[What is this, you may wonder? Explanation and beginning of the series can be found here]
Knudsen
Knudsen was in a rage. In order to calm himself, he played a game of Patience*. The day before yesterday, Brägevoldt had visited him from Rostock and had appointed a Party instructor for today, after noon. Knudsen told Brägevoldt: the Party can lick my ass. The Party should have shot him, instead of sending an instructor now. But this new Five Person Group System, Brägevoldt had said, is very interesting, you'll see. Rubbish, Knudsen had answered, in Rerik there is only one Single Person Group, and that's me. Brägevoldt: and the others? Knudsen: shit scared. Brägevoldt: And you? Knudsen: no interest. Moreover, I have to get to the cod. Brägevoldt had said something about a shock effect as a result of the increase in terrorism that would subside, and then he shoved off after he had arranged the meeting betwen Knudsen and the instructor.
While Knudsen laid down the cards, he could think about it. Brägevoldt or the Party had put him in a difficult position. The other boats had already sailed the day before yesterday. Knudsen aroused suspicion if the "Pauline" stayed in the harbor much longer. Too, the youth was innocent. Quite apart from the income, the tide was ebbing. The pretty cod. Knudsen yearned for cod. His lost his Patience and flung the cards aside.
He went into the little garden that lay behind the house, a tiny space of dull, darkened greenness, in which a pair of white asters glowed. On one side stood a rabbit hutch; Knudsen heard the animals rustling. Bertha sat on the bench, knitting, despite the cold. Put on an overcoat, said Knudsen, if you must sit outside. Laughing happily, she went into the house and came back a few seconds later, wearing the coat. Knudsen watched her, how she returned to sit on the bench. She smiled. Knudsen glanced at the part in her blond hair; she was blond and gentle, a pretty young woman of forty. I must tell you a joke, she said. Anxiously, she looked up to him and asked: Listen? Yes, I will listen, said Knudsen, as he pondered about Brägevoldt and the Party instructions. In Machnow, related Bertha, a man once watched how the lunatics jumped from a diving board into the pool in the middle of winter. He said to them: there is absolutely no water in there! They called back to him: we're just training for the summer, as they rubbed their blue bruises. Why had she chosen this cruel joke, thought Knudsen, as Bertha expectfully watched him. He smiled and said: yes, yes, Bertha, it's a good joke. If I don't pay attention, he thought, they would take you to the lunatics also, even though you're not even crazy. She just had a little quirk, he reflected. It started a few years back, when she had begun to tell this joke of the lunatics who jump into the empty pool. Otherwise she was friendly and gentle, a good woman. He had never made out when and from whom she had heard this through-and-through bad joke. She told it everywhere, but she had been telling it for years, and after a while the city stopped gossiping about Bertha Knudsen. But a year ago one of the Others came to Knudsen and had said: your woman is mentally disturbed, we must put her in an institution. With help from Doctor Frerking, Knudsen had prevented them from taking her away. He knew what they did to the mentally disturbed when they put them in an institution for the first time, and he held on to Bertha. When he was out to sea with the trawler he was always afraid that he would not find Bertha upon his return. He had gotten the impression that they wanted to blackmail him with the threat of putting Bertha in an institution. They wanted him to keep quiet. They would use poor Bertha as a weapon against the Party.
Make my provisions ready, he said, I will sail later, and he saw her cheerful laugh, her perpetual and fatal laugh on her pretty, ever-youthful face, as he went back inside the house. He sat on the bench by the oven and lit a pipe.
He had to decide now, if he'd keep the meeting with the instructor. It was three o'clock in the afternoon, and he had one hour's time. The boat was ready for sea; the youth had been aboard for two hours; at four o'clock they could already be far outside the pilot island.
But it wasn't about the one hour. Knudsen thought harder. To meet the instructor meant to get involved. The others had grasped this faster than he: they had already cleared out. Elias had said it straight to his face: listen, we're not going to talk anymore about the Party. It had happened remarkably: two years of preparation for the illegalities, then two years of sticking together, afterwards stagnation. And now, in the year 1937, since no one was afraid anymore, the Others suddenly tightened the screws. One heard of arrests in Rostock, in Wismar, in Brunshaupten, on the entire coast. They smash the wood to pieces since it had begun to crumble. They are preparing for war, Knudsen had said to Elias. Elias just turned away. The comrades still all spoke to Knudsen, but not about politics.
This was preferred, though, for this way the Others don't discover who leads the Party. They knew that there were Knudsen, Mathiasson, Jenssen, Elias, Kröger, Bahnsen, and a few others more. But to arrest them all wouldn't do in such a small town as Rerik. The Others had to be able to depend on the fact that nothing more about the Party would be spoken. When no more is said about it, the Party exists no longer.
Naturally they knew that there was one -- at least one -- who led the Party further. Knudsen was convinced that they reckoned with that one. So it was dangerous for him that the "Pauline" lay still docked in the harbor while the entire fishing fleet had sailed. But it was not dangerous if he didn't meet the instructor. By the rules of the Party, the instructor didn't know Knudsen. If Knudsen didn't go to the meeting, the instructor could turn black from waiting. Then Knudsen was out. When the new instructors from the Central Committees of the Party didn't arrive in Rerik, then there was no more Party in Rerik. Then for Knudsen, just like for everyone else, there were just the cod and the herring. And Bertha. But if he went, then he involved himself in the measures that the Party took, thought Knudsen. He couldn't go and then not carry out the instructions of the Party. If he wanted, he really didn't need to go. Now I'm the fish, thought Knudsen, the fish before the angler. I can bite, or not. Can the fish decide? he asked himself. Of course it can, he thought with his ancient fisher's faith. And with his ancient fisher's contempt: the fish is stupid. But I've spent my entire life long biting at this bait, he remembered. And the hook has always hurt. Always has it yanked me into the air in which one could hear the screams of the fish. I'll be damned, thought Knudsen, full of rage, if I am to be a silent fish.
*"Patience" is a european name for what americans call "Solitaire." I decided not to change the name in translation here, because the subsequent play on words ("He lost his Patience") is a close and true approximation of the original, one of those rare instances where a translated phrase works really well. ("He lost his game of Solitaire" just doesn't have the same effect.)
Showing posts with label Zanzibar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zanzibar. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
I.5
[What is this, you may wonder? Explanation and beginning of the series can be found here]
The Youth
Although he sat concealed under a curtain of willow branches, he could glimpse the tower from St. George and read the clock. Half past two. In a half hour I must be aboard the trawler, because Knudsen will want to sail away at five o'clock, he thought, and then the boring fishing will begin, the creeping about here and there with the boat at the Buksand and under the land, the monotonous work with seine nets, two or three days long, together with the sullen fisherman. Knudsen never sailed out onto the open sea like father, even though father's trawler wasn't bigger than Knudsen's. But then father was lost at sea. And so I must get away, thought the youth, because I heard people say that father had been stinking drunk again when he died. Huck Finn's father was a drunk, so Huck Finn had to run away, but I have to get away because my father wasn't a drunk, although they claim he was since they were jealous of him, for he was sometimes out on the open sea. Not even one tablet did they hang for him in the church, a tablet with with his name and the words "died in with his boots on" and his dates of birth and death, like they do for all those lost at sea. I hate them all, and that's the second reason why I have to get away from Rerik.
The Youth
Although he sat concealed under a curtain of willow branches, he could glimpse the tower from St. George and read the clock. Half past two. In a half hour I must be aboard the trawler, because Knudsen will want to sail away at five o'clock, he thought, and then the boring fishing will begin, the creeping about here and there with the boat at the Buksand and under the land, the monotonous work with seine nets, two or three days long, together with the sullen fisherman. Knudsen never sailed out onto the open sea like father, even though father's trawler wasn't bigger than Knudsen's. But then father was lost at sea. And so I must get away, thought the youth, because I heard people say that father had been stinking drunk again when he died. Huck Finn's father was a drunk, so Huck Finn had to run away, but I have to get away because my father wasn't a drunk, although they claim he was since they were jealous of him, for he was sometimes out on the open sea. Not even one tablet did they hang for him in the church, a tablet with with his name and the words "died in with his boots on" and his dates of birth and death, like they do for all those lost at sea. I hate them all, and that's the second reason why I have to get away from Rerik.
I.4
[What is this, you may wonder? Explanation and beginning of the series can be found here]
Helander
Knudsen would help, thought Father Helander, Knudsen wasn't foolish. He bore no grudge. He'd help against the common enemy.
No sound or echo came from outside. There was nothing more empty than St. George Church Square in late autumn. Helander prayed intensely against the emptiness for a moment. Against the three already leafless lime trees in the corner between the transept* and the choir, against the mute dark redness of the brick wall, whose top he couldn't see from the window of his study: the southern transept of the St. George Church. The grounds of the square were a bit lighter than the brown-red bricks of the church and the parsonage and the humbler houses that were attached, older houses made from fired bricks, houses with small stepped gables and simple houses with glazed woodbrick roofs.
No one ever walks over this square, thought Helander, gazing down upon the cleanswept pavement. No one. It was an absurd thought. Of course people walked over this dead corner of the church square too, where the parsonage stood. The foreigners who came to the ocean spas in summer, in order to visit the church. Members of his parish. The sexton, father Helander himself. Nevertheless, thought Helander, the square was wholly lonely.
A place as dead as the church, thought the priest. Which is why only Knudsen could help.
He raised his gaze to the transept wall. Thirty thousand bricks, a naked board without perspective, two-dimensional, brown-red, slate-colored red, yellow-red, blue-red, and finally a single, darkly phosphorescent red one, without depth, hanging before Helander's window, his decades-long antithesis: the board upon which the writing that he awaited never appears, so that he paints it with his own fingers, always erasing the text and writing new words and characters. The grounds of the square waited upon steps that never sounded; the brick wall upon writing that never appeared.
In this way, Father Helander unjustly put the guilt upon the bricks, the dark bricks of the houses and the church. His ancestors had come with the journeying king from a land in which the houses were built from wood and colorfully painted. In that land, one's footsteps crunched cheerfully on the gravel in front of the wooden parsonages, and the Word of justice and peace was carved on the beams. Happy dreamers, his ancestors were, when they were tempted to venture to a land in which the thoughts were dark and intemperate like the stone walls of the church in which they began to preach the true Word. It wasn't heard, the true Word: the darkness remained stronger than the small Light that they had brought out from the friendly land.
The dark thoughts and the excessive brick churches were guilty for forcing him to go and seek help from Knudsen, thought the priest. His fierce, reddened, passionate face grew darker. His prosthesis creaked as he went to the desk to take the key to the parsonage out of the drawer, and he felt the pain in his stump that had for some time now had made itself noticed whenever he took a step too quickly. The pain was stabbing: it impaled him. The priest stood still and balled his fists. And after a while, when the spear had slowly retreated back, he had the feeling as if, behind him on the church wall from which he had turned away, the writing that he was waiting for, appeared. Carefully, he turned. But the wall was as empty as ever.
*Classically, churches were built in the shape of the cross. The nave is the long, "upright" bar of the cross, while the transept is the horizontal crossbar.
Helander
Knudsen would help, thought Father Helander, Knudsen wasn't foolish. He bore no grudge. He'd help against the common enemy.
No sound or echo came from outside. There was nothing more empty than St. George Church Square in late autumn. Helander prayed intensely against the emptiness for a moment. Against the three already leafless lime trees in the corner between the transept* and the choir, against the mute dark redness of the brick wall, whose top he couldn't see from the window of his study: the southern transept of the St. George Church. The grounds of the square were a bit lighter than the brown-red bricks of the church and the parsonage and the humbler houses that were attached, older houses made from fired bricks, houses with small stepped gables and simple houses with glazed woodbrick roofs.
No one ever walks over this square, thought Helander, gazing down upon the cleanswept pavement. No one. It was an absurd thought. Of course people walked over this dead corner of the church square too, where the parsonage stood. The foreigners who came to the ocean spas in summer, in order to visit the church. Members of his parish. The sexton, father Helander himself. Nevertheless, thought Helander, the square was wholly lonely.
A place as dead as the church, thought the priest. Which is why only Knudsen could help.
He raised his gaze to the transept wall. Thirty thousand bricks, a naked board without perspective, two-dimensional, brown-red, slate-colored red, yellow-red, blue-red, and finally a single, darkly phosphorescent red one, without depth, hanging before Helander's window, his decades-long antithesis: the board upon which the writing that he awaited never appears, so that he paints it with his own fingers, always erasing the text and writing new words and characters. The grounds of the square waited upon steps that never sounded; the brick wall upon writing that never appeared.
In this way, Father Helander unjustly put the guilt upon the bricks, the dark bricks of the houses and the church. His ancestors had come with the journeying king from a land in which the houses were built from wood and colorfully painted. In that land, one's footsteps crunched cheerfully on the gravel in front of the wooden parsonages, and the Word of justice and peace was carved on the beams. Happy dreamers, his ancestors were, when they were tempted to venture to a land in which the thoughts were dark and intemperate like the stone walls of the church in which they began to preach the true Word. It wasn't heard, the true Word: the darkness remained stronger than the small Light that they had brought out from the friendly land.
The dark thoughts and the excessive brick churches were guilty for forcing him to go and seek help from Knudsen, thought the priest. His fierce, reddened, passionate face grew darker. His prosthesis creaked as he went to the desk to take the key to the parsonage out of the drawer, and he felt the pain in his stump that had for some time now had made itself noticed whenever he took a step too quickly. The pain was stabbing: it impaled him. The priest stood still and balled his fists. And after a while, when the spear had slowly retreated back, he had the feeling as if, behind him on the church wall from which he had turned away, the writing that he was waiting for, appeared. Carefully, he turned. But the wall was as empty as ever.
*Classically, churches were built in the shape of the cross. The nave is the long, "upright" bar of the cross, while the transept is the horizontal crossbar.
I.3
[What is this, you may wonder? Explanation and beginning of the series can be found here]
The Youth
Running away inland made no sense either, thought the youth who sat under the willow by the river. Huckleberry Finn had had the choice either to go into the deep forest to live as a trapper or to disappear on the Mississippi, and he'd chosen the Mississippi. But he could've just as easily gone into the woods. But there were no woods here into which a guy could disappear, anyway -- just cities and villages and fields and plains of willows and so very little forest, as far as you could see. So it was all just nonsense, thought the youth, I'm not a child anymore, I've been out of school since Easter and I don't believe in Wild West stories anymore. But Huckleberry Finn was no Wild West story. A guy has got to do like Huckleberry Finn and get away.
There were three reasons why you had to get out of Rerik. The first went like this: because nothing ever happened in Rerik. There was really, totally, nothing. Nothing will ever happen to me here, thought the youth, as he pondered the autumn yellow, lance-shaped willow leaves on the Treene, drifting slowly away.
The Youth
Running away inland made no sense either, thought the youth who sat under the willow by the river. Huckleberry Finn had had the choice either to go into the deep forest to live as a trapper or to disappear on the Mississippi, and he'd chosen the Mississippi. But he could've just as easily gone into the woods. But there were no woods here into which a guy could disappear, anyway -- just cities and villages and fields and plains of willows and so very little forest, as far as you could see. So it was all just nonsense, thought the youth, I'm not a child anymore, I've been out of school since Easter and I don't believe in Wild West stories anymore. But Huckleberry Finn was no Wild West story. A guy has got to do like Huckleberry Finn and get away.
There were three reasons why you had to get out of Rerik. The first went like this: because nothing ever happened in Rerik. There was really, totally, nothing. Nothing will ever happen to me here, thought the youth, as he pondered the autumn yellow, lance-shaped willow leaves on the Treene, drifting slowly away.
I.2
[What is this, you may wonder? Explanation and beginning of the series can be found here]
This part was harder than I expected. I find Gregor's thoughts to be complex to the point of confusion sometimes. He speaks and thinks with detailed imagery, almost stream-of-consciousness at times. Translating his thoughts is an exercise in understanding.
Gregor
It's possible, thought Gregor, provided that one isn't in danger, to see the pale, standing pines as a curtain. Like this: an open assembly of lightly colored poles, from which matte green flags motionlessly fluttered under a gray sky until they united into a transparent green wall. The practically black, macadamed street seemed like a seam between the two halves of the curtain, and one undid it while bicycling along. After a few minutes, the curtain opens and reveals a scene of city and sea coast.
But since his life was in danger, thought Gregor, nothing was like anything else. The objects comprised themselves in their names, fully and completely. Outwardly, they revealed nothing of themselves.
So there were just solid things: forest, bicycle, street. Where the woods ended, one finds the city and the coast -- no backdrop for a game, but rather the stage for a menace that freezes over everything in inalterable reality. A house is a house, a wave a wave, neither more nor less.
Just on the other side of this menace, seven miles removed from the coast on a ship to Sweden -- if there should be a ship to Sweden -- would the sea, for example, be comparable to a bird wing, a wing of icy ultramarine that the late autumn scandanavians flew around. Until then the sea was nothing more than the sea, a turbulent mass that one had to see firsthand to know if it were suitable to allow an escape.
No, thought Gregor, whether or not I flee doesn't depend upon anything about the sea. The sea will allow passage. It depends upon sailors and captains, upon swedish and danish seafolk, upon their courage or their greed, and if there are no swedish or danish seafolk then it depends upon the comrades in Rerik--upon them with their fishing trawlers, it depends upon their looks and thoughts, namely that their looks aim for adventure, and their thoughts can manage an easy sail-setting motion.
It would be easier, thought Gregor, to be dependent upon the sea, instead of upon men.
This part was harder than I expected. I find Gregor's thoughts to be complex to the point of confusion sometimes. He speaks and thinks with detailed imagery, almost stream-of-consciousness at times. Translating his thoughts is an exercise in understanding.
Gregor
It's possible, thought Gregor, provided that one isn't in danger, to see the pale, standing pines as a curtain. Like this: an open assembly of lightly colored poles, from which matte green flags motionlessly fluttered under a gray sky until they united into a transparent green wall. The practically black, macadamed street seemed like a seam between the two halves of the curtain, and one undid it while bicycling along. After a few minutes, the curtain opens and reveals a scene of city and sea coast.
But since his life was in danger, thought Gregor, nothing was like anything else. The objects comprised themselves in their names, fully and completely. Outwardly, they revealed nothing of themselves.
So there were just solid things: forest, bicycle, street. Where the woods ended, one finds the city and the coast -- no backdrop for a game, but rather the stage for a menace that freezes over everything in inalterable reality. A house is a house, a wave a wave, neither more nor less.
Just on the other side of this menace, seven miles removed from the coast on a ship to Sweden -- if there should be a ship to Sweden -- would the sea, for example, be comparable to a bird wing, a wing of icy ultramarine that the late autumn scandanavians flew around. Until then the sea was nothing more than the sea, a turbulent mass that one had to see firsthand to know if it were suitable to allow an escape.
No, thought Gregor, whether or not I flee doesn't depend upon anything about the sea. The sea will allow passage. It depends upon sailors and captains, upon swedish and danish seafolk, upon their courage or their greed, and if there are no swedish or danish seafolk then it depends upon the comrades in Rerik--upon them with their fishing trawlers, it depends upon their looks and thoughts, namely that their looks aim for adventure, and their thoughts can manage an easy sail-setting motion.
It would be easier, thought Gregor, to be dependent upon the sea, instead of upon men.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
A new project
I'm going to start something new here, namely a serial translation of one of my favorite books: Sansibar oder der letzte Grund. It was written by Alfred Andersch in 1957, a german writer, and translated to english as "Flight to Afar" in 1961, but I don't own a copy of the latter, and I've been meaning to reread it for some time. A translation is a forcible way to thoroughly read and understand, and I'm a glutton for punishment, anyway, so....
The book is organized in chapters, each chapter subdivided in parts describing something about each of the main characters. The places (cities and regions) are real, as are many other things in the novel (such as the statue that will make an appearance). I will offer the spoiler that it is set in WWII-era Germany; this would become apparent after a while anyway, but it helps to know this from the start.
Like most post-war german novels, it is introspective of german society, but does so through the lens of each of the characters' personalities, and their struggles. Each one seeks something, sometimes desperately, and their efforts to prevail illuminate the oppression of the society. It's a timely novel for modern-era USA, I think. I have left in a lot of german notation and names in my translation. If you're like me, you read some passages aloud to yourself when you read as you go. Here is a quick german pronunciation primer for english speakers, for those bits that are still native:
- Most letters "read how they look," if you have studied latin languages. If you haven't, may god have pity on your soul.
- "ä" is pronounced as the letter 'a' in the english word "mate"
- "ö" is pronounced roughly like the first sound in a kid saying "EWWW!" Just don't purse your lips.
- "ü" is pronounced as if you were to say the letter 'i' the way it sounds in "hit," but through pursed lips
- "ch," as in the pronoun "Ich," is not necessarily as gutteral and rough as american movies might make it. In the north, where this novel took place, it is often very soft, almost like "ish." (Listening to a dreamy blond Hamburg girl say "Ich liebe dich" is a rare pleasure.)
- J = 'y'. Ja, ja, ja!
- V = 'f'. "Von" sounds like "fon."
- W = 'v'. "Woher" sounds like "vo hair."
- In a word with a compound vowel (e.g., "erschien") the pronunciation is of the second vowel. So "erschien" sounds like "air sheen."
What follows is the first part and installment of this translation.
Zanzibar, or The Last Reason
And death shall have no dominion
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.
Dylan Thomas
The Youth
The Mississippi would be the best, thought the youth. On the Mississippi a guy could just steal a canoe and get away, if it was true what was in Huckleberry Finn. On the Baltic Sea nobody could ever get very far, quite apart from the fact that there weren't any canoes anymore but rather just old beat-up rowboats. He looked up from his book to the brook, the Treene, flowing silently and slowly below; the willow under which he sat hung down into the water, and across the water in the old tannery nothing moved, like always. The Mississippi would be better than the storehouse in the old deserted tannery and the willow by the slow moving creek. Out on the Mississippi a guy could escape, while at the tannery and and under the willow you could only hide -- and only as long as it had leaves, and they had already begun to fall and turn yellow upon the brown water. Hiding wasn't the way, anyway, thought the youth -- you've got to get away.
A guy has to get away, but he has to end up somewhere. And you can't do it like dad, who wanted to escape, but who always just wandered aimlessly out on the open sea. When someone has no other goal than the open sea, they always come back. You've only really escaped, thought the youth, when you find landfall beyond the sea.
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