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

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

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

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

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

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

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….