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

The Twin Poles of Poetry

The Poems of Georg Trakl and The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba

Umberto Saba

Trakl and Saba were both born in the 1880's, were romantic modernists, clinically depressive, poets of yearning (Saba for erotic fulfillment, Trakl for death), both were participants in the First World War, each was addicted to opium, both were recipients of generosity from notable patrons (Trakl's patron was Ludwig Wittgenstein, who delighted in giving away his father's money; Saba's early supporter was Mario Novaro of the journal La Voce), and both wrote lovely, lyrical verse that stands in contrast to much of what was produced in the same period by English, French, and American modernists.

"Tell me that I am not insane. A stony darkness has come over me." (Trakl to Ludwig von Ficker, 1913)....There is a great deal of Rimbaud in Trakl, or perhaps of Heine--Trakl's body was constantly at war with his spirit, his propensity for self-destruction was restrained, unsuccessfully, by his love of nature, books, and ideas.  He was a poet of contradictions, or, since all poets are fond of contradiction (what else is poetry for but mediating ambiguities or obscuring clarity?), perhaps it is more accurate to say that Trakl allowed contradictions to dominate his poetic voice:

Decay

Evenings, when bells are chiming peace,
I follow the flights of birds in wonder
That long have gathered like pious pilgrims
To vanish in clear autumnal distance.

I stroll through the garden dense with twilight,
And trace their brighter fates while dreaming,
Barely feeling the hour-hand's movement.
Thus over clouds I follow their journeys.

Then a scent of decay makes me shudder.
The blackbird laments in leafless branches.
The red wine sways on rusting fences,

While the death-dance of pale children
Around dark well-rims worn by weather,
Blue asters in the wind bow low and shiver.

Georg Trakl

Large doses of Trakl are not going to cheer your heart on a day like today--gray and cold and bleak. His poems typically begin with a kind of Keatsian pleasure in the natural world, but quickly devolve into lamentation or fear: "Into the court the autumnal moon shines white./From the roof's edge fall fantastic shadows./In the empty windows a silence dwells;/The rats appear quietly from below..." (The Rats).  In addition to the cocaine that would kill him in 1914, Trakl was an alcoholic, and some of his poems have the nightmarish quality of delirium about them: "God's vultures gnaw your metallic heart."  In many ways--the intensity of his images, his distortions of 'reality', his tendency to parody romantic conventions--Trakl reminds me of the tragically short-lived protégé of Klimt and Kokoschka, Egon Schiele.

 Umberto Saba's poetry seems to me to be far more complex in feeling if not in expression than Trakl's.  To be sure, Saba finds much to lament and a great deal to fear in nature and in his fellow man; but his vision of things displays a detachment and irony that one doesn't find in his Austrian contemporary.

"Illusion, falsehood,
vanity of things
that are not itself, or are
the many forms it wears
to not be seen, and still are that one
in which the flesh embraces
all the sweetness of creation."

This is from "Desire," a poem that laments vanity and the tug of eroticism, but at the same time  concedes that most of what a person does is stimulated by desire, that life-force perfectly described by Freud as libido, whose power over the human will is frightening but whose affirmation of life is the source of all that is beautiful and much that is moral in our lives--"oh life-giving desire." 

Saba's beloved city of Trieste figures in many of his poems, as does his yearning for the flesh of both men and women; some of these erotic poems are, frankly, mawkish, but others are touching: "I pursued my thought as though/hunting a beautiful creature/that leads one where it wills, and at last/you lose its grace forever/at a curve in the road."

Saba's testament might be this simple epigram: "O my heart divided in two at birth,/how much pain have I endured to make them one!/ How many roses to hide an abyss!" 

Here is my favorite of Saba's poems, one that reminds me of Eugenio Montale:

Winter
It’s night, a bitter winter. You raise
the drapes a little and peer out. Your hair
blows wildly; joy suddenly
opens wide your black eyes,
and what you saw—it was an image
of the world’s end—comforts
your inmost heart, warms and eases it.
A man ventures out on a lake
of ice, under a crooked streetlamp.

(trans. George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan)

George Trakl's Poems, translated by Margitt Lehbert, are published by Anvil Press, with a fine introduction by Lehbert
http://www.anvilpresspoetry.com/

Songbook: The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba, trans. by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan, with an introduction, notes, and commentary by Hochfield are published as a "World Republic of Letters Book" from Yale University Press.

George Ovitt (4/10/13)

G org s P r c and Lit rary Tomfool ry

A Void  

Today, at sunrise--who can say why?--I had a yearning for a dose of one of my favorite books, Hopscotch (in Spanish, Rayuela), and for one of my favorite sections, the one (18) where the anti-hero Horacio Oliveira (surely Julio Cortázar himself) looks back on a night of drinking, talking, and listening to jazz with his friends and his lover (the mysterious Uruguayan La Maga) with a melancholy sense of loss.  In the English of that genius-translator Gregory Rybassa Oliveira thinks as follows:

"All disorder had meaning if it seemed to come out of itself, perhaps through madness one could arrive at that reason which is not the reason whose weakness is madness...." and there follows this passage: "And La Maga was crying, Guy had disappeared, Etienne had left after Perico, and Gregorovius, Wong, and Ronald were looking at the record that was spinning slowly, thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute, no more no less, and in these revolutions there was Oscar's Blues, Oscar himself on piano, of course, a certain Oscar Peterson, a certain pianist half tiger, half felt, a certain sad, fat pianist, a guy on piano and the rain on the skylight, all those things, literature, after all."

"All those things, literature, after all." 

The playfulness and beauty of Hopscotch lies in the Cubist fracturing of the story--hundreds of gem-like fragments that can be read forward and backward, in any order one wishes, and still there is a story of sorts, impressions that are indelible (of Paris in the Fifties, of drinking and smoking and listening to jazz, of high-minded conversation, of seduction and betrayal, a book that is a marriage of  Celine and Proust).  And yet there's a problem: I wonder if a narrative can exist in such a form, or rather, in such formlessness.  If the ordering of events is of no consequence, then can the novel be anything more than a magician's trick, a bit of literary sleight of hand?  When I read or browse in Hopscotch--and browsing seems not only warranted, but justified--I feel just the way I do when, for example, I stand in front of Wassily Kandinsky's Composition IV (as I did this past summer) wondering where my eye should rest, where I might find the center from which the meaning of the painting might be derived.  With Kandinsky and Cortázar, I can easily orient myself by deploying jazz as a metaphor--Hopscotch or Kandinsky or Klee or Mondrian should be compared to the modal forms of Miles's "Kind of Blue"--uncentered, improvisational, deliberately not beautiful, harmonious rather than coherent.



After a bracing a.m. dose of Hopscotch I gave some thought to my true subject--Georges Perec's A Void (La Disparition, 1969)--a literary trick of a far more serious kind.  Perec, whose parents were murdered in the Holocaust, created in A Void a book about loss ("disappearance"), a lipogrammatic anti-story influenced by the 1939 novel Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright, a three-hundred-page tour de force which does not employ the most common vowel in the English language, "e."  The "loss" of the letter "e" is only one of many losses in A Void: the main character, Anton Vowl, is "lost" and the plot (such as it is) of the novel is the search by a linguistically talented group of friends for Vowl (!), rather like a group of advanced acrostic-players hunting everywhere for Will Shortz.   The search is naturally impeded by the missing vowel, and Perec, whose almost supernatural cleverness is inexhaustible, twists and turns to avoid the dangerous, forbidden letter--Perec writes with the wit of Laurence Sterne, or in the mode of an anti-Cabbalist:

"My ambition, as Author, my point, I would go so far as to say my fixation, my constant fixation, was primarily to concoct an artifact as original as it was illuminating, an artifact that would, or just possibly might, act as a stimulant on notions of construction, of narration, of plotting, of action, a stimulant, in a word, on fiction-writing today." (not an "e" in sight)

Perec's fictions typically deploy baroque artifices, as if merely writing a novel were too easy.  Life: A User's Manual describes, room by room, inch by inch, an ordinary Parisian apartment house; Le revenentes (trans. as The Exeter Text) only uses the vowel "e."  To call Perec a "postmodernist" seems rather silly; his fiction  is so original, so deliberate and uniquely suited to his tragic life that any labeling of it seems beside the point.  When I read A Void I felt like I did years ago when I traveled to Cape May in the late autumn looking at the thousands of migrating snow geese.  One knew that among those thousands of identical birds there would be a single Ross's goose--a slightly different, much rarer bird--and to see one was an epiphany.  I kept hoping to find an "e" in A Void, a slip of the pen, a joke, a bit of wordplay within wordplay. To no avail.  But that was fine: the effect, of course, was to reinforce my attention, to make me uneasy, to open up the sense of loss by closing off the words we most often use. The effect was disorienting and powerful.

Gilbert Adair, whose ability to English such a odd text is itself a kind of miracle, hasn't slipped--there isn't an "e" to be found--no mere or pere, no lost parents, no Perec, no hope or love or bit of the true. Think of it--think of giving up one of the foundations of one's language--language!--and what this entails for the writer and the reader.  A maze of puzzles and games and dead ends that lead, by the end of the book, to sense of loss as profound as any in fiction.

Georges Perec (1936-1982) was born the only son of Polish-Jewish parents who both died in the second world war: his father fighting for the French army, and his mother at Auschwitz. He was born Georges Peretz but his parents had changed his name when he was young. When the Nazis came through the Alpine town where he had taken refuge with relatives, the name Perec, being plausibly Breton, did not attract suspicion. Thus, his survival as a child was linked with linguistic coincidence and wordplay.

A Void and other books by Georges Perec are published by Godine, under the Verba Mundi imprint. http://www.godine.com/category.asp?cat=VM, some of the finest, and most durable of hard-to-locate European classics. 

George Ovitt (4/5/13)

 

 

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

The Novel in Reverse

 

Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb

Szerb's masterpiece is the first novel I can remember reading for some time that appears to move backward: a married couple in Venice falls into the spell of the past, into the torturous memories of the bridegroom, Mihály--a man who wishes, of all things, to have a normal life.  To do so [spoiler alert] he leaves his wife and follows various clues left by a single eccentric episode of his past into, first, a nervous breakdown, and then to a monastery, and finally to Rome where instead of "finding" himself--as any self-respecting fictional hero should do--he loses himself, his wife, his sense of adventure and his love of life.  He goes home to Budapest "to conform"! 

 

Isn't the usual trajectory of the fictional hero from "up" to "down" (or "down" to "up"), or from happy to sad, or from alive to dead (or, today, from dead to alive)?--but to create a warm-blooded character whose fictional arc is defined by the desire to be boring and by the yearning to overthrow one's nature--this was unsettling.  Generally the novels I most enjoy feature narrators who don't change at all--Proust's Marcel or Musil's Ulrich or any of Bernhard's monomaniacal monologuers--but a character who abandons seduction and ironic self-mockery for earnestness, this was a revelation.  I even thought, with a shudder, of Thomas Merton's Seven Story Mountain, not a cheerful thought by any means. 

Today (Easter Sunday) as I was reading Journey by Moonlight I kept thinking of how good fiction sets expectations and then proceeds to fulfill them while great fiction sets expectations and then proceeds to show how foolish it was for the reader, or the characters, to believe in the notion of fulfilled expectations in the first place.  

Mihály wishes to find happiness in a normal life; his wife, Erzsi has married Mihály believing he will save her from the tedium of conformity; neither one has any idea of why he or she believed their doomed marriage could advance their wishes--Szerb, whose touch is as gentle as any I have ever encountered (perhaps he is an ironist, but I'm not so sure) quietly undoes both Mihály's and Erzsi's illusions about one another, about their mutual acquaintances, about their past and the future to such an extent that, by the end of the book I was thinking how relieved I was that there could exist a world in which no illusions remain, and, at the same time, how surprised I was that any writer would set out to depict such a place.  

 

As much as I loved this book, I was put off, or perhaps slightly disturbed, by how perfect the pitch of the narrative was--reading Journey by Moonlight was like listening to Schubert lieder--you understand that you're in the presence of genius,and the performance is, let us assume, flawless, but you can't help but wish, ungratefully, for that discordant note that humanizes what is otherwise unearthly.  Whatever my ingratitude for the book's obvious stylistic perfection, I have to say that I was charmed by the intelligence of the author.  Szerb was an intellectual prodigy, a student of languages who "knew everything," and who read everything--in English, French, German, and Italian--a scholar-novelist who wrote his own history of world literature at a young age, a teacher, a man of elegance and breeding.  

In Journey by Moonlight, Szerb has written a book (translated, and I would say perfectly so, by Len Rix--it reads as if written in English) in which not a single word seems out of place, a book so economical, so flawless as to put one more in mind of poets rather than of novelists.

Do I exaggerate?  Here is the passage where Mihály meets his old friend Ervin, now a remarkably (not in degree, but kind) holy Franciscan monk:

"[The Monk] led Mihály into one of the building where lights were still burning. A few minutes later Ervin arrived, no longer in his flowing robes but his brown Franciscan cowl. It now struck Mihály how thoroughly Franciscan Ervin had become, The tonsure gave quite a different look to the face, as if its owner had expunged from his nature every worldliness, every conceivable worldliness, and elevated himself into the air of the Giottos and Fra Angelicos.  And yet, Mihály felt, this was Ervin's true face. From the very first he had been growing towards this face. The tonsure had always been there on his crown. It had simply been hidden by his bushy black hair...There could be no doubt that, however alarming the result, Ervin had found himself."  

"He had been growing towards this face." (!)

And this is the theme of Journey by Moonlight: no matter how alarming the result, there can be no doubt that each of the characters, like each of us, comes to discover that his or her true self--selves that mostly seem inconceivable at the beginning of the book, at the beginning of our lives--are made to appear the inevitable outgrown of apparently insignificant events lodged not so much in the past as in the persistence of our imperfect memory of the past.  A journey by moonlight is bound to go wrong as the light is bent by the water and lost in the shadows.   

Journey by Moonlight is published by Pushkin Press, in London
http://www.pushkinpress.com/

Antal Szerb was born in Budapest of assimilated Jewish parents in 1901--Szerb became a Roman Catholic. Four of his novels are available in English, and I plan to read them all....Szerb was beaten to death in a concentration camp in 1945.

George Ovitt (April 1, 2013)
   

The Art of Interpretation: “Lu zhai” or “Deer Park” by Wang Wei

19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei

by Eliot Weinberger & Octavio Paz

It was my wife, Annie, who introduced me to Eliot Weinberger through his superb collection of essays, Works on Paper—short, astute reflections on subjects ranging from India to Mateo Ricci to The Bomb.  It was also my wife who introduced me to the non-fiction of Octavio Paz, most notably his collection of essays, The Labyrinth of Solitude (with its brilliant disquisition on the extraordinarily versatile Spanish verb chingar) and his Convergences: Essay on Art and Literature.  It was therefore only natural that she, Annie, was the one to introduce me to a book that combined the strengths of both these men—as writers, translators, and critics—a work called 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei that focuses on the translation history of a single Chinese poem.

The poem ‘Lu zhai’ or ‘Deer Park’ by the wealthy Tang Dynasty Buddhist painter, calligrapher, and poet Wang Wei is one of the world’s most famous quatrains, taken from a series of twenty poems inspired by various sites along the Wang River in the Shanxi province of northeastern China. The poem, written as part of a massive horizontal landscape scroll (a genre Wei himself invented), and some 1200 years old, is now one of the most widely translated poems from the Chinese classical tradition.  It is generally believed that the title ‘Lu zhai’ is an allusion to the Deer Park in Sarnath, the site of the famous Bodhi Tree beneath which the Gautama Buddha preached his first sermon.

Everyone knows Wallace Steven’s poem “Thirteen Way of Looking at a Blackbird”.  Now consider 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, an attractively slim volume in which essayist and translator Eliot Weinberger and Mexican Nobel Laureate poet and essayist Octavio Paz have selected and critiqued a sampling—in English, Spanish, and French—of some of the most outstanding translations of this subtle, sophisticated, notoriously difficult poem.  As Weinberger remarks in his short introduction to the collection to emphasize the scale of this challenge, “Chinese prosody is largely concerned with the number of characters per line and the arrangement of tones—both of which are untranslatable.” Paz as well, in reflecting upon his own struggles to render the poem, notes: “The translation of this poem is particularly difficult, for the poem carries to an extreme the characteristics of Chinese poetry: universality, impersonality, absence of time, absence of subject.” 

Starting with W. J. B. Fletcher’s 1919 ‘The Form of the Deer’ and ending with Gary Snyder’s untitled version from 1978, this collection is extraordinary, not only for its focus on the translation of a single poem over time, with all the changes in poetic sensibility that that entails, but for Weinberger’s and Paz’s engaging, often Talmudic remarks regarding the subtleties of Chinese poetry, the strengths and weaknesses of the various renditions, and the art of translation in general, an art the particulars of which are certain to interest any student of language. While praising all of the translations by including them in the collection, the editors criticize some as attempts to “improve” upon the original, others as “poetic”(meaning Westernized, ironic), at least one as inaccurate, and still another as a typical example of Chinoiserie.   For Weinberger there are two types of translators at work in this collection: those who are scholars and read Chinese and those who are poets and don’t.  To his mind, each type has its strengths—the scholars their grasp of classical Chinese, the poets their mastery of English prosody and verse.  It is this combination that really gives life to these different, if consistently  illuminating renditions.

Surely one of the most engaging features of the book are the editors’ largely incidental reflections on the art of translation itself.  To Weinberger translation is nothing less than a spiritual exercise, and as such “…dependent on the dissolution of the translator’s ego: an absolute humility toward the text...” A good translator is but a conduit, a medium, through which the poem can speak. Of the essence of a poem, that part which survives translation, he insists, "The living matter functions somewhat like DNA, spinning out individual translations which are relatives, not clones, of the original. The relationship between original and translation is parent-child. And there are, inescapably, some translations that are overly attached to their originals, and others that are constantly rebelling.”  This is exactly what makes this collection of translations—and the editors’ tussle with them—such a pleasure to read.

Here is a brief sampling:

                    The Form of the Deer

So lone seem the hills; there is no one in sight there.

     But whence is the echo of voices I hear?

The rays of the sunset pierce slanting the forest,

            And in their reflection green mosses appear.

                                               - W.J.B. Fletcher, 1919

                           La Forêt

Dans la montagne tout est solitaire,

On entend de bien loin l'écho des voix humaines,

Le soleil qui pénètre au fond de la forêt

Reflete son éclat sur la mousee vert.

                                 -G. Margoulies, 1948

              Deer Forest Hermitage
Through the deep woods, the slanting sunlight
Casts motley patterns on the jade-green mosses.
No glimpse of man in this lonely mountain,
Yet faint voices drift on the air.
                             -Chang Yin-nan & Lewis C. Walmsley, 1958

         Deep in the Mountain Wilderness

Deep in the mountain wilderness

where nobody ever comes

Only once in a great while

Something like the sound of a far off voice.

The low rays of the sun

Slip through the dark forest,

And gleam again on the shadowy moss.

                               -Kenneth Rexroth, 1970

             En la Ermita del Parque de los Venados 

No se ve gente en este monte.

Sólo se oyen, lejos, voces.

Por hos ramajes lasluz rompe.

Tendida entre las yerba brilla verde.

                           -Octavio Paz, 1974

Empty mountains:

            no one to be seen.

Yet—hear—

            human sounds and echoes.

Returning sunlight

            enters the dark woods;

Again shining

            on the green moss, above.

                              -Gary Snyder, 1978

Eliot Weinberger was born in New York City in 1949.  He is the primary translator of Octavio Paz into English. His anthology American Poetry Since 1950: Innovators and Outsiders (1993) was a bestseller in Mexico, and his edition of Jorge Luis Borges's Selected Non-Fictions (1999) received the National Book Critics Circle prize for criticism. In 1992, he was given PEN's first Gregory Kolovakos Award for his work in promoting Hispanic literature in the United States, and in 2000 he was the first American literary writer to be awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle by the government of Mexico.

Eliot Weinberger's publications include the collection of essays Karmic Traces: 1993-1999 and a translation of Bei Dao's Unlock (with Iona Man-Cheong), both published by New Directions in 2000. He is the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry (2003).*

Octavio Paz.  Poet, essayist. Born on March 31, 1914, in Mexico City, Mexico. Paz was exposed to literature at an early age thanks to his grandfather's library. The son and grandson of political journalists, he followed the family tradition and became a writer, publishing his first volume of poetry, Luna silvestre, in 1933. Paz was also a skilled editor and helped found a literary magazine called Taller in 1938. He entered the diplomatic service in 1945 and was later appointed the Mexican ambassador to India, a position he held from 1962 to 1968. Paz resigned in protest over the Mexican government's handling of student demonstrations during the Olympic Games.
Adept at both poetry and prose, Paz moved back and forth between the two genres throughout his career. Poetry, such as Piedra de sol (1957), and critical and analytical works, such as El Laberinto de la soledad (1950) cemented his reputation as a master of language and a keen intellect. He produced more than 30 books and poetry collections in his lifetime. Paz received numerous awards for his work, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. He died on April 19, 1998, in Mexico City, Mexico.

* Bio.com

19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei is published by Asphodel Press 

www.asphodelpress.com/

Peter Adam Nash