Daniela Fischerová | Prst, který se nikdy nedotkne (Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else) / 2000

the emperor is an emperor is an emperor

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniela Fischerová Prst, který se nikdy nedotkne, translated from the Czech by Neil Bermel as Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else (North Haven, Connecticut: Catbird Press, 2000)

 

Daniela Fischerová, one of the most accomplished of contemporary Czech writers, composes stories with a quiet and subtle intensity, some of which have recently been collected and translated into English as Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else.

     In "My Conversations with Aunt Marie," we are presented from a young girl's viewpoint, her and her mother's relations with her Aunt Marie, an incredibly romantic and independent woman who is clearly at odds with the child's mother over issues of love (it's suggested that, perhaps, both were love with the same man, now the young girl's father), behavior, and politics. Marie, it is apparent, was in also love with a German soldier during World War II, and was stoned by the citizens of her small village after the war; the aunt has refused to leave her property since that time. But within the small space of the house and yard, the aunt weaves miraculous tales of beauty and love, and engages the child in fantasies that include her being transformed into a beautiful young woman. The mother, who dresses her like a boy, obviously disapproves, and when authorities enter the aunt's isolated world to vaccinate all within, the aunt's world once more comes crashing down on her head and closes their enchanted relationship.

     "A Letter for President Eisenhower" is also told through the eyes of a young girl, in this case a young imaginative schoolgirl, who is chosen for the honor to write a letter from her school to President Eisenhower asking for world peace. Her young friend, Hana—excellent in penmanship—is chosen to actually pen the letter, and the two go ahead with the activities with conspiratorial delight. Hana's mother, however, finds the whole concept ridiculous on political grounds, and the young narrator of the story, so proud of her achievement, is forced to come to terms with reality when she overhears the mother laughing about the letter's content and, later, is made to understand that the letter was never actually sent. Needless to say, her relationship with Hana is destroyed and the new relationship she undertakes with Sasha, is a dramatization of frustrated love.

    "Dhum" tells the tale of a mental clinic doctor who has created a highly structured system of points for awards and punishments for his women patients. His own voyage to a swami in India, ends in an enlightenment he could not have expected. And "Two Revolts in One Family" centers upon a dreadfully domineering mother and a rebelling daughter, the latter of whom eventually discovers through her brother (who as a young man attempted and failed to escape their home) that it is not the mother, but the father who has arranged and allowed for the mother to imagine that she is controlling things.

    These stories are all well written, narratively well-structured, and (as is evident in Neil Bermel's excellent translations) crafted with superb linguistic skills. With such talent, however, one feels nonetheless somehow a bit disappointed, wishes that the author would take more chances, would abandon the carefully-wrought, slightly old-fashioned tales she has spun in favor of more adventuresome matter. It is almost in answer to these feelings that one encounters, as the last tale in the book, what might almost be read as the author's definitive answer to just such responses to her work.

    For "The Thirty-Sixth Chicken of Master Wu" is indeed about a battle between tradition and originality. Cook to the Chinese Emperor and Empress, Wu is asked every year to prepare a new chicken dish in honor of the Emperor's birthday. This year, however, he has clearly having difficulty in coming up with something new, and the visit of his poet-nephew, who rails against the court poets and their inane comparisons of the emperor with elephants, only adds to his agitations. Over the course of the story, we discover that, although the chef has little respect for poetry, it was the effects of the court censor (and esteemed poet) that took Wu from his position as an uneducated, unfeeling boy to the sensitive artisan he has become. When his nephew, after composing what seen as a blasphemous poem (The Emperor / is an emperor / is an emperor / is an emperor goes the first stanza in Gertrude Stein-like fashion), is in danger of being condemned to death, the censor queries Wu to discover the motives for his poetic offering, and when the boy's concerns for language become evident, the young poet is allowed to escape. Wu meanwhile creates his new chicken dish to great acclaim; only he discerns that the taste is that of the common vegetable radish. Who is the more original creator in this story? What does originality mean? These and other such questions that cling to Fischerová's delicious tale take us to the very heart of her art. And while the tale may not answer the questions it raises nor entirely explain her art, it and the other short works of this volume certainly reveal a fully comprehending intelligence at work. One only hopes to see more works of this quality by this talented Czech writer in the future.

 

Los Angeles, 2000

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (December 2009).

Rafael Alberti | A la pintura (To Painting) / 1997 || Sobre los ángeles (Concerning the Angels) / 1995

poet to painter

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rafael Alberti A la pintura, translated from the Spanish by Carolyn L. Tipton as To Painting (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press/Hydra Books, 1997)

Rafael Alberti Sobre los ángeles, translated from the Spanish by Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno as Concerning the Angels (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995)

 

Born in 1902 in Puerto de Santa María in the south of Spain, Rafael Alberti is one of the preeminent poets of the 20th century, and, perhaps, also that century’s most representative poet—in part because he outlived so many others. As Carolyn L. Tipton writes in her intelligent and informative introduction to To Painting, “Rafael Alberti and the twentieth century progressed together; born in its infancy, he experienced the excitement and novelty of all the artistic movements of the 1920s of his youth—Cubism, Cinematic Imagism, Surrealism; participated as an adult in the political upheaval of the 1930s, working ardently for a more equitable society; and then, having suffered war and exile, finally reached a place of quiet at the end of the 1940s, a place of maturity out of which he created—and would continue to create for years to come—with insight and a profound nostalgia for the world of his youth.” Part of the great literary renaissance of Spanish poetry of the late 1920s—the Generation of ’27, which included notables such as Federico García Lorca, Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén, and Vicente Aleixandre—Alberti has produced over 47 volumes of poetry. Yet, until the publication of this book Americans knew him primarily for one work only, the great Sobre los ángeles (Concerning the Angels) from 1929, most recently reissued in an excellent new translation by City Lights in 1995.

     Accordingly, it is a joy simply to hold in one hand another volume of poetry by this important artist, particularly when it is so beautifully produced as this one. To Painting is a watershed work of Alberti’s oeuvre, a work shedding his angry and often sardonic lyrics of the 1930s. With its 1945 publication in Buenos Aires, to where he had exiled himself, Alberti signaled a return to aesthetic issues, combining his deep love of painting—he himself began as a painter and continued painting throughout his life—with his poetry. As Tipton explains, the book consists of three different types of poets: poems dedicated to colors (which most often take the form of numbered lists of the uses, shades, hues in nature, or associations); traditional sonnets, presented almost as “toasts” to various subjects of art; and poems dedicated to artists—to Giotto, Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto, Bosch, Dürer, Rubens, Goya, Cézanne, Van Gough, Picasso, and others. These three types, in turn, are structured by theme, chronology, and other issues, and then interrelated by color and artist and numerous other “pairings.”

     Given what the translator has described as a meticulous structuring, it is a bit strange to be told that she has excised from the original six sonnets and seven poems to painters because “I think that most of them tend not to be as strong as the other poems, and I felt that their inclusion would weaken the whole.” Even within the selection we are presented there are certainly poems of less interest than the best of them, so one feels some sympathy with Tipton’s decision. But it would have been better, I believe, to have the whole of the original volume, and to let time and readers determine its strengths and weaknesses.

     Personally, I find many of the sonnets, in part because of their traditional form, uninteresting. The debate continues whether translators should keep the original rhyme and meter or attempt to bring the poems into a more suitable American-English form by using internal and slant rhymes or subtly suggesting the original rhyme in other ways. Tipton has chosen to retain the end rhyme, and she almost gets away with it:

 

                                               To Perspective

 

                        To you, the perfect hoax, through whom the eye,

                        like a reaching hand, extends its view,

                        moving to what is far from what’s close by,

                        to paler amethyst from deepest blue.

 

                        To you, feigner of depth & endless space,

                        giving to flat planes profundity,

                        through whom, beyond the balcony’s iron lace,

                        we think that we can just make out the sea.

 

                        To you, value prized above all others,

                        hazy diminution of the colors,

                        architecture, music of the spheres.

 

                        On you, pictorial space lays its foundation.

                        Line & number sing your celebration.

                        To you, the tiller by which Painting steers.

 

The form, however, cannot escape the feeling of stiltedness in the American ear—at least this American ear.

     Fortunately, many of the other poems are brilliant, and make this book an important one. The lists of colors are often truly inventive, and read, in the vaguely associational connections, a bit like the lists of New York School poets, albeit without the flat, seeming disinterestedness of those poems. Alberti, clearly, is an enthusiast—of art, of living. His colors represent catalogues of heightened experience.

 

                                                     10

 

                          Hosannas in the blacks of Titian.

 

                                                     11

 

                          Blacks wet & green

                          —Tintoretto—rising,

                          toppling suddenly

                          in storm.

 

                                                     

 

 

                                                  12

 

                          The black of Spain, all

                          five senses black:

                          black sight,

                          black sound,

                          black smell,

                          black taste,

                          the Spanish painter’s touch.

 

                                                (from “Black”)

 

     My favorite poems of this volume are among Alberti’s very best, and represent to me the importance of this poet. “Goya,” for example, mixes narrative and magic incantation to conjure up a world of dark horror:

 

                          Your eye: I keep it in the fire.

                          Your head: I nibble on it.

                          Your humerus: I crackle it. Your harrying

                          inner ear: I suck its snail.

                          Your legs: I bury you up to them

                          in mud.

                                         One leg.

                                         Another.

                                                            Flailing.

 

                          Run away! But stay

                          to witness, to die

                          without dying.

 

And Alberti’s “Bosch” is a true masterpiece of poetry and translation. Just a short piece of it conveys little of its energy, but the entire poem is a marvel of image and world-play:

 

                          ……………

 

                          Mandrake, mandrake

                          The devil has a crooked stake.

 

                                                  Cock-a-doddle-do!

                                                  I ride and I crow,

                                                  go mounted on a doe

                                                  & on a porcupine,

                                                  on a camel, on a lion,

                                                  on a burro, on a bear,

                                                  on a horse, on a hare,

                                                  and on a bugler.

 

                          Cork, cork,

                          The devil has a small pitchfork.

 

To Painting will be a necessary volume in anyone’s collection of important twentieth century poetry.

 

Los Angeles, 1997

 

 

Peter Handke | In einer dunklen Nacht ging ich aus meinem stillen Haus (On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House) / 2000

acting and perceiving

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter Handke In einer dunklen Nacht ging ich aus meinem stillen Haus, translated from the German by Krishna Winston as On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000)

 

The small village of Taxham—on the outskirts of Salzburg, Austria—was constructed early-on in the manner of many villages throughout the world today, with barriers blocking most of its entrances and exits due to the highways, nearby airport, natural boundaries, and old military bases. In short, it is a city unknown almost to all except those who live and work in it.

    Peter Handke's most recent novel, On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House, centers on one of Taxham's citizens, the local pharmacist, whose life, like that of the other villagers, has been carefully constructed to keep others out and himself locked in. Although he shares his house with his wife, she and he have little communication and live in spaces (real and imaginary) that each other does not inhabit. His major activities other than the daily pattern of opening and closing the town's pharmacy, is a morning swim, his reading of medieval romances, and his love of nature, the latter of which is particularly focused on the gathering, tasting, and analyzing of various varieties of mushrooms.

      For the first third of this work, he indeed appears as an unlikely candidate for the fantastic fable that he, the narrator of the work, and Handke himself are about to tell. But one evening, while in the woods, his is apparently attacked and hit severely on the head. The injuries, which at first seem minor, are soon recognized as serious when, at the local airport restaurant, he is unable to speak. There, as if in a dream, he picks up two strangers—a former Olympic sports champion and a poet, both now down on their luck, and travels with them into a strange world, which, although later named as Spain, represents an archetypal city "of the night wind," as surreal as the worlds created by Kafka, Walser, Celine and other continental fabulists.

      They've chosen the city, almost by accident, because the poet recalls that his ex-wife and a child he has never met lives there. But upon arriving in the strange Santa Fe, they perceive the city is celebrating a festival, and the poet can recognize very little. Although they find the house, his wife no longer lives there. Nonetheless, the pharmacist, now described by the other two simply as "the driver," there encounters, once again, the former woman friend of the ski champion in whose house they had spent the previous night and who had strangely enough entered the pharmacist's room and pummeled him in his bed; and he also recognizes, among the gypsy musicians, his own son, who had abruptly left his family years before upon being slapped by his father in the face upon the boy's release from the authorities for a petty theft. And soon after, the poet recognizes his own daughter as the queen of the festivities at the very moment she is arrested and taken off.

      In short, the three together vaguely represent aspects of one being, and events in each of their lives recall and newly affect one another. In the days following the first evening of the festival, the town and townspeople gradually take on stranger and stranger qualities as a plague of near-madness begins to affect the citizens, one by one of them falling into tirades and attacking, for no apparent reason, others, often killing them. Upon saving his poet friend from just a fate, the pharmacist realizes he must leave, and enters the seemingly endless vastness of the surrounding steppes.

      Accordingly, Handke sends his character across a near-desert in a kind of pilgrimage into the self, the past, and all that in the bunkered-up village of Taxham the pharmacist has attempted to escape. The surreal voyage across this seemingly desolate and empty space—which we gradually come to see is actually filled with animals, vegetation and other itinerant voyagers—is a true literary tour-de-force, as Handke's anti-hero both suffers and finds, at times, near ecstasy in the inexplicable search for something different in his life. The vague magnet of this voyage is the skier’s friend, the woman described earlier in the book as "a winner," presumably a term applying to her appearance and personality, but growing in the pharmacist’s voyage to mean so much more: a winner in life, something as the young skier was, a champion, perhaps a prize.

     Handke's hero does ultimately find something of value, his own voice, a reconciliation of sorts with the son (who is seen with the poet's daughter), and the discovery of love with the "winner." But the final section of the book is not a record of fulfillment and rewards, but a statement of the role and purpose of art. For life has returned to its usual pattern, slightly altered perhaps, but filled with the tedium of the daily repetition and workaday acts. The pharmacist, now designated as "the storyteller," has experienced something amazing, but he knows that he must record it, not only "tell" the story, but as he says as the narrator, to see it in print, in "black and white." "I want to have my story in writing. From speaking it, orally, nothing comes back to me. In written form, that would be different. And in the end I want to get something out of my story too. Long live the difference between speech and writing. It's what life's all about. I want to see my story written. I see it written. And the story itself wants that."

      Handke brilliantly points up the differences here between the act of living and the recognition of it, the reception of those acts. They are not the same. As in this profound, short work, things simply happen in life, one is pulled, driven to it in a world where the acts themselves often make little sense, often seem to be without meaning; while art records them, reveals them, allows one to observe them, giving them substance.

 

Los Angeles, 2000

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (April 2009).

Jane Unrue | The House / 2000

a new way of seeing

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jane Unrue The House (Providence, Rhode Island: Burning Deck, 2000)

 

The narrator of this beautiful poetic text describes, in its various aspects and relationships with its inhabitant, a modernistic house, a house of great architectural style "built on narrow supporting columns arranged on a geometric grid...pierced around by windows." But while the house is almost wondrous in its ability to reflect illuminated light and receive sunlight, there is something almost sinister and dark about the constructed box.

  

   At several points, the narrator—in her detailed descriptions of moving up and down its staircases and in and out of its rooms—lashes out in desperation seeking "a new house" or a complete immersion in the nearby lake. Indeed, at one point in her frustration, she seeks a new vantage-place by entering the matching house attached and looking out from its windows just has she has done from her own.

     Much of her movement throughout this geometric grid is, perhaps, an attempt on the part of the narrator to find a new perspective, a new way of perceiving. And, as her masturbatory fantasies increase along with brief memories of sharing the house with another, the reader begins to perceive the very sterility of this glass container in which the narrator is entrapped.

     There are no narrative punches or even near-explanations in this work, but the beauty of the language and the emotional effect the author achieves through it should delight anyone for whom plot is not the major device of fiction.

 

Los Angeles, 2000

John Updike | Gertrude and Claudius / 2000

before the curtain rises

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Updike Gertrude and Claudius (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000)

 

Why American critics and prize-givers have been so enthusiastic about John Updike's work (he has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Howells Medal) and readers so faithful (this is his 18th novel) has always been a mystery to me. I have my theories, but they shall have to wait for another occasion.

      Regarding his most recent novel Gertrude and Claudius, however, I can only assert—in contrast to the several appreciative reviews that have proceeded this one—that it is little more than a work of restrained mediocrity.

    The problems are many, not the least of which is the fact that Updike has chosen to write in the shadow of a great work of art that we all know and love, only to leave off at precisely the moment the other begins. That is, he has chosen to narrate the events of Shakespeare's play up until the very moment Hamlet gets underway.

     Certainly, the story of Gerutha (later Geruthe and finally Gertrude) and Feng's (later Fegon and ultimately Claudius) adulterous relationship fits nicely into an oeuvre obsessed with adultery. And in the hands of a greater artist—Tom Stoppard has shown us in Rosencrantz and Gildenstern what can be done with Shakespeare and his sources—this might have been an entertaining fiction. But in Updike's hands there is no sustaining story. Gerutha is forced by her father Rorik to marry Horwendil (King Hamlet); she finds him unsubtle and lacking in the finer sensibilities of bedroom behavior, and from childhood has been attracted to his brother, Feng. When Feng returns from his multifarious travels—undertaken primarily to remain away from his brother and Gerutha, to whom he too has been highly attracted—they gradually develop a relationship that quickly shifts from a play of wits to a drama of secretive and romantic love. When the King discovers their treachery, Feng (with the help of the Lord Chamberlin, Corambus [spelled throughout the novel also as Corambis, later Polonius]) poisons the King and takes over the throne, marrying his lover. Enter Hamlet.

     Of course, great works of art have been written with much less of a story to go on. But Updike's work—at least in this novel—is highly dependent upon plot, and with so little to work with he fills the book with what I am sure he believes are deep insights into his characters: Gertrude is an independent woman who has no other choice in her society but to be pliant and supple; King Hamlet is a man of good deeds, a good King, a good Husband, but has no sensitivity whatsoever, and hence, is referred to by Gertrude and Claudius as "The Hammer"; Claudius is a true romantic and is capable of great subtlety in love, but also is deceitful and capable of murder. In repeating these qualities again and again throughout this short work, however, Updike becomes less than subtle himself and hammers his characters' qualities into the poor reader's perceivèd thick head. Gertrude is described over and over as "surrendering" (even as late as page 200 in the 210-page work); King Hamlet is The Hammer throughout, Claudius a clever but too subtle man.

     One might overlook some of these simplistic characterizations had Updike filled his yarn with some true adventure, but it is almost as if the author could not decide what to fill it with. Time and again in the book, he devotes paragraphs and entire passages to various arcane subjects: a short treatise on falconry, a description of the various toiletries available to a Scandinavian queen of the day, a list of the foods they eat, a short historical compendium of the Byzantine empire, a brief explanation of the Nordic råd and thing. Many readers enjoy historical fictions precisely because of what they can glean from such information. In the hands of a Lagerlöf, of an Undset or a Yourcenar these kinds of facts are thoroughly embedded in the stories themselves; here Updike features it as if proving to the reader that he has done his research or used his imagination; or perhaps again he feels that few readers could possibly have knowledge of such things. One can almost see the scraps of loose jottings spread across his writing desk as he determined what to include and what not.

    That said, there are a few delightful moments in the plot, as when Gertrude (having obtained from Poloinus the use of his castle for her rendezvous) requires the middle-aged Claudius to climb through the tower window, which she must help to pull him through. The couple later have a hot groping session—with their heavy clothes on. Yet, Updike doubting, so it appears, that the reader may not recall the event, repeats it later, as Claudius—fresh from emptying his vial of poison into the ear of the King—climbs for his escape, through a window (reminding him of the earlier one) into the castle latrine. Get it?

    The paucity of plot might be less an issue if Updike's style—that for which he is most often touted—were not so embarrassing. He begins the novel in a kind of fake Shakespearean language "bespoken" with "bewitchments, be-botherments, and bewildernesses" and some inverted syntax that, fortunately, he quickly drops. But what replaces it is, at times, even more embarrassing. After a discussion between Gertrude and Polonius, the author waxes poetic:

 

         O the days, the days in their all but unnoticed beauty and variety—  

         days of hurtling sun and shade like the dapples of an exhilarated beast,

         days of steady strong cold and a blood-red dusk, tawny autumn days smelling of

         of hay and grapes, spring days tasting of salty wave-froth and of hearth-smoke

         blown down from the chimney pots, misty days...days of luxurious tall clouds...

         days when the shoreline of Skåne lay vivid as a purple hem upon the Sund's

         rippling breadth...[this continues for another page]

     

One can almost see, as in a grade B film of 1940s, a montage of calendar pages being ripped away one by one. How one longs for a simple, elegant, "Time passes."

    Indeed, there is a kind of hack cinematic quality in many of Updike's images and words throughout the book. Each character is described at some point as if the camera were embracing their faces in a closeup, perspiration forming on their upper lips ("A ridge of dew appeared on Geruthe's upper lip, which bore transparent down he had never noticed before.") But the language of much of Updike's work is that of the soft porno novel. Penises are referred to as "horns," "members" or—when the action gets truly racy—"spouting cocks" ("I should beat you. I should pound the pale slime of that spouting cock from your gut.") Just before this ridiculous statement Updike devotes a whole page to again emphasizing Gertrude's oft cited submission to men, to a description that summarizes the quality of much of the book:

 

         Whereas Fengon was content to loiter in a twinned concupiscence, telling Geruthe

         over and over, with his tongue and eyes and rethickened horn, all the truth

         about herself that she could hold. He uncovered in her not just the warrior but

         the slave. Had he bid her lie down in pigshit she would have squeezed her

         buttocks together in the clench and rejoiced to be thus befouled. At night, reliving

         the afternoon's embraces, she would lick her pillow in hunger to be with her

         lover again—her redeemer from lawful life's deadening emptiness, her own self

         turned inside out and given a man's bearish, boyish form. Her father's court

         held no more eager slut than she.

 

Had Hamlet read this version of his mother's secret life, instead of returning to Elsinore, he might have stayed in Germany.

 

Los Angeles, 2000

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (January 2009).