“Minha Terra”: Ivo’s Brazil

Snakes’ Nest or A Tale Badly Told

But sometimes, it was as if the sea did not exist, and he lived among stones, in a nest of snakes.

“During a dictatorship, all narratives are poorly told…” writes Lêdo Ivo in reference to the rambling, unreliable narration of this short novel. Indeed, as University of New Mexico professor Jon Tolman explains in his helpful introduction, Snakes’ Nest is a set in Brazil in the 1940’s, during what was known as the “New State,” a semi-fascist experiment in caudillismo, a cult of personality around the charismatic leader, Getúlio Vargas, that lasted from 1930-1945.  At heart an allegory of good and evil, this “sunny nightmare” rises like a miasma from the streets of Maceió—from the bars and brothels and sugar depots that distinguish this seedy port city in  northeastern Brazil that even today is renowned for its rampant corruption and violence.  As described in a 2011 article in The Economist, “The road from Maceió, the capital of Alagoas state, to its airport passes luxury-car showrooms and shops selling outsize Jacuzzis. In the central reservation, indigent families live under plastic sheeting. Even by the standards of Brazil's north-east, Alagoas is scarred by poverty and extreme inequality. With 107 murders per 100,000 people, Maceió is also the most violent state capital in Brazil, just as, with 60 murders per 100,000, Alagoas is the country's most violent state. It is a place of sugar and cattle, where the sugarcane cutters settle scores with fists and knives and the well-connected escape punishment by using contract killers instead.”  

It is this latter world that serves as the setting for this collection of powerfully rendered vignettes about the workaday men and women of Maceió—the lawyers, gangsters, sailors, poets, prostitutes, and nuns—a story, a novel (though Ivo denied it the name) in which the narration flits like a hummingbird from character to character, from place to place, sipping here, drinking there, darting back and forth in time as if drunk on the nectar it finds. In an age when more and more American writers are forced by the market to answer to the same dull master, that is, plot over character, murder and mystery over language and symbol and theme, this novel comes as a positive relief. 

Ivo’s heterodox approach to storytelling, to fiction, should come as no surprise to anyone who knows of him, for he was a poet, first and foremost, a writer who flirted with Modernism before turning his back on it to embrace more classical, more traditional forms. One feels the poetry in his language and rhythms, in the weight and balance of his words, yet there is nothing fussy or self-conscious about his style. Even in English his phrasing has the blunt simplicity, the force and gravitas, of prophesy or scripture, as in this passage describing the moments—the minutes, the seconds—before one of his characters, a manager of a local airline agency, blows out his brains:

"It was raining—it was a rain of words.  The wind blew—it was a wind of words.  The world wasn’t made of skies, clouds, cities, sugarcane mills, ports, dams, yards, old cars, streets, power plants, houses, men.  It was made only and exclusively of words—and the people spoke in words. Even the paving stones of Maceió were made of words.  Alexandre Viana ate words, slept words, worked words.  And he felt more alone than ever, as if the very weapon that sketched itself before his eyes would turn into a word."

While Snakes’ Nest is set in the Maceió of Ivo’s childhood, what he calls “minha terra” or “my land,” it is important to note that the period in which the novel was written, that is, the early 1970’s, was actually a more politically repressive time for Brazilian artists and writers than that of the quasi-fascist caudillismo of Getúlio Vargas, evidence enough that such authoritarianism is perfectly at home in the rich Brazilian soil. 

What makes this significant, what makes it  especially poignant to me, is that I have only just now finished reading the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig’s book, Brazil: A Land of the Future, a gushing, 250 page hymn to the nation that had given him home and sanctuary as a Jew in flight from Hitler’s Europe. The picture he paints of early 1940’s Brazil and its future in the world is just short of utopian, an incredible feat, given Vargas’ staunchly corporatist, right-wing, anti-Marxist politics, a tyranny over thought and expression that included censorship and the harassment, torture, and execution of leftists.  Somehow, for all of Zweig’s perspicacity as a writer and exile, he had failed to see the forest for the trees. Blinded to the rise of fascism there, in Brazil (the selfsame period described by Ivo’s novel) by his desperate need to keep faith with the human race, to believe in the possibility of a paradise on earth, Zweig ends his introduction to this Panglossian tribute by writing: “For that reason, one of our best hopes for a future civilizing and pacification of a world that has been desolated by hate and madness is based upon the existence of Brazil.”  That Brazil was indeed a sort of paradise to Zweig is clear; what is also clear—a fact perhaps only acknowledged by Zweig himself on the eve of his suicide in 1942—is that, by the time he’d finished writing Brazil: A Land of the Future, the Serpent was already in. 

Here, to conclude, is one of Ivo’s better known poems:

The Sound of the Sea

Sunday afternoon, I return to the old Maceió cemetery
where my dead never stop dying
their consumptive and cancerous deaths
that penetrate the ebb tide stench and constellations
with coughs, groans, imprecations
and their dark mucus
and in silence I summon them to return to this life
where from childhood on they slowly lived
with the bitterness of long days fixed to their monotonous existence
and the fear of dying of those who witness the close of day
when, after rain, the ants are scattered
across the maternal ground of Alagoas and can no longer fly.
I say to my dead: Arise, come back to this unfinished day
that has need of you, of your persistent cough and your tired gestures
and your footsteps on Maceió’s crooked lanes. Return to those insipid dreams
and windows opening on to suffocating heat.

On Sunday afternoon, among mausoleums
that seem suspended by the wind
in the bluish air,
the silence of the dead tells me they won’t come back.
No use calling them. From the place where they are now, there’s no return.
Just names carved in stone. Just names. And the sound of the sea.

© Translation: 2010, Alexis Levitin

Lêdo Ivo (1924-2012) was a Brazilian journalist, poet, novelist, and essayist who was awarded the prestigious Brazilian Walpmap Prize in 1973.  Born in Maceió, Alagoas, Brazil, the son of Floriano and Euridice Placido de Araujo Ivo, he later married Maria Leda Sarmento de Medeiros and fathered three children.  Ivo’s first volume of poems — As Imaginações — granted him national recognition in 1944. His other works of include Ode and Elegy, Ode to Twilight, Birth of the Sonnet, Language, and The Common Soldier.  In addition to Snakes’ Nest, he write three other novels: Alliances, The Road without Adventure, and The Death of Brazil.  Snakes’ Nest is published by New Directions Books. 

Peter Adam Nash

Poland, 1945

Jerzy Andrzejewski, Ashes and Diamonds (1948)

As a historian, there are particular moments in European history that I especially want to understand; among them, preeminent even, is the passage of Eastern Europe from Nazi Occupation to Soviet-dominated governments.  What events precipitated the defeat of nationalist aspirations in Poland (for example) during the critical years between the end of the war and the establishment of the Polish United Workers' Party under Boleslaw Bierut? The facts aren't difficult to come by; what is wanted is the feeling of these years, impressions of the primary participants in the nation's reluctant embrace of Stalinism, a sense of the human cost to a nation already dismantled by the Nazi Occupation, Hans Franks' systematic terror, and the extermination of Polish Jews.  As usual, one must turn to works of literary art to gain insights, however limited, into the tragedy of post-war Poland. 

Often the 'whys' of history are neglected in the standard textbooks. We might say, for example, that given the horrors of Nazism, the Soviet Union was a natural ally for Polish nationalists who survived the camps (non-Jewish Poles were sent to Arbeitslager or German slave labor camps like Gross-Rosen, which figures prominently in Ashes and Diamonds) and were liberated by the Red Army.  But one suspects that this explanation is too simple; the truth, it would appear from Andrzejewski's brilliant and compelling novel, is that men and women were drawn into the sphere of Soviet influence, seduced by promises of brotherhood and Polish solidarity, for all sorts of reasons--out of patriotism, despair, personal ambition, greed, and idealism.  Andrzejewski's remarkably well-drawn characters embrace or reject communism only in part because of their experiences in the war; a great strength of this novel is that it depicts the power of an individual's will even at the most "world historical" of moments.



Barracks at Gross-Rosen



At the beginning of Ashes and Diamonds, the war has just ended--or has it? One of Andrzejewski's narrative talents is the blurring of time.  The novel transpires over some undefined period of days or weeks, and the events of the war, once so visceral to its survivors, are now receding from the memories of some characters (by choice) and defining the actions of others, especially those who hope to create a communist nation--a brotherhood of equals--in Poland. In other words, history isn't experienced in the same way by every person, and this is not only true, but a brilliant novelistic observation that enriches and deepens Andrzejewski's great book.

The deftness with which Andrzejewski sketches his characters is remarkable.  During a briefing that will lead to the murder of a member of the Communist Party by a Polish nationalist, the Colonel, who has ordered the assassination, calms a young man's qualms by saying:

"We're living and fighting under very difficult and complex circumstances. But the war years, which were the testing years for everyone, have taught us that things have to be regarded in their elementary, basic set up. There's no time for subtle discrimination. If there had to be any discrimination, it must be simple and clear. Good is good, and evil evil. You agree?"

But of course nothing is ever so clear.  For the socialist Podgorski, the world isn't divided into Manichean absolutes but gray with ethical questions and humane concerns; for the ambitious Mayor Swiecki the tragedy of Poland has served only to feed his ego--a mediocre man in peacetime, Swiecki remakes himself into the perfect Party toady, a yes-man for the cynical and brutal.  For Kossecki, at one time a prisoner at Gross-Rosen, the aftermath of the war is fraught with fear and self-loathing for what he allowed himself to become in the camp.  Opportunists like Drewnowski and Pieniazek (yes the names will give you fits!) have no allegiance to party or nation, while others, like the richly- drawn Communist Szczuka, have complex feelings about the meaning of commitment in the face of Poland's apocalypse (six million Poles, including over 90% of Polish Jews, perished in the war, out of a pre-war population of 35 million). 

Among Andrzejewski's many narrative talents is the subtlety with which he moves his story forward.  Much of the action of the book takes place in the Monopole, the central hotel and restaurant in the town of Ostrowiec, an establishment previously owned, we are offhandedly informed, "by Lewkowicz...one of the wealthiest men in Ostrowiec, [who] died with the rest of his family at Treblinka." Slomka, the new manager of the Hotel Monopole, has been the beneficiary of Nazi racial policies, but no further mention of this fact is made. In 1945 there is emerging a new order, a world that is a blank slate for the ambitions, idealism, and cruelty of every man and woman. When the new world (of communism or of Polish nationalism? That remains to be seen, at least in the novel) has been created, will it be "only ashes and confusion" or "a star-like diamond./The dawning of eternal victory?"  [from the epigram by Cyrpian Norwid].  We know the answer of course--Poland's story since the war has been far more a tale of ashes than of diamonds.  And Andrzejewski as well seems to have been fully aware of the historical situation of his country:

"The fact is I don't know what this new Poland is, just yet."
"How can I put it in a few words? It's difficult, that's probably the best way to describe the tangle of conflicts and contrasts which we're faced with at every step and which we certainly shan't resolve tomorrow or the day after. ...the war is over, but the fight here is only beginning." 

Ashes and Diamonds was the third film in Andrzej Wajda's great trilogy which included A Generation (1954) and the unforgettable Kanal (1956) [Ashes and Diamonds appeared in 1958].  I saw the entire trilogy over one long, rather depressing weekend while in college.  Andrzejewski wrote the screenplay for Ashes and Diamond; the films are available through Janus and provide an emotional immersion in both wartime and post-war Polish history.

Ashes and Diamonds, the novel, is brought to us by the wonderful folks at Northwestern University Press whose series of European Classics includes novels by Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, Vladimir Voinovich, and the incomparable Heinrich Boll, who has written the introduction of Andrzejewski's novel. 

http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/Home/AllTitles/tabid/86/Default.aspx


George Ovitt (4/16/13)

Haitian Alphabet: One Soul’s Rising

Tired of zombie stories, movies, television series, and video games? If so, try Haitian Jean-Euphèle Milcé’s searing short novel Alphabet of the Night. It may be the antidote you need. Set in the smoke-blackened capital city of Port-au-Prince during the dying days of the Duvalier dictatorship, in the very land where the zombie (zonbi in Haitian Creole) was born, this story—for all its zombies and voodoo, for all its bloodshed and violence—offers little titillation for those weaned on Hollywood, Max Brooks, and AMC. What it offers instead is a portrait of a gravely wounded man and nation haunted by corpses, the missing, and the walking, still-talking dead. 

After the daylight murder of his lover, Lucien, Jewish shopkeeper Jeremy Assaël decides to leave his cursed and lawless homeland for good, but not before discovering the fate of his childhood friend and one-time lover, a mulatto named Fresnel, who has mysteriously disappeared. By the time the novel opens, the Duvalier family has ruled the country for nearly thirty years through a strategy of corruption and terror: an estimated 30,00o Haitians have been murdered by ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier’s security forces alone, thousands ‘disappeared’, and tens of thousands more exploited, terrorized, and finally forced to flee the country with nothing—quite literally—but the clothes on their backs.

Jeremy Assaël’s quest to learn the fate of his missing friend and lover takes him on a journey through the hell of contemporary Haiti in the course of which he encounters a broad sampling of the Devil’s disciples—government henchmen, foreign aid workers, Catholic priests and Brothers, Protestant missionaries, Rotarians, and even a German Consul General.  Commencing his journey on All Souls’ Day, an important Catholic holiday of alms-giving and prayers for the dead trapped in purgatory (Dante, by contrast, begins his journey through Hell on the day before Good Friday), the narrator has first to make his way through the raucous celebrations, celebrations which, while ostensibly Catholic, are in practice something much much more. Indeed in Haiti, All Souls’ Day has a special resonance for the descendants of African slaves, mixed with voodoo, as it is, and informed by the deep-seeded fear that one’s deceased loved ones have becomes zombies, dead people who cannot get across to lan guinée (literally Guinea, or West Africa), the leafy-green paradise of their ancestors. Only through the intervention of a voodoo priest and the execution of an elaborate series of rituals can the dead be so freed.

Near the end of the novel, the narrator himself meets a hougan, a voodoo priest, who helps him to complete his quest. For, like his black compatriots, Jeremy Assaël yearns to discover—if only in a secular sense—if his lover, Fresnel, has become a zonbi or crossed safely to lan guinée.

Jean-Euphèle Milcé, born in 1969 in Haiti, readily identifies himself as an ex-islander. Having qualified in Applied Linguistics at the State University of Haiti, he trained in information and library management. Jean-Euphele Milce taught Creole Literature and was in charge of the main National Library of Haiti. In 2000 he settled in Neyruz, Switzerland with his wife and children. Alphabet of the Night is published by Pushkin Press. http://www.pushkinpress.com/

Related recommendations:

The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, C.L.R. James

Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti, Amy Wilentz

Travesty in Haiti: A True Account of Christian Missions, Orphanages, Fraud, Food Aid and Drug Trafficking, Timothy T. Schwartz, Ph.D.

All Souls’ Rising, Madison Smartt Bell

Peter Adam Nash

Spain: The Windmills of Sergio Prim

The Scale of Maps

 “A Knight Errant going mad for a good reason— there is neither pleasure nor merit in that. The thing is to become insane without a cause and have my lady think: If I do all this when dry, what would I not do when wet?” 

                                                              Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

 “We shall do our best to avoid the fatal error of looking for so-called ‘real life’ in novels,” declares Vladimir Nabokov in the first of his six-part lecture series on Don Quixote.  “Let us not try and reconcile the fiction of facts with the facts of fiction. Don Quixote is a fairy tale, so is Bleak House, so is Dead Souls. Madame Bovary and Anna Karenin are supreme fairy tales. But without these fairy tales the world would not be real. A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.” This admonition is fitting not only as a description of the dazzling surreality of Belén Gopegui’s lyrical novel The Scale of Maps (La escala de los mapas), a story as fairy a tale as “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” and “Snow White,” but—perhaps more aptly—its main character, Sergio Prim, a humble, ‘prematurely old’ geographer/ philosopher with ‘a cracked mental map,’ is nothing if not a modern (more modern) Don Quixote adrift amidst the windmills of 20^th century Madrid. And, as in Don Quixote, the Spain depicted in The Scale of Maps  bears little resemblance to the familiar, geographical Spain we know, which is certainly a part of the novel’s charm. So unwonted, so unfamiliar is the story’s landscape, that one feels one has stumbled into some byzantine tale by Nabokov or Borges, say, Ada, or Ardor or “The Garden of Forking Paths.”

Quickened by hallucinations, pricked and bewildered by his own Dulcinea, a flighty fellow geographer name Brezo Varela, Sergio Prim struggles daily through the fog of his brilliant, anxious, sometimes paranoid madness to map his way to a place, a ‘hollow,’ a gap between time and space, in which love—his late-term love of Brezo—is forever safe from harm. Just as Don Quixote waxes poetic over Dulcinea’s beauty, praising her lips as coral, her teeth as pearls, her neck as alabaster, so too does Sergio Prim exult in the manifold wonders of his baffling, beautiful Brezo—his ‘little automatic umbrella,’ his ‘sea-swell,’ his ‘love without a perch.’  

Alternating deftly between first-, second-, and third-person perspective, the novel that unfolds between these covers is a marvel for its unpredictability and strangeness, for the daring versatility of Gopegui’s prose. Even at its most elusive, most confounding, its imagery and language work a kind of magic on the senses, the mind, propelling one swiftly through this adroit and bewitching tale.

Belén Gopegui,  Belén Ruiz de Gopegui, was born in the city of Madrid in 1963 as the daughter of the aerospace scientist, Luis Ruiz de Gopegui. Belén chose to study in Madrid at the Autonomous University of Madrid where she studied for her degree in Law, but before she even finished her studies, she had already decided that what she truly wanted to be was a writer. Once she finished her degree, she began her career by collaborating in the literary sections of a number of publications, including 'El Sol', for which she carried out interviews. She continued working in this manner up until the publication of her first novel, La escala de los mapas, in 1993. This novel was published by Anagrama and was met with great success, winning the Tigre Juan and the Ibero-American Santiago del Nuevo Extremo Prizes. An ardent communist, she has written numerous articles about Cuba.

She has been praised for the maturity of her prose and literary approach, her very original narrative structures, the brilliance of her metaphors, through which she shows a more than superficial understanding of the world, her scientific vocabulary, and her intimate and poetic character.*

The Scale of Maps, translated by Mark Schafer, is published by City Lights Books www.citylights.com

*www.classicspanishbooks.com 

Peter Adam Nash

Pavese: Love and the Abyss

Stories by Cesare Pavese  (The Ecco Press)

In the first Pavese story I ever read, a story called “Wedding Trip,”  completed on December 6, 1936, the narrator—a newly married man named George—stands, with his young wife, Cilia, by the Genoa harbor at night, the only night they could afford for their honeymoon, and feels the darkness closing in upon them. “We came to the railings of a terrace and caught our breath.  The night was calm but dark, and the street lamps floundered in the cold abyss that lay before us.” For Pavese this darkness, this abyss, as perceived by the narrator, is not simply hyperbole, a figure of speech designed to intensify the mood, nor is it merely the aggravated projection of a newly married man, pinched with mourning for his bygone bachelor days, but a stark and telling measure of Pavese’s own special dread. 

All of the stories in this collection, the ones for which Pavese is most widely known and admired, were written in the shadow of Italian and German fascism, a period—dating roughly from 1936 to 1945—that marked a kind of Dark Ages for Italian intellectuals, artists, and writers, like Pavese.  Surely this was a part of his dread. Under Mussolini, the parliamentary system was abolished, all teachers in schools and universities had to swear allegiance to the fascist regime, and freedom of the press was strictly curtailed.  Pavese himself was summarily convicted of antifascist activities and sentenced to a year of ‘preventative detention’ in 1935 for a series of articles he had written as editor of a review called La Cultura.  After a few months in prison at Brancaleone Calabro, he was sent into ‘confino’ or internal exile in Southern Italy, the common punishment for those guilty of lesser political crimes, the same punishment suffered by fellow writers and Leftists,  Leone Ginzburg and Carlo Levi.  It was an experience—Pavese’s time in prison and exile—that wrought a significant change in him, scarring him psychologically and darkly coloring his work.

That, by the end of his life, Pavese hated women is a fact well-known to readers of his work. This too must be understood as a part of his dread. Plagued by depression and asthma, a tortured loner long-enamored of suicide, he suffered one failed relationship after another, first with a mysterious woman he met while at university known only by the phrase “la donna dalla voce rauca” (the girl with the husky voice), and finally with the beautiful American actress, model, and former mistress of Elia Kazan, Constance Dowling.  So intense was his love for Dowling, so turbulent their affair, that he never recovered from it, finally taking his own life in a hotel room in Turin. "Non scriverò piú," “I will not write anymore,” he concluded his diary that night, swallowing a mouthful of sleeping pills before climbing into bed.  One of his last poems, “Verra la morte e avra i tuoi occhi,” or “Death Will Come and Look at Me with Your Eyes” was written for Dowling with Dowling in mind:

Death will come and look at me with your 

         eyes-

the death that follows us around

from morning to night, insomniac, deaf,

like some stale, now irreparable guilt

or ridiculous habit. Your eyes

will be empty words,

a suppressed cry, a silence-

the way you see them each morning

when you lean toward yourself alone

in the mirror.                                    

         O dearest hope, on that day we too will know

that you were life, and you were nothingness.

For everyone, death has a certain look.

Death will come and look at me with your

         eyes. Then the habit will be given up,

we will see in the mirror

the dead face reemerging,

the sealed lips will have their voice.

And we, the silenced, go down into the abyss. 

(translated by Alan Williamson)

If Pavese felt tortured and betrayed by women, he felt tortured and betrayed by love itself, which he dreaded for the way it exposed him as a man. In his diary he wrote: "One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love--any love--reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness." Indeed his stories and poems are replete with examples of what he came to see as the fundamental treachery of women, of love.  Still, Pavese’s need of and obsession with women is clear.  As Geoffrey Brock puts it in his thoughtful introduction to Pavese’s poetry, Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950, “Most of the late poems are addressed to a female ‘you,’ who, while inspired by particular real-life women, tends to blur into an archetypal figure who is by turns, and sometimes simultaneously, attractive and repulsive.” 

Such is Pavese’s complexity when it comes to women, when it comes to his vision of life, that to simply dismiss him as misogynist is to miss the anguished, hard-won beauty of his work.  For while, in his story “Wedding Trip” (to take but one example), his narrator is relentless in his derision of his young wife, Cilia, resentful of her for the inadequacy that her love makes him feel, Pavese’s portrayal of her is neither that of succubus nor shrew. In contrast to him—the narrator, George—Cilia is radiantly human: tender, trusting, romantic. A haunting affirmation of life, she is all he longs for and dreads. Even in his story “Suicides,” in which the narrator’s callous behavior actually drives his lover, Carlotta, to take her own life, Pavese makes it clear, if only in the way he yields to gentleness and pity in his description of her, that the story’s life-force, its humanity, is hers. 

In this same story, the narrator reflects: “Long ago I realized how essential astuteness is to living, and before being astute with others one must be astute with oneself.” Pavese, the man, the writer, was nothing if not astute—with others, and above all with himself.  What is plain, what elevates these haunting, often pain-filled stories to the stature of art, is that Pavese himself was well aware of the fact that his much-professed hatred of women had less to do with women themselves than with his own insecurity and self-loathing. Cruel as his male characters can be, they remain defiantly human, tortured as they are by remorse, by regret, by longing—by all the “dark angles” of love they are blessed and burdened to know. 

As Brock concludes in his aforementioned introduction to Pavese, “Even when his subject is the turning inward, the work itself is a reaching out…” Complex, resounding, often deeply elegiac, Pavese's stories have survived him to do just that.

Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) was a novelist, short-story writer, and poet who, in 1950, one month before his death,  was awarded the Strega Prize, Italy’s preeminent literary award.  He was then at the height of his fame as a novelist and a Communist man of letters.  The youngest of five children in a lower middle class family of rural origin, Cesare Pavese was born on 9th September 1908 in S. Stefano Belbo. His father died when he was six. He went to school in Turin, studying at high school under Augusto Monti, a friend of Piero Gobetti and Antonio Gramsci, and a prominent figure in the anti-fascist Turin. He graduated in letters in 1932 with a thesis on Walt Whitman. During the same period he began working as a translator for the publisher Frassinelli, translating Moby Dick by Melville and Dark Laughter by Sherwood Anderson. It was through Pavese’s translations that most Italians of the period first became acquainted with the works Faulkner, Joyce, Stein, Dickens, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, and Defoe.  Most Italians first encountered Herman Melville, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Charles Dickens, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, and Daniel Defoe in Pavese's translations Most Italians first encountered Herman Melville, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Charles Dickens, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, and Daniel Defoe in Pavese's translationsSuffering from one of his recurrent fits of depression, Pavese committed suicide on 27 August 1950.

While Pavese’s short stories are only available from used booksellers like AbeBooks http://www.abebooks.com/ and Alibris http://www.alibris.com/, I also recommend The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese and The Moon and the Bonfires published by New York Review Books Classics, as well as Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950 (English and Italian Edition) published by Copper Canyon Press.

Peter Adam Nash

Palestinians at Sea

The Ship (al-Safīnah)

by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra

The ‘ship of fools’ has been an important allegory in Western art and literature for at least five hundred years. Typically involving a pilotless ship packed with fools of every kind, it is the story of a journey to nowhere, an apologue, a parable, that has been traced to actual practice in Renaissance Europe. As described by Michel Foucault in his book Madness and Civilization, there was a tradition—no one knows how rare or widespread—of ridding a city of its lunatics by crowding them onto a ship then turning it out to sea.  

I first really learned of this allegory when I happened upon a copy of Katherine Anne Porter’s 1962 novel, Ship of Fools, a story about a motley collection of Mexicans, Germans, Americans, and Jews bound from Veracruz, Mexico, aboard a German freighter called the Vera, to Europe on the eve of World War II—a journey to nowhere indeed! Clearly Jabra Ibrahim Jabra had something similar in mind when he wrote The Ship, if with some bold and compelling variations. Set shortly after the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, what Palestinians refer to as ‘The Catastrophe’ (النكبة‎, an-Nakbah), the novel follows an assortment of Palestinian exiles—writers, professors, artists, and intellectuals, as well as a smattering of Lebanese, Iraqis, and Europeans—on a journey aboard the passenger ship Hercules as it plies the Mediterranean en route to London.  Drinking, dancing, debating, declaiming, the travelers pass their days in a state of restless limbo, a sort of floating Purgatory between East and West, neither here nor there.  Into this crucible Jabra pours all of the hopes and dreams, all of the anger, frustration, and despair of the Palestinian people, as well as that of the Arab world itself.  According to translators Adnan Haydar and Roger Allen, “Palestine is the microcosm of the Arabs’ defeat, of their failure to determine their destiny in their own lands.  The fall of Palestine in not an incidental event; it is the tragic fall of the whole Arab world, a product and a result of Arab acquiescence in a reality before which they are helpless.  Palestine is the land, the soul to be reclaimed…” 

What is so striking about Jabra’s novel, The Ship, about his particular version of the allegory, is that for all its nods to the West, its rich and numerous allusions to classical Greece and nihilism, to Bach, Freud, Goethe, Balzac, Eliot, Le Corbusier, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Thomas Aquinas, the novel hardly feels Western at all.  For we read also—and to equal effect—of Ibn al-Arabi, Ahmad Shawqi, and the Arab history of Palestine, hear the haunting, incomparable voice of Umm Kulthum. Told from a variety of perspectives, in a series of dramatic, sometimes internal monologues, the novel feels far more like a modern version of Tales from the Thousand and One Nights than a remaking of Porter’s Ship of Fools.  Distinctly Arab in style, distinctly Palestinian in longing and grief, the novel represents a dexterous bridging of East and West that springs directly from the identity of the author himself.  Born to a Syriac Orthodox Arab family in Bethlehem in 1919, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra came to be one of the finest ambassadors of his time between the Arabic and European worlds. Novelist, poet, translator, sculptor, painter, art collector, playwright, and critic, his work and interests knew no boundaries. Sadly, as noted by the late Anthony Shadid in a 2010 article for The New York Times, “His [Jabra’s] secular notion of identity has withered before the ascent of sectarian and religious forces.  In an asymmetric conflict, at times cartoonish, an aggressive West faces a seething East.” 

Here, to round things out, is one of Jabra’s best-known poems:

In the Deserts of Exile

Spring after spring,
In the deserts of exile,
What are we doing with our love,
When our eyes are full of frost and dust?

Our Palestine, green land of ours;
Its flowers as if embroidered of women’s gowns;
March adorns its hills
With the jewel-like peony and narcissus;
April bursts open in its plains
With flowers and bride-like blossoms;
May is our rustic song
Which we sing at noon,
In the blue shadows,
Among the olive trees of our valley
And in the ripeness of the fields
We wait for the promise of July
And the joyous dance amidst the harvest.

O land of ours where our childhood passed
Like dreams in the shade of the orange-grove,
Among the almond-trees in the valleys—
Remember us now wandering
Among the thorns of the desert,
Wandering in rocky mountains;
Remember us now
In the tumult of cities beyond deserts and seas;
Remember us
With our eyes full of dust
That never clears in our ceaseless wandering.
They crushed the flowers on the hills around us,
Destroyed the houses over our heads,
Scattered our torn remains,
Then unfolded the desert before us,
With valleys writhing in hunger
And blue shadows shattered into red thorns
Bent over corpses left as prey for falcon and crow.

Is it from your hills that the angels sang to the shepherds
Of peace on earth and goodwill among men?
Only death laughed when it saw
Among the entrails of beasts
The ribs of men,
And through the guffaw of bullets
It went dancing a joyous dance
On the heads of weeping women.

Our land is an emerald,
But in the deserts of exile,
Spring after spring,
Only the dust hisses in our face.
What then, what are we doing with our love?

When our eyes and our mouth are full of frost and dust?

*Translated by Mounah Khouri and Hamid Algar

Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1920 – 1994) (Arabic: جبرا ابراهيم جبرا) was a Palestinian author born in Bethlehem at the time of the British Mandate. Educated in Jerusalem and, later, at Cambridge University, he settled as an exile in Iraq, in Baghdad, following the creation of the State of Israel.  An internationally renowned writer, artist, and cosmopolitan, he distinguished himself in the Arab world with his critically acclaimed  translations of Shakespeare, Chekov, Eliot, Beckett, Faulkner, Camus, Wilde, James Frasier, La Fontaine, Edmund Wilson, and Dylan Thomas.  The Ship is published by Three Continents Press.  Also noteworthy is Jabra’s novel In Search of Walid Masoud published by Syracuse University Press.

Note: The house that Jabra built in Baghdad (complete with his beloved orange trees, library, and art collection), a home in which for more than forty years he played host and mentor to artists, writers, and intellectuals from around the world, was destroyed in a car bomb attack in 2010.

*Photograph of Jabra’s house by Holly Pickett for The New York Times

* Detail of painting ‘Ship of Fools’ by Hieronymus Bosch (painted c. 1490–1500)

Peter Adam Nash