Category: Translated

If all happy families are alike, each strange family is strange in its own way: Love Letter in Cuneiform by Tomáš Zmeškal

The novel begins with a wedding.

Alice and Maximilian exchanged rings and kisses, and signed a document confirming that the state of matrimony was primarily a contractual arrangement, which at the moment was of course the last thing on the newlyweds’ minds. After the ceremony, the priest invited the wedding party to the sacristy. Now, whether they liked it or not, Alice and Maximilian were on their own in the world. They answered everyone’s questions,  chatting about the declining quality of sacramental wine under the communist regime. Alice joked and laughed with her friends, while Maximilian drank a toast with  a bottle of slivovice, which, as usual on occasions like these, somebody suddenly seemed to pull out of nowhere, but through it all the metallic lace of their new situation slowly began to envelop them, closing in on them, fragment by fragment. Slit by slit the lacework net descended on them, enveloping them, protecting them, sealing them off.

Actually, there will be two weddings, because only the civil service later in Prague can be recognized by the law. But in the time between the two ceremonies, the couple and their friends and families gather in Alice’s parents’ apartment where her father’s friend, Dr. Antonin Lukavský, has a surprise in store. He has commissioned the eccentric pastry chef Marek Svoboda (who we will soon learn is also the doctor’s patient at the psychiatric hospital where he works) to prepare a cake for the festivities. And what a cake it turns out to be—an elaborate three-tiered marzipan castle of mythic proportions depicting, from top to bottom, the heavenly heights, the earthly realm, and a rich chocolate hell. So although it may be billed as a family sage, it’s clear from the start that  Tomáš Zmeškal’s Love Letter in Cuneiform will be anything but ordinary.

For one thing, Alice and Maximilian’s marriage is not the central focus and the “metallic lace” enveloping their new marriage does not prove very resilient because, after the birth of their son Kryštof, it unravels quickly. Rather, it is the marriage of Alice’s parents, Josef and Květa which runs the course of the novel, from the end of the second world war through to the early years of the 1990s, even if they themselves are separated and then estranged for most of those years. Love is a complicated affair for all, it seems. Meanwhile, as the family drama unfolds in a strange and sometimes disturbing fashion, Svoboda the pastry chef regales his doctor with fantastic visions that span both time and space. The result is an ambitious, layered work that is by turns tragic, philosophical, and absurd.

Zmeškal was born in Prague in 1966 to a Czech mother and a Congolese father. In 1987, he was granted permission to leave Czechoslovakia and travel to London, but when the Iron Curtain fell two years later, he chose to stay on in the UK to study English language and literature. Finally, in 1998, he decided to resettle in his home town where he soon began work on what would become his first novel. Following a lengthy search for a publisher, Love Letter in Cuneiform was finally released to widespread acclaim in 2008, with an English translation by Alex Zucker following in 2016. As Zucker notes in his Afterword, original reviewers responded to this unique, award-winning novel with efforts to place Zmeškal within the context of Czech post-Velvet Revolution literature. But that might be too limiting. Zucker argues that it also makes sense to look beyond the boundaries of the author’s homeland as well, indicating that Love Letter’s distinct labyrinthian construction and mythogenic qualities call to mind Borges, whereas an underlying “paranoia and slippery identity” may even suggest Philip K. Dick. It is, to be fair, a work that defies attempts at simple summaries, and is, in fact, perhaps better approached without an overly detailed road map.

The love story of structural engineer Josef Černý, lover of classical music and passionate devotee of the slide rule, and his wife Květa may be the central thrust of the novel, but the narrative does not proceed chronologically. Rather, it unfolds in fragmented pieces with shifting styles, forms, and voices. Letters of varied types, including a formal appeal to authorities to address a past crimes and lengthy romantic plea in cuneiform script, take up some of the key aspects of the story, while a forged letter does irreparable damage. But this is no epistolatory novel—the letters form only part of the picture and go only one way—nor does it confine itself to Josef, Květa, their daughter, grandson, and a few friends and extended family members. There is also the side story of the pastry chef, the most eccentric character in a cast of idiosyncratic individuals who not only terrifies a would-be thief with his bizarre marzipan creations, but entertains the good doctor with his detailed psychotic visions. He tells of a strange, manipulated existence in the Arizona desert, a journey to ancient Persia, and the assignment to repair a mysterious device in a Prague hundreds of years in the future. By bending expected storytelling conventions, vastly expanding the time scale, and playing with genre, Zmeškal crafts a tale that is not only heartbreaking and human, but that opens up plenty of space for questions of good and evil, immortality and death, belief and atheism, and of course, the endurability of love.

Josef first met Květa when he and his friend Hynek Jánský were at University during the war. Both men took a liking to her, but she chose Josef. Then, in the early years of their love affair, Josef was introduced to cuneiform through an odd coincidence. He learned in a class that his birthday, November 24, 1915, corresponded exactly with the date that Czech orientalist and linguist Bedřich Hrozný announced to a meeting of the German Oriental Society that he had deciphered the language of the ancient Hittites, a people who lived in Anatolia (present day Turkey and Syria) three thousand years ago. This sparks his interest in the curious wedge shaped script that originated in Mesopotamia but was adapted by other cultures, and the idea of solving the riddle of a previously unknown language. When he shares it with Květa, she tells him she is certain he could do the same. “She had a better imagination than I did,” he confesses, “she always has, and over time I learned not to oppose her using logical arguments and facts.” So it becomes his secret mission to crack some as yet untranslated language.  Or at least learn to read cuneiform.

Josef and Květa marry after the war ends and welcome Alice, their first (and only) child, in 1950. But their old friend Hynek soon plots his revenge. The communist government has taken advantage of his “talents” of persuasion and punishment, and promoted him accordingly. He arranges for Josef’s arrest and ultimate imprisonment on obscure charges. As a result, Josef will be gone for the first ten years of his daughter’s life. Uncertain what to do, Květa turns to Hynek hoping he will help her free her husband and thus begins one of the most deeply disturbing aspects of the book—a prolonged and brutal relationship that, when it is later exposed, will drive Josef and Květa  to part shortly after Alice’s wedding. Alice stays in her family apartment to raise her son after her own marriage ends , Josef spends most of his time at the rural house where he grew up, and Květa moves in with her aging Aunt Anna, an outspoken spinster with an opinion on everything. And life goes on, fraught with heartbreak, misunderstandings, and stubborn resolve. Alice is caught between her parents, while Josef forges an increasingly deep bond with his grandson. Finally, the Iron Curtain falls and a newly independent nation and its citizens are left to find their bearings in a world of new possibilities.

Some reviewers of the translated text have suggested that the novel loses its intensity in its later chapters, but it is perhaps more accurate to describe what occurs as a change in tone as threads of the story begin to converge. The central characters—Josef, Květa, Alice, and the seemingly indestructible Aunt Anna are all getting older. Kryštof, now an adult, has become accustomed to the countryside where he has spent so much time and has set his sights on marriage to a girl his grandfather insists on calling “the blonde.” But into the mix comes a distant cousin,  Jíří (or George), a young man of Czech heritage, related to Aunt Anna but born abroad and raised in England, who arrives to experience his ancestral homeland now that the Iron Curtain has fallen. He stays with Alice and works in the city, but his regular letters to his sister offer his impressions of their ancestral nation and its peculiarities (not to mention the oddities of their relatives) often revealing more of the evolution of Czech society and the transition from communism to capitalism than he realizes. This is yet another layer that Zmeškal deftly weaves into his broader narrative tapestry.

Love Letter in Cuneiform is a novel that challenges and exceeds the norms of a multigenerational family saga at every opportunity. Josef and Květa’s love story has a grand, tragic arc to it that mirrors the kind of conditions—unfaithfulness, cruelty, misunderstanding, separation, failed attempts at reconciliation—that often tear lovers apart in mythological traditions. In an interview with Words Without Borders, Zmeškal confides: “I love old stories and myths, and I think that whatever changes in the world, we still live similar lives, though in different circumstances, of course.” That spirit comes through. This is a novel that is on one level very much bound to the history and politics of Czechoslovakia (as it was known from 1918 through 1992) through the second half of the twentieth century, while, on another level, it is a larger-than-life and often very funny tale of love, loss, wisdom, madness, and evil—though not necessarily in that order. Throughout, its unique energy is sustained in translation with Zucker’s careful, and at times creative, attention to the subtleties and playfulness of Zmeškal’s language.

Love Letter in Cuneiform by Tomáš Zmeškal is translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker and published by Yale University Press.

Slipping into the twilight zone: Diving Board by Tomás Downey

The first thing I think to write is this: what’s happening to me is incredible. But immediately, I stop—I’m suspicious of everything. I think about it, reread the sentence, and the pen slips through my fingers and falls to the floor. It bounces and flips in the air, does some involuntary acrobatics. Describing what’s concrete is easier.
(from “Astronaut”)

If there’s a common feature uniting the nineteen stories gathered together in Diving Board, Argentinian writer Tomás Downey’s first collection in English translation, it’s the uncomfortably close focus he places on the experiences of his narrators or protagonists. His lens is so tight that the edges of the world around them becomes  increasingly distorted, leaving them emotionally isolated and alone. Consider “The Astronaut” quoted above, for instance. The narrator is a man who has inexplicably found himself freed from the restraints of gravity, a condition that has literally turned his world upside down. Only at ease resting on the ceiling, every time he returns, even briefly, to the floor he is struck by waves of dizziness and nausea. There is no magic in this altered reality; everyone else, his wife included, remains grounded, unreachable. He decides there is only one means of escape—an open window.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1984, Downey is one of Argentina’s foremost short story writers, a master of a strangely unsettling terrain that his fellow Argentinian writer Mariana Enriquez refers to as bizarro fiction, not a genre but: “a disturbing variant that hides a vague threat, that leaves the reader feeling something between awe and unease.” As such, his stories vary from harsh realism to fantasy to horror to speculative fiction, but regardless of form, he tends to minimize set-up and avoid resolution altogether, intensifying the tension. In most instances, his settings lack excessive detail which allows circumstances, personalities, and interrelationships to take centre stage. As a result, even stories that take place in rural settings have a certain pervasive claustrophobia.

Short story collections, especially those that contain so many titles, can run the risk of falling into either unevenness or sameness. With Diving Board however, even if many of the tales involve either couples or families, no two stories are alike. Each treads a distinct terrain. In “The Cloud,” a thick, damp fog settles on a community, driving everyone indoors as the temperature rises and snails and slugs seem to multiply rapidly. A family tries to wait it out as this strange, heavy, wet plague spreads. In “Horce,” a man buys a seed that grows into a horse, a creature he hopes will offer him an excuse to reach out to the woman he loves, but instead the vegetal animal only increases his isolation. And, in the title story, a divorced father takes his daughter to a swimming pool, but when he finally agrees to allow her to jump off the diving board, she disappears into thin air:

Josefina leans over again, gauging the distance. She walks back to get a running start. She runs, jumps. He closes his eyes for a second, they’re irritated by the sun and the bleach. He hears a scream or a laugh. When he opens his eyes, Josefina should be in the air, about to fall, but she’s not. He hasn’t heard a splash either.

While many of Downey’s stories exist on the edge of the uncanny, reminiscent of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone and its iterations, others lean straight into horror with characters who harbour cruel and twisted intentions. The action often stops just as things fall apart or in some vague aftermath. No explanations or reasons are ever offered. But sometimes there seems to be a deeper, more serious message. Such is the case with my favourite piece, “The Men Go to War.” Although it is not tied to any specific conflict, Argentina and other Latin American countries have seen their share of uprisings, coups, and warfare, but in truth this tale could take place anywhere, any time. The setting here lies in the shadow of a brutal war. Jose’s husband Manuel is a soldier. Every day she sits at home, refusing invitations to go out or welcome visitors. She is angry at her husband’s willingness to get involved. Then two officers appear at the door with the grim news that Manuel has been killed. They tell her that the incident occurred in a critical battle. They assure her they are winning:

Jose nods, possibly without listening. She’s used to condolences and accepts them with the hint of a smile, trying to downplay their importance, and always responds with a look that’s melancholic and resigned. She waits for the moment to pass, for nothing further to be said on the subject. Whatever it takes, she needs to believe that Manuel’s death is one fact among many, that it’s not of great importance. Thousands have died, all the women are widows, all the children orphans, winter is almost over, and the roofs of the houses need to be repaired. This week there were bananas at the market. When was the last time there were bananas at the market?

Jose’s measured response only cracks briefly when she is given all that remains of her husband, a knife with a mahogany handle and leather sleeve that had once belonged to his father. But when the men have left, she places it in a drawer. Then, as the days pass and winter begins to give way to spring, the official visits continue repeating the same script. Jose seems to be trapped in some kind of time loop, a repetition she responds to with the same questions, the same acceptance, the same self-control. This is yet another story that dissolves into its mysteries rather than revealing them.

Downey’s haunting, weird tales tend to linger, leaving a discomposing sensation in their wake. But they leave one wanting to move on and find out where his imagination will wander next. His stories have appeared in a number of English language publications, but now with this collection, translated in clear, clean prose by Sarah Moses, a broader introduction to the eerie landscape his characters inhabit is available in one volume.

Diving Board by Tomás Downey is translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses and published by Invisible Publishing.

War is back again: War Primer by Alexander Kluge

When I was a pupil, we learnt to read and write with a primer. When war breaks out, Bertolt Brecht said, we have to learn to read and write again.

These words, which come from the acknowledgement at the close of Alexander Kluge’s War Primer, reference both the primer as a short introductory book on a subject or informative piece of writing, and Brecht’s famous War Primer, a series of short poems written in response to images the poet collected while exiled from Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Kluge’s own experience of the war, especially the allied bombing of his hometown of Halberstadt when he was thirteen,  has had a significant influence on his long career as a writer, philosopher, and filmmaker. And again it appears here in this slender volume, but the instigation for this work is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022—the return of full scale war to Europe. However, his multi-faceted look at  our stubborn propensity for conflict across the western world, is both wide and immediate, and conveyed via brief historical accounts, anecdotes, short stories, and imagined conversations, interspersed with images and film clips.

The book opens with a personal series of reflections. He thinks of his mother, born in 1908, considers how little he and his fellow students understood of the dangers mounting in late 1944, and recalls the last few months of the war and the burning of his hometown on April 8, 1945 (a subject to which he has devoted an entire book). As a boy whose sense of war was much coloured by the exploits of his tin soldiers on imaginary grounds, he could only have a thirteen year-old’s understanding of what the troops he was observing on those final days meant. From today’s perspective—in the case of this volume, his ninety-first birthday in February of 2023—his knowledge is much deeper, broader, and no less troubled.

Although some of the textual and visual material directly references the current conflict in Ukraine, the overall effect here is to create a mosaic of contextual commentary and musings about the nature of war, the military mindset, and the inevitable, often deadly, dance of diplomacy. Kluge’s short pieces approach moments or aspects of the First and Second World Wars, the US Civil War, the invasion of Iraq, and more. He examines the idea and illusions of armour from different angles, zeroes in on specific battles, and dramatizes often hapless discussions about the dynamics of power and peace. This is not a detailed exegesis, it is rather a collection of vignettes. Kluge’s characteristic approach to fiction that holds close to the borders of nonfiction, allows him to incorporate voices from the past in first person or dialogue. Yet, there are no solutions. As we continue to see, war is endlessly reinventing itself, and its small moments of hope always cling to a thread:

TWO SIDES TO A HAPPY ENDING

In the early days of the Ukrainian war, there was a report of a certain number of villagers, including young people and children, holding up a Russian tank. After a period of hesitation, the tank driver put it in reverse and rolled back out of the village.

This is an urban legend. It was already making the rounds during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. During the 1991 coup in Moscow, the scene actually occurred several times and led to several tank divisions withdrawing from the city. In Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, however, the same kind of confrontation ended in a massacre.

The report in the case of Ukraine emphasized the bravery of the civilians who opposed the tank. But it takes two to tango, as it were, for an encounter to end happily: the determination of the residents, but also that of the young tank driver, perhaps all of 18, who put the tank in reverse.

The images that illustrate this book come primarily from Kluge’s original film montages, along with a few documentary photographs. QR codes link out to cinematic material of varying lengths, typically triptychs of these same images shifting against musical scores, but other material as well. Most are very short and worth viewing. Taken together, text, image, and sound make this very much is a primer for the twenty-first century. One that, sadly, seems to be still be a necessary resource.

War Primer by Alexander Kluge is translated from the German by Alexander Booth and published by Seagull Books.

The reluctant barber: The Hairdresser’s Son by Gerbrand Bakker

Cut and shave, eat and drink, swim. Dead, unknown father, slightly hysterical mother. Never had a steady boyfriend. It was too easy, maybe, having an occupation thrown on his lap. He’d gone to hairdressing school, of course, but that didn’t mean it was something he wanted to do.

That, in a nutshell, is Simon Weiman. The protagonist of Dutch writer Gerhard Bakker’s novel The Hairdresser’s Son, now available in a meticulous English translation by his long-time translator, David Colmer. He is a middle-aged gay man living in an apartment above the shop he inherited from his grandfather, a once-bustling hair salon that is now a barbershop even though it’s “fancy” name—Chez Jean— and 70s décor have not changed. Simon runs his business at a relaxed pace, focusing on almost exclusively male clientele with no more than a few scheduled appointments per day. He values his privacy and free time, but seems to do little with it.

His  comfortable routine begins to change when his mother asks him to help out with a weekly swim for intellectually disabled adults. It seems that her friend and co-worker has suddenly run off to the Canary Islands with her new beau, a somewhat discomfiting echo of Simon’s father’s own sudden mysterious disappearance before he was born. One morning in 1977, Cornelus Weiman had slipped off without a word to anyone, to board the ill-fated KLM flight that would crash on the island of Tenerife later the same day. His death was a strange silent space in Simon’s life, one that had left him to ultimately assume his father’s place in the family business, an obligation he had accepted with the quiet reluctance that seems to underlie so much of his existence.

So, if he would rather not give up his Saturday mornings to some sort of poolside babysitting task, his mother’s request is one that he cannot turn down—not that she gives him the option—because he is more than qualified to assist. Swimming is the one personal passion he has. Once a competitive swimmer, he continues to work out in the pool three times a week, savouring a solid hour of laps in the quiet of the early morning, sometimes even hooking up with a fellow swimmer afterwards. But he’s not quite prepared for the group of young people he meets when he arrives for is first disabled swim session. For one thing, only one girl swims while the rest splash about or huddle in a corner. And then there’s Igor. He’s the spitting image of Simon’s favourite Olympic swimmer, Alexander Popov, an athlete whose framed poster still graces the wall of his bedroom. However, inside the fully grown man’s handsome body, is a non-verbal adult with the cognitive development of a child. It’s a contradiction Simon cannot square as, week after week, his obsession with Igor grows until this inappropriate attraction starts to slide toward seriously questionable territory.

Meanwhile, the other challenge to Simon’s settled order of being comes from one of his regular customers, a writer who asks if he can observe some of the typical activities and interactions in the shop because he is thinking of bringing a character who is a barber into his next novel. Lucky for him, he happens to stop by on a day when Simon’s gregarious grandfather Jan is in for his monthly haircut, and he is able to acquire far more enthusiastic detail about the profession than he would have gained otherwise. But it is the writer’s expansive curiosity that starts to trigger in Simon a deeper interest in the famous plane crash that apparently claimed his father’s life. This gradually becomes an obsession that begins to consume more of his free time. There are so many unanswered questions, including the absence of any identifiable remains from the accident site. Against this search for some kind of closure, a secondary thread is introduced that reveals the truth about Cornelus’ actual fate. The fiery crash in Tenerife was his official death, but not the end of his life. Rather it offered an unexpected new beginning, and Cornelus’ secret story forms a counterpoint to Simon’s.

Bakker is a slow, precise storyteller and this novel unfolds at a slow simmer. But it simmers for nearly 300 pages. One might argue that this is intentionally a book that focuses on slowly and deliberately bringing a character to life, but one might also question just how much life actually burns inside Bakker’s central protagonist. Almost everyone else in his life—his mother, his grandfather, the writer, the disabled swimmers—appears more vibrant and alive through vivid passages of description and dialogue in which Simon is typically the passive participant. There are moments where the energy and momentum rises, including the integration of the factual details of Tenerife accident and the stories of the victims and survivors.  But the tedium, routine, and internalization of Simon’s days only serve to make him feel even flatter and more repressed. He has difficulty allowing himself to be receptive to others, even men he has slept with. Then wonders why he is alone. His sensuality is primarily channelled into his touching and handing of the heads and necks of his clients, a safer contact perhaps, but one that preserves emotional distance. By contrast, what we come to know of his absent father’s life, its striking similarities and differences, only complicates one’s empathy for the solitary barber, or rather the “hairdresser’s son,” that lingers after the book closes.

The Hairdresser’s Son by Gerbrand Bakker is translated from the Dutch by David Colmer and published by Archipelago Books.

Slippery features, mocking voices: The Faces by Tove Ditlevsen

She put on her bathrobe and sat down at the dressing table, making as little noise as possible. In the mirror her face seemed to her tired and used, like an old glove. Her mouth was set in brackets by two faint, sketchy lines that stopped a little before the slope of her chin, as if the unknown artist had been called away in the middle of his work. Her eyes had that same open, sincere expression as in children who are telling a lie. Three delicate wrinkles lay like a pearl necklace around her neck, and they would dig deeper day by day. Would this face last out her time, this face that bore traces of so many things the world must know nothing about? Did it turn toward her with hostility whenever she wasn’t looking? And what would be underneath, when it fell apart one fine day?

Lise Mundus has an acute awareness of faces, her own and those of others—what they hold, what they hide, what they give away. And it seems to becoming more of an obsession. Not only has the sudden fame that accompanied her publication of a popular adult novel after years of writing children’s books pushed her face out into public view, but of late she has begun to question the motives of those around her. She already knows her husband is wildly unfaithful, she fears that she is losing touch with her children, and she resents the presence in her household of Gitte, the young housekeeper who looks after everything. And everyone. Haunted by crippling writer’s block, increasingly feeling isolated and alone, she begins to overhear hushed conversations rising through the plumbing and from behind closed doors. Her husband Gert has just suffered the loss of his mistress to suicide, and now, Lise is certain, he and Gitte are conspiring to push her to that same end.

The Faces, first published in 1968 by celebrated Danish writer Tove Ditlevsen, is a sharp, tight portrait of a woman’s spiralling descent into an episode of paranoid psychosis , her hospitalization, and subsequent recovery. Ditlevsen’s personal life was marked by domestic upheaval, addiction, and multiple psychiatric admissions, and she is clearly drawing on lived experience here, but she is doing so with poetic clarity and remarkable insight to impart a sense of what it is like to be unable to distinguish reality from hallucination and yet feel like one has full control of one’s sense, no matter how strange the experiences.  However, this is neither memoir nor autofiction. Rather, it is, even through its protagonist’s darkest moments of anxiety and confusion, a story told with great warmth, compassion, and even humour.

At first, there is nothing funny about the fragile state Lise is in as we first meet her. She is haunted by memories, appearances, and even the very rooms she occupies. No matter how she tries to hide her concerns, she believes that others are out to exploit her weaknesses—even her best friend Nadia, a psychologist who drops by to visit and strongly suggests that she stay away from the sleeping pills Gitte provides and call her psychiatrist instead. Lise wants to trust her friend, but what she detects in the faces around her and hears whispered behind her back is getting the better of her. She ends up doing the opposite. Convinced that Gert really does want her out of the way, she downs the entire bottle of pills (and immediately calls her psychiatrist to tell him she doesn’t want to die). She wakes up days later, in the toxic trauma centre.

Once she is medically stabilized, Lise is taken to the psychiatric hospital. By this time she is in a state of full-blown psychosis. Voices speak to her from speakers embedded in her pillow and from behind grates in the room to which she has been confined, strapped to the bed, after she failed to settle on the open ward. This room, which is actually a bathroom, becomes her safe space. She can hide here, protected by the voices that alternately attack her and warn her against the nurses and psychiatrist who are all part of their scheme to destroy her. It’s easy for her to believe the danger, she can read in their false faces. Convinced she is being poisoned, she refuses to eat and resists medication.

As the anti-psychotics begin to take effect, Lise starts to accept and embrace her insanity, no longer terrified, but now increasingly alert and wise to the subterfuge that surrounds her. At least, that’s what she thinks. Convinced, for instance, that a nurse has painted her face to look like someone from her past, Lise reasons that she “did it to confuse her and break down her resistance, but [she] saw right through such childish tricks with her healthy, clear sense of judgement.” And certain illusions are especially resistant, no matter how often (and patiently) she is corrected. She continually sees the male nurse named Petersen as her husband, even when the solidity of own perception starts to slip:

‘That’s right,’ said Gert, satisfied. ‘You’re starting to behave quite sensibly.’ His face was suddenly blurred, the way it looks when you’ve forgotten to wind the film and you’ve taken two pictures on top of each other.

‘You have two faces,’ she said, astonished. ‘That’s not allowed. You can only wear one face at a time.’

If the voices and hallucinations that have fueled her paranoia prompted a most desperate, potentially life-threatening action, their gradual retreat into the hard, tactile environment of the hospital ward leaves her fearing that she will be abandoned. Understanding that the manifestations of psychosis is rooted in one’s own disordered thoughts is unsettling, and for a time Lise actively resists the idea that she is moving toward returning home.

As a reader who has experienced an episode of manic psychosis and hospitalization (albeit under very different circumstances), I am always impressed when an author can capture the salient aspects of  mental illness—the internal reorientation of reality, the distortion of time— so clearly without sacrificing the literary and poetic qualities that contribute to a good story. Drawing on lived experience is not, in itself sufficient, Ditlevsen achieves this balance through point of view and by keeping her narrative short and focused.

When The Faces opens, Lise is already beset by suspicions and hallucinations, so we come to know her, and those around her, entirely through her increasing warped perceptions. With a tight third person perspective—ideal for conveying madness—there is no ground zero. At first, it’s difficult to tell whether there is a justification for her fears; it does look like there may be some gaslighting going on. Even when she swallows the handful of pills it’s not clear if she has been pushed to the limit by outside forces. Yet, once she’s committed to the psychiatric hospital where she wages her daily struggle against the voices that taunt her and her belief that she is the victim of a grand conspiracy, the extent of her illness becomes apparent. We can “hear” the outside voices of the nurses, doctors and other patients, in concert with what she thinks she hears. Now we have to listen and hope that she will slowly emerge from her psychotic state. The actual state of affairs at home, the “real” nature of her reality so to speak, won’t be revealed until she is finally ready to be released.

The Faces by Tove Ditlevsen is translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally and published by Penguin Books. (Also published by Picador)

Of ghosts and angels: The Painted Room by Inger Christensen

Recently re-issued by New Directions, Denise Newman’s translation of Inger Christensen’s 1976 novella The Painted Room might at first appear to be somewhat more conventional than the Danish poet’s experimental prose works like Azorno or Natalja’s Stories. That would, of course, be a premature assessment. Subtitled A Tale of Mantua, this slender three-part volume is set in, and revolves around, the court of Ludovico Gonzaga III and the painting of the famous Bridal Chamber by Andrea Mantegna in the mid-1400s, but it is more than a simple piece of historical fiction. By turns witty, magical, and wise, The Painted Room offers a pointed commentary on art and immortality, power and passion.

As Italy gradually splintered following the fall of the Roman Empire, it evolved into a patchwork of independent territories over which powerful families battled for control until, by the fifteenth century it was common for each of these regions to be held under the autocratic control of single princes. Mantua in northern Italy, ruled by the Gonzaga’s from 1328 to 1707, was not only a tyrannical, war-focused principality, but, as its ruling family sought to elevate its social status through patronage of the arts, architecture, and music, it would become an important cultural centre in the early years of the Renaissance.  In 1459, acclaimed artist Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), noted for his striking compositions and innovative studies of perspective,  agreed to enter into the service of Ludovico, the Marquis of Mantua, and the following year he was appointed court painter—a position he would hold for over forty years. His masterpiece would be completed there, the Camera degli Sposi or The Bridal Chamber in the ducal palace, a room decorated with realistic architectural details, frescoes featuring interrelated narratives  and a spectacular illusionary ceiling that appears to be a concave structure with an oculus open to the sky. The painting of this room and its images, offer the inspiration for Christensen’s novel, but the story she weaves extends far beyond these four walls.

The first part, “The Diaries of Marsilio Andraesi: a selection” proports to be outtakes from the personal journal of Ludovico’s devoted secretary, pictured to the far left of the Bridal Chamber’s “court scene” fresco which features members of the Gonzaga family and their attendants. Here Andraesi is leaning in to listen to the prince who has turned to speak to him. From the secretary’s personal account, which begins in March of 1454, we get an unvarnished, if rather biased and often catty, record of events leading up to Mantegna’s arrival at Mantua through to his death in 1506. Andraesi is not impressed with his master’s persistent efforts to woo the celebrated artist and the reason for his resistance is unlikely. It seems that the painter’s wife, Nicolosia Bellini (of the Venetian artistic dynasty), was once his secret love, now forever lost. So he focuses his attention on rumours he’s heard of Mantegna’s reputation as a troublemaker trained in “arrogance, brutality, and the hunt for novelty.” He feels the prince’s idolatry will only lead to shame. But, of course, the offer is accepted and the secretary’s would-be romantic rival arrives, at first on his own, but soon followed by his family:

Today I finally caught a glimpse of Nicolosia. I became deathly pale and could barely move. My brain turned completely white and my heart so drained of blood that it could hardly beat; I froze. An angel in the fire of earthly feelings.
(17th of August, 1460)

Bitterness and jealously continue to colour Andraesi’s reports, especially as progress on decorating the palace room is slow, and his secret confrontations with Nicolosia intensify. Then, when Mantegna’s wife suddenly dies (at least in this version of reality), the relationship between the two men gradually begins to shift toward what will eventually become one of friendship and respect. In the meantime, Mantegna’s young children are devastated by the loss of their mother but comforted by their father’s inclusion of her likeness in his art. After all, in art, the dead live on. When the frescoes are finally completed in 1474, guests are welcomed for a dedication event in what Ludovico calls “The Painted Room,” but which the children have christened the “Ghost Room.” In his reflections on the occasion, Andraesi calls attention to the uncomfortable dynamic that exists between art and immortality:

There is more life in the paintings than in all of these lively and rapturous spectators who simply put on airs because they are afraid of the pictures’ soul which is their own. The pictures are like all great ghosts in Art who calmly and tirelessly wait for their living models to die. All those who have had the chance on this occasion to look at themselves in the light of Art’s exegesis have consequently entered  into a relationship with Death; and they must each conduct  their negotiations with him day by day over the time and place and manner of their dying, and about their measure of anxiety.

In the second part, Christensen’s narrative adopts an even more fantastic examination of life at court and its connections to the broader world. However, immortality continues to be a central theme, not explicitly through art but through children, legitimate or otherwise. Attention turns to the dwarf depicted in the “court scene,” a member of the prince’s entourage, re-imagined as Ludovico’s daughter and given the name Nana (Italian for dwarf). When we meet her she is distraught about her unfortunate fate, imagining that her diminutive height will deny her an opportunity to love and marry. The gardener steps in and arranges for her to marry his beautiful son Piero once they are both old enough.

Nana’s story adds an added dimension to the events recounted in the first part. On the day of her wedding three unknown women appear; no one is certain who they are but coincidentally Mantenga has captured their likenesses among the figures who are seen leaning over the balustrade that surrounds the oculus painted on the ceiling of the so-called Ghost Room. To Nana, they are clearly angels. They tell her that Piero is actually the son of Pope Pius II, and leave her what she calls “The Angel’s Book,” a volume that is in fact the popular erotic novel written by the Pope before his call to the priesthood, when he was known y his birth name, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini. The Tale of Two Lovers tells of the tragic affair of Euryalus, one of the men waiting on a nobleman and Lucretia, the wife of a wealthy man. Their love is expressed through a series of letters until they are finally able to meet in bed. Variations on the theme of this tale are echoed and played upon as The Painted Room unfolds, along with the revelation of other surprising entanglements.

The final, dreamlike part of The Painted Room takes the form of a “how I spent my summer holidays” school assignment written by Bernadino, the then ten year-old son of Mantega. He details his role in assisting his father in his work on his masterpiece, describing much of the process involved in laying the foundation, and mixing and applying the paints. But then he realizes that he is expected to record some kind of trip or adventure when in truth he has gone nowhere. So taking inspiration from his younger sister, he imagines himself entering the background of one of his father’s paintings and meeting an aged Greco-Roman hero who has forgotten who he is. Yet another glance at the question of immortality through the daydreams of a child facilitated by the magic of art.

Inger Christensen’s fiction—and her poetry for that matter—tends to work with layers, variations, and cross-referenced themes. Her foray into the world of fifteenth century Italian court life is filled with art, intrigue, infidelity, and murder, blending fact and fantasy to create an informative, entertaining, and intelligent tale. And, like any one of Mantegna’s famous paintings, repeated visits and closer inspection promises to offer ever more detail and connections.

The Painted Room by Inger Christensen is translated from the Danish by Denise Newman and published by New Directions.

The truths we know and those we don’t: No One Knows Their Blood Type by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat

I don’t know which night I was conceived, but I do know that when nine months had passed, my life started to get complicated. All that I will relate here is not confirmed truth—these are stories I pass on from motley sources. None of them are entirely correct or straightforward, they follow the meandering intentions and motives of the storytellers.

Jumana, the central figure of Palestinian poet Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s debut novel No One Knows Their Blood Type is,  as she tells us in an account of her early years living with an unloving aunt in 1980s Amman, a collector of secrets. The more she discovers, be it the rumour that her mother did not in fact die in the war in Lebanon, or the unwanted advances of a male cousin, the less certainty there is in her life.  As the story unfolds, shifting speakers and perspective backward and forward across more than three decades, it becomes clear that she is not the only member of her family haunted by secrets, doubts, and insecurity.

This slender, fragmented, nonchronological novel opens in a hospital in Jerusalem in 2007 where Jumana is assisting with the cleansing of the body of Malika, the gregarious midwife who has just passed away. She only knew this elderly Greek woman for less than two weeks—the time that she has been coming to visit her own dying father—but already she has fallen in love with her nephew Suheil, so she is almost family, so to speak.  However, when her father dies shortly after, the shock of attending to his body causes her to collapse and end up in emergency—a detour that will suddenly call into question her own relationship to the family she grew up in. Her father’s death certificate and her lab results reveal his blood type is O positive whereas hers is AB positive. While Suheil calmly shrugs it off as an error, Jumana is not so sure.

From here the novel moves back to Jumana’s account of her childhood in Amman. She and her older sister Yara were born in Beruit, but, at the ages of nine months and three years respectively, they are shipped off to live with their father’s sister in Amman. Their aunt treats them very poorly and the fate of their mother remains a mystery, while their father who in Spain with the PLO, is little more than a voice on the phone and a very occasional visitor. Then, in the early nineties when he has been exiled to Tunisia, the girls are packaged up and sent to join the father they barely know.

From here the narrative shifts to Tunisia in 1993. First, from the perspective of Abu al-Saeed, we see a man struggling with sudden single parenthood, anxious to protect—and if necessary, control—the honour of his two teenaged daughters. He goes to head with the eldest who is as stubborn as he is and, as a result, often incurs his wrath, while Jumana remains an enigma. He can’t figure her out, so he resents her. Meanwhile at work and among his fellow exiles he is frustrated, resentful, at odds with the world, and in turn he carries this frustration back home. When Yara picks up the thread, still in Tunisia, she details the close bond she and her sister have as security against their father, but even she notes, often with jealousy, how different Jumana seems. And then, when the signing of the Oslo Accords cements her father’s intent to return to Palestine, she not only feels despair at the thought of leaving her first love, but she wonders what it means to go “home” to a place she has never been.

Yet another angle to the story of this splintered and displaced family is offered from Amhal, the girls’ mother, as she gives her account of her life in Beruit from 1979 to 1982. She speaks of her unwanted and unhappy marriage to Abu al-Saeed, his disappointment with her failure to produce sons, and her longing to be with Omar, the young Lebanese man she truly loves. When her daughters are sent off to Amman she makes some effort to follow, but borders are difficult to cross and her direct account comes to an end. Jumana will later be in contact with her mother, but answers to the question that haunts her as she marries and has her own child, can only be addressed through DNA testing, but even then the whole question of her identity, not to mention her nationality, will be at risk if her father, or the man she knew as her father, was not related at all.

In his Afterword, translator Hazem JamJoum explians that his immediate attraction to this novel lay not in what was, but what it was not. Rather than writing to make grand statements against colonialism and oppression, or illustrate victimhood, he says: “It just assumes the grotesque facets of the workings of power, and conducts its conversation with whoever recognizes themselves as already in the fight.” He goes on to consider the questions might be more appropriate to ask, including:

Why do we lionize the figure of the revolutionary militant when that militant is, however understandably, transformed into a monster when it comes to those they supposedly love and cherish? Why aren’t questions about motherhood and fatherhood, sisterhood and kinship, love and friendship at the core of conversations about liberty and freedom? If they were, how would that change our notion of emancipation . . . should it change our notion of resistance?

If we ask such questions, and we should, this is a novel that raises more concerns than it settles. Which is okay. It is a story that is inextricable from Palestinian history, occupation, war, and exile, but its focus is on one girl and woman in particular, and the complex and delicate balance of relationships within the extended family network that surrounds her. The fragmented nature of the narrative gives us often conflicting interpretations and perspectives, and as such does not inspire an immediate empathy with any one character, even the primary protagonist. Siblings clash as much as they conspire, mothers struggle to connect with their infants, fathers respond in ways that often reflect their own upbringing, and decisions are made that may or may not be justified. But, in the end, what No One Knows Their Blood Type demonstrates so clearly, is that so often truth is not only relative, but ultimately elusive and perhaps there are times when it is better to leave it that way.

No One Knows Their Blood Type by Maya  Abu Al-Hayyat is translated from the Arabic by Hazem Jamjoum and published Cleveland State  University Poetry Center.

That day was a little bit odd: The Minotaur’s Daughter: Selected Poems by Eva Luka

That day was a little bit odd. After walking down the street
.       I stopped in a movement,
at one particular moment of growing older.
And I sensed it (the moment of growing older) like a scientist
.      over a microscope:
the precise split-second border between the former and the
.       future me.
In that borderline, tangible second, I was nothing; only an echo
of a former self and the germ of the future, the old me.

It lasted for only that one moment. Then the air rustled like
.      golden hay
and into the street a horse came.

(from “A Horse Came Into Our Street”)

Odd is one way to describe the poetry of Slovakian poet Eva Luka—deliciously, devilishly, delightfully odd. Her poems open up strange, shimmering vistas filled with fantastic imagery. Born Eva Lukáčová  in Trnava, Slovakia, in 1965, she studied English and Japanese, first in Slovakia and later in Japan. She began publishing poetry under her given name, first in anthologies and then, in 1999, with her first collection Divosestra (Wildsister).  For her second book, Diabloň (Deviltree), published in 2005, she adopted her nom de plume, along with what would become her practice of selecting a poem from each collection to provide the title for the work to follow. In this way, her poems speak to one another within and across collections which also include Havranjel (Ravenangel, 2011) and Jazver (I-Beast, 2019).

With The Minotaur’s Daughter, translated by James Sutherland-Smith, a selection of poetry drawn from her work to date, is now available in English for the first time. In his Afterword, Sutherland-Smith suggests that Lukáčová  may be one of the last great poets of resistance in Europe, citing her:

resistance to conform artistically and [a] resilience against the potential psychological pressures resulting from the circumstances of her life and times. Eva’s resistance to conform to being categorized within a specific poetic movement—particularly those associated with a single gender—reflects the individual nature of her work, and this artistic independence even challenges gender identity in the personae that inhabit her poems.

A transgressive spirit illuminates her poetry, extending beyond matters of gender, to explore questions of personal freedom, sexuality, and desire within a phantasmagorical landscape featuring eccentric figures, mythical creatures, and fabulous flora and fauna. She creates, with her poems, haunting, often dark, scenes or vignettes that can be as intriguing as they are disarming.

Unlike many similar selections that draw from across a poet’s oeuvre, the fifty-nine poems that comprise The Minotaur’s Daughter are not presented chronologically, or divided according to the individual volumes they come from. Rather, the assortment seems to be loosely thematic, with many of the earlier poems coming from more recent collections, and some of the Japanese inspired work from her first book coming later. And, because she sometimes writes companion pieces that appear one or two volumes apart—for example, “Wildsister,” the title poem from her first book, is later answered with “Wildbrother” in her third—here they are presented together. The impact is more powerful this way. It is also evident that Luka appreciates the poetic storytelling potential of triptychs and series, something that may have developed over time, as Sutherland-Smith seems to think that her upcoming fifth collection may include even more.

One of the most developed sequences in this selection begins with an ekphrastic poem inspired by Leonora Carrington’s painting  Portrait of the Late Mrs Partridge. In this piece, the speaker is the artist commissioned to capture the likeness of the wild-haired woman in her odd partridge skirt. He then becomes famous, but is ever haunted by the painting. Four more “Late Mrs Partridge” poems follow, addressing her body, her death, her husband, and finally her wake. Mrs Partridge herself voices all but her husband’s lament from beyond this life, even returning to her own wake, still nursing an internal flame, to drink a toast with the bereaved:

A man sits at the top table, his face,
wrinkled from the tertiary era, with an incalculable expression.
The atmosphere is gloomy, but still audible
is a ubiquitous slurping, gurgling and belching,
as if the whispered stories haven’t had as much power
as unstoppable bodily hunger and thirst.

Leonora Carrington’s eerie, fantastic paintings appear again as the stimulus for five other poems in this translation (not to mention the poet’s own artwork which graces the cover). At times, Luka stands as an observer, as in “And Then They Saw the Minotaur’s Daughter”  where she watches  the “two well-behaved boys—somewhere between childhood and doubt” watching the noble horned woman-creature while spirit-like forms fill the room, Elsewhere she animates and engages directly with the scene, even imagining the central figure outside their fixed setting as in the Mrs Partridge quintet and  “Necromancer,”  a poem after the abstracted, surreal painting of the same name.

The images that dominate Luka’s poetry are drawn from nature—water, flowers, birds, reptiles, and animals—but, as with her human beings, the line between the real and the spiritual is fluid. They inhabit a shifting borderland and there is a pagan, pantheistic sensibility at play. Her animals inspire awe and fear, mythological figures speak, and a woman invites an angelic black bird (Ravenangel) into her bed in a dark sequence of desire, longing, and loss. Hers is a magical world, albeit one that accepts that mystery can be tinged with heaviness and pain. But it is not a relentlessly dark place; rather it exists in a kind of intermediate, and yet, ultimately familiar, space:

It’s incomprehensible, that border of yours
between the feverish night and the healing morning; as if you
.       didn’t recognize
the differences between frenzied hyacinths and tamed hyenas.
.       What you tell me
in the evening, no longer applies in the morning, and vice versa

(from “You and Me When the Cock Crows”)

One might describe the poetry of Eva Luka as akin to richly woven tapestries; the vignettes she crafts are vivid, often disturbing, but they tend to close with a note of promise, that is, with a measure of the resilience that characterizes her work. This quality is evident in The Minotaur’s Daughter. Her striking imagery is well captured in Sutherland-Smith’s translations, while his decision to break with the typical chronological ordering of a “selected poems” collection offers her first English language readers a deeply rewarding introduction to her singular poetic universe.

The Minotaur’s Daughter: Selected Poems by Eva Luka is translated from the Slovak by James Sutherland-Smith and published by Seagull Books.

“I never forgot. Everything is there. All I have to do is close my eyes.”: The Emperor by Mackenzy Orcel

I asked for none of this. I was waiting for the bus. I was waiting forever. I think I’ve been waiting since I was born. I sat on the floor for hours, fighting the urge to sleep. Looking beyond the clouds of dust that covered the horizon. The days went by, one looking just like the other. The bus wouldn’t come.

In an apartment in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a man is waiting. He knows that eventually the police will find him. He has made no effort to hide. In fact, the crime he has just committed leaves him with an eerie sense of satisfaction. He has no regrets and is ready to serve whatever sentence he receives. He has known far worse confinement in his life, he is certain. Even freedom, such it was, offered a different form of slavery and only one brief respite of joy. As he awaits the inevitable, he revisits the events that have led him to this point, beginning as far back as he can clearly remember. The Emperor by Haitian writer Mackenzy Orcel is his story—fractured, pain-filled, and proud.

Our unnamed narrator does not know exactly how he came to be abandoned as a child, left alone by the roadside, but he does know that at some point he was swept up and taken into a rural community, or lakou, where a false vodou prophet—the Emperor—holds sway over a flock of worshippers, his sheep, who like slaves, work his fields and tend to his every need and desire. He demands absolute devotion, and punishes anyone who fails to fall into line. The narrator grows up in this unforgiving environment, identified by a number rather than a name, but he is not alone. He is  guided by the wisdom of a blind old man known as the Very Old Sheep, dedicated to the true traditions of voodoo, and aware of the risk of pretenders, and by his own internal compass,  a motivating force he refers to  as the Voice Within. Together they keep him from losing himself amid the brain-washed, weakened souls who surround the supposed holy man or seek his intervention with the divine:

Only the Emperor is granted the power of the word. To mould them to the shape of heart, his anger or his madness. What words capable of cauterizing wounds are not also accused of being lost or eternal? Yours were difficult to grasp. They reminded us of fond memories of the gods. Their goal was to intercede in our favour. To save us. To destroy us. To bring truth, morality and the past to an end. To transform others into obedient machines. A widespread and lucrative venture. You made a fortune off the penniless and their spoilt crumbs, their ill-gotten gains. You recreated an ancient formula.

Despite the very specific cruelties he dispensed upon his young sheep, it is the Emperor who inadvertently paves the way to his release from the lakou by forcing him to play a drum for the ritual dances. In drumming he finds expression, communication, that reaches others without words. He is punished for his disobedience, but is unable to conform. This ultimately leads to his expulsion from the community and, this time, the bus does come and carries him away to the city. He arrives in Port-au-Prince with no name, no education, and only a little cash he’d spirited away. Here he faces a new kind of brutality, but his past has prepared him for “its tyranny, its inhumanity.” He survives. He finds a job delivering newspapers, one of a crew of downcast men, working for a dishonest boss, but at least he is no longer captive. He is free. Until he falls in love.

With clean, clipped prose, finely translated by Nathan H. Dize, The Emperor is a  contemporary fable with gritty, violent undertones. The narrator’s fragmented monologue, largely addressed directly to the Emperor, moves back and forth in time, from the room where is waiting for that knock, knock, knock on his door, into his past, from his early experiences in the countryside to his hardscrabble life in the city, and, finally, to his criminal act. But it is not a strictly chronological account, nor is it always clear or consistent. It is uncertain how old he is; he seems to be both prematurely aged and preternaturally wise. Details from his time under the Emperor’s control continue to emerge throughout, a function in part of him being his primary audience. Yet, some of what he claims seems strange—there is a sense that he himself does not have as firm a grip on things as he thinks when he claims: “I never forgot. Everything is there. All I have to do is close my eyes.” One senses that he has never truly been free, the anger always simmering at or just below the surface of his narrative betrays him. And now he is waiting to surrender his liberty to the police, calm and unrepentant—he even has the evidence to prove his guilt sitting neatly beside him—but, perhaps, in a strange way, he is finally exercising his freedom by giving it up.

The Emperor by Mackenzy Orcel is translated from the French by Nathan H. Dize and published by Seagull Books.

The words / created their own states of being: “it” by Inger Christensen

It may seem hard to imagine that a single poem (or sequence of poems) extending over 200 pages could become an instant hit upon publication, embraced by critics and the public alike, but that is exactly what happened when Danish poet Inger Christensen released what would become known as her masterwork, it, in 1969. What, you might wonder, does this simple pronoun, “it,” refer to. It might be simpler to ask what “it” does not refer to, for here it is simply the personal pronoun for the impersonal verb “to be”—as in “it is.” Danish, like English, necessitates such a construction, so this epic, moving as it does from the most basic elements, expanding in relation to one another, on into a world formed and named in its process of coming into being, and finally differentiated into individual, experiential existence, is a grand orchestral exploration of the nature of life. But it is also a piece that pulls you into to its rhythms, echoes and images. In Denmark it has become so iconic that sections have been set to music and certain lines from it have entered the daily lexicon.

In her introduction to the 2006 English translation by Susanna Nied, poet Anne Carson views Christensen as a contemporary counterpart of Greek epic poet Hesiod combining elements of his hymn of creation, Theogyny, and his moral guide, Works and Days: “Her det [it] is at once a hymn of praise to reality and a scathing comment on how we make reality what it is. The dazzled and the didactic interfuse in det.” However, the requirement for a personal pronoun for “to be” which does not exist the same way in Greek, means that her cosmogony is also a cosmology—a condition made explicit in the structure and realization of it. In a 1970 article, “In the Beginning was the Flesh” (quoted by Carson but since made available in its entirety in the essay collection The Condition of Secrecy), Christensen talks about some of the thinkers and artists, including linguist Noam Chomsky, whose ideas contributed to the genesis of what she a began to realize would be a creation poem:

Then I started thinking a little about this sentence: “In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word was made flesh,” I thought, what if we could think the unthinkable: that flesh could speak, that one cell could signal to another, so that the whole inarticulate world suddenly partook in the following impossible (to human awareness) experience: In the beginning was the flesh, and the flesh was made words . . .

To maintain a hold on the duality of these two paradoxical conditions, she started to write as if she wasn’t there, “as if it (“I”) were just a bit of flesh talking, a bit of protoplasm, acted as if I were just following along, while a language, a world, took shape.” She called this part, the opening of her work, the time before consciousness, PROLOGOS. However, although it first emerges as a pre-sentence entity, the poems that comprise this section follow a strict mathematical formula. Each line consists of 66 characters (in the original Danish) and there is one 66 line poem, two 33-line poems, three 22-line poems, six 11-line poems, eleven 6-line poems and so on until the final set of sixty-six single-line poems. (The translation is unable to preserve the character count of each line, but does keep the number of lines.) Thus, PROLOGOS sets the cosmological grounding for the poem to follow, moving from the most fundamental elements—beginning, of course, with “It. That’s it. That started it. It is. Goes on. Moves. Beyond. Becomes.”—and moving through abstract form and function, slowly evolving over time. Cosmic. Geological. Natural. Communal. And, finally, individual.

It’s come around. Come to stand on its own, confront itself. To disengage from the mass and stand out. It’s engaged in an evolution, shifted its stance, attained eminently engaging expression. Has pursued itself and accidentally found itself. As a natural result. Has come to stand for itself. And can begin by itself. To experiment with sets of freestanding, free-floating expressions. Occasionally with straight-swimming ones. Dreaming. In another world. To imply itself.

(from PROLOGOS)

The main body of the poem, LOGOS, explores the word as creative principle, or, as Christensen puts it: “The place where things are consciously staged, put into action, into relationship.” It contains three sections, STAGE, ACTION, and TEXT which are each further divided into eight subsections of eight poems each (Christensen, as ever, loves mathematical and musical structure). The inspiration for the subsections came from a work titled Præpositioners teori (A Theory of Prepositions) by Viggo Brøndal, an attempt to classify the words languages use to show relationship. She selected:

eight terms that could stay in a state of flux and at the same time give order to the indistinctiveness that a state of flux necessarily must produce: symmetry, transitivity, continuity, connectivity, variability, extension, integrity, and universality.

And thus, the stage was set, so to speak.

It is perhaps not surprising that the poems that comprise the first section, STAGE, are more varied in structure and form than those we will see later, order comes with time. Words are at work: “The words / created their own states of being / made a world out of ‘world.’” (STAGE, symmetries, 7), but it not a smooth operation. Here the imagery moves between descriptions of natural processes, and the intentional creation of sets, painted and varnished to “represent” mountains and scenery. A tension exists between what is and the way it can be expressed:

And when it’s said that words fly
(like birds that fill an end-
lessly vanishing space)
it’s probably to conceal the fact
that words are not one
with the world they describe.
Words do not have wings.
And neither do they flower nor will
but they take potential flowers
and set them in a garden
which they then set
in an image of a garden
in an image, etc.
The words stay where they are
while the world vanishes
This is a criticism of the way language is used
Because it’s a criticism of the way things are.

(from STAGE, connectiveness, 1)

When “I” becomes part of the dynamic, the relationship between humans and language becomes more complex, and existential questions begin to arise. This first part also introduces a wide variety of images, motifs, and refrains that will recur throughout the work as a whole, providing a coherency to it when read and experienced (as it is meant to be) as a single long poem.

With ACTION and continuing on through TEXT, Christensen introduces more structure—employing both formal and experimental forms— to the poems within each subsection, adopting a consistent line count, verse pattern and rhyme, if relevant, for at least the majority of the eight poems (Susanna Nied’s award-winning translation preserves form and rhyme whenever possible), thus adding an ever-shifting musicality to the poetry. Thematically, the net she casts is wide, taking in the natural world (deserts, forests, gardens), human awareness (self-identity, hope, despair, sex, death), and community engagement (cities, hospitals, factories). Her vision encompasses the personal and the political, always returning to the power of language, the fundamental quality of the word, creating and mediating the world as we know it, alone and in relation to others:

A society can be so stone-hard
That it fuses into a block
A people can be so stone-hard
That life goes into shock

And the heart is all in shadow
And the heart has almost stopped
Till some begin to build
A city as soft as a body

(ACTION, symmetries, 8)

Throughout the ACTION section, one can see the influence of the 1960s on Christensen’s  worldview and some of the imagery she employs. Of course, the more political and economic currents change, the more they stay the same. Poetry is timeless and this vibrant, life-affirming epic aims to reach beyond the limits of time—as does language—and as such, the third part, TEXT, offers poems that begin to speak to passion and meaning in living and loving. The tone, if not strictly prescriptive, carries positive energies. There are no promises that things will be easy or pain-free, but it is worth trying, even in a world that contains darkness and corruption.

After the fourth morning I seek
the lips’ speechless expression

Again and again I stand completely
still so the wheel goes around and
there’s no cause for panic

What you gave my thought is no-
where, with a body that’s a
gift to the earth

What you gave me is pure rest / restlessness

My passion:  to go further

(TEXT, variabilities, 4)

By the close of this section, the “I”, the speaker, has come to an understanding of her interconnectedness with the world, and all that it contains.

Then, finally, comes the EPILOGOS. Beginning and ending with “That’s it” this piece works its way through the many shades and facets of fear we encounter as embodied beings, to slowly embrace words as the very cells of the body, and ultimately find freedom in letting go:

Erotic attempts
when the body
in its blind
sexual
activity
strives to be invisible
the cells are words
when the body
is lost
in it all
and lost
as it is
persists
survives
surpasses
itself
and its limits
the cells are words

(from EPILOGOS)

This is a work that, the deeper you get into it, benefits from longer, sustained reading sessions (especially if inclined, as I tend to be, to move slowly through a collection of poems). Although any one of the poems in this extended, structured sequence could stand on its own, they speak to one another, repeating and re-imagining phrases and imagery—a quality that tends to mark Christensen’s poetry and prose—so that the reading builds its own exhilarating momentum. it is an experience.

it by Inger Christensen is translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied with an Introduction by Anne Carson and published by New Directions.