcard from My Vacation," about a visit to the site of a former prison camp in Croatia. The story/essay describes a writer who visits the camp, Goli Otok, with a group of fellow-writers. As they tour the grounds, it turns out that some of the members of the tour were incarcerated there during the time when the island was either a political prison for pro-Stalinists in the 1950s, or a more ordinary prison in the later years. One of the former prisoners had moved afterwards to Australia and was back for the first time. The protagonist observes that as the former prisoners describe what their life had been like they seem almost joyous. Indeed, one of them bursts into song to show what they had been forced to sing as they did their hard labor, and he throws himself with gusto into the singing. They tell of how the prisoners taunted and informed on one another and expose the complexities of camp life. During their tour the group comes upon the set for a pornographic movie. The government, it seems, has been renting out the former prison as a location for making porn. The group reconvenes at the tourist shop where there are miniature versions of cudgels and other torture instruments to purchase as souvenirs. Despite these distractions, the horror of the camp propels the protagonist into a panic attack. She muses on how everyone is out to extract a profit from the past except the victims, and leaves us with an image of Goli Otok inmates, forced to stand and shield from the baking sun with their shadows the saplings they have planted in the island's barren rocky soil.

Nobody's Home takes the reader on a transnational tour of the world, showing us the mingling of people and places. In a New York nail salon the essayist watches the Vietnamese proprietor instruct his fledgling Mexican beautician how to do nails. She watches Europe flit by through the windows of a train like a slide show of attitudes, prejudices, and nostalgia. When she sets the beeper off as she is leaving a store where she's been shopping in Stockholm, the kindly saleswoman suggests it might be her cellphone or an iPod. When it is neither, she tells the protagonist: "Relax, all the foreigners are beeping."

Dubravka Ugrešić lends us her wry, thoughtful gaze, her way of seeing things we thought we knew.

—Ellen Elias-Bursać

//

Ellen Elias-Bursać has translated works by several writers from the former Yugoslavia, including David Albahari's Götz and Meyer, for which she was awarded the ALTA National Translation Award in 2006. She also received the AATSEEL Award in 1998 for her translation of Albahari's Words Are Something Else.

"My Home" by Olga BerggoltsIntroduction and translation from the Russian by Andrew Glikin-Gusinsky

2008-09-28T13:03:00.005-04:00

Olga Berggolts (1910 - 1975) remains one of the most enduring personages of the 900 Day Siege of Leningrad. The siege was one of the most tragic, and at the same time most heroic, episodes of The Great Patriotic War. Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was called during the Soviet era, was surrounded by the German army for almost three years, resulting in a blockade that caused the starvation deaths of over a million civilians. The siege itself, although not a key strategic event on the Eastern front, holds an important place in the Russian national memory of war. At the same time, it is one of the events of the war that is, with several very notable exceptions, commonly overlooked by Western scholars and sources. While textbooks often mention the heroics of the Battle of Stalingrad, Leningrad is rarely mentioned. Berggolts is often remembered for her cultural work during those 900 days. Her radio broadcasts did much to raise the morale of the city’s beleaguered citizens. As exemplified by this poem, the war left an indelible mark on Berggolts and influenced much of her writing.

МОЙ ДОМ

А в доме, где жила я много лет,
откуда я ушла зимой блокадной,
по вечерам опять в окошках свет.
Он розоватый, праздничный, нарядный.

Взглянув на бывших три моих окна,
я вспоминаю: здесь была война.
О, как мы затемнялись! Ни луча...
И все темнело, все темнело в мире...

Потом хозяин в дверь не постучал,
как будто путь забыл к своей квартире.
Где до сих пор беспамятствует он,
какой последней кровлей осенен?

Нет, я не знаю, кто живет теперь
в тех комнатах, где жили мы с тобою,
кто вечером стучится в ту же дверь,
кто синеватых не сменил обоев -
тех самых, выбранных давным-давно...
Я их узнала с улицы в окно.

Но этих окон праздничный уют
такой забытый свет в сознанье будит,
что верится: там добрые живут,
хорошие, приветливые люди.

Там даже дети маленькие есть
и кто-то юный и всегда влюбленный,
и только очень радостную весть
сюда теперь приносят почтальоны.
И только очень верные друзья
сюда на праздник сходятся шумливый.

Я так хочу, чтоб кто-то был счастливым
там, где безмерно бедствовала я.

Владейте всем, что не досталось мне,
и всем, что мною отдано войне...

Но если вдруг такой наступит день -
тишайший снег и сумерек мерцанье,
и станет жечь, нагнав меня везде,
блаженное одно воспоминанье,
и я не справлюсь с ним и, постучав,
приду в мой дом и встану на пороге,
спрошу... Ну, там спрошу: "Который час?"
или: "Воды", как на войне в дороге,-
то вы приход не осуждайте мой,
ответьте мне доверьем и участьем:
ведь я пришла сюда к себе домой
и помню все и верю в наше счастье...

1946

//

My Home

In the home where I lived many years,
From where I left the winter of the blockade,
A light once again appears in the evening windows.
It is pinkish, festive, elegant.

Glancing at the three windows that used to be mine,
I remember: the war happened here.
Oh how we darkened, without a ray of hope...
And everything darkened, everything darkened in this world...

Afterwards the owner did not knock on the door,
As though he had forgotten the way back to his own apartment.
Where is he now, absent-mindedly roaming?
What is the last place that gave him shelter?

No, I do not know who lives there now,
In these rooms where you and I used to live,
Who, in the evenings, knocks on that very door,
Who left the blue wallpaper as it was,
The very same wallpaper that was chosen so long ago...
I recognized it from outside through the window.

The windows’ inviting comfort,
Awaken memories of such bright, forgotten light,
That I believe that kind people live there,
Good, welcoming people.

There are even little children there,
And someone young, who is perpetually in love,
And the postman only brings them happy news,
And only the truest friends come here for noisy holidays.

I want so dearly for someone to be happy,
There, where I suffered immeasurably.

Possess everything that was denied to me,
And all that I gave up for the war...

However, should such a day arrive,
When the tranquil snow and glimmering twilight,
Will light ablaze my blessed memories,
So vividly that I will not resist knocking on the door,
Coming into my home, standing in my threshold,
And asking...well asking, “What time is it?”
Or “Water,” like I did on those roads of war.
If that happens, do not judge me,
Answer me trustingly and compassionately,
After all, I have come here to my home,
And I remember it all and believe in our happiness.

1946

•••

Andrew Glikin-Gusinsky is a freelance translator and writer living in New York. He is the translator and compiler of In the War and Other Stories, an anthology of Vasily Grossman’s short stories, which was published by Sovlit.com. In addition to being a frequent contributor to Sovlit, Andrew has been an assistant editor for Ulbandus, Columbia University’s Slavic Review, and was the 2007 recipient of Columbia’s Pushkin Prize for poetry in translation. Professionally, he has worked on several translations and transliterations, most notably producing transliterations for the Miller Theatre’s Stravinsky Festival. He blogs at http://mikhailych.wordpress.com

Interview with Pratilipi

2008-09-21T17:22:00.002-04:00

In June I was alerted to the existence of Pratilipi, a new journal of literature in translation, among other excellent things. It only took me three months to write some interview questions, which the editors graciously answered. It's thrilling to learn that others are attempting a venture in the same spirit. We wish them good luck.

CALQUE: Let’s begin with the name of the magazine. What is its significance?

PRATILIPI: Pratilipi, in common usage, means a duplicate or a copy. But, if we break the word into the prefix ‘prati’ and ‘lipi’ (both derived from Sanskrit), it can be understood as ‘Counter-Script’ which, perhaps, explains the intended meaning.

CALQUE: What are the origins of Pratilipi?

PRATILIPI: See [here].

CALQUE: Elaborate on your editorial goals beyond what is written in the About section of the website?

PRATILIPI:
• To help create an online, translative space across Indian languages.
• To publish more and more diverse kinds of texts – writing and other media.
• To improve upon the quality of translations.

CALQUE: Tell us about your goals as publishers. What would you like Pratilipi to look like in 5 years? Do you have a model?

PRATILIPI: In 5 years we hope to have a regular print edition with a circulation of 5000, and editors from other languages, Indian and non-Indian.

CALQUE: Can you describe the literary landscape in India? Where does Pratilipi fit in? Is the climate receptive to a project like yours?

PRATILIPI: India is a multilingual, multi-script culture. The Indian constitution recognizes 22 languages, excluding English. The Sahitya Akademi (the National Academy of Letters) recognizes 24 – including English. They publish two periodicals, one in Hindi and one in English, with work from all Indian languages – translated into Hindi or English. Similarly, there are magazines published by the State Academies, in the language of the region. Sometimes they too carry translations from other Indian languages. Still, there are no magazines/platforms that have the scope and flexibility to bring all these literatures together.

Besides, one of the persisting legacies of colonialism is that English is the dominant language when it comes to translations. Most translations from Indian languages are into English. Translations across Indian languages are rare (except by the Sahitya Akademi) and, ironically, this is something not many people, including writers, are very worried about. Translation into English gets you some money, recognition, near-canonization and a pan-Indian/global presence – something that translation into another Indian language cannot offer.

In such a scenario, we wish we could be a magazine where interaction across Indian languages and also between the Hindi and English worlds of national literary life could take place. Most good authors in Indian languages get translated into English, but the two worlds have remained, basically, very different worlds.

Hindi and Indian languages have maintained the Nehruvian welfare model in a dangerous way. Nothing can happen there without government involvement in the form of institutions or funds. And there are the publishers’ canards about readership in Indian languages. Even when satellite-TV giants and publishers like Penguin and Harper Collins have entered the Hindi/Bhasha market, everybody keeps repeating that Hindi/Indian language literature does not sell. In Hindi and other languages, the average print run for a book is 1000, with most of the copies going to public-sector libraries at a profit margin that has kept some publishers in business for more than sixty years. On the other hand, the English scene has always been market-driven.

We, the editors, as north Indians from Rajasthan, have access to Hindi, English and Rajasthani (recognized by the constitution only as a regional dialect, but by the Sahitya Akademi as a language). That’s why, so far, we have been able to focus mainly on Hindi and English. To be frank, we need to become an agency that pays its authors and translators and proposed language editors if we wish to do more than that. We have been lucky to get 60-odd good, serious and seriously-taken writers from Hindi, English, Kannada, Urdu, Assamese, Rajasthani, Spanish, Catalan, Swedish, Japanese and Norwegian to contribute for the magazine in its first three issues and we’d like to make a public expression of our gratitude to all of them.

So far, we have had a ‘dream run’ and we come across exciting possibilities almost every week.

CALQUE: What are some of the difficulties and advantages of working with a bilingual format on the website?

PRATILIPI: The biggest difficulty/problem is making sure that the Hindi sections are visible properly across various operating systems and web browsers. The situation is improving, though, with the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox supporting Unicode display and native support for it on the latest version of Apple’s OS-X and the new Linux distributions. Wordpress (the CMS on which we’ve built our magazine) also handles the Hindi text fairly well, though BlogSpot is better in that regard – which, by the way, has led to an explosion of sorts in Hindi blogging. To be sure, Unicode is what has made the site, as we conceived it, possible.

The other problem is the lack of an intuitive, offline transliteration tool (it’s always easier to type in roman script, what with the keyboards all being English…) and the lack of proofing tools for Hindi.

The last major problem is aesthetic – there are no good-looking, readable fonts in Hindi which are also complete, in terms of the glyphs they can handle. On-screen readability, especially, is a major issue. A standard set of complete fonts – for screen and for print – is desperately needed.

The advantages are self-evident: the ability to read originals and translations side-by-side; publishing in two languages increases the range of pieces we can offer our readers; the bilingual format also puts us in a rather unique position – we are the first online, Hindi/English, literary journal.

CALQUE: Tell us about the Hindi language and the challenges it presents to the translator into English.

PRATILIPI: Hindi has a problematic history – especially Khari Boli, i.e. the modern Hindi (Khari Boli Hindi is one language that was born ‘modern’). It has a more problematic past as a language that was promoted to be the Rashtrabhasha (National Language) and the Rajbhasha (Official Language), as a language that was instrumental in creating a nation(ality).

Hindi (literary Hindi) is, broadly, of two kinds: one with a tatsama (originary/Sanskritic) inclination, the other with a tadbhava (derivative/folk/Urdu-Persian) inclination (also known as Hindustani). For translations into English, both pose specific problems. A novelist like Hazari Prasad Dwivedi is generally considered untranslatable for his dominantly tatsama language and a writer like Phanishwar Nath Renu is generally considered untranslatable for his dominantly dialectical/regional tadbhava Hindi.

It has also has some connection to a writer’s relationship with western modernism and his level of comfort with English. Someone like Nirmal Verma, one of the most widely translated Hindi writers, is perhaps also the most (easily) translatable. His Hindi is syntactically very different – it reflects the modernistic influences that formed it.

CALQUE: A terse reader commented that the translation of "1857: Search for Material" a section from the lead article in the August issue was "terrible," but was not generous enough to elaborate beyond these three syllables. Can you describe this poem and the translation for us?

PRATILIPI: Asad Zaidi’s poem was first published in his collection ‘Saamaan kee Talaash’ (Search for Material, 2008). Then, it was reproduced in a Hindi print magazine ‘Pahal’, this time with a note by the poet Mangalesh Dabral.

A review in a Hindi daily, ‘Jansatta’, sparked off culturalist responses which were brought online by a Hindi blog. For what the poem is, at a textual level, please read Rajesh Kumar Sharma’s piece [here].

The poem says that the battle of the working-class and the common people against imperialism is not over. In its contemporary version we have farmers committing suicide in the wake of globalization and the free-market economy. It also registers a strong disapproval of the way 1857 has allegedly been ignored by the ‘elitist’ canon of Hindi language and literature and lists some of the masters and makers of Hindi literature who did so.

Giriraj, who translated the poem, found it to be, relatively, easily translatable. There is another English translation of the poem available online [here].

CALQUE: Your August issue addresses the connections between history and literature, but there is almost no discussion on how the colonial history in India complicates the practice of translations into English. Is this a deliberate editorial choice?

PRATILIPI: Yes. We wanted to address it separately and you’ll only have to till the 4th issue is out (October).

CALQUE: Pratilipi is available for on-demand printing through CinnamonTeal. Tell us about the choice to offer the magazine as print matter in this way. What does it look like in print?

PRATILIPI: We decided to make it available in print because (a) there are many writers, especially in Hindi and other Indian languages, who do not read online and (b) the online format was never our first choice.

We have uploaded the print-edition covers [here].

CALQUE: What should readers look forward to in the next issue? Can you show us a preview?

PRATILIPI: The lead story is the text we are most excited about. It is a very significant research paper on Ramanand, whom tradition(s) have referred to as the guru of the great medieval saint-poet Kabir. Modern scholarship holds that Ramanand and Kabir were not contemporaries and that the Brahman Ramanand could not have been the guru of the low-caste Kabir. It is a brilliant piece of academic research on one hand and a powerful critique of contemporary identity discourses on the other. Noted Kabir scholar, Purushottam Agrawal’s, work is not only likely to generate some serious academic responses but may also direct the course of identity debates for some time.

Besides this, we have: six major poets – Dhoomil, Shreekant Verma, Soumitra Mohan, Kunwar Narain, Kedarnath Singh, from Hindi (in English translation) and Keki Daruwalla; excerpts from Marguerite Duras’ novel The Malady of Death in Hindi translation; poems by and an interview of Kasi Anandan, a Tamil elam poet; a follow-up article to the third issue’s theme of ‘History and Literature’; a feature on an Indian music band and an editorial on the problematic of translation into English.

•••

Interview with Pratilipi

2008-09-21T16:55:00.004-04:00

In June I was alerted to the existence of a new journal of literature in translation, Pratilipi. It only took me three months to write some interview questions, which the editors graciously answered. It's thrilling to learn that others are attempting a venture in the same spirit. We wish them good luck.

CALQUE: Let’s begin with the name of the magazine. What is its significance?

PRATILIPI: Pratilipi, in common usage, means a duplicate or a copy. But, if we break the word into the prefix ‘prati’ and ‘lipi’ (both derived from Sanskrit), it can be understood as ‘Counter-Script’ which, perhaps, explains the intended meaning.

CALQUE: What are the origins of Pratilipi?

PRATILIPI: See [here].

CALQUE: Elaborate on your editorial goals beyond what is written in the About section of the website?

PRATILIPI:
• To help create an online, translative space across Indian languages.
• To publish more and more diverse kinds of texts – writing and other media.
• To improve upon the quality of translations.

CALQUE: Tell us about your goals as publishers. What would you like Pratilipi to look like in 5 years? Do you have a model?

PRATILIPI: In 5 years we hope to have a regular print edition with a circulation of 5000, and editors from other languages, Indian and non-Indian.

CALQUE: Can you describe the literary landscape in India? Where does Pratilipi fit in? Is the climate receptive to a project like yours?

PRATILIPI: India is a multilingual, multi-script culture. The Indian constitution recognizes 22 languages, excluding English. The Sahitya Akademi (the National Academy of Letters) recognizes 24 – including English. They publish two periodicals, one in Hindi and one in English, with work from all Indian languages – translated into Hindi or English. Similarly, there are magazines published by the State Academies, in the language of the region. Sometimes they too carry translations from other Indian languages. Still, there are no magazines/platforms that have the scope and flexibility to bring all these literatures together.

Besides, one of the persisting legacies of colonialism is that English is the dominant language when it comes to translations. Most translations from Indian languages are into English. Translations across Indian languages are rare (except by the Sahitya Akademi) and, ironically, this is something not many people, including writers, are very worried about. Translation into English gets you some money, recognition, near-canonization and a pan-Indian/global presence – something that translation into another Indian language cannot offer.

In such a scenario, we wish we could be a magazine where interaction across Indian languages and also between the Hindi and English worlds of national literary life could take place. Most good authors in Indian languages get translated into English, but the two worlds have remained, basically, very different worlds.

Hindi and Indian languages have maintained the Nehruvian welfare model in a dangerous way. Nothing can happen there without government involvement in the form of institutions or funds. And there are the publishers’ canards about readership in Indian languages. Even when satellite-TV giants and publishers like Penguin and Harper Collins have entered the Hindi/Bhasha market, everybody keeps repeating that Hindi/Indian language literature does not sell. In Hindi and other languages, the average print run for a book is 1000, with most of the copies going to public-sector libraries at a profit margin that has kept some publishers in business for more than sixty years. On the other hand, the English scene has always been market-driven.

We, the editors, as north Indians from Rajasthan, have access to Hindi, English and Rajasthani (recognized by the constitution only as a regional dialect, but by the Sahitya Akademi as a language). That’s why, so far, we have been able to focus mainly on Hindi and English. To be frank, we need to become an agency that pays its authors and translators and proposed language editors if we wish to do more than that. We have been lucky to get 60-odd good, serious and seriously-taken writers from Hindi, English, Kannada, Urdu, Assamese, Rajasthani, Spanish, Catalan, Swedish, Japanese and Norwegian to contribute for the magazine in its first three issues and we’d like to make a public expression of our gratitude to all of them.

So far, we have had a ‘dream run’ and we come across exciting possibilities almost every week.

CALQUE: What are some of the difficulties and advantages of working with a bilingual format on the website?

PRATILIPI: The biggest difficulty/problem is making sure that the Hindi sections are visible properly across various operating systems and web browsers. The situation is improving, though, with the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox supporting Unicode display and native support for it on the latest version of Apple’s OS-X and the new Linux distributions. Wordpress (the CMS on which we’ve built our magazine) also handles the Hindi text fairly well, though BlogSpot is better in that regard – which, by the way, has led to an explosion of sorts in Hindi blogging. To be sure, Unicode is what has made the site, as we conceived it, possible.

The other problem is the lack of an intuitive, offline transliteration tool (it’s always easier to type in roman script, what with the keyboards all being English…) and the lack of proofing tools for Hindi.

The last major problem is aesthetic – there are no good-looking, readable fonts in Hindi which are also complete, in terms of the glyphs they can handle. On-screen readability, especially, is a major issue. A standard set of complete fonts – for screen and for print – is desperately needed.

The advantages are self-evident: the ability to read originals and translations side-by-side; publishing in two languages increases the range of pieces we can offer our readers; the bilingual format also puts us in a rather unique position – we are the first online, Hindi/English, literary journal.

CALQUE: Tell us about the Hindi language and the challenges it presents to the translator into English.

PRATILIPI: Hindi has a problematic history – especially Khari Boli, i.e. the modern Hindi (Khari Boli Hindi is one language that was born ‘modern’). It has a more problematic past as a language that was promoted to be the Rashtrabhasha (National Language) and the Rajbhasha (Official Language), as a language that was instrumental in creating a nation(ality).

Hindi (literary Hindi) is, broadly, of two kinds: one with a tatsama (originary/Sanskritic) inclination, the other with a tadbhava (derivative/folk/Urdu-Persian) inclination (also known as Hindustani). For translations into English, both pose specific problems. A novelist like Hazari Prasad Dwivedi is generally considered untranslatable for his dominantly tatsama language and a writer like Phanishwar Nath Renu is generally considered untranslatable for his dominantly dialectical/regional tadbhava Hindi.

It has also has some connection to a writer’s relationship with western modernism and his level of comfort with English. Someone like Nirmal Verma, one of the most widely translated Hindi writers, is perhaps also the most (easily) translatable. His Hindi is syntactically very different – it reflects the modernistic influences that formed it.

CALQUE: A terse reader commented that the translation of ‘1857: Search for Material,’ a section from the lead article in the August issue was "terrible," but was not generous enough to elaborate beyond these three syllables. Can you describe this poem and the translation for us?

PRATILIPI: Asad Zaidi’s poem was first published in his collection ‘Saamaan kee Talaash’ (Search for Material, 2008). Then, it was reproduced in a Hindi print magazine ‘Pahal’, this time with a note by the poet Mangalesh Dabral.

A review in a Hindi daily, ‘Jansatta’, sparked off culturalist responses which were brought online by a Hindi blog. For what the poem is, at a textual level, please read Rajesh Kumar Sharma’s piece [here].

The poem says that the battle of the working-class and the common people against imperialism is not over. In its contemporary version we have farmers committing suicide in the wake of globalization and the free-market economy. It also registers a strong disapproval of the way 1857 has allegedly been ignored by the ‘elitist’ canon of Hindi language and literature and lists some of the masters and makers of Hindi literature who did so.

Giriraj, who translated the poem, found it to be, relatively, easily translatable. There is another English translation of the poem available online [here].

CALQUE: Your August issue addresses the connections between history and literature, but there is almost no discussion on how the colonial history in India complicates the practice of translations into English. Is this a deliberate editorial choice?

PRATILIPI: Yes. We wanted to address it separately and you’ll only have to till the 4th issue is out (October).

CALQUE: Pratilipi is available for on-demand printing through CinammonTeal. Tell us about the choice to offer the magazine as print matter in this way. What does it look like in print?

PRATILIPI: We decided to make it available in print because (a) there are many writers, especially in Hindi and other Indian languages, who do not read online and (b) the online format was never our first choice.

We have uploaded the print-edition covers [here].

CALQUE: What should readers look forward to in the next issue? Can you show us a preview?

PRATILIPI: The lead story is the text we are most excited about. It is a very significant research paper on Ramanand, whom tradition(s) have referred to as the guru of the great medieval saint-poet Kabir. Modern scholarship holds that Ramanand and Kabir were not contemporaries and that the Brahman Ramanand could not have been the guru of the low-caste Kabir. It is a brilliant piece of academic research on one hand and a powerful critique of contemporary identity discourses on the other. Noted Kabir scholar, Purushottam Agrawal’s, work is not only likely to generate some serious academic responses but may also direct the course of identity debates for some time.

Besides this, we have: six major poets – Dhoomil, Shreekant Verma, Soumitra Mohan, Kunwar Narain, Kedarnath Singh, from Hindi (in English translation) and Keki Daruwalla; excerpts from Marguerite Duras’ novel The Malady of Death in Hindi translation; poems by and an interview of Kasi Anandan, a Tamil elam poet; a follow-up article to the third issue’s theme of ‘History and Literature’; a feature on an Indian music band and an editorial on the problematic of translation into English.

•••

from Praxis, 8: Album, tumult by Per HøjholtTranslated from the Danish by Martin Aitken

2008-09-03T17:18:00.005-04:00

What follows is a random selection from Praksis, 8: Album, tumult [Praxis, 8: Album, tumult] (1989), by Per Højholt. A full and distinct selection of Højholt's prose poems translated by Martin Aitken will be published in CALQUE 5, forthcoming in November, 2008.

• • •

Per Højholt (1928-2004) was one of Denmark’s most influential poets, a philosophical modern master whose work throughout is shaped by playful, often equilibristic linguistics and a simultaneous and astonishing ability to express highly philosophical issues in a colloquial style employing ironical humour as one of its foremost instruments. A trained librarian, Højholt debuted in book form in 1949 with Hesten og Solen (The Horse and the Sun), echoing the predominant Danish modernist style that was coming to expression notably in the Heretica journal. However, Højholt soon discovered a more radical continental modernism as practised by Stephane Mallarmé and his subsequent collection Poetens hoved (The Poet’s Head) (1963) marked the beginning of the authorship proper. The oeuvre spans prose as well as poetry, the latter though predominant, some 40 works in total, overriding themes being the paradox of man’s removed status in relation to the natural world, and language, its nature, function and (lack of) meaning. The so-called Praksis series ran to twelve small volumes published from 1977 through 1996 and provided a laboratory framework for much of the poetic oeuvre. Praksis, 8: Album, tumult (1989) contains 59 short prose pieces, the majority extending no more than half a dozen lines or so, all archetypal Højholt. CALQUE 5 brings an impromptu selection of fifteen of these pieces. The following is a taste of what is to come. The recipient of numerous major literary awards (including the Danish Arts Foundation’s lifetime grant), shortlisted for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize in 2003, Højholt appears here for what may be the first time in English.

• • •

from Praxis, 8: Album, tumult

3. Around the town, even on its more frequented thoroughfares, there are places where no-one or hardly anyone sets foot. Places which have not always been there, brought into existence as they are by the town itself, an architecture with the rectangle and the square as its basic forms. But since people in the main move in curves, these corners and triangles are in surplus, they fall outside the scope, though never on that account approaching nature. They are without growth and innocence and become places of sojourn for children, dogs, leaves, drunks and litter, which here, without inconveniencing more purposeful traffic, are able to play, shit, perish or rot, or move slightly in windy weather.

16. The way across the floor to the door I manage as a matter of course. It is going down the stairs I take exception to, all those steps, one merely referring to the next. If the last only referred to my death, but it refers as a simple matter of course to the floor down here in the kitchen.

26. The lobster. His one hand is large and red and chapped and wet, it severs the head and fins of the fish and tears away the skin with sacking and passes the parcel over the counter. The other is smaller, yellowish, without nails, and is wiped with a cloth.

39. Minor Kafka idyll. The more I spoke to him the larger his head became. Several times I tried falling silent to encourage him to empty himself, but he challenged me each time with new questions demanding detailed replies, and thereby against my will, little by little, I caused his head to take on a quite monstrous proportion. When later we accompanied each other along the street I noticed to my surprise that it was me people were staring at, not him, and when we took leave of each other and I remained standing a moment to watch him manoeuvre his great, egg-shaped head down through the pedestrian street, it was not him, but me they applauded.

© Per Højholt & Gyldendal 1989
Translation © Martin Aitken 2008

• • •

Martin Aitken (born 1961) is a translator of fiction and poetry. He holds a PhD in linguistics and lectures in English language. He lives in rural Denmark and is currently translating a novel for Simon & Schuster in New York.

Translating Madness by Doreen Stock

2008-08-24T12:34:00.006-04:00

Madwomen, The Locas Mujeres Poems of Gabriela Mistral, a bilingual edition, Edited and Translated by Randall Couch, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2008.

To approach the grand theater of madness is to sing the song of the other using what is extreme in the emotional ground of the self.

To attempt an articulation from perspectives of empathy and witness of such states, which exist with their own inner grammar, requires on the part of the poet a self-induced trance to translate them into poetry, and on the part of the translator a rigorous transparency which allows this trance to flow into the second language. Randall Couch has gathered a remarkable collection of Mujeres Locas, the Mad Women pivoting brilliantly within twenty six poems by Gabriela Mistral, taken from previously published and unpublished sources. He has accepted the challenge of setting them forth in English, and one can only respect and applaud his efforts, undertaken with painstaking scholarship and impassioned linguistic acuity. In his introduction, Couch beautifully evokes the terrain of the poems: “Again and again in Locas Mujeres, the landscape presents a timeless liminal space in which boundaries between physical and spiritual realms dissolve… The terrain is rural or wild: houses, villages, lighthouses, farm buildings are virtually interchangeable among settings in ancient Greece, the Eliqui valley, or biblical Palestine… Such stripped-down scene contributes to a sense of suspension, of synchronic rather than diachronic time, of the step that’s always ‘about to land, that never does.’ ” How do the translations succeed in rendering the states within them in the movement from Mistral’s original Spanish into Couch’s English? I will try to highlight some of these movements and the problems they embody for me. The first word of the first poem in the collection presents the question of what to do with gendered words. “La Otra” in Spanish is markedly feminine, while “The Other,” in English is not.

Una en mi mate
Yo no la amaba
I killed one of me
One I did not love

The poem begins simply enough in the original Doris Dana translation, (John Hopkins Press, 1961). John Couch renders this line:

I killed a woman in me
One I did not love.

And were I to take a “stab” at this line I would probably come down closer to Dana’s line:

I killed one of me
one I didn’t love

feeling, perhaps, that the use of the first person by a female poet is sufficient to confer the feminine on the other, the use of the word “woman” displacing the drama from the center of the self by focusing on marking gender. Also, the pronoun “ella,” “she,” appears in the third line, firmly establishing the gender of the subject. In another poem, “La Bailarina,” Couch solves a similar problem using the word “Ballerina” in English, which to the non-Spanish-speaking eye looks like the Spanish, but is far from it, the word “bailar” meaning simply “to dance,” and having only tangentially to do with ballet via the common root. “The Dancer” would be simpler, truer, the pronoun “ella,” “she,” also appearing in this poem in the third line, marking gender. The larger than merely word choice issue here is that in translating madness, the flow of the inner state should take precedence over a diction that pulls the reader of the poem into a more objective or even ironic position as the reference to the formalism of ballet is apt to do. I’d like to return to “The Other,” because it seems emblematic of the poems in the collection, creating as they do narratives that proceed in dreamlike images and exclamations to their conclusions. In this poem, two images, that of a flaming cactus flower and of a fierce, starving eagle characterize The Other and bear her through her transformation and separation from the self that is trying to exorcise her. The interesting question that the poem poses but leaves essentially unanswered: does the killing of the other free the speaker of the poem, or is the act of killing it (i.e. the repression of the other) the source of her madness? In this parable of the scorching cactus- flower woman the grasses actually twist away from her hot breath as she naps on the ground and her words can’t flow freely. The violent and deliberate self-annihilation occurs at the very point in the poem where the cactus flower woman becomes a starving eagle :

La deje que muriese,
Robandole me entrana.
Se acabo como el aguila
Que no es alimentada.
(Mistral)

I left her to die
Robbing her of my heart’s blood
She ended like an eagle
Starved of its food.
(Couch)

I tore my guts from her.
I let her die,
a starving eagle
left unfed.
(Dana)

I let her die
tearing my guts from her
She ended like an eagle
left to starve.
(Stock)

The progression of images conjures up a terrible hunger and thirst, a thirst unto death, but the speaker is then haunted by grieving sister spirits of the eagle whom she urges to create “another burning eagle” from the clay of the ravines. Here we are at that terrain Couch has so aptly described as both physical and spiritual, the states dissolving one into the other. The final utterance of the poem is an exhortation to these grieving sisters to kill the other within themselves as well if they should fail to recreate her from the fiery clay, the poem ending at the intersection of the rising up of dark cravings and the need to destroy them. Or, as Couch describes it, in "synchronic time,” at “the step that’s about to land but never does.” Here I want to ask, does the translator take it upon himself to embody the meaning of the poem before attempting to render it? Can he? All considerations of diction, meter, word choice fall away, it seems to me, in the face of this central question. Can he be female? Be mad? What would this entail? And how would the poem be sung should he allow himself to experience it at his depths? Should the translator merely transpose the Spanish words of the poet into English, or should the state the poet is channeling also be taken into account? And if the answer involves the latter, what would it take to make this happen? How would the poem’s syntax emerge then? The inner grammar of a poem has to do with its form in the unconscious. From this the poet sings it into the original language, passing it through her own vocabulary and voice. What should be done to get back to the original prelingual poem? Can this ever be done as a group activity? Can a poem be lost in committee? This question occurred to me as I read the translator’ introduction and acknowledgments. The final stanza of “The Other” is addressed to the grieving sister spirits of the dead eagle:

Si no podeis, entonces,
!ay!, olvidadla.
Yo la mate. 1Vosotras
Tambien matadla!
(Mistral)

“If you can’t do it, then,
too bad! Forget her.
I killed her. You women
must kill her, too!”
(Couch)

“If you can’t, then
forget her.
I killed her. You
kill her, too.”
(Dana)

“If you can’t , then,
!Ay! Forget her.
I killed her. You
must kill her, too.”
(Stock)

“Too bad,” does not work for me here. I would prefer the soul wrenching “Ay!” of the original Spanish to convey the emotion involved in this traumatic form of forgetting, the letting go of a part of the self engaged in such passions as are conveyed in this poem. And the gender marking here (“You women”) again, seems to underscore the distance of the self translating the poem from the unconscious drama being concluded.

Translating madness demands no less than an exclamation coming from the self in extremity, and if there is no evidence of a descent to this state, the new poem becomes a linguistically apt shadow of it former self.