Gained in Translation by Zachariah Wells + Reproduction and Recreation by Lidia Valencia-Fourcans

Gained in Translation

by Zachariah Wells 

It's often said that poetry can't be translated, but poetry itself is an act of translation, as the alchemist poet attempts to transubstantiate external and internal realities into verbal structures. This is why poetry, like alchemy, is an art defined by failure. Translating a poem from one language to another is relatively easy, both being base metals, but nettlesome nonetheless. Pitfalls abound: individual word choices; syntax; rhythms and/or metre; rhyme schemes and other patterns of sound. To say nothing of peculiarities of diction related to regional dialect, idiomatic expressions, the neologistic predilections of the poet (many of whom have cultivated a highly personal idiolect), the passage of time, etc. What's remarkable—as with most human undertakings—is how miraculously well poetry translation often works.

When Colin Carberry, who knows the highs and lows of translation as well as anyone, invited me to take part in the Linares International Literary Festival, he asked that I come with poems translated into Spanish. My first step was finding a translator. I needed someone who could do better than make an accurate prose paraphrase of my poems in Spanish. I needed someone with an ear for poetry, who would be able not only to convey the sense of my poems, but who could also convert their rough Anglo-Saxon music into the melodious cadences of Spanish. The last thing I wanted, after travelling some 5,000 km, was to sound lame.

I put out feelers and got a few leads. The most promising came from Stephen Henighan, who introduced me to Lidia Valencia Fourcans, a former student of his at the U of Guelph. Lidia, a professional translator originally from Mexico City, had rendered a story of Stephen's into Spanish when he had read in Linares a year earlier and he said she'd done a very fine job.

My next step was to select poems. I skipped my first book altogether. Not only because I'm distant from it, but because its locus, the far north, is so far from Mexico that I feared more than usual would be lost in translation. My most recent collection, Track & Trace, with its coastlines and cities and farms, seemed a safer bet. Until I started going through it with an eye for the more easily translatable poems. All I could see was problems and headaches, potholes and hurdles. (One of my poems, “Orkney Report,” contains so many Orcadian dialect words it practically needs to be translated into English.)

I finally chose nine poems from the book that I thought strayed the least from Standard Written English, and added “Waypoints,” an unpublished poem dedicated to Elizabeth Bishop, who loved Mexico. I sent the works off to Lidia.

When she returned the first draft of her translations, I learned that my poems were more nodular than I'd thought. My knowledge of Spanish—acquired from a Mexican friend in high school who taught me to swear and from a first year Spanish class I took at the end of the last century—is extremely crude and Lidia's English is very good, but I knew enough to recognize a few instances of mistranslation. One culprit: idiomatic expressions. The sort of dead metaphors that native speakers of a language take for granted, but that second language speakers have a devil of a time (e.g.) mastering. So, for instance, “fag ends” became literal cigarette butts and “rest your bones” was “descansar tus huesos,” which I was pretty sure wasn't a colloquial equivalent to the English phrase it reproduced in good faith. And then there were the obscure words (“pardic”) and neologisms (“scudged”) where all poor Lidia could do was insert an ellipsis in square brackets. In a couple of poems, knottily recursive syntax left her unsure how to parse the originals.

So I went back to my own poems with fresh eyes, hunting for anything that might be ambiguous or otherwise problematic, and returned them to Lidia, heavily annotated. Working with Santiago Hernán Sicilia, whom she'd recruited to help her, Lidia produced not just one set of translations, but the two versions she describes below, along with a comprehensive set of notes explaining various choices. The poems still hadn't gelled completely, but we were getting there.

After a few more emails back and forth, we had our final versions. During this stage, I got actively involved in the translation process myself. One of the more vexing problems was posed by the rhymes in my poem “A Winter.” Spanish is a very rhyme-friendly tongue, but it turns out that nothing in Spanish rhymes with “Fraser.” Lidia, wanting to keep that majestic western Canadian river in the Mexican version of the poem, tried using “alka-seltzer” as a slant rhyme. But that so distorted the line that I couldn't live with it. I could, however, live with changing the name of the river, a liberty Lidia didn't feel licensed to take. And so, the mighty Colorado cut a canyon into “Invierno.”

I made other changes that had more to do with how the poems were sounding to me. Although I can't really speak Spanish at all, it's a phonetically regular language, and I can read it reasonably well. Knowing that cold readings of unfamiliar poems rarely go well, I intended to deliver the translations myself in Linares, so I practiced reading them aloud and in the process found a few things that just didn't sound quite right to me. (This is a test I routinely put to poems and prose I've written in English, too.) Using an online Spanish-English dictionary, I made tentative changes here and there, which I sent to Lidia and Santiago. A few of my changes were troublesome or downright wrong (I learned, for instance, that “moreno” doesn't just mean “brown,” but has racial connotations) and some needed slight modification, but I was chuffed to learn that a number of my tinkerings constituted improvements in the opinion of my translators. (I hasten to add that I would never have been able to venture such tweaks without the incredibly thorough, conscientious and inspired work done by Lidia and Santiago.)

The final step was, of course, reading the poems to real live Mexican audiences. In doing so, I learned something else about translation. In my poem “What He Found Growing in the Woods,” I describe slugs as “creeping beads / of cool snot,” a line that occasionally elicits mild disgust in those who hear it. The translation of that phrase, “reptantes gotas / de moco fresco,” which sounds to my ear like something a Starbucks barista might whip up on a sultry afternoon, is, it turns out, hilarious to Mexicans; it got laughs every time I read it. Lidia explained that it was a cultural thing; that Mexicans would not expect to encounter such a dirty image in a poem, hence the giggles. I suspect it has as much to do with the music of the thing, the comic assonance in those repeated R's, E's, T's, C's and O's. Every now and then, something unexpected is gained in translation.

Reproduction and Recreation 

by Lidia Valencia-Fourcans

Poetry is probably the greatest challenge a translator can undertake, no matter the language or cultural context. The translator has  not only to render the text accurately, but has to come up with an interpretative recreation of the original. This is not likely to happen while translating legal or technical documents, and certainly it is a risk no translator would consciously take with such documents.

The hardest challenge of poetry translation is walking the line between faithful reproduction and free recreation. It might be impossible to render a text with the same grammatical qualities, rhythms and rhymes, but when a translator allows herself many stylistic differences the result is a recreation of the original instead of a translation.

Most of the challenges I faced while translating ten poems by Zachariah Wells were related to idiomatic peculiarities. In certain cases, it was very difficult to find words with identical meanings, connotations or even associations. That is why it took a tremendous amount of time and discernment to make accurate word choices. Also, the ambiguities of syntax and punctuation were an interesting  problem. Poetic language has rules of its own. Therefore, it is not simple to translate its syntax, rhythms and phonetic aspects from the original to target language. Spanish does not have much in common with English, as it has with other romance languages such as Italian, Portuguese and French. Hence it was more complicated to capture the “earthy” voice of the poems' lyric subject and all the syntactic ambiguities of the original.  What I saw in these poems was a natural, "colloquial" lyric subject who was not very engaged with poeticism, but at the same time was very precise in his descriptions of places, objects, feelings and nature. The dialogue between the lyric subject and the reader is well defined, in both the original and the Spanish translation, by the use of a particular register and even a regional accent. The hardest part for me was to translate not only the meaning and the poetic expression but the style too. That is why I decided to work on two different versions.

The first version was more elaborate, maintaining the meaning of the poem, but focused mainly on the poem's stylistics. This translation took place more at the level of ideas than language. The second version focused on the use of language and fluidity of the poems in Spanish. The first version lacked literality but I kept the translation as faithful as possible to the original. No matter the stylistic differences, it was still a translation from the original, not a recreation. The second version was a more literal translation. It did not have many variations in the word choices and phrasal combinations but it lacked Spanish fluency in the poetic lines and had an impoverished rhythm. I was very fortunate to be able to question and discuss everything with the author throughout the translation process, which provided me with better insight into the essence of the poems. At the end I was very pleased to have a final version that stylistically and linguistically captured the essence of the original version in English but in the beauty of the Spanish language. Overall, it was a very enriching experience for me as a translator and as a poetry lover.

The following translations were published in Ten Poems / Diez Poemas by Cactus Press in a signed and numbered edition of 100. Copies can be ordered from Zachariah Wells.

WHAT HE FOUND GROWING IN THE WOODS

Green air and a rusty babble.

Tender tight fists of fiddleheads

fronding into bitter-leafed ferns.

Salamanders, nude under turned-

over stones, and slugs, creeping beads

of cool snot. Foam of bubbles

coating a dam of fallen tree rubble.

Cicadas scraping shrill creeds

and credentials. Flowers where a fire once burned.

Brown blurred pheasants churning

green air. His last full head

of hair and the first faint traces of stubble.

LO QUE ÉL ENCONTRÓ BROTANDO EN LOS BOSQUES

Aire verde y un susurro mohoso.

Tiernos puños apretados en retoño

brotando en helechos de hoja amarga.

Salamandras, desnudas bajo piedras

volcadas; y babosas, reptantes gotas

de moco fresco. Espuma de pompas

cubriendo un dique de árboles caídos.

Cigarras chirriando estridentes credos

y logros. Flores donde antaño ardió la brasa.

Borrosos faisanes marrones agitando

un aire verdoso. Su última rica cabellera

y los primeros bosquejos de barba.

A WINTER

It was a winter of atmospheric depressions

It was a winter of anhedonic ennui

It was a winter of dumb indecision

It was a winter of her, a winter of me

It was a winter of silt in the Fraser

It was a winter of tugboats and freight trains

It was a winter of rust on the razor

It was a winter of nightmares and rain

It was a winter of dull unemployment

It was a winter of landlords and in-laws

It was a winter of ill-planned deployments

It was a winter of hammers and saws

It was a winter of wrongheaded answers

It was a winter in which nothing clicked

It was the winter the cat died of cancer

It was the winter you quickened and kicked

INVIERNO

Era un invierno de depresiones atmosféricas

Era un invierno de anhedónicö hastío

Era un invierno de irresoluciones huecas

Era un invierno de ella, un invierno mío

Era un invierno de fango en el Colorado

Era un invierno de remolques y lentos cargueros

Era un invierno de polvo y rastrillo oxidado

Era un invierno de malsueños y aguaceros

Era un invierno de aburridos desempleos

Era un invierno dentre afines y caseras

Era un invierno de despliegues erróneos

Era un invierno de martillos y argalleras

Era un invierno de respuestas muy dispares

Era un invierno en el que nada coexistió

Ese invierno murió el gato de cánceres

Ese invierno en que latiste y tu patadita se sintió

____________________

Zachariah Wells is the author of the poetry collections Unsettled and Track & Trace; co-author, with Rachel Lebowitz, of the children's book Anything but Hank!; and editor ofJailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets and The Essential Kenneth Leslie. Over the past decade, his critical reviews and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals and anthologies in Canada and the US and he has won Arc Poetry Magazine's Critic's Prize four times. Originally from Prince Edward Island, Wells now lives with his family in Halifax, where he works as a freelance Zach-of-all-trades. 

Lidia Valencia-Fourcans was born in Mexico City and has lived in Mexico most of her life. After completing her B.A. in English with a minor in Literary Studies and Translation, Lidia traveled to Quebec in the summer of 2006 to learn French and be able to read some of her favourite poets in their original language. In 2011, she completed an MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Guelph, with a dissertation focused on solitude as a leitmotif in the poetic work of the contemporary Mexican poet Jaime Sabines (1926-1999).

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An Excerpt from The Accident by Mihail Sebastian, translated by Stephen Henighan

SHE DIDN'T KNOW HOW MUCH TIME had passed. A few seconds? A few long minutes?

     She felt nothing. Around her she heard voices, footsteps, people calling out, but all muted and grey, like a sort of auditory paste, from which occasionally a tram bell or a shout shook loose with unexpected clarity, only to fade away again into the suffocated commotion.

     They’ll say it’s an accident, she thought very calmly, almost with indifference.

     The thought made her feel neither alarmed nor hurried. She had a very vague impression that she must be stretched out next to the sidewalk with her head in the snow. But she didn’t try to move.

     A stupid, senseless question passed through her mind: What time is it?

     She strained to listen to the tick-tock of her wristwatch, but couldn't hear it. It must have been smashed. Then, in an effort to concentrate, as though immersed in herself, she observed that in fact she heard nothing of her own being; not her pulse, not her heart, not her breath.

     I’m..., she reflected. I’m like a clock. And it seemed to her that she was smiling, although she couldn’t feel her lips, for whose outline she searched in vain somewhere in that familiar yet vanished space that was her unfeeling body.

     She remembered suddenly the moment of the fall, so suddenly that she had the impression that she was falling again, and she heard again the brief noise, like that of a shattered spring, that she had heard then.

     She hadn’t dwelt on it at the time, but now it returned with an absurd precision: the dry sound of a tearing ligament, of a snapping bow. In truth it seemed to her that somewhere in the intimacy of this body that she no longer felt, something had been ripped out of its natural place.

     She tried to review her being, with a brisk inward glance, in order to identify, as though on an X-ray screen, the exact spot of the dislocation.

     The collar bone? The aorta? The kneecap?

     For each word, it seemed to her that she had to find a response in her inert body, which she listened to again, forcing herself to explore it with her hearing down to its most remote fibres.

     All right, something’s broken. But what?

     Voices rose and fell on the street around her in noisy outbreaks that suddenly became distant. They reached her as though passing through mist or steam.

     All at once she overcame the penetrating cold and at the same time she felt her right knee naked against the snow, as though it alone in all her body had awoken her from a powerful anaesthetic. So far away, yet how intensely she felt it! She concentrated her thoughts on this sensation for a moment. This single sensitive point felt extremely strange to her, detached from her swoon like a little island of life.

     Then, like a wave of blood, the cold rose above her knees and spread like a fine net through her calf, calling back to life new regions of her flesh. The snow was fluffy, soothing, and it had the softness of chilled bedclothes. She plunged her leg with caution straight into that snow and felt its utter nakedness, her stocking having fallen to her ankle.

     In that moment, the tearing sensation of a few seconds earlier flashed through her again. Her mind, which had hesitated until now, located the exact point of the torn piece of her anatomy: her garter. Having broken loose, its metallic spring pressed up against her calf like a small round signet.

     I must be half naked, she thought without panic. She had barely lifted her head when the voices grew clearer, as though the mist had suddenly dispersed.

     “Criminals!” an old man shouted. He blustered, suffocated by the violence of his anger, at a tram driver, who stood in dazed silence. “You don’t look in front of you, you don’t look around you, you don’t give a hoot about your passengers, about women or children...”

     The tram driver gestured, trying to explain.

     “Well, if she’s getting off....”

     “So what if she’s getting off? Doesn’t she have the right?”

     “She doesn’t have the right because this isn’t a stop,” somebody else said, in a tone of indifference.

     From the ground, she tried to see the person who had spoken, but in the darkness she could only make out an expression lacking in curiosity.

     “Of course it’s not a stop,” the driver repeated, mildly encouraged.

     The elderly gentleman, indignant, refused to back down.

     “It’s a damned shame it isn’t. It should be. We pay for this service. You know they take our money, but they don’t lend a hand to build new stops. Criminals, bandits.... You’ve got rich on the money from our pockets.”

     She became aware of a smile that fluttered in the dark and, without raising her head far enough to receive this smile full in the face, was certain that it belonged to the indifferent voice of a moment earlier.

     “...Yes, that’s how they get us, we deserve it, we’re dumb and we don’t respond...”

     He was stupid, certainly, but she realized that, sprawled there in the snow, she wasn’t listening to the strident voice of the outraged old man, but rather to the other man’s distant silences.

     “...Yes, gentlemen, we fail to respond. Let’s call a police officer and we’ll send you off to see a judge, you lawbreaker....”

     Finally she heard again the other man’s voice, that slightly deaf, slightly lazy voice. He was probably speaking to the tram driver.

     “Hit the road, lad. Get back into your tram and hit the road.”

     “Sure, let him hit the road and leave her there dead in the snow.”

     Everyone gazed in her direction. In the heat of the argument she had been forgotten, but now she once again became the central character in the drama.

     She felt ridiculous, sprawled out as she was –who knew how long she’d been there?– in the middle of the street amid a group of curious bystanders. She would have liked to get up, but she knew she couldn’t do it alone.

     She glanced around in a circle, seeking a familiar figure among those grey faces, and stopped at the man whose lazy voice had caught her attention. She recognized him by his uncaring gaze, which bore a strong resemblance to his voice.

     “Rather than having a fight, why don’t you help me get up?”

     The man didn’t look at all surprised. Without haste, he took a step towards her, paused, kneeled, placed his hand beneath her right arm and lifted her firmly, if without great deftness.

     She was unable to suppress a small cry of pain when, reaching a standing position, she was left with her full weight on her right leg.

     “Does it hurt?”

     “I don’t know. I’ll see later.”

     What should she do now? The circle of curious bystanders tightened around her. Her hat slipped onto the nape of her neck, her right stocking had slid down her leg, her overcoat was covered with snow, her gloves were soaked....

     She felt that getting up had been a mistake: she had been more comfortable lying in the snow. For a moment she was tempted to tumble back down on the spot, a thought that made her smile and recover her calm. I’ve got to escape from this, she said to herself, confronting the group’s curiosity with courage.

     She returned to the man at her side, who also seemed rather embarrassed by the spectacle.

     “Would you like to take a few steps with me?” The suggestion seemed to bore him. She hastened to calm him. “Just a few, as far as the car.”

     She didn’t wait for his reply. She took his arm and set out alongside him, treading with care in order not to reawaken the pain of a few moments earlier.

*

Neither a car nor a taxi could be seen. The young gentleman made no effort to conceal his boredom. He remained stubbornly silent, distracted.
     She would have been happy to leave him and continue on her way alone, but she didn’t trust her right leg. Twice she tried to tread with her full weight, and the pain sliced into her ankle like a blade.
     He’s been badly brought up, but I need him. She took his arm more firmly, as though she wished to show him that she wasn’t going to allow herself to be intimidated by his bad upbringing and that she wasn’t giving up.
     She walked a little behind him, not daring to tell him to take shorter steps. She was able to scowl at him in profile without his noticing. A drab guy, with undefinable features, young-looking, although not of any precise age; his hair looked blonde, although it wasn’t of any clearly defined colour. Maybe I’ve seen him before somewhere.
     Was he tall? Short? She wouldn’t have known what to say. He looked tall in that loose, grey overcoat with large pockets into which he had thrust his hands with a self-assured air.
     He remained silent, in the silence of a long journey, reserved, enduring, expressionless.
     It’s as if he were alone. As if I weren’t here by his side. As if he had forgotten that I was by his side. What if he really has forgotten? What if he wakes up and finds us arm-in-arm and asks me what I’m doing here, hanging onto his arm?
     She decided to break the silence.
     “I don’t know how it happened. I slipped, you see, on the step of the tram. I was trying to get off.”
     “While the tram was moving?”
     Hearing his voice surprised her. She thought he hadn’t heard her, that he wasn’t going to respond. Her surprise made her animated.
     “Yes, while the tram was moving. I always get off when the tram’s moving. Otherwise it doesn’t work. I live near here, on Bulevardul Dacia, and the number 16 tram only stops on Donici or on Vasile Lascar. It’s too far away. That’s why I get off at the turn, where the tram goes onto Orientul. Not just me. Everybody who lives around here does it. And nothing ever happens. Except for today... I don’t know how it happened.”
     They were passing beneath the pulsing of a streetlight. In the light, his face again looked distracted.
     What an unpleasant guy! Even so, she summoned the courage to stop.
     “Don’t be troubled by what I’m about to ask you. I want you to pull up my stocking. I’m completely frozen.”
     She bent over, realizing only now that she was bleeding: her right knee was red, but lower down, towards her ankle, where the scrape was deeper, frozen blood plastered the stocking’s fabric to the wound.
     “Is it serious?”
     “I don’t know. For the time being it’s not hurting. I should go to the pharmacy. Will you come with me?”
     He didn’t reply, but he took her arm and asked with his eyes: Which way?
     “It’s not far. Look, over there on the other sidewalk.”
     They crossed the street. From afar she found it difficult to recognize herself in the reflection in the pharmacy’s windows next to this man, who looked even stranger in the distant image on the glass. As she approached, she smiled with compassion at her own face. How pathetic I look, poor me! She took off her hat with a brisk motion and stood with it in her hand, dismayed.
     “I can’t go into that shop. The pharmacist knows me, he’ll ask, I’ll have to explain.... Will you...?”
     He accepted unenthusiastically, frowning with his brows.
     “What do you need?”
     “A little iodine and....I don’t know, a little oxygenated water.”
     She was about to open her handbag to give him the money, but, without waiting, he pushed open the door of the pharmacy and went inside.
     From outside, she watched him through the pane of the display window: how he entered, how he took off his hat, how he said good evening, how he approached the pharmacist in his white lab jacket. She found it odd to watch him opening his mouth and uttering words that she couldn’t hear. What a peculiar voice he had! A little muffled, a little quashed, and yet with a rough tone. The pharmacist was pouring the tincture of iodine into a bottle.
     Why was he taking so long? It must be as hot as a greenhouse inside. The metal scales were still. The heavy liquids, as though drowsy, slept on the shelves in solemn crystal flasks.
     The pharmacist was asking him something and he was replying with plenty of enthusiasm. He was more talkative inside in the heat than he had been out here in the cold. And if she were to leave him? If she walked away now, without waiting for him? How astonished he would be at not finding her here, but what a feeling of relief he would have, the saucy devil!
     Her knee started to hurt. To sting more than to hurt. She thought again of the lovely warmth on the other side of the display window and closed her eyes. She felt as though she were slipping into a kind of slumber....
     “Did I take too long?”
     It was his voice. That uncertain voice, which didn’t stress his words and gave her the impression that he was walking at her side without paying attention to her.
     She didn’t reply and didn’t open her eyes.
     “Are you feeling ill?”
     “I’m not ill. But I’d like to get home. I’m freezing.”
     “You said it wasn’t far....”
     “Don’t worry, it isn’t. Another twenty paces and you’re free.”
     She didn’t expect even a polite denial from him. She took his arm, determined not to say anything more to him; she was impatient to be left alone. She forced herself to take ever longer strides, although her right leg was still hurting.
     For the first time since that stupid accident had happened, she felt like she wanted to cry.
     She finally stopped in front of a multiple-storey building, leaned against the glass front door and extended her hand....
“This is it. You can go now. Thank you.”
     He squeezed her hand for a second without holding it, then touched a finger to his hat, sketching a vague half-wave.
     She wanted to tell him: You’re the most unpleasant man in the world. But she was too tired to tell him anything. She left him there in front of the building, and went into the bright foyer, where an enervating wave of heat received her.
     ....She was alone in the elevator. She pressed the button for the top floor, the sixth, then fell onto the bench with a relieved sigh. She promised herself she would cry with all her heart once she got to her apartment. She felt that nothing could be better for her: a good cry followed by a steaming hot bath.
     Somewhere between two floors the elevator stopped with a brusque shudder. At first she thought she had arrived, but she realized that in fact she was suspended in the air.
     This is the day for accidents. She tried to make a joke in her mind. She pressed for a long time on the alarm button.
     She remembered that last summer the old lady from the third floor had spent a whole morning locked in the elevator between two floors. The thought terrified her. She pressed again, with a long, nervous, harsh start of panic, on the red button. In the deep silence, everything was motionless; somewhere far away, as weak as a call from another world, the alarm bell rang without anyone responding to it.
     She could no longer hold back her tears. She looked at herself in the elevator’s rectangular mirror and felt pity for the state she was in: dishevelled, ragged, dirty, frozen. The hot tears welled from her eyes, and she received them with a sudden pleasure, as if she had drawn near to a warm hearth.
     From below someone, probably the porter, shouted: “Hey, third-floor door. Who opened the third-floor door?”
     The third-floor door was closed: the elevator set off noiselessly on its way. She would have liked not to stop again, to travel like that forever, and to be able to cry peacefully to the slow, silent movements of the elevator.
     On the top floor the young gentleman in the grey overcoat was waiting for her. She looked at him in astonishment, unable to understand what was going on.
     “You?”
     “Me. I forgot to give you the iodine tincture and the oxygenated water.”
     Indeed, he pulled two bottles out of his pocket enveloped in the pharmacy’s multicoloured paper.
     “And how did you get up here?”
     “By the stairs.”
     “Six floors?”
     “Six.”
     What an odd guy! she thought, watching him for a moment, intrigued again by his lack of expression. Now, too, he had that far-away, unquestioning gaze, which she had first seen when she had raised her head from the snow.
     She remembered that she had been crying. Embarrassed, she lowered her eyes; but it was too late: he had noticed.
     “You were crying?”
     “No.... Well, yes. A little. But it’s not important! It’s never important when I cry...”
     She took the key out of her handbag.
     “Do you want to come in for a moment?”
     He responded by lifting his shoulders.
     “Does that mean Yes, or does that mean No?”
     “I don’t know what it means. It’s a habitual gesture. Let’s say Yes.”
     “So come in.”
     Next to the door was a small, metal plate: Nora Munteanu. He asked the question with his eyes and she confirmed: “That’s me.”

________________________________________

Mihail Sebastian (1907-1945) was one of the major Central European writers of the 1930s. Born in southeastern Romania, he worked in Bucharest as a lawyer, journalist, novelist and playwright until anti-semitic legislation forced him to abandon his public career. His long-lost diary, Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years, was published in seven countries between 1996 and 2007, launching an international revival of his work. Sebastian's novels and plays are available in translation throughout Europe, and have been published in Chinese, Hindi, Bengali and Hebrew. The Accident is Sebastian's first work of fiction to appear in English. 

Stephen Henighan’s previous translations include Ondjaki’s Good Morning Comrades and most recently, Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret. He is the author of a dozen books of fiction, reportage and criticism, including the short story collection A Grave in the Air and the essay A Green Reef: The Impact of Climate Change. He teaches at the University of Guelph, Ontario, and is the International Translation Series Editor for Biblioasis.

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Two Poems by Émile Nelligan, translated by Marc di Saverio

Christ on the Cross

I'd always gaze into this plaster Jesus
pitched like a pardon at the old abbey-door—
a black-gestured solemn scaffold
with saintly idolatry I'd bow before.

Now as I sat around at the hour of cricket's play,
in funereal fields, blue-viewedly musing
one near-past night with wind-blown hair, reciting
Eloa, in that swelled esthetic ephebic way,

I noticed near the debris of a wall
the heavy old cross heaped up tall
and crumbled plaster among primroses

and I froze, doleful, with pensive eyes,
and heard spasmodic hammers strike, in me,
the black spikes of my own Calvary. 


The Golden Ship

She was a massive ship, hewn in heavy gold,
with masts that fingered heaven on seas unknown.
Under redundant sun, with scattered hair,
was prowed outspread Venus, bare;

but then one night she hit the huge reef
in waters where the Sirens sing,
and this ghastly shipwreck tilted its keel
to the depths of the chasm, that immutable

tomb. She was a ship of gold, but her diaphanous
flanks showed treasures over which the blasphemous
sailors Psychosis, Spite and Nausea clashed.

So, what has survived this flash of storm?
What about my heart, abandoned ship?
... O, still it sinks, deep in Dream's abyss. 


________________________________

Marc di Saverio hails from Hamilton, Ontario. His poetry and translations have appeared in such outfits as The Dalhousie Review, Modern Haiku, Haiku Scotland, and Maisonneuve Magazine. Simply Haiku named him one of “the top ten world’s finest living English language haiku poets for the year 2011.” In September 2013, his debut collection, Sanatorium Songs, was published with Palimpsest Press, to critical acclaim. His long poem, The Love Song of Crito Di Volta, will be appearing in October of 2014 with Frog Hollow Press. He is currently translating The Collected Poems of Emile Nelligan, another of which recently appeared in Hazlitt.  "Christ on the Cross" and "The Golden Ship" originally appear in Sanatorium Songs. 

Émile Nelligan (1879-1941) was a francophone poet from Quebec. Highly influenced by the symbolist poetry of Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire and others, he was a precocious talent and published his first poems in Montreal at the age of 16. He suffered a major psychotic breakdown in 1899 and never finished his first book of poetry, which according to his notes, was to be named The Recital of Angels. His Collected Poems were published in 1903, and his reputation has only grown in the years since. He is now considered a Quebecois literary icon. 

14:17 3 comments

Child Narrators and the Wonder-laced Universe of Ondjaki

How does one write about a period of political strife without falling prey to the ideological trappings of the time? What are the moral implications of writing an effervescent, light-hearted, colourful novel against the backdrop of civil war? And how would one go about 'dexploding' a giant rocket-shaped mausoleum built in honour of former Angolan president Agostinho Neto? For Luandan novelist Ondjaki, the solution to these questions lies in inhabiting the consciousness of the unnamed childhood narrator of Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret, a larger-than-life, inquisitive, and sensitive youth on the brink of self-knowledge with an imagination that is nigh-synaesthesiac. 

M.A. Othofer discusses the many virtues of Ondjaki's child narrator and his wonder-laced universe in The Complete Review, highlighting how he unveils the extraordinary in the quotidian, and how the obliviousness of a child can lead to unique insights about political unrest. "This is, ultimately, a profound novel," writes Othofer, "perhaps a definitive one of collapsing Soviet power and influence in 1980s Africa."

We like to think of Ondjaki as mixing the picaresque tradition of Twain with the eccentric linguistic inventiveness of a Mia Couto or a Clarice Lispector. His novels are peculiar, resting in the very foreign gap between Young Adult and avant-garde fiction, and although he is occasionally characterized as having a kinship with magical realism, Ondjaki had some very interesting things to say on the matter of surrealism and conscious invention with CBC's Paul Kennedy:

Fiction doesn't happen to me, fiction happens in Angola and I happen to be there, and I happen to be born there. Among us, if you find another writer from Angola, you will not hear this comment, "oh that book of yours, what a powerful imagination," no; the question is, where did you see that?!

So one might say that Ondjaki considers himself a reporter from a forgotten realm, a reporter with the eye and soul of a child. And for those of you wondering at the difficulty of his task, the name Ondjaki means "he who faces challenges." In Granma Nineteen and the Soviet's Secret, Ondjaki rises to the occasion, shining a light on a utopic space within a world of disrepair.

"Is that what tales from before were like a long time ago?"

"Yes, son."

"So before is a time, Granma?"

"Before is a place."

"A place really far away?"

"A place really deep inside." 

14:25 No comments

Wigrum by Daniel Canty: An Excerpt

There is only one way to survive time's war: Depart, leave yourself far behind, rub yourself out of the picture. At dawn, Wigrum will no longer be there. Yet as long as objects will continue to speak in his place, he will be certain of remaining alive. 

***

This collection presents, in alphabetical order, [a selection of] all the objects connected to the “ordinary collector’s” work. They belong, in fact, to three distinct sets.

The Collection of the Mirror, mentioned in Joseph Stepniac’s preface, contains fourteen objects. Discovered in 1986 at 41 b Regent’s Lane, London, it is unequivocally attributed to Sebastian Wigrum.

The artefacts whose nomenclature is accompanied by a date are part of the Prague Collection. Their descriptions were perhaps written by the metaphorical or human hand of Joseph Stepniac, the first scholar of Wigrumian literature, who vainly applied himself to pastiche his style.

The other objects make up the Excerpts from Patience. This graceful title is possibly the invention of Klára (or Clara). Her name haunts this book and she is also the author of the “Blank Page” entry, found on a postcard of wintery Mount Rainier, in Washington State.

Readers who wish to consult the collection in more depth are invited to read Daniel Canty’s afterword and postcript. Those who wish to untangle the threads of fact from fiction can also rely on the Inventory of the Succession, the index arranged by Leroy Stein at the end of this volume.

- The Publishers

***

Wigrum: A Partial Selection from the Collection

Claus Dentures Collection of the Mirror The dental impression conserved by this cookie is of particular interest. The bite mark was identified in 1899 by Sam Marwinkle of the NYPD as characteristic of the wooden dentures worn in the late eighteenth century. Three cookies were placed on a plate on the mantelpiece of the Baum domicile in Chittenango, New York, by Lyman Frank, age eight, on Christmas Eve, 1863. There are no fingerprints to substantiate the case, since the traditional glass of milk was left untouched, but one of the cookies was not of the type left by young Lyman Frank. Twenty years later, Baum evokes the incident in a letter to Dorothea Cramberg of Wichita, Kansas: These cookies are impossible to find in the Confederation. If Egon, the Norwegian friend I wrote you about, had not sent me a tin for the holidays, I would never have known why I wrote The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus. You will agree, I am sure, that this sign—for I consider it as such—is not devoid of character…
Fate's Armament Collection of the Mirror This stone was in the possession of a Baptist preacher from the town of  Peterborough, Ontario. It was lodged in the mouth of a possible  suicide, one Mr. Staunton, who was found drowned in his auto- mobile at the bottom of Minnewebake Lake. The preacher has chosen to remain anonymous. In the winter of 1907, his wife, let us call her Mary, was hit between the shoulder blades with a snow- ball containing this stone. She and her husband had apparently stumbled into a kids’ battlefield. Shortly thereafter, Mary abandoned the manners that had made her an icon of virtue. Some of the town’s citizens—particularly the men—called her a saint or a witch. Whether or not he is responsible for Mary’s shocking personality shift, the person guilty of launching this stone has yet to be identified.
October Tape Collection of the Mirror This measuring tape was given to Miss Zeno, child prodigy, on her fifth birthday. Clara Zeno astounded England and Europe in the 1930s with her uncanny measuring ability; with a simple glance she could determine the exact dimensions of any object according to the metric or imperial systems. When putting her gift to work, Clara would in- tently examine the objects, clutching the rolled-up measuring tape in her right fist. Mrs. Herménégilde Zeno, a French woman who had crossed the Channel to marry the sea exporter Joseph Zeno, tells how her young daughter would routinely go to the seashore in her native Brighton carrying her measuring tape and come back with a gibberish of measurements chalked up on her slate. Upon her return, she would proudly show her mother her “results,” always maintaining that she was “getting close to a solution.” Clara disappeared on October 29, 194 4, during a family trip to Land’s End. The tour across Europe had exhausted her and this generally taciturn child had been diagnosed by Dr. Aloysius Tattertale as severely “splenetic.” He had prescribed a trip of rest and relaxation. The measuring tape was found by Clara’s mother on the beach near their hotel. Until high tide, this message could be read scrawled into the sand, measuring the exact length of the tape, outstretched beneath it as though to underline its significance: “I vanish from the coast of Britain and light out for the October Country.”
Poisoned Spinning Top, 1959 Prague Collection This top is dangerous. Its gyratory movements augment the effects of a powerful hallucinogen concocted from the muglorian blossom, used by some dying junkies in Tangier in the 1950s. The effect of the muglorian drug is particular because, to borrow the lingo of this illicit milieu, it starts on a down to end on a high. In this, it is similar to a vaccine or an antivirus. According to some former users, its injection enables them to traverse “The Expanse of the Great Sickness.” The addict lies on the floor, gives the top a spin at eye level, then injects a hit. Wilhelm Broch, an expatriate who advocated its use with the slogan “Young Boys Need It Special,” said that “its spiral leads out of this world, hooked into the pupil’s depths.” A general muscular relaxation follows, combined with an extreme nervous tension, where the addict expels all bodily fluids through diarrhea, vomiting and ejaculation. During the process, the addict has the sensation their body is being constellated by gelatinous tumours and gradually becomes transparent. The subject’s identity seems to eventually separate and transfer to the pool of secretions around them, as though constituting a discrete entity. Something then comes loose in their consciousness and the subject begins a strange dialogue with all their internal organs, babbling disjointed phrases, entangling verb tenses and inverting sense. The particular rhythm of these phrases lends them a certain lyrical cohesion. This rhythmic dyslexia is accompanied by a feeling of temporal dislocation, in which the language seems a kind of “machine for folding time.” The addict sees, in the pool of their fluids, the contours of another world, and the trip ends in a parallel reality, where the invariant properties of time and space have been turned from their course. Feet planted on the edge of the world, swollen with language, the subject, inhabited by an indescribable feeling of plenitude, witnesses certain primordial scenes. The addicts describe transparent beings, huge apes and gnome-like workers in overalls bustling beneath the spiralling sparkle of stars. These accounts are similar to the results of sensory deprivation experiments. At this crossroads of worlds, subjects say they “touch the exact idea of the soul at last.” Then a serpent springs from the void, jaws agape, tongue spiralling, and they let themselves be snatched out of “this spaceless space.” Wilhelm Broch, guru of the spinning top, had inscribed on the toy’s packaging: “There are subtler bites than those that pierce the flesh. Their invisible poison sinks into us and already we travel out of ourselves and out of the world. It is never too late to know that we are not from here. One day, thanks to you, humanity will wake from the Great Sickness.”
Suicide Pens Collection of the Mirror In his New Arabian Nights, Robert Louis Stevenson describes the activities of a London-based suicide club, whose jaded members seal suicide pacts ac- cording to the whims of a game of chance. Recent evidence proves the existence of this “suicide club.” A sheaf of exhaustive minutes from their meetings, describing dozens of sordid suicide plans, was unearthed by Scotland Yard’s agents in an  abandoned building overlooking the Thames in front of their offices. These documents were instrumental in solving several unexplained deaths amongst London’s elite. Used pen nibs were found with the documents; the razor blade a reminder that the last page was signed in blood. The club’s members seem to have terminated their activities in the early 1920s.
Unpoppable Bubble Excerpts from Patience A bubble is a surface curved around a void, distended with the least resistance. This bubble is particular as, until proven otherwise, it is unpoppable. While it hasn't yet been tested by a direct pinprick, its perfectly balanced elasticity resists a pin’s touch. Its origin goes back to Archimedes’s “Eureka!” which brought him out of his bath with his finger enthusiastically raised. Archimedes, carried away by his discovery of the principle of buoyancy, didn't notice the bubble’s durability. It is thanks to the Pythagoreans that it has come down to us. Informed by a servant, who was a member of their cult, of the unpoppable bubble’s existence in the master’s bathroom, they stole it. They regarded it as a violation of the natural law, the perfect geometry that made up ideal thought, whose image they strove to preserve on earth. The bubble likely passed down from generation to generation, like a Grail, in the hands of various closed orders. In the seventeenth century, it reappeared in one of the bathrooms of King Leopold of Prague, who amused himself by bouncing it between his fingers, reflecting out loud: “Nature is indolent, yet it is constantly renewing its efforts. Science stands on the tip of a pin. The house of knowledge is challenged by a bubble’s integrity.”1 It was pilfered from the pedestal where he used to set it after his baths, and returned, like waste water, to the subterranean sewers. The signal of this bubble, approximately two centimetres in diameter with a bronze complexion of ancient marrow soap, circulated amongst the most passionate followers of bubble baths. Many are those who go for a quick dip with amplified alertness, in fear of inadvertently breaking this perfect bubble, their hope for a new revelation. 1 Příroda je líná, ale znovu a znovu obnovuje své úsilí. Věda visí na hlavičce hřebíku. Konstrukce vědění stojí na bezúhonnosti bubliny.↩ ________________________________ Translated from the French by Oana Avasilichioaei  Originally published in French by Le Peuplade, published in English by Talonbooks Daniel Canty is a Montreal-based writer and film director who works in literature, film, theatre and design, and new media. Canty collaborated with the pioneering multimedia studio DNAMedia, in Vancouver, and directed the inaugural issues of Horizon Zero, the Banff New Media Institute’s web space on the digital arts in Canada. Canty’s first book, Êtres Artificiels (Liber, 1997), is a history of automata in American literature. From 2002 to 2005, Canty co-directed the poetry magazine C’est Selon. He has devised three award-winning collaborative books: Cité selon (2006), on the city; La Table des Matières (2007), on eating; and Le Livre de Chevet (2009), on sleeping. He has also translated books of poetry by Stephanie Bolster, Erin Moure, Charles Simic, and Michael Ondaatje. Canty has directed several short films. His latest, Longuay (2012), melds the gaze of an ancient French abbey with that of a tablet computer, while Cinema for the Blind (2010) lets the audience slip into oneiric depths behind the cinema screen. Canty also conceives poetic interfaces for the Web and live interaction; he built Bruire (2013), an architectural poetry-reciting machine, and wrote the libretto for Operator (2012), an alphanumeric automata by Mikko Hynninen presented at Lux Helsinki. Copyright 2011 by Daniel Canty and Le Peuplade Translation copyright 2013 by Oana Avasilichioaei Drawings copyright 2011 by Estela López Solis

19:54 1 comment

A Scrupulous Fidelity: Douglas Glover on Thomas Bernhard's The Loser

The Man and His Books 

Thomas Bernhard is dead. He had a terrible life, at least the early part. He was born in Holland where his Austrian mother had fled to escape the shame of her unwanted pregnancy. He never knew his father who died far away and in obscurity (and obscure circumstances). His mother mistreated him because of the shame he represented. Back in Austria he wanted to be an opera singer and studied music but caught a cold working at a menial job to make ends meet; the cold turned into tuberculosis. He was hospitalized repeatedly, his treatment was bungled, he was given up for dead, and survived just to prove how stupid his doctors were. Since opera-singing was out, he became a writer. He became a famous writer of deadpan, mordant, hilarious, difficult (modernist) novels and plays that often portray depressed characters with lung diseases. 

The full version of this essay appears in
Douglas Glover's Attack of the Copula Spiders
and was featured in The Brooklyn Rail

Another common theme is Bernhard’s disgust with his native Austria which he continually berated for its Nazi past, its stupidity, sentimentality, and philistinism. In his will he stipulated that none of his works could ever be published in Austria. Paradoxically he rarely left Austria and lived quietly in a country retreat outside of Vienna (many of his characters live in country retreats outside of Vienna). 

Despite the fact that he seemed to put himself in every one of his novels, little is known about his intimate life. He wrote a five-volume memoir, Gathering Evidence, which is quite beautiful but, as all memoirs are, unrevealing. His first biographer somehow managed to discover that he liked to masturbate while watching himself in the mirror. This is both comic and significant; over and over Bernhard presents his narrators as characters watching themselves think about themselves. In fact, his narrators seem more interested in watching themselves think about themselves than in telling the story which often seems, upon analysis, more of an occasion for baroque invention than an end in itself. Reading Bernhard one is often reminded of the American experimentalist John Hawkes who once famously said: 

My novels are not highly plotted, but certainly they’re elaborately structured. I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme . . . structure—verbal and psychological coherence—is still my largest concern as a writer. Related or corresponding event, recurring image and recurring action, these constitute the essential substance or meaningful density of my writing. (Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 1965) 

Bernhard’s narrators contradict themselves, digress, fall into hyperbolic rants that go on for pages, repeat themselves, and obsess, trapped, as it were, in a logorrheic paralysis. He writes whole books in one paragraph, eschews quotation marks, doesn’t mind run-on sentences, changes tense without reason, and italicizes words apparently at random. Above all he is ironic, and the reader can never be sure whether Bernhard means what he says or is joking around. And, paradoxically, when he is just joking around, he is also being deadly serious. This is very puzzling to the reader accustomed to contemporary market-based sentimental realism (make no mistake: we are in a Tea Party Lit trough these days, driven by politics, recession and the cultural terror inspired by the digital revolution), the kind of fiction that tells a story about real characters we can identify with and scenes we can recognize, the kind of novel North Americans have come to expect, and, when they write, to write. In contrast Bernhard’s characters are almost all clownishly self-obsessed, suicidal artists with lung diseases who cannot seem to tell a story straight. 

The Recession of Narrators 

Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser is the story of three aspiring concert pianists—Glenn Gould (drawn from real life), an Austrian pianist named Wertheimer (the notional protagonist) and the unnamed narrator—who become friends in 1953 in Salzburg while studying piano with the great Horowitz. Wertheimer and the narrator have dedicated their lives to becoming piano virtuosos, but one day they chance to overhear Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations and his genius destroys them. Gould gracelessly adds insult to injury by calling Wertheimer a loser; Wertheimer is the loser of the novel’s title. 

The narrator abandons the piano almost immediately; eventually he ends up living in Madrid writing a book called About Glenn (which he periodically destroys and starts again). But Wertheimer has a much more torturous unravelling. For years he keeps playing, unable to abandon his dream. Finally he sells his beloved Steinway and begins writing a book he also keeps destroying and re-starting; this book is called, yes, The Loser. At the same time he works off his disappointment in an abusive, quasi-incestuous relationship with his sister (the whole novel has Poe-ish overtones). Somehow the sister manages to escape Wertheimer’s clutches, marrying a wealthy Swiss industrialist. Shortly after hearing that Glenn Gould has died suddenly of a stroke at the young age of 51, Wertheimer takes a train to Switzerland and hangs himself in front of his sister’s house. 

This is the skeletal story, the novel’s bones, all told as thoughts and memories (not present-time forward-moving plot) through the point of view of the overwrought narrator who is, yes, writing about himself thinking about himself, the other characters, and the story of the novel in a farrago of anecdote, rant, digression, repetition, aphorism, and paradox while also planning to destroy the book he is writing—in a sense the book you are reading doesn’t even exist. 

. . . today I write down this nonsense which I dare tell myself is essayistic, to use this hated word once again on my way to self-destruction, I write down these essayistic remarks, which in the end I will have to curse and tear up and thus destroy, and not a single person knows anymore that I myself once played the Goldberg Variations, though not as well as Glenn Gould. . . . 

All the while, nothing happens: for the first 115 pages of the 170-page novel, the narrator describes himself standing alone in the front room of an inn thinking. Bernhard emphasizes the narrator’s act of thinking-and-not-acting (logorrheic paralysis as a metonym for existential paralysis; the word “paralyzed” recurs relentlessly throughout the novel) to the point of self-parody: 

The Steinway, I thought while standing in the inn and looking about, was aimed against my family.

Glenn’s death had hit him very hard, he said, I thought while standing in the inn.

That certainly wasn’t correct, I thought now in the inn.

[This is the end of the 115-page scene and the beginning of the next scene. The comma splice is the author’s and is typical of his run-on dramatic transitions.] The so-called bottom line is he killed himself, not I, I thought, I was just picking up my suitcase from the floor to put it on the bench, when the innkeeper walked in. (115) 

The narrator has actually come to the inn on a whim, out of curiosity, at least that’s how he describes it at first. The notional present-time plot of the novel presents the narrator thinking about the main plot, the past, in the hours following Wertheimer’s hasty funeral in Switzerland. Traveling back to Vienna from the funeral, the narrator has made an impulsive decision to get off the train at a rural station near Traich, Wertheimer’s hunting lodge. He wants to search through Wertheimer’s papers before the sister or anyone else conceals or destroys them, believing that those papers hold some secret about Glenn Gould that he can use in his own book. But later in the novel the narrator reveals a more sinister and damning reason for his quest. 

If a friend dies we nail him to his own sayings, his comments, kill him with his own weapons . . . We exploit his unpublished papers in order to destroy even more the one who left them to us . . . We plunder everything that can be used against him in order to improve our situation. 

The first 115 pages of the text, as I say, present the narrator alone in the inn. The next 30 pages present various conversations with the innkeeper (she was Wertheimer’s lover), including some details of an undignified and uncharacteristic flood of parasitic guests at Traich just prior to the suicide. Then it takes 14 pages for the narrator to walk from the inn to Traich. And finally the last 13 pages of the novel take place at Traich, the narrator in conversation with Franz, the woodsman, who tells the story of Wertheimer’s final weeks: Wertheimer, the loner, had a piano delivered from Vienna and invited a crowd of “artists” to come and stay; then he proceeded to drive them out of the house with his incessant, incompetent piano-playing; they destroyed his furniture, drank his booze, and then he finally paid for taxis to take them back to Vienna. 

In the last lines of the book the narrator asks Franz for some time alone in Wertheimer’s room. The papers and notes have all been burned (Wertheimer and Franz did this together); what remains is Gould’s famous recording of the Goldberg Variations, still on the turntable where Wertheimer had left it when he went off to kill himself. 

Thus before we even get to the details of Bernhard’s rhetorical pyrotechnics we discover an immense amount of action on the structural level. There are, to begin with, three representational tempos: 1) the narrator writing the book which he ultimately expects to destroy; 2) the notional present which comprises most of the text, the narrator thinking as he waits in the inn, talks to the innkeeper and visits Traich; and 3) the recollected narrative of Wertheimer’s manie de perfection and its comic-tragic aftermath. This technique of the receding point of view is not uncommon; Joseph Conrad uses a variant in “Heart of Darkness” as does Cervantes in Don Quixote; it parodies the naïve point of view structure commonly deployed in so-called realistic novels and ironizes the concept of point of view in general— it is the literary version of the philosophical paradox of the subject that cannot be an object to itself. 

Stressed Form and the Duplication of Plot 

Superimposed on this temporal grid are at least three plots: 1) the surface plot of the narrator’s ultimately failed quest for Wertheimer’s papers at Traich—this plot being the occasion or the pretext for the narrator’s re-thinking of the past; 2) the main plot, beginning 28 years earlier, in which Glenn Gould’s genius crushes Wertheimer’s desire to be a “piano artist” and drives him to his eventual suicide; and 3) what I call the shadow plot, the vindictive story of the narrator’s own disintegration and his passive-aggressive role in Wertheimer’s death revealed as a Lacanian excess in his transparent snobbery, denial, self-justification, and outrageous tirades. 

As always I was exaggerating now too, and to my own mind it was disturbing to suddenly hear myself call Wertheimer the tormentor and destroyer of his sister, I thought, I always behave this way with others, unjustly, even criminally. 

You can imagine main plot and the shadow plot as two congruent triangles: Gould thwarts Wertheimer, and Wertheimer deflects his animus onto his innocent sister (scapegoating is a common theme in Bernhard’s novels) just as the narrator (also suffering a mania for perfection, also thwarted) torments Wertheimer— 

I only visited Wertheimer in Traich to destroy him, to disturb and destroy him . . . 

—forever bringing the conversation around to Glenn, reminding Wertheimer of Glenn, forcing the reluctant Wertheimer to visit Glenn in New York (where Glenn calls him a loser again). At the end, when Wertheimer needs him the most, the narrator refuses to answer his letters. 

. . . my bad conscience, which was still troubled by the fact that I hadn’t answered Wertheimer’s letters, had more or less ignominiously abandoned him. . . . 

Ultimately the narrator destroys Wertheimer by writing about him. The narrator’s version of Wertheimer is a loser; a weak, indecisive, unoriginal cypher who tries to model himself on, of all people, the narrator. “Weak characters never turn into anything but weak artists,” says the narrator, and “Wertheimer confirms that theory absolutely.” 

The Loser, so well known for its irregularities, is a surprisingly good example of the traditional novel devices of character grouping and gradation and plot and subplot, albeit so forced and exaggerated as to make them instances of what I call stressed form; that is, the form is stressed to the point of implausibility. The three principles—Gould, Wertheimer, and the narrator—are all graded variations of the same character. All three want to be piano virtuosos: Gould represents the limit, the absolute artist whose ambition, skill and focus have carried him beyond the merely human piano artist; Wertheimer and the narrator are similar versions of remarkable but merely human accomplishment. They all have that lung disease, they’re all wealthy men, they all have country homes (Gould’s is just outside New York), they all stop playing the piano (Gould, of course, famously stopped playing public concerts and retreated to the recording studio). Wertheimer and the narrator are both would-be suicides, they both end up writing books they cannot finish and will ultimately destroy; Gould and Wertheimer die at almost the same moment, though for different reasons. 

In other words their plot trajectories are parallel, almost identical in parts but with significant variation. In fact a good deal of Bernhard’s comedy derives from his deadpan, obsessive forcing of the conventions of the well-made novel to the point of absurdity. He concentrates less on plot and psychological plausibility than on the extraordinary duplication and reduplication of situation, character and action (stressed form). His constant trope is hyperbole—and you know he is playing with technique as absurdity when he gives that lung disease, which is really his own lung disease, to the innkeeper as well (in this example, the narrator and the author momentarily are identical— another little game Bernhard plays with his reader). 

The innkeeper once had a lung disease like mine, I thought, like me she was able to squeeze this lung illness out of her, liquidate it with her will to live. 

Irony, or the Double Sign of Difficulty 

Except for the first page, as I say, the entire novel consists of one paragraph of character thought, a single, unstoppable column of prose weaving in and out of content topics, plot and figure and trope, without a discrete stop along the way (Bernhard will even shift from one content stream to another on a comma in the middle of a sentence, with no logical or grammatical transition), so that it is all a trope, an image, oddly fragmented but with the fragments glued back together such that it resembles the thought-ravings of a madman who cannot control the logorrheic flow, not even minimally by breaking it into conventional logical segments called paragraphs. 

Over and over, the reader senses that the narrator is thinking fast to prevent himself from thinking, his thoughts always implying an excess they dare not express (although the narrator does let slip many very clear pointers). The entire text is framed within an implied conflict—the narrator’s resistance to a truth he cannot face—and this conflict propels the text forward with a mysterious urgency. The desperate, compulsive, and transparently self-serving if not delusional nature of the narrator’s thoughts in turn motivates the stressed form characteristic of the prose. Hysteria motivates hyperbole. The mechanical elaborations of grammatical yoking are desperate attempts on the part of the narrator to appear logical and analytical even as he is constantly dropping into spiraling word repetitions, fugue stops, digressions, and self-revealing tirades. 

But the disorder is only a semblance of disorder. It looks like a verbal torrent, the delirium of a madman, which of course it is meant to resemble in some superficial and theatrical sense, a deranged dramatic monologue (of thought), when in fact it is also artfully controlled, patterned and symmetrical (right down to the substandard Ehrbar piano the narrator plays as a child which returns at the end of the novel as the rented, “horribly untuned” Ehrbar Wertheimer plays for his travesty concert), art as symptom or symptom as art (repetition is a pattern of art and also of dream and neurosis), super-controlled (such an Austrian trait) and at the same time in tension with its own apparent haphazardness and compulsivity. 

Hyperbole and absurdity subvert every aspect of Bernhard’s novel; hyperbole is the constant marker for irony, the double sign that destroys the fictional facade of plausibility and univocal meaning and points to a second meaning that is absent in the text. This is the ultimate moment of ambiguity and difficulty, the text announcing that it doesn’t mean what it says it means. 

There are reasons for this difficulty, this incomprehensibility. One reason (perhaps the least interesting) is political, the collapse of trust in the German language shared by almost all thinking writers of German after the Second World War. This is perhaps true in spades for Austrian writers, coming from a country whose unforced complicity in that Nazi horror show is still denied. How do you write the truth in a language of lies (when the Nazi statues are so huge they can’t be moved out of the cultural house)? The answer is that you draw attention to the corruption of the German language by writing in corrupt, unbeautiful, incorrect, unclear German. You use language to attack itself. If language cannot express the truth, the secret horror at the back of history, then you write in a way that draws attention to the paradox of writing in a language that cannot write the truth—in so doing, you somehow draw attention to, implicate, limn, the truth. 

A second reason for incomprehensibility is philosophical. Kant drew a line between the real world and the world of existence (where we live): absolutes, God, the Good, Beauty and Truth on one side of the line; science, but also fallible humans, uncertainty, ambiguity, and doubt on the other. All so-called knowledge is limited to the phenomenal or existential world, all knowledge is human; that is, as Kant wrote, “It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representations”—The Loser reads as if Bernhard assimilated this sentence and made it his stylistic talisman. But paradoxically even the conscious subject, the person who thinks, cannot appear to itself as an object; the heart cannot know its reasons. 

The great Viennese (wealthy, Jewish, neurasthenic, suicidal) philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein drew the noose even tighter by defining language as a limiting concept; ultimately language cannot speak the truth but can only talk about itself, play with itself (pun intended). Modern philosophy after Kant is famously difficult stylistically, mainly because philosophers have had to work around the central problem that, by definition, they cannot talk about what they are talking about. 

Difficulty and incomprehensibility become aesthetic virtues after Kant (perhaps not what he intended); clarity and formal neatness are marks of fantasy or prevarication. Hence the tradition of German Romanticism, a paradoxical aesthetic based on the impossibility of creating beauty. What goes for beauty (in novels, paintings, symphonies) are only failed attempts to create beauty, which is otherworldly, unconditioned, absolute, sublime (in the Kantian sense) and beyond language. German Romanticism is a hyper-realist aesthetic in the sense that it values works of art that represent their own inevitable failure. In contrast to the ideal of classical unity, it values fragments, digressions, interruptions, mixed forms, incompleteness, difficulty, and, above all, irony. 

Friedrich Schlegel famously defended difficulty in his essay “On Incomprehensibility,” which is really an essay about the role of irony in a post-Kantian literature. Irony in its original form comes in two basic varieties: 1) Socratic irony which is the cunning use of dissimulation to make a point; and 2) the ancient Greek dramatic device of parabasis, the moment when the chorus turns away from the other actors and addresses the audience directly. Irony is that moment in a text when the author glances up at the reader and says, You realize, of course, that this isn’t real, that what I put on the page is not what I mean. (Always the literalist, Plato condemned Ironists at the same time as Sophists and Poets.) To German Romantics, the novel is the great modern example of ironic form, and the novel tradition out of which they write begins with Cervantes’ Don Quixote (a book about an insane person, about 50, in a quest for the absolute) and descends through Laurence Sterne and Denis Diderot, the masters of digression, delay and self-parody. 

“A Scrupulous Fidelity” 

About his own ironic style Jacques Derrida once wrote, “I have this attitude that some people must have perceived as double, of emancipation, revolt, irony, and at the same time a scrupulous fidelity.” It is to this aspect of “scrupulous fidelity” we must now attend. 

The Loser is very much a novel-as-performance, both image and allegory, more image than discursive thought yet very much a novel of ideas with the ideas implicit in the structure, action, and style. Besides the aesthetics of German Romanticism The Loser reflects a conception of art inherited from Schopenhauer—especially Schopenhauer’s notion that art itself is the intermediary between the supra-sensory and the merely human, that in creating or correctly appreciating great art we enter an eternal realm of Platonic Ideas (Beauty, God, or even Being in Heidegger’s sense) and leave the tawdry realm of existence behind (what Bernhard’s narrator calls “the existence machine”). 

The Loser fictionalizes the European version of nostalgia for Being (the American version is a retreat to fundamentalist Christianity) and a sense of living in a fallen existential world. It presents three men whose goal is to become transcendent artists; one succeeds, the other two fail, and their psychomachia is rather a soul-unmaking or disintegration leading to paralysis and the one authentic act left, suicide. Glenn Gould is the virtuoso, the genius, the perfect instrument. Albeit, he is also unconsciously cruel and a buffoon. But there are passages in The Loser where the irony seems to lift and some deeper reality is revealed. 

The second he [Gould] sat down at the piano he sank into himself, I thought, he looked like an animal then, on closer inspection like a cripple, on even closer inspection like the sharp-witted, beautiful man that he was. 

Gould is only perfect, only beautiful (and nothing else in the novel is described as “beautiful”) when he is playing. This is the hierophantic moment, the ur-moment to which Bernhard returns throughout the novel, starting with the scene in Salzburg, when the narrator and Wertheimer overhear Gould playing the Goldberg Variations and are destroyed, and repeating (insisting) through to the novel’s close, the Goldberg Variations on the record player, the narrator alone in Wertheimer’s empty bedroom at Traich. 

The way Bernhard distorts the facts of Gould’s death makes thematic sense, having him die of a stroke at “the perfect moment”, that is, while playing the Goldberg Variations instead of, as was in fact the case, during his sleep. Gould achieves transcendence through his art, he goes “beyond the limit” and attains “the inhuman state”; the narrator and Wertheimer meanwhile fail, dazzled, paralyzed, crippled by fear, and caught in what the narrator calls the existential trap. The Loser is all aftermath, a narrative of disintegration, laced with transparent self-hatred, denial, and resentment, obsessively circling back on itself, always returning to the ur-moment, the fatal confrontation with genius. Having attempted to reach the heights, they fall back into the crippled world of the merely human, Kant’s phenomenal world, imperfect, ambiguous, clouded. 

We look at people and see only cripples, Glenn once said to us, physical or mental or mental and physical, there are no others, I thought. The longer we look at someone the more crippled he appears to us. . . . The word is full of cripples. 

Every great novel possesses a mysterious flickering quality, the on/off light of irony, that conceals and reveals its moment of fidelity. The Loser presents the image of the fallen world (Kierkegaard’s “present age”) haunted by the idea of goodness, tormented by beauty, a losers’ world, a metaphoric Land of the Dead where only conditional motives and mediated relationships are possible, ruled by language and the Imaginary, where people are trapped in a relation of reflexive creation. Like Hegel’s master and slave the narrator and Wertheimer (Wertheimer and his sister) need each other in order to exist, and that relation can easily be reduced to the negative: I need to crush him in order to exist just as he needs to crush me in order to exist. 

But the image of a fallen world implies its opposite; this is the mimetic paradox. Bernhard riddles out the unseen world of the Absolute, of Beauty and the Good, in the narrator’s contorted prose. The style is a vehicle for meaning, the prose contorted because it is reaching beyond the limit of language. In the end, we can only imagine through art what it might be like to have perfect clarity of action and thought, to be Glenn Gould.

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Douglas Glover's bestselling novel Elle won the Governor General's Award for fiction and was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His stories have been frequently anthologized, notably in The Best American Short Stories, Best Canadian Stories, and The New Oxford Book of Canadian Stories. In 2006 Glover was awarded the Writers' Trust of Canada Timothy Findley Award for his body of work. He lives in upstate New York and is on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program. 

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